Should we have bunches of neutral body parts?

Brad, it seems that I can count on you to restore my faith in human nature.This message has been edited by Electron, 25 February 2005 22:20 AM

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1. Mutation creates the platform (Neutral trait)

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and some have posted more than platitudes about this form of expression. I dont have all the time necessary to create all of the informatioin on a rejection of this platform but I will start by calling attention to PM Sheppard discussion of Wright's views in "Natural Selection and Heredity" so to properly respond to your platform starting your post, the argument would have to be brought a bit further up to date, but this should go a short way towards approving what Electron had to say rather than what someothers created here.Sheppard wrote, "If we reject Fisher's hypothesis and accept Wright's view that recessive mutants are recessive because they are less active than the normal alleomorph, we have no difficulty over the magnitude of the selective values involved being too small to account for the evolution of dominance. His hypothesis does not, however, really help, for it does not explain why the normal alleomorph is usually so active that even if its activity is halved, it still produces an excess of enzyme...."I claim that the strength of your notion that mutation can create a "neutral" platform relies on a LACK of explanation of what the NORMAL ALLEOMORPH is down doing. I believe there are ways to suggest in harmony with Wright's position on the recessive but with the normal how it helps if one doesnt suppose a neutral trait from this start. Sheppard did not need, in his time, to address this in terms of your contribution to evc because the difference of biochemistry and the origin of genetic information was not as detailed as it is today. My post to pinksq was a begining of an explanation otherwise
EvC Forum: What's wrong with reproductive cloning?
and my recent considerations on probability
EvC Forum: Current status/developments in Intelligent Design Theory
make the whole thing rewritable FROM Sheppard's SENSE OF EVOLUTION. This is what is standard(not to reject Fisher's view). High School Teachers dont think of change like this. I did not think like this for some time either. There is still some overvalued of British rangechange here so this is not the final version.

Agreed. All body parts have some cost. The term 'neutral body part' seems to be interpreted differently by each poster (myself included).Hector's query of gman: To respond to this adequately we need to be sure of what definition of 'neutral body part' gman intends.I take it to mean a non-vestigial appendage, growth, organ, blastocyst, etc. that is the result of random mutation that provides NO competitive advantage or disadvantage.Ergo an Emu's wings would not be considered neutral, but perhaps something like the lack of wisdom teeth in homo sapiens is.It's possible gman is confusing vestigial 'body parts' (pelvis in snakes, coccyx in humans, etc.) with a distinct, benign mutation that has conveys no competitive advantage.

Ok, I’ll agree somewhat. We can however respond directly from the start if we had something in mind that did not need to see theoretical biology as divided into rigid categories of determinism(bad) other causality(good). I guess my thought arose because I was able or thought I was up to that candlewax.Gman and Paul got OUT of the difference a relation between neutral trait and neutral body part but dpardo’s redirect on bunch was not directly responded to. The the topic shifted to the eye spot but Mick insisted that the entire transition in verbality was an acceptability provided one considered the amount of mitchondrial genes in the exemplar.Note also
EvC Forum: that crazy Walter ReMine....
Where there was a link
http://www.arn.org/...t_topic/f/13/t/001878/p/15.html#000585Where you can readNow Crow said,

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Most of these have to do with the verbal description of a concept that is essentially mathematical.

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but because in the 80s not the 60s to which Crow is justly referring you couldn’t even get near this remembrance of Crow without Mayr ASSUMING typology and others listening to the exchange simply comforting the tennis players and apologizing for the dean of evolutionists behavior else you get locked up involuntarily for talking about the situation too much. Thanks to the internet those kinds of things get overwhelmed by the added dimension of faith based discussions and are inessential thank God but there is still the problem of getting less comfort(you cant sleep on a lap top but God doesnt care if that is how you do it) and more understanding because what biology needs are people who can think BOTH MATHEMATICALLY and BIOLOGICALLY and NEVER relate the two but on paper. So what LOOKS neutral to a mathematician can become an object of the biologist’s neutered notion that becomes a null that the biologist moved to dissect that became the zero of a formula that not longer neutral looking to the mathematician not because his eyes have changed but because of the WORK the biologist did on the object which might have a load but no cost which gains a cost by the zero being rewritten in a database without the null which then appears in print and not in tissue to the biologist who notices a more expensive version who changes the token thought Now when we let c/e issues get in the way of these operations it is hard to carry a thread beyond a certain point.Crow went onto say,

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Any differences seem to me to be semantic rather than substantive.

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but given that Niche Constructors have in this millenium positioned the TRANSMISSION of semantic information across generations it has indeed now become impossible for a student to break out of a recursive loop what was simply a matter of cutting and pasting a few words in the 90s during the bubble blowing time.As for why Crow did not shout for reproductive excesss from the housetops in the past, well Farina knew all too well what they looked like in Collegetown Ithaca NY in the 60s I know that I have been up on this house top for so long I cant get down any more, and I did not think I would have the reproductive excess of two children out of wed lock as must it be if one was by rape. In that case I might have just put the sperm in the dish. It was not, it was just the ‘excess’ or an x-relationship.So maybe some things still look neutral. But that we SHOULD have bunches of them — I also say NO! Besides as soon as a bunch of blebs start appearing it is usual/natural for any neutral thought to start to disappear. And as for my wisdom teeth all I needed to see was that Crow could contemporaneously imagine a slowing down of rate

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I don't think the Haldane principle is useful as a way of putting a brake on evolution rates

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but I am not trying to tie directly these two topics at this time.It still looks to me that they cant get off the diffusion of Kimurisms and that was the same situtation in the 80s if I got that correct. I wish I didnt come to this line thinking I was still ahead of the game of burning the wax on both sides of Cornell Campus but that seems more like the bunch than anything incorrect I have seen in the bunch of posts in this thread.

In the context of this discussion there is no difference between the two. Both represent a cost to the organism that it could do better without. Explain why that is wrong and you'll have cracked it, otherwise gman has an answer to why life does not have a huge number of neutral, non-functional body parts.