Evolution falsifies God/s?

Hey RAZDYour overall challenge to faceman is good, I just wanted to point out a couple things ... There really isn't a YES or NO answer to this question. Duplications can have wide ranging effects from completely neutral to a speciation event. For example polyploidy could be considered whole genome duplication and can often lead to speciation. Duplication of a non-coding sequence would be neutral. Duplications of other types of sequences would vary greatly in their effects.Perhaps, "... a duplication mutation COULD be neutral?" would be easier to answer. One of the problems in discussions like these is the YEC like to use the human genome as an example of "genetic load," "genetic deterioration," "genetic meltdown" or whatever the term of the day is. Humans are the worst example to use to discuss this because we have found so many way to get around deleterious mutations. For example, if I had been born 300 years ago, I would probably not lived to reproductive age. My eyesight is so bad i would certainly fell off a cliff or been the first to die in a battle, etc. But today because of corrective lenses, I have been able to pass on my genes just fine - although my daughter has eyesight almost as poor as mine.SO if we are talking about humans ... I DISAGREE that natural selection would tend to remove them, but for all other species, I would AGREE (the key words though being "tend to remove")However, it doesn't appear faceman wanted to answer your questions, so my pointing this out was probably pointless, as I doubt you actually needed to be corrected on these points.HBD

Hi faceman. Curious, what do you see as the "take home message" from this article you referenced?HBD

Well..... You say that. But have you ever heard of Hox genes?Here is a simple explanation Link

Not really. Because of their rapid generation times, bacteria and to a lesser extent, fruit flies are under significant constraints to keep their genome small and compact. This provides for efficient, rapid duplication and conserves resources. If you look at a bacterial gene map, you would see that there is very little untranslated regions. The following table is a very generalized overview:

	E. coli	Fruit Fly	Human
# genes	4,500	15,700	20,000
# base pairs	4.6 M	139.5 M	3,235 M
# chromosomes	1	4	23

Gene density is not a straight forward calculation, however. For E. coli, the average distance between genes is about 120 base pairs. Humans can have 10s of thousands of base pairs between genes. Also, about 25% of the human genome is introns, which are spliced out and recycled (some introns do have functions so ~20% are discarded). E. coli does not have introns.The point is that the human genome has huge areas where mutations could occur that would have no effect on fitness. Mutations would be much more likely to affect fitness in bacteria. So their "simpler genomes" means more can go wrong. You seem to imagine natural selection as an active agent that constantly scans the genome for defects so it can remove them. Not so. If a fruit fly was born with one leg that was 25% shorter than the others, that would probably be a slightly deleterious mutation, right? But... would that stop him from finding a mate and producing offspring? Probably not. So he mates and the female lays 1,000 eggs, roughly half of which have this slightly deleterious mutation. This would be how slightly deleterious mutations "squeak by, unnoticed by natural selection." The question should be "Will the mutation affect the organism's ability to produce offspring?" That is how fitness is determined by natural selection. Do you like uphill battles just for the sake of uphill battles? I hope you are the kind of person who is willing to learn a few things rather than just wanting to rage against something you don't like or don't understand.HBD

Hi faceman.Thanks for the advice and information. I don't think her nearly neutral theory says what you think it does, or that it is the cause of your genetic extinction.
_________________________________________________ You are new around here, so I will just say "don't hold your breath."

Okay I can go with that. As we see from Straggler and the Hox gene article such duplications can also end up beneficial (just not immediately, which is the point I was moving towards). Yes, we have affected (changed) our ecology so that they are neutral rather than deleterious, even though they would have been deleterious 100 years ago.

I don't follow your reasoning here. A bicycle is simpler and has fewer parts than a 747; this doesn't mean that bollixing one part of a bicycle is less likely to make it useless than if you did the same to a 747.

I'm guessing here, but your response to ringo seems to imply a deep misunderstanding of the word "beneficial."In biology, when discussing mutations, "beneficial" does not mean "more like humans."
Beneficial does not even necessarily mean:
-more intelligent
-more dexterity
-stronger
-camouflaged
-bigger
-better eye-sight
-new sensesNone of these are what "beneficial" means.
They can be beneficial.
And they can also not be beneficial.When discussing mutations in biology, "beneficial" only has one meaning: helps the organism survive to the point of reproducing.That's it.Sometimes that means getting stronger or bigger or more intelligent.
Sometimes that means getting weaker or smaller or dumber.It can sometimes be extremely counter-intuitive (like getting dumber being beneficial).
Intelligence can sometimes lead to taking time to make decisions. If you take too much time, and get eaten... the intelligence is not beneficial. In such a circumstance, getting dumber is beneficial.If you're going to attempt discussions about biological mutations, it's best to understand what the terms actually mean in biology and not what they can mean when talking to your friends about your day.

The question I asked was, "How is different information not 'new' information?" How does a DNA molecule "know" whether a mutation produced "new" information?Of course, from the molecule's point of view, there is no "beneficial". The molecule just does what it does. It produces an organism which may or may not reproduce before it dies. If it does reproduce successfully, then the mutation was "beneficial".There is no way of determining what was beneficial until after the fact. Did we take the "best" route from A to B? Well, we got here, didn't we? So we took a working route. There's no way to rewind history and rerun it to see if another route was "more beneficial". What's the difference between fish DNA and human DNA? Anything that mutations can't change? (Hint: mutation = change, so "Anything changes can't change?")

Here is a research article that may help to clarify RAZD's points about duplication. Read it through and see if it clears up the misconception about useful information no longer being available.HBD

You are missing the point.Let me give you an analogy. Suppose we spend a week observing a man walking in Ohio. During the course of our observations, he's walking due East, making an average of ten miles a day. Now, this does not prove, and no-one claims that it proves, that he's walked all the way from the West Coast. To ascertain that, we'd need further data about the earlier stage of his journey.What it does prove, conclusively, is that there is no mysterious force that ineluctably and inevitably drags everyone due West.

Are you talking to me? You're not cussing, so it's hard for me to tell.

The point I'm sure you know I'm getting at, but are pretending not to hear, is that developing the ability to create an eye or an ear would be an example of gaining new information (compared to where life began - according you folks anyways). If no organism can have specific sequences that its species doesn't already own, then how did that species acquire those sequences in the first place? You're contradicting yourself. Would 40,000 generations be enough time to create new and useful modifications? It was tried with Escherichia coli, but the result sounds a lot like genetic entropy to me. Don't forget one of the greatest examples of all: Coelacanth.

Hi HBD, Small population size + genetic drift = no natural selection (or very little).

So the Hox genes in our LUCA (1 bya) had all the information necessary to create the diverse body plans we see today?