More Evidence of Evolution - Geomyidae and Geomydoecus

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Well, they might already be expressed when exaptation takes place.

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Well, okay, but that isn't what you said before: --

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Let me try this hypothetical scenario:

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Thanks. That does make it clear what you are saying.Except how did these two alleles come about to begin with? Presumably one of these alleles did not exist previously; it came to exist because a mutation in a gametes of some individual change the previously existing allele to this particular one.Of course, it is possible that given some allele or other, once it is produced (presumably through a mutation) it may not be selected for or against; then because of neutral drift it might disappear or it might become established in the population. Then, as you say, later on some environmental factor might change and give one allele an advantage over the other.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

Martin, you have demonstrated that you can write in perfectly clear English. Please do so. It has become almost impossible to decipher these almost incomprehensible strings of words.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

Martin, if you're getting the "1:100" number from the "P<.01" in the paper, then it doesn't apply the to probability of mutations being selected. The paper doesn't address mutation selection probability in any way. The word "mutation" doesn't even appear in the paper. The "P<.01" refers to the probability that the study's result is valid.If you're getting the "1:100" number from somewhere else, then please explain where you're getting it from.I have to concur with Chiroptera. Your misunderstanding combined with the language barrier makes it difficult to tell your post from nonsense.--Percy

Was that the point he was trying to make? I understood his point to be "random mutation isn't always the source of new features." I say that's his point because he appeared to repeat it, several times, but I guess it's possible I understood.If, indeed, his point was as you've framed it... so what? Obviously the mutation responsible for a feature has to predate its selection - otherwise there's nothing to select.If, say, a population of bacteria are exposed to an antibiotic before any individuals have mutated a resistance to it, the result is the complete extinction of the population. However, we know that an average population of bacteria will almost certainly have evolved the resistance before we expose them to the antibiotic - because, indeed, they've already developed, via random mutation, resistance to a whole spectrum of antibiotics, or to viruses, or to anything at all.We know this from a hundred bioreactor experiments where a bacterial monoculture is incubated and a small sample is taken. Each sample shows a random distribution of mutations, some of which usually correspond to a degree of resistance to a certain antibiotic - before the antibiotic has even been introduced.It's not that the bacteria are seeing the future, of course. Some of them just got lucky in the "mutation lottery."Nonetheless, we're delving off-topic. I still maintain that HM's point, as I understand it, is fundamentally wrong - it's not appropriate to refer to things like HGT or endogenous retrotransposons as alternate sources of genetic novelty. They may very well be novel to that population, or to that organism, but ultimately those sequences came about as a result of mutation - before subsequently being transfered into a new organism by the means listed above.But I have no idea what that has to do with picket gophers and their pubic lice. Maybe HM can explain the connection?

I don't get it either. Hoot Mon began by suggesting that we weren't giving MartinV a sufficiently complete explanation, but his own suggestion seemed to wander off into minor quibbles that I didn't think were all that bad as far as accuracy, but I didn't see how they would be helpful to MartinV. It seemed like piling some fairly subtle detail onto someone who's already having trouble just understanding simple English.--Percy

I'd like to pull my new friend ICDESIGN into this discussion, and in order to do so, I'd like to urge him not to be frightened by words like "Geomyidae"; I simply used the scientific nomenclature of these organisms in the title so that we didn't wind up with a whole thread called "Pubic Lice."Since I know he's having some trouble with the material I'd like to invite his questions at this point. And I'd like to summarize my OP so that it makes a little more sense to the layperson:Scientists working in a field called "molecular phylogeny" use genetic information contained in our cells to develop charts, called "phylogenies", that describe the evolutionary relationships of closely-related species. These charts purport to explain who evolved from who and at what time. They're basically family trees for species.Evolutionists maintain that these charts accurately describe the evolutionary relationships of species, and since we can make these charts for any arbitrary number of species, it's fairly easy, in using them, to come to the conclusion that all species on Earth are related in this family tree, ultimately descending from a single life form.Creationists disagree; since they assert that species are not related in this way, the charts and phylogenies that evolutionists develop must be false; they're either fictions that scientists agree, in a grand conspiracy, to act as though they're true; or else scientists are honestly mistaken and are interpreting meaningless genetic "noise", much as one might claim to hear voices in static or see faces in a TV turned to a dead channel.Those are the two possibilities. In this particular case, I present research on two groups of organisms that live in close proximity - a scientific family consisting of many species of pocket gopher, and a scientific family consisting of many different species of pubic lice that live only on pocket gophers.Scientists who generated phylogenies for both of these groups of organisms found that, despite the fact that gophers and lice are only held to be very distantly related (gophers are mammals and lice are insects, obviously), these separate charts were nearly identical in structure - indicating that, nearly every time a new species of gopher split off from an old one, a new species of lice split off from an old one, too.The odds of this happening by chance are just like the odds of two TV's having identical static, or the same numbers winning the lottery twice, or two people flipping coins and coming up with the same result every time. A lot less likely than any of those things, in fact. Which means that the matchup isn't by chance. This is very good evidence for the evolution position, that molecular phylogeny techniques do tell us about the evolutionary history of organisms, and proof that creationists are wrong.That's what we're talking about, ICDESIGN. I hope this has been helpful.

That bad, ay? How can you say that after writing this stinker in post #32?: What’s this? Natural selection "selects individuals”? Do you actually believe that natural selection operates at the level of the individual? I don’t know of any credible biologist who thinks natural selection selects individuals.This is a good example of how people like MartinV get confused about the Darwinism. You have other concepts confused, too. For example, many good neo-Darwinians will dismiss "convergence" and "parallelism" on the grounds that "deep homology" can acount for the same effect. Furthernore, there are no "proofs" of convergence, not when you consider the alternative explanations.What do we expect MartinV to take from all of this confusion? He would be better served if we took our Occam's Razor to some of this evo-devo fluff. And if the word "random" is a bother for him, then he might take comfort in knowing that selfish genes have a distinctively non-random attribute: they deterministically adopt strategies for survival. Hamilton and Dawkins have provided much more "proof" of that than what is claimed to be "proof" by the evo-devo advocates.”HM

MartinV, maybe it would help if you understood that “random mutations” are not the only way that evolution can happen. Evolution can also happen when:1. a subject population's size drops below a level where random genetic drift cannot be avoided,2. genes and/or alleles from external populations enter the subject population’s gene pool,3. all individuals of the subject population do not have equal access to mating, and4. all individuals of the subject population do not have equal success in reproduction.Given those requirements it’s a wonder that any species lasts very long. But I suppose the human species measures time on its own scale.”HM

We're all quite aware, HM, of exactly how much you don't know. This post, for instance, makes it abundantly clear that you don't have the first clue what you're talking about. Homology between a tunneling mammal and a parasitic insect? Your whoppers strain credulity. But, you know, thanks for making it abundantly clear that your sole expertise in biology is in your ability to cut-and-paste random terms from a glossary. "Evo-devo fluff"? Absolutely nothing on-topic in this thread has had anything to do with evolutionary developmentology. You're just making it obvious that your sole contribution to this thread is to make it precisely obvious how little you know about what you're talking about. I'll thank you to keep your pointless nonsense out of my thread. There's absolutely no sense to be made of these statements. "Deterministically adopt strategies for survival"? And, again, who said anything about evo-devo?I have a low tolerance for nonsense, but that appears to be just about all you're capable of generating. "Deterministically adopt strategies." LOL!

More nonsense. Genetic drift can never be avoided, no matter the size of the population; there are merely populations so large that genetic drift doesn't constitute a significant force on the population's genetics. As I've explained, and you have yet to reply to, introducing gene flow as an "alternative" to random mutation introduces a recursion problem. Genes may flow from A to B, but how did they get to A in the first place? These are both selection. Nobody's asserted that evolution is all about random mutation; but random mutation is the only source of genetic novelty in the natural world. Selection doesn't create alleles; it merely has effects on the frequency of alleles in a population. This doesn't make any sense at all.

Frog, you're living in The Dark Ages.

Our charming banter is so much fun, but I really do wonder what on Earth you think any of this has to do with the topic.Do you have a reply to the OP, or not?

If the random mutation is the only source of genetic novelty than mathematical computations about how "random mutation with natural selection" is more probable to occur as "pure chance" is absurd.I underestand that darwinists like math beacuse it gives their stories a look of science. The first who introduced math into darwinistic story of mimicry was F. Muller. It turned out that all his math is wrong because it stands on wrong premises.The mathematics that shows how process of "random mutation" as source of cospeciation is more likely to occurs as "pure chance" is ridiculous.Might be dawninists here do not fully realize that random mutation is inevitable for their story of cospeciation too - let me cite Ernst Mayr:

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To be sure, selection for adaptedness is paramount at the second step, but this is preceeded by a first step”the production of the variation that provides the material for the selection process, and here stochastic processes (chance, contingency) are dominant. And it is this randomness of variation that is responsible for the enormous, often quite bizarre diversity of the living world.

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Considering the text of darwinistic guru I cannot see why darwinists here defend untenable assumption. This untenable assumtion consist on the nonsensical using of math in order to prove how cospeciation governed by "pure chance" is less probable than darwinistic explanation that is fully dependent upon "random mutation" as it source.One of tactic you and your friends (Percy) use here is that I miss the point of the math used. You claim that percentage 0,01 has nothing to do with "random mutation" but with probability of cospeciation. Under the picture 1. we could read this:

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Solid circles are cospeciation events involving Geomydoecus that were inferred from reconciliation analysis...

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Yet such "cospeciation events" are unthinkable without random mutations that preceded them. So you cannot pretend that the mentioned math has nothing to do with random mutation while random mutation is source of cospeciation events. And you should know that random mutation is tantamount to chance mutation.
And if your math prove that observed cospeciation events are more probable by whatever reason as pure chance alone (100:1?) I may use this math for support of Nomogenesis as well, don't you think? It means evolution has nothing to do with chance and is directed.

Nothing. Using math to support how process based on "random mutation" is more probable to occur as the same process governed by "chance alone" is so confusing itself as medieval scholastic maths how many angels fit onto the tip of a needle.

Natural selection can only allow an entire individual to either survive to reproduce, or not. There is no method by which natural selection can select only some of the traits of an individual to pass on to its progeny. I can only assume you're thinking of populations, but it was clear that Crash was referring to individuals. In trying to keep things understandable for MartinV, something you've emphasized yourself, Crash focused on selection at the level of the individual. I suppose one could quibble about whether the point would be more clear to MartinV if made about populations rather than individuals, but this thread is already having trouble staying on topic. Now I'm beginning to wonder if you're just using MartinV as an excuse to quibble about anything you feel like. English is a second language for MartinV, he's already having trouble with simple distinctions, so it seems a foregone conclusion that drawing fine distinctions between convergence and parallelism would only be inviting further confusion. I think that for a start we should help MartinV understand what P<.01 refers to. Focusing on this would be constructive, *and* it has the added bonus that it actually concerns the paper mentioned in the opening post! --Percy