quote:Like I said, they are only superficial answers. Look at it like this: How did he die? Lack of oxygen. Why did that kill him? Ooooh... that's a bit more complicated.
They're superficial answers, yes. But they are not uninformative answers. Neither are they tautologies.
Right now, Resh, you can only handle superficial answers. People have attempted to give you less superficial answers about why natural selection is thought to work, only to have you complain about the amount of technical jargon used. You keep coming back to "natural selection says that those who survive to breed, breed" as if that were the extent of the theory. It's not. It's no more the full extent of the theory than "humans need oxygen to live" is the full extent of what we know about the way humans process various gases. But it's the only part of the theory that you seem to retain, despite many attempts to the contrary.
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quote:Originally posted by swbarnes2: You said that you believed a genome contains all the information it needs to generate a wide variety of phenotypes.
Well, you've got a whole genomes for a fair number of organisms at your fingertips. Human, mouse, rat, dog, zebrafish...etc.
So pick one varying trait, like fur color in mice, and show us in the genome of C57L/B6 where all the information for all the other fur colors are kept.
Or admit that you can't find any evidence to support your supposition.
Willful misinterpretation of what I said? I didn't say I believed that is what happened. I just said that I haven't ruled it out as a possibility. And with my limited technical knowledge of genetics, I still haven't. You're insisting that I go and do something that I can't do, because I don't have the training required to do it. Somehow this is supposed to show that I have no right to doubt the theory of Evolution.
If it helps, as someone that theoretically has the technical knowledge, I couldn't do that. You need to get several mice to actually get the full range of alleles.
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quote:Originally posted by swbarnes2: You said that you believed a genome contains all the information it needs to generate a wide variety of phenotypes.
Well, you've got a whole genomes for a fair number of organisms at your fingertips. Human, mouse, rat, dog, zebrafish...etc.
So pick one varying trait, like fur color in mice, and show us in the genome of C57L/B6 where all the information for all the other fur colors are kept.
Or admit that you can't find any evidence to support your supposition.
Willful misinterpretation of what I said? I didn't say I believed that is what happened. I just said that I haven't ruled it out as a possibility. And with my limited technical knowledge of genetics, I still haven't. You're insisting that I go and do something that I can't do, because I don't have the training required to do it. Somehow this is supposed to show that I have no right to doubt the theory of Evolution.
If it helps, as someone that theoretically has the technical knowledge, I couldn't do that. You need to get several mice to actually get the full range of alleles.
I realized on rereading that Resh's constant flip-flopping between talking about natural selection working on individuals and it working on species cause me to misread his argument. What he wrote was
"Natural selection doesn't simply work on the mutations, it works on the variation within a species. The finches have encoded into their DNA a certain amount of variability in the size of their beaks. No mutations needed"
I though he meant "finches" to mean that every individual finch had multiple alleles to make beaks of any size. Which is dumb, but a common Creationist argument. But he probably meant that there were many different alleles in the population.
Still, he missed the point that the way those variants came about is...by mutation, so there's no mutation-free evolution here.
And in any case, I’m sure that Resh would approve of my caution if I assert that I’m not ruling out my previous assessment of the quote. I’m also not ruling out the possibility that Resh’s computer is powered by pixies, or that he’s logging on from the moon. Ruling things out is dangerous…it leads one to have to pick an argument and defend it.
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I interpreted Resh's statement the same way as you swbarnes. I guess we'll just have to wait and find out what he meant.
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Oh, that's what Resh was saying! I made the same misinterpretation. It's certainly better than what I thought he said, though, as swbarnes said, there's still the not-too-difficult-to-answer question about how that variation got there.
Though concievably God made multiple finches, with different alleles, or something. I mean, we're talking omnipotent beings here.
But even if he did just up and make them like that, when precisely did he decide to make them, why so recently and not farther back on the fossil record (recent is, er, relative to several hundred million years here, of course) and further, how exactly did it happen? Did they materialize out of nothing? Did some other animal morph, or what, if we're suggesting that God made the finch fully formed, with a large enough starting group to have enough alleles to be spread out?
Further, how do you tell the difference between the alleles that were there originally, and the ones that came later, due to later mutations, which we can and do witness in the world around us?
This isn't sarcastic, either! I'm honestly curious how this idea, if I'm understanding Resh right, would work...
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Further, how do you tell the difference between the alleles that were there originally, and the ones that came later, due to later mutations, which we can and do witness in the world around us?
This isn't sarcastic, either! I'm honestly curious how this idea, if I'm understanding Resh right, would work...
I'm glad I wasn't the only person to misread that comment. I actually felt a bit silly about it. But it was ambiguous, and front-loading is a Creationist idea, so it wasn't absolutely crazy that I thought that's what he was saying.
In the magical kingdom where Creationism is real and makes sense, one could look at a genome, and tell which mutations cause the genetic material to degrade, and which ones don't, and one could speculate that the degrading ones were random mutations, and the variants with the same amount of information are god-given variants.
In our world, you can't tell how much "information" an allele has. Sure, you can count how many DNA base pairs it has, or how many amino acids it has. You can measure how well it performs a certain reaction, or how tightly it binds to a particular protein.
But none of that is a measure of information.
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quote:Originally posted by scholar: I am a little confused about exactly where the cutoff between micro and macroevolution lies.
Technically, it's the difference between an evolutionary change that results in speciation and one that does not, but since multiple instances of the latter tend to result in the former, the distinction isn't particularly black and white.
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To make it worse, I am fuzzy on speciation. Working with phage and bacteria, definitions of species that involve mating don't make much sense. Posts: 1001 | Registered: Mar 2006
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Basic gist: A type of E. coli that causes infection was engineered to be far less able to mutate. The non-engineered E. coli was put into a mouse, which was given antibiotics at a dose that would make things harder for the bacteria but not kill them. The same thing was done with the engineered E. coli.
Then the scientists took the bacteria out and put them on petri dishes. They looked to see how much antibiotic was needed to inhibit growth. In the control (non-engineered) strain, there were several resistant strains, and they were able to withstand more antibiotic than any of the bacteria were during the same test before it was in the mouse.
The bacteria that were engineered, on the other hand, did not have much change in resistance after being in the mouse.
So not only did one set of bacteria have a trait that it did not have before, but the other set that wasn't allowed to mutate did not have that trait. Therefore:
1. New traits can appear in populations.
2. Mutations are necessary for at least some of these traits to occur.
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To play devil's advocate here, how are they able to tell that the engineered bacteria doesn't mutate as much?
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There's a pathway for activating DNA repair proteins that encourage mutations when the DNA is significantly damaged. It was removed. The actual mutation rate was counted by the rate at which new colonies formed on antibiotic petri dishes (which would only happen when that colony acquired resistance). That's circular if you don't believe that the resistance developed because of mutations, of course.
There's also the sequencing data. The engineered bacteria that were resistant had a particular type of mutation called a deletion (three nucleotides were missing from a gene). The normal bacteria ended up with both deletions and substitutions (switching nucleotides without changing the length).
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quote:The actual mutation rate was counted by the rate at which new colonies formed on antibiotic petri dishes (which would only happen when that colony acquired resistance). That's circular if you don't believe that the resistance developed because of mutations, of course.
Yeah. That circularity is what I was wondering about. Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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Resh, thanks for your invitation to participate in this thread too. But, by the time I read all the previous posts, I realised my “plus” with my dogs and Noah's Ark is unnecessary, as the discussion has got to touching most (if not all) of my intended points.
Still, I'll read this thread and I'm sure I'm going to learn interesting things in it.
A.
PS: One (unasked for) piece of advice: Have patience, the potential knowledge is worth it. Good luck!
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quote:The actual mutation rate was counted by the rate at which new colonies formed on antibiotic petri dishes (which would only happen when that colony acquired resistance). That's circular if you don't believe that the resistance developed because of mutations, of course.
Yeah. That circularity is what I was wondering about.
Hence the second paragraph of Shigosei's post. The scientists confirmed the presence of novel mutations by sequencing.
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scholar: even with large, multicellular organisms, species lines are often very blurry. This is unsurprising, given that the definition is a convenience for humans not something reflecting any concrete distinction in nature.
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Here's an interesting thought, in every scientific stand the church has taken over its many centuries of existence, has been consistently WRONG every time. I would say that is a pretty reliable track record, and can easily be applied to their stand on Evolution.
Scientist and the Theory of Evolution can and will change as new knowledge of the natural world comes into being. Scientists are more than willing to modify its theory to match the evidence. Just as they will gladly modify the theories of electricity, chemistry, and physics when new evidence comes to light.
The Church on the other hand will hold rigidly to archaic unfounded beliefs until such time as they become a laughing stock for doing so, at which time they will claim they knew it all along.
It takes a decade to change science, it takes a century or more to change religion.
Here is a news bulletin, the earth is not flat, the earth is not the center of the universe, the sun does not revolve around the earth, vacuum is not the work of the devil, little minute creatures do live in pond water, colored lights can indeed flash across the sky, modern medicine is not the work of the devil, electricity is not the work of the devil, etc... etc...
Your track record speaks for itself.
Modern science will gladly modify its views to fit the currently available knowledge of the natural world.
Modern religion will cling to outdated outmoded beliefs until doing so is so ridiculous and humiliating and embarrassing that they would lose all credibility in continue in such foolishness.
I have the easy position, all I have to do is wait until you finally come to your senses. You on the other hand have an unfounded untenable position that is and will continue to make you a laughing stock until such time as the embarrassment will force you to finally concede.
To deny science is to deny nature and to deny nature is to deny God. Since, in my view, you are the one denying God, I can only conclude that eventually you will lose this argument. The Hand of God in the natural order will out. Unfortunately, I don't see that coming for a long long time.
I don't even really need science to dispute you, just a combination of commons sense and a working knowledge of your track record in this area, plus a LOT of patience.
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Hypothetical question : Would you change your mind if you were in possession of the Absolute Truth ?
I mean, I can perfectly understand that someone who believes to be in possession of the A.T. to be "very hard" (read impossible) to accept another "truth", what there is to see is how does that someone know to have such a thing in possession in the first place.
posted
Or to put it in another, less aggressive way:
In the 16th century, the idea of an heliocentric universe was heresy. It went against the teachings of the church of the day and was backed up by scripture - quite convincing and solid scripture, if you want to use the bible as literal truth.
Of course, at the time that Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo made their observations, they faced problems similar to what Resh's problem is with evolution: that there was an awful lot of evidence, much of it directly observed - but until humans could leave the planet and view for themselves the nature of the universe, they could never say that this could be seen 'in action'.
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quote:Originally posted by BlueWizard: Here's an interesting thought, in every scientific stand the church has taken over its many centuries of existence, has been consistently WRONG every time. I would say that is a pretty reliable track record, and can easily be applied to their stand on Evolution.
My church accepts evolution. I guess it must not be true. I'll look for a different theory, then.
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quote:My church accepts evolution. I guess it must not be true. I'll look for a different theory, then.
It's the positions that churches have taken up in opposition to science that have been wrong. Nodding and saying "sure, why not" to a scientific theory is usually the safe way to go. If that's what your church does, then good!
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When theologians make pronouncements about science they tend to make incredible asses of themselves. Likewise when scientists make pronouncements about God or religion.
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"Likewise when scientists make pronouncements about God or religion."
Religion, perhaps. God, not so much. Some of the most profound statements about god I've seen have come from scientists, whether religious scientists or atheist scientists.
That said, I'd be interested if you could find a statement by a scientist, on the subject of god, that has proven to be wrong?
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I was thinking more about announcements about how this or that discovery proves that God doesn't exist. They generally show a profound misunderstanding about what religious people mean by "God."
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Hrm. I guess I haven't seen too many (read: I haven't seen )scientists say that a discovery proves god doesn't exist. Or perhaps it just didn't register when I did read it.
Examples would be appreciated.
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I've seen Dawkins, for one, argue that certain specific types of God can't exist. But I don't recall any "this discovery proves the non-existence of God" publications. Doesn't mean there haven't been a bunch, though.
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I suspect that journalists will often put such statements in the mouths of scientists because it makes good copy.
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I hate to tell this anecdote since it is the exception and not the rule, but it relates. One of the science profs was given an hour to talk about whatever he wanted. A large part of it was about idiots who believe in religion. He went on to claim that within 50 years, science will have proven that man does not have souls and God cannot exist. I thought he was a raving idiot, but other people seemed to find him interesting. Most of the scientists I know are respectful of religion though and many attend church regularly. Most do find IDers annoying though (but would be ok if IDers stopped claiming ID to be a science).
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quote:Originally posted by BlueWizard: Here's an interesting thought, in every scientific stand the church has taken over its many centuries of existence, has been consistently WRONG every time.
You really need to add a modifier between "the" and "church" since there are hundreds of different churchs in the world and many of them don't fit the description you give.
quote:Originally posted by dkw: When theologians make pronouncements about science they tend to make incredible asses of themselves. Likewise when scientists make pronouncements about God or religion.
I think that the problem with this statement is that no person is only a "theologian" or only a "scientist". As people, we all play many rolls. There are even some out there who are both "theologians" and "scientists". I think what Dana was actually saying (and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), was that when people try to draw conclusions about science based on theological reasons or conclusions about theology based on scientific reasons they tend to make asses of themselves.
[ December 11, 2007, 09:40 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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The only positive thing I can say about this thread is that it is not a person hijacking another thread that was doing better before.
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Thanks Rabbit, that is indeed a better phrasing of what I was trying to say. I even thought about a few scientist-theologians when I was writing it but I was in a hurry to get out the door and didn't take the time to be as precise as I should have been.
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Based on his statements, Blue Wizard appears not to be an example of the type of person who finds any need to differentiate between religious types. His (mostly correct, as far as the often biased historical record states) rant is directed at the Catholic Church. They were wrong about a lot of things, not least of which was the Christian religion. Hence, Protestantism. Maybe he assumed I was Catholic...? (Assuming that post was directed at me.) They seem to be doing a bit better now. Still playing catch-up, though.
To clarify the point of confusion, I was talking about the gene pool of Finches (and any other species group) in general. If all finches came from a single parental pair (as, I believe, both Evolution and the Bible would have you believe), then what you guys are saying is that all the varieties of beak sizes are not possible within that gene pool and would only be possible from mutations. If this is true, then as far as I understand if you were to remove a male/female pair from the parent population and they both had very small beaks, it would require some mutation in order for any of their offspring to acquire beaks as large as might be found in the parent population. Do correct me if I'm wrong.
However, without invoking any hypothetical mutations, is it possible for a single male/female pair of a species to hold between them all the genetic material necessary to account for all the variations that are found within that species? For example, is it possible that an original pair of dogs could have accounted for all the applied variations within the species, without mutations?
Secondly, and I don't even know if that's a good question, but I'm asking it, but if mutations are required, are degrading mutations sufficient? In other words, if you had a hypothetical perfect pair of a species, would all the variation that you find in that species require at least one -I don't know how this would be phrased- improving mutations, or mutations that add data to the genes? Or would mutations that only take away data from the DNA do all that was required to explain the variations?
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quote:Originally posted by scholar: I hate to tell this anecdote since it is the exception and not the rule, but it relates. One of the science profs was given an hour to talk about whatever he wanted. A large part of it was about idiots who believe in religion. He went on to claim that within 50 years, science will have proven that man does not have souls and God cannot exist. I thought he was a raving idiot, but other people seemed to find him interesting. Most of the scientists I know are respectful of religion though and many attend church regularly. Most do find IDers annoying though (but would be ok if IDers stopped claiming ID to be a science).
I think that what IDers are doing (and I guess that's what I am, but I'm not a scientist) are trying to reset the rules of what actually count as science. They're saying that although the current state of scientific inquiry dictates that only Naturalistic mechanisms are admissible as evidence, this does not mean that only Naturalistic causes are possible. They would like to change the ground rules of science to allow for other possibilities.
I mean, if you think about it, "science" is just a human concept, it's not an objective thing that we are tapping into. If everyone decided that science was something else, then that something else is what science would be, right?
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Evolution would not have you believe all finches came from a single parental pair. Evolutionary change (usually) happens gradually along a multidimensional continuum which tends to appear to have an excluded middle when looked at in retrospect.
I'll bring up an example of finches I've brought up again and again in evolutionary threads. Imagine a population of finches living on an island where there are many ground predators and lots of fruits. Imagine some of them are blown to an island that has very few ground predators and lots of nuts. Finches on the latter island that have larger beaks for nut cracking, that spend more of their time on the ground (and thus less energy flying) will be selected for. Over time, the finches will become some other species of bird, given a strong enough selection pressure, with a larger beak, better suited to living on the ground most of the time.
However, at no point will there be a break in their development. The population will be interfertile all the time. There is no point we will be able to say "here is where it stopped being a finch", yet if the change becomes extreme enough, we will look at the beginning and the end and say, "these are different".
And no, we know of not a single pair where a single species could have held all genetic variation found in a species. Since evolutionary theory doesn't predict that will occur much, if ever, that's not much of a problem. Now, sometimes when species are mostly founded on a small population it is a matter of polyploidy, in which case there's a lot of spare 'space' in their genome for development. They can have a mutation in a gene and still have a working copy of the gene elsewhere.
Btw, mutations don't generally 'take away data' from the DNA, because there is no definition of 'data' held by DNA. Do you have something more specific in mind?
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We have plenty of fields that commonly incorporate non-naturalistic thinking. Use one of them.
Also, there's nothing in science against non-naturalistic explanations. There are things against non-testable explanations, since science is about explaining things. Why should things that can explain nothing (in the sense of, provide testable predictions that turn out at least somewhat successful) be incorporated into science?
It isn't like science is totally antithetical to that traditionally called non-naturalistic. There are periodically experiments trying to identify effects due to prayer, for instance. Strangely, the presence of prayer in any controlled situation is found to have no explanatory power for outcomes.
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quote:Originally posted by scholar: I hate to tell this anecdote since it is the exception and not the rule, but it relates. One of the science profs was given an hour to talk about whatever he wanted. A large part of it was about idiots who believe in religion. He went on to claim that within 50 years, science will have proven that man does not have souls and God cannot exist. I thought he was a raving idiot, but other people seemed to find him interesting. Most of the scientists I know are respectful of religion though and many attend church regularly. Most do find IDers annoying though (but would be ok if IDers stopped claiming ID to be a science).
I think that what IDers are doing (and I guess that's what I am, but I'm not a scientist) are trying to reset the rules of what actually count as science. They're saying that although the current state of scientific inquiry dictates that only Naturalistic mechanisms are admissible as evidence, this does not mean that only Naturalistic causes are possible. They would like to change the ground rules of science to allow for other possibilities.
I mean, if you think about it, "science" is just a human concept, it's not an objective thing that we are tapping into. If everyone decided that science was something else, then that something else is what science would be, right?
But science is something very specific and ID doesn't qualify and it's disingenuous to teach it in a science classroom as if it meets those rigourous standards.
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quote:I think that what IDers are doing (and I guess that's what I am, but I'm not a scientist) are trying to reset the rules of what actually count as science.
By their own admission they wanted to use a definition of science that would accept astrology as being scientific.
Which is what you've been doing too. And with ghastly few exceptions, nobody else in the ID movement 'is a scientist' either.
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To clarify the point of confusion, I was talking about the gene pool of Finches (and any other species group) in general. If all finches came from a single parental pair (as, I believe, both Evolution and the Bible would have you believe)
No, evolution doesn't predict that at all. It says that there was a population of birds which were not finches, and over time, they changed, becoming more and more finch-like, until they were what we would be comfortable labeling "finches".
quote:then what you guys are saying is that all the varieties of beak sizes are not possible within that gene pool and would only be possible from mutations.
Even if you did start with some magical first pair that had genetic differences, that first pair would have a common ancestor, and the reason that those two individuals have differnt genes is because of mutations.
There's no getting away from mutations.
quote:If this is true, then as far as I understand
But you don't understand! That's what we keep trying to tell you, and you refuse to accept! You don't understand evolution!
quote:if you were to remove a male/female pair from the parent population and they both had very small beaks, it would require some mutation in order for any of their offspring to acquire beaks as large as might be found in the parent population. Do correct me if I'm wrong.
You are wrong. Let me guess, since you didn't believe evolution, you figured that flunking high school genetics was okay.
Well, if you'd passed, you would have known that having a large beak size could be a recessive trait, in which case the parents would not exhibit it, but they could be carriers, and their offspring could therefore manifest it.
quote:However, without invoking any hypothetical mutations, is it possible for a single male/female pair of a species to hold between them all the genetic material necessary to account for all the variations that are found within that species?
No. Humans have hundreds of alleles for some genes. The most any individual can carry is 2.
2 << 100. Or did your disbelief in evolution cause you to ignore math too?
quote:For example, is it possible that an original pair of dogs could have accounted for all the applied variations within the species, without mutations?
No, it's not possible. And 20 people are going to tell you that, and you will still refuse to "rule out the possibility"
And then you will complain that everyone is just telling you things, and expecting you to believe them at their word.
And really, since this is your claim, its up to you to prove it, not up to us to disprove it.
So go prove it. Go the latest dog assembly in ensembl, or whatever organism you like, and show us where all this genetic diversity is hiding.
You won't read. You won't listen. You claim that's not innovative enough for you.
Well, looking up your own evidence would be innovative for you, and I'm out of ideas as how else to get you to see that you are wrong.
quote:Secondly, and I don't even know if that's a good question, but I'm asking it, but if mutations are required, are degrading mutations sufficient?
Would you know a degrading mutation if it bit you in the face?
Go back to the post I made in the other thread with those short DNA sequences.
If one is the orignal, and one is degraded, why don't you tell us which is which? Count up the information, and show us which has less, and by how much, if you can.
If you can't, then stop talking about information in genes as if you had some idea of how to count that.
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quote:Natural selection is a tautology because it is self-evidently true. It also, by virtue of being a tautology, contains exactly *zero* explanatory power.
I have to say that I don't understand this argument. For one thing, that's not the definition of "tautology". But more importantly, why would tautologies and other self-evidently true things contain no explanatory power? Before that is explaned, I don't see the point of going further along this line of argument. I'd say self-evident things DO often have explanatory power.
quote:But science is something very specific and ID doesn't qualify and it's disingenuous to teach it in a science classroom as if it meets those rigourous standards.
Tons of stuff that is taught in science classrooms is not, strictly speaking, science. For instance, we studied how the proponents of the heliocentric model of the solar system were persecuted by the church when I took science in high school. That is pretty clearly history - not science - but it was still taught in the science classroom, and I don't think anybody was confused by the notion that all sorts of science-related things can be discussed in science class.
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quote:Tons of stuff that is taught in science classrooms is not, strictly speaking, science. For instance, we studied how the proponents of the heliocentric model of the solar system were persecuted by the church when I took science in high school. That is pretty clearly history - not science - but it was still taught in the science classroom, and I don't think anybody was confused by the notion that all sorts of science-related things can be discussed in science class.
True, but the history behind an idea, while anecdotal, is useful for explaining where an idea came from and how it's been accepted over time. People who have been promoting ID have largely promoted it as science or an "alternative" theory to evolution. There's a big difference between anecdotal information and theology being taught as science.
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"That is pretty clearly history - not science - but it was still taught in the science classroom, and I don't think anybody was confused by the notion that all sorts of science-related things can be discussed in science class."
What we DON'T teach in science classrooms, though, are anti-scientific ideas, or ideas that are contradicted by the scientific method, as if they are science.
If someone in class asks me about ID, I have no problems answering questions about it for a few minutes... but part of the answer will be "Its an idea that is arrived at by ignoring the scientific method."
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quote:Natural selection is a tautology because it is self-evidently true. It also, by virtue of being a tautology, contains exactly *zero* explanatory power.
I have to say that I don't understand this argument. For one thing, that's not the definition of "tautology". But more importantly, why would tautologies and other self-evidently true things contain no explanatory power? Before that is explaned, I don't see the point of going further along this line of argument. I'd say self-evident things DO often have explanatory power.
quote:But science is something very specific and ID doesn't qualify and it's disingenuous to teach it in a science classroom as if it meets those rigourous standards.
Tons of stuff that is taught in science classrooms is not, strictly speaking, science. For instance, we studied how the proponents of the heliocentric model of the solar system were persecuted by the church when I took science in high school. That is pretty clearly history - not science - but it was still taught in the science classroom, and I don't think anybody was confused by the notion that all sorts of science-related things can be discussed in science class.
Yeah, but Tres, it's taught as an outmoded and ultimately false view of the universe and explaining how our understanding of the universe progressed from geocentric to heliocentric has numerous lessons pertinent to science.
I feel quite certain that if ID were to be taught in school science class that they wouldn't want it taught in this context! Of course, this is exactly the context it should be taught in, but hey.
Posts: 2245 | Registered: Nov 1998
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There is such a thing as the history of science, which might reasonably be taught in a science course. Especially when it's relevant to understanding how the scientific method works and doesn't work.
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quote:Originally posted by Reshpeckobiggle: [QB]If this is true, then as far as I understand if you were to remove a male/female pair from the parent population and they both had very small beaks, it would require some mutation in order for any of their offspring to acquire beaks as large as might be found in the parent population. Do correct me if I'm wrong.
Its not necessarily that simple be because beak size isn't the result of only one gene and many characteristics are recessive. A bird can carry genes needed for big beaks but not necessarily have a big beak. Lets pick a simply example. Blue eyes are a recessive trait so if someone has blue eyes they can't carry the gene for brown eyes. So if we were separate people with blue eyes from the rest of the population and only allow blue eyed people to mate with blue eyed people, they would never have any brown eyed children unless there were mutations.
quote:However, without invoking any hypothetical mutations, is it possible for a single male/female pair of a species to hold between them all the genetic material necessary to account for all the variations that are found within that species? For example, is it possible that an original pair of dogs could have accounted for all the applied variations within the species, without mutations?
No this isn't possible. Each individual contains only two copies of each gene. A single mating pair can carry at most 4 variants of a given gene. We know that within humans there are hundred and sometimes thousands of variants for different genes.
quote:Secondly, and I don't even know if that's a good question, but I'm asking it, but if mutations are required, are degrading mutations sufficient? In other words, if you had a hypothetical perfect pair of a species, would all the variation that you find in that species require at least one -I don't know how this would be phrased- improving mutations, or mutations that add data to the genes? Or would mutations that only take away data from the DNA do all that was required to explain the variations?
This isn't a distinction that is commonly made. The Most mutations don't either take away data from the DNA or add it. (Although mutations of that nature do occaasionally happen). Most mutation change the DNA sequence. If the DNA were a piece of text, most mutations would neither add lines nor delete lines, they would change some letter in the text. When scientists compare the genes for two individuals, they look at how many letters in the gene are different.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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I've been reading, "The Blind Watchmaker", which reads almost as though 10+ years ago Richard Dawkin traveled into the future, read Resh's threads, and wrote an entire book specifically addressing them in a very clear, and I might add quite interesting, way.
Really, it's quite good and has some really interesting stories about animals. I'm sure it wouldn't convince anyone who refuses to be swayed, but it's a great read anyway.
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