Re: Experiment on Natural Selection

On Mon, 9 Jul 2007 03:41:59 +0100, Ernest Major
<{$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk> wrote:

In message <c24393dhhr77t3t3ig6sgo9o703kn3ralm@xxxxxxx>, Zoe
<muze10@xxxxxxx> writes
On Sun, 08 Jul 2007 12:29:42 -0700, Earle Jones
<earle.jones@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <3nd093tue48eevmdua7ug2mo0s0lagl2fd@xxxxxxx>,
Zoe <muze10@xxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

I am asking you to explain how mutation and natural selection can take
a single cell from being a single cell to life's present diversity. A
question is not a tacit concession, is it? If I can wrap my mind
around your mechanism, then maybe, just maybe, I can try a hands-on
experiment.

*
Zoe: I believe that you have learned Lesson (1). That is, abiogenesis
is not evolution.

what I have learned is that evolutionists divorce origins from
evolution because they have no answers in regard to origins. So they
spend all their time on a forum titled "Origins" promoting evolution
instead, and call that promotion "on topic."

If you want us to discuss your "experiment on natural selection" you
might want to refrain from rude and dismissive comments like that.

I was not being rude or dismissive, Ernest. Sorry if you interpreted
it as such. I was stating a fact. If facts hit you in a weak spot,
then maybe you might want to fix that weak spot.

Abiogenesis is not evolution;

there you go again. Discussion of evolution should be found in a
talk.evolution group. Instead it dominates a talk.origins
group....maybe in hopes of drowning out the fact that evolutionists
have no scientific answer to origins?

if you want to discuss evolution (and in
this thread you so claim) then you have to learn to make the
distinction, or else we'll all be spending our time trying to rectify
your confusion on that point, rather than discussing evolution.

I would prefer to discuss origins and then see how well your origins
foundation supports evolution.


Here's Lesson (2): Individuals do not evolve. Populations evolve.
That means individual animals, plants, bacteria, cells, molecules, atoms
-- do not evolve. Evolution has to do with averages measured over a
population.

oh stop. This is not making any sense.

A single "beneficial" mutation can happen to only one organism at a
time. It does not hit every member of a population. That single
organism would then pass on the mutation in its germ cell to its
offspring. If a population evolves, as you say, then it would have to
be because there was a single member somewhere that passed on its
mutations to its offspring. That individual would have to evolve
first.

You're trying to focus on the earliest life forms.

righto.

These wouldn't, any
more than living bacteria. have had separate germ cells. In fact a
separate germ-line is a trait displayed by only a small branch of the
living world (eumetazoans - animals other than sponges - if I recall
correctly, with the proviso that it also appears to have been lost in
placozoans and myxozoans).

forget the side issue of germ cells. Can we work on the earliest life
form and how natural selection originates the first species of a
different genus?

In a large population a beneficial mutation can happen to more than one
organism. But the point is that it then spreads through the population
by selection.

I don't know about spreading through the original population. If I
were to describe your theory, it would be that you think that one
organism gains a "beneficial" mutation which will be the start of an
entirely new population whose members will all have this mutation. The
advantaged individual is selected over the less advantaged individual,
and his offspring will continue to be selected. So to say that
natural selection works on populations doesn't make sense. It has to
first recognize an advantaged individual and then this advantaged
individual would pass on its advantage to offspring.

The definition of evolution given in the text books is the change of
allele frequencies in a population over time; this can result from
mutation, selection, drift, or geneflow (and any other process that has
escaped my attention). The appearance of a mutant individual is by this
definition evolution, but it's a very small amount of evolution, and
it's evolution of the population, not the individual. The bigger change
in allele frequencies in the population (i.e. the greater amount of
evolution) results from the spread of that mutation by selection, not
from its original production.

see above.

So can we get back to the feasability of a single individual macro
evolving and passing on its macro changes to its offspring to create a
new macroevolved population?


You're asking us to defend a position - saltationism - that we don't
hold.

I do not ask you to defend saltation. I am asking you how it works.
If instant morphological change is not how it works, if macroevolution
does not occur in a single mutation, then I would like to know why
mutations that do not yet confer full advantage are even preserved.
There is no way for selection to know that sometime down the road the
gradual changes will become advantageous.

snip>

.

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