Barbarian notes that most mutations don't do much of anything:
Does your 1965 biology text book tell you that?
You have it backwards. Before we could do good genetic analyses, we weren't aware of the very large number of mutations with no observable consequences.
Geneticists are concerned about the impact of mutations on our genome. The reason geneticists are concerned is because mutations destroy.
In fact, you have a fair number of mutations that your parents did not have. It is very unlikely that any of them will cause you problems. And occasionally, one will turn out to be favorable. The Milano mutation, for example, provides excellent resistance to arteriosclerosis. We have been able to trace the mutation back to the original person who had it. There are many other examples. Would you like to learn about some of them?
If you wish, I can refer you to articles from evolutionary geneticists discussing our "high mutational burden".
I don't think you really want to go there. It's pretty technical, and I can tell you in advance, it's not what you hope it is. You see, rapid mutation rates are harmful, and large numbers of neutral mutations can eventually be a problem if rates are too high. On the other hand, if mutation rates are too low, organisms fail to adapt to changing environments.
So there's some argument about the optimum rate. Would you like to learn how that works?
Barbarian observes:
almost all of us have several of them that didn't exist in either of our parents.
Again you seem to be using 1965 info.
I don't think anyone suspected that in 1965. Do you have a cite for us?
Or, did you mean that we have several hundred more mutations than our parents?
"Several" doesn't mean "several hundred." (Barbarian checks)
When parents pass their genes down to their children, an average of 60 errors are introduced to the genetic code in the process, according to a new study. Any of those five dozen mutations could be the source of major differences in a person's appearance or behavior as compared to his or her parents and altogether, the mistakes are the driving force of evolution.
Sixty mutations may sound like a lot, but according to the international team of geneticists behind the new research, it is actually fewer than expected. "We had previously estimated that parents would contribute an average of 100 to 200 mistakes to their child," Philip Awadalla, a geneticist at the University of Montreal who co-led the project, said in a press release. "Our genetic study, the first of its kind, shows that actually much fewer mistakes, or mutations, are made."
http://www.livescience.com/33347-mutants-average-human-60-genetic-mutations.html
Barbarian continues:
A few are harmful (very, very few "destroy").
You haven't kept up with genetics.
See above. If even a tenth of those sixty mutations were deadly, most of us would be dead. Maybe it's time to go back and learn about the way it actually works?
You are using old evolutionist arguments that science has proven wrong.
You've got that backwards, too. At the beginning, in Morgan's fly room, where mutations were first studied, they could only see mutations that made big changes. And of course, most of those were harmful. They never new about those many other mutations that don't do any detectable harm. So scientists earlier though mutations were more harmful than most of them actually are, and science has shown that (as I told you earlier) most of them don't do much of anything.
Your argument may have had a bit more legitimacy when evolutionists thought our DNA was 97% junk.
You were misled about that, too. Until the Human Genome Project, we didn't know what most of the DNA did. But even in the 60s, when I was an undergraduate, there were papers about the functions of non-coding DNA. (that's what scientists actually call it)
Mutations are overwhelmingly deleterious...even though most have no noticeable effect..IE they are slightly deleterious or near neutral.
That's closer to the truth, but the scientists who espouse that idea, don't really understand neutralist theories. The most outstanding neutralist geneticist, Motoo Kimura makes it clear that this phenomenon is not a bar to Darwinian evolution.
The neutral theory of molecular evolution holds that at the molecular level most evolutionary changes and most of the variation within and between species is not caused by natural selection but by random drift of mutant alleles that are neutral. A neutral mutation is one that does not affect an organism's ability to survive and reproduce. The neutral theory allows for the possibility that most mutations are deleterious, but holds that because these are rapidly purged by natural selection, they do not make significant contributions to variation within and between species at the molecular level. Mutations that are not deleterious are assumed to be mostly neutral rather than beneficial. In addition to assuming the primacy of neutral mutations, the theory also assumes that the fate of neutral mutations is determined by the sampling processes described by specific models of random genetic drift.[1]
According to Kimura, the theory applies only for evolution at the molecular level, and phenotypic evolution is controlled by natural selection, as postulated by Charles Darwin. The proposal of the neutral theory was followed by an extensive "neutralist-selectionist" controversy over the interpretation of patterns of molecular divergence and polymorphism, peaking in the 1970s and 1980s. The controversy is still unsettled among evolutionary biologists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_theory_of_molecular_evolution
It's highly mathematical, but accessible to anyone who has taken college level math. What do you know of the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium?
Mutations destroy.... Once in awhile....very rarely there is a "useful" mutation, but it almost always is a result of information being destroyed.
Show me your numbers. Anytime there's a new allele in a population, the information rises. Assume whatever frequencies you like, and show us the math.
In the pipe dreams of evolutionists natural selection sorts it out. But reality and science tell us something different.
Nope. For example, Barry Hall demonstrated the evolution of a new, irreducibly complex enzyme system in bacteria, via a series of useful mutations. Would you like to see how that happened?
We have perhaps 300 more mutations than our parents did.
That's about five times the actual rate. The genetic literature can be daunting, but if you want to talk about this, you'll have to do some reading in it.
Barbarian asks:
Would you like to learn about some mutations that produced not just additional information, but useful new information?
Sure, lets see what you have!
The Milano mutation produced a new lipoprotein that reduced the risk of arteriosclerosis. The old lipoprotein, from which the new one evolved, is still present, via gene duplication.
ApoA-1 Milano (also ETC-216, now MDCO-216) is a naturally occurring mutated variant of the apolipoprotein A1 protein found in human HDL, the lipoprotein particle that carries cholesterol from tissues to the liver and is associated with protection against cardiovascular disease. ApoA1 Milano was first identified by Dr. Cesare Sirtori in Milan, who also demonstrated that its presence significantly reduced cardiovascular disease, even though it caused a reduction in HDL levels and an increase in triglyceride levels.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ApoA-1_Milano
So now, instead of one of them, there are two. Show me your numbers on information content for that.
The nylon bug mutation, via a frameshift in a plasmid, gave bacteria the ability to digest nylon oligomer.
Negoro, S., Biodegradation of nylon oligomers (2000), Appl. Microbiol. Biotechnol. 54, 461-466.
There's a family in the U.S. that has almost unbreakable bones. Turns out, it's single mutation that makes them much more durable than most of us.
http://yalemedicine.yale.edu/autumn2002/news/findings/53806
A mutation that happened in Europe sometime before 1000 AD, gives excellent resistance to Bubonic Plague - and HIV.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.htm
How many would you like to see?
Survival of the fittest doesn't create, does not create the fit, but it eliminates some of the weak...sometimes.
No, that's wrong, too. You see, natural selection not only tends to remove the unfit, it also changes the available alleles in the next generation.
No... that isnt what happens.
That's what we observe happening. No point in denying it. For example, the CCR5-delta 32 allele spread rapidly through the European populations, because it gave good immunity to bubonic plague, and was therefore strongly selected. Other alleles were removed as their owners were much more likely to die before reproducing.
So, succeeding generations of Europeans were much more likely to have this allele, even though the plague was then absent, because natural selection changed the frequencies of alleles available in the population.
Its impossible for selection to detect individual nucleotides
It can, however, detect the phenotypic effects of the allele, and thereby preserve those individuals having it. The net effect of natural selection was to increase the frequency of that favorable allele.
Science and Gods Word tell us that everything reproduces after their own kind.
Barbarian observes:
No. Genesis does not say that everything reproduces after their own kind. That is another addition that creationists insert into scripture.
21*So God created*the great creatures of the sea*and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.
24*And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds:*the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so.
25God made the wild animalsaccording to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds.And God saw that it was good.
As you see, nothing about organisms reproducing according to kind. That is an alteration of the text, which creationists must do to make the Bible fit their new doctrines.
Gods Word, and science tell us evolutionism is not possible.
If you have to change it to make it fit your beliefs, isn't that an important clue for you?
