Novel features and the evolutionist word-magic flimflam: If you assert it aggressively enough that will make it true.

There's a new thread at EvC about how novel features could have evolved, started by Tangle, who is one of the best posters EvC has ever had. Yes, he's an evolutionist but he's reasonable, he approaches the different subjects carefully, really makes an effort to grasp the best creationist arguments and treats them as rational rather than idiotic, is able to express the arguments articulately, and tries to find good evidence to answer them.

That's what he hopes will come of this new thread, since the last one on the subject degenerated into side issues and what he calls "exotica," or a sort of theoretical neverneverland -- which is usually where I stop reading a thread myself.

Some 17 posts into this new thread my assessment of him is holding up as he's dealing well with the other posts so far and keeping the creationist argument he wants to defeat clearly on the table.

I do want to comment here on JAR's contribution because JAR's arguments for the theory of evolution are mostly irrational and emotional, assuming most of it without evidence and thinking he's produced evidence when all he's done is assert the theory and dumped an observed fact or two into it. That's more or less what they all do but JAR is over the top most of the time. What I quote from Taq in my previous post on genetic information a couple days ago is an example of this kind of thinking, a real salad of assumption, assertion and the occasional fact. And for an example of JAR's inability to distinguish evidence from fantasy see his thread about the mummified man Oetzi from a few years ago.

Anyway, here we have another JAR production. First he asks:

Is this another hunt for the super genome? I thought we put that absurdity to bed long ago?

Tangle does a marvelously clear job of answering this later, the answer being No, a super genome isn't needed, the creationist position is that all the material for variation is in the genome we see now. Again if it weren't for my arthritic bones I'd jump and dance for joy at such clarity.

I used to think some sort of super genome was probably called for to explain the very great genetic variability that would have been needed to support the vigor and longevity of pre-Flood life, both human and animal, but I came to realize that simple heterozygosity for most traits provides an enormous range of variability. And, if junk DNA represents all the genes lost through the bottleneck of the Flood, and killed by mutations down through the generations since then, there would have been a huge range of genetic possibilities available before the Flood, and these two factors alone amount to a "super" genome without having to posit any difference in its structure.

Then JAR gives us this information:

We have come a long way in a fairly short period of time in sequencing various genomes. There are grape and cow and human and ancient human and neanderthal and bee and chimp genome sequencing projects and one factor has become pretty much a universal characteristic and that is that the genomes can be identified.

Send a lab an unknown sample and they send back a short note saying "That's a goat." or "That's a human." or "That's a elm tree".

We have samples from ancient folk and modern folk, from here and from there.

Marvelous! Exactly what a creationist would expect to see! Exactly what exists in reality! Observed facts that confirm creationism. Of course he doesn't notice that he's confirming creationist expectations and assumes instead that he's confirming his evolutionist bias -- or perhaps he thinks that if he announces it aggressively enough it will stop supporting creationism.

But then in a mind-boggling non sequitur he says this:

Novel features evolve over time in populations by changes in the genome that then get filtered by natural selection.

But all he's offered so far is nothing that could support this amazing leap into Evo Fantasyland but in fact supports the creationist view. The fact that solid scientific laboratories can so clearly recognize different Species from a look at their DNA naturally raises the question how one could evolve from another, how novel features could possibly arise. But of course he doesn't know, all he can do is recite the Evolutionist Creed that flatly declares that they DO arise, do "evolve over time in populations by changes in the genome". Uh huh. HOW, Jar? Silence. And he also knows that they "then get filtered by natural selection." Which isn't in dispute.

Then he adds another non-sequitur in another bit of creed:

It all comes down to imperfect copies.

I'm glad Tangle seems to know how to avoid getting entangled as it were in this typical frustrating evolutionist irrationality, and I hope he can continue doing so and get this thread on the track of something useful.

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Then in Post #18 JAR says:

But today we can identify not just individual species from a DNA sample, but often specific populations within a species.

That shows that genomes do change over time.

Again, he says this as if he's saying something that supports evolution, but in fact it supports creationism just as well. It's great to hear that DNA can tell them so much about a species and its varieties, really great. It reflects exactly what a creationist sees in the phenotype, and it's great to see that the DNA reflects it so exactly. The usual variation, the expected variation built into the genome. Microevolution.

Why can't these people at least LEARN what the creationist claims are and stop arguing with their straw men? And this is only one part of the futility of the Evo-Creo debate.

Well, again, I hope Tangle is up to untangling all this.

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5/24 Too bad, apparently Tangle isn't. The thread has degenerated into obscurantist technospeak, more credal announcements peppered with the usual accusations of creationists.

And of course nobody has criticized JAR for posting information as if it was evidence for evolution when it actually confirms creationist expectations just as well, proving again the futility of debate there.

Too bad, started well.

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May 30 follow=up. Tangle again seems to have extricated the question from the oblivion that was threatening:

There have been a couple of further studies by the same people on these mice that add to the evidence. This one shows that natural selection is the mechanism that matches dark mice with dark rocks and light mice with light rocks. (Sadly, I can see only the abstract)

Previous work has demonstrated that two Mc1r alleles, D and d, differ by four amino acids, and are responsible for the color polymorphism: DD and Dd genotypes are melanic whereas dd genotypes are light colored. To determine the frequency of the two Mc1r allelic classes across the dark-colored lava and neighboring light-colored granite, we sequenced the Mc1r gene in 175 individuals from a 35-km transect in the Pinacate lava region. We also sequenced two neutral mtDNA genes, COIII and ND3, in the same individuals. We found a strong correlation between Mc1r allele frequency and habitat color and no correlation between mtDNA markers and habitat color. Using estimates of migration from mtDNA haplotypes between dark- and light-colored sampling sites and Mc1r allele frequencies at each site, we estimated selection coefficients against mismatched Mc1r alleles, assuming a simple model of migration-selection balance. Habitat-dependent selection appears strong but asymmetric: selection is stronger against light mice on dark rock than against melanic mice on light rock. Together these results suggest that natural selection acts to match pocket mouse coat color to substrate color, despite high levels of gene flow between light and melanic populations.

Jun;58(6):1329-41.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15266981 The writers of these papers are very confident that they have identified the genes responsible for coloration in the mice that they have studied (but not other mice in other locations) and say that the difference is 4 amino acids.

How confident can we be that the allele changes are as a result of a mutation of an 'original' gene?

Good question I say. But I'd also say they don't have an answer because that question isn't one they are investigating. Mutation is usually assumed rather than made the subject of scientific inquiry.

The Genetic Markers of the Flood Bottleneck

Here comes JAR with his usual wrongheaded assertions (no, no evidence here) against the Flood of Noah.

To mention "fossils" when talking about the Biblical Flood is of course simply silly. The Biblical Flood, if it had happened, was far too recent to have anything to do with fossils.

Too recent to have anything to do with fossils? 4500 years isn't enough time? Even though evolutionists claim that fossils are being formed every day in our own time in far more mundane circumstances than the global biblical Flood? Excuse me? The Flood buried bazillions of living things which would have been made into fossils in a lot less time than 4500 years. I've seen discussions, probably creationist of course since evolutionists are committed to not knowing such things, that show the process occurring in a matter of years in caves that drip calcium carbonate. If I find such a discussion I'll post it.

The Biblical Flood myths say that all the critters on land and in the air with the exception of those critters on the fictional ark were killed during a very short period.

If that were true, then every land and air critter living today, plant or animal, would be descended from the few critters on the ark.

Very true and they are.

That would leave a genetic bottleneck marker in EVERY single living species of plant of animal, and the marker would be only a relatively few generations back.

If the Biblical Flood happened, then that marker MUST be there.

It ain't.

Case closed.

I've heard this bit of evolutionist lore many times by now, but I have NEVER ONCE SEEN AN EXPLANATION OF EXACTLY WHAT "MARKER" WOULD POINT TO A BOTTLENECK. Perhaps I merely missed it but I've been looking for some time whenever this subject comes up and all that's offered is this assertion, perhaps some ridicule and choice epithets along with it, BUT NO CLUE AS TO WHAT THE MARKER MIGHT BE THAT WOULD DEMONSTRATE THE BOTTLENECK IN QUESTION.

Now that it's come up again perhaps I'll be motivated to make a more dogged search for such information.

But meanwhile I wanted to highlight JAR's post because of something I just learned about these things that opens up a new answer to the question. I've been rereading Morris and Parker's What Is Creation Science? over the last few days, one of the first books on creationism I read after becoming a Christian, and besides recognizing many points they make that I've made my own in this debate although I'd forgotten their source, I've also run across some points that illuminate some things I hadn't digested and am only now beginning to think about.

One of them suggests an answer to just what WOULD be the genetic indicators of the bottleneck at the Flood and they aren't the sort of "marker" that would jump out at you but something a geneticist today would simply take for granted as the normal state of the genome. Whenever I've gone that far into this part of the debate I find myself wondering about a formerly much bigger genome --polyploidy for instance, which never really fit but now I have a better understanding anyway -- from which it would be easier to imagine descent of all the life forms we see today and extravagantly more varieties before the Flood as well, which certainly must have been the case BECAUSE of such an extreme bottleneck.

No, not a bigger genome, but a different genetic situation along more ordinary lines:

Parker describes how all the varieties of humans and animals are easily accounted for by simple Mendelian genetics combining a given built-in array of genes for various traits. The example he gave was of two parents with "medium" or "average" skin color, expressed as AaBb, with the capital letters representing the darkest and the lower case the lightest, saying that EVERY shade of skin that we see on earth can be produced from those two parents, from the darkest African (AABB)to the lightest Scandinavian (aabb). When you think of every other trait as genetically expressed by the same formula, it becomes clear that an enormous variety of combinations would produce an enormous variety of types or varieties or races -- of people and animals of all kinds -- which would become characteristic of groups as they migrated and became geographically isolated from one another.

And all this incredible variety requires is normal sexual recombination AND HETEROZYGOSITY of the traits.

He also gave this statistic on page 112: "[evolutionist Francisco Ayala] says that human beings are "heterozygous" for 6.7% of their genes, on the average. That means that 6 or 7 times in a 100, the pair of genes for a given trait differ like the genes for brown or blue eyes, or for rolling or not rolling the tongue. Now this may not seem like much. But Ayala calculates a single human couple with just "6.7% variety" could produce 10 to the 2,017 children ...before they would have to produce an identical twin..."

He goes on to say that the whole spectrum of skin color we see today would be easily produced IN ONE GENERATION with just this 6.7% heterozygosity for that trait. Combining that with the same breadth of possibilities for size, hair or fur color, bone type, muscle type, and so on and so forth, would certainly yield an enormous variety of individuals within each created kind or type.

So I figure this 6.7% heterozygosity is what remained on average to all creatures after the Flood, or perhaps it was somewhat more then and has decreased since then. It's still enough to produce enormous variety, everything we see today.

Well, what does a bottleneck do genetically anyway? Doesn't it produce HOMOZYGOSITY for a number of traits? Isn't that what happened to the cheetah -- it has reached the point genetically where most of its genes are fixed and no variety is possible at all. Since the cheetah is of course descended from the cats on the ark, with their already drastically reduced heterozygosity -- perhaps comparable to the 6.7% of human beings -- a later bottleneck would have reduced it even further to the current state of almost 100% fixed loci, so that each individual is almost a clone of all the others, and further variation is as good as impossible.

THERE'S YOUR "MARKER" JAR. Not what you were expecting but there it is. It wouldn't be recognizable in the genome because nobody is looking for it. The average heterozygosity seen today would be accepted as the norm for all human beings for all time. It wouldn't be suspected as a marker of anything, although the basic principle is quite well known.

So instead of the genetic complexities I was trying to imagine to account for the necessity of an enormously greater variety among humans and animals before the Flood, I now appreciate that simple ordinary everyday heterozygosity can account for it all, but presumably there would have been much MORE heterozogosity for a much greater number of genes or traits before the Flood. 100% back at Adam and Eve? 50%?

And to that I would like to add another "marker" of the bottleneck, one of my favorite topics, JUNK DNA -- which makes up something over 90% of the genome. You wouldn't suspect that as a sign of the bottleneck at the Flood, would you, JAR? But if it's what I keep thinking it must be, the record of the genetic death brought about by that bottleneck, as well as all the accumulated death from other causes of course, then its mere existence in the genome is very glaring evidence of the Flood, now to be added to the other marker, the very low incidence of heterozygosity that resulted from all that death. This genetic junkyard or graveyard is a hint at enormously more genetic possibilities at the Creation than exist today.

May I please have my Nobel Prize now?

Mulling the genome and rapid speciation

Thought:

Variation through change in gene frequency as populations are isolated from other populations is such a common event in nature, occurring within observable time periods and not requiring millions of years, even on out to actual "speciation" as defined by evolutionists, not to mention that it's the way new domestic breeds are intentionally developed, it seems to me the question could be raised:

In all this shuffling and shifting of alleles and development of new phenotypes therefrom has any gene for anything other than variations on the basic structure of the Kind been observed to change? If macroevolution ever occurred wouldn't you expect that in all that shifting of alleles you'd see some alleles shift that pertain to the very dogness of dogs, the very catness of cats, the very horseness of horses? But we have huge dogs and tiny dogs and an enormous range of types in between and there is no doubt they are all dogs; same with cats.

Can they even distinguish genes that pertain to these things from others in the genome? Superficial traits such as eye color, skin color, hair and fur color and type, overall body size and musculature, these things are easily and rapidly changed over comparatively few generations. But has anyone ever seen a dog eye change in the direction of a cat eye or vice versa, or the yapping or barking of dogs change into something else etc. Or work with what evolutionism believes: could you breed a reptile of your choice into something that is even somewhat birdlike? (Since there were once apparently flying reptiles (in the pre-Flood world) I would expect you MIGHT be able to tap into that genetic possibility in a reptilian genome (maybe it's all gone to junk DNA now though) but could you get a scale to evolve into a feather?)

That is, has anything that is DEFINITIVE of a Kind ever shown the slightest change into something else from all this alteration in the genes and alleles over observable generations? Could it? It doesn't happen, does it?

I'm thinking the genome must obey some laws that haven't yet been discovered, that keep the basic blueprint of the Kind from changing while a large variety of secondary characteristics may change freely.