The messiness (aka bloodiness, harmfulness, ugliness) challenge to creationism answered again

Just a quick comment on that same thread about novel features I posted on below. Tangle has been bringing it back from time to time, Zaius and WK get off into technical neverland occasionally but even they are doing a better job than I would have expected of keeping the main question in mind, which is whether mutations are the source of new alleles / traits, or they are built in from the beginning. So far they are unable to make a definite call. Of course I'm convinced that any actually useful alleles were there from the beginning and that mutations are ONLY destructive accidents that evolutionists have pounced on as their one vain hope for a mechanism of change that could support the theory.

Be that as it may, what I really wanted to comment on was Tangle's off-the-cuff comment in the post linked above:

ABE - as an irrelevant aside, the sheer messiness and complexity of these systems are evidence against design.

Well, it's true that God's original design doesn't account for it, but since what you really mean is that it's evidence against creationism as such, that's not so, Tangle. This is another favorite evolutionist challenge to creationism that has been answered over and over but keeps being thrown out there again anyway.

It can only be answered by a BIBLICAL creationist, however, who accepts Genesis in its entirety and doesn't try to read extra time between the lines or explain away the traditional understanding of the text:

The messiness of genetics is explained not by the Creation -- that is, God's original design -- but by the Fall, which introduced the processes of death and disease into the Creation. Complexity is one thing, expectable in God's Creation -- that rightly should lead to awe and appreciation -- but the kind of complexity that is really unpredictable chaos and confusion that is difficult to interpret must be attributed to the Fall. Mutations must be attributed to the Fall -- until someone can show that their occurrence obeys a law, which so far hasn't happened and doesn't seem at all likely ever to happen. Mutations are accidents, mistakes in the replication of the genetic material, KNOWN to be the cause of thousands of disease processes and NOT known even once to have produced a viable healthy allele.

Design is not challenged by the messiness, the messiness was introduced by disobedience of God, and evidence for this is everywhere in damage to the original creation -- which still shines through in many ways nevertheless.

Yes you DO get loss of genetic diversity with evolution Part 6

Percy's 6th:

Faith writes:
I’m simply repeating the FACT that selection and isolation, NOT MUTATION, are what bring about the new phenotype that characterizes a whole new population.

Faith, as long you continue to assert that mutation plays no role in speciation there will be no peace for you in this thread. People would not find it outrageous to argue that changing allele frequencies and permutational recombinations of alleles are a more significant factor over mutation in speciation. That would actually be a very interesting discussion. But to just declare that mutations have no role at all is once again to simply deny the real world, and assertions denying what is obviously true tend to draw many responses.

I suppose it could have gone in that direction except that people kept bringing up mutations. But there isn't really much more to say anyway. Changing allele frequences IS the formula for evolution after all, mutations only get stuck in there by debaters. If they are going to define my argument to say that changed allele frequencies are a "more" significant factor than mutatios this is going to keep requiring me to think about those nonexistent mutations anyway. How about just considering the situation without any mutations at all in the mix? They can pretend they are there but only being kept out of the discussion for now if they want.

But even by this point of the thread it's pretty clear my efforts at EvC are all over. And so endeth my last stint at EvC. Oh it limped on for a while but after this there is no point in going back. Ever. And of course they are going to go on ignoring my blog as well, although I'm sure some of them read it from time to time.

I've made the basics of the case: You don't NEED mutations to get new phenotypes, change in gene frequencies does that, and if you kept getting mutations after the breed was established you'd lose the breed. That much ought to be obvious to anyone -- except of course it isn't to evolutionists who are allergic to the implications of it.

But beyond those points, there is simply no such thing as a mutation that can form a healthy allele and they have no evidence for such a thing -- This is, again, merely an article of the faith that's necessary to the idea that phenotypic variation is open-ended, not limited to the Species. Again, all they have is theory, and they treat the theory as fact, without the evidence to justify it. But at least there is an existing stretch of DNA, the gene, for the mutation to work on, which gives them the illusion that it COULD be the source of healthy alleles, but there is nothing at all that can create a gene, the whole sequence of DNA itself that is the basic formula for a given trait.

My whole argument is pretty basic and obvious and would be recognizable IF they didn't keep throwing in the irrelevant baggage of evolutionism.

Breeders should recognize it, conservationists should recognize it. You don't get phenotypic change without a reduction of genetic diversity.

And that spells FINIS to Evolution.

How the cheetah, living proof that evolution is not possible, becomes just another figment of the evolutionist imagination

Hey, I'm honored, mentioned by Iblis in a post at EvC, of course the usual nonsense argument and I'm not there to defend myself but that's OK. There is no defending yourself at EvC if you're a creationist. The thing about evolutionism is that it can morph in any direction it likes in order to answer you because it's all a fantasy. If you say something that seems to challenge the theory, amoeba-like it just extends a pseudopod to gobble up the challenge -- glurrrp -- and everybody's happy.

And this is a case in point.

Faith used to back her affected agrument by incredulity with specious appeals to "genetic meltdown". Her favorite example was the amazing cheetah.

Lessee, of course you must use all the most derogatory terms you can think of to poison the well against the argument for starters, such as "affected" and "specious," to be sure nobody could possibly think the argument had any merit. Oh and be sure to call it an "argument by incredulity" even though it is no such thing -- that's SUCH a no-no.

I also don't recall ever using the term "genetic meltdown" so it shouldn't be in quotes in reference to my argument.

Now he goes on in a way that is rather hard to follow, kind of a word salad approach that serves mostly to obscure and in any case doesn't get anywhere near the argument I was always trying to make by referring to the cheetah:

He's had it rough as the poster-child for reduction of genetic diversity. Due to depopulation, isolation and inbreeding his genetic variability is so low that skin grafts between unrelated animals do not result in immunological rejection! And so on, there are a lot of lovely fables in this area.

IS that a fable? I don't think I ever used that particular example but everything I've read about the cheetah does say that the genetic variability IS so low that individuals are almost like clones of one another. Is he trying to dispute that even after declaring it?

But contrary to popular belief, this is nothing new for the cheetah.

Contrary to popular belief? Whose belief? I never said it was "new?" What does its being new or old have to do with anything? The point is that the cheetah is a prime example of extremely reduced genetic variability. He seems to affirm this yet also try to deny it. This is a very confused piece of writing.

Well, now here comes the Evo Fairy Tale. Get some popcorn, pull up a chair:

It began thousands of years ago, toward the end of last ice age,

Yes, long long ago ...

in a fairly ordinary genetic bottleneck.

... in a land far far away ...

Did anyone ever suggest the bottleneck was not "ordinary?" The point about a bottleneck is that it eliminates a bunch of genes all at once, leaving a very few individuals to form a new population with the reduced genetic variability they share, whether it's an "ordinary" or extraordinary bottleneck, whatever that might be.

And as result of this process, the cheetah has become the least "feline" of all the big cats.

Well, it has a smallish head as felines go but otherwise it's plenty feline it seems to me. But apparently saying it's less "feline" is supposed to imply that it's an example of evolution. Sigh. Are we getting anywhere with this little dissertation? Doesn't it seem to be wandering around trying to obscure the issue?

So now we go from this completely subjective notion that it's less feline looking to this HUGE jump:

In another million years or so, he may look something like this [here we get a picture of -- a hyena? A doglike animal with some cheetah-like coloring and markings]

Oh brother. Because the cheetah just sort of looks less feline to this guy it's evolving and is going to look even less feline in a million years. Sigh.

The point about such drastically reduced genetic variability is that EVOLUTION HAS COME TO A STOP. That is the point of using the cheetah as an example. The cheetah is NOT EVOLVING. It's reached a genetic dead end. When you have no new genetic possibilities there is simply no direction in which the animal COULD evolve. It goes on producing individuals that hardly vary at all from each other, to the point that they are truly like clones. You CANNOT GET EVOLUTION FROM THAT POINT.

A bottleneck is what happens when for some reason you have just a few individuals inbreeding among themselves to form a new variation of a species. A bottleneck is simply the most drastic way animals get "selected" -- randomly in this case -- and isolated, these being the "mechanisms" or conditions that bring about new gene frequencies, which is supposedly the basis for evolution. And it IS, it is the basis for MICROevolution, or the variation that commonly occurs from generation to generation in any species. If part of a population gets isolated from the rest it develops characteristics to some extent different from the former population with its own reduced gene pool. But it WILL have a reduced gene pool, it WILL have reduced genetic variability compared to the previous population. A bottleneck will simply bring about a DRASTICALLY reduced genetic variability compared to the usual reduction because it involves so few individuals. This is what makes such examples the best for making the point about how evolution comes to an end by simply following out the normal processes that create new varieties, or microevolution. ALL reduced populations tend in the same direction of reduced genetic variability but the extremely reduced populations are where you see the tendency itself in action, where it's hardest to ignore it, the tendency, that is, toward the complete inability to evolve further somewhere down the road.

Of course fantasy can surmount any obstacle thrown up by reality, and here we have Iblis totally ignoring this point and assuming that the cheetah is going to go on evolving although it doesn't have the genetic means to go on evolving:

The misadventures of these fellows actually provides the key to your whole puzzle. You see, when the gene pool is large and conditions remain stable, the overwhelming majority of even the effective, non-neutral mutations are quickly lost in the shuffle. They are outnumbered and as they provide no selection advantage, there is no reason for them to be preserved.

If mutations are going on at the rate they assume, then there is no such thing as their not having an effect. A mutation is a change in a gene, it is a substitution of a new coding sequence for another. If it has no effect all that means is that it has no detectable effect, no effect that they know of. But the very fact that a coding part of the DNA has been changed means that SOMETHING HAS CHANGED in whatever that segment formerly coded for. It can't be a good thing that a formerly coding sequence no longer codes for whatever it used to code for. At the very least something has been killed, some part of the organism no longer functions, a very tiny hardly discernible part no doubt, something beneath the detection capacity of the instruments available, but how can the death of a coding portion of DNA ever be just "neutral?" And most mutations supposedly have this non-effect. But that means that most mutations are killing off genes coding bit by coding bit. This is no doubt how "junk DNA" gets formed and there's an awful awful lot of junk DNA in the genome of most creatures, certainly the human genome. But that's a whole nother subject.

When the gene pool is greatly reduced however, either due to large-scale changes in the environment in terms of selection factors or to the spreading out of outliers of a population into a new area or niche, this changes. The cow's primary source of genetic diversity is, other cows with somewhat different genes.

Exactly, this is how genetic diversity is maintained in most large populations of any animal. Individuals vary from each other, they have different genetic possibilities that can combine with those of other individuals to create the variation that shows up in the next generation.

The cheetah's, though, is mutation.

Uh huh. Mutation is the only thing left to the cheetah, and this is true. But consider the RATE situation now. How many of the expectable mutations provide any kind of change that could be useful to the animal? Actually, it's pretty much zip. You get all those "neutral" mutations and you get deleterious mutations. Those are known. The useful ones are purely imaginary.

Each new trait produced by mutation is valuable to a reduced species and likely to be preserved

Pure fantasy. There ARE no new "traits" known to be produced by mutation. All that is KNOWN to be produced are degenerative changes and "neutral" changes, that, as I point out above, aren't really neutral because they DESTROY genes.

resulting in large-scale morphological changes over a relatively short period of time. Still in the high thousands and millions though.

Man these guys love their theory. They NEVER have to come down to reality and actually PROVE anything, they're quite content to affirm the fairy tale of beneficial mutations that drive evolution even in the face of EVIDENCE that, as in the case of the cheetah, evolution is simply no longer possible.

And this is the main factor underlying Gould's "punctuated equilibrium". For ten million years, everything is fine. Then things change; and when they do, things change. Eerie. But not mysterious, simple statistics.

Eventually you'd think a brain would simply implode from the strain of having to invent all those fictions to support all the imaginary notions that support the imaginary theory.

But thanks for the mention, Iblis, gave me the opportunity to restate my favorite argument.

Evolution has been killed dead a zillion times but they keep following its ghost around pretending it's alive

Oh BROTHER. This would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. Now they are accusing ICANT and other creationists on the thread "Can I disprove Macro-evolution" of being off topic. Hoo boy, what will they think of next? But then it turns out it's not that they're off topic, it's that they haven't disproved Macroevolution, which is what the title of the thread supposedly demands of them, which of course the evos wouldn't recognize if it bit them, and they have teeth marks all over them but don't seem to notice. Case of genetic entropy perhaps -- nerve degeneration radiating out from the gluteus maximus?

The problem is that Dawn Bertot and JRTjr and ICANT are happily leading you and others down those oh so attractive rabbit holes.

The topic is NOT whether Macro-Evolution happened, it is an assertion that they can disprove Macro-evolution.

It is their assertion that it did not happen, and until they provide a model that better explains what is seen than the current model, they have failed.

Stop letting them change the subject and lead you guys astray.

It is up to them to provide convincing evidence that Macro-Evolution did not happen.

Nothing would qualify as convincing evidence for them, obviously. They are just wilfully blind to the good evidence that HAS been provided. There's nothing wrong with ICANT's evidence.

And the latest in this string of nonsense posts on that thread:

i know i would poste the latin name of that new mouse and the house mouse but he would still say they are still mice

Of course he would because that IS the evidence against Macroevolution and he has fulfilled the requirement of the title of the thread with a resounding Yes he CAN disprove Macroevolution and he did. Because you can't just redefine reality and call it science, folks, if mice are still mice no matter what new Latinized characteristics a particular strain of them may have you have not achieved Macroevolution. AND again, they will have reduced genetic diversity TOO, which is THE real-world actual-fact killer of evolution.

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I guess this is a place to tack on a reaction to a later post by ICANT: This is a post where he and I disagree:

I also understand that there will be sub-species that will arise due to malfunctions in errors in DNA information resulting in mutations.

Sub-species arise from the simple shuffling of the genetic possibilities that God built into the DNA, a very abundant array of possible variations, far MORE abundant in past generations and extravagantly abundant in the pre-Flood world, losing diversity over time thanks to the Fall and the Flood.

The reason offspring are different from parents is not mutations, it's the shuffling of the alleles for the various characteristics in the parents' DNA and this is how new varieties get formed too, as limited populations become isolated from the greater population and their smaller gene pool is the source of their own characteristics.

I'm sure science is right that we do all have mutations, even our own unique mutations, but I can't think that is a good thing since there are thousands of genetic diseases in the human genome, no doubt caused by mutations, and I'm also convinced that "junk DNA" is -- mostly -- the result of mutations, basically a killing off of formerly functioning genes.

Evolutionsts ASSUME that all the DNA was the result of mutations but that's just an article of faith; there is no evidence that that is so. Mutations are errors in the DNA and must be a consequence of the Fall. Of course evolutionists aren't going to do the necessary tests to really pin it down and I don't know how many creationists are looking in this direction either.

Mutations are not necessary, and I personally doubt that they ever contribute anything positive to the development of varieties or sub-species.