New Forum For The Debate of Origins and Creationism, page 2
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reply posted on 13-10-2005 @ 07:31 PM by eternal_rider
Interesting topic you have going here...

I believe that natural selection is fact - we see it around us everyday. It is the process by which a population adapts to change due to environmental stimulus. For example - dogs.

We know that all breeds of dogs have come from a common ancestor - a wolf-like animal. From the wolf DNA, canines in different environments have adapted to their environment by expressing specific genes that aid their survival. i.e. heavy coats for canines in cold climates (huskies) and lighter coats for canines in warmer climates (dingos). These dogs have also been interbred (with the help of humans) to produce the kind of various breeds we see in dogs today, from great danes to chiuahuas.

However, i believe evolution cannot take credit for these changes, since all genetic variability is due to a loss of genetic material or gene supression. In every area of genetic research (that I know of), when DNA information and coding is studied, scientists find that genetic mutations nearly always produce harmful results. Even on the incredibly few times that a beneficial mutation is found, it is due to a loss of genetic information.

From this, I am inevitably led to the question - How did we evolve from bacteria to humans (which requires vast amounts of increase in DNA volume and complexity) when all mutations that add DNA base pairs to the genome always cause major detrimental results in the organism? This is not my theory, all basic cell biology / genetics courses taught in high schools and universities teach these principles of genetic mutations and their results.

Therefore it is logical in my mind that when studying the basics of genetics, that life could have been created perfectly and then through natural selection and loss of genetic information through mutations, we find the variations in nature we see today.

-Eternal Rider.


reply posted on 13-10-2005 @ 08:23 PM by Zipdot
We often hear claims that "most mutations are harmful" and "mutations do not add new information," but there are serious flaws with these claims. They are, in essence, baseless.

"Most mutations are harmful, so the overall effect of mutations is harmful."

Most mutations are neutral. Nachman and Crowell estimate around 3 deleterious mutations out of 175 per generation in humans (2000). Of those that have significant effect, most are harmful, but a significant fraction are beneficial. The harmful mutations do not survive long, and the beneficial mutations survive much longer, so when you consider only surviving mutations, most are beneficial.


"Mutations are random noise; they do not add information. Evolution cannot cause an increase in information."

It is hard to understand how anyone could make this claim, since anything mutations can do, mutations can undo. Some mutations add information to a genome; some subtract it. Creationists get by with this claim only by leaving the term "information" undefined, impossibly vague, or constantly shifting. By any reasonable definition, increases in information have been observed to evolve. We have observed the evolution of

- increased genetic variety in a population (Lenski 1995; Lenski et al. 1991)
- increased genetic material (Alves et al. 2001; Brown et al. 1998; Hughes and Friedman 2003; Lynch and Conery 2000; Ohta 2003)
- novel genetic material (Knox et al. 1996; Park et al. 1996)
- novel genetically-regulated abilities (Prijambada et al. 1995)


This information was taken from
Talk Origins. Does this information affect your outlook, or are you going to stand by your beliefs?

Go Astros.

Zip


reply posted on 10-11-2005 @ 07:17 PM by mattison0922
Originally posted by Earth Angel
An expert on the "THIS MORNING PROGRAM" uk WHICH IS ALWAYS A VERY RELIABLE SOURCE.

If you go into thier website there should be information regarding this. Not many people are aware of this fact apparently but none the less.

Yes mice are 99% the genetics of humans, why do you think the poor buggers are experimented on such as growing human ears on them. Because it is the closest thing to a human ear you will get that a human will not reject!


Sorry - irrespective of the historical veracity of your morning news show with respect to scientific manners, what you're saying isn't exactly true.

Mice and humans are roughly 85% homologous at the sequence level with respect to coding genes. The actual calculated values vary from 70 - 90%. This says that in the CODING regions of the mice and human genomes, about 15% on the average will be different.

Now what this expert might have said is that we share 99% of our genes with mice. That could be true, I don't know that for sure, and am feeling to lazy to look it up. Believe it or not those are completely different statements though. The latter says that 99% of the genes present in humans are present in mice - but the differences between homolgous genes between mice and humans is still ~15% of the nucleotides. That is to say if Gene X is present in both humans and mice, and the gene is 100 nucleotides in length, 85 would be the same between mice and humans, not 99.

Mice are popular experimental animals for a number of reasons including but not limited to: being cheap, readily available, established laboratory animals, with short reproductive times, low maintenance demands, that serve as a good model organism for several diseases, and have a wide variety of established protocols associated with them. In particular, protocols for "knocking-out" and somewhat less so "Knocking-in" genes to the mouse genome are readily established, making them very attractive for genetics studies. Why spend millions on research with primates, for which there are significantly fewer protocols, etc. and orders of magnitude more hassles, when you can spend thousands on research with rodents, which are incredibly easy to work with?


reply posted on 10-11-2005 @ 09:29 PM by Zipdot
The number is "at least 80%," (later referenced as "about 80%") in reference to actual genes shared and not the similarities between "coding genes" as matt discussed.


It shows that about 80% of genes in mice and men are like for like.

But if one considers just the different classes of genes - mice have more genes involved in reproduction and smell, for example - then the similarity rises to 99%.


This information is regarding the 95% of the mouse genome that has so far been studied.

Zip

[edit on 11/10/2005 by Zipdot]
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