Originally posted by Bob Sholtz
i've explained a billion times, evolution requires lots of beneficial information-adding mutations. instead of finding lots of evidence for them, we find very little. they happen very, very rarely. the rate of deleterious mutations is such that the genome is shrinking over time, not getting bigger. this means that the mechanism that drives evolution doesn't actually exist, ergo nothing could have evolved.
The mechanism doesn't exist? The mechanism IS genetic mutation sorted out by natural selection. This is proven to be true.
So basically your entire argument based on all those studies is that since more harmful mutations happen than beneficial ones as observed in a few select generations of chimp and man, it means our genome is losing more information than its gaining. I still don't understand why that means we couldn't have evolved. I still insist that the research is far from conclusive, with such a low sample size from a limited time period of studying mutation rates to determine anything about evolution from it. Also, you can't determine if rate changes over time, or what external factors are involved, as I said early. It certainly warrants more study. It may be something to be concerned about, but again, it doesn't mean we couldn't have evolved, although it may mean something completely different.
It's also worth noting that humans aren't exactly driven by natural selection like they use to be. In the past, humans needed to have substantially more children in order to ensure some survive. Today we have medicine, which oddly enough uses predictions based on evolution to develop new vaccines, hence the survival rate of children and lifespan overall is greatly increased.
walter remine wrote a book and described the problem renowned geneticist J.B.S. Haldane had found elegantly. walter remine didn't do the research, he merely summed up the problem haldane found in an elegant fashion.
So why didn't the article source Haldane instead? Some guy talking about his work isn't the same as Haldane himself.
i've already shown that talkorigins uses outdated and completely wrong information. it is a biased source that constantly lies.
Say what? Where did you do this? Can you show me examples of the lies?
for "average rate of success" they want how many deleterious mutations occurs per individual. put "3". for "poisson random variable" put "0", this means that you want to know the odds of a child being born with zero deleterious mutations with the rate you've put in.
No offense, but that calculator is one of the silliest things I've seen on here. How on earth do you expect that to actually calculate the accurate odds of a child being born with zero harmful mutations, while ignoring so many factors in the equation. It is probability, not actual figures. You understand the difference, right? Also not all deleterious mutations actually harm the person in a noticeable way, and since beneficial mutations are more likely to happen in a 'less fit' creature it makes sense that we don't see that many in humans (in the extremely small sample size that is).
www.nature.com...
Breed almost any organism under conditions where it is forced to accumulate random mutations, its fitness will invariably decay. The reason is that very few mutations improve an organism's ability to survive or reproduce; the majority are harmful. But a recent study suggests that the size of this majority depends, to a surprising extent, on the contact in which the mutations occur. The same mutation occurring in a poorly adapted individual, Silander et al. (2007) argue, is more likely to be beneficial than if it occurred in a well-adapted individual.
That actually makes a lot of sense.
edit on 31-1-2012 by Barcs because: (no reason given)
