Hi again CTD
Hello everyone

The problem I’ve found with CTD’s arguments is that he, purposefully or otherwise, does not actually understand what the Theory of Evolution (ToE) actually says. He has, on another forum, presented evidence that directly supports ToE while claiming that it contradicts it while ignoring direct evidence that contradicts his claims. This argument is a case in point. In a post to another board long before his last post here I gave him links and details of bacterial experiments in which single bacteria are bread up and grown over many generations and then subjected to environmental challenges. These experiments start with exactly zero genetic variation as bacteria don’t even have the two parallel DNA strands that we have and given that the experiments started with just one individual all the variability we see, which is a huge amount, throughout these experiments has been ‘invented’ by mutation and selection. He did not comment on these experiments and then he makes statements such as those above on this forum which totally ignore this evidence. Is he ignoring the evidence? Did he not understand it? Which is it CTD?

In one of his most telling posts to date CTD presented a list of accumulated genetic defects as proof that ToE is untenable. Upon examining the list I found that it was exactly what ToE predicts, it was focused exclusively on creatures for which selection pressure had been dramatically reduced thus the weeding out factor, natural selection, which normally removes such mutations was not working at least not to anywhere near the extent that it would for species under strong selection pressure. His list documented inherited genetic disorders in humans and domestic animals for whom modern medicine and supportive care significantly reduce selection pressure.

Your last post CTD again ignores what ToE says when you complain that recombination makes a bigger difference than mutation so mutation will be swamped. Recombination of existing alleles will produce larger effects in the short term than mutations on average as there is a large pool of them in many populations to select from but there are limits to how far recombination can move a species. There may be 20 genes’ that code for neck length but even if all the ‘long’ alleles are combined in one creature you won’t get a giraffe. Once the extreme limit has been reached mutation is necessary for creatures to move beyond that boundary and such mutations have been observed so we know that they occur. The most obvious example is in those bacterial experiments that I pointed out to you earlier where there is no recombination at all so all the change is due to mutation. In most spices a combination of mutation and recombination is needed.

In a clear proof that your world view is unfounded lets look at a simple example. If we were to accept, for the sake of argument, that the genesis account of our origins is real humans can have exactly four alleles at any locus given that we descend from just two individuals. The fact that we have hundreds in some loci proves that either mutation is real or we did not start out from just two individuals. Which do you think is more probable CTD? Do we throw out your complaints against mutation or do we throw out genesis as they can’t both be true?

In Reason

Russell