I'll tell you what I note:
I note that your challenge has proven every bit as bogus as I cannot doubt everyone already knew it to be.
I take it that you are unable or unwilling to provide an example of an evolutionary scientist who refers to a mutation in a way that does not mean changes in DNA. So be it.
What's the point of this? You knew, I knew, everyone who's spent any amount of time on this or any similar forum knew that there are several definitions of 'mutation'.
We looked in detail at a definition from a dictionary. Is there a scientific meaning of the term that you know of, that is clearly something other than "change in DNA"? You appear to have refused to tell me what your own definition is and simply tell me (not for the first time) that you gave it at some point. I didn't see it in the link you provided. You could provide it right here, right now and there'd be no way I could "ignore" it.
RAZD argued most insistently that the results of recombination need to be included in the definition of 'mutation'. And we know why: recombination produces beneficial results.
What he actually said, and you quoted, was this:
We come back to recombination still being regarded as a mutation, even by the "high priests" (although I would hesitate to call the wiki editors that), in large part because mutation is defined as change to the DNA. Any change = mutation.
He was making an argument for recombination being a change in DNA, which is a mutation. I don't know as much about genetics as he does and I don't know what the debates about this are in the scientific world; you may be surprised that scientists don't agree about everything.
The second sentence of your quote is unsupported speculation.
You can google "mendelian recombination" and find out for yourself.
The thing is, this is not going to get you from the four-legged ancestor of the whale, to the whale. What Mendel got when he crossed pea plants was pea plants inheriting dominant or recessive alleles from the parents. If you want to pick bones about nuances in definitions then I suggest you do it with RAZD, whom you can freely speak with on CvE.
By the way,
this site lists mutation and Mendelian recombination as separate things.
Right... Mutations continue to accumulate throughout one's lifetime. They contribute quite a bit to aging. The definition you offer has too little thought behind it, and your skills are insufficient to cover for the blunder.
That's not necessarily the case. Have a read
here. The genetics of ageing is more complicated than you seem to realise and we still know little about it.
I find I've forgotten why we are having this conversation in the first place. let's re-focus. What is your point in disputing the definition of mutation?
