A question I have been asking myself. If God (or an Intelligent Agent) could have intervened but didn’t how would you distinguish that observationally from one which proceeded entirely through natural processes?
The original question btw was
Every beneficial mutation is conditionally beneficial. There is no adaptation that is universally beneficial. Take the polar bear as an example. The polar bear has many adaptations that are well suited for polar climates. However, if you plopped a polar bear population into the middle of the Sahara then they would die off quickly. Does this mean that all of those adaptations for a polar climate are deleterious?
Your mistake is labeling one allele as normal and the other as abnormal. Using your criteria, any mutation that changes gene expression will be abnormal since it is found at such a low number within the population. This is yet more proof that you won’t accept any mutation as being beneficial, no matter what it does. If you saw each and every mutation leading to humans from a common ancestor shared with apes each and every mutation would not be normal, and therefore would not be beneficial.
You consider it trivial because it challenges your world view.
Please provide evidence that this didn’t happen.
Wait… did I just read that you declared a universal rule, declared and sustained by God no less, that it is impossible for a mutation to create a net gain in capacity or function …
and then when drawn face to face with a mutation that is a net gain, you said (about this violation of God’s supreme law about genetics) that it isn’t important?
I’d like to announce to those currently in close proximity to @aarceng to please slowly step in a direction that will take you safely out of harm’s way. Lightning can be unpredictable, so please err on the side of a surplus of caution!
Recent research into the function of Light has revealed this is part of a system controlled by Switch . The purpose of Switch is to activate Light in response to appropriate external factors and deactivate it in response to other factors.
Researchers have also identified two mutations of Switch ; Switch1 and Switch0 .
Switch1 leaves Light permanently activated (on) and this has been found to be beneficial in coal mines and other dark places. Switch0 leaves Light permanently deactivated (off) and this too has been found to be beneficial in situations where energy consumption is critical.
Opinion is divided however about the significance of these mutations. Theory A proponents are excited about these results saying they show the ability of systems involving Light to produce beneficial mutations to adapt to different environments. However Theory B proponents claim that both Switch1 and Switch0 are simply two cases of broken switches that can incidentally have beneficial effects in specific environments.
And for the bonus… don’t forget to include that it’s pretty much irrelevant anyway.
God does not have a system where he scores Mutations according to beneficial or harmful qualities…
Why? Because things are changing all the time. When Tetrapods came out of the sea, limbs were pretty gosh darn important.
Then after a while, snakes started throwing tantrums about their limbs getting in the way … Then sure enough,
some tetrapods go back in the water, and first thing they do is get rid of their rear legs… in lots of different ways…
Why can’t people just keep score of their mutations?
Actually, I said it was trivial, but nobody has asked me why I think that.
But I have said mutations can be beneficial.
No, it is quite consistent with my worldview. (and Kenneth Miller has provided supporting evidence.)
How do you prove a negative?
And I was being sarcastic. Yes, you said it was trivial.
This would be like Newton pronouncing on the universal nature of gravity … except for melons on tuesdays… they tend to float upwards from their vines - - “but that is trivial”.
Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd.
Did I ever say that? I think the closest was where I said in #26
Certainly the commonly quoted ones such as human adult lactose tolerance and sickle cell trait are due to defects (loss of function mutations), as are most examples of antibiotic and insecticide resistance; possibly all, since I don’t know if all have been examined in sufficient detail to make a decision.
Then in #101 I did think of a mutation that could be a gain of function
So I think I have been quite consistent in distinguishing between benefit at the phenotype level and gain of function at the genotype level. What I find surprising is the continued insistence by some people in conflating benefit with gain of function. I have even provided a lovely little graphic to make the distinction clear. Here it is yet again.
Now the vast majority of mutations will fall in the LD square, some will fall in the LB square, very few will fall in the GB square.
This “model” you are using, where mutations are categorized as “gain in function” or “loss in function” is rather a waste of time. In fact, it’s irrelevant. I don’t believe any professional evolutionist attempts to make these distinctions that you are so interested in.
Natural Selection is about “best fit” … why would you want a mutation where “old equipment” is never lost?
Whales used to have legs… and they are a hindrance. If the legs were never lost, whales with legs would be trying to overcome a hindrance for eternity.
If fish didn’t “lose their gills” … how long do you think a fish with lungs and legs would do with gaping gill slits too?
And for us to even notice a neutral mutation, there had to be a time (a while ago) where a mutation doesn’t do anything that is negative or positive… and then one day, we learn that a neutral mutation is no longer neutral… but it had been for a while.
How about a professional biochemist, or a professional geneticist, or even Wikipedia?
- Loss-of-function mutations, also called inactivating mutations, result in the gene product having less or no function (being partially or wholly inactivated). When the allele has a complete loss of function (null allele), it is often called an amorph or amorphic mutation in the Muller’s morphs schema. Phenotypes associated with such mutations are most often recessive. Exceptions are when the organism is haploid, or when the reduced dosage of a normal gene product is not enough for a normal phenotype (this is called haploinsufficiency).
- Gain-of-function mutations, also called activating mutations, change the gene product such that its effect gets stronger (enhanced activation) or even is superseded by a different and abnormal function. When the new allele is created, a heterozygote containing the newly created allele as well as the original will express the new allele; genetically this defines the mutations as dominant phenotypes. Several of Muller’s morphs correspond to gain of function, including hypermorph and neomorph. In December 2017, the U.S. government lifted a temporary ban implemented in 2014 that banned federal funding for any new “gain-of-function” experiments that enhance pathogens “such as Avian influenza, SARS and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS viruses.”[59]
It doesn’t appear that the concept of gain or loss of function mutation is outside general discourse. In fact you will notice the Wiki article has separate subheadings for By effect on function and By effect on fitness. This is simply what I am arguing; effect on function and effect on fitness are not necessarily the same thing.
That’s up to you. You made the claim, so now you need to support the claim with evidence.
If that is your point, you could have quit long ago. I have no bone of contention regarding that.
As a matter of fact, i thought you were arguing that they WERE correlated.
So… why did you bring it up?
Did you really make that mistake when I said
You need to avoid conflating changes in the genotype with effect on the phenotype. It is tempting to think that a mutation that is beneficial is “gain of function” in the genotype; and vice versa. A more sophisticated understanding decouples the two as shown in the diagram below.
and
A relatively small number of beneficial mutations do occur that do not incur negative costs, but they always represent miniscule changes. For instance, certain species of cichlid fish obtained a mutation in a rhodopsin protein which allowed for greater sensitivity to light at greater, versus lesser, water depths. But the new protein only differed from the original by a single amino acid. This single alteration represents the most impressive feat of evolution in one of biologists’ most prized case studies over a period of time comparable to that in which the largest transformations took place in the fossil record.
Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves Topples Foundational Claim of Evolutionary Theory | Evolution News
[edit]
So back in #26 I said “Most (all?) beneficial mutations are actually defects.”
Now I can say “Most beneficial mutations are actually defects.”
(Sorry @pevaquark, you replied before I came back to add this)
I don’t get this. This seems like moving the goalposts to me. Basically where one party claims no positive mutations for decades (despite lots of evidence otherwise) and then when they get around to accepting the evidence they say ‘not good enough/not impressive enough.’
1 Like
I suppose a different metaphor could apply (as an alternative to ‘moving goalposts’). … as in “Okay - I’ve scaled this foothill now, but there’s the next higher one in front of me and others too before I reach that ‘promise-land’ summit.”
It’s my early-start black Friday for metphors! 
These argyle socks go with the plaid pants, don’t they?
1 Like
The word ‘defect’ implies there is some ideal that the species should have in their past and no longer do. What does defect mean when you use it?
Like Baleen Whales have a deactivated gene for making enamel (a ‘defect’?) with one of the changes being a single point insertion where many other tetrapods mammals don’t- in other words the idea of something being a defect is not the right question but simply a matter of fitness to any given environment. What would be a defect in one environment is a strength in another.
5 Likes
I dont even understand why we allow conversations to fixate on information. Speciation frequently avoids approximations on information.
When one bird population speciates and changes color… there is not even a hint that one population is more info-bound than another!
This topic was automatically closed 3 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.