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Checkmate evolutionists

What has the initial claim got to do with evolution? It seems to be saying that if you have a child it will most likely die from lethal mutations. This means that if the creationist is right, that human reproduction is impossible. They have obviously misinterpreted a scientific claim or falsely stated it. Also, isn't it funny that to try to counter evolution, they use (misuse) data from biologists and biological science. So, they don't believe the biologists when they say evolution is a fact, but will accept as true anything said by biologists about genetics, and then put their own spin on it.
 
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Spacetime Inhabitant said:
What has the initial claim got to do with evolution? It seems to be saying that if you have a child it will most likely die from lethal mutations.
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“Lethal mutations” is a broad category. Certainly cancer will gitcha if nothing else does first. You die as a centenarian, of a lethal mutation. So what? What you die of doesn’t matter to evolution except insofar as it hinders reproduction.
 
I am NOT interested in "creation science." I AM curious about the statement that "If much more than 10-15% of the genome is functional, the mutation rate would lead to a lethal mutational load." Can someone explain this? (Google provides non-exact hits on the sentence, but little clarity.)

I think I understand that DNA's mutation rate is nicely tuned to achieve the proper compromise between stability and scope for evolution, but the quoted sentence tells more than this.
 
The key term is 'natural section'. It is not that difficult.

In the long run beneficial mutations enhance survival and procreation. Lethal maintains are less likely to be passed on.

With modern medicine kids who would not have survived long after birth survive. Heart defects are treated. Disease and vaccinations.

I'd have to look up actual numbers. In the 19th century a couple might have 6 babies of which 2 might survive.

I heard it said you may be the best adapted fish in your lake, but if your lake dries up you are history. Long term survival is complex. We are seeing large scale extinctions due to climate change.
 
Ninety percent of your genome is junk — interview with Larry Moran.

Gotta scroll up to the start of the article, it’s one of these deals that the link takes you to the highlighted part I was searching for when I typed in Moran’s name and stuff about junk in the genome.
 
DBT said:
Epigenetics...what is 'junk' now may become beneficial under different conditions?
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Or we don't presently understand how the rest is functional or beneficial.

How much of the cosmos or the universe is not functional or non beneficial? Could it be a lot smaller and be just fine? That's a strange way to look at things. Do humans need all that potential energy wasting away in our atomic nuclei? Does a giant sequoia need all that size and mass to produce a few measly cones and seeds just so it can reproduce? We may be getting a little too anthro in our judgements. Dinosaurs used to be big, dumb and clumsy.
 
A joke I herd as a kid from an uncle.

A kid is born with a silver screw in his belly button. No one can figure out what it is there for.

As he gets older he keeps fiddling with it.

Finally he gets it unscrews and when he jumped up for joy his ass fell off.
 
JohnG said:
8.2% of our DNA is functional.
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Or, more plausibly, we have been studying DNA since 1860. It took us ninety years just to work out the structure of the molecule*; In the next seventy years, we have so far found out what 8.2% of it is doing, and still have very little clue what the other 91.8% is up to.






* This was famously deduced in 1953 by Watson and Crick, who used the well established chemical methodology of taking X-Ray crystallographic prints from a much smarter woman, Rosalind Franklin, and then not giving her any credit.
 
bilby said:
JohnG said:
8.2% of our DNA is functional.
Click to expand...
Or, more plausibly, we have been studying DNA since 1860. It took us ninety years just to work out the structure of the molecule*; In the next seventy years, we have so far found out what 8.2% of it is doing, and still have very little clue what the other 91.8% is up to.






* This was famously deduced in 1953 by Watson and Crick, who used the well established chemical methodology of taking X-Ray crystallographic prints from a much smarter woman, Rosalind Franklin, and then not giving her any credit.
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But see Moran’s discussion I linked above. He argues that 90 percent is indeed junk, and we have no reason to think we will discover otherwise. This dovetails with his contention that most evolution is driven by drift and accident, with natural selection playing a far smaller role than realized.
 
pood said:
most evolution is driven by drift and accident, with natural selection playing a far smaller role than realized.
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That’s nonsensical.
Drift and accident provide opportunity for natural selection to act upon allele frequencies within a population.
Natural selection doesn’t cause mutations, it acts on them.
On the flip side, a bazillion mutations arising from drift or accident may occur before one of them causes a sufficient differential rate of reproductive success to cause one mutation to become fixed - via natural selection - within a population. The rest of them will have had no effect or a detrimental one.
 
Of course I know natural selection doesn’t cause mutations. But that is hardly the issue. Moran and other anti-adaptationists certainly do not dismiss selection outright, but say that near-neutral evolution dominates at the genotyping level and often also at the phenotypic level. Moran had a big argument once at his blog with Dawkins on the subject. A genome of 90 percent junk is more in accord with evolution by accident than it is with adaptationism.
 
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