Not nested ones.
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I don’t think random gene loss explains the pattern if the Venn is even close to correct. Others that I have had talked to about this agree. If random gene loss was as prevalent as the pattern suggests, I would expect more gene variation in mice rats etc. Animals that have been around awhile, have short generation times and live in diverse environments.
What makes you think that the fossil record must preserve a perfect record of transitions? What makes you think transitions themselves happen without any branching? There is no such expectation among palaeontologists according to what we know about evolution and the nature of the fossil record.
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Why?
Why? Also, what variation have you looked for? Have you looked at any mouse genetic variation papers, and if so, could you reference them? I would hazard a guess that you haven’t looked at any papers on the subject.
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I have looked. I do not find any papers that point to mouse to mouse variation. The mouse genetic set is presented as fixed. This is a good test for the Venn. The other issue you have is gene gain.
You don’t know how paleontology works.
Nope. You don’t understand how phylogenetics works, even though it’s been explained to you many times. Again: it isn’t sorting by degree of similarity. Nor do you know what a nested hierarchy is.
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Then you can’t make any claims about mouse to mouse variation. Your argument is without evidence.
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Who are these others? Are they all creationists?
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Your understanding of this issue is too grossly inadequate for your personal opinion to be of any value. And the fact that you can talk to equally uninformed people who agree with you does not change this.
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When you talk about “mouse”, what are you actually referring to? The species Mus musculus? The genus Mus? The family Muridae?
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Well, you’re one of the people he has talked with. But, of course, you don’t agree with him. So who knows what metric Bill uses to determine which of the people he talks with he will believe.
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I think I know.
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How about between mice and rats? You mentioned mice and rats in your earlier post, were you suggesting that you don’t find as much variation between mice and rats as you’d expect according to the hypothesis that gene loss happens?
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I strongly suspect that it varies depending on the point he’s trying to refute with words instead of evidence.
How was the mouse genome genetically mapped back in the late 1980s, then?
I was a postdoc in the lab that did most of it. Are you claiming that you did not find any papers involving genetic mapping, which I seem to recall requires variation?
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first: why should they be specific to birds? any non-hierarchical combination should fit with the mix idea. second: we can find such instances too. here is one potential example:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/292/5523/1903.long
and here is the excuse:
“The more probable explanation for the existence of genes shared by humans and prokaryotes, but missing in non vertebrates, is a combination of evolutionary rate variation, the small sample of nonvertebrate genomes, and gene loss in the non vertebrate lineages.”
i will add that the more probable explanation is design. if not in this case at least in many others.
indeed. maybe we should define first what “small steps” means. according to evolution a complex system can evolve by small steps. by small steps i refer to at max 1 or 2 parts every step. otherwise it will be a big step (i think that even 2 steps should be a big jump but ok). do you think that its possible to make a gps by small steps when every step is functional by its own?
i never said that, but since these fossils dont fit with the hierarchy i have no problem to call them “out of place”. otherwise any fossil will not be “out of place”. even human with a dino.
Unsupported assertion. Par for the course.
No. But, of course, a GPS is designed. It didn’t evolve. You didn’t know that?
You have no problem calling them “out of place” because you have no clue what it would mean for a fossil to be “out of place.” Ignorance can be quite liberating in terms of the claims one feels comfortable making.
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“Out of place”, certainly in creationist parlance, implies that the fossils contradict what is expected by our understanding of common descent and the fossil record. A human fossil in the Cretaceous would qualify. Tetrapod fossils being found a few million years earlier than more “primitive” transitional tetrapodomorphs does not.
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Did you you actually read the paper? It’s not an “excuse”, it’s a well-reasoned conclusion.
There’s a passage relevant to discussions of “Sal’s flower”:
One explanation for the species-sampling effect shown in Fig. 1, and the reason why species distribution patterns must be interpreted with great caution, is the phenomenon of gene loss. It is likely that many genes shared by the eukaryotic common ancestor have been lost in some lineages. This seems especially likely in some of the species analyzed here, such as Arabidopsis thaliana , which was chosen for genome sequencing in part because of its small genome size, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae , for which extensive gene loss has been documented (10). A simple computation illustrates the possible contribution of gene loss to the pattern. Suppose the five eukaryotic genomes analyzed all resulted from a single adaptive radiation. If this common ancestor started with 10,000 genes [see Rubin et al. (11) for a discussion of “core proteome” sizes] and each lineage lost 30% of its genes, then the probability that any one gene was lost from four lineages is (0.3)4 = 0.00081, or 81 genes lost from all four of the nonvertebrate lineages. Of course, some genes are probably less likely to be lost than others (e.g., DNA polymerase genes). Supposing that 20% of a proteome cannot be lost, then 30% loss translates into 65 genes lost in all four lineages. It appears likely that gene loss alone could account for a large proportion of the BVT set.
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there is no big difference between pushing back tetrapod evolution and human evolution. if we can push back tetrapod evolution by about 20 my why we cant push back human evolution by 20 my and even more?
but that is the point: gene loss is an excuse since we cant prove that such genes existed in these genomes in the first place (unless we have remains of these genes), so we need to invoke “gene loss”.
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