If a couple wants to have children with blue eyes, would their wants drive the mutations for blue eyes? How would that work? What are the mechanisms?
This also leads to some uncomfortable conclusions. Children are born with de novo mutations that cause severe diseases. Did that child’s parents use their brains to cause that mutation?
It is also worth noting that women are born with all of the eggs they will ever produce. Eggs form before there is a fully formed brain. How do you account for that?
You would also need to explain the pattern of substitution mutations, as I discuss in this thread:
Because homogeneous morphologies and social pressures between the two species would frontload similar sensory stimuli and derive highly similar chemical signatures resulting in very nearly identical mutation rates at the genetic level.
How? What is the mechanism, and why does it produce this specific pattern? Also, why do other vertebrates in different environments and different morphology also have this same pattern?
You should also address why DNA polymerase acting on its own is not a valid explanation for the over abundance of transition mutations. That sure looks like the most valid mechanism to me.
Because cells outside the body do not behave normally. They can be prompted to replicate but damage quickly sets in. And when they do seem to replicate, it is certainly not healthy or normal cell function that is occurring.
You mean that the cells in dishes in the lab are only seeming to replicate? Why are thousands of people going in to the lab this weekend to passage them if they are not really replicating?
Natural selection, impacting sensory cells in the brain, cause information to be sent to genes normally used to promote eye development, “instructing” them to instead, defer and reassign that energy to more resourceful features.
The point is, this is not randomness in operation. Rather, it is natural selection and the brain in deliberate adaptive operation.
For the study, the team acquired captive cavefish and measured the energy cost of their sight. They did this by calculating the oxygen consumption of their eyes and vision-related parts of their brain .
Damian Moran, who led the study, says vision is costly because “of energy-hungry photoreceptive cells and neurons .”
That certainly sounds like the point @r_speir is making. If we momentarily suspend disbelief and imagine that the brain could do such a thing, it would be interesting to determine how the brain selectively alters tissue-specific gene expression patterns to accomplish it.
Do you realize in your scenario the fish doing the “changing” to its DNA wouldn’t have any morphological change itself? Any changes would only show up in its offspring. How did the fish brain figure that out?
Also did every individual fish in the population send the same “information” to its genome? How did that work?
The idea sounds suspiciously like Bill Cole’s assertion a mind alone can physically manipulate matter. Of course we are never told the mechanism how this is accomplished.
That’s not how it works. Eyes don’t develop because of mutations that are present at the single cell stage, and that lack of development occurs during embryonic development before the brain is fully formed.