Controlled breeding is much more than "artificial selection"

Can you read? Darwin coined both those terms meaning NOT “identified long before Darwin”.

He mislabeled something that already had a name (controlled breeding into “artificial selection”). And he invented and IMAGINED an impossibility: the term/process “natural selection”.
You were wrong, so why continue?

Hahahaha! I call Poe’s Law on Nonlin’s possible parody of an internet anti-evolutionist.

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@Nonlin.org… can you think?

Are you saying: natural selection was not in operation until Darwin or anyone else coined the term?

The African cheetah population went through an extreme population bottleneck, so it does happen in nature.

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Why don’t we look at the rock pocket mouse. These mice are found in the deserts of the American southwest. For most of their range they are the same color as the terrain around them, a nice dusty brown. However, relatively recent volcanic activity produced areas of black basalt within these deserts which produced black basalt rocks. In these areas you find black pocket mice.


Nachman et al. (2003)

As you can see, the camouflage for each color of pocket mouse is dependent on the environment they find themselves in. When you look at the pocket mouse population you find black mice in the areas with black basalt rock and brown mice in the brown desert. The black allele is dominant over the brown allele, and the black and brown mice freely interbreed where they are next to each other, but you still see mostly black mice in the black basalt rocks and absolutely no black mice as you move out into the desert.

So what do you think is causing this? Most scientists chalk it up to natural selection through predation. Do you disagree with the scientists?

Not then and not now, but that’s a different story

False: “identified long before Darwin” !

True or not, this trivia has nothing to do with anything.

“Most scientists” are wrong. And camouflage helps. So?

How do you explain the distribution of fur color in this mouse population? If it isn’t natural selection, then what is it?

Before any “selection”, the mouse has to have the capability to change color.

Color changes as well as metabolic, antibiotic, antibiotic-resistance, and many other adaptations is what organisms do day in and day out.

“We conducted association studies by using markers in candidate pigmentation genes and discovered four mutations in the melanocortin-1-receptor gene, Mc1r , that seem to be responsible for adaptive melanism in one population of lava-dwelling pocket mice.”
Nachman et al. (2003)

They have already found the mutations that are associated with the difference in fur color, and it happens to be in the same gene that causes differences in melanin expression in humans.

So, how do you explain the distribution of this allele in this population if it isn’t natural selection?

I don’t even know what we are disputing any more.

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Color change is part of the design. A built in capability of the mouse and human. But note some limitations: no chameleon mouse, no weird colors, etc. Darwin’s “natural selection” is simply impossible for many reasons. And obviously, NS cannot explain anything - like why I can’t breed pink mice with purple ears for instance.

@T_aquaticus

He has been spouting this nonsense for a year now…mostly at BioLogos.

A brown mouse does not have the genetics to have black fur, so I don’t understand what you mean by this. Even more, another group of black mice hundreds of miles away has different genetics for black fur. How is this “built in”? What does that even mean? Also, how do you explain the distribution of the allele for dark fur?

Nature demonstrates that you are wrong on this point. We can watch natural selection happening right in front of us.

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As you both know, BioLogos eventually blocks inconvenient voices in a tacit admission of defeat. You see, expressing inconvenient views is “not gracious” but censoring is very “gracious”.

Should be easy to disprove if “nonsense”… like Darwinism for instance:

Gradualism fails – http://nonlin.org/gradualism/
Natural selection fails – http://nonlin.org/natural-selection/
Divergence of character fails – http://nonlin.org/evotest/
Speciation fails – http://nonlin.org/speciation-problems/
DNA “essence of life” fails – http://nonlin.org/dna-not-essence-of-life/
Randomness fails – http://nonlin.org/random-abuse/
Abiogenesis fails – http://nonlin.org/warmpond/
Science against Religion fails – http://nonlin.org/philosophy-religion-and-science/
etc., etc.

And let’s test it again and make sure it fails again and again: http://nonlin.org/evotest/

  1. As far as I can tell, organisms have been designed with certain capabilities including color change. Similarly, DRL in your car is also a designed capability. Genetics is just a designed in adaptation tool - we are not defined by genetics, remember? Distribution of alleles is just camouflage… which is good enough but not perfect as it’s not changing in real time.
  2. You have misinterpreted what happens in nature. You didn’t follow the link to see why.

@Nonlin.org:

You will need to find someone who already agrees with you. Good luck…

But the mice aren’t changing color. They are one color their entire lives. If you take a brown mouse and put it in an area with black basalt rocks it doesn’t turn black. They have to be born with the allele for black fur color in order to have that color. For the purposes of this discussion it really doesn’t matter where the black allele came from. The question is why the black allele is only found in the mouse population that lives among the black basalt rocks.

How does camouflage determine the distribution of the black fur allele? What is the mechanism?

I have? My interpretation is that the brown mice are eaten by predators at a higher rate in the areas with black basalt rocks, and the same for the black mice that find themselves in the light brown colored desert. This difference in predation causes the differences in the allele distribution. What do I have wrong?