This is @Art claim. Maybe he can engage here and refresh the discussion.
So should we interpret your discussion points as ACCEPTING that God employs evolutionary mechanisms in his acts of creation?
Or are you rejecting that possibility? If you are definitely not rejecting that possibility, then I can withdraw my objections and leave you in peace.
What say you, Bill?
There goes Bill running headlong away from requests he back up his claims. Same as usual. 
1 Like
Possibly yes. Thats what we are exploring and I am open to it.
So you have located an Atheist to discuss how God can employ evolution?
Do you think thatās a really good idea? It sounds pretty foolish and futile in my view.
That is false. āInnovative changeā is your idea. Show us the emergence of innovation in a single generation, and the genetic differences between those generations.
Please stop pawning off your own claims onto others.
2 Likes
I am interested in recombination as an innovative mechanism. If you are not then letās table this. @Art had some interesting data on corn making an adaption based on his hypothesis this was a change from recombination. The reason @Art data was interesting is that it involved exon shuffling. Most recombination I have seen is at the gene level. This is only one piece of evidence. Joshua is discussing modeling recombination.
What do you mean by this? Are you suggesting that recombination tends to occur more frequently within genes? That isnāt true in humans:
On average, the recombination rate is lower in genic regions than in intergenic ones, a difference that is greater for females (average SRR = 0.898 and 1.053, respectively) than males (average SRR = 0.992 and 1.012, respectively). For both sexes, the recombination rate tends to be lower at genic bins containing exons, and higher for those containing only introns, particularly those where the closest exon is more than three bins away. This latter difference is much greater for males (SRR = 0.868 and 1.284, respectively) than females (SRR = 0.843 and 1.013, respectively). In fact, intron bins far from exons exhibit the greatest difference between male and female SRR (0.270, P = 2.2 Ć 10ā7) among the bin categories studied. At intergenic regions, for both sexes, the recombination rate first increases with distance from the first or last exon of genes, peaking at approximately three to four bins away, then decreases.
(From Fine-scale recombination rate differences between sexes, populations and individuals)
3 Likes
Define innovative.
It generates a significant new feature. Muscles, nerves, brains, circulation, eyes, bones, echo location, flight feathers, light bones for flight, placenta etc.
What counts as new and significant? You donāt seem to understand what a definition is, you just give examples of things rather than explain why they count as innovations.
Muscles, nerves, brains, circulation, eyes, bones, echo location, flight feathers, light bones for flight, placenta etc.
Right, those are examples of things you think count as innovations, but why? What we need is a principle, not examples or synonyms of innovation.
A principle would be if you said something like āA gene counts a novel innovation if it exhibits increased catalytic activity by X orders of magnitude, or binds substrate a stronger by X amount, or is different from itās ancestral version by at least X% of the sequence, or increases fitness of an organism in an environment by at least Xā.
Could a mutated duplicate gene count as an innovation, why or why not? What would it take for it to count? How much different should it be? What other function should it perform, if any? By what magnitude must itās molecular effect change to count as an innovation?
1 Like
Thanks for the citation. When cross over occurs in chromosomes the data I have seen shows that the change is in gene location. @Art showed an example in plants where exons were shuffled.
What data have you seen? What species do they come from?
1 Like
Generally humans. I know very little about this subject but am interested. Any education you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
Generally, most recombination events tend to occur in āhotspotsā that are determined via a combination of the local chromatin structure and especially by the presence of specific DNA motifs that enable binding of the PRDM9 protein (at least in mammalsā¦the specific mechanisms differ across many other groups). This 2013 review is a good starting point:
Meiotic recombination in mammals: localization and regulation
Iām not sure if there is a paywall or not, so here are some key points:
The localization of meiotic recombination sites in humans and mice is determined by the DNA-binding specificity of PR domain-containing 9 (PRDM9), which is instrumental in the specification of recombination hot spots. The PRDM9 DNA-binding domain has quickly evolved under positive selection. This evolution may be linked to the erosion of PRDM9-binding sites owing to meiotic DNA double-strand break (DSB) repairā¦
In mice and humans, high-resolution genetic mapping of chromosomal crossovers at a limited number of loci led to the characterization of 1ā2 kb-intervals, named hot spots, in which recombination crossovers are distributed, with the number of crossovers peaking at, or close to, the centre of the hot spots7,8,9. Consistent with the prediction that crossover hot spots are preferred sites for DSB formation, non-crossovers were monitored and detected at the centre of almost every hot spot that was assayed7. The analysis of genetic diversity permitted the assembly of the first genome-wide, high-resolution human genetic map on the basis of linkage disequilibrium (LD) patterns10 (Box 1). This allowed the identification in humans of more than 25,000 crossover hot spots, which showed variation in recombination activity over four orders of magnitude and a tendency to be located outside genes11,12. In mice, hot spots that were identified using the same methods had similar features13, and the recent development of a method for mapping genome-wide meiotic DSBs has led to the identification of 15,000ā20,000 hot spots in the mouse genome14,15 (Box 1).
(emphasis added)
3 Likes
So the ability to digest milk even as an adult was an innovation that occurred in some human populations, that was beneficial.
Asians do not not have this innovation.
Native Americans do not have this innovation (remember, the innovation Iām describing is that tolerance for milk extends past childhood into adulthood).
The fact Native Americans did not was the cause for at least one war: there is a story about a Viking band that landed somewhere on North America. They encountered an Indian hunting party and gifts were exchanged. The Vikings grew up on milk and shared their supply with the Indians, who were surprised and delighted with the white liquid!
But a few hours later, all of the Indians started to experience fairly intense cramps. After they started to recover, they concluded the obvious: those Vikings had tried to poison them! So they returned to the Viking camp and attacked!
I do not know what happened to that band of Vikingsā¦
Recombination is mutation, and recombination can result in beneficial mutations. I am not seeing a difference between beneficial and innovative. Can you please explain the difference?
Which of these examples happened over a single generation?
1 Like
The types are in the examples above.
Bill ducks the question again. How typical.
1 Like
I do see a difference, which is that we have a definition of beneficial (has a positive effect on fitness), yet we have been given zero explanations of what innovation is. I could define it myself, but then Iād have to waste time trying to persuade Bill that my definition is good. Iād rather he just define it himself, instead of giving examples.
The point is that we should be in possesion of a principle that makes up able to determine if a mutation has resulted in innovation. We canāt do that with a handful of examples, because they donāt allow us to determine whether some genetic or phenotypical attribute would count as an innovation if they are different from the list of organs or structures Bill wrote.
With Billās list of examples we couldnāt say that some novel organization of tissue or proteins is an innovation if it doesnāt result in a heart muscle, or an eye, because Bill has not explained what it is about hearts or eyes that make them innovations.
This is why definitions are better than examples. If Bill continues to refuse to give a good definition that can be applied to evaluate any novel structure or mutation, I suppose we can just make one up ourselves.
1 Like