Natural Selection Makes New Phenotypes But That Makes Evolution Genetically Impossible

Might as well state it from time to time. This is my theorywhich I started laying out at EvC forum maybe twenty years ago or so. It evolved ocver time to get somre refined but it's the same idea. I calledc it back then "Evolution Defeats Evolution" and I still rather like that pithy way of saying it, but to be more precise it's Natural Selection, the supposed Engine of Evolution, originally proposed by Darwin and reiterated all the time by Richard Dawkins, that kills evolution. Or brings it to a stop.

This is the observation: The formation of new populations or subspecies of any sexually reproducing creature rquires the3 reduction of genetic diversity. The simplest way this happens is that alleles for competing traits drop out of the population as the new traits or phenotypes become established in the population. Another way to say tyhis is that you get more homozygosity in the new population than the parent population had. Fixed loci is anotherway of saying that. Paired alleles, the allele for the heterozygous form of that gene dropping out.

How do I know this? I inferred it originally from the examples of doestimc breeding, which is where Darwin himself got the idea of natural Selection in thefirst place, and then from the example of endangered species, the cheetah being the prime example. The cheetah i genetically highly comkpromkised, having many fixed loci or homozygous genes for its salient traits. this is what endagers it wlthough that's a side issue in this discussionm. The point is that you have the cheetah's traits or phenotypc because it doesn't have alleles that compete with those traits. Those all3eles no doubt belonged to the parent population from which it was isolated in the first place, but they didn';t make it into the new population of cheetahs.

In domestic breeding at least as it used to be done the whole point was to lose the traits for breeds you didn't want. You selected traits and bred animaols that had only those traits until you got a pure breedd, and when you have that breed you have an animal with many fixed loci for those traits and have lost the genetic material for competing traits.

Breeding and engangedred specieas are the extremes of the processes that occur at a much slower rate in the development of all variations in all sexually reproducing animals. There ids always, no exceptions, a reduction in genetic diversity that is necessary to the devleelopment of the new variation. Always.

I've answered how mutations don't do anything to correct this situation, and I've argued why Noah's family on the arik, and all the animals on the ark wren't endangered species. I don't have room for it in a post these days.

But the point is that getting a new "species" or completely new version of any animal, requires the loss of bgenetic material, that's is the opposite of what would be required if the theory of evolution were true. Itg's not true. Evolution is impossible from a genetic point of view.

This along with the fact that the strata are not time periods absolutely kills evolutionh. Gosh it would nice if someone came along who saw how this is true.

Eye for an Aye -- aAnother One They Mangle

Jesus said that was the old law and He was giving His followers a new commandment: not to retaliate at all. But I get very tired of hearing the old law made into something it isn't, people saying how if that were followed we'd be up to your eyeballs in violence.

Do they think at all? Any of them? Isn't it obvious on the fac e of it that to require an eye for an eye is nothing but perfect justice? Yes Christians are now not to retaliate at all but that doens't change the fact that as law that earlier law was perfect justice.

Many of the Old Testament laws were aimed at toning down the vigilante justice that people so often exacted in retaliation for wrongs against them. Cities of Refuge were established for instance because even someon who had accidentally killed someone would have been murdered by the family of the person killed. Same with eye for an eye. If someone's eye was put out in a fight, he was likely to retaliate by killing the person who wronged him. The law of eye for an eye restricted him to retaliating only to the level of thje offense. You lost an eye you may only take an eye in retaliation. You lost a tooth, you may only take a tooth in retaliation. ,br>
An example of the kind of overkill such laws were designed to mitigate would be the incident when a young man from a neighboring tribe raped Dinah, Jacob's daughter and the sister of his twelve sons. The youhjng man was in love with Dianah and wanted to marry her so it wasnt even your standard violent rape, though of course Dinah had no say in any of it in the culture of that day. Anyway her brothers murdered the young man and his family for the violation of their sister. Jacob was worried about what that would do to his family's standing in the neighborhood, but the point is that there was a tendency in those days to exact far more in retaliation than the crime warranted. Hence, boiling it down to "eye for an eye."

In general the Old Testament is attacked by antireligionists for things it actually represents a liberal humanizing influence on the wild culture of the day. That is also true of its dealings with slavery which was a universal practice that nobody would have given up in that context, but better treatment of slaves and requirement that they be released after a certain term of service were humanizing effects of the OT laws. Yes including the call on Abraham to sacrrifice his son Isaac. Today's self-rightesou judges hae no sense of perspective whatever.

The Virgin Birth and Its Enemies

No, the Hebrew word in Isaiah that is translated "virgin" in the Christian context, is not mistralslated. That's a common Jewish claim, and that claim goes back to the time of Jesus when the slander was floated among the unbelieving Jews that Mary's child was simply illegitimate, that she'd cheated on Joseph. That slander ended up in the Talmud too as I understand it, and was part of the reason that Luther had his conniption fit at the Jews.

However, that Hebrew word if translated "young woman" instead of "virgin" would imply that an UNMARRIED young woman had a baby and that just doesn't work in the Old Testament context. You just don't have an unmarried mother. Adultery was severelyu punished. No, the word is properly translated "virgin."
And of course the New Testament accounts of Mary's being visited by the angel Gabriel to announce her pregnancy are all lies according to this slander. God formed jesus in her womb. She was a virgin.

And Jesus had to be born of a virgin because if he'd had a human father he would not have been sinless and would ot have qualified to be our Savior.

But of course those with a vested interest in discrediting Christianity are going to go on promoting the lies.

Another Case of Misappropriating What is Not Evolution to Evolutionary Theory

Another one from Bret and Heather. They are talking about a discovery he made some years earlier about the length of mouse telmomeres, which were understood to be longer than in other animals but whicvh he determined were really only longer in laboratory mice, that is, mice bred for use in laboratories. The way they are selected and bred caused them to develop long temomeres. That is, these long telomeres are not found in mice in the wild, only in oaboratory mice, a consequence of the way they are bred for that role.

And this is important because the long telomeres confer a resistance to toxity and other things that means they aren't good models for laboratory experiments where the toxicity of say drugs is being tested on them. They would have resistance to toxic drugs that would give a false judgment of their toxicity for use in humans. Which of course could be very dangers.

This sounds like an important discovery with very important ramifications.

But of course that's not the point of my post. I have one little point to make. It odes NOT take "evolutionary thinking" to recognize such a problem. I have to make an issue of this because it's a mjor way evolution keeps getting validated based on a false idea of whart is really going on. They are al=ways coop coopting normal variation to evolution, microevolution as they think of it. It is not evolution at all. Variation is built into the genome of each Species orf Kind and it's as obvious to all of us as the fact that the offspring of sexually reproducing craetures, such as humjann beings, differ from their parents and from eacfh other. That's the result of sexual recombination, not evolution. It has nothing to do with evolution, it has nothing to do with mutation. It does not take evolutionary thinking to recognize this obvious ordinary simple fact.

Selection works on normal variation. If you isolate a part of a population of any sexually reproducing animal, each separated part witll develop new characteristics. By isolating a small number of individuals you create a new population with a new set of gene frequ3encies which is going to bring about a new set of observative traits within some number of generations. This is not evolution at all, although I've used it to demonstrate that this process in producing new phenotypes requires the reduction of genetic diversity which spells death to evolution through its own processes. But that's another discussion.

The Lifting of a Great Black Cloud of Doom From Over the Nation

While I'd be happiest if more people realized that abortion is wrong based on understanding that it's a human being from conception, my main reaction to the Supreme Court decision is a huge relief that the nation is no longer under God's judgment for this sin of murdering babies to the tune of sixty million. It is clear from the Bible that a nation is judged on the righteous or unrighteous acts of its leaderrs and removing the federal government from that responsibility which threatens all of us with all kinds of calamities, is a relief I can hardly ddescribe. It's huge. The sun camed out. God may smile on thenation again. Oh there are still plenty of sins on the hands of the government but with this one lifted there's some breathing space and others may follow. Maybe we could even have a revival.

I Really Don't think There's Any Rational Argument on the Side of Abortion

Sigh. I wanted to leave Bret and heather alone for a while. they say good things about the curretn political insanities so although they are liberals who have some opinions I'm not going to like I'd rather not make an issue of them if I can avoid it.

But in their latest they get into this discussion about the Superme Court dicision that just came down taking the federal government out of Roe v Wade and sending it back to the states, and the thing is, even though they are moderates who object to some of the left's fanaticism on the subject they make arguments that are not logical.
It just makes no difference whatever that we celebrate the lives that were allowed to be born as long as we tacitly agree that it's ok to do away with others, meaning kill them. It also makes no sense to aregue that we shouldn't get all emotional about lost lives considering that there are so many ways for them to be slost and so many bazillions of sperm and egg combinations that never see the light of day etc, because golly gosh, there's a difference between nature's doing away with them, or the opperation of chance in preventing th4eir existence, and you know, like intentionalloy killing them. ,br> Tthey got into this by responding to an equially silly argument on the other side, about how aborion may be doing away with great people who could have been of benefit to humanity. Quite true but irrelevant. But the answer isn't that because that is silly reasoninjg it allows for abortion since we can't be required to make all those caluculations aboutg possibilities that are never going to happen.
br> Sigh.

The Dawkins Delusion

Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist , is a very likeale man, genial, with a pleasant Brtitich accent. And he's very sincere about what he sees as the dreadful danger to humanity and especially science from "religion." That's what this movie "The God Delusion" is about, which is based on his booki of that title. It's pretty depressing for a believer of course. As usual it would take a book to answer it properly and I'm limited to a blog post or two. Oh well.

As usual with these atheitst , he lumps all "religions" teoghether as if it's all the same thing, which is THE most frustratiing thing about such presentations. He also has a scarily limited idea of the history of religion, how it made western civilization, how it made England for that matter. He laments the tradition of requiring respect for religion, which can only be because he has such an appalling lack of knowledge of how the civilized world deppends on Christianity. No, not on "religion," but on Christianity.

He targets his idea of "faith" as common to them all, and of course undderstands it as believing something without evidence, or too little evidence, which pits it against science, by which of course he means evolution in particular, which gets my eyeballs rolling madly in their sockets. Christian faith is based on enormous quantities of evidence, allt he witness accounts reported in the bible. As John says in his gospel he wrote his own accounts so that we might believe. ut of course if you approach the Bible with the modern sophisticated prejudice that wthe supernatural is just plain false, because, well, it's just plain false because we say so, or because science says so, which it doesn't, then you'll just erase the supernatural from the bible even if you like some of the other things it has to say. That's how Thomas Jefferson came up with his own denatured Bible. Just delete all the supernatural stuff. Leaves a pretty think bible. And these days there's Jordan Peterson who seems to appreicate the nbible enormously, but has to remake it in his own image. He'll quote part of it such as "Man does not live by bread alone," which enthralls him, but leave out the rest of the sentence which says "but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." Dawkins doesn't seem to like it at all though.

Some time I should write a little essay about faith because it is wrongly ascribed to any relig8ion other than Christianity, where it is cewntral and original. But all I'll say here is that Christian faith is about the tenets of Christianity, otherwise we are as rational, and I suspect more rational than he about everything else. I won't comment on Islam or catholicism which he lumps in with Christianity as offenders according to his standard. They are falsae religions, about which he knows nothing.

Oh well, it's the usual reversal of truth, attcking the true God while supporting his false science. I think I'll just leave it at that for now.