How is there reality without God?

[EarthScienceguy]

Neils Bohr
"No Phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." Or another way to say this is that a tree does not fall in a forest unless it is observed.

The only way for there to be an objective reality is if God is the constant observer everywhere.

Physicist John Archibald Wheeler: "It is wrong to think of the past as 'already existing' in all detail. The 'past' is theory. The past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present."

God is everywhere so He can observe everywhere and produce objective reality.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to William in post #262]

If folk are less intelligent, how would this explain the increase in technology and construction?

I think to answer this you'd need to examine what fraction of the population is responsible for the new technology and construction. Is that any different today than it was 100 years ago, or 500 years ago? I expect that cutting edge advancements are only carried out by a very small percentage of the population, and of course population has grown exponentially over the last centuries, especially since the 1700s, so if the same percentage of "smart" people existed to do all of the technological advancements, there'd be a lot more such capable people today in raw numbers:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/popu ... 00..latest

We've gone from 600 million to 8 billion since 1700 ... a factor of 13.3 increase in the number of humans. So even if the fraction of highly intelligent people has dropped due to less intelligent people reproducing more (and assuming the genes for lower intelligence always passed down ... not always the case, obviously), there should still be enough highly intelligent people around to continue advancing technology and construction. And once a new technology has been developed, everyone has access to it (in principle) regardless of how many people exist on the planet.

Lastly, each generation has access to the knowledge of the prior generation, and this results in an exponential accumulation in overall knowledge by an exponentially increasing population. It may not have required any more raw intelligence to develop the transistor or the laser than it did to develop the steam engine or a Roman aqueduct.

[The Barbarian]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #0]

As I showed you, that would depend on many different things. It's like asking how long it would take water to run down a mountain. But do you see why a 1% difference would require you to determine how long 0.5% change takes? This is important. Think about it.

(again, ignores Barbarian's question)

Since you like to bring up hemoglobin as an example let's look at your hemoglobin example.

There are three alleles for human blood types ABO. A and B are dominant and O is recessive, a point that you continually seem to overlook.

Blood types are not hemoglobin. They depend on certain proteins on the surface of erythrocytes. The different types of human hemoglobin are not related to blood types. But that's only the first error you made. Let's go on...

But here is the problem with your evolutionary fairytale.
Results
We have analysed two male Neandertals that were retrieved under controlled conditions at the El Sidron site in Asturias (Spain) and that appeared to be almost free of modern human DNA contamination. We find a human specific diagnostic deletion for blood group O (O01 haplotype) in both Neandertal individuals. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2629777/

Conclusion
These results suggest that the genetic change responsible for the O blood group in humans predates the human and Neandertal divergence. A potential selective event associated with the emergence of the O allele may have therefore occurred after humans separated from their common ancestor with chimpanzees and before the human-Neandertal population divergence. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2629777/

So the genetic change in humans for blood type O started with the Neandertals.

Very unlikely. It would be very unlikely for identical blood types to evolve independently. Humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and at least one other race of H. sapiens all evolved from a common archaic H. sapiens race. You see, we didn't evolve from Neanderthals nor did they evolve from us. (we did interbreed from time to time, however). So blood types were almost certainly evolved before the split of these different races.

Neandertals could mate with modern humans so they would be considered the same kind of human as is living today by creationists.

Genetically, they are close enough to us to be considered a race of H. sapiens. There are no biological human races now, but at one time, there were at least 4. The consensus of scientists is that Neandertals are (as we are) a subspecies of H. sapiens.

Evolutionist theories have to change like the wind because

In science, theories change as new evidence indicates. In contrast, creationism requires reality to conform to creationist assumptions.

If there was a mutation to produce this blood type O in humans then it would be an almost "neutral" mutation because there does not appear to be any deleterious effects or selective advantage over the other two blood types.

For example, if a mutation that gave blood type O were actually 1 percent more beneficial than type A, it would take 100,000 generations to fix this mutation in the modern human population from a beginning population of 10,000 people. C. Patterson, Evolution (Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing Associates, 1999); J.C. Sanford, Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome, 2nd ed. (Lima, NY: Elim, 2005)

Considering that it's not fixed in the human population, I don't see your point. Perhaps you don't know what "fixation" is in genetics. What do you think it is?

60% of all people living today have the O allele, regardless of where they may be in the world. it is by far the most common blood allele in the world. Transcending all races and ethnic groups. (E.C. Minkoff, Evolutionary Biology (Menlo Park, CA: Addison Wesley, 1983); E.W. Sinnot et al., Principles of Genetics, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1958)) That means one of two things. Adam and Eve when they were created had all three alleles AB and O, or Neandertals, and modern humans have been on the earth for over 2 million years.

As you just learned, genetic evidence indicates that the common ancestor of anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals had these blood groups. And the evidence suggests that humans have been around at about 2 million years or more.
https://www.britannica.com/story/just-h ... mo-sapiens

There are three alleles for the human ABO gene. There are many different versions (alleles) of the hemoglobin gene, each coding for a slightly different beta-globin protein. Not sure if anyone has published a definitive list of the known alleles. I assume we can agree that hemoglobin is an essential molecule, right? This alone is devastating for YE beliefs. As you know, if we all descended from one pair of humans 10,000 years ago, this would be a lot of mutation for an essential gene. If you rely on scientific data, the last common ancestor of all humans living today, lived about 150,000 years ago. Still, that would be a mutation which survived to spread in the population every 3,000 years. Lots of other genes are like that. Most of our genes have dozens of alleles. We have about 30,000 functional genes, so do the math. If the average number of alleles is as little as 10, we are left with about 2 a year that end up spreading through the population.

Not at all. This is exactly what would be expected to happen after the tower of Babel and the human population were scattered across the earth. Each little group of humans would have its characteristic polymorphisms that could then be used to identify their ethnic groups.

So you're saying that each of these groups would have different genes? That's a testable assumption.

And it's been refuted decisively. The Human Genome Project demonstrated that there is more variation within any human "race" you might define than there is between such groups.

Their polymorphism is not fixed in the entire population but they are part of specific ethnic groups that are associated with specific regions of the world.

Nope. It's a common belief among racists, but it's false. You're as likely to be a good genetic match with a New Guinea highlander as with your next door neighbor.

Biblical creationists have a mechanism for this diversity. And notice that most of the genetic diversity in humans that we find is according to ethnicity.

Nope:

The project found that there is more genetic variation within a single population subgroup than between two different population subgroups. For example, there may be more genetic diversity within a population in Asia than between that same population and a different population in Europe.

Another way of saying this is that, while certain populations tend to cluster around certain regions of the world, the variation that exists between them is continuous, not discrete—that is to say, different populations (e.g., Asians and Caucasians) are not “grouped” into discrete genetic races; rather, genetic variation between individuals varies according to a sliding scale, with people who are closer together geographically sharing greater genetic similarity and those further apart sharing less.
https://scienceandsociety.duke.edu/does-race-exist/

This fact is utterly mysterious to creationists, but it makes perfect sense in light of evolution.

From your link:
“At first glance, what we found seemed to contradict established theory that initial mutations are entirely random and that only natural selection determines which mutations are observed in organisms,” said Detlef Weigel, scientific director at Max Planck Institute and senior author on the study.

Delef is mistaken there. Natural selection does not cause mutations:

The Luria–Delbrück experiment (1943) (also called the Fluctuation Test) demonstrated that in bacteria, genetic mutations arise in the absence of selective pressure rather than being a response to it. Thus, it concluded Darwin's theory of natural selection acting on random mutations applies to bacteria as well as to more complex organisms. Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in part for this work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luria%E2% ... experiment

Genetics, Volume 136, Issue 3, 1 March 1994
Luria-Delbrück fluctuation experiments: design and analysis.
Abstract
Luria and Delbrück, in a seminal paper, introduced fluctuation analysis primarily as a means to elucidate the timing of mutation in relation to the imposition of selective conditions. Their work, and subsequently that of LEA and COULSON, established also a basis for measuring the frequency of mutational events.

Yea, about your belief that mutations are random.

Turns out, they are. In fact, your study merely reinforces that:
"New study provides first evidence of non-random mutations in DNA; posting.php?mode=post_reply&post_num=247&f=17&p=1108338"

From your link:
The new finding does not disprove or discredit the theory of evolution, and the researchers said randomness still plays a big role in mutations. But the study does show that these genetic alterations are more complex than scientists previously believed.

Did you not even read it? It appears that the plant protects certain parts of it's genome from mutation, but not others. But such a mutation is certainly possible and open to natural selection. It just reinforces the theory by showing how such random mutations could affect mutation rates.

So now Haldane's dilemma is even more of a dilemma because of the length of time it would take to have a nonlethal mutation in one of these areas.

See above. Reality, again.

You mean the reality of having many different bottlenecks at the same time

No, I meant the observed evolution of a new irreducibly complex enzyme system. Reality beats anyone's reasoning.

And the global distribution of blood type frequencies seems to be affected by natural selection:

The evolutionary forces of and have no doubt played a significant role in the current distribution of ABO blood types worldwide. Geographic variation in ABO blood groups is also likely to be influenced by

, because different blood types are thought to vary in their susceptibility to certain diseases. For example:

People with type O blood may be more susceptible to cholera and plague. They are also more likely to develop gastrointestinal ulcers.
People with type A blood may be more susceptible to smallpox and more likely to develop certain cancers.
People with types A, B, and AB blood appear to be less likely to form blood clots that can cause strokes. However, early in our history, the ability of blood to form clots — which appears greater in people with type O blood — may have been a survival advantage.
Perhaps the greatest natural selective force associated with ABO blood types is malaria. There is considerable evidence to suggest that people with type O blood are somewhat resistant to malaria, giving them a selective advantage where malaria is endemic.
https://humanbiology.pressbooks.tru.ca/ ... ood-types/

[William]

[Replying to DrNoGods in post #281]

Which is to say, one cannot point to the dummies and declare "therefore," that a random process is doing all this stuff without knowing it is doing all this stuff....

[Clownboat]

But here is the problem with your evolutionary fairytale.

"after the tower of Babel and the human population were scattered across the earth."
"where small groups of humans settled after the tower of Babel."
"Adam and Eve when they were created had all three alleles AB and O"

Go on, please tell us more about the evolutionary fairytale. Surely you are trying to slay us with irony?!?

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to William in post #284]

Which is to say, one cannot point to the dummies and declare "therefore," that a random process is doing all this stuff without knowing it is doing all this stuff....

??? ... I don't see how anything I said relates to the above statement. If the "random process" you are referring to is less intelligent people having more children than more intelligent people, and that leading to an overall decline in the fraction of highly intelligent people, this process does not necessarily mean there aren't enough highly intelligent people around to continue with advances in technology and construction (the point of my post). I made no comments on how this process works (if that is what you were referring to) or whether it was itself intelligent so could "know" what it was doing. Or maybe you are referring to some completely different "process."

[William]

[Replying to DrNoGods in post #285]

... which is what I was arguing with my original post [Replying to Diogenes in post #255] viewtopic.php?p=1108502#p1108502

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to William in post #287]

... which is what I was arguing with my original post [Replying to Diogenes in post #255]

Right ... the second sentence of that post (#262) is what I responded to initially, and in response you said this:

Which is to say, one cannot point to the dummies and declare "therefore," that a random process is doing all this stuff without knowing it is doing all this stuff....

How is less intelligent people having relatively fewer offspring than more intelligent people a "process"? Or if it can be classified as a process, what would allow it to "know" anything? I'm sure there are rational reasons why this difference in offspring numbers exists, but I don't see how it could be described as a process rather than simply an observation related to human behavior.

My initial comment though, was a response to this question in post 262:

If folk are less intelligent, how would this explain the increase in technology and construction?

My point was that the increase in technology and construction can be explained by the fact that there can still be (and obviously are) sufficient numbers of highly intelligent people in the population, even if their relative percentage were less than in the past, due to an exponentially growing population.

[William]

[Replying to DrNoGods in post #287]

How is less intelligent people having relatively fewer offspring than more intelligent people a "process"? Or if it can be classified as a process, what would allow it to "know" anything? I'm sure there are rational reasons why this difference in offspring numbers exists, but I don't see how it could be described as a process rather than simply an observation related to human behavior.

Observation is a process and human behavior is a process - series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end, be that to breed or be that to do anything else...processes are involved.

If folk are less intelligent, how would this explain the increase in technology and construction?
My point was that the increase in technology and construction can be explained by the fact that there can still be (and obviously are) sufficient numbers of highly intelligent people in the population, even if their relative percentage were less than in the past, due to an exponentially growing population.

More processes.

My comments there, are re the process likely being interpreted incorrectly.

There may be a false interpretation of the evidence in several studies that show the current generation is less intelligent than earlier ones, thus reversing the Flynn effect. It may be false that high intelligence does not suit the individual as well as we think. It may be false not to assume intelligence is THE direction evolution should point to. It may be false to think that the interpretation of the evidence points to evolution having no direction, no goal, no purpose. It may be false that it is just a random process, which allows mutations to survive if they are suited to the current environment of an organism.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #0]

As I showed you, that would depend on many different things. It's like asking how long it would take water to run down a mountain. But do you see why a 1% difference would require you to determine how long 0.5% change takes? This is important. Think about it.

And as you have already learned it depends on whether you are talking about a dominant or recessive gene. For a recessive gene to become fixed in the entire genome of an organism. Even if the organism is at a low number say 10,000 it would take 100,000 generations. The larger the population the longer it would take. So it really depends on how large you want to make the starting population size. Creationists start with 2 and 8 as population size for those traits that all humans have. Ethnic traits are from smaller groups of humans that were displaced after the tower of Babel. The different ethnic traits are really all that creationists have to account for.

Evolution is your fairytale how am I supposed to answer a question in which you have set no fairytale limits? Creationism can account for all observations. It is Evolution that cannot account for the observations made.

Very unlikely. It would be very unlikely for identical blood types to evolve independently. Humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and at least one other race of H. sapiens all evolved from a common archaic H. sapiens race. You see, we didn't evolve from Neanderthals nor did they evolve from us. (we did interbreed from time to time, however). So blood types were almost certainly evolved before the split of these different races.

And this was another bedtime fairytale brought to you by our favorite storytime teller The Barbarian. Facts man, facts, not fairytales. Neanderthals could mate with modern humans, and Denisovans could mate with modern humans. What is also interesting is that the Neanderthals and Denisovans disappeared at the same time right around "50,000 years" ago. But we are in agreement that a descendant of these humans did have the O allele.

In science, theories change as new evidence indicates. In contrast, creationism requires reality to conform to creationist assumptions.

Theories change when they are wrong. And new theories are put in their place. That is not the case with evolution. Take for example the basic mechanism of evolution. Is it natural selection or is it genetic drift? Kimura used genetic drift to counter Haldane's dilemma. And yet you and many on this forum believe the mechanism is natural selection. You say that mutations are random and yet there is evidence that mutations are not random but are actually directed.

If there was a mutation to produce this blood type O in humans then it would be an almost "neutral" mutation because there does not appear to be any deleterious effects or selective advantage over the other two blood types.

For example, if a mutation that gave blood type O were actually 1 percent more beneficial than type A, it would take 100,000 generations to fix this mutation in the modern human population from a beginning population of 10,000 people. C. Patterson, Evolution (Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing Associates, 1999); J.C. Sanford, Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome, 2nd ed. (Lima, NY: Elim, 2005)
Considering that it's not fixed in the human population, I don't see your point. Perhaps you don't know what "fixation" is in genetics. What do you think it is?

Maybe I do not but I am pretty sure that Patterson and Sanford do know what it means to be fixed in the population.

There are three alleles for the human ABO gene. There are many different versions (alleles) of the hemoglobin gene, each coding for a slightly different beta-globin protein. Not sure if anyone has published a definitive list of the known alleles. I assume we can agree that hemoglobin is an essential molecule, right? This alone is devastating for YE beliefs. As you know, if we all descended from one pair of humans 10,000 years ago, this would be a lot of mutation for an essential gene. If you rely on scientific data, the last common ancestor of all humans living today, lived about 150,000 years ago. Still, that would be a mutation which survived to spread in the population every 3,000 years. Lots of other genes are like that. Most of our genes have dozens of alleles. We have about 30,000 functional genes, so do the math. If the average number of alleles is as little as 10, we are left with about 2 a year that end up spreading through the population.

I am not following your evidence because of the following.

• Many different types of hemoglobin (Hb) exist. The most common ones are HbA, HbA2, HbE, HbF, HbS, HbC, HbH, and HbM. Healthy adults only have significant levels of only HbA and HbA2.

• Normal Results
  In adults, these are normal percentages of different hemoglobin molecules:
  
  HbA: 95% to 98% (0.95 to 0.98)
  HbA2: 2% to 3% (0.02 to 0.03)
  HbE: Absent
  HbF: 0.8% to 2% (0.008 to 0.02)
  HbS: Absent
  HbC: Absent
  In infants and children, these are normal percentage of HbF molecules:
  
  HbF (newborn): 50% to 80% (0.5 to 0.8)
  HbF (6 months): 8%
  HbF (over 6 months): 1% to 2%

• What Abnormal Results Mean
  Significant levels of abnormal hemoglobins may indicate:
  
  Hemoglobin C disease
  Rare hemoglobinopathy
  Sickle cell anemia
  Inherited blood disorder in which the body makes an abnormal form of hemoglobin (thalassemia)
  You may have false normal or abnormal results if you have had a blood transfusion within 12 weeks of this test.

• https://www.ucsfhealth.org/medical-test ... and%20HbA2.

So the majority of humans have HbA hemoglobin. I am not seeing the problem for creationists.

So you're saying that each of these groups would have different genes? That's a testable assumption.

And it's been refuted decisively. The Human Genome Project demonstrated that there is more variation within any human "race" you might define than there is between such groups.
Their polymorphism is not fixed in the entire population but they are part of specific ethnic groups that are associated with specific regions of the world.
Nope. It's a common belief among racists, but it's false. You're as likely to be a good genetic match with a New Guinea highlander as with your next door neighbor.

with people who are closer together geographically sharing greater genetic similarity and those further apart sharing less.
https://scienceandsociety.duke.edu/does-race-exist/

This is exactly what I said happened because of the tower of Babel. If you have ever taken a DNA test you can know exactly where your ancestors came from.
Thank you. You just supported my tower of Babel argument.

Did you not even read it? It appears that the plant protects certain parts of it's genome from mutation, but not others. But such a mutation is certainly possible and open to natural selection. It just reinforces the theory by showing how such random mutations could affect mutation rates.

Oh I did read it you must not understand the implications of what it is saying. There are certain parts of the genome that are impossible to change. Totally refuting the evolutionary fairy tale.

No, I meant the observed evolution of a new irreducibly complex enzyme system. Reality beats anyone's reasoning.

I don't know how new it is because the information was already there. And it reduced overall function but if want to believe that it is that is fine because you are missing the point. It is not about one, or two mutations it is about the length of time it takes for "evolution" to happen. How long does it take for a chromosome to fuse and all for telomere ends to shorten? When the telomere ends in humans carry vital information.

[The Barbarian]

As I showed you, that would depend on many different things. It's like asking how long it would take water to run down a mountain. But do you see why a 1% difference would require you to determine how long 0.5% change takes? This is important. Think about it.

(again, ignores the question)

And as you have already learned it depends on whether you are talking about a dominant or recessive gene.

No. It depends on the selective value of the mutation. The mutation for adult lactose, for example spread through about 35% of the human population in about 20,000 years:
Most babies can digest milk without getting an upset stomach thanks to an enzyme called lactase. Up until several thousand years ago, that enzyme turned off once a person grew into adulthood — meaning most adults were lactose intolerant (or "lactase nonpersistent," as scientists call it).

But now that doesn't happen for most people of Northern and Central European descent and in certain African and Middle Eastern populations. This development of lactose tolerance took only about 20,000 years — the evolutionary equivalent of a hot minute — but it would have required extremely strong selective pressure.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/20 ... -tolerance

Evolution is your fairytale how am I supposed to answer a question in which you have set no fairytale limits? Creationism can account for all observations.

You know better. Creationism can't even explain how Hall's bacteria evolved a new enzyme system, much less the fossil record of whales:
At this point in time, the largest challenge from the stratomorphic intermediate record appears to this author to come from the fossil record of the whales. There is a strong stratigraphic series of archaeocete genera claimed by Gingerich60 (Ambulocetus, Rhodocetus, and Prozeuglodon [or the similar-aged Basilosaurus]61) followed on the one hand by modern mysticetes,62 and on the other hand by the family Squalodontidae and then modern odontocetes.63 That same series is also a morphological series: Ambulocetus with the largest hind legs;64-66 Rhodocetus with hindlegs one-third smaller;67 Prozeuglodon with 6 inch hindlegs;68 and the remaining whales with virtually no to no hind legs: toothed mysticetes before non-toothed baleen whales;69 the squalodontid odontocetes with telescoped skull but triangular teeth;70 and the modern odontocetes with telescoped skulls and conical teeth. This series of fossils is thus a very powerful stratomorphic series. Because the land mammal-to-whale transition (theorized by macroevolutionary theory and evidenced by the fossil record) is a land-to-sea transition, the relative order of land mammals, archaeocetes, and modern whales is not explainable in the conventional Flood geology method (transgressing Flood waters). Furthermore, whale fossils are only known in Cenozoic (and thus post-Flood) sediments.71 This seems to run counter to the intuitive expectation that the whales should have been found in or even throughout Flood sediments. At present creation theory has no good explanation for the fossil record of whales.
YE creationist Kurt Wise, Toward a Creationist Understanding of Transitional Forms
CEN Tech J. No. 9 vol. 2 1995

It is Evolution that cannot account for the observations made.

Dr. Wise disagrees with you. He admits that the fossil record is very good evidence for macroevolutionary theory. Dr. Wise still prefers his interpretation of scripture, but he's honest enough to admit that the evidence indicates evolution.

(claim that blood type were inherited from Neanderthals)
Very unlikely. It would be very unlikely for identical blood types to evolve independently. Humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and at least one other race of H. sapiens all evolved from a common archaic H. sapiens race. You see, we didn't evolve from Neanderthals nor did they evolve from us. (we did interbreed from time to time, however). So blood types were almost certainly evolved before the split of these different races.

And this was another bedtime fairytale brought to you by our favorite storytime teller The Barbarian.

Well, let's take a look...
The gene that produces the ABO blood system is polymorphic in humans, meaning that there are more than two possible expressions of this gene. The genes for both A and B blood types are dominant, and O type is recessive, meaning that people who are type A or B can have genotypes of either AA or AO (or BB and BO) and still be A (or B) blood type, but to have type O blood one must have a genotype of OO. Various selection factors may favor different alleles, leading to the maintenance of distinct blood groups in modern human populations. Though chimpanzees also have different blood groups, they are not the same as human blood types. While the mutation that causes the human B blood group arose around 3.5 Ma, the O group mutation dates to around 1.15 Ma. When scientists tested whether Neanderthals had the O blood group they found that two Neanderthal specimens from Spain probably had the O blood type, though there is the possibility that they were OA or OB (Lalueza-Fox et al. 2008). Though the O allele was likely to have already appeared before the split between humans and Neanderthals, it could also have arisen in the Neanderthal genome via gene flow from modern humans.
https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/ge ... anderthals

Those are the facts. Not your creationist fairytales.

Neanderthals could mate with modern humans,

Yes, that's what I showed you. Remember when I showed you that they are H. sapiens, just a different race, like us, Denisovans and at least one other race not yet identified.

In science, theories change as new evidence indicates. In contrast, creationism requires reality to conform to creationist assumptions.

Theories change when they are wrong.

And creationism cannot change, even when it's wrong.

And new theories are put in their place. That is not the case with evolution.

You already know that's wrong. Remember when I showed you that the four points of Darwinian theory remain as solidly demonstrated as ever? But Darwin's theory has been modified by genetics, which explained how new traits can spread in a population, by punctuated equilibrium, which explains why most speciation is allopatric, and so on.

Take for example the basic mechanism of evolution. Is it natural selection or is it genetic drift?

Neither. You're confusing evolution with agencies of evolution. It's just a change in allele frequencies. Genetic drift can explain how this happens when there is little or no selective pressure. Natural selection explains things like the evolution of that new enzyme system in bacteria.

Kimura used genetic drift to counter Haldane's dilemma.

And Hall used reality, showing us an example that did not comply with Haldane's assumptions (which, as you remember, Haldane admitted were likely incorrect).

And yet you and many on this forum believe the mechanism is natural selection.

See above. You're still confused about how it works.

You say that mutations are random

I think your confusion has to do with how they are random. They aren't necessarily random in time, but random in the sense that they don't appear in response to need. This is what Delbruck and Luria showed.

If there was a mutation to produce this blood type O in humans then it would be an almost "neutral" mutation because there does not appear to be any deleterious effects or selective advantage over the other two blood types.

No, that's wrong, too. Blood types do have some selective value.
https://topadvantagesof.com/advantages- ... -positive/

Considering that it's not fixed in the human population, I don't see your point. Perhaps you don't know what "fixation" is in genetics. What do you think it is?[/quote]

Maybe I do not but I am pretty sure that Patterson and Sanford do know what it means to be fixed in the population.

If you don't know enough to say, what makes you think they are right?

There are three alleles for the human ABO gene. There are many different versions (alleles) of the hemoglobin gene, each coding for a slightly different beta-globin protein. Not sure if anyone has published a definitive list of the known alleles. I assume we can agree that hemoglobin is an essential molecule, right? This alone is devastating for YE beliefs. As you know, if we all descended from one pair of humans 10,000 years ago, this would be a lot of mutation for an essential gene. If you rely on scientific data, the last common ancestor of all humans living today, lived about 150,000 years ago. Still, that would be a mutation which survived to spread in the population every 3,000 years. Lots of other genes are like that. Most of our genes have dozens of alleles. We have about 30,000 functional genes, so do the math. If the average number of alleles is as little as 10, we are left with about 2 a year that end up spreading through the population.

I am not following your evidence because of the following.

Many different types of hemoglobin (Hb) exist. The most common ones are HbA, HbA2, HbE, HbF, HbS, HbC, HbH, and HbM. Healthy adults only have significant levels of only HbA and HbA2.

Turns out, in areas with malaria, a heterozygote for HbS has a considerable advantage over HbA or HbA2 people. Heterozygotes and even homozygotes for HbC are even better off. They will leave more viable offspring to reproduce. And the frequency of the gene in those populations matches the evolutionary predictions.

So you're saying that each of these groups would have different genes? That's a testable assumption.

And it's been refuted decisively. The Human Genome Project demonstrated that there is more variation within any human "race" you might define than there is between such groups.
It's a common belief among racists, but it's false. You're as likely to be a good genetic match with a New Guinea highlander as with your next door neighbor.[/quote]

This is exactly what I said happened because of the tower of Babel. If you have ever taken a DNA test you can know exactly where your ancestors came from.

The fact that someone from Southeast Asia is as likely to match a person from Northern Europe as they match their neighbors, completely disposes of the tower of Babel argument.

Did you not even read it? It appears that the plant protects certain parts of it's genome from mutation, but not others. But such a mutation is certainly possible and open to natural selection. It just reinforces the theory by showing how such random mutations could affect mutation rates.

Oh I did read it you must not understand the implications of what it is saying. There are certain parts of the genome that are impossible to change.

It doesn't say what you thought it does. No part of the genome is impossible to change. Some parts are just more likely to change. That's true in pretty much all organisms, BTW.

A study that examined 17 million mutations in the genomes of 650 cancer patients concludes that large differences in mutation rates across the human genome are caused by the DNA repair machinery. 'DNA spellchecker' is preferentially directed towards more important parts of chromosomes that contain key genes. The study illustrates how data from medical sequencing projects can answer basic questions about how cells work.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 142354.htm

This plant just has a more pronounced difference. And not surprisingly, the trait evolved just as evolutionary theory would predict, in a way to enhance survival. Incidentally, your assumption about mutations is wrong, too. The protected areas aren't kept from mutating; they are just better protected by "spellcheck" functions that repair damage.

No, I meant the observed evolution of a new irreducibly complex enzyme system. Reality beats anyone's reasoning.

I don't know how new it is because the information was already there.

Sounds like a rather unlikely assumption. Both the enzyme and the regulator did not exist prior to them evolving. But I'd be interested in seeing your numbers. Do you know how to calculate genetic information? It's not that difficult, if you're familiar with Shannon's equation. Show us what you have.

And it reduced overall function

I don't see how any rational person could say that a new enzyme and regulator "reduced" function. Obviously, it produced two additional functions. But let's see your data; what do you have?

It is not about one, or two mutations it is about the length of time it takes for "evolution" to happen.

One generation. Remember what evolution is. Change in allele frequency in a population over time. Genetic data says it took lactose persistence about 20,000 years to spread to roughly a third of humans. It says that it took less than a year for Halls bacteria to evolve a new, regulated enzyme system. Remember how I told you that the time it takes, depends on generation time and selective pressure?

How long does it take for a chromosome to fuse and all for telomere ends to shorten?

One generation. In vertebrates, this happens maybe once every thousand pregnancies. A fusion is a mutation that joins two chromosomes together. But I'm thinking you're a bit foggy on what telomeres have to to with it. In the case of the human no.2 chromosome, the fusion did not remove the telomeres. At the fusion site, we can still find remains of those telomeres, right where they were predicted to be.

When the telomere ends in humans carry vital information.

Well, not the way you seem to think. You see, they function only to prevent loss of genetic data. In vertebrates, they are just repetitions of TTAGGG. Normally, each cell division results in a shortening of the telomeres. The loss of these elements leads to the death of cells by aging and limits the number of times a cell can divide. If we could find a safe and effective way to restore them, we could greatly increase human life spans.