Creation & EvolutionForum for the discussion of this important topic. This forum is open to non-believers. There is a Christians-only forum in the Christians-only section too.
This also makes no sense. If there are 10,000 monkeys in a population and one of them gets infected with a retrovirus and passes on an insertion, the chance that the mutation will end up in all of its offspring is one in 20,000.
Ten thousand breeding monkeys, 10,000 different infection locations, at least, assuming one viral element gets into every germline. If you have one infected monkey in 10,000 and you have 10,000 breeding monkeys, the location never spreads to the rest of the population. It stays in the infected monkey's line. So the odds would be a 100% it would be passed on to all of it's offspring. But that leaves us with the majority that do not have the mutation. I don't think calling it a mutation is right either. Mutations create variety, unless you are saying ERVs add information. If so, then are we the product of the accumulation of ERVs over time?
So most mutations are lost. But mutations are occurring all the time, in lots of different monkeys, and the chance that one of the mutations will be preserved ends up being very high. Once the mutation is present in all of the monkeys, it will also be present in all species that descend from that population of monkeys. It doesn't have to do anything special to "incidentally survive the extinction of the entire species".
Well again, speaking of mutations, there might be some that might confer a benefit. Are you saying only ERV carriers survived? Not likely.
Well, there's more than one male in a population, not to mention many populations, and every one of them has an equal chance of having millions of descendants. What happened to them? If every male and female was infected by a nonfatal virus, then yes, but then the insertion location would be different in every one of them.
"every one of them has an equal chance"
This is not the case, as I have said. In these populations, there is a dominant male responsible for 90% of the offspring.
Note that as I implied before, I am not a behavioural anything-ist, so the above is conjecture. It is, however, testable conjecture, an hypothesis that someone with the right training and resources could test.
Goddidt is not in anyway testable, and really, you give me two options
option 1) Continue to accept the overwhelming evidence for the ToE and continue to use its predictive value in my day-to-day work (drug discovery)
option 2) goddidit, time for a new career.
The power of the ToE is not that it lets us look backwards, it's that it lets us predict forwards. The denial of the ToE is ludicrous, without it we would not have had any of the major medical advances from the last 100 years, and, as I said, the last 20 years of my life would not have existed.
This is not the case, as I have said. In these populations, there is a dominant male responsible for 90% of the offspring.
Yeah and he doesn't like other males infecting his females. I think sometimes if the offspring are not his, they are driven out. I can see how something might spread virus-like within a herd. If this male was infected, then his offspring would carry the ERV and they might infect the offspring of the noninfected animals. And mixing within the herd might eventually cut off all the noninfected lines. But animals move about and populations don't mix. I would expect to find populations of noninfected animals and animals with different infections within the species. If that is not the case, then it becomes difficult not to believe in the flood story because there you have an explanation for why all chimps, for example, are infected with the same ERVs. You have a starting point; the destruction of all living things except for a male and his mate according to their kind.
Yeah and he doesn't like other males infecting his females. I think sometimes if the offspring are not his, they are driven out.
Or in the case of chimpanzees, killed and eaten.
But animals move about and populations don't mix.
This is a broad assumption, I doubt it is true in all cases, or even the majority.
I would expect to find populations of noninfected animals and animals with different infections within the species. If that is not the case, then it becomes difficult not to believe in the flood story because there you have an explanation for why all chimps, for example, are infected with the same ERVs. You have a starting point; the destruction of all living things except for a male and his mate according to their kind.
But remember that speciation derives from some kind of geographical separation. If there was constant mixing
speciation would not have occurred. At any rate, the flood does not explain the homology in ERV sequences...in fact, YEC doesn't explain why the ERVs are there in the first place
__________________ I hear stories from the chamber / How Christ was born into a manger
And like some ragged stranger / Died upon the cross
And might I say it seems so fitting in its way
He was a carpenter by trade / Or at least that's what I'm told
--Mercy Seat, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Only if the population is isolated from the parent population, assuming there must be one to begin with, and what happened to their progeny?
No, the population does not have to be isolated. What I said is a simple fact of genetic drift: eventually, all selectively neutral mutations either disappear from the population by chance, or reach 100% frequency, again by chance. The only exception is if the population is so large that the time to fixation is long compared to the time to extinction. Think of it like this: There are some number of copies of a mutation in the population at a given time. If the mutation is neutral, then there will be on average the same number of copies in the next generation -- but only on average. The actual number will be probably be slightly smaller or larger, just by chance. Then the next generation the number will be slightly different again, and so on. It's a random walk, and the frequency will continue to drift around until it happens to hit one of the two stable state: everyone in the population has the mutation, or no one does.
Ten thousand breeding monkeys, 10,000 different infection locations, at least, assuming one viral element gets into every germline. If you have one infected monkey in 10,000 and you have 10,000 breeding monkeys, the location never spreads to the rest of the population. It stays in the infected monkey's line. So the odds would be a 100% it would be passed on to all of it's offspring. But that leaves us with the majority that do not have the mutation. I don't think calling it a mutation is right either. Mutations create variety, unless you are saying ERVs add information. If so, then are we the product of the accumulation of ERVs over time?
Still wrong. What I said before was accurate (to a good approximation): if there are 10,000 monkeys and only one of them gets a germline infection, then there is 1 chance in 20,000 that that infection will eventually reach 100% in the population (assuming it has no negative effects on the monkey's ability to reproduce). For each additional infection, there will be an additional 1 in 20,000 chance.
And yes, it is a mutation. A mutation is any heritable change to the genetic material
And as I might add to the discussion:
as long as the retroviral insertion is not on a vital part of the germcell, the "mutation" is considered neutral, BUT you have to keep in mind that the individual just survived an infection and so might be better equipped (genetically) to survive these kind of infections. Therefore although the ERV might be considered neutral, the fitness of the individual and his ERV-carrying offspring might be better than that of his fellows. (as long as the infection is on the same chromosome as the "fitnessfactor" and there is no chromosomal crossing etc. its a bit more complicated actually) So the chance of spreading the ERV to the whole population might be better than with a neutral mutation.
Linear Mode
