There's a lot of that going around.
Talk about not reliably reporting someone's views. Indels cause frameshifts when base pairs are added or deleted, when the lengths of the resulting amino acid is not divisible by three:
There are two types of coding indels: those that have lengths that are divisible by 3, and those that do not. Indels with lengths that are not divisible by 3 cause frameshifts, and are presumed to be deleterious to gene function. (
SIFT Indel)
That's just to be clear, it should be obvious but the semantic shell game that will no doubt follow often corrects the obvious no matter how wrong the correction is.
You seem to be insisting that this isn't true, that indels are not causing frameshifts which would be absurd.
Indels involving one or two base pairs (or multiples of two) can have devastating consequences to the gene because translation of the gene is "frameshifted". This figure shows how by shifting the reading frame one nucleotide to the right, the same sequence of nucleotides encodes a different sequence of amino acids. The mRNA is translated in new groups of three nucleotides and the protein specified by these new codons will be worthless.
Every time I get into one of these debates, and they are always debates, I search through the available scientific literature. This morning I browsed no less then three and this one I spent considerable time on.
Did we really just go through all that to make the point that most effects from mutations are neutral?
57646 Single amino acid substitutions 36825 neutral 20821 deleterious.
729 Deletions 652 deleterious, 77 neutral
171 Insertions 110 were deleterious 61 neutral
79 Replacements 79 deleterious 59 neutral
21662 deleterious 37022 neutral 58684 totals
Predicting the Functional Effect of Amino Acid Substitutions and Indels
I am very interested in what you and your colleagues are finding and I've read as much of the scientific literature as I could find and digest. I ran into this once before with the Nylon eating bacteria and instead of being a mutation the reading frame was being swapped out, something I found fascinating and the Darwinian horde ignored. This go round the color of mice comes up and apparently a single amino acid substitution in the lab was sufficient to produce the color change, which is very interesting. I also brought up the arctic cod that has an entire gene built from simple repeats, something else I find fascinating and the Darwinian horde ignores.
Now, this pedantic correction over frameshifts. All I can tell you is so what? So the effect is more likely to be neutral then deleterious or a frameshift, so what Steve? Is that all we are supposed to care about when exploring what you and your colleagues do, that creationists are wrong and Darwinians are right? Would it be too much to ask that every once in a while you actual offer a genuine insight into how adaptive evolution actually happens?
These guys make gross and glaring errors constantly and you do nothing but encourage it. LM should be one of the best read individuals on the board and he is still struggling to understand the basics. I blame you.
Have a nice day
Mark