Barbarian, regarding the notion of "pristine genomes":
Not possible. Their genomes would have, like every other genome, all sorts of mutations, gene duplications, and so on. There's nothing magical here. Every organism is born with mutations that neither parent had.
Ugh says the caveman, you are projecting modern observation with speculation about past periods. Mutations have almost nothing to do with adaptive evolution, which is probably the worst legacy of Darwinism.
Sorry, that's wrong, too. When Hall's bacteria evolved a new, irreducibly complex enzyme system, it happened via a series of observed mutations in the bacterial culture.
So it's observably true.
Barbarian continues:
With 3 billion base pairs, that would be, um... three million differences. Lots of mutations. However, it is true that humans went through a bottleneck that greatly reduced variation, back before anatomically modern humans, Neandertals, and Denisovans diverged from a common ancestor.
Not mutations, differences with regard to comparative genomics.
That's a two-dollar word for "mutations."
Barbarian adds:
Evolution also occurs in large populations, where there is no founder effect or bottlenecks.
Ugh says the caveman, baloney.
One word: horses. Billions of them, and we can show a whole bush of different kinds of horses diverging over time.
Barbarian observes:
Doesn't seem have happened to humans. Our population was fairly small for a rather long time. And the key change in H. sapiens (larger brain, smaller face, paedomorphic trend) goes back before H. sapiens existed.
No, it goes back about 2 mya and it had to be permanently fixed.
No, that's wrong too. For example, later Australopithecines had larger brains. And early forms of Homo had smaller brains than those coming later. It's been a gradual process over a rather long time:
Barbarbarian concludes:
Tends to. It's not a lock, though.
Ecclesiastes 9:11 I turned me to another thing, and I saw that under the sun, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the learned, nor favour to the skilful: but time and chance in all.
Tends to eliminate the unfit.
It's what Darwin wrote in his book. I think that qualifies it as Darwinism. "Survival of the fittest" was Spencer's formulation. Darwin thought it was a good summary, but it is not much used by Darwinists today, because it does not completely describe what natural selection does.
The theory of evolution by natural selection was proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858. They argued that species with useful adaptations to the environment are more likely to survive and produce progeny than are those with less useful adaptations, thereby increasing the frequency with which useful adaptations occur over the generations.
Selection | biology
“Survival of the fittest” means that those who are best adapted to their environment thrive and tend to be favored by evolution due to “natural selection”.
Survival of the Fittest, Only the Strong Survive - Fact or Myth?
Natural selection is, as Darwin and Wallace recognized, the tendency of organisms that are well suited to their environments to survive and reproduce at higher rates than those that are ill-suited. It doesn’t always work since there is a lot of chance, and organisms do not always show enough genetic variability to adapt to their environment, especially if it is changing rapidly. ‘Survival of the fittest’ captures some of the variability in survival and reproduction, and it is usually fuzzily meant to mean the same thing as natural selection.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-survival-of-the-fittest-and-natural-selection
