We would need to define what a beneficial mutation is, as well as defining what loss of fitness is.
Please proceed.
Well right off the bat, we have a few issues. They state...
In bacteria, a wide range of mutations can be shown to provide a beneficial phenotype to the cell. These benefits are often of sufficient phenotypic affect that they can undergo strong positive selection.
Does the "Biblical model of creation" include natural selection or not? You and AiG say it does, Stripe says natural selection never happens. Which is it? Kinda hard to discuss this if you guys can't even agree on the basics.
Also, I really don't feel like playing your little creationist game where you post a link to a creationist site (or copy from one as you did earlier with creation.com), I respond, you ignore most of my response, and just post another copy/link to another creationist site. That's pretty dishonest of you.
Just yesterday you copied from creation.com, but now that I've responded and asked some follow-up questions, you ignored them and are now apparently expecting me to just go along and do the same with the AiG page? Seriously?
How about you first go back to my
LAST POST and actually address the responses to what you posted.
No exactly correct. In the past, it was believed the vast majority of mutations were neutral or silent.
As you saw from the National Institutes of Health, that remains the case today.
However, part of the reason for that belief was the false belief in "junk DNA". If 97% of our DNA was garbage, then it made sense that mutations in that region were neutral. However, ENCODE is changing the way geneticists look at our DNA, as well as how they look at mutations.
We've been over this. Do we really need to do it again?
BUT..... even before ENCODE results were released, geneticists usually would not consider a mutation completely neutral. For example Kimura famously showed that with mutations there is a "zone of near-neutrality". In his graph, he shows no mutations that are absolutely neutral.
Your biggest mistake, or misrepresentation though is in saying "the rest of the mutations are deleterious or beneficial". You say that as if they are on a equal playing playing field. But, mutations that have a beneficial outcome, are so rare that geneticists such as Kimura do not even factor them in on a graph. (Crow agrees) Everything he shows is to the left of the absolute zero. (beneficial would be to the right) Geneticists have pegged beneficial mutations at 1 in 1 million (Lenski and Gerrish).
You know, it's pointless to cite things without providing the name and date of the papers, and the journal in which they were published. Are you intentionally hiding those things so I won't look them up, or did you just forget?
