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From: gordon@uw-june (Gordon Davisson)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Re: Vestigal Organs
Message-ID: <87@uw-june>
Date: Mon, 22-Jul-85 04:50:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: uw-june.87
Posted: Mon Jul 22 04:50:55 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 25-Jul-85 04:50:17 EDT
References: <2156@ut-sally.UUCP> <347@scgvaxd.UUCP>
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 45

>> [Paul Torek] 
>> Indeed, many insect species have "vestigal" wings, which are small 
>> non-functional organs sitting right where the wings were/are on the
>> closest related species.  If there's a God who created all species
>> from scratch, He must be trying awful hard to trick us into believing
>> in evolution!

>[Paul DuBois]
>No, just trying to see how many people can look at degeneration
>and say "evolution!"  Break comma give me a.
>
>Seems to me that a number of creationists have mentioned degeneration
>as a component of "creation models".  How is your example supposed to be
>inconsistent with that?

It's not inconsistent with degeneration, but it's inconsistent with
degeneration and logic.  How is this degeration supposed to occur, what
with working against natural selection and all?  The chance that a
disadvantageous mutation will spread to most of a population is
miniscule.  Even the 'given enough time, anything will happen' argument
won't work here, because even if the mutation happens to spread to the
entire population, a countermutation can occur and reverse the
degeneration.

>Thanks, also, for the counterexample to this recent statement.

>> [Gordon Davisson]
>> Harmful mutations have no lasting bad influence on a population because
>> their carriars tend not to have many decendants.  Thus, after a while, the
>> mutation dissapears from the population.  Beneficial mutations, on the
>> other hand, cause their carriers to tend to have more decendants than
>> the non-carriers, so after a while, most of the population carries the
>> mutation, and the population has taken a step to the right (so to speak).

>Never heard of genetic load, I guess...

The genetic load is the result of a large number of harmful mutations.
Although the impact of each individual mutation is small (as I said above),
they are very common (on the order of one per individual), so their total
impact is noticable.

--
Human:    Gordon Davisson
ARPA:     gordon@uw-june.ARPA
UUCP:     {ihnp4,decvax,tektronix}!uw-beaver!uw-june!gordon