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→Mutations don't lead to evolution? New genetic information?
::::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 10:10, 30 October 2008 (EDT)
::::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 10:10, 30 October 2008 (EDT)
::::::I was not stopping the mutations there, nor "systematically" trying them all. In a large populations over a large period of time the improbable is possible, all combinations might arise. Mutations can arise on top of each other, but given the occurrence rate of mutations and the size of most genomes, mutations happening in the same gene aren't likely (but yes, they do happen! improbable is not impossible!). As for whether or not the sentence made sense in context, the changing of one base pair in a gene isn't the same as changing a letter in a sentence. It might be my fault for trying to use an example to make things simpler, but addition before algebra. I'm not sure what you mean by the "context" a protein might find itself in, but a single amino acid change can do a lot or a little. Changing the hydrophobicity for example can make it more or less effective at what it does, but not necessarily take it "out of context". And before we start discussing on the accumulation of mutations, just how much time are you talking about here for age of the earth? --[[User:Rainedaye|Rainedaye]] 21:11, 2 November 2008 (EST)
::::::I was not stopping the mutations there, nor "systematically" trying them all. In a large populations over a large period of time the improbable is possible, all combinations might arise. Mutations can arise on top of each other, but given the occurrence rate of mutations and the size of most genomes, mutations happening in the same gene aren't likely (but yes, they do happen! improbable is not impossible!). As for whether or not the sentence made sense in context, the changing of one base pair in a gene isn't the same as changing a letter in a sentence. It might be my fault for trying to use an example to make things simpler, but addition before algebra. I'm not sure what you mean by the "context" a protein might find itself in, but a single amino acid change can do a lot or a little. Changing the hydrophobicity for example can make it more or less effective at what it does, but not necessarily take it "out of context". And before we start discussing on the accumulation of mutations, just how much time are you talking about here for age of the earth? --[[User:Rainedaye|Rainedaye]] 21:11, 2 November 2008 (EST)
::::::: You may not have ''intended'' to stop the mutations there, but that's as far as your example went, and continuing it would have changed the result.
::::::: Time is not the magic wand that saves the argument. Trains run on tracks. Not when there are active processes working to weed out misfits, etc.
::::::: Not every combination of letters—even just three letters—constitutes a valid English word. And not every combination of valid English words makes sense. And not every combination of valid English sentences make sense. And so on. In the case of DNA, there are only 64 ''possible'' "words", and, unlike English, every single one of them "makes sense", i.e. codes for an amino acid. But does every combination of amino acids make sense? And every combination of proteins? And so on all the way up the chain, even to the whole organism. A brain cell in a liver doesn't make sense, for example. This is what I mean by context. You would have wondered what my reference to trains was there for. The words of that sentence are all valid. The sentence itself makes sense. But the sentence ''in this context'' doesn't make sense. (It even ''disrupts'' the flow of thought, as the next sentence seems to refer to it, although it's not meant to.) A random change in a very small unit (e.g. a gene) might well make sense locally, but not in the wider context, especially the wider you go. The wider you go with the context, the greater the chance that it makes no sense at all.
::::::: I'm out of time now, but I hope that's clear enough.
::::::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 02:52, 3 November 2008 (EST)
== KathrynMonroe's edit ==
== KathrynMonroe's edit ==