...you wouldn't be in this fix. But although you declared that geneticists said "devolution" was a problem, you couldn't find even one case where that happened. I asked several times, and you declined each time. You could have just admitted that you were wrong.
But that would require a creationist like yourself to use dialectic instead of rhetoric. And as everyone knows, the worst thing a YE creationist can do is stay on topic.
I'm the one who showed you that. And I showed you how they learned that it is mitigated. Would you like me to show you again?
You're still having trouble with that concept. Let's take a look...
Apparently "devolution" actually means "being disabused of creationist error." From "Answers in Genesis:...
The Devolution of a Creationist
by Ken Ham on November 29, 2014
Recently a blog post appeared on the BioLogos website (an organization that promotes compromising Genesis with millions of years and evolution, and spreads that message to the church) written by a recent homeschool graduate who describes his switch from accepting young-earth creation to believing in old-earth, evolutionary ideas. He claims, “My shift away from young-earth creationism began not due to convincing answers from the evolutionist crowd, but because of the unconvincing and confusing answers of the young earth crowd.”
https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/k...a-creationist/
Yes. As you learned, even "Answers in Genesis" admits that's a fact. Would you like me to show you that, again?
Or at least enough of it to increase fitness in the population. You see, you and I have many harmful recessives, but unless we marry a close relative, it's unlikely to reduce fitness of our offspring. Do you understand why?
Perhaps you don't know what "fixed" means in this context. What do you think it means?
Observations has shown otherwise. Harmful alleles tend to be reduced in frequency in a population, or disappear entirely. Would you like to see some examples?
Normally, "breaking" would mean "making it inoperative." But as you learned, favorable mutations make the allele more functional in the specific environment. So you assumption is wrong.
You've got that wrong, too. You see, we know that most useful new genes come about by duplication followed by mutation. But it turns out, that damaged genes, even non-functional ones, can be repaired and used to improve fitness.
Some cod species have a newly minted gene involved in preventing freezing.
In the depths of winter, water temperatures in the ice-covered Arctic Ocean can sink below zero. That’s cold enough to freeze many fish, but the conditions don’t trouble the cod. A protein in its blood and tissues binds to tiny ice crystals and stops them from growing.
Where codfish got this talent was a puzzle that evolutionary biologist Helle Tessand Baalsrud wanted to solve. She and her team at the University of Oslo searched the genomes of the Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) and several of its closest relatives, thinking they would track down the cousins of the antifreeze gene. None showed up. Baalsrud, who at the time was a new parent, worried that her lack of sleep was causing her to miss something obvious.
But then she stumbled on studies suggesting that genes do not always evolve from existing ones, as biologists long supposed. Instead, some are fashioned from desolate stretches of the genome that do not code for any functional molecules. When she looked back at the fish genomes, she saw hints this might be the case: the antifreeze protein — essential to the cod’s survival — had seemingly been built from scratch1.
The cod is in good company. In the past five years, researchers have found numerous signs of these newly minted ‘de novo’ genes in every lineage they have surveyed. These include model organisms such as fruit flies and mice, important crop plants and humans; some of the genes are expressed in brain and testicular tissue, others in various cancers.
De novo genes are even prompting a rethink of some portions of evolutionary theory. Conventional wisdom was that new genes tended to arise when existing ones are accidentally duplicated, blended with others or broken up, but some researchers now think that de novo genes could be quite common: some studies suggest at least one-tenth of genes could be made in this way; others estimate that more genes could emerge de novo than from gene duplication. Their existence blurs the boundaries of what constitutes a gene, revealing that the starting material for some new genes is non-coding DNA (see ‘Birth of a gene’).
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03061-x?utm_source=pocket-newtab
So while you've now admitted that you were wrong in your claim that geneticists say "devolution" is a problem for populations, you're still resisting the idea that mutations can produce useful new alleles.w
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I'm sure you'll admit to that eventually, too.