Why not just stick your fingers in your ears and hum?
You are just ignoring what I am saying and substituting your own strawman to argue against.
A recessive gene that happens so rarely in a population that it is never seen is quite likely to disappear--it only has a 50% chance of being passed to offspring.
Actually, there are quite a few rare but recurring genetic disorders that exist as recessive genes. Since the rare recessive genes that cause them are found in very different populations they have apparently been around a while.
I do not think it necessary to sequence the genome of every single human on the planet to conclude that we do not have genes to produce feathers.
If someone suddenly grew feathers I think we could be sure their DNA was tampered with purposefully, not that they were victims of a simple mutation.
On the other hand, if someone is born with a given rare trait you can't simply assume mutation until you demonstrate that their parents didn't have those genes.
Mutations are absolutely random, and a large number of humans *do* die before their mothers even know they exist.
According to your numbers, 1 out of 6 lives. It stands to reason then, that if 5/6 of those mutations are terminal, something like 5/6ths of the viable offspring have harmful mutations and half of those will be dominant. And they would be infinitely varied. Instead the same defects are the most common and occur in rates from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 10000.
Does the fact that you don't want to actually read some of the (thousands of) scientific papers for yourself make those papers non-existent? Every Wikipedia article or webpage I have linked to has a ton of references.
Detecting a pattern here -- every time I bring up an inconvenient excerpt from one of your citations, I am too uneducated to understand it. Anyone else who tries to elaborate outside of your control is "unscientific". And since when did Wikipedia attain the credibility of a scientific paper?
You are just ignoring what I am saying and substituting your own strawman to argue against.
I have read every word that you wrote, and I still see that you have no grasp of science. BTW, just because I point that out does not mean I am "substituting my own strawman." Since making a strawman essentially consists of person A putting words into person B's mouth that B didn't actually say in order for A to argue against his/her own falsehood--I simply haven't done that. I have specifically answered what you actually said and tried to explain what is the actual case.
Actually, there are quite a few rare but recurring genetic disorders that exist as recessive genes. Since the rare recessive genes that cause them are found in very different populations they have apparently been around a while.
Not necessarily. When someone has a rare disorder that requires two defective copies of a gene, you don't know without analyzing their parent's DNA whether they got one defective copy from one parent who was a carrier and the other copy spontaneously mutated, both copies spontaneously mutated, or both parents were carriers. If the parents passed the defective gene to their child, it may be impossible to tell when that gene originally mutated; all you can know is that it mutated sometime in the past. Not all disorders are recessive; some are dominant, and some don't follow dominant/recessive patterns. A child who has a genetic disease caused by a non-recessive gene, and neither of whose parents have the mutation, has a de novo mutation.
If someone suddenly grew feathers I think we could be sure their DNA was tampered with purposefully, not that they were victims of a simple mutation.
On the other hand, if someone is born with a given rare trait you can't simply assume mutation until you demonstrate that their parents didn't have those genes.
If someone suddenly started sprouting feathers, I doubt I'd look at the DNA at all. I'd assume they were one of those freaks who go to extraordinary lengths to look like something other than ordinary human. If a baby were born with feathers, OTOH, I'd start looking at their genotype... and I wouldn't assume genetic manipulation until I could show that.
Unless a rare trait is purely recessive, you don't need to look at the parent's genes; if the child has a non-recessive trait that neither parent has, it's a de novo mutation. It happens quite a bit, actually.
According to your numbers, 1 out of 6 lives. It stands to reason then, that if 5/6 of those mutations are terminal, something like 5/6ths of the viable offspring have harmful mutations and half of those will be dominant. And they would be infinitely varied. Instead the same defects are the most common and occur in rates from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 10000.
Actually, it's more like 2/3 of all conceived humans don't live more than a few weeks into pregnancy. I never tried to calculate how many of the remaining third actually survive to reproduce (which is the only criterion that matters when speaking of evolution), but it's clear that we're doing just fine despite the high early death rate. It only takes one out of the ~130 mutations to be lethal; the majority of mutations are not lethal. They are not dominant, they are not recessive; most of them have little to no effect on phenotype and don't even occur in genes (either coding or regulatory regions).
Detecting a pattern here -- every time I bring up an inconvenient excerpt from one of your citations, I am too uneducated to understand it. Anyone else who tries to elaborate outside of your control is "unscientific". And since when did Wikipedia attain the credibility of a scientific paper?
You've brought up excerpts from some of my links that you completely misunderstood because you don't have the scientific training to understand what they were really saying, or what their context was, but you have yet to bring up an actual scientific excerpt that contradicts anything I've said. You also have never made a claim that you've backed up or even tried to support with any kind of reference to a scientific source.
I choose to link the Wikipedia articles, because I've found that they give pretty decent explanations that are, as far as I can tell, understandable to someone who doesn't have a PhD (or any science education, for that matter). I scan the articles to make sure the information they present is accurate, without glaring errors. Then I look over the references to see how many there are (every fact mentioned in a scientific article must be supported by at least one reference), and what the quality of them is (only journals and scientific books are reliable). Linking the Wiki articles also saves me from having to dig up a reference for every single thing I say, because the authors of those Wiki entries already did all the reference hunting. The Wiki articles aren't scientific papers; if I linked to those, no one but me and maybe a handful of other FReepers would be able to understand them. But they are very good for a layperson who wants to learn more about the subject, plus anyone is free to look up the references and read them. I do this kind of vetting process for everything that I link.
In my professional career, whenever I want to find out more about a subject that is unfamiliar to me, I often read the Wikipedia article as a place to start. *Then* I start searching the scientific literature.