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To: VadeRetro
There will be no dragging him back to the problem to which said phenomenon is not an answer at all.

But the case he cited had nothing hidden. We were discussing mutations. He implied that mutation wasn't the source of change because there was a recessive trait.

At this point I challenged him to explain how this worked in bacteria. He has never responded to my challenge. I'm still waiting.

Words are magic to him. Say the right incantation and facts go poof. His problem remains: Explain how recessive traits work in a bacterial colony descended from a single individual.

906 posted on 01/25/2005 7:59:58 AM PST by js1138
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To: js1138
Whether or not he ever explains his own dumb-dumb version, here's a nice key to disentangling further arguments from semantics.

Procaryotes. (I gather that's some kind of Brit spelling.)

Highlights:

Bacterial lateral transfers are known as parasexuality.

Beside the exchange of genetic information via plasmid, the cell is able to gain valuable information by taking up DNA. These mechanisms are generally referred to as parasexuality. In contrast to the sexuality of eucaryotic cells, where the genetic information of both partners is equal and where both genomes contribute equally to the species’ progeny, in parasexuality, the information of one partner is enhanced at the expense of the other’s.
This isn't even a sharing of information, really. It's more like the stealing of same. What one gains, another actually loses.

It is mostly the extra-chromosomal plasmids involved in this process that create the appearance of polyploidy:

Bacteria have an extensive array of restriction endonucleases specific for this purpose at their disposal. The bacterial genome is mostly haploid, but the information stored in the plasmids has to be regarded as polyploid, since the cells contain usually several copies of the same type of plasmid.
This is the data set that someone is Googling up a little bit at a time to prove that no new information is ever created, nor does it need to be because bacteria are diploid.
910 posted on 01/25/2005 8:14:52 AM PST by VadeRetro
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To: js1138
I forgot to mention this part:

The complete nucleotide sequence of strain K12 is known. It contains 4,639,221 base pairs corresponding to 4,288 genes.
That's the total size of the founder Ur-cell that has in it already somewhere recessive genes coding for every antibiotic resistance and every food-metabolization adaptation which will ever be needed. K12 is a strain of Southack's "diploid" E. coli.
915 posted on 01/25/2005 8:20:24 AM PST by VadeRetro
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