[xenophiles]

A typically badly-written science article. The point isn't that a duplicated gene is a safety backup, it's that two normal copies give an effect different from that of one normal copy and one mutant. And the article doesn't mention whether there's any similarity between the mutant variants, so we don't know whether the mutant variants are doing anything at all.

I have a serious question for you creationists. About how many of these anti-evolution arguments do you have at hand, and can you remember ever seeing any of them refuted?

[neverdem]

A typically badly-written science article. The point isn't that a duplicated gene is a safety backup, it's that two normal copies give an effect different from that of one normal copy and one mutant.

"Because mutations in this gene typically cause mammal and fish embryos to die, Harris and Rohner suspected it must have a twin somewhere else in the zebrafish genome. It did. The researchers found an intact version of fgfr1, in addition to the mutated copy that leads to mirror scales.

"To see if the process of duplication and mutation happens outside the lab, Harris and Rohner scanned for fgfr1 in mirror carp. They found duplicate fgfr1 genes in two varieties of mirror carp: One had lost 111 bases from the twin gene, and another had a base substitution in the twin gene, both of which had presumably led to fewer scales."

IMHO, they're alluding to two pairs of genes for fgfr1, not simple Mendelian genetics with a pair of dominant and recessive alleles, but copy number variation(cnv).

A Microhomology-Mediated Break-Induced Replication Model for the Origin of Human Copy Number Variation

I only read this citation's abstract so far, but it's a review article. I've posted other articles about cnv that you can find clicking on the appropriate keywords.

P.S. I'm not interested in proving or disproving evolution. I can live with it, just like the Roman Catholic Church does. Different human populations have various copy number variations for amylases.