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To: Boogieman
"I learned about Mendel and heredity in grammar school"

Perhaps grammar school was too early, because your previous statements evidences lack of understanding of these principles:

"The only possible way the evolutionists can overcome this obstacle, that I can fathom, is if by some miraculous confluence, all of the exact same genetic mutations were passed down to at least one male and one female offspring"

A single mutation (in either male or female) may be passed to the offspring, and then become widespread in the population, if it promotes survival and further breeding.

59 posted on 09/25/2009 10:39:07 AM PDT by Behemoth the Cat
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To: Behemoth the Cat

But a single mutation is not enough to produce a new species. This would require a string of mutations, which would accumulate to the point at which, a member of the original species would give birth to offspring which was a “new” species. Each of the contributing mutations would have to originally occur in a reproductive cell, since a mutation in any other cell would never be passed on to offspring. These mutated reproductive cells would have to, by pure chance, be the cells that would contribute their information to a new offspring. This first stage, before the mutations accumulate to the point where speciation occurs, has a chain of improbabilities all its own to account for.

Once the offspring is produced which is a member of a “new” species, then the series of improbabilities which I talked about in my original post arises. So even if, a great number of mutations had accumulated in the general population, and only a single additional mutation was required to create the “new” species, in order for a male and female to acquire this same mutation, either two individual organisms, would have to have this exact mutation occur in one of their reproductive cells or one individual organism would have to have this mutation occur in two of their reproductive cells, and these cells would have to be the ones to produce viable offspring, at least one male, and one female. These offspring would have to be located in close geographic proximity, both would have to reach sexual maturity, and both would have to find and mate with each other, and their offspring would have to survive and breed, etc.

For each speciation event, all of these improbabilities, along with others I haven’t mentioned, would have to occur and this would have to be repeated many thousands of times, each time multiplying improbabilities upon improbabilities. At what point does an improbability reach a statistical impossibility?


72 posted on 09/25/2009 12:06:42 PM PDT by Boogieman
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