I'm sorry for the tone that made you so defensive. I was hoping you'd gently mention to your co-creationist that his argument was bad. We evos have all known his arguments were generally bad for some time now, and our respect for you would probably have gone up a notch if you'd come out and point out gore3000's blatant & painfully obvious error and the embarrassing way he doggedly tries to defend it. You do disagree with his "50%" argument, don't you?
But hey, if instead you choose to refuse to comment on gore3000's "50%" argument, then so be it.
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One tends to be defensive when responding to "attacks". If his argument is bad then the argument from Talk Origins in my post 1741 is equally bad. Is it flawed?
Even your friends disagree with you Jenny, that is why Vade and RWNilla are already heading for the hills and starting to say that even duplicate genes are immediately helpful. Because they see that you are wrong and that Mendelian genetics is a great problem for evolution. Heck, even look at Andrew's post#1641 from your favorite place, the evo home, Talk Origins. It too is contradicting with what you are saying and agreeing with me. Let me explain this one more time in a different way, perhaps you will understand it better.
1. It is well established that every individual has two sets of chromosomes, not identical, but very similar, and which function pretty much the same.
2. It is well established that on reproduction only one half of those pairs of chromosomes is passed on by the father and another half by the mother, the progeny thus receiving two sets but only one from each parent.
3. It is obvious that a newly mutated gene will appear on only one of the two sets of chromosomes.
4. Since only one of the paired genes gets passed by each parent and there is only one copy in the individual with the mutation, the chances of his passing it on are one in 2.
Now here's why it cannot spread even through a small population. Let's say it is a small species with only 1000 individuals in it. In those 1000 individuals there are 2,000 copies of the gene which mutated. There are 1999 copies of the gene without the mutation and only one with the mutation. On the first generation, 1000 of those 2000 genes will dissappear. Each one of them has half a chance to survive (see 2). Now on the first reproduction the chances are that the you will get either 1000 non mutated genes or 999 non mutated and 1 mutated gene. So what we have here is essentially a coin flip. However, the mutated gene, in order to win and become fixed needs to keep winning coin flips. The chances of that are infinitesimal. Not impossible but infinitesimal.
In short, it is a problem of population genetics. As I said, Mendel turned natural selection on its head. He showed that organisms are very resistant to change and that the odds against it are humongous any way you look at it.