Another day; another bad day for Darwinism. This is so true that I rarely post here anymore. Why bother? Darwinism is beat up everyday by its adherents doing experiments.
Here’s another one.
The team investigated the validity of Haldane’s predictions for the probability of fixation of a beneficial allele. They used C. elegans because it reproduces asexually, thus ensuring “genetic identity” from one generation to the next.
While validating Haldane’s predictions for the initial introduction of both deleterious and beneficial alleles to a population, they found this:
If its [i.e., the allele’s] frequency was higher than 5% (when more than five different individuals in a population of 100 individuals), the allele was perceived as deleterious and it started to be eliminated by natural selection. But when the frequency was less than 5%, the allele was beneficial. The result of these complex dynamics is that genetic diversity could be maintained indefinitely, without one allele or the other ever being fixed in the population.
IIRC, several years ago, in a study involving bacteria, it was found that when a bacterial population utilizing one type of sugar was place in the environment of a different type sugar, then the population switched over to the new sugar type; however, the ‘allele’ for the original sugar was never COMPLETELY eliminated from the population. Only WGA could determine this.
What these two examples suggest is that the ‘genome’ has the ability to monitor the level of use of any particular ‘allele’, and that depending on its current ‘use’, the ‘allele’ that would be ‘deleterious’ for the current environment is held at some minimal level so that should the environment change in the future, the needed ‘allele’ [then ‘beneficial’] would be ready at hand. [Which makes sense given how improbable it is to generate an allele from scratch]
To my mind, this calls the very idea of Natural Selection into question. We already know—Dawkin’s tells us this—that Natural Selection is no more than the “Grim Reaper.” Thus, NS is no more than the elimination of “unfit” alleles through “death.” But, in this scenario—backed up by the two experiments I’m speaking of—it is the population itself which determines what is ‘deleterious’, and hence eliminated via “death,” and which is ‘beneficial.’ In this case, it is the genome—very likely communicating with itself via individual genomes—that is making the “SELECTION;” NOT ‘nature.’
This is potentially devastating to Darwinian thought. But, don’t worry, you can be sure that our Darwinian ‘true-believers’ will invent some new ‘epicycle’ to explain—in their minds only—this deathblow to population genetics.