Neutral Mutation Puns

OP commanders: Zeratul, Tychus, Abathur, Stetmann.

The mutation doesn’t need to counter all of them, one is enough.

Consider how mutations that are neutral compared to those that have a fitness effect spread through populations (drift versus selection). If a new mutation occurs in a population, and it is neutral, is it more likely to become fixed in a large or small population?

This is what I have so far :

Typically traits are more likely to become fixated in smaller populations than in larger populations. However, when sexual selection and the ‘good genes’ mechanism occurs a neutral gene is less likely to become fixated over one with a higher fitness. Therefore, the neutral fitness mutation will be more likely to become fixed in a larger population than a smaller one. In a smaller population it will be quickly eliminated due it to having no advantage, but in a larger population it may linger.

Any help would be appreciated

1. You grow a prehensile tale.

your skin turns ashy black.

you slowly begin to develop vision that can only function well in low light/no light.

2. Your start to develop a third eye that can see a far greater spectrum of colors.

You develop a new brain lobe on the side of your head which manifests as a gleeful and somewhat annoying companion that you hallucinate.

One of your arms begins to develop horrific bone growths, making it harder to move.

3. Your brain “reboots”, causing you to lose some of your memories but providing new clarity of thought.this process happens over D6 days.

Your skin takes on the vague color and texture of any material it is contact with for more than 5 minutes.

The skin on your face starts to contort and meld into a mockery of the last animal you touched.

So, /u/MRH2 has posted this request to /r/creation:

>This issue of Inference Review is highlighting the best essays over the past 6 years. There's one here on Haldane's Dilemma that I'd be interested in having you guys dissect and explain to me. I'm not really conversant with this field.

So, Haldane's Dilemma is pretty simple, really: if you were breeding cattle, you might want to optimize genetics for multiple products: milk and meat. So, you could start selecting for traits in two breeds and try to make a good hybrid.

However, in reproduction, you lose half your genetics passing forward to a child. So, even if we push the right gene forward, there's a 50% chance we won't pass forward something else we wanted. And so: for each trait you're trying to fix, you need to breed twice as many cows, to be able to generate a stable population of the target size with all the traits you want. And cows that didn't have our perfect genetic mix, well, something has to be done about them.

And so, this is Haldane's dilemma: to increase fitness quickly, you need a high cull rate -- but if you have high fitness, you don't get a high cull rate; and the faster a gene spreads, the more genetic diversity you lose in doing so. This leads to Haldane's Limit: for a stable population, independent of the size of that population, only about 1.5 mutations fix per generation -- larger populations have more mutations, but they also need to spread further, which keeps thing relatively constant.

When mutation start fixing faster than that, you begin to lose diversity faster than you gain it, and that usually suggests something bad is happening at a species level, or that a new allele is wildfire and inbreeding is likely a consequence of its spread.

Keep in mind, Haldane was working in a cold-war environment, so much of his study, along with much genetics analysis of the era, is mostly speculation: they didn't have access to sequencing technology and so had almost no information about how genetics actually operated, and many of these studies were looking at nuclear fallout scenarios, such as how many people would you need to maintain a stable population underground, and how many radiation induced mutations we could handle before our long-term genetic health fails.

And so, when people take them as law, I always give them a stran

The default custom mode presets "I love Brutality", "Tactics for the win", and "Survival is my jam" currently disable all the neutral mutations (e.g. Ydgar Orus Li Ox, Masochist, Dead Inside, etc.)
I don't understand why the neutral mutations are disabled by default in these presets, it makes no sense.
Why do I have to reenable the mutations manually after selecting an otherwise very useful preset?

Creationists posit two genetic bottlenecks - an original Adam and Eve, as well as Noah's Flood.

A recent study of 348 female birth canals demonstrates a wide variety of shapes of birth canals around the world, and is evidence for neutral mutations from genetic drift, as well as evidence against a recent bottleneck, and also against a strict dualistic antagonism of evolutionary forces of a widely held theory of the "obstetric dilemma" -

> ‘obstetrical dilemma’ - whereby locomotory efficiency poses a limit to the size of the birth canal in our species, sometimes leading to childbirth complications due to cephalo-pelvic disproportion (a mismatch between the size of the fetus' skull and the mother's birth canal).

This theorised obstetric dilemma was thought to

> [be] a tug-of-war between two opposing evolutionary forces: It needs to be wide enough to allow our big-brained babies to pass through, yet narrow enough to allow women to walk efficiently.

The study observed patterns of morphological diversity consistent with neutral evolution;

> Despite the suggested evolutionary constraints on the female pelvis, we show that women are, in fact, extremely variable in the shape of the bony birth canal, with human populations having differently shaped pelvic canals. Neutral evolution through genetic drift and differential migration are largely responsible for the observed pattern of morphological diversity, which correlates well with neutral genetic diversity.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2018.1807

That being said, there has been evidence

> Despite this seeming lack of change in average pelvic morphology, we show that humans have evolved a complex link between pelvis shape, stature, and head circumference that was not recognized before. The identified covariance patterns contribute to ameliorate the “obstetric dilemma.” Females with a large head, who are likely to give birth to neonates with a large head, possess birth canals that are shaped to better accommodate large-headed neonates. Short females with an increased risk of cephalopelvic mismatch possess a rounder inlet, which is beneficial for obstetrics. We suggest that these covariances have evolved by the strong correlational selection resulting from childbirth.

https://www.pnas.org/content/112/18/5655.short

tl;dr

Birth canal variations are evidence that humans undergo neutral mutations and genetic drift. Birth canal variations are evidence against a recent Adam

https://donotlink.it/r5JO

>The theory of evolution by natural selection can be easily and completely falsified if geneticists are unable to find the GENETIC missing links that, by the very definition of the theory, MUST be there within the 450 years that DNA remains sufficiently viable to map the entire genome.

>That's enough time to establish an average of 495 base pairs that are a) no longer part of the current human gene pool and b) are shared with the Chimp Human Last Common Ancestor. Moreover, the same holds true of modern chimpanzees, assuming that 450-year old chimpanzee DNA can be located.

>Essentially, what I've done is to observe that evolutionists are now facing the very same problem of the various missing links with genetics that they previously faced with the fossil record, only now they can no longer appeal to the difficulty of finding those fossils.

Sever things... First off, DNA is viable for much longer than 450 years. http://mentalfloss.com/article/48815/how-long-does-dna-last DNA can last to over 800,000 years.

In a later post: https://donotlink.it/56MG

>And even that retreat fails to account for the fact that we should be seeing more and faster fixated mutations among the human race further separating us from the CHLCA because a) beneficial mutations fixate faster among growing populations and b) the environmental changes have been greater over the last 450 years than at any time previous, including catastrophes and Ice Ages.

Now, Vox seems to have never heard off neutral changes, not to mention he never considers the idea the rapid changing of the environment means there would be little time for any mutation to be fixed through natural selection, as selection pressures come and go rapidly.

Basically my plague walker mutation kills my brahmin whenever I try to milk it, sometimes it just does a few ticks of damage which sends it running and turns it red, and so I get to watch it run into enemies or get stuck into terrain.

A change to this mutation only dealing damage to actively hostile targets would be nice.

A thumbnail sketch of evolution might go as follows: Sexual reproduction throws up genetic mutations which result in random variations in the resulting offspring of two organisms. If these random variations give the organism a slight advantage, it is more likely to survive and pass on its genes; if they do not, it is more likely to perish before reproductive age and therefore fail to pass on those unfit genes.

We might summarize this still further by saying with Dawkins that reproduction is a sort of "combinatorial lottery" upon the results of which survival on earth exerts a selective force. But in that case the rules of the game are, “Anything goes,” followed by, “If it works once it’s here, it stays; if it doesn’t work, it's out,” with nothing to account for the conspicuous absence of functionally redunant attributes.

To put it slightly differently, if the above outline of evolution is valid might we not expect to see more animals with traits that offer NEITHER an obvious survivalistic advantage NOR a disadvantage? But looking at any particular organism on earth, one is impressed by how amazingly streamlined and efficient it is. You can say, “The spinal cord is poorly ‘designed,’” or else, “The optic nerves of the eye whorl back rather uneconomically through the pupil,” or whatever. But nevertheless, there seems to be zero fat or shoe-leather on Earth's organisms in that every trait, organ and feature serves a particular, easily identifiable and necessary purpose.

What I am struggling to express and understand, to conclude, is that the mechanism of evolution allows for the emergence and persistence of functionally neutral traits but that these are rarely if ever seen.

As an example, let's imagine that twenty-thousand years ago a dragonfly is born with a larger mandible that enables it to consume a more varied died—but this trait is randomly paired with a nodule on its back. The advantage of an increased jaw size offsets whatever energy is squandered growing the nodule and so a selection bias emerges for the paired traits. But millennia later scientists will face a conspicuous feature of dragon-fly anatomy with no identifiable function.

I'm a mere artist and this is no doubt a crude example but it is easy to extract the basic idea and imagine the rich variety of traits of neutral functionality that might exist if evolution were random and the only selection force the advantageousness or disadvantageousness of the resulting variations because *the

And how are they affected by the different parameters of the population -- population size, mutation rate, generation time, something else?

EDIT: I should say, the ratios for new mutations. I know that selection will purge bad ones and promote good ones over time; the question is about the ratios at inception.

The blind cave fish has lost its eyesight because the formation of eyes in a dark cave is not helpful to the fish. It is a large energy expenditure and is also susceptible to infection. With out any light, the trait of eyesight actually becomes a liability in caves. Therefore, natural selection has led to the loss of that trait through both active natural selection and the accumulation of neutral mutations that prevent eyesight. They are neutral in this context because being able to see provides no benefit to the fish. A nonworking gene is no worse than a functional one.

In another example of evolutionary "regression", we can look at the STD chlamydia. This is an intracellular parasite that lives the vast majority of its lifecycle within other cells. As such it has progressively shed large parts of its genome because the cellular machinery it needs is mostly available through its host. IE, loosing genes that enable independent existence from the host aren't needed so mutations that break those genes are neutral. The cell without the gene is as fit or more fit than the one that didn't.

Evolution doesn't always work in the direction of greater complexity. It works in the direction of greater fitness, which sometimes means loosing traits that are less useful in a new environment.

For most of human history, the environmental pressures have been quite severe. In cold climates especially there was a strong negative selection pressure on low intelligence. However, modern life has worked ever more on getting rid of these selection pressures. For this I have no doubt we are all grateful, however, the problem that arises is that now low intelligence could be considered a neutral trait. Like a fish in a dark cave that doesn't need eyes, what does a modern person need with high IQ in a pampered modern existence? Well of course, things aren't as simple as that. There are other factors still in play, such as sexual selection, but I think the fact remains that the suppression of fitness for low IQ traits is less than it was historically. Thoughts?