Why does radiation produce valuable mutants?

Question

A key Creationist argument is that beneficial mutations are rare, yet they subsist on them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/science/28crop.html

There are other studies on the frequency of beneficial mutations.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/98/20/11388

This large lab accelerates the process, but it cannot compete with the total area of the Earth for frequency.

Actually, the process can produce new information. If you have two identical copies of an allele, now you have two alleles. The alternative allele creates two possibilities where there was one. That is more information. The most important mutation is crosslinking strands. This allows the genome to be extended with more copies of a gene. If one of the extra alleles is altered, now you have all the old information, plus the new information. The hackneyed 747 argument doesn't apply. You took the control panel (or at least an instrument) out of one and put it in the other (the catch with cross linking is that where one daughter cell gains and another loses). Hit a random button, and you might start the engine. The nature of genes shows that there are a number of families of functional genes that vary subtly. Cold blooded animals have a variety of genes for the same function, each optimized to a temperature range.

As to the assertion that you cannot have a beneficial mutation, it's all over drdino, a convicted fraud's site.

http://drdino.com/articles.php?spec=3
http://drdino.com/articles.php?spec=15

Answer 1

Beneficial mutations are rare. Much rarer than mutations with no effect or deleterious effects. What this article does not say is how many seeds they mutate. Also something you don't realize is while these mutations may be good for farming where there is human intervention they may not be good mutations if the organism was in the wild and did not have human intervention.

In order for this to really prove anything they would first have to show the mutations could occur easily in a natural
environment. And secondly the number of good mutations to deadly or silent mutations would be necessary.

I just want to add that you have used this article several times. However in the article it states "Whereas natural
selection applied to large populations demonstrates that beneficial mutations exist (19, 20, 29), it is generally thought by population geneticists that the vast majority of new mutations are neutral or deleterious, and only a tiny fraction are beneficial." Which is what many of us in here had said. Also 52 mutations were examined in two different growth media. In the one media, glucose, no mutations conferred a selective advantage. Only 3 (after employing the bonferroni correction) of the mutants in maltose showed a selective advantage. And even with the results here the authors are not able to conclusively state that they have proven beneficial mutations are more common that originally thought. It brings up the possibility but this is far from proven.

By the way I am in no way denigrating their research. I actually find it quite interesting. I am just saying that you using this to show beneficial mutations are relatively common or even more common than is now believed is not exactly accurate.

Be kind of interesting if beneficial mutations are more common than has been thought. Creationists believe that all species basically had to spread out after the ark. I would assume evolution/natural selection would have to go on then with the animals from the ark to get the species we have today. If beneficial mutations were found at a higher rate than previously thought it could actually be a good thing for creationists. Before you ridicule this just think about it.


Thatguyjoe who is down below. pnas.org is just the website for proceedings of the national academy of science. It is one of the premiere scientific journals. Funnily enough I am a creationist and in the next week or so I am going to be submitting an article to them for publication.

Answer 2

Response to Edge:
Why?

Let's say that 90% of the mutations were harmful and 9% were neutral and that only 1% were beneficial. So? That means that 90% of the mutations would be likely to be weeded out by evolution. Even so, that the beneficial or neutral (under current conditions) mutations exist means that there's now, through natural means, variation for evolution to work with and if the mutations prove superior for survival then the mutation will become more common in the gene pool. Evolution.

Mutations are rare, most won't succeed, a very few will and that's one way that evolution takes place.

Radiation is one way that mutations happen. Spikes in radiation do happen in the natural world. Mutations happen in the natural world. What's happening in the lab speeds the process but it only reflects what we do find in nature.

The Creationist argument that mutations are only harmful, never helpful, is false. The Creationist argument that mutations can't add new information (change in shell thickness, change in color, etc.) but can only remove information is false. Reality clobbers standard Creationist arguments once again.

Note for nightmare: there's no mechanism that would stop a series of smaller changes from eventually becoming a major change over many succeeding generations. The only difference between micro and macro is time and number of accumulated changes.
[Edit: I responded without getting vulgar. Are references to pnas.org really appropriate when children who can pronounce the web site's name might be present?]

Answer 3

a couple things I noticed about that, and your statement/question. Radiation speeds the process up. So "... going through 10,000 to one million" one can finally find a beneficial mutation. Meaning, it is rare, but with radiation, the process can be sped up making them be found faster.
This is performed on plants, not animals.(as far as I can tell)
This process only affects minor traits. As in, corn is not turning into an orange tree. This data in no way conflicts with Creationism. If scientists can alter a plant to give it make it more adaptable, more power to them. Creationists do not have a medieval concept of genetics, we just feel the evidence is in favor of God creating life.

Joe, I thought we are not supposed to use what we don't know as evidence. Otherwise I might point out that evolutionists also lack a mechanism to naturally form life. I believe in Macro evolution in the sense that animals that technically are different species could have the same ancestor. Like a hyena and a wolf. But it is reasonable to say that there is some limits. Even after all our experiments with bacteria, we still have yet to see one become a functioning two celled organism. That would only require the addition of 1 cell! I'd type more, but I am tired, and it is late, or should I say early.

Answer 4

I know alot about the effects of different types of radiation on matter, both inert and organic.

When various radiation strikes our cells and their DNA/RNA, it never politely rearranges the molecules. It creates a "huge" micro explosion (usually in the form of a steam explosion) and there is a huge loss of "information" in that area. There is no polite rearrangement of data. But, at times, the loss of data can have "some" desired results, as is sometimes seen in microorganisms.

It's the old "explosion in a junkyard” argument. You can't create a 747 (fully fuelled, with all of the switches in their proper positions, sitting on a runway) by calling in an artillery strike in a junk yard.

It's more like setting off a large hand grenade on an airplane, that gets rid of a "secondary" system that appears to make the plane more efficient for a "particular" purpose.

Great question again Novangelis, but there is no "creation" there, just a loss of info by destruction.

I would call it "devolution" (or for you "Novelution"). I couldn't call that process evolution by any stretch.

I'd love to get into it with more detail with you, but if I don't get back to my old lady soon, she'll kill me, lol.

Answer 5

Mutations are actually quite common. Most of them are either adverse or neutral, and natural selection will quickly weed out the losers. Neutral ones will hang around for a while; a subsequent mutation may wind up making use of the earlier mutation to do something useful. The vast majority of mutations make changes which are too subtle to see; a favorable one may simply provide extra resistance to a disease process.

Answer 6

So what if they're rare, that's like getting the answers to the test in advance. It's a huge leg up on the competition. And it's (obviously) not as rare as they think.

In the game of life, anything that helps you out is good. Shoot, even the stuff that hurts the rest and reduces the competition is just as helpful.

EDIT: Since Edge and Nightmare have been dealt with, I'll take Serafim: Okay seraphim, listen closely: You're assumptions and arguments are flawed. I'll explain:
First, you are assuming that evolution is random. I base this on your 747 analogy, or blowing up a book, whatever you people call it today. Evolution is not random. It is not directional, but it is not random. Do you understand that?
Second, you clearly do not understand who mutation works. Go to wikipedia, that will help. There are no explosions, bases in the genetic code get altered from A or T to G or C, or an combination thereof. Or terminated, which kills the organism.

Thirdly, and most importantly, you are completely wrong about mutation not adding info. The following explanation is good:
"Claim CB102:
Mutations are random noise; they do not add information. Evolution cannot cause an increase in information.
Source:
AIG, n.d. Creation Education Center. http://www.answersingenesis.org/cec/docs/CvE_report.asp
Response: It is hard to understand how anyone could make this claim, since anything mutations can do, mutations can undo. Some mutations add information to a genome; some subtract it. Creationists get by with this claim only by leaving the term "information" undefined, impossibly vague, or constantly shifting. By any reasonable definition, increases in information have been observed to evolve. We have observed the evolution of increased genetic variety in a population (Lenski 1995; Lenski et al. 1991)
increased genetic material (Alves et al. 2001; Brown et al. 1998; Hughes and Friedman 2003; Lynch and Conery 2000; Ohta 2003) novel genetic material (Knox et al. 1996; Park et al. 1996) novel genetically-regulated abilities (Prijambada et al. 1995)
If these do not qualify as information, then nothing about information is relevant to evolution in the first place.
A mechanism that is likely to be particularly common for adding information is gene duplication, in which a long stretch of DNA is copied, followed by point mutations that change one or both of the copies. Genetic sequencing has revealed several instances in which this is likely the origin of some proteins. For example:
Two enzymes in the histidine biosynthesis pathway that are barrel-shaped, structural and sequence evidence suggests, were formed via gene duplication and fusion of two half-barrel ancestors (Lang et al. 2000). RNASE1, a gene for a pancreatic enzyme, was duplicated, and in langur monkeys one of the copies mutated into RNASE1B, which works better in the more acidic small intestine of the langur. (Zhang et al. 2002) Yeast was put in a medium with very little sugar. After 450 generations, hexose transport genes had duplicated several times, and some of the duplicated versions had mutated further. (Brown et al. 1998)
The biological literature is full of additional examples. A PubMed search (at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi) on "gene duplication" gives more than 3000 references.
According to Shannon-Weaver information theory, random noise maximizes information. This is not just playing word games. The random variation that mutations add to populations is the variation on which selection acts. Mutation alone will not cause adaptive evolution, but by eliminating nonadaptive variation, natural selection communicates information about the environment to the organism so that the organism becomes better adapted to it. Natural selection is the process by which information about the environment is transferred to an organism's genome and thus to the organism (Adami et al. 2000).


The process of mutation and selection is observed to increase information and complexity in simulations (Adami et al. 2000; Schneider 2000).
Links:
Max, Edward E., 1999. The evolution of improved fitness by random mutation plus selection. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/fitness

Musgrave, Ian, 2001. The Period gene of Drosophila. http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/apr01.html "

In addition to that, you should read this:
"Claim CB101.2:
Mutations only vary traits that are already there. They do not produce anything new.
Source:
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. 1985. Life--How Did It Get Here? Brooklyn, NY, p. 103.
Morris, Henry M. 1985. Scientific Creationism. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 51.
Response:
Variation of traits is production of novelty, especially where there was no variation before. The accumulation of slight modifications is a basis of evolution.

Documentation of mutations producing new features includes the following: the ability of a bacterium to digest nylon (Negoro et al. 1994; Thomas n.d.; Thwaites 1985);
adaptation in yeast to a low-phosphate environment (Francis and Hansche 1972; 1973; Hansche 1975); the ability of E. coli to hydrolyze galactosylarabinose (Hall 1981; Hall and Zuzel 1980);EVOLUTION OF MULTICELLULARITY FROM SINGLE CELLED GREEN ALGAE(Boraas 1983; Boraas et al. 1998); modification of E. coli's fucose pathway to metabolize propanediol (Lin and Wu 1984); evolution in Klebsiella bacteria of a new metabolic pathway for metabolizing 5-carbon sugars (Hartley 1984);

There is evidence for mutations producing other novel proteins: Proteins in the histidine biosynthesis pathway consist of beta/alpha barrels with a twofold repeat pattern. These apparently evolved from the duplication and fusion of genes from a half-barrel ancestor (Lang et al. 2000).

Laboratory experiments with directed evolution indicate that the evolution of a new function often begins with mutations that have little effect on a gene's original function but a large effect on a second function. Gene duplication and divergence can then allow the new function to be refined. (Aharoni et al. 2004)

For evolution to operate, the source of variation does not matter; all that matters is that heritable variation occurs. Such variation is shown by the fact that selective breeding has produced novel features in many species, including cats, dogs, pigeons, goldfish, cabbage, and geraniums. Some of the features may have been preexisting in the population originally, but not all of them were, especially considering the creationists' view that the animals originated from a single pair.
Links:
Max, Edward E. 1999. The evolution of improved fitness by random mutation plus selection. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/fitness/

Musgrave, Ian, Steven Pirie-Shepherd, and Douglas Theobald. 2003. Apolipoprotein AI mutations and information. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/information/apolipoprotein.html

Thomas, Dave. n.d. Evolution and information: The nylon bug. http://www.nmsr.org/nylon.htm"

The articles can be found here: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html under the biology section.

Answer 7

Your arguing with a group of people who cannot be reasoned with. If you want to understand the Creationist mind, watch the movie idiocracy.

Answer 8

What if we shot radiation into a human to alter their DNA! Do you think that they would evolve into the next plane of existence?
Just wondering.

Answer 9

The Ninja Turtles are good mutants! I like them.

Answer 10

valuable mutants produce the radiation these days .