Can natural selection create?
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components that individually have only a small impact on the whole unit, and have only a miniscule impact on the fitness of the whole individual. In combination, these nucleotides contain most of the information contained within the gene - without them the “important nucleotides” are meaningless. Yet they are all individually un-selectable. So how can we establish them and keep them in their respective places, during gene construction? The answer is obviously that we simply cannot. And apart from these “insignificant masses” of nucleotides the elite “important nucleotides” cannot be selected for either. Because of the nearneutral problem, we cannot even get to first base in terms of building our hoped-for new gene. The entire framework of the new gene is defined by the near-neutrals - but there is no way to either put them or hold them in place. The near-neutral nature of beneficial mutations is strong evidence that every gene had to be designed, and that there is simply no conceivable way to build a gene one nucleotide at a time, via selection. 10. Putting bad mutations back in the picture. We have briefly considered a variety of powerful arguments about why progressive mutation/selection must be very limited in its scope.
These
arguments have temporarily excluded from consideration all deleterious mutations. However, in reality, progressive selection must occur in the real world, where deleterious mutations outweigh beneficial mutations by perhaps a million to one. To be honest, we must now re-introduce deleterious mutations. a) Muller’s Ratchet - As I have mentioned earlier, when we study the human genome, we see that large blocks of DNA have essentially no historical evidence of recombination (Gabriel et al. 2002, Tishkoff and Verrelli, 2003). Recombination appears to be primarily between genes rather than between