Premarital Sex

MosbyMarion
Sat, 01 May 2010 09:20:15 +0000

That doesn’t make a species more or less complex; it just makes a species more or less varied. Variety =/= complexity. There is remarkably little variety in the function of the human body, all around the world. Does that mean we are not complex organisms? Maybe complexity just isn’t the concept you are looking for.



Variability is a better word, you are right. The point is, this is not a case of a population developing new traits, but rather a case of existing traits being shuffled and naturally selected.



No, alleles can be a) changed drastically and b) changed in some ways, as outlined by fairy_dream’s link. So yes, an individual “changes” in that it is not identical to its parent. In that sense, the individual has “changed.”



Like I said, that link didn’t specify all the exact changes that occured, and until APs are over I won’t have time to look into it in detail. But from my first readover it seems that in at least most of those experiments the variation was a result of a) existing traits being naturally selected, or b) a mutation causeing information to be lost, not gained. There is a big difference between a mutation that causes a protien to be absent, and one that causes a new protien to come into existence. There is also a big difference between changing an antigen due to a copy error in existing DNA, and creating an entirely new structure (like, say, a eukaryotic cell from a prokayrotic cell).