Re: POC's Questions

From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Tue Jun 03 2003 - 19:08:13 MDT

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    On Tue, 3 Jun 2003 16:34:48 -0700 (PDT), Party of Citizens
    <citizens@vcn.bc.ca> wrote:

    > Can you or the Drosophilus Dude from UBC give me a reference to a journal
    > which describes an adaptive mutation in fruit flies?

    What an interesting shift to anyone familiar with watching a shell game
    artist fleece a mark. First it's a mutation you ask for, then it's an
    *adaptive* mutation. Well, GEE, how'd the pea get under THAT shell? Aw, I'm
    sure your attention just wandered. You'll get it right NEXT time, for
    SURE...

    So the next move in this little game is that someone brings up those famous
    moths getting selected for changes in shade as pollution built up and then
    declined in the British Isles, with the _presumption_ that one or the other
    color was a mutation WRT its opposite, at which point you tell us that's
    just selection pressure applied, not to mutation, but to "normal variation"
    or a subspecies or recessive gene or some such--leaving the question of how
    either the recessive or the dominant trait came into being if not by
    mutation. Since we didn't have perfect information (genome data), how can
    we tell?

    Give it a rest. You're not the only detective here--but you still seem to
    live under a bridge.

    MMB

    -- 
    I am not here to have an argument. I am here as part of a civilization. 
    Sometimes I forget.
    


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