*** The Official MAGAposting thread ***

[oskar]

Along these lines, what causes speciation (or just variation within species)? Is it *something something how genes express something something*? Is it fair to say that a population could reproduce in such a way that genes that might have a specific effect lose their "prominence," resulting in that effect no longer remaining?

You clearly know more about this stuff than I do, so you probably have some good answers.

I skipped over this originally because you could just google it, but this is preferable to what we have going on right now. Speciation occurs when two groups can no longer produce fertile offspring. Horses and donkeys can produce offspring, but their offspring cannot reproduce. They are effectively speciated. Unlike horses and donkeys, northern and southern white rhinos look practically identical, but cannot interbreed. Their last common ancestor could go back as far as 1M years.

In the chapter I linked from The Ancestor's Tale, Dawkins uses the example of two common grasshopper species who are identical in appearance, but will not interbreed. They can however interbreed if you pair the female of one species with a particularly hot male of the other species. Literally. You have to heat the male up if you want the female to respond to his mating call. In laboratory conditions these grasshoppers can produce fertile offspring, but since it never happens in the wild, they are considered speciated and will continue to drift apart genetically until they will no longer be able to produce offspring. This is an interesting example because usually speciation requires geographical isolation.

Darwins finches are a great example why you don't need to worry about a brown mono race. There are 13 species of finches spread around various galapagos islands. Through environmental pressures they evolved so dramatically different that they were originally documented as entirely different species and were only later found to be subspecies of finches sharing a common ancestor only a couple million years ago. This common ancestor carried virtually all the genetic information necessary to produce 13 separate subspecies that behave and look dramatically different.

It is a common misconception that mutation is the primary driving force in evolution. Very gradual changes through environmental and sexual selection are much more prominent. Which is why in the mathematical models you quoted, both of those factors have to be eliminated to be able to make meaningful predictions. In the real world those factors will always remain the main driving force.