Before I get questioned on this statement I ought to add that I was
referring to the chance of a mutation happening at either a particular base
pair position or specific deletion/insertion event rather than how often
mutations (beneficial or otherwise) occur in general. The prior point being
that although they don't occur very often they do occur and that that event
in combination with selection or stochastic effects may allow new alleles
to become fixed in a population (such as new forms of genes/alleles that
confer salt tolerance). Although a far cry from being evidence of
macroevoluion such events do demonstrate that mutation can be "good" and
thus will at least give pause to those that are quick to pronounce that all
mutations (undefined in pronouncement) as being "bad."
Joel Duff
>
Don Page writes:
> This reminds me of Genesis 1 in the King James version, which has
>"after his kind" and "after their kind" so many times, such as in Gen.
>1:11-12
>(courtesy of <http://www.shef.ac.uk/~schm/bible/01_gen.html>, since I don't
>have a King James Bible in my office): "And God said, Let the earth bring
>forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after
>his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the
>earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the
>tree
>yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it
>was good."
>
> Anyway, using the data that Joel gave, one might conclude that these
>verses are at least 99.9999% accurate, which is fantastic! So if these
>verses
>are interpreted to rule out evolution, I would say that even with evolution
>they are highly accurate statements, and one should focus on the fact that
>they
>are almost always true, rather than on the exceptions. Would we really have
>expected God to inspire the writer to write the awkward phrase, "herb
>yielding
>seed after his kind (except in less than 0.0001% of the cases)"?
>
> However, there is a point I am curious about. When I looked up these
>verses in the New Revised Standard Version of The New Oxford Annotated
>Bible, I
>didn't find the idea of "after his kind" at all, but rather "plants yielding
>seed of every kind" and so forth. Does this mean that the "after his kind"
>translation in the older King James was not the best translation?
>
> Don Page