>GM>Now. if God made a real cavern system, and placed you in it. He
>>has delimited where you can go. You can not go through the walls.
>>Similarly, if God created the "cavernous" phase space of DNA, He has
>>delimited what sequences of DNA are successful. This is not
>>naturalistic. God set out the pathways before the foundation of the
>>universe.
>
Stephen responded
>It's interesting in another post you are claiming there are no limits
>to genetic change, yet here you are claiming there are limits.
>Again, please clarify.
I believe that what Glenn is trying to say is that the _kinds_ of limits on
variation that creationists claim exist do not appear to exist. Or that
there is no compelling evidence that such limits exist. The specific kinds
of limits we're talking about are limits that would prevent a major
morphological change to occur as the result of genetic variation(or an
accumulation of them). You are correct in observing that there _are_ some
sorts of limits to variation: When an adapting population gets
sufficiently close to a global or local extremum of its fitness function,
further variation is unlikely to improve fitness, so the population just
"floats" in the vicinity of the optimum. Haldane apparently showed that
there are limits to how quickly mutations can occur (not surprising), and
obviously genetic variation cannot produce an individual which can do
something which violates the laws of physics. But people who work in a
field tire of attaching a string of qualifiers to every sentence. To
communicate with them you have to spend some time learning what sorts of
behavior would be considered significant -- and therefore worth discussion
-- and what sorts of behavior are observed all the time, well understood
and therefore not discussed. You have to be willing to consider the
(explicit or implied) context of a statement.
>
Bill Hamilton | Vehicle Systems Research
GM R&D Center | Warren, MI 48090-9055
810 986 1474 (voice) | 810 986 3003 (FAX)