adam149 said:
It tends to happen that way.
I shall try my best.
Thanks, Adam
Sorry to say, your answers did not get to the heart of my question, but a couple of the references did.
Perhaps I need to clarify the issue.
I am not worried about fitting animals onto the ark. My concern is the recreating of various species from the founder pairs emerging from the ark.
adam149 said:
As to how two animals have all the information in them to reproduce once again all the species of animals of their type, it is perfectly feasable. A single man and woman can produce many hundreds of thousands of people without a single one of them being identical to another.
This is true because we are looking simultaneously at all the various characteristics that make up an organism. You can get tremendous overall variety by mixing a very limited number of options for each particular characteristic.
Take faces for example: suppose we have only two options per characteristic
e.g thin or bushy eyebrows, brown or blue eyes, straight or "ski-slope" nose, light or dark skin colour, full or thin lips, weak or jutting chin. With just two options for just these six characteristics one can generate 64 different faces. If we increased the options to four per characteristic we get 4^6=4,096 different faces.
And the more characteristics you look at, the more variation you can get. No problem there.
My question was directed at how much variety one could get
in each separate characteristic.
And this is where I found the AiG article on variation helpful, though perhaps not fully answering the question.
Here is the relevant paragraph.
All (sexually reproducing) organisms contain their genetic information in paired form. Each offspring inherits half its genetic information from its mother, and half from its father. So there are two genes at a given position (locus, plural loci) coding for a particular characteristic. An organism can be heterozygous at a given locus, meaning it carries different forms (alleles) of this gene. For example, one allele can code for blue eyes, while the other one can code for brown eyes; or one can code for the A blood type and the other for the B type. Sometimes two alleles have a combined effect, while at other times only one allele (called dominant) has any effect on the organism, while the other does not (recessive).
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/re1/chapter2.asp
We see from this that each individual has two copies of each gene and the two genes can be identical (in which case the individual is homozygous for that characteristic) or different (in which case the individual is heterozygous for that characteristic.)
But while each individual carries only two copies (and therefore a maximum of two alleles) of each gene, there can be more than two alleles for that gene in the population as a whole.
As noted in the article, humans have both A and B alleles for blood type. Another allele for blood type is the O allele. No one person can carry all three of these alleles. You must have at least two people---and one of them must be heterozygous for two of the alleles. Of course, the human complement of the ark was 8. Noah's sons would only have copies of the genes from their parents, so among these five people there would exist a maximum of four alleles for any one gene. Even that is enough to account for the three blood type alleles. And for other characteristics, the daughters-in-law could each account for an additional two. So the human survivors of the ark could preserve up to 10 alleles per gene.
But what if God originally created an animal kind with 10 different alleles in one gene locus? This would mean creating a minimum of 5 of that kind, since each individual can only carry two of the ten alleles. Now, Noah takes only two of most kinds, so there is necessarily a selection of at best 4 of those 10 alleles. So where does the information come from to recreate a species that originally had 10 alleles at one gene locus? How does a species get back the six missing alleles?
This is where the article on bears came in:
However, it is likely that not all the features for todays bears would have been coded for directly in the genes of the original bear kind.
Mutations, genetic copying mistakes which cause defects, may on rare occasions be helpful, even though they are still defects, corruptions or losses of information. Thus, the polar bears partly webbed feet
may have come from a mutation which prevented the toes from dividing properly during its embryonic development. This defect would give it an advantage in swimming, which would make it easier to survive as a hunter of seals among ice floes.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v20/i4/bears.asp
Emphasis added.
Now,this frankly surprised me, even with the qualifier that this mutation is a defect. For I have never heard a creationist source speak even this positively of mutations before.
Yet, I could not see any way of getting more than four alleles per gene without mutations. And I know that in some species, there are upwards of 100 alleles of a particular gene.
If mutations are the only way to get new alleles that would mean 96 or more mutations for that gene locus alone since Noah's day. And more for every gene for which there are now more than four alleles in today's representatives of the kind.
I didn't think that was acceptable to creationism until I saw the AiG article on bears. Even now I am not sure.
So is this explanation widely accepted by creationists as the source of new alleles in one specific gene?
Or does someone have an alternate theory for developing new alleles of a gene? One that does not rely on mutations?
