The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #134693   Message #3067568
Posted By: Steve Shaw
05-Jan-11 - 05:10 AM
Thread Name: BS: Young Earth Creationism
Subject: RE: BS: Young Earth Creationism
"Single population" is misleading and will get evolution scientists bristling. Better to stick to "common ancestor."

14. The differences between populations which share a common ancestor tend to increase as reproductive selection increases. In other words, in a population, the degree of divergence from the common ancestor is inversely related to the proportion of successfully reproducing organisms in the population.

Your second sentence is a non-sequitur, not "in other words." Also, it isn't a corrrect assertion. It's nothing to do with what proportion of the population is reproducing. It's to do with natural selection acting differentially on heritable traits, some of which will increase because of their advantages to the population. The rapidity of divergence may depend on changes in the environment or the appearance of advantageous factors by mutation (which itself may have environmental causes). In addition, generation times will have a huge effect on the rapidity of divergence as well. Fruit flies have a huge advantage over elephants in this regard, for example. Incidentally, I don't know what "reproductive selection" is supposed to mean. Something's getting garbled here.   

15. In a population, the traits of the organisms with the greatest reproductive success will tend to increase, and the traits of those with the lowest reproductive success will tend to decrease.

This is off-beam. Traits which confer advantages will increase over time because they confer advantages, not because of relative rates of reproductive success (whatever that is). Darwin was at pains to point out that natural selection acts on heritable traits within a species and not on individual organisms, still less between species.