Re: [asa] Humanity and the Fall: Questions and a Survey

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 7:25 AM, Dick Fischer <dickfischer@verizon.net>
wrote:

> Reminds me of when I was in the Air Force and an enlisted man returned
> after a two year tour at Thule, Greenland to find his wife had a five
> month old child. Before he could say anything his wife said, "I know what
> you're thinking but go talk to the flight surgeon."
>
>
>
> So he went to the flight surgeon's office and explained that he had spent
> two years at Thule, Greenland and when he got home his wife had greeted
> him with a five month old child, to which the doctor said, "Well, it
> happens."
>
>
>
> "It does"?, the startled young airman replied. "Okay, if you say so."
>
>
>
> Note the doctor didn't say the child was his.
>

I didn't say a brown-eyed kid shouldn't provoke some suspicion but rather
that phenotypes are clues and not necessarily definitive. We were both
taught in high school that blue eyes are recessive. The "real world" is
often much more complicated than that. Here's the real story, and this is
probably overly simplified too!

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0002929707626822

*A Three–Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism Haplotype in Intron 1 of OCA2
Explains Most Human Eye-Color Variation*

We have previously shown that a quantitative-trait locus linked to the OCA2
> region of 15q accounts for 74% of variation in human eye color. We conducted
> additional genotyping to clarify the role of the OCA2 locus in the
> inheritance of eye color and other pigmentary traits associated with
> skin-cancer risk in white populations. Fifty-eight synonymous and
> nonsynonymous exonic single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and tagging SNPs
> were typed in a collection of 3,839 adolescent twins, their siblings, and
> their parents. The highest association for blue/nonblue eye color was found
> with three OCA2 SNPs: rs7495174 T/C, rs6497268 G/T, and rs11855019 T/C (P
> values of 1.02×10−61, 1.57×10−96, and 4.45×10−54, respectively) in intron 1.
> These three SNPs are in one major haplotype block, with TGT representing
> 78.4% of alleles. The TGT/TGT diplotype found in 62.2% of samples was the
> major genotype seen to modify eye color, with a frequency of 0.905 in blue
> or green compared with only 0.095 in brown eye color. This genotype was also
> at highest frequency in subjects with light brown hair and was more frequent
> in fair and medium skin types, consistent with the TGT haplotype acting as a
> recessive modifier of lighter pigmentary phenotypes. Homozygotes for
> rs11855019 C/C were predominantly without freckles and had lower mole
> counts. The minor population impact of the nonsynonymous coding-region
> polymorphisms Arg305Trp and Arg419Gln associated with nonblue eyes and the
> tight linkage of the major TGT haplotype within the intron 1 of OCA2 with
> blue eye color and lighter hair and skin tones suggest that differences
> within the 5′ proximal regulatory control region of the OCA2 gene alter
> expression or messenger RNA–transcript levels and may be responsible for
> these associations.
>
Ouch! That gave me a headache (and that's just the abstract). Getting back
to using genetics to probe human origins. The genetics of OCA2 and blue eye
color tells us something very interesting about H itler's so-called master
race.

*Blue eye color in humans may be caused by a perfectly associated founder
mutation in a regulatory element located within the HERC2 gene inhibiting
OCA2 expression*

http://www.springerlink.com/content/2045q6234h66p744/

The human eye color is a quantitative trait displaying multifactorial
> inheritance. Several studies have shown that the *OCA2* locus is the major
> contributor to the human eye color variation. By linkage analysis of a large
> Danish family, we finemapped the blue eye color locus to a 166 Kbp region
> within the *HERC2**OCA2* promoter in a highly conserved sequence in intron
> 86 of *HERC2*. The brown eye color allele of rs12913832 is highly
> conserved throughout a number of species. As shown by a Luciferase assays in
> cell cultures, the element significantly reduces the activity of the *OCA2
> * promoter and electrophoretic mobility shift assays demonstrate that the
> two alleles bind different subsets of nuclear extracts. One single
> haplotype, represented by six polymorphic SNPs covering half of the 3′ end
> of the *HERC2* gene, was found in 155 blue-eyed individuals from Denmark,
> and in 5 and 2 blue-eyed individuals from Turkey and Jordan, respectively.
> Hence, our data suggest a *common founder mutation in an OCA2* inhibiting
> regulatory element as the cause of blue eye color in humans. In addition, an
> LOD score of *Z* = 4.21 between hair color and D14S72 was obtained in the
> large family, indicating that *RABGGTA* is a candidate gene for hair
> color. [emphasis mine]
>

The whole master race concept should be facially silly given that blond hair
and blue eyes are for the most part recessive. Nevertheless, the study above
puts the nail in the coffin. A founder mutation is a
*non-adaptive*mutation. In other words, there is no genetic advantage
and it is not
selected for but rather arose from genetic drift. So, far from evolutionary
theory supporting so-called N azi science, it disproves it.

Speaking of founder effect we know that Scott Minich understands this as an
evolutionary concept because he said on the stand in Dover he learned it in
his undergrad bio class. If you look at the table of contents to Explore
Evolution (http://www.exploreevolution.com/table_of_contents.php) you see
there is no section concerning non-adaptive evolution. That's been around
since, what? the sixties? There is also no section on genetics for the case
for common descent! Explore Evolution specifically said they were going to
address neo-darwinism rather than classic darwinism. This clearly shows that
all they want to do is to knock down a strawman. Minnich's testimony also
shows that they know it is a strawman. They also said it was not a pro-ID
book yet they replaced these necessary sections for understanding
evolutionary theory with a section on so-called molecular machines.

Doing a colliquy between competing views does have value but make it a real
colliquy where the proponents write their own sections. We did that at my
church when discussing origins and InterVarsity Press did that in their
"Three Views on Creation and Evolution". And they didn't have to bring in us
"nasty" TEs. They could have had Michael Behe write the pro-common descent
section.

A couple of things are unusual with EE as a text book. You cannot get an
evaluation copy nor can you purchase it on Amazon. You can only look at a
few pages on the net. This is enough, however. I will address this more in
detail later but the turtle shell example is quote mined to death. What is
it with YEC and ID publications that practice such disingenous rhetoric?
It's become a truism that quotes are much more likely to be quote mined
rather than fairly quoted. The quote mines are not merely putting words in
their opponent's mouths but editting them to their opposite sense! They also
repeated the lie concerning fossils and the so-called Cambrian Explosion
found in Icons.

I think we have reached the end of the thread here, Dick. I would like to
assure you that unlike what I was discussing above I found our disagreement
was an honest debate of the iron sharpening iron variety. I look forward to
more such interactions in the future.

Rich Blinne
Member ASA

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Received on Thu May 8 11:46:09 2008