Steve Matheson, writing up more good science:
1. Does the evolution of new features require new, rare, mutations in major genes?
Perhaps this seems like a stupid question to you. Anti-evolution propagandists are eager to create the impression that evolutionary change only occurs when small numbers of wildly improbable mutations somehow manage to help and not hurt a species. And in fact, experimental biology has produced good examples of just such phenomena. But there is at least one other genetic model that has been put forth to explain the evolution of new forms. This view postulates that many major features exhibited by organisms are “threshold” traits, meaning that they are determined by many converging influences which add together and — once the level of influence exceeds a threshold — generate the trait. The model predicts that certain invariant (i.e., never-changing) traits would nevertheless exhibit significant genetic variation, since evolutionary selection is acting on the overall trait and not on the individual genetic influences that are added together. Hence the implication that…
…populations contain substantial cryptic genetic variation, which, if reconfigured, could produce a discrete shift in morphology and thereby a novel phenotype. Thus, evolution would not be dependent on rare mutations, but on standing, albeit cryptic, genetic variation.
–from Nick Lauter and John Doebley, “Genetic Variation for Phenotypically Invariant Traits Detected in Teosinte: Implications for the Evolution of Novel Forms,” Genetics 160:333-342, 2002.
He ends with a note that frankly should be faxed by every thoughtful theist to the ex-Reagan Administration hack who currently runs the Discovery Institute:
So in summary, we can do the experiment. And we’ve done the experiment. (‘We’ being John Doebley and his many able colleagues.) And we’ve learned a lot about evolution and development. Now if we can just get people to read it. Then they’ll know more about evolution, and about God’s world, and about the trustworthiness of the anti-evolution propaganda machines that are exploiting the credulity of evangelical Christians.
Well said.