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Hybridization, not Darwin’s natural selection, explains why butterflies mimic each other?

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Here’s an open access paper, just published in Nature online (May 16, 2012) , about whose abstract a friend writes to say, “You could request a full paragraph of explanation for each sentence.”

Well-known examples of South American butterflies mimicking each other’s wing patterns may be due – not to wing panel by wing panel natural selection – but to hybridization.

That would make more sense. Never mind the famous question “What good is five percent of an eye?” Well, some good.

A more important question for many life forms is, what good is looking only five percent less like lunch? Five percent of an eye may be useful; looking only five percent less like lunch is not likely to be. And it is typical of a Darwin-crazed culture that so many people accept the Darwinists’ sales job and so few notice the critical difference.

Paper:

Butterfly genome reveals promiscuous exchange of mimicry adaptations among species

The evolutionary importance of hybridization and Introgression has long been debated. Hybrids are usually rare and unfit, But even infrequent hybridization can aid adaptation by transferring Beneficial traits between species. Here we use genomic tools to investigate introgression in heliconius, a rapidly radiating genus of neotropical butterflies widely used in studies of ecology, behaviour. we sequenced the genome of heliconius Melpomene and compared it with other taxa to investigate chromosomal evolution in lepidoptera and gene flow among multiple heliconius species and races. Among 12,669 predicted genes, biologically important expansions of families of chemosensory and hox genes are particularly noteworthy. Chromosomal organization has remained broadly conserved since the cretaceous period, when butterflies split from the _bombyx_(Silkmoth) lineage. Using genomic resequencing, we show hybrid exchange of genes between three co-mimics, heliconius melpomene, heliconius Timareta and heliconius elevatus, especially at two genomic regions that control mimicry pattern. We infer that closely related heliconius species exchange protective colour-pattern genes promiscuously, implying that hybridization has an important role in adaptive radiation.

Comments
Ah, but don't forget that drift doesn't know a thing about either and still magically turns up up the goods without selection. And don't forget that if the gnomes are too industrious, selection gets swamped anyway and encourages stasis. And don't forget that the gnomes' lack of planning is an assumption based on ignornace of their language. The ones living in James Shapiro's lab get quite annoyed when you accuse them of it.Jon Garvey
May 20, 2012
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I think Jon Garvey has it right. Selection really doesn't care how the variation came to be, and the little gnomes with the monkey wrenches don't really care which of their efforts will look less like lunch. Each operates without knowledge of the other, but together they comprise the Invisible Hand of evolution.David W. Gibson
May 19, 2012
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Jon @ #5, precisely. We can just call the evolutionary mechanism "variation" and that should pretty much cover everything by default, irrespective of whatever processes drive the variation, or how such processes came to be constructed in the first place.Chance Ratcliff
May 18, 2012
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Except for the bit where baramins don’t share common ancestors.
Except neither descent with modification nor hybridization nor natural selection nor drift nor evolution, require a sharing of common ancestors. And guess what? Seeing that the "theory" of evolution is silent on origins then it is also silent on the number of trees and therefor silent on universal common descent.Joe
May 18, 2012
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Baraminology is, in a nutshell, descent with modification. Hybridization is but one means of generating heritable variation.
Except for the bit where baramins don't share common ancestors.NickMatzke_UD
May 18, 2012
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It's good to know that when somebody finally spots the microscopic gnomes exchanging the genes with tiny monkey wrenches, it will be no threat at all to evolutionary theory because it's subsumed into "variation" and the results are still subject to natural selection. And drift, of course. Mustn't forget drift.Jon Garvey
May 18, 2012
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Baraminology is, in a nutshell, descent with modification. Hybridization is but one means of generating heritable variation. BTW natural selection is a result and doesn't "act" on anything. And the "theory" of evolution is too vague to be contradicted by any evidence.Joe
May 18, 2012
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Whatever is meant by "Darwin's natural selection", it isn't at all confounded by this study. Darwinism is, in a nutshell, descent with modification, natural selection acting on heritable variation. Hybridization is but one means of many for generating heritable variation. Which means hybridization is a mechanism for producing the "substrate" for natural selection. There is no contradiction or problem (of any sort) for evolutionary theory in this report.Arthur Hunt
May 17, 2012
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It’s hybridization *and* natural selection.
And drift. And sexual selection. And convergent evolution. And inbreeding. And, well, evolution.Joe
May 17, 2012
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Here’s an open access paper, just published in Nature online (May 16, 2012) , about whose abstract a friend writes to say, “You could request a full paragraph of explanation for each sentence.”
Um, that's why people write the paper and not just the abstract.
Well-known examples of South American butterflies mimicking each other’s wing patterns may be due – not to wing panel by wing panel natural selection – but to hybridization.
Um, what? They are talking about the selective sweep of genes for wing color across several 'species'. It's hybridization *and* natural selection.NickMatzke_UD
May 17, 2012
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