Tag: Evolution

Teaching Creation in Schools

My personal opinion, in a perfect world, would be to teach both sides, something the late Philip Johnson called “teaching the controversy”. However, in a perfect world, no one would be teaching evolution at all so, obviously, I’m not getting that. In the current fallen world we live in, I do not expect the public school system to incorporate any creationism in the near future, and frankly, I’m fine with that. Most evolutionists couldn’t tell me even basic aspects of creation anyway so even if they wanted to represent creationists fairly (they don’t), they couldn’t.

Inbreeding Depression

Inbreeding depression is a very strong danger to small populations. As relatives with
similar DNA interbreed, more and more deleterious mutations begin to be expressed,
effectively crippling the population, and often driving it to extinction. However, small
populations are often unable to avoid inbreeding, meaning other mechanisms must be
employed to counter its destructive effect.

Maintenance of Deleterious Alleles

Deleterious alleles are, by definition, not beneficial and should be selected out. However, sometimes deleterious alleles are maintained in a population, despite their harmful effects. Scientists have proposed several explanations for this unintuitive quirk of biology. Overdominance, otherwise known as heterozygote advantage, and mutation-selection balance are two such explanations.