Quote:
Originally posted by DrBarr:
Furthermore, I just can't ignore the fact that several thousand generations of fruit flys have yet to produce a single advantageous mutation.
?It is a striking, but not much mentioned fact that, though geneticists have been breeding fruit-flies for sixty years or more in labs all round the world?flies which produce a new generation every eleven days?they have never yet seen the emergence of a new species or even a new enzyme.? Gordon Rattray Taylor (former Chief Science Advisor, BBC Television), The Great Evolution Mystery (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 48.
Dehammer, because there is no shortage of food and no predators, each line of fruit flies is preserved. So it seems to be ideal conditions for mutations to flourish and run their course.

Okay...60 years of breeding...offspring every 11 days...say 1000 different fruit fly ancestral lines being bred across the world (surely a huge underestimation)...gives us 1,968,000 generations. Human equivalent 20 years a generation gives us 39,720,000 years of evolution without a single detectable change. Okay, all very rough but still makes me wonder when I think about the total mutational changes needed to arrive at a creature as incredibly complex as a human.

Blacknad.