Evolution without mutation

You'd just optimize the current population and then stick there in equilibrium.

Probably horseshoe crab is the one surviving without mutation.

Mayr's opinion was that there is sufficient diversity in a genome to achieve genus evolution. Remember, entire genic complements of various phyla are often the same. Of course mutation adds new means and fuel to the mix, but as we learn that there is some controller mechanism in the"junk" DNA that the genomeeffectively is rather large after all. Remember 25% of a mouses genome is in a humans without any repeats or changes.
A genome is like a large bar code with lots of economy therein. Once a controller sequence is "invented" it is passed on to other genera without modification.
Look at a chimp and a human male. Our chromosomes are exactly the same because chriomsome 2 in humans is actually a fuised 2 and 2R of the chimp. SO to say that we have 98% of a chimps genes is not correct, we have 100% but its been rearranged by chromosomal fusing.
Im sure anybody that has taken genetics has spent time over the microscope drawing chimp and human male chromosomes.

AS far as mutations go, lethal mutations occur and that recipient is taken out. Netral mutations accumulate in the junk all the time. These occur in the interons and are often "moved up" by recombination , so that new gene lengths are made available for a new environmental expression, should the environmental change meet up with the "hopeful" gene.
We accumulate mutations at a fairly constant rate so that our own wanderings could be almost timed from "out of Africa" to Eastern Europe. These rates are usable that forensic scientists can track members of populations to their ethnic origin areas (even as small as a small region of a country) if the data base is kept in some international repository.

As Goul;d said, genes are just the "bookkeeping of evolution" not the driver. The driver is the environmental change that favors or weeds out the adapted.

Amazing. So much of what has gone before us is still recorded in our DNA, and available as raw material for design change.

I hope they are teaching this in biology classes these days, because it's really a significant aspect of the process, one which they neglected to mention in my high school classes in the 70's.

This explains why there is such an acceleration in the diversity curve over the last 4billion years. Mutation isn't the primary driver; it's reshuffling and reuse of prior genes which is the primary force now.

Back in the precambrian, when there was less raw material (Genes) to work with and atmospheric conditions were different, I wonder if Mutation was the primary force for change?

I don't think so. Populations would continue to change due to re-shuffling of genetic material, and natural selection would act on the new combinations as it always has.

The depth of recombination could be almost infinite, all without any new mutation.

well, one thing has been discovered about cyanobacters that live in hydrothermal vents. These guys have genes for oxygen respiration but the O2 has been surpressed and theyve adapted to H2S and NO O2 environments.
Ive always looked at gene compliments as a sort of data base o how long species have been around. I dont think theyve decoded the Limulus yet (horshoe crab), but Id be really interested in its genome

Will anyone ever teach this nuance of evolution in Kansas? Will it matter if we do or don't?

Kansas, at its present rate, will be depopulated by 2025. (That is unless some population of immigrants moves in, then at least they will have the intelligence to teach evolution)

I was taught that we have 98% of our genetic sequence are the same as chimps... So it's the fusing of certain chromosomes that made the difference?

ooh oooh oooh

You must have been reading your Farmerman (from above)

I dont think there are really all that many people in places like kansas that actually deny the reality of evolution...I think many of them are probably waiting for someone to come up with a realistic scenario where self replicating molecules can spontaneously be created.

Not really - BIG, big morphological differences in terms of size and sexual characteristics. Probably due to a positive feedback loop - the more we became less like chimps the better our ability to expand our niche. It is also very likely that the original 'human' population was very tiny indeed and may have had a smaller gene pool to speciate with.

The population of chimpanzees also probably outnumbered that of humans until... what.... a quarter of a million years ago?. Maybe even as recently as 100K BP. Impossible to tell - they are a very successful species.

There's a school of thought -- I'm not sure how popular, but it seems very feasible to me -- that the chief difference between humans and chimps is our arrested development. Anatomically, we're pretty much underdeveloped chimpanzees -- the foramen magnum (the big hole at the base of the skull through which our spinal cord passes), for instance, is oriented at the same angle relative to the spinal column as that of late foetus/early infant chimp. (There's a bunch of other stuff, too, that have been noted for at least a century.)

Humans are pretty unusual in being born without a fused cranium. It leaves our brains very vulnerable, but it also gives them the opportunity to continue developing for a long time after birth. So, if we're born premature, and our brain is allowed to grow as it interacts with the external environment -- could be a very big determinant.

And such a developmental shift might require an infinitesimal alteration to the genome.

It is quite a disturbing fact that any fossils of chimps are not found yet.

Perhaps they be we, and not we, they.





Course, we don't really know that we've found any human bones of that vintage, either, when it comes down to it.

Why?

Multiple fossils of Australopithecus to Cro-Magnons have been found, but fossils of chimps are not. I think this is very strange.

because how can we know that they ever existed unless there is solid evidence in the ground to support the theory of chimpanzee existance.