Mutation vs. natural selection

Gemma Tarlach, writing in Discover Magazine online 2014 wrote:
“Mutation, Not Natural Selection, Drives Evolution. Molecular evolutionary biologist Masatoshi Nei (2013) says Darwin never proved natural selection is the driving force of evolution — because it isn’t.”

“In 1972, he devised a now widely used formula, Nei’s standard genetic distance, which compares key genes of different populations to estimate how long ago the groups diverged. In the early ’90s, Nei was a co-developer of free software that creates evolutionary trees based on genetic data. Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis, or MEGA.”

So that’s the scientist who brought us genomics. Perhaps there were others, too.

Nei continues:
“Natural selection occurs sometimes, of course, because some types of variations are better than others, but mutation created the different types. Natural selection is secondary.”

Someone is forgetting sexual selection, which encourages certain phenomic changes over others. Someone is forgetting extinction by disease, comet impact, etc., which clears the Earth for survivors.

Nei continues:
“My position is mutation creates variation, then natural selection may or may not operate, it may or may not choose the good variation and eliminate the bad one, but natural selection is not the driving force.”

Nei continues:
“I had developed the genetic distance theory [in the ’70s] because I wanted to make a phylogenetic tree, and distance can be used for making trees. But I was also interested in statistics. So I combined the two methods. To test it, first we did computer simulations: We generated a DNA sequence for an evolutionary tree where we already knew where the tree branched.

Or did they? The large reptile tree (LRT, 1596+ taxa) upsets many traditional relationships among the taxa its tests. The LRT cladogram was not available to Nei in 2011 and was probably overlooked in 2013.

Nei continues:
“Then we used statistics, the neighbor-joining method, to reconstruct the tree and test whether it resembled the actual phylogenetic tree. It did, and that’s how we knew this method gave a pretty good idea of how species evolved and diverged.”

So, false positives matched false positives. Think Afrotheria. Laurasiatheria. And remember no fossil taxa are used in genomic studies. Think what a difference fossil taxa make.

Nei continues:
“But any time a scientific theory is treated like dogma, you have to question it. The dogma of natural selection has existed a long time. Most people have not questioned it. Most textbooks still state this is so. Most students are educated with these books.”

“You have to question dogma. Use common sense. You have to think for yourself, without preconceptions. That is what’s important in science.”

You also have to add fossil taxa. And where was the common sense that nested elephants and kin as basal placentals? And who would nest flamingoes with grebes, except genomic workers?

In the comments section of this online article,
medical laboratory scientist James Kohl wrote: “In “Roles of Mutation and Selection in Speciation: From Hugo de Vries to the Modern Genomic Era” (2011), Nei ignored ecological factors as he did in his book “Mutation-Driven Evolution”. He also ignored the biophysical constraints on protein folding that prevent mutation-driven evolution. Instead, in his book he evoked ‘constraint-breaking mutation” as the source of all biological innovations and species diversity in the world. Now, with the lesser role for natural selection, mutation-driven evolution “just happens” due to constraint-breaking mutations. Is there a model for that? Is there a model organism that exemplifies it?”

“Species diversity is is obviously nutrient-dependent and it is controlled by the metabolism of nutrients to species-specific pheromones, which control the physiology of reproduction in species from microbes to man. Chemical ecology and olfactory/pheromonal input link the epigenetic landscape to the physical landscape of DNA in the organized genome of species from microbes to man. There is no reason to add the biologically implausible role of constraint-breaking mutation until experimental evidence ecologically validates the earlier versions of untested theories about evolution that are still based on population genetics instead of on experimental evidence of conserved molecular mechanisms sans mutations.”

References
Nei M 2013. Mutation-Driven Evolution.
Nei M and Nozawa M 2011. In “Roles of Mutation and Selection in Speciation: From Hugo de Vries to the Modern Genomic Era”,

http://discovermagazine.com/2014/march/12-mutation-not-natural-selection-drives-evolution

https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/speciation-the-origin-of-new-species-26230527/