Denial of evolution III

[Emil]

Of all the random changes what is the percentage admitted as evolutionary?

[matthew809]

Natural selection tends to eliminate harmful mutations over time and tends to encourage beneficial mutations.

I agree. But my hailstorm analogy is not concerned with the microevolution processes that cause relatively minor genetic variations within species(ie. white moths into black moths), be it through genetic mutations or genetic flexibility. My analogy deals with macroevolution(ie. fish into humans).

It is wrongly extrapolated that microevolution(observable and understood) eventually leads to macroevolution(not observable and not understood). It is this evolutionary leap of logic that is wrong, and this is what my analogy exposes. That's why my analogy seems silly to you. My analogy deals with macroevolution from a neo-Darwinism point of view, yet you are thinking about it in terms of microevolution.

So I agree that my hailstorm analogy makes no sense. And in the same way neither does evolution make any sense.

[iceaura]

And considering the huge diversity of species all perfectly adapted to it's environment and living in sync with each other, this improbable occurrence happens routinely- all on the same planet, and all at the same time.

That is nowhere near an accurate description of the living world.

Nothing is "perfectly adapted", almost none of the adaptations occurred "at the same time", beings don't "live in sync with each other", and so forth.

[matthew809]

That is nowhere near an accurate description of the living world.

Nothing is "perfectly adapted", almost none of the adaptations occurred "at the same time", beings don't "live in sync with each other", and so forth.

In geological timescales, all these improbable occurrences of beneficial mutations happened at roughly the same time. For example- take the mouth-cleaning fish and the sharks that let these cleaning fish work in their mouth. That's a perfect example. Take the woodpecker- and the fact that it must have evolved a super-tough bill, better shock-absorbers throughout the body, and a desire/willingness to peck into trees- all at the same time(sync) in order for any one trait to be advantageous and naturally selected to carry on. Just consider the diversity of species living on the earth at the same time. Each divergence of species required an astronomically improbable mutation many years ago, just for them to be alive today.

[alephnull]

All analogies are terrible.

But.... Would you like to explain why this analogy is so bad? That might be more useful.

I was away from my computer so could not answer before Pandaemoni did. My response would have been similar, but (s)he probably explained it better than I ever would have.

[GeoffP]

I agree. But my hailstorm analogy is not concerned with the microevolution processes that cause relatively minor genetic variations within species(ie. white moths into black moths), be it through genetic mutations or genetic flexibility. My analogy deals with macroevolution(ie. fish into humans).

Then your objection has a problem. I realize that as, a priori, the side proposing the ToE, it is on our account to defend it: at the same time, I would be interested to know the defense of anti-evolutionists against the clear series of models in fish-amphibian evolution, horses, and the many branches of humanity.

It is wrongly extrapolated that microevolution(observable and understood) eventually leads to macroevolution(not observable and not understood).

Ah - so you are a saltationist? That's fine. Whether you consider evolution as major leap or minor gradient, there is abundant evidence that relatively few genes need be involved to achieve major morphological differentiation. Eyedness in fish with cave and free-dwelling populations is one such example:

http://genepath.med.harvard.edu/~tabin/Pdfs/Protas2.pdf
http://scienceblogs.com/afarensis/20...and_selection/
http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/content/93/1/19.full

I met Borowsky a while back. Seemed brusque at first, but a nice chap when you got to really talk to him.

In geological timescales, all these improbable occurrences of beneficial mutations happened at roughly the same time. For example- take the mouth-cleaning fish and the sharks that let these cleaning fish work in their mouth. That's a perfect example.

This would be a case of commensalism. Evolutionists propose a fitness basis for this joint behaviour: anti-evolutionists propose - what? Godly intervention? Directed evolution? To what end?

In any event, the sheer number of possible animal-animal, animal-plant, plant-plant interactions is a multiple of the number of species involved across all possible species boundaries. Against the number of possible interactions that could have arisen, the relatively small number of such overt examples should come as no surprise. A handful of explicit commensalist behaviours in the - literally - millions of such that could occur? A trifle.

Take the woodpecker- and the fact that it must have evolved a super-tough bill, better shock-absorbers throughout the body, and a desire/willingness to peck into trees- all at the same time(sync) in order for any one trait to be advantageous and naturally selected to carry on.

This is a different sort of example: pleiotropy. The phenomenon of pleiotropy is of old date and much interest - I've studied it myself. In point of fact, the evolution of the woodpecker is not so alarming: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wood...oodpecker.html. In short, progression is entirely possible for the woodpecker system: short-tongued woodpeckers could use a well-braced bill for pecking into rotten wood for grubs in shallow zones, and long-tongued woodpeckers their fantastical tongues for probing after bugs in their own holes. I'm no ornithologist - a waste of time, if you ask me - but I would expect to find other birds presently occupying such niches. Secondly, morphological integration (Wagner 1996) suggests that related structures should become co-inherited (within the same gene block); mutations within this gene block should permit much more rapid evolution since large deletions or insertions could produce easy co-inheritance of mutations in both traits.

Just consider the diversity of species living on the earth at the same time.

Indeed, as I have above.

[GeoffP]

That is nowhere near an accurate description of the living world.

Nothing is "perfectly adapted", almost none of the adaptations occurred "at the same time", beings don't "live in sync with each other", and so forth.

Quite.

[keith1]

... but apparently because bacteria is still bacteria, that's not evidence for evolution...

No, bacteria is precisely where you find irrefutable evidence of evolution at work before your eyes:

"...In 1975 a team of Japanese scientists discovered a strain of Flavobacterium, living in ponds containing waste water from a nylon factory, that was capable of digesting certain byproducts of nylon 6 manufacture, such as the linear dimer of 6-aminohexanoate, even though those substances are not known to have existed before the invention of nylon in 1935. Further study revealed that the three enzymes the bacteria were using to digest the byproducts were significantly different from any other enzymes produced by other Flavobacterium strains (or any other bacteria for that matter), and not effective on any material other than the manmade nylon byproducts...

Later research:

"...This discovery led geneticist Susumu Ohno to speculate that the gene for one of the enzymes, 6-aminohexanoic acid hydrolase, had come about from the combination of a gene duplication event with a frame shift mutation. Ohno suggested that many unique new genes have evolved this way..."

"...There is scientific consensus that the capacity to synthesize nylonase most probably developed as a single-step mutation that survived because it improved the fitness of the bacteria possessing the mutation. This is seen as a good example of evolution through mutation and natural selection that has been observed as it occurs..."

courtesy: Wikipedia

And it limits the length of time of evolution occurrence to the time of factory startup to 1975. Which is very quickly.

next.

[Neverfly]

That is nowhere near an accurate description of the living world.

Nothing is "perfectly adapted", almost none of the adaptations occurred "at the same time", beings don't "live in sync with each other", and so forth.

This is a good example of how so many people have misunderstandings about what many theories actually say.

Parallel Universes are one biggie. The layman envisions mirrors facing eachother in which actual realities are superimposed on eachother... inaccurate. Black Holes are one. The layman envisions a cosmic vacuum cleaner indiscriminately sucking everything up... Very inaccurate...
Evolution of course...

I blame poor education and bad representation for it. And scientists are just as much to blame for slipping up and using bad wording. Hell, I have to correct my own posts on this forum for wording things improperly all of the time and it's annoying. I also suffer from misconceptions all the time, too. More annoying. Especially when I embarrassingly get called on one and realize I've just 'done gone n made a durned fool o' my danged self.'
You end up with people saying something incredibly stupid like, "Sharks are so well designed, they have not needed to evolve for millions of years!"

It's no wonder a lot of people have so many misconceptions.

I was away from my computer so could not answer before Pandaemoni did. My response would have been similar, but (s)he probably explained it better than I ever would have.

Seconded.

As well as GeoffP's post below it.

The thing that irks me about it is that, considering my post in response to iceauras comments pointing out how people misunderstand evolution, is that believers will just skim over it and try to get witty; try to come up with a way of refuting it BEFORE asking themselves if any of the points are valid or if they should get educated on the topic.

Refuting arguments is not a bad thing. It can be a great learning process. But closing ones eyes and stumbling blindly forward is not the way to do it.

[ Glares balefully at Emil. ]

[Captain Kremmen]

Of all the random changes what is the percentage admitted as evolutionary?

100%
Some lead to increased survival, some to decreased.

[Mr MacGillivray]

Was reading an article in science where they showed human evolution. As in you could see it.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/329/5993/740

One of the mutations was so advantageous that it had spread to 90% of all Tibetans in just 4000 years, Nielsen and his colleagues at BGI in Shenzhen, China, reported in the 2 July issue of Science (p. 75). But fewer than 10% of the Han Chinese sampled (who live at sea level) carried this version of EPAS1. Thus the team had discovered the most rapid and strongest example of selection known in modern humans.

[Emil]

100%
Some lead to increased survival, some to decreased.

What percentage exists between those lead to increased survival and those decreased?

[Pandaemoni]

I agree. But my hailstorm analogy is not concerned with the microevolution processes that cause relatively minor genetic variations within species(ie. white moths into black moths), be it through genetic mutations or genetic flexibility. My analogy deals with macroevolution(ie. fish into humans).

It is wrongly extrapolated that microevolution(observable and understood) eventually leads to macroevolution(not observable and not understood). It is this evolutionary leap of logic that is wrong, and this is what my analogy exposes. That's why my analogy seems silly to you. My analogy deals with macroevolution from a neo-Darwinism point of view, yet you are thinking about it in terms of microevolution.

So I agree that my hailstorm analogy makes no sense. And in the same way neither does evolution make any sense.

Your reasoning is still unsound...though from your use of Creationist buzzwords I would assume that you are not open to learning any differently. Still, in case anyone else thinks you have a good argument...

Assuming you are right, if errors are possible in the DNA at all there is no known mechanism to prevent "microevolution" (a term scientists do not use) from eventually aggregating into a "macroevolutionary change". White moths change to black moths. Black moths then develop a better respiratory system because they happen to be in an area of low air quality, later a new predator population is introduced into their ecosystem and they respond by developing a better wing design...all of those changes are cumulative and might very well cause people to distinguish them as a separate species and affect their reproductive behaviors.

If beneficial changes are propagated, what mechanism walks them back once the number of beneficial changes becomes too high? Also, why? The only reason to give up on on going beneficial adaptations seems to be "because the Creationists/God prefer it that way."

As for evolution unobserved...that is not a scientific requirement. No one observed the birth of the universe, yet the big bang theory is scientific. No one has ever observed an electron in a superposition of states (and observing that would be impossible), yet we have a scientific theory that accepts superpositions as existing.

What matters as far as science goes is that evolution is useful in making predictions and that the theory is falsifiable. Evolution posits that land animals likely developed from fish, and so the theory predicts that there must have been an early tetrapod around 400 million years ago that evolved from fish and helped make the transition to land...and if true we can predict that fossils of animals like that can be found. And they have been. Prediction verified, and we even got he dates right.

The fossil record is clear that modern species in the complex animals (like, say, mammals) are recent, and in the distant past the Earth was populated with entirely different fauna at different times. There is a lot of overlap in the time period in which different species lived, but the observed overlap suggests a more or less continuous system of change with certain large discontinuities, like major extinction events.

That's all science.

[Emil]

Let me give you some esemple what I believe are truths that no doubt.
Law of conservation of mass.
Law of definite composition.
Law of conservation of energy.
Law of conservation of momentum.
All mathematical theorems.
Law of Thermodynamics.

And more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laws_in_science
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scienti...d_after_people

For me, compared with those laws,Evolution is a very plausible assumption but going to be demonstrated.
I ask those who accept evolution as fact,for them laws listed above and evolution are equally true?

[Neverfly]

What percentage exists between those lead to increased survival and those decreased?

This question makes no sense.

The environmental factors determine a strong part, as well as surrounding wildlife.
Traits that increase arousal or attractiveness of a mate can increase chances of mating success, even for a creature that carries bad traits.

A creature is not extinguished because it has bad traits. All it takes for a creature to survive is for it to-- SURVIVE.

So if a creature has enough advantageous traits to keep breeding, even if it's chock full of detrimental traits, it will survive as a species for a long time.

[Ophiolite]

What percentage exists between those lead to increased survival and those decreased?

It varies randomly.

[Neverfly]

Let me give you some esemple what I believe are truths that no doubt.
Law of conservation of mass.
Law of definite composition.
Law of conservation of energy.
Law of conservation of momentum.
All mathematical theorems.
Law of Thermodynamics.

And more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laws_in_science
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scienti...d_after_people

For me, compared with those laws,Evolution is a very plausible assumption but going to be demonstrated.
I ask those who accept evolution as fact,for them laws listed above and evolution are equally true?

You might be surprised.

[Captain Kremmen]

It varies randomly.

Yes, but it's not a bad question.
I can't think offhand whether the percentage would be high or low even.
Varies randomly within which parameters?

[GeoffP]

Let me give you some esemple what I believe are truths that no doubt.
Law of conservation of mass.
Law of definite composition.
Law of conservation of energy.
Law of conservation of momentum.
All mathematical theorems.
Law of Thermodynamics.

And more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laws_in_science
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scienti...d_after_people

For me, compared with those laws,Evolution is a very plausible assumption but going to be demonstrated.
I ask those who accept evolution as fact,for them laws listed above and evolution are equally true?

Clearly, this is so.

Evolution is change in gene frequencies over time. Descent with modification has clearly occurred. I would certainly call both impressions "laws" - one of mathematical inheritance (coefficients being subject to modification) and the other of phenotypic descendancy.

[GeoffP]

Was reading an article in science where they showed human evolution. As in you could see it.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/329/5993/740

That's a lie.

Everyone knows we are perfect.

Even the banana was designed for how perfect we are.