Stupid Christian Article on Evolution

[John Jones]

From the beginning, it predicts greater complexity. It's silly to deny it. I am not arguing that evolution can proceed with decreases in genes. In fact, the only kind of evolution that is observed pretty much does exactly that.

What I am saying is that if life evolved, then genes and the genome evolved, at least according to NeoDarwinism. ND rejects the idea God or any intelligent force designed it, right?

Not as far as I'm aware. There's just not any necessity that a supernatural force was required.

Plenty of Christians accept their god, and the scientific theory of the origin of species by natural selection.

 

[dlorde]

I am suggesting these are things your side is now saying.

My side?

Yes it does and even some evos are saying as much and talking about the limitations of "adaptionism."

[panto]Oh no it doesn't[/panto]. ISTM there are two other possibilities here - you misinterpreted what some 'evos' are saying, or some 'evos' are mistaken. Unless you identify these 'evos', and/or provide a reference to what they are actually saying, I can't comment further.

 

[Dinwar]

There is nothing to suggest organic molecules would not have broken down even after just thousands of years much less millions.

Sure there is. It's called "fossil evidence". We find fossil DNA fairly frequently--frequently enough that we can use DNA in Quaternary finds to determine the relationships between Quaternary mammals.

Evolutionists don't think we have to find billion year old DNA to assess what their genome was like. They have theories they work with on mutational rates and study living creatures and do analysis that is generally accepted.

Bull. We use DNA to determine how closely related various organisms are--we do NOT use DNA to determine what ancient DNA looked like. While modern data can provide some information, the simple fact is that there have been too many changes, and any genes lost during evolution are gone for good, as are any genes which have been substantially altered. What we DO have is a fossil record extending well over half a billion years into the past, and chemical trace fossils extending 3.6 billion years back. We also have inheritable variation. Inheritable variation, when given a long enough time to work, necessarily produces evolution.

Mutations though happen fairly slowly. And they remain through natural selection due to new traits given creatures a competitive advantage.

I've found that most ID advocates/Creationists don't really have a good sense of either genetics or time. Mutations are a constant fact of life. I have a number of novel mutations in my DNA, things that neither my mother nor my father had. Add crossovers, double crossovers, and the like, and the number increases even more. Every generation of humans--and of most if not all organisms--includes mutations. And considering the fact that many multicellular organisms have a generation time of one year, that's a LOT of mutations over 560 million years.

So with so few traits compared to say, us, human beings, how did they manage to evolve into such genetic complexity that is likely greater than human beings? How did they evolve genes for complex nerve function if they had no complex nerve function? There was no trait there to be selected for. They hadn't evolved that much.

Argument from Personal Incredulity. You can easily increase genetic complexity via double crossovers and a bit of time.

As for the article you linked to, you obviously don't know enough about the field to comment on it--it's an article written about a specific controversy within the field of evolution (not about whether the field is valid or not, but a technical matter dealing with how evolution operates), and the intended audience is those researchers familiar with that controversy. But the money quote is this:

However, despite the difficulties in establishing scientific arguments in favor of specific historic evolutionary events, there is still much to learn about evolution from genomic data.

The article YOU cited doesn't support your conclusions. Thanks for playing.

As for falsification, it's easy. Show us a Precambrian bunny rabbit. More generally, show us a fossil, in stratigraphic context, which occurs before the parent species arose. It hasn't been done, despite hundreds of years of fossil collecting.

 

[John Jones]

No, I completely agree that it should not lead to a specific result. There should not be a duplication in the pattern but there is, over and over again. That is not a sign of random genetic variation.

Why do you think that?

 

[sadhatter]

this entire 8 page ordeal amounts to nothing more than Randman attempting to et people to mention specifics of evolution and so help anyone promoting it if one person makes one mistake. Suddenly the applecart is now overturned because a single internet poster didn't 100% understand the evolution of the pinky toe in a south american tree rat. A very typical approach by the evolution deniers.

Here is something Randman, why don't you do the same thing that your asking everyone to do, heck, instead of trying to drag it out question fragment by question fragment, like your doing ( a rather tired tactic to thin the heard of supporters, as few want to spend the time answering little bits of baited questions. ) i will put it in a conscise manner.

Using a minimum of direct cut and paste, describe in great detail your views on the evolution of life. Attempt to keep it succinct, don't just throw up a wall of text. If anything needs clarification , we will ask you, avoid regurgitating tracts posted by someone else, in all but situations in which hard facts are required ( such as ages, or things of that nature.).

Want to play the "pokin holes" game? Show some integrity and throw up your theory.

 

[John Jones]

How? How does natural selection act on genetic mutation?

It's obvious.



Mutations that benefit the reproductive success of a population tend to be passed-on to the next generation. Mutations that do not do the above tend to be eradicated from a population.


What did you think natural selection meant?

 

[bokonon]

So with so few traits compared to say, us, human beings, how did they manage to evolve into such genetic complexity that is likely greater than human beings? How did they evolve genes for complex nerve function if they had no complex nerve function? There was no trait there to be selected for. They hadn't evolved that much.

Hey, rather than talking about some hypothetical ancestor, for which neither you nor I can do more than guess about its genome, let's talk about this water flea. It has more genes (31,000) than humans (23,000), but certainly doesn't look especially complex.

The researchers think that many of these new genes are involved in responding to changes in the animal’s environment. Daphnia are found on every continent including Antarctica and are known to evolve rapidly in response to environmental stress, Kueltz said.

 

[John Jones]

[...]I don't have it handy but she published a paper comparing ostrich red blood cells after cutting into an ostrich with the dinosaurs and said they were similar. There are also reports of a remark about ostrich bones when they first cut the dino-bones open.

Link or it never happened. I suspect you misunderstood the article.

 

[Dinwar]

No, I completely agree that it should not lead to a specific result. There should not be a duplication in the pattern but there is, over and over again. That is not a sign of random genetic variation

The bolded part is pure fiction. Evolution has constraints--for example, the laws of physics and engineering. Flight requires air foils and a low mass to volume ratio. Speed requires low drag. Digesting large amounts of low-quality food requires a large volume. Given such principles it's obvious that organisms that fill similar niches should have similar shapes. Fast-swimming predators should be sleek, long, and muscular. Flying things should have long, thin extensions of their bodies. And so on.

Moreover, evolution doesn't work from the ground up. It must use what it has. Because bats, birds, and pterosaurs all share a common ancestor (lobe-finned fishes, back far enough) they have the same basic parts to work with, and they evolve similar structures. You can't evolve a third set of limbs over night (though it's not impossible to evolve them), and land vertebrates seem particularly adverse to HOX gene alterations. So they're going to evolve similar structures, due to constraints in materials and requirements of physics. You'll note that insect wings are completely different than vertebrate wings.

Like sadhatter argued, if you're going to play the "Let's poke holes in the theory" game you should have a good understanding of the theory. And you obviously do not.

 

[dlorde]

I guess you didn't read much more than that one article. But even there, based on your comments, your link agrees with me. I certainly didn't make up the ostrich reference.

Define "recent" btw.

The dinosaur bones in the articles I read were from an 80 million years old duck-billed hadrosaur, and a 68 million year old T-Rex. Dated from the rock strata they were found in. The same rock strata by age in which all the other duck-billed hadrosaurs and t-Rexes are found...

Do you suppose they are all actually more recent and for thousands of years their dinosaur mates have dug graves and buried all of them at the relevant depths where we now find them?

 

[John Jones]

Never said it was ever-increasing but the original genome would necessarily be small as mutations happen slowly. You think all the mutations needed just happened right off the bat?

Moreover, adaptionism (evo theory) posits that natural selection plays a role in causing those mutations to remain. So you have specific traits involved with specific mutations. They do hand in hand.

Why is that so difficult for you to grasp?

So how would the simplest organisms with very few traits have the most complex or close to it, genomes?

Do they? So what? No one has postulated that the organisms with the simplest genomes possible are still around.

 

[Simon39759]

Randman, I think that your problem is a basic lack of knowledge about the basic theory. It is compounded by a large helping of Dunning-Kruger and by the fact that you already decided where the truth was and care not a bit for the truth.

So, it is going to be a waste of my time but I will go back to some basics. For the proverbial lurker's sake:

As said, new genes are sometime produced by evolution, mostly, it is caused by gene duplication followed by genetic drift so you ends up with two progressively divergent copies of the same gene.
Some genes can be passed along and modified for a long back, their origin arching back to a distant homologue providing very different function. A while ago, I mentioned the long distant origin of the hemoglobin molecule, dating back to a time before even there was oxygen enough to breath...
The article you mentioned is the same thing. Some genes that our evolution have co-opted as part of our neural system actually have their origin into a surprisingly distant past. That's really cool, but not something that is unknown from us, and certainly not something that would put the theory of evolution in debate...

You also seem not to understand the notion of convergent evolution.
As you know, mutations produce various copies of the genes, and natural selection increase the prevalence of the better adapted ones.
For example, an organism that leaves in a dark environment, will tend to get darker so that to be less visible to predators. Ok?
So, what about two organisms living in the same dark environment? Well, the same selective pressure will apply to both of them and they will tend to both get darker.
Similar pressure, similar solutions.

Now, if you have similar ecological niches, putting similar selective pressures to two organisms, the theory of evolution actually predicts that these organisms should evolve similar solutions.

And yet, these solutions will only superficially similar. The wings of a bat may look like that of a bird, similar pressures, but these solutions, the shape of a wing, are achieved in very different ways.
Similarly, the marsupial and placental mouse may share similarities, due to a somewhat similar ecological niche, but they also have significant differences.
Even more, if you look at their genes you will see that the placental mouse is still very much a placental mammal and that the marsupial one is very much a marsupial.
Different clay but modelled similarly because put into a similar mold.


You also don't seem to have a very clear idea of the timing of evolutionary time.
You give the example of corals as being a very simple and primitive organism, for example, but, in reality, they arrived quite late.
Sure, they are very old but they are still 'only' Cambrian. That is 500 millions years old. Life already was 3.5 billions years old by that time. This organism was already very complex.

As for Schweitzer's discovery; you have, once again, misunderstood what was going on.
Yes she did report some protein, but certainly not whole cells as you are saying, nothing to suggest a level of freshness anywhere similar to the one you describe. Indeed, she herself mentioned that she did not consider her findings as supportive of young earth creationism... Furthermore, it must be mentioned that her lab's practice of secrecy have been made replicating her findings difficult and that they have been criticized for it. Also, there have been suggestions that their equipment might have been contaminated by Ostrich samples they were previously working with. Right now, it is difficult to know for sure but one thing is certain, this discovery should be taken with a grain of salt...

 

[John Jones]

So basically you were ignorant of the fact that "the mammalian ear" has been discussed in print over the past few years, on how it evolved via convergent evolution, and you were wrong.

Link?

 

[John Jones]

Even individuals are not generally genetically identical. I assume you are talking about parts of the genome? That a random process isn't going to produce the same genetic sequences, right?

If you believe that, what happens to your theory if we do see the same genetic sequences emerge?

Um. Nothing?

 

[sphenisc]

Hey, rather than talking about some hypothetical ancestor, for which neither you nor I can do more than guess about its genome, let's talk about this water flea. It has more genes (31,000) than humans (23,000), but certainly doesn't look especially complex.

Certainly looks like an interesting beast to discuss. How would you account for this for example?

It turns out to share more of its genes with humans than with other invertebrates, such as the fruit fly Drosophila.

 

[John Jones]

Are you familiar with molecular studies in the literature that purport to assess the genetic complexity and features of the last common ancestor, etc,....even though we have no DNA, nor expect to find any?

Are you?

 

[John Jones]

We're talking about red blood cells and soft tissue. Look it up. Even evos admit this is a conundrum and they never thought it was possible, but they won't change. They say there must be a way.

You should have said red blood cells and soft tissue then, and not organic molecules.

 

[John Jones]

Certainly looks like an interesting beast to discuss. How would you account for this for example?

How would you?

 

[bokonon]

Certainly looks like an interesting beast to discuss. How would you account for this for example?

Originally Posted by http://www.netnewspublisher.com/daphnia-pulex-genome-reveals-its-secrets/
It turns out to share more of its genes with humans than with other invertebrates, such as the fruit fly Drosophila.

I'd account for it by something akin to what randman seems to have been saying: a lot of the genetic diversity we see today originated in more primitive organisms which reproduced more quickly, exchanged genetic material more promiscuously, and were subjected to more diverse selection pressures than many of the more complex organisms which carry those genes today.

It suggests to me that some common ancestor of the water flea and the human possessed many of these common genes. The evolutionary branch leading to fruit flies found many of these genes unnecessary, and left them on the cutting room floor. The branches leading to humans and water fleas continued to find them useful, and tended to conserve them.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

So, this entire 8-page thread has been a day's worth of argument from incredulity by randman, based on his lack of understanding of the theory of evolution - getting increasingly shrill and repeating the same questions, even if they had been answered several pages back? Nice.

He's fun. I vote we keep him.