VirOptimus You have followed the pattern I described - as will all others who reply and believe evolution.
You never attempted to answer a single Q.
I answered all of them in another thread. Here are those answers.
Qs, # 1. We are told by people like Richard Dawkins and others that bacteria turned into things like sponges and jelly fish and then eventually into you. Give one shred of evidence for that.
The evidence is in the fundamental unity of life that simply doesn't have to be there other than for common ancestry. For example, we use the same tRNA anti-codons and the same metabolic pathways. If life did not share a common ancestor, then the tRNA's and metabolic pathways could have been very different. ATG codes for methionine in humans, but is there any reason why it couldn't code for alanine in bacteria? There is certainly nothing stopping that from happening, other than common ancestry.
LoricaLady stated, "I'll give you the real evidence. See if you can refute it. Yes, bacteria do change somewhat. But every last one of them stays a bacteria. Always have. Ditto sponges, jelly fish etc."
Just for reference, that is not evidence. That is an assertion.
Qs. # 2 We are told that natural selection leads to evolution. Again, we see change, indeed, through natural selection. Look at all those countless varieties, for ex. of fish in the waterways and birds in the air....all staying fish and birds.
That is what you should see if evolution is true. You don't evolve out of your ancestry. You are what your ancestors were, plus modifications. Humans are still apes, still primates, still mammals, still vertebrates, and still eukaryotes. If we are to believe the argument being put forward by LoricaLady, then all eukaryotes, from pine trees to people, evolving from a single celled eukaryotic common ancestor isn't change simply because we can describe all of those species with one name: eukaryote.
This is what I call the creationist name game. They think that if they can use the same name to describe two different species that they can somehow claim that no change has happened. As we can all see, this just doesn't work.
Then we get even more empty assertions, like this one:
"In order to turn a reptile into one of countless other varieties of reptiles there is only the need to shuffle, or eliminate, some genetic material it already has, through natural selection or even human intervention. To turn a reptile into a bird you would need totally new, bird, DNA for things like wings, feathers, beaks etc."
This claim is never supported by any evidence. Nowhere does LoricaLady support this assertion.
Qs #3 We are told mutations are the 2nd mechanism leading to evolution. Where is the evidence for that? Yes, mutations happen all the time. Virtually all are harmful, and the few "beneficial" ones are debatable. Even if they are beneficial in some very slight way, though, where is the evidence that mutations build on one another like leggos to create new structures, say to turn a fin into a foot?
This is a really easy one to answer. Why do you think humans are different from chimps? It is due to a difference in DNA sequence, is it not? We have plenty of evidence showing that humans and chimps share a common ancestor, such as the ERV evidence. When we compare our genomes to that of apes, we can directly see the mutations that have made all of these species different from each other.
Genetic equidistance is evidence that mutations accumulate.
"The genetic equidistance phenomenon was first noted in 1963 by
Emanuel Margoliash, who wrote: "It appears that the number of residue differences between
cytochrome C of any two species is mostly conditioned by the time elapsed since the lines of evolution leading to these two species originally diverged."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock
You can check the data yourself here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/homologene?cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AlignmentScores&list_uids=133055
Also, nowhere is any data shown for the claim that a majority of mutations are harmful.
Qs, # 4 Pick any "transitional" fossil you like, Lucy, Australopithecus, whatever. Then answer these Qs with data, with evidence. How do you know it ever had a single descendant significantly different from itself in any way much less that it eventually changed from say Ambulocetus, a little animal with four legs and hooves, into a great whale?
It is the mixture of physical characteristics that evidences evolution. The theory of evolution predicts that we should see fossils with a mixture of human and basal ape features, and that we should not see fossils with a mixture of ape and dog features. It is these predictions that are tested with the fossil data. You seemed to have confused the terms transitional and ancestral. They are not the same thing.
"A transitional fossil is any
fossilized remains of a life form that exhibits traits common to both an ancestral group and its derived descendant group.
[1] This is especially important where the descendant group is sharply differentiated by gross anatomy and mode of living from the ancestral group. These fossils serve as a reminder that taxonomic divisions are human constructs that have been imposed in hindsight on a continuum of variation. Because of the incompleteness of the fossil record, there is usually no way to know exactly how close a transitional fossil is to the point of divergence. Therefore, we can't assume transitional fossils are direct ancestors of more recent groups, though they are frequently used as models for such ancestors."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossil
Let's see the two major icons of evolution were Charles Lyell
and Charles Darwin. The first had a degree in law, the 2nd in theology. So, since academic credentials
in scientific fields are vital to you before you believe something, you might want to review your faith in what they had to say?
They were well respected in their fields because of the knowledge they displayed. The unfortunate part of your posts is that much of it is based on assertions instead of knowledge. For example, you claim that most mutations are harmful. This is asserted with no evidence to back it, and it flies in the face of the knowledge we do have in the field. Most mutations are neutral. Only about 10% of the human genome shows evidence of negative selection against harmful mutations. It also flies in the face of simple comparisons of genes between species. For example, human and yeast cytochrome C differs by 40% at the sequence level. If mutations are almost always harmful, how can you change a gene by 40% and not cause harm?
If you had said that most indels in coding regions of genes are harmful, I might agree with you.
