Are there transitional fossils?

[sfs]

Sorry, but genetics had a hand in Social Darwinism and eugenics.

Note the original name for the current scientific journal Annals of Human Genetics. It used to have the title, Annals of Eugenics.

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

It's ad hominem attacks and your buddy there has been doing it exclusively throughout the thread. I've quoted the rant about trying to bring religion into this and stormy just ignores it. Watch those posts closely because that's what yours are turning into fast. I've seen very few recover from it and some pretty able posters have major meltdowns from resorting to it. It's not too late, pull up or your going to keep arguing in circles till you finally crash.

BUT YOU DIDN'T SHOW ME WHERE I INSULTED YOUR RELIGION!! I have asked you many times to show me where and you have made obvious attempts to ignore me and to refuse to answer my request. I can see that and many other people can see that, which leads me to conclude that you are just flat out lying about what you claim I said.

 

[pitabread]

Watch those posts closely because that's what yours are turning into fast. I've seen very few recover from it and some pretty able posters have major meltdowns from resorting to it. It's not too late, pull up or your going to keep arguing in circles till you finally crash.

Considering you appear to delight in actively goading people and then declaring a self-congratulatory victory, I'm not surprised some have a meltdown. It's quite frustrating trying to discuss anything with you.

 

[pitabread]

I have asked you many times to show me where and you have made obvious attempts to ignore me and to refuse to answer my request.

This also appears to be a re-occurring pattern.

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

This also appears to be a re-occurring pattern.

Arrogance of the highest order.

 

[doubtingmerle]

I've always been open to old earth cosmology.

Oh good, and open to the idea of a round earth, I hope?

Some things in science are so well confirmed, one hopes for more than just an openness to the idea that they are right. I suppose I could congratulate a person for being open to the idea that the earth revolves around the sun, but that seems to be setting the bar a little low. I would like to see people recognize that the earth is indeed round, is indeed moving around the sun, and is indeed very old.

So can I move the bar up a notch, and ask what it would take for you to agree that the earth is more than 4 billion years old?

I find the dating of geological layers and the identification of living systems embedded therein to be unconvincing. Life was created about 6000 years ago.

That is where you and Sedgwick differed. Sedgwick saw the Cambrian layers down there, and knew that life was very different back then. And he knew that it was all wiped out somehow. And then he saw the Silurian layer was a little closer to our life, and that it occurred after the Cambrian, but it too got wiped out. And as he went up the column, he kept finding these strange creatures that all got wiped out. And he concluded that the earth must be very old for all of that to happen.

Do you have an explanation for how the Cambrian, Silurian and Devonian layers all exist down there, each with distinctly different fossils? That does not seem possible in a 6000 year old earth.

No but then again geology has always left me cold. There are just too many inconsistencies and ultimately geology is irrelevant to the doctrine of creation.

But what about the consistencies that were known by creationists like Sedgwick in the 19th century? Since the observations consistently show these layers were in this sequence, can we conclude anything else than that there were different periods of time with different creatures in each?

Before delving into Devonian fossils I think a more recent and extensive area of research would make a lot more sense.

Did you see the thread title? We are talking about transitional fossils. One would think that a discussion of transitional fossils would be right on topic on such a thread, yes?

 

[doubtingmerle]

First of all adaptive evolution doesn't rely on mutations:

In the living cell, DNA undergoes frequent chemical change, especially when it is being replicated (in S phase of the eukaryotic cell cycle). Most of these changes are quickly repaired. Those that are not result in a mutation. Thus, mutation is a failure of DNA repair. (Mutations)
​

Mutations are the worst explanation possible for evolution.

Uh, no, your quote in no way says that. Cells obviously need to minimize mutations, otherwise they would be overwhelmed with changes. But occasional mutations that make minor variations, these can be valuable in adding variations to a species that can later be selected for by natural selection.

What you would start with is nearly pristine genomes that haven't accumulated mutations yielding a far larger gene pool, thus, greater diversity and rapid adaptive radiation.

You seem to be saying animals coming off the ark had "nearly pristine genomes" that yielded a far larger gene pool. That is patently false. If a pair of animals went on the ark, then you are left with 4 alleles at each gene locus for that species. That is an extremely limited amount of genetic information. So how is that a large gene pool? The result would have been creatures coming off the ark with very little gene variation, and very little ability to adapt to changing conditions.

The cheetah, for instance, is known to have been reduced to probably seven members 10,000 years ago. The result is that cheetahs now are largely identical in many of their genes. This has hampered their ability to adapt. See Cheetah Genome Confirms Population Bottleneck | Abbexa News . If all animals had a similar bottleneck 5000 years ago in Noah's ark, how were all other animals able to keep their genetic diversity? Wouldn't they all have the same problem as cheetahs?

How many pairs of the cat family went on the ark? Are you saying one pair of cats produced all lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs and house cats? How can you possibly get that kind of diversity starting with only four alleles at each gene locus? That isn't enough variation for a single normal species, let alone divide into multiple specific species.

Once adaptive traits become fixed bottlenecks and the inevitable mutations make such adaptive radiation much more limited.

The idea that one pair of cats could rapidly radiate out to form the known species of cats without relying on mutations to add diversity, is simply preposterous.

 

[pitabread]

You seem to be saying animals coming off the ark had "nearly pristine genomes" that yielded a far larger gene pool. That is patently false. If a pair of animals went on the ark, then you are left with 4 alleles at each gene locus for that species. That is an extremely limited amount of genetic information. So how is that a large gene pool? The result would have been creatures coming off the ark with very little gene variation, and very little ability to adapt to changing conditions.

This is what I'd like to know. Just within humans, there are genes with hundreds of known variants. Either the originating gene pool was packed with more than a few extra copies of those genes or we had mutation rates occurring far beyond the normal level one would expect over ~4000 or so years.

(Or the more logical scenario, none of that ever happened.)

 

[doubtingmerle]

its one possibilty. yes.

Xianghua, do you even have a position to defend? Because when I ask you what you believe, you just seem to be saying all these things are possibilities. If you allow all sorts of other ideas to be possibilities, why don't you allow evolution as a possibility also?

You seem to confine yourself to discussing problems with evolution. Well sure, we have limited knowledge, especially when it come to fossils, so there always will be questions. But the fact that there are questions does not prove your view is right. In fact, since you apparently have no view you wish to present, we will never get the chance to see how close your view matches the actual fossil record. Would we find that your view has immeasurably more problems in aligning with the fossil record than the few minor issues you present here with evolution? We will never know. Because you take no position on this.

When you allow your view to float, it is easy to imagine that somewhere in that mix is a better answer. It is the same thing that happened with Republicans and Obamacare. They all "knew" that one or more of the plans in the mix of alternatives was better than Obamacare. But when it came to picking out one that was indeed better, well, er, uh, it seems that Obamacare beats out every plan they were thinking of in a one on one match. So maybe Obamacare wasn't all that bad. Maybe it was the right basic idea after all, and only needs some tuning and TLC.

But I digress. Back on topic. Maybe evolution is the right idea, and only needs a little tweaking to answer some new observations.

not realy. all of them are actually in the wrong place:

Discovery pushes back date of first four-legged animal : Nature News

the first tetrapod appeared before all of them (date about 400my). so we have an out of order fossil.

Interesting find. So there may be vertebrate tracks on land 395 million years ago, sooner than the 387 million year date traditionally believed? I hear the jury is still out on this. It could well be that we need to push the date of early land walkers back a bit. The transitionals we found would then just be more distant cousins of the true transitionals. But as I explained before, the animals we find usually are not the exact species that made the transition, but descendant species of the transitionals. So there are several possibilities here: a) animals like Tiktaalik are just descendents about 20 million years after the true transitionals, b) the tracks found 395 million years ago have another explanation, or c) the animals that made the tracks found 18 million years earlier were another evolutionary line, that later was overcome by the different line of land walkers represented by Tiktaalik.

What is your take on this? Are you suggesting that placental mammal lived for 600 million years?

i said that its possible. yes. but again; its doesnt prove any evolution.

Are you even trying to read what I write? Because I wrote in detail that the fact that we find transitionals would not by itself prove evolution. I even included the chart of Ford cars and mentioned the transitional cars without evolution. But you just ignore all that, and pretend you are telling me something I don't know. But you are just repeating what I said. Why do you do this?

If you want to argue for the other option that allows for transitionals, progressive creation, we could discuss that. But as usual, you refuse to take any position, and confine yourself at taking shots from the cheap seats at those who actually choose to take a position.

its a good question. and yes- it's possible that the earth isnt so old. and we have evidence for that too.

Uh no, we don't have any good evidence the earth is young. Those arguments have been defeated long ago. But if you wish, we could take that topic up in another thread. See How Good are those Young-Earth Arguments .

 

[mark kennedy]

The idea that there were currently multiple subspecies of humans wasn't suggested by Darwin, in publication. Origin of species barely makes a remark about human evolution.

It certainly was in the Descent of Man. This was a commonly held view among naturalists for a very long time. Eugenics was clearly Darwinian and Oliver Wendell Holmes wasn't basing eugenetics on anything remotely empirical, nor were the Germans who cited him at Nuremburg.

That's a fair conclusion, given that the bible itself never specifically gives an age for this planet. As for the origin of life, that's not a part of evolutionary theory. Again, I think it is abiogenesis that you take issue with. "Changes in species over time" is an observation that requires life to already exist.

I recently encountered a paper, I kid you not, entitle 'RNA world, worst Possible Explanation Except for all the Others'

“I, for one, have never subscribed to this view of the origin of life, and I am by no means alone. The RNA world hypothesis is driven almost entirely by the flow of data from very high technology combinatorial libraries, whose relationship to the prebiotic world is anything but worthy of “unanimous support”. There are several serious problems associated with it, and I view it as little more than a popular fantasy” (reviewer's report in Biology Direct by Charles Carter)​

Well, define brain related. One of the notable distinctions between humans and other modern apes is that we lack functionality in a group of genes relating to the regulation of brain growth (which is why our brains develop so quickly and grow so large, but is also the reason that we are so prone to brain cancers compared to other apes), and a group of genes relating to the development of a muscle that would have restricted how large the skull can be, which contributes to jaw strength. The most highly conserved genes I can think of are the HOX genes, which direct development of the basic body plan before birth/hatching.

Any protein coding or regulatory gene directly and exclusively involved in neural development qualify as brain related. What I generally found were transcriptones and various discussions regarding gene expression.

Well sure, not every mutation is viable (though the vast majority of mutations are functionally neutral). Hence why the DNA replication process is so highly retained in the life on this planet. Congratulations on being the first person I have seen bring that up on here. However, what I am referring to is limits that would prevent "one kind from transitioning into another". The irregular definitions of "kind" notwithstanding, I do not see how the limits you mention would not allow for significant genetic and physiological change or prevent it from being promoted with the right selective pressures and niches open.

Darwin himself said the bane of horticulture was that hybrids were infertile. Mendel was attempting to develop hybrids and he saw the limits as being the limited external effects produced through cross pollination. When you really look at the timeline you have the 'southern apes' then paranthropus then every gracial skull in Africa is hominid. That means two million years ago the human line doubles the size of the cranial capacity virtually over night. That's a lot of highly conserved genes being overhauled and at least 60 emerging de novo. That's not Darwinian gradualism, that's a giant leap. The largest distinctive divergence is found in immune system and olfactory genes, third would be neural or brain related. Selection can explain survival of the fittest but not the arrival of the fittest.

It is also worth noting that there are plenty of mutations which have both negative and positive consequences, and how they balance out depends on the environment. For example, the mutation which causes sickle cell anemia in those that have two copies of it also grants a resistance to malaria. Since people who are heterozygous for this mutation rarely suffer from the genetic disease associated with it, and retain the resistance to malaria, the mutation is more beneficial for people that live in areas where malaria is prevalent and medicines are scarce, since malaria is such a deadly disease. However, it has no benefit to people that will never encounter malaria.

Your describing a marginal benefit from a deformed blood cell. I'm talking about a massive overhaul of highly conserved genes involved in our most vital organ adapted on an unprecedented scale for primates. This in addition to the fact that there are virtually no beneficial effects from mutations and a long list of disease and disorder.

I agree completely. Have you noticed that punctuated equilibrium has been brought up more, lately?

I noticed the 'hopeful monster' gains popularity in spurts. When I have the time I like to look around for studies involved in adaptive evolution that identify specific genes. It's very seldom due to mutations. Indeed most mutations are neutral and the majority of those with an effect are deleterious. Beneficial effects are exceedingly rare and its even rarer for them to have an adaptive effect on an evolutionary scale. There has to be a better explanation then beneficial effects from mutations because the costs far outweigh any benefits.

-_- science has no inherent philosophy; they are separate disciplines entirely. The scientific discoveries we make stand, regardless as to how people feel motivated to apply them.

Science is essentially an epistemology, the word itself means knowledge. It's an inductive approach to the exploration of natural phenomenon. I don't know what how people feel about it has to do with anything.

An aspect that is disproven by dog breeding alone, as well as evolution experiments with bacteria, the Italian wall lizard, etc. Find a paper published in a scientific journal that deems that there is such a limit, do not use one from over 100 years ago as if it stands today.

I have seen a lot about bacteria and dog genomes but wall lizards is a new one for me. With pure breed dogs it isn't very many generations before they have to be back breeded.

Sigh, Social Darwinism is what happens when people who have only some understanding of the science try to shape their philosophy with it. No scientific theory has any inherent morality to it. The theories that contributed to the production of the atomic bomb don't become immoral just because how people chose to apply that knowledge is morally questionable. It's not uncommon for the same information to have just as much potential to save lives as it does to destroy them.

Darwinism went off on a tangent with Galston, Holmes and Marx just to name a few. It's not just a unified theory of biology because genetics was destined to provide that with the DNA double helix model anyway. It got into social, legal and political thinking and clearly knows no bounds. Daniel Dennett aptly called Darwinism 'universal acid' that eats through everything.

Furthermore, are you seriously suggesting that genetics had no impact on Social Darwinism? People were killed and sterilized on the basis of "having inferior genetics and contributing to weakness in future children". Without the inheritable factor, there is no basis to such actions. Genetics is incorporated into evolutionary theory. You can't try to fault the unifying theory of biology and say genetics, a part of that theory, isn't equally at fault. In fact, I'd say that's one of the aspects that contributed to that nonsense the most, second to misunderstanding what "survival of the fittest" means. More like survival of the most promiscuous.

Genetics has never been a political or social theory. Although I did see one sociology paper that suggested behavior was driven by genes. It's absurd since all genes do is defines how cells are made.

Comment: Darwin's Origin of Species was a banned text in Nazi Germany. Evolutionary theory was not taught in German schools at the time, because it was viewed as incompatible with the government enforced religion: Christianity. More specifically, Catholicism. Again, regardless as to the negative social impact some scientific theories may have, it doesn't make their content factually incorrect.

I'm no more concerned that Hitler banned Darwin then that he claimed to he a Christian. Genocide wasn't his first choice that was the final solution, this all has to be taken in context.

Furthermore, the practice of sterilizing people actually hurts our species as a whole. It promotes the start of a genetic bottleneck, and I trust that you know as well as I do how that impacts the health of a population. In a sense, any reduction in genetic diversity, no matter if it is well intentioned or not, has the potential to eliminate the part of our population that will be resistant to whatever pathogen is going to hit us next, and have other negative consequences for us down the road. To be blunt, the easiest way to have more healthy children is to have kids with someone genetically dissimilar to yourself (relative, given how genetically similar our species is as a whole). Since the most severe genetic disorders tend to be recessive or are at their worst when two copies of the disease allele are present, it mostly eliminates the chances of having a child with cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia and a bunch of other nasty conditions if you marry someone with ancestry from a different region than yourself. All with the plus of not reducing the genetic diversity of our species.

Darwin was someone who knew so much about how favorable traits were passed on he married his cousin, as did his grandfather. The first thing to go is the immune system and his daughters died of fever. Biographers often mention the loss of his daughters in connection with the publication of On the Origin. I've often thought Hitler was way off tract trying to build a master race by inbreeding Aryans. The thing to do is to build up the gene pools by including other races.

But hey, if you take Darwinism to mean more than just the scientific theory, you are welcome to do that. Just note that Social Darwinism and eugenics ceased to be very popular thanks to how disgusted people were with the actions of Nazi Germany. No one wanted to be associated with any such thing after that, for the most part. I'm sure there are still some people around the fringe that support some eugenics type stuff, but they aren't a majority. Not anymore.

I don't think I'm quite ready for a tin foil hat but I see Darwinian thinking throughout European and US academic culture, even in seminaries. It is very distinctive and readily discernible.

-_- also, don't assume that supporters of evolutionary theory such as myself derive any philosophy from it. Deriving philosophy from any scientific theory is a mental flaw that regularly leads to complete garbage and making people look like morons. I'd use harsher language to get that point across, but this site would just censor it. So here is me getting creative with how I feel about people that try to derive philosophy and morality from scientific theories and discoveries: such people have the brains of hermit crabs well below the 10th percentile for hermit crab intelligence, and a moral compass as functional as an actual compass surrounded by magnets.

I'm not sure what you think philosophy is but what we call science started out as an inductive approach to physics as opposed to Aristotelian scholasticism which was exclusively deductive logic. I know you find this about as interesting as watching paint dry given your major but bear with me, I do have a point. Francis Bacon was the first to propose the inductive approach, Kepler provided the Y-squared that became so integral to the principles of motion. Galileo argued vigorously to scrape Aristotelian physics which is what really got him hauled to the Inquisition. He was wanting to put their unified theory on the chopping block. Finally it would be Newton who published a paper on the theory of light, in experiments described in detail, he argued it was composed of seven colors. His opponents argued from deductive logic but he retorted that his method was demonstrative, thus inductive, so it could only be disprove in that way. Modern science was born. His greatest achievement was yet to come, he would device a way of calculating the Y-squared in motion thus calculus was introduced.

Ok, if you still haven't dosed off this is my point, science as we have come to know it is an inductive approach to natural phenomenon and the correct classification of it in philosophical categories is epistemology.

Ha, thinking eugenics is modern. I dare you to make a thread with a poll asking people if they support eugenics or not. Let's see how many evolution supporters on here are complete morons.

You can't just call it eugenics, or genocide or racism, obviously no one is going to argue it when put that way. Ask them this way. Say hi I'm a life science major who can extract DNA in a centrifuge that costs about as much as the toaster in your kitchen. One day I might be working in a lab with access to a gene editing tool known as CRISPUR and literally have the power to edit any genomic sequence. I mention that to ask you how you would feel about using it to produce designer babies, eradicate malaria in Africa or possibly repair genetic mutations on a germline level. Then you will know the morons from the informed simply by whether or not they take it seriously because I'm not exaggerating the potential here.

Your choice, it was just a friendly suggestion. You often get very frustrated with not being taken seriously, and I was only trying to help.

Darwinism is no more pejorative then creationist, it's not good or bad it just is. I've never understood people who are profoundly Darwinian having an adverse reaction to the term. I once was targeted when I first started posting here because I said Darwinism is metaphysics. The call out thread simply denied it and in a couple of days the thread had went 25 pages. What was most puzzling is that the only rank higher in science then a law would be a unified theory with universal scope.

Sorry, but genetics had a hand in Social Darwinism and eugenics. Genetics is our understanding of how the inheritance and expression of traits works; without a basis of how inheritance works, Social Darwinism and eugenics don't have any basis for a process to meet their goals. It's not science's fault people can make stupid conclusions. It is on us to be responsible for our own actions.

Genetics was developed in labs doing knockout genes with bacteria, fruit flies and mice. No one was paying that much attention while Darwinism became a prevailing world view throughout America, Europe and Asia and continues to be to this day. Meanwhile post WW2 Mendelian genetics was rejected in Communist Russia and China as western propaganda. Because of that they missed out on the genomic revolution and still struggle to catch up.

I don't know about that, nucleic acids were discovered in 1868, and Darwin died in 1882. So, he might have known a little bit about DNA before he died, though not much.

That's probably the early days of molecular biology but it would be another 40 years until anyone would see a chromosome. Darwin for sure knew very little about it since he still held to a blending of characteristics concept, described in his warm little pond analogy. People really think historic people had access to vast libraries teaming with peer reviewed articles and vast pools or research data but truth is, not so much.

-_- racism is not an inherent property of evolutionary theory. People were racist long before that point, and tried to make a scientific justification for it. To be blunt, based on evolutionary theory alone, all you could conclude about the "races" of humans is that each one has a few minor differences in phenotype that mildly improve their survival chances in the regions from which they originated. Seriously, Social Darwinism comes from the time period in which people were trying to use the ratio of the distance of their chin and naval to justify racial superiority. When people have an agenda they aren't willing to give up on, they'll deviate from the scientific process.

Most favored races is part of the title of On the Origin of Species. Historically it was an integral part of evolution but that was progressively dispelled by genetics.

You are bringing up a lot of items that really don't matter in terms of the scientific theory alone. Whatever crazy politics and philosophies people build around scientific theories is on them, not science.

It's on science when one of those crazy theories is uniformly equivocated with evolution as a natural phenomenon VS. A philosophy of natural history.

 

[mark kennedy]

Uh, no, your quote in no way says that. Cells obviously need to minimize mutations, otherwise they would be overwhelmed with changes. But occasional mutations that make minor variations, these can be valuable in adding variations to a species that can later be selected for by natural selection.

Your not getting all that from Kimball:

Mutations are rare events.

This is surprising. Humans inherit 3 x 109 base pairs of DNA from each parent. Just considering single-base substitutions, this means that each cell has 6 billion (6 x 109) different base pairs that can be the target of a substitution.

Single-base substitutions are most apt to occur when DNA is being copied; for eukaryotes that means during S phase of the cell cycle.

No process is 100% accurate. Even the most highly skilled typist will introduce errors when copying a manuscript. So it is with DNA replication. Like a conscientious typist, the cell does proofread the accuracy of its copy. But, even so, errors slip through.

It has been estimated that in humans and other mammals, uncorrected errors (= mutations) occur at the rate of about 1 in every 50 million (5 x 107) nucleotides added to the chain. (Not bad — I wish that I could type so accurately.) But with 6 x 109 base pairs in a human cell, that means that each new cell contains some 120 new mutations. (Kimball's Biology Pages, Mutations)
​

There is a long list of deleterious effects resulting in devastating disease and disorder and only passing reference to anything beneficial resulting. For more on a Darwinian perspective try (Evolution and Adaptation), it's a pretty comprehensive discussion of the various ways selection happens and most of it would not involve the kind of copy error type mutations that are almost exclusively deleterious or neutral.

You seem to be saying animals coming off the ark had "nearly pristine genomes" that yielded a far larger gene pool. That is patently false. If a pair of animals went on the ark, then you are left with 4 alleles at each gene locus for that species. That is an extremely limited amount of genetic information. So how is that a large gene pool? The result would have been creatures coming off the ark with very little gene variation, and very little ability to adapt to changing conditions.

The whole problem with bottlenecks is that it shrinks the gene pools and mutations accumulating over time are diminishing the gene pools as well. I'm not debating basic genetics here, especially given the basics of adaptive evolution are being grossly neglected.

The cheetah, for instance, is known to have been reduced to probably seven members 10,000 years ago. The result is that cheetahs now are largely identical in many of their genes. This has hampered their ability to adapt. See Cheetah Genome Confirms Population Bottleneck | Abbexa News . If all animals had a similar bottleneck 5000 years ago in Noah's ark, how were all other animals able to keep their genetic diversity? Wouldn't they all have the same problem as cheetahs?

They wouldn't have had serious bottlenecks for several generations and recombination helps to clean up problems from that as well. Cheetah's are seeing a greatly decreased environment and inbreeding is becoming a serious issue. Immediately following the flood those issues would be no where near as pronounced or compounded.

How many pairs of the cat family went on the ark? Are you saying one pair of cats produced all lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs and house cats? How can you possibly get that kind of diversity starting with only four alleles at each gene locus? That isn't enough variation for a single normal species, let alone divide into multiple specific species.

When you can't get a basic definition of evolution or Darwinian selection nailed down it's unlikely a discussion of the specifics regarding tracking alleles are going to be helpful.

The idea that one pair of cats could rapidly radiate out to form the known species of cats without relying on mutations to add diversity, is simply preposterous.

That's not the place to start, the place to start would be the Great Apes of Africa and Asia because there has been extensive genomic research on those comparisons. My preference is arctic wildlife and possibly Australian wild life since the diversity in those places are extraordinarily unique. Rain forests would be an interesting study but cat genomics seems a bit off the beaten track.

 

[mark kennedy]

This is what I'd like to know. Just within humans, there are genes with hundreds of known variants. Either the originating gene pool was packed with more than a few extra copies of those genes or we had mutation rates occurring far beyond the normal level one would expect over ~4000 or so years.

Not what I'm getting from the 1000 genome project. Since the split human descendants diverge by 1/10th of one percent while our nearest relative diverges but closer to 5%. Genetic mutations are not a formula for adaptive evolution, more like a formula for extinction.

The structural space of the human proteome is large and diverse due to the presence of various protein variants (isoforms), including post-translational modifications, splice variants, proteolytic products, genetic variations and somatic recombination...​

...Although all humans are almost identical biochemically (99.9%), there are large variations between individuals in the population as a result of allel-specific genetic variations in the protein-coding regions. Many of the genetic variations are in non-coding regions of the genome, but some also affect the amino acids in the protein-coding parts of a particular gene. Approximately 17800 genes have been described with genetic variations yielding protein isoforms based on the 1000 genome project. (The Human Isoform Proteome)​

Human Genetic variation comes down to 1/10th of 1%. Most of the variation is in the protein product. The divergence assumed to be due to mutations on the other hand is vast:

• Single-nucleotide substitutions occur at a mean rate of 1.23% between copies of the human and chimpanzee genome
• Orthologous proteins in human and chimpanzee are extremely similar, with ~29% being identical and the typical orthologue differing by only two amino acids, one per lineage.
• he indel differences between the genomes thus total ~90 Mb. This difference corresponds to ~3% of both genomes and dwarfs the 1.23% difference resulting from nucleotide substitutions (Initial Sequence of the Chimpanzee Genome, Nature)

(Or the more logical scenario, none of that ever happened.)

Right, it's so much easier to believe that at the split the respective genomes are being inundated with enormous mutations, some millions of base pairs long. That all going on while brain related genes are experiencing massive overhauls and 60 de novo genes appear as if out of thin air.

 

[pitabread]

Right, it's so much easier to believe that at the split the respective genomes are being inundated with enormous mutations, some millions of base pairs long. That all going on while brain related genes are experiencing massive overhauls and 60 de novo genes appear as if out of thin air.

Considering that the Noah's Ark flood scenario (particularly one occurring a mere 4000 years ago) is contradicted by virtually every branch of human knowledge... yeah, it is rather difficult to believe.

 

[mark kennedy]

Considering that the Noah's Ark flood scenario (particularly one occurring a mere 4000 years ago) is contradicted by virtually every branch of human knowledge... yeah, it is rather difficult to believe.

So you have an exhaustive understanding of every branch of human knowledge? The scenerio is certainly preferable to an a priori assumption that includes all taxa across all of history based a a presupposition determined to eliminate God as first cause. Divine providence is certainly adequate to explain adaptive radiation with fully developed molecular mechanisms without the mutation load following adaptive bottle neck and cumulative copy errors that have become heritable.

Adaptation is far more dependent on isodorms and gene splicing and other protein coding expressions. Most do not require highly deleterious changes in coding sequences and the consequences of deleterious effects are negligible if nonexistent.

 

[Speedwell]

So you have an exhaustive understanding of every branch of human knowledge? The scenerio is certainly preferable to an a priori assumption that includes all taxa across all of history based a a presupposition determined to eliminate God as first cause.

Faint hope. Even an elementary understanding of formal theology reveals that such a presumption of universal common ancestry does not, cannot eliminate God. A verification of naturalistic abiogenesis wouldn't do it either.

 

[PsychoSarah]

It certainly was in the Descent of Man. This was a commonly held view among naturalists for a very long time. Eugenics was clearly Darwinian and Oliver Wendell Holmes wasn't basing eugenetics on anything remotely empirical, nor were the Germans who cited him at Nuremburg.

I never said eugenics followed the scientific process. However, Darwin never suggested that we selectively breed our own species to make the next generation more "fit". In fact, refinements to selective breeding wouldn't come until Mendel's work (I am not suggesting that Mendel actively contributed to eugenics).

I recently encountered a paper, I kid you not, entitle 'RNA world, worst Possible Explanation Except for all the Others'

“I, for one, have never subscribed to this view of the origin of life, and I am by no means alone. The RNA world hypothesis is driven almost entirely by the flow of data from very high technology combinatorial libraries, whose relationship to the prebiotic world is anything but worthy of “unanimous support”. There are several serious problems associated with it, and I view it as little more than a popular fantasy” (reviewer's report in Biology Direct by Charles Carter)​

Ha, that quote is so salty. Whoever authored that let their emotions get the best of them.​

Any protein coding or regulatory gene directly and exclusively involved in neural development qualify as brain related. What I generally found were transcriptones and various discussions regarding gene expression.

Alright. That has less to do with mutations and more to do with regulatory systems in gene expression. It is worth mentioning that some of the physiological differences between humans and chimpanzees are the results in differences in how frequently genes are expressed, rather than differences in the genes themselves. It's truly fascinating to look into.

Darwin himself said the bane of horticulture was that hybrids were infertile. Mendel was attempting to develop hybrids and he saw the limits as being the limited external effects produced through cross pollination.

Depends on the genus of plants. Any orchid breeder could tell you that many orchids you see for sale are the result of many different hybridizations. As a grower of nepenthes, I can tell you that the vast majority of nepenthes hybrids (tropical pitcher plants) and further crosses made with them are fertile. What distinguishes species in such cases is that the hybrids are not true-breeding for traits, and that physical distance makes hybridization in nature rare or completely impossible.

When you really look at the timeline you have the 'southern apes' then paranthropus then every gracial skull in Africa is hominid. That means two million years ago the human line doubles the size of the cranial capacity virtually over night. That's a lot of highly conserved genes being overhauled and at least 60 emerging de novo. That's not Darwinian gradualism, that's a giant leap. The largest distinctive divergence is found in immune system and olfactory genes, third would be neural or brain related. Selection can explain survival of the fittest but not the arrival of the fittest.

Well, assuming that those fossils represent human ancestors, or even share the same lineage with each other and are not different branches of a closely related "family tree". Such fossils are used to represent the types of physical developments that likely lead to our species, and an approximate likely timeline. It's actually highly unlikely that any of the fossil species we have found are direct human ancestors, and since DNA doesn't last long enough, it's unlikely that we will ever be able to tell for sure.

Individual mutations are capable of drastic physiological changes, if they happen on certain genes. I agree that mutations aren't going to follow through with natural selection pressures, no matter how significant those selection pressures are. The rate of mutation in humans is between 40-60 new mutations per person. Now, let's say we start with a population of 10,000 human ancestors with a growth rate of .01% a year. That means the population in total increases by 100 the first year. Ignoring death being a factor (which would mean a few more people were born to make up for it), in that first year, at least 4,000 new mutations were introduced into the population. Just 1 year. Even if the population size remained stable, that'd be about 400,000 new mutations in 100 years. And that's the cynical estimate. Now, these are the mutations for live births, so you can eliminate the worst of the negative mutations (which result in miscarriage). I think you are underestimating mutation rates.

Rate of Evolution in Brain-Expressed Genes in Humans and Other Primates This is an interesting article on the subject of the evolution of brain-related genes. Apparently, in apes specifically, these genes are subject to more frequent mutations than, say, in mice, and in humans it is particularly fast. Might be a quirk of some ancestral species.

Your describing a marginal benefit from a deformed blood cell. I'm talking about a massive overhaul of highly conserved genes involved in our most vital organ adapted on an unprecedented scale for primates. This in addition to the fact that there are virtually no beneficial effects from mutations and a long list of disease and disorder.

Meh, calling the brain our most vital organ is a bit of a stretch. No doubt you need it, but issues with heart or liver function are going to consistently kill faster than issues with the brain. Furthermore, approximately 5% of mutations are beneficial in some measurable way. So, of those 400,000 in 100 years I meantioned earlier, about 20,000 were benevolent to varying extents. Since selective pressures favor the beneficial mutations, they persist on average far longer than the ones with negative consequences.

I noticed the 'hopeful monster' gains popularity in spurts. When I have the time I like to look around for studies involved in adaptive evolution that identify specific genes. It's very seldom due to mutations. Indeed most mutations are neutral and the majority of those with an effect are deleterious. Beneficial effects are exceedingly rare and its even rarer for them to have an adaptive effect on an evolutionary scale. There has to be a better explanation then beneficial effects from mutations because the costs far outweigh any benefits.

Remember that the worst of the negative mutations leave the population fairly quickly. Basically, anything that would result in a significant increase in the probability of death prior to the reproductive years (and any mutation that impairs reproduction itself) almost never moves on to the next generation. Only with recessive carriers do they persist. Thus, the retention of the few beneficial mutations that do occur is far higher than that of the negative mutations. Also, genetic diversity is highly beneficial, and can only be increased via mutation, as it increases the chances of survival in the face of plague and environmental change. Take for example, a bacterial colony that all descended from a single bacterium. Without mutation, assuming the original bacterium had no antibiotic resistances, if that population were ever exposed to an antibiotic, they would all perish. However, as we observe, antibiotic resistances in bacterial populations have increased along with our use of antibiotics.

It is not uncommon for the antibiotic resistant bacteria to be afflicted with a variety of issues, such as reduced capacity to infect or process nutrients. However, the benefit of the bacterial resistance is so great that it not only allows these populations to be successful, but they are more successful than their non-resistant counterparts.

Science is essentially an epistemology, the word itself means knowledge. It's an inductive approach to the exploration of natural phenomenon. I don't know what how people feel about it has to do with anything.

Nothing, which is why I wondered why you were bringing up Social Darwinism and eugenics.

I have seen a lot about bacteria and dog genomes but wall lizards is a new one for me. With pure breed dogs it isn't very many generations before they have to be back breeded.

Pure bred = inbred, yes, I know. But dogs are a good comparison for what would have happened to humans if we only allowed people with certain traits to have children.

Darwinism went off on a tangent with Galston, Holmes and Marx just to name a few. It's not just a unified theory of biology because genetics was destined to provide that with the DNA double helix model anyway. It got into social, legal and political thinking and clearly knows no bounds. Daniel Dennett aptly called Darwinism 'universal acid' that eats through everything.

Again, the term "Darwinism" as you use it doesn't refer to just the theory of evolution, but the crazy ways people tried to use principles of it to justify terrible ideas. What problems do you have just with the theory itself?

Genetics has never been a political or social theory. Although I did see one sociology paper that suggested behavior was driven by genes. It's absurd since all genes do is defines how cells are made.

-_- and our brains are made of cells, and brains are the centers of our behavior and personality. It's not entirely absurd. The accepted conclusions in modern times is that who we are as people is shaped both by our genes and environment, with environment contributing a bit more.

I'm no more concerned that Hitler banned Darwin then that he claimed to he a Christian. Genocide wasn't his first choice that was the final solution, this all has to be taken in context.

Yes, the context that he was a crazy person that hated Jewish people. This fueled his attempts to justify harming that group, and others.

Darwin was someone who knew so much about how favorable traits were passed on he married his cousin, as did his grandfather. The first thing to go is the immune system and his daughters died of fever. Biographers often mention the loss of his daughters in connection with the publication of On the Origin. I've often thought Hitler was way off tract trying to build a master race by inbreeding Aryans. The thing to do is to build up the gene pools by including other races.

You are entirely correct that you won't get any "master race" by doing that. Darwin married his cousin for reasons entirely unrelated to his theory (it being a common practice among the upper class at the time to keep money "in the family").

I don't think I'm quite ready for a tin foil hat but I see Darwinian thinking throughout European and US academic culture, even in seminaries. It is very distinctive and readily discernible.

Some examples? Many such seminars are recorded.

I'm not sure what you think philosophy is but what we call science started out as an inductive approach to physics as opposed to Aristotelian scholasticism which was exclusively deductive logic. I know you find this about as interesting as watching paint dry given your major but bear with me, I do have a point. Francis Bacon was the first to propose the inductive approach, Kepler provided the Y-squared that became so integral to the principles of motion. Galileo argued vigorously to scrape Aristotelian physics which is what really got him hauled to the Inquisition. He was wanting to put their unified theory on the chopping block. Finally it would be Newton who published a paper on the theory of light, in experiments described in detail, he argued it was composed of seven colors. His opponents argued from deductive logic but he retorted that his method was demonstrative, thus inductive, so it could only be disprove in that way. Modern science was born. His greatest achievement was yet to come, he would device a way of calculating the Y-squared in motion thus calculus was introduced.

Ok, if you still haven't dosed off this is my point, science as we have come to know it is an inductive approach to natural phenomenon and the correct classification of it in philosophical categories is epistemology.

I know this history, and plenty of the science and math relating to Newton. I have to take physics and calculus for my major.

You can't just call it eugenics, or genocide or racism, obviously no one is going to argue it when put that way. Ask them this way. Say hi I'm a life science major who can extract DNA in a centrifuge that costs about as much as the toaster in your kitchen. One day I might be working in a lab with access to a gene editing tool known as CRISPUR and literally have the power to edit any genomic sequence. I mention that to ask you how you would feel about using it to produce designer babies, eradicate malaria in Africa or possibly repair genetic mutations on a germline level. Then you will know the morons from the informed simply by whether or not they take it seriously because I'm not exaggerating the potential here.

The moral concerns you brought up are entirely legitimate. Furthermore, there is no clear moral right, in this case. Personally, I have a bit of a mixed approach to this. Change your kid's eye color? Superfluous. Prevent your child from developing a genetic disease that would have killed them in childhood, like Tay Sachs? Have at it, that would increase the genetic diversity of our population and save a life. But where to draw the line is the question that is likely to have inconsistent responses. I draw my line at diseases that can easily be managed by modern medicine, such as hemophilia. By the way, all of this has to do with genetics.

Darwinism is no more pejorative then creationist, it's not good or bad it just is. I've never understood people who are profoundly Darwinian having an adverse reaction to the term. I once was targeted when I first started posting here because I said Darwinism is metaphysics. The call out thread simply denied it and in a couple of days the thread had went 25 pages. What was most puzzling is that the only rank higher in science then a law would be a unified theory with universal scope.

I told you, it's a commonly used term by creationists to treat evolution like a religion (which it isn't). How you use it is fairly uncommon, especially on forums such as this.


I'm going to address the rest of your post later, I have to get to a meeting.

 

[pitabread]

So you have an exhaustive understanding of every branch of human knowledge?

Come now. You should know as well as anyone that in order to be a creationist (particularly a Young-Earth creationist), one needs to reject various findings and conclusions of cosmology/astronomy, geology, paleontology, physics, biology, and human history/archaeology.

This is especially true of the Noah's Ark scenario in particular and the idea that somehow the entirety of biodiversity of life on Earth is the result of 8 people and a bunch of animals stepping off a boat ~4000 years ago. Not only does this blatantly contradict the aforementioned disciplines, but it's especially egregious with respect to human history given the existence and continuance of various civilizations during this alleged event.

The scenerio is certainly preferable to an a priori assumption that includes all taxa across all of history based a a presupposition determined to eliminate God as first cause.

Why do you keep creating the dichotomy between creationism and atheism? Lots of theists reject modern creationism (specifically YEC and OEC), but are still theists that apparently believe in a deity as an originator of the universe, including many Christians.

Divine providence is certainly adequate to explain adaptive radiation with fully developed molecular mechanisms without the mutation load following adaptive bottle neck and cumulative copy errors that have become heritable.

"Divine providence" effectively explains nothing. The minute you reach for the supernatural, you're inserting an unbounded explanation that can be used to answer anything and everything. In fact this is basically required by creationists to assert the Noah's Ark scenario since it violates practically everything we otherwise know. It just becomes one long series of *insert miracle here*.

This is why I referenced Last Thursdayism earlier. You appear to have created an inherently unfalsifiable position (philosophically speaking) and one which effectively runs into a brick wall as far as discussion goes.

 

[doubtingmerle]

Mark,

The fossil record is full of transitional fossils. Here are a few more.

They are down there. They have been known for years. And yet you ignore them. And you keep on trying to divert this thread from transitionals to your favorite topics. I am not buying it. Do you have anything to say about all the transitional fossils that are down there? Do you even care about the topic of this thread?

The whole problem with bottlenecks is that it shrinks the gene pools and mutations accumulating over time are diminishing the gene pools as well. I'm not debating basic genetics here, especially given the basics of adaptive evolution are being grossly neglected.

What does this have to do with transitionals? Now do you have anything to say about transitionals?

Immediately following the flood those issues would be no where near as pronounced or compounded.

How can the flood explain any of this?

We still find fossils that are hundreds of millions of years old. Do you have an explanation for why there are fossils down there that are hundreds of millions of years old? Can you explain why all the fossils of the Cambrian are different from modern species?

When you can't get a basic definition of evolution or Darwinian selection nailed down it's unlikely a discussion of the specifics regarding tracking alleles are going to be helpful.

You have been told that many people use the word evolution and mean different things by it. That is a fact of life. If you cannot stand to live in a world where people use the same word and mean different things by it, then pack up and move on. I am fine with living in this world, and that is the way it is.

I have told you what I mean when I use the word evolution in this thread.

 

[Speedwell]

Why do you keep creating the dichotomy between creationism and atheism? Lots of theists reject modern creationism (specifically YEC and OEC), but are still theists that apparently believe in a deity as an originator of the universe, including many Christians.

That is the pachyderm in the parlour.

 

[mark kennedy]

Mark,

The fossil record is full of transitional fossils. Here are a few more.

I'm aware of that, thanks.

They are down there. They have been known for years. And yet you ignore them. And you keep on trying to divert this thread from transitionals to your favorite topics. I am not buying it.

You mean horse pictures, that's what I'm getting from you while the paranthropus and other actual ape fossils have yet to draw a single substantive remark. Hominid fossils have yet to enter the conversation and the only transition I see was from the Pildown fraud to the stone age handyman myth. Cats, dogs and horses aren't exactly crucial nodes in adaptive evolution, the giant leap in cranial capacity is.

Do you have anything to say about all the transitional fossils that are down there? Do you even care about the topic of this thread?

You mean like the multitude of fossils related to African ancestral apes and hominids.

What does this have to do with transitionals? Now do you have anything to say about transitionals?

Creation is a series of event during the span of six days where the parental forms of all living creatures originated, Adam pass and reviewed all of that, naming each in a days time. Noah emerges from the Ark with the ancestral common ancestors of all mammals, reptiles and birds 4000 years ago resulting in 2 to 60 million descendant species today. Do you really think I as a creationist have a problem with variations of dogs, cats and horses? The only transition that is in conflict with the doctrine of creation are the ones passed of as our ancestors. How well you dont know even after try to get me to chase your arguments in circles so many times before. Not taking the bait dude, does anyone?

How can the flood explain any of this?

Rhetorical questions lead to circular logic doughtingmerel, just say no to fallacious reasoning.

We still find fossils that are hundreds of millions of years old. Do you have an explanation for why there are fossils down there that are hundreds of millions of years old? Can you explain why all the fossils of the Cambrian are different from modern species?

Can you explain what fossils and why I should care about these random generalities after you ignored repeated attempts to discuss human ancestors

You have been told that many people use the word evolution and mean different things by it. That is a fact of life.

And I have shown by actual source material that biological evolution is not one thing but two. Invariably Its a natural phenomenon and a philosophy of natural history known as Darwinism.

If you cannot stand to live in a world where people use the same word and mean different things by it, then pack up and move on. I am fine with living in this world, and that is the way it is.

You can live in whatever fantasy world you like but I much prefer the reality of, words mean things. Now I suppose in your world it's perfectly permissible to assign meaning at will and at random but scientific definitions for evolution are consistent and precise.

I have told you what I mean when I use the word evolution in this thread.

I don't care how you use it, I care what evolutionary biologists mean by it, and it's not one thing but two. It's the change of alleles in populations over time and the a priori assumption of universal common ancestry by exclusively naturalistic means going all the way back to and including the Big Bang, aka Darwinism. The former is population statistics from Mendelian genetics and the latter is a myth.