In natural selection, the environment affects the gene frequency in a population. Even so, natural selection is a mindless and blind process acting on mutations which are random, mindless and blind.
Evolution (which is mindless and blind) will never achieve anything.
That does not follow. Chemical bonds are mindless and blind. Yet they can produce amazing, highly organised structures like crystals.
evolution relies on beneficial mutations that will allow a species to change and adapt to it environment. they become more complex as time goes on. yet why were there so many good and beneficial mutations as opposed to bad mutations which didn't amount to anything.
There are actually
few beneficial mutations compared to bad ones or ones that simply don't do a thing. However, many more of the beneficial ones are preserved. Furthermore, things don't
have to become more complex as time goes on. Parasites (e.g.
this guy) and symbionts (e.g. mitochondria) are classical examples of simplification, but they are probably far from alone.
being that mutations by their very nature are errors in the process of replication or unrepairable damage to DNA how does more improved complex and improved life stem from this.
Beneficial mutations are exactly the same kinds of chemical changes as harmful ones. Their effect depends on where and in what environment they occur.
even a beneficial mutation comes from a random process how do organisms know that this is beneficial in the first place and even if they did some how because it is random how does that new beneficial mutation then become a new part of the organism to use when it was random in the first place.
New parts are rarely truly new. Most of the time, new parts come from old parts by tinkering, reshuffling ingredients, etc. Basically, a beneficial mutation changes a pre-existing part in a way that (1) makes that part better at what it's doing under the circumstances, or (2) gives it a new function.
An example of (1) would be the haemoglobin of
bar-headed geese. These birds fly at high altitudes during their migrations over the Himalayas. A single mutation makes their haemoglobin better at capturing oxygen from the thin air.
An example of (2) is the recently published story about the
grasshopper mice for whom scorpion venom acts as a painkiller. Normally, scorpion venom triggers pain receptors. The pain receptors of these mice have a modification in one of their surface proteins that makes them respond to the venom by shutting down instead...
DNA is now used as a proof for evolution as all species can be linked through their DNA back to common ancestors. yet this still doesn't fit the evolutionary model. if you take the duck billed platypus you would think it evolved from a duck like creature or a beaver like creature as its characteristics are similar.
Only superficially. Beavers don't lay eggs, ducks don't lay
soft-shelled eggs, and the bills of ducks are not made of soft rubbery skin studded with electric sensors. And so on.
yet its DNA points to it coming from and related to a kangaroo and koala bear.
No, no, no. The platypus is no more related to a kangaroo than we are. In fact, humans and kangaroos are more closely related than kangaroos and platypuses. This isn't just indicated by DNA. For example, humans and kangaroos both lack egg shells, bear live young, have nipples (platypuses don't; babies lick milk off mum's fur), separate holes for digestive waste and babies (platypuses have a cloaca), and share many other
more obscure traits that platypuses don't possess.
Evolutionary geneticists have often experimented on fruit flies and other rapidly reproducing species to induce mutational changes hoping they would lead to new and better species, but these have all failed to accomplish their goal. No truly new species has ever been produced, let alone a new "basic kind."
I have a feeling you are quoting this from somewhere.
That said, new species have been produced many times in labs, and not even by such extreme approaches as mutagenising poor flies. An example from TalkOrigins'
wonderful compilation (bolding mine):
TO said:
Dobzhansky and Pavlovsky (1971) reported a speciation event that occurred in a laboratory culture of Drosophila paulistorum sometime between 1958 and 1963. The culture was descended from a single inseminated female that was captured in the Llanos of Colombia. In 1958 this strain produced fertile hybrids when crossed with conspecifics of different strains from Orinocan. From 1963 onward crosses with Orinocan strains produced only sterile males. Initially no assortative mating or behavioral isolation was seen between the Llanos strain and the Orinocan strains. Later on Dobzhansky produced assortative mating (Dobzhansky 1972).
(Of course, if you have a different species definition in mind, we can discuss that as well. But you have to state which one, because in sexually reproducing organisms, speciation usually refers to the biological species definition [= ability to produce fertile offspring].)
"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." 3
Let me continue the quote.
Darwin 1859 said:
Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.
[...]
With these facts, here far too briefly and imperfectly given, which show that there is much graduated diversity in the eyes of living crustaceans, and bearing in mind how small the number of living animals is in proportion to those which have become extinct, I can see no very great difficulty (not more than in the case of many other structures) in believing that natural selection has converted the simple apparatus of an optic nerve merely coated with pigment and invested by transparent membrane, into an optical instrument as perfect as is possessed by any member of the great Articulate class.
Yeah. Not to mention that this is evolutionary biology
150+ years ago.
No mechanism has been put forward that even begins to explain how something like the human eye could have been produced by time, chance, natural selection and mutation. but then evolution says that it is with time that this could happen so i guess time itself can allow amazing things.
Actually, a simulation of eye evolution with selection for better images was already around
nearly twenty years ago. It does require time, but not as much as you might think - the "pessimistic estimate" mentioned by the paper's title is only a few hundred thousand years from a light-sensitive patch of skin to a vertebrate-like eye.
Evolutionists commonly answer the above criticism by claiming that evolution goes too slowly for us to see it happening today. They used to claim that the real evidence for evolution was in the fossil record of the past, but the fact is that the billions of known fossils do not include a single unequivocal transitional form with transitional structures in the process of evolving.
What does a transitional form with transitional structures in the process of evolving looks like?
Neither is there any clue as to how the one-celled organisms of the primordial world could have evolved into the vast array of complex multi-celled invertebrates of the Cambrian period. Even dogmatic evolutionist Gould admits that:
Gould? Dogmatic?
The Cambrian explosion was the most remarkable and puzzling event in the history of life.8 Equally puzzling, however, is how some invertebrate creature in the ancient ocean, with all its "hard parts" on the outside, managed to evolve into the first vertebrate -- that is, the first fish-- with its hard parts all on the inside.
The answer is ridiculously simple. Vertebrates did not evolve from hard-shelled invertebrates but soft-bodied ones.
Hard shells and skeletons originated many times, and they're not terribly hard to evolve. Most shells and skeletons are made of materials that every living thing routinely encounters and/or produces, namely calcium, carbonate and/or phosphate ions.
Even those who believe in rapid evolution recognize that a considerable number of generations would be required for one distinct "kind" to evolve into another more complex kind.
What is a kind?
(And please, please source your quotes and indicate that they are quoted. The above sentence from your post is lifted word for word from
an ICR article. What you are doing here is plagiarism.
I would suggest that the Cambrian explosion included man and lions and wolves and ravens and all kinds!
Then, by all means, show me their Cambrian fossils.
All the Cambrian explosion refers to is the creatures that could fossilize in that different past nature.
The problem is that the most famous Cambrian deposits preserve the exact same kinds of creatures that fossilise easily in other circumstances, PLUS tons of ephemeral, soft-bodied things that are virtually absent from the regular fossil record. The bones and teeth of large vertebrates are highly fossilisable, especially compared to squishy beasties like
Nectocaris or
Pikaia. If they existed in the Cambrian, there should be fossils.
the Cambrian period was a major diversification of organisms. the rate of evolution accelerated and the diversity of life began to resemble that of today. many complex organisms appeared from seemly nowhere. some had no traceable connections to anything in the fossil records.
That is a bit of an exaggeration. Fossils of various groups appear step by step in the Cambrian. You don't get things like trilobites until millions of years into the period, and the complex animals that gradually show up by the Mid-Cambrian are still not really the animals we're familiar with today.
The Cambrian explosion has generated extensive scientific debate. The seemingly rapid appearance of fossils in the Primordial Strata was noted as early as the 1840s, and in 1859 Charles Darwin discussed it as one of the main objections that could be made against his theory of evolution by natural selection...
... and now we are plagiarising
Wikipedia and/or
the BBC. I know Wikipedia is free and all that, but it's still considered polite to at least indicate that these are not your words.
with evolution it needs time as how can you imagine one thing turning into another without it. so this is one period where scientists haven't fully understood or have a proper explanation for. on one hand they say you need time and hence that's why they date things to old ages to slowly evolve into something else then how does this fit in.
The Cambrian explosion lasted tens of millions of years by the most conservative estimates, and there are indications (like my favourite
Kimberella) that put its start back tens of millions of years before the Cambrian. There is something unusual about the CE, but it's by no means "miraculously" fast.
so they are coming up with other ways for it to be explained like there was a period of time that has not showed up in the fossil records showing the preceding fossils.
I think one of the best explanations is that most of the earliest steps happened in small soft-bodied animals. Many lines of evidence indicate that animals appeared long before the Cambrian. Even the most conservative DNA-based estimates place the origin of animals way back in Precambrian times. Fossil embryos of multicellular creatures appear ~40 million years before the Cambrian,
Kimberella and its associated trace fossils indicate a slug-like animal that crawled around and grazed on microbes, etc.
It's now fairly commonly accepted that oxygen levels before the Cambrian were pretty low in the oceans. That limits how much animals can do and how big they can grow. In today's oxygen-limited environments, there are animals but
there are virtually no predators, for example, and "trying not to get eaten" is one of the strongest selective pressures you can imagine to drive evolution.
Put all of that together, and what you get is a long period when most animals were small, wandering around microbial mats eating things that didn't run away or fight back, and under no pressure to come up with things like shells, eyes, burrows or fast swimming that would save them from predators. Also, leaving few fossils.
or by by the theory of punctuated equilibrium which developed in the early 1970s and which views evolution as long intervals of near-stasis "punctuated" by short periods of rapid change.
While Eldredge and Gould did suggest applying PE to the Cambrian, it is primarily a theory about low-level (i.e. species to species) transitions.
