by Natural Selection?

OneLargeToe

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Pete Harcoff said:
worship4ever, you may want to do yourself a favor and read the following:

I seriously doubt these guys are actually reading the links or even the meat of people's replies.

One thing has become obvious is that these hardcore creationist types just spam new posts and replies without actually comprehending what they're arguing against.

Ignorance is bliss, I guess. :(
 
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Pete Harcoff

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The Barbarian said:
The confusion is in "mutations per gene" vs. "mutations per individual". The former is quite rate, while the latter is very common.

Because there are many, many genes in an individual.

And then there's also the issue of mutations in coding versus non-coding DNA.

One thing I've learned from readings on the topic of mutations and genetics, is that it's nowhere near as cut-and-dry as some creationist propoganda would have you believe.
 
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Pete Harcoff

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OneLargeToe said:
I seriously doubt these guys are actually reading the links or even the meat of people's replies.

One thing has become obvious is that these hardcore creationist types just spam new posts and replies without actually comprehending what they're arguing against.

Ignorance is bliss, I guess. :(

Heh, I'd take that one step further are wager that some creationists don't even know what they are arguing for, let alone against.

It's always funny to see creationists argue that species are immutable, when the very concept of Noah's Ark depends heavily on rapid speciation to repopulate the Earth with the diversity we see today.
 
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Cantuar

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Isn't that the "hopeful monster" theory?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
That term's new to me.

The hopeful-monster theory is the same as the saltationist scenario, where one individual in one species produces an offspring sufficiently different from the parent to count as a new species all in one generation. Punctuated equilibrium has nothing whatever to do with saltationism; it doesn't say that gaps in the fossil record are due to huge differences from one generation to the next, it refers to the speed of evolution in isolated populations that are poorly adapted to new environments, in relation to evolution in the original population that's still in the environment to which it's well adapted.

The characterisation of punctuated equilibrium as hopeful-monster saltationism is a favourite trick of creationists and can be refuted by spending a couple of minutes reading the original work or later descriptions of it by Gould or Eldredge or both. When someone comes along with this particular argument, it simply means that he's swallowed the creationist version whole without going back to the source to see what was actually being said.

The sad thing is that the creationist version of saltationism isn't really all that close to the actual saltationist theory as it's developed; it's a distortion of that as well as being a total fabrication where punctuated equilibrium is concerned.
 
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Natural selection is an abstract, a process by which creatures that are not as well-adapted to their environments tend to die and thus fail to reproduce, while creatures with traits more compatible with their environment tend to reproduce fruitfully. This process is ongoing and leads to better-adapted creatures of all species.
DNA is not sentient. It does not "know to change, or even by [sic] mutated to help the species"

DNA, the "memory chemical" that stores genetic information, comprises the genes of every living organism.

The upshot of the analysis is this, says Goodenough: "The fact that the same kinds of genes are found in all the different kinds of organisms on the planet today, including both bacteria and organisms like ourselves, indicates that these genes developed long ago." To put it slightly differently, the presence of similar or identical genes in two organisms is a genetic fingerprint of a common ancestor at some time in the past.

The detailed science of fingering common ancestors and figuring out how their descendants are related is complicated stuff, way beyond my powers of comprehension. But the essential technique is obvious to anyone who has played telephone. You remember: You sit in a circle and whisper a phrase into your neighbor's ear, who then passes the phrase along. When the phrase returns to its starting point, "A pox on both your houses," may be transmogrified into, say, "A box of genes in both kinds of louses."

Obviously, the further you are from the origin, the more distorted the phrase will be (although if you are clever in sorting out the phonemes and the rhymes, you can deduce how the two sentences are related and how they were changed while being passed around).

While taxonomists traditionally analyzed relationships among organisms in terms of shared features, say wings or scales, genetic analysts measure relationships by calculating time to a common ancestor.

There's another way to show the similarity of genes in various organisms. Remember the lowly yeast, the microbes that raise dough into bread and ferment hops into beer? To demonstrate the similarity between yeast and human genes, experimenters remove genes that make proteins the yeast need to live.


What happens? The yeast croaks, that's what. But when the deleted genes are replaced with similar human genes, the yeast lives. These results, says Kansas biologist Robert Palazzo, "argue that common molecules exist in systems as distant as yeast and humans."

Much of this analysis is done with RNA in the ribosome, a cellular unit that assembles proteins under the direction of the genes. Because the genes for ribosomes change slowly, this analysis shows the evolutionary links between humans, worms, fruit flies and other organisms that, to the naked eye or microscope alike, look rather different.

In short, Organisms that are better suited to the environment are more likely to survive and reproduce, forcing species to change, or evolve.

Although not as old as life itself, the debate over evolution goes back quite a way. Even before Darwin wrote his seminal "The Origin of Species," European explorers were returning facts that demanded explanation. New animals challenged the notion that Noah's ark could possibly have held two representatives of every species. New geologic evidence indicated that the Earth was far more ancient than a literal reading of the Bible would permit.


Another discovery demanding explanation was the new races of people from Africa, Asia and Oceana. The question arose: Were humans all one species? "People saw more differences than similarities in these races," says Blair Nelson, a Ph.D. candidate in the history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, "and it was difficult not to construct a racial hierarchy."
Just as Darwin's work made many people uncomfortable calling a monkey "uncle," many Europeans were uncomfortable with the notion of calling an Australian Aborigine "cousin."

Starting around 1840, a scientific explanation called polygenism arose to explain the appearance of so many races. According to polygenism, God created not one race but several. Despite the fact that scientists had developed polygenism, "It was a creationist theory," says Nelson, "and there were more acts of creation than in Genesis."

While polygenism was promoted by scientists who used God to explain nature, its opponents were theologians who pinned the differences among humans on the effects of environment as people migrated away from Mt. Ararat after Noah beached his ark.
In other words, they held that environment could affect appearance.
Nowadays, it's the religious folks who are arguing that God did the creating, while the scientists claim that environment (the testing force for natural selection) is what affects body type and species formation. "There has been a complete switch between Christians and scientists" since the earlier debate, Nelson says.
 
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stargate

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Will someone explain to me how natural selection is conducive to evolution? Darwin wrote that if biology, in the course of its development, ever demonstrated that an organ in its intermediate stage (i.e. half a heart) would not be functional, than his whole theory would fall to pieces. He was rather tentative about it. It seems like natural selection would serve only to eliminate those creatures who were "on their way" to becoming more advanced. For example, if an arm is starting to grow feathers, won't they hang up on things before they could ever provide lift, making that animal die off faster? Why am I wrong about this? Why is Darwin wrong about this?
As far as punctuated evolution goes, once life became advanced enough for life to reproduce sexually, once each "hopeful monster" was born, with what would it reproduce? How would the offspring be fertile? Wouldn't these have to inbreed, causing the genetic code to break down further? Don't evolutionists frequently argue (against the traditional Flood story) that not even two animals of the same species could repopulate earth? How does one unique animal do it the first time?
I am interested to see what evolutionists have to say about these questions. If you cannot answer them and still do not choose to believe in a Creator, then find a different theory!

We know selection works because we are here. Since we are here that means we got selected. If we were not here that means we didn't get selected. Likewise it's a good thing our parents were fit, otherwise we'd never be here cuz they'd have been deslected. See?
 
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Valkhorn

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Worship4Ever -

Um, I am full of mutations, namely one is having two lines on my hand instead of three or four. No one in my family has ever had that.

It is a change in the base pair, and so it is a mutation.

It could even be beneficial to me since I may have been able to grip things better in the wild :p

I really wish people would actually learn something. We are not all clones. We are all different somewhere genetically - and the differences are mutations if you want to be trite about it. Mutations can be good and bad. Better hearing (or worse) is a mutation. Better vision (or worse) is one too. Ever notice how nearsightedness or deafness can be inherited traits?

Or even ever notice how if your family or dad or mother had a great sense of smell or great vision that you might as well? Or that if they were tall you might be? Or short?

And these traits are selected in the natural world by a non-random process called natural selection.

In the wild, depending on how you could adapt you would survive (or not) and pass your genes on (or not).

WHY IS THIS SUCH A DIFFICULT CONCEPT FOR CREATIONISTS?
 
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I would argue that thread resurrection can sometimes be useful. I lurked here a long time, and really, you could almost lift the whole of 2004's discussions, replace the dates, and find almost the same set of posters arguing the same set of topics, and with pretty much the same end results, learning-wise.

Perhaps each 'new' posted question or refutation should be just plunked wholesale into a previous thread on the subject. Timesaving.
 
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