Mutations Really Do Happen

[[serious]]

That's my point. How do mice exist at all?



Sure, but why do they exist? According to evolution mice exist because of millions of uninterrupted, successful changes over millions of years. How likely is that?

iif mice didn't exist, we wouldn't be asking that question. Mice existing is a prerequisite for asking why the exist. In short, they exist because that was one of the populations that survived. If the ancestors of mice did not have surviving offspring and some other group did, perhaps you would be asking the same question about a different animal that in our world has never existed.

Asking why a mouse exists is exactly like asking why a smulplumph exists. The only difference is that the mouse happens to exist. If we were to travel back in time and let pre-mouse ancestors evolve all over again, we might instead end up with the smulplumph.

 

[florida2]

If I did, I wouldn't call it "my opinion."

Then your opinion can take a hike.

 

[Loudmouth]

But there comes a point that the cumulative improbabilities render such occurrences impossible.

What you are ignoring is the high probability of something happening. Once life is established there is a very high probability that a new species will evolve. Exactly which of trillions of possibilities will occur is not known, but a result will occur.

The odds of Mus musculus is 100%. Why? Because it happened. If M. musculus had not evolved, the odds of something else evolving is 100%. The only time the odds of a new species evolving is nearly improbable is when all life goes extinct.

Science says evolution must have happened because here is the mouse. Creationists say creation must have happened because here is the mouse. What remains is calculating the odds of each (a WAG will do).

When something has happened the odds of it happening are 1 in 1.

 

[Loudmouth]

I would say a ballpark figure might be this. The odds against a single-celled organism becoming a complex organism, like a human, would be,

the odds against that cell dividing at all times the number of all of the evolutionary changes necessary to complete the process.

So my wild --- guess would be,

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000:1 against evolution.

(I had to stop there as my commas became periods (????).

Then winning the lottery should also be impossible.

For our calculations let's say that the odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 100 million. For each drawing, there are 100 million tickets sold and there is 1 winner for each drawing. There are 10 winners that won in this order: Frank, Suzy, Ed, Jack, Wilma, . . . and so on.

So what are the odds that those specific 10 people would have won that lottery in that order? The odds are 100 million to the 10th power, or 1 in 1E80. That's a 1 with 80 zeros after it, more zeros than you listed for evolution. Therefore, if evolution is impossible, then so too should winning the lottery, and yet people win it all of the time.

 

[Loudmouth]

what is this supposed to tell me?

it's been known for years that there is a higher incidence of mental retardation the older you are when you conceive.

Down's Syndrome is due to trisomy 21 which is a type of chromomal duplication that is not covered by the paper in question. The scientists in that study were looking for much lower level changes such as single base substitutions and relatively smaller chunks of DNA that were inserted or deleted.

What this is supposed to tell you is that everyone is born with mutations. If you are going to argue that mutations don't occur, then you need to explain how the scientists saw different DNA sequences in offspring compared to their parents. If you are trying to make the argument that the vast majority of mutations are deleterious, then you need to list the 50 or so genetics diseases that you were born with since you were born with about 50 mutations.

 

[Split Rock]

Mutations do occur.

We call that "adapting" -- not "microevolving."

Microevolving opens the door to macroevolution, which opens the door to deep time, which opens the door to considering ourselves "animals," which opens the door to classifying ourselves as "wise man," which, according to Romans 1, leads to atheism.

Romans 1:22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

Sorry to spoil your little paradigm, buddy, but the concept of Deep Time was accepted before Evolution was accepted. The classification of man with other animals is even older that that. Your daisy-chain fails.

 

[AV1611VET]

Sorry to spoil your little paradigm, buddy, but the concept of Deep Time was accepted before Evolution was accepted.

Oh, ya.

I forgot about the six or seven other types of evolution (stellar, chemical, etc.), all rolled into one: Cosmic Evolution.

Good catch!

 

[Loudmouth]

in my opinion, DNA must have some kind of "master plan", that deals with the above combination.

What do you base this opinion on?

Is part of this plan to have children born with deadly mutations?

hox genes might be that plan. these genes have never been mutated.
can someone explain why?

Really? It would seem that nature has already run that experiment for us. You might want to check out Homologene. Enter "hox1" in the search window at the top:

Home - HomoloGene - NCBI

A lot of different hox genes will turn up. Click on any of them. I clicked on homeoboxA13. On the next page, I scrolled down to where it says "Show Pairwise Alignment Scores" and clicked it. What I got was a comparison between model organisms, and guess what? That HOX gene is not conserved between species. It is mutated.

 

[[serious]]

I would say a ballpark figure might be this. The odds against a single-celled organism becoming a complex organism, like a human, would be,

the odds against that cell dividing at all times the number of all of the evolutionary changes necessary to complete the process.

So my wild --- guess would be,

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000:1 against evolution.

(I had to stop there as my commas became periods (????).

Let's go with that. I'm going to ballpark that as ~10^200. Let's assume that anything with those kind of odds never happens. I posit casino blackjack doesn't exist then.

A standard 4 deck black jack shoe holds 208 cards in random order. The odds of them being in any specific order is 208! or 2.411110054 E+393. Since every order of cards is impossibly unlikely, the cards must not exist at all.

Interesting note, many factorial calculators seem to break around 170! Had to search for a calculator that would even return a number for that.

 

[PsychoSarah]

Oh, ya.

I forgot about the six or seven other types of evolution (stellar, chemical, etc.), all rolled into one: Cosmic Evolution.

Good catch!

Evolution is an overused word, unfortunately, it doesn't mean the same thing in every context, but people get confused by that as a result. Kinda like the word "love", we say we love french fries, and also that we love our mom, but obviously love doesn't mean the same thing in both those contexts. Unless your mother is french fries

 

[AV1611VET]

Evolution is an overused word, unfortunately, it doesn't mean the same thing in every context, but people get confused by that as a result. Kinda like the word "love", we say we love french fries, and also that we love our mom, but obviously love doesn't mean the same thing in both those contexts. Unless your mother is french fries

The next time you order French fries, say "Freedom fries" instead, and see if they even know what you're talking about.

 

[PsychoSarah]

The next time you order French fries, say "Freedom fries" instead, and see if they even know what you're talking about.

You do realize that the term references the shape of the fries, not the origin of the food, right? I wonder what you call French Toast.

But we are getting off topic; evolution in a general sense means change over time. However, how the universe as a whole changes over time is impacted by different factors than how biological life changes all the time, and they have very little to do with each other.