The Fossil Record Proves Speciation, Not Evolution of Lifeforms Observed

[juvenissun]

But by your very own definition life requires a cyclic process. If what you described was only 3/4 of a cycle then it's not life.

You truly are an awesome teacher

Not a bad student.
the rest 1/4 is the processes of dying and rejuvenation.
And, this cycle is NOT the cyclic process I talked about.

 

[Bungle_Bear]

Not a bad student.
the rest 1/4 is the processes of dying and rejuvenation.
And, this cycle is NOT the cyclic process I talked about.

So what is the cyclic process you talked about? Last time I asked you told me to go see a science fiction movie, but it would help me an awful lot if you'd at least hint at which one.

 

[juvenissun]

So what is the cyclic process you talked about? Last time I asked you told me to go see a science fiction movie, but it would help me an awful lot if you'd at least hint at which one.

A cyclic process which continues within the life system, for example, A rock.

 

[Bungle_Bear]

A cyclic process which continues within the life system, for example, A rock.

You can't name one, can you?

And don't try some pseudo-enigmatic response. Failure to provide the requested information will be taken as admittance that you have no example to provide.

 

[PsychoSarah]

Yes. Because they are not able to do it.

-_- only because you are a stubborn son of a gun. There are tons of people that hold on to views despite 0 evidence supporting them and a mountain of evidence going against them just because they are unwilling to change their view. You being unable to be convinced that our arguments against the idea that rocks are alive are well put is on YOU, not us. Even the view that people haven't given you conclusive arguments that rocks aren't alive is ridiculous.

You are not the standard by which a good argument is measured. Heck, your arguments against mine are downright terrible. Even if you view the current definition of life as too broad, it clearly isn't broad enough to consider a shard of granite alive. Furthermore, acting as if your arguments exclusively rely on perceived ambiguity of 1 definition is wrong. You need metabolism's definition to be too broad. You need reproduction's definition to be too broad. You need the phrase "responding to stimuli" to be too broad. I could go on. The fact of the matter is, they aren't so broad that rocks could be reasonably considered to have a metabolism, reproduce, etc. Even your stretches of the definitions don't work.

 

[PsychoSarah]

Minimum condition: Changes caused by internal difference on chemical potential between mineral components. Normally, the ambient temperature is an important factor. This change caused the rock to grow from immature to mature stage.

Negatory, the rocks do not control these chemical potentials in any regard. It's still the temperature, not the rock, changing what is inside. A living cell doesn't stay the same REGARDLESS of temperature; any temperature at which the cell is alive, as well as during transitioning to a temperature at which it is not, the cell is changing its own chemical processes. Even immobile organisms which cannot control their internal temperature do not simply slow down or speed up with temperature changes; the types of proteins produced and their amounts change in response.

You are also ignoring my statement from before: in order to be considered alive, the rock MUST perform its own maintenance and control its own reproduction. The temperature is directly causing those internal changes in the rocks; hormones signal cells in a cascade to change protein output or divide, they do not in and of themselves change the proteins directly. Thus, this is still not an example of internally directed changes in response to a stimulus. Additionally, rocks do not and cannot maintain themselves independently under any circumstances. If I break a piece off of a rock, it is not going to take up material and grow it back in response. If left out in the open, it will just slowly erode away.

Furthermore, you'd never be able to identify a rock as being in a "mature stage" while also maintaining your ridiculously stretched definition of reproduction. As long as I can crack a rock into two or more pieces, you have expressed that you think this could qualify as reproduction. Since a single molecule or atom does not make a rock, by definition, there is no such thing as a rock that cannot "reproduce" and therefore no such thing as an immature rock.

 

[PsychoSarah]

What we can see is:

Fetus material of rock takes a long incubation time to give the birth of a new rock. Then this rock will pass a very long period of time to grow up and gradually changed to its mature form and old form. This is part of the life cycle of rock.

-_- rocks do not contain fetuses, nor do they give birth. A geode with crystals growing inside isn't going to ever independently crack open, and the crystals aren't going to mature later on to become geodes with crystals growing in them.

 

[juvenissun]

-_- only because you are a stubborn son of a gun. There are tons of people that hold on to views despite 0 evidence supporting them and a mountain of evidence going against them just because they are unwilling to change their view. You being unable to be convinced that our arguments against the idea that rocks are alive are well put is on YOU, not us. Even the view that people haven't given you conclusive arguments that rocks aren't alive is ridiculous.

You are not the standard by which a good argument is measured. Heck, your arguments against mine are downright terrible. Even if you view the current definition of life as too broad, it clearly isn't broad enough to consider a shard of granite alive. Furthermore, acting as if your arguments exclusively rely on perceived ambiguity of 1 definition is wrong. You need metabolism's definition to be too broad. You need reproduction's definition to be too broad. You need the phrase "responding to stimuli" to be too broad. I could go on. The fact of the matter is, they aren't so broad that rocks could be reasonably considered to have a metabolism, reproduce, etc. Even your stretches of the definitions don't work.

I am not trying to convince you that your definition of life is wrong. I am arguing that it is too narrow and also not seeing the critical aspect of life. As a consequence, you are getting this kind of arguments from me.

So, I set up a set of modified rules to define life. So what? It is "similar" to the one you use. Why should yours be the only one which is "right"? I can borrow your terms in the definition of life and give them modified contents. I have a system of material that can be applied to the modified definition. Why is the result not qualified for a newer, broader view of life? How many such a wonderful system you can find anywhere in the universe?

You (and everyone else) should know, the living rock system does NOT exist at every place you can find rock. For example, on Mars, the Mars rock is dead (does not fit my criteria of a living rock). So, the Mars is a dead planet.

 

[juvenissun]

Negatory, the rocks do not control these chemical potentials in any regard. It's still the temperature, not the rock, changing what is inside. A living cell doesn't stay the same REGARDLESS of temperature; any temperature at which the cell is alive, as well as during transitioning to a temperature at which it is not, the cell is changing its own chemical processes. Even immobile organisms which cannot control their internal temperature do not simply slow down or speed up with temperature changes; the types of proteins produced and their amounts change in response.

You are also ignoring my statement from before: in order to be considered alive, the rock MUST perform its own maintenance and control its own reproduction. The temperature is directly causing those internal changes in the rocks; hormones signal cells in a cascade to change protein output or divide, they do not in and of themselves change the proteins directly. Thus, this is still not an example of internally directed changes in response to a stimulus. Additionally, rocks do not and cannot maintain themselves independently under any circumstances. If I break a piece off of a rock, it is not going to take up material and grow it back in response. If left out in the open, it will just slowly erode away.

Furthermore, you'd never be able to identify a rock as being in a "mature stage" while also maintaining your ridiculously stretched definition of reproduction. As long as I can crack a rock into two or more pieces, you have expressed that you think this could qualify as reproduction. Since a single molecule or atom does not make a rock, by definition, there is no such thing as a rock that cannot "reproduce" and therefore no such thing as an immature rock.

Of course it is temperature. What do you expect? A biological cell is not affected by temperature? And, you obviously do not know. Some rocks will still change even be put on the surface of moon. I said it is due to the imbalance of internal chemical potential. It could be all internal. From this point of view, a rock is a more efficient chemical system than a biological cell.

 

[juvenissun]

-_- rocks do not contain fetuses, nor do they give birth. A geode with crystals growing inside isn't going to ever independently crack open, and the crystals aren't going to mature later on to become geodes with crystals growing in them.

Unless you are willing to walk out the confinement of your traditional biological view. This discussion is meaningless to you. You better save energy and do not reply. I think you are still young and have time. Try to consider geology, which will definitely open your eyes.

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

Of course it is temperature. What do you expect? A biological cell is not affected by temperature? And, you obviously do not know. Some rocks will still change even be put on the surface of moon. I said it is due to the imbalance of internal chemical potential. It could be all internal. From this point of view, a rock is a more efficient chemical system than a biological cell.

A rock may change physical form, but it is still a rock.
Using a rock as a comparison is not a valid thing to use to talk about life. It's just idiotic.

 

[DogmaHunter]

So, is the "debate" here about rocks being alive or not, still raging?
It seems so.

What does it say about a thread, if for several pages, the debate topic is about wheter or not rocks are alive?

 

[Shemjaza]

So, is the "debate" here about rocks being alive or not, still raging?
It seems so.

What does it say about a thread, if for several pages, the debate topic is about wheter or not rocks are alive?

The Black Knight never loses.

 

[stevevw]

One could try to argue that, but there's not a single creationist I know of that can explain why any creator would make chickens with enough teeth formation genes that they actually have teeth briefly as embryos, when at no point do chickens use teeth. Or why the heck emus have tiny arms without any musculature.

It is an assumption in the first place in assuming that creatures having the genetic info for features not used is evidence for evolution and that any designer cannot design a program for life which has dormant info included. As with the paper posted earlier there may have been a universal code that included all programs for life where some have been switched off but can be activated again.

Universal Genome in the Origin of Metazoa: Thoughts About Evolution
This model has two major predictions, first that a significant fraction of genetic information in lower taxons must be functionally useless but becomes useful in higher taxons, and second that one should be able to turn on in lower taxons some of the complex latent developmental programs
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.4161/cc.6.15.4557#.VaEEzbUoTfc

The chicken that had teeth in embryos was from certain mutant chickens where the gene for teeth was switched. But it is an assumption to say that this is proof of Darwinian evolution that is supposed to gradually evolve teeth. It would be wrong to assume that this one gene was responsible for suddenly creating all the teeth. If anything, it is support for pre-existing genetic info that produced these features in one go which is still within the chicken’s genetic makeup.

Evolution is supposed to weed out useless features no longer needed so therefore the capacity to produce teeth should not still be there. But here we see a chicken still with the ability to produce teeth suddenly. If this is how evolution works, then this means that it can suddenly produce all sorts of complete features in one go. But that is not how it works and what we see and that would indicate that the genetic info for the feature was already there and was just switched on.

Developmental biology and embryology have found many examples in embryo development that show similar common control genes for most of life that produce the body plans which have either been switched off or are switched on in development according to the environmental. This would point to a pre-existing code for body plans that had to have been around from the beginning because the same basic body plans have always been in existence from the beginning.

The concept of an "incomplete" feature is a creationist misunderstanding of evolution. At no point is it claimed that fish evolved feet via having a useless half foot first. Rather, they start as simplistic, complete structures, with the start of feet being fins with some motion to them that were beneficial for moving along river beds, etc.

The point is how did the fin come about which is the prototype for the foot. As the fin is so like the foot there is no great change for evolution to achieve but rather a simple tweaking and switching on or off of a gene to make the slight alterations. It is an assumption that a blind and random process produced this because if it did then we would see 100s of feeble attempts to get the foot right. But what we see is maybe two or three set designs that make the foot all within the capacity of a pre-existing body plan. We see the sudden appearance of all the phylum body plans in the Cambrian explosion for which all life has stemmed from.

Lol, what are you talking about? The loss is gradual, in that the teeth got smaller over the course of bird evolution. Members of the genus Jeholornis, for example, had very few, small teeth, and didn't even have a diet that utilized them much. How's about looking up bird evolution before making assumptions?

Then if teeth were lost through deselection out of the genomes of Dinos then why do they still exist with the capacity to be switched on to produce teeth again. It is also an assumption to think that because there are some creatures in millions of year old fossils with smaller teeth that this is evidence of the loss of teeth along a particular line of evolution. THis is a very patchy way of establishing things as there is also contradictory evidence showing that dinos didnt evolve into birds through Darwins theory of random mutations and blind selection.

There is evidence of birds without teeth being around very early with the Dinos before thoise transitions with teeth. There is also evidence for showing how other body structures and features between Dinos and birds is so different that it would make it impossible for birds to evolve from Dinos. This is something that can be explained by there being a universal code that was around early that makes creatures have similarities in some cases but not one that would show separate lines where certain creatures had to morph from others at certain times to produce a neat tree of life.

 

[stevevw]

Nah, it's totally expected to see sudden changes in lineages when it comes to fossils, considering the rarity of fossils. Especially for organisms with soft bodies like squid, and organisms with fragile bones such as birds. Not that there aren't organisms that left behind tons of fossils for their lineage, such as trilobites. And guess what? We see plenty of more gradual changes in that lineage. Even with them, it's not like we get to see every 10th generation represented in the fossils so that we can see every significant evolutionary event (I'm not saying that there's only ever 1 such event within 10 generations, I just know that having that would make the evolution of any given lineage more gradual than a flip book).

It is an assumption that Darwinian evolution that has caused any change in the fossil record, and second it is an assumption when looking back at fossils that any variation is a transition and not just a variation within a type of creature. This is the problem with Darwin’s evolution, it claims there are plenty of examples when it supports transitions, but it is because of the rarity of fossils when it doesn’t. Similarities show transitions between related creatures but it's convergent when it doesn’t. Evolution is gradual except when it's punctuated. Etc. Whereas there are other processes that fit the evidence better and don’t need all these extra explanations to account for anomalies. They can accommodate the contradictions because they are not trying to fit what we see to an idea that just can’t account for what we see.

Your misunderstanding of evolution persists. Simple feet, not incomplete feet. Simple lungs not incomplete lungs.

But that is not what we see in the fossil records. We see the sudden appearance of complex creatures representing all the phylum in the Cambrian explosion coming from virtually nowhere. This supports a pre-existing code that all life is built upon. There are no simple feet, and this is a false idea that is painted and presented to help tell the story. This is just an extension of the junk DNA idea and that early life must have been simple like dumbed down ape-men. Everything is complex in evolutionary terms even what has been presented as simple if we consider the whole picture of how something is made including at the molecular level.

There is also a false picture painted that because evolution works from simple to complex that presenting a few stages then explains and supports evolution. This is not the case and in reality there are 1000s of steps and systems within systems of complex networks and a blind and random process cannot explain how it can account for those steps. As one paper by a prominent mainstream biologist who doubts the capability of natural selection being able to evolve many of the networks needed for complex life in a step by step process states
The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity
Michael Lynch
Jacob (46) argues that “it is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species.” The vast majority of biologists almost certainly agree with such statements. But where is the direct supportive evidence for the assumption that complexity is rooted in adaptive processes? No existing observations support such a claim and given the massive global dominance of unicellular species over multicellular eukaryotes, both in terms of species richness and numbers of individuals, if there is an advantage of organismal complexity, one can only marvel at the inability of natural selection to promote it. Multicellular species experience reduced population sizes, reduced recombination rates, and increased deleterious mutation rates, all of which diminish the efficiency of selection (13).
The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity

Bacteria studies demonstrate otherwise. There is a bacteria evolution experiment that has gone on since the late 1980s, and one of the E. coli lineages developed the capacity to effectively digest citrate. They kept samples of every single generation, and thus not only could confirm that the bacteria didn't start out with this capacity genetically but noting that the digestion of citrate like this demands multiple genes, they were able to pinpoint the generation that was 1 mutation away from being able to effectively digest citrate, and repeat the result. Complex traits can arise via mutation, even if multiple intermediate steps have very little impact compared to what happens after the final mutation.

That is what they said about the antibiotic resistance in bacteria where antibiotics were the result of recent additions to medicine so bacteria must have mutated this into existence. Yet we have now discovered that antibiotic resistance has been an ability well before antibiotic drugs and may go back 1000s if not millions of years. Also, ancient bacteria has been found to be very similar to modern bacteria. As mentioned the complexity of life was around from the beginning as it is basically built on the same program.

Scientists have found antibiotic resistance genes in the bacterial flora of a South American tribe that never before had been exposed to antibiotic drugs. The findings suggest that bacteria in the human body have had the ability to resist antibiotics since long before such drugs were ever used to treat disease.
Bacterial flora of remote tribespeople carries antibiotic resistance genes | The Source | Washington University in St. Louis

 

[PsychoSarah]

That is what they said about the antibiotic resistance in bacteria where antibiotics were the result of recent additions to medicine so bacteria must have mutated this into existence. Yet we have now discovered that antibiotic resistance has been an ability well before antibiotic drugs and may go back 1000s if not millions of years. Also, ancient bacteria has been found to be very similar to modern bacteria. As mentioned the complexity of life was around from the beginning as it is basically built on the same program.

Scientists have found antibiotic resistance genes in the bacterial flora of a South American tribe that never before had been exposed to antibiotic drugs. The findings suggest that bacteria in the human body have had the ability to resist antibiotics since long before such drugs were ever used to treat disease.
Bacterial flora of remote tribespeople carries antibiotic resistance genes | The Source | Washington University in St. Louis

-_- it is demonstrable that the original E. coli from which the citrate digesting population is descended from cannot digest citrate and doesn't have any of the key genes for citrate digestion. They keep frozen samples of each generation in order to pinpoint when significant mutations occur and to repeat experimental conditions with previous generations.

-_- no one should be shocked that bacteria had antibiotic resistances before we used antibiotics, because the first antibiotic we used was produced by a fungus. That is, living organisms can produce antibiotics. Furthermore, there's no reason that the mutations that grant resistance to some antibiotics would occur only after said antibiotics already existed. Mutations do not only occur when it would be beneficial to have them. Bacteria have such short genomes that it is a statistical inevitability that populations will eventually produce individuals immune/resistant to a particular antibiotic. To the point that you can select an individual you know is not resistant to an antibiotic and eventually get a descendant of it that is resistant within a relatively small time frame.

However, being resistant to antibiotics that aren't a threat is a pointless waste of energy, so until our use of them became very extensive, antibiotic resistant strains were generally in the minority.

Furthermore, "ancient bacteria was similar to modern bacteria"? Bacteria fossils are little more than distinguishable shapes or colonies surrounded by metabolic byproducts. We can't assess their DNA or organelles at all (instances of organelle fossilization are extremely rare, and the only examples I can find are of eukaryotes). So, at most, we can say that they outwardly resemble modern bacteria and that some of the metabolic processes may have persisted to modern day.

 

[Kylie]

I can't convince you if you rely on me to tell you things.
Shemjaza is asking questions. If you do the same, you might be able to convince yourself.

I want you to tell me what your definition of life is. Do you think this is unreasonable? If so, tell me why it is unreasonable. If it is not unreasonable, answer the question.

 

[Kylie]

Unless you are willing to walk out the confinement of your traditional biological view. This discussion is meaningless to you. You better save energy and do not reply. I think you are still young and have time. Try to consider geology, which will definitely open your eyes.

So you are redefining things to mean what you want them to mean.

By that logic, I could say that the sun rising is the same thing as going to the toilet, provided I redefine "going to the toilet" to include "the sun is rising."

Your argument has not accomplished anything.

 

[juvenissun]

I want you to tell me what your definition of life is. Do you think this is unreasonable? If so, tell me why it is unreasonable. If it is not unreasonable, answer the question.

It is reasonable within a domain (the earth). It is too restricted because there are other systems outside the domain (space) behave the similar.

Deeper, yours (and most people's) definition may cause problems in some human behaviors.

 

[juvenissun]

So you are redefining things to mean what you want them to mean.

By that logic, I could say that the sun rising is the same thing as going to the toilet, provided I redefine "going to the toilet" to include "the sun is rising."

Your argument has not accomplished anything.

Yes, if you define things that operates in a system well enough, then the definitions are acceptable.

In your example, something obviously need to be explained. So it is not good enough, at the least, is not competed. It does not sound as easy as it appears. You need to have a pretty deep knowledge base in order to do that. My rock-alive model is undefeated because I have the whole petrology as a knowledge base behind it, and the challengers have none or very little.