I know it would be mere speculation on your part, but if "fish" is a kind, and Noah had the basic "fish" kind on his ark, what do you think it looked like? Which extant fish would you say it most closely resembled? Was it bony or cartilaginous? Did it have a jaw? What was it's basic body plan?
Do you think this might be the first time Dragon hears of jawless fish?
Because the oldest fossils or newest fossils in every strata is fully formed, from the beginning of the strata to its end.
What do you mean "fully formed"? Where does evolutionary theory predict anything that isn't?
The beginning of the next strata is fully formed, from its beginning to its end. No exception ever noted.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
There was no transition from RNA to DNA, that's why it's still debated.
No. It's still debated because the origin of DNA genomes happened a long time ago, only left circumstantial evidence, and consequently it's very hard to figure out what happened and how. We'll probably never know for sure how.
Because it has never been observed, so has no basis in factual evidence at all, merely someone's belief of what occurred, the same thing you disparage about religion is it not? What, not going to hold your evolution to the same factual basis you hold religion to?
When was the last time I disparaged anything about religion? Are you sure you are talking to me? I demand evidence for
scientific claims. I don't care what god you believe on what basis, but if you make a statement about the material world, you'd better be prepared to back it up.
Also: you need to learn what a "factual basis" is. Hint: directly witnessing an event is not required to infer that event occurred.
There is no proof any simple form of life evolved into more complex. As a matter of fact every scientific observation of existing life shows it merely replicates itself, with basic changes in the order of code, leading to appearance changes and nothing more.
Meaningless statements and nothing more. Where does an "appearance change" end and an increase in complexity begin? Is
multicellularity one?
And no, chemicals combining into larger chemicals does not constitute proof that life itself has ever done this. All biological life replicates, one and all, it does not form from scratch every time. Chemicals once they bond into certain compounds, do not replicate, never did.
Except they do. Not to mention that
life is made of chemicals. The RNA that makes your precious proteins is chemically no different from the RNA synthesised in a lab.
They simply add what exists to their chemical bonds.
I'm trying and failing to find meaning in this sentence.
Like I said, when you get life from dirt, let me know. I don't even ask that you merely use gasses and liquids, after all, we are formed from the dust of the earth, so have at it.
Define life, please. I'm asking this seriously.
I am going to have to agree here that there is some evidence of common descent among species. But that, in itself, is not evidence for evolution nor for how life got here and achieved complexity in the first place.
Common design from an ID can also cause similar patterns in unrelated systems.
Can. But it by no means
has to. In contrast, there is only one pattern classical evolution (not counting horizontal gene transfer and hybrid speciation) can cause, and it's a nested hierarchy.
If life did not fit into a nested hierarchy (within a margin of error, as no estimate of relationships is perfect), the simple branching model of common descent would be falsified. In fact, as you rightly point out, it
is a very difficult concept to apply to prokaryotes, which swap genes all over the place.
(And then there are viruses, which may not fit into the classification of cellular life forms at all. I don't know a whole lot about viral phylogenetics, but my impression is that they're really... different.)
Is there a pattern that would falsify ID?
"The phylogenetic trees for the gene families are not consistently nested, as would be expected in the case of allo-tetraploidy or two widely spaced auto-tetraploidy events. Finally, tree topologies of genes within paralogy blocks are not always congruent, indicating that the process of gene loss and rediploidization spanned the duplication events."
(Paramvir Dehal, Jeffrey L. Boore, "Two Rounds of Whole Genome Duplication in the Ancestral Vertebrate," PLoS Biology, Vol. 3(10):1700-1708 (October 2005).)
Do you understand this paragraph?
Here, the authors are discussing the
nature of the vertebrate genome duplications. (The strongest evidence for the
fact of the two duplications is the way whole blocks of related genes are often present in four copies in tetrapod genomes. In fact, when the
Florida lancelet genome was published, those who worked on it found that an awful lot of such blocks existed in single copies of this distant relative of ours.)
They are giving reasons why they think the two events were close in time rather than far apart. It's a well-known problem in phylogenetics that closely spaced branching events can make correct trees difficult to reconstruct. It's because they leave very little time for distinguishing characters to evolve on either branch before they split again. Let's take this hypothetical tree of four paralogous genes, where coloured blobs represent mutations:
The red mutations are the only data that can correctly group A with B. Likewise for the blue dots and C and D.
Every other blob in this diagram is noise. Noise can make spurious connections. In the above case, A split from B very soon after both split from C and D. There is much more noise than signal, and it's likely that a treebuilding method would find the wrong tree or no tree at all for these four genes.
(Incidentally, this is one of the problems plagueing the study of deep animal phylogeny.)
