Well, duh...

[The Barbarian]

Evolution: That Famous ‘March of Progress’ Image Is Just Wrong
New research shows animal evolution often involves losing genes and becoming less complex.

I suppose 140 years late isn't too bad. This brings up a really important topic, though. The vast majority of people who think they hate evolution, have no idea what it actually is.
Evolution: That Famous ‘March of Progress’ Image Is Just Wrong

 

[Hank77]

Hmm...interesting.

Sounds very much like what my grandson's old fifth grade science book says and that was from 4 yrs. ago. I would quote what it says about bacteria mutation and penicillin resistance but I don't want to take the time so this is just a portion. Note: what's no longer being controlled is the production of the chemical penicillinase.

Penicillin-resistant bacteria already had the DNA information for the "new" features present; the mutation takes away the ability to control how this information is used.

Mutation almost always causes loss of information not gain.

EDIT: that was 4 not 10 yrs. ago

 

[public hermit]

I may have missed this in the article, but do we know what triggers the difference between complex gene development vs. gene loss? Is it supposed to be completely randomn, or is there some mechanism or context in which one occurs instead of the other?

 

[dzheremi]

Evolution: That Famous ‘March of Progress’ Image Is Just Wrong
New research shows animal evolution often involves losing genes and becoming less complex.

I suppose 140 years late isn't too bad. This brings up a really important topic, though. The vast majority of people who think they hate evolution, have no idea what it actually is.
Evolution: That Famous ‘March of Progress’ Image Is Just Wrong

Yep. My field, linguistics, which grew up in tandem with biology and tends to borrow from/share a lot of terminology with it (e.g., we speak of language families, genetic relationships that indicate common descent, etc.), is perhaps an easier place to make this same point. I have found that people who are against what they think biological evolution is will often ask "why aren't we some kind of super-'evolved' new species by now, after thousands of years as homo sapiens?", but appear to have no problem with the idea of language becoming simpler over time, which is often true in the strict sense of losing features -- just compare what remains of the case system of Modern English with the considerably more robust Old English case system. Granted, most people who complain about this don't really mean it that way (William Safire et al. didn't get famous by complaining that we don't speak Old English anymore), but it's still an example of evolution over time involving the loss through transformation of certain earlier modes of packaging information, which many laypeople people would see as a devolution (however it should be pointed out as well that in the area of linguistic typology, the opposite switch, from being a more analytic language to being a more synthetic language also happens, as happened in the lifespan of Egyptian, for instance).

It's not a perfect analogy by any means, but just try to get some old codger to stop talking about how teenagers' speech is, like, totally, literally ruining the English language. It's something that a lot of people seem to feel a lot more proprietary outrage over ("hey, buddy, I speak a language every day!"), compared to discussing the evolution of some biological organism. (Outside of the present board, of course.)

 

[inquiring mind]

Nice post. I just want to make a couple comments concerning the article and misunderstandings about evolution. First, regarding “It is important to make it clear that evolution is not a theory about the origin of life.” How true, but only because they can’t, imo, many evolutionists never work backward searching for anything other than a naturalistic beginning of life.

Second, regarding “No, your great-great-great-ancestor was not a monkey.” How true, but evolutionists like that common ancestor thing, can’t give it up, and try their best to make connections that make it appear so. You know, the old ‘we started out as something neither man, nor monkey, but an ape-like being that branched into the two (and yes, the common genetic sequence shows it). They’re never going to consider creation and a silo-type progression (micro evolution, variation and adaptation within Kinds, etc), possibly with a utilization of the same (or percentage of) building blocks initially.

 

[The Barbarian]

I may have missed this in the article, but do we know what triggers the difference between complex gene development vs. gene loss?

How does "complex gene development" differ from "simple gene development?" New genes come about through two major processes.

The first known was gene duplication, followed by mutation. Lots of that in the literature.

But it turns out that it also happens by mutations in non-coding DNA (what creationists call "Junk DNA") that converts it to a gene that can code for a protein. This seems to happen surprisingly often.
Retroviruses facilitate the rapid evolution of the mammalian placenta

Is it supposed to be completely randomn,

The mutations arrive randomly, but some bacteria have evolved a mechanism that raises the rate of mutations when it's beneficial, and there is some evidence that they also have some ability to mutate in beneficial ways in specific environments. That's kind of a surprise. Luria and Delbruck shared a Nobel for showing that favorable mutations don't appear in response to need.

or is there some mechanism or context in which one occurs instead of the other?

There doesn't seem to be a developmental program for that. And much of the simplification we see in evolution does not involve loss of genes, but changes in gene expression. For example, the simpler shoulder joints, necks, jaws, etc. seen in mammals, compared to their reptilian ancestors, did not involve loss of genes, but changes in gene expression.

 

[public hermit]

How does "complex gene development" differ from "simple gene development?" New genes come about through two major processes.

The first known was gene duplication, followed by mutation. Lots of that in the literature.

But it turns out that it also happens by mutations in non-coding DNA (what creationists call "Junk DNA") that converts it to a gene that can code for a protein. This seems to happen surprisingly often.
Retroviruses facilitate the rapid evolution of the mammalian placenta



The mutations arrive randomly, but some bacteria have evolved a mechanism that raises the rate of mutations when it's beneficial, and there is some evidence that they also have some ability to mutate in beneficial ways in specific environments. That's kind of a surprise. Luria and Delbruck shared a Nobel for showing that favorable mutations don't appear in response to need.



There doesn't seem to be a developmental program for that. And much of the simplification we see in evolution does not involve loss of genes, but changes in gene expression. For example, the simpler shoulder joints, necks, jaws, etc. seen in mammals, compared to their reptilian ancestors, did not involve loss of genes, but changes in gene expression.

That's really helpful, thanks.

 

[The Barbarian]

“It is important to make it clear that evolution is not a theory about the origin of life.” How true, but only because they can’t, imo, many evolutionists never work backward searching for anything other than a naturalistic beginning of life.

Darwin, for example, just supposed that God created the first living things:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Last sentence of On the Origin of Species, 1872

However, God says that nature brought forth life, as He recounts in Genesis. So, I guess it depends on whether or not you think the creation of nature counts as "naturalistic."

 

[The Barbarian]

Second, regarding “No, your great-great-great-ancestor was not a monkey.” How true, but evolutionists like that common ancestor thing, can’t give it up, and try their best to make connections that make it appear so.

No. Monkeys are far too evolved in their own ways to have given rise to humans.

You know, the old ‘we started out as something neither man, nor monkey, but an ape-like being that branched into the two (and yes, the common genetic sequence shows it).

You seem to be conflating "monkey" and "ape" in fact, monkeys are composed of two very different groups, only one of which (Old World monkeys) which gave rise to apes. But the common ancestor of monkeys and apes wasn't like any monkey or ape we see today.

They’re never going to consider creation and a silo-type progression (micro evolution, variation and adaptation within Kinds, etc), possibly with a utilization of the same (or percentage of) building blocks initially.

Because of the evidence. Genes, for example, show the same sort of family tree that Linnaeus first noticed long before evolution was realized.

Another reason the vast number of transitional forms between that which creationists call "kinds." If there was some limit to variation of living things, those transitionals would not exist.

 

[The Barbarian]

ep. My field, linguistics, which grew up in tandem with biology and tends to borrow from/share a lot of terminology with it (e.g., we speak of language families, genetic relationships that indicate common descent, etc.), is perhaps an easier place to make this same point. I have found that people who are against what they think biological evolution is will often ask "why aren't we some kind of super-'evolved' new species by now, after thousands of years as homo sapiens?", but appear to have no problem with the idea of language becoming simpler over time, which is often true in the strict sense of losing features -- just compare what remains of the case system of Modern English with the considerably more robust Old English case system.

I'm not very familiar with linguistics, but I'm wondering if this change has much to do with English-speakers having the habit of grabbing words from other languages and incorporating them into English.

And does the fact that we tend to nuance our expression by selecting from a wide number of (sorta) synonyms like "smell" "odor" "fragrance", "stench", etc. relate to this?

 

[inquiring mind]

Darwin, for example, just supposed that God created the first living things:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Last sentence of On the Origin of Species, 1872

When you read his comment, it sounds like ‘believed’ would be a stronger description than ‘supposed.’

However, God says that nature brought forth life, as He recounts in Genesis.

Actually, He says it both ways, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind” and “God made and created… every living kind”

So, I guess it depends on whether or not you think the creation of nature counts as "naturalistic."

Good point, sort of whether you want to take God out of the picture, or not.

 

[dzheremi]

I'm not very familiar with linguistics, but I'm wondering if this change has much to do with English-speakers having the habit of grabbing words from other languages and incorporating them into English.

I wouldn't think so. That's not a phenomenon that is unique to English, of course (though the degree to which we do so may be greater or lesser than others), and it's not very usual that such borrowing would have any effect on the morphological typology of the words themselves (which is what cases are about). Like we can borrow a foreign word with something approximating its native pronunciation (that's how we got the 'French S' sound ʒ in words like 'pleasure' or 'leisure', even though that's not its own separate sound in English like it is in the Slavic languages and others), but it's much rarer to borrow a meaning-bearing morpheme (morphemes are things like -es/-s for plurals; they're not words in themselves, but they're parts of words that carry meaning in themselves and can be typologically arranged and predicted) such that it would introduce a new case. I know that we borrowed the -nik agentive suffix from Russian, for instance (words like "no-goodnik", meaning person who is up to no good), but that doesn't create a new 'agentive case' or even a productive agentive suffix for English nouns. Like you can't stick -nik on the end of English nouns more generally to create agentive nouns like you can in Russian -- e.g., xolodilnik 'refrigerator', from xolodniy (adj.) 'cold' + -nik agentive suffix, i.e. ~ 'cold-maker'. That's simply not how English nouns work, even though we have successfully borrowed that suffix to make 'Russian-sounding' words.

And does the fact that we tend to nuance our expression by selecting from a wide number of (sorta) synonyms like "smell" "odor" "fragrance", "stench", etc. relate to this?

Not directly, though this point reminds me a bit of the relation of English and French in Norman England. French, being the language of the nobility and upper class at the time, gave us words like beef to refer to a meal of animal flesh, while the Anglo-Saxon farmers who actually tended to the animals that became the beef (meal) called it nēat or cu, the Anglo-Saxon words for the animals (cu is the term for the adult female of the species, hence cow). This kind of pattern is found all around the world where diglossic situations exist (one language or variety is used for 'high status' functions like political speeches or religion, with another language or variety used for 'low status' functions, like everyday communications between non-elite people). Like if you're going to speak Arabic in a newscast, you're going to use the artificial 'Modern Standard' dialect that nobody actually speaks as a first language, while out in the street the people will be speaking Egyptian, Tunisian, Moroccan, or whatever other dialects, which are not even necessarily mutually intelligible on extreme ends of the spectrum (my Arabic professor in college once said that you'd be better off learning French to communicate in North Africa if you speak an Arabic dialect from the Gulf, because they're simply too far apart; I have no idea how true that is, though, since he was an American who had lived in the Gulf, not North Africa, for years). The same is absolutely true for English, and England proper is rather famous for its many dialects and accents, as satirized in this funny clip from the film Hot Fuzz:

 

[The Barbarian]

Darwin, for example, just supposed that God created the first living things:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Last sentence of On the Origin of Species, 1872

When you read his comment, it sounds like ‘believed’ would be a stronger description than ‘supposed.’

Maybe so. It seems to me, he just assumed that was the way it was, based on his religious upbringing.

However, God says that nature brought forth life, as He recounts in Genesis.

Actually, He says it both ways, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind” and “God made and created… every living kind”

Which means, they are just two ways of saying the same thing. Hence nature is the way He created living things. Still does, as the evolution of new species demonstrates.

 

[The Barbarian]

. Like if you're going to speak Arabic in a newscast, you're going to use the artificial 'Modern Standard' dialect that nobody actually speaks as a first language, while out in the street the people will be speaking Egyptian, Tunisian, Moroccan, or whatever other dialects, which are not even necessarily mutually intelligible on extreme ends of the spectrum

Is it like Latin, where its role as an ecclesiastical language codified it into "Church Latin?"

Or do calls to prayer and public services all use the vernacular, as the Catholic Church now does? (I admit that I miss the Tridentine Mass)

 

[dzheremi]

Is it like Latin, where its role as an ecclesiastical language codified it into "Church Latin?"

Or do calls to prayer and public services all use the vernacular, as the Catholic Church now does? (I admit that I miss the Tridentine Mass)

I can't speak for the religion of most of the Arabic-speaking people (obviously), but I can understand the Islamic call to prayer, so I'm assuming it's in standard Arabic (fus-ha), which is also what we use for the readings in church. (Though sometimes I have noticed people slipping into the Egyptian dialect by accident, because fusha is pretty different than Egyptian and difficult.) MSA is heavily based around the classical language, anyway.

I would imagine that for the Muslims, it is a priority to use proper Qur'anic Arabic (as in the exact form recorded in their Qur'an, which is supposedly recorded in the dialect of the Quraish, Muhammad's own tribe, so it's neither MSA nor in any 'national' dialect...but see the next sentence), since that has some theological importance to them. Nevertheless, variant readings were supposedly the impetus for the caliph Uthman's canonization of the Qur'anic text, which according to legend involved the burning of all preexisting records of the text, so that they would have one standard text throughout the Muslim world. As Christians we don't really have that problem, since we don't have that attachment to the Arabic language in the first place (not in the Coptic Orthodox Church, anyway, or the Syriac churches; I don't know what the Melkites or others who come from the Arabized Greeks in the Egypt, the Holy Land, or Antioch would say to this).

 

[-57]

I may have missed this in the article, but do we know what triggers the difference between complex gene development vs. gene loss? Is it supposed to be completely randomn, or is there some mechanism or context in which one occurs instead of the other?

Complex gene development is impossible when one considers the randomness, amount of places for a mutation to occur and the rareness of so-called beneficial mutations.

On the other hand when you breed "kinds"...you mix the genetics and often leave out a lot of the ancestral genetics. This is pretty much how we got the variety of animals after departing from Noahs Ark.

 

[-57]

But it turns out that it also happens by mutations in non-coding DNA (what creationists call "Junk DNA") that converts it to a gene that can code for a protein. This seems to happen surprisingly often.

I believe a creationist would say "junk DNA" coded for something at one time. De-evolution is currently eroding away our DNA. Current human DNA is no longer as perfect as Adam was.

 

[dzheremi]

I believe a creationist would say "junk DNA" coded for something at one time. De-evolution is currently eroding away our DNA. Current human DNA is no longer as perfect as Adam was.

How can you have de-evolution if you don't believe in evolution in the first place?

 

[-57]

How can you have de-evolution if you don't believe in evolution in the first place?

Because it's possible to lose genetic information. To build a complex and sophisticated DNA code to become more complex and sophisticated by a process in which random chance is in the equation....won't happen.

 

[The Barbarian]

I believe a creationist would say "junk DNA" coded for something at one time.

They might, but they'd be demonstrably wrong. Much of it is random repeats that never coded for any protein. And a lot of it is functional in that it serves to regulate gene expression in various ways.

De-evolution is currently eroding away our DNA.

There is no "de-evolution." That's common superstition. There is just evolution. (change in allele frequency in a population over time)

Current human DNA is no longer as perfect as Adam was.

That's a supersition, too. God never said Adam was perfect. In fact there are hundreds of important alleles that make humans better that neither Adam nor Eve had. Would you like me to show you how we know?