Denial of evolution IV

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by Hercules Rockefeller, Oct 27, 2009.

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  1. Zenithar66 Registered Member

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    First off, im sure those hox genes dont control tightness of legs, size of heart and everthign else ive mentioned let alone the co ordination of there growth. Did you see any co ordination with those fruti flies..nope, we had heads coming out of eyes, and of course the legs had no blood supply, which means that the veins must be controlled by a differetn gene. either way, invoking hox genes simply means nothing becuase, there amount of growht would still have to be proportional, and judging by teh fruitly mutatons that is a serious long shot...of course ive yet too see girrafes fossils that look like anything drastic happened in there hox genes..(maybe we just havent found them yet?)




    this is very different since its not coevolution its co growth from a pre existing recipe. the coevolution involves long stretches of time where diffrent parts of the anatomy gain complementary mutations..which, for me at the moment, hard to swallow, but maybe im wrong, Ill just have to keep studying.




    well im glad that you are the first person to admit that indeed you do belive that these things had to keep up..everyone else just danced around it. Of course you have just admitted to invoking a miracle.
    Do you realise how many changes your talking about, over 6 mllino years, with only an average of 60 mutations per germline and most are in non coding regions do you know the task you are setting the mechanism?(that stat was for humans, but im sure it cant be much less or more for girrafes, of course im open to be proven wrong)
    How many times do you think the same mutations occured? since you obviosly think there were alot of failurs then teh same thing must have occured over and over...

    Its not as simple as simply claiming those others died, indeed how do you you test that many of those mutations happened and produced failed attempts? what would be the evidence for that.

    Since not all of the needed chagnes would be linked to the same hox gene then you are invoking a miracle(either way)..

    I see no strong evidence at all for this claim, and it gets worse a thousand fold when we talk about symbiosis or sexes etc, the problem gets so bad as to become biblical!

    I will adress this in a future thread should you wish to check it out..

    not to mention you obviously feel this is a common phenomenon.
    Did you see those italian wall lizards i posted on? One can only invoke faith when applying the mechanisms to that incident.
     
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  3. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Because it wasn't helpful enough to us. It is helpful to bees so they evolved UV vision.

    It's certainly not perfect - but again it's good ENOUGH. And that's all that matters.

    The eye is indeed pretty cool. It just doesn't numb my mind as it does yours.

    No, it's not, that's the point. There was a point in our evolution where people with better eyes survived, and people with worse eyes did not. The people with better eyes could see edible animals from farther away, could tell ripe apples from leaves, could tell turbid water from clear, could tell their way back to the tribe slightly better etc. The people with worse eyes could not, so they died.

    Nowadays, of course, we have glasses.


    Precisely! Selection of existing and new (i.e. mutated) genetic material.

    Yes, they did.

    Again, it only looks to you like a miracle because you see the outcome. Seeing a proto-giraffe with slightly less tight skin die isn't a miracle - but that's how the miracle in the long term works.

    Yep. And many animals likely had problems with that longer trachea. They all died. Only the ones that did not have problems survived.

    Again, those "miraculous events" are not miracles, they are miserable deaths for animals whose hearts could not stand the strain, whose skin grew edematous and ischemic, and whose brains did not get enough blood. The few that could became the next generation of proto-giraffes. Their necks, perhaps only an inch longer, were able to get even more food, and they survived.

    You seem to have this image of a modern giraffe being born from a zebra, with larger heart, better skin, better balance, larger vertebrae etc all ready formed, magically configured and ready to go. It doesn't happen like that. It takes literally millions of offspring to get one with a neck even slightly longer, then another million to get one with a slightly stronger heart. And that means it's going to be a long, long time before the NEXT longer neck comes along, because until that stronger heart can keep up with the animal's requirements, that next mutation can't happen.

    What is critical is that they can all happen one at a time over millions of years. No one step relies on the other happening at the same time.
     
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  5. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Well, flies don't have veins. But the really cool thing is that the legs work. The HOX genes said "build a leg here" and the rest of the genome said "oh, look, I see a leg here, better connect nerves, muscle anchors etc."

    Your not understanding how it works does not mean that it's a miracle. It just means that you don't understand how it works.

    Let's say it's 60 significant coding changes. That's one every 100,000 years! That's a lot of time to evaluate literally billions of mutations and find one - just one - that helps you survive just a little bit better.


    Absolutely! And the failures FAR outweighed the successes.

    That's simple. They died before reproducing. That's the test for whether they failed.

    You keep saying that. But you should realize that you are the only one who thinks that this requires faith, or is a miracle. And incredulity or misunderstanding is a poor proof of a miracle.
     
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  7. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    Zenithar66:

    You should read specifically about the haploid archegonium, and how it has been preserved in land plants' haploid phase as they transitioned their diploid phase from non-vascular stalks, to vascular rootless stalks, to vascular rooted stalks, to vascular seed plants, all of which retained the archegonium as a necessary organelle for reproduction. Once you've read up on that, I might respond to further posts of yours. Show me your knowledge about the archegonium.
     
  8. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    Go and look in a mirror.
    Your spinal cord grows at the same rate as your spinal column.

    Heart size is, in part, determined by blood pressure, it is one of the reasons that hypertension can become problematic if left uncontrolled.

    I propose a new theory.
    I call it the lazy designer - and I think that there are a lot more things in nature that scream lazy, than there are intelligence.

    In so far as skin goes
    Have you handled a womans breasts?
    Are you familiar with the concept of stretch marks?
    Bones can outgrow muscles, it happens some times at puberty, it results in discomfort, but the muscles stretch with the bones, then grow to accomodate them. It's what muscles and veins do, they grow. So muscle, skin, and veins are non-starters in this issue.

    The term is hypertensive, not hypersensitive.
    It's a tautology - the answer is 'of course', because those Giraffes who were insufficiently hypertensive to cope with the slightly lengthened neck, would be classed as being hypotensive, and less successful.

    This is an argument from personal incredulity, you can not believe that it happened, therefore you believe it could not happen.
    Meanwhile you miss the obvious point that perhaps the leg strapping pre-existed as some other structure, that served an entirely different purpose, and evolution co-opted it.
    Or, alternatively, maybe female giraffes find bruising in the lower legs unattractive.

    Again, you're arguing from personal incredulity.
    But more to the point you're completely missing the point - I only made two assumptions to build a long necked giraffe from a short necked giraffe. That their physical characteristics (neck length, and blood pressure) exist on a normal distribution, and that having a longer neck provides some sort of advantage.

    This isn't speculation, it's deductive logic - more to the point, it's deductive logic that provides testable predictions.

    I dealt specifically with the issues you raised in your posts to that point - blood pressure, and nerve growth.
    If my response was inadequate, it's because the post I was responding to was inadequate.

    There was no faith involved in my post, it was deductive logic, looking at things from a ground-up perspective. My job involves a substantial amount of statistics, and I have cross trained accross several fields, which often leads me to insights that I consider obvious, that those around me miss.

    I doubt it, but I would be happy to be proven wrong.

    Once again, to assert that I should have setout to explain every aspect of the evolution is dishonest and fallicous. I responded to your post, and addressed the issues you had raised, if you found my post to be lacking, then it was only because your original post was equally lacking.

    I find shifts in population statistics far from miraculous, because that is the only thing I described in my post - the migration of population statistics.

    Nonsense.
    I don't suppose that having high bloodpressure is any more advantage for our proto-giraffe than it is for me. In fact, I would wager that being hypertensive is probably every bit of deliterious for our proto-girrafe as it is for me. That's the point that you missed though, having high blood pressure only becomes advantageous to our proto-giraffe if it has a longer neck then average.
     
  9. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    Yes - I believe I mentioned Hox genese in my post - a mutation in Hox genes in fruit flies can result in things such as legs growing on heads in place of antennae.

    The simple fact of the matter is that yes, there are a some genes that control the large scale distribution of body parts and such.
     
  10. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    We do. It's called Aphakia. [ur;=http://starklab.slu.edu/humanUV.htm]W. Stark[/url] seems to have written a number of articles on human UV vision.
    The wikipedia article suggests that it may have been responsible for Monet's sense of colour.
    Yes, at this point it requires cataract surgery, however, the point is that you're asking the wrong question.
    The question is not "Why haven't we evolved UV vision".
    But "Why did we evolve coreneal pigments to block UV light in the first place".
    The answer to that question is probably environmental, and could be found in Africa, or it might be as a result of something that happened 60 million years ago.
     
    Last edited: Jul 8, 2011
  11. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    At this Juncture, it seems appropriate to share this:
    Storm: The Animated Movie
    I suppose some sort of disclaimer regarding the language Tim Minchin uses some times is appropriate.
     
  12. Zenithar66 Registered Member

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    so they evovled it becuase it was helpfull? i thought it would be the other way around?




    well, considering you said it was quite subjective i dont think you can say its CERTAINLY not perfect, your logic, not mine.


    pretty cool! understatement of the cetury, I advice you read biology of the eye, then your mind will be numbed!!



    people with beter eyes see beter? ahh that explains everthing,






    yep and coevolution of thos parts. Oh and simply stating that new mutations occured means nothing. Indeed there could be other factors at work considering epigenetics and how large scale changes can be made without mutations, i personally do not think there is even nearly enoug evidence to suggest that such processes coevolved a girrafe and i personally think its invoking a miracle.


    oh , great, now its a fact! painful



    umm no, i dont simply see the outcome i ponder teh proces you are invoking and call it miraculous, becuase it is.


    so the theory would predict! i cant go on just so stories thanks..



    [/quote]Again, those "miraculous events" are not miracles, they are miserable deaths for animals whose hearts could not stand the strain, whose skin grew edematous and ischemic, and whose brains did not get enough blood. The few that could became the next generation of proto-giraffes. Their necks, perhaps only an inch longer, were able to get even more food, and they survived.
     
  13. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    Now you're just being silly. Of course it can happen - on an individual basis, it can happen at any time, it's just unlikely to survive to pass the trait on to offspring, and so be considered to be a population trait rather than a sample trait (for lack of a better way of putiting it).

    What (I imagine) Billyon means is that it could happen at an individual level, but it's unlikely to become a population trait for a long time, or until something unusual happens that forces rapid adaptation.
     
  14. Zenithar66 Registered Member

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    is this supposed to prove something?


    i like how you only addressed the heart there, very nice..avoided the important issues..


    wow, you truly must be unstudied to think this of nature...i would guess your cases are ones of personal incredulity. I am studying nature at macro and micro and all I can say is I am literally glad i got a chance just to live here. Its that amazing, balanced, efficeint, technological, beautiful etc etc. anything we have ever made has alrady been done twice over by mother nature, ask the biomimicry people just how "lazy" a designer mother nature is....what an horrific worldview imo


    a non starter becuae they grow? wow, so becuase muscles nowadays grow to a suitable size that is predertimined then girrafes muscles etc could coevovle? ok..of course you cherry picked again i see. Yes or no, do you believe the girrafe has undergone a significant amoutn of coevolution of parts?


    you answred nothing , but stated obvius facts of survivlal.


    Unfortunatly your wrong, i can accept it if i see enough reason too.
    And i suppose becuase you believe it it did happen? becuase indeed it is a belief...i have used my own deductive logic and deducted that.

    first off, its a story to fit what you think occured, second I highly highly doubt they had such a clearly specialised adaptiion in the past. But the point is not if they did, its how many things had to coevolve.
    What adavantage woudl such leg strapping have to an animal with regular pressrue in ints circulatory system, if anythign it would drasticaly slow blood flow..dosent sound adavantageous to me...anywho its simply specualtion on your part. Oh and sexual selectin simply picks whats there, it dosent lead to higher complexities neccacarily, and it doesnt addres the coevolution issue,


    well you need to make more assumptions becuase you missed alot of other things that would have had to coevolve. its not incredulity its my opinion based on evidence and study. Just becuase someone dosent accept somethign dosent mean there incredulous. You hold a belief about what occured based on shoddy evidence..simple


    fine deductive logic, yet you are still speculating using it,

    many theories have had testable predictions only to be thrown out later. either way, thats how science works. ok, what do you think is the best evidence that such co evolution is so common throughout nature via the proposed mechanisms?(unfair question? dont answer if you dont want to)

    nope you dealt with those you wanted too, and seriosly the whole "post was inadequate" thing is purely childish, why even respond if it was so?
    come on,


    yes, so when you speculate it is deductive logic, but i am incredulous?
    infortunatly you indeed hold faith since it cannot be proven that such events actaully occured. ie accruing of complimentary mutatons over such long periods.





    nope I was not asking to explain all of evolution, re read my post..


    yes becuase you trivializing the whole thing by simply calling it shifts in population statistics make you sleep better at ngiht i take it? iwont do such a thing, i will keep digging.
     
  15. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    They evolved it because a mutation produced an increased sensitivity to UV, and natural selection preserved it because it was helpful in helping the organism reproduce. Bees that can see more variations in flowers can return more food to the hive.

    I have. I suggest you learn more about eyes of other species; your eyes may be opened (pun intended.)

    Everything "coevolved" in that every single mutation we have preserved was based on other, earlier mutations. Our muscles could not work without blood; our blood could not circulate without a circulatory system; that system could not transport oxygen without a heart and lungs; our heart and lungs could not work without a brain. A religious type, ignorant of biology, could easily exclaim "therefore it is IMPOSSIBLE for any of these things to exist without the other! We were created all at once!"

    A wiser person would do a little research and realize that there are animals with hearts but without circulatory systems. There are animals with hearts but no lungs. There are animals with nervous systems but no heart. Thus the claim that "everything must have evolved together" is proven false.

    That's fine. A person raised in the jungle might think a cellphone was a miracle. He's as right as you are - and both of you can believe whatever you like.

    Oh, it could. But without the stronger heart, the longer necked animal would die and not reproduce. So the mutation would not propagate, like 99.999% of mutations.

    Not at all! They don't happen in order. But until it is survivable, the mutation stops there. Once it IS survivable (say, in an animal that now has a slightly stronger heart) then it is preserved.

    What components do you claim have been added to a giraffe's neck?
     
  16. Zenithar66 Registered Member

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    and i suppose the requisite brain functions co evolved with this?
    can such a mutation causign uv vision happenin one go? and if not, can we simply presume such stepwise formatinon of uv vision would have an advantage all the way, specifcally with the brain having to coevolve ?




    that is not true, since coevolution is not the building of muattions in oneplace, but the complimentary occurence over long periouds..also coevolution is defined as predator prey, pollinaters and flowers etc..

    [/quote] Our muscles could not work without blood; our blood could not circulate without a circulatory system; that system could not transport oxygen without a heart and lungs; our heart and lungs could not work without a brain. A religious type, ignorant of biology, could easily exclaim "therefore it is IMPOSSIBLE for any of these things to exist without the other! We were created all at once!"
     
  17. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    Yes - growth of the bone and growth of the nerve are controled by the same factors.

    Get real. Stop trolling.
    I used one as an example.

    Argumentum ad hominem, this is a science forum. Address my argument, not me.

    In the context of what I said, this statement is bordering on nonsensical.

    But mother nature is lazy, she keeps reusing the same basic designs over and over again.

    No, and I have made that abundantly clear - I agree with the others that you are abusing the term co-evolution.
    Do you suggest that the growth of a Giraffe from a new-born to an adult is somehow different?
    Do you suggest that the mechanisms that ensure that a newborn giraffe has sufficient arteries, trachea, muscles, nerves, and so on and so forth, can not be applied to a Giraffe with an above average neck length? Because that is the only thing that I am proposing.

    And in so doing answered everything, because the obvious fact is the answer (ot at least, that's part of what I'm suggesting).

    It's you're, not your, you're is the abbreviatead form of you are, your indicates possesion. I am wrong, but I do not own a wrong.

    And no, I am not wrong - your state,emt is precisely an argument from incredulity.

    I don't believe that it happened, for me this is not a question of faith. The evidence available to me supports the logical deduction that it happened, and from that I infer that it probably happened that way.

    Then your decutive logic has led you awry.

    This is pure bullshit. I didn't say it must have happened that way, I simply offered two alternatives to your assertion that it could only have happened in response to blood pressure.

    Argument from personal incredulity - you can not see how it might have been advantageous in some way, therefore you assume that it wasn't.
    Meanwhile, you miss the point that it might have been advantageous to a proto-giraffe ancestor, or its common ancestor from a nearby relative. There are literally, a myriad of possibilities.

    I don't recall suggesting otherwise.

    And?
    Giraffe has random mutation that leads to increased skin or muscle density in its legs that act as strapping.
    Consequently the veins in our giraffes legs are capable of handling higher bloodpressures without bruising.
    Female giraffes who dislike bruising find this attractive, the mutation leads to more success breeding, the mutation is passed on to offspring, and eventually becomes a population trait.

    There is no co-evolution issue.

    Only a bunch of stories made up by some religous folk who are afraid of what lies in the dark corners.

    No, I don't, because I observe that in the growth of giraffes, all of these red herrings that you keep bringing up are already addressed.

    The only mutation that's required to lead to a long neck is in the genes that control how fast the neck grows, however, those genes control all factors of how fast the neck grows.

    It is the very definition of incredulity.

    I believe nothing, however I infer much from the information available to me.

    Most of the points you have raised - with one possible exception, can be trivially explained by examining the factors that lead to growth from a newborn to an adult, because at its core, what we are discussing is simply a variation on that.

    Your misrepresenting what I said.

    My speculation is based in deductive logic and observation, and yes, you are incredulous.

    Yes, it can.

    Not what I said, you need to go back and re-read mine.

    I'm trivializing nothing, and you have provided no evidence that anything other than that has happened.
     
  18. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    They likely evolved before that, actually. Compound eyes see color by using color filters in each eye. The insect brain evolved the ability to use receptors with varying filters to see in color because it was advantageous to be able to see in color. Adding an additional color component was something its brain was already prepared to process - much the way that a woman with tetrachromatic receptors can see more colors without needing any new brain connections. If you cause mice (which normally only have two types of color receptors) to generate a third through genetic engineering, their brains can process the additional colors as well without any "co-mutation" requirement.

    Yes, as sometimes happens in humans (although it's just another blue receptor, not a UV receptor.)


    You keep changing your definitions.

    If you define "coevolution" as evolutionary changes that support each other, then it is present everywhere. If you define it as changes that must occur at exactly the same time, then it happens very rarely (if ever.)

    Exactly! That's why it takes so long to produce a useful mutation - and why, once it happens, it spreads so fast. 99.9999% of mutations are destructive.

    Agreed. If you define evolution as changes that happen at exactly the same time, then they are exceedingly unlikely.
     
  19. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    Sensitivity to certain frequencies of light is a matter of chemistry, not neurology.
     
  20. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    The S-cone is sensitive down to 400nm, but the cornea has pigments in it that block the UV before it reaches the retina, and I can think of several evolutionary advantages to us for this - which you can probably understand if you've ever looked directly at a black light.

    This was interesting:
    http://neuronresearch.net/vision/files/photopiceffic.htm
     
    Last edited: Jul 9, 2011
  21. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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  22. Zenithar66 Registered Member

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    and veins? muscles, tendons, lymph system, nerves too?


    if you think stating a fact is trolling then indeed i am trolling,


    oh please , you have cherry picked mine? AND addressed me so i believe that is called hippocrisy


    you have not disproved your incredulity ie, i dont understand something so there for i attribute it to "lazy" design, what an odd thing to say about nature imo.

    Oh, but those body plans are put to use is such uncountable and myriad ways, modifications of every archetypal plan give nature her pallet. There is archetypal forms, but there is such variation that yout point really says nothign at all except that nature is efficient since it uses a solid base in endless ways for purposes that we are still and alwasy will be discovering!


    OH im abusing the term, how terrible! its the only term i can use for parts that co evolve over long periods..unles there is a better term?




    if you got this from anything i said then i cant help you.


    Oh...that explains...that




    nope, i have weighed the evidence i have seen so far(i notice you chose not to link me up to anything, your call.) and deducted that it simply dosent hold up, ie, the extrapolation of what we observe now is strethed way to far.

    You dont believe it happened? so you know ? indeed it is faith, whether or not you want to admit that. Do you think there is no faith in what you deducted?






    I really dont remembering asserting such a thing becuase if i did i admit it was silly.


    and you CAN see so therefore assume that it was.
    And your right i didnt consider the potential advantages closely enough but i cant think of any at the moment since(surly) it would give terribel blood flow to the lower legs when the veins arent adapted to such force?
    Of course thinking up advantages to suit what youthink happened dosent really count as much.

     
  23. Zenithar66 Registered Member

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