Facts of vs Theory of Evolution

Discussion in 'Religion' started by Dinosaur, Jun 5, 2014.

  1. matthew809 Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    480
    Or, maybe.... it's a squirrel that is evolving a different appendage, as opposed to a "new" appendage. What I mean is that this species is coded for so much more than it's current expression of DNA. If it is evolving a wing, then the DNA code for this wing already exists.

    I would like to see some evolutionists try to artificially select for tentacle-like structures to replace it's tail. How much time do you need?
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,057
    If you can't test it, your prediction is not on the same footing as the scientific (evolutionary) prediction.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,635
    ?? What's the difference? An arm changes into a wing (as in bats) or into a flipper (as in a dolphin) or goes away completely. Or something else gets used as an arm (prehensile tails, noses in elephants.) You can call it whatever you like; evolution doesn't care about what it's called.

    Incorrect. The DNA codes for an arm. It slowly changes into DNA that can code for a wing or a flipper.

    Put it this way. There is pretty much zero chance that you will wake up one day with a tail and flippers instead of arms and legs - even though whales and humans share an ancestor. That's because we don't have the DNA for flippers; we have the DNA for arms. We still share some very basic DNA that all mammals do, though.

    Well, we know it can be done in 40 million years. That's how long it took from the time that old world monkeys (i.e. us) and new world monkeys split off from each other to develop such a structure. New world monkeys like spider monkeys have prehensile (i.e. tentacle-like) tails. No doubt we could do it a lot faster with selective breeding.
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. Grumpy Curmudgeon of Lucidity Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,876
    matthew809

    Evolution is descent with modification(mutations mostly)tested by survival to reproduce. You received about 70 unique(to you)mutations from your parents. This is well established fact in every study of gene sequences. These mutations are sequences your parents DNA did not contain, only the gametes that formed you has them. Most of those mutations are to inactive DNA in your genome and have little or no effect. Some can prove fatal, either by immediate death or lifelong debilitating disease. A very few might give you a slight advantage in the reproducing game(the only game in town, as far as evolutionary theory is concerned). Just the combination of your parents genes and a beneficial mutation might be responsible for Angelina Joule level good looks, or the tail of a Peacock. DNA contains old, unused sequences, you have one for a tail, there are more people born with one than you know, quiet surgical removal in early childhood being the norm in the developed world.

    But consider this, goats have never in their long history of evolution produced spider silk, yet goats exist today that do that very thing. Simply by identifying the spider genes responsible for drag line silk(the strong, non sticky kind used for drag lines and support structure), isolating those genes and splicing that gene in the section of the goat's DNA responsible for the proteins in the goat's milk we can now separate spider drag line silk from that goat's milk. In massive, industrially significant amounts. I think we know a good bit about DNA and you are just wrong.

    Human's and chimps have the same DNA(97%), it is the 3% that developed between our last common ancestor(8-13 million years ago)that is unique to humans, and the 3% that developed in the chimps during the same period is unique to them(we do not share it). If it was as you describe our DNA would have to be identical, 100%. It is not.

    When you do not understand the ramifications of a theory(in the case evolution's ramifications for DNA)it no wonder you get the wrong idea about it.

    Grumpy

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  8. matthew809 Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    480
    But how much do we really know? I could make a printout of Windows XP in the form of zeros and ones, and through trial and error figure out the ramifications of rearranging parts of the binary code. I could even eventually somewhat identify and loosely categorize whole sections of the code as pertaining to certain broad functions of the operating system. But I could never understand this binary code in any way similar to the way that the programmers do.

    So how do we really know whether or not squirrel DNA already has the instructions to evolve wings, for example?
     
  9. Grumpy Curmudgeon of Lucidity Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,876
    matthew809

    Squirrels don't have wings, flying squirrels have flaps of skin between their front and back legs and can only glide, those squirrel like creatures that did develop wings we call bats. Bats and squirrels are remarkably genetically similar otherwise.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Squirrels do not have DNA code for bat wings, but they might develop that or similar code for them in a few million years of gliding, if that gliding gives an advantage to that species of squirrel. That is likely the same reason bats developed wings long ago. Bat wings is just an optimized version of a flying squirrel's flaps of skin, as can be seen in the photo above.

    Grumpy

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  10. matthew809 Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    480
    Other possible options:

    1) Bats and squirrels are similar due to re-use of code from the designer, but they actually do not share a common ancestor. Therefore squirrels may have code for wings, but they may be different from the wing-code for bats.
    2) Present-day squirrels may share an ancestor with bats, but might no longer have the code for wings due to genetic deterioration.
    3) Maybe squirrels do have the code for evolving wings, but this code is not recognized as such (compared to bat wings) because it is in a dormant state.
    4)etc.... use your imagination
     
  11. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,057
    Again, how do you define "deterioration"?
     
  12. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,635
    Good example. You do not have to understand anything to make changes to the code - and evolution (mutation + natural selection) does not have to "understand" DNA to make changes to its code. Through enough trial and error you get what works.
    It has all the instructions it needs, just as Windows has all the 1's and 0's you need to make your changes. Of course that doesn't mean you can do it without a lot of trial and error.
     
  13. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,635
    Since they have a lot of identical DNA (even non-coding sections) that is extremely unlikely. They share a placental-mammal ancestor with us.
    "Deterioration" is another way of saying "evolution."
    There's lots of dormant DNA in all of us, because almost all organisms have previous traits that have been "turned off." Tails on humans would be one such example; they occasionally reappear.
    Imagination is great, but you have to subject it to the scientific process before anyone will take you seriously.
     
  14. usmanishaquecdz Banned Banned

    Messages:
    6
    Agreed with Jeeves
     
  15. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    54,036
    Did you know we have genes for yolk production? Only they have been made inactive with disuse. So that proves we evolved from an egg-laying ancestor.
     
  16. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,478
    my ears were burning..
     
  17. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,635
    Human fetuses still have (and use) a yolk sack; indeed, it is critical to early development of human embryos.
     
  18. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    54,036
    But it contains no yolk.

    "... but we know that there was an important transition in the mammalian lineage: we had to have shifted from producing eggs in which yolk was the primary source of embryonic nutrition to a state where the embryo acquired its nutrition from a direct interface with maternal circulation, the placenta."

    "...Taken together, these data tell a story. Lactation evolved first, representing a gradual shift in parental investment from storage of yolk in eggs to later, post-hatching care. This reduced selective constraints on yolk production — three genes were overkill for the level of output needed — and was permissive in allowing the gradual decay of the VIT genes. Viviparity and placentation then made the yolk proteins more and more superfluous, as embryos became more and more reliant on simply tapping directly into the maternal blood supply. The process represents a pattern of change away from stockpiling massive quantities of nutritional supplies for future growth, to a more efficient just-in-time delivery system.

    The story is all right there in your genes. You’re walking around carrying the crumbling record of hundreds of millions of years of history — all we need is the tools to extract it and read it."

    PZ Myers

    http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/03/19/reproductive-history-writ-in-t/
     
  19. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,635
    It actually does. In humans it's called vitelline fluid, and serves to nourish the embryo before the embryo has a competent circulatory system. However in humans it functions only for a very short time (days) whereas in birds it functions almost until emergence from the egg.
     
  20. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    54,036
    No doubt there is a fluid, but it's not the yolk protein vitellogenin, which mammals do not produce, even though we have the genes.
     
  21. wellwisher Banned Banned

    Messages:
    5,160
    Fossil data, although useful to evolution, presents a conceptual problem for evolution. Fossil data is discontinuous data and therefore will lead to a discontinuous theory, by default. In other words, if the process of evolution was continuous, for the sake of argument, but only partial and discontinuous data existed, one may not be able to prove continuous, but rather the data would support a discontinuous theory.

    As an analogy, which you can do as an experiment, make a complex shape with popcorn in a field somewhere. Allow some time to pass so the birds, bugs, and little animals eat away at the shape until all there is left is 1% of the original shape. One may not be able to infer the original shape from what is left, since it is only a random and broken image of itself. Instead the remaining popcorn data may be better defined by a different shape that is false to the original image.

    Another way to test this is to use modern real time data of life that is fully stocked with all the options so all nuance is side by side. With humans there are large, small, tall, short, strong, weak, different colors, birth marks, hair colors and textures, etc. Fossils data would only have a few of these dozens of options, and will assume this limited set was selected. But the real time data that has all these options selected since all are here. Since there are too many selections, to call it selection, maybe another theory would be needed. But with fossil data narrowing down the options in an arbitrary or random way, the idea of a selection process appear to better describe the limited data.
     
    Last edited: Jul 4, 2014
  22. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,635
    But then you start digging. And every single time you find a new piece of popcorn under the surface, it fits the original shape. At some point you are going to say "OK, we know what the shape is" even if you have not uncovered every single piece of popcorn.

    You can't see strong, weak, color, birth marks, hair color or texture from fossils. Only bones.
     
  23. wellwisher Banned Banned

    Messages:
    5,160
    The point I was making fossils represent only a fraction of all the data (of life that existed). This small data subset can lead to a biased interpretation. If you were doing a survey and had only two people in your survey, and someone else had two thousand people in their survey, which would be more accurate? What would be wrong with a two person survey? Fossil data surveys natural history using the two people survey analogy each time period.

    The current estimate is there are about 8.7 million species of life on earth. There are 7 billion humans, 24 billion livestock, trillions of land mammals and trillions of reptiles, hundreds of billions of birds, etc, This is the entire data set of life today, with just the 7 billion humans showing a wide spectrum of sizes and shapes. If in a million years from now, they find 1000 full sets of fossils and 10,000 partial sets from this moment in time, how can you get a realistic picture from that? You would never know there were 8.7 million species since the data says 11000 at the best. These fossils were the one's selected to represent the whole group but that will not be enough to see an accurate real time picture.

    If we only find bones from 10 humans, you would never just how diverse this one species was. Rather we may need to assume these 10 sets of bones were the norm or average due to evolution at this time. If you somehow found all the bones from 7 billion people, this data will need to be arranged in another way and may come looking like an evolutionary tree all by itself.

    The 8.7 million species today, suggest lateral pressure for change (over space), is stronger than vertical evolution and change (over time). The fossil data by being small in the space dimension, appears to make the time axis appear more dominant than it is.
     

Share This Page