Can random mutations increase fitness?

Yes there are.

 

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Could you please refer me to a site or something?

 

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I'm not sure how the fact of evolution, like the fact of gravity can even be questioned, what we don't know for sure is exactly how it works in entirety. A long time ago there were dinosaurs, then there were dinosaurs with wings, now there are chickens. There are no fossilized chickens, so when did they appear? ...and how? Most species go extinct after a while, so why are there so many species still around? Humans weren't always here, we can't find human skeletons much more than 3 or 4 million years old, yet there are dinosaur skeletons hundreds of millions of years old. We should find humans alongside dinosaurs, but we don't, and we never will. If species are not constantly being formed, we should find the greatest number of species in the distant past, when God created them. Then we should find them gradually disappearing, with the least number of species existing now. This is, however, not what we find. We do find an ebb and flow in the number of species- times of great variety, followed by times of mass extinction, and then times of more variety.

We can also observe evolution and natural selection happening very rapidly, like with the number of different strains of the AIDS virus, which adapts to drug treatments in a matter of weeks. We also see new diseases emerging, like SARS. Did God create SARS, or did it evolve recently?

 

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786, please read (and I'm sure you'll love it) Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene". This is an absolute must for any self respecting intellectual let alone scientist.

So long as there is a variation within a population then natural selection can change the 'gene-frequency' of alleles 'for' various traits in the gene pool (sexual reproduction maintains a good mix (see meiosis)). Occational mutations may result in new variation (bare in mind the millions of years that our cells had evolved over, even if our ancestors were not human when when new features came about) and hence life can adapt to create new species by any definition.

That's the theory, look back at James R's list of key points and you'll see that they not only look good, but have yet to be disproved.

Spidergoat, I imagine 786 (et al, if any) are convinced that evolution occurs - it's more the "climbing mount improbable" issue that seems to be the difficult one to digest.

 

Nope. I don't believe the evolution of specie to a completely different specie. So you were wrong there. But I kind of believe the different varities of the same animal. And yeah, "mount improbable" is also something difficult to digest. You're right about that.

 

We don't even need to observe natural selection. It is "theoretically infallible"!