Well he certainly is doing the job of a good deep-cover evolutionist.
Denial of Evolution VI.
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Well he certainly is doing the job of a good deep-cover evolutionist.
oh really?
the entire premise of evolution is built on one species turning into a completely different genome.
i was taught this happens through small accumulating changes.
up until recently many on this board stressed this was A FACT, and still do.
the article in science said this isn't so after analyzing the data.
Wrong. You appealed to his authority the moment you started talking about how the consensus at the Chicago conference included the statement that "small changes do not accumulate". You were in fact talking about a statement that Roger Lewin attributed to Francisco J. Ayala, whether you realize it or not.
But as I pointed out earlier (and as AlexG pointed out before me), Francisco J. Ayala denies ever making such a statement. Moreover, such a statement is in opposition to the content of the paper that he was presenting (see here), as he pointed out.
What this means is that if you possess even a modicum of intellectual honesty, you have to let this one go and try to make your case some other way.
I certainly did. More than once. Here's the section we are discussing right now:
Notice how that statement was attributed to Ayala? So you were indeed wrong when you said you didn't reference his comments. Further, here is his response, again:
Notice how he has provided references? Those references allow us to confirm the truth behind what Richard Arrowsmith has presented on his website regarding Ayala's actual position on the matter of the accumulation of small changes. You can start here.
So, is Francisco Ayala an authority, or not? Funnily enough, you've gone and got yourself in the unfortunate position of not being able to answer that question without doing damage to your own arguments.
leopold
No, it isn't. The entire premise is descent with modification(you are slightly different from your parents, your children are slightly different than you...)tested by survival. A fruit fly can NEVER evolve into a horse, they split long ago(likely at the single cell level)and will never, ever meet again. We did not evolve from modern apes, we had a common ancestor about 8 million years ago, our DNA is almost identical, the difference being about 2%. We are all Primates, we will all always be Primates, we cannot evolve to be an insect, or a plant or a bacteria, we can evolve only into a different kind of ape.
Kingdom: Animalia (as distinguished from plants and bacteria)
Phylum: Chordata (as distinguished from all animals without a backbone)
Class: Mammalia (as distinguished from all animals that do not have mammalian traits)
Order: Primates (as distinguished from all non-ape mammals)
Family: Hominidae (all apes, chimps, gorillas, Bonnobos)
Tribe: Hominini (all upright walkers) Only one species currently exists
Genus: Homo (a variety of upright walking apes that has enough brains to build a fire) Only one species currently exists.
Species: H. sapiens (us for the last 200,000 years or so)
Each point above indicates where our line split from all other lines, none represents where one type of creature became another type of creature. A fruit fly evolves ONLY into another type of fly, it cannot even evolve into a spider or a beetle or a bee, much less a dog.
You were taught correctly.
As they should, even PE is the accumulation of small changes at a rapid pace, a pace so rapid we do not have fossils of the intervening species, leading to the false appearance of sudden appearance of new species. I'm sorry, wolves did not suddenly start popping out chihuahua puppies, evolution does not work that way.
Even if that is what it said(and it didn't)they were wrong, as we now know. Obsolete-no longer valid.
Grumpy
No, it isn't. The entire premise is descent with modification(you are slightly different from your parents, your children are slightly different than you...)tested by survival. A fruit fly can NEVER evolve into a horse, they split long ago(likely at the single cell level)and will never, ever meet again. We did not evolve from modern apes, we had a common ancestor about 8 million years ago, our DNA is almost identical, the difference being about 2%. We are all Primates, we will all always be Primates, we cannot evolve to be an insect, or a plant or a bacteria, we can evolve only into a different kind of ape.
Kingdom: Animalia (as distinguished from plants and bacteria)
Phylum: Chordata (as distinguished from all animals without a backbone)
Class: Mammalia (as distinguished from all animals that do not have mammalian traits)
Order: Primates (as distinguished from all non-ape mammals)
Family: Hominidae (all apes, chimps, gorillas, Bonnobos)
Tribe: Hominini (all upright walkers) Only one species currently exists
Genus: Homo (a variety of upright walking apes that has enough brains to build a fire) Only one species currently exists.
Species: H. sapiens (us for the last 200,000 years or so)
Each point above indicates where our line split from all other lines, none represents where one type of creature became another type of creature. A fruit fly evolves ONLY into another type of fly, it cannot even evolve into a spider or a beetle or a bee, much less a dog.
You were taught correctly.
As they should, even PE is the accumulation of small changes at a rapid pace, a pace so rapid we do not have fossils of the intervening species, leading to the false appearance of sudden appearance of new species. I'm sorry, wolves did not suddenly start popping out chihuahua puppies, evolution does not work that way.
Even if that is what it said(and it didn't)they were wrong, as we now know. Obsolete-no longer valid.
Grumpy
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
There are three other kingdoms: Fungi, Algae and Archaea. The latter was discovered recently and is not easy to study since all the known specimens are single-celled and live on the sea bottom.
Most famously: mammary glands in our females. We're also famous for having hair and three inner-ear bones.
Apes are only one clade of primates. Primates are distinguished by many features, perhaps most notably a shoulder joint that allows much wider range of motion in more directions than any other mammals; five digits on all four limbs including opposable thumbs (humans have the unique ability to touch the thumb to all four fingers, but all primates can touch at least one); and sensitive tactile pads on the ends of our digits.
The bonobo is commonly called the bonobo chimpanzee, and until recently zoologists didn't realize that it's a distinct species. It's smaller and much less aggressive than the "true" chimpanzee and this led to some very unfortunate events in zoos. There are also two species of gorilla, and orangutans are Hominidae also. This family has the vernacular name "Great Apes" in contrast to the many species of gibbons, called the "Lesser Apes."
Actually the dog is now properly identified as a subspecies of wolf, Canis lupus familiaris, rather than a separate species.
Only the earliest differentiation between dog and wolf was natural selection: The wolves who were more gregarious, more comfortable around humans and other species, and content to eat a scavenger's diet rather than a predator's, were the ones who hung around human camps to eat the gigantic piles of perfectly good food that always seem to spring up in our vicinity. They were rewarded by being encouraged to continue to do so in order to help us keep the place clean. This was purely psychological evolution, at this point there were no anatomical differences between wolves and dogs.
Once we took control of their breeding, much of the evolution was still psychological. Perhaps unconsciously, we selected for neoteny, the retention of immature traits into adulthood: Wolf pups bark, wag their tails, roughhouse and chase sticks, but adult wolves lose these behaviors. Dogs do these things until the day they die and this endears them to us.
But eventually dogs developed anatomical differences too. Their teeth are much better suited for chewing carrots than ripping a wildebeest in half, and their brains (whose maintenance accounts for much of a mammal's protein intake) are significantly smaller than wolf brains, allowing them to subsist in good health on the lower-protein diet of a scavenger.
As I said at the beginning, very little of this differentiation can be attributed to natural selection. It's been mostly unnatural.
Even if your understanding of what you were taught is correct, none of this equates to turning a Fruit fly into a dogthrough genetic manipulation.
What it does equate to, however, is Fruit flies and dogs having a common ancestor.
Again, we come back to the Hippocrocoduckopus argument.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
How ironic that Leopold might put someone on his ignore list!
Post 432 in the thread 'Does Evolution Exsist[sic]" http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?106025-does-evolution-exsist/page22
So while technically leopold is correct, he is more than a little disingenuous.
But you did quote him to support your post, and then deny the rebuttal.
no, what's ironic is even when it comes from a peer reviewed source it's still no, no, no, no, no.
i fail to understand why you, and others, keep saying these scientists did not say what they did or mean what they said.
the ONLY counter argument offered is molecular evolution, but we are still faced with the gaps in the record.
as for the accumulated small changes these scientists said no.
oops, they used the word microevolution, which is small changes.
they concluded that this process cannot be extrapolated to macroevolution.
grumpy
about molecular evolution:
how do you determine the dna structure of a fossil?
leopold
...and they were wrong, as many other scientific conclusions from the 80s are now known to have been false or incomplete.
Depends on the age of the fossil. Fragments of DNA have been extracted from fossils millions of years old, but complete DNA sequences are rarely found older than a few hundred thousand years old and complete genomes are unlikely at greater than about 25,000 years(we have complete genomes for Neanderthals, the last of which died about 17,000 years ago). But all the changes in DNA leave clues in the modern forms of creatures. Much of our DNA is inactive, traits they coded for were suppressed in favor of others, but they are still there(sometimes erroneously called "Junk DNA"). And studies of DNA today can tell us what they coded for, in the case of humans the same DNA sequences can often be found in apes. Example: Humans have a sequence that leads to being mostly hairless, but we still have exact copies of the gene sequence for hairiness in the Great Apes. Some people have a defect in the hairless sequence, it seems to affect Hispanics And Indians(from India)more often than others, in Mexico they call them werewolves, wolf boy(or girl) or wolf people.
It's called hypertrichosis(which means "too much hair")and the case can be mild with just additional facial hair, or severe with pelts any chimpanzee would be proud to bear. There are approximately 50 cases worldwide. DNA studies have only found the affected gene sequence in the last couple of years because before that the genome of humans and chimps had not been sequenced and could not be cross checked. All Great Apes have the hairiness gene, only humans have the baldness mutation, we developed it sometime after we split from them some 8 million years ago. We've learned more about the genetic sources of diseases and traits in the last 10 years than in the more than 150 years since Darwin, large swaths of what we thought we knew before 10 years ago are now known to be false or incomplete, including your favorite paper from 1983.
Grumpy
...and they were wrong, as many other scientific conclusions from the 80s are now known to have been false or incomplete.
Depends on the age of the fossil. Fragments of DNA have been extracted from fossils millions of years old, but complete DNA sequences are rarely found older than a few hundred thousand years old and complete genomes are unlikely at greater than about 25,000 years(we have complete genomes for Neanderthals, the last of which died about 17,000 years ago). But all the changes in DNA leave clues in the modern forms of creatures. Much of our DNA is inactive, traits they coded for were suppressed in favor of others, but they are still there(sometimes erroneously called "Junk DNA"). And studies of DNA today can tell us what they coded for, in the case of humans the same DNA sequences can often be found in apes. Example: Humans have a sequence that leads to being mostly hairless, but we still have exact copies of the gene sequence for hairiness in the Great Apes. Some people have a defect in the hairless sequence, it seems to affect Hispanics And Indians(from India)more often than others, in Mexico they call them werewolves, wolf boy(or girl) or wolf people.
It's called hypertrichosis(which means "too much hair")and the case can be mild with just additional facial hair, or severe with pelts any chimpanzee would be proud to bear. There are approximately 50 cases worldwide. DNA studies have only found the affected gene sequence in the last couple of years because before that the genome of humans and chimps had not been sequenced and could not be cross checked. All Great Apes have the hairiness gene, only humans have the baldness mutation, we developed it sometime after we split from them some 8 million years ago. We've learned more about the genetic sources of diseases and traits in the last 10 years than in the more than 150 years since Darwin, large swaths of what we thought we knew before 10 years ago are now known to be false or incomplete, including your favorite paper from 1983.
Grumpy
In other words, you're copping out.
By all means, please do. And once you've done so, please commit yourself to that course of action by never clicking on "View Post". That way when you're wrong about something (which happens a lot) I can go about demonstrating it without having to deal with your ultimately ineffective but nonetheless irritating interference. After all, it's been established that this exercise is more about our silent readers than anything else.
Given long enough - yes.
For the most part, yes. Occasionally there is a very large phenotypical change caused by a change in a single gene, as in the example of the HOX gene. But in all cases the genetic changes are small and they accumulate.
To quote that article:
"These structuralist ideas are presented as if they are antagonistic to the [standard theory of evolution.] In fact, you will find the major ideas here in a book I wrote 25 years ago . . . You are in danger of preventing understanding by suggesting that there is intellectual antagonism where none exists."
I've never done that. What I have done is point out instances of hypocrisy. There's a difference.
With respect to this discussion, I didn't say anything that isn't actually a matter of record. Even our moderators agree.
But by all means, continue the process of ruining this thread just because you can't handle being called out for your own bullshit in another.
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