KINDS and ADAPTATION

[Donray]

EarthScienceguy wrote:

I believe in adaptation not evolution. Adaptation says that organisms change because of heredity not mutations.

God created kinds of animals. So yes He only created one species of humans.


In another topic when I asked EarthScienceguy what he believed instead of evolution he wrote back the above. I asked him several times to explin his theory and he incapable of explanation and debate of his theory.
I would like to find from any Christians that believes like EarthScienceguy something about this belief and some proof using known fossils and how these fit in.
How do you explain Homo neanderthalensis (the Neanderthal) and The Denisovans that both had sex with modern humans? If you are from Europe for your background you have some Neanderthal DNA.

Since this theory uses “kinds of animals� that a lot of creationist do could someone list all the kinds that were on the ark and then the list of animals, insects, bacteria, etc that these kinds adapted into. Are you with a lot of the undereducated people that think the world is less then 10K years old?

What is adaptation and not evolution? Does it have anything to due with DNA changing? Could someone point out all the articles that support this theory? I would hope that there is a list of science articles that shows your science of adaptation of kinds on the ARK to all the diversity we have.

I would like to have a debate on this theory since Christians like to debate evolution we should have this debate also.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to DrNoGods]

And what does this have to do with planets starting out as balls of H2O? It is just another creationist website article touting the Humphreys paper, and misinterpreting geologic data to suit their young earth nonsense. I saw no comments in it supporting the idea that the planets started as balls of H2O.

This is one area that still needs research. I can speculate on how hydrogen and oxygen changed into the components that make up the earth and everything we see in the universe.

Humphreys believes that God created the elements that make up the stars and the Earth. But I am not inclined to believe that God needed to create more matter.

But make no mistake about it. Week one in any theory of origins was an unusual week.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to post 198 by DrNoGods]

And some of the links I sent are old (in genetics terms ... early 1990s). But it is the current "best" explanation of how we got to 46 chromosomes from 48 in our great ape ancestor.

Are you really trying to sell this fusion thing again? Once again the fusion could not have happen because chromosomes to not fuse telomere to telomere in healthy mammals. (Adega, Guedes-Pinto, and Chaves 2009; Chaves et al. 2003; Tsipouri et al. 2008).

While telomere-telomere fusions have been documented in the rearranged genomes of human cancer cells, these are not indicative of healthy cells but instead are associated with genomic instability (Tanaka, Beam, and Caruana 2014; Tanaka et al. 2012; Tu et al. 2015)

So your monkey may have had a telomere to telomere fusion but it would have died quickly. I am not sure how a dead monkey could make humans but I am not the one trying to sell this snake oil.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 199 by EarthScienceguy]

This is one area that still needs research.

No amount of additional research will show that the Earth began as a ball of H2O. We already know for certain that it didn't.

But make no mistake about it. Week one in any theory of origins was an unusual week.

Outright magical, wouldn't you say? What happened in week 2?

So your monkey may have had a telomere to telomere fusion but it would have died quickly. I am not sure how a dead monkey could make humans but I am not the one trying to sell this snake oil.

The creationist websites all have their ammunition to try and argue against this, and you are certainly adept at parroting those websites as you did again here, but the world of real science believes this is the most likely explanation for why we have 46 chromosomes and the great apes we evolved from have 48. There is enough evidence to support the mechanism. Ever heard of Robertsonian translocation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertson ... nslocation

Similar translocations have occurred in gorillas:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC311135/
(references here also on the chromosome 2 fusion, but this is in older article)

Humans with only 44 chromosomes exist:

https://blogs.plos.org/dnascience/2016/ ... n-species/

And there are many other examples of genetic "mishaps" in the plant and animal kingdoms that aren't fatal. Your creationist website arguments are, as usual, dead wrong.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to DrNoGods]

No amount of additional research will show that the Earth began as a ball of H2O. We already know for certain that it didn't.

Sure it will. Z-pinching to new elements. Starting with hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen and oxygen being separated by electrolysis and then new elements are made during the z-pinch process.

Did you happen the here about the star that was found with an atmosphere almost totally made of oxygen. That is pretty exciting, eh.

Quote:
But make no mistake about it. Week one in any theory of origins was an unusual week.


Outright magical, wouldn't you say? What happened in week 2?

Well, Magical would be naturalistic theories. In which there can be no such thing as causality, that according to the naturalist brightest scientists on origins.

The creationist websites all have their ammunition to try and argue against this, and you are certainly adept at parroting those websites as you did again here, but the world of real science believes this is the most likely explanation for why we have 46 chromosomes and the great apes we evolved from have 48. There is enough evidence to support the mechanism. Ever heard of Robertsonian translocation?

Have you ever heard of telomere to telomere fusion which Robertsonian Translocation is not. Neither has anyone else heard of telomere to telomere fusion. What does Robertsonian Translocation have to do with the discussion?

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 202 by EarthScienceguy]

Sure it will. Z-pinching to new elements. Starting with hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen and oxygen being separated by electrolysis and then new elements are made during the z-pinch process.

As I predicted ... the Z-pinch nonsense again. I suppose early bacteria were doing this after they arose entirely from water and gathered enough metal electrodes that were also made from of water. Makes perfect sense.

Have you ever heard of telomere to telomere fusion which Robertsonian Translocation is not. Neither has anyone else heard of telomere to telomere fusion.

Really?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl ... 0-0197.pdf

There are plenty of others, for example:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 2589901376

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02933040

https://genetics.thetech.org/ask-a-gene ... romosome-2

From this last link:

"What you can see in this part of human chromosome 2 is a pretelomeric sequence, two fused telomeres and then another pretelomeric sequence. This is exactly what you would expect if two chromosomes fused together relatively recently. And this is exactly what researchers saw in the Denisovan DNA. They saw nothing like it in chimpanzee DNA."

What does Robertsonian Translocation have to do with the discussion?

A lot more than Z-pinch! But it was just an example of a significant genetic "mishap" as I stated in the post. All kinds of wild things happen in genetics, including telomere-to-telomere fusion. The only place I've seen opposition to the chromosome 2 fusion idea is on creationist websites, who naturally oppose it because it contradicts the biblical creation story or the idea that humans are special. If it didn't, you wouldn't hear a peep from them on the issue. But they've never shown that it didn't happen.

[John Human]

[Replying to post 84 by EarthScienceguy]

The only thing "special" about humans is that we evolved a large and complex brain that is about 80% neocortex, and which is capable of abstract thought far beyond any other animals. But this in no way suggests that humans are special creatures created by a god ... it only shows that we developed the necessary mutations, reinforced by natural selection, that allowed growth and complexity of the brain organ. It isn't complicated when you think about it, and no reason to invent explanations when we have one that works, and has been positively demonstrated to be valid in the real world.

I'm still looking through all the posts in this thread, but I see zero evidence supporting the claim that speciation happens through so-called natural selection, which is and always has been a deceptive metaphor masquerading as a causal agent. If my thoughts below have already been addressed in an earlier post, perhaps DrNoGods or someone else tell me the post number(s).

DrNoGods has referred to the fusion of a pair of chromosomes that led to chromosome 2 in humans, supposing that this happened in a two-step process of random mutation, with an intermediate step of 47-chromosome primates from which evolved a group of 46-chromosome primates.

I have seen reference, in one of the links that DrNoGods provided, to subspecies of mice with a differing (even) number of chromosomes, and this sub-species cannot reproduce with mice that have the original number.

Two questions here:
(1) Is there any evidence that an abnormality leading to a human with an odd number of chromosomes (Downs Syndrome comes to mind) is anything other than debilitating? If not, then a supposed "natural selection" evolutionary path through such a random-defect process would seem to be of the absurd monkey-randomly-typing-Shakespeare variety.

(2) Apart from the question of how it happened (natural selection or intelligent design or a space-alien graduate student or something else), it is commonly and plausibly supposed that a sub-species of the ancestor of chimpanzees arose with only 46 chromosomes. It is further supposed that this sub-species underwent a further set of speciation events leading through an evolutionary chain to modern humans.

The problem here, if we suppose that this further speciation happened through natural selection, is that speciation means one or more jumps from one species to the new, further-evolved one -- with a bigger brain and a cranium that continues developing after birth so childbirth of a bigger-brained baby doesn't kill the mother.

So let's imagine that we hit the evolutionary jackpot and a mating pair of bigger-brained proto-humans (with the latest-model post-birth cranium development feature) miraculously appears in the same limited area. The offspring of this fairy-tale breeding pair could only mate with each other, and inbreeding among humans leads inexorably to sterility, so this random-chance evolutionary jump would quickly die out.

But wait -- how about if a thousand or so identical viable random events miraculously occur? That's like going to the casino and hitting the jackpot every day, day after day, for a solid month. But at least that way there would be a sufficient gene pool of newly-evolved humans to continue procreating through the generations. This seems to be the fairy-tale pixie-dust absurdity of evolution of humans by means of natural selection from a primordial mating pair of proto-great apes with only 46 chromosomes.

[brunumb]

[Replying to post 202 by EarthScienceguy]

Sure it will. Z-pinching to new elements. Starting with hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen and oxygen being separated by electrolysis and then new elements are made during the z-pinch process.

So we have a gigantic ball of water. Now, where does the technology for electrolysis and the z-pinch process come from? Please describe how this all turns our gigantic ball of water into planet Earth. Actually, you're better off just sticking with God-magic and skipping all the woo nonsense altogether.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 204 by John Human]

(2) Apart from the question of how it happened (natural selection or intelligent design or a space-alien graduate student or something else), it is commonly and plausibly supposed that a sub-species of the ancestor of chimpanzees arose with only 46 chromosomes. It is further supposed that this sub-species underwent a further set of speciation events leading through an evolutionary chain to modern humans.

The chromosome 2 fusion appears to have happened not in "a sub-species of the ancestor of chimpanzees", but after the split between Homo and Pan. This article is a simple summary:

https://biologos.org/articles/denisovan ... e-2-fusion

Note that the fusion event did not lose much in the way of functionality as two chromosomes fused with most of their genetic information still intact. So it was mainly a rearrangement of the chromosomes rather than a loss of information, and as noted in the link above this is seen in other lineages. So a change in chromosome number in and of itself isn't necessarily a deleterious event if the genes are maintained, but simply reorganized on the chromosomes.

But natural selection as a mechanism doesn't know or care about any of this. It has no "mind of its own" and doesn't "direct" anything. It is simply the term given to the process by which beneficial DNA changes (however they occur ... mutations, insertions, deletions, fusions, etc.) that improve reproduction rates spread through a population while deleterious DNA changes are weeded out because they result in a lower (or no) reproduction rates.

So something like bipedalism that preceded any brain size expansion in the Homo line may have offered benefits as mentioned before (freeing the arms/hand for other purposes, being able to see above the grass to spot predators, etc.). Over thousands of generations small changes occurred in organization of the feet and hands (eg. opposable thumbs), legs got longer and arms shorter (compared to apes), etc. These things happened the same way that the fins of certain fish became legs in the transition from fish to amphibian.

Natural selection drove the process as there was some benefit to certain fish living near shorelines to be able to move around on land (eg. maybe their tidal pools were drying out and they needed to move between them regularly, or some new predator in the water drove them onto land more often). Any fish that obtained a DNA change that improved the stiffness of fins would benefit (eg. a single-point mutation that resulted in a different protein involved in the fin structural makeup that made it stiffer). It may have taken millions of years and hundreds of thousands of generations for cumulative small changes like this to result in legs, but it clearly eventually happened as we have amphibians now and can show, genetically and via fossil analysis, that they came from finned fish.

Why would the process leading to humans be any different? Here it was bipedalism and the many associated changes to legs, arms, pelvis, head position, etc., as well as brain development (increased size and more complex structure) that conferred advantages. Natural selection selected for these and they became fixed in the population as the individuals with the beneficial DNA changes had higher survival and reproduction rates. There were no doubt many deleterious DNA changes along the way as well and those died out. And we can see that Homo sapiens "won" the evolutionary battle over the other extinct Homo members as we are the only ones left (although we have a long way to go to catch up with Homo erectus who was around for some 1 million years and we're less than half of that now).

You seem to not like natural selection as a mechanism for some reason, but it fits observations, and the more we learn from genetics the more it is confirmed to be correct, including with the evolution of modern humans. Chromosome reorganization is not that uncommon, and evidently the fusion of ape chromosomes 12 and 13 into Homo chromosome 2 conferred some benefits and so it became fixed in the population as natural selection would dictate.

[John Human]

[Replying to post 204 by John Human]

(2) Apart from the question of how it happened (natural selection or intelligent design or a space-alien graduate student or something else), it is commonly and plausibly supposed that a sub-species of the ancestor of chimpanzees arose with only 46 chromosomes. It is further supposed that this sub-species underwent a further set of speciation events leading through an evolutionary chain to modern humans.

The chromosome 2 fusion appears to have happened not in "a sub-species of the ancestor of chimpanzees", but after the split between Homo and Pan. This article is a simple summary:

https://biologos.org/articles/denisovan ... e-2-fusion

That is an interesting and well-written article, but it doesn’t address the question of whether the chromosome fusion happened before or after the speciation event splitting the two groups. (But I don't think iit's an important issue here; it doesn’t affect our disagreement about natural selection.)

But natural selection as a mechanism doesn't know or care about any of this. It has no "mind of its own" and doesn't "direct" anything. It is simply the term given to the process by which beneficial DNA changes (however they occur ... mutations, insertions, deletions, fusions, etc.) that improve reproduction rates spread through a population while deleterious DNA changes are weeded out because they result in a lower (or no) reproduction rates. So something like bipedalism that preceded any brain size expansion in the Homo line may have offered benefits as mentioned before (freeing the arms/hand for other purposes, being able to see above the grass to spot predators, etc.). Over thousands of generations small changes occurred in organization of the feet and hands (eg. opposable thumbs), legs got longer and arms shorter (compared to apes), etc. These things happened the same way that the fins of certain fish became legs in the transition from fish to amphibian.

I’m glad you brought up bipedalism, because the human locking knee joint seems to be a good example of an evolutionary improvement that could never have happened by “natural selection.� See https://www.trueorigin.org/knee.php
In a nutshell, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the human knee joint, with sixteen "critical characteristics" that must all be present for the knee to function properly, came about by design.

These things happened the same way that the fins of certain fish became legs in the transition from fish to amphibian.

Natural selection drove the process as there was some benefit to certain fish living near shorelines to be able to move around on land (eg. maybe their tidal pools were drying out and they needed to move between them regularly, or some new predator in the water drove them onto land more often). Any fish that obtained a DNA change that improved the stiffness of fins would benefit (eg. a single-point mutation that resulted in a different protein involved in the fin structural makeup that made it stiffer).

Here, after implying that SPECIATION happens by "natural selection," you postulate a beneficial mutation causing a variation WITHIN a species, as opposed to the very different case of a speciation event resulting in a new species that can’t mate with a member of the parent species to produce offspring. And I suspect that the general point about human knee design (couldn't happen randomly) applies the transition from fins to legs.

It may have taken millions of years and hundreds of thousands of generations for cumulative small changes like this to result in legs, but it clearly eventually happened as we have amphibians now and can show, genetically and via fossil analysis, that they came from finned fish.

Your logical fallacy here is as follows:
(1) We have amphibians now.
(2) DNA and fossil analysis supports the conclusion that amphibians somehow evolved from fish.
(3) Therefore (and here’s your error): Natural selection (as opposed to God or a space-alien biologist or an ineffable "species spirit" that creates a new species so it can have a baby spirit, or who-knows-what) “drove the process� (your words – another metaphor) of the speciation event(s) that occurred on the way from fish to amphibians. You are arguing beyond the available evidence.

Why would the process leading to humans be any different? Here it was bipedalism and the many associated changes to legs, arms, pelvis, head position, etc., as well as brain development (increased size and more complex structure) that conferred advantages. Natural selection selected for these and they became fixed in the population as the individuals with the beneficial DNA changes had higher survival and reproduction rates.

See the reference to the locking knee joint above. "Natural selection" is a "must-believe-to-get-your-Ph.D" myth, because it supports the prevailing ivory-tower pseudo-scientific doctrine of reductionist materialism. You simply don't have any supporting evidence for your presumption that “natural selection� was the causal agent for the emergence of modern humans. But one point in that last quote calls out for attention:

Natural selection selected

Um, I’d like to super-size my metaphor, thank you ](*,)

p.s. If you’re going to go all-in with “natural selection� to explain speciation, you need to either posit male-and-female matching mutations so you have a breeding pair for the brand-new species, or speculate about "genetic drift" while ignoring things like locking knee joints. Maybe Noah was a genetic engineer who managed to preserve his collection of genomes on his flying saucer.

p.p.s. That breeding-pair headache doesn’t consider the additional human problem of inbreeding. With humans, repeated inbreeding leads to sterility in a few generations. So if we get that wonderful miraculous single first breeding pair with locking knees and the deluxe big brain option, it will breed itself out of existence pretty quickly, unless there are a whole bunch of breeding pairs that were created more or less simultaneously.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 207 by John Human]

In a nutshell, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the human knee joint, with sixteen "critical characteristics" that must all be present for the knee to function properly, came about by design.

Why use such a simple example as a knee joint? How about an eye? I've posted this link many times here but it is a good analysis of how something complex can arise from many small changes over a long period of time in large populations:

http://faculty.jsd.claremont.edu/dmcfar ... c_1994.pdf

It doesn't matter how complex something is or how many parts it has ... if slow development of the various parts shows incremental benefit at each step then natural selection will ensure that that step hangs around because it provides a benefit. Enough events over enough generations can result in very complex structures. Plus, where is your "designer", and why did it continually design defects?

Here, after implying that SPECIATION happens by "natural selection," you postulate a beneficial mutation causing a variation WITHIN a species, as opposed to the very different case of a speciation event resulting in a new species that can’t mate with a member of the parent species to produce offspring. And I suspect that the general point about human knee design (couldn't happen randomly) applies the transition from fins to legs.

It isn't a "very different case" ... it is a matter of degree. You seem to be falling into the common trap theists fall into where they create this artificial distinction between small changes over relatively short periods of time (so-called "micro" evolution), and larger changes over longer periods of time (so-called "macro" evolution). But there is no such distinction in the real world. Enough small changes can result in speciation and larger changes. Ring species shows this, as does fish to amphibians, apes to humans, etc.

(3) Therefore (and here’s your error): Natural selection (as opposed to God or a space-alien biologist or an ineffable "species spirit" that creates a new species so it can have a baby spirit, or who-knows-what) “drove the process� (your words – another metaphor) of the speciation event(s) that occurred on the way from fish to amphibians. You are arguing beyond the available evidence.

We don't just have fish and then amphibians with nothing in between and are making a giant leap of faith in saying that amphibians evolved from fish. Wikipedia have a short article with an Evolutionary History section:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphibian

and there are many others like this one:

http://chem.tufts.edu/science/evolution ... sition.htm

Your fallacy is assuming that this event didn't happen via evolution by natural selection and then trying to discount it with only partial information. And again, natural selection has nothing whatsoever with how DNA changes (mutations, etc.) come to be ... it only acts on the resulting population where the changes happened. Surely you can appreciate that a beneficial DNA change could have some consequences in terms of survival and reproduction (ie. improve them). Natural selection is simply the term used to describe the process whereby these benefits remain in the population and has nothing to do with how the DNA changes came about.

You simply don't have any supporting evidence for your presumption that “natural selection� was the causal agent for the emergence of modern humans.

Other than the obvious evidence that humans exist, they evolved from apes (surely you are not contesting that in 2019!). Natural selection simply says that the relevant DNA changes along the way were beneficial and so persisted in the population, eventually leading to a "bushy" evolutionary tree with Homo sapiens the only extant member of the genus Homo. It didn't "cause" anything ... it just describes the process whereby benedicial DNA changes that improve survival and reproduction rates hang around and deleterious ones do not. That's it.

p.s. If you’re going to go all-in with “natural selection� to explain speciation, you need to either posit male-and-female matching mutations so you have a breeding pair for the brand-new species, or speculate about "genetic drift" while ignoring things like locking knee joints. Maybe Noah was a genetic engineer who managed to preserve his collection of genomes on his flying saucer.

Again ... natural selection has nothing to do with how DNA changes come about. So there is no need to explain mutations or genetic drift, etc. Natural selection only comes into play after these things have happened and it is time to assess whether they impacted survival and reproduction rates. You are confusing the mechanism of how mutations and other DNA changes happen, with natural selection which has nothing at all to do with that.