Challenge for Evolutionists

Creationism, Evolution, and other science issues

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anchorman
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Challenge for Evolutionists

Post #1

Post by anchorman »

I am not trying to sound arrogant...a lot of what is discussed on this website is out of the scope of my expertise, however Here is a challenge:

Has science observed or witnessed a mutation on any mammal that increased genetic information which made the mammal superior to others in its species and as a result the mammal was able to pass that information on to its offspring?

Mutations that cause information to be lost or mutations that cause genes to be copied dent count. different Information has to be added. for instance a beaver must grow feathers.

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Nyril
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Post #21

Post by Nyril »

First off, I'm not going to pretend I've done nothing but read biology textbooks and read about evolution so that I can answer every potential question generated. I had help, I got it from here. I do not study fossils for a living, nor am I a particular expert in this field. As I doubt you are either, I am restricted to using references to back up my assertions.
"first there were monkeys" (Scientists still cant figure out how primates arrived on the scene.. they are an evolutionary mystery)
From here.
Palaechthon, Purgatorius (middle Paleocene) -- Very primitive plesiadapids. To modern eyes they looks nothing like primates, being simply pointy-faced, small early mammals with mostly primitive teeth, and claws instead of nails. But they show the first signs of primate-like teeth; lost an incisor and a premolar, and had relatively blunt-cusped, squarish molars.
Cantius (early Eocene) -- One of the first true primates (or "primates of modern aspect"), more advanced than the plesiadapids (more teeth lost, bar behind the eye, grasping hand & foot) and beginning to show some lemur-like arboreal adaptations.
Pelycodus & related species (early Eocene) -- Primitive lemur-like primates.
Amphipithecus, Pondaungia (late Eocene, Burma) -- Very early Old World primates known only from fragments. Larger brain, shorter nose, more forward-facing eyes (halfway between plesiadapid eyes and modern ape eyes).
Parapithecus (early Oligocene) -- The O.W. monkeys split from the apes split around now. Parapithecus was probably at the start of the O.W. monkey line. From here the O.W. monkeys go through Oreopithecus (early Miocene, Kenya) to modern monkey groups of the Miocene & Pliocene.
Propliopithecus, Aegyptopithecus (early Oligocene, Egypt) -- From the same time as Parapithecus, but probably at the beginning of the ape lineage. First ape characters (deep jaw, 2 premolars, 5- cusped teeth, etc.).
Aegyptopithecus (early-mid Oligocene, Egypt) -- Slightly later anthropoid (ape/hominid) with more ape features. It was a fruit-eating runner/climber, larger, with a rounder brain and shorter face.
Proconsul africanus (early Miocene, Kenya.) -- A sexually dimorphic, fruit-eating, arboreal quadruped probably ancestral to all the later apes and humans. Had a mosaic of ape-like and primitive features; Ape-like elbow, shoulder and feet; monkey- like wrist; gibbon-like lumbar vertebrae.
Limnopithecus (early Miocene, Africa) -- A later ape probably ancestral to gibbons.
Dryopithecus (mid-Miocene) -- A later ape probably ancestral to the great apes & humans. At this point Africa & Asia connected via Arabia, and the non-gibbon apes divided into two lines:
Sivapithecus (including "Gigantopithecus" & "Ramapithecus", mid- Miocene) -- Moved to Asia & gave rise to the orangutan.
Kenyapithecus (mid-Miocene, about 16 Ma) -- Stayed in Africa & gave rise to the African great apes & humans.
We know where primates came from.
"monkeys lost their tails" Have you ever witnessed a monkey born without a tail and then pass that trait on to its offspring? And then become the norm.
May I interest you in a gorilla or two? Regardless, that is a strawman.

Image
Image
"They even lost a chromosome pair" If a child was born with out a pair of chromosome do you think that child would live a normal life? I would be willing to bet that the information in the DNA within the chromosomes that have been removed would destroy enough vital information that the child would some die
According to the Wikipedia, a mouse had 1% of its genome removed and no noticable change was recorded. Also, roughly 97% of the human genome has been identified as "junk" DNA, in which no function has been identified.

I'm willing to bet that you could remove a heck of a lot of DNA before any problem was noted.
It is common sense that if all life evolved from a single cell organism Billions of years ago than genetic information must be gained along the way.
I've heard this from you, and YEC. On behalf of of the dozen creationists I have asked this question:
What is genetic information?

anchorman
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Post #22

Post by anchorman »

nice gorilla but gorillas never had tails....show me a spider monkey losing its tail and then pass that trait on to its offspring then you have something

regarding "where did monkeys come from" your post states that the first primates looked nothing like primates....maybe because they were not primates

Regarding mice....I would like to see the documentation of humans or monkeys losing a pair of chromosomes and then pass that trait on to their offspring. It would most likely be deadly. Also I believe that in humans when chromosome 21 is duplicated d. syndrome appears. Mutations are almost always harmful.

Regarding tetrachomats...until the study is finished and confirmed you should not sight it as evidence. However, you are probably correct...they most likely do exist. What makes this unique is that the extra cone in the eye actually functions. The problem is that theoretically tetrachromats offspring would have a much higher probability of being color blind rather than becoming another tetrachromat. It is very possible that 1000's of years ago tetrachromats were in far greater numbers than today and the number is on the decline and that this is nothing new and far from an evolutionary wonder. Even so I still find it interesting that this would be, "the greatest human mutation ever discovered"

I look at an increase in genetic information as the introduction of a new complex structure. I would define a complex structure as a feather, hair, eyes, fingernails etc. If dinosaurs evolved into birds then a feather would have had to suddenly appear or a partial feather would have had to appear. I am looking for the sudden appearance of complex structures and here is why...

"Darwin admitted that his theory would absolutely break down "if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications." 18 Denton shows that the avian lung and the feather will just about do the trick. 19 In general, an historic difficulty for Darwinian theory is that a blind, groping process having no advance knowledge that sight, hearing, etc. are even possible cannot reasonably be visualized as building over a stretch of many generations either organs or other bodily parts that are unserviceable and cumbersome until they have been completely formed. Now the data of empirical science have widely verified this insight."

http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt63.html

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Jose
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Post #23

Post by Jose »

anchorman wrote:nice gorilla but gorillas never had tails....show me a spider monkey losing its tail and then pass that trait on to its offspring then you have something
And why do you think you need to see an individual monkey losing its tail? If that's the process of evolution, as you conceive of it, well...that's not how it works. Try looking here.
anchorman wrote:regarding "where did monkeys come from" your post states that the first primates looked nothing like primates....maybe because they were not primates
This would, of course, be true. Primates derived from ancestral mammals that were not primates. And mammals derived from ancestral animals that were not mammals. This is excellent reasoning on your part, entirely consistent with evolutionary theory.
anchorman wrote:Regarding mice....I would like to see the documentation of humans or monkeys losing a pair of chromosomes and then pass that trait on to their offspring. It would most likely be deadly. Also I believe that in humans when chromosome 21 is duplicated d. syndrome appears. Mutations are almost always harmful.
Again, although you are right about aneuploidy, your expectation of how changes in chromosome number occur evolutionarily is incorrect. In mammals, the actual number of chromosomes is irrelevant. We have 23, Indian Muntjacs have 4--but we have the same amount of DNA, and the same basic genes (albeit with some sequence variation, and regulatory variation, which accounts for our different developmental programs). What happens is not wholesale loss of chromosomes, but Robertsonian Fusion, in which two chromosomes join to become one. By simple counting, this is "loss" of a chromosome, but in terms of genetic information, there is little change.
anchorman wrote:Regarding tetrachomats...until the study is finished and confirmed you should not sight it as evidence. However, you are probably correct...they most likely do exist. What makes this unique is that the extra cone in the eye actually functions. The problem is that theoretically tetrachromats offspring would have a much higher probability of being color blind rather than becoming another tetrachromat. It is very possible that 1000's of years ago tetrachromats were in far greater numbers than today and the number is on the decline and that this is nothing new and far from an evolutionary wonder. Even so I still find it interesting that this would be, "the greatest human mutation ever discovered"
Why do you favor the idea that tetrachromats used to be present in greater numbers? Because of the increase in visual perception, tetrachromacy is unlikely to be selected against, so some human populations should still retain this feature, if it is truly ancestral. That none do indicates that it is a new feature. Now, you will conclude that it is not new information, because (according to the usual genetic behavior of rhodopsin genes) it arose as a gene duplication. Subsequent mutation of the duplicated gene enabled it to respond to wavelengths that are distinct from the wavelengths our old, normal rhodopsins respond to. Since this a a change of one gene, within the context of the developmental program for cones, it functions just fine.

I don't think it would be a good idea to "prove" that she is really a tetrachromat with new cones by grinding her up and analyzing her retinal cells. It seems sufficient, at this point, to accept the functional evidence. She sees better than we do.
anchorman wrote:I look at an increase in genetic information as the introduction of a new complex structure. I would define a complex structure as a feather, hair, eyes, fingernails etc. If dinosaurs evolved into birds then a feather would have had to suddenly appear or a partial feather would have had to appear. I am looking for the sudden appearance of complex structures and here is why...
You're talking not about information, but about the consequences of information. Genetic information is DNA sequence. Increase in genetic information is increase in DNA sequence, even if it is a straightforward gene duplication, giving twice the information for one protein. Your new structures require complex developmental programs involving many genes. Many of them--hair, feathers, fingernails, scales--involve the same genes, but in different patterns of regulation. Obviously, since this involves many genes, and genes do not mutate together, all at once, to create some pre-ordained structure, you'll never see this happen except over the course of millions of years.

Now, your dinosaur-to-bird complaint is out of date. You say that feathers would have to suddenly appear, or partial feathers would have to suddenly appear. Why suddenly? Aside from that question, it is now known that even dinosaurs that are not in the direct lineage of birds, like T. rex, had partial feathers. Young T. rex had small single-barb feathers, which are referred to as proto-feathers. They lost them as they grew up, just as baby elephants lose their hair as they grow up. There is lots of evidence for feathers of various morphologies on dinosaurs.

You probably know this, of course, since it is standard policy to say that the fossils that represent intermediates between birds and dinosaurs "are not intermediates, but are just dinosaurs with feathers" or "are not intermediates, but are just birds with teeth and claws."

Why not plead for reptile-like scales on birds? That would seem to indicate that the transition from dinosaur to bird is not yet complete.
anchorman wrote:"Darwin admitted that his theory would absolutely break down "if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications." 18 Denton shows that the avian lung and the feather will just about do the trick. 19 In general, an historic difficulty for Darwinian theory is that a blind, groping process having no advance knowledge that sight, hearing, etc. are even possible cannot reasonably be visualized as building over a stretch of many generations either organs or other bodily parts that are unserviceable and cumbersome until they have been completely formed. Now the data of empirical science have widely verified this insight."
Darwin is right. The trouble is, no such organ has been found (despite what the IDers say--they just ignore much of the evidence when they talk about it). As noted above, feathers don't do the trick. Lungs don't either. IDers are successful because they present their logic to non-scientists, using big scientific words (to sound credible), but with the basic argument of "gee, this seems awfully complicated, so I bet you can't think of a way that it could be produced by evolution." The non-scientist audience can't think of a way, and the IDers don't tell them about the ways that have been described.

It is an interesting consideration, but logically fallacious, to imagine that a complex structure would either (1) be built in many steps from the very parts of which it is made today, or (2) be built because some magical mechanism enabled the organisms to produce structures that might be useful in a hundred million years or so. Structures are built from slight modifications of pre-existing structures. If you want an example, think about feathers. Or think about bird wings, which are slight modifications of the standard tetrapod forelimb, using the same genes for their construction. There's little point in talking about the notion of "pre-planning" by mutation, since it is so obvious that it cannot occur. Evolutionary theory does not invoke it, so saying that it doesn't happen is simply agreeing with evolutionary theory.

I guess it's hard to think about evolution accurately if we start with the assumption that its purpose was to create humans, birds, sunflowers, cholera bacteria, and all of the other species that exist right now. That assumption seems to lead to a very strong desire to see some kind of guidance, or planning in the mutations that occur. I think that a possible way out of this logical trap is to think about what species existed at any particular time, and think about the characteristics those organisms had then, and how slight modifications of those characteristics might have given them a competitive advantage. "What was important then" rather than "how did it know to arrive here so much later?"
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anchorman
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Post #24

Post by anchorman »

Jose

in your animation sequence very few of the intermediates have been discovered and of those...very few have been found that have not had the bias of a evolutionist reconstruct the skeleton for viewing. Many skeletons are simply a jaw bone or a forearm and then passed on to a museum and reconstructed as a whole (sometimes with a partial tail....this is an animation based on interpolating between species not factual evidence. I realize that the animation does not cover every species along the so called primate to man evolution tree but for humor sake I cant help pointing out that within the animation at some point a fairly long tail just sort of fell off. (but you have claimed evolution doesn't work this way.)

Jose wrote:
"This would, of course, be true. Primates derived from ancestral mammals that were not primates. And mammals derived from ancestral animals that were not mammals. This is excellent reasoning on your part, entirely consistent with evolutionary theory"

It is also consistent with the bible, man will produce man and primate will produce primate and extinct animals also produced after their own kind.
Only evolutionary "Theory" has a wide range of imaginary intermediates.

Jose wrote:
"Many of them--hair, feathers, fingernails, scales--involve the same genes, but in different patterns of regulation. Obviously, since this involves many genes, and genes do not mutate together, all at once, to create some pre-ordained structure, you'll never see this happen except over the course of millions of years."

Many evolutionists have questioned that very small changes over millions of years account for all of life today. Here is an example

*Richard Goldschmidt spent 25 years trying to get the gypsy moth to change into something else. Using X rays, he was able to compress the mutational changes of millions of years into a short time. Yet all he succeeded in doing was to produce damaged and dead gypsy moths.
His idea was that every so many hundreds of thousands of years, millions of favorable mutations would occur in one egg, and it would hatch into a totally new creature. He called this the "saltation" (leap) theory, and he called the emerging new species a "hopeful monster."
In 1977, *Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard professor and leading paleontologist (fossil expert), declared that there were no transitions between species in the fossil record, and therefore *Goldschmidt's theory must be right after all!
Gould said this rare monster-mutation event occurred once every 50,000 years, and had produced all our millions of species. Because the earlier theories had failed and Gould was the leading evolutionary spokesman of the latter half of the 20th century, his revolutionary article was carefully considered.
*Steven M. Stanley, of Johns Hopkins University, is another leading paleontologist. He has come to the same conclusion as Gould, and he gave the monster theory a new name: "quantum speciation." Like the monster advocates before him, he said that nature only produces such a multimillion-positive-mutation creature once every 50,000 years—but, Stanley added, by sheerest coincidence two (male and female) are produced each time
http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encycloped ... 0Mutations


Jose wrote:
"Again, although you are right about aneuploidy, your expectation of how changes in chromosome number occur evolutionarily is incorrect. In mammals, the actual number of chromosomes is irrelevant. We have 23, Indian Muntjacs have 4--but we have the same amount of DNA, and the same basic genes (albeit with some sequence variation, and regulatory variation, which accounts for our different developmental programs). What happens is not wholesale loss of chromosomes, but Robertsonian Fusion, in which two chromosomes join to become one. By simple counting, this is "loss" of a chromosome, but in terms of genetic information, there is little change. "

First of all I am very confused regarding your comparison of humans to Indian Muntjacs (deer). Your example seems to argue that Indian Muntjacs are Humans and they only have 4 chromosomes because of Robertsonian Fusion and the same amount of DNA as humans. Again Indian Muntjacs are a barking deer. I also realize that the number of chromosomes doesn't transfer to "more information"....A potato has the same number of chromosomes as a human.

"Robertsonian Fusion" as you mentioned simply fuses two chromosomes together. Keep in mind not all chromosomes can experience robertsonian Fusion. If a person is born with chromosomes 13 and 14 fused together(only 13,14, 15, 21, and 22 have potential) chances are much higher that their offspring will have serious medical problems. So passing on this trait for many generations is unlikely. Again most all mutations are Harmful. This was my point on my last post. I never said that you couldn't remove two chromosome I simply said it would most likely be fatal. (in primates or Humans). Chromosomal abnormalities are found in at least half of spontaneous abortions.

Jose wrote:
"Aside from that question, it is now known that even dinosaurs that are not in the direct lineage of birds, like T. rex, had partial feathers. Young T. rex had small single-barb feathers, which are referred to as proto-feathers. They lost them as they grew up"

I hope you have a fossil of a baby T-Rex and can show beyond a doubt that it had feathers other wise you are as guilty as several evolutionist of making inaccurate claims. The only information I could find said the following:

"Xu added that even large dinosaurs like T. rex may have had feathers when they were young. "They are not likely to be completely featherless animals for [their] whole life," he said."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... _dino.html

(notice the words "may have" and notice how you used the words "T.rex had small single -barb feathers" Unless you can direct us to solid proof...you are misleading in order to make a point. You seem very intelligent so I can only assume that you have information I don't.

The problem with evolutionists is they are famous for making statements as if they are based on solid undeniable evidence. They then take "so called evidence" and extrapolate it or interpolate it to meet their theories.. For example they may find something that resembles hair on a dinosaur that pre-dates T-rex and assume it is feathers because they strongly believe that dinosaurs evolved into birds. They then extrapolate the information and assume that dinosaurs that appeared much later also had feathers. And poor me and you then watch a national geographic program and the following comment is make. "T-rex had feathers"

Maybe some dinosaurs had feathers but I am skeptical and here is why:

"A tiny, earlier cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex sported at least a partial coat of hairlike feathers, scientists reported today"
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... _dino.html

(what is a hair like feather....could it just be hair? or could it be something else?)

"Larry Martin also thinks that the feathers found on dinosaurs “lack any clear feather characteristics and are called feathers only because some researchers theorize that dinosaurs should have feathers."

"We should remember that the media often sensationilize ‘proofs’ of evolution, but the later disproofs, even by other evolutionists, hardly rate a mention. For example, in 1996 there were headlines like ‘Feathered Fossil Proves Some Dinosaurs Evolved into Birds.’5 This was about a fossil called Sinosauropteryx prima.6 Creationist publications advised readers to be skeptical and keep an open mind.7 They were vindicated when four leading paleontologists, including Yale University's John Ostrom, later found that the ‘feathers’ were just a parallel array of fibres,8 probably collagen."
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/ar ... apter4.asp


"He issued the highly critical letter after National Geographic magazine published a story in November 1999 reporting on several feathered dinosaur specimens that scientists claimed were "a missing link" between terrestrial dinosaurs and birds that could fly. One of the specimens from China was later found to be a composite, which prompted an internal investigation of the incident.
Among his comments, Olson said that "none of the structures illustrated in [the] article that are claimed to be feathers have actually been proven to be feathers"
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... rdino.html

Jose wrote:
Darwin is right. The trouble is, no such organ has been found (despite what the IDers say--they just ignore much of the evidence when they talk about it). As noted above, feathers don't do the trick. Lungs don't either. IDers are successful because they present their logic to non-scientists, using big scientific words (to sound credible), but with the basic argument of "gee, this seems awfully complicated, so I bet you can't think of a way that it could be produced by evolution." The non-scientist audience can't think of a way, and the IDers don't tell them about the ways that have been described

This is an extremely elitist comment. What you have basically said is that if a scientist gives an explanation for a problem than it must be true. Keep in mind that scientists are human and subject to all human traits. They have purposely made false claims or falsified research to keep grants or to be published. There are many examples of this throughout recent history. I am not anti-science, I am an engineer by degree...I just am skeptical by nature because we have been burned many times by false scientific claims. This is one reason why I am waiting for the study on tetrachromats to be completed and reviewed before I accept it as fact.

I have read evolutionists rebuttal on "irreducable Complexity" The ones you say "ID's" don't tell people about. They are not convincing. I would be happy to debate you on this topic in another tread.

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Jose
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Post #25

Post by Jose »

anchorman wrote:in your animation sequence very few of the intermediates have been discovered and of those...very few have been found that have not had the bias of a evolutionist reconstruct the skeleton for viewing. Many skeletons are simply a jaw bone or a forearm and then passed on to a museum and reconstructed as a whole (sometimes with a partial tail....this is an animation based on interpolating between species not factual evidence. I realize that the animation does not cover every species along the so called primate to man evolution tree but for humor sake I cant help pointing out that within the animation at some point a fairly long tail just sort of fell off. (but you have claimed evolution doesn't work this way.)
The purpose of the animation is to illustrate the process--a mutation appearing in one newborn individual, then (if it is advantageous) eventually becoming the norm. This sequence is repeated over and over and over through many generations. Obviously, I could not have produced an accurate animation spanning thousands of generations, because we'd both get bored with it. I used as many generations as I could stand to program, and that I thought the viewer would be willing to sit through. The animation illustrates the concept and the mechanism.

I still stand by my statement that "it doesn't work that way" concerning tails (or any structure). You'll note that the individual in question was born without a tail (rather, the tail, like ours, does not protrude from the body; we call our tail a coccyx.) What did not happen was that an adult individual had its tail fall off, and then transmit taillessness to its offspring. Mutations occur in DNA, and can affect an entire organism only by entering into egg or sperm, and thus the fertilized egg from which that individual organism develops. Once that organism has developed, and reproduced, then that mutation is part of the genetic diversity of the population, and may become common (if advantageous) or may become lost (if disadvantageous). A genetic mutation that results in taillessness is quite plausible, actually, since such a mutation is known in mice, and another in cats.
anchorman wrote:It is also consistent with the bible, man will produce man and primate will produce primate and extinct animals also produced after their own kind.
Only evolutionary "Theory" has a wide range of imaginary intermediates.
And in evolution, each species reproduces according to its kind. It's just that mutations happen, and genetic diversity creeps in, so the characteristics of each kind can change with time.

I'd be interested in knowing what your image is for an "intermediate." In fact, I'll need to know this before I can comment on whether they are imaginary.

Well, you know, Goldschmidt's "hopeful monster" kinda made sense at one time, before we knew more about genetics and development. I recall hearing about it in biology classes decades ago, as a possible explanation for how things might work. It didn't sound plausible to me then, and it doesn't now. Goldschmidt didn't know about developmental control genes, you see, so he developed a hypothesis that made sense to him at the time, on the basis of the evidence available to him. I can't speak for Gould; I haven't seen the entire passage to which you refer. It is important to know what he was actually talking about, and not take isolated words out of context. Again, however, in 1977, very little was known about developmental regulatory genes. Ed Lewis knew, of course, and Thom Kaufman was working on another set of genes that work the same way, but this was just before the explosion in knowledge about these kinds of genes.

Now that we know more, it isn't necessary to invent "hopeful monsters" or "quantum leaps." Speciation very often occurs without any significant change in appearance, while significant changes in appearance can easily occur without speciation.
anchorman wrote:First of all I am very confused regarding your comparison of humans to Indian Muntjacs (deer). Your example seems to argue that Indian Muntjacs are Humans and they only have 4 chromosomes because of Robertsonian Fusion and the same amount of DNA as humans. Again Indian Muntjacs are a barking deer. I also realize that the number of chromosomes doesn't transfer to "more information"....A potato has the same number of chromosomes as a human.
Why does a comparison of humans and muntjacs suggest to you that I am arguing that they are the same? The comparison is between two mammals with roughly equal amounts of genetic information, but wildly different numbers of chromosomes. It is similar to your comparison of humans and potatoes, which, I presume, you are not using to indicate that humans are potatoes.

Your discussion of chromosome fusion, as with your last discussion of aneuploidy, remains correct. It is usually the case that such a chromosome fusion would be lethal. You've missed the even more obvious problem that a simple fusion produces a chromosome with two centromeres, which is torn apart at cell division. So, as we might expect, a Robertsonian Fusion that successfully leads to a viable organism would be rare, but not at all unheard of. In work with Drosophila and C. elegans, researchers have occasionally recovered individuals in which some odd chromosomal abnormality has occurred, simultaneous with a defect in meiotic disjunction that resulted in a zygote with a normal complement of DNA. Such individuals are perfectly viable, and can produce offspring if they are lucky enough to get another odd gamete. This is rare normally, but this sequence would be reasonable if the parent/population carried a mutation that alters meiotic disjunction. Such mutations exist, some tightly linked to mutations that confer other phenotypes. Selection for a tightly linked, favorable mutation would outweigh the negative effect producing occasional non-disjunction offspring (which die as embryos--the spontaneous abortions of which you speak).

We agree that most mutations are harmful. Everyone agrees. But, "most" is not "all." This is where many people get hung up. There are occasional mutations that are advantageous.
anchorman wrote:I hope you have a fossil of a baby T-Rex and can show beyond a doubt that it had feathers other wise you are as guilty as several evolutionist of making inaccurate claims. ...
I was merely summarizing what I read in a recent issue of Science or Nature a couple of months ago. There's no point in misleading, except as a sure-fire way to lose one's credibility! The current thinking seems to be that many dinosaurs were feathered. Now, you'll quibble with this, since you ask whether I really mean "feather" or some sort of little hair-like thing that isn't really a feather, or whether I've been sucked in by a fossil fraud or the mis-diagnosis of collagen fibers.

The fossil fraud is out, since we know about that. We expect such frauds any time there is a big black market, as there is for rare fossils. The collagen fiber idea, as far as I can tell, is still unresolved. Just because frayed collagen from the blubber of a dolphin looks somewhat like the fossil's fuzzy edges doesn't show that the fuzzy stuff really is collagen. It would be nice if we could do the protein analysis, and see if it's collagen or keratin, but we can't do that.

Still, the reading I've done indicates that more and more fossils are being found with feathers, or small pre-feather-like stuff that is hypothesized to have been used for heat retention. Mammals developed hair; dinosaurs seem to have developed feathery hair-like stuff. They could have done the same thing, I suppose, but since mutations occur at random, they didn't.

Now, suppose we think about how evolution of feathers might occur. We certainly are not going to see the sudden appearance of full-blown flight feathers popping up out of nowhere. The IDers might say that this proves feathers are designed, because a partial feather doesn't work. However, if we consider what it would take to build the feather-producing developmental pathway, we come up with: ya gotta start with something a lot simpler, and modify it. So, if we find little hair-like things, well...they aren't full-blown feathers by any stretch of the imagination. But, they might be something that could be modified to be a little bigger, or stiffer. Or, by changing the arrangement and number of cells that secrete the protein (whether collagen or keratin), a little hair-like thing can be made much more complex. If these were used for insulation, then we might expect some kind of increase in complexity to handle cooler climates.
anchorman wrote:
Jose wrote:IDers are successful because they present their logic to non-scientists, using big scientific words (to sound credible), but with the basic argument of "gee, this seems awfully complicated, so I bet you can't think of a way that it could be produced by evolution." The non-scientist audience can't think of a way, and the IDers don't tell them about the ways that have been described
This is an extremely elitist comment. What you have basically said is that if a scientist gives an explanation for a problem than it must be true. Keep in mind that scientists are human and subject to all human traits. They have purposely made false claims or falsified research to keep grants or to be published. There are many examples of this throughout recent history. I am not anti-science, I am an engineer by degree...I just am skeptical by nature because we have been burned many times by false scientific claims. This is one reason why I am waiting for the study on tetrachromats to be completed and reviewed before I accept it as fact.
Perhaps it does sound like an elitist comment, but the correct inference is not what you have suggested. I do not imply that a statement must be true if it comes from a scientist. I imply only that if an IDer (or a scientist) gives you some information and tells you what to think about it, then you should be wary of accepting their conclusion until you've looked to see what else is known. Did they give you all the data? This is what we do automatically with other scientists. Part of science teaching, albeit not in high school, and little in college, is training scientists to treat each other with great suspicion. Look for the flaw in their argument. Think of hard questions to ask 'em after their talk. Try to prove 'em wrong when you get back to the lab. Insist that they really have the data to make their conclusions. And always, always, present the information as "the data suggest" because you're probably wrong yourself.

Unfortunately, the general public has a serious misconception about how science works. In school, we are usually taught science as if it is the memorization of facts, as if science could produce facts. We come out thinking that scientists are supposed to be telling us Truth. We have no idea that science can't do that--it can only collect data, and interpret the data to the best of our human ability. When new data come along, we often find that our prior interpretation is wrong, and we have to change our interpretation. To the public, this comes across as having lied the first time when we told them it was True. We never said "this is True." We said "we think this is how it works." Unfortunately, this gets translated in the press, or just in peoples' minds, as "this is True." Then people feel burned when they find out later that it wasn't true, but just the current interpretation at the time.

And yes, there are occasional scientists who are caught falsifying data, just as there are occasional CEOs who are caught falsifying financial reports, or citizens falsifying tax returns. Science is not free of people who get so caught up in the frenzy of "winning" that they cheat to get there. But science does have internal methods of checking--competitors who repeat the experiments and discover that the data don't come out that way. This is something that Creationism/ID doesn't have: because they start with the answer, the data have to come out that way.

I said that IDers foist their logic on an unsuspecting audience because their presentations are scientific--let's look at the evolution of the ribosome!--and beyond the typical person's expertise. They use Paley's argument that things are too complex for evolution to have built them, and apply it to proteins, the production of which is one of the most difficult things to learn in high school biology. They overlook the details of how proteins are made, and do not discuss how mutations occur, and how mutations can--and do--change the three-dimensional structure of proteins and thus their function. There's a lot they leave out. They leave it out because it is beyond the expertise of their audience, and because leaving it out makes it much easier to make their case that "it's just too complicated, so God must have done it." Having said that, I can also note that I'll treat any scientist just as harshly if they do the same kind of thing.
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