If you accept microevolution

[jamesmorlock]

Simply because they are identical.

Consider an analogy:

Imagine that you can travel across the universe by walking. You have an infinite amount of time to do this, but you must make your journey by taking small steps. You have no destination, but you can go anywhere and you must never stop walking.

A thousand years pass. Where are you now? Further.
A million years pass. Where are you now? Even Further.
A billion years pass. Where are you now? Far, far away.

For every iteration of time, you will have traveled further and further. It is inevitable, for every small step takes you further. It is not possible to not travel far.

Microevolution is the small step. Macroevolution is the collective of small steps over a large period of time.

When walking for billions of years, how can you not be far away from your starting point?

[nobspeople]

[Replying to jamesmorlock in post #261]

When walking for billions of years, how can you not be far away from your starting point?

Are there saying we aren't? What's the impetus of this question?

Billions of years is a lot to us, but so much if we're considering infinity. Are we considering infinity or a set amount of time? If a set amount, what amount?

[Purple Knight]

The religious argument is not that some large number of small steps won't or can't happen, but that, at times, it's difficult to see how some extremely complex systems could be the result of small steps, however many. They're not convinced of the viability of every intermediate step, and thus, to them, the process seems directed. They reason that there must have been at least some big steps; some direction.

I don't necessarily agree but if we wake up tomorrow to some big step (for example, if half of us are X-Men) it'll at least be a point in their favour.

I can at least see how they think it would be hard to get some of the things we have without equally large (if not equally silly) leaps forward. I mean, really, eyesight is the greatest superpower I can think of, real or imaginary.

[Critical_Thinker]

It is scientifically impossible for a mutation or a combination of mutations to cause a positive change in a species, let along eventually cause a species to become a different species. Every organ is composed of multiple cells. No matter how much time is given for even the smallest change to occur, there is no way that coordinated changes occur, no positive change in any organ would ever result. Also, in the intermediate time between the original state and the imagined end result would be eliminated by natural selection. After the “neutral period” has passed, any additional change would be detrimental to the species, so the creatures with these deformities would not be able to survive and their genes would not be passed of to future generations. For example, a creature with a forelimb in the process of developing into a wing would eventually not be able to walk on all four limbs, as the feet would have become deformed and possibly the half developed wing with feathers would only hinder the creature from being able to function properly to survive. In such case, the creature with the deformed forelimbs would not live long enough to spread their genes to future generations. Mutations could never cause any changes that would lead to a major change in a species. This claim that mutations causes positive changes in species has never been observed or verified and never will. It only gives Darwinian evolutionists an explanation of how positive changes cause species to gradually evolve into different species, but it is only an unproven theory with no evidence to support it.

[brunumb]

It is scientifically impossible for a mutation or a combination of mutations to cause a positive change in a species, let along eventually cause a species to become a different species.

Why then do so many scientists, particularly specialists in the field, have no problem with speciation resulting from genetic mutation? What evidence do you have in support of your claim, or is it just an opinion that you hold?

[Purple Knight]

What evidence do you have in support of your claim, or is it just an opinion that you hold?

In this case he's claiming that something doesn't happen, so we would need to prove, or at least provide evidence that it does.

I have no problem whatsoever with a seeing-is-believing approach to evolution, and it's true that immediate, observable positive mutations are going to be rare. Personally I would cite the tuskless elephants.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/anim ... or-change/

However, a religious person would counter with, well, that was always in the population, it just became more prominent due to selective pressure. The critically thinking ones don't have a problem with that. What they have a problem with is new mutations changing a species into something that didn't exist before. If you walk the world looking for brown dogs, and pick out two brown dogs and breed them, you get more brown ones, but, according to them, you would need some brown ones to start with. I don't really disagree with their thinking here, because they take the same seeing-is-believing approach to evolution that I do to god.

My cat is an Oriental Shorthair. I paid $1200 for this cat. I don't think wild cats have this degree of length of body, ear size, or elegant head shape. If this cat has larger ears than any that exist in the wild, breeders would have had to wait for those mutations and snap them up. There were none to start with that looked like this. Now, on the outside, you can say, perhaps gene A increases the ears by 10%, and gene B increases them by 15%, and gene C increases them another 5%, perhaps breeders scoured the globe and put them all together. Fair enough, but it still results in a type unseen in the wild.

Here is an example of an Oriental Shorthair. (My cat is being all upset now because I tried to take a picture of him.)



My cat looks about like this except that he's colourpoint chocolate, not black.

[Clownboat]

It is scientifically impossible for a mutation or a combination of mutations to cause a positive change in a species,

Please show that you speak the truth. Remember, this is the science subforum.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to Critical_Thinker in post #264]

It is scientifically impossible for a mutation or a combination of mutations to cause a positive change in a species, let along eventually cause a species to become a different species.

There is an accepted (by the scientific community for many decades now) scientific theory for how this happens called the Theory of Evolution. Speciation is a very common process among plants and animals, and the evolution of Homo sapiens from a great ape ancestor is a perfect example of how this works. There is no evidence to support the idea that Homo sapiens simply appeared, fully formed as we exist today without any prior evolutionary process.

To believe that you'd have to believe in some sort of creation event where we were just poofed into existence from nothing, but there is simply no evidence for that scenario. In contrast, the fossil record shows that the evolution of Homo sapiens from a great ape ancestor was a long and "bushy" process with many intemediates and dead ends along the way. How would you explain this fossil record if not an evolutionary one that resulted in speciation among members of the genus Homo, via combinations of mutations, genetic drift, etc. acted upon by natural selection? You claim it is "scientifically impossible", but it has in fact happened repeatedly across the plant and animal kingdoms for hundreds of millions of years, and we have plenty of actual evidence for it.

[bluegreenearth]

It is scientifically impossible for a mutation or a combination of mutations to cause a positive change in a species, let along eventually cause a species to become a different species. Every organ is composed of multiple cells. No matter how much time is given for even the smallest change to occur, there is no way that coordinated changes occur, no positive change in any organ would ever result. Also, in the intermediate time between the original state and the imagined end result would be eliminated by natural selection. After the “neutral period” has passed, any additional change would be detrimental to the species, so the creatures with these deformities would not be able to survive and their genes would not be passed of to future generations. For example, a creature with a forelimb in the process of developing into a wing would eventually not be able to walk on all four limbs, as the feet would have become deformed and possibly the half developed wing with feathers would only hinder the creature from being able to function properly to survive. In such case, the creature with the deformed forelimbs would not live long enough to spread their genes to future generations. Mutations could never cause any changes that would lead to a major change in a species. This claim that mutations causes positive changes in species has never been observed or verified and never will. It only gives Darwinian evolutionists an explanation of how positive changes cause species to gradually evolve into different species, but it is only an unproven theory with no evidence to support it.

Were you aware that no scientific theories are ever "proven" to be true but are only conditionally accepted as the most reasonable falsifiable explanations as long as they continue to survive the various tests that are designed to try and disprove them? In the case of evolution, every experiment in evolutionary biology has been and continues to be an opportunity to falsify the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. To date, no one has succeeded in falsifying the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection despite the fact that the results we would expect to observe if the theory was false have never been produced in any of the published and peer reviewed experiments. Therefore, scientists abductively infer from these results that the process of evolution is currently the most reasonable explanation for the biodiversity we observe. Does this "prove" the theory is true? No. Does this disprove the claim that an intelligent designer is the cause of the biodiversity we observe? No. However, with the Theory of Evolution, it at least makes novel testable predictions we can test to eventually discover if it is false. Of course, if you have an alternative theory that can be tested for us to know if it is false, you are welcome to propose such an explanation for us to consider.

Note: Bird wings are not hypothesized to have evolved directly from a quadruped but from a bipedal dinosaur.

Comsognathus (157.3 million years ago - 145 million years ago)


Archaeopteryx (150.8 million years ago - 125.45 million years)

[The Barbarian]

Nothing prevents mutations from happening, but natural selection prevents most mutations with phenotypic effect from sticking around in the population, since they are usually deleterious.

This is an important point. The only thing I'd point out, is that there are many many possible mutations with phenotypic effects that are neutral or beneficial. Most mutations are of course, of very little effect at all. What percentage are beneficial? That depends on the population and the environment. The better-fitted to the environment, the less likely it is that a new mutation will be beneficial. It's no surprise that well-fitted populations in a constant environment tend to change very little.

There is no reason in principle why organisms should be viable beyond a certain mutational distance from existing species.

The best evidence for that would be homeobox genes.

Homeobox genes are a cluster of regulatory genes that are spatially and temporally expressed during early embryological development. They are interesting from both a developmental and evolutionary perspective since their sequences are highly conserved and shared across an enormously wide array of living taxa.
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/homeobox-g ... d-homeobox

The same HOX genes play a role for eyes in insects and humans (among many others), but not poriferans,which lack true tissues. This shows that the same genes can be involved in very different body plans. The phenotypic distance between insects and vertebrates is rather large.

Whether too many mutations to a genome leads to a dead organism or to a new species is an empirical question(*), not one to be settled by analogies to space travel.

Time and chance happens to them all. It's a point that we can't discard out of hand. Natural selection tends to remove sudden extreme changes, while it tends to refine the genome by removing or preserving gradual changes according to their selective value. But that's not always true.

[The Barbarian]

It is scientifically impossible for a mutation or a combination of mutations to cause a positive change in a species, let along eventually cause a species to become a different species.

Both have been directly observed. Indeed, even YE creationists generally agree that new species, genera, and (sometimes) families develop from other species. AIG and ICR, for example, think so. They merely argue that it's not "real evolution." Since evolution is defined scientifically as a change in allele frequencies in a population over time, it's clear that they have a different definition of the word than scientists do.

Can we talk about some of those?

Every organ is composed of multiple cells. No matter how much time is given for even the smallest change to occur, there is no way that coordinated changes occur, no positive change in any organ would ever result.

You're correct in noting that somatic mutations would not lead to positive changes in almost all cases. However, it's mutations in eggs and sperm that are transmitted to the next generation. And these are, depending on the fitness of the population to the particular environment, more or less likely to be beneficial.

For example, a creature with a forelimb in the process of developing into a wing would eventually not be able to walk on all four limbs, as the feet would have become deformed and possibly the half developed wing with feathers would only hinder the creature from being able to function properly to survive.

Let's consider dinosaurs to birds. Many later dinosaurs had feathers, an "avian" respiratory system, and walked on two legs. So the upper limbs were not required for walking. And consider bats, which have wings, and yet can walk around with them. It seems that pterosaurs were also able to walk using wings.