[Morgoth]

@Chewy - you should be perfectly able to write one, rather than four following posts.

[Cause]

Chewy;134914 said:

Your evidence of descent is similarity. "Children are like their parents". Evidence? Or conclusion? I say conclusion.

Genetics has discovered natural barriers to change. Chromosome pairs. Wrong number - deadly to children.

Fruit fly experiments. All mutations bad and only a limited number, same ones repeated over and over. These tests were abandoned. They did not provide an observation of a mechanism that could account for genetic changes. We were all taught that these experiments provided conclusive proof. Now abandoned because they failed to provide proof. Other "proofs" have been abandoned but we were told at the time we had "the proof".

well its alot better than that. Complementarity of dna base pairs allows for 'spell checking'. Even if dna mutates, theirs a good chance your dna will catch it and say hell no. Than we have a degenerate code for translation from RNA to amino acids. Mutations might not even change the amino acid they represent, even if they do that change might be conservative. Isoleucine for leucine. Well the world wont explode if that happens But remeber most mutations as you point out are bad. They are not guided, they are pure random statistical chance. Having nucleotides randomly substituted is not a good thing and funnily enough organisms have elvoved to do their best to halt evolution. When your a human being with 6.4 billion base pairs haing them randomly change is not a good thing. A simply flaw in your fructose-6-phosphatase enzyme will create flux problems in your entire multi trillion cellular strcutures metabolism. But a virus 200 killi bases big. Well if that protomer for its capsid is changed by twen bases, Who cares. It wont effect much. If it works great it works. If it works better it will outcompete the others and new supervirus. if it does not work. Well few billion cells with a burst number of 500 after infection. It does not really make a diffrence if 20% experience failed mutations. Well still get a few trillion cells. A 1000%increase in population.

And please Im intrested in your thoughts to the above

[stone monkey]

Of course you could just try and ban evolution altogether...

@ Chewy - Do you actually read my posts?

If we're going to be pedantic; the fossils are rare, this says nothing about how rare the organisms were in life. For all we know there could have been flocks of millions of Archaeopteryx, like Passenger Pigeons, the fossils are very rare however...

Also, as Mezla has pointed out (whom, it should be noted, researches this sort of thing for a living) there really isn't any such thing as a transitional organism.

*sigh* Okay, I'll make it simple.

Of course children resemble their parents, that's where (the only place) they get their genetic material from! Therefore examination of that genetic material provides you with evidence for what their ancestors were like. And how they differ from their descendants. The geological record provides you with more evidence as to why that is the case.

All mutations arent bad, the vast majority of them don't make any difference. Of the remaining ones, most are bad. Very obviously, this implies that some are good. This fact leads you, fairly inescapably IMO, to the supposition that, in the real world, most organisms would have very specific error checking mechanisms in place to discourage mutation. Which actually turns out to be the case.

BTW in human children an extra chromosome pair (in one case) leads to Down's Syndrome, which isn't deadly at all. Most of the really dangerous genetic diseases would appear to be due transcription errors (repeated base sequences etc.) Some of these cause the embryo to spontaneously abort - I know this from experience as my family has a tendancy towards a genetic disorder that causes malformation of fetal bone deposits, my sister has lost 3 pregnancies (that I'm aware of) to this.


As for the fruit fly experiments; I hate to rain on your parade, but they continue to this day all over the world.

[Dolorous Menhir]

I'd like to note that evolution is a scientific subject which requires a base level of knowledge before you can make legitimate statements about it. Some people here have that background, and some do not.

This is why "I don't understand so it's not true" or "it doesn't make sense so it's not true" are weak lines of argument. You don't understand because you don't understand, not because it's false.

[D Man]

Chewy;134911 said:

Re-read reply. Conclusion: Fossil evidence of change is rare. (didn't put it all here)

@DM Am I wrong in conclusion?

Well, stricktly speaking youre right. Its rare. Thats true.

But thats a overly simple conclusion. The point is that gaps in the fossil record are predicted by and support evolution. We dont expect to see continuous change in the fossil record from our current understanding. We expect to see sudden jumps.

Edit:

Chewy;134914 said:

Your evidence of descent is similarity. "Children are like their parents". Evidence? Or conclusion? I say conclusion.

Genetics has discovered natural barriers to change. Chromosome pairs. Wrong number - deadly to children.

Fruit fly experiments. All mutations bad and only a limited number, same ones repeated over and over. These tests were abandoned. They did not provide an observation of a mechanism that could account for genetic changes. We were all taught that these experiments provided conclusive proof. Now abandoned because they failed to provide proof. Other "proofs" have been abandoned but we were told at the time we had "the proof".

Evidence:

We see that offspring inherit characteristics from parents every time parents reproduce and from nowhere else:

Conclusion:

All Characteristics are inherited.

The italiced words are the logical connection between the evidence (every observed natural reproduction) and the conclusion (that all others are the same).

The implicit additional conclusion is that no genetic material has arrived in a life form by anything other than means of normal inheritance. This includes mutations, of course. And therefore excludes God.

FYI there are an average of about 300 mutations between a parent and an offspring in mammals.

To hijack a religious argument (if evolution is true then why arent monkeys turning into people now): if god created life, and he has wiped out 99.9% of species that have lived (its a fact that 99.9% of species that have lived dont today) then why isnt he making more species spring into existance before our eyes?

To modify that argument for the theist or deist that thinks the current state of life has arrisen due to the guidance of an intelligence: why do we not see a beneficial mutation or structure in one life form transfer to another line of descent that could use it now that the designer has developed the adaptation? The designer knows the benefit it would bring, and like every car manufacturer could see the advantage of windshield wipers and add them when they saw them rather than wait till they thought of them themselves, a designer of life could interchange characterstics outside of the confines of lines of descent.

We dont see this, and we see lots of descent.

If life is designed, the designer has gone to an awfull lot of trouble to make it look like it evoloved.

[Cause]

The explanations are insiuffiecient because you cant and wont understand them.

Your entirer argument above is one of ignorance and personal convictions coloured by your personal beliefs. I cant accpet that a computer program cant write itself? Well no one cares what you can or cant accept. Prove it or disporove it. You cant accpet that life can happen without an inteliigent designer. Well than Im sure we will adjust the entire field of science to accomedate your view.

[Illuyankas]

@Chewy - There have been studies of simulating life in computer programs, starting with a simple asexual-behaving 'lifeform', which breeds and spreads and adapts into predators, parasites and proper gendered sexes all without any intervention. Multiple times.

I highly recommend Evolving The Alien by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart for some interesting reading material - it deals with what aliens could possibly, and plausibly, be like, including variations on DNA (two are expanded on, and there are more) and more exotic ideas, like magnetic vortices in stars (which could encode information and be stable); what aliens won't look like
(grays and Star Trek come to mind) and instances of life on Earth that defy conventional thinking. It's also a cracking read. If you like that, try the Science of Discworld books they did with Pratchett too, especially the first one.

[D Man]

I'd just like to point out you can use programming to simulate evolution quite effectively, but you cant draw an analogy between it and evolution completely.

Programming needs a manufactured substrate: computers and written code.

Evolutions substrate is already all around us: chemisty. It has no problem being self organising. Thats what it does, quite naturally.

[Dolorous Menhir]

Chewy;141635 said:

A computer program cannot write itself. A house cannot make itself. A scientific experiment cannot take place without a scientist (or whatever he calls himself.) I don't think you understand those processes yourself or else you would have tried to explain it. A computer program that simulates evolution. No such thing. The designer of the program tells it what to do and it does it. What new "fly" or other creature was created through experiments? Hybrids are common, but they cannot propogate. The evolution model predicts gaps in the fossil record? And thats what we find. The gaps are there becuse of natural selection. OK. The creation model predicts the same gaps for a different reason. The creation model predicts that the kinds of organisms created have variety but do not break the barrier of genetics. No partially formed structures. Is there other eveidence that I haven't heard about? Please provide.

The Creation model predicts gaps in the fossil record????

The Creation model doesn't even predict fossils.

[stone monkey]

I stand corrected, although your inference was that it was always instantly fatal...Which ain't actually the case.

ps. re Evolutionary simulations: if a programmer were to tell the computer what do do at each and every step of the way, there'd be no point them writing the program in the first place, would there? What you appear not to understand about simulations is that even though the parameters are known (as they're usually initially defined) the results obtained are not necessarily predicatable.

The reason no new creatures have been created through evolutionary simulations because they're simulations.

Your main argument here seeems to be what's known as the Argument From Design (or The Watchmaker Hypothesis) which assumes, as you do that because something is complex in form it has to have been designed by an intelligence. I might point out here that snowflakes are rather complicated in form but no one's suggesting that each and every one of them has been individually sculpted by hand, when in fact we know they exist only as a result of a bunch of dynamic chemical and physical processes.

An interesting aside here for you biblical literalists is the so-called Omphalos question; that is, did Adam or Eve, for that matter) have a navel? (unlike myself - don't get excited, I lost mine as the result of a hernia operation when I was a toddler) It's more interesting than you think; if they did, why? We do know what navels are for and, given their supposed origins, neither Adam nor Eve would have need of one...So what point would there be in creating them with something that was of no use to them?

[D Man]

Chewy;141635 said:

A computer program cannot write itself. A house cannot make itself. A scientific experiment cannot take place without a scientist (or whatever he calls himself.) I don't think you understand those processes yourself or else you would have tried to explain it. A computer program that simulates evolution. No such thing. The designer of the program tells it what to do and it does it. What new "fly" or other creature was created through experiments? Hybrids are common, but they cannot propogate. The evolution model predicts gaps in the fossil record? And thats what we find. The gaps are there becuse of natural selection. OK. The creation model predicts the same gaps for a different reason. The creation model predicts that the kinds of organisms created have variety but do not break the barrier of genetics. No partially formed structures. Is there other eveidence that I haven't heard about? Please provide.

Computers dont make themselves. But chemicals are already there. Codes dont write themselves. But chemicals rearrange themselves. Bricks dont organise themselve. But chemicals organise themselves.

Analogoes are OK, if youre carefull, to help along understanding. But evolution is not computer programming, evolution is not civil construction, evolution has no objective.

Its not these things. It has commonality with them: it increases local order. Nothing more. Stop understanding evolution in terms of other things and you might understand it.

[The Rope]

Where do the processes come from? Where do the chemicals come from?
Are you familiar with lego bricks? They come in sets, and you have to assemble them. Every piece in the set is important to the overall design.
Take every piece, toss them in a box, and jumble it al together. Let me know what kind of design you get.