Thesis at 110 pages and about 90% complete after a nice push yesterday. Today, I have to go read some phylogeny papers to see whether Family Drosophila diverged in the Late Cretaceous or Paleocene.
My question is important, though. An underlying current of creation theory is about how creation is perfect, how no random processes could have created the complexity of life. But pseudogenes are a clear example of broken things in the genome. Even things that would be of clear advantage to us – the ability to synthesize vitamin C – are not present due to chance events. The remnants of the genes are there but they are clearly evolving neutrally once they are broken and lose functional constraint.
The second part of my question – why molecular evolution matches paleontology and morphology – ties in in a similar way. All of the evidence points in one direction. There are only two possibilities: a) Evolution b) God/Satan/whoever did it and wants us to think its evolution. And if you answer (b), then you have to ask why God is trying to fool us. The Gnostic Trickster God is not too appealing for most fundamentalist Christians, I’d dare say.
And why the California fruit crop is always in danger.
Yeesh, when are you guys gonna study some INTERESTING critters? It’s always Drosophila and lab mice! How about bringing back some dinosaurs or mammoths?
** If you were going to create a new species of primate, you would begin with primate DNA. This DNA would be altered to form the unique characteristics of the new species. I believe that this is the method that God used to create new species of life on earth. How does this differ from evolution driven through natural selection and how can you distinguish the two methods? Naturalistic evolution could, in theory, produce some of the changes in structures that would account for some of the phenotypic differences observed between the old and new species. However, evolution is unable to account for the design of new structures. Even more of a problem are the ravages of mutation on the genomes of organisms.7 Mutation, the mechanism by which evolutionary change is proposed to occur, most often has no effect upon the fitness of an organism. In humans, these “neutral” mutations occur at a rate of 2.6 mutations per person per generation. However, deleterious mutations occur at a rate of 1.6 mutations per person per generation. Although these deleterious mutations are usually recessive (not expressed unless there are two copies), they will accumulate in the gene pool over time. Decreases in population size leads to the expression of these deleterious mutations through inbreeding, which seriously affects the fitness of the species. In fact, this is the mechanism by which species go extinct. Because of the small amount of genetic variation among humans, evolutionists have proposed that the human species went through a population bottleneck in the recent past. However, such a bottleneck would lead to expression of deleterious mutations, which would further drive down the population numbers, leading to extinction. I believe that God created humans by editing primate DNA - adding new features and removing the deleterious mutations of this DNA template. If evolution were the mechanism by which species arose, deleterious mutations would continue to accumulate as new species evolved. This mechanism would lead to ever increasingly defective DNA through the biological history of the earth. How does this creationary model relate to pseudogenes? Since pseudogenes are not deleterious, I believe that God left them in the genome as part of the filler DNA required to maintain chromosome structure. Richard Deem**
Now answer me this.
Please give me a scientific explanation on how life can come from non-living matter?
Do not use another theory. Or give me the patented evolutionary answer of “A hellish, fiery wasteland, a molten planet hostile to life, yet somehow, amazingly, this is where we got our start.” As you can see just by this quote evolution is presumed even though it goes against all science as to the conditions needed for life as we know it. And you say that you don’t accept this stuff on faith…
Ding ding ding! Subject of thread: evolution. Subject of this question: not evolution. We’ll be happy to answer with what science thinks about this particular question, but this is not exactly a good sign.
Clearly not true. Evolution can easily account for the design of new structures from the slight modification of existing structures, the classic example being Darwin’s account of the evolution of the eye.
I’m curious if Deems accepts an old earth, and only has a problem with humans evolving from primate DNA (though since we are primates our DNA is primate DNA also.) Does he accept that primates evolved through natural selection. Or did God create each new species at just the time the fossil record says?
You might want to give a cite or a link to the source of what you copied, by the way. Oftentimes it is interesting to read what else the guy says.
As for deleterious mutations in the gene pool, my allergies and near-sightedness say they happen - not to mention our lack of ability to synthesize Vitamin C. If God copied primate DNA, why didn’t he fix this? I bet any graduate geneticist could do it. Did he flunk gene splicing 101 in Heaven U?
Let me be the first of many to tell you that the beginning of life (abiogenesis) has nothing to do with evolution. There are many hypotheses, but no real theories yet. You might begin by defining life for us. Are virii life? Prions? A standalone DNA molecule? If we have a self-replicating molecule, which can evolve by variations during replication, when does it stop being a molecule and start being life?
Why? Did God need cliffs notes or something? Why couldn’t he maybe just create a new species without making it so obviously a modification of ancestral species? At the very least, he could have fixed our spine so that it’s actually decent for an upright posture.
So God is constantly breaking his own natural laws to tinker with creations that he created too inferiorly to work on their own? Creations that, according to this guy, are constantly degrading and so have to be fined tuned to keep them from extinction? God gave himself the role of being just a sort of genetic pit crew?
New structures ARE just changes in old structures. That’s why in living things, you can trace back most “new” features" to previously existing features that were progressively modified, such as the jawbones-to-earbones transitions.
Depends on what you talking about mutations TOO. Most of the human genome is unexpressed, so mutations to it don’t do anything (that’s why most are neutral).
Except… not. They aren’t “per person”: they tend to “clump” in particular individuals and then get quickly weeded out all at once by natural selection and other sorts of selection. And, indeed, the worst of the worst mutations are usually weeded out before they even get to be expressed in living beings in the first place. While some problems (especially those that only show up after reproductive age) can accumulate, in general they get weeded out pretty quickly. Talking just about deleterious mutations without talking about the OTHER processes happening is like talking about soil erosion without talking about volcanic upwelling and then claiming all land will quickly fall into the sea, the end. And the other issue is that there’s no good way, except in the worst of cases, to always be able to objectively label a mutation deleterious. Whether a mutation is deleterious or not depends in part on the environment.
The human bottleneck is still proposed to be way larger than would be deadly dangerous to humans as a whole via inbreeding. Many species have surived worse bottlenecks.
So let me get this straight: creationists answer to things is now to retreat to the idea that God progressively modified existing creatures in a way very similar to evolution: in fact perhaps so similar that it’s hard to detect the difference? Seems like we’re making progress on this fighting ignorance front!
Interestingly, the quote our friend uses is in an essay of Mr. Deems’ titled Pseudogenes , an Argument for Evolution and Against Design.
His argument seems to involve the theory that God is constantly tinkering and creating new species, that there are new ‘kinds’ since the Ark. His arguments against evolution, as opposed to his arguments for God, seem to be that “God could reuse things, if he felt like it.” That, and some arguments about the rate of mutation meaning that clearly, we would all be extinct by now. I don’t feel especially convinced.
Is this belief, that new species are created, what you follow, Nolies? Mr. Deems seems to state that something the exact shape and form of Evolution happens, but the shaping model is not survival of the fittest, but the will of God. The obvious quest ion is, “How can you tell the will of God?”
Oh, and “No matter how improbable something is, if it happened, it happened.”
Soooo…the great apes predated homo sapiens? This is inconsistant with Young Earth Creationism (as I understand it). Is this from your Bible, or…what exactly is your story with regard to Creation?
Please demonstrate why “naturalistic evolution” and produce changes in structures but “can’t account for the design of new structures”. It isn’t clear where the distinction between “changed” and “new” strucutres lies. Is this the “variations within but not between species” argument? Do you understand that species are taxinomical labels we somewhat arbitrarily grant to a group of creatures in order to fit them into a category but don’t actually reflect the continuum of genetic variation?
You are getting into theory of games (or biological economics) here…but you’re not stating any calculation to argue against. You throw out a couple of numbers and assert an impossibility based on them but demonstrate no proof of your assertion. Deleterious mutations tend to weed themselves out or not depending on how damaging they are in relation to the reproductive fitness of the vessel overall–and what might be considered deleterious from one perspective (such as the genotype for sickle cell anemia) can be beneficial in another way. If you are going to make an assertion such as the one above, you need to provide a calculation or a cite (not just a few random numbers) that backs up your claims. This is the standard to which scientists hold each other, and this is what causes the disagreements between scientists that Creationists like to exploit in their “See! They don’t even agree with each other!” attacks.
Darwin’s Finch and I had an interesting discussion of this wrt the peacock’s tail a while back (whether and why it would develop such ostentatious ornamentation) and while I’m not totally convinced of his argument (and clearly neither his of mine) what is clear from looking at evidentiary fitness is that the plumage does serve some evolutionary advantage, whether in attracting mates and demonstrating “handicap fitness” or some other functional mechanism.
Eh? Why wouldn’t your god just remove the “useless” pseudogenes and build the “chromosome structure” so that “filler DNA” were not needed? As an engineer, I wouldn’t build a car frame with a bunch of extra struts and brakets just because they were lying around, or because I needed a little support over here; I’d design the thing to use minimum material and least complex fabrication and assembly. The human genome is loaded with crap that doesn’t appear to serve people at all, some of which is actually somewhat detrimental (but not to the point that it prevents effective replication). This argument makes about as much sense from an Intelligent Design standpoint as the ass-backwards vertebrate retina or the veriform appendix.
Abiogenesis is one of the great pressing questions of evolutionary biology. We have some clues–in particular, organic compounds such as the organic bases–appear reguarly in nature, even under conditions, such as outer space, where we wouldn’t expect them to form. We’ve seen compounds catalyze in nature. And we regularly see crystaline strutures form from “disorder”, obviating the misconjecture that the laws of thermodynamics make it impossible for “order to come from disorder”. We don’t know, and will probably never will know, exactly how life formed, if it happened only once or multiple times, and exactly what initial path it took, because such primative strutures were unlikely to have fossilizied. We do, however, have fossil record of very primative bacteria on up through the modern day, which demonstrates a traceable progression of complexity. We can create a model for abiogenesis, but as far as knowing exactly how it happened in the first place, unless we are able to borrow a time machine from Professor Frinkie down at Springfield U, we’ll never have it.
Science, unlike religion or “Creation Science” doesn’t pretend to have all answers, and the claim that the scientific explaination is invalid because it can’t provide such is bogus. What it does is offer up tested and validated theories for challenge and refinement (or replacement, if a better fitting competing theory is proposed), based upon the integrated body of human knowledge about the natural world. A theory is accepted, or not, based upon how well it plays with what we already know about the world and how likely or well supported it is based upon those interrelations. Of course, like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, there are gaps in understanding, and frankly, we’d be suspicious if there weren’t. (And it’s a failing of the popular press when they promote the latest hypothesis as being a “truth”.) But gaps and things left yet to discover doesn’t mean that we don’t have a good overall picture, or imply that the whole mass of science is a house of cards to be knocked over by a petulant god who doles out vague clues and red herrings.
Unsubstantiated claim. BS. By definition under the process of natural selection, truly deleterious mutations are removed from the gene pool, as they render their carrier less fit to survive and reproduce.
Unsubstantiated claim. BS. Please cite us a single example of a species proven to have gone extinct due to “accumulation of deleterious mutations.”
Repetition of previously unsubstantiated claim. More BS.
Repetition of previously unsubstantiated claim. The pile is getting pretty deep.
We’re still waiting for you to provide scientific support for all your previous claims as well …
I should expand on the “really bad mutations” stuff. First of all, mutations that affect anything in sex cells directly will cause those cells to fail, meaning that they’ll be weeded out before they even get used (sperms with non-working tails, eggs with too thick walls, etc.). Most other bad mutations will show up in embryology: as they get expressed in a fertilized embryo, they will mess up the process, leading to a spontaneous abortion. Spontaneous abortions are actually extremely common in the animal kingdom.
I still haven’t heard one thing that can account for (abiogenesis) yet.
To say that it has nothing to do with evolution is a bit disengenuious don’t you think. For with out it the big bang and all the mystical ways that mutatation has changed one form of life into another, while the other stays as it was, is just wishing.
It, (abiogenesis), according to science can’t happen. Abiogenesis
And if one animal in a species has a mutation that somehow makes it better adapted to survive. It would need to breed with all of the other of its species and hope that the mutation is dominant and not recessive in order for it to be passed on. The rate of passing on an exact copy of the (advantageous) mutation is so low as to be of no use as a means of evolution. Yet evolutionist still cling to the idea that this is a means to populate all of a species with a beneficial mutation.
I saw the saticical analyisis once years back but you know what you can do with statistics…
Nolies, I repeat a question I asked earlier that you totally ignored…
Do you have any positive evidence FOR Creationism? Note, that does not mean “things my limited understanding of biology see as wrong with evolutionary theory”, but actual positive evidence that would show that Goddidit.
Because, as I said before, you have to do more than tear evolutionary theory down for Creationism to become the new accepted theory of the development of life.
Twoflower already hit it, but there are a number of profound inaccuracies in your argument. I’ll take 2.
Mutation only takes away information.
Deleterious mutations leads to species extinction.
Let’s hit (1). Have you never heard of gene duplication and divergence? This actually accounts for a fair number of pseudogenes out there. Genes duplicate and then diverge and add new functionality in the genome. Sometimes, these duplicated genes are lost as functionality is lost because it is not selected for or by drift, thus turning them into pseudogenes. A good example would be the odorant receptors, which all come from a common ancestor but have duplicated and diverged hundreds of times to create vast gene families. Here’s a pretty good article on it, although not peer reviewed. Or for instance, here’s a Pubmed cite on the differences in odor receptors between humans, mice, and dogs. Pretty interesting stuff, and it is pretty clear that humans lose odorant receptors (thus creating pseudogenes out of them) at a pretty high rate – 63% of the 900 or so human odorant receptors are pseudogenes. Alas, look at dogs and mice – 18% of the 850 of dogs are pseudogenes and 20% of the 1500 in mice are pseudogenes. If that isn’t adding information into the genome, I don’t know what is…
(2) Populations bottleneck and these small populations are often lost. But that’s not generally how evolution works. Claiming that it is represents a profound misunderstanding of evolution. As the population guys will tell you, except in large extinction-scale events (like comet impacts), whole species don’t become bottlenecked and die off. Small populations branch off and diverge and become new species through bottlenecks or die off. Extinction events are different from speciation.
No. Rather, it is dishonest for Creationists to persistently try to “debunk” abiogenesis when no scientist has even attempted a theory regarding it. (There are a few hypotheses, but nothing that rises to the level of accepted, or even debated, theory.)
The Theory of Natural Selection addresses the observed phenomenon of evolution among life forms. Regardless how life originated, once living beings began to exist they have propogated and died and over generations the forms that they have taken have changed. This indicates a process of evolution.
Attempting to derail this discussion by inserting the red herring of abiogenesis is simply one more example of the sort of dishonest tactics that many of us have come to associate with Creationism. (I have used the phrase “nine Commandment Christian” for several years for those people who insist on ignoring the prohibition against bearing false witness once they enter a discussion of evolution–Gish and Hovind come to mind.)
You began this rant with an attack on sedimentation and the fossil record, getting your facts wrong, then attacked a mention of dating that the author had corrected over a day before you responded. You have quoted one person who was defending evolutionary thought out of context in order to pretend that they were attacking evolutionary theory. You then attempted to elicit support from someone who basically says “Yes, evolution occurred, but God did it although I can’t prove how or why.” Now you are attempting to go off on abiogenesis.
Until you can actually provide a substantive assault on the Theory of Natural Selection, I am afraid that you are continuing to relegate yourself to the status of one more crank who really does not understand what he is attacking.
I’ll second that. The way science works is theories which are disproven are replaced by new theories which are supported better by the evidence available. If you really want me to trade in evolution for Creationism, if you really think I’ll be a better Christian, or any kind of a Christian, please answer the question I asked you earlier. If you can’t answer it, please acknowledge that you at least read it and tell me why you can’t answer it. That’s no more than what you’re asking of people who accept evolution. In fact, it’s a lot less. The question, if you don’t want to backtrack was, “Based on the first two chapters of Genesis, were plants and animals created before or after human beings?” If you’re unwilling or unable to answer a question which is so simple basic to your beliefs, aren’t you being unreasonable when you expect others to answer far more detailed and complex questions about evolution, geology, and cosmology?
