Religious people should embrace evolution. It gets god off the hook for doing such a lousy job.
All this talk about mutations in these threads, and hardly ever does anyone mention the shuffling of genes via sexual reproduction. His genes + her genes = infant with a unique combination of genes which may or may not survive to reproduce again.
Right, but this does not (and can not) lead to speciation.
Oooh, oooh, I did! I did! Do I win anything? 
Even if populations become separated over a sufficient time? (I admit my ignorance here.)
On edit: indistinguishable: you win my apologies for merely skimming the thread
It can’t?
You have a population which somehow becomes isolated into two populations. If they evolve differently enough, they eventually become reproductively incompatible, which is what we’d consider speciation, as I understand it. But it doesn’t matter what drives their evolution; it could be all through mutations, or there could be no mutations at all and just sexual reproduction shuffling things up very gradually, but enough over time. Or have I misunderstood something?
Without mutations, no matter how much shuffling human DNA goes through via meiosis, it’s still human DNA. If there aren’t any mutations (whether caused by radiation, chemicals or DNA transcription errors) that’s not going to change. Of course there always are mutations, so that isolated populations will eventually start to diverge.
Well, that seems an odd way to analyze the situation. What constitutes its being human DNA? I would imagine the particular genetic combinations, the family resemblance of the DNA as a whole in that regard to the DNA of other humans, are involved here. I wouldn’t think it’s something like “Yep, this gene is, in itself, a human gene. So is this one. And this one. Yep, they all check out, so this guy is a human”.
Couldn’t theoretical, gedankenexperimentally mutationless sexual shuffling of two isolated populations which were originally one eventually lead to the two camps being significantly different, to the point of reproductive incompatibility? And wouldn’t this constitute speciation?
Cite? I’m no believer in ID, but arguments such as this do a terrible disservice to the idea of evolution. So, I want to see proof that an undergrad (one working alone, as you claimed) has managed to build a biped (presumably a robot of some sort) that can best a reasonably fit individual in some normal biped activity (running, navigating rough terrain, something). Bonus points of the biped could win an Olympic gold medal.
On edit: I’d like to also note that the deck is already stacked in favor of the undergrad. He/She has the opportunity to observe and experiment on a working biped (themself or other people) while designing–a luxury that evolution never had.
Heh, so what? The post you’re replying to was trying to illustrate that the theoretical intelligent designer doesn’t appear to be that intelligent a designer, not trying to attack evolution as a poor method of design. You’re not complaining that the deck was rigged against God because he didn’t get access to good knowledge on how to make a biped, are you?
Well, no. I’m talking about the whole here, not the constituent genes. What I mean to say is that no matter how much shuffling of the genes is done, at the end you still have exactly the same number of them, if there are no mutations. The result can only code for a human; this is never going to change
I can’t see how. There’s still going to be the same number of chromosomes and all the cellular machinery is going to remain the same. What mechanism do you propose which would cause reproductive incompatibility?
How about giving her a few hundred thousand years?
The big problem with ID is that it predicts the designer would do an optimal or near optimal job. Evolution tends to find local optima, good enough for survival but not nearly optimal overall. The intelligent undergrad would look at the possibilities and, while maybe not producing a truly optimal design, would not make the obvious blunders evolution does.
I have a suggestion. Why don’t you tell us, in your own words, what you think evolution and cosmology says. No cutting and pasting, let’s see if you actually understand it.
So far, a thousand apes with copies of Word and big cut and paste buttons could create a more coherent set of posts then yours have been.
You can go back to your church and tell them they had better try harder.
I agree with John Mace. The key element of b_wad’s argument is that the odds against random evolution are too extreme to be possible so intelligent design is the more likely alternative. But intelligent design presumes that an intelligent designer exists. And how are the odds of an intelligent designer existing less improbable then the odds of life existing?
I’m not sure what exactly you mean by all the cellular machinery remaining the same, but two distinct species can have the same number of chromosomes while still being incompatible, can’t they?
I admit, I don’t have a mechanism in mind for incompatibility, just a vague feeling that it should be possible to eventually produce creatures divergent enough as to achieve it. But I could just be wrong.
There are lots of trivial ways of doing it. Say an animal mated at a time when the birth n months later would be when there was maximum food. If the population split, and one wound up in a place (or slowly migrated to a place) where the harvest was earlier, it might move mating time earlier also. If the two groups now came together, they would be effectively reproductively incompatible, even if offspring from a forced mating would be possible. After a while, they may drift to a point where they are truly incompatible.
I believe there was an insect that lived off a fruit tree in the MidWest. When apple trees were planted, it “learned” to eat them. Since the time of the blossoms was different, it split in just the way I mentioned. Cite for this is a “retelling” of the Origin, with pictures and additional examples. It was from the library, so I don’t remember the exact cite.
I suggest that the debate might be more fruitful if both sides keep the above quotes in mind.
The reason that I say that statements like the one I responded to, or the one immediately after, are a “terrible disservice to the idea of evolution” are that (1) they do give the impression that evolution is a poor method of design (which is IMO at best problematic, at worst false) and (2) they’re likely to come across to an ID believe as something akin to “You’re a piece of crap, therefore evolution is true.”
If you’re going to ue the fact that humans are not optimally designed, then the best you’re going to get is an argument against an infinitely intelligent designer. To make the case against a finitely intelligent designer we must discuss how the designs are suboptimal (as they will be for both evolution and finite intelligence). Things that evolution would tend to do that we see in reality:[ul]
[li]Clustering around old designs. Intelligent designers (using us as a model) would probably do this as well, but always? Never any fundamental redesigns?[/li][li]Propigation of old, good designs to areas where they are no longer optimal. Intelligent designers may do this sometimes (e.g., QWERTY), but they would surely create fundamental changes sometimes.[/li][li]Lack of lateral motion (between species) in design space. This is IMHO the clincher. If an octopus design concept can enhance human design, why not just port it over? Why must it be discovered independently in human design?[/ul][/li]
Is the deck stacked against God? Probably not, but it’s difficult to stack the deck against the omniscient. Againt a non-omni-whatever designer? Probably yes.
There’s merit to your points, and so I basically agree with your position. (I was kind of irked by these kinds of statements on the exact grounds of your 1) myself)
It is a bit hard for me to think of any IDer contenting themselves with a finitely intelligent designer, as though they really left open in their minds some doubt as to whether the designer was God or aliens or what have you. But perhaps some people really are like that. At any rate, the debate is certainly strengthened by properly considering that possibility as well.
But that last part is the key, isn’t it? Genetic drift requires mutations. (The discussion here concerned whether speciation could occur without mutations, only recombination of existing genes.)
Q.E.D. is not explaining it right. It’s not the number of genes or chromosomes, but what the genes code for. We often talk about variants of a given gene, so that one might find X, Y, and Z forms of the gene in humans and A, B, and C forms of the same gene in another species. In addition, we will find that humans have a certain gene that just doesn’t exist in other species. So it’s a combination of those two things.
And the number of chromosomes can be important or not so important. Humans have one less chromosome than chimps, but that because sometime in our past two chromosomes combined to form one. Our chromosome #2 is the result of the fusion of two chromosomes sometime after the human/chimp split. So although we have a different number of chromosomes, you can still map the genes between human chromosome 2 and chimp chromosomes 2a and 2b (named thusly for obvious reasons).
Also, keep in mind that what we’re really talking about is alleles. Your mother may have allele X of gene TC809* and your father has allele Y of gene TC809. Each chromosome has one allele and the two chromosomes have a gene consisting of both alleles. You probably remember doing Mendelian genetics in Jr High with genes AA Aa or aa.
*that’s a made up name for a hypothetical gene.