Nah. Just someone struggling with the issue of undirected change who is ignoring the fossil record as inconvenient.
Hiyruu, why does the earth (according to the fossil record and “leftover” DNA) have widely diverging numbers of genera throughout its existence if no species can arise from another? We have a record that clearly indicates a period when there were no wolves. Where did wolves originate if they had to come with their own set of pre-ordered characteristics? erislover, it may be true that competition is one driving force for evolution, but cooperation is just about as strong. If cooperation was not an agent, then all our cells would still be wandering around in the oceanic soup fighting for individual survival and none would have banded together, cooperatively, to become heart, lungs, bone, blood, etc.
I can’t believe our resident Darwinists let this lip through.
I hate to burst your bubble Hiyruu but dogs and wolves have exactly the same chromosome count : 39 pair. Wolves have 78, dingoes have 78, malamutes have 78, Alsations have 78, collies have 78, great danes have 78, chihuahuas have 78. Your theory has absolutely no basis in reality whatsoever.
By sugesting that species can change chrmosome count and remain the same ‘kind’ you are giving a big push for the theory that humans and chimpanzees evolved from a common ancestor. Humans and chimps are very closely related but with humans lacking one chromosome pair and the associated genetic material. By your theory this seems to imply that we shared a common ancestor and that humans are only “expressing those built in genes that are meant for their given situation.”
As I have said; the archtypal ancestors may be incorporated into the “grand design” by default to keep it in balance, this would include humans. This seems to be the best theory to attribute to the “design” model.
How, then, does the genome “know” when it needs to morph into a new form? And why did it take many generations of breeding to go from Wolf to Chihuahua? If your theory were correct, then one should expect that wolves could go straight to chihuahua. However, we know that is not the case. We can trace which breeds were bred from which, ultimately all the way back to the wolf.
Shades of Lamarckism, which has been disproven for some time.
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Correct. If trial and error were not a factor, then we would expect all wolves in arctic or near-arctic climes to have white coats, would we not, since they are all experiencing pretty much the same environment? Surely if it is useful to one group it must be useful to all?
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Design necessitates the existence of a designer; a designer implies creation.
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We already know quite a bit. And what we know supports the idea that diversity is the result of gene-level differences between, and among, organisms. If we subject an entire population of, say, wolves, to the same environmental conditions, then, given their supposed archetypal status, they should all exhibit the same change in diversity, rather simultaneously (that is, the next generation should all possess whatever necessary adaptation).
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Wolves and domestic dogs have the same number of chromosomes (78). They are, in fact, the same species (Canis lupus). Here is a site which discusses the molecular evolution of canids in gory detail.
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Evolution is based on chance in the sense that random mutations occur, and these are then selected for, or against, by environmental factors.
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Nature would disagree with you. There are no (I repeat no) examples of altruism to be found in nature. The closest nature comes is in symbiotic relationships. In such interactions, both parties involved give something in exchange for something - there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Nature is competitive, and this competition, even among family members in many species, is one of the driving forces behind evolution.
Evidence against the idea that an organism comes pre-packaged with the ability to deal with any and all stresses that it may encounter can be found in the many instances where one organism out-competes another, or instances where transplanted organisms fail to adapt to climatic conditions and die out. Evidence against the “archetype” comes in the form of morphological, phenotypic, and genotypic similarity between disparate forms.
good catch gaspode. My cursory reading was missing that it was the “number of chromosomes” changing. For some reason I had it in my head that environmental factors precipitated dormant/inactive/mystery genes into action, thus causing a new species to emerge.
That’ll learn me.
Ben, I, er, did plead ignorance on the subject. Care to enlighten me for the sake of enlightenment instead of enlightening H for the sake of argument?
Was there one species of . . .oh, say, turtle with the inherent morphability to become a wolf? Were there lots of these archetypes at the beginning of the Cambrian period, or was it turtles all the way back?
What about man? Was there an ape archetype that could become man, and bonobo, and Gorilla?
How about the fact that there are whole genera of creatures that did not exist at the beginning of the Holocene epoch that exist now? Did the survivors of the Permian Extinction include all the archetypes? And again at each other great extinction event, the archetypes survive, but none of the unmorphable species do? Neat design.
Which wolf, by the way? What about foxes? Dholes?
Are all the primates descendants of one archetype species?
After you finish making this new biology up, please let us know the details. You might try it out at one of the Creationist web pages, they will probably give it serious consideration.
Tris
“The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards.” ~ Alexander Jablokov ~
Damn! I just want to say that this is one active thread for the time of day it is! Yeow! I can’t keep up and I’m not even trying to defend an opinion!!
Notice how only the “wolf-like canids” have 78 chromosomes, incidentally 78 is the greatest number of chromosomes in the canid family and they are attributed to the wolf, which supports my theory of an ancestoral wolf containing the greatest genetic potential. So, thanks for the reference.
I think what you are saying is that you would like your theory of origins to be whatever would suit your particular preferences. Fine, OK. But as I said, don’t expect to get too far with scientists and rationalists with that sort of thing.
In fact later posts, between this one and your one quoted above, start to do some serious shredripping of the theorised but factually unsupported notions you are peddling.
I am not sure exactly what you mean with your comment about evolution being based on chance and chaos being the God (Oh, alright Erislover, Goddess then) of evolution. If you are trying to suggest that this puts evolution on a supportless platform of the type I attribute to your position, I think you need to read up on probability and chaos theory. Chance and chaos are (paradoxically) very very reliable in the long term, and over a large number of instances. Just ask someone who owns a casino, if anyone who earns an income that solid will give you some of their time.
Here is a question for you evolutionists: If I bury a dog in my backyard and I cover it with the soil of the earth, is the dog as old as the soil, or is the soil older than the dog?
The soil is older than the dog, so why do you evolutionists base your dates of species existance on soil depth and layers?
Hiyruu here is the problem: the phrase “built-in genetic variety”, genetic variety yes, built-in NO.
Many fundamentalist articles claim that genetic variety is scaring the pants of evolutionists. In reality is the other way around, but yes, “being a false witness” is a virtue for many of these guys.
I am getting the feeling that this is an effort from fundamentalists or special designers to grab an idea from science and claim that all along a designer was there, however the consensus among the scientists is that:
So Hiyruu, evolutionists are NOT rejecting genetic variety:
Using “built-in” together with genetic variety is were you are wrong.
Which indicates that either a) wolves are the canine “archetype”, or b) all extant canids evolved from a common, wolf-like ancestor, and that the wolves are the most “primitive” of the extant forms.
The fossil record clearly disproves option a), and supports option b).
Tomarctus is an early canid from ~15-30 mya, which gave rise to both the wolf and fox lineages - which is to say that foxes are as old as wolves, despite the much lower chromosome number in the former. Clearly, they (wolves and foxes) did not evolve one from the other. While it is possible that coyotes (as a third example) evolved from wolves, it is a fact that coyote fossils (from Maryland and New Mexico) pre-date any grey wolf fossils by tens of thousands of years.
If you actually wanted the answer to this sort of question you would have looked it up on Talkorigins a very long time ago. It answers all the usual creationist claptrap, including this tedious old chestnut. As I’m sure you know (or have it your way, perhaps you don’t know, few people involved in this thread would have much difficulty believing you were not averse to being ignorant). Conclusion: you don’t want to know about anything that supports evolution or is damaging to your position.
And I’m still waiting for your rational evidence for your own position. Or is leaning out the glass windows of your own house throwing stones all that you are capable of?
See here for an introduction to relative dating. See here for a discussion of radiometric dating, and here for a nice summary of techniques used to date fossils.
Darwin’s Finch, I’m not attempting to defend Hiyruu’s position, but you are aware of the latest developments concerning the discovery of prion switchs that trigger fairly major phenotypic changes by affecting the functioning of stop codons? Since these prions have been shown to change form in response to environmental stress, and since they enable the transcription of pre-existing genetic material that isn’t normally utilised they do basically allow the genome to code for new phenotypes only in response to stress. Not exactly morphing from one form or another, but this is an new field of research whose implicatons for non-microbial lifeorms is largely unknown. It does provide a mechanism for allowing new life-forms to develop rapidly (inside one generation in fact) from old by acting on pre-existing but unutilised genetic diversity. Essentially what Hiyruu is talking about (I think).
It has been proven in yeast, and there has been some research done on insects, which suggest these prion triggers may result in heritable phenotypic changes in response to environmental stress imposed on the parents. Lamarckism isn’t quite as dead as you might think.
I hope you evolutionists realize that “natural selection” does not even enter the realm of genetics.
Natural selection can only be a selection at the level of phenotype, because it has to work with something that is already there. Natural selection does not operate at the level of genotype in any way.
So supposedly genes came about by chance? But natural selection can only be in the context of there being something to choose from, hence “selection”. So natural selection only comes into play when two organisms are available to choose from, and the only way to choose which is best is to test it’s phenotype in given environment.
So the genotype is not even considered at this stage.
