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Author | Topic: WTF is wrong with people | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
deleted
Edited by Tangle, : stupidLife, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android |
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Faith writes: Anyone who can look at that chart Coyote put up and hallucinate genetic descent over millions of years from one to another of those cute little drawings, has no right to bother about the specific meanings of words. It's fair to say that with this chart......
...... which is Darwin's original sketch of common descent - you're looking at an idea - not a proven theory. But when you're looking at a chart like this one - which is the family tree of all living birds - you're looking at something quite different. That's chart is just an infinitesimal part of roughly 150 years of research has proved that original idea to be correct. Well it does for everyone except a few religious loonies that is.
First ever family tree for all living birds reveals evolution and diversification - Archive - News archive - The University of SheffieldLife, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Didn't even look did you? This is the heading
First ever family tree for all living birds reveals evolution and diversification The world’s first family tree linking all living birds and revealing when and where they evolved and diversified since dinosaurs walked the earth has been created by scientists from the University of Sheffield. There are, of course, hundreds of these trees for family groups and also trees that show common descent going back to bacteria - but then you know that, you just choose to un-know it from time to time.Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Faith writes: True, I didn't look closely at it, so apparently it IS just another fantasy chart based on sheer imagination. So much for that. Ah Faith, you do provide endless hours of amusement - but really, you need to get a bit of a grip on reality before you disappear up your own fundament.Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Faith writes: I'm getting tired and you are obviously misunderstanding me, no doubt because you have a completely different idea about what the words mean that we use to describe genetic events. One of the wonderful things about science is that no-one - not even you - is allowed to have his or her own definition of scientific terms. And yours, Faith, are wrong. You think that you can sit at home and self educate by reading bits of the internet - you can't, all you can do is confirm your own bias. If you really cared about this stuff, you'd enrol in a course of study about evolution and get a real glimpse of what it entails. There's no substitute to holding a real fossil in your hands and properly understanding what it is. But you won't, you'll continue to think that you have a better understanding of palaeontology, geology and gentics than the millions of real scientists that have worked for over a hundred years to discover - yet you have never formally studied any of those disiplines. Now that is truly weird.Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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All this is Faith, is what we Brits call 'a statement of the bleedin' obvious.'
If 2 organisms split off from a population, become isolated but continue to breed it's bleedin' obvious that the genomes of those two will have less diversity than the genomes of the original population. No-one disagrees because we know that that creates a genetic bottleneck and it's one reason we know that Noah's flood did not happen 6,000 years ago - because that genetic bottleneck does not exist. The point you are missing is that whilst those two individuals contain less genetic diversity than the population they came from, all other things being equal, they will have the same amount of genetic diversity as any other two individuals in the population. The individuals have not lost diversity - they just don't have access to a larger genetic pool anymore. If they survive, they will recover genetic diversity through mutation and carry on in their own way finding a best fit to their new environment. But this will take thousands of years, maybe hundreds of thousands - if they survive (and the likelihood is that they won't.) The second part of your story is simply the hoary old tale of a super genome where every organism on the planet contains enough genetic variety to form into any species. That's a assertion which should be possible to prove, so please point to the peer reviewed science that proves it. Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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That's a lot of very repetitive words that boil down to a very few simple points.
1. The isolation of individuals from the main population reduces the genetic diversity available to those individuals for further breeding, but it does not reduce genetic diversity in the individuals themselves. 2. If the smaller population survives - and very small populations are very unlikely too - it's stuck with whatever genes it has in the reduced gene pool. The larger the number of isolated organisms, the larger the genetic diversity. 3. The surviving population will reproduce and adapt to it's new environment or it will die. If the environment is similar to its last one there's no reason to expect much change. If it differs a lot, they will die. If it differs only slightly there's the possibility that the naturally occurring and random mutaions that we see routinely happen during sexual reproduction will make cahnges to the animals and some of them will be beneficial to them. 4. Over a long period this process will increase the genetic diversity of the new population and may also create organisms which can no longer breed with the old. This process will take a very long time. All that's just simple 101 biology. Now the disputed parts seem to be: 1. That mutations can be beneficial. I'm not interested in arguing that point because it's also in the 'bleedin' obvious' category. 2. That a species once isolated will somehow miraculously 'turn into' another species because the genes for it to do so are already in it's genotype. This is from this extreemly weird statement:
(and I consider the cheetah and the elephant seal to be breeds though I know the fact that they were formed from just a few individuals gives them some other status in the eyes of science. Again I think science is missing the point. It shouldn't matter how the new breed is formed, if it has its own genetic picture to itself then its a breed unto itself.) So seals and cheetahs are breeds and deveoped from the very same original genotype. That is a fantastical statement - it would be a huge amount of fun to hear how you think that might have happened without mutation and selection - how did a cheetah-like kind turn into a seal-like kind? And where are all these extra genes hiding? If you say Junk, I'm going to say prove it. (And accept your Nobel Prize.) Go for it gal!Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Faith writes: So I needed to say that EACH was formed from just a few individuals? Well yes - just so's we're clear. But that wasn't the question - it was about this:
Seals in the one case, cats in the other. Really, that wasn't clear to you that I couldn't possibly have meant they both came from the same genotype? They don't have the same genotype now so at what point was it the same? They're not only completely different species but also genus, family and even sub-order; in fact they only meet under the heading of Carnivora. The ToE tells us that these two modern species have a common ancestor some millions of years ago and changed over time by mutation and natural selection. As far as I understand what you're claiming, both species (etc) came from the same genome 4500 years ago - I'm intrigued as to how and why we can't see evidence for it.Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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The exit - not just of Faith but of other fundamentalists I've argued with - is often straight to their blog to report how right they are and how wrong we are.
It's actually a retreat to the pulpit to preach to the converted; a safe harour beyond criticism. Another thing happens too, Faith's kind of belief requires not only a rejection of all the natural sciences, but also a re-invention of them for their own purposes. Seemingly they can't accept miracles, it must all have naturalistic explanations - just not those of science. But the hubris of it! How can any individual, with no formal learning of any of the sciences they're criticising, think that they can sit on their own at a computer and prove hundreds of years of science from literally millions of scientists in multiple disciplines wrong? Where does that kind of ego come from? Delusion is an amazingly powerful thing.Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Percy writes: But just as clearly they haven't proved it. I also don't think that it's proven that mutations caused the changes. When we looked at this in some detail in the thread below, we couldn't quite nail it - and an alternative and plausible explanation for the changes is gene plasticity. EvC Forum: How novel features evolve #2 We got further with the mice, but fell at the final hurdle of pinning down all the actual genes involved that had mutated. It seems that it's extremely difficult to do - bacteria are much easier that large, multicellular animals. This makes no difference to Faith's weird claims of course, but it does feel unsatisfactory from our side of the fence.Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Given the short time period, wouldn't a significant role for mutations be unexpected? Exactly. In fact, I'd say it would be very suspicious if we DID find such large changes to the digestive tract so quickly. A change from a carnivorous diet to vegetarian is not trivial.Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Faith writes: We'll have an answer for you eventually. Yes, of course you will, fiction only requires imagination.Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
"Evolutionist" = Biologist. It's a tautology
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Faith writes: Selection is only one of the ways reproductive isolation is brought about. You may not mean what you've written there but you seem to have said a similar thing several times and it's confusing a few issues. What classical ToE says is that when a group of organisms are separated from the main population by some kind of barrier - water, mountains, forrest etc, they (obviously) no longer have access to the main population's genetic pool, they have a subset of it. Over time the two population's genetic make up will change - by drift and mutation. It's separation that allows the process of differential change to happen simply because the two populations can not interbreed to maintain a uniform gene pool. After separation though, it's selection that determines which changes are kept and which are discarded. If the two population have identical environments we can reasonably expect few, or very gradual changes to occur because the population is already fitted to its environment. If the environment is very different we can expect faster and more dramatic changes. (or the sub-population will simply die.) So even if we accept what (I think) you claim, that the sub-population contains all the genes to create a phenotype, it seems self-evident to me (and biology) that the phenotypes best fitted to the new environment will be selected for. If you look at the classic case of the peppered moth it's really easy to accept selection (by differential predation) as the reason why dark moths prosper where trees darkened by pollution are prevalent and light moths where the reverse is true. In other words, there's no reason for you to reject selection - you can hang on to your erroneous model but still accept selection. Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Percy writes: If by "genetic makeup" you mean the original set of genes and their alleles, then changes in the members of that set can take place through both mutation (introduction of the new alleles or new genes or even new chromosomes) or selection (removal of alleles, genes and even chromosomes) from the population). If by "genetic makeup" you mean the original allele frequencies, then change can take place through mutation, through allele and gene shuffling during reproduction, through selection, and through drift. I simply mean that both population's genotypes - the mother population and the split population - will change in the normal ways through drift and mutation but they will do so independently of each other. They may then (or may not) diverge far enough to become non-interbreeding species. The wall lizards are a little confusing because we don't actually know what the driving factor for the change to a more vegetarian diet was - although we can speculate that it was because of the relative abundance of vegetation on the new island. My money though is not on mutation to create the jaw and digestive tract changes - including the ability trap bacteria to break down cellulose - it seems far more likely to be a genetic trait from an earlier population has popped back up because the environment suits it. The mice though are very close to a proof of mutation then selection. Faith tho' seem to think that the mere act of separation is enough to create what she calls a variety - which is daft; there needs to be a mechanic for a change which, as we know is drift or mutation and a mechanic to direct the change, which we know is selection.Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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