Evidence For Evolution - Top Ten Reasons

There are lots of flightless birds. No one explanation is going to work for them all - you'll need to know what the evolutionary history of each species is, what are the fairly unique environmental circumstances that made a non-flight existence a better deal than one involving flight.Penguins, for example, for great swimmers, and make their living swimming and catching fish in the sea. But the evolutionary adaptations that led to being better swimmers - obviously a survival advantage since they could then catch more food and/or escape from sea-predators (flight would be useless until you could at least get to the surface) - were adaptations that made for lousy flight. It seems that for penguins, it was better to be a good swimmer than a good flyer.Ostriches, on the other hand, grew big. Obvious advantage to being big. But big things have trouble flying. But by the time the pre-osterich became too big to be an efficient flyer, it was probably big enough to be a fast runner and/or a powerful kicker (I hear that osteriches can do pretty well when facing a lion).

This is just the worst sort of biological Platonism. There's no such thing as "rat-ness". An organism is only a rat because we decided to call it that, because it's able to breed true with other organisms we call "rat".This is why the "kinds" model always fails - it's based on nothing more than what we arbitrarily decide to call a given organism.You've got to stop using the folk concept of species. There's individuals, and there's the individuals that individual could mate with. Every other distinction is a purely arbitrary grouping for human convinience. I think we both know that if I showed you a rat with wings, or a bird without them, you'd argue that they were still rats and birds. That's the problem with arguing from the folk concept of species; it's a fixed-species nomenclature in a world where species change.

Ok, Agrav8r, the mutation is in a single gene and it alters a single aspect of the rat. It may take many generations ofrats before this single mutation becomes more common in the population that the "normal" gene type. Then along comes another mutation, maybe conferring something else on the rat. That single mutation may take many generations to become established. Meanwhile there may have been other mutations which were so detrimental that the baby rat never even lived long enough to be born. Now, to accumulate enough beneficial mutations so that you end up with an animal that is distinct from the original rat you'd have to look at thousands and thousands of generations - a long time thousands of years, given the generation time of rats. So you're not going to be able to stand by and watch. Evolution from one species to the next isn't a discrete step, it doesn't happen in one go, it's a very gradual thing, akin to Chinese whispers. As an example, I use a quote from Terry Pratchett. The sentence started as "And Khuft said unto the First" and was passed along a line of people and at the end of the line, the last person gets the message "Handcuffed to the bed the Aunt thirsted". Now you can sort of see a relationship between the starting sentence and the end one, if you looked at the message that each person got along that line you would see how the gradual changes gave rise to the final result. Its very gradual, you can't jump from the start to the finish in one go - there are intermediates.So it is with evolution. You are not going to see a single gene mutation give rise to a brand new species and you're not going to be around long enough to see the accumulation of enough mutations to give rise to your non-rat. However, if you're very lucky you may find some dead rats that were lucky enough to die in conditions where their bones ended up fossilised and you can compare them to your modern day rat. The further back you go the more different your rats might be until you find that although you know they are part of the chain because you've been following it, if you only looked at your modern rat and your oldest fossil, you wouldn't be able to see how one got to the other.You can't say that they adapted because they had the mutation in the population BEFORE warfarin was introduced so they had nothing to adapt to. It was only when the selection pressure of warfarin appeared that the weedy rats could get a toehold in the population. The population may have adapted, but the individuals within that population didn't.To explain, think giraffes. Imagine they started with short necks. Now no two neck lengths are the same, some are a little longer than others. While the savannah is nice and lush all the giraffes have an equal ability to get leaves from trees and grass. Now the climate starts to dry out and during the summer, the grass shrivels up, so the giraffes only have bush and tree leaves to eat. Thing is, they can only eat those they can reach so those with a slightly longer neck can eat low bushes and low tree leaves and higher tree leaves, while those with shorter necks can only eat low bushes and low tree leaves. If the giraffes denude all the lower branches, then those that can't reach higher are hungry. Now starvation etc means that they don't raise as many young as the unhungry longer necked variety, so the longer necked ones, while not breeding any faster than before still end up in the majority, not because their numbers have increased, but because the numbers of shorter necked ones have dropped. If the climate in the area continues to get drier and drier, eventually only the very longest necked ones will be able to reach the tops of the trees.You have to think of it as not so much encouraging those with the beneficial mutation, but actively discouraging those without it.Does this help?

Pretty much, though natural selection ‘chooses’ in the same way that a sieve ‘chooses’. Only those organisms that best ‘fit’ the environmental circumstances get to pass on their genes.Incidentally, it’s worth noting that organisms are in effect always one dice-throw behind the game. The ones born ‘now’ are the offspring of the ones that fitted their environment best; but there’s no guarantee that these new ones will fit their environment best. Organisms are built by the genes that fitted yesterday’s environment, not today’s: the mechanism has no foresight.This is why evolution has no foresight: it works on a generation-to-generation basis. And that is why organisms can contain deactivated genes for previously useful features, such as birds with teeth-making genes, and humans (and other apes) with genes for synthesising their own vitamin C. The mutations that deleted these features happened in lineages, living in environments etc, where they didn’t matter. But the gene remnants are conserved in the genome as fossils.I’d be interested to hear how creation explains such genetic fossils. Homosexuality, like sexual behaviour in general, is a complex phenomenon. There are fairly few things that aren’t: the easy majority of phenotypic effects are the result of countless interactions of genes with each other and the environment the developing body they find themselves in.Others have covered the homosexuality thing, but in a nutshell: it’s most probably not a single-gene mutation; there are potential benefits for any gene causing it through kin selection; and homosexuality isn’t a black-and-white phenomenon anyway: homosexuals often reproduce nevertheless. So I don’t see how this refutes evolution, it just doesn’t have a simple explanation (what’s new?). Far too simplistic. I suggest getting hold of a genetics textbook from your library; Lewin or Brown are pretty good. Hint: watches don’t reproduce. And organisms do not spontaneously self-assemble -- they derive from parents. Which also had parents. And those had parents too. If an offspring can be different from its parents, why can the differences not accumulate? I apologise for assuming you understood what you were criticising. Start here: Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution and then move to some other ‘must-read’ files there: The Talk.Origins Archive: Must-Read FAQs Sure, the second half. But chaos is to do with tiny effects having unpredictable, potentially large, outcomes. That is not what we are observing: what we see is not chaos, but a particular pattern. And it is on that pattern that arguments from design are based. So whether they come about by perturbations in the initial conditions is not relevant, so neither is chaos theory. Chaos, meaning higgledy-piggledy disorder, is only tangentially related to chaos theory. Chaos theory feeds into complexity theory; it is as much about getting patterns (eg fractals) out of the system as it is to do with randomness and disorder. The chaos in chaos theory is a system’s unpredictability, not its disorder. Hence my mirth at your bringing it up here. So god wants it that way really, is that it? (Sorry, your sentence is a bit mangled.) If so, introducing chaos is mere obfuscation: the point still remains. Unless one is the equal of god’s intellect, we cannot tell whether what we see is really what he intended; we cannot tell whether apparent designs are good or bad really, or even if they are designs at all.Maybe ‘designs’ are in fact pretty fractals resulting from chaos in action. Only god can see the pattern, and we are stuck with just looking at the numbers. If so, this is another reason (same reason, different slant) why you cannot use apparent designs as evidence for the designer. Unless you claim to know god’s intentions...? I do apologise; I may have misunderstood. You said:

quote:

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you are looking at a frame of Casablanca and judging it's quality, and then jumping on to say that due to the bad frame, the whole thing is worthless.

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I was taking this to be a variation on what you’d already said: that bad frames don’t invalidate the ‘film’ because we cannot know what the film’s meant to look like as a whole. Which is why I thought I’d already covered it: if we don’t know what the whole thing’s meant to look like, we can’t tell whether the good frames are right or not either. Perhaps a blurry picture was what the director was trying to achieve!But we might go further, and assume that a good picture is the aim, because the preponderance of frames are clear. But this is where the analogy breaks down. For under creation, each frame was separately photographed by the director. Who could, consequently, have re-shot the bad ones or re-edited the film. But the director of the movie Life did not do this.I now see another interpretation of you analogy: when we look at the whole thing, it’s beautiful, so to complain about the bad frames here and there is missing the big picture.But again, each frame was allegedly shot by the creator. Who did not correct these frames. We might assume that they do not matter: the overall picture’s quite nice. But they only don’t matter when you don’t look too closely. Yet looking closely is what we’re being asked to do when we’re shown the beauty of living organisms as evidence for a designer. Sure, Bergman looks lovely in close-up. But she’d look better if that boom operator had kept it out of shot.Also, to continue the analogy, we aren’t talking about single frames -- a species here, another several scenes later. Sure, the nautilus’s lack of a lens in its eye may be a couple of over-exposed frames. But what we have with the movie Life is whole scenes that are mis-shot. All the marsupials are out-of-focus due to their birthing method; all the mammals are distorted by the fisheye lens used to film them, due to their laryngeal nerve and inferior lungs. And the final airport scene is covered in guano: all the birds having teeth-making genes and typical vertebrate backward-wired retinas, y’see. Note that the whole soundtrack is made cloudy by a low buzz from life’s inherent wastefulness. Well since you let it pass by mentioning it, I’ll ask once again for you to explain:

• how you decide that something is good design
• how, exactly, sin inverts a retina... and still have it work so well that creationists try to argue it’s not suboptimal
• how sin can reroute a nerve
• how sin can replumb the urethra and the larynx-pharynx junction
• how sin can give bats -- and all other mammals -- an inferior (but still pretty good) lung ventilation system to that of birds
• how sin can form a coccyx
• how sin can cause marsupial infants to not be born straight into the pouch.
• how sin can make dolphins have to breathe air
• how sin caused whales to have small bits of pelvis embedded deep in their bodies
• how sin put genes for making teeth into birds.
• why sin might have given us ear-wiggling muscles
• the amazing creationary abilities you appear to be crediting sin with
• what the laws of physics are that state everything becomes "less complex/ degrades over time"
• how it is that "Evolution flys in the face of the laws of physic by stating that as time passes thing become more complex"

And now I’ll add: why are there so many blemished frames -- and whole scenes shot from odd angles -- in an allegedly perfect movie?TTFN, DT

Ned and Crash gave some good facts in response, so I'll simply add this: please consider that not knowing how it happened, or could have happened, is not a great reason to reject a theory outright. I hope you will approach these questions with an open mind and learn what there is to learn before you make a final judgment.

Firstly, we did not evolve from chimpanzees. We share a common ancestor with them. We are no more descended from -- "evolved from" -- chimps than you are descended from your cousin.Secondly, it's a lot of generations. Our common ancestor lived somewhere between 7 and 3.5 million years ago. So I'll get my calculator out. Let's get lower and upper estimates.Let's say that a generation might be 12 years (low) and 20 years (high).3,500,000 / 20 = 175,000 = approx least number of generations.
7,000,000 / 12 = 583,333 = approx most generations.Personally, I'd go in the middle. I think 15 is a reasonable guess for a generation length, especially for earlier species, but the human-chimp split is perhaps 5mya.
5,000,000 / 15 = 333,333 generations.So we are talking in the region of 350,000 generations. Three hundred and fifty thousand. Put it this way: there's been only about 120 generations since the time of Christ.Quite a lot of generations.To put it in context, imagine this as a distance. Suppose you were to walk it. Assume that a pace is one metre (c. a yard) (quite a decent stride), and call each generation one pace. On that scale, 350,000 generations = 350,000 metres = 350,000 paces. That is, you would have to walk 350 km, or 217 miles. That is, you'd be walking non-stop with a pretty good stride for over two days.Alternatively, suppose a generation is an inch. 350,000 inches is 29,166 feet. Or roughly the height of Mount Everest.Get the picture?TTFN, DT

Sorry it took so long to reply, but I was away for most of the weekend.
I did not intend that my statements be interpreted as a persopnal attack on you agrav8r, but rather on what is was you said. And crashfrog, you're correct...I should have explained "why", but I really didn't think it was necessary.Ok agrav8r, let me see if I can explain what is wrong with what you said. First we'll start with something that has been repeated over and over and over and over on this site. Here it goes...read it carefully... NO evolutionary biologist has ever said that humans evolved from chimps (yet we continue to hear creationists make this claim). I'll say it again just for you agrav8r, we did not evolve from chimps. What the ToE says is that we (humans and chimps) share a common ancestor. We are two distinct species, which brings me to the second point.
I'm not sure why you think that we should be able to mate with a chimp and produce viable offspring. Even if we did evolve from them (but I repeat...we did not), why would that mean we could successfully mate? Let me ask you this: why do we consider humans and chimps to be separate species? That is to say...how do we define a species? My understanding of the biological species concept is as follows: "A group of actually or potentially interbreeding populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups". Reproductive isolation is important here, and there a couple of major types. One is called postmating or postzygotic reproductive isolation. In this case, mating is allowed but is not successful. Why? Simple. In your example, the human sperm or eggs are biochemically incompatible with the chimp sperm or eggs. Either fertilization will not occur or subsequent embryonic development will be unsuccessful. To be honest, I'm not a reproductive biologist so I cannot tell you specifically where the "mating" will go awry, but that is not important. The important thing is that the mating will not produce a "sub-human super chimp".
As for the last portion of your quote...the part about the offspring being genetically controlled by the humans dominant genes...well, that is not what is meant by the term "dominant" when we try to explain the traits we see in an organsim. Dominant and recessive refer to alleles. Alleles are alternate expressions of a gene. Genes are portions of DNA that are expressed. For simplicities sake, I'm going to ignore things like multiple alleles coding for a trait, codominance, polygenic inheritance, and pleiotropy and say that you simply have two alleles for each gene that you express. You get one allele from your mother and one from your father. Each allele could be either dominant or recessive. What's the difference between the two types? A dominant allele will mask the affect (expression) of a recesssive allele. So, when you parents mated, there were three possible combinations of the two alleles for any given characteristic.
1. You could have gotten two dominant alleles = homozygous dominant.
2. You could have gotten two recessive alleles = homozygous recessive.
3. You could have gotten one of each = heterozygous.
In examples #1 & 3, the expression of the given characteristic will be identical, even though the genes are different. By that we mean that the expression of the homozygous dominant alleles will look identical to the heterozyous alleles. Even though we call it the dominant allele, it in no way implies relative importance. The dominant allele is not a "stronger" or "better", or "more desirable" allele. It simply is expressed when you have at least one copy of it...it dominates the ability to be expressed so to speak. In example #2 from above, the recessive trait will be expressed. So you can see that in the simplest of examples, dominant characteristics have a 2:1 ratio of expression when compared to the recessive characteristics. And since natural selection can only act on genes that are expressed, homozygous recessive traits are deleterious more often than dominant ones.Now we'll address this quote: Why? You can't just toss in a mutagen and expect a noval species to arise. And what's so magical about 5 years? Ignore the introduced mutagen, give your fruit flies a few thousand years on their own and maybe you'll see something "new" as a result of good ole natural selection. I know, I know, you're just trying to speed up the mutation rate so you don't have to sit around for a few thousand years. But it's not that simple. First off, what are mutations? They are simply changes in the DNA sequence. You seem to want to limit mutations to things like radiation, or things that we can "see" or "control". Many mutations are spontaneous. That is, they are changes in sequence without a causitive agent. A simple "screw up" in DNA replication is a spontaneous mutation, and introduces a new sequence. What effect will it have? Who knows? Guess what agrav8r, there are actually plenty of examples where something like this has already been done. See Crashfrog post #87 for a link (which I assume you already have visited by the time you read this).
You know what though...maybe in your example you will get a new species (remember the biological species definition though). Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "completely distinct". Are you suggesting something new that looks in no way like a fruit fly? Why? Would it still be an insect? I hope you're not going to try and make the claim that we (evolutionists) try to teach that these fruit flies could evolve into something that would be placed into a completely different phylum, class order, etc. (the ole "frog into a Prince" argument). PaLeeze.And now for the last comment: First off let me clarify something. Adaption means adaptation. So what is an adaptation? There are two very important and distinct parts of the definition. First, an adaptation is any characteristic that contributes to an organisms fitness (reproductive success). Second, it needed to be brought about into its current function by natural selection (two additional concepts are exaptation and aptation, but I'll ignore these in this post). Additionally, even though it's not part of the definition, please remember that there is no such thing as a pre-adaptation. In your case though, I think the first half of this definition is important to undersatnd. Fitness does not equate to strength. Fitness refers to the number of viable offspring contributed to the next generation. Evolution, on the other hand, (in it's simplist definition) is a change in a populations gene frequency over time. Natural selection, then, will result in organisms with the greatest fitness contributing more of their genes to the next generation, which results in a change in the populations gene frequency, which is evolution. What's the problem?
And what is it with creationists always talking about things evolving from simple to complex? Stephen Jay Gould wrote a great book titled "Full House", which does a wonderful job of dispelling this idea. It also explains a great many other things about evolution that even a non-biologist can understand. I would suggest, agrav8r, that if you want to read something that does a way better job of explaining evolution than I can, pick up a copy of that book.There, does that clear anything up at all? Again I apologize for my earlier comments without an explanation as to why your ideas were flawed.

Another possible reson why flightlessness might evolve is a lack of predation, as proposed for the Dodo, flying is a very energy intensive thing to do, if you can get by waddling along the ground eating nuts and don't have to worry about big beasties getting you then it makes sense not to bother with it.Hmmm, that all sounds a bit teleological but I'm sure you know what I mean.

And the evidence for that is all around us. For example the hedgehogs which are predating ground-nesting birds in Lewis, the catastrophic decline of the kiwi since cats were introduced - the list goes on and on.

Another bit of evidence you can use with the coccyx argument above is that there are cases where people have pain related to the coccyx which is resolved by its removal:Summary of seven studies of coccygectomy for coccydynia
(Note that the success is judged on curing the pre-existing pain condition, while the point of interest here is covered under "Complications of surgery") The coccyx was removed in many cases (not all) with no loss of function for the patient. It is removed and not replaced by any prosthetic device. It was unnecessary. Because it caused pain, it was also a bad design.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

AbbyLeever,I was just wondering that if you think that anything that causes pain is a bad design. Also, if it is a bad design, why do you think that natural selection hasn't eliminated it by now?

Natural selection does not produce optimum designs. Natural selection does not eliminate bad designs that do not reduce reproductive fitness.Natural selection does produce "locally optimal" designs, which are reasonably good designs that are very similar to a pre-existing design. The systems produced by natural selection are often Rube-Goldberg-like, and are often just good enough to do whatever they do.A designer who is not limited by the "very similar to a pre-existing design" constraint can often do much better than natural selection.

You are deifying subjective standards of what constitutes good designs, then pointing to examples in creation that do not fit the bill.Crappy designs are still designs, but the claims of a Creator doesn't include all designs to be optimal, which eviscerates your claim that the so called crappy ones evidence against ID.The claim of the Bible has God declaring that He left fingerprints that can be deduced. Michael Behe's IC systems and their defiance to ultra slow evolutionary processes is spectacular evidence in favor of ID. Those systems are so overdone it becomes an obvious fingerprint, but like the Romans text indicates, it takes some God sense to recognize it.

Holy crap! Well, thanks for the response, I suppose, but it took you over four months to reply to this... with this?! Hardly deifying . But the standards are actually pretty objective. At least, they are applied equally to all apparent ‘designs’. If a camera oscura is an elegant image-forming device, then a squid’s eye might be thought so too. And the criteria we use to decide that there is good design involved also mean that the human eye is more poorly designed than the squid’s. What is so difficult here? So you admit that they are crappy, and that the allegedly intelligent designer did do things poorly. No? Not ‘perfect’, and not even optimal? You are claiming an intelligent designer might use designs that are blatantly poor.Under what definition of intelligent can you include ‘being stupid’?Just what, then, does your ‘hypothesis’ predict? Absolutely bloody anything. You are saying that, yes, the designer did do a whole bunch of stupid things, but he’s clever really.Go figure. Saying so does not make it so. There is no logical way that intelligence -- especially of the order claimed -- in designing things can be reconciled with stupidity ion designing things. It is as conceptually absurd as calling someone a master pianist when he frequently muffs some basic scales. The creator, according to you, is a Rembrandt who forgot how to hold a paintbrush. And the fingerprints of the watchmaker reveal that he was, on occasion, wearing Arctic-grade mittens when doing intricate work. ... which are laughable, as you should know by now... They ‘defy’ nothing of the sort. If we could show how an ‘irreducibly complex’ system could evolve, then the whole concept of IC would be doubtful, would it not? Evolution of flagellaIt seems that your defiance to the ultra slow, careful and extensive processes of explanation is spectacular evidence of a lack of intelligence.And despite all this straw-grasping and flim-flam, you have still ignored some pretty basic questions in my post. So I’ll repeat them (and anticipate a short irrelevant reply sometime around August)1. Please define intelligent design.2. Please explain why an intelligent designer might form idiotic contraptions. What definition of ‘intelligent design’ predicts stupid design?And perhaps you could respond to the related post, linked in the one you’ve 'replied' to... sometime this year please?http://EvC Forum: Some Evidence Against EvolutionTTFN, DT

Classic, dude.