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Originally posted by quicksink:
>How does a bat get echo location through random mutations? The problem is that you cannot go halfway....
Yes you can, but it not the way you are thinking.
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>How does a fully formed nervous system develop from a single-celled organism? Certainly, any animal that was born with, quite literally, half a brain, would die.
True, but you are not describing evolution.
You seem to believe that the theory suggests massive and radical changes over a short period. For example, that an arthopod suddenly gives birth to offspring with human sized brains. A mutation capable of such change probably would kill both the mother and the offspring. But that isn't the way it works.
Evolution works in tiny steps over great periods of time, even in the case of punctuated evolution you're still talking tens or hundreds of thousands of years. And.... big and!... every small step along the way has to be functional, or at least not detrimental. This seems to be where you are hitting your snag. Eyeballs did not go from "a creature with no eyeballs" to "a creature with mammal-like eyeballs" Instead, eyeballs started out as a tiny little spot of tissue capable of detecting light-- not vision, just the presence or absence of light. As this was beneficial, it caught on. As it caught on, it became more important. As it became more important, the individual with the better light sensors had a minute advantage and hence reproduced slightly more than the less light sensitive individuals. And so on, and so on.
Think about this. You are capable of determining the direction from which a sound is coming. Perhaps you can't do so very efficiently, but you can do it. Now, suppose some circumstance forces you to depend upon this ability-- say, you are forced by predation to live in caves and come out only at night. Your ability to survive and reproduce becomes very dependent upon sound ( and senses other than vision ) This give the advantage to those in your population with the best ability to hear directionally. This ability, remember, depends upon slight differences in biology-- ear canal shape, neural pathways, etc. So those reproducing the most are passing along the directional hearing traits. The same thing happens every generation as long as the selective forces remain more or less the same. Add these slight changes up over ten thousand generations and you end up with some serious change. But every step along the way is functional.
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>Where are those transitionals?
Everything is transitional.
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>The number of mutations required to create something like a human from an ape is enormous? Why do we not see such a transition in the fossil strata?
We do, or we would if we found a fossil from every single generation from ground zero to the present. But this isn't going to happen. The conditions that create fossils are too rare and we get only bits and pieces of the chain. Its a bit like taking slices of a color spectrum. You can take a green slice and a red slice and deny that there is any connection, but if you look at the whole spectrum you realize that the colors flow together pretty smoothly. Sadly, we'll never have the whole evolutionary spectrum, so we piece together what we have as best we can.
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Developing such a complex system would be extremely complicated and extremely lucky!
yes indeedy..... try to remember that for every species you see today, there are countless thousands that died out.
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Why is it that we do not see such massive leaps today? Why do we not see more than just albinos or retarded animals?
We do see such things in simple creatures like bacteria. Humans live no where near long enough to witness radical change in a complicated organism.
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>The low volume of mutations and high-number of negative mutations makes it very difficult to create such diversity in the plant and animal kingdom.
Think BILLIONS OF YEARS. Your life span is a whisper of a drop the sea of time.
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>The fossil record is compatable with evolution, but it does not give any evidence of evolution. The diversification indicates gradual evolution, but what created these differences, and what embeds diversity in a population? There is no evidence of mutations in the fossil strata. Where are transitionals? Where are grossly mutated organisms?
Sloppy DNA replication is the source of the differences. Grossly mutated-- ie. non functional half-this half-thats-- forms DIE before reproducing. In other words there are no populations of weirdly mutated creatures, hence the chance of finding one is ridiculously small.
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Demonstrate that mutations are not sufficiently abundant, or that the ratio of positive mutations is small, and you completely dismantle the evolutionist argument.
But all you need is a petri dish and some bacteria to demonstrate that mutations are sufficiently abundant.
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The problem came when others ran with the idea. They, too, lacked the devices to test his radical and appealing concepts. But nonetheless, the concept sounded so good to them, that they propagated it. They planted it into the scientific community so quickly that by the time the methods to test it [mutations] came about, people had taken the concept for granted.
Wrong. Just wrong. It has been tested nearly to the point of nausea.
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This concept is not inherently false- the concept that you can travel faster than the speed of light is inherently false.
Travel faster than the speed of light is no more inherently false than evolution. That the speed of light appears to be the top end on the speedometer depends upon Einstein's mass/energy equivalency equations. If these are wrong, the speed of light may be surpassable. Not saying they are wrong, but enough with the "intrinsically false." Our judgments of truth and falsehood depend upon our current understanding. There is really no such thing as intrinsically true or false. All we have are predictions based upon the best available interpretations of the best available data.
Take care.
John
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