Kinds and diversification through microevolution and hybridization

Agreed Brad. Not every convergent genomic appearence is horizontal transfer. Just like not every out of sequence fossil is a wash in or a folding event.

PeterIt is an issue of extent. I think our bodies, our eyesight, our consciousness is incrdible evidence that God created. How the sun works? You're right we understand that now - but I still think how we got here is qualitatively differnet.

Mammuthus1.5 Simple organisms
I do not claim that all genomes increase in complexity over time. However, the human genome is more complex than a fly's which is more complex than yeast's which is more complex than a prokaryote's. I'm talking big picture - I know that hundreds and thousadns of genes can be lost over time due to switching niches.I'm reading the fugu paper on the train tonight.I wont argue with you about complexity within mammals - it's about equal by most objective measures. It's too hard to quantitate speaking and thinking.You said: "How can the ultimate origin (of gene families) not be abiogenesis???" The reason is by definition - nobody believes that the 'first or simplest' organism had anything like all known protein families - it would have had only a small percentage. We know from he genomes that most have arisen after your supposed abiogenesis. Do you disagree with this? So the 'first' organisms genes were abiogenesis, but the new gene families as we go from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to multiellualr to vertebrates to mammals are not called abiogenesis by anyone I've ever met (and not you by your next paragraph).You continue to talk of duplications and horizontal transfers etc. Please stop doing that - becasue I wont argue with that. But surely you know that that doesn't connect more than a handful of the known protein famiiles! Duplications only link paralogs to each other. Shufflings swap domains. There are no systematic hints as to where most protein families came from.2) Lab evolution
Are you sure the lecture you went to wasn't a 'phage display' peptide lecture? That makes much more sense. I know all about phage display. Great technique. Allows one to try billions of sequences. These peptides do not form folded proteins - they are only ten or so amino-acids long. But creationist studies by PhDed molecular biologists have shown that random searches for folded enzymes take too long for macroevolution.3) Protein families & BLAST
Most protein families only show homology within their family. The other hits will usually have high E values. Some families are huge. but many genes only give a handful of hits to paralogs and the equivilent homologs.Duplicaiton within protein families could have been evoltuion although I personally believe God created all HOX genes. HOX genes in fish are more similar to those in reptiles than those in birds. What you call phylogentics I call common designer.To be continued . . .[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 10-02-2002]

^ Interesting Mammuthus.So I'll reconsider hemoglobin as a 'core-genome' protein in that case. But you can't argue that for all protein families. Mycoplasma Genitalium only has about 80 families and yet thousands exist in vertebrates!Thsands of new folds and families still had to originate somewhere post abiogenesis.[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 10-02-2002]