Genetic Evidence of Major Changes in Body Shapes

Give them some time....they're probably all praying that this discovery will fall flat on its noze before they are forced to face it in debates...

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Originally posted by KingPenguin:
a human with wings possibly or scales or the abililty to breath underwater.

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And what would be the purpose of these mutations exactly. Even if human had wings,we could not fly because our bone structure it too heavy. Scales might be usefull to us but then they might also hinder us in some way. Gills to breath underwater? sure,i believe that its concievable but then,we would also have to develope the ability to swim much faster than we do today or we'd fall victim to predators like sharks quite easily. But more to the point,we do not live in environements that require us to develop these mutations to adapt and survive so they wouldn't be much use to ujs anyway.

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Originally posted by KingPenguin:
well then you can tell that to your sea cruture that evolved into a land bug.

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But there's a marked difference between us and the sea creature that turned into a land bug. We have the brain capacity to adapt our environement to our needs wereas the critters need to adapt themselves to THEIR environement...this is just theory mind you but perhaps the sea creature mentionned in the article became trapped in a land locked lake that was slowly drying up and so,the critter had to adapt itself to this changing environement or else its population faced extinction. makes sense,dont you think?

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Originally posted by KingPenguin:
doesnt that disprove human evolution then? we never need to mutate because of our brain, given to us by God. So we never mutated.

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Not at all...though the principle of mutations is still not quite understood,it does seem to be closely related to environemental concerns. It is possible that we used to mutate heavily at an earlier time and those mutations considerably slowed down when we reached the stage of thinking hominids with the capacity to modify our environement,thus reducing the stress it placed on our adaptive genes.

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Originally posted by KingPenguin:
or is an accumalation of knowledge evolution?

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No you dont understand. Evolution,weather it micro or macro is driven by the stress the environement places on a given species. Evolution,it would seems,is the natural mechanism that living organism are endowed with to respond to that stress. And if you go from there,then it would appear logical that the rate of evolution is directly related to the amount of stress the environement places on living organism. Human beings have a rather unique ability of being capable to almost completely adapt its environement to fit THEIR needs,thus considerably reducing the stress the environement normally imposes on us and by extention,reducing our biological need to "mutate" if you will,to adapt to this environement.

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[This message has been edited by LudvanB, 02-11-2002]

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Originally posted by mark24:

Probably not, mutations need to be culled by natural selection. Every organism in a species having too many mtations at one time will result in extinction.

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Different genes mutate at different rates, there is no evidence that there was a "fast" period, indeed, the problem is, that it is literally lethal.

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I'm not sure where you get the environment being responsible for mutations. It most certainly is responsible for some, but is it responsible for MOST mutations?

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Mark

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I think so to a degree and this would certainly go a long way toward explaning the crustacean turning into a fly over time...as a result of its changing environement.