The origin of new genes

Of course not and in fact that can be shown to be total nonsense. See the thread Looking for the Super Genome. Experiments show that is a fact. It is not just an assertion but rather the conclusion from many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many...many experiments. By the time there were multicell organisms life was well along the evolutionary path. BUT, the number of genes in an organism is not really a good measure of anything except the number of genes in that organism.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

I'm not a scientists so please understand that I may use the wrong terminology when asking a question.New information for cells to now make feathers. What is the process for this to be accomplished?How did it get this information in the first place and how did the cells know after trial and error with this new innovation that it can be permanently imbedded in the germ line for reproduction so feathers remain a fixed trait which would allow all of the varieties of species with feathers?

Mutation + natural selection Natural selection, though "trial and error" is perhaps not the right way to describe that.Edited by Huntard, : No reason given.

That never happens.Mutations happen all the time but they are not "to make something". They do not have some intended purpose. The mutations just happen, they are errors.There is no goal involved. First, as said above, the way it happens is through errors mostly (there are other processes but for now I'll stick to mutations). The cells NEVER know anything. They do not decide what to keep or throw away, they just change.How things get fixed in a population is the other side of the theory, Natural Selection. Natural selection is simply the world and environment we live in. It too has no purpose, no goals.BUT...it does act as a filter. Some critters live long enough to reproduce, others do not. Those that do live long enough to reproduce pass on their genes, including any that were changed.With me so far?

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

The extinction of the dinosaurs does not make any sense if you insist on believing that it was just random mutations and natural selection. One would expect to see some features of dinosaurs left in all of the species we have today. Am I suppose to believe that a small rodent that lived at the time of the dinosaurs was able to radiate every warm blooded species across the globe based on random mutations and isolation for natural selection to change their appearances in every environment.
it is not possible for one species to do this.The changeover from the large mammals to the one currently living today does make sense in random mutations and natural selection to occur. However it does not explain how the large mammals emerged in the first place.I think evolution is weak when trying to explain the whole picture of how species evolved into the next.

Of course the dinosaurs did not go extinct, they are with us still.Also, mammals are NOT descended from dinosaurs.Large mammals evolved and also went extinct in exactly the same way that large dinosaurs evolved and went extinct.Evolution is simply a fact. That much is a given.Now the Theory of Evolution is certainly open to question, but so far it is the best, and quite frankly the only, explanation we have.Why would we expect to see any features of a dinosaur in a mammal?What we see in mammals today is not from one small rodent that lived at the time of the dinos, but rather from all the various mammal species that lived at that time, just as the birds we see today are not from some one dinosaur but rather from descendants of those dinosaur species that did not go extinct.Still with me?

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

I recall there was a big honking sky rock in the scenario. Not believe but acknowledge as fact, yes. As jar noted, more than one species of small rodent was involved. Really? Care to explain how you made this determination?Just to forestall any later complaints, you made the claim thus it is up to you to substantiate. And please understand, personal incredulity will not be acceptable. This is the Science side of the forum and only verifiable Scientific evidence should be cited.Edited by AZPaul3, : opened a jar and had to clarify.

Why would you expect that? Dinosaurs aren't the ancestors of all the species we have today.

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It\'s not enough to bash in heads, you\'ve got to bash in minds
soon I discovered that this rock thing was true
Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil
Jesus was an architect previous to his career as a prophet
All of a sudden i found myself in love with the world
And so there was only one thing I could do
Was ding a ding dang my dang along ling long - Jesus Built my Hotrod Ministry
Live every week like it\'s Shark Week! - Tracey Jordan
Just a monkey in a long line of kings. - Matthew Good
If "elitist" just means "not the dumbest motherfucker in the room", I\'ll be an elitist! - Get Your War On
*not an actual doctor

Hi, Barbara. Organisms can only pass on their features to their offspring.
So, one would have to be the offspring of dinosaurs to have inherited the features of dinosaurs.----- Well, no. Not a rodent (most mammals did not evolve from rodents). And not just one animal.But, yes, that’s the basic idea. And, frankly, the math works out rather well, too. Changes happen all the time, and they can accumulate into large differences over rather shorter periods of time than you think.----- Size is not really a difficult thing to change via evolution. Even within our one species, we see very tall, very short, very large and very small people. It isn’t really hard to imagine that, over very long periods of time, we could see even greater variation in size due to random chance mutations. In fact, we kind of are seeing this exact trend in the human population today.----- I humbly submit that this is probably because you do not understand it fully.Can you give us some real reasons (rather than just disbelief) why you think evolution is a weak explanation?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Please help me with the math.There are 50 and 500 billion mutations in humans every generation at a rate of 1/10 of 1% rate 2 to 20 million per year.Woman are born with 2 million eggs out of which 200 to 300 are viable during the reproduction years. On average 2 children per individual.Out of 500 billion mutations are actually in the germ line?Then take those numbers and apply to viable eggs then take natural selection to account 2 children produced on average in a generation.I don't see how it is possible for humans to be anything but humans in the future.

barbara, I need to ask you a question, and please don't take offense. Is English your second language? Because honestly, I can't make head nor tail of what you're saying here.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. -- Thomas JeffersonFor we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and non-believers. -- Barack ObamaWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- PhatIt has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

All of them. The figures you're referring to are to heritable germline mutations.The figure for mutations throughout the human body is several orders of magnitude higher; approximately 1 per 3 billion base pairs replicated. In tissues where cells are replicating constantly - skin, intestinal lining, hair follicles - that results in hundreds of accrued mutations throughout one human body every day. (More if you're out in the sun.) Humans will indeed always be humans, but the term "human" will come to refer to more species than just "Homo sapiens." Evolution is a bush, not a ladder.

Thank you!As you can see I am not a scientist nor am I a creationists. I really have a desire to obtain as many facts as I can to come to my own conclusion. It is very difficult to do when the information is so conflicting from one website to another.For the person that enjoys insulting people's intelligence is not a way for anyone to want to read your opinion on any subject here and accept your so called belief in yourself that you are more intelligent.

That's true; that's a problem.Why not abandon websites altogether and begin with appropriate science texbooks on the subject? You know, like they use in college. Brock's "Biology of Microorganisms" has a lot of interesting material on evolution, in fairly simple examples of microbes. But it goes into the kind of depth you need to talk about the science intelligently. As a rule I don't insult people's intelligence. But some people have the strange notion that they know as much about biology as people with PhD's in the subject, despite having no formal training in it whatsoever and getting almost everything they say about it wrong. They need to know that they have much learning to do, and I don't consider it an insult to tell someone that they need to learn more, and to point them to the resource they need to do so.