if you really study biology like you claim you do
I don't claim to study biology, I am a working post-doctoral researcher. But as I have often pointed out qualifications are irrelevant.
you should never beter than to just throw your hands up in the air, and say, well we have it mostly figured out already, so what is there to argue.
That isn't what I said, I just pointed out how ludicrous your strawman was.
So now you seem to want to say that there is tons of evidence that doesn't involve the simplistic biology mutations which do nothing to form new structures
No, that isn't what I said. What I said was that the evidence for the role of simple mutations, and most single instances of mutation are essentially simple be they deletions or insertions or transversions or transitions, is not restricted to bacteria.
As to 'forming new structures', this is just more IDist flack, like the creationists who want us to show them cats giving birth to dogs. You want us to show you experimental evolutionary evidence showing the undirected production of novel limbs or organs in a field that is barely a century old when the evidence suggests such structures take millenia to evolve.
Now novel traits are a different matter, I could cite the evolution of insecticide resistance in various insect species both in laboratory experiments (
Adcock et al., 1993;
Pittendrigh et al., 1997;
McKenzie and Batterham, 1998)and out in the field (
Ffrench-constant et al., 2004;
Labbe et al., 2007;
Karasov et al., 2010). As with the nylon bug example many of these are instances of insects being exposed to novel environmental factors and adapting to them and the genetic basis of these adaptions is often as simple as a nucleotide substitution, although a number of resistance mutations have been identified associated with transposon insertions as well (
Aminetzach et al., 2005).
what we are seeing more and more, is the evo-devo style of large scale changes, being "switched" on by animals to self-style their own needs.
Please provide one scintilla of evidence to support this. You may complain that the only evidence for RM/NS is from bacterial experiments, and when you do you are wrong, but when it comes to directed adaptive mutation that really is the case and it is only identifiable in a handful of examples as well. There is absolutely no evidence as yet for such mechanisms operating in animals.
My own background is in evo-devo and I can assure you that what you describe bears no relation to it. There are no large scale developmental changes 'switched on', what there are are genetic modules of signalling molecules and downstream effector cascades that we see re-used again and again in various different developmental contexts and for which we can see simpler varieties in less morphologically complex organisms.
We do know that ectopic expression, expression outwith its normal pattern, of some genes can lead to the growth of extra limbs for example. We also know that the changes required to alter a genes pattern of expression or level of expression are exactly the sort of simple mutations I described earlier. Small, even single nucleotide, mutations can cause changes in expression which in turn lead to changes in the morphology of the organism.
You know this perfectly well, and I am sure this is why you keep wanting to bring up the "other mechanisms" argument for biology-within being willing to pin down what you mean
I gave you several very specific examples of other mechanisms, obviously I can't predict what as yet undiscovered mechanisms there are because I'm not psychic.
Because you know this presents a huge problem for Darwinian biology.
No, I don't. I'm beginning to agree with Dr. A's complain that it is the height of futility for you to lie about what I know or believe
to me.
If organisms have switches that control large scale areas of their development, who decides which switches get used.
As I said, this is an incredibly bad representation of what developmental biology has shown us, but in terms of what really happens the answer should be obvious. When mutations lead to morphological differences in organisms in a population the thing that decides which mophology comes to predominate, or rather the different morphologies comparative fitnesses, is natural selection with a bit of noise from genetic drift thrown in.
And where did the switches come from to begin with?
We have quite extensive evidence from comparative developmental genetics for a wide variety of more rudimentary froms of various developmnetal modules in less complex animals such as
C. elegans,
Ciona intestinalis, sponges and others. There is also a very compelling body of data showing how a few key types of protein (such as FGF, BMP, WNT and HOX proteins) have diversified into larger families as organisms have evolved more complex morphologies. This isn't a linear relationship by any means but the number of transcription factors, key regulators of gene expression, has been suggested to correlate quite well with morphological complexity . Some argue that other regulatory factors such as microRNAs have had an equally important role in morphological evolution.
what do you think about people saying fossils are the evidence for RM/NS?
I'd agree that fossils aren't evidence for RM/NS
per se. They certainly show compelling evidence for the dynamic nature of biological morphology over time and for common descent within the animalia. They are consistent with RM/NS but in the absence of accompanying genetic evidence they don't really seem to add to the evidence for RM/NS. I think that what people perhaps really mean is that they are evidence for evolution.
What do you think of the lack of ONE concrete example in this thread so far of a non-bacterial example of anything?
I think it is due to the fact that people don't see the point in being sucked in to yet more creationist/IDist goal shifting. We get told, 'there are no beneficial mutations', so we show the research in the most extensive well documented and controlled cases, which are bacterial, only to be told 'Well yeah, but there are no beneficial mutations that aren't in bacteria'.
We start with the simple cases because, as is brought home to us again and again, most of the people making these claims have very rudimentary grasps of both evolutionary biology specifically and also biology in general. In many cases they are simply parroting criticisms they have taken from elsewhere on the web. And as we also see repeatedly they will use all sorts of tortuous logic to try and fit reality to their preconceptions.
Anyway just for you I have provided several examples from the animal kingdom earlier in this post.
What do you think of people sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "we are right" so we don't care about evidence.
I think you should stop doing it.
If anything is fucking stupid, its that people want to accept this theory so badly, that they will accept that anything proves their theory true, including that fossils are the proof of the mechanisms.
Frankly I think you have only yourself to blame, you framed your OP in terms of Darwinian evolution but what you are actually attacking is the modern synthesis with its focus the accumulation of genetic changes under selective pressures. Darwin had no real framework for the generation of inherited rather than acquired morphological variation other than that it existed.
I think many people have been taking your critique as being directed at the broader category of Darwinian evolution rather than simply RM/NS, but I may be wrong and they do have reasons for arguing that RM/NS is evidenced by elements of the fossil record, that is for them to say.
TTFN,
WK
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