Evolving the Musculoskeletal System

There's no law that says different species cannot interbreed. The more similar two species' genomes are, the more likely the possibility of interbreeding. Lions and tigers can interbreed. Horses and donkeys can interbreed.I've read ahead a bit and found this exchange: But obviously you're wrong, and elsewhere you said this: Your insufficient knowledge is leading you to incorrect conclusions. When do foothills become mountains? When does harbor become sea? When does a boy become a man? Any line of division we choose is arbitrary because the change is gradual.A smooth blend from one species to another with no clear lines of demarcation is produced by the gradual change of evolution. Species A₁ evolves into A₂ and then into A₃ and A₄ and so forth. At some point the chain of evolution includes so much change that A_n is no longer able to breed with A₁. But A_n can still interbreed with A_n-1 and A_n-2 and so forth, but not with all prior species back to A₁. At some point they become too different.--Percy

Oh, I see where the confusion lies. You were using the word "kind" in a creationist sense while I was using it generically. Kind is not a classification within biology. Whatever the creationist definition of kind might be, evolution has nothing to say about it.But we were talking about gradual change. What you said in Message 198 was: The reply I gave earlier still applies. Whether the change is from one species to another or one genus to another or one family to another, the change is gradual. The more different two species are genetically, the less likely it is they can interbreed, but there's no explicit law within the field of biology that says that genera can't interbreed or families can't interbreed and so forth. Of course, by the very nature of genetics it must be considered very unlikely.Where one species becomes another or one genera becomes another or one family becomes another is an inherently arbitrary choice. There's never any actual "line that has to be crossed." You maybe could talk about a region. On one side of the region you know they're the same species or genera or family, and on the other side you know they're a different species or genera or family, but there's no precise point within that region where the transition happened.But we don't want to drift too far from the main point, which is that evolving a new feature takes many, many generations, and that at each point along the way the change must provide some advantage, otherwise it won't be selected and will be lost.--Percy

Science attempts to understand how things work, and evolution represents our best understanding of how life changes over time. Life cannot change in sudden large steps because while reproduction is not perfect, it is certainly mostly perfect. An error rate of 1 in 10 million cannot produce rapid change.If you were able to gradually change the shape of a jigsaw puzzle piece you would find that it gradually fits with the surrounding pieces less and less well. In the same way, as two populations of the same species that split from a single population change over time through successive generations they "fit" less well with each other and become less and less able to interbreed. You'd probably measure it by the percentage of organisms in the populations that can interbreed. Maybe after a hundred generations 95% of the organisms could still interbreed between the two population. After 500 generations maybe it's down to 80%. After a thousand generations it's down to 50%. After 2000 generations it's down to 10%. After 5000 generations it's down to 2%. And after 10,000 generations it's down to 0.1%. At what point in this process do you say that the two species are insufficiently interfertile to be considered the same species?Clearly at some point the interfertility drops to zero, and then there's no longer any ambiguity. But the fact of the matter is that classification categories like species, genus and family are arbitrary categories invented by people. The categories are not an inherent property of nature. They're an artifact of our efforts to understand nature.Skeletons arose the same way all structures arose throughout time: gradually with one tiny step at a time with positive traits being selected for and becoming more common and negative traits being selected against and becoming less common.--PercyEdited by Percy, : "imperfect" => "perfect"

As Meldinoor later noted, it depends upon what kind of large steps you're asking about.If, as in Meldinoor's example in Message 228, we saw a "hippo turn into a porcupine in a flash of light," then that would be magic, and it wouldn't have any implications for evolution.If a millipede of 20 segments gave birth to a millipede with 22 segments, assuming a genetic basis, then that's a fairly large step with new structures popping into existence, but it's still evolution because they're just copies. The gene that said "create 20 segments" mutated into a gene that said "create 22 segments."If a horse were born with wings, and we looked at the underlying genetics and found genes for wings where neither parent had any such thing, that would pretty much prove intelligent design. It wouldn't disprove what we already know about evolution, but quite obviously there's another process we were unaware of, and we would have to begin figuring what events of natural history had been wrongly attributed to evolution.--Percy

Evolution and all of science are just attempting to describe what we find in nature and how it works. I don't know what you mean by "broad assertions," so can you be more specific? Is there some aspect of evolutionary theory in particular that says something about nature that isn't true? Do you ever find birds hatching from lizard eggs? Do you ever find large steps such as entire new structures like a new limb or a new organ evolving in a single generation? Do you ever find less fit organisms being more successful at producing progeny than more fit organisms? Do you ever find instances of poorly adapted creatures outcompeting well adapted creatures?We never see these kinds of things, and that's why they're not part of evolutionary theory. What we do see is gradual change over time with the better adapted passing more of their genes on to the next generation, and since that's what we see, that's what evolution says.Obviously it would make no sense to observe something happening and then ignore it when you formulated the theory. That's why all successful theories have gone through a period of making successful predictions about the natural world, because that's how they prove that they really do describe the natural world and are not made up.--Percy

Wow, ICDESIGN, what a spectacular collection of errors!Let me start by addressing your most egregious error, which was posting a cut-n-paste as if it were your own. The three paragraphs after the quote from me are a cut-n-paste from this webpage at Intelligent Design Evidence: This is rule 7 from the Forum Guidelines:

7. Never include material not your own without attribution to the original source.

Your next error was to not check your source. The paper did not appear in Biology Today. I think there may have been a magazine called Biology Today years ago, but whatever the case, it no longer exists. Biology-Today.com is a website containing a number of short unattributed articles about biology. It is not a peer reviewed journal, and you can't find Koonin's paper there anyway.Koonin's paper is at Biology Direct, which is an on-line open source journal with no real peer review and whose Editor-in-Chief is (gasp!) Eugene V. Koonin himself! My God, this is like a Russian enigma but done with chicanery instead of mystery. You post an unattributed cut-n-paste of an erroneous attribution of a paper published at a website run by the paper's author and where in the paper he just makes things up (more about this in a second).What an unbelievable chain of, uh, I'll be polite, errors! You can't make up stuff like this. Onifre, get over here, lots of material for your next routine!The paper itself can be found here: Here's your quote from the paper, which your plagiarized text described as a conclusion but which actually appears in the appendix. I've taken the quote from the paper itself instead of your plagiarized version in order to give it the original formatting: Note that he's talking about "spontaneous formation." No one believes the first replicator came about spontaneously. As we keep telling you over and over and over again, the evolution of life, including the development of pre-life prior to what could properly be called life, occurred gradually. No serious origins-of-life researcher believes there were huge, sudden and very unlikely leaps. Koonin, despite his position at the NCBI, cannot be considered a serious origins-of-life researcher. For proof I offer as evidence these pictures of Koonin and commedian Louis CK: Coincidence? I don't think so! Koonin is obviously Louis CK pulling a fast one in the style of Andy Kaufman! Seriously, it is easy to believe that the spontaneous formation of anything complex is incredibly unlikely. That's why few believe it was a factor in the origin of life.By the way, when you say this in a subsequent reply to Nwr: You're wrong about what I was saying, and you're even wrong about what Koonin was saying because your second quote is not of Koonin but of the website you plagiarized. Your determination to be wrong about so many things is awe inspiring!But this thread isn't about the origin of life. It's about the origin of complex structures like the musculoskeletal system, which however it happened all actual scientists believed occurred gradually in tiny steps.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.Edited by Percy, : Fix superscript.

Moving on? YOU'RE MOVING ON!! After that spectacular display of plagiarism, misrepresentation and uncomprehension you're just going to ignore it and move on? Unable to comprehend Koonin (about whom Crashfrog is right when he says the site you plagiarized from misconstrued the point of the paper - I didn't bother you correcting you on that point because my post was already running long) and apparently totally uninterested in reading the paper yourself you instead just quote him over and over again as if senselessly wielding a cross to ward off the devil.And now you're just going to toss it all and move on?If nothing else could you at least learn from this that you should verify your sources, and read and understand what you're referencing. Seriously, do you really expect to get anywhere when you so determinedly fail to understand what you're talking about? Ignorance never wins any arguments, although the other side often just has to throw up their hands and give up. Why don't you find something in apes that doesn't exist in fish and we'll talk about that.--Percy

You commit plagiarism and this is the closest you can come to contrition?Tell me, do you really have no sense of right or wrong? No conscience? Aren't you forgetting to mention that Theodoric had already called you out on your plagiarism? I guess we can now add dissembling to the list.ICDESIGN, I'm sure you consider yourself an honest and responsible person, but if you want other people to think the same then you have to behave that way.No more plagiarism, okay?No more quoting sites without first vetting what they say, okay? I know Koonin's website calls them peer reviews, but those are just reviews. Peer reviews are conducted prior to publication and play a significant role in whether a paper is published, the reviewers are anonymous, and their comments are not made public. Plus Koonin is editor-in-chief of Biology Direct.What is your problem that you see no shenanigans? Has anyone else here ever cited a paper whose author was also editor-in-chief of the journal that published it? Just you so far, right? Something as complex as that? Of course I wasn't saying it formed spontaneously. How many times in this thread have I (and everyone else) told you that things happen gradually and not in sudden large leaps? This "organism" had a simpler predecessor which itself had a simpler predecessor which itself had a simpler predecessor and so on.The sudden leap that Koonin postulates is a creationist idea. The only thing I can say in his defense is that he probably wanted as unlikely a scenario as possible in order to best make the point that in an infinite number of universes it would make no difference how unlikely it might be, it would still be inevitable.--Percy

You didn't "post information without showing where it came from."You cut-n-pasted someone else's text verbatim into your own message without giving any indication whatsoever that the words were not your own.It's called plagiarism. Why would an evolutionist ever be wrong about evolution in a conversation with you? You're at such a basic level that getting something wrong would be akin to an adult getting the alphabet wrong when teaching it to a 5-year old.Most of your problem with understanding evolution, and the reason why your understanding remains rudimentary even after all you're participation here, is that you accept or believe little of what we tell you. We've told you over and over and over again that evolution doesn't make sudden leaps, but you keep arguing, "Evolution is wrong because new functions can't come into existence all at once." Today we saw this once again with your citation of Koonin's "spontaneous formation" argument.About ear lobes, is there something difficult to believe about gradual change in the shape of the cartilage around the ear hole?About eyelids, they're just flaps of flesh. Is there something difficult to believe about gradual change in the flesh around the eye?About the nose, fish have noses, though apparently they're called nares.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

WK,We disagree that it was "a pretty flakey article." Could you maybe meet me halfway and go as far as "extremely flakey?" The key point is that a read of that paper indicates that Koonin thinks "spontaneous formation" of something extremely complex is a necessary prerequisite for life, and he does what creationists do here all the time, make up an incredibly tiny probability out of thin air. My bullshit alarm bells are going off like crazy, and I'm wondering why yours aren't, too.--Percy

I didn't want to get into a discussion about specifics so I didn't respond about the review process when I replied to WK, but what you say sums up my views pretty well, too. I know I'd feel pretty weird submitting a paper to a process where I knew who the reviewers were and that the reviews, often made before another round of changes, would be made public.So since I'm addressing this I may as well respond to WK's question about why I assumed the reviews occurred after publication. I of course don't know when the paper and reviews were put up at the website, and I made no comment about it, but since the author's comments appear on the reviews, and *not* the other way around with the reviewers comments on the paper, obviously Biology Direct's process is backwards.--Percy

Well, yes, but he has no evidence that we're lying. He blames evolutionists for his many misunderstandings about evolution when the source of these misunderstandings is either himself or creationist sources. Every time we correct him he concludes that either we're lying now or we were lying before. In reality he's far too frustrated and confused to reach any reliable conclusions about veracity. Yeah, it struck me the same way, but I found that the sentiments resonated with me. I admit I was pretty disgusted at ICDESIGN's blas attitude about it. Most of us here are probably fairly similar in that we find it terribly embarrassing to be caught in some significant faux pas (unwitting or not), and it's bit startling to encounter someone who doesn't react that way. Right you are! --Percy

Hi ICDESIGN,There was a lot of constructive advice in what people said. Evolution is just a theory about the real world. If it's wrong then evidence from the real world will tell us it is wrong. At heart all the criticism you're receiving is because you so determinedly ignore real world evidence. Your focus should be on alleviating your ignorance of real world evidence instead of finding excuses to avoid it. Stop feigning outrage. It was your blatant plagiarism followed by denial that invited all the criticism. You brought it on yourself by your own behavior, so suck it up.My Message 286 continues the discussion about new functions/features possessed by apes but not fish.--Percy

Hi ICDESIGN,Sorry for replying twice, but I should have reinforced my comments about how determinedly you maintain your ignorance by commenting on this: How many times have we told you that they are not "lucky accidental mutations?"Concerning yesterday's Koonin's paper, how many times have we told that evolution proceeds gradually in tiny steps?If evolution is wrong it isn't because it asserts that "lucky accidental mutations" happen, because it doesn't.If evolution is wrong it isn't because it asserts that evolution proceeds in giant leaps, because it doesn't.And if you're ever going to have a prayer of making progress promoting your position it won't be by continuing to be wrong about what evolution says.Your problem is ignorance. I'm sure in school you found that the more you knew the better you did. It's the same here and in most things in life.Let's continue the discussion of new functions/structures that developed between fish and ape.--Percy

The reviewers weren't actual peer reviewers making sure that Koonin's paper satisfied scientific criteria prior to publication. The reviewers were writing reviews that had nothing to do with whether Koonin's paper would be published. Their comments had no influence on Koonin's paper. The reviewers were not anonymous. If this is how things now work in your neck of the scientific woods then you sound like an apologist for a system that has gone badly awry.--Percy