Can I disprove Macro-Evolution

Even were we to accept this assumption it in no way contradicts macro-evolution. Many intelligent design advocates, most prominently Michael Behe, accept common ancestry.And in terms of common ancestry DNA is about the worst evidence you could bring to the table since the pattern of genetic commonality we see among living things is the single strongest evidence for essentially universal common descent.TTFN,WK

Well since 'the genes that form the leg' is almost as incoherent in terms of developmental biology as your idea that Eyeless is the sole gene responsible for eye development it shard to say.What was actually done experimentally was the co-option of non-coding enhancer elements causing limb specific ectopic regions of Eyeless expression. This does indeed induce ectopic eyes, but so does similar ectopic expression of the gene Dachsund (Shen and Mardon, 1997 (PDF)). So how many involved in eye development do you accept? Some estimates are in the low thousands. And if several of them have the same capacity as Eyeless to induce ectopic development what does that mean? Obviously without any intervention the fly should develop normally. I assume you mean Pax-6, which was previously called Small eye, the answer is that it similarly induce ectopic fly eyes. If you mean do you need to ectopically express other genes then the answer is no, but all the other genes are already contained in the genome. As I said before, the vast majority of the genes and information required are in the genome in every cell of the organism.TTFN,WK

Hi Crash,You are using homologous in a very odd way here. Homology is a term to describe similar structures which share a common evolutionary ancestral origin. Different genes can be homologous to each other, different body parts can be homologous, but I don't see how it makes sense to talk about DNA being Homologous to body parts.An enhancer element driving expression in the head isn't homologous to the head under any meaning of the word I have come across.When you say 'homologous' what you seem to mean is Homoeotic as in the Hox genes with their spatial colinearity.TTFN,WK

Responsible for the induction, not the development. If you put Eyeless into the wing or leg imaginal discs of a fly which has had certain other genes knocked out you will not get an eye.Eyeless just binds to certain specific genetic elements causing changes in the regulation of other genes which then go on to regulation the further downstream elements of eye development.I can similarly induce ectopic limbs if I implant a bead soaked in FGF-4 into a chick embryo's flank (Cohn et al., 1995). This doesn't mean that the FGF-4 molecule contains the information for developing an entire limb, it just tells the other genes in the limb deveelopment pathway where to build. This depends on what you mean by operational. The eyes are relatively normal anatomically, though not perfect, and are responsive to light, some of them even send out axonal projections which contact the central nervous system (Clements et al., 2008). What they don't do is connect to the visual lobes of the drosophila which would allow them to perform the normal function as sensory organs. That is correct. Well those are 2 distinct and vastly separate questions. In terms of the first cell you seem to be demonstrating the traditional creationist/IDist lemming like tendency to run off to abiogenesis as soon as a discussion has started, even though abiogenesis is not the topic. The topic is whether macro-evolution exists.In terms of the eye it depends a lot on what you think constitutes the first eye. Was it the first time a photosensitive membrane receptor arose? The first time a true retina formed? The first time an eye with a lens formed?In terms of the information, I will repeat what I have said on countless threads- The information comes from the environment. The environment imposes constraints upon the organism and the interaction of these environmental constraints with the genetic variation arising from mutation causes certain variations to proliferate in the population over subsequent generations. For a more formalised approach to this issue see Frank (2009) for a paper suggesting how natural selection can maximise Fisher information. That is arguably the case, but many times there are other elements in oocytes which are from the mother which are vital to normal development, similarly there are modifications to DNA which vary between cells and some of these can compromise the ability of the DNA to trnasfer the infromation for developing the entire organism. Just having the necessary DNA is not all that is required to reconstitute an organism, if it was cloning would be trivially easy instead of really hard.TTFN,WK

This doesn't necessarily follow, there is another gene Twin of eyeless (Toy) which can induce ectopic eyes in flies in which Eyeless has been knocked out (Jacobsson et al., 2009). Similarly the gene Eyegone can induce ectopic eyes independently of Eyeless (Jang et al., 2003; Dominguez et al., 2004).TTFN,WK

What are we talking here? Chlamydomonas and Euglena eye spots? Or bacteriorhodopsin?TTFN,WK

I'm not sure what the organism you are thinking of is, but I was reading a vey interesting review by Walter Gehring which described several unicellular vison sytems including those in Erythropsis and Warnovia which have some remarkable structural similarities to the lens and retina set up in many metazoa (Gehring, 2005).The paper also puts forward the speculative hypothesisis that transfer of genes from such organisms as a secondary consequence of endosymbiosis might account for animalia acquiring photoreceptors.TTFN,WK

This firt bit is for Percy:Hi Percy, just to point out since this has come up again so soon, this is what happens when you mollycoddle people who don't understand science by telling them we know what they mean. They keep on repeating the same mistakes again and again, and I'm not referring to one individual, we have had several creationists/IDists who think mutations are about transcription. ICANT specifically draws a distinction between DNA replication and transcription, but he still has some absurd wrongheaded notion that transcription is what is important in mutation and therefore in evolutionary terms.And for ICANT: Mutations rate are increasingly well quantified in many species. We can measure the error rates of Polymerases which synthesise new DNA strands. We can empirically measure mutations as the result of environmental damage too. The rates are consistent with the comparative data on genetic distance between species. Do you have any reason to think they are not sufficient?Most polymerases are highly accurate, in some bacteria the principle replicative polymerase DNA Pol III is accurate enough that their average mutation rate is below 1 mutation/genome/generation when the genome is small enough. Can you tell me when anyone has attemmpted this? It sounds like all the fictional Drosophila experiments Idist/creationists keep saying failed to produce beneficial mutations. Given that your source was writing in 1867 he had no more of an understanding of molecular genetics than Darwin did, the 4th generation may have been morphologically indistinguishable from dogs but genetics might be quite different. Since genetic elements are discrete it should surprise no one that an outside trait may be lost following successive rounds of inbreeding, however when it comes to the whole genome it seems unlikely that all traces of the jackal genome would be lost in all it's descendants after 4 generationsTTFN,WK