A test for claimed knowledge of how macroevolution occurs

Funny Taq, how your chimp-human comparisons are begging the question and you don't seem to know it. You assume a genetic relationship and everything you say reflects that assumption. But since I don't assume it, what you are saying is nonsense. What separates the human and chimp genomes is a different design altogether, using a lot of similar genetic information because of the similarities between the designs, llke the similarities between two car designs perhaps. There is no ACTUAL relation between the two, they just have similar design elements.

But since you think there is such a relationship, it should make a good place to start on the demonstration dredge and I keep asking for. It's not a huge project llke rodent to whale, the changes should be easier to track for that reason. What changes in the chimp genome have to happen? Give us a series of mutations that could change the chimp genome into the human genome. How do you get from the one to the other given the fact that mutations are random and unpredictable. You can't just point out the differences, you have to track how they could occur genetically over time, formed by these random mutations.

From my point of view you are going to get random mutation after random mutation of different traits, all within the chimp genome and never producing anything but those chimp characteristics, where they produce anything beneficial at all but of course mostly they do nothing or once in a while they produce something deleterious. You have to think through such a thicket of random changes to show how they could possibly construct an entirely new creature over millions of years.

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Then what makes a chimp different from a human? Isn't it the differences between their genomes?

Of course it is, but you assume the one evolved from the other, whereas I am saying they are simply different designs hardwired to the creature. You think mutations could change what's different in the chimp to make a human, I'm saying that's impossible, mutations are random events and even a billion years wouldn't be enough since it's in principle impossible. You'll only get variations on the chimp, and really you'll most likely get a lot of dead chimps, but anyway.

If changing a genome can only ever produce the same species, then how was God able to produce so many different species?

He MADE them different to begin with. You keep assuming something llke He made the one from the other? but He didn't. He made a chimp and He made a man, two entirely different things that happen to have some features in common.

According to you, there should only ever be one species because no matter how much you change their genomes they will still be the same species.

You keep saying this but it makes no sense. You think mutations get you from one species to another so you even seem to think God had to do it that way. No, I believe God created separate Kinds/Species at the beginning. It had nothing to do with mutations, just design factors He built into each creature. He took a ball of clay, you could say, and he made a human being. He took another ball of clay and He made a chimp. He took other balls of clay and made horses and insects and elephants and whales and so on and so forth, each out of a separate ball of clay.

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Faith writes: Funny Taq, how your chimp-human comparisons are begging the question and you don't seem to know it. You assume a genetic relationship and everything you say reflects that assumption.

I make conclusions based on evidence, not assumptions.

First, orthologous ERV's establish common ancestry. We observe both in the lab and in the wild that ERV's are produced by retroviruses that insert randomly into genomes. Therefore, finding the same ERV at the same base in two genomes is evidence that the insertion happened once in a common ancestor.

Second, the pattern of mutations is consistent with observations of mutations happening in real time. When we look at the mutations that humans are born with we see that transitions are more common than transversions, and CpG mutations happen at the highest rates. The observed pattern of mutations is also consistent with the differences between different humans. More to the point, we see the same exact pattern when comparing the human and chimp genomes.

I would strongly suggest that you read the article that those images came from:

https://biologos.org/...ancestry-its-all-about-the-mutations

So to refute your claims, I am not making assumptions. I am following the evidence.

What separates the human and chimp genomes is a different design altogether, using a lot of similar genetic information because of the similarities between the designs, llke the similarities between two car designs perhaps.

It isn't a different design altogether. 98% of the bases are the same in both the chimp and human genomes.

What changes in the chimp genome have to happen?

Humans didn't evolve from chimps. We evolved from a common ancestor. The changes that had to happen are among the differences between our genomes, as I have already discussed.

You can't just point out the differences, you have to track how they could occur genetically over time, formed by these random mutations.

Can you point to a single difference between the chimp and human genomes that could not be produced by known mechanisms of mutagenesis? I bet you can't. Naturally occurring mutations include substitutions, deletions, insertions, and recombination. These mechanisms can produce all of the differences between the human and chimp genomes.

From my point of view you are going to get random mutation after random mutation of different traits, all within the chimp genome and never producing anything but those chimp characteristics, where they produce anything beneficial at all but of course mostly they do nothing or once in a while they produce something deleterious.

Your point of view isn't supported by a shred of evidence. It's just a fantasy.

Faith writes: Of course it is, but you assume the one evolved from the other,

False. I have the evidence, so I am making a supported conclusion.

You think mutations could change what's different in the chimp to make a human,

Just to reiterate, I am saying that mutations made both chimp and human from a common ancestor. Humans didn't evolve from chimps. The mutations that separate chimps and humans are mutations that happened in both lineages.

To use an analogy, the Romance Languages (e.g. French, Italian, Spanish) evolved from Latin. The differences between the languages are differences that accumulated in each language lineage. It would be a mistake to say that French evolved from Italian. They both evolved from Latin, their common ancestral tongue.

He MADE them different to begin with.

According to you, this is impossible. God couldn't make a genome that produced anything other than humans because no matter how much you change the human genome it will still be human. This is your argument.

yes I know humans and chimps are said to have evolved from a common ancestor but in this context that's just a distraction. So track the changes back from the chimp and the human being to this common ancestor then. Or however you want to do it.

He MADE them different to begin with. According to you, this is impossible. God couldn't make a genome that produced anything other than humans because no matter how much you change the human genome it will still be human. This is your argument.

Well, you are suffering from some kind of mental glitch I'm not sure how to undo. But it's the same argument for the chimp genome which God created separately. The chimp genome can't produce anything other than a chimp because no matter how many variations it can produce, or that mutations can bring about in the chimp genome it will still be a chimp. Same with a dragonfly. No matter how many variations occur in its genome, or how many mutations occur in it, it will still be a dragonfly. Or a horse: No matter how many variations occur in its genome or how many mutations, it will still be a horse.

Of course it is, but you assume the one evolved from the other, False. I have the evidence, so I am making a supported conclusion.

Well, actually you are not. You are merely stating that the one evolved from the other by means of mutations, you are not showing any evidence for this statement at all.

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First, orthologous ERV's establish common ancestry. We observe both in the lab and in the wild that ERV's are produced by retroviruses that insert randomly into genomes. Therefore, finding the same ERV at the same base in two genomes is evidence that the insertion happened once in a common ancestor.

I can't read that article,* sorry, I can barely tolerate looking at your charts. But to determine if this does in fact show a common ancestor I'd have to see examples, because a single species that has varied into many other species or subspecies WILL have a common ancestor and you'd need to differentiate between this situation and the situation of two entirely different species where perhaps the same retroviruses occur. My guess would be the former is the example you are talking about, which is the usual case of evos wrongly calling ordinary microevolutionary variation "evolution" and the latter doesn't happen, but you need to show me if my guess is right or wrong.

Second, the pattern of mutations is consistent with observations of mutations happening in real time. When we look at the mutations that humans are born with we see that transitions are more common than transversions, and CpG mutations happen at the highest rates. The observed pattern of mutations is also consistent with the differences between different humans. More to the point, we see the same exact pattern when comparing the human and chimp genome

I can't follow you so if you want to get this across to me you'll need some other way to do it. However, it sounds **** what you are saying is that mutations are not random but predictable and coherent, which flies in the face of everything I've ever read about mutations. This is truly revolutionary information if it's true, but I suspect there's something wrong in this description that I can't detect.

Perhaps it's that you are assuming any kind of difference between genomes, or similarities too, is due to a mutation without any evidence whatever that it was formed by a mutation. In other words perhaps you are mistaking normally occurring variations for mutations. Which would be expected since the ToE has you assuming that all normal alleles were originally mutations.

*ABE: BY THE WAY I'VE COPIED THE ARTICLE INTO WORD WHERE I CAN MAKE THE BACKGROUND BLACK.

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You in Message 34:

...breeding a whale...

You in Message 36:

...breeding these alleged ancestral "rodents" towards whale-ness...

You in Message 40:

...breed these "rodents" to move them along the path to whale-ness...

You keep repeating the same mistake. Breeding is not the artificial version of evolution. You'd have to combine breeding with genetic engineering to have an accurate analogy of the artificial to the natural. That is:

(Artificial selection + genetic engineering) == (natural selection + mutation)

Breeding by itself, which can't change the genetics, could never produce a whale from a now extinct ungulate (not a rodent - can you name any rodent with hooves?).

--Percy

RAZD writes: No point in continuing with you on this thread and letting you repeat all your refuted nonsense.

I haven't finished reading to the end of the thread yet, but so far Dredge isn't engaging with any of the information provided to him. I'd like to see him explain how people are wrong in their criticisms of his views, but instead he's just ignoring them, making discussion impossible.

--Percy

So on my Word copy of the article with the black background I've read down to the point where it is asserted that changes in human beings that show a difference from a common ancestor are mutations. This is an assumption based on the ToE. There is no reason whatever to assume these are mutations. On my model they are most likely merely built-in variations, normal alleles that vary from generation to generation to make the differences we see in human beings down those generations. For instance take skin color. A dark skinned parent and a light skinned parent may have children of a whole variety of skin colors from light to dark without any mutations whatever, just the normal sexual combination of the DNA for the dark and light skin.

And each subsequent generation will combine the offspring's DNA with another person's light or dark DNA to produce their own variety of skin colors in their own offspring. Two light skinned individuals will probably produce light skinned offspring but since there is a dark skinned ancestor of one of the parents a darker shade could show up, and if both parents have a dark skinned ancestor then the same darkness of skin as the ancestor's could show up. This is normal variation based on normal built in genetic differences. down the generations say you've got a variety of dark skins. Still a light skinned offspring could show up in such a genetic llne. I don't see how this is taken into account in that article.

The article is assuming exactly what we object to, that mutations are the reason for the variations in the genome. They are not.

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... which is nothing but an isolated population within a population that undergoes exactly the same processes as a geographically isolated population. The way any population microevolves based on reproductive isolation.

Times 60 million years and yeah you got it. Rat to whale.

And since I'm arguing from the same materials you are and haven't mentioned my "book" you are being disingenuous to a fraudulent degree in this debate.

I like to remind people that you are one of them religionist kind so they'll know where the deficiencies come from.

Despite your denials we can still show hard evidence and, more importantly, a preponderance of evidences scanning many disciplines. You've got ... what?

Are you going to help Dredge out? Prove god?

What separates the human and chimp genomes is a different design altogether, using a lot of similar genetic information because of the similarities between the designs, llke the similarities between two car designs perhaps. There is no ACTUAL relation between the two, they just have similar design elements.

Yet again, absolute nonsense. You really must learn something about genetics as well as about evolution or else you will continue to post nonsense.

As has already been covered and presented to you so many times, many amino acids in a protein can be substituted with other amino acids without any effect on the functionality of that protein. An example of an active site on a protein (given by Thwaites and Awbrey in their two-model class) showed about half its loci to accept any amino acid -- that says nothing of the purely structural parts of that protein in which most loci should accept any amino acid.

While similar design requirements could result in similar results, there is no reason to expect similar features which have nothing to do with the design to be so strikingly similar.

Take a specific protein from a wide variety of species (ie, the same protein in different species) and compare them with each other. What do we expect?

• According to your "similar design" idea, we should expect the important parts of the proteins (the parts that do the actual work of that protein) to be similar. That is reasonable, since those parts are what make that protein that protein. As for the rest of the amino acids, your idea offers no reason whatsoever to find similarities in which amino acid sequences show up.

• According to the evolutionary idea of similarities due to descent from common ancestors, we would expect to find similarities not only in the important parts (for the same reason as your idea would) but also in the amino acids that make up the rest of the protein, namely the unimportant parts. And while we would expect mutations over time to result in differences arising in the unimportant part, we would also expect to find more differences in species that are more remotely related (ie, had diverged from their common ancestor longer ago) and few differences between more closely related species.
  

So what do we find? We find the pattern of differences that are predicted by the common-descent model of evolution and absolutely no support for your "similar designs" idea. The only way that your idea would work would be if your Creator were a Trickster God (eg, Loki) who deliberately planted the patterns of differences that would support common descent and no other explanation.

Another problem with your idea is that it fails to explain the inheritance of retro-virus DNA insertions with the exact same sequences in the exact same locations in the genomes of related species (eg, human and chimp) that are found in all species that diverged after the insertion of that viral sequence but not in the related species that had diverged before that insertion. They serve no functional purpose, so there is no design-based reason for them to have been copied so identically in multiple species. Again, your "similar design" idea completely fails to explain them whereas common descent explains them quite easily.

Faith, please learn how things work so that you can keep from making such nonsensical false statements.

... which is nothing but an isolated population within a population that undergoes exactly the same processes as a geographically isolated population. The way any population microevolves based on reproductive isolation. Times 60 million years and yeah you got it. Rat to whale.

There's no need to have mentioned it at all then, it's nothing but a form of microevolution which won't evolve into anything but a variation on the species.

And since I'm arguing from the same materials you are and haven't mentioned my "book" you are being dsngenuous to a phraudulent degree in this debate. I llke to remind people that you are one of them religionist kind so they'll know where the deficiencies come from.

What you are actually doing is implying that I'm arguing about evolution based on my religion, which I am not. Schyster.

Despite your denials we can still show hard evidence and, more importantly, a preponderance of evidences scanning many disciplines.

Just more empty declarations as I already said. You listed your "evidences" already and they aren't evidence, they're just the usual assumptions, nothing but hot air.

You've got ... what?

Evidence that you've got only hot air for starters. And reasoning that demonstrates the nonsense of your claims.

Are you going to help Dredge out? Prove god?

I'm acknowledging where dredge and I seem to have a similar argument about evolution. We are not talking about God. Wake up. Pay attention.

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What separates the human and chimp genomes is a different design altogether, using a lot of similar genetic information because of the similarities between the designs, llke the similarities between two car designs perhaps. There is no ACTUAL relation between the two, they just have similar design elements. Yet again, absolute nonsense. You really must learn something about genetics as well as about evolution or else you will continue to post nonsense.

Your lectures are tiresome since they are nothing but bluff.

As has already been covered and presented to you so many times, many amino acids in a protein can be substituted with other amino acids without any effect on the functionality of that protein.

Yes I know, it's how you get so many "neutral" mutations. I've discussed this many times before, whenever it's relevant, which it wasn't up to this point in this discussion.

An example of an active site on a protein (given by Thwaites and Awbrey in their two-model class) showed about half its loci to accept any amino acid -- that says nothing of the purely structural parts of that protein in which most loci should accept any amino acid.

And why do you feel the need to get so specific about such a common event? Just trying to sound erudite?

While similar design requirements could result in similar results, there is no reason to expect similar features which have nothing to do with the design to be so strikingly similar. Take a specific protein from a wide variety of species (ie, the same protein in different species) and compare them with each other. What do we expect? According to your "similar design" idea, we should expect the important parts of the proteins (the parts that do the actual work of that protein) to be similar. That is reasonable, since those parts are what make that protein that protein. As for the rest of the amino acids, your idea offers no reason whatsoever to find similarities in which amino acid sequences show up. According to the evolutionary idea of similarities due to descent from common ancestors, we would expect to find similarities not only in the important parts (for the same reason as your idea would) but also in the amino acids that make up the rest of the protein, namely the unimportant parts. And while we would expect mutations over time to result in differences arising in the unimportant part, we would also expect to find more differences in species that are more remotely related (ie, had diverged from their common ancestor longer ago) and few differences between more closely related species. So what do we find? We find the pattern of differences that are predicted by the common-descent model of evolution and absolutely no support for your "similar designs" idea. The only way that your idea would work would be if your Creator were a Trickster God (eg, Loki) who deliberately planted the patterns of differences that would support common descent and no other explanation.

I frankly have no idea what you are talking about and don't recall this topic ever coming up before. God doesn't work with mutations in my model, He created DNA to be a permanent system of creating interesting variations from generation to generation, and mutations are nothing but mistakes that are proliferating because of the Fall. Since there IS coherence in chemistry they sometimes produce something beneficial though apparently very seldom, but I don't see how any of this furthers the ToE at all. Common descent isn't needed to explain any of this.

Another problem with your idea is that it fails to explain the inheritance of retro-virus DNA insertions with the exact same sequences in the exact same locations in the genomes of related species (eg, human and chimp) that are found in all species that diverged after the insertion of that viral sequence but not in the related species that had diverged before that insertion. They serve no functional purpose, so there is no design-based reason for them to have been copied so identically in multiple species. Again, your "similar design" idea completely fails to explain them whereas common descent explains them quite easily.

It sounds reasonable but name some species that share them. How do you know when they appeared? Even though they occur in species that you assume share a common ancestor you can't know that for sure. I agree that it fits the model as you have so far explained it but there are no doubt other explanations.

There's no need to have mentioned it at all then, it's nothing but a form of microevolution which won't evolve into anything but a variation on the species.

That's right. Right then. But there is a majik ingredient that is mixed in slowly, imperceptibly. Time.

What you are actually doing is implying that I'm arguing about evolution based on my religion, which I am not.

Of course you are. We have all see it for years. Every objection you have to evolution and to each mechanism of evolution is religiously motivated. No human being can be so twisted of mind on evolution without religion.

And I'm not a Schyster. I'm a Pisces.

You listed your "evidences" already and they aren't evidence, they're just the usual assumptions, nothing but hot air.

Americans. Such short attention spans needing instant gratification.

You're not going to get that level of evidence on an Internet forum. The evidence is scattered in hundreds of museums, labs and universities around the world and requires decades of concentrated study. But it is there if you ever want to go look at any of it.

You, on the other hand, have nothing to evidence your god. It's a hoax.

We are not talking about God.

Of course you are. That is the alternative you seek to push upon society. Godonit.

You want evidence of long large evolution, we got that.

What have you got for your alternative? Show us god.