A test for claimed knowledge of how macroevolution occurs

Tanypteryx writes: Dredge writes: Yet humans remain humans … and dogs remain dogs, water rats remain water rats, E. coli remain E. coli ... funny that. And humans remain mammals and humans remain vertebrates. What's your point? { clipped standard Dredge BS blathered in order to dodge a simple direct question }

Why did you avoid answering his question?

What is your point? Other than demonstrating how much you misunderstand evolution.

According to evolution, all of an ancestral species' descendant species will still be what that ancestral species is. Future species descended from humans will still be humans. Future species descended from dogs will still be dogs.

Therefore, humans are still Homo, also still Hominini, also still Homininae, also still Hominidae, also still Hominoidea, also still Catarrhini, also still Simiiformes, also still Haplorhini, also still Primates, also still Mammalia, also still Amniota, also still Mammaliaformes, also still Synapsida, also still Amniota, also still Reptiliomorpha, also still Tetrapoda, also still Stegocephalia, also still Elpistostegalia, also still Eotetrapodiformes, also still Tetrapodomorpha, also still Rhipidistia, also still Sarcopterygii, also still Euteleostomi, also still Teleostomi, also still Eugnathostomata, also still Vertebrata, also still Olfactores, also still Chordates, also still Deuterostomes, also still Nephrozoa, also still Bilateria, also still Eumetazoa, and also still Animalia. And all future descendant species of humans will still be humans and also all of the above. That is what evolution says.

Your expectation that evolution says that should not be the case only demonstrates that you do not understand even basic evolution. Furthermore, you persist in that misunderstanding despite the truth about what evolution says having been explained to you repeatedly.

So answer Tanypteryx' question: What's your point?

Edited by dwise1, : Added qs blocks

That was to Faith, not Dredge

RAZD writes: Expandingng on this the process, the implied simulation of the actual known natural history of evolution of whales on earth would entail: ... provide an environment similar to, but wetter, than their previous environments No need to - a breeding program relies on artificial selection, not natural selection.

So you want to breed a whale that lives on dry land. Fascinating show of ignorance.

To replicate what occurred in the evolution from an even-hoofed ungulate (not a rodent) you need to replicate the ecological changes that occurred as well, or your artificial selection will not be capable of replicating what natural selection did.

Whales don't live on dry land, or are you unaware of that as well.

select the healthiest survivors, make single genetic changes to each individuals reproductive gametes that would make them closer to the whale genomes available If you have to rely on genetic engineering to evolve your rodents, you are admitting you don’t know how to breed them in order to eventually produce a whale - in which case you don’t know how whale evolution happened nor how macroevolution occurs.

Wrong. We do know how macroevolution occurs. Remember this (I've posted it to you before):

The process of evolution involves changes in the composition of hereditary traits, and changes to the frequency of their distributions within breeding populations from generation to generation, in response to ecological challenges and opportunities for growth, development, survival and reproductive success in changing or different habitats.

The process of anagenesis -- lineal evolution -- with the accumulation of changes over many generations, is an observed, known objective fact, and not an untested hypothesis.

The process of cladogenesis -- divergent evolution -- with the subsequent formation of a branching nested genealogy of descent from common ancestor populations is an observed, known objective fact, and not an untested hypothesis.

This means that the basic processes of "macroevolution" are observed, known objective facts, and not untested hypothesies, even if major groups of species are not observed forming (which would take many many generations).

The Theory of Evolution (ToE), stated in simple terms, is that the process of anagenesis, and the process of cladogenesis, are sufficient to explain the diversity of life as we know it, from the fossil record, from the genetic record, from the historic record, and from everyday record of the life we observe in the world all around us.

Again, if you really want to replicate what occurred you have to replicate the random mutations that occurred (changes in the composition of hereditary traits), as the likeliness of them reoccurring randomly are as close to zero as any IDologist would have an orgasm over. The only reasonable way to replicate that is to genetically engineer mutations that would increase similarity between genomes of your even-hoofed ungulate (not a rodent) and whales.

If you're going to simulate natural selection with artificial selection to simulate evolutionary history, then you need to simulate natural mutation with artificial mutation or your simulation is a half-vast model doomed to failure.

Again, Fascinating show of ignorance.

and breed them randomly if they are whale-like, then you are done if they are not whale-like, repeat from step 2 if they all perish, start over from the beginning In other words, you don’t know how a whale evolved from a “rodent”. You’re relying on trial’n’error and luck, rather than knowledge.

And wrong again. Evolution occurs by trial and error, so to replicate it you need to involve trial and error. You need trial and error to provide a basis for your artificial selection or all you will accomplish is in-breeding and your simulation would be a half-vast model doomed to failure..

So, again, yet another Fascinating show of ignorance.

Enjoy

Dog breeders use inbreeding to induce unnatural mutations, ....

BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA

Enjoy

After all the corrections it is perplexing that you persist in these errors:

Dredge writes: Btw, do you know how to breed ancient “rodents” so that a whale will eventually evolve?

First, whales are thought to have evolved from a now extinct ungulate, not a rodent. Putting quotation marks around rodent does not turn it into an ungulate. Both rodents and ungulates are mammals, but that's about all they have in common. In particular ungulates are hoofed, rodents are not.

Second, breeding by itself could never turn an ungulate into a whale because breeding doesn't include mutations.

Third, because mutations are random, resetting the world back back to the time of the ungulate whale predecessor and then letting time run forward again would produce a different set of random mutations that experience selection pressures differently, not just in the ungulate whale predecessor but in all life. You would be very unlikely to get whales or wolves or squirrels or elephants or people. No matter how many times you reset to the initial conditions and repeat the experiment, you're very unlikely to get whales or anything like the world of life we see today. You would get other creatures filling the same ecological niches.

I have a fragile eggshell mind and my IQ is only 9.

No one believes that. Seriously, what would you say is the reason you're ignoring the many explanations of the mistakes you're making?

--Percy

Dredge writes: Percy writes: whales didn't evolve from rodents but from a now extinct ungulate (a hoofed animal), i.e., it no longer exists Whatever. You’re splitting hairs - some articles describe the evolutionary ancestors of whales as a “rodent-like creature”.

It's not splitting hairs, and no science article or paper would call an ancient ungulate a "rodent-like creature." Today the earliest whale ancestor is thought to be Pakicetus, an ancient ungulate with small hooves on the end of its toes. In the interest of accuracy you should describe the ancient whale ancestor as a now extinct ungulate or as Pakicetus.

If you don't know how to breed whales from their ancestral “rodents”, you don't know how whales evolved nor how macroevolution occurs.

Breeding, because it lacks mutations, could never produce a genetically new species.

Can you even explain how the first step in such a breeding program?

This is an incomplete sentence. Could you repeat the question?

How are you going to breed these landlubber “rodents” such that a large enough population of them live permanently in the ocean?

If breeding is the only option, it couldn't be done. If genetic engineering is included then theoretically it could be done, but we don't know what huge portions of any genome even do, so on a practical level it would still be impossible, at least with today's level of genetic knowledge.

You don’t need to know what the ancient environment was like and you don't need selection pressures - in the proposed breeding program the necessary features are selected artificially, not naturally. If you don't know which "rodent" features to select, then you don't know how whales evolved.

Whales have characteristics that Pakicetus did not. You cannot select characteristics that don't exist. It isn't possible to get a whale from Pakicetus through breeding.

But more important is the earlier point that mutations are random. If in your hypothetical experiment the breeding program lasts for millions of years then mutations will occur naturally, but mutations are random and will not be the same ones that led to whales.

Since breeding leaves mutation out of the equation you are absolutely right that there are limits to the degree of changes breeding can effect. I don't understand this. Breeding leaves mutations out of the equation? Aren’t mutations responsible for the natural variations in dogs, for example, which breeders have exploited to produce hundreds of different breeds? Dog breeders also induce unnatural mutations via inbreeding, which are also selected.

No, mutations are not responsible for the variety of dogs. Breeding relies on selecting for qualities that already exist in the animal.

Breeders are definitely not producing generation after generation of animal waiting for a mutation that yields the quality they want, perhaps a spotted coat or pointy ears. While mutations are part of every reproductive event, the vast majority have no effect, and those that do do not usually result in viable offspring. They either abort very early, even before pregnancy is detected, or die in the womb or die young. Beneficial mutations are rare. Beneficial mutations that are exactly what the breeder wants would be nearly impossibly rare. Dogs are still wolves.

You're going to have to correct your misunderstanding of breeding before the discussion can make meaningful progress.

--Percy

Sorry, but I don’t understand your question ...

I"m sorry that my questions are so difficult for you.

Since you have so many other responses, I'll withdraw my question for the time being.

Not that I think you had any intention of answering, though.

(which is probably due to the facts that I have a fragile eggshell mind and my IQ is only 9).

Hmm, I thought it was 19.

Breeding is not a surrogate for evolution.

Breeding is not a surrogate for evolution.

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.

Hi Faith.

I'm still struggling to understand the disconnect here, and to get my head around what you think a genome is. You tell us to "give us a series of mutations that could change the chimp genome into the human genome"; but then say. "you can't just point out the differences".

This is incoherent. Listing the differences between two genomes is listing the series of mutations that could change one into the other. Obviously we're not going to list them, because there are lots. The differences between the human and chimp genomes are thirty-five million single-nucleotide differences, five million insertions or deletions, one chromosomal fusion, and about 10 chromosomal inversions. So, the mutations needed to change one to the other would be those 35 million SNP mutation, those five million insertions or deletions, one chromosome fusion (or fission, depending on which direction we're going) and those 10 inversions.

I know you don't believe that these mutations are the actual cause of the difference between the two, but that's not the point. Nor do we, since we don't think the human genome evolved from the chimp genome. You'd asked for a hypothetical list of mutations that could turn one to the other.

How can we provide a hypothetical list of mutations to turn genome A into genome B if we're not allowed to list the mutations that would be necessary to turn genome A into genome B?

Dredge writes: ... I fail to see what any of this this has to do breeding ancient rodents to eventually produce a whale.

It's actually a triple play: rodent to ungulate to whale.

The problem with trying to breed that change is that we don't know all of the steps along the way. If you walk from New York to San Francisco, we know you stopped at Detroit and Chicago and St. Louis and Denver because we have time-stamped pictures of you in each of those places. But we don't know the exact route that you took from New York to Detroit or from St. Louis to Denver, etc. We do know that you went from New York to San Francisco.

Dog breeders use inbreeding to induce unnatural mutations, ...

What the hell are you talking about?

Breeding does not involve inducing any mutations. Obviously, we need to add mutation, breeding, and genetics to the long list of things that you have no clue about.

What kind of blithering idiot are you? Oh yeah, you're a creationist. Your only true statement is that you are an extremely low-grade moron with an IQ of 9, though even that is obviously an exaggeration (ie, it's obviously much lower).

Dredge writes: Taq writes: Dredge writes: For instance, wolves were bred to produce many different breeds of dogs, but harmful mutations limit how far this process can be taken. You have never supported this assertion. It's common knowledge: quote: "Health and welfare problems in pedigree dogs can arise as a result of the deliberate selection for exaggerated physical features or as a result of inherited disease. While some of the following problems can occur in any breed, cross breed or mixed breed dogs, purebred pedigree dogs are at greater risk and appear to be over-represented clinically. This is mainly due to traditional breeding practices. Difficulty breathing Difficulty giving birth Difficulty walking Serious eye problems Serious skin problems" https://www.rspca.org.au/...ve-common-problems-pedigree-dogs

Such problems are not due to mutation. They're due to the selection process. For example, some of the characteristics selected for in the German Shepherd were linked genetically to hip dysplasia. There is no hip dysplasia mutation. The alleles for hip dysplasia were already present in the wolf genome, but selection and inbreeding has made them more prevalent in the German Shepherd.

So the story goes - which contradicts thousand of years of empirical evidence gathered by animal and plant breeders.

Before we can have a productive discussion you're going to have to understand that mutation plays a nearly zero role in breeding.

--Percy

Dredge writes: Stile writes: Your test doesn't align with the claim. The fact of the matter is, if you don’t know how to breed ancients “rodents” into a whale, you don’t know how whales evolved and you don't know how macroevolution occurs.

Of course not.
One can easily know how macroevolution occurs without knowing how to breed ancient "rodents" into a whale.

quote:

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If you want to learn how macroevolution occurs - you should start by asking how macroevolution occurs.
The answer begins relatively simply: Natural selection + mutations + time.

By Stile in Message 5

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Just as one can easily know how electricity works without knowing how to build a nuclear power plant (thanks, Tanypteryx!)

Your "fact" is contradicted by reality.
Really puts a damper on your credibility.

Dredge writes: Point 1 makes some sense - except you have absolutely no idea how large the rodent population must be. So there’s problem No. 1 for any potential breeding program. If you don’t know how large the initial population must be, this means your knowledge of how macroevolution occurs is based on a certain degree of ignorance and guesswork. Points 2-4 are irrelevant - artificial selection means you don’t need to reply on natural selection. If you don’t know how to artificially select the rodents you need to breed them towards whale-ness, this demonstrates that you don’t know how your alleged evolution occurred. Point 5 indicates that you don’t know how an ancient “rodent” evolved to eventually become a whale. You’re just stabbing in the dark and hoping for the best. Point 6 indicates that your so-called knowledge of whale evolution and how macroevolution occurs is childishly simplistic, based on blind faith and pseudo-science.

Your issues are all about specifics that don't matter for knowing how macroevolution works.
Your issues are about detailed specifics on the precise microevolution steps on how rodent-to-whale evolution happened. All of such detailed specifics aren't known, and aren't need to be known in order to understand the macroevolution involved.

You were the one who said "unlimited time" was available.
In "unlimited time" all these items can be figured out.
-population size not large enough? -start over with a larger initial population
-mutations not occurring to produce the following stages as the fossil record shows? -start over and allow the random mutations to try again
-just keep trying, over and over, until the random mutations duplicate what they did before -if it doesn't work, start over and try again
-use breeding-selection instead of natural selection to keep the large-enough populations that naturally mutate according to the fossil record
-voila - a large population of whales

Your credibility dives once again - this time caught by your own rule

Therefore, the answer to your question on the macroevolution involved in going from rodent-to-whale still stands, no changes required:

quote:

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The explanation of your test, however, also begins relatively simply:
1. Start with a very large population of rodents - equivalent to that when such rodents roamed the earth.
2. Provide an environment equivalent to that when such rodents roamed the earth.
3. Provide selection pressures equivalent to that when such rodents roamed the earth.
4. Wait for the populations to reproduce and evolve due to selection pressures and mutations.
5. If the progressive evolution of the rodent into a whale isn't matching what occurred the 1 time it previously happened at any point in the "unlimited time" available for the breeding - kill off all creatures and begin again at step 1.
-due to the random nature of mutations, this is expected to occur many, many times before it matches the 1 time it previously happened again.
6. Viola - a large population of whales.

By Stile in Message 5

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You need to work on your replies.
You very rarely make a reply that requires a change in the post you replied to.
You seem unable to point out any issues that actually matter.
Only issues that are made up. Such irrelevant protests are easily swept aside simply by repeating the correct answer.

Before we can have a productive discussion you're going to have to understand that mutation plays a nearly zero role in breeding.

Several people have said this, but I think it's a bit of an exagerration. Animal breeders cannot cause mutations, of course; but there are several known examples of them taking advantage of naturally occurring mutations. The stumpy legs of sausage dogs, for example, or the hypertrophied muscles of Belgian Blue cattle, were naturally occurring mutations that breeders seized upon and preserved. I'm sure that many mutations have been involved in the creation of our domestic breeds - the examples mentioned are just particularly easy to find since they would be so obviously maladaptive in nature.

And with modern knowledge of genetics, breeders don't necessarily wait for mutations, either. Plant breeders will expose plants to radiation or chemical mutagens to induce dramatically higher mutation rates. Obviously they can't target what mutations appear, so much of what's produced is worthless; but by inducing massively increased mutation rates agronomists can find in a few years useful mutants that might have taken millennia to crop up naturally (pun intended). There are thousands of commercially available strains of grains and tubers developed by this method.