A test for claimed knowledge of how macroevolution occurs

I often hear evolutionists claim they "know how macroevolution occurs". If their claim is valid, then they should have no trouble explaining how, for example, the evolutionary ancestors of whales - ie, a rodent-like creature - could (hypothetically) be bred by humans to produce a whale (given unlimited time).

Sure. I'll do that ... if you do something first.

Prove to me your god exists.

If you succeed in doing the easy one I'll do the hard one.

There's no reason to think you'd get anything whalelike at all, depending on mutations for this, even through hundreds of trials.

That is kinda what RAZD was saying. You may well run out of universe before repeating what nature already did.

I'm not sure you understand the implications.

If the clock were wound back to do it all again, humans would not be here. There were a mindbogglingly large number of paths history could have taken in the past 4 billion years. Humans were only one possibility that did not have to happen given the number of equally likely alternatives.

But for a lot of luck and the spooky actions of QFT your god would never have been fantasized.

More likely your rodent is just going to get tired of being wet and long since would have emigrated to a more congenial climate.

Most of them sure. But this is nature we're talking about. Not everything is perfect. Some were likely to stick around in that lovely wet in all those oceans with all that food. Presto-changeo. Whales. Well, ok, millions of years of presto-changeo.

It can't happen.

And yet it did. And not just whales but every critter on this planet went through the same thing.

Chemistry is amazing.

And yet it did." You guys are a laugh riot. You assume what your theory predicts. Ha ha.

No. We don't assume. We have the evidence. We know the lineage. We even know the kinds of chemistry involved which we can replicate in the lab. We can see mutations happen. We can see genetic drift at work and we can watch macroevolution unfold.

On your side, you have an old book of fables. Nothing substantial. Nothing demonstrable. Nothing but your own wishful thinking.

We can show the efficacy of macroevolution (which is really easy since we can show the reality of microevolution and we know the reality of time). While you can show nothing of your god.

... 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?

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.

You have a misunderstanding of the scope we are addressing. We are not talking a few or few dozen mutations between some pair of close species. We’re talking billions of them.

In humans between parents and child there are on average about 100 mutations introduced into the genome. 100 mutations introduced into the genome per birth. That’s a lot of mutations in a population of billions of breeding beings.

Now, take that times how many generations for millions of years? The genome available to the breeding population now is millions of mutations different from the starting population millions of years ago.

No one can identify the chain of how many of what groups of mutations were responsible for the path taken by nature from rat to whale.

A mutation or mutations that could turn a dog into a different species would have to change the dog genome in some way, otherwise mutations would just vary the dog stuff and it would still be a dog.

You’re not half wrong. Whatever species bud off the dog species in the next million years or so will still have that dog lineage and that, by then heavily mutated, dog genome.

Yes, they are random mistakes. Not mistakes. Changes.

Random changes from all kinds of sources. Single nucleotide to whole chromosomal segments.

But there are a lot of them. By the billions just in one species in one generation.

You know that has to have an effect on the genome available to distant populations.

How could it not alter the appearance of the far future offspring? There is no known mechanism to stop it.

Of the billions of new genes available to a population a million years from now the beneficial ones will have survived. By the billions. By definition the less beneficial the less it appears in the gene pool. The future genome will be built by only the more successful alleles of which many billions would have arisen in that past million years.

Other control groups of DNA/RNA. All subject to mutation of course.

B and b are alleles. They are on the DNA strand like any other allele and get expressed/activated/transcribed into protein in the same way as any other allele when the full chain of the control groups has worked its magic. The control groups are activated/controlled by yet other control groups which determine which allele gets activated for how long.

Well I can't help with Dem Nutz but that is the scoop from the reality side of the fence.

Oh, she knows. She gets it. But the religion is still in the way.

Tany just gave me a thought. (Thank you, Tany)

You know, Love, you can still be a good biblical conservative alt-reich racist commie Stalinist fascist theocrat and still understand the true nature of evolution. You know that right? The two aren’t necessarily exclusive.

Where I used to think a single trait such as eye color was probably governed by many genes, it seems now that it's governed by different regions of a single gene??????

Just to muddy your waters: One gene, one protein went out years ago. We know now that the control sequences inform the transcription RNAs where to begin and end transcription. They can direct transcription to any part of the gene and even cause segments to be transcribed multiple times, all to make one specific protein. A single gene can thus be transcribed into multiple different proteins.

Such a process is called alternative splicing and the resultant proteins are called isoforms.

And if that's not complex enough the control mechanisms can even produce specific proteins from transcribing different regions of separate genes. Cross gene alternative splicing.

Eye color is dependent on a number of items like melanin and other proteins in the leaves of the iris. Some isoforms some not. Some cross gene isoforms.

Chemistry is fun.

I’m not so sure. I think she can see the processes we present. She just cannot accept them.

She is resistant, because of religion, to any system, realistic or not, that challenges the catechism. That’s why she opposes evolution.

But that resistance also extends to learning what evolution is and is not. As a consequence the lady has accumulated a whole bunch of wrong ideas about how the chemistry actually works.

We have an opportunity to maybe, just maybe, change a wee bit of that by showing that evolution does not work in her straw man way. That mutation is not the disaster she is led to believe. That genomes are not static. That minor change by minor change, micro step by micro step, the phenotype of a far future lineage of dog will vary significantly from any dog today because the future dog gene pool will be considerably different from the dog gene pool of today.

She doesn’t want to entertain such reasonable notions since they don’t fit the straw man she thinks she has defeated.

Maybe we can’t make her into an evolutionist. But, we may be able to educate her away from some the more preposterous processes her straw man entails.

Maybe not.

Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Oh but mutations ...

That is the answer. I don't think you know what the actual question is.

I hope you and caffeine won't mind but I was in the area and stopped in for a visit.

Yes, but for the moment taking the chimp as the ancestor we descended from, the task is getting ALL the keratin differences in the chimp body to become human keratin. Is this going to happen bit by bit, fingernail by fingernail or is there a place in the DNA that governs the whole thing?

Yes to the DNA.

...evolution has the task of making all those "small" changes in all those parts of the body.

No, it was not a “task” to be performed. Evolution couldn’t care less about task. It was what happened. For the longest time we didn’t know why/how but with centuries of concentrated study we now have the chemistry pretty much nailed down. We know how it happened. The rocks and the chemistry are quite clear in what happened.

We can’t say with certainty each granular step that took place, there is missing data, but, in detail finer than mere broad line, we know the connections.

You all keep talking about how we all have many mutations but aren't most of them in the body where they won't be passed on anyway?

We’re talking only mutations in germline cells not somatic cells. Germline cells have some of the most wonder ways of leaving the body taking their mutations with them.

The mutations, to matter, have to be in the germ cells, but not saying so leaves the discussion in a suspended state.

It shouldn’t. The rest of us in this discussion seem to understand the references. We know we’re talking germline. May I ask how you didn’t?

And as I keep arguing, which keeps getting treated llke trash, you don't need mutations to produce even a dramatically new population of any given species.

Really doesn’t matter whether mutations were necessary or not. Fact is, and we know the facts M’Lady, that mutations did the trick quite well. We’ve seen them in the lab. We can create them. We know how they work. We can see their effect on populations in the far past sitting there in our own genome.

We really are good at chemistry.

I don't see how mutations could do any of this no matter how much time you give them.

Well, that is what happened, more or less, and we have just boatloads of evidence. You can disagree all you want but that isn’t going to change