"Best" evidence for evolution.

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The same pseudogene is present in humans and primates, but the guinea pig has a different pseudogene. "Intelligent Design" might argue for similarities in the active DNA code between humans and chimps, and dissimilarities between human and guinea pigs, but the inactive part of the DNA indicates the branching of the evolutionary tree.

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Well, no. First of all these things are not part of the original Creation but reflect the disease processes brought about by the Fall. And yes they most likely DO show the effects of similarity versus differences in the body structures. This doesn't necessarily "indicate the branching of the evolutionary tree" but simply the differential effects of the Fall on different creatures.

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The "differential effects" seems to be an attempt to explain away any evidence by special pleading. You can't simply say something supernatural happened (the "Fall") and then leave it at that!

In general complexity does increase, but that's only because the early forms weren't complex. Also, complexity can increase greatly but it cannot decrease below a certain amount (otherwise we're talking an insufficient number of molecules to have a life form).Think of it this way: a crowd of people stand by a wall (representing the lower bound on complexity) and move about at random, both away from and towards the wall (evolution of greater or lesser complexity). As time goes by the average distance from the wall will increase, but not because of any deliberate plan to move away from the wall, just through random motions. I hope this dispels any misapprehensions you may have got from reading the posts of "one of you people".

I certainly haven't studied retroviruses either, so I can only quote the sources that describe the research of those who have. I can't independently verify the statement "it is statistically impossible for any two individuals to have the same exact endogenous retrovirus in the same exact spot on the genome unless they both inherited it from a common ancestor who had the original infection" but the article appears reasonable to this layperson, providing evidence that humans and chimps share a common ancestry. Why does it appear unreasonable to you?

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Creationist ignorance is what says the fossil order is defined by increasing complexity?

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It is certainly ignorance.

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I'm sure I got MY "ignorance" from one of you people here. Where else would I get it?

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Only if you’ve decided to believe the opposite of what we say, which would be foolish and certainly not our fault. I’m pretty sure you seized on it as an excuse to call the observed order of the fossil record an illusion.It is most likely you got it from popular but ignorant sources. But then you have invented sillier ideas and loudly insisted on them even though they are obvious nonsense. For instance your idea that lithification must happen at the surface which is entirely your invention and doesn’t make any sense at all.

Faith seems to be under the impression that there is a gene called 'eye colour', and so if it mutates the only phenotypic effect it can have is to produce a different eye colour.

I have been told that eye color is governed from many different DNA locations but I'm not sure what they are. I also had the idea some time ago that many different genes were involved in determining eye color. Not sure what the truth is but also not sure it matters.And I'm afraid I've lost track of what this thread is about, at least this current topic. Apparently I was making a distinction between normal variation by normal sexual recombination within a given species, and what I figure it would take to evolve a new species. It's true that I think of mutations as changing only whatever a given species genome already makes for that species, that there shouldn't be any kind of mutations beyond that.But when I'm thinkinng about how it could be possible at all ever, to evolve a new species from an old one the only possibilities that come to mind involve mutations, drastic mutations that change the structure of the creature rather than just incidentals like eyes, fur, skin, size, etc. However, even mutations of HOX genes in fruit flies produce the same fruit fly structures, they just rearrange them, so it's probably not possible at all.But the thing is I was trying to imagine how it could possibly be and all I could come up with is trial and error as the method since there is no built in pathway to the characteristics of some new species as there is within the speice.s And trial and error, meaning mutations all over the genome changing all kinds of things over millions of years, is still not possible. Perhaps I haven't been clear about what I'm imagining here, which is probably because it IS hard to imagine, but I notice nobody else has even tried to imagine it or suggested an alternative pathway to a new species. Probly cuz it isn't possible?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Here are some examples of "pathways":1. A population of worms separated into two populations (one in a lab) diverged until they could no longer interbreed.

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THE EVOLUTION LIST: Macroevolution: Examples and Evidence

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In 1964 five or six individuals of the polychaete worm, Nereis acuminata, were collected in Long Beach Harbor, California. These were allowed to grow into a population of thousands of individuals. Four pairs from this population were transferred to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. For over 20 years these worms were used as test organisms in environmental toxicology. From 1986 to 1991 the Long Beach area was searched for populations of the worm. Two populations, P1 and P2, were found. Weinberg, et al. (1992) performed tests on these two populations and the Woods Hole population (WH) for both postmating and premating isolation. To test for postmating isolation, they looked at whether broods from crosses were successfully reared. The results below give the percentage of successful rearings for each group of crosses.

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WH WH = 75%
P1 P1 = 95%
P2 P2 = 80%
P1 P2 = 77%
WH P1 = 0%
WH P2 = 0%

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They also found statistically significant premating isolation between the WH population and the field populations. Finally, the Woods Hole population showed slightly different karyotypes from the field populations.

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2. A new species of grass evolved that can tolerate soil contaminated with mine tailings.

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http://education.nationalgeographic.com/...opedia/speciation
Parapatric speciation sometimes happens when part of an environment has been polluted. Mining activities leave waste with high amounts of metals like lead and zinc. These metals are absorbed into the soil, preventing most plants from growing. Some grasses, such as buffalo grass, can tolerate the metals. Buffalo grass, also known as vanilla grass, is native to Europe and Asia, but is now found throughout North and South America, too. Buffalo grass has become a unique species from the grasses that grow in areas not polluted by metals. Long distances can make it impractical to travel to reproduce with other members of the species. Buffalo grass seeds pass on the characteristics of the members in that region to offspring. Sometimes a species that is formed by parapatric speciation is especially suited to survive in a different kind of environment than the original species.

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3. Mice brought from Europe to Madeira islands diverge into new species.

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Are new species still evolving? › Ask an Expert (ABC Science))
A small handful of European mice deposited on the island of Madeira some 600 years ago have now evolved into at least six different species. The island is very rocky and the mice became isolated into different niches. The original species had 40 chromosomes, but the new populations have anywhere between 22-30 chromosomes. They haven't lost DNA, but rather, some chromosomes have fused together over time and so the mice can now only breed with others with the same number of chromosomes, making each group a separate species.

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4. Flowers introduced into a new environment produce new species.

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Evolution: Watching Speciation Occur | Observations - Scientific American Blog Network
In the early 1900s, three species of these wildflowers - the western salsify (T. dubius), the meadow salsify (T. pratensis), and the oyster plant (T. porrifolius) - were introduced to the United States from Europe. As their populations expanded, the species interacted, often producing sterile hybrids. But by the 1950s, scientists realized that there were two new variations of goatsbeard growing. While they looked like hybrids, they weren't sterile. They were perfectly capable of reproducing with their own kind but not with any of the original three species - the classic definition of a new species.

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Here is an example of humans breeding new species.

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Just a moment...
Varieties of wheat that have forty-two chromosomes are the most recently evolved and most used types of wheat. All of these varieties have been cultivated by humans (as opposed to growing wild). They are hybrids of twenty-eight-chromosome wheats and wild fourteen-chromosome wheats or grasses. Early bread wheat was the result of the crossing of goat grass (Aegilops tauschii ) with Triticum turgidum. Modern bread wheat varieties have forty-two chromosomes and evolved from crosses between emmer and goat grass, which is the source of the unique glutenin genes that give bread dough the ability to form gluten. Goat grass grows abundantly in the region stretching from Greece to Afghanistan. Descriptions of the fourteen species of wheat that yield the thousands of wheat varieties grown today are provided here.

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It is a remarkable idea that natural variation can result in changes over many generations, which is why some people are reluctant to accept the idea. But many things that science has discovered over the years (air has weight, matter can be transmuted into energy, organisms so small you can't see them can make you sick, the Earth is round, white light is made up of many different colors, the Earth is billions of years old, ...) were considered remarkable discoveries at the time.

What is needed is a GENETIC pathway. How do you get from the GENOME of say reptiles to the GENOME of say mammals?Population genetics actually proves that evolution comes to an end, by the way, runs out of genetic diversity and can no longer produce genetic changes. I've argued this to death before, not really up to it now. But the point is population genetics isn't going to work for you.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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What is needed is a GENETIC pathway. How do you get from the GENOME of say reptiles to the GENOME of say mammals?

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RAZD has asked more than once for a problem getting from a common ancestor to chimpanzees and humans. Which is a better example since we at least have the genomes of chimpanzees and humans. Nobody has ever come up with one.There is plenty of genetic evidence of relationships.If you think there is a problem it is really up to you to make a case for it.

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Population genetics actually proves that evolution comes to an end, by the way

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No it does not, and you know it. That’s just one of your opinions - that has been disproved.

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runs out of genetic diversity and can no longer produce genetic changes.

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It can’t permanently run out of variations unless mutation stops. Extinction is the only likely way for evolution to end in that fashion.

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I've argued this to death before, not really up to it now

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Your arguments are certainly dead. The lack of any significant evidence or theoretical case is rather a serious problem. Did you really think you could get away with claiming to have proved your case when you don’t even have a real case ?

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But the point is population genetics isn't going to work for you

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Well that point isn’t true, is it? You don’t have a proof. You don’t even have much of an argument.

I cannot follow your example of the worms so if you want me to have a response to it I'll need some more explanation.Skipping to the third example just because I recognize the kind of example it is: Why is this anything more than the usual microevolution? It reminds me of the Pod Mrcaru lizards example. Ten individuals or five pairs of a species of lizard found on the mainland were released onto Pod Mrcaru island where they interbred in isolation for thirty years before anyone checked on them. At that time their population had increased a great deal though I don't know the numbers, and they had all developed features different from those of the parent population but universal throughout the island: Large laws that allowed them to eat tougher food than the parent population ate, and adaptations in the gut that made it possible to digest this kind of food. This occurred in only THIRTY years. Perhaps after hundreds of years they'd differentiate into niches as the mice in your example did. But my point is only that this is what you get from normal built in genetic variability, it is not macroevolution. It doesn't matter whether these lizards could interbreed with the parent lizards and I don't recall that being mentioned, but that definition of speciation has always struck me as bogus. There might be many reasons why a new population of the same species can no longer interbreed with the parent population and there be no legitimate reason to consider it anything but the same species. For one thing when you have only a few founding individuals for your new population you are severely restricting its genetic diversity in relation to the parent population and that alone over generations of breeding among the new population could lead to a genetic mismatch that would make such breeding impossible. Although of course there could also be merely behavioral reasons for it.The concept of "speciation" based on inability to breed with the parent population is one of the biggests hoaxes going on in Evo Land.Sorry, I get tired easily lately, or depressed, or whatever, and it's hard to respond to a long post. But I hope to get back to this.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This is not macroevolution, this is the usual kind of breeding people have done forever with all kinds of plants and animals, simply making use of the built in variability in each species. Basic Mendelian genetics. It is a huge fraud to claim this ordinary principle known to bhumanity forever is now co-opted to the ToE. Using the term "species" creates this illusion for one thing. It's just semantic manipulation, word magic. Call them "subspecies" perhaps, but "species" implies something false.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Anything I say about chimps and humans is too easily rationalized away by suppositions about the similarities between the body types without the slightest sense of what in the underlying genetic situation would need to change in ways that are not shared by both species. So I'm not going to fall into that trap.The reptile to mammal example is therefore more useful. It is claimed that the mammals evolved from the reptiles and we have some specific organs such as the ear design that supposedly could be traced if someone wants to try. When I try it I immediately run into to such a plethora of unuseful mutations I'm immediately struck by how utterly impossible it would be to get from one to the other. The ear alone requires the repositioning of chambers and the addition of at least one, and without a built in set of DNA instructions for the mammalian ear all you are going to get is wild mutations that go nowhere or create weird useless changes akin to the fruit flies that have their bodies and heads in reverse position. Getting even ONE change that could conceivably be useful seems mathematically impossible to me but I'm no mathematician, so "impossible" is just "impossible" to me.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Once again, learn the very basics Faith.Mutations happen. We can find mutations in every living critter.Selection happens. We can see selection happening in real time.And it's important to remember how selection works. Any new mutations that are not so detrimental that they prevent that individual from reproducing can get passed on. So even partial changes that are not so serious that they keep the critter from reproducing are not selected against.BUT Wait...there's more.Any mutations that confer an increased advantage in breeding or survival are selective passed on.That means the neutral or positive mutations can continue but the negative mutations are selectively removed.Mutations plus Selection guarantees that there will be new species over time.

Give us a sequence of mutations and selections that could get us from a reptile to a mammal, or just a reptilian organ to a mammalian organ. The generalities are just a way to hide the fact that it's impossible.