"Best" evidence for evolution.

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In the trilobite the spines determine the shape to a great degree

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There are plenty of differences in trilobites other than the spines. The trident organ in Walliserops is an especially dramatic example.

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Yes the caecal valve in the lizards is interesting because it adapts the gut to the tougher foods the larger jaws can handle. Remember both these adaptations occurred within thirty years, and they are obviously interdependent. I'd say it must have something to do with design factors determined at the DNA level that work together somehow although that is a pretty mysterious possibility in itself.

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I think that it is an environmental response. But if you are going to count longer toes as a big difference I think you have to count it, too.

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"An environmental response?" Sounds rather Lamarckian though I guess all you mean is that a slight adaptation along those lines had survival value so it kept being selected. But that's pretty much what I said myself. it has to appeare in the first place though, that's the hard part to account for.

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No, it isn’t Lamarckian because it isn’t evolution. I’m suggesting that it’s just a feature of the species that they develop slightly differently (in growing up) because of the environment. And I’d mark their diet as the most plausible difference.

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But I'm more interested in how you can tell these can all be produced by 'the same genome'. What's your criteria for figuring this out?

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In her ignorance Faith decided that all trilobites were the same species. Therefore they are. That is all there is to it.The fact that this makes her look worse than admitting to her original mistake is something she is unable to understand.

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That's why I brought up goats and horses as two separate species. What makes a goat clearly a goat.... Same as "what makes a chimp clearly a chimp..." You look at the similarities in the basic body design, but the goat and the horse are even more similar to each other in that way and yet different in the ways they are different.

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But a horse and a goat they are more different at the level of parts than a chimp and a human. Although they do have the same basic parts.

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Yes it's hard to get this said.

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It’s hard to find a sensible criterion that gives the result you want. Because there isn’t one.

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Remove all the chimp's hair/fur, give it human type skin, and it will still be a chimp and not a human being. No, what I mean by having all the same basic parts does not put a chimp and a human in the same category, same as it does not put goats and horses in the same category.

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Because having the same basic parts is NOT a sensible criterion for identifying species. You just chose that because you want to put all trilobites in the same species. But to do that you have to choose a criterion that is too broad - as we can see.

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I wish I COULD say this as clearly I would like to. I've pointed to various differences to try to make the point but I need an overall way of saying it I don't have except for "what makes a chimp a chimp and not a human..."

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It’s quite clear. It is just that you are obviously wrong. There is no sensible criterion that makes trilobites all one species but also makes humans and chimps separate species. That is WHY trilobites are classified as an Order.

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Just one thing: selection of normal variation just gets you normal variation within a species, if artificially selected it gets you new breeds; it's what I'm always talking about as what eventually leads to the point where further evolution is impossible as it leads to fixed loci.

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It would if mutations did not occur. But they do. In large numbers. We’ve been telling you that for years.

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Evolution that could get from species to species HAS to be based on mutations...

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And I’ve been telling you that for years.

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and that means bazillions of trials, because the variability is NOT built in, it's all random, the changes have to be created from scratch as it were. And as I've thought it through the errrors involved and the numbers of trials required are impossible; evolution is simply impossible.

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You haven’t really thought through it though. You have no real idea of the number required or the number that actually occur. All you have is another uninformed opinion. That isn’t something that should carry much weight at all.

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Here's an interesting article I found that tries to compute how many mutations occurred in the human population over some time period or other but I haven't been able to read the whole thing.

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That’s an article written by a Creationist Computer Scientist. At the least you should be reading articles by researchers working in the field.My correction, it’s a laughable article written by a hopelessly ignorant Creationist Computer Scientist who thinks that every base pair has to be added by an individual mutation. Someone tell him about gene duplication!Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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Thank you for your argument based only on bias against the researcher

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It isn’t an argument. It’s a caution against trusting biased and likely poorly-informed sources. Which should be obvious. But I guess you just have to be nasty about it.But anyway see my edit. The article is worthless nonsense.

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How many trials is hard to estimate because the whole shebang is random

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It helps to work out what you’re counting as trials. And you really haven’t even been clear about that,

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Just to get one beneficial mutation at any given locus could involve hundreds of trials as it were, and meanwhile the same hit-or-miss process would be going on all over the genome, hundreds per locus perhaps

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It sounds like you are counting any mutation as a trial - and there are a LOT of those.

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And the changes have to be coordinated with each other to produce a coherent phenotype.

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No, there is no need of any coordination. And what would an incoherent phenotype be, anyway?

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Above all, to get an actually new species you have to have changes in the structural parts of the genome, otherwise all you'll get is variations on the species itself rather than any kind of changes that could lead to something completely different.

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What do you mean by the structural parts of the genome? What do they do?

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I guess I could try to describe all the misses I expect would have to happen, the mutations that would have to be weeded out by selection because they are deleterious in some way. Some mutations would have to be like those that put the fruit fly parts in the wrong positions.

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Why would you need to? That they are misses is enough. And changes that big will be rare and aren’t likely to leave traces.

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Think it through yourself.

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If you had actually thought it through you could do better than this vague rambling.

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The whole thing is simply impossible.

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So you say, but you haven’t offered any real support - or any reason to think that you’ve really thought it through.

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We keep getting these flat statements about how evolution is just the continuation of normal microevolution. It can't be

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So you say again, and again the reasoning is lacking.

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You run out of genetic variability at the point you get a "pure" breed or subspecies.

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Which never happens, excluding species reduced to a single individual.

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There is no way to get from there to something the genome does not have instructions for. That would require all this trial and error because it isn't built in, and that is simply impossible.

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Sure, the Scottish fold cat must be an individual creation by God himself. Or you’re talking nonsense.

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changes to whole members like a foot couldn't possibly be sudden. The trial and error that must happen is going to make tiny changes over huge swaths of time, and my point is that these tiny changes can't contribute anything beneficial to the creature that could lead to a new kind of body part that would be useful. A human foot is not going to benefit a chimp.

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This is just assumption. Of course a human foot is adapted to a human lifestyle, not a chimp’s. But the gradual change in foot structure relates to a change in lifestyle - indeed, the two are interlinked.

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The WEASEL program and others like it assume open-ended genetic variability so that changes can just go on and on and on and on, but they can't. The example I give all the time is how we get purebred domestic animals because the genetics has to be the same in the wild too although random. As you isolate animals for their chosen characteristics you eliminate alleles for other characteristics until you finally have fixed loci for whatever pure breed you've chosen. This is the old fashioned method of breeding which is now considered to be bad for the animals' health but the genetics is the point her

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Being wrong about genetics seems to be the point. A persistent error that resists correction. It all comes down to rates. Artificial selection, operating faster than natural selection - and maintained in the case of purebreds - will naturally outpace mutation. Natural selection, averaged over long periods of time need not - and by the evidence does not. At least in the case of the surviving lineages. This is why genetic variation has not disappeared.

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To get evolution beyond a species would mean getting something breand new from a genome, which reallyh is impossible but I play with the idea since it's the only way it COULD happen although it can't.

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Funny how something that actually happens is labelled impossible.

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So you have to get mutations upon mutations to make any changes at all, most mutations making no changes, some making deleterious changes and maybe a very very few causing a change that survives

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It is inevitable that mutations will happen and some will make changes that you notice (and more will make changes that you do not) and inevitable that natural selection will favour the beneficial changes and disfavour the detrimental. This is all fact.

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The best you ever get is maybe an interesting anomaly like the cats' curled ears, but you'll never get changes that could make a new species.

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And why not? You offer no reason to think so, nor any real explanation of the evidence that indicates that it has happened.For someone who claims to have thought it through you have very little argument, and show no sign of even having tried to get the information you would need to think it through.

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This actually describes the situation of a "purebred" animal which shares all or the majority of its genes with all the others in the population, which means the population as a whole has very low genetic diversity. That's what "near exact" copies of a genome in a population would actually be. That is not the situation in the wild where great genetic diversity prevails even in large populations with a homogeneous "look" to it which is brought out by the the most numerous alleles in the population, and no doubt the dominant ones, as opposed to recessive

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In reality it describes a wild population quite well, with the variant alleles well distributed through the population. Which, I am sure, was the intent.

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Yes I'm sorry, this is a problem I don't know how to solve. it is very difficult to be clear when the word "species" is merely a term that means a "kind" and there are levels of "kinds" involved as species or populations split off and vary from the parent species or population.

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You don’t know how to stop using your own private meanings for common words? Meanings which change to suit your convenience?
Just stop doing it. It really is that simple for any rational person.

You really think that hummingbirds and ostriches are the same species? Really? Because I don’t see much chance of hybridisation, even if birds are rather more prone to that than mammals.

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Yes I do think hummingbirds and ostriches are the same species. They have all the same body parts, same basic body structure.. They are both clearly birds -- beaks, feathers, wings, bird legs etc. By one species I mean that they share the same genome. Their genome does not include hair or fur for instance.

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So, in the same way that humans and chimpanzees are the same species.In other words your private definition of species has no real meaning other than the fact that you want to call them the same species.(ABE for some sanity look here Wikipedia it’s utter nonsense to say that ostriches and hummingbirds have the same genome while humans and chimps do not)

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Many species have varieties that (micro) evolved to the point of inability to interbreed with one another.

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In other words you use your word-magic to deny the fact of macroevolution. But silly word-games don’t control reality.

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Mammals are not one species however. Bears are bears and are not horses or cows or dogs or cats etc.

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Try owls and woodpeckers with their specialised adaptions.

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I've been wondering about rodents. Have to spend some time on that one

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Since it only comes down to what you want, how much time could you possibly need?Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

It actually makes sense. Crocodiles are genetically closer to birds than they are to lizards. So if you want to say that all reptiles have the same genome you ought to include birds.

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This discussion is for the sake of trying to improve communication

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It doesn’t look like it. It would be easier if you didn’t try using your own private classification based on uninformed guesses.

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If I don't use my own classifications I'll never be able to get across what I'm trying to get across so forget that idea

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So forget about communication. How is THAT going to help you get your point across? And since your classifications only demonstrate that you are ignorant and opinionated they don’t seem useful without confusing the terminology either.

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What I'm arguing is very different from the establishment point of view and needs to make use of very nonestablishment concepts.

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Which would be better served by introducing new terms rather than trying to hijack existing terminology. If you were trying to communicate. Obviously you aren’t.

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Sure that makes it hard to be understood but it can't be helped.

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It is entirely clear that your lack of understanding is the problem. It is entirely clear that by your own classifications you should consider humans to be the same Faith-species as chimps - unless you are going to argue that they are TOO similar (which would be absurd but much of what you say is absurd). It is entirely clear that your argument that evolution must stop is fallacious - but that you insist on trying to pass it off as a fact nonetheless.Many things are quite clear - clear enough to say that you need to go back and have a real think about matters. For once.

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Sorry you got it so wrong and sorry you give up so easily.

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It’s not caffeine getting it wrong that’s the problem. It’s that your position is so obviously absurdly wrong - as he illustrated - that he feels no point in arguing it. Apparently he thinks that anyone who believes such nonsense is beyond reach. And I can see his point.Too bad you can’t.