"Best" evidence for evolution.

Perhaps all fungi should be considered one species. All animals of course not, because a species has to have specific shared characteristics such as the beaks, feathers, wings, bird legs of birds. If it has all those characteristics it's a bird. I know some characteristics can be suppressed such as the bird legs in penguins. I'd still call them birds. But I could change my mind about some of this, I haven't spent a lot of time on it.AbE: I just looked up penguins and see that they actually have real bird legs under their feathers. No truncation there at all.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Right, well it turned out wshen I looked up penguins that there is no problem. They have feathers though a very short version of feathers, and they have actual bird legs just hidden by those feathers. When you see their skeletons you realize they are true birds and not some odd anomaly as they appear to be on the surface.Anyway, you are welcome to make up your own taxonomy. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

How very strange. I'm talking about classifying all reptiles together as a species and you throw in a sparrow, a bird, as if I'd included it which of course I had not.This discussion is for the sake of trying to improve communication so don't throw birds into the reptile species please.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

We're talking about what *I* said or so I thought. The establishment opinion is not relevant to what *I* said.And besides that's a big fat disingenuous deceit anyay: You don't call birds reptiles and neither do I and neither does anyone else.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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. What I'm arguing is very different from the establishment point of view and needs to make use of very nonestablishment concepts. Sure that makes it hard to be understood but it can't be helped. So just defining a few things might help. If not then not.

I really don't know what cumulative selection is or what you are accusing me of, but look, this is my argument, that selection, ANY selection, any kind of selection, has to reduce genetic variability. This is my own observation and I've been arguing it for years here. Selection means cutting out some parts of the popujlatoin which means at least reducing the presence of some genetic material in the new population as compared to what was in the old, and if the new population is very small some alleles will not be present at all in the new population. this is how you get a new phenotype, a new composite phenotype to characterize a new population. This is what evolution is. You get new characteristics, new phenotypes, new populations, by reducing or eliminating whatever genetic material underlies competing characteristics. This, again, is why I like to use breeding as the main example since it is very clear there that to get your breed you are eliminating all the genes for other breeds. The whole process of getting a new set of characteristics IS elimination of the other characteristics.In the wild it may be reduction rather than complete elimkination that allows the new characteristics to emerge. Reduction rather than elimination is also what happens on the way to getting a pure breed. You get a pure breed only when the competing characteristics have been completely eliminated and you have fixed loci or homozygosity for all the salient characteristics of your chosen breed.Selection does NOT do what the ToE claims it does. Don't know what this refers to. Well I'm not going to check on it in the middle of writing a post but maybe I can afterward. I still have no idea what you are talking about. Sorry. It's apparently something you think is important but I'm working a comjpletely different argument here.Apparently WEASEL and your program MONKEY are thought to reflect what selection can do, but all they do is reflect the changes in the phenotype and ignore the genetic substrate, as you yourself said. Neither takes into account that selection always ultimately involves reducing/eliminating genetic diversity, which ultimately means a point will be reached where further evolution is simply impossible in any evolving population.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I don't care about odd examples, i'm trying to define an overall concept. What are you trying to prove?

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

I'm sure you are trying to present unusual or exceptional examples that I'll misclassify somehow and you're probably right that I would, but I'm just not that deeply into the classification issue even to try it. because all I'm trying to do is sketch out the basic way I think of species: birds are one, cats are one, dogs are one, horses are one and so on . I might revise my views when I take the time to really think it through but this is just an attempt to give a general idea of what I mean by a species, that's all, and I'm not even sure it helps clarify the problem of how I use the word anyway.

Actually I'm pretty sure it doesn't help much with the problem of how I use the word because that problem comes in when we talk about daughter populations, subpopulations, subspecies and so on.

You come up with some of the strangest ways of interpreting what I think.Yes Species is really the creationist Kind in my mind. I guess I should have said that. To me there's nothing arbitrary about it, it's determined by the particular characteristics of the creatures. I think those characteristics are very specific and easily recognized myself but I guess if one is steeped in the evolutionist way of looking at it all they seem arbitrary.But as I said above defining the Kind/Species isn't really the problem dwise was getting at, it's what happens when I try to describe my view of the development of new opulations.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yes it's not enough, because you can get strikingly new phenotypes from the genome of any given species, but they are simply variations on that species nevertheless. it's built into the genome of that species.l Whereas a "brand new" phenomenon would be something that the species genome does not code for, doesn't have instructions for, like a straight big toe in the chimp genome perhaps, or paws in the reptile genome perhaps instead of their clawed feet, and so on.I don't think evolution beyond the species/kind/genome is possible, just to get that said in case it's confusing, but I've been hypothesizing that to get beyond the species genome would require so many mutations it's simply impossible. Variations withihn a species genome get wonderful new phenotypes, all the different subspecies/breeds of dogs and birds and cattle and so on, but nothing beyond the characteristics of those species/kinds is genetically possible -- AND, let me add here, these new varieties come at a genetic cost, you are always losing alleles or other genetic bases for other phenotypic characteristcs, whenever you get a new phenotype or composite phenotype for a population, which is at an extreme when you have mostly fixed loci for all the salient charactdristcs of the new phenotype.. The only way evolution beyond that could possibly happen would be through bazillions of mutations and the specific kinds of changes required plus the needed coordination with mutations all over the genome, are just impossible.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I don't know if turtles belong to the reptile Kind or not. I said I'm aiming for a general concept, the specifics would take working out.Yes apparently some species can be distinguished from others by their DNA. Even some subspecies or breeds can be identified. So what?

Specific creatures, especially if we kinow them in their fossil form and otherwise are unfamiliar with them, don't say anything at all about what I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to spell out a system so specific that others could use it, I'm trying to give a general idea of what I'm arguing in this discussion and nothing more. I believe I've made a pretty good case for how evolution beyond the Kind or Species is not possible, and the taxonomic question is completely secondary, irrelevant to that discussion."Convergent evolution" is just one of those concepts needed by the erroneous ToE, it has no independent factual status on its own.Yes I'm sure much of what I'm arguing opposes many scientific concepts. I'm a creationist, what else would you expect? Evolutoin is a huge ungainly scientific edifice constructed out of mutually supporting purely conceptual mental exerceses. A house of cards, an elaborate fantasy.

It COULD be mostly a problem of disagreement since this is a paradigm clash at root, one model opposing another, but such a clash usually also involves redefinition of terms and therefore a lot of misunderstanding.