"Best" evidence for evolution.

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.

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You come up with some of the strangest ways of interpreting what I think

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I don’t think that there is anything strange there. Your weird aversion to the word macroevolution has been demonstrated.

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Yes Species is really the creationist Kind in my mind. I guess I should have said that.

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Yes, and you should start calling them kinds for the sake of communication since they aren’t species as the term is currently used.

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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.

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Obviously it is biologically arbitrary since you count humans and chimpanzees as different kinds while counting more dissimilar creatures - like hummingbirds and ostriches - as the same kind. In phenotype and genotype humans and chimpanzees are the closer of the two. It is clearly and obviously arbitrary.

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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.

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So it’s not a problem of understanding, it’s just that we don’t agree with your opinions.

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.

But you do not have a model Faith and have NEVER been able to present your model, method, mechanism, process or procedure while the conventional approach as developed by Creationist does have model, method, mechanism, process and procedure.Edited by jar, : fix sub-title

And yet you claimed that all reptiles *are* the same species. Changed your mind? There already is a general concept (plus specific and detailed mapping of all known organisms on earth). It was developed by creationists and if it had been developed by little green aliens - or even yourself - it would look the same. That's because features are features - objective facts that can be observed and categorised by anyone. All of them can. Think Faith, think.The taxonomic map of all known species was built solely on what organisms looked like - two legs, 4 wings, 23 segments, evergreen leaves, head/thorax/abdomen, thorns cloven hoof, 8 petals, tuberous roots, yellow sepals etc etc etc.Then DNA analysis comes along and shows that in almost all cases the map developed entirely on what organisms look like matches their DNA patterns too. Two different methods producing more or less the same map. So the map is correct.If you had the training, patience and time to do it, you would produce the same map.If you are claiming otherwise, you need to explain exactly why.

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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.

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I don’t think there has been any misunderstanding other than that created by your abuse of the term species.You assume that all variety within a kind is a result of selection alone, with mutation playing no role. And that is about it. And you still have no real case for that.

You are extremely dishonest in your repeitition of that false claim over and over again. I've even spelled it out in detail in earlier threads.Here I'll try again. Life was originally created in separate Kinds, each of which is designed to form hundreds of wonderful variations when isolated into separate populations which brings about new combinations of traits that cause each new subspecies to differ from all the others.During the Flood the enormous genetic variability that each was created with was severely bottlenecked, but at that time there was still an enormous amount of genetic variability in every individual so that the bottleneck only reduced the heterozygosity in each genome to a very limited extent, allowing for the great number of wonderful variations on all the creatures we see today, including all the races of humanity. I believe we have something like 7% heterozygosity left in the human population and probably some comparable percentage in other species, but at the time of the Flood it must have been much greater, 80%?: 50%?The Fall had brought death and disease into the world which had previously not existed, though all creatures nevertheless lived for hundreds of years up until the Flood when the changes in the environment brought about by that event, and the genetic bottleneck of each creature, contributed to the decreasing longevity and health we see in the genealogies of the scripture. This general decrease or deterioration occurred over the following centuries until we are finally left with seventy or eighty normal years of life subject to all kinds of diseases, genetic and otherwise. As for those genetic diseases, mutation is a disease unto itself, a mistake in the replication of the genetic material that brings about such diseases. It changes the genetic code so that even if disease does not immediately manifest and the results are "neutral," that change is like a ticking time bomb for further disease when other mutations continue their work of destruction at that locus.If there had been no death in the world every creature would simply vary in endlessly wonderful ways, in beautiful different forms, the ultimate in biological diversity. No creature would ever become extinct. Sheer beauty and divine creativity would characterize all living things. But death brings all life to death in the end. The second kaw if thermodynamics expresses the situation after the Fall as everything is running down toward death and destruction in the universe, including the planet itself. The Flood contributed greatly to the destruction of the planet, leaving us with enormous stretches of uninhabitable spaces, not even counting the places where it is possible to grow food but only by enormous toil. Since Christ, however, things have improved in that God has given us many means of making our lives easier. Death will nevertheless continue to rule us until He comes again.The means by which creatures vary is selection. That's the mechanism that causes all the variation ibnto all the wonderful new phenotypes. Each Kind has its own genome that can vary in these ways, always within the parameters given for the characteristics of that species and no other. You can never get anything but variations on the given species. One species cannot turn into another species.A great part of the genome of every species is formerly functioning DNA that no longer functions, or "junk DNA." This is a record of all the formerly functioning capacities God built into every creature at the Creation, that have since been lost because of the Fall and the Flood.I know I'm forgetting a lot. It will come back to me eventually.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

It seems you have no idea what a model, method, mechanism, process or procedure is Faith. What you posted is nothing but a perversion of what is written in the Bible stories, poor dogma from your cult at best.Now maybe you will try again to present model, method, mechanism, process and procedure.

I'm sure with time a truly scientific model could be made of that information. For now it really is a sufficient model for the realities of how life came to be and how it varies.The only "procedure" indicated would be how we are charged by God with being husbands to his Creation, making the best of it, developing beautiful gardens, cultivating edible plants to their maximum of perfections of different tastes and nutritional value, cultivating animals to form new varieiteis that nature itself doesn't bring about, breeding in other words. This can't really happen in this broken Falllen world beyond a very limited extent, but in the New Creation there should be glorious opportunities for us to develop the Creation according to the intelligence God gave us.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

As you say, someday a model might be presented by the new Creationists but we already have the model, method, mechanism, process and procedure that was created with the original creationists; it's called Evolution and change over time. For now though you have no model, method, mechanism, process or procedure; period!

Problem is YOUR model is a total fantasy.

Yes, we understand you wish that were true; however the current model is supported by evidence from many different techniques and lines of inquiry and has been confirmed by reality and actual observation for well over a century now.What is your model, method, mechanism, process or procedure Faith?

So?With biology we test for reproductive compatibility to distinguish variety from species. We do run into some difficulties, as with ring species and single cell life forms, but by and large this test serves us well. It is also somewhat critical when we look at further generations of daughter species that no longer share mutations, and thus evolve independently, adapting to different ecologies they inhabit. Varieties do not do that.We also know about Mimicry - Wikipedia, where one species has evolved to appear similar to another species. Your "solution" would likely be to claim they are all one species, but that doesn't explain the mimicry.We also know about Convergent evolution - Wikipedia, as in the placental flying squirrel and the marsupial sugar glider. There are many others, like the example shown here: Again, your likely "solution" would be to claim they are the same species ... as you did with the trilobytes, even though they had much more variety and many species.And we know about Parallel evolution - Wikipedia, a special case of convergent evolution, where a trait passed down through daughter populations independently evolves in a similar manner after the daughter species diverged. Here you would likely claim that the trait lay hidden until the conditions arose for it to emerge, or some such nonsense.And finally we know about [url=https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cryptic%20species]cryptic species, which are only distinguished by their inability to cross-breed. Again, your likely "solution" would be to claim they are the same species ... as you did with the trilobytes, even though they had much more variety and many species, many of which could not interbreed. And yet for biologists, as we can readily see from the above, a change in appearance is insufficient to say it is a different species, and your requirement of a radical change in appearance is inadequate to make the above distinctions (which is why you will try, wrongly, to lump them all into a single species) Which is why, every time you are confronted with actual evidence of evolution beyond species, you claim it is variation within a species. Also wrong. What stops it? Please provide evidence for this assertion, if you can. Also wrong. What stops it? Please provide evidence for this assertion, if you can. And also wrong. What stops mutations from providing additional new alleles/traits? Nothing, as you have been told so many times it's like a broken record. And once again, also wrong. Please provide your math and the evidence for it.Bald assertions like this have no place in science.Lots of false statements that are invalidated by facts of observed speciation according to the scientific definitions and proper use of terminology of science. Are not equivalent definitions.In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring,In Christian and Jewish creationism, a religious view based on the creation account of the book of Genesis, created kinds are purported to be the original forms of life as they were created by God. .. eg -- no real, precise or applicable/usable definition provided.In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is the genetic material of an organism. So strictly speaking, not identical to species. What is usually referenced is the Reference genome - Wikipedia.Trying to mash them all together only creates misinformation and confusion.Find a new word.Enjoy

Obviously I can talk until I'm blue in the face and you'll never get it. You don't have to agree with it, just get it for pete's sake.Of course I'm going to say that the different phenotypes we get from variation are not evolution. Just acknowledge that that's what I mean instead of saying "so?" as if you donb't have a clue. Of course maybe you don't since you don't get anything I say and donb't want to.\As for mimicry of course there are adaptations like that that can be selected. God built in the stuff that makes all such adaptations possible. Makes for wonderful fun don't you think?As for convergent evolution no I'm not going to say they are the same species for pete's sake, and how does it help your case to say something so obviously a misrepresentation? Many of you do resort to this level of "argument" though, you are so sure of yourselves and so unable to think through anything I'm saying. Some of the same functions show up in different species, so big deal.You are asking me stupid questions, RAXD, that I've answered many times that you ought to know the answer to by now and if you don't I just assume you don't care enough to follow the argument because I don't think you're that stupid.I have to come back to this after I let my ulcer calm down.