Where do Creationists think the Theory of Evolution comes from?

All this emphasis on mutation seems like a brand new trick pulled out of a hat, and in saying that I'm not denying your facts. It remains true that the processes that select any trait whatever lead to reduced genetic variability. In any case I will abandon this line of inquiry until I know more.And once again, this is off topic and we should respect the thread's host.

Faith, good call! You really ought to step into your role as an Admin! Here is the Original Topic again:

Heh, no, trust me - mutation has been identified as a prominent mechanism of expanding variation for as long as we've understod genetics. There's nothing new about mutation. Sure. The selective processes of evolution reduce variation, to some degree. That they do not do so randomly is one of the driving forces of evolution.

I would like to emphasise BELIEF. ToE has nothing to do with BELIEF. It's a tentative position based on evidence. Kinda like a detective examining a crime sceen.He thinks the buttler did it, but then comes DNA evidence, and the buttler is excluded. That sort of thing.A BELIEF based detective would come to the crime sceen and decalere that the Buttler did it. When the DNA evidence is presented, the detective will reject it and announce that his BELIEF is inspired by the one true god, therefore the buttler had to do it.Bully for the perp., pitty for the buttler. I don't see how this makes sense. How do the two ideas connect? Creationism isn't testable. We can't test for invisble spirits any better than we can test for flying, invisible, pink unicorns in the crab nebula. I think Faith hit it on the head earlier. ToE is perfectly valid. It's the only way to look at the world without bringing in the supernatural.Since Faith want's to believe the supernatural, to her there are miriad of other magical possibilities. She, of course, only subscribes to one magical creation account. However, her position is just as valid as the Flying Sphagettii monster. They are both just as magical, and just as logicaly valid.ABE: When one claim holds equal logical weight with an infinity of proposed absurd claims, it holds no weight at all.If I can put YECism on the same footing as Zeus-ism and Flying Sphagetti monster-ism, you know your position has problems.This message has been edited by Yaro, 11-22-2005 09:55 AM

"Everybody has, in some way...". You have a hypothesis but fail to support it with a thesis as to how it holds together. So its not really a hypothesis. More like an assertion. Be careful here 8up, folk could wrap you up hours of you time getting you to undergird your assertions with some hard, factual information. (and THAT is not an assertion)Welcome to EvC

I didn't say MUTATION was new, I said ALL THIS EMPHASIS on mutation is new. All of a sudden everything is mutation. Most of it is not beneficial, much of it is destructive but who cares, the more the better.SORRY. THIS IS OFF TOPIC TOO.This message has been edited by Faith, 11-22-2005 11:35 AM

It's not new. The emphasis on mutation as a source of genetic diversity is, again, as old as our understanding of genetic molecules. Watson and Crick, etc.In fact, if anything, the current state of scientific thought is about decreasing the emphasis on purely random mutation as the main source of genetic diversity and phenotypic variation.The emphasis is not new, and in fact, the trend is exactly the opposite of what you seem to think it is. Well, yeah. When you have a selective force, it doesn't matter how detrimental most of the phenotypic mutations are.

Totally lost me on this one, Faith. I know we can't get too deep into this, since it's sorta off topic and kinda sciency, but it seems like you are saying"The more that a group changes, the less variablity there is within the group." That doesn't make sense to me. If you have 100 tennis balls, 50 are green, 50 are yellow, and you randomly paint 25 balls blue, you will have 3 diffenent sets of tennis balls and therefore more variability

I believe, Faith, that mutation has always been the key to the ToE.

Clearly, as I'm sure many here believe, evolution and G-d can both be true. The Catholic Church even accepts this:Requested Page Not Found | National Catholic ReporterPope JPll could see the real possibility of evolution:"In his talk to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the pope reportedly stated that evolution is "more than a hypothesis."
Catholic.net - Catholics on the net

Ok, sorry for this being off-topic but I kinda can’t let this go.It seems, faith, that you do have a bit of background knowledge when it comes to genetics, but there are a few things that you seem to have misunderstood (which you’ve admitted, granted). Your argument for the impossibility of evolution falls apart when you take the following points into consideration:If you’re gonna talk about natural selection reducing variation, know that natural selection will affect an advantageous (or disadvantageous) allele - positive or negative selection - decreasing diversity at that allele, and maybe those alleles of neighboring genes (hitchhiking). The rest of the genome is still free to be as variable “as it likes”.Genetic Drift in the form of bottlenecks and founder-effects, on the other hand, will decrease variation globally, across the genome, but I digress.What one should realize is that genetic diversity i.e. variation has little to do with speciation! A homogeneous species can evolve just as much as a heterogeneous species, barring the fact that you are more likely to find an advantageous allele in a heterogeneous species, due to sheer numbers of alleles.It is Genetic Differentiation that results in speciation, i.e. is one population genetically different enough from another population, to constitute a new species? Remember, not many species exist in a single population.It is not natural selection per se that results in speciation. It is natural selection in a population of an initial species, without gene flow to/from another population of the same species, that results in increased population differentiation, to the point of speciation. The new species is thus an “off-shoot” of the initial species, and the initial species does not necessarily cease to exist.Hope this helps you understand the flaws in your argument, allowing you to “adapt” As an aside, there is, in fact, a form of natural selection that promotes increased variation! viz. Balancing Selection; an example of which being the sickle-cell trait. While homozygotes for this develop sickle cell anaemia, heterozygotes are quite healthy and at the same time, are more resistant to malaria than homozygous wild types.

---

So intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.
- Pablo Neruda

quote:

---

I didn't say MUTATION was new, I said ALL THIS EMPHASIS on mutation is new. All of a sudden everything is mutation. Most of it is not beneficial, much of it is destructive but who cares, the more the better.

---

In evolution, mutation (diversification) and selection cannot be separated. If you had just selection without diversification, you would soon run out variants to select from and your system would cease to evolve. You would end up with a very homogenous populations no longer able to adapt to changes in the selection pressure.If you had just diversification without selection, you would increase the diversity in the population. However, since most random changes in such complex a system as a living organism are changes to the worse, your system would deteriorate.The balance between the rate of mutation and the stringency of selection determines how an evolving system develops: The evolutionary drift (change in the average properties of a population over successive generation) depends on striking a balance where the rate of mutation is large enough to maintain sufficient diversity in the population to selection from, and the stringency of selection is sufficient to eliminate those variants which do not improve the adaptation to the selective pressure.

Hi Yaro!I've been trying to get some ideas from creationists about their opinions on where the ToE comes from, and why it exists. Most replies have been way off topic, but I did have one reply saying that the ToE is the work of Satan!I suppose I'm just trying to put a new angle on the whole topic. Basically, before Darwin the only explanation of where we all came from was religous texts. If everyone was happy with these stories and accepted them to be true, why would a contradicting scientific theory prove to be so popular?I gave a few possible theories which ranged from the sensible to the extreme. Like I say, so far I've had one straight answer which I would put in the extreme category!I don't think creationists like to consider the origins of the ToE, becuase they start to realise how weak the creationist arguement is (personal opinion!).

welcome to the fray nadine.do you think it is possible that the rate of mutation has evolved to match an equilibrium point with change in the environments?that this too can react to sudden massive changes, such as mass extinctions and toxic waste?I believe there is evidence for this.Enjoy.

---

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand

​

RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

Actually there is experimental evidence in bacteria, since these have such short generation time that you can actually observe evolution in action, that the rate of mutation adjusts, mainly through mutations in the DNA repair enzymes. If you put bacteria under high selective pressure, you select vor strains in which DNA repair is impaired, which leads to increased frequency of mutations.(e.g http://www.bcm.edu/fromthelab/vol04/is8/05oct_n1.htm,
see Conserved domains in DNA repair proteins and evolution of repair systems - PubMed
for a review on the different repair systems)Of course, the more complex an organism is, and the larger its genome, the more precise its DNA replication has to be to keep the number of mutations per generation within the optimal range.