quote:
Originally posted by ksc:
I really enjoyed reading the evo responce. For all you out there this is it in a nut shell "No one says animals have to evolve." Funny though, even the evo logic dictates that they do. In my post I presented an example of evolution they tell us occurred, (wolf to whale) in a time frame according to evo time frames much shorter than the coelacanth ghas supposedly been around. Image all the mutations that they say would have occcured in all of those millions upon millions of years and the coelacanth is still the same......What's wrong with their pcture? They want the cake and eat it too.
I've been busy for the past few days, so have only just caught up on this particular thread.
Firstly, the living coelecanth
has evolved. 250 million years ago they were small to moderate size fish (upto about 60cm long), had no indication of viviparity and about a third of species were freshwater dwellers. Later specimens can be much larger. Today the only surviving coelacanths are deep sea fish, growing up to 2m and are viviparous.
I thoroughly recommend the following paper: Yokoyama, S. and Tada, T. (2000) Adaptive evolution of the African and Indonesian coelacanths to deep-sea environments.
The bradytely (slow rate of evolution) of the coelecanth does little, if anything, to undermine the theory of evolution. A period of rapid mutation, settling into a much longer period of slow mutation is exactly what one would expect from a model of efficient adaptation to a relatively stable environment. The architectural stability of the coelecanth genome is further attested by the measured genetic drift between the two main populations African and Indonesian populations of living specimens - the species have drifted to the point where it is not known if they can interbreed, yet remain morphologically all but identical. The genome of the coelecanth appears to be architecturally stable - and again, pleiotropic constraints on mutation is exactly what one would expect of a species mutated to a stable environment.
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