Evidence For Evolution - Top Ten Reasons

All living things have genetics. Under your model (as under evolution) you can go from ameobas to humans and have it still be adaptation. It's just genetics, it's just protiens. I sense that you're trying to hold out a little wiggle-room here. What does it mean to "have the ability to create an enzyme"? Either you have the genes for it, or you don't. If you didn't have them, and then you do, that's adaptation and evolution.You're still trying to draw a line between two things that are the same. It's rather confusing, actually.

You are thinking of a "gay gene" as all or nothing (which is one error).Note that the sickle cell gene causes early death if two copies are inherited but one is benificial if maleria is present. Therefore it remains at a certain level in a population.A "gay gene" (which there probably isn't one single gene for) may not be an all or nothing thing. We all have varying amounts of both genders in our makeups for one thing. It also appears to need an environmental trigger in some cases.It seems that a male born to a mother who has had previous sons is more likly to be gay the more older brothers he has.This isn't conclusive proof of everything but might lead one to a population control hypothosis. Might it not?You are, of course, right about the "matest" bit. Almost anyway. It is those that produce offspring which survive to produce more offspring (and so on). This allows for all sorts of different stratgies.

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Common sense isn't[This message has been edited by NosyNed, 01-10-2004]

Hey, do yourself a favor read the whole thread before you dive in next time.You say:

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He stated that the abnormalities proved the non existence of maker, and i was merely mimicking his weak arguement with a similar weak arguement to allow hime to see the fallacy.

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Yet, back on page 2, DT says this:

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Look, this is not difficult. In the absence of any other explanation, I would happily still deduce design. There could be a committee of them; there could be one, who was sometimes drunk or otherwise having a bad heed day. What is ruled out is a single highly intelligent designer, operating always at the height of his powers.

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This is quite a bit different from your description of his argument.

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But it would not be passed on as the "host " would not want to copulate and thus not evolve. sorry I don't see your point.
I keep hearing survival of the fittest, but that is not the case. for evolution to work it must be survival of the "matest" ( sorry but I like it)

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Oh NO! Another Syamsu! If he says anything about relative fitness, forget debate and just RUN!

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It doesn't matter if the animal lives long or well, only that it passes on it's genes. anything after that would be "extra".

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Yes, but don't forget that genes are:1)often present in the organism's relatives, and
2)not always expressed.If you do not understand the concept of kin selection, I highly recommend reading The Selfish Gene or at least googling for some decent sites regarding the idea. Until then, one example off the top of my head is the honeybee: sacrificing one's own life to defend the colony is a stupid idea if the organism is the sole unit of natural selection, since its fitness will never result in reproduction. It is nonetheless a genetically coded instinct that is rewarded by nature. Dawkins also discusses species of birds in which the first individual to cry at the approach of a predator is more likely to be killed. Yet the genes of such a bird are somehow passed on, because they continue to exist.

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so only genes that improve quality ( more successful attempts) or quantity ( more attempts across the board) would pass on. so logically this would lead to either orgy type behavior, or super sperm capable of breeding with a large number of "species" or common ancestor, or hybrid ( take your pick on terminalolgy) this is what i was refering to with the chimp comment in an earlier post.

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You are clearly pulling these ideas out of a very dark place, at the far end of your digestive system. If you think orgies are the only way to maximize your production of successful offspring, you haven't thought about what happens to all those babies when you abandon their mothers to starvation and predators. Pair bonding may reduce the number of offspring produced, but it increases their survival rate and thus their likelihood to become successful reproducers themselves. The reduction in one factor is more than compensated by the increase in the other.The super sperm concept is interesting, but the fact is that our chromosomes will not match other species well enough to construct viable organisms. Better to focus our efforts on other humans, which once again maximizes the "better" part of your equation. It's not like your own race is in short supply.All that said, some species do use vastly more promiscuous strategies than that employed by humans. It is a result of natural selection acting in different environments on different species.

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So when I talk of mutations, i am speaking of things that have not existed in the species before- such as meat eating fruit flys ( if we could test their genes to ensure that they do not have the ability to create a meat dissolving enzyme or some such) I would have to think of a better way to do the test, because i think it has flaws, but i will stick with it for now, until i have time to ponder it.

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Given this, I wonder what you would think of bacteria discovered feeding on industrial waste that has existed for only a few decades. Further, what would you say if their DNA was found to differ by only one mutation from that of a similiar bacterium that feeds on carbohydrates?This is obviously a new species of bacterium, since its only food source is a recent product of industry. In another environment, the mutated gene in question would be considered "broken" and the first bacterium possessing it would have starved and died. However, in a pool of nylon oligomers, it exploits an ecological niche previously unoccupied, and has no competition for food.Are Mutations Harmful?
(paragraph 2 in that section)

I have been hit with quite a number of post and it will take time to go through each piece but I did love this
"You are clearly pulling these ideas out of a very dark place, at the far end of your digestive system. If you think orgies are the only way to maximize your production of successful offspring, you haven't thought about what happens to all those babies when you abandon their mothers to starvation and predators. Pair bonding may reduce the number of offspring produced, but it increases their survival rate and thus their likelihood to become successful reproducers themselves. The reduction in one factor is more than compensated by the increase in the other.
The super sperm concept is interesting, but the fact is that our chromosomes will not match other species well enough to construct viable organisms. Better to focus our efforts on other humans, which once again maximizes the "better" part of your equation. It's not like your own race is in short supply."Perhaps I was hasty with Orgies, perhaps , but I was getting to why monogamy? You touch on it here with pair bonding , and this makes me curious, how would this develop? from a single cell standpoint i can't see it- so it had to be after that stage. Where do we think? I have a point , but before i allow myself to be whipped for not knowing every arguement ever used, I wanted to see where this goes.
Actually the super sperm would be more like a virus in that it takes over the host egg and "dominates" it. If in evolution virus can do it, it (should) could have happened. why not?
If we came from the same ( group, family, species, filum, common ancestor, pick the proper term) wouldn't the changes still allow mating- i mean you are saying that it mates to change and when it mates more we keep changing, but than you say it can't mate because it has changed.-- ok so the time wasn't long enough, the greater the seperation the less chance of mating- Ok i see that , so Africans would be unable to mate with chinese- ok maybe not isolated/ mutated enough- lets move to tribes in africa, or better yet, recently discovered tribes in South america, or perhap polynesian islands. how much time does there need to be - how many generations? we can only be so many generations old, if we evolved from chimps- so how many is it? 1, 12 ,1000

Some of the questions you are asking are answered at length in Ridley's "The Red Queen, Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature"I'll post excerpts from it later.

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Common sense isn't

I sense that you're trying to hold out a little wiggle-room here. What does it mean to "have the ability to create an enzyme"? Either you have the genes for it, or you don't. If you didn't have them, and then you do, that's adaptation and evolution.How's this as a better example:
you are arguing for evolution, and so you adapt to my arguements with arguements of your own ( or someone's you feel is right) this is adapting.
However if you were to suddenly start to argue creationism ( which would be against your "nature" ) you would have evolved.
This is what i mean- Aa Bb Cc Dd are four genes, a different combinations will cause different mutations, and there are "unknown "(currently at least) bits that appear "dead" or are extra, we will call them Xx Yy. this are all inconnected and so if you get AA you will likely get XX - or something to that effect. However if you get AA and Xx it would have appeared to mutate although there was technically the ablity to create this originally. now if we isolate a group of 100 and ensure that they all have the same bits ( cloning would do the job) and you suddenly get a Mm variation, after throughly checking the lab to verify that no manipulation ( either intenional or accidental) had occured we would say that it had evolved, otherwise any other combination ( whether seen before or not) would be adaption.

Unknowingly, you've hit on it - pair bonding or other social structures for childbearing crop up when an organism is too complex to gestate quickly. When having one or a few children occupies most of a female's year, then it becomes advantageous for her to seek strategies that maximize the father's time and resources.Males and females have conflicting reproductive strategies. Males want to broadcast their genes, because they can do so - each shot is 100,000 potential babies, after all. Whereas females want to get the father to pay all his attention and resources for her offspring. It's this conflict that leads to many of the pair-bonding social structures we observe in the animal kingdom. Also it explains "cheating" behavior in both sexes - males trying to hedge their bets with other females, and females trying to get the best of both worlds - the superior resources of one male and the superior genetics of another. To speciate? It depends on how many mutations per generation. Do a search on http://www.pubmed.com for more scientific literature. Offhand, I don't myself know.

Evolution doesn't always require novel genetic material. Evolution is a change in allele frequency. (Stop me if you don't understand what that means.) Adaptation is a change in allele frequency. They're the same process.Look, it's like you're trying to say that if you walk to the grocery store, it's microwalking or adaptation, but if you walk to the next town, that's macrowalking or evolution. What I'm trying to tell you is that they're both walking.I realize you may disagree. But the thing is, under your model, where evolution is separate from adaptation, that's going to have consequences that frankly, we just don't observe. What we do observe is that there's no known barrier to species transformation.

Look, it's like you're trying to say that if you walk to the grocery store, it's microwalking or adaptation, but if you walk to the next town, that's macrowalking or evolution. What I'm trying to tell you is that they're both walking.
"No more like I am walking to the grocery store, but sprouting wings and flying to the next town." you would argue that they are both moving you from place to place and I would say they are different dur to the processes that are involved. this is because in evolution we have to get from whatever the start was ( I assume everyone will say a basic one cellular thing) to where we are now. I would say that we would need to create new "material" to do this. However adaption as I understand it, would be to take the parts that are currently available and mix them around, better forms would mate. However the genetic material ( through recessive genes) are passed on to appear if needed. so in one something is created (evolved) and in the other it is repressed. I apologize for any mix ups- but I try to respond in a quick manner and may not convey the entirety of my thought- my fault of course, but school starts shortly and I feel that my time on this forum will drastically be reduced.

Right, now it's time to return to reality. Observation shows that mutation and natural selection produce adaptation. Observation shows that mutation and natural selection produce evolution.The processes are the same in both cases because they're the same thing. "Micro" and "Macro" evolution are the same process, only over different distances. No, that cell and all humans (and everything else) are made from the same thing: protiens.What you need is novel genetic sequences, and mutation supplies those. Natural selection weeds out the ones that suck.See, that's why your model is wrong. You don't need anything new besides new genetic sequences to get from bacteria to humans, because they're made from the same thing. Mutation accounts for those new genetic sequences; ergo evolution/adaptation can account for the evolution of complex life.

Zephyr, what a great example of the process of evolution. Bacteria always win hands down when it comes to illustrating things like this. One thing which I feel has been missing so far in the debate is the length of time all of this sort of thing takes. It's not so much time as in days, hours, years etc, but time in the time taken to get from one generation to the next.Agrav8tor, some bacteria have a generation time of as little as 20 mins, humans 20 years. To see the effects of heritable changes you have to watch generation upon generation. With humans, you won't get far, maybe three or four, but with bacteria you can get millions overnight. Rats, mice, rabbits allow a little bit of a look at the processes of evolution, but bacteria are number one. However, there is a rat example which was used to teach me the concept of what survival of the fittest actually means and although I might have forgotten some details, the gist of it is as follows. Bear in mind that I'm a molecular biologist currently working on potatoes, previously fish and before that bacteria so rats aren't my strong point.In rats a mutation can arise which results in offspring which aren't quite as strong as other rats. They're weak, poorly in their health and they can't compete as well for food, mates etc, and die younger so they leave fewer offspring so they're not very numerous in the population. Then along comes warfarin, the rat poison. Now, the mutation that makes our weedy rats weedy just so happens to confer resistance to warfarin - it's a coincidence, the mutation occurred in the absence of warfarin. Our strong rats, however, are sensitive to warfarin and they start dying. This reduces the number of competitors the weedy rats have to fight against and many of the strong rats die before they can reproduce. Very slowly, over a number of generations the strong rats become fewer and the weedy rats more numerous. They're still weak, poorly little runts, but they have a definite advantage over strong, dead rats when it comes to reproduction!!! Strong rats still get born now and again, maybe due to a reversion of the mutation, but they don't last long. Now remove warfarin from the equation. If a strong rat turns up he is at a definite advantage over the weedy rats, he gets more food, he finds more mates so strong rats start to become more numerous again and over time the population can swing back to strong ones, with the odd weedy one skulking about, praying for the reintroduction of warfarin to his little world.So, you can define "survival of the fittests" as the survival of those INDIVIDUALS best suited to the environment. If the environment changes, be it temperature, light availability, water availability or the sudden appearance of aggressive incomers to the region, those individuals who already possess the ability to cope better (and may have possessed it for generations) will now have a chance to outperform their fellows and therefore have more offspring. Over time the accumulation of changes can mean that the end result is so changed from the original (by little increments) that they can become a distinct species.I now have to ask my usual question. Am I making any sense here?

Making sense to me, but so what?Is it know what the mutation is that give warfarin resistance?

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Common sense isn't

Not sure what side your on, but your statement proves my point- they adapted , but did not gain any "non ratness". The part was already there, only supressed by the envirnoment. By this train of thought, a rat would not "unrat", like slowly grow wings, due to its environmentand thus the rat will remain a rat.
speaking of birds- why are there flightless birds? flight would allow the birds to escape most of its preds and therefore mate more. I am sure I will get a wishy washy well it happened that way, but i would like something with more substance.