Faith wrote:
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Yeah I forgot some of them. What's your point now, it's not two or three but six or seven?
First, we had listed over a dozen, with more coming up in conversation. My point wasn’t that it was this or that number, but that it is much more than just one or two cases, and that you know that.
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And what are they supposed to prove?
They show that it is quite plausible that the current diversity of life is accumulated traits such as these. The principle here is statistical sampling. For instance, if I test a mL of water from 1000 different places around the earth, and I find bacteria in 941 of them, then it’s reasonable to conclude that bacteria is common in water on earth. BUT HOLD ON - I’ve only tested a total of 1 liter out of the over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 liters of water on earth. (yes I calculated that out). It’s reasonable due to statistical sampling, even though the percentage tested is tiny.
In our case, we’ve seen plenty of mutations, some beneficial, some harmful, most neutral, in the past couple hundred years, even though we only have looked at a tiny percentage of animals and humans. Thus, if we’ve seen plenty in such a short time, it’s quite reasonable to expect that we are seeing the typical rate. Of all the millions of animals born in the past few centuries, we’ve only watched a tiny percentage of them, less than 0.00000001%. And as far as time goes, 200/4 billion=0.00000005. Multiplying those numbers predicts that we’ve only seen a very small fraction of the mutations that have occurred. So it’s quite reasonable that there have been billions of beneficial mutations based on what we’ve seen and discussed here at EvC.
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I thought the tail example wasn't supposed to be a mutation. What would be the point in that case? Isn't it supposed to prove we're related to apes? A novel trait wouldn't prove that.
First, in science one piece of evidence doesn’t “prove” something. Evidence from different lines of inquiry all support (or don’t) a given hypothesis.
The tails are what we’d expect if we are descended from earlier primates (not just apes, which don’t have tails anyway). For instance, if 8 million years ago a gene is something like
AATACGTGTTGTGAC, and it promotes tail growth, then a mutation, say to
AATACGTGTTGTGAT, may render it nonfunctional. That gene may then be selected for (since maybe women find a shorter tail sexy), and so later humans could all have the second version. Then, in a baby in Spain in the 20th century or some such, a mutation occurs that switches it back to a C, or to an equivalent nucleotide, since the system is redundant anyway:
AATACGTGTTGTGAC. So the baby has a tail due to the mutation, revealing our evolutionary past (since the rest of the genetic mechanism for making a tail is still there).
Now, for a creationist, this mutation must be a novel trait, since humans didn’t come from tailed primates. That’s why I listed it, because in the creationist worldview, it’s novel. Did I misunderstand the creationist view of tails in human babies?
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