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Author Topic:   A barrier to macroevolution & objections to it
alexcj
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Message 84 of 303 (348658)
09-13-2006 5:44 AM
Reply to: Message 80 by mjfloresta
09-13-2006 1:24 AM


Re: Creationists beg scientists: Please prove my point for me!
When you say that scientists have not “proven” by experiment the evolution of an organ like the eye I don’t think you appreciate the scope of exactly what you are asking. To prove that small changes in each generation can lead all the way back to an eye patch would require recreating every ancestor in the lineage. We could start with a random human, yourself or myself for example and sequence that genome. We would then need to sequence your parents genomes and show that you could arise from a combination of their genes plus mutation. We would then have to do this for your grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents etc. You are asking scientists to recreate millions (billions? Can’t be bothered to do the maths) of generations, show that they are viable and that their genomes are the product of their parents plus mutation. You would have to be able to work out every single base change for these millions of generations prior to creating the genome. How would you work out what the genome of your great, great, great grandparents was let alone a far distant pre-human ancestor. Of course no one has managed to do this. When an evolutionary history of a complex organ is given it is a rough sketch because it simply isn’t possible to extrapolate back this distance and show every single change.This is why the best examples of evolution in action are simple ones, antibiotic resistant bacteria for example. At this level it is possible to trace the exact base pair changes from one generation to another. The more complex and longer the evolutionary pathway the rougher the sketch becomes. This is just another way of saying we don’t know everything about everything.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 80 by mjfloresta, posted 09-13-2006 1:24 AM mjfloresta has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 85 by RickJB, posted 09-13-2006 6:14 AM alexcj has not replied
 Message 88 by Archer Opteryx, posted 09-13-2006 7:27 AM alexcj has not replied

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