Impossible evolution of new beneficial proteins

Percy, My apology for the "name calling" I didn't mean it in that light, I meant to refer to the mental capacity of the writers. However, after reading the post I realized it might be taken the wrong way. I wish there was a way to edit what has been posted.

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"The Fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God'"Creation Man

Look why is this so hard?When a gene is duplicated, that technically "increases" the amount of information. And when there is a frameshift mutation, this is "new" information.BUT...Never will you ever see a gene that codes for reptile scales, undergo a mutation or mutations (even over time) that changes that reptile scale information (code) to bird feather information (code). I have seen no demonstration of this.Does this clarify the point???

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"The Fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God'"Creation Man

Look why is this so hard?
When a gene is duplicated, that technically "increases" the amount of information. And when there is a frameshift mutation, this is "new" information.BUT...Never will you ever see a gene that codes for reptile scales, undergo a mutation or mutations (even over time) that changes that reptile scale information (code) to bird feather information (code). I have seen no demonstration of this.Does this clarify the point???

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"The Fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God'"Creation Man

So being able to make two different proteins, where you could only make one before the mutation, is a decrease in information.Right.Under what definition of "information?"

It would help if you could clarify to whom you are responding, and engage some of the specific points which have been raised by various contributors.Definitions certainly are important. Can you give a definition of "information" which you were using when you refer to no mutations yielding new information? This was in Post 13 of this thread, and I responded to that with some corrections in Post 25. Actually, it is entirely possible. In fact, what could prevent it? Microevolution is the small scale evolutionary change from generation to generation. Over many generations, change accumulates.Macroevolution is evolution above the taxonomic level of species. It is concerned with how diversity in living forms accumulates and diverges.A curious phenomenon in recent time is an increasing acceptance by creationists that speciation can occur rapidly. Indeed, this is absolutely required to account for the enormous diversity in living forms to arise since all the ark. It gets worse than this; to address diversity many creationists are reduced to denying the bible (which speaks of all animal life being extinguished: Genesis 7:23) and proposing various animal survivors on "floating mats" and other such inventions. I do not know if you use such models; but if you want to keep up with what creationists are proposing you need to be aware that they invoke massive amounts of macroevolutionary change (as the term macroevolution is used in biology; change above the level of species); far more than evolutionists. You need to be aware that mutations do not accumulate in one individual; but over a lineage. For example, you yourself, based on observed levels of mutations, probably have well over 60 new mutations not present in your parents. These will be passed on to your children, and they will add a futher 60 to 100 mutations or so; and so on as time passes. The accumulation of mutations is known; it occurs at rates consistent with the observed amounts of genetic differences between us and closely related primates, like the chimpanzees, and the amount of time since we shared a common ancestor.Macroevolution is pretty much inevitable under such circumstances. Of course, it is unusual to observe dramatic morphological change in a short period; but there are certainly observed changes which are classified as macroevolution. Examples include the development of maize, and evolution of mice on the island of Madeira; both of these over several hundred years. See, "Rapid chromosomal evolution in island mice", by J Britton-Davidian et. al., in Nature. 2000 Jan 13;403(6766):158.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...
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and the less technical description at Island mice may evolve faster: From one species to six, at the Genome News Network.Cheers -- cjhs[This message has been edited by Sylas aka cjhs, 02-12-2004]

Where did I see that.....
there is a breed of chicken that has feathers down its legs where most chickens have scales (scutes, actually). Darwin's Terrier, do you know something about that?I'll be back... heck, I might even find a reference to this - scales to feathers...it can't be done, except when chickens and such do it....Added in edit: start here -
Dinosauria On-Line[This message has been edited by Coragyps, 02-11-2004]

It's not hard at all. You have just learned something, for which sincere congratulations. Mutations can give new information, after all. No problem. This is a good place to ask.This transformation is documented in Requirement for BMP Signaling in Interdigital Apoptosis and Scale Formation, by Hongyan Zou and Lee Niswander, in Science Volume 272, Number 5262, Issue of 3 May 1996, pp. 738-741. The abstract is as follows (and look for the phrase I put in bold): This is, of course, because chickens already have the long evolutionary history for development of feathers; you won't get feathers on a snake by a single mutation.But the mutation to make scales into feathers is a good demonstration of just how closely related feathers and scales really are.Cheers -- cjhsPS. Added in edit. (You can edit posts, CreationMan; look for the edit button at the bottom of posts.) A comprehensive and detailed discussion by Richard Prum (Uni of Kansas) is available at The Evolutionary Origin and Diversification of Feathers. It has a wealth of detail, and includes a brief mention of the work of Zou and Niswander, with some useful cautions. Prum may be known to those following the BAD/BAND dispute. Prum is a colleage of Larry Martin; though they are in robust disagreement.[This message has been edited by cjhs, 02-11-2004]

What kind of creatures did these mice evolve into?

The topic is beneficial proteins.Your question is off topic.You should be asking about the nature of the genetic changes and the resulting phenotype.

A new kind of mouse, of course. That is how evolution works. It is a process of divergence of existing forms into a range of new forms.This is often not understood by critics of evolutionary biology, who ask for something like a cat evolving into a dog, or a mouse into a pig. In fact, evolution says this will never happen. What happens instead is that cats get more diverse over time. They are all still cats, but they can be described also as what species of cat: puma, tiger, ocelot, jaguar, lynx, etc.As time goes on, cats might either die out, or become still more diverse. Most likely, it will be a combination; some species or families of cats will die out, others with continue to live and diversify. We can observe just this process of diversification in mice on Madeira.Macroevolution is about this level of change; but it still arises by the accumulation of genetic change in diverging lineages.The mice on Madeira are, I believe, still described as "Mus musculus domesticus"; but they have a distinct karyotype; with fewer chromosomes than the normal mouse species. See House mice on the island of Madeira, which is within a page which explain more about speciation for you.It is interesting that a reduced number of chromosomes in the six new species on Madeira arose by a fusion of chromosomes appearing in the parent species. A similar event has occurred in human ancestry. Humans have one less chromosome pair than the great apes, and it is immediately clear which two chromosomes in apes correspond to the single fused human chromosome. See Comparison of the Human and Great Ape Chromosomes as Evidence for Common Ancestry.Cheers -- SylasPS. (Added in edit.) I think this was a good and important question by Skeptick; though AdminNosy is right that it was technically off topic for the thread. I think we have established already that new beneficial proteins can arise by evolution. The mouse example serves to show that macroevolution can occur without a need for new proteins to be involved.[This message has been edited by Sylas aka cjhs, 02-12-2004]

My humblest apologies. I must have failed to properly understand forum rules. I'll be more diligent in the future, but I'm not as smart as everyone else here, so I'll need to try a little harder. The topic of mice was brought up as significant piece of information for this topic (see post 35), complete with a link to reference the details. I was under the mistaken impression that I could actually ask a question about the information, which was brought up by a more learned member, and I felt compelled to ask a question about it so we could delve deeper into this topic. Was it I who was off topic, or "Sylas aks cjhs", or both of us? Just wondering, since your pleasant reminder was directed toward my post. Would post #40 of this thread also be considered off topic? Perhaps more of us are confused with this forum rule.Thank you for your kind assistance.

Well, there has been a bit of an increased push to stay on topic.The question I suggested looks like it would have, indeed, been relevant since the mice my not have anything to do with proteins. So you could have asked about that and found them to be irrelevant. (and off topic).

"A new kind of mouse, of course. That is how evolution works. It is a process of divergence of existing forms into a range of new forms."Biologically speaking that is not evolution. If you start with a mouse and you finish wth a mouse, that's not evolution, that's just mice.What you described was MICRO-evolution, we except that, that's not a problem. But you want us to except (on faith) that the observable MICRO leads ----> To the UNOBSERVABLE MACRO.As a biologist who starts his hypotheses with observation, I can't except that.

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"The Fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God'"Creation Man

Did you happen to notice what animal was being discussed?A CHICKEN!!!Do you realize what two kinds of genes, chicken DNA codes for?FEATHERS AND SCALESOf course scales can be "changed into feathers" when the information for feathers is already present in the Genome!
That's baby biology.Show me a Snake or Lizard (with no info for feathers) change it's scales into feathers, IT CAN'T!! Why? Because the information for feathers cannot spontaneously generate in a genome which codes exclusively for scales.

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"The Fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God'"Creation Man

quote:

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Biologically speaking that is not evolution. If you start with a mouse and you finish wth a mouse, that's not evolution, that's just mice.

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If you start with a mammal, you finish with a mammal.
If you start with a chordate, you finish with a chordate.
If you start with a eukaryote, you finish with a eukaryote.At one point do you draw the line. Also, how would you classify fossils that are intermediate between reptiles and mammals?This is important. Information increases are incremental, not wholesale insertions of new code. You have to show how incremental changes in the genome will not accumulate to such a piont that the new species will not differ greatly from the parent stock. You have yet to show how accumulation is impossible.[This message has been edited by Loudmouth, 02-12-2004]