(October 30, 2017 at 3:17 pm)SteveII Wrote: a. How complex organs/traits evolved without any survival benefit until they were complete (please give examples of partially formed non-functioning abilities found in nature today)
b. How are biological networks to have evolved?
c. Why doesn't DNA support the "tree of life"?
d. Why there is a glaring lack of fossil records/intermediate forms.
e. Junk (non-coding) DNA, originally thought of as the leftovers of mutations/transcription errors, yet we continue to discover purposes for it.
f. Why natural selection is not enough for traits with a low selection coefficient...yet we have them.
To answer your questions:
a) by supporting other functions until they developed into their current forms (eg the bacterial flagellum was likely a sectretory gland until it developed as a locomotive instrument), or by not being detrimental until it was being found to be needed, or by slowly developing over time in effectiveness (eg the eye).
b) what is this I don't even. Phrase the question in an intelligble manner and I might be able to answer it. As it stands you're asking something equivalent to "when does knurd smell lavender?"
c) It does. Mitochondrial DNA is a powerful tool for showing the descent of many different animals, comparing genetic similarities shows relations between species and evolutionary paths
d) Not many places where living things die are suitable for fossilisation, then you've got stuff like plate tectonics, vulcanism, cataclysmic impacts and even other living beings feeding off the corpses to make the process even rarer.
e) Is a point in favour of evolution. Plus it simply means that our techniques for examining DNA is getting better and our scientific knowledge improving with it
f) Again a horribly parsed question (for somebody who's an english language native you're horrible at the language), deep time takes care of your answer. The Earth is 4.567 billion years old (take the biblical time frame and multiply that by 1,000,000) and life roughly 3-3.5 billion years old. On that scale natural selection works very well in ensuring that the fittest species survive. For example the genes that code for lactose tolerance have a low selection coefficient of somewhere between 0.09 and 0.19 in Scandinavian populations (source), however over even just 9,000 years (300 generations or thereabouts) this allowed Scandinavian peoples to develop high frequencies of lactose tolerance from a very low starting point.
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