Darwinism

[Kyuuketsuki]

Adaptation (what you creationists would have us call micro-evolution so that you can accept what evidence shows is happening while denying the possibility of speciation) is change, adaptation occurs all the time and as anyone (any 5 year old I imagine) could tell you one plus one equals two, something small plus something small equals something bigger. So it is with change ... small change plus small change plus small change plus small change plus (ad infinitum) results in much larger change, IOW adaptation (which even creationists, through the sheer hammering home of evidence, have been forced to admit occurs) happens and adaptation across sufficient time results in speciation. Change at the species level (given the currently accepted age of the Earth and the forces acting in the environment) is pretty much inevitable, new species will arise ...

Interesting trying to switch the argument around on the non-evolutionist to show what keeps species stable. I still think the burden of proof lies on the evolutionist to show how drastic changes happen and if little change after little change can overcome stabilizing factors in life. It seems to be that Mendelian genetics within populations, the extreme rarity of beneficial mutation along with the problems of gene fixing, as well as gene self-regulating and repairing tends to keep life basically the same. Even in the era of modern research on the fruit fly and bacteria, we still find that there are limits to the change, with almost all changes being harmful or at best neutral. Even with bacterial drug resistance which is the only helpful change I know of, it still comes with a high cost. What's interesting yet rarely reported is that those resistant bacteria when placed back with the parent culture without the drug can't keep up reproductively, which means that natural selection would weed them out and there was no net gain. Only in specific extreme environments would they be dominate, and that's what we find in extreme temperatures and acidity environments (or hospitals). But not surprisingly they are still bacteria.

Do you? Unfortunately for you just about the entire scientific community (and all of the relevant experts) accept evolution so actually it is YOU that has to supply reasonable evidence that the theory of evolution isn't what happens. The advent of entirely novel species has been documented and given that no serious evolutionary scientist expects new species to be popping up every week (speciation is really a rather rare event when considered on a human timescale) those that have been shown are simply additional evidence that the theory evolution does explain the diversity of life we see around us.

What's really interesting is that you utterly failed to answer my question.

The fossil record gives plenty of evidence for the stability of life. It shows that the vast majority of animals appear suddenly and live for long periods of time with little change, then most go extinct pretty much how they appeared. I think there are a handful of fossils claimed to be transitional, yet even these are plagued with problems in showing that they are actually transitional and not just assumed to be due to some similarity in their bones. The "living fossils" that have been found when studied have been huge let downs. One such example is the coelacanth (walking fish transitional fossil) that supposedly went extinct 65 million years ago, but when found alive and studied they actually swim with those fins and don't walk with them. As I said the burden of proof is still on the evolutionist.

Sigh! Do you really want to talk transitional fossils?

I know you're a creationist so let me try and explain this simply for you ...

Consider your mother and father. The three of you are very different morphologically and, in genetic terms, the differences between you are immense. What is the reason for this difference? The reason, quite simply, is that you are a product of your mother and your father with enough additional variation thrown-in to make you an individual. Now consider yourself again in comparison with some of the races that exist around the world. Some of them are "white", some are "yellow", some are "red", some are "brown", and some are "black", some have red hair, some have black hair, some have blond hair, some have "blue" eyes, some have "brown" eyes and some have "green" eyes. Some are short, some are tall, some are thin and some are fat. Some have heritable conditions such as deafness, cancer resistance, optical problems, ankylosing spondylitis and many, many more non-fatal "genetic flaws". Yet these are only (some of) the most easily discernible characteristics ... there's blood groups, various hereditary disease and I haven't even started on biochemical & protein differences. Yet, despite the immense level of morphological variation within & between these individuals races, they are all classified as human ... strange that!

You see the classification of a species is not something that was built into nature, the classification is manmade in order to allow us to deal with these animals on an objective basis ... genetic & morphological variation cover an immense range, even within a single species.

Assume for a moment, that a species exists within some hypothetical environment and that within that it moves to a different environment or that environment is changed around it. According to the theory of evolution that species will begin to adapt and change to the new environment and successive generations will keep changing until, at some non-specified point, that species is no longer the species that we started with but another. So at what point does species A become species B? Quite simply when it ceases being species A.

It is important to understand that it is only with hindsight that we realise that any given species has mutated to another. We note Species A and through observation define it. We note Species B and through observation define it as well. We note and define more species and construct a possible chain through which they might have evolved ... later evidence and predictions confirm that this chain of evolution is possible even highly likely. But though this chain is very complete we "know" that there must have been change between them and therefore whatever it was in the middle of that chain is what we refer to as a transitional. Now species (as we see from above) are not the some fixed biological entity that is laid down in a textbook it is general type of animal covering a relatively broad range of biologically similar animals. And the typical view is that transitionals are simply animals that we are unable (for various reasons) to conveniently classify into one given species or another (actually all end-branch species such as humans are transitional but I'll deal with that in a later post).

The reason that your evangelical leaders make the kind of claim you do (that evolution does not work, that new species do not arise) is because it is convenient fopr them to do so. In order to defeat those aspects of science they find unacceptable they simply take an accepted scientific definition or explanation and redefine it to a creationist version of that definition or explanation. Then they destroy those definitions and explanations in a manner that can easily persuade those of lesser scientific knowledge without making it clear to their potential convert's that they are not actually destroying any known scientific theory at all.

With specific reference to transitionals, you creationists would have us believe that transitionals start at the moment the first change is introduced but that cannot be so … if it were every single animal and person on this planet would be of a different species. Transitionals for reasons of fossilisation and poor creationist understanding of science are not as common as you would like to believe they are.

Robert Tague and Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University addressed this issue by reconstructing the obstetrics of Lucy, the well-preserved female skeleton that belongs to Australopithecus-afarenesis. They concluded that her pelvic inlet, the skeletal portal for the birth canal, would have allowed her to give birth to a baby no larger than a newborn male chimp or orangutan. Like all primates, Lucy's new baby would have resembled these newborn apes in having a brain that constituted about 10% of its total weight.

As for Lucy herself: Even the hind limb of Australopithecus though adapted for walking and running on the ground, retained traits that would also have made it superior to modern humans as a climber. The toes were more curved than ours and longer for length of the leg. Also the long curved finger bones would have been useful for curling around the branch of a tree or for gripping its trunk. And there is the fact that all humans on the earth can directly trace their DNA back to Lucy (or a close ancestor of). Since that time, when man was in one its transitional stages, we have evolved since then. We no longer have curved finger bones and other limbs designed for climbing trees.

I guess technically you could say there has been speciation if you define a species as a reproductively isolated population, which is one of the common definitions in scientific research, but this just shows that two bird populations (for example) don't naturally reproduce in the wild. Many times they still can in captivity (a popular non-bird example being the lion and tiger = the liger), plus it doesn't show any new forms or changes in the higher levels above the species which is really where evolution must explain. The different species still have wings and beaks, their bones are still hollow and made for flying, they still lay eggs, etc. Not to mention that this definition of species leaves out the fossil record and any asexual reproducing life. I'm OK with this type of reproductive speciation by the way, because it is still limited and doesn't account for the massive variety between phyla, at least the actual evidence doesn't show that it does.

You realise don't you, the massive time scales involved in evolution? You realise that observing the fossil record gives clear evidence supporting an obvious tendency for more recent fossils to resemble modern species, chains or branches connecting primitive genera with modern radically different ones and a lot of gaps entirely expected by the theory?

Not trying to be funny here but as far as I can tell you're just letting your religious beliefs suborn your intellectual ability7.

I'm still interested in if you have an answer to the problem of the Cambrian explosion, you waved it off in your last post and so I'm not sure if your conceding the point that it is a dilemma for evolution or just didn't have time to answer it.

There are fossils of complex organisms originating from tens of millions of years before the Cambrian, some of which are obvious precursors to Cambrian animals, and smaller fossils are found from hundreds of million of years before. The 'explosion' lasted for tens of millions of years, which is only brief by geological standards. The Cambrian actually shows animal groups appearing over many millions of years in forms very different than they appear today.

Kyu