Darwinism

[Samson]

One thing you need to keep in mind Senseiotho, is that that the term, "Micro/Macro" is not used in Scientific community/Circles on a normal basis....The creationist are the ones who have separated this for their own uneducated agendas, and of course the, so called, Scientist who consider themselves creationist. (And I use the term Scientist very loosely)...

    Just a note to clarify about "uneducated agendas."  It was the Russian Entomologist Yuri Filipchenko who coined the terms "macroevolution" and "microevolution" in 1927 in his German language work, "Variabilität und Variation." That is how it attained its modern usage. The term was later brought into the English-speaking world by the neo-darwinist Theodosius Dobzhansky in his book "Genetics and the Origin of Species" (1937). Dobzhansky actually worked with Filipchenkowas and Dobzhansky was a very influential and prolific evolutionist.
     Creationists did not coin the terms or the distinction with their "uneducated agendas." It is a helpful distinction created by evolutionists between what has been verified scientifically and what is still speculation or assumption (I can give you his quote if you would like). I was using the term because I find it a helpful distinction as well, even though I know that some modern evolutionists are trying to get rid of the terms and the distinction. Though it seems like a PR campaign to gloss over the actual difficulties of macro-evolution and let its truth value ride on the evidence for micro-evolution. Webster still defines them as changes below the species level (micro) and major changes such as species formation (macro). This is how I was basically using them.  But, I will try to use the terms adaptation and speciation if that is the scientific norm now, since they are basically the same. Though I don't know if speciation normally covers the emergence of new organs and body types. I guess generally speaking it would "given enough time".

You missed the point.....And number one, I never said the Creationist are the one's who discovered or came up with Micro/Macro, I've read about Yuri years before.....Id'ers can barely say it, much less think that far outside of the box. But yes, "Creationist have spewed the two as separate for their own uneducated agendas. Apparently you haven't read the utter mess for the past 30 years they have been screaming between the two....

Again, in the Scientific community the two are not commonly used, because it's already understood of the meaning in the same. And as far as Yuri, just from what I've read and studied in the past on him, the Creationist separation was by far "NOT" the way he would have intended it to be viewed upon. (Regardless of his Orthodox backings)....

Id'ers seem to not understand that the core of Evolution (The Term itself) was simply a term given for the facts which were discovered and has been shown. In other words, Evolution was not first, the facts were found and it was given the name. What continues to change over time as new discoveries are made, is the Models from which are built around Evolution. No Scientist denies that fact...They know that something may take place a year, 10 years, 20 years from now that will redo the model....HOWEVER....The one thing that always stays the same and is never changing is the "Core" of Evolution.... That is the fact from which the models are built.....

It is dumbfounding for anyone to say that Evolution as a whole is not a fact....When in actuality, the term itself was given because of the facts and discoveries in place....

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

@Samson


A broad observation: People whose beliefs have been formed without the inconvenience of reason, evidence, or a scientific education are incapable of assessing such things even when bitten by them on the glans penis.

There seems to be no evidence that those people have grasped the meaning of basic terms such as 'evidence' and 'theory' let alone 'scientific method.'

Three are still large numbers on the religious lunar right who continue to insist there is a debate between evolution and creationism/ ID. There is not now and never has been. Evolution is a fact. Creationism/ID is is a religious doctrine. The end.

[Samson]

Padraic, Amen....LOLOL

[LonePiper]

SenseiOtho, you mention how species tend to appear in the fossil record and stay around barely changed for a long time before disappearing again. You also mention how in the Cambrian there was a rapid increase in diversity of body plans the likes of which we have not seen since. The answers to both of these queries are actually part of a larger fact about evolution.

There is a saying that I've heard thrown about in biological circles, and that is "evolution proceeds despite natural selection".

As you rightly pointed out there are a very large number of mechanisms to minimise the amount of mutations that creep into the gene pool. This is because environments tend to change only slowly over time and so when an organism is optimally suited to its environment its best interests are actually to stay the same rather than continue to change. It's no longer adaption if the animal is already adapted. Any mutations are only likely to be detrimental.

When the organism's environment does change, however, it must adapt as well. These mechanisms to control mutations still operate of course, but they can never filter out everything - if they did the species would ultimately die out. This is where natural selection kicks in again. In a stable environment it tends to favour organisms that stay the same if they are already optimally adapted. When the environment changes natural selection favours those organisms who are slightly better at survival. It's the most basic and simple principle of evolution. And you have to keep in mind even a changing environment takes thousands if not millions of years to change, and while mutations - especially beneficial ones - tend to be very rare after the "weeding out" process, any species is represented by a large number of reproducting individuals over many many generations. The sheer numbers will ensue that beneficial mutations will find their way into the gene pool eventually.Evolution takes a long time. And this whole process of stops and starts is something called "punctuated equilibrium". A lot of creationists seem to think it's a hasty quick-fix invented by evolutionists to save their theory, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Evolution would actually be harder to swallow without it. It would be like insisting that Moses and his followers when crossing the Sinai desert packed up all their tents every morning, carried them a few metres then set them up again, thereby crossing the desert in 40 years. (I didn't make that up. Thank Richard Dawkins!)

Now, the mechanisms for gene regulation described are probably also a large part of the reason for the cambrian explosion - or rather the lack of them.
As Kyu has already pointed out, complex life did not suddenly pop into existence at the beginning of the Cambrian. There was the Ediacaran before that, and through the fossil record and some educated guesswork we can make a perfectly reasonable line of descendants from single celled organisms to all the variety of multicellular body plans that developed in the Cambrian. There are no completely unexplainable gaps (though there are some gaps without enough solid evidence to tell us with explanation is the right one).
But that's not what I want to talk about. The reason we don't find the kind of massive diversification any time after the Cambrian is probably at least partly due to the lack of these gene control mechanisms found in todays organisms. (I say probably because we obviously don't have a copy of any genomes from organisms back then. It's an educated deduction, but that doesn't mean I won't accept a new theory if it can explain things better)
Gene regulation and mutation supression are, like every aspect of biology, evolved things. Multicellular life was still relatively new in the Cambrian and these functions simply hadn't arisen yet - and not just because they didn't have time to. Also because they weren't necessary back then. With multicellular life only right out of the package, the Earth was overflowing with untapped ecological niches and environments. It would not have been in an organism's best interest to stay the same for too long if it had the opportunity to exploit some resource not yet exploited by other organisms.

The other important factor would have been the genome of organisms back then. Nowadays genes are immeasurably complex things - any part of our body will have a number of different genes controlling it, and every gene controls a number of different parts of our body. It can be safe to assume that things would'nt have been quite as complex in the Cambrian, and as a result a single gene mutation could have had a much greater effect on an organism's basic morphology.
One might also be able to assume that organisms, being much simpler, would have had a somewhat lower chance of muations being detrimental. Without the complex interrelationship between the different organs and structures in a body an organism can afford to have farily drastic mutations. And this is true even if it makes the organism less effective overall, provided they can explot an untapped niche in the process. They can work on improving their effectiveness later.

Okay, I think I've covered everything I wanted to cover...

[SenseiOtho]

The real connection between entropy and evolution comes from looking at information theory. The kind of entropy that is important to evolution is informational entropy. Like thermodynamic entropy on a universal scale, informational entropy tends to increase over time. Since an increase in informational entropy means the complexity of a message increases, the message transmitted by DNA over generations increases in complexity. The organisms specified by the message will be more complex as a result. Evolution thus seems to be an inevitable consequence of the properties of information. Selection provides a filter that determines which of the more complex messages survive. Illustrating these trends are examples of organisms that, under specific selective pressures, experience partial or complete duplications of genes that lead to increased information content of genomes, enhanced fitness, and improved proteins. While these examples may not be as dramatic as creationists demand in asking for the "proof" of evolution that they don't really want in any case, the examples at least falsify the creationist contentions that information-increasing beneficial mutations do not exist.

There seems to be two senses of the term "information." one is the "Shannon theory of information" or "Kolmogorov-Chaitin" information which seems to be what your article was about where only the complexity or length of the thing in question is looked at, that type of information theory seems to be best for electronic communications which I think it was designed for (I think this is correct, though not totally sure). So yes, from that strict stand point of information theory where more "bits" of information are created (generally through gene duplication) I concede the point to you. True you get more information when you double genes and as your article said there have been shown to be a couple benefits when doubling genes in specific environments. Just an aside, but wouldn't that mean that then the duplicated gene can't be point mutated to evolve without causing it to be inferior to the other "normal" cells with both working genes. It was the double of the gene that made it live better in that environment, not any new mutation. It seems that you are right back at the same problem of how to evolve to make new genetically useful information, other wise there is no natural selection benefit to a new mutation.

But what I was meaning with information was the meaning behind the strands of amino acids in DNA or the purpose of the DNA and what it codes for, the genetically useful information. (sorry, I should have been more specific, but I'm not sure what else to call it) One thing about the type of information theory you were talking about is that it could care less about the actual meaning of the information in question. For example, we could set up a system for me to e-mail you when I wanted you to turn on your cell phone. we could agree that an e-mail with "0" could mean on, but we could also have chosen "00000" to mean on, depending on what code we choose the more "0's" the more information it has according to information theory, yet the information communicated in the general since is identical in both cases. In the broader since I was referring to the purpose of the DNA and how natural processes don't seem to be able to account for it. All the genes in DNA are complex and specific, they are used and made at certain times and for certain purposes. The whole cell is extremely complex, even the most basic cells are extremely complex. Life seems to need some way of transporting nutrients and signals within the cell. It needs ways of replicating, and responding to the environment. I'm sure there are other basic things associated with life, but I think you understand my point. There is a huge gap between lifeless chemicals reacting and even the simplest form of life imaginable, much more the simplest form of life we have evidence for.

In the reading I've done I've seen no naturalistic mechanism that can account for DNA or RNA, it seem that in natural environments (even prebiotic environments) nature works against the actual formation of DNA/RNA and other proteins, even the most basic ones. Even the basic building blocks and basic forms cannot be made in the lab under semi realistic conditions, much less the information it contains to be useful for life. It's like even if you could find an naturalistic explanation for how scrabble pieces were formed and got on the table in a line, the message or words spelled still needs explaining of how purely naturalistic mechanisms can create biologically relevant information.
Not to mention that DNA and Proteins need each other to exist, so which evolved first. I know your examples were not for the beginning of information in the cell, but it just highlights the point of only being able to take existing information and just duplicating it, maybe changing it a little after the fact. But it still doesn't account for the existence of genetic information in the first place or the vast changes in function of different genes or even basic evolutionary pathways for them. (Here is an interesting and more detailed site for some of this stuff, if you care to read more. It actually is a reply to Dawkins on this very subject. "The information Challenge")

I have two other issues with the whole gene duplication and then point mutation theory for explaining evolution, but I'll write about them later.

[Tiberius]

Even the basic building blocks and basic forms cannot be made in the lab under semi realistic conditions

You mean, apart from the scientists who have formed some basis building blocks in semi-realistic (and realistic) conditions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_experiment
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/0...cleotides/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/o...matechange

Or read a large summary of them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

[Kyuuketsuki]

In the reading I've done I've seen no naturalistic mechanism that can account for DNA or RNA, it seem that in natural environments (even prebiotic environments) nature works against the actual formation of DNA/RNA and other proteins, even the most basic ones. Even the basic building blocks and basic forms cannot be made in the lab under semi realistic conditions, much less the information it contains to be useful for life. It's like even if you could find an naturalistic explanation for how scrabble pieces were formed and got on the table in a line, the message or words spelled still needs explaining of how purely naturalistic mechanisms can create biologically relevant information.

IOW you're too wrapped up in your pathetic belief system, in being a dumbass creationist, to actually envisage that something naturalistic could have led to the nucleic acids?

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Abiogenesis
Introduction
The concept of spontaneous generation, the notion that inanimate matter could suddenly become alive, goes back as far as Aristotle ... maybe further. "According to Descartes (viewing maggots in meat): "Since so little is required to make a being, it is certainly not surprising that so many animals, worms, and insects form spontaneously before our eyes in all putrefying substances" (Margulis and Sagan, 1995). However the same text also states that "...all worms found in meat were derived from flies, not putrefaction" (Redi). Experiments, nevertheless, continued to support the concept until, in the mid 1800’s, it was finally disproved by Pasteur.

Spontaneous generation was not a specifically evolutionary concept, simply the best explanation of a phenomenon that scientists had until Pasteur's experiments. Creationists claim, somewhat absurdly, that Pasteur was opposed by the biological establishment because of his opposition to spontaneous generation and to Darwinism. Yet, in a time of belief that at least some illnesses resulted from possession or sin, Pasteur, by recognising the microbial origin of disease, actually set the treatment of disease on a naturalistic path for the first time.

Discussion
At some point in the distant past the first living cells formed ... exactly when, and by what mechanism, is as yet unknown. The oldest speculated life forms are, at least, 1 billion years old so we can be certain that it happened sometime before that. The origin of life was not a process of evolution but of abiogenesis and scientists have speculated on the possible ways in which it might have occurred. The earliest chemical steps are believed to have been as follows:

* The spontaneous formation of ribose. The probability for this to have occurred is good.
* The spontaneous formation of nucleotide bases. The probability for this to have occurred is good.
* The assembly of ribose and bases into nucleosides (probability of this occurring is low).
* The activation of these nucleosides into nucleotides. The probability for this to have occurred is good.</UL>

It has since been demonstrated (Gunter von Kiedrowski) that oligonucleotides can replicate via ligation. Following the ligation of oligomers the synthesis of larger chains of nucleotides would become fairly certain and large chains of folding nucleic acids that could catalyse reactions a distinct possibility.

With the formation of membrane structures around the nucleic acid strands the first life would have appeared on Earth.

Whilst there can be no doubt that the above has problems and is largely speculative, that life spontaneously formed is beyond doubt ... it is only the precise mechanisms that remain to be elucidated.

The Chemicals of Life
There has been no particular mystery to the formation of the first organic chemicals ever since Friedrich Wöhler (1928) demonstrated that no special requirements were need for the spontaneous synthesis of Urea. Since then the exploration of space has further demystified organic chemistry.

Space is permeated by a tenuous “cloud” of microscopically fine particulate matter (typically referred to as “Interstellar Dust”) which contains carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and silicon. These molecules tend to be highly reactive free radicals which under normal conditions (on Earth) would react with other chemicals to form stable compounds, many similar to those found in living organisms. Further, amino acids have been discovered on celestial bodies e.g. the Murchison meteorite (Australia 1969) and Haley’s comet which was analysed from spacebourne instruments during it’s recent passage through the solar system. The Murchison meteorite was carbonaceous and carried concentrations of amino acids as high as 100 ppm, the same kind that Stanley Miller’s pre-biotic experiments produced in the 1950’s. Saturn’s satellite Titan also is believed to have “seas” composed of hydrocarbons.

With evidence such as this scientists widely agree that complex organic chemicals are not necessarily the product of life but form spontaneously by banal reaction. It is highly likely that, given the proper conditions, the first building blocks of life could arise (on Earth or elsewhere) as do simple chemicals ... spontaneously and according to the rules of simple thermodynamics.

Stanley Miller (1953), a graduate student at the University of Chicago in Harold Urey’s lab (the discoverer of Heavy Hydrogen and a widely acknowledged authority on planetary formation), designed a series of experiments to test the effect of lightening on Earth’s primitive atmosphere. On the assumption that Earth’s early atmosphere was a mixture of hydrogen, methane, ammonia and water vapour Miller found that more than 15% of the methane carbon had converted to a variety of amino acids in only a few days. Recent thought is that the atmosphere would not have been as rich in hydrogen but data from the Murchison meteorite and elsewhere strongly suggests that Miller’s results are still of significant value.

Miller’s work forms the basis of the new discipline abiotic chemistry ... the chemistry of compounds formed without life and specifically concentrating on the abiogenetic events of the early Earth. Experiments within this discipline have yielded amino acids, sugars, organic acids as well as purine & pyrimidine bases (some of the components of DNA & RNA) and other biologically significant substances. Although contrived some of the experiments give clear indication that abiogenesis is the most likely method for the formation of the early chemicals and the emergence of early life on Earth.

Conclusion
“How far in the direction of biochemical complexity the rough processes studied by abiotic chemistry may lead is not yet clear. But it seems very likely that the first building blocks of nascent life were provided by amino acids and other small organic molecules such as are known to form readily in the laboratory and on celestial bodies. To what extent these substances arose on earth or were brought in by the falling comets and asteroids that contributed to the final accretion of our planet is still being debated.” Christian de Duve

According to Miller the basic chemicals ands a reducing atmosphere are all that’s required for the formation of life. How much space dust contributed to that process is uncertain, certainly meteorites tend to feature high levels of chemicals such as hydrogen cyanide (essential to prebiotic synthesis of amino acids), but Miller feels that if they could form naturally in space then they could also do so on Earth. Ultimately, however, he feels it doesn’t really make much difference where compounds like HCN came from as long as it was present at the time and the proper conditions existed.

References
“The Probability of Abiogenesis”, Andrew Ellington (1995)
”From Primordial Soup to the Prebiotic Beach (an interview with exobiology pioneer, Dr. Stanley L. Miller, University of California San Diego )”, Sean Henahan (1996)

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Yawn!

Kyu

[Purple Rabbit]

And there are more Airbuses going to the goddamn* scrap yard than are returning from it, these friggin'* days anyway, so you see the information on your shithole* DNA is all wrong and degenerating rapidly into some lunatic fucking* atheistic cock sucking* fallacy out of hell predestined by the moronic* lord after eating an apple of some sucking ass* tree with pedantic epistemological mind blowing imbecile* impact in some cruel cunt* of a way that you idiotic submissive crap* brain doesn't understand anyhow. Anyhow, are you still there?....then screw* you. QED

(*) I could have added some mean looking smileys from the über boring collection over here but some WYSIWYG swearing is a lot more fun, much more creative and moderator proof

[Kyuuketsuki]

Stuff ...

I'm sorry? Was that aimed at me or him?

Kyu

[Purple Rabbit]

Stuff ...

I'm sorry? Was that aimed at me or him?

Kyu

Seems self-explanatory to me. What part did you miss?

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Well then, there's a reference to the scrap yard boeing hypothesis in it, a reference to information on DNA, to degenerating DNA, to some biblical garden of eden stuff, to submission to the divine, to the unfathomable way of the lord and the whole is presented as clear evidence against evolution. To enhance the effect some WYSIWYG certified swearing is added. Seems a good rebuttal of Darwin to me. On topic too, but that's pure coincidence I guess.