News you won't see in controlled mainstream media.

I wonder how much you understand yourself about recombination and epigenetics, CTD? These falsify evolution . . . how? Can you explain you ideas with specific examples please?

Yes, CTD, your position is unmovable, but then both fanatic belief and delusion are like that. Science has the capability of being moved, but the conditions are specific: the concept needs to be tested and falsified.

This is standard issue avoidance behavior, and all it shows is that you can't provide any scientific theory that has been proven. You've erected a strawman ("skunk funk"), which unlike scientific theory is not based on evidence as an ad hoc hot air argument so that you can hide behind it.

And yet you have not in any post shown that there is a significant difference in any definition of evolution or of the theory of evolution. What you bolded is the change in hereditary traits in populations from generation to generation, and it also fits Darwin's original definition of his theory, descent with modification.

What is humorous is that the meaning is the same even though the words used to describe that meaning are different, which means that if you really think all these definitions are substantially different, that you don't understand the meaning.

No, I shall think that you don't see that your position(s) have been falsified, and that sticking to them in the face of contradictory evidence is normally a sign of delusion. I shall think that attacking the messenger instead of the message when you are confronted with the evidence is normally a sign of cognitive dissonance, of inability to deal with the issue. I shall think that fabricating false fantasies about the various messengers of reality is normally a desperate attempt to portray the messengers as unreliable in order to tell yourself that the evidence is not real.

So you admit that you are clueless, but then assume that Russ could be correct when studies have actually demonstrated that his concept is false? Or are you going to say that we haven't had enough time for white people living in australia and south africa to have measured the effect of tanned parents on offspring skin coloring? Very simply put, the children are not born tanned.

And the issue of acquired muscles is straight classical Lamarckism that has specifically been falsified. Very simply put, the children are not born with more muscles than other children.

Thank you for displaying your lack of understanding of both recombination and mutation: recombination is one of many mechanisms that result in mutations.

Gene expression under different environments, and the sometimes different effects of those environments on the development of the individual organism is what epigenetics is about.

Of course when I include epigenetics in the discussion, you are quick to ridicule it.

CTD in message #254580
Or were you too busy attacking the messenger and misrepresenting the information to notice what it was about?

Enjoy.

It is indeed obvious avoidance, but you seem to think you can accuse me and divert attention. There were several issues being discussed, and the instant you saw my post where I said I wouldn't be attacking my own Skunk Funk theory, you have done nothing but harp on this. All else is to be forgotten, eh? Dream on! Most browsers have scrollbars, you know.
<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/saywha.gif" alt="" />

What I bolded was "Macroevolution requires that organisms' morphologies have changed throughout evolutionary history" You know, unstasis.

I never said it didn't sound like Lamarckism; but until I have evidence one way or another it wouldn't be prudent to make a call.

<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/lame.gif" alt="" />
Out-of-context quoting? How low are you willing to go? (Here's the original.)

I shall. I'm already pleased with the thought that as long as this thread exists, people all over the world can see what evolutionism does to a man. Some will <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/watchingtvfunny.gif" alt="" /> and some will just <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/watchingtvscary.gif" alt="" />.

Shall we change subjects once again? I note that you say "please" but tempt me with an odd question. Recombination & epigenetics are descent with modification, so you must have something else in mind, maybe 'evolution'?

I shouldn't wonder that you'd be concerned about 'evolution', but you've told us more than once that we need to let RAZD define the term for us. Anyone can see that the question makes no sense if we do so. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

It is noteworthy that these things are controlled by many complicated mechanisms in the cell which were formerly considered "junk DNA". They're not well-understood just yet, but they manipulate and regulate DNA. The desire to portray every alteration in DNA as a "mutation" has kept them from receiving any publicity, (as well as the desire to maintain the "junk DNA myth).

But it's not always so difficult to tell when something isn't a mutation. Mutations are fairly random, or the result of mutagens. Characteristics which switch back & forth in a repeatable manner aren't random. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ooo.gif" alt="" />

Still evading the issues CTD.

Yes, and here is all of what you posted on that message:

Can you point out the part where you address the message and not attack the messenger? Saying something is not coherent is not demonstrating that it is, as that woulod require you to show that the conclusions do not follow from the observations. This is just another of your flat assertions that you have failed to support.

No, for we can see macroevolution -- speciation (that is the way evolutionary biologists use the term) -- with and without "stasis" (ie "stassis" is irrelevant to whether speciation occurs), and yes, for speciation we do require evolution to occur, that is how populations become different from generation to generation. The fossil evidence for the transition from reptile to mammal for instance, shows several stages along the way, including several intermediate stages where the organisms had double jointed jaws.

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/2437/therapsd.htm
No major sudden (unless you consider 40 million years "sudden") change, nothing beyond the degree of variation we see in dogs, is necessary to explain the gradual evolution from one fossil species to the other, and often they blend so well that it is hard to distinguish where one species leaves off and another begins.

And that would be laudable if this was your normal approach to all information where your knowledge is incomplete, but it isn't.

Epigenetic effects are environmental, and they only affect the organism while it is in that environment, but it is also necessary that they have a direct effect on the development of the organism - change it from normal development - to be of any importance, otherwise it is not liable to selection. Remove the environmental factors and the epigenetic effect goes away.

Consider thalidomide and the marked effect it had on offspring during development, yet did not effect offspring when not taken during pregnancy. Nor is the effect of the offspring passed down to their offspring, because there is no effect on the genes, and their children develop normally.

http://www.acpoc.org/library/1992_01_003.asp
Tanning and muscle development are behavioral, rather than environmental, and the acquired effects are easily lost by the individual. There is no mechanism to change the genetic code by tanning or muscle development, and thus they are not passed on to the offspring, nor do these behavioral factors necessarily apply to offspring.

Certainly it is possible for the offspring to acquire the same traits with the same behavior, particularly if that behavior has a selection advantage (again see Evolution Theory Explains Diversity again), but it is equally possible for them to be avoided.

The major difference between evolutionary effects -- change in hereditary traits in populations from generation to generation -- is that the changes can keep occurring until there are variations that are not in the original population, while all the effects of behavior and environment are static: an individual with developed muscles cannot have offspring with greater and greater muscle development, and a chemical "X" child that uses chemical "X" when they are bearing offspring will have chemical "X" children and not chemical "X*X" children.

What we see in the fossil record is that change is sometimes continuous and sometimes variable, but that overall there are continued trends that cannot be due to environmental or behavioral effects.

I'll stop here to see if any of this has an effect.

Enjoy.

I don't always undertake to demonstrate the obvious. All anyone has to do is read the post, and they can see that it doesn't contain a coherent hypothesis. Quite obviously the lack thereof is a matter of the post's content. Pointing out this glaring defect is addressing the message. If you think this reflects poorly on you, you might consider taking precautions.

No? Changing morphology is either stasis or it isn't. I think most folks understand which, evobabble notwithstanding.

You act like you know all there is to know about epigenetics. I think no man possesses more than a small fraction of the knowledge.


And what you say is the exact opposite of
I think I'll continue to wait. The anti-Russ position still looks risky to me.

So change isn't due to environment now? This would be yet another defect in the stasis story. My what a tangled web you weave!<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/kookoo2.gif" alt="" />

Well, CTD, it seems you are back to just repeating assertions, and totally failing to demonstrate your thesis.

Saying this does not make it so, taking the premises (the observations) and then showing that the conclusions do not follow logically is how you actually demonstrate claims like this.

I agree, that all anyone has to do is read the post, see that it follows from the first post (you call them theory one and theory two, when the second post is just developing the points of the first and using actual observation to back it up -- what we call substantiating a position in real debate).

The fact that you don't find it coherent doesn't mean that it isn't -- only that you are unable to understand it. We know you don't understand evolution, epigenetics, recombination, Darwin's descent with modification through variation and natural selection, and a host of other things, so we just add this to the list. Nobody else complained about coherence, so we only have your word on it.

If you can't demonstrate that the logic is faulty then the logical conclusion is that the logic is valid and the problem is with the receiver. Of course cognitive dissonance plays a role here -- a normal intelligent person can seem to be stupid when confronted with contradictory evidence for a basic belief, because they just can't fit it in to their world view.

Sorry. foraminifera change gradually over millions of years, with a virtually complete record of the evolution for over 65 million years, with examples of speciation and a rather constant rate of change in hereditary traits in populations from generation to generation. Whether you call it stasis or not is irrelevant, it certainly is classic gradualistic change in morphology, and no puncuation was involved.

Pelycodus, on the other hand, show a population that is fairly stable, growing in body size gradually with time, but otherwise no significant change in morphology - the basic body plan is the same generation after generation - and then we have a speciation event where the population divides into two different populations with a rather sudden (in geological time, still takes many generations) shift of one population away from the other. If there were no fossils from the period of divergence it would seem that a second species appeared in the fossil record next to the parent population: classic punk eek, sudden change in morphology.

Change in morphology with and without stasis: ergo stasis is irrelevant, no matter what you think or what you think other people think (you do know that the appeal to popular opinion is a logical fallacy don't you?)

First off, this is equivocating Lamarck's original thesis - that environment has an effect on organisms - with "lamarckism" , the theory that acquired traits are heritable (a theory that Darwin also included, btw).

Heritable as long as the organisms remain in the environment and subject to the effect. What this means is that the effect keeps happening, generation after generation, while the organisms are in that environment, not that the effects are permanent. It is possible that neutral mutations that cause similar effects occur and are selected for along with the epigenetic effect. If so then when the population moves or the environment changes some of the effects remain, but it isn't necessary.

As I said before, being skeptical is laudable, if you are universal in your skepticism rather than use it to mask your bias. You choose not to be skeptical of the "Russ position" because it suits your bias just as you choose to be skeptical of the "anti-Russ position" because it suits your bias. Thus this isn't being skeptical, it is being biased.

Genetic change is due to mutation (including recombination changes), and not to environment, selection is dependent on how well the organism can survive and reproduce, but the environment does not cause genetic change.

No, it just demonstrates that your understanding of evolution is false.

Enjoy.

An hypothesis isn't evidence. You just like to repeatedly abuse terms. And although you claim you're not like Dawkins, your abuse of the term "cognitive dissonance" is perfectly in keeping with his program: lie and say anyone who doesn't follow your religion is mentally ill. Who can fail to see your intolerant intentions?

I think the evolutionist is forced to be intellectually dishonest when confronted by the fossil record. The "prediction" says one thing, and the record shows the opposite. Of course none of the phony "predictions" are intended to be falsifiable; they simply mock science. All I did was point out the inconsistency in the policy. That you are, or pretend to be, blind to this isn't a surprise. That you think you can fool anyone else with such nonsense is somewhat insulting.

Funny how you snipped out the parts that were directly opposing what you said, and chose to focus on this sentence instead. Coincidence?

A mutation could potentially screw up the epigenetic mechanisms? SO WHAT? A mutation could potentially screw up anything to do with genes. This doesn't make epigenetics a non-factor.

You seem dead-set on downplaying, distorting, and just plain misstating everything to do with gene expression. I suppose you could be genuinely ignorant, but in that case it would be in your interest to follow some links and learn a thing or two. Your behaviour is not consistent with this. One wonders what you see in these things that frightens you so.

Could it be that you're unable to imagine a way for these things to have evolved? I have to say it is very difficult. It might seem to require true junk DNA to evolve as a precursor, and then mutate until it finds a use. But how could selection choose in favour of extra, useless, ineffiecient clutter bogging down the metabolism of every cell in the body? And make this choice continually for who knows how many generations... until enough accumulated & mutated to start doing something which in all probability wouldn't be worthwhile on the first try, or even the first billion tries.

Even then, how could this junk evolve the knowledge to supervise the rest of the DNA properly? Would it not see the subordinate parts as either doing their job or not? How could it learn that some adaptations are better in some situations, when to apply them, when not to apply them?

Yes, that is a tough question. Anyone who could truly answer would have to know how to build an autonomously self-programming computer (and then some). But evading it won't answer it. You should face epigenetics and recombination head-on, and lie through your teeth. Study Huxley if Darwin's examples don't inspire you.

You misunderstand the situation. When Russ saidThis indicated to me that he's looked into the matter. The anti-Russ argument is knee-jerk call it "Lamarckism" and write it off.

You then proceeded to make statements which directly contradicted the information in my links, doing just what Russ said you must.

Now any educated person (and at this point, with the links & all there's no need to be otherwise) can see that although Russ' examples resemble Lamarckism, one cannot be certain that they are of the type that's been demonstrated not to occur. We have 3 evolutionists & a cheerleader who still haven't produced any evidence that they are of this type rather than epigenetic.

Surely I cannot be expected to conclude either way until I have evidence. Even more surely, if anyone does expect this of me, I intend to disappoint.

Still dodging CTD.

Nor have I said that hypothesis are evidence or fact, so this is just another red herring comment designed to avoid the real issue.

Observations are evidence, evidence of the natural world that surrounds us every day.

Nor are conclusions "evidence" -- conclusions based on those observations are either valid or invalid, depending on (1) the truth of the observations and (2) the logical structure of the argument.

To deal with the argument you need to show that either (1) the observations are false or (2) that the logic is faulty and the conclusions do not follow from the premises (which here are the observations).

The observation that no two individual organisms are identical is not an hypothesis, but an observation of the evidence of the natural world that surrounds us every day.

The observation that some of the differences between individual organisms are hereditary (genetic, genotype), some are due to environmental effects (affect development, phenotype), and some are acquired by the organisms (behavioral, learned, individual traits, memes), is not an hypothesis, but an observation of the evidence of the natural world that surrounds us every day. I believe Mendel figured this one out.

The observation that some (not all) of the difference between organisms enable some (not all) of the organisms to survive and breed more than others, is not an hypothesis, but an observation of the evidence of the natural world that surrounds us every day.

The observation that to affect the whole populations of organisms, traits need to be passed from one generation to the next. Genetic traits are passed by genes, environmental traits are passed by the environment, learned traits are passed by memes. Again, this is not an hypothesis, but an observation of the evidence of the natural world that surrounds us every day.

The conclusion that hereditary traits that result in differences that enable some organisms to survive and breed better, will become more common in following generations of those organisms than hereditary traits that don't, or that hinder survival and breeding, and evolution - the change in hereditary traits in populations from generation to generation - will occur, is a testable hypothesis based on the observations.

The problem with these facile portrayals of yours is that they fail to include the fact that everyone is susceptible to cognitive dissonance, nor is it necessarily equated with mental illness. I would be surprised if there were any top scientiest that had not had to deal with cognitive dissonance, particularly when confronted with a new theory. The effects of cognitive dissonance are the same to anyone who has run into it. The question is how a person reacts when confronted with contradictory evidence.

Well, once again we have the problem CTD, that you can say any dang thing you like (and frequently do), but it doesn't mean squat unless you can demonstrate evidence for your position (which you invariably (conveniently ignore?) fail to do). Perhaps you can explain how the fossil record of over 65 million years of foraminifera fossils, showing (relatively) constant change, coupled with "hundreds" of speciation events - places in the evidence where lineages divide from a parent population into different daughter populations, ... perhaps you can explain how this requires "intellectual dishonesty" in order for a scientist to say that it shows the process of evolution, rather than just make a blind unsupported assertion.

Do you mean that you think the prediction you quoted is false?

Do you think this has NOT happened? Especially when they go on to LIST EXAMPLES?

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section5.html
Do you claim that those are NOT morphological changes?

The part that I bolded is of particular note, because it also addresses the small degree of variation that is needed for macroevolution as defined by evolutionary biologists in discussing biological evolution (rather than creationists discussing straw man falsehoods).

And yet you have not shone that a single one of the predictions on that website cannot be falsified by evidence that contradicts it. Even with this one you have not shone that actual evidence showing an absence of morphological change, and then that speciation occurred, would falsify the prediction. The fact that this is extremely unlikely does not mean that it is not a falsifiable prediction, just that the theory is very robust due to the prevalence of even everyday experience and observation matching the predictions. No, I am not blind, I just don't confuse evidence with hypothesis and hypothesis with theory.

The fact that rocks keep falling to the ground when you drop them does not mean that the theory of gravity is not falsifiable by one rock NOT falling. Our experience with gravity is so thorough that we do not expect to see this falsification test happen, but that does NOT mean that it would NOT invalidate the theory if it did. Whether you "like it" or not, our everyday experience with evolution is the same: we do not expect to see it falsified, but that does not mean that it won't/can't happen, just that it is as unlikely as floating rocks.

This is a typical CTD argument -- introduce a red herring, and then claim your points are not addressed when the red herrings aren't followed. The point was that "Lamarckism" is defined as the theory of acquired characteristecs being hereditary, while one of Lamarcks OTHER theories says that environment can affect the development of organisms.

The fact that what Russ was talking about was the heredity of acquired characteristics -- tanned skin and developed muscles -- and NOT epigenetics or the (Lamarckian) effect of environment on the development of organisms. Thus any discussion of epigenetics or (Lamarckian) effects of environment on the development of organisms does not contradict the argument that Lamarckism -- the heredity of acquired characteristics -- has been falsified, proven to be false, invalidated.

Exactly NOT what I said. What I said was that during periods where epigentic factors were modifying development that mutations could occur that would be neutral to that development, but which would result in the same development when the epigenetic factors were removed. There would be no selection against those mutations. Or any other mutations rendered neutral by the epigenetic effect.

Not in the quotes you mentioned, but in your misinterpretations of them.

You just contradicted yourself, totally, and now we are back to hereditary traits in genes and away from epigenetics. What this shows is that you are just making up ad hoc concepts whether they are based on reality or your imagination, and your only purpose is to "downplaying, distorting, and just plain misstating everything to do with" evolutionary biology.

Except that you have, and you have done so by ignoring the evidence.

Enjoy.

The great irony about this conversation is that the evidence that keeps getting presented in support of evolution is based on faith, yet the disciples fail to see this fact.

For this reason...

Evolutionists will wake up one day and realize that those who have led them—those who have filled their pliable minds with eccentric ideas of meaninglessness—will abandon them for a new whim.

The difference between a right conclusion and a blight error is in knowing who to believe.

OK Russ, then give me your alternative explanation for just one of the pieces of evidence produced here. There is a complete fossil record for foraminifera which spans millions of years. No gaps. I suggest you either take some time to explain specifically how evidence like this is "faith," or refrain from making sweeping unsupported generalisations.

And the silence is deafening.

I'm also curious how tanned skin can be hereditary in any way when you continually shed skin to the extent that in 3 to 4 weeks you have a completely new epidermis, and the replacement cells being formed by cell division the same as in bacterial asexual reproduction, from a depth that does not get tanned.

How does the "tanned skin information" get preserved Russ?

Enjoy.

I never thought of it that way before. Shouldn't it be that no skin information is hereditary then? Hair can be fairly transient as well. Is this why there are hairless dogs & cats?

Still doesn't explain how any creature can have skin... Tough riddle there.

Hey CTD.

No, because hereditary traits can affect how skin looks and behaves in the sun - variations is color (including mottled), variations in susceptibility to burn vs tan, as well as texture can be due to genes, and thus the results of those genetic traits on the developed organism are susceptible to selection with different results in different ecologies. They can also play a role in sexual selection. Hair the same.

All skin is, basically, is a colony of cells, not that different from sponges.

http://ebiomedia.com/prod/BOsponges.html
There are some primitive sponges that you can put through a screen, breaking them up into small bits, and they will reassemble into a colony.

Enjoy.

"All skin is...colony of cells."

Wow.

This is exactly the kind of "academic" -license that I distance myself from. It is not science.

There is a huge difference between news and editorials. We need to learn to recognize the difference.

In a very short concept:

It would be by a complex system of information retrieval, storage, and transmittal...

...very complex.

Thanks Russ,

In other words, you don't have a clue to how it could be accomplished, and so you invoke magic\fantasy.

Enjoy.

Hi Russ, still not looking at the facts?



http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/skin.aspx
Melanin is produced to protect skin against UV, and this is what "tan" is -- more melanin in the skin cells, the cells that are continuously shed and replaced from cells deeper in the skin that are not tanned. Without continual exposure all tans fade.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin#Epidermis
What this means is that the cells that get tanned are shed in continuous process that replaces the skin every 3 to 4 weeks, and they are replaced by cells that are not tanned and do not have your tanned "information" ...

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitosis
... in other words, skin cells reproduce in exactly the same way that bacterial cells reproduce, whether in colonies or as single cell organisms.

It is always humorous to see people seize on a comment to mock, in order to avoid dealing the the issue and the evidence that shows their assertions are false.

Enjoy.

Doesn't sound like a "colony of cells" to me. More like an integrated, well-planned structure.

The same word is used, but there are some pretty important differences.

Bacteria and other single-celled lifeforms have mechanisms which shuffle their DNA when they reproduce, so that they are not all identical. The cells which make up a body try to make perfect duplicates as replacements, unless some adaptive mechanism is directing them to do otherwise.

A well verified, but seldom stated result of the shuffling of the bacteria's genetic material is that a small percentage of bacteria always have been and always will be resistant to antibiotics.

Again you have failed to realize what you have implied yourself...that we are not as intelligent as you. In fact, you imply it in this very post.

Since you obviously realize that you are far more educated and bright than we are, you must also understand that we cannot always follow your logic.
So, with that in mind, could you provide some more detail about the transmission of tanned skin from one generation to the next?
How is the tanned skin information retrieved within the parents?
How is it stored?
What is the mechanism of transmittal?

You go Bex......

Hi Russ.

I'm a little confused still regarding pigmentation and such. If I spend several months tanning and then conceive a child, only to lose my tan weeks later from no longer spending time in the sun, what natural pigmentation will my child have?

I understand that you have done your homework and respect that fact. I, admittedly, have not, which is why I am asking you for your input here. So, if you please, what skin tone will a child inherit if a person is tan while conceiving? Moreover, if I lose my tan will my child then lose their tan as well? What happens if a mother gets tan halfway through the 9 month pregnancy? Will the child become half tan? Will only parts of their body be tan while others remain pale?

I look forward to your feedback. Anything will suffice. If you have any links to Kent Hovind videos or links to Born Again Christian sites, etc., which explain how inheriting tan skin works I would be only too happy to read it.

Oh - I almost forgot, is there a difference between a parent who tans in a sunbed versus outside? Does this affect the outcome of the "tanned" child in question? Thanks again.

Hi CTD



The name of the process is mutation. Genes mutate during reproduction because the reproduction is imperfect, and thus does not result in perfect copies, clones, of the parent organism.

This is the same process that occurs in reproduction of multicellular organisms.

They are perfect except where they are not perfect: a curious circular and meaningless answer, but irrelevant because it too is wrong. Cells don't "try" to do anything in the usual sense of "try" - what they do is live reproduce and die like bacterial cells. They reproduce by mitosis, the same process used for bacterial cells reproduction. Cells that make up the body are not perfect duplicates, they are just as susceptible to reproduction mutations as bacterial cells.

The same word is used because the process is identical.

Which is just another way to describe a colony of cells.

Yes, that is the benefit of have several variations due to neutral mutations within populations that accumulate over time. The process whereby most of the population dies and only those that are resistant survive is called natural selection: they pass on their antibiotic resistant genes to their offspring, something the dead bacteria are not capable of doing, eh?

Thanks for giving us a good example of evolution in action.

Enjoy.

Hi Pwcca,


Interesting questions, and it will be interesting to see Russ's answers. Let me add another:

If tans are hereditary does that mean that boys will inherit their mothers tan lines? I've never seen a boy with a bikini top tan.

Enjoy.

The name of the process is Recombination. Errors in recombination are mutations. But the evomachine attempts to claim all recombination is 'mutation'. Why? Because (by very impressive design) recombination improves fitness. Their favorite way to claim 'beneficial mutation' occurs is to distort things. Beneficial recombination certainly occurs, but this IS NOT MUTATION.

I have elsewhere provided a handful of links about recombination, and those who know what it is will be immunized against your deception.

They are alive. They try to do many things. The word is appropriate and accurate.

That you should dispute whether life 'tries' to do things just shows your dedication a sad, meaningless philosophy.

The same word is used for both processes, but they are only superficially the same. There is generally no mechanism in the cells of a body which shuffles genetic information in order to ensure variety.

An exception is the white blood cells. When needed, they shuffle like mad to try to find a better set-up to fight disease. And the reason immunization works, is because information is stored on every past disease they have ever had to fight. I don't know exactly how many details have been discovered recently about the ingenious workings of the immune system, but everything I do know is just amazing.

Why don't you get some education? Or integrity, whichever you're lacking.

What's so integrated about the typical group of single-celled creatures? What planned structures do they form? As I mentioned in
( http://herballure.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=36819#Post36819)
there is an exception which has been discovered. The remarkable thing about slime molds is that they are an exception. Their behaviour isn't seen in other single-celled life. God has shown that He can teach even the humblest life forms to do amazing things.

Thanks for demonstrating how evolutinism must distort the truth. Resistance is a design feature. A simple way to figure out if something is the result of random mutation or designed recombination is to see if it regularly repeats. By definition, random mutation doesn't do this. But since resistance is the result of recombination, it will always turn up. The same "experiments" get the same results. It couldn't get much more Mendelian, or much less Darwinian.

(See my "Most Arrogant Lie" thread if you've been conned into thinking the two aren't antithetical.)

I would also caution anyone that the known differences between single-celled life and multiple-celled life are not mentioned 99% of the time when evolutionists are propagandizing. Any ignorance about the distinctions will always be exploited. When one knows which is which, these deceptions are... it would be an understatement to say "easy to spot". They jump right up in your face waving flags and sounding sirens.

This is one place I would have to draw the line when it comes to giving the benefit of the doubt. Anyone who knows about recombination, really knows what it means - they just have to be a liar to believe in evolutionism; that's my opinion. There's no way I can attribute it to ignorance, and one cannot reconcile two such antithetical things. It seems to me that the one which has actually been observed must be the one that exists in reality.

Hey CTD,

This is you playing silly word games to fool yourself -- it is the same process, whichever way the mutation trends (beneficial to deleterious), recombination is just random mixing of genetic material during the reproduction of the genes in sexual reproduction (meiosis), due to the fact that replication is imperfect. We also have point mutations, where single amino acids are replaced with another amino acid, and these too occur randomly.

http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/AB/BC/Genetic_Recombination.php
That's it in a nutshell: the mix of genes changes during replication, whether that change is beneficial, neutral or deleterious will depend on the ecology and other factors affecting growth, survival and reproduction ... ie - natural selection.

Recombination is also part of the process of meiosis, and not mitosis, which is the way skin cells reproduce
We were talking about how skin cells are like bacterial colonies, and how they even reproduce the same way, by mitosis, so when you introducing recombination this means either (1) you are trying to distract people with a different process or (2) you don't understand that recombination is not part of skin cell reproduction. Or both.

Which doesn't keep you from being wrong because you misrepresent the material, nor does it keep you from not addressing the issue of skin cells reproducing by mitosis, a process that does not involve recombination.

Correct, it is not done "in order to ensure variety" - it ensures variety because it is random, because replication is not perfect. Imperfect replication necessarily result in variety, some of which are beneficial, some of which are neutral and some of which are deleterious. We can actually watch and count and measure these so we do know that they fall across the spectrum from beneficial to deleterious.

They make antibodies for foreign proteins and cells, and there is nothing magical about it. Sometimes they make a "mistake" and make antibodies for parts of the parent organism, and this is part of why organ rejection is a major problem in transplants. When sever enough the white blood cells can cause death by attacking the body rather than a disease.

Of course this is not what they are "trying" to do - it is just what they do as a part of living, eating and reproducing cells.

And yet you are so impressed by what white blood cells accomplish.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/109913378/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
Obviously you have not looked closely at many colonial organisms, including sponges (remember sponges? They are part of the issue under discussion here), which have specialized tasks and share resources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvox
That looks pretty integrated to me, working toward a common goal and sharing the results.

From there we can go to sponges:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponge
Again there is a division of tasks and some cells have different tasks than others, and they work as a community.

Or we can look at Siphonophorae
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonophore
Or at Chondrophores
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chondrophore
Seems to me that these colonial single cell organisms are more complex than skin ... so maybe I was overstating the case ...

Since we are here talking about bacteria, and in particular bacteria that reproduce by mitosis and not by meiosis (sexual reproduction), and since we know that recombination is a part of meiosis (in particular for the formation of sex cells), we know that you either (1) are telling falsehoods, or (2) you really do not understand what you are talking about. Or both.

We can also test the bacterial colonies to see if the exact same mutation arises in each colony that develops resistance (the ones that die are mute on the subject, except to say that there was no magic there). We see that the mutations are different, and thus are not, cannot be, due to some magic handwaving hypothetical pre-program function.

And yet you are wrong in your description and wrong in your result. You mix up sexual reproduction with asexual reproduction, and you ignore cases where whole colonies perish when subject to the antibiotics to focus on only those that survive. You claim there is some magic mechanism that allows these colonies to survive, while ignoring the fact that different colonies, with different mutations to draw from, survive for different reasons.

The reason they survive is evolution, pure and simple: variation due to mutations, natural selection culling the ones not adapted and allowing those that have a beneficial mutation, no matter what it is, to survive.

Enjoy.

Sorry to go off topic, but can I just ask where you learned so much about these little critters, RAZD? That was a fascinating post. I had no idea that the Portuguese man o' war was actually a colony. (It features prominently in a Sherlock Holmes story.) I didn't actually know, either, that single-celled organisms tend to co-operate to this extent. But it does lend support to the idea which intrigues me, that multicellular organisms can be seen as collections of symbiotic colonies of cells as well, which joined together in ages past because it was beneficial for them to specialise and therefore expend less energy on survival.

I've learned a lot from your posts here, and from the links you've provided. Thanks.

An outright lie. Recombination is not mutation, not random, and it is absolutely a design feature of life.

The follow-up is a lie of omission. And the source indicates this.
There are at least 3 other forms of recombination. My memory's not the best, but RAZD sure intends to leave a lot out of the picture. Anyone who wants can research this themselves, although some of the sites use a lot of jargon to make things confusing. And few, if any, sites attempt to give a clear picture of the whole topic. Recombination really is a route to immunity from all forms of evosickness.

Duh, what did I say? Did I say skin cells reproduce the same as bacteria? No. You play Bugs Bunny again. But I'm no Daffy Duck, and I don't think you're fooling even your pals. Well, maybe Linear...

No you can't. And you wouldn't do it honestly if you could.

LOL! The evolutionists have been trying to fool folks into thinking the white blood cells mutate and evolve for some time now. You not only don't follow creation science, you don't even keep up with your own hypemongers. Of course the downside is that no evolution is involved - just wonderful design.

Surprised you posted some of what followed. Perhaps a little review is in order.
Not bad until they threw a bone to the priesthood with that last sentence. Talk about a backwards conclusion! None of those design features are compatible with evomyths.

The evomyth is that these critters can't "try" to do anything, yet they even communicate and work as a team.

Still, they're not integrated at the same level as an organ. But I'll leave that one for folks to figure out.

...for now. It's tempting to see how many absolutely unevolvable counter examples you'd produce.

Funny that you call scientific discoveries "magic". "Mutations" - what a joke. Sad that so many are fooled, but just a few wee drops of education are all one needs. Yes, you can find scores of evosources & decievees who think immunity is the result of mutation. Won't make it so.

The experiments themselves give lie to it! It's been repeated countless times: expose a large enough group of bacteria to antibiotics, and you'll always get a resistant population. They've even tried growing "clonal" groups from non-resistant bacteria; but this fails too, because the bacteria are designed to always produce (think Mendel) a small minority of resistant offspring.

One can find the truth about recombination on the internet, but as I shall explain, even before the internet one could have figured some of it out.
No! I unmix the evohype, that's what I do. It has been known for a long time that bacteria don't produce clones, and that this is by design - not some piddly defects.

God has provided built-in variety for all kinds of creatures - not just those that reproduce sexually.

Actually, I seem to recall 4 "variants" of bacteria which are resistant, and 3 of the 4 are clearly not mutant. The one that (they pray to Darwin) might be mutant was some sort of compounding effect on a resistant type that made it even more resistant. I suspect they'll prefer not to solve the mystery, as evolutionism waxes in ignorance & wanes in the presence of information.

The reason they survive is that they're resistant. The reason the others die is because they're poisoned. Poisoning a rat isn't 'natural selection' either, and your paintbrush can't make it so. Killing any lifeform in a lab is 'artificial selection', or in plain English, killing.

And who'd bother killing all these bacteria if they didn't already know some were probably going to survive? Shoot, if they just wanted 'em dead, fire works fine. Now they can't know what random mutations may or may not be present, so by simple deduction, we can figure out what they know. Actions always speak louder than words, RAZD. Even clear, simple words like "no new taxes." Where does that leave your gibberish?

You have evidence that recombination is not affected by random variables? As you know simply saying someone is lying is not evidence that they are actually lying.
Can we also assume that by "design feature" you mean that you can substantiate the process by which the design occurred?

Of course, the usual insult.


Are you just calling RAZD dishonest or does the "you" in your statement refer to all microbiologists? You, of course have some sort of evidence to back up your claim that mutations in the replication process cannot be counted nor can their affect on the resultant organism be categorized.
If you really can't back up your claim, should we consider that fact in our judgment of your honesty?


Then you claim that there are no cases where the immune system attacks its own body? Perhaps you are saying that white blood cells don't reproduce with mutations? You have evidence for this I'm sure. Your reason for not presenting it is......???

Well, CTD, denial is once again rearing it's head.

Which would be easy to demonstrate with actual evidence if you had any.

Here's only one of the many logical problem you are faced with: recombination can cause one set of genes to switch with another during meiosis, and in the process produce 1 out of 4 possible sex cells, all with an equal probability of being incorporated into a new organism (very small). Thus your designed recombination can result in absolutely no effect on the organism being produced, because it was not one involved in actual reproduction. Now you may call a random probability that is less than flipping a coin "design", but then you would be just fooling yourself eh?

And you are still not addressing the fact that we are talking about skin cell reproduction, which occurs by mitosis, the same method of reproduction of bacterial cells.

So your "outrage" (whether feigned or not) is irrelevant and just another attempt at distraction from the issue: skin cells reproduce like bacterial cells.

Really? You do know that you can google a topic or use wikipedia to refresh those aging gray cells, yes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_recombination
That's a total of 3, with one being artificial, one being cross-over during sexual reproduction, and the last being rare cases of mitotic recombination:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitotic_recombination
Even this kind of recombination does not occur all kinds of cells. In all cases, however, it is a form of mutation, change, to the DNA of an organism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation
Notice the reference to somatic cells here and in the previous section.

Thus the only time recombination is passed on to descendents is when it occurs in sex cell reproduction in sexual species during meiosis. It is, of course, possible that I overstated the case, but the fact remains: recombination is one type of genetic mutation, and no amount of howling on your part will change that simple fact.

Actually it has been done, many times, in the process of doing normal lab experiments in biology. The fact that you cannot accept this reality is not the fault of the facts, but of your cognitive dissonance.

For instance, Richard Lenski of Michigan State University is doing it:

This experiment demonstrates two beneficial mutations measured and counted in 31,500 generations. Of course, given that the first one was neutral until the second made it beneficial, it is entirely possible that many mutations are missed in the counting and measuring, but that does not change the fact that we can count and measure mutations that fall across the spectrum from beneficial to deleterious.

Curiously, I know from personal experience that you are absolutely wrong. I am a survivor of Lymphoma, a cancer where your white blood cells mutate and became cancerous and - if ignored - will kill you. You, on the other hand, are foolish and ignorant if you think that your obviously ill-informed opinion means squat about reality.

Which they can do by looking at the evidence of other colonial life forms that I listed and which you have conveniently ignored.

Curiously, the fact that you ignore Siphonophores and Chondrophores does not make them go away nor force them to behave in uncoordinated ways that don't resemble organs. And they are not alone.

So your constant avoiding of issues and your almost inevitable failure to confront the evidence that contradicts your arguments shouts that you have no real response to the objective evidence of reality.

Yet, curiously, you can take a parent population, generate offspring from it (whether rats or mice or bacteria is irrelevant) and subject the parent population to your "poison" and kill every last one. Then repeat the same with the offspring population/s, and you will find that a mutation occurs that allows the organism to survive. Maybe not the first generation, maybe not the second, but eventually.

This is just like Richard Lenski's (above), or Barry Hall's (and many other) experiments where an ability arises in a daughter generation that did not exist in the parent population.

Because that is how science is done, CTD, hypothesis are tested against reality. It is what makes it different from opinion based on faith and mythology.

Enjoy.

So I need to repost the same links so they can be ignored?

Ah, people can look these things up? Why then should I repost the links? Please make up your mind before you offer advice.

And for the record, I recommend folks doing their own research on this. Shortcuts like wiki aren't the best route, either. I don't think I need to post links to evosites where they conspire to edit bias and disinformation into wiki (and worse), and even an honest researcher could settle for a superficial view which omits the more important aspects.

There is more than one type of recombination, and most sources focus on one type exclusively. Add up all the currently-known types and phases (recombination ensures that each sperm and each egg is an individual, even before the recombination stage which occurs at conception), add in gene expression, and one can get a picture of the real source of variety.

And you need to read your own sources.

You want folks to believe I'm making up meiotic recombination, right? Mighty clumbsy.

and
Another "creationist myth", gene expression, is real too. Notice that gene expression and recombination work as a tag team to help life efficiently adapt to its surroundings.

Even if one could spare a few hundred thousand years waiting for just the right magic mutation to crop up, there's no need. Usually within a couple or three generations the adaptations are provided from pre-existing DNA already designed to deal with the contingency.

Now you try to redefine 'mutations' to include recombination, just in case folks discover recombination is real. Fat chance!

I'm telling you this won't work. Even the vast majority of evolutionists recognize that recombination isn't mutation (that is, those evolutionists who know that there is such a thing as recombination).

All anyone has is guesstimates of mutation rates. They can't count them accurately at all, let alone evaluate them.

This is one of the silliest red herrings in recent memory. And I note that rather than providing counts of mutations, you provide counts of critters who have the mutation. Um, that ain't the same thing.

That doesn't sound like evolution to me.

You snipped that out just to make it look like I can be talked down to by the likes of yourself? Classic!

Lots of denial, CTD. Lots of mockery.

Still no evidence that tans are hereditary.

Still no evidence that skin does not reproduce by mitosis, just like bacteria.

Still no reply on the many organisms that form colonies that act as an integrated whole.

Still trying to distract people away from your failure to deal with the issue.

Curiously, reality is still unimpressed by your opinion.

And the "pre-existing DNA" is due to mutations that have spread through a population because they are beneficial, or neutral, or not significantly deleterious enough to entirely prevent survival or reproduction.

Again, the issue is not whether you can count every single mutation and categorize it properly as beneficial, neutral or deleterious, the issue is that we can identify mutations that fall across the spectrum from beneficial to deleterious.

You continue to avoid the issue.

Let me rephrase my previous comment:

It is, of course, possible that I overstated the case, but the fact remains: recombination is one type of genetic change, and no amount of howling on your part will change that simple fact.

The fact also remains that the result of recombination can be beneficial, neutral or deleterious.

The fact also remains that this is not a mechanism to make tans hereditary.

The fact also remains that this does not effect the reproduction of skin cells in any way that renders it different from the way bacteria reproduce - by mitosis.

Want to address the issue?

Enjoy.

For those who don't have much time to spare, there is one simple shortcut which will help one start to understand the relative magnitudes & speeds of recombination vs. mutation.

Look at a large family. Note the differences between siblings. Far less than one per cent of these differences are due to mutation. The differences you see (a.k.a. variety) are overwhelmingly the result of recombination.

May not sound like a big deal, but it's more than enough to shut down any version of evolutionism I've ever encountered. The environment is supposed to 'favour' this or that, say tallness for example. Will tallness show up as a result of recombination? You bet! And quickly. Will it show up as a result of mutation? It could. How many generations are you prepared to wait? How many is the environment going to wait?

It's not hard at all to see that even if one imagines beneficial mutations, they can't get any traction, and the race is over before they even reach the starting gate.

Now factor in gene expression: the capacity for coded information to lie dormant for centuries just waiting until it's needed. Then "whoop there it is!" How can mutation compete with that? No way! Lifeforms adapt to their environments by design. These are all things which have been observed, and they handily eliminate the need for & possibility of unobserved mythological conceptions.

Note also that in purebred animals, there is much less variety. Much of the information has been bred out of these creatures, which is why they all look alike and tend to be vulnerable to the same diseases. Inbreeding also diminishes genetic information.

It's not hard at all to see why evolutionists view(ed) genetics as the antithesis of Darwinism. It's a xor deal, unless you can buy Hegel's nonsense, and that obviously takes effort and intent to deceive oneself.

Edit:
One should be aware when reading the hype, that most of the time, the results of recombination and gene expression are reported as "mutations". If you have time, look into some of these for yourself & be prepared to laugh. You'll even see cases where highly "educated" biologists get it totally wrong - which just shows the extent to which the truth of recombination is kept out of their college courses. You will see it, and you will know it; it doesn't take all that much education - just factual, accurate, simple knowledge.

And we still have no evidence that tanning is hereditary, that skin cells don't reproduce by mitosis, or that simple single cell organisms don't form simple multi-cell colonies that can act in unison with different cells taking on special tasks compared to other cells.

In other words, we still have no evidence for any of the arguments made by Russ or CTD.

The big problem with this whole argument though, is that before you can mix existing different alleles you have to make them.

Mutation makes them. And it has been demonstrated. That "far less than one per cent of these differences" is more than enough to accumulate over time. One hundred generations produces much more than 100 times the mutation rate, because the mutation rate applies to every member of the population.

We have also seen where such mutations have provided an immediate benefit to the organisms whenever they are able to use a new food source, a type of beneficial mutation that is recorded many times in lab experiments and in the wild.

CTD's focus on recombination is nothing but a red-herring argument. He once again ignores the issues.

Enjoy.

Hi again CTD
Hello everyone

The problem I’ve found with CTD’s arguments is that he, purposefully or otherwise, does not actually understand what the Theory of Evolution (ToE) actually says. He has, on another forum, presented evidence that directly supports ToE while claiming that it contradicts it while ignoring direct evidence that contradicts his claims. This argument is a case in point. In a post to another board long before his last post here I gave him links and details of bacterial experiments in which single bacteria are bread up and grown over many generations and then subjected to environmental challenges. These experiments start with exactly zero genetic variation as bacteria don’t even have the two parallel DNA strands that we have and given that the experiments started with just one individual all the variability we see, which is a huge amount, throughout these experiments has been ‘invented’ by mutation and selection. He did not comment on these experiments and then he makes statements such as those above on this forum which totally ignore this evidence. Is he ignoring the evidence? Did he not understand it? Which is it CTD?

In one of his most telling posts to date CTD presented a list of accumulated genetic defects as proof that ToE is untenable. Upon examining the list I found that it was exactly what ToE predicts, it was focused exclusively on creatures for which selection pressure had been dramatically reduced thus the weeding out factor, natural selection, which normally removes such mutations was not working at least not to anywhere near the extent that it would for species under strong selection pressure. His list documented inherited genetic disorders in humans and domestic animals for whom modern medicine and supportive care significantly reduce selection pressure.

Your last post CTD again ignores what ToE says when you complain that recombination makes a bigger difference than mutation so mutation will be swamped. Recombination of existing alleles will produce larger effects in the short term than mutations on average as there is a large pool of them in many populations to select from but there are limits to how far recombination can move a species. There may be 20 genes’ that code for neck length but even if all the ‘long’ alleles are combined in one creature you won’t get a giraffe. Once the extreme limit has been reached mutation is necessary for creatures to move beyond that boundary and such mutations have been observed so we know that they occur. The most obvious example is in those bacterial experiments that I pointed out to you earlier where there is no recombination at all so all the change is due to mutation. In most spices a combination of mutation and recombination is needed.

In a clear proof that your world view is unfounded lets look at a simple example. If we were to accept, for the sake of argument, that the genesis account of our origins is real humans can have exactly four alleles at any locus given that we descend from just two individuals. The fact that we have hundreds in some loci proves that either mutation is real or we did not start out from just two individuals. Which do you think is more probable CTD? Do we throw out your complaints against mutation or do we throw out genesis as they can’t both be true?

In Reason

Russell

Hey Russel, welcome to the fray.

My opinion is that this condition is common with many people, a product of education that has been neutered to appease christians in general and vocal YEC types in specific. Science doesn't appease opinion, but public pressure pushes school boards to make political decisions.

Another factor is cognitive dissonance, where changing strongly held beliefs are resisted, such as that the earth is young, in spite of worlds of evidence to the contrary. This leads people to become convince that the contradictory evidence is false and that the people presenting it are part of a massive conspiracy to corrupt information, a position that you commonly see among YEC types, but this is not an exclusive reaction. Cognitive dissonance affects everyone with strongly held beliefs.

A third factor, imho, is that logical thinking is not taught, and thus people do not recognize arguments that are fallacies. Thus you have many non-sequitur, ad hominum, arguments from incredulity, straw men, red herring, arguments from authority, and other logical fallacies, and little in the way of arguments supported by evidence and valid logical structure. Again, this condition is not specific with YEC types, but it does seem to be readily apparent in many YEC arguments.

We can add this to the ever growing list of (contradictory) evidence that remains unanswered

This is also a general pattern with cognitive dissonance, and typically the person will claim that they answered this previously ("scroll up and read"), because - to avoid the conflict caused by the dissonant information - they convince themselves that they have dealt with the issue.

Enjoy.

Evolution Redefined...

You guys are really skilled at stoking each other, but then again, denial works better with a support group.

Another video, Russ? May I ask why you no longer seem to be writing your own words here?

I started watching this and it began with an out-of-context quotation from Colin Patterson which he himself acknowledges as such; you can find detailed information about the true context of the quote, as well as ample evidence that Patterson is in no way saying that there are no trnasitional forms, here.

Your speaker then goes on to begin quoting Stephen J. Gould, another favourite target of creationist quote mines. Can't be asked to listen to the thousandth creationist quote mine there.

I don't understand why creationists here think that out-of-context quotes from scientists proves anything. First, appealing to quotes in this way is a logical fallacy called argument from authority. Second, it is a misrepresentation of what the person actually said -- it would be like me going through here and deliberately cherry-picking things creationists have said in order to make it look as if they are presenting a totally different position, for example -- and third, the implication here seems to be, in the case of people like Gould, that scientists are conspiratorial liars who occasionally are "tripped up" by their own words in revealing the truth.

No reasonable person is going to buy any of it. Now, are there any salient points in the vid that you'd like to summarise, Russ? Anything to do with any of the subjects under discussion in this particular thread?

lol. the support group has just grown. Thanks for the link Russ. 10 minutes and potent.

Hey Russ, nice to see you back on the thread to answer those pesky questions from your last assertions.

Ah yes, when you can't answer the questions, attack the character rather than the message. It's called the ad hominem logical fallacy.

Still no answer on how tanning is hereditary eh? or muscle building?

Enjoy.

I'd like to join your "support group" RAZD. Perhaps if two people ask we can get an answer.

Hi, Russ. How've you been? Great to see you back and involved in this forum. Do you recall awhile back commenting that a tanned hard-working farmer who has children will produce tanned, muscular children, thus indicating that it's merely a form of "adaptation" (if you will) and not evolution?

I understand that you are both a Christian and a creationist because the facts have led you there, that the theory of evolution is absurd. Therefore, could I beg you to shed the light for me so that I too may follow your path? In order to do this, I just need to start with finding out how a tanned parent will produce tanned offspring, as well as a muscular parent producing muscular offspring. Does it come from the father or the mother? If I start tanning now and my wife conceives, will this suffice for my child to acquire my tan? I'm very confused how this works. Would you kindly expound on this for me?

If discussing this here is considered a derail, I'll happily start a new thread so as not to offend anyone. Please just let me know. I understand you're a busy man, I am as well. That being said, when you find the time I'd be only too happy for you to answer my questions. I really hate to bother you and I have no intention of entering lengthy debates about this. I just need to be pointed in the right direction. Does Kent Hovind have any Youtube videos out there explaining this phenomenon? Are there any other links you can direct me to? Thanks in advance!

Wiki lists the " Tenets of the Modern Synthesis "
Seems not everything the High Priests decree makes its way down to the lay masses. Purposefully or otherwise...

You've been part of the "support group" for ages, cheerleading on the sidelines.

Hi CTD

Does that have anything to do with what I said?

Does it explain why you present clear evidence in line with ToE yet claim that it contradicts ToE?

What I’m suggesting is not that you can’t cut and past summaries of ToE but rather that you don’t actually understand what they say. Most eight year olds can cut and paste.

In Reason

Russell

How old must one be to understand that bold indicates emphasis?

And by the way, that wasn't cut & paste. It was copy & paste. I don't revise wiki.

Hi CTD

Well I got that when I was in primary school. I have no idea when most people learn it.

So in what way did that copy and paste answer what I had said? How does it show that you actually understand ToE? It's easy enough to copy other people's words, harder to show personal understanding of them. It’s an especially bad sign when you quote 70 year old ideas as if they were the current understanding of the field.

Recombination and crossover during meiosis mix and match not only genes but parts of gene’s to produce sequences that have never existed before. This alone has been shown to be enough to drive evolution to some extent but mutation of germ line DNA is a powerful ingredient of our modern understanding of evolution and to ignore it or write it off shows a profound misunderstanding of where ToE stands today.

In Reason

Russell

Ah, but you forget (actually twist the idea) that the sequences always fall within certain parameters within the original design ("design parameters", as engineers would call them). This is really, really important for the continuation of life.

You have to remember that the mechanisms that enable adaptation complicate the original design dramatically, and therefore make evolution less probable than without it (if this is possible). Yes, adaptation is complicated, not simple.

Your argument is counterproductive to your cause if you understand what you are really saying (but it looks appealing to the layperson).

I find this often with people who have not done engineering work. They have a habit of having the "hit the television on the side to fix it" mentality. In other words, sometimes, really complex things look simple when you don't understand them.

When you mention combinations that never existed before, you are neglecting to admit that rarely are these adaptations harmful, yet, all (competent) evolutionists admit that the processes that are claimed to be evolution are based on processes that produce harmful mutations almost always.

Do you see the contradiction here? You are confusing 2 entirely different things.

This is another example of maintaining mutually exclusive faiths in your mind at the same time. A necessary attribute of evolutionists. (no offense, just a fact; a word to the wise)


Part of this lecture will help clear it up for you


"One of the determining forces of scientism was a fantastic accidental imagination which could explain every irregularity in the solar system without explanation, leap the gaps in the atomic series without evidence [a gap required by the Big Bang theory], postulate the discovery of fossils which have never been discovered, and prophesy the success of breeding experiments which have never succeeded. Of this kind of science it might truly be said that it was `knowledge falsely so called.' "

—David C.C. Watson, The Great Brain Robbery (1976).

"I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning, consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption . . The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do . . For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom."

—Aldous Huxley, "Confessions of a Professed Atheist," Report: Perspective on the News, Vol. 3, June 1966, p. 19 [grandson of evolutionist Thomas Huxley, Darwin's closest friend and promoter, and brother of evolutionist Julian Huxley. Aldous Huxley was one of the most influential liberal writers of the 20th century].

Hi.

How do tanned skin and muscular body types pass from parent to offspring?

Thanks.

Hi Russ

Recombination and crossover during meiosis mix and match not only genes but parts of gene’s to produce sequences that have never existed before. This alone has been shown to be enough to drive evolution to some extent but mutation of germ line DNA is a powerful ingredient of our modern understanding of evolution

Ah, but you forget (actually twist the idea) that the sequences always fall within certain parameters within the original design ("design parameters", as engineers would call them).

They do? Show me the mechanism that limits the sequences to fall within ‘design parameters’ other than the fitness test of natural selection? Do you have a scientific paper on that? Some logic or evidence to back up this claim?

This is really, really important for the continuation of life.

So maybe you do get the idea of fitness just a little. The point is that there is no known limit to the results of mutation or crossover except fitness. Fitness is contingent on current conditions which, obviously, change from time to time so the limiting factor is not static. Remember also the bacterial experiments that I talked about earlier. They started with one individual and so no variability for selection to work on and no crossover as bacteria are not diploid leaving the inventiveness of mutation as the only source of genetic novelty yet thousands of generations later the products were very diverse and very different from their distant ancestor from which the colonies started. If your complaints were true this is not what we would expect to see.

You have to remember that the mechanisms that enable adaptation complicate the original design dramatically, and therefore make evolution less probable than without it (if this is possible). Yes, adaptation is complicated, not simple.

You’ll have to explain what mechanisms enable adaptation and complicate things for evolution. Adaptation is indeed complicated but not in the way you are suggesting.

When you mention combinations that never existed before, you are neglecting to admit that rarely are these adaptations harmful, yet, all (competent) evolutionists admit that the processes that are claimed to be evolution are based on processes that produce harmful mutations almost always.

Actually the vast majority of mutations are neutral having no discernable effect on the individual who carries them. Of the remainder most are indeed harmful and only a minority are beneficial. Darwin’s insight was a mechanism by which the beneficial ones can come to dominate a species while the harmful ones are weeded out (that’s what natural selection does). Just as with compound interest only a tiny percentage of benefit is required and over time these benefits will compound and come to dominate the species.

Do you see the contradiction here? You are confusing 2 entirely different things.

Which two things am I confusing Russ?

This is another example of maintaining mutually exclusive faiths in your mind at the same time. A necessary attribute of evolutionists.

If that were so you’d be able to point out, clearly and concisely, which two ‘mutually exclusive faiths’ I am holding? Can you?

Part of this lecture will help clear it up for you

You’ll have to show me where that has anything to do with what I said. I’m not sure how it affects anything here that a distant descendant of one of the founders of ToE wanted sexual freedom or that David C.C. Watson has issues with the ‘supposed’ motives of some in the scientific community of the late twentieth century.

If you want to counter what I have said I suggest you find evidence relevant to what I have said, evidence regarding how evolution works, how DNA behaves, how mutation occurs, that sort of evidence not ad homonym complaints against people far removed from the issue.

In Reason

Russell

If you got it in primary school or at any other time, it doesn't show.

Now who has problems understanding? You say mutation provides the mojo, but the tenets of your religion say it is recombination that does it.

Why should I bother with your hollow assertions? It gets rather old exposing every false accusation, and I don't see that it has jack to do with this topic. Ad hom's generally don't.

Most folks who frequent forums have enough sense to read what's been copied & pasted. Had you done so, you would see that it does not match the propaganda either you or RAZD have presented.

If you actually follow the link, you'll find that even the author of the wiki article omits to explain recombination. This is in keeping with what I've said earlier in this thread. Recombination is so feared that even though it is included in the tenets of the religion, it gets no further mention. Instead everyone touts mutation. Actions still speak louder than words, these actions are most eloquent.

Your attempt to misportray my post as some "see - here's a definition" nonsense has backfired. I couldn't care less about "proving" to you that I understand evolutionism. Everyone can see that I copied & pasted what I did because it directly addresses the role of recombination. That this role has in subsequent years been concealed even from the faithful should be much more a concern for you than it is for me, seeing that it has left you so obviously uninformed about your own belief system.

As you're new here, I'll advise you that it's the current fad among evolutionists to refuse to use the scroll function on their browsers, and pretend nobody else can either. If you want to 'fit right in', you should now pretend I never pasted what I did. As I recall, you're not a total stranger to this game.

Show you the mechanism? Show me the mechanism that prevents a gasoline engine from revving to 300,000 RPM.

No mechanism is needed to prevent a thing from doing something it lacks the capacity to do.

What you "expect to see" is distorted by both your evogoggles and your false assumption that bacteria produce clones.

Furthermore, if evolution were true, it would account for lifeforms that reproduce sexually, and there ought to by some observations available by now. They've sure harmed enough fruit flies over the years.

But you think the clone myth allows you to trick folks into accepting bacterial "evolution", and you'll con them into extrapolating this onto all forms of life. Even if the clone myth were true, your argument is fatally flawed, and your strategy betrays that this is known.

An argument from ignorance. Just because you don't know what harm is done does not mean no harm is done.

It's an exact parallel to the vestigial organ argument. Just because they don't know an organ's function, it must not have a function. Same "logic" - new application.

Darwin didn't even know what mutations were. Your devotion to your prophet is noted.

Conjecture. Actually, that's a compound conjecture, since the 'benefits' are themselves conjectural.

Cute. Send Russ off on a wild goose chase. There is no evidence evolution works. I doubt this stunt will work.

I missed those complaints. I scroll up the page, not suffering from the odd plague, but they aren't there. Do evogoggles produce hallucinations?

Still at it eh CTD?

The link is messed up, it should be
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolutionary_synthesis

Curiously the sidebar listsAnd when I click on mutation I find:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MutationIn other words recombination is a kind of mutation that causes large scale change to the DNA, however it is not the only one, nor are mutations limited to large scale changes.

We come back to recombination still being regarded as a mutation, even by the "high priests" (although I would hesitate to call the wiki editors that), in large part because mutation is defined as change to the DNA. Any change = mutation.

American Heritage Dictionary, 2008.

...

...

And we still have no answer to how tanned skin is hereditary, how muscular development is hereditary, how skin cell reproduction is different from bacterial reproduction (ie - by mitosis), or a number of other issues that get tedious to repeat as there are so many.

Enjoy.

Hi CTD

You say mutation provides the mojo, but the tenets of your religion say it is recombination that does it.
Actually the modern understanding of ToE says that both play a role, exactly what percentage is due to each varies from situation to situation, in large diploid species such as ourselves recombination and crossover mixing of existing genetic code accounts for a significant percentage of the change that occurs in DNA and thus in our phenotypes while in the bacterial experiments I have discussed with you earlier where there is no duplicate DNA strands involved recombination and crossover mixing don’t occur at all so all of the change is due to pure mutation. Horse for courses.

I’m still baffled why you would think that quoting the opinion of one person from 70 years ago should be seen to define and/or constrain the entire modern field of evolutionary biology? That’s was the point I was making.

Does it explain why you present clear evidence in line with ToE yet claim that it contradicts ToE?
Why should I bother with your hollow assertions? It gets rather old exposing every false accusation, and I don't see that it has jack to do with this topic. Ad hom's generally don't.
It’s not an ad homonym fallacy to point out that your opponent in a debate is presenting false evidence only to suggest that his ideas should be ignored because of his character. You’ll note that I did not do that to you. I pointed out that you were wrong simply because you presented false information.

Most folks who frequent forums have enough sense to read what's been copied & pasted. Had you done so, you would see that it does not match the propaganda either you or RAZD have presented.
Oh I read it. I’m not about to defend Wiki, it’s not a definitive source on this stuff though there is a detailed article on Genetic Recombination on Wiki if you care to look as RAZD pointed out and another linked right within the one you cited that explains crossover. You write off one of these ideas while accepting others for no apparent reason, all form part of our current understanding of genetics and so form part of our current ToE. Now maybe I move in the right circles but I’ve known about recombination for a very long time, it has been a crucial part of our understanding of how genetic changes occur for quite a few years now. The article on Chromosomal crossover also explains in some detail the existence in each of us of just two allele’s of any given gene as I was trying to explain earlier to you. Have a read and see if you can understand what I’m talking about. The truth is always worth the trouble to study.

Show me the mechanism that limits the sequences to fall within ‘design parameters’ other than the fitness test of natural selection?
Show you the mechanism? Show me the mechanism that prevents a gasoline engine from revving to 300,000 RPM.
Sure, there are several. The maximum mixture throughput of the induction system limits maximum RPM by restricting the amount of fuel and oxygen that can reach the engine. Unloaded this still accounts for a very high RPM but there is a limit. Exhaust restrictions also limit the maximum RPM an engine can reach due to the back pressure caused by the systems inability to clear the combustion gasses from the last cycle during the open time of the exhaust valve. Many modern fuel injected engines have RPM limiters programmed into them to avoid engine damage. This system works by reducing the amount of fuel injected or in some cases by not firing all of the cylinders on every cycle again limiting the maximum RPM an engine can reach by reducing the power generated on each stroke. If all of these factors are removed and the throttle is opened to the max the engine may speed up to the point of failure. This point is determined by the limiting strength of the weakest component usually in the engine’s primary drive train (main bearings, bearing caps, crank shaft, con rods, big end bolts, gudgeon pins pistons etc). The weakest of these will fail and thus limit the maximum RPM that a given engine will reach in a catastrophic failure.

Now back to the question at hand. DNA is just data, show me what mechanism limits how much you can change the document you have in your computer right now? Actually there are a number of limits on that, how about we use a hex editor and you show me what it is that limits your ability to alter the hex code of a file filled with random numbers. That’s probably a more analogous example.

There are limits in DNA as I said, they are Darwin’s insight, natural selection. Any change that makes a creature less fit will be removed while any that makes a creature more fit will become more and more common in succeeding generations. That’s not just an idea it’s a direct observation that comes out of those bacterial experiments I mentioned earlier. It has also been observed in captive breeding programs and in the wild in quite a number of species.

No mechanism is needed to prevent a thing from doing something it lacks the capacity to do.
Indeed but I have explained that there are no known limits that behave as Russ suggested. Can you show me one that I have missed? DNA can change by random mutations. It is not restricted in this other than by fitness. Such mutations are random so they don’t follow rules they just occur.

They started with one individual and so no variability for selection to work on and no crossover as bacteria are not diploid leaving the inventiveness of mutation as the only source of genetic novelty yet thousands of generations later the products were very diverse and very different from their distant ancestor from which the colonies started. If your complaints were true this is not what we would expect to see.
What you "expect to see" is distorted by both your evogoggles and your false assumption that bacteria produce clones.
I don’t believe for a moment that bacteria produce clones; if they did then we would expect to see no change in all of those generations. Bacteria evolve very quickly accumulating mutations at a rate way beyond what humans do. The question you need to ask is where do those changes come from. There was only one ancestral DNA strand to work from so recombination is out the window at least until mutation had produced some variability for it to work on. But if there was no variability in the first place and if you are correct that mutation does not work then were did that variability come from. Is god getting down and dirty in test tubes now?

Furthermore, if evolution were true, it would account for lifeforms that reproduce sexually, and there ought to by some observations available by now. They've sure harmed enough fruit flies over the years.
I think we can safely say that sexually reproducing species are the products of evolution, you and Russ have been pointing out the importance of mixing, crossover etc. These processes which allow beneficial allele’s to get together on one DNA strand and so to be combined into one body only occur in recombinant species which includes all sexually reproducing species. Without recombination each line would have to individually evolve each and every change. Evolution would be much slower and any line that achieved recombinant reproduction would have a huge advantage. That’s not a point that can be proved right now but it’s a logically sound hypothesis to explain sexual reproduction. The difficulty is that recombination arose so very long ago that we can’t observe it so we have little if any direct access to evidence of how it arose so we probably will never move beyond such hypothesis but never say never.

Actually the vast majority of mutations are neutral having no discernable effect on the individual who carries them.
An argument from ignorance. Just because you don't know what harm is done does not mean no harm is done.
If you read what I said I explained that it was no discernable harm. Of course we know that many mutations are silent because they don’t code for a change in protein sequences. Proteins are coded for in DNA by three bases each of which can be one of four possible DNA bases which gives 64 combinations. There are however only 20 amino acids coded for. Many amino acids are coded for by a number (up to six) different combinations. The first form of silent mutation is thus those which do not change in any way the protein coded for by simply changing the DNA code from one sequence that codes for a given amino acid to another which codes for the same. Given code similarity between them this is a common occurrence.

Another form of silent mutation is mutations which occur in non coding DNA. This is harder to quantify as it’s hard to tell for sure what DNA sequence is really silent but there are some long stretches in the human body which do not contain start or stop codons and for which no protein equivalents are ever detected so chances are that many if not most of these are silent.

There are also many protein sequences that are not critical. The active sites on proteins are often very sequence specific, if even a minor change is made the protein will not function but there are many areas that are not so specific if they are specific at all. For these areas which are usually structural, changes of amino acids will not affect the function of the protein. This too gives great scope for silent or at least harmless mutations.

Of the remainder most are indeed harmful and only a minority are beneficial. Darwin’s insight was a mechanism by which the beneficial ones can come to dominate a species while the harmful ones are weeded out (that’s what natural selection does).
Darwin didn't even know what mutations were. Your devotion to your prophet is noted.
Indeed he did not but he did observe that phenotypic traits were heritable; he further observed that they were discreetly heritable and finally he observed that they were mixed in the offspring in very specific ways. He showed that ‘good’ traits would be passed on more often and so would come to dominate a species and that they could be consolidated in one individual by mixing. He did not know of modern genetics, he had no idea how the information got from one generation to the next, yet he had some profound insights into how it worked from a phenotypic viewpoint none the less.

Just as with compound interest only a tiny percentage of benefit is required and over time these benefits will compound and come to dominate the species.
Conjecture. Actually, that's a compound conjecture, since the 'benefits' are themselves conjectural.
Read that info I gave you ages ago on bacterial experiments, it’s worth it.

If you want to counter what I have said I suggest you find evidence relevant to what I have said, evidence regarding how evolution works,
Cute. Send Russ off on a wild goose chase. There is no evidence evolution works. I doubt this stunt will work.
Do you really believe that Russ’s counter to my point which discussed the motivations of people many years after the establishment of evolutionary theory and which did not discuss that theory itself were a reasonable answer to my explanations of how recombination and mutations work as part of ToE?

Sorry no time to proofread this. Apologies!!

All the best CTD

In Reason

Russell

Thanks for the fix, RAZD. Linking has been buggy for me the last couple of weeks. I double-checked that spud, but it still came out wrong.

Sorry to anyone who got disappointed by that one. I'll try to watch even more closely from now on.

So, you see this as a 70 year old opinion and RAZD sees it as that of a wiki author.

What it actually is is the treaty written up to assure peace between evolutionists and geneticists. It's the latest document I know of which arguably represents a consensus on evolutionism. If there's something newer, I'd be happy to take a look.

I do not maintain that contemporary evolutionists are familiar with it, nor do I particularly care. Persons on both sides were fully aware that mutations occur, yet the word chosen for use in this treaty is clearly 'recombination'.

I am also aware that this treaty was not signed by both sides, but rather published in a book which was subsequently promoted by both sides. Historians understand how to look at actions when assessing motives. Antihistorians prefer to focus on words alone.

You asserted that I do not understand evolutionism. Understanding evolutionism and understanding your cockeyed 'arguments' are two separate and distinct issues.

I see that you have taken my advice and assumed people cannot scroll. You now say "I pointed out that you were wrong simply because you presented false information." Anyone can verify what you actually said by using their scroll feature.
I should hope folks are sharp enough to ask me (or read what I actually say) if they want to know what I reject, what I accept, and what my reasoning is. It's really pretty simple: I accept legitimate science and I reject evolutionism.

The issue of defending wiki? Well, it's looking like we now have 3+ versions of evolutionism under discussion. You and RAZD each have one, wiki gives the closest thing to an 'official' one, and of course that one was an arrogant lie. I generally prefer to discuss the real article. You may each in turn cry "straw man", but you'll defend it as best you can.
Those are not mechanisms. Those are just what you're about to call them, 'factors'.

And this is just what I said: a matter of capacity - not a mechanism.

A governor is an actual mechanism, which you managed to mention, but not recognize as the only 'mechanism' in the bunch.

The term 'neutral' is in this case not appropriate. 'Indeterminate' is the correct term, or 'unknown'. This would prevent erroneous arguments like RAZD's claim that mutations have been accurately counted and categorized, so we can clearly see why there is a preference for 'neutral'.

Yet the category is labeled 'neutral'. Doesn't real science pride itself on accurate and precise language?

Speaking of language, I note that you and RAZD apply some terms differently. If you think this will contribute to confusion and misunderstandings, I expect the practice to continue. Be advised, I shall be using terms properly to the best of my ability, so the definitions may differ substantially from those of evolutionists. Meanings will be easily obtained from the context and/or my comments.

I may from time to time or
when your disagreements grant merit to the practice.
Ah... so you think he wasn't being reasonable, and you retaliated by sending him to seek that which cannot be found. I get it now.

Okay, time for another link. This one takes time because you have to wait for the ad/registration screen to clear. It'll eventually load up right.

Time-takin' Link
While it's loading, you may want to take a look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharomyces
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mating_of_yeast

Yeast, for those who may not know it, isn't bacteria. They are single-celled and they do undergo recombination.

Can't tempt RAZD & R2 to :computerhammer: too much, so I thought it'd be best to slowly dismantle their illusions. Kinda let them adapt gradually to the factual environment, if you know what I mean.

In addition to the other fine evidence which may catch your eye, please note the bottom section's title (which is also a link): Evidence for joint genic control of spontaneous mutation and genetic recombination during mitosis in Saccharomyces.
See that RAZD is not the only one attempting to confuse issues. (The author may be a victim, repeating rather than originating this mistake). If a "mutation" is controlled by the genes, it's not a random event, is it? It's not an accident, but a product of design. Just because it isn't understood does not make it a 'mutation'.

Now I think we can all figure out several reasons why evomongers call these things "mutations", rather than acknowledging that they're products of design, so I won't insult your intelligence by listing them here.

And if you follow that link, the resulting page (goggle up R & R!) has a link entitled The sep1 mutant of Saccharomyces cerevisiae arrests in pachytene and is deficient in meiotic recombination.


Now if they goggled up, they'll be complaining "recombination only occurs in mitosis - not meiosis!" If they didn't goggle up, who knows what they'll say when they stop

Still at it CTD, spreading those insinuations.

We still, however, have:

No mechanism for tanned skin being hereditary (please read Russ's expose).

No mechanism for muscular development being hereditary (again I refer to Russ's expose).

No demonstration that skin does not reproduce by mitosis in the same way that bacteria reproduce. Or that skin is regularly shed so that any tan is lost in 3-4 weeks.

No answer to the issue that single cell organisms do in fact form colonies that behave as a whole organism, where different tasks are shared by different individuals.

No answer to the fact that recombination is not relevant to any of the above issues, and therefore was introduced by you as a red herring to avoid discussing the previous issues you have not answered.

No answer to the fact that recombination is still a change in genetic arrangement and therefore still a mutation (just a large scale mutation of one specific documented type, among several).

No answer to the fact that recombination, without other mutations causing different (and new) alleles, would accomplish nothing when it occurs with perfect alignment of the genes.

No answer to the fact that when it is not in perfect alignment, that recombination creates insertions/deletions ("indels") of segments of DNA in the process: indels that are identical to the kind of indels that occur without recombination (ie other forms of mutation).

No answer to the fact that bacteria bred from a single ancestor organism evolve into different daughter populations, some of which have hereditary abilities that the parent did not have, that these hereditary abilities were not inherited from the original parent organism but occurred through mutation.

No answer to the fact that these hereditary abilities are actually objectively beneficial when they allow the daughter population to use a food source the parent organism was unable to use.

No answer to the fact that the many different hereditary changes that occur in all the daughter populations, (a) are not inherited from the parent organism, and (b) are neutral if they offer no advantage or disadvantage. Calling them 'indeterminate' or 'unknown' does not alter the fact that they are neutral in terms of selection. The reason they are called neutral is because they are not affected by selection, not because their future cost/benefit is not known.

There there are the other unanswered issues ... such as the significant differences between Darwin's "descent with modification" and "the change in hereditary traits in populations from generation to generation" ... differences that mean the modern version is a weakened or diluted version of evolution from that original proposal.

Enjoy.

This is how the argument from spam works. Although many of the items on the list have been covered, I haven't responded to everything. Whether or not I respond has little bearing on whether or not an item makes the list. The whole point is to generate a large list - not an accurate list. To compile an accurate list would be more difficult and time-consuming, and the whole point of the spam argument is to make the other fellow waste his time.

RAZD attempts to give the impression that he's eager to discuss a lot of things. Makes one wonder what's so special about that which I actually did post, that makes it the one thing he doesn't care to talk about. Not a terribly deep mystery, I'd say.

Looking again, it shouldn't waste too much of my time, and may prove entertaining.

Double wrong. I never said tanned skin or muscular development were hereditary.

And I did explain the mechanisms which would be involved if they were.

Actually I did explain this, and I'm working on making it even more clear than I already have.

Russell2 mentioned that the mechanics are different for diploid & non-diploid cells. Can we expect infighting any time soon?

So what?

Ah yes, this issue I said I was done discussing. What am I supposed to do, continue on and just play 'who can get the last post'?

Your response indicates it isn't a red herring at all. Indeed, you fault me for not discussing it enough! See?

All complaints that I need to discuss recombination further. Neither your actions nor the tenets of your religion are consistent with recombination being a red herring.

Well, those who were following will recall that you still haven't answered your own question. The observant or inquisitive can stroll over to the thread dedicated to your quest to continually redefine 'evolution', and find my solution. My solution hasn't drawn any criticism yet, and it's been a little while...

Were I to dredge up issues from this thread, I'd start with the closeness of the imagined evolutionary relationship between men and Jarvik hearts. I don't think you ever convinced anyone we're all that closely related. I don't expect too many folks'd attend their family reunions, and I don't think marrying one would constitute incest.

I was looking forward to some good laughs, but you disappointed me on that one. Judging from how ridiculous your starting point was, that discussion could've provided a lot of entertainment; but for some strange reason you lost inspiration, or whatever you artsy types call it...

Thanks CTD for the extra effort, I know it weighs hard on you to deal with all the requests for evidence.

Nor did I say your had. What I said was that there still was no evidence for it, and that it seems Russ was being deceptive. I noted that you had supported him, made some ad hoc remarks that amounted to hand waving ("very complex") and that you remained skeptical of any claims that it was not hereditary (actually just skeptical of any argument contrary to Russ's deception).

I'm sure biologists are waiting impatiently for this explanation that contradicts what has been observed under microscopes.

Yes it will be interesting to see how you deal with real information.

So tanned skin is not an adaptation. Nor is muscular development an adaptation. They are acquired traits.

So you agree that there are colonial organisms that display integrated behavior and share tasks. Good.

Curiously that does not keep if from being a red herring to the previous discussion. It appears to be your standard operating procedure, when discussing {A} introduce topic {B}, then before fully discussing {B} introduce topic {C}, and you never get around to completing a single discussion.

What, I haven't answered something that you claim is my own question without any reference to what that question is? Shocking behavior. (issues three slaps on the wrist).

Enjoy.

You were just padding your list for the sake of appearance. This is the essence of spam.

More padding.

Those who were following don't need a reference. They can recall.

I try.

Hi CTD

There is more than one way to define evolution but the following seems to me to be a concise yet accurate definition. Much more detail can be added to flesh out what exactly is going on but this gives a good basis for understanding how the term is currently understood in scientific circles

"[E]volution can be precisely defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next."
- Helena Curtis and N. Sue Barnes, Biology, 5th ed. 1989 Worth Publishers, p.974

OK that’s a bit short but it is accurate. Here’s a slightly longer version that fleshes out some of the detail. A full description could take pages with all the nuances that must be included to cover the full range of possibilities.

"Biological evolution ... is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual. The ontogeny of an individual is not considered evolution; individual organisms do not evolve. The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are inheritable via the genetic material from one generation to the next. Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion of different alleles within a population (such as those determining blood types) to the successive alterations that led from the earliest protoorganism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions."
- Douglas J. Futuyma in Evolutionary Biology, Sinauer Associates 1986

Now from there we can discuss mechanisms etc but that’s what evolution is in a nut shell. The crucial part of the definition is inheritance. Mutations in all their forms, point mutations, insertions and deletions from whatever source, duplications, mixing, crossover etc all of these are mutations yet none are evolution. Evolution is the longer term effects of selection on the frequency of allele’s produced by mutation within the population. Allele variants are produced by mutation, selection then weeds out most of the variation, what remains becomes part of the future generations of the organism, the changes in the frequencies of those allele’s are evolution at its most basic level. Alleles are what is selected for or against in evolution. Most commonly it is the phenotypic products of allele’s that are selected for or against but not always.

It's really pretty simple: I accept legitimate science and I reject evolutionism.

It does sound simple but it glosses over the really important stuff. Most people would disagree with you about what ‘legitimate science’ is I would suggest including especially the vast majority of those who actually understand evolutionary biology.

We can discuss terms all day, I see a limited size in the intake manifolds as a control mechanism, all be it a passive one, while you don’t see it as a mechanism rather as a limiting factor. Either way I have shown you why a petrol engine is limited in its ability to rev beyond certain limits. Can you do the same for evolution?

The term 'neutral' is in this case not appropriate. 'Indeterminate' is the correct term, or 'unknown'. This would prevent erroneous arguments like RAZD's claim that mutations have been accurately counted and categorized, so we can clearly see why there is a preference for 'neutral'.

No the term neutral is in fact the most appropriate term for many of them. DNA produces (with help) mRNA which produces proteins. Changing the bases of DNA only sometimes changes the proteins that are produced at the end of that chain. Proteins do the work in our body while DNA is an information carrier. If the products of the information are not altered then the change in the information is correctly classified as neutral I would suggest. Not that any of that affects the argument just the percentages that happen to effect evolution. If every single mutation resulted in a phenotypic effect and so was selected for or against evolution would still occur just at a different rate to what we observe. Its like arguing about the arrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s irrelevant to the outcome in virtually every way.

Yet the category is labeled 'neutral'. Doesn't real science pride itself on accurate and precise language?

Yes neutral. Neutral because, to the best of our knowledgen such changes have no phenotypic effect. If we find out tomorrow that they do have an effect we will have learned that evolution has more data to act on. Evolution will still be true it will just work on a richer canvas that appears the case at this stage. So until information comes to hand to contradict it the correct term for changes in this DNA is neutral.

As for the links you’ll have to explain what that has to do with the arguments put here so far. There are a number of DNA repair mechanisms which remove DNA damage (insipient mutations). This can include removing point mutations and other forms of damage. That DNA can repair itself is well known, the only way it achieves such a high degree of fidelity in duplication is by self repair mechanisms. All of these mechanisms combined don’t get replication to 100% fidelity so some mutations remain, these are a largely but not completely random subset of the mutations that arose and they are what selection has to work with to drive evolution. There are even some instances of programmed DNA modification; these are the rare exception not the rule but they do exist. None of that challenges evolution. If all mutations were programmed that would be amazing, it would throw evolution as we currently understand it out the window at one stroke but that’s far from the truth. Even with all the known mechanisms of purposeful DNA modification or repair the vast majority of mutations are still uncontrolled random events and evolution, through selection, works on them to produce changes in allele frequencies over time from one generation to the next which is the definition of evolution. Some organisms have interesting ways of reproducing, even bacteria undergoes recombination of a sort. None of that challenges evolution again it’s just filling in the details of how evolution works.

In short there are mutations, selection removes some and so changes the frequencies of the allele’s that remain based on the environment the organisms inhabit in such a way as to ‘improve the fitness’ of future generations of that organism. That’s evolution in a nutshell and nothing you have said casts any doubt what so ever on that.

In Reason

Russell

Hey Russell2, just a quick note:

This is another one of CTD's repeated false interpretations of what I said. I said that we can accurately measure mutations, and we find that they fall across the spectrum from beneficial to deleterious.

His emphasis on accurately counted and categorized misrepresents this position by overstating it.

Curiously we do not need to count every mutation, and categorize every mutation, in order to show that some are beneficial, some are deleterious, some are neutral. Nor do we need to count every mutation to show the pattern of distribution within a population of those that are known.

Curiously the ones that are hardest to count are the neutral ones ...

Enjoy.

What RAZD actually said:
There's more, but this will suffice to set the record straight, even for those with broken scrollbars or deficient browsers.

Even just now, in your feigned denial of accuracy, you say "I said that we can accurately measure mutations, and we find that they fall across the spectrum from beneficial to deleterious."

As I already pointed out, there is no way to determine neutrality.

R2 omits to mention that DNA can be read more than once. It is sometimes read forwards, then again backwards and/or skipping every so many letters. The information density is astonishing, as some of you may know. Just because one function of the DNA isn't degraded, that does not mean others aren't.

And the only way for a typo to fail to degrade a text is if an optional letter or a placeholder is involved. For example, potatoe can lose the e on the end and still be potato. Both spellings are correct. Also, a partially degraded text can be read sometimes, but further deterioration will make it useless.

The farmer milked his cow.
Thh farmor milked hii cow.
Shh farmod milled hii ckw.
Shh fyrmoo qillen hbi dkw.

At which point does it become impossible to read? Which degrade was neutral? Now imagine I'd been clever enough and taken the time to encode another message in the text. The word "wilt" is present, reading backwards, but the number of intervening letters isn't constant. Pretend it was. See how easily that message can become garbled even if the first one can still be deciphered?

And the fact remains: not all functions of any given stretch of DNA code are known. You could scramble the beans out of the routines that deal with hotkeys, and a person using a text editor might never find out - until/unless they went to use the hotkeys. Since DNA is known to use the same stretch of code for more than one purpose, until we know all the purposes and circumstances under which the code is designed to be read, it is nothing but a blatant argument from ignorance to claim the code isn't degraded, and call an unknown element 'neutral'.

Note that the very same argument was used with vestigial organs. R2 repeats history. How accurate did it turn out to call organs with no known function 'useless'? It is to be expected that they'd like you to make the same mistake all over again, folks. So do you learn from history, or not? That's the question here.

Hi RAZD and CTD

RAZD said, correctly, that we can watch, count and measure mutations. There are obviously limits to how closely we can watch but we can indeed watch these changes. Those bacterial experiments I explained earlier are a prime example where only one DNA strand was present at the initiation of the experiments yet we can now count mutations (as any variation from that original DNA pattern is a mutation) and we can observe their effects. We can even go so far in these experiments as to track the protein changes and the metabolic pathways created in great detail to know that evolution in these organisms is indeed inventive and produces beneficial changes in these organisms as we watch.

From this one set of experiments we can see deleterious mutations that lead some colonies to extinction, we can see beneficial mutations that lead some colonies to increased fitness and we see many changes that have no detectable effect on the organisms. We also know, due to the nature of Codon encryption, that many changes are silent as they don’t change the protein which the gene codes for in any way. Outside coding regions this is less certain as some non coding DNA sequences have been shown to have a regulatory effect on genes around them.

I didn’t see anywhere where RAZD said that we could count every single mutation. That is not true as we would have to sequence every single individuals DNA and even then we’d miss the mutations that occur during the lifetime of the individual to non germ line cells. Wild studies that track the genetics of every single member of a population are being done in a number of in the wild studies today but I’m not aware of any results coming in yet. Such a venture is very expensive and time consuming though the results should be facinating.

This seems to be a big deal for you CTD so lets ask what would be the effect on evolution if it were true that there was no such thing as a neutral mutation. Would that destroy ToE? Not at all. All that this discovery would do, much as the vestigial organs arguments do, is to refine our understanding of how the process works. For evolution to work there has to be some beneficial mutations, that’s it. If you could show that there were no beneficial mutations, ever, you would have disproven ToE.

Vestigial organs are very interesting and much misunderstood by creationists in particular and many others in general. A vestigial organ in evolutionary terms is not an organ with no current function, if it had no function today it would probably have disappeared altogether or would at least be in the process of doing so. The correct definition of a vestigial organ is one that has lost its primary function. The appendix is an organ used for cellulose fermentation in the vast majority of creatures who possess one and, in creatures who actually use it, it contains a high concentration of cellulose digesting bacteria. It is in effect a bacterial nursery. In humans it has lost this previously primary function. Like most organs the appendix housed more than one function but in humans at least its primary function is no longer necessary and the organ has shrunk significantly as a result. That is the definition today of vestigial.

R2 omits to mention that DNA can be read more than once. It is sometimes read forwards, then again backwards and/or skipping every so many letters.

I omitted to mention many things that may in time come to be relevant to this discussion. I’m not writing a text book on the subject here. When such things are relevant I’ll discuss them. How is any of that relevant to what I said? Does it change the understanding I have presented in any way?

And the only way for a typo to fail to degrade a text is if an optional letter or a placeholder is involved. For example, potatoe can lose the e on the end and still be potato. Both spellings are correct. Also, a partially degraded text can be read sometimes, but further deterioration will make it useless.

Yes I understood already CTD that you don’t know how DNA works so let’s look at how it actually works. It’s not a language like English so your analogy fails. If you wanted to write Leucine (a protein base) in DNA you could write UUA or UUG or CUU or CUC or CUA or CUG for instance. Now obviously any mutation that changes one of those codes say corrupting UUA to UUG would be silent and so Neutral as they both spell Leucine. There are some exceptions in which DNA is read frame shifted but as transcription always begins at a start Codon AUG in diploid species this is not normally the case at least for humans and other animals. There are a very few exceptions in non diploid species in which transcription may start at other locations without mutations. These do make true silent mutations rarer for some organisms but, as I said, that doesn’t apply to humans, it doesn’t apply to any diploid species that I am aware of.

And the fact remains: not all functions of any given stretch of DNA code are known.

That’s true, for non coding DNA, DNA that does not contain start/stop codons and so does not get transcribed into mRNA. Some such DNA stretches have been shown to have regulatory functions so it’s not easy to determine if a given stretch of DNA has no function though much of it does not appear to. Knockout experiments have shown that perfectly healthy organisms can be created with some large stretches of ‘silent’ DNA removed so that’s at least suggestive that it lacks function.

In Reason

Russell

Assuming changes weren't the result of pre-programmed information, they'd be mutations. This is the factor that some evolutionists would have us overlook.

Which is just another way of saying it's unfalsifiable. We can only observe in the present, and have no access to ever.


Yes, we know the definition's been changed in order to lower the bar. Old news. And the new definition's not much use because the "primary function", rather than being a fact, is a conclusion/assertion of the evolutionist.

Just as I said.

And yesterday's definition? It must be discarded on the say-so of talkdeceptions?

I explained how it is very much relevant. If a text contains two or more messages, rendering any of them illegible is not 'neutral'.

It is a language written with letters. I didn't invent the analogy - it's already been used by scientists.

Really? You assume CUU is a synonym for CUC, but who's to say it isn't a misspelling which can still be read? Unless you know the correct spellings, you have no idea if the information has degraded or not.

See what I said about hotkey code in a word processor. And 'suggestive' is a far cry from 'conclusive' outside of evospeak. I venture to say all arguments from ignorance are the result of abusing "something suggestive" in this manner.

Both RAZD and the wiki author have attempted to define 'recombination' as 'mutation'. They have fulfilled the prediction of evolutionology in doing so. To be clear, the prediction is not that efforts to confuse the two terms would take place - that much had been observed. The prediction was that such must continue.

A while ago, both the observation and the prediction were disputed at EVC. RAZD participated in the discussion, and one can certainly make arguments both ways - either that he did not or did indeed take notes.

If you'll follow the link, you'll find quite a list of evolutionists who disagree with RAZD's take. The funny thing is: I was not arguing that they didn't exist - only that RAZD's sect does exist. This may have been too fine a point for some to appreciate.

Surely a better, if downplayed, explanation of recombination can be found at http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1526701 They go on to sayThe whole thing is about different methods of obtaining estimates of genetic change. Perhaps if RAZD had read this, he might have painted a different picture...

I think enough time has passed, so here's the heartbreaker.
Yes, this catches some by surprise. Although it's been known at least since the 70's that bacteria undergo recombination, news of this type does not travel fast. The link is not what I'd call an excellent piece, but it is still good. I recommend it for those who have an interest.

Still trying to paint the picture your way CTD.

I participated in the thread but not in the discussion. You had enough to deal with from trixie and PaulK, who, interestingly took you to task for your claims about recombination.

Consider this fine point CTD:



Recombination sorts existing DNA between two existing (parent) strands into two new (offspring) strands. Where it starts on each strand is highly variable, and so you can have one offspring strand longer and the other shorter than they would be by a 1 for 1 switch. You also have no guarantee that they start and stop on whole genes rather than some arbitrary point on each strand.

So when recombination, because the start and stop points are not fixed in stone, results in novel heritable change in nucleotide states at the points of crossover, introducing new variants in the process,what do you have?

Mutation?
Recombination?
Or is this a false dichotomy?

Interestingly I started a thread on EvC Forum, "changes or mutations" where I tried to find distinctions of DNA change from mutations, and got taken to task by the geneticists there, who basically said that all changes were considered mutation. Most helpful for my understanding was Wounded King in post 16:

Note the bolded = mutation attributed to the recombination process.

Because recombination can result in novel change to DNA as well as restructuring, you do not have a black and white, one or the other, process. In fact the likelyhood of it being cut on strict genes on both strands is rather low, so the probability is that most recombination adds some novel DNA mix in the mix.

Enjoy.