A New Run at the End of Evolution by Genetic Processes Argument

Can you explain how the whale phenotype includes the genes able to make a leg every now and then?

So how about an answer to Understanding Faith's argument, Message 128?Please make any corrections if I have it wrong.Enjoy

This was the post I had to interrupt for the Internet Technician. I'll get the finished version up soonEdited by Faith, : No reason given.

I don't know if you're serious or playing games or feigning innocence or ignorance or what. You keep repeating the same pattern of going off the rails, as you did a couple days ago, then getting back on course, then going off the rails again. I told you just two days ago over at Report Discussion Problems Here 4.0 that you could resume discussion as soon as you adopted a willingness to actually discuss, so you resumed discussion presumably because you had adopted an attitude of willingness to discuss, and yet here you are already accusing people of accusing you of things and jousting with the moderator. I see little likelihood of further interaction with this moderator helping at all, and I can't allow you to continue in this unconstructive way, so I think all I can do is give you a little time to think about it. See you in a couple days.

Okay, it needs a lot of cleanup, so you might want to start over when you can. In particular I think you need to reconsider your initial reaction\response to my question regarding differentiation between mutations and rare alleles: Part of your thesis is that the rare alleles rise to dominate the split isolated population, and if there is no way that rare alleles are differentiated from mutation alleles, then those mutation alleles can just as easily rise to dominate the split isolated population.So calling the question silly does not answer why this would not be a severe problem for your argument. Instead it is conflict avoidance behavior of the kind (it seems to me) Percy wants to see exchanged for one that treats the question seriously and respond to it with a reasoned answer.However, be that as it may, I am much more interested in a response to Understanding Faith's argument, - Message 128 at this point. Because if we can establish that your argument is actually understood, then we can discuss intelligently why there are problems with it, without being accused of not understanding the argument.It seems premature to me for you to be responding to my later posts without answering that one.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : ..Edited by RAZD, : ..

As I requested of Faith, please keep the focus on the topic and on the problems you see in the arguments from the other side. Let the moderator take care of other things.Edited by Admin, : Fix author.

Faith, you may want to review this last message you posted. Especially after this line: Shortly after that point, you appears that you are arguing for macroevolution. And you end it by rediscovering : Your formatting and placement of the qs tags may have gotten messed up.

I've read no further than this first sentence of your post, and I don't yet know if you're going to carry on in this vein, but it is disturbingly close to your earlier accusations that people just aren't thinking about your ideas deeply enough, and that you'll have nothing further to say. I want to nip this in the bud now. If that's the direction you're going, please stop now.

This is actually what I said, not Faith. Apparently she pasted in my post and was adding her comments when the INTERNET TECNICIAN came.This also explains what dwise1 noted in Message 157.So please cut her some slack, let Faith return with her technician fixed internet and after the 48 hr suspension (can you make it 24? I'd really like an answer to Message 128), and let her clean up that post (or delete it and replace it).Thanks.Enjoy

You're right, they were your words, but Faith was already, as I said, beginning to go off the rails again. I think Faith could use the time away to fix her Internet and decide if she's going to try to work together toward a successful discussion.AbE: If people want to discuss with Faith maybe her blog would be a better place.Edited by Admin, : AbE.

We'd probably be banned after a couple of posts over there.

I am not trying to accuse you of anything. I assume that you are trying to present your views in good faith and I don't suspect any "skulduggery." But your position is faulty; it doesn't match up with the reality that we work with every day. What you are doing is focusing on a few general observations and extrapolating those observations to the whole ToE despite there being observations that invalidate your conclusions. If you want us to concede that evolution caused a reduction in genetic diversity in cheetahs, elephant seals and domestic breeding populations, I think we already have. I said it a long time ago that yes, it's true, but trivially true. PaulK has said it, and I believe Dr. A, RAZD and Percy have agreed as well; it's true, but trivially true. It is not the whole story.My examples and questions were meant to challenge the idea that evolution REQUIRES a reduction in genetic diversity and that as organisms evolve they will eventually run out of genetic diversity. Groups of organisms that have undergone multiple speciation (or sub-speciation, whatever) events have NOT run out of diversity. That challenges the idea that evolution REQUIRES a loss in diversity. No. You may have reached a conclusion based on your study but when you apply it to a broader scope, like addressing the ToE, it becomes a premise. After you have formed your premise then you need to form the hypothesis such as: If evolution reduces genetic diversity then we should observe groups that have undergone multiple speciation events to have significantly reduced genetic diversity. Now before you can draw a conclusion about your premise, you need to run tests and/or examine the data based on your hypothesis.What data do you have on, for example, dogs? Do you have any genetic diversity information on dogs at all? Can you demonstrate that any breeds have less genetic diversity than the breeds they were derived from?If no, then you cannot make a conclusion as to whether your premise is true or not.from Message 146Incomprehensible?? You have actually been studying this issue longer than I have. How is anything I said or asked incomprehensible?My questions DO have everything to do with what you are arguing. You claim that your ideas completely discredit the ToE, and yet you only want to focus on a few unique cases where the species have low genetic variability. Certainly not enough to convince me to change the direction of my research. Nor do I see that your premise has any bearing on the ToE in any significant way. Certainly doesn't discredit it; doesn't really even challenge it.HBD

Message 1 briefly alluded to the evolution of the mammalian ear from reptiles, so it's worth mentioning here in this thread about genetic processes that scientists recently confirmed that the reptilian and mammalian ears evolved independently. A brief blurb in the July issue of Scientific American describes it like this:

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Evolutionary biologists have long wondered why the eardrumthe membrane that relays sound waves to the inner earlooks in humans and other mammals remarkably like the one in reptiles and birds. Did the membrane and therefore the ability to hear in these groups evolve from a common ancestor? Or did the auditory systems evolve independently to perform the same function, a phenomenon called convergent evolution? A recent set of experiments performed at the University of Tokyo and the RIKEN Evolutionary Morphology Laboratory in Japan resolves the issue.

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When the scientists genetically inhibited lower jaw development in both fetal mice and chickens, the mice formed neither eardrums nor ear canals. In contrast, the birds grew two upper jaws, from which two sets of eardrums and ear canals sprouted. The results, published in Nature Communications, confirm that the middle ear grows out of the lower jaw in mammals but emerges from the upper jaw in birdsall supporting the hypothesis that the similar anatomy evolved independently in mammals and in reptiles and birds. (Scientific American is part of Springer Nature.) Fossils of auditory bones had supported this conclusion as well, but eardrums do not fossilize and so could not be examined directly.

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I did find this description somewhat confusing, as sometimes it talks about just the eardrum, sometimes also the ear canal, and other times the entire middle ear. If anybody wants to look into this and clarify a bit it would probably be appreciated.But the main point is that it has now been confirmed genetically that the mammalian ear evolved independently from other non-ear reptile structures and not from the reptile ear itself. I wonder if they know what happened to the original reptile ears as our mammalian antecedents evolved.

Link?My first impression is one of confusion, possibly caused by words used.The evolution of the mammal ear is not, strictly speaking, from reptile ears but from common ancestors of mammals and reptiles -- with the "non-mammalian amniote" or "early synapsid" denotation intended for an intermediate between the common ancestor with reptiles and the beginning of the mammal ear evolution. These early amniote synapsids still had the ancestral ear linked bone structure.

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Synapsids (Greek, 'fused arch'), synonymous with theropsids (Greek, 'beast-face'), are a group of animals that includes mammals and every animal more closely related to mammals than to other living amniotes. ... Synapsids evolved from basal amniotes and are one of the two major groups of the later amniotes; the other is the sauropsids, a group that includes modern reptiles and birds. ...

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So the ancestors of mammals (synapsids) diverged from the ancestors of (true?) reptiles (sauropsids) before ears evolved from the jaw-bone linked structure in either clade.As such I would find it surprising if the ear evolution were the same.So the confusion would appear to come from calling the common ancestors "reptiles" (as opposed to "reptile-like" or properly as "amniote") ... hence the usage of "non-mamalian amniote" above and in previous discussions, something I will now be even more careful about.This divergent evolution of the ear is also good evidence of not using the same "design" over, even when all the parts are there, readily available, and fully functional.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : clrty

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When the scientists genetically inhibited lower jaw development in both fetal mice and chickens, the mice formed neither eardrums nor ear canals. In contrast, the birds grew two upper jaws, from which two sets of eardrums and ear canals sprouted. The results, published in Nature Communications, confirm that the middle ear grows out of the lower jaw in mammals but emerges from the upper jaw in birds

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Most likely, this stuff is just over my head, but I don't understand why this experiment conclusive decides the issue. I'd appreciate any explanation/insight you or one of the life science experts might have.