explaining common ancestry

ROTFLI remember, years ago, visiting the ape house at the Bronx Zoo. There was a sign there, announcing the world's most dangerous ape. If you checked out the sign, you found it was a mirror.Zoos have long recognized that humans are apes.Satya July 00: Editorial by Catherine Clyne

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Changed image from .bmp to .jpg, reduced displayed width to 600 pixels. --AdminThis message has been edited by Admin, 12-23-2005 12:23 PM

Many zoos have a primate section, part of which is devoted to apes. When you visit the gorilla cage, the cage is not labeled "apes". It probably says Gorilla beringei (eastern gorilla) or Gorilla gorilla (Western gorilla). Most likely there is a lengthy description of the gorilla, which will include the fact that a gorilla is a type of ape.When you visit the chimpanzee cage, the cage is also not labeled "apes". It probably says Pan troglodytes (common chipanzee) or Pan paniscus (bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee). The description at this cage will tell you that chimpanzees are a type of ape.The visitors watching the gorillas and chimps are also a type of ape. Of course we can breed with apes. Human beings breed with apes all the time. I've personally done it myself! But there is only one species of ape with which Homo sapiens can breed, and that is other Homo sapiens. We cannot breed with any gorilla species of ape, nor with any chimpanzee species of ape. Application of evolutionary theory to the fossil record and the study of genetic interrelatedness tells us that all modern apes descended from a common ancestor. In other words, human beings did not descend from gorillas and they did not descend from chimpanzees. Millions of years ago humans and gorillas and chimpanzees did not exist. They hadn't evolved yet. But there was a common ancestor from which all modern species of human, gorilla and chimp evolved. Yes, for the umpteenth time, species evolve on their own, through a process described as descent with modification combined with natural selection.--Percy Minor grammar fixes. --PercyThis message has been edited by Percy, 12-23-2005 12:26 PM

Carico, So all those silly biologists have it wrong? You have just described most mammals, I think you need to narrow down your criteria, mate. And how many species of apes can a gorilla breed with? An orangutan? You see what a silly thing this was to say? Not being able to breed with more than one species of ape (your own) does not disqualify a species from membership, or there would be no such thing as apes, obviously.Mark

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I provided the proof for you in Message 91.

The term "homonid" applies to humans, too. It's a shorthand for an animal in the family Hominidae, the great apes, which includes those of us in the genus Homo.Could you clarify something? You keep talking about a species "turning into another species." Now, most of us automatically translate this to mean, "turning into a new species," because the alternative doesn't make any sense. The alternative in this case being a species turning into another, already existing species (even one from an entirely different class) such as in your example from Message 94: Given some of the other things you've said, it's possible that you're not being facetious, and that you really think that evolutionary biology says that birds can turn into dogs and so forth. If so, I can assure you that this is a terrible misrepresentation. I know you've been asked this before, but can you explain what you think evolution is?

First off I know that logical people really understand evolution and the process by which speciation occurs. This even includes several creationists.But just for grins let's put your "logic" to a logic test:Your precept is: "If {species A} are apes, then they should be able to breed with {species B} apes"Now to the test:Current apes include chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans.Chimps are apes.
They do not breed with orangutans.
They do not breed with Gorillas.
They do not breed with humans.
They fail the test.Gorillas are apes.
They do not breed with orangutans.
They do not breed with Chimps.
They do not breed with humans.
They fail the test.Orangutans are apes.
They do not breed with chimps.
They do not breed with Gorillas.
They do not breed with humans.
They fail the test.Humans are apes.
They do not breed with chimps.
They do not breed with Gorillas.
They do not breed with orangutans.
They fail the test.According to your "logic" chimps cannot be apes because they do not breed with other apes (orangutans, gorillas and humans).According to your "logic" gorillas cannot be apes because they do not breed with other apes (orangutans, chimps and humans).According to your "logic" orangutans cannot be apes because they do not breed with other apes (chimps, gorillas and humans).According to your "logic" humans cannot be apes because they do not breed with other apes (chimps, gorillas and orangutans).According to your "logic" there are thus no apes at all.All these species are apes.Therefore your logic is invalid. You are wrong. Your precept is invalid. Your conclusion is false. You are wrong.It is more than you are just a little wrong here - you cannot possibly be right. Think about that for a minute: you cannot possibly be right. You cannot be right because the result of your "logic" is an unavoidable contradiction: there are apes and there are no apes.It doesn't matter whether you include humans in the mix or not, you are wrong.Denial won't make any difference either. You are wrong. Your logic is false. Your precept is invalid. You are wrong.Let me make this clear: if there is one thing you take away from here it needs to be that ... you ... are ... wrong.One final question: do you understand that you are wrong?Enjoy.

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Actually, my logic is that each species breeds its own kind, but that doesn't appear to be your logic, nor does your logic conform to any reality. And again, for the umpteenth time, since apes and humans cannot breed with each other, they are different species. This also agrees with the Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurs American Edition which defines a spcies as; "A classification of living organisms consisting of individuals with similar characterisitcs CAPABLE OF EXCHANGING GENES AND INTERBREEDING." Therefore, again, for the umteenth time, HUMANS CANNOT BE APES.Therefore, since humans and apes cannot interbreed, then the ONLY WAY that evolutionists can say that humans came from apes is to claim that one species turns into another species on its own without breeding with that species. And again, that does not conform to ANY reality about how species reproduce. Nothing. Zip. It all simply comes from the imagination. So since your logic contradicts the way any species breeds and reality itself, it is the one that fails the test. But my logic is confirmed by reality PERFECTLY. Breeding is what passes along genes to offspring, not one species simply turning into another on its own. So I'd suggest you brush up on basic biology before you even dare to declare that one species evolves into another one without being able to breed with that species. It is not only impossible, but an embarrassment to mankind to even declare such a thing. You only fool those who have no clue about how genes are passed along to offspring.This message has been edited by Carico, 12-23-2005 11:17 PM

Carico, No shit, Sherlock!!As has been explained by myself & others, does the fact that chimps don't mate with gorillas mean chimps & gorillas aren't apes either?THINK!You are not untypical of a creationist. You breeze in here all guns blazing when in truth you know fuck all about systematics & classification, or any other relevant science.Just stop for a moment & consider that the people talking to you know what they are talking about, & you appear very, very silly & ignorant. I guarantee that you haven't ever picked up a book pertaining to cladistics, systematics & classification. If you had you will understand that gorillas, chimps et al. are grouped together because the apomorphies they share warrant their placement within the same taxon. For exactly the same reason humans are placed in the same taxon. What's your beef? If you are happy to accept that chimps, gorillas & orangs go into the same group because of their apomorphies, what reason other than an insubstantial religious bias do you claim that humans are a special case & should be placed in a separate group despite the apomorphies shared with the rest of the great apes?This may come as a great surprise to you, but science already understands that humans are apes, in the same way they are also primates, mammals, tetrapods, craniates, chordates, & animals. It is you that are having problems, not science.
Mark

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Actually, it comes primarily from mutation of genes and natural selection acting on those mutations. Both of these mechanisms are factual, observable in populations of modern organisms everywhere. Even most creationists are aware of this.Do you know what mutation is? You should, if in fact you studied evolution for 30 years as you claim. Evolution isn't about one species changing into another already existing species by breeding with it. That is a straw man and a red herring.

But you are still saying that one species turns into another species on its own, which has never been witnessed to happen to any species.You are thus saying that:1)The gene for brown eyes just happens to change into the gene for blue eyes
2)The gene for talking simply appears from...?
3)The gene for thinking just simply appears from...?
4)The gene for brown hair simply turns into the gene for blond hair
5)The gene for walking on 2 legs comes from...?And I know what mutation is better than you do because it can only act on the characteristics ALREADY PRESENT in a cell. It CANNOT form NEW GENES or characterictics. Otherwise, again, scientists would simply let cancer cells mutate into healthy cells! Why do you supose they don't do that? Do you even have a clue? But evolutionists claim that genes magically turn into a gene for ANYTHING which is absolutely ludicrous.This message has been edited by Carico, 12-24-2005 08:34 AM

Bingo. In a nutshell. Change happens. Each individual is an accumulation of changes - you are not identical to any of your ancestors - and when those changes have accumulated to a point where there is no breeding between subpopulations of a species then speciation is occurring, they are diverging into two distinct populations that do not interbreed. As time passes they will accumulate different changes and become distinct from each other. This whole argument of yours is just pure incredulity coupled with a lack of even an attempt to visualize how this could be: the failing is at your end of the stick. That specieation has never been observed is another false assertion on your part. It has been observed many times, and you have been given several examples of same occurring under observation.Nor does it need to be directly observed to know that it has happened. Take the foraminifera for example: we have an almost complete fossil history of these little creatures from over 65,000 years ago to the present, and their shells have undergone continuous change in that time - hundreds of speciation events are observed in these changes, with almost complete lineages.From A Classic Tale of Transition (click)
And as a side note, even AiG accepts that speciation events occur and have been observed. From Arguments we think creationists should NOT use (click)
(bold mine for emPHAsis. Again you are making false statements. Evolution claims that change happens.When a change is beneficial it gets selected by increased survival or reproductive ability, when a change is deleterious it gets de-selected by decreased survival or reproductive ability, when a change is neutral there is no selection pressure, but the change still propogates through the population in the offspring.Again, you are wrong, your argument is based on false premises and your conclusions are false.

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You are contradicted by your own premises. You are wrong.

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Sure it has. It takes many generations for one species to evolve into another, so we can't observe this happening for the longer lived species. For example, let's say it takes a thousand generations for a new species of primate to evolve. If a generation is 10 years, as it might be for gorillas, then it would take 10,000 years for a new species of gorilla to evolve. This is far, far too long for any experiment to observe.But many bacteria produce new generations in much less than an hour, and a thousand generations can be produced in only a week or two. Evolving new species of bacteria is easily done.Fruit flies also have a fairly short generation time. Not as short as bacteria, but short enough for evolution to be observable. New species of fruit fly have been bred in the lab.Plants provide many examples of speciation because there are more ways it can happen. In addition to the traditional method of descent with modification combined with natural selection there are also polyploidy (multiplication of the number chronosomes) and hybridization (cross-breeding).The technical literature is full of examples of speciation. There's a good article at Talk.Origins titled Observed Instances of Speciation that lists a number of them. More than one gene is involved in all these things. For talking, thinking and walking there must be thousands of genes involved. But for the sake of keeping the discussion simple, let's assume that eye color is under the control of a single gene. Each type of the eye color gene is called an allele.Continuing to keep things simple, let's further assume that there are only three alleles for the eye color gene: brown, blue and green (we won't worry about dominance, either). Each allele is a string of nucleotides at the place for this gene on a longer DNA strand. A mutation in one of these alleles would change it into an allele that is neither the green allele, nor the blue allele nor the green allele. It's a new allele. How it affects eye color is anyone's guess. It would depend on the new protein it produces and the effect of that protein on eye color. As the above discussion indicates, mutations cause genes to produce new proteins that they did not produce before. The effect of the new protein may be deleterious, neutral or advantageous. Except for the case where it is neutral, the new protein can produce new characteristics and behaviors in the cell that were not previously present.Look at it this way. A cake is a mixture of many ingredients. If you change the ingredients then the cake will come out differently. In a similar way, a cell is a mixture of many chemicals combined into DNA, RNA, proteins, catalysts and so forth. Change the composition of the cell by changing one or more proteins and the cell will come out differently. There's a good reason this doesn't work. Let's assume it is possible for cancer cells to mutate into healthy cells. In that case, some will mutate into healthy cells, but the rest will remain cancer cells and will continue dividing at the high and uncontrolled rate typical of cancer cells. Because the rate at which cancer cells reproduce is much higher than normal cells, even if some percentage of the cancer cells return to normal behavior, the remaining cancer cells will continue to produce new cancer cells. At best, if cancer cells can mutate back to healty cells, the effect would only be to slow the growth of the cancer. Evolution does not claim this. The outcome of mutation is often unpredictable. It is the filter of natural selection that determines which genes succeed and which fail.--Percy

Carico, Au contraire:Drosophila paulistorum Dobzhansky and Pavlovsky (1971) reported a speciation event that occurred in a laboratory culture of Drosophila paulistorum sometime between 1958 and 1963. The culture was descended from a single inseminated female that was captured in the Llanos of Colombia. In 1958 this strain produced fertile hybrids when crossed with conspecifics of different strains from Orinocan. From 1963 onward crosses with Orinocan strains produced only sterile males. Initially no assortative mating or behavioral isolation was seen between the Llanos strain and the Orinocan strains. Later on Dobzhansky produced assortative mating (Dobzhansky 1972).Sympatric Speciation in Drosophila melanogasterIn a series of papers (Rice 1985, Rice and Salt 1988 and Rice and Salt 1990) Rice and Salt presented experimental evidence for the possiblility of sympatric speciation. They started from the premise that whenever organisms sort themselves into the environment first and then mate locally, individuals with the same habitat preferences will necessarily mate assortatively. They established a stock population of D. melanogaster with flies collected in an orchard near Davis, California. Pupae from the culture were placed into a habitat maze. Newly emerged flies had to negotiate the maze to find food. The maze simulated several environmental gradients simultaneously. The flies had to make three choices of which way to go. The first was between light and dark (phototaxis). The second was between up and down (geotaxis). The last was between the scent of acetaldehyde and the scent of ethanol (chemotaxis). This divided the flies among eight habitats. The flies were further divided by the time of day of emergence. In total the flies were divided among 24 spatio-temporal habitats.They next cultured two strains of flies that had chosen opposite habitats. One strain emerged early, flew upward and was attracted to dark and acetaldehyde. The other emerged late, flew downward and was attracted to light and ethanol. Pupae from these two strains were placed together in the maze. They were allowed to mate at the food site and were collected. Eye color differences between the strains allowed Rice and Salt to distinguish between the two strains. A selective penalty was imposed on flies that switched habitats. Females that switched habitats were destroyed. None of their gametes passed into the next generation. Males that switched habitats received no penalty. After 25 generations of this mating tests showed reproductive isolation between the two strains. Habitat specialization was also produced.They next repeated the experiment without the penalty against habitat switching. The result was the same -- reproductive isolation was produced. They argued that a switching penalty is not necessary to produce reproductive isolation. Their results, they stated, show the possibility of sympatric speciation.Selection for Geotaxis with and without Gene FlowSoans, et. al. (1974) used houseflies to test Pimentel's model of speciation. This model posits that speciation requires two steps. The first is the formation of races in subpopulations. This is followed by the establishment of reproductive isolation. Houseflies were subjected to intense divergent selection on the basis of positive and negative geotaxis. In some treatments no gene flow was allowed, while in others there was 30% gene flow. Selection was imposed by placing 1000 flies into the center of a 108 cm vertical tube. The first 50 flies that reached the top and the first 50 flies that reached the bottom were used to found positively and negatively geotactic populations. Four populations were established:Pop A + geotaxis, no gene flow
Pop B - geotaxis, no gene flow
Pop C + geotaxis, 30% gene flow
Pop D - geotaxis, 30% gene flow.Selection was repeated within these populations each generations. After 38 generations the time to collect 50 flies had dropped from 6 hours to 2 hours in Pop A, from 4 hours to 4 minutes in Pop B, from 6 hours to 2 hours in Pop C and from 4 hours to 45 minutes in Pop D. Mate choice tests were performed. Positive assortative mating was found in all crosses. They concluded that reproductive isolation occurred under both allopatric and sympatric conditions when very strong selection was present.Hurd and Eisenberg (1975) performed a similar experiment on houseflies using 50% gene flow and got the same results. Au contraire once again mes amis!Barry Hall in 1982 removed the genes that produce the cleaving enzyme, control mechanism for the enzyme, & permease for lactose from a single bacteria, & all three reevolved. That's new genes AND characteristics. Yes, that's correct but DNA can be duplicated, become redundant & coopted by other functions. Hence new genes & function can arise from preexisting DNA. What a STUUUUUPID thing to say! You would do well to learn the subject before coming out with smart alec comments like this. The only one looking the fool is you.Mark

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't