The End of Evolution By Means of Natural Selection

Uh, yes, this is a public forum, and you were going way off topic. If you'd like to have a private conversation with WK then use the private messaging system.What you said in Message 792 that I was responding to was this: I responded that the issue is actually one of needing to evidence your assertions. You've misunderstood. There's no claim of direct evidence that the mechanisms driving directed mutations were themselves the result of mutation and natural selection. The claim is that the same mechanisms of mutation and natural selection that have been observed operating in the world today were also in operation throughout the history of life on this planet, and that they are sufficient to explain the appearance of mechanisms for directed mutations. There is no need to invoke unknown and unevidenced non-natural mechanisms. The claim is that processes and mechanisms that we actually know can happen and have happened were involved, and not ones that are made up. Yes, you did bring up your religious beliefs, when you accused me of making natural explanations the "desired conclusion." Or are you going to claim that wasn't an argument for the supernatural?The topic of the thread is the validity of natural selection as part of evolutionary theory. I suggest you talk about that instead of accusing people of being afraid to admit that their theory is in tatters or that they're driving toward inappropriate desired conclusions.I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but your patten is to take a short vacation, then return and debate rationally for a while but followed by going off the deep end after a few days. Could we break the pattern this time?--Percy

As someone who has not ever studied biology, why do you believe that this is true? Faith?

There are moments throughout time where evolution pushes forward and different species are capable of evolving at a faster rate than usual. However, this accelerated rate of change takes anywhere from 10,000 years to a million years to occur. With the acceleration of technology in the past 50 years it may become impossible for human evolution to keep up with the pace of technology. What do we do when evolution can't keep up with the rate of change in technology that humans are now forced to confront?Could global warming and environmental catastrophes be an example of how our technology is improving faster than we can see the biological impact on our planet Earth?I remember seeing a discussion like this on evolution and technology on a Facebook community page Update Your Browser | FacebookHere’s a link to the actual video on evolution.
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This is overstating things a bit, in order for it to stay extant in the bacterial population you wouldn't need constant exposure. I agree you would need exposure regularly enough for it to be maintained but I couldn't give you any reasonable estimate offhand of what that means in terms of such a trait in a bacterial population but I think your extended period of time would have to be quite substantial.What I think would be interesting would be finding out at what sort of frequency this insertion occurs at normally when glycerol is in the environment and there is an active Crp gene. All of the experiments from Zhang and Saier are done in a Crp^- genetic background where virtually all glycerol metabolism will have been abolished. Clearly this creates a massive selective pressure in favour of bacteria which are able to metabolise glycerol.But if we consider what we are seeing to be a form of regulation for further increasing glycerol metabolism when glycerol is in the environment, rather than the rather outlandish idea of an emergency backup system in the unlikely event that the Crp gene is deleted, then we would expect to see a sporadic amount of insertions in a wild type genetic background allowing increased glycerol metabolism. Zhang and Saier showed in a further paper that the level of glycerol phosphorylation, an indicator of Glycerol kinase activity ( a proxy for the glycerol metabolising activity of the proteins regulated by glpFK), is higher in bacteria carrying the insertion in a Crp^- background than in the Wild Type without the insertion (Zhang and Saier, 2009). I'd suggest that this would also mean that the insertion occuring in a Wild Type background would also have a higher level of glycerol metabolism.TTFN,WK

The glycerol metabolism example is but a single example. We know from experimentation that the vast majority of mutations do come about through random mechanisms, and that those random mutations do pass through natural selection.What you need to show is that every single mutation occurs through a similar mechanism. Perhaps you can stick to real world observations instead of inventing fantasies to falsify the theory?

No, it has a specific type of mutation that is beneficial ocurring which is otherwise repressed. No, but if you are in a 'bad' environment then selective pressures aare going to be much higher and even a slight advantage can be greatly magnified in terms of reproductive success. That is a very big 'if', the idea that evolution should give rise to perfectly adapted alleles is a specious one. It is also worth noting that while living fossils are morphologically conserved we have no idea how genetically conserved they are. This is probably the most accurate characterisation. The more optimally adapted an organism is to its environment the less beneficial any given mutation is likely to be. This very much depends on the particular challenges that make it a 'bad' environment. Some challenges may have multiple possible mutations that could ameliorate them while others may simply be too restrictive, or perhaps only have a very small number of possible beneficial mutations available from the current bacterial genome.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

Which is exactly what I was aiming for. Maybe I tried talking too much.
The rest of the problems probably derived from my cluelessnes of what the paper said.

Science has not proven that any mutations over time will produce a new species or life form. The mutations that do not have a protein assigned to it are unknown as what affect it has now or what it will do in the future. The only mutations that we are aware of is the ones that cause diseases and that is still speculative. Science makes the assumption that mutations over a long period of time will produce new characteristics that it no longer appears what it looks like today.Will science give the sea slug a new phyla group once chloroplasts becomes a permanent member of its DNA? This one is definitely a case of evolution since it is being transformed right now. It also didn't need require millions of years in its changeover to obtain this valuable new trait. Each generation as it consumes more and more chloroplasts, the DNA of chloroplasts is moving segments at a time into the sea slugs until eventually it will no longer require it to eat algae anymore.

This simply isn't true, there are many documented beneficial mutations. As to disease causing mutations being speculative, I can't see how anyone with even the faintest familiarity with actual research into such things could make such a claim. There are a wide range of genetic diseases for which the causative mutations are well known and the mechanisms by which they cause disease well understood. I doubt it though these sea slugs are a fascinating example of both endosymbiosis and horizontal gene transfer. I'm not sure what you mean by this, as far as I know these sea slugs haven't just suddenly switched to this strategy of harvesting plastids from algae. This seems to be hinged on you assumption that there is an ongoing process which will eventually transfer all the neccessary nuclear genes for plastid function to the sea slug, but there isn't really any basis for such an assumption. Any evidence for this? Incidentally it is the algal DNA not that of the chloroplasts that has been transferred since the chloroplast DNA does not in fact provide all the necessary genetic infromation for producing functioning chloroplasts.I know there is evidence for the transfer of algal genes into the sea slug genome but I don't know of anything to support your contention that this is an incremental process 'each generation'.I agree that were the correct genes all to be transferred then it is possible that a sea slug could eventually evolve which was independent of the algae as a source of chlorplasts, but I certainly don't see that outcome as inevitable.TTFN,WK

The evidence indicates that new species are produced, and that mutations and natural selection play a large role in this process.This is what biologists and geneticists have concluded. It appears that the primary opposition to this comes from believers in certain fundamentalist religions, and their beliefs are not supported by scientific evidence.Unless you have some evidence I am not aware of?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

The proof is in our genomes and the genomes of other species. It is quite simple, really.Why are humans and chimps different? It is because our DNA is different.Mutations cause DNA to be different.It is an inescapable conclusion that changing DNA through mutations will result in different species. That is completely false. You might want to check out the Human Haplotype (or HapMap) Project:http://www.genome.gov/10001688We know of tons of neutral mutations. Most biologists use cladistics nowadays so the phyla designation really doesn't have that much pull. No matter what happens to the sea slug it will always be a member of its clade.

No ... ... and yes. As I have said several times evolutionary biology does not pretend that random mutation and natural selection are sufficient explanation for the entire observed diversity of life on Earth. I'm not trying to downplay anything just to portray a more realistic version of modern evolutionary biology than the straw man you put forward. The other mechanisms are not some vague incohate concept they are things like horizontal gene transfer, endosymbiosis, heritable epigenetic variation and probably others not as well understood. Well that wasn't really what I was talking about in terms of other mechanisms, but I would certainly not quibble that the transposon insertion is a mechanism which forms part of the glycerol metabolism regulation system. This fits so many wrong assertions and assumptions into one sentence it is hard to know where to begin. We haven't somehow lost RM and natural selection as explanations. Their not being able to explain the entire diversity of life on Earth doesn't mean they can't contribute substantially towards explaining that diversity. We don't lose anything by gaining understanding of other mechanisms which generate heritable variation. Well now you seem to be reaching to semantic cheeseparing in the absence of any substantial argument. Despite continual Idisat/Creationist bleatings evolutionary biology is not an atheist religion, if traditionally held 'dogma' is challenged by solid evidence it will be overturned, it happened with the central dogma of molecular biology when reverse transcription was discovered and arguably with Prions. Unless its offspring subsequently had 2 heads then it wouldn't be anything to do with evolution. I really don't see how this is the case. The point of evolutionary theory is not to dictate to reality how it must behave but to allow us to explain and model the reality of biological evolution as accurately as we can.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : corrected typo

Where are you claiming these processes, like endosymbiosis, and epigenetic inheritances arose from? Were they random mutations that were selected for through natural selection?

How about transposon insertion, where did that "mechanism" come from? Random mutations?

Hi Bolder-dash,Have you thought ahead to how your line of questioning might somehow provide support for your position? There's so much science doesn't know that you should have little problem coming across things we don't know, but everything we didn't know and later figured out turned out to have natural causes. Nothing has ever been traced to an IDer or the supernatural. For this reason things we don't know cannot be evidence of an IDer or the supernatural.When we study transposons there is no evidence of anything going on except matter and energy following the physical laws of the universe. Even if we had no idea how the transposon process originated it wouldn't help your cause.If you're looking for things we don't know then I don't understand why you're bothering with questions buried in the details of microbiological processes. Why don't you just go straight to the big items for which science has developed no consensus. While there are plenty of ideas, we don't know what caused the Big Bang, and we don't know how life originated. If our lack of knowledge in these areas doesn't help your cause, how in the word is any lack of knowledge about details like transposons or epigenetics or endosymbiosis going to help you?You need to find a strategy that might actually work. Could I suggest searching for evidence for your favorite theory, ID?--Percy