Evolution in pieces.

NosyNed I have a question, do we have any DNA sampals for species which lived millions of years ago?(added by editLooks like 400,000 years represents the oldest dna samples we have currently. BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Most ancient DNA ever?
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Thank You
The Elder[This message has been edited by The Elder, 12-17-2003]

John Paul,If I seem to be repeating what you have heard from evolutionists before it is only because creationists are adept at making statements like "it can be equally used as evidence for a common creator..." and then leaving it there as if that was enough. I've seen it a couple of times on these forums and I thought I'd take you up on it. If it is purely due to misinterpretations from evil scientists trying to bring down established religion then it should be easy to look at the data an reinterpret. So why don't you do this?Don't come back with meaningless (your lastest 'two sentences" attempt was completely detached from the facts) , use the real data. For example: when you compare the ribosome (a protein/RNA complex that ALL life has) from a vast number of organisms by looking at its' sequence you construct a 'tree-of-life' that spookily mirrors those produced by fossils/comparitive anatomy. The sequence changes bit by bit as you go along each of the branches, so if a creator was involved in this process he/she is tinkering with things a bit at a time - rather like the way evolution is meant to work. How else would you read these facts?Incidentally can you also back up your claim that The chimp genome has recently been sequenced and from what I've read it seems to back up how remarkably similar we are![This message has been edited by Ooook!, 12-17-2003]

I assume you mean CR Woese? Do you have a reference for this refutation? I ask because doing a brief online search brought up this paper by CR Woese, O Kandler and ML Wheelis, from which I quote:"Within the last decade it has become possible to trace evolutionary history back to the (most recent) common ancestor of all life, perhaps 3.5-4 billion years ago."The references for this passage pass onto two further papers from Woese.

A basic search comes up with:

quote:

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A genetic annealing model for the universal ancestor of all extant life is presented...The universal ancestor is not a discrete entity. It is, rather, a diverse community of cells that survives and evolves as a biological unit.

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Very interesting: he's saying that the "universal ancestor" was a fusion of several discreet cells that merged and evolved as a "biological unit."Could you point out where he refers to the original created kinds? No? Then I'll take Woese's work as evidence for my position, not yours. So you don't really know, right?What good is a classification scheme if you don't know how to classify things with it? Science isn't going to help you know what the created kinds were until you can say what a created kind is. In the years I've been having these debates no creationist has ever been able to define kinds. I doubt you'll be the first.

Sure. Here's one from your Carl Woese, in fact:

quote:

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On the evolution of cells.

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Woese CR.

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Department of Microbiology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 601 South Goodwin Avenue, B103 Chemical and Life Sciences Laboratory, Urbana, IL 61801-3709, USA. carl@phylo.life.uiuc.edu

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A theory for the evolution of cellular organization is presented. The model is based on the (data supported) conjecture that the dynamic of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is primarily determined by the organization of the recipient cell. Aboriginal cell designs are taken to be simple and loosely organized enough that all cellular componentry can be altered and/or displaced through HGT, making HGT the principal driving force in early cellular evolution. Primitive cells did not carry a stable organismal genealogical trace. Primitive cellular evolution is basically communal. The high level of novelty required to evolve cell designs is a product of communal invention, of the universal HGT field, not intralineage variation. It is the community as a whole, the ecosystem, which evolves. The individual cell designs that evolved in this way are nevertheless fundamentally distinct, because the initial conditions in each case are somewhat different. As a cell design becomes more complex and interconnected a critical point is reached where a more integrated cellular organization emerges, and vertically generated novelty can and does assume greater importance. This critical point is called the "Darwinian Threshold" for the reasons given.

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On the evolution of cells - PubMed

I can show you the ocean that prevents your drive to Hawaii. So show us where the ocean is between micro-evolution and macro-evolution. You can't postulate an unknown barrier, just as you can't postulate an unknown ocean between New York and San Francisco. Just saying "There could be a barrier" is no evidence at all. Maybe you need to look up what "positive" means before you shout it at people. You're making the positive claim - that something exists - therefore it is you who needs to show the positive evidence. We're making a negative claim - that something doesn't exist - so there's no onus for evidence on us, whatsoever. No, Mike Gene thinks that. Don't confuse his thinking with that of mainstream evolutionary biology.

Careful, Crashfrog, species itself is a somewhat imprecise classification scheme - to the best of my knowledge there is no single clear definition of species.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "change occurred", but I was reading a relevant passage in "The Creationists" recently. As late as the 1940's many creationsists, notably George MacReady Price (the founder of "Flood geology") insisted that there had been no speciation since Eden and "kind" is the same as "species"."The Creationists", Ronald Numbers, University of California Press, 1992, pg 127, discussing the conflicts in the Deluge Geology Society (DGS) between Price and others:"Ironically, the recent publication of the biological part of Clark's manuscript under the title Genes and Genesis (1940) had pushed Price into doing just that. In his book Clark defended limited Darwinian natural selectionwithin genera, families, and even ordersagainst the "extreme creationism" of those who insisted that God had created every species." {emphasis added - JRF}ibid, pg 129:"Clark was not alone among DGS members in pushing for greater acceptance of microevolution within the originally created kinds. In the early 1940s another university-trained Price protege, Frank Lewis Marsh (1899-1992) {inventor of the term "baramin" - JRF}, joined Clark in advocating post-Edenic speciation. ... While teaching at an Adventist school in the Chicago area, Marsh took advanced work in biology at the University of Chicago and obtained an M. S. in zoology from Northwestern University in 1935, specializing in animal ecology. Later, after joining the faculty of Union College in Lincoln, he completed a Ph.D. in botany at the University of Nebraska in 1940, where he wrote his dissertation on plant ecology and became the first Adventist to earn a doctoral degree in biology. While attending these secular universities, he resisted the impulse to challenge his professors on the issue of evolution, telling himself that he 'was there to learn what they had to offer,' not to convert them to his way of thinking.Like Clark, Marsh never deviated from a literal, recent creation and universal flood, but the more he learned, the more he questioned the notion that all species had originated by separate creative acts. {emphasis added - JRF} Zoologists, he noted, had identified thousands of species of dry-land animals alone, yet Adam had been able to name all of them in a single day. Thus it seemed unreasonable to equate the Genesis kinds with the multitudinous species of the twentieth century. {emphasis added - JRF} Besides, as he once explained to Price, his close association with evolutionists over the years had given him 'an understanding of their way of thinking' and a confidence in their taxonomic work that Price could never appreciate. 'You have never rolled up your sleeves and worked as one of their crowd on various research projects as I have," he reminded the self-taught geologist.'"

No, you haven't, at least not in this thread. Reference or a reference to your previous reference, please.

Even if that is the case so what? Was Lucy more human-like or more chimp-like? Lucy was bipedal so we evolved from a bipedal "ape". (I'm using Ape loosly of course).

That is, of course, not true. There is evidence cna accumulate in the way biologists say they did. What is under discussion is how far this way can go. That is what your own link is saying.And the whole point of the article seems to be that some other mechanism is needed to be added to the "accumulated small changes" mechanism. It, in fact, suggests one such possible mechanism.However, it doesn't clarify whether that mechanism is based on a "small change" or not. In fact it doesn't clarify when a change is small or large. Don't we need that distinction?

I don't understand this paragraph. I get almost none of it. Could you translate please?Specifically, what are "imigartions"? What does "at a metaphoric standpoint" mean? What does "untill deployed otherwise" mean?
I don't even understand "...shared derived characters supplement anymore then similarites for eukaryotes.".

No, we don't, directly that is.However, there are good reasons for thinking that the fingerprints of past DNA is still there in extant organisms. In addition, we are learning how changes in control mechanisms (which they discuss) can have large phylogenic changes while being "small" changes in the genetics.added by edit:
Their claim seems to be that the genetics are a "black box" that we don't understand. It doesn't require old samples of DNA to correct that problem if it is as bad as they say.[This message has been edited by NosyNed, 12-17-2003]

kickmeiamadoublepostingbastard[This message has been edited by zephyr, 12-17-2003]

Goodness, I should hope not.This website is frozen.*courtesy of darwinsterrier