Evidence of Evolution that was presented but never addressed

[omega2xx]

Neither salamander nor gull is a species. The herring gull and black-backed gull are emphatically different species at the extremes.

Irrelevant. Salamandersa are a species. I forget what type of gulls were involved in their ring species, but they were a species. Both the salamanders and the gulls remained the same, exact species, but were for some unknown reason were no longer able to reproduce. Remaining the same species IS NOT evolution.

 

[Kirran]

Irrelevant. Salamandersa are a species. I forget what type of gulls were involved in their ring species, but they were a species. Both the salamanders and the gulls remained the same, exact species, but were for some unknown reason were no longer able to reproduce. Remaining the same species IS NOT evolution.

No, this is factually incorrect. Salamander is not a species, there are many species of salamander. Same goes for gulls.

You're alluding to the Christian creationist 'kinds' concept, which is an unscientific one.

 

[sayak83]

Natural selection needs to have existing features to work on.How did those existing features get there in the first place? Natural selection does not create anything. As the saying goes selection can explain the survival of the fittest but it does not explain the arrival of the fittest. This is even supported by nonreligious biologists. They say that it is not natural selection that can create complex genomic networks that are needed to build these features but other nonadaptive forces.

Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics
There is no consistent tendency of evolution towards increased genomic complexity, and when complexity increases, this appears to be a non-adaptive consequence of evolution under weak purifying selection rather than an adaptation.
Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics

Evidence shows that it is not selection, that is creating the complexity of life but nonadaptive forces such as (developmental bias); how the environment directly shapes organisms’ traits (plasticity); how organisms modify environments (niche construction); and how organisms transmit more than genes across generations (extra-genetic inheritance).
Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?

It is easy to make up a speculative explanation based on the reasoning of natural selection sifting and sorting to build complex features and creatures. But there is always a lot of explanation left out. It's easy to take 1/2 a dozen steps and say look how easy it is to make life, through adaptations. Life is not just the limbs we see or the skin and bones. It is also the cells of that skin, the different layers of that skin which all have different makeups that need to work together and be created at the same time. There are systems within systems right down to the nerves and signals that go to the brain and the millions of neurons. Then this goes even further into the proteins that build all the components of those features. Then this goes even further down to the cellular level further again into the micro level. But this is never explained how all this can be created by mostly nonbeneficial random mutations and blind selection.

So when someone says hey it's easy to create something through natural selection they only look at one level and that is why it's a fallacy because they can never explain how it happens at all levels. They can only speculate about this. But the biggest hurdle is that through all these levels this blind and random process has, to produce the exact piece of the puzzle at the right time and in the right place each and every time to make it happen. Becuase this same process also allows many, more non-beneficial mutations that will cause those exact pieces to not work properly that it is hard to believe that it can create such complex and finely tuned features. That is why many scientists cannot explain how this can happen altogether. They will take one experiment or example and turn that into an entire theory.

It seems to leave the building of precise and delicate complex networks to a blind and random process that introduces situations that continually undermine those precise and delicate structures seems hard to believe and doesn't make sense. Then to say that the process of selection will neatly sort it all out does not make sense and leaves a lot of unanswered questions and does not fit what is being seen. Life follows preset paths where it seems to be able to adjust and tap into preexisting genetic material either within itself or through other cohabitating life forms including microorganism and the environment. It is all connected. There are other mechanisms as mentioned in the papers I linked which shows life has much more ability to adapt and change than through adaptations.

The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity
The goal here is to dispel a number of myths regarding the evolution of organismal complexity (Table 1). Given that life originated from inorganic matter, it is clear that there has been an increase in phenotypic complexity over the past 3.5 billion years, although long-term stasis has been the predominant pattern in most lineages. What is in question is whether natural selection is a necessary or sufficient force to explain the emergence of the genomic and cellular features central to the building of complex organisms.
The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity

It is quite well known that natural selection plays no part in the increased complexity of organisms. The increasing complexity of organisms and their genetic code through time is a natural and inevitable outcome of the second law of thermodynamics acting through processes like gene mutation and duplication (and is consistent with increasing complexity in physical, chemical realms of the universe as well). Increasing complexity does not need an explanation, since it is predicted by the basic laws of physics. Marrying that inherently increasing complexity to adaptive function and preserving that function from noise is where the mechanisms of evolution become important.

The Surprising Origins of Evolutionary Complexity

McShea and Brandon suggest that we look not only at the sheer number of parts making up living things but at the types of parts. Our bodies are made of 10 trillion cells. If they were all of one type, we would be featureless heaps of protoplasm. Instead we have muscle cells, red blood cells, skin cells, and so on. Even a single organ can have many different cell types. The retina, for example, has about 60 different kinds of neurons, each with a distinct task. By this measure, we can say that we humans are, indeed, more complex than an animal such as a sponge, which has perhaps only six cell types.

One advantage of this definition is that you can measure complexity in many ways. Our skeletons have different types of bones, for example, each with a distinctive shape. Even the spine is made up of different types of parts, from the vertebrae in the neck that hold up our head to the ones that support our rib cage.

In their 2010 book Biology's First Law, McShea and Brandon outlined a way that complexity defined in this way could arise. They argued that a bunch of parts that start out more or less the same should differentiate over time. Whenever organisms reproduce, one or more of their genes may mutate. And sometimes these mutations give rise to more types of parts. Once an organism has more parts, those units have an opportunity to become different. After a gene is accidentally copied, the duplicate may pick up mutations that the original does not share. Thus, if you start with a set of identical parts, according to McShea and Brandon, they will tend to become increasingly different from one another. In other words, the organism's complexity will increase.

As complexity arises, it may help an organism survive better or have more offspring. If so, it will be favored by natural selection and spread through the population. Mammals, for example, smell by binding odor molecules to receptors on nerve endings in their nose. These receptor genes have repeatedly duplicated over millions of years. The new copies mutate, allowing mammals to smell a wider range of aromas. Animals that rely heavily on their nose, such as mice and dogs, have more than 1,000 of these receptor genes. On the other hand, complexity can be a burden. Mutations can change the shape of a neck vertebra, for instance, making it hard for the head to turn. Natural selection will keep these mutations from spreading through populations. That is, organisms born with those traits will tend to die before reproducing, thus taking the deleterious traits out of circulation when they go. In these cases, natural selection works against complexity.

Unlike standard evolutionary theory, McShea and Brandon see complexity increasing even in the absence of natural selection. This statement is, they maintain, a fundamental law of biology—perhaps its only one. They have dubbed it the zero-force evolutionary law.

Read Post #9 for an excellent demonstration of this process.

 

[beenherebeforeagain]

IMO this could also be evidence for de-evolution.

Uhhh...what exactly is "de-evolution?"

 

[buddhist]

Uhhh...what exactly is "de-evolution?"

IMO the reduction from complexity to simplicity.

 

[beenherebeforeagain]

Simple logic, for recorded history the "closest" living relative the primate has yet to evolve into organized language, or design and build anything.

Like was mentioned also, fish still exist blowing away the theory of survival of the fittest.

I believe simple logic refutes evolution, but to each their own.

Your 'simple logic' makes an assumption: that each species has a purpose, form, or function that it is trying to evolve into. In your understanding, which is NOT what the theory of evolution postulates, once fish have evolved into land animals, they are no longer necessary, have no role to play in life...when humans evolve language, technology, etc., there is no purpose served to still have chimps, bonobos and other Great Apes around...so of course it makes no sense.

Evolution, does not have a "purpose" beyond survival of the population of breeding individuals and continuation of the line through descent (offspring). A changing genetic code for the descendants ensures that the changing (usually slowly, sometime quickly) environment will select for or against traits in a population. Over time the genetic drift of populations (as well as other developments) results in new species.

Fish still exist because they continue to survive in their environment. It doesn't matter to fish that land creatures evolved from them, because land creatures do not significantly affect their populations. Chimps and other Great Apes still exist because they survive in their natural environments...it doesn't matter to them that humans exist (except that humans might make them extinct...).

Fish, chimps, etc., still exist because they can and do survive in their natural environments. Their existence is subject to various kinds of selection pressures, so we see over time that the mix of populations changes, and that species that exist at one time often go extinct later, while species that did not exist before, develop out of the prior populations.

 

[beenherebeforeagain]

IMO the reduction from complexity to simplicity.

Can you give an example from the biological world?

And how does that differ from descent with modification through the various selection pressures which have been identified--which actually explains both increased and decreased complexity in later generations?

 

[buddhist]

Can you give an example from the biological world?

And how does that differ from descent with modification through the various selection pressures which have been identified--which actually explains both increased and decreased complexity in later generations?

All of the examples in the OP can be interpreted as descent instead of ascent. I stated "de-evolution" because "evolution" is generally taken to mean an ascent in complexity.

 

[beenherebeforeagain]

..."evolution" is generally taken to mean an ascent in complexity.

And that generality is incorrect. There are many examples of lineages that have become in some or many ways less complex than their ancestors. But increased complexity itself is not a required component of evolutionary theory. Generally, life has become more complex, but it doesn't always have to.

 

[james bond]

Thus the theory of evolution predicts a pattern, a pattern that has no reason to exist otherwise. Here is the pattern

1) The ancient earth will have no land animals but only fish in the sea. This is indeed what we see before 400 million years.
2) There will eventually be groups of fish that will have some similarities with land animals. This is observed in the fossil record with lungfish (fish with lungs) and other lobe-finned fish (fish with four fleshy limb like fin lobes) cropping up from 400 million years. No land animals are found yet.
3) Some groups of lobe finned fish are seen to adapt to shallow waters and begin to sport primitive limb bones in their fins
Example Eusthenopteron. 385 million years ago, after generic lungfish are seen and before any animals are seen.
Palaeos Vertebrates Sarcopterygii: Osteolepiformes: Eusthenopteron

http://palaeos.com/vertebrates/sarcopterygii/eusthenopteron.html

You're assuming too much just like the atheist scientists who think it started with some tiny water organism, and this happened 400 million years ago or 3.8 billion years ago. What a fairytale.

1. Show me that abiogenesis happened.

2 and 3. Around 1990, the lungfish and coelacanth (400 million year old fish found still living haha) were found by evolutionists* but the lungfish was discovered in the 19th century by Edward Cope. Your evos thought they found that elusive "transitional" fossil haha.

(* See Box 1 : Getting a Leg Up on Land : Scientific American )

 

[sayak83]

1. Show me that abiogenesis happened.

All questions regarding abiogenesis is to be directed here
Science of Abiogenesis:- By popular demand
Recommended Posts
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2 and 3. Around 1990, the lungfish and coelacanth (400 million year old fish found still living haha) were found by evolutionists* but the lungfish was discovered in the 19th century by Edward Cope. Your evos thought they found that elusive "transitional" fossil haha.

(* See Box 1 : Getting a Leg Up on Land : Scientific American )

Why is the continued existence of lungfish problematic?
Americans never immigrated from Europe because there are still Europeans??!!

 

[james bond]

I swear the atheists will believe anything.

Isn't it more likely that Tiktaalik "evolved" into a whale as in natural selection? The whale according to evolutionists came to be because a tetrapod walked back into the sea after they evolved on land to become apelike and then human haha.

Tiktaalik

Killer whale

 

[sayak83]

I swear the atheists will believe anything.

Isn't it more likely that Tiktaalik "evolved" into a whale as in natural selection? The whale according to evolutionists came to be because a tetrapod walked back into the sea after they evolved on land to become apelike and then human haha.

Tiktaalik

Killer whale

The whale fossils are found around 300 million years after the last tiktaalik. Regards. Descendants of groups of whom tiktaalik was a member eventually became reptiles, some of whom evolved into mammals and some of these mammals eventually evolved into sea-going mammals like the whales. Furthermore the entire skeletal structure of tiktaalik show it to be far more distantly related to whales than the mammals who were the direct ancestors of whales. One example is the presence of gills and gill arches in tiktalik that is not found in whales, but traces of it are still present in the land amphibians who evolved from tiktaalik like species just after.

More on whale evolution will be presented in future.

 

[Revoltingest]

Better than being "true", evolution is endlessly interesting.

 

[beenherebeforeagain]

because a tetrapod walked back into the sea after they evolved on land to become apelike and then human haha

Again, another assuming that there is a purpose to evolution: the emergence of humans, and that once that purpose is fulfilled, the prior species no longer has a purpose...utter nonsense.

That descendants developed different features and that some became bears, or cats, or humans, or cows, or mice, or whatever else, has NOTHING TO DO with whether or not the parent species, or any of the other offspring species, survive and thrive and evolve into other things.

What would apes and humans evolving have to do with the evolution of whales from a very ancient common ancestor, down different lines of descent? Under evolution, unless they are in a close relationship, such as predator and prey, there is no connection, except that both are examples of evolution occurring.

 

[Skwim]

You're assuming too much just like the atheist scientists who think it started with some tiny water organism, and this happened 400 million years ago or 3.8 billion years ago. What a fairytale.

Good grief, resorting to books published by the ultra conservative Encounter Books! No wonder your outlook is screwed up.
And a book on biology written by a philosopher (David Stove). What next books on astronomy written by plumbers. In any case, Stove did accept evolution.

"In his final years Stove began to examine and criticise evolutionary biology. This surprised and dismayed many of his supporters. However, Stove's attack on biological evolution was not as radical as it appeared – he accepted evolution was true of all living things, and said he had no objection to natural selection being true of more primitive organisms. What he wanted to attack was the allegedly distorted view of human beings proposed by some "Ultra-Darwinists". For example, he misattributed J. B. S. Haldane's famous quip that he would "lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins" to the Oxford biologist W. D. Hamilton, who had recently developed ideas of kin selection, and suggested that such ideas are probably false, and certainly unverified. Stove argued that these sorts of strong claims are often made by hard-line sociobiologists, yet they are seldom pointed out even by many of their opponents.
source​

.

 

[sayak83]

Is the rate of beneficial mutations enough to account for emergence of the diversity of Life? Yes.



All evolutionary changes are based on differential fitness caused by single mutation events over successive generations. A single mutation event can be the alteration of a single letter in a gene (or a regulatory element of the gene) or a gene duplication or gene deletion event where an entire section of the DNA is pasted in twice (or not pasted in at all) due to a mistake in the replication process. There is no gene where 5 simultaneous mutations are required before it becomes beneficial when the starting ancestral sequence was not.

The rate of mutation in humans is 1.2*10^(-8) per nucleotide per generation.
This has been experimentally demonstrated
Rate of de novo mutations, father’s age, and disease risk

A human genome has 3 billion base pairs or 6 billion nucleotides. Thus the number of new mutations that occur in every child is (6*10^9)*(1.2*10^-8)= 72 mutations.
Thus every human being is born with avg. of 72 mutations that did not exist in their parents.

Now consider that there are 7 billion people in the world.
So number new mutations arising at every nucleotide site in the human genome somewhere in the human population is (7*10^9)*(1.2*10^-8)= 84 new mutations per nucleotide site in the human population each generation.

The percentage of beneficial mutations is about 1% (several experimental studies. One example LINK). The percentage of harmful mutations is about 5% and the rest 94% is neutral.


Here is a nice homework problem.

Given that each person is born with 72 mutations on average of with 1% is good, 5% is bad and 94% is neutral, what is the probablity that a person is conceived with
1) At least one beneficial mutation and no harmful mutation?
2) A person is conceived with at least one harmful mutation and no beneficial mutation?




This number above is before considering differential selection. Differential selection is the process by which descendants with harmful mutations are removed from the population because either
1) Due to their harmful mutation they die too early to have offsprings themselves.
2) They have less offsprings than others because of their harmful mutations.


A stark example of differential selection is the fact that 66% of all human embroyos that are conceived are aborted spontaneously. (LINK). It is near certain that these embroyos have harmful gene variants that cause them to stop growing. Thus the percentage of people who are born at all is already a self-selected group from which a significant fraction (find out how much) of the descendants who had one or more harmful mutations have been eliminated already.

Here is a concrete example of beneficial mutations cropping up in human populations today.

News Feature: Genetic mutations you want

Further, recent research has shown the sheer number of beneficial mutations that do occur in actual evolution experiments. The original idea (pre 1950-1960) of the rare-ness of beneficial mutations was simply wrong
When timing is everything

“We have a poor idea of how many things were good enough to get a start, but never got far enough to win,” Marx said. “There could easily be hundreds, or even thousands, of beneficial mutations that can occur in a population of a billion bacteria in less than a tablespoon of liquid, but we only tend to find the one eventual winner. Because of the unusual nature of this type of mutation, it became easy for us to find them, distinguish independent events that occurred in the same population, and thus understand that these mutations are more common than we thought.”

A bit of math to demonstrate this fact

If a new mutation has a selective advantage of "s" then its chance of being fixed in the population (i.e. achieving complete dominance) is 2s. So a new mutant gene with a 1% selective advantage has a possibility of 2% of getting fixed.

However every mutation has a probability of occurrence "u" per gene per generation. So if the population size is N, then the probability of occurrence of a given mutation is 2uN (as every individual has two copies of the same gene). Hence, the mutation with a selective advantage of "s" has a chance of occurring 2uN times in the population in each generation. For large populations (humans, mice, bacteria etc.) this value is actually often greater than 1.

Let me show you how this is. In humans, the rate of mutations per DNA base pair per generation is 4*10^(-8) . LINK
Suppose specific mutation in a base pair is giving rise to the advantageous gene variant.
Then probability that each human possesses at least one copy of that gene is 0.25* 2*4*10^-8 = 2*10^(-8). (each letter can be altered 4 ways, only one way is being considered advantageous).
There are 7*10^9 people (7 billion) on this earth.
Therefore average number of this mutation arising every generation is = [7*10^(9)]*[2*10^(-8)] = 7*2*10=140


Now each of these 140 copies of the same advantageous mutation has the 2% chance of making it, i.e. becoming a dominant gene. Now the odds that at least one will succeed is = 1-[(0.98)^140] = 0.94...94%

Does not look so bad now does it?

So it is precisely in large populations, that an advantageous mutation has a greater chance of succeeding. In small populations, genetic drift effects may cause good mutations to get lost, but not in large ones. Thus one can see that evolution through the emergence of beneficial mutations that get selected for is an inevitable process in biology.

 

[sayak83]

Evidence of Evolution of the Giraffe

Often textbooks cite the Lamarckian theory of elongation of giraffe's neck, but the actual evolutionary evidence of giraffe evolution is left out. Recently a lot of new fossils have emerged to provide a reasonably complete picture of the evolution of the giraffe family.

The fossil animal is called Samotherium Major, a species intermediate between modern giraffes and okapi-like ancestors.

All details of the fossil including complete description of the neck and other features of the skeleton that make it a transitional giraffe ancestor are presented in the paper below.
The cervical anatomy of Samotherium, an intermediate-necked giraffid | Open Science



The neck bone anatomy is shown in detail below.
a) Okapi b) Samotherium c) Giraffe


The neck bone anatomy is shown in detail below.
a) Okapi b) Samotherium c) Giraffe

But Mere relatedness is only the beginning. If species just existed willy-nilly without evolutionary relationships we would expect to see no trends in the fossil record at all. You would have seen long necked and short necked and intermediate necked variations right down to the past. But that is not what we see. In the earliest times we see only short necked animals, related to giraffes but bearing no characteristic long neck. Then we see intermediate neck lengthed giraffes, and only in much more recent times to the long necked forms observed in the fossil record. And in all these cases, the species that came before are closely related to the species that came after and then to the species that came after that, based on bone morphology. Thus the evidence is

1) The presence of short necked giraffe-related animals in the earliest times and the absence of all other types. Example Helladotherium (11 million years)

2) The subsequent presence of intermediate necked giraffes (Samotherium, 7 million years, see above) closely related to the previously existing short necked giraffes and the continued absence of long necked type

3) The subsequent presence of long necked forms (3 million years) closely related to the earlier intermediate necked forms and continuous with modern giraffes.

Only evolutionary theory predicted a pattern such as this, and the fossil record validates evolution handsomely.

If all types of giraffes (short, long, intermediate necked) arose simultaneously in the fossil record, then evolution will be falsified. But that is not what is found.

Comparing neck vertebrae :- Pe= Prodremotherium elongatum(20 mya); Cs= Canthumeryx sirtensis(16-14 mya); Oj=Okapia johnstoni (living); Gp=Giraffokeryx punjabiensis (13mya); Sg=Sivatherium giganteum(2 mya); Bm= Bramatherium megacephalum(4 mya); Sm=Samotherium major (7 mya); Pr= Palaeotragus rouenii(7 mya); Ba= Bohlinia attica (7 mya); Gs=Giraffa sivalensis(2mya); Gc=Giraffa camelopardalis(living).

SOURCE

Thus here we have a classical case of good scientific theory. It predicts a certain specific pattern and it would be falsified by an opposite pattern in the fossil record. But the fossil records validates the pattern predicted by the theory, hence making us more confident about its truth. I can provide many such examples (human evolution, bird evolution, whale evolution, horse evolution......)

 

[Ouroboros]

Yes of course evolution is true
I agree.
But if one does not believe in evolution, even then it won't stop, and do no harm to the person who does not hold that.
It is not much of a problem to an ordinary human being.
Please
Regards

There are problems with people denying or being uneducated about evolution. For instance, MRSA, the superbug that resists all antibiotics evolved because of improper (or ignorant) use of antibiotic use for all colds and flu. The root worm has evolved to resist the BT-toxin in corn because of improper buffer zones around the areas, which comes from ignorance about evolution. We have to understand evolution to avoid further harm. We're creating super-bugs and super-pests in nature simply because we're not understanding that evolution is still in effect and not understand how it works. Denying evolution could be what eventually would undo our very existence.

 

[Ouroboros]

IMO this could also be evidence for de-evolution.

There's no real de-evolution, as I understand it. Evolution is just evolution. Any "de-evolution" would be just evolution. And there's no evidence so far that mutations could follow its path backwards to some earlier stage. There's no record that can be played in reverse.