If Evolution Were True

[Nepenthe]

I would think that if science want to prove that there has been enough time for evolution to happen that somewhere along the line they figured out how long, on average, it would take for a new species to evolve from the first appearance of a new species until it evolves into another species.

Say the average was 5 minutes. There would have been plenty of time for all of life to come from a singe species.

Say it took a billion years. Well, there would only be a few species around today.

It would seem to me to be a fundamental concept in figuring out how long would be needed to account for all the species we have.

Autodidact and painted wolf have gone over this already in detail but as for the time scale, it varies considerably, and there was more than enough time for the billions of life forms to have prospered and gone extinct in the 4.5 billion years available (even longer if the panspermia hypothesis is entertained). 20 million years, 100 million years or more- it's a drop in the bucket on the geological time scale. So the question doesn't even really make much sense.

Speciation is incontrovertible; in most species of larger animal the process is so slow we have the fossil and genetic evidence to chronicle it, while with insects we have actively observed speciation. We've actually seen the emergence of new species before our very eyes. Animals are reproducing constantly, and mutations increase the information content of the genome constantly. The rate at which information is added to the planet's genome is so rapid that the entire process of abiogenesis probably occurred within a 10,000,000 year span. A geological blink of the eye. But I won't focus on abiogenesis since that is a different issue than evolution; there've been interesting mathematical models of the evolution of the human eye as well that are equally quick. Not only was the time available for the seemingly limitless biota that have lived and died on Earth, but it's a wonder it took so long at all.

If you're looking for something a bit more specific, then it has been estimated that 4 to 6 [edit] million years was all that was necessary for the chimpanzee and Homo sapien to diverge from their common ancestor. Again, a pretty short time span considering what time was actually available.

 

[sandy whitelinger]

I can certainly give it a go.

I assume (I may be wrong) that you are looking for genus level changes in the fossil record.

Do you mind if I use horses as an example? The horse fossil record is quite nice and I can get decent pictures for you to look at. If not, I can try to keep with Canids. I'll use them to explain Genus.

You seem to get what I'm asking. If changes from one genus of "pre-horse" to horse is an excellent example of this, then, yes, I would like to see what evidence is used to make the assertion that the two geni are related.

Basically Genus arrive just like species do... with little changes, just built up over a bit more time.
For example the Red fox (vulpes vulpes) is a different genus than the Grey Fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus). They are separated by genetics and by features of the skull, jaws, feet and other sundry bits as well as history. The American Vulpes foxes came over from Europe during the ice age. The Urocyon foxes have been here at least twice as long.

I assume you are pointing out how these different fox geni are related and not their map of ancestory.

So Genus is just a matter of degrees of separation. Where Species are like brothers and sisters, Genus are more like aunts and uncles. Family would include cousins and so on.

Hope this helps some.

To paraphrase Neo from The Matrix, "I know Genus."

ps. p+q=1 because each is a % of a whole... so .4+.6=1 One being 100% of the population.

Ok, so I assumed since they were talking about alleles that this was a mutation. Is this correct?

If so then why must the entire population have the allele or it recessive counterpart?

Also why are they talking about recessive genes at all?

 

[sandy whitelinger]

Autodidact and painted wolf have gone over this already in detail but as for the time scale, it varies considerably, and there was more than enough time for the billions of life forms to have prospered and gone extinct in the 4.5 billion years available (even longer if the panspermia hypothesis is entertained). 20 million years, 100 million years or more- it's a drop in the bucket on the geological time scale. So the question doesn't even really make much sense.

...there've been interesting mathematical models of the evolution of the human eye as well that are equally quick. Not only was the time available for the seemingly limitless biota that have lived and died on Earth, but it's a wonder it took so long at all.

All I'm looking for is that someone give me the math that is responsible for backing this claim up? It's already been established here that evolutionist's accept this. The best answer I've gotten so far as to why is that really smart people accept it.

If you're looking for something a bit more specific, then it has been estimated that 4 million years was all that was necessary for the chimpanzee and Homo sapien to diverge from their common ancestor. Again, a pretty short time span considering what time was actually available.

Is this what is accepted, then, as a good average for all speciation? Also, how many trait changes happened in that time in your example?

 

[sandy whitelinger]

Well, faith in the sense of reasonable reliance on something that has demonstrated its effectiveness again and again, not in the sense of blind reliance despite the evidence. But you don't? When you're sick, how do you decide what treatment to take? You do the research from scratch, or rely on what's already been done? Before flying in an airplane, do you ask for the calculations on what keeps it aloft? Or do you rely on "faith"?

Faith it is. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.

My point is that I'm consistent--I apply the same standards here as to other scientific issues. Do you?

I don't understand your context here.

You, on the other hand, automatically reject the same conclusion, also without seeing or understanding the calculations. You assume that thousands of scientists, using their best efforts for decades, trying to knock down the theory and failing to do so, are all wrong, and that you, who know nothing of the underlying math, are right. That's unwarranted faith--plus ignorance.

Thousands of scientists have been known to use faulty reasoning to come up with faulty models.

 

[RemnanteK]

Faith it is. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.

I don't understand your context here.

Thousands of scientists have been known to use faulty reasoning to come up with faulty models.

:clap


Noooo scientists would NEVER falsify data to support there "hypothesis".

Also, the government cares about the people and not power.

And I am in fact the Great spaghetti monster in the sky.

Hehe... :yes:

The only truth is the truth you can prove to yourself through study and learning.

 

[painted wolf]

You seem to get what I'm asking. If changes from one genus of "pre-horse" to horse is an excellent example of this, then, yes, I would like to see what evidence is used to make the assertion that the two geni are related.

I'll get working on it... likely in a thread of it's own, as it will take up quite a bit of room and I'm sure discussion.

I assume you are pointing out how these different fox geni are related and not their map of ancestory.

Isn't it kind of both? How you are related to others is part of your ancestry.

To paraphrase Neo from The Matrix, "I know Genus."

So then you know how Genus is just a small step up from species, and often as hard to pin down.

Ok, so I assumed since they were talking about alleles that this was a mutation. Is this correct?

Correct.

If so then why must the entire population have the allele or it recessive counterpart?

We all share the same genes, that is what makes us a unified species. You don't find humans that don't have the full set of human genes... we may have slightly different copies of those genes (like blue eyes vs. brown eyes) but we all have the same gene.

Also why are they talking about recessive genes at all?

Recessive genes are very important. They are also easy to spot in a population. Most are harmless (like eye color: blue eyes is a recessive gene). It is how sets of genes change in a population that determine how species adapt and change over time.

wa:do

 

[Nepenthe]

All I'm looking for is that someone give me the math that is responsible for backing this claim up? It's already been established here that evolutionist's accept this. The best answer I've gotten so far as to why is that really smart people accept it.

Mathematical models can only help us to predict what will happen, but it requires actually following through on the experiment to determine the validity of the proposition. So yes, mathematical models are indispensable, but as blueprints. I think you might be looking for information on nested hierarchies- that is how evolution can be described by the mathematics of Markov processes and chains. Biologists use Bayesian statistics and Markovian math to model evolution, populations, and genetics. I'm no mathemetician though; my schooling was in archeology and hominid evolution, so I offer this only as a slightly informed layperson.

As for the evolution of the eye, the best know study was a Swedish paper titled A Pessimistic Estimate of the Time Required for an Eye to Evolve by Nilsson DE, and Pelger S, Proc R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 1994 Apr 22;256(1345):53-58. To read the original paper you may have to actually order a copy; I can't access it online, but did read it about 10 years ago during some biology coursework. It's phenomenal stuff. And Richard Dawkins gives a great analysis of the study in his book Climbing Mount Improbable and writes on it here as well.

Abstract: Theoretical considerations of eye design allow us to find routes along which the optical structures of eyes may have evolved. If selection constantly favours an increase in the amount of detectable spatial information, a light-sensitive patch will gradually turn into a focused lens eye through continuous small improvements of design. An upper limit for the number of generations required for the complete transformation can be calculated with a minimum of assumptions. Even with a consistently pessimistic approach the time required becomes amazingly short: only a few hundred thousand years.

Is this what is accepted, then, as a good average for all speciation? Also, how many trait changes happened in that time in your example?

I'm not sure what an average would be here, but genetic studies of the molecular clock place the split at 4-6 (or 5-7) mya, and modern humans 120 to 250 thousand years ago from the last common linkage. Simply put, the genetic clock is how these numbers are derived; it's an indispensable method of measuring the rate of gene change and putting organisms into chronological order. And at the risk of sounding flippant or tautological, the amount of trait changes that happened were enough to cause a divergence. The most recent studies I'm aware was through the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences who looked at genes that code for proteins. The team examined 167 different gene sequence sets from chimpanzees, humans, macaques and mice- choosing such a divergent sample reduced the variability in the time estimate. And this confirmed, as it has time and time again in the past way back to '67, the numbers matched what has been previously shown: Old World primate divergence at approx. 35 mya, and human-chimpanzee divergence approx. 5-7 mya. The original paper is here.

 

[Inky]

Is this what is accepted, then, as a good average for all speciation?

Speciation is prompted by environmental factors, such as two populations of the same species being split off from one another, so I wouldn't think there would be a consistent time table for it. If a species was perfectly adapted to a single niche and its environment never changed or split the population up, it would probably never speciate. If it was suddenly set free in a new environment with many divering opportunities, it might speciate very rapidly. (Biology people, tell me if I'm wrong, but this is the impression I got from Bio 101.)

All I'm looking for is that someone give me the math that is responsible for backing this claim up?

I'm not an expert, but if all you're looking for is a reasonable explanation of how we could get billions of species in a few billion years' time, it's best to understand that what we have is an exponential problem. Say we start with one species, and every ten million years it splits into two, and each subsequent species also splits in two every ten million years. Of course in the real world there are limits to growth, and sometimes a species will go for more than ten million years without speciating and sometimes take less time, but this is just an example. Anyway, after 100 million years you'd have 2^10 or 1024 species, at 200 million years you'd have 2^20 or 1,048,57, and at 400 million years you would have 1,099,511,627,776 species. So at any "average" speciation rate of ten million years or less, and span of time greater than 200 million years, the thing keeping the number of species out of the trillions digit is going to be environmental limits, not an inherent inability to get that much diversity that quickly.

 

[painted wolf]

Speciation is prompted by environmental factors, such as two populations of the same species being split off from one another, so I wouldn't think there would be a consistent time table for it. If a species was perfectly adapted to a single niche and its environment never changed or split the population up, it would probably never speciate. If it was suddenly set free in a new environment with many divering opportunities, it might speciate very rapidly. (Biology people, tell me if I'm wrong, but this is the impression I got from Bio 101.)

Major changes may not happen, but speciation can and does still happen. You can't stop evolving, even it you are just "staying in place".

wa:do

 

[Autodidact]

Why did you recommend those books then?

Because they address the questions you asked.

 

[Autodidact]

Faith it is. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.

I don't understand your context here.

Thousands of scientists have been known to use faulty reasoning to come up with faulty models.

I think this post, and your previous posts, demonstrate how creationism is fundamentally anti-scientific. What you're saying is that you reject scientific knowledge in favor of your religious doctrine. You don't trust scientific advances unless you make it yourself. I think that scientific knowledge, at any given moment, is the best that we have. It's wrong, but it's less wrong than anything else we have right now. The Biblical description of the natural world has been shown to be wrong again and again, while scientific knowledge gets less and less wrong, and again, has been demonstrated over history to constantly expand and improve our understanding of the natural world.

In this post you show that you reject science in general. But I bet you take full advantage of it nonetheless. For example, when you're sick, you probably follow the medical recommendations regarding your treatment, am I right?

 

[Autodidact]

All I'm looking for is that someone give me the math that is responsible for backing this claim up? It's already been established here that evolutionist's accept this. The best answer I've gotten so far as to why is that really smart people accept it.

After having subjected it to decades of questioning and probing. One reason this information is hard to dig up is that it was done about 100 years ago.

And we're looking for you to come up with the math that is responsible for undermining it, remember?

 

[Autodidact]

sandy:

I'm still completely unclear on your position, as you've told us that new species do evolve from existing ones, and that they don't. This is a huge, significant, difference. According to you, do new species ever come about, or not?

 

[painted wolf]

I'm still completely unclear on your position, as you've told us that new species do evolve from existing ones, and that they don't. This is a huge, significant, difference. According to you, do new species ever come about, or not?

I think she already said she does.

wa:do

 

[sandy whitelinger]

:clap


Noooo scientists would NEVER falsify data to support there "hypothesis".

Also, the government cares about the people and not power.

And I am in fact the Great spaghetti monster in the sky.

Hehe... :yes:

The only truth is the truth you can prove to yourself through study and learning.

that's my theory. The Bible says to trust no man.

 

[sandy whitelinger]

Because they address the questions you asked.

How do you know if you've never read them?

 

[sandy whitelinger]

I think this post, and your previous posts, demonstrate how creationism is fundamentally anti-scientific. What you're saying is that you reject scientific knowledge in favor of your religious doctrine. You don't trust scientific advances unless you make it yourself. I think that scientific knowledge, at any given moment, is the best that we have. It's wrong, but it's less wrong than anything else we have right now. The Biblical description of the natural world has been shown to be wrong again and again, while scientific knowledge gets less and less wrong, and again, has been demonstrated over history to constantly expand and improve our understanding of the natural world.

You say that science uses evidence to postulate possibilities. We who believe the Bible use the same methods.

In this post you show that you reject science in general. But I bet you take full advantage of it nonetheless. For example, when you're sick, you probably follow the medical recommendations regarding your treatment, am I right?

Actually I haven't seen a doctor in about 25 years.

 

[sandy whitelinger]

sandy:

I'm still completely unclear on your position, as you've told us that new species do evolve from existing ones, and that they don't. This is a huge, significant, difference. According to you, do new species ever come about, or not?

Once again, go back and review, I answered your question about that yesterday.

 

[sandy whitelinger]

We all share the same genes, that is what makes us a unified species. You don't find humans that don't have the full set of human genes... we may have slightly different copies of those genes (like blue eyes vs. brown eyes) but we all have the same gene.

Recessive genes are very important. They are also easy to spot in a population. Most are harmless (like eye color: blue eyes is a recessive gene). It is how sets of genes change in a population that determine how species adapt and change over time.

I am under the impression that it is a variation in a few members that begins the process of evolution and natural selection can favor that change until it then becomes part of the population. I gues I'm unsure as to why one used that equation to prove evolution is happening if the whole population has it. I'm also unsure if the equation can predict how often, in a time frame, a new species arises.

 

[sandy whitelinger]

Mathematical models can only help us to predict what will happen, but it requires actually following through on the experiment to determine the validity of the proposition. So yes, mathematical models are indispensable, but as blueprints. I think you might be looking for information on nested hierarchies- that is how evolution can be described by the mathematics of Markov processes and chains. Biologists use Bayesian statistics and Markovian math to model evolution, populations, and genetics. I'm no mathemetician though; my schooling was in archeology and hominid evolution, so I offer this only as a slightly informed layperson.

As for the evolution of the eye, the best know study was a Swedish paper titled A Pessimistic Estimate of the Time Required for an Eye to Evolve by Nilsson DE, and Pelger S, Proc R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 1994 Apr 22;256(1345):53-58. To read the original paper you may have to actually order a copy; I can't access it online, but did read it about 10 years ago during some biology coursework. It's phenomenal stuff. And Richard Dawkins gives a great analysis of the study in his book Climbing Mount Improbable and writes on it here as well.

Abstract: Theoretical considerations of eye design allow us to find routes along which the optical structures of eyes may have evolved. If selection constantly favours an increase in the amount of detectable spatial information, a light-sensitive patch will gradually turn into a focused lens eye through continuous small improvements of design. An upper limit for the number of generations required for the complete transformation can be calculated with a minimum of assumptions. Even with a consistently pessimistic approach the time required becomes amazingly short: only a few hundred thousand years.

I'm not sure what an average would be here, but genetic studies of the molecular clock place the split at 4-6 (or 5-7) mya, and modern humans 120 to 250 thousand years ago from the last common linkage. Simply put, the genetic clock is how these numbers are derived; it's an indispensable method of measuring the rate of gene change and putting organisms into chronological order. And at the risk of sounding flippant or tautological, the amount of trait changes that happened were enough to cause a divergence. The most recent studies I'm aware was through the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences who looked at genes that code for proteins. The team examined 167 different gene sequence sets from chimpanzees, humans, macaques and mice- choosing such a divergent sample reduced the variability in the time estimate. And this confirmed, as it has time and time again in the past way back to '67, the numbers matched what has been previously shown: Old World primate divergence at approx. 35 mya, and human-chimpanzee divergence approx. 5-7 mya. The original paper is here.

Thanks, I'll go over this and see how it fits into what I'm looking for.