My goodness
......it never ceases to amaze me how blind some people can be to very simple facts.
Amen. Were truer words never spoken accidentally.
My mother did not give birth to a dog or a cat or any other creature because her human DNA combined with my fathers human DNA to produce a family of humans. No matter how much time elapses, that will always be the case. Humans will produce other humans as they were designed to do.
It is a continuum. You need to read up on Ring Species, where genetic variability is spread over space rather than over time.
The duck DNA was already designed ready to be passed on to the next generation, who would all bear the same beautiful patterning. All species reproduce "according to their kind"....it's not rocket science is it?
No, it is not rocket science, but it seems to escape you. I guess that is because it runs counter to your preconceived notions.
The fossil record does not supersede this fact of nature. When science produces fossils with the assumption that evolution must have taken place, then it can fill in the gaps with imagination and all manner of "scientific" musings that cannot be proven.....it has to do that because there is nothing else to link one fossil to another. The chain is imaginary because no links actually exist.
Spoken like someone with a weak and passing knowledge of the fossil record and even less familiarity with the confirming geological, immunological and genetic data.
The chance factor is not in an alteration of my genes, but in the diversity of our appearance, dictated by the combined gene pool. My siblings and I do not look alike, yet we are all humans with the same uniquely human characteristics. We have the same body structure and internal workings, yet we have different personalities, different hair color, different eye color, and somewhat different builds, yet all of this was dictated, not by chance, but by the genetic combination that resulted when fertilization took place in each occasion. You mistake the wonder of diversity for blind chance? Seriously, you are grasping at straws.
Again, your lack of background and understanding is showing. Random chance (e.g., mutation) is the origin of all diversity ... that's where the raw material comes from (if you don't believe this, you need to look into what is know about the genetics of Sickle Cell Anemia, speaking of differences in internal workings), but random assortment of the available parental genes is where the diversity of your appearance (and so much more) comes from.
Is anybody else reading what I am reading in these replies?
Seriously....we need to question the level to which some are willing to descend to prove their point. Pathetic guys.....I thought you were smarter than that?
"Question the level ..." what ever are you talking about? This is a debate forum. You are not debating, you provide no evidence. You make no arguments. You just preach and expect everyone to bow down before the idols of the four horsemen of logical fallacies: argument from ignorance, straw-man, god of the gaps and argument from personal incredulity.
The mechanism that produces life is beautifully crafted.....replicas of ourselves are produced because we are designed to do so.
Yes, the mechanism is beautiful, honed by billions of years of evolution. We do not produce replicas, we produce new combinations with new variations and let nature sort it out.
"Whom" we produce in that process is immaterial. It was 'humankind' that was to "fill the earth" along with all the other creatures designed to share life on this planet. If we are among them, then we need to be grateful that we have life, when the odds against us individually being here are astronomical.
That is typical of your debating style, a bold-faced misstatement of fact, bereft of evidence or support, presented as though the logical fallacy tapped (in this case argument from fallacy and appeal to probability) lends some credibility.
Is that a serious question?
There is absolutely no evidence that humans and dinosaurs ever shared the same air or land space at the same time. I am not a YEC. What Noah took into the ark was what God brought to him. Noah did not have to go out and lasso them. There was a pair of each "kind" of wild animals and 7 of the more domestic ones.
Genetic bottlenecks are rather easy to detect and date, if the Noah fairy tale had any basis every population on Earth, including people would show:
allelic diversity that decline more than heterozygosity. This results from the fact that bottlenecks tend to eliminate many low-frequency alleles. [Nei et al. (1975) "The Bottleneck Effect and Genetic Variability in Populations."
Evolution 29:1-10.] So, there is an excess of heterozygosity in selectively neutral loci. [Cornuet and Luikart. (1996) "Description and Power Analysis of Two Tests for Detecting Recent Population Bottlenecks from Allele Frequency Data."
Genetics 144: 2001-2014.] Tests for bottlenecks focus on detecting this "excess" heterozygosity, which may last for many generations as allelic diversity recovers through mutation (if there were no mutation, as you'd have it, there'd be almost no heterozygosity).
Figure: Excess heterozygosity under a stepwise mutation model, from Cornuet, et.al. Curves 1-8 represent different amounts of time after the bottleneck event; as you can see, heterozygosity excess first increases, then decreases. The lower the number of post-bottleneck alleles, the more heterozygosity excess. If the Noah story had any basis all populations would show similar (statistically the same) curves.
One can also look at allelic deficiency given the amount of heterozygosity, or the deficiency of rare alleles, since these tend to be eliminated first [Maruyama and Fuerst. (1985) "Population Bottlenecks and Nonequilibrium Models in Population Genetics. II. Number of Alleles in a Small Population That Was Formed By a Recent Bottleneck."
Genetics 111: 675-689.], of one can test for a reduction in the variance of allele frequencies, for the same reason. See [Luikart et al. (1998) "Usefulness of molecular markers for detecting population bottlenecks via monitoring genetic change."
Molecular Ecology 7: 963-974] for a comparison of statistical power. (Spoiler: The variance test comes out on top.)
(thanks, Shan Kothari)