What mechanism prevents evolution above species level / "kind"?

[Man of Faith]

You can't just take a wolf and have it produce poodles. In fact you probably can't do it if you had a thousand years.
The poodle is the result of mutations producing the right traits and humans selectively breeding for those traits and breeding out others.

wa:do

You can take two wolves and use selective breeding to eventually get to poodles because the genes for poodles were already in the wolves. However you can’t take two poodles and eventually get back to wolves because the wolf genes were bread out. That tells us that selection isn’t evolution it is just selecting. No new information was generated, the information for poodles were already in the wolves.

 

[painted wolf]

You can take two wolves and use selective breeding to eventually get to poodles because the genes for poodles were already in the wolves. However you can’t take two poodles and eventually get back to wolves because the wolf genes were bread out. That tells us that selection isn’t evolution it is just selecting. No new information was generated, the information for poodles were already in the wolves.

No... if wolves had all the genes for making a poodle then they would be born poodles.

Seriously... if you are going to discuss genetics then you should at least try to grasp the basic concepts of the subject.

wa:do

 

[Man of Faith]

I would agree with you that if the first organism had all the genes for all species, then creationism would be true. However, nothing points towards this case. Not in the genetic records and not in the fossil record.

A single mutation wont produce a new "type of organism" (please be more specific, as I mentioned in the first post!), but several over a very long time might. We have observed speciation, after all.

Could I ask you to provide me with scientific evidence for your claims and define your terms like I asked for in the first post?

The difference is that one is a symbolic code, and the other is a genetic code. The first is design by man and the second shows no signs of design (not excluding the possibility that it was designed, of course). That you use "agreed upon symbols" implies intelligence, and the process of mutations isn't a conscious one, so it's a bit misleading. Even if DNA was designed, that doesn't really change anything about evolution, it just debunks abiogenesis .



Painted Wolf already explained why this is wrong, so I'll point to her answer.

You can tell that creation is true because people accept that natural selection is evolution, it’s what we observe and that is that genes are already in the original forms that produced the variety that we see today. There are no genetic records of evolution, just of natural selection. And the fossil record validates that there are no provable ancestor or descendent relationships between fossils. I would recommend that you stop using the world speciation to try to prove evolution because there is no scientific consensus on what is a species. You might as well ask a creationists what a kind is as to ask a scientist what a species is.

I don’t have access to peer-reviewed documents so if you want me to stop posting in this thread because of that, then I will respect that. Very few people on here post peer reviewed documents. There are no peer reviewed documents that show that I don’t know what evolution is and I am accused of that frequently. You yourself have never produced a peer reviewed document stating that nothing is true unless it is peer reviewed.

If all known codes are designed by intelligence then the simplest explanation of how the genetic code came about would be by intelligence. The Morris code isn’t symbolic, it is real, it uses symbols and so does the genetic code. They are identical in that they have a sender, a receiver and use agreed upon symbols for interpretation. And the genetic code does debunk evolution because evolution doesn’t say that all the genes for all the forms of life would be in the very first life form. I agree that it doesn’t debunk natural selection, and there is some discussion and debate as to if natural selection is evolution, which I don’t think it is.

 

[InformedIgnorance]

When I read the thread title I thought it would be attempting to ask why a species cannot become some sort of 'super' version of itself, and I was like... well... it isn't really a mechanism as such but... well... the rate at which the environment (or their role within that environment) changes, the frequency of the breeding cycle, the extent of potential variation (while remaining compatible for breeding) within a single cycle, the extent to which the possible breeding individuals are whittled down... i.e. mainly time and the capacity for intra-species genetic variations to be accommodated.

Then you went and burst my bubble... we aren't talking about humans becoming super-humans but rather the differentiation of species...

Serious buzz kill.

FINE.

Well, complex organisms have such a high degree of similarity between their possible viable resulting variations as well as such a prolonged reproduction cycle that in order to view such a divergence of 'kinds' would probably be too difficult to ensure an inarguable differentiation of kind.

Instead, simple organisms are without doubt more suitable to such an examination, because they have a much much smaller reproduction cycle and the lack of complexity theoretically makes this process more accommodating of variation (less error checking results in more variation, including more errors).

However simply said such experiments HAVE been conducted already, demonstrating massive change in subsequent generations be it in terms of the structure or function... until such time as the offspring are capable of human speech I think it unlikely a new 'kind' will be acknowledged.

 

[Man of Faith]

No... if wolves had all the genes for making a poodle then they would be born poodles.

Seriously... if you are going to discuss genetics then you should at least try to grasp the basic concepts of the subject.

wa:do

If the genes in wolves didn't have the genes of poodles then how can they be selected? You yourself said that it was "selective breeding". They could be dormant.

 

[Sunstone]

Seriously... if you are going to discuss genetics then you should at least try to grasp the basic concepts of the subject.

Learn the subject before discussing it? Why, PW, I declare! You have such a way with coming up with novel approaches to life!

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

I don’t have access to peer-reviewed documents so if you want me to stop posting in this thread because of that, then I will respect that. Very few people on here post peer reviewed documents. There are no peer reviewed documents that show that I don’t know what evolution is and I am accused of that frequently. You yourself have never produced a peer reviewed document stating that nothing is true unless it is peer reviewed.

Forget the whole "peer reviewed" thing for now. How about you just tell us, in your own words, a couple of things:

- what is a "kind"? Is a "kind" the same thing as a species, or something else (a group of species,. maybe)?

- what allows evolution to happen within a "kind"? (I ask because you seem to be arguing that the mechanisms identified in the theory of evolution wouldn't be able to cause speciation)

- what causes evolution to stop at the limits of a "kind"?

 

[painted wolf]

If the genes in wolves didn't have the genes of poodles then how can they be selected? You yourself said that it was "selective breeding". They could be dormant.

Mutations.

And no... they aren't dormant. If they had genes for poodle fur they would have poodle fur.

Wolves do not have a larger genome than dogs... thus they can't have all the dog genes and all the wolf genes. It's simple genetics and even simpler math.

wa:do

 

[fantome profane]

Mutations.

And no... they aren't dormant. If they had genes for poodle fur they would have poodle fur.

Wolves do not have a larger genome than dogs... thus they can't have all the dog genes and all the wolf genes. It's simple genetics and even simpler math.

wa:do

PW, you just don't understand this advanced genetic science. You see it is like sculpting from rock. You start with a wolf, and just remove are the bits that are not poodle.

 

[Curious George]

Thought I would again jump in on my Droid ( it seems as though I cannot read these threads and hold my tongue all the time). Please forgive any grammatical errors as I am not proficient in texting.

First of all I see several mistakes in the thread thus far. Leaving the poodles and wolves alone let me address the Morse code analogy. If I were to send a message to one person the likelihood of that person receiving the message wrong is somewhat small. Now suppose that person were to then send the message to another. Again, we find a small likelihood that there would either be an error in the sending or the receiving. The accumulative effect we find here is the more times a code is transmitted the more likely an error is to be present. Moreover, the longer the message the more likely that over time an error will be present. Some of the Morse code errors will be fixed. Similarly, if I were to write teh. Instead of the most people might be able to figure out that I meant the. Now let us imagine that a code was sent by one and received by several who in turn each sent out the code to several more. This level of multiple telephones after 3.8 billion years might develop some rather uniquely different messages. We could suggest that the messages are still of the same kind because they are all comprised of English letters. But this would be akin to suggesting all life is of the same kind simply because it is carbon based.

 

[Curious George]

Forgot to mention that while some encoding or deciphering errors might be realized and fixed. Others would not.

 

[Curious George]

Btw. I do have access to scientific journals and have cited empirical evidence that suggests macro evolution. However I am not so narrow minded that I think this is the only possibility or the whole story. There are also scientific papers supporting front-loaded evolution and stabilization theory. However one will find that most front-loaded evolution seeks to poke holes in classical evolution and fails to do so when concepts such as stabilization theory are taken into account along with classical evolution. In short, if you accept that classical evolution is not the whole story or a perfect theory. I find it unlikely though that if you were to ask a biologist " is it possible that there are parts of evolution that we do not fully understand?" That the biologist would say no. Evolution is a theory that is still developing. That said there is so much empirical evidence that we can say unequivocally evolution is a fact

 

[Curious George]

So getting back to the original thread which is designed, I am guessing to illustrate in a clever manner, how microevolution and macroevolution are really just the same thing. If one were to acknowledge that microevolution does existing as much evidence shows, then one is by default acknowledging macroevolution. For one cannot say that just one gene is subject to variance. I.e. length of hair. And if length of hair can change so too can all genes. Now I believe the confusion is that is occurring deals with genotype and phenotype. The suggestion that wolf DNA contains information to create a poodle comes from the concept that despite phenotype the wolf still has the genotype that allows for shorter or curlier hair. However, genotype/ phenotype is not a full understanding of evolution. Natural selection is a part of evolution but we also must look at changes to alleles not just variable combinations of alleles present.

 

[mycorrhiza]

You can tell that creation is true because people accept that natural selection is evolution, it’s what we observe and that is that genes are already in the original forms that produced the variety that we see today.

What do you mean by their "original form"?

There are no genetic records of evolution, just of natural selection.

We see the connections in the different genomes, and since evolution beyond species has been directly observed, we have genetic evidence of that too. If I recall correctly, we even have some genetic material from long dead animals like mammoths. How could we have a genetic record of a mechanism? Natural selection together with a few other mechanisms leads to evolution. What we have genetic evidence of is evolution.

Evolution makes several predictions, and they all turned out to be true. For evolution not to happen beyond "kind" there would have to be a genetic barrier that didn't allow this. Which is why I made this topic, to see if there was any evidence for this.

And the fossil record validates that there are no provable ancestor or descendent relationships between fossils.

That's the opposite of what it does, actually. Ask any paleontologist ! And even if we didn't have a single fossil, we would still have enough evidence for evolution.

I would recommend that you stop using the world speciation to try to prove evolution because there is no scientific consensus on what is a species. You might as well ask a creationists what a kind is as to ask a scientist what a species is.

The scientific consensus is a population of individuals that cannot produce fertile offspring with other populations. Sure, tigers and lions can interbreed and occassionally produce fertile offspring, so I guess they're two populations in the process of speciation.

However, I've never seen a satisfying definition of what a kind is, and I guess one of the predictions a creationist hypothesis would make is that we can find clearly defined "kinds".

There are no peer reviewed documents that show that I don’t know what evolution is and I am accused of that frequently.

I'm asking for peer-reviewed articles that support your views on evolution, not to support that you know what evolution is.

You yourself have never produced a peer reviewed document stating that nothing is true unless it is peer reviewed.

That would be quite meta . Being peer-reviewed means that it has stood up to scientific review, which increases the chances of it being true.

If all known codes are designed by intelligence then the simplest explanation of how the genetic code came about would be by intelligence.

The problem with that is that it's a more complex answer, because we need to explain the intelligence that created it, and that intelligence must be more complex than any life on Earth.

The Morris code isn’t symbolic, it is real, it uses symbols and so does the genetic code. They are identical in that they have a sender, a receiver and use agreed upon symbols for interpretation.

The morse code is indeed symbolic. It uses symbols. It's like our alphabets, they only symbolize sounds. The genetic code is physical, while the morse code is symbolical.

And the genetic code does debunk evolution because evolution doesn’t say that all the genes for all the forms of life would be in the very first life form.

Could you provide me with any evidence that the first life form had all the genes for all lifeforms? Could you propose a mock-up of it's genome and how a typical member of this species would look?

I agree that it doesn’t debunk natural selection, and there is some discussion and debate as to if natural selection is evolution, which I don’t think it is.

Natural selection isn't evolution itself, but it is a process that leads to evolution. There is no debate in the scientific community about the subject, but let's get back to topic.

 

[Pegg]

Creationist often state that while microevolution is possible, macroevolution is not. What mechanism prevents it? Why can't a species evolve past it's "kind"? There must be some kind of genetic barrier or similar to prevent this, so could you provide evidence of it?

So, here's what I want you to do:

1. Define what you mean with micro- and macroevolution and subsequently how you define species or "kind", whichever of those are brought up.

macroevolution presumes that small changes accumulated slowly over billions of years and produced the big changes needed to make fish into amphibians and apelike creatures into men. So macroevolution is about the 'assumed' big changes that take place.

While the small changes that take place over short periods of time, such as the selective breeding of dogs which can produce descendants with shorter legs or longer hair, describes “microevolution.”

2. Show, preferably with peer-reviewed material (and preferably containing original research), why macroevolution, as you define it, is not possible while microevolution, as you define it, is.

Simply stating that it has never been observed is not evidence as I'm looking for the mechanism itself that prevents it from happening.


I'm doing this so you get a chance to present the evidence for your side, and I'm willing to change my opinion about evolution if you do provide convincing scientific evidence that evolution above species or "kind" is not possible.

DNA passes on the characteristics of organisms from one generation to the next. It is the code within the DNA that controls many of their inherited characteristics and it is stable enough to maintain the distinction between basic kinds of creatures.
The reason why DNA is so stable is because before it can reproduce, it must replicate itself...the process of replication is always the same. The four chemical bases A, T, G, and C always pair in the same way: A with T, and G with C. If one side of a rung is A, the other side is always T; G always meets C. This uniformity allows for microevolution to take place, not its just too stable for the great changes supposed by evolutionists.

 

[mycorrhiza]

macroevolution presumes that small changes accumulated slowly over billions of years and produced the big changes needed to make fish into amphibians and apelike creatures into men. So macroevolution is about the 'assumed' big changes that take place.

While the small changes that take place over short periods of time, such as the selective breeding of dogs which can produce descendants with shorter legs or longer hair, describes “microevolution.”

Fair enough. It's not the scientific definition, but I'll accept it.

DNA passes on the characteristics of organisms from one generation to the next. It is the code within the DNA that controls many of their inherited characteristics and it is stable enough to maintain the distinction between basic kinds of creatures.
The reason why DNA is so stable is because before it can reproduce, it must replicate itself...the process of replication is always the same. The four chemical bases A, T, G, and C always pair in the same way: A with T, and G with C. If one side of a rung is A, the other side is always T; G always meets C. This uniformity allows for microevolution to take place, not its just too stable for the great changes supposed by evolutionists.

Do you have any evidence to support this?

How much change is possible? How would we genetically define kind?

 

[camanintx]

There are no genetic records of evolution, just of natural selection.

Apparently you don't know what endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are.

ERVs - Evidence for the Evolutionary Model

 

[camanintx]

DNA passes on the characteristics of organisms from one generation to the next. It is the code within the DNA that controls many of their inherited characteristics and it is stable enough to maintain the distinction between basic kinds of creatures.
The reason why DNA is so stable is because before it can reproduce, it must replicate itself...the process of replication is always the same. The four chemical bases A, T, G, and C always pair in the same way: A with T, and G with C. If one side of a rung is A, the other side is always T; G always meets C. This uniformity allows for microevolution to take place, not its just too stable for the great changes supposed by evolutionists.

And yet each of us carries between 100 and 200 mutations in our DNA. With that many changes in each individual, how much change would you expect after 250,000 generations?

 

[Zoe Doidge]

And yet each of us carries between 100 and 200 mutations in our DNA. With that many changes in each individual, how much change would you expect after 250,000 generations?

Assuming 200 mutations per generation you should expect to see up to a 1.563% (rounded to 3dp) change from the original genome, purely based on random mutations.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

macroevolution presumes that small changes accumulated slowly over billions of years and produced the big changes needed to make fish into amphibians and apelike creatures into men. So macroevolution is about the 'assumed' big changes that take place.

While the small changes that take place over short periods of time, such as the selective breeding of dogs which can produce descendants with shorter legs or longer hair, describes “microevolution.”




DNA passes on the characteristics of organisms from one generation to the next. It is the code within the DNA that controls many of their inherited characteristics and it is stable enough to maintain the distinction between basic kinds of creatures.
The reason why DNA is so stable is because before it can reproduce, it must replicate itself...the process of replication is always the same. The four chemical bases A, T, G, and C always pair in the same way: A with T, and G with C. If one side of a rung is A, the other side is always T; G always meets C. This uniformity allows for microevolution to take place, not its just too stable for the great changes supposed by evolutionists.

How does this allow for "microevolution"? It seems to me that you're arguing that mutation is impossible, which (besides being demonstrably wrong) would imply that "microevolution" is impossible, too.