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Why do some creationists think evolution = atheism?
- Thread starter Jose Fly
- Start date
Some places are the Belt, and some places are the Buckle.
It is unfortunate that your objections to macro evolution is based on a religious agenda and not science. Without the bias of a religious agenda, 98%+ of all scientists support evolution as described as science.
Actually no, because of the limited time frame of recent history when compared to tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of the geologic history of evolution of the diversification of species, that is just part of over all evolution of life on earth. Evolution of species can take place slowly over time, which is the dominant case due to environmental change and isolation of varieties and subspecies, but it can also take place rapidly depending on the environmental factors involved. We do see the process of speciation and the causes and processes in the evidence of recent history. We have seen new species evolve today as in the following research; Rapid Evolution Changes Species in Real Time | DiscoverMagazine.com
Rapid Evolution Changes Species in Real Time
Some species are evolving far more quickly than Darwin ever imagined.
By Jane Braxton Little|Thursday, January 22, 2015
As a graduate student in the late 1970s, David Reznick set out on a modest quest to test a key part of the theory of evolution. Reznick wanted to examine Charles Darwin’s concept of the struggle for existence — specifically, how predator-prey interactions shape the evolution of new species. Enthusiastic and ambitious, he intended to do it in the wild. “I wanted to watch evolution happen,” says Reznick, now an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside.
So in 1978, he flew to Trinidad in search of guppies. Armed with a topographic map traced onto a piece of notebook paper, he headed into the Caribbean island’s rugged Northern Range. Working under a canopy of tropical trees amid squawking birds, multicolored butterflies and boas, he collected 1,600 guppies, a colorful fish species so prolific that the females can produce dozens of babies every three to four weeks. Reznick was curious to see if predators could affect genetic adaptation in guppies over a short time.
It was not considered a promising experiment. A century earlier, Darwin had assumed that evolution takes tens to hundreds of thousands of generations to produce new species — a plodding path so slow it is essentially invisible. That theory still held sway when Reznick began grad school in 1974. Scientists had studied evolution in controlled laboratory experiments, but watching it happen in a natural setting in a human lifetime was considered improbable at best, more likely impossible.
Reznick’s study of Trinidad guppies revealed that the fish can evolve rapidly.
Paul Bentzen/Dalhousie University
“I was hanging my career on the idea that you could change the environment and see things evolve significantly in time to get tenure,” Reznick says. “People thought my thesis was cute, but doubted I would live long enough to see the results.”
Undaunted, in 1981 Reznick returned to Trinidad’s swift streams to test his theory. He transplanted guppies from a site where they had to fend off cichlids, an aggressive, wide-mouthed fish, to a new site with no predators and no other guppies. Reznick also introduced cichlids to guppy sites without predators.
He found that within four years — a mere six to eight generations — male guppies had significantly changed their reproductive patterns. Those transplanted from a high-predation site to a stream without predators were larger, matured later and reproduced more slowly. Where Reznick had introduced predators, the guppies adapted by maturing at an earlier age. Survival became a race to produce more babies.
“The risk of death alters the ways organisms allocate resources for survival,” Reznick says.
The results of his federally funded study prompted what he calls one of his proudest moments in science: a National Enquirer story with the headline, “Uncle Sam wastes $97,000 to learn how old guppies are when they die.” Actually, Reznick chuckles, “I learned a great deal more than that.” His work with the guppies changed his thinking about how quickly species can evolve. And it helped launch a paradigm shift in scientists’ thinking about evolution.
In the decades since Reznick’s first trip to Trinidad, other studies have demonstrated a fast drive toward adaptation that scientists have come to call “rapid evolution.” Researchers who once assumed evolution required millennia are documenting species adapting in mere decades, or even shorter time frames. Mosquitoes that colonized the London Underground in 1863 are now so different they can no longer mate with their above-ground relatives. Chinook salmon from Alaska to California needed just a human generation to become smaller and shorter-lived after an increase in commercial fishing in the 1920s. Adaptation is happening right under our noses, in our lifetimes.
Green anole lizards adapt to the invasion of brown anoles in only 20 generations.
Seth Patterson/Nature Picture Library
Most recently, evolutionary biologist Yoel Stuart found that green anole lizards on islands in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon needed just 20 generations to adapt to an invasion of brown anoles. Driven to higher perches by the invaders, the green anoles became better at clinging to branches by developing larger toepads with more scales — in just 15 years. It’s more evidence of “evolutionary change on observable time scales,” says Stuart, now at the University of Texas at Austin.
Many of the extraordinary adaptations happening around us may be because of us. As human activity disrupts climate patterns and modifies habitats, rapid evolution appears to be an increasingly common strategy for survival.
The effect of warming temperatures on tawny owls is one of the first documented examples of adaptation to climate change in a wild population. Finnish ornithologist Patrik Karell and others found in a 2011 study that the coloration of the owls morphed in response to warming winters in Finland.
Tawny owls come in two colors, pale gray and reddish brown. Until recently, natural selection favored the pale shade, which gave owls a better chance at survival in a snowy landscape. As winters became milder, Karell noticed a steady increase in the proportion of reddish-brown owls.
“Even subtle alterations shape how organisms evolve,” Reznick says.
Species are evolving at speeds that Darwin could not have imagined. But not all species can adapt quickly enough to evade harm. When a non-native species arrives in an ecosystem, the native species often are ill-equipped to defend against the foreign invader. Ash trees in North America, for example, lacked “evolutionary accommodations” to protect against the emerald ash borer when it arrived from Asia, Reznick says. As a result, tens of millions of ash trees across the continent are threatened by the green beetle, which is thought to have hitchhiked to the U.S. in wood crating or pallets.
Today’s evolutionary biologists have the analytic power to track species adaptation like never before. Advances in molecular biology allow them to identify the very genes that help individuals move away from their ancestors as they adapt to new conditions. For example, a team of scientists at Harvard Medical School and Princeton identified BMP4 as the key gene that sculpts the beaks of the Galapagos finches that gave Darwin his first inklings of the theory of evolution.
“We are no longer forced to infer evolution from its historical footprints in the fossil record or from dusty collections of moths,” Reznick says.
Reznick and his team continue to transplant guppies in the tropical streams of Trinidad. Along with other new tools of evolutionary biology, such as DNA analysis, they are using a technique Reznick developed to mark individual guppies so they can more easily recapture them later. This marking method allows his team to reconstruct the pedigree of individual guppies and measure their reproductive success. The research is answering questions about how predator-prey interactions shape evolving species, but it has also generated new questions: If environmental forces can change guppies, could the guppies themselves also change their ecosystems? Intrigued, Reznick has turned his attention to how ecological and evolutionary processes interact.
Now he’s not only monitoring guppies; he’s also watching their predators to see how the interaction changes the ecosystem. His team wants to know how guppies adapt to predators as well as how predators evolve in response to guppies — the ecological cause-and-effect relationships.
“What hardly anyone’s thinking about is that the animals and plants left behind may have evolved and are different from what they were before predators were eliminated,” Reznick says. This raises fundamental questions about ecological restoration, invasive species, natural selection and what else changes when the fittest actually survive.
Documenting the rapid evolution of species in natural settings turns Darwin’s “mystery of mysteries” into a real-time scientific adventure. And while Reznick has succeeded in watching evolution happen, he’s beginning to think his earlier calculations underestimated how quickly species actually adapt in nature. “What’s exciting,” says Reznick, “is that it is now feasible to incorporate evolution into our thinking about how the world is changing.”
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Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
Yes, the limits of micro-evolution are corroborated by everything we see, direct experimentation- be it dogs, fruit flies, bacteria, the fossil record, genetics and ultimately the cold hard math itself.
We can tweak parameters in our posts here, governing text size, color etc, just as the size and color of dogs can be altered. We cannot extrapolate this limited customization, to creating the supporting software, or the animal itself by that same process. Far less the operating systems that in turn underwrite these (DNA itself)
Tempting as it may be, it's not just a matter of scale, it's a logical/ mathematical impossibility inherent to nested information systems, problems unknowable in the Victorian age the theory was conceived.
Jenny Collins
Active Member
I am not saying that science hasn't helped you! I am not saying that microevolution doesn't exist! However studying something (macroevolution) that doesn't exist, is not responsible for your cure! The study of science helped you! And I always make sure to point out that when people on the internet make claims as you just did, that you were in a wheel chair and are now okay, that caution is is order! You could be making stuff up to add weight to your argument! I am not claiming you are, it is just that there is no proof! The same as the people here who claim to be scientists! Or that one who keeps bragging that he was good friends with Dawkins and knows Nobel prize winners! Those are internet claims! When I was on Yahoo Answers, everyone there claimed to have an IQ of 140, 150, 160! A guy I once debated, was talking about how he knew some medical facts that I didn't and that he had read books on the subject for 25 years! He had me doubting myself, until I talked to a doctor where I work and he confirmed that I was the one who was right! You very likely were in a wheel chair, I just don't know that for a fact! But in any case, it was science that helped you! It may have been evolutionary biologists that discovered something that helped you, but they were not studying something that doesn't exist-they weren't studying macroevolution!
Jenny Collins
Active Member
You mention "religious agenda" Everyone, including you, has an agenda! You are promoting your own beliefs and are influenced by your own bias! As far as the person having a "religious bias" you use the word religion like it is a bad word! "Religious bias rather than science" you say!It is unfortunate that your objections to macro evolution is based on a religious agenda and not science. Without the bias of a religious agenda, 98%+ of all scientists support evolution as described as science.
Actually no, because of the limited time frame of recent history when compared to tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of the geologic history of evolution of the diversification of species, that is just part of over all evolution of life on earth. Evolution of species can take place slowly over time, which is the dominant case due to environmental change and isolation of varieties and subspecies, but it can also take place rapidly depending on the environmental factors involved. We do see the process of speciation and the causes and processes in the evidence of recent history. We have seen new species evolve today as in the following research; Rapid Evolution Changes Species in Real Time | DiscoverMagazine.com
Rapid Evolution Changes Species in Real Time
Some species are evolving far more quickly than Darwin ever imagined.
By Jane Braxton Little|Thursday, January 22, 2015
As a graduate student in the late 1970s, David Reznick set out on a modest quest to test a key part of the theory of evolution. Reznick wanted to examine Charles Darwin’s concept of the struggle for existence — specifically, how predator-prey interactions shape the evolution of new species. Enthusiastic and ambitious, he intended to do it in the wild. “I wanted to watch evolution happen,” says Reznick, now an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside.
So in 1978, he flew to Trinidad in search of guppies. Armed with a topographic map traced onto a piece of notebook paper, he headed into the Caribbean island’s rugged Northern Range. Working under a canopy of tropical trees amid squawking birds, multicolored butterflies and boas, he collected 1,600 guppies, a colorful fish species so prolific that the females can produce dozens of babies every three to four weeks. Reznick was curious to see if predators could affect genetic adaptation in guppies over a short time.
It was not considered a promising experiment. A century earlier, Darwin had assumed that evolution takes tens to hundreds of thousands of generations to produce new species — a plodding path so slow it is essentially invisible. That theory still held sway when Reznick began grad school in 1974. Scientists had studied evolution in controlled laboratory experiments, but watching it happen in a natural setting in a human lifetime was considered improbable at best, more likely impossible.
Reznick’s study of Trinidad guppies revealed that the fish can evolve rapidly.
Paul Bentzen/Dalhousie University
“I was hanging my career on the idea that you could change the environment and see things evolve significantly in time to get tenure,” Reznick says. “People thought my thesis was cute, but doubted I would live long enough to see the results.”
Undaunted, in 1981 Reznick returned to Trinidad’s swift streams to test his theory. He transplanted guppies from a site where they had to fend off cichlids, an aggressive, wide-mouthed fish, to a new site with no predators and no other guppies. Reznick also introduced cichlids to guppy sites without predators.
He found that within four years — a mere six to eight generations — male guppies had significantly changed their reproductive patterns. Those transplanted from a high-predation site to a stream without predators were larger, matured later and reproduced more slowly. Where Reznick had introduced predators, the guppies adapted by maturing at an earlier age. Survival became a race to produce more babies.
“The risk of death alters the ways organisms allocate resources for survival,” Reznick says.
The results of his federally funded study prompted what he calls one of his proudest moments in science: a National Enquirer story with the headline, “Uncle Sam wastes $97,000 to learn how old guppies are when they die.” Actually, Reznick chuckles, “I learned a great deal more than that.” His work with the guppies changed his thinking about how quickly species can evolve. And it helped launch a paradigm shift in scientists’ thinking about evolution.
In the decades since Reznick’s first trip to Trinidad, other studies have demonstrated a fast drive toward adaptation that scientists have come to call “rapid evolution.” Researchers who once assumed evolution required millennia are documenting species adapting in mere decades, or even shorter time frames. Mosquitoes that colonized the London Underground in 1863 are now so different they can no longer mate with their above-ground relatives. Chinook salmon from Alaska to California needed just a human generation to become smaller and shorter-lived after an increase in commercial fishing in the 1920s. Adaptation is happening right under our noses, in our lifetimes.
Green anole lizards adapt to the invasion of brown anoles in only 20 generations.
Seth Patterson/Nature Picture Library
Most recently, evolutionary biologist Yoel Stuart found that green anole lizards on islands in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon needed just 20 generations to adapt to an invasion of brown anoles. Driven to higher perches by the invaders, the green anoles became better at clinging to branches by developing larger toepads with more scales — in just 15 years. It’s more evidence of “evolutionary change on observable time scales,” says Stuart, now at the University of Texas at Austin.
Many of the extraordinary adaptations happening around us may be because of us. As human activity disrupts climate patterns and modifies habitats, rapid evolution appears to be an increasingly common strategy for survival.
The effect of warming temperatures on tawny owls is one of the first documented examples of adaptation to climate change in a wild population. Finnish ornithologist Patrik Karell and others found in a 2011 study that the coloration of the owls morphed in response to warming winters in Finland.
Tawny owls come in two colors, pale gray and reddish brown. Until recently, natural selection favored the pale shade, which gave owls a better chance at survival in a snowy landscape. As winters became milder, Karell noticed a steady increase in the proportion of reddish-brown owls.
“Even subtle alterations shape how organisms evolve,” Reznick says.
Species are evolving at speeds that Darwin could not have imagined. But not all species can adapt quickly enough to evade harm. When a non-native species arrives in an ecosystem, the native species often are ill-equipped to defend against the foreign invader. Ash trees in North America, for example, lacked “evolutionary accommodations” to protect against the emerald ash borer when it arrived from Asia, Reznick says. As a result, tens of millions of ash trees across the continent are threatened by the green beetle, which is thought to have hitchhiked to the U.S. in wood crating or pallets.
Today’s evolutionary biologists have the analytic power to track species adaptation like never before. Advances in molecular biology allow them to identify the very genes that help individuals move away from their ancestors as they adapt to new conditions. For example, a team of scientists at Harvard Medical School and Princeton identified BMP4 as the key gene that sculpts the beaks of the Galapagos finches that gave Darwin his first inklings of the theory of evolution.
“We are no longer forced to infer evolution from its historical footprints in the fossil record or from dusty collections of moths,” Reznick says.
Reznick and his team continue to transplant guppies in the tropical streams of Trinidad. Along with other new tools of evolutionary biology, such as DNA analysis, they are using a technique Reznick developed to mark individual guppies so they can more easily recapture them later. This marking method allows his team to reconstruct the pedigree of individual guppies and measure their reproductive success. The research is answering questions about how predator-prey interactions shape evolving species, but it has also generated new questions: If environmental forces can change guppies, could the guppies themselves also change their ecosystems? Intrigued, Reznick has turned his attention to how ecological and evolutionary processes interact.
Now he’s not only monitoring guppies; he’s also watching their predators to see how the interaction changes the ecosystem. His team wants to know how guppies adapt to predators as well as how predators evolve in response to guppies — the ecological cause-and-effect relationships.
“What hardly anyone’s thinking about is that the animals and plants left behind may have evolved and are different from what they were before predators were eliminated,” Reznick says. This raises fundamental questions about ecological restoration, invasive species, natural selection and what else changes when the fittest actually survive.
Documenting the rapid evolution of species in natural settings turns Darwin’s “mystery of mysteries” into a real-time scientific adventure. And while Reznick has succeeded in watching evolution happen, he’s beginning to think his earlier calculations underestimated how quickly species actually adapt in nature. “What’s exciting,” says Reznick, “is that it is now feasible to incorporate evolution into our thinking about how the world is changing.”
By the way, do you think that award winning scientists like Frantisek Vyskocil wouldn't have an answer for you when you say things like "studies of evolution biology have solved all of these problems"? Respected scientists who have defected from the cult of evolution, have certainly considered what you are proposing and have still abandoned this conjecture!
Jenny Collins
Active Member
Why would people "everywhere in America claim that they live in the Bible belt"? The Bible belt are Southern states! I live in Wisconsin and would never claim that I lived in the Bible belt! He doesn't sound very bright, and yeah he does seem intense! Brags about feeling hostile to people!
Jenny Collins
Active Member
I know it is an open forum! Did I claim otherwise? I told the guy that I was talking to someone else and that he was butting in! Being an open forum means that you have the capability to talk to whoever you want as much as you want! Clearly he has the capability because he did it! It also isn't against rules, so I wasn't telling him that he was doing anything that was banned here! That said, people can police their actions on here! If they see someone has their hands full talking to a lot of other people, they can observe and not step in and be rude! And when someone tells them that they feel they are intruding, they can respect that or they can push on anyway! You and I are talking about different boundaries! He doesn't have boundaries related to what he can or can't do! But he SHOULD have boundaries about what he chooses to do!
Jenny Collins
Active Member
I cannot comment on all of the details of Mary's discovery such as the bird/dino link! But defectors from the cult of evolution CAN! I am sure if you had a discussion with Frantisek Vyskocil and the many other "rock stars" who defected from the cult of evolution, they would give you their rebuttal! But I will point out something to you, I used Mary Schweitzer as an example of discovering something that defied the logic of current thinking! And she was afraid to come forward because of the arrogance, snobbery and pride of the science rock stars! You feel the need to use my example to change the subject! I didn't bring Mary up to explore in detail her findings, I used one tiny element to make a point! But you can't stick to the point, you ignore it and change the subject! Intellectually dishonest! Now we have another subject!
If you were on a debate team, they would rate you low because you aren't sticking to the subject! You introduce unrelated things and miss the point, hijacking the discussion in a different direction! Since you did change the subject, I will say a little bit without directly commenting on the bird/dino thing!
When these scientists claim to find apelike creatures that are our ancestors, they actually may have found an ape! Like the much famed Lucy! Probably just some kind of ape!
When they find some skeletons of quirky humans, perhaps they were simply deformed! It has happened! Or perhaps they were an extinct group of humans!
We have the platypus which is just some weird animal with features of mammals, features of birds, features of reptiles!
We have the giant panda which once was thought to be a racoon, now is thought to be a bear, and still has people claiming it is simply a Panda! George Schwaller makes a case that it belongs in a group all its own!
I cannot comment exactly on the dino/bird thing that you are talking about, but I know this much! If the creature that she studied back then, had ancestors that were around today, they would be the same as said creature of that time!
Jenny Collins
Active Member
Is H
FIrst of all you quote Dawkins, now you quote Hamlet! Are you always so easily impressed with mere human beings or fictional human beings? As a child did you say: "My dad says" or "my dad told me"? Hamlet cannot tell me that I protest too much! You are hijacking words from a play, or whatever and applying them to me! You have very naive thinking too! If you were accused of a crime that you didn't commit, would you protest a lot? There is no evidence that because someone denies something loudly or a lot, that it must be they are doing it to cover for themselves! You have very irrational, simple minded ideas! Did they teach you in your Ivy League school to argue so simply! Telling people they must be wrong because they protest strongly, and because Hamlet said those words? For once I would like to see you present an idea of your own, rather than relying so heavily on the quotes, ideas and opinions of others! If you are some rock star, ivy league scientist, isn't it kind of loserish to hang out on a site like this, bickering with people? Of course, I am here too, but I am recovering from surgery and am bored! Also I am not some rock star who could use my talents to find some cure for disease or whatever!
Did you quote the right person? I have no objection to macro-evolution....It is unfortunate that your objections to macro evolution is based on a religious agenda and not science. Without the bias of a religious agenda, 98%+ of all scientists support evolution as described as science.
Actually no, because of the limited time frame of recent history when compared to tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of the geologic history of evolution of the diversification of species, that is just part of over all evolution of life on earth. Evolution of species can take place slowly over time, which is the dominant case due to environmental change and isolation of varieties and subspecies, but it can also take place rapidly depending on the environmental factors involved. We do see the process of speciation and the causes and processes in the evidence of recent history. We have seen new species evolve today as in the following research; Rapid Evolution Changes Species in Real Time | DiscoverMagazine.com
Rapid Evolution Changes Species in Real Time
Some species are evolving far more quickly than Darwin ever imagined.
By Jane Braxton Little|Thursday, January 22, 2015
As a graduate student in the late 1970s, David Reznick set out on a modest quest to test a key part of the theory of evolution. Reznick wanted to examine Charles Darwin’s concept of the struggle for existence — specifically, how predator-prey interactions shape the evolution of new species. Enthusiastic and ambitious, he intended to do it in the wild. “I wanted to watch evolution happen,” says Reznick, now an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside.
So in 1978, he flew to Trinidad in search of guppies. Armed with a topographic map traced onto a piece of notebook paper, he headed into the Caribbean island’s rugged Northern Range. Working under a canopy of tropical trees amid squawking birds, multicolored butterflies and boas, he collected 1,600 guppies, a colorful fish species so prolific that the females can produce dozens of babies every three to four weeks. Reznick was curious to see if predators could affect genetic adaptation in guppies over a short time.
It was not considered a promising experiment. A century earlier, Darwin had assumed that evolution takes tens to hundreds of thousands of generations to produce new species — a plodding path so slow it is essentially invisible. That theory still held sway when Reznick began grad school in 1974. Scientists had studied evolution in controlled laboratory experiments, but watching it happen in a natural setting in a human lifetime was considered improbable at best, more likely impossible.
Reznick’s study of Trinidad guppies revealed that the fish can evolve rapidly.
Paul Bentzen/Dalhousie University
“I was hanging my career on the idea that you could change the environment and see things evolve significantly in time to get tenure,” Reznick says. “People thought my thesis was cute, but doubted I would live long enough to see the results.”
Undaunted, in 1981 Reznick returned to Trinidad’s swift streams to test his theory. He transplanted guppies from a site where they had to fend off cichlids, an aggressive, wide-mouthed fish, to a new site with no predators and no other guppies. Reznick also introduced cichlids to guppy sites without predators.
He found that within four years — a mere six to eight generations — male guppies had significantly changed their reproductive patterns. Those transplanted from a high-predation site to a stream without predators were larger, matured later and reproduced more slowly. Where Reznick had introduced predators, the guppies adapted by maturing at an earlier age. Survival became a race to produce more babies.
“The risk of death alters the ways organisms allocate resources for survival,” Reznick says.
The results of his federally funded study prompted what he calls one of his proudest moments in science: a National Enquirer story with the headline, “Uncle Sam wastes $97,000 to learn how old guppies are when they die.” Actually, Reznick chuckles, “I learned a great deal more than that.” His work with the guppies changed his thinking about how quickly species can evolve. And it helped launch a paradigm shift in scientists’ thinking about evolution.
In the decades since Reznick’s first trip to Trinidad, other studies have demonstrated a fast drive toward adaptation that scientists have come to call “rapid evolution.” Researchers who once assumed evolution required millennia are documenting species adapting in mere decades, or even shorter time frames. Mosquitoes that colonized the London Underground in 1863 are now so different they can no longer mate with their above-ground relatives. Chinook salmon from Alaska to California needed just a human generation to become smaller and shorter-lived after an increase in commercial fishing in the 1920s. Adaptation is happening right under our noses, in our lifetimes.
Green anole lizards adapt to the invasion of brown anoles in only 20 generations.
Seth Patterson/Nature Picture Library
Most recently, evolutionary biologist Yoel Stuart found that green anole lizards on islands in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon needed just 20 generations to adapt to an invasion of brown anoles. Driven to higher perches by the invaders, the green anoles became better at clinging to branches by developing larger toepads with more scales — in just 15 years. It’s more evidence of “evolutionary change on observable time scales,” says Stuart, now at the University of Texas at Austin.
Many of the extraordinary adaptations happening around us may be because of us. As human activity disrupts climate patterns and modifies habitats, rapid evolution appears to be an increasingly common strategy for survival.
The effect of warming temperatures on tawny owls is one of the first documented examples of adaptation to climate change in a wild population. Finnish ornithologist Patrik Karell and others found in a 2011 study that the coloration of the owls morphed in response to warming winters in Finland.
Tawny owls come in two colors, pale gray and reddish brown. Until recently, natural selection favored the pale shade, which gave owls a better chance at survival in a snowy landscape. As winters became milder, Karell noticed a steady increase in the proportion of reddish-brown owls.
“Even subtle alterations shape how organisms evolve,” Reznick says.
Species are evolving at speeds that Darwin could not have imagined. But not all species can adapt quickly enough to evade harm. When a non-native species arrives in an ecosystem, the native species often are ill-equipped to defend against the foreign invader. Ash trees in North America, for example, lacked “evolutionary accommodations” to protect against the emerald ash borer when it arrived from Asia, Reznick says. As a result, tens of millions of ash trees across the continent are threatened by the green beetle, which is thought to have hitchhiked to the U.S. in wood crating or pallets.
Today’s evolutionary biologists have the analytic power to track species adaptation like never before. Advances in molecular biology allow them to identify the very genes that help individuals move away from their ancestors as they adapt to new conditions. For example, a team of scientists at Harvard Medical School and Princeton identified BMP4 as the key gene that sculpts the beaks of the Galapagos finches that gave Darwin his first inklings of the theory of evolution.
“We are no longer forced to infer evolution from its historical footprints in the fossil record or from dusty collections of moths,” Reznick says.
Reznick and his team continue to transplant guppies in the tropical streams of Trinidad. Along with other new tools of evolutionary biology, such as DNA analysis, they are using a technique Reznick developed to mark individual guppies so they can more easily recapture them later. This marking method allows his team to reconstruct the pedigree of individual guppies and measure their reproductive success. The research is answering questions about how predator-prey interactions shape evolving species, but it has also generated new questions: If environmental forces can change guppies, could the guppies themselves also change their ecosystems? Intrigued, Reznick has turned his attention to how ecological and evolutionary processes interact.
Now he’s not only monitoring guppies; he’s also watching their predators to see how the interaction changes the ecosystem. His team wants to know how guppies adapt to predators as well as how predators evolve in response to guppies — the ecological cause-and-effect relationships.
“What hardly anyone’s thinking about is that the animals and plants left behind may have evolved and are different from what they were before predators were eliminated,” Reznick says. This raises fundamental questions about ecological restoration, invasive species, natural selection and what else changes when the fittest actually survive.
Documenting the rapid evolution of species in natural settings turns Darwin’s “mystery of mysteries” into a real-time scientific adventure. And while Reznick has succeeded in watching evolution happen, he’s beginning to think his earlier calculations underestimated how quickly species actually adapt in nature. “What’s exciting,” says Reznick, “is that it is now feasible to incorporate evolution into our thinking about how the world is changing.”
My response was meant to point out why one does not expect to see rapid speciation happen on a frequent basis in the biological world as claimed by another creationist poster here.
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Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber & Business Owner
On what credentials, background, and evidence do you make this claim?
Jenny Collins
Active Member
Jenny Collins
Active Member
Why do you think I need credentials? I had a nutritionist who gave me advice to take vitamins to help heal my bones! He had the credentials, but I followed his advice! I could also have found a quack who would advise me wrong! If instead of saying "macroevolution doesn't exist" I said "Macroevolution does exist" would you demand that I produce "credentials, background, and evidence! This is how it goes: There are credentialed people who teach that evolution is true, and credentialed people who teach it isn't! Therefore if you were interacting with award winning scientist Frantisek Vyskocil, and asked him for background and credentials, he would supply them! Now lets take this a little further! We have established that there are credentialed people on both sides of the issue! Now we have the rest of us, the uncredentialed! We also either believe evolution or don't! We hear the arguments of both sides, and pick one to go with! So if you are one of those who has the "badge" of being credentialed, it would be a mistake to compare yourself with me and pooh pooh my position! Because that would give Frantisek V the right to talk to an evolution believer who lacked credentials and razz him! Here is what I can do! I can point out basic truisms and point out faulty arguments! For instance Dawkins or one of those guys, said something like "No real scientist disbelieves evolution" It is certainly within my abilities to point out that this is a sweeping generalization! Anyone with the right degree is a scientist, and he can not declare them "fake scientists" If true experts were only the ones who agreed with the prevailing ideas, sayings like "Three out of four dentists choose Crest" would have to disappear! Because the fourth dentist could not be one! He dissented!
As far as my background and evidence, it is 50 years of life, a lot of personal experience, dabbling around, listening and reading, weighing things people say to me and pondering things! And I have presented some evidence already in this forum, feel free to go back and read what I have already written about the peppered moth, bacteria, finches, etc! Of course you would not agree that is evidence, your problem, not mine!
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber & Business Owner
Because I would never go to an auto mechanic to fix my plumbing.
From you specifically, no, as I have read the studies and have been exposed to the evidence and by people with actual backgrounds in the relevant fields of science that lend evidence to support the theory of evolution.
I actually do have a footing towards having credentials, and am close to having more than just a footing. Things such as pro-social behaviors in social animals, similarities in behaviors between humans and chimpanzees, and even non-verbal signals found throughout the animal kingdom (such as an animal, or even reptile or fish, puffing up and making themselves appear larger to look more threatening and intimidating) bring up observations and questions that are answered and predicted by the theory of evolution.
There is no such thing as an "evolution believer." No more than there is a "believer in mental illness" or a "germ believer" or "gravity believer."
You haven't been doing this.
Dawkin's own personal opinions reflect his own personal opinions, not the findings or functionings of science.
That is not how science works. There is a "side" for a flat Earth, but the Earth is not flat and will not flatten itself because people believe it is, nor will the facts and evidence ever support such a position. Science works by making predictions, recording systematic observations, replicating experiments and results (or finding different results), and falsifiability of a hypothesis and theory is a must. Evolution can be proven wrong, but what we learn only adds to support evolution. About the only way evolution is ever going to be proven wrong is if we find fossils that are very geochronologically out of place and we discover a mechanism beyond random mutations that drive DNA replication.
Jenny Collins
Active Member
"I would never go to an auto mechanic to fix my plumbing" Well I would, and let me explain: The auto mechanic could also know something about plumbing! When I stood up in a wedding, the lady that did my hair did an expert job, and she had no schooling; She said that she dabbled around and learned things about hair styles!
My ex husband is a local historian of sorts! He did not get schooling for it but knows a lot!
I am an artist however I didn't get schooling beyond high school for it!
I have a family with a rare syndrome and I know more about it than some doctors because I have researched it!
It is a common mistake that only credentialed people have anything to offer about a subject! I know a doctor whose daughter is a lawyer! He knows a lot about law that she doesn't know and she consults with him!
Jenny Collins
Active Member
You say that you "have read the studies and been e
You said you have "read the studies and been exposed to the evidence" I doubt if you have read ALL studies on the subject! That would be a pretty big task! And what you view as evidence is your subjective opinion and interpretation! You are telling me "I know what the evidence is" Well maybe that is just YOUR interpretation! F Vyskocil would say: "I have read the experience and been exposed to it too"
Jenny Collins
Active Member
If you would not go to an "auto mechanic to fix your plumbing" than don't seek my opinion on evolution, seek scientists like F Vyskocil! I am not an expert, he is!
Jenny Collins
Active Member
"I actually do have a footing towards having credentials" So you admit that you are uncredentialed!
ImmortalFlame
Woke gremlin
But that doesn't mean you should trust the words of an expert over those of a layman. In either case, the people who are in the right are those whose words more accurately reflect the facts - and it simply stands to reason that those who have demonstrated years of study on a particular subject ill have a more reliable knowledge of, and exposure to, said facts.
If you were to ask two people how to bake a particular kind of cake and both give very different advice, whose advice do you think should have more weight? The advice that comes from somebody who has never baked a cake before, or the other person who runs a successful bakery and is an award-winning cake maker?
Jenny Collins
Active Member
"There are similarities between apes and humans and fish blow up so this shows evolution" There are similarities in all nature! Spiders have eyes, people have eyes! Parrots can talk, people can talk! Bananas share DNA with us! Pandas look similar in ways to raccoons! Platypus and ducks have bills! This is homologous structures and this does not prove evolution! It lends weight to the argument that there is a God that knows what he is doing and can use the same features in different animals!
And there are more dissimilarites of ape and human than similarities! The experiments of teaching sign language to apes has actually shown how vast a gulf there is between ape and human! A couple apes can use signs to say things like "dirty toilet devil" (Koko said this) and name a cat "All Ball" meanwhile children can learn several languages, if exposed to them from early on!