[Avodah] evolution [was: Clear Thinking about Male Homosexuals]

[Chanoch (Ken) Bloom]

On Wed, 2012-02-29 at 22:36 -0500, T613K at aol.com wrote:
>  
>  
> From: "Chanoch (Ken) Bloom" <kbloom at gmail.com>
> 
> >>Please name some specific physical/biological processes that would
> be
> required by macroevolution, which are not required by
> microevolution....
> 
> Once we determine specific processes necessary for macroevlution, we
> can
> search to see whether evidence of that process has been reproduced
> experimentally on a microevolution timescale. For example, one might
> propose that speciation events (where a species whose members could
> all
> interbreed splits into two species that can only interbreed within
> their
> new species) are example of such a process. To which I could answer
> that
> there is a long list of experiments that have observed speciation
> events
> at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html  <<
>  
>  
>  
> >>>>>>
>  
> The article you linked to is long but very interesting and relevant to
> this discussion.  It starts by showing how many different definitions
> there are for "species" and how difficult it is to determine whether
> two birds or two fish or two ears of corn are different species or
> different varieties of the same species.
>  
> It then gives many examples of "new species" that have been observed
> as they came into being in nature or as they were created in the lab.
> In each of these cases, some kind of hybridization occurred and the
> new species contained only old genes from its progenitors, not brand
> new spontaneously occurring genes or features.
>  
> You want to know what biological process would be required by
> macroevolution that would not be required by microevolution.  The
> answer is:  something brand new.  Brand new mutations.

I chose speciation as my example, becuase it's usually considered the
harder thing to demonstrate. The presence of new mutations that makes an
animal more fit (and wind out in evolution) has occurred in more
experiments than speciation. One particuarly unambiguous example is
Richard Lenski's E. coli evolution experiment, where E. coli evolved the
ability to take advantage of a whole new source of nutrients, and Lenski
was able to prove that it was the result of a series of mutations, when
the new mutation turned on the new nutrient pathway, and only then was
there a positive evolutionary effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment

> Darwin believed that evolution happened by random mutations, and that
> is what modern Darwinists believe too.  He knew only gross anatomy,
> scientists today know genetics and would say that the random mutations
> happen at the genetic level.  
>  
> For evolution to work according to the theory, you couldn't have birds
> having bird babies forever and grasses having grass babies forever.
> You'd have to have some process whereby entirely new features appeared
> that had never before been seen.  The accumulation of these tiny but
> entirely new changes, over time, would turn dinosaurs into birds,
> forelegs into wings, blind creatures into sighted creatures, water
> creatures into land creatures.
>  
> In nature, random genetic mutations are almost always harmful and
> inimical to the survival of the individual.  Think of serious birth
> defects, defects in the creature's ability to breathe or to digest
> food or to move normally.  It is hard even to think of a random
> mutation that improves the functioning of an individual. 

But there are enough of them that it does occasionally help, and does
last from generation to generation.
And besides that, a lot of the evolution that it takes to make wings on
a bird that can fly aren't inventing totally new structures -- they're
reconfiguring the proportions of the existing skeleton.


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