Oolon Colluphid

Ye gods! I could have sworn you were given this, plus the reasons why it is not that simple. But if you want a simple definition (which will not therefore cover everything), try this:

Evolution:

(1) change in the genetic makeup of a population over time.

(2) descent with modification.

Precise enough?

TTFN, Oolon

Wyz_sub10

I am always surprised at how creationists insist upon throwing out canards that have been refuted conclusively many, many times before.

Vanderzyden, do you not read the literature available? Do you even check to see what your fellow creationists advocate or do not advocate?

BTW, a semantics lesson - "abnormality" does not equal "harmful". An abnormality can be beneficial. If I acquired a mutation that allowed me to stay under water for hours at a time it would be an abnormality, but certainly beneficial.

One last time for all creationists - mutations are not diseases, they are not sci-fi like deformities, they are not illnesses.

The point made on neutral mutations should be noted because many mutations that *become* beneficial originate as *neutral* to the species.

[ August 27, 2002: Message edited by: Wyz_sub10 ]</p>

pangloss

Wow... Where to begin?

Others have done good jobs pointing out several flaws and common creationist rhetorical tricks. I will focus on just one issue:


Care to expand on this? Of course, some loci are less informative than others. There are, believe it or not, perfectly valid reasons that this is so. What do you mean 'difficult'? In what way?
The statement "By and large, the trees still hold true is in fact quite accurate. I know of no publications, for example, that do NOT place humans in a clade with the great apes.
Indeed:
"The analysis presented in this study unambiguously shows that chimpanzees are our closest relatives to the exclusion of other primates. This is an important point that cannot be discounted. Further, the functional genetic differences that are represented by nonsynonymous sites also show this relationship. The notion that the great apes form a functional and evolutionary grade is not supported by our analysis. Rather, humans and chimpanzees are a functional evolutionary clade."

<a href="http://www.uchicago.edu/aff/mwc-amacad/biocomplexity/conference_papers/goodman.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.uchicago.edu/aff/mwc-amacad/biocomplexity/conference_papers/goodman.pdf</a>
The absurdity of this has, I think, already been pointed out. Allow me to explain to you what molecular phylogenetic analyses actually looks for:

patterns of mutation


Good. Bad. Or indifferent. Point mutations or large scale insertions and deletions. The phylogeneticist cares not one way or the other. All that we need is informative sites. The "requirement" of "beneficial mutations" in this context is radically misplaced and quite incorrect. This is true of what you wrote, that is correct. If you say so. Hey - I'm a bit of a skeptic, could you produce some verifiable documentation for that assertion? I submit that you do not know what a 'molecular clock' is, much less how such clocks are employed. There are no 'global clocks', for example, but there are very good agreements between 'local clocks' and the fossil record. See:
Mol Phylogenet Evol 1999 Nov;13(2):348-59
Molecular phylogeny of Old World monkeys (Cercopithecidae) as inferred from gamma-globin DNA sequences.

Page SL, Chiu Ch, Goodman M.


for example. What an amazing coincidence! Consider this a request. I was unaware, however, that molecular clocks were presented as 'positive demonstrations' of 'Darwinism.' Perhaps you have a ref for that, too? Methodological assumption... Based on TESTED methodologies...

One of many examples:

Science 1991 Oct 25;254(5031):554-8

Gene trees and the origins of inbred strains of mice.

Atchley WR, Fitch WM.

Department of Genetics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh 27695.

From the abstract:
"Extensive data on genetic divergence among 24 inbred strains of mice provide an opportunity to examine the concordance of gene trees and species trees, especially whether structured subsamples of loci give congruent estimates of phylogenetic relationships. Phylogenetic analyses of 144 separate loci reproduce almost exactly the known genealogical relationships among these 24 strains... "


Those pesky methodological assumptions... Utter bullshit.
Also from that article (which is, interestingly, the same one Wells quotes out of centext in his book):

But first - did you even read that article? Do you know what it is about? It is about the clonal theory of the origin of eukaryotes. Anyway:


"The clonal theory began to crumble a decade ago when..." Now insert your doctored quote above. Funny how things change when you don't edit out words that don't prop up your claim. THE ROOT OF THE TREE. Do you have a clue as to when that root is thought to have been? What bearing does that have on what happened later? Not in the slightest. What you have done here is a common creationist tactic - extrapolated special cases to field wide truths.

This is false. Whether or not we can ever reproduce 'the' universal tree of life is doubtful because of the length of time that has traqnspired, if no other reason. This, however, has no logical or scientific bearing at all on whether or not phylogenetics is a valid field, which you seem to be implying that it is not.


Regardless of the length of time you put into this hathet job, it is nothing more than the usual creationist bullshit.

GeoTheo

I think a very simple creationist explanation would do just fine. How about this:
Humans once had 24 chromosomes in their gamete cells just like chimps, gorillas and orangs. At some point there was a fusion and now humans have 23. They were created with 24 but through entropy an error occured. Fortunately it was not serious.
The reason humans and chimps all had the same number originally is because they all were created to look alike. As far as why they look alike we can only guess. (But we know it has nothing to do with common descent )

Valentine Pontifex

Vanderzyden,

Changing the subject is not an answer. You did not even remotely answer scigirl's question.

You have also quoted out-of-context.

Consider this quote:
Woese's views are simply not relevent to scigirls question. Indeed it is very safe to that Woese agrees 100% with what scigirl's argument. Woese's article can be found at:
-- "No consistent organismal phylogeny has emerged from the many individual protein phylogenies so far produced. Phylogenetic incongruities can be seen everywhere in the universal tree, from its roots to the major branchings within and among the various [groups] to the makeup of the primary groupings themselves. " [Carl Woese, "The universal ancestor", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95 (1998), p. 6854]

When examined on will find a classic out-of-context quote. Woese is not placing any doubt about the phylogeny of animals whatsoever. He is soley talking about rooting the three great domains: eukaryotes, bacteria, and archaea. You see when you bump into someone you don't exchange genetic information--ever. This is not true for one-celled organism. They often exchange genetic information with each other. The problem this causes in trying to deduce phylogeny is obvious: if a bacteria got a gene from an member of archaea then using that particular protein to deduce phylogeny will make that bacteria appear to be in the archaea. And indeed if enough of these genetic exchanges occure then the concept of definate genealogies of cells becomes an utterly meaningless concept. Geneologies are
not meaningless with organisms where one finds
mothers and fathers. Hense this does not apply to the human/ape split.

If short, you either lied about what Woese wrote or you committed plaigerism. If you are copying and pasting someone else's list of quotes you MUST cite it as a source -- period! Otherwise you are claiming you examined the quote in the original.

How about this quote:

Gee, not one gene has ever been sequenced in 1971. Furthermore this question has been answered. It was answered AFTER 1971. This is a case of an out-of-date quote.

Now for a really silly argument:
Ignoring the fact that biologists do hold that humans share a common ancestor with all the organism listed....

Did you actually read one word of what scigirl actually wrote?

She is not arguing that humans and apes have a common ancestor because of a coincidence of the number of chromosomes. Lets go over what she was actually arguing about. From an evolutionist point-of-view one can explain the different number of chromosomes by humans and the great apes as well other specific features of those chromosomes by the hypothesis that two chromosomes in humans merged. This hypothesis leads directly to some predictions: the very likely existence of "fossil" telomeres and almost certain existence of a "fossil" centromere. These were found at the exact location where the evolutionary hypothesis said they would be. If one uses a design "hypothesis" one would expect not to find them since their function no longer functions. This very similiar argment to humans having a gene (actually a pseudogene) for making vitamin c that has been deactivated by a mutation. Our nearest relatives also can't make vitamin c and it was predicted, via evolutionary theory, that our nearest relatives would have lost the ability to make vitamin c in the exact same way. When it was done the evolutionary prediction came true. See: <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/molgen/" target="_blank">Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics</a>.

With these things in mind, please reread what scigirl actually wrote and write a response to it. And if you use any quotes either have read them directly from the original sources or tell us exactly where you got them from. I would encourage, whenever possible, reading in the original. From PNAS articles from about 1990 to 2001 you are without excuse since they are all online for free without any registration.

bluefugue

A very minor point...

"that man has come from -- and is nothing more than -- the ape."

This is a non sequitur. Whether we come from apes has nothing to do with whether we are "more than" apes. I don't even know how you would begin to judge whether a human is "more" or "less" than other ape species; but it is quite plain that humans have different capabilities than other apes. (I have not seen any gorillas playing Chopin piano concertos, for starters.) Evolution also suggests that man "has come from" bacteria; it does not therefore follow that we are "nothing more than" bacteria. We are neither more nor less than bacteria. We are different.

Baloo

This should be interesting. Van has clearly taken what somebody else wrote, chopped a piece out of it, and quoted that piece to make it sound like that person meant something else. Does he feel guilt? I mean, even a trace of remorse? Is he someone who, if arrested for shoplifting, would only regret being caught? Is he someone who would try to convince a jury of his innocence, shortly after they've watched the security camera recording his actions?

Or will he take the moral high road? Will he admit to quoting sources without reading them? Will he apologize for deliberately misrepresenting the views of others, not just to the members of the forum but, to the best of his abilities, to the sources of the quotes themselves? He is a christian, presumably, and I wonder if that will factor into this moral decision of his. I guess time will tell...

Valentine Pontifex

How about an analogy to explain this concept if terms this person might understand?

Lets pretend that Adolf Hitler had kids and that some of his descendents are still alive. Now lets take John Doe, descended from Hitler. Is John Doe just a "Hitler"?

Or maybe what John Doe should be considered as John Doe regardless of who is ancestors were. If he was a good person then that is what should count, not that he had Hitler and more distantly apes as ancestors.

gallo

Vanderzyden seems to have misunderstood what the predictions were and why they are meaningful. What was specifically predicted was the presence of telomeric sequences, two head to head sequences to be exact, in the length of human chromosome 2 at a specified location. There is no reason to believe that these sequences should be present at that location unless they are vestages ancestral chromosomes that have fused. Their presence was not known before the prediction was made (it was not a retrodiction).

The prediction was that if the hypothesis of chromosome fusion were correct, then there should be remnants of telomeric sequences at the location of the fusion. Further, there should be two head to head sequences present. When that location was sequenced, the prediction held.

The same is true of the alphoid sequences remaining at the location of the ancestral centromere. In both cases the chromosomal regions were sequenced as a test of the prediction.

Valentine Pontifex

gallo,

In other words this guy thinks we are comparing something like aaaatgc to aaaatgg and atactgg -- merely comparing sequence to sequence.

Well if he thinks that then he simply did not bother to read what scigirl wrote.

For, as you know, what scigirl was talking about is far more powerful than the observation that humans and chimps have genetic content that is 98-99% the same.