Eric H

Peez, If I may stick my nose in here...


Welcome Peez, welcome nose,



----------------------------------------------
Quote Peez That depends on what you mean by "tiny bits" and "a very long time scale." As an example, during horse evolution there was a substantial increase in size. The width of one particular tooth appears to have increased from about 8 mm to about 34 mm over about 15 million years (it became over four times bigger, along with similar increases in the rest of the animal) . If we assume generations of about three years (and, for simplicity, a linear increase), this works out to about 0.000005 mm per generation (this is about the size of some small molecules). Thus, we see substantial change (an increase in size of more than four times) through the accumulation of tiny bits (so small that they could not possibly be detected) over a very long time scale (about 3,000 times longer than it has been since the earliest pyramids were built).

Peez
------------------------------------------



I can see how a tooth growing four times in size the way you describe it and the amount of detail that is required, could constitute a big change.

But how many other changes were happening at the same time to this horse. In the 15 million years of time that you quote.
Moving away from horses though, it seems in the period from about 550 million years ago, it took about 300 million years to bring about a vertebrae with four legs.

Using your time scale of fifteen million years for the tooth development, 300 would give you twenty periods of fifteen million years.

This suggests to me that several bones would have to evolve at a time, also teeth muscles ligaments and tendons.

How does natural selection do this, and still comply with all the other laws of nature?

Sorry I am getting tired and not thinking straight, hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.

Peace

Eric.

Eric H

Hello all,

I am stuck for time so I am making some hasty conclusions.

It seems that the laws governing evolution have limitations; this only means that man’s knowledge is limited.

It now needs a free thinker to abandon the theory of evolution and search for new laws. These new laws must explain the catalyst that enabled many separate changes to happen at once.

From a position of ignorance, I will offer a possibility.

I feel that rapid changes of many components through natural selection is unlikely to happen at child, or adult stages of life.
Therefor it most likely happened at single cell size, or something very small that we could call a seed.

Maybe during this period of 3-4 billion years, our friend Mr and Mrs single cell managed to achieve seed status.

It seems that about 500 to 600 million years ago something major happened that allowed these seeds to grow to adult status.

Maybe the missing link is an incubator of some sort, which would then bring the chicken and the egg together.

I am sure that this and many other possibilities are being investigated now.

Any thoughts?

I will not be able to reply again until Saturday evening.

Peace

Eric

Wounded King

The fact that mans knowledge is imperfect is completely obvious. I don't see why this means we should abandon as successful a theory as that of evolution by natural selection.

I really doubt that anyone is investigating your theory at the moment, it is sketchy to say the least, and doesn't really seem to mean much. The obvious place for inheritable mutations as you rightly point out is in an embryo or in the germ cells of the parents, in a multicellular organism at least. You also seem to believe that there is some direction to evolution and that these single celled organisms were striving to become multicellular. Quite how you get from the evolution of multicellularity to child and adult stages of evolution I do not know.

Peez

Many, there is no particular limit to the number of traits that can evolve at the same time. I should also note that, while the evolution of the size of this tooth is relatively rapid in the fossil record, it is much slower than evolution that has been measured in living populations (obviously, since we would not be able to measure it unless it was much faster than that). Further, we can cause evolution through artificial selection that is much faster than that seen in living populations. The point is that evolution can proceed much faster than it did with the horse's tooth, and it likely does at some times. I am picturing a bone from your back (a vertebra, plural vertebrae) with four legs. Sorry, I just couldn't resist. I presume that you are referring to a vertebrate with four legs, and that by "bring about" you mean evolve from a unicellular ancestor. According to the introductory biology text book that I have handy (Biology, Sixth Edition. Campbell and Reece. 2002. Benjamin-Cummings), the first multicellular organisms evolved about 1.2 - 1.5 billion years ago. The line between a colonial unicellular organism and a truly multicellular one is fuzzy, but fossil evidence of simple animals dates from about 600 million years ago (they may have been around earlier). The line between a vertebrate with four fins and a vertebrate with four legs is also fuzzy, but according to the same text the earliest Amphibians evolved over the period 400 to 350 million years ago. For the sake of argument, we can look at the evolution of the amphibians of 350 million years ago from the simple animals of 600 million years ago: a period of 250 million years.

The simple animals of 600 million years ago likely already had muscles. This is not a big innovation: many unicellular organisms can move through interactions of certain proteins in the cell, and these proteins and interactions are very similar to the ones that muscles use to contract. These early animals were not the same as living species such as jellyfish and flatworms, but these living species show us how relatively simple animals can move about with relatively simple muscle systems.

The earliest evidence of animals that we would call chordates (the group that includes vertebrates) is from about 525 million years ago. Chordates are identified by their having, among other things, a notochord. This is, according to my text book here:This structure would have been advantageous because it would have allowed some leverage for the muscles to work more efficiently in swimming. We have 75 million years to get that far. There are living chordates (called lancelets) that are at similar to these primitive chordates in relying on the notochord for such support.

The lancelet has two ridges along the ventral surface (underside), giving it a triangular cross-section. This apparently helps to stabilize it when it is swimming, and allows it to rest upright on the substrate. It is not hard to imagine that an ancestor similar to this might have been a more stable swimmer with ridges that are stiffened by more fibrous tissue. Natural selection could easily favour such chordates with such stiffened ridges, and further could favour those individuals with ridges that became separated front from back (instead of one long ridge on each side, there is a ridge at the front and a ridge at the back on each side), because this could give the animal more agility in the water. We now have a chordate with fins that are stiffened by cartilage.

Let us zip along a bit. These chordates continue to evolve, get larger, and increase the number of places that cartilage is used to provide leverage and stiffness. Natural selection favours these changes because they make the animal's muscles more efficient, because they make the animal swim better, and because they can provide protection for vital organs such as the brain. Eventually we get something similar to a modern shark: a vertebrate with a skeleton of cartilage. From here, in some populations natural selection favoured a stiffer skeleton, which was provided by adding certain minerals to the cartilage, making bone tissue. This gives us something like a modern bony fish. Fossil evidence indicates that bony fish were around well before 400 million years ago, allowing 125 million years to get this far, plenty of time.

Some populations of lobe-finned bony fish lived in the shallow water of swamps, and often had to push their way through weeds. The evolved strong fins, which allowed them to push their way out of the water and onto the shore. Because there were no large animals living on the land, natural selection favoured some which could move around better on land. By 350 million years ago, some of these vertebrates were so good at moving about on land that we call them amphibians. This allows 50 million years for these changes, more than enough time.What "laws of nature" are you referring to? I don't understand what could prevent the evolution described.

Peez

Eric H

Quote Wounded King, The fact that mans knowledge is imperfect is completely obvious. I don't see why this means we should abandon as successful a theory as that of evolution by natural selection.
----------------------------------------


Hello Wounded King, I wasn’t suggesting that the laws of evolution should be abandoned because they are wrong, I feel in some way that they are incomplete.

If the laws of evolution by natural selection, are the only laws needed to govern how life came into existence and how life changes, then there is no need to search for any more laws.

Are you saying that there are no other laws needed to explain creation?

Peace

Eric

Eric H

Here are a couple of reasons why I believe that there must be more laws other than competition through natural selection that affect the creation of life.

Using humanity as an example, there are masses of male sperm which compete to fertilize maybe only one female egg. Once the female egg is fertilized it does not have to compete against anything else. It’s only goal seems to be to survive, grow and leave the womb.

I am told that even if there are two or more fertilized eggs in the womb, that they do not compete against each other, they co-exist together.

Take the chicken egg, once the chick is in the egg, it does not have to compete against any other eggs, and its goal seems to be self preservation, growth and to leave the egg.

And a second reason why I believe there must be other laws that govern single cells.

Go back in time maybe a billion years, supposing that there was a population of a thousand single cells, and each of these cells carried the DNA information of a rat.

These single cells would not have to walk, hunt for food, mate, and do all the other things an adult rat would do, yet they carry the information of a grown rat.

In other words these single cells do not appear to compete against each other through natural selection in the same way a population of a thousand adult rats would.

Now if the secrets of creation are centred around the single cell, what separate laws would be needed for the accumulation of information in a single cell?

And here is another conflict of needs.

Supposing these single cells did accumulate this massive amount of information,

What need would all this information serve in the single cell?

Could it be seen as a computer, the more information you feed into it, the slower it becomes, until at some point you clog the thing up.

Life only seems to advance through a conflict of opposing needs.

What opposing needs do single cells have, what laws would explain these needs?

Just rambling again.



I will probably only have time for one more post Sunday night then I am away for a week.

Hello Peez, thank you for your explanations; I am still thinking on these.



Peace

Eric

Wounded King

Dear Eric,

I apologise if I misunderstood you but

Sounds very much as if you are suggesting we should abandon natural selection.

I seriously doubt there are any evolutionary biologists who feel that we understand all the factors which affect evolutionor that natural selection is the be all and end all of the evolutionary process, genetic drift is an obvious example.

It is not true that once an egg is fertilised it is not subject to selective pressure in the womb. There is quite a big body of literature on parent offspring conflict. Here is an online review http://gator.uhd.edu/~williams/child/conflict.htm.

The single celled organism did not contain the information for the development of a rat, unless you ascribe to some sort of ID preformationist theory. The genetic code itslef is all that is neccessary, by your logic an oligonucleotide of ATCG would contain all the information for any organism.

Single celled organisms have conflicting needs, pretty much the same as all other life. They need food and space and they compete for these resources.

Eric H

Hello Wounded King, Sorry. I wasn’t very clear.

And time has beaten me tonight, but thank you all for your patience and understanding, Peez, PZ, Wounded King, Ipetrich, Godless Dave, scigirl, Jobar, yguy, Principia, Asha’man, braces-for-impact, Late-Cretaceous, Majestyk, Coragyps, SanDiegoAtheist, Monkeybot, Albion, Dr,GH, RBH, and of course MattofVA for starting it.

I realize my thoughts have been of target at times, but I am now away for a week.

Peace

Eric

Peez

I don't know anyone who talks about the "laws of evolution." We have the process of evolution: an inheritable change in characteristics of individuals in a population from one generation to the next. We have the fact of evolution: the evolution of living forms through descent with modification from common ancestors. We have numerous evolutionary hypotheses regarding specific lineages within this broad fact. We have the theory of evolution: the interconnected web of explanations for the mechanism by which evolution occurs. The very fact that biologists continue to do research on evolution is ample evidence that our knowledge and understanding of evolution is incomplete, just as is our knowledge and understanding of gravity, subatomic particles, etc.Evolution is not concerned with "how life came into existence" at all. As for "how life changes," nothing that we have seen suggests that the theory of evolution would be insufficient to explain how it evolved (but of course new data is always possible)."Creation" as used by creationists typically includes many things that are unrelated to evolution, such as the origin of life, the origin of the earth, and the origin of the universe.

Peez

Peez

There are. The theory of evolution is more than just natural selection.It actually may compete with the mother, but this can be a complex issue.Told by who? How would they compete? You are being rather vague here, but in fact siblings in a multiple pregnancy do compete. It took me all of about ten seconds to find Multiple births are more likely to result in LBW infants (LBW = Low Birth Weight).I am not sure what you are getting at. When a gopher is hiding in its hole it is not competing with anything. So what? There is nothing in the theory of evolution that requires that individuals compete for every moment of their lives. That being said, chicken eggs do compete: with their sibling eggs for warmth and space in the nest.??? Are you under the impression that any biologist actually thinks that unicellular organisms one billion years ago had DNA that coded for rats?Please tell me that you are joking. These single cells would be competing just as any other population of organisms with limited resources.I have no idea what the "secrets of creation" refers to, but you will be able to address this issue much better if you first read about evolution. I recommend a good introductory level biology text book, any respectable library should have some. TalkOrigins is also an excellent resource.What is a "conflict of needs," and what "conflict of needs" have you demonstrated?What "massive amount of information"? The DNA to make a rat? This is not the theory of evolution. Please tell me where you got the bizarre idea that biologists think that all the DNA that a rat needs was once in the unicellular ancestors of rats.Some would be quite useful, as many of the processes of life are identical, and much would be useless. So what? Those ancient cells did not have such DNA.No, this would be a poor analogy. However, the point remains that those ancient cells did not have all the DNA of rats.I disagree.The same as multicellular organisms: access to resources. Why do you think that things would be different for unicellular organisms than for multicellular organisms?Hi, Eric H. Please don't think me rude, but I am really unsure of how to respond to some of your "rambling." You seem to be looking for some flaw in "evolution," but the first step should be to know and understand what it is. It would be easiest to learn about it through the many resources available (use credible scientific resources, creationist sources routinely get it wrong).

Peez