kinetekade

These were thown at me in another forum, and if any of you guys have the time and generosity, please help me out! And hello everyone... I'm new here, and very glad that I finally signed up!


1. With what did the first cell capable of sexual reproduction reproduce?

2.How can mutations (recombining of the genetic code) create any new, improved varieties? (Recombining English letters will never produce Chinese books.)

3.Natural selection only works with the genetic information available and tends only to keep a species stable. How would you explain the increasing complexity in the genetic code that must have occurred if evolution were true?

4.When, where, why, and how did:
Single-celled plants become multi-celled? (Where are the two and three-celled intermediates?)
Single-celled animals evolve?
Fish change to amphibians?
Amphibians change to reptiles?
Reptiles change to birds? (The lungs, bones, eyes,reproductive organs, heart, method of locomotion, body covering, etc., are all very different!)

5.How did the intermediate forms live?

6.When, where, why, how, and from what did:
-Whales evolve?
-Sea horses evolve?
-bats evolve?
-Eyes evolve?

-Ears evolve?

-Hair, skin, feathers, scales, nails, claws, etc., evolve?

7.Which evolved first how, and how long, did it work without the others)?


The digestive system, the food to be digested, the appetite, the ability to find and eat the food, the digestive juices, or the body's resistance to its own digestive juice (stomach, intestines, etc.)?

8.The drive to reproduce or the ability to reproduce?

9.The lungs, the mucus lining to protect them, the throat, or the perfect mixture of gases to be breathed into the lungs?

10.DNA or RNA to carry the DNA message to cell parts?

11.The termite or the flagella in its intestines that actually digest the cellulose?

12.The plants or the insects that live on and pollinate the plants?

13.The bones, ligaments, tendons, blood supply, or muscles to move the bones?

14.The nervous system, repair system, or hormone system?

14.The immune system or the need for it?

15.How would evolution explain mimicry? Did the plants and animals develop mimicry by chance, by their intelligent choice, or by design?

16.When, where, why, and how did man evolve feelings? Love, mercy, guilt, etc. would never evolve in the theory of evolution.

*How did photosynthesis evolve?

*How did thought evolve?

*How did flowering plants evolve, and from that?

Also, do any of you have resources addressing the "Information theory?" That was brought up too, and I don't know enough about it to provide a sufficient response. Thanks!

Secular Pinoy

Is this a school assignment?

kinetekade

Absolutely not, though I AM still in school. If it was a school assignment, would it matter to you? And I normally wouldn't ask for assistance when responding to questions regarding Evolution, but these were particularily vague and frustrating for me.

Albion

Oh, this is just Kent Hovind's list of questions by the look of it. Somewhere there's a website that goes through and gives answers.

Here:

http://home.attbi.com/~fsteiger/kent...-questions.htm

http://members.madasafish.com/~fist/site/qanda.htm

http://www.beliefnet.com/boards/mess...ssionID=215471

The questions you're interested in start on p. 2 of this last link.

lpetrich

First off, you can check such resources as talkorigins.org and No Answers in Genesis; those sites are full of criticisms of creationist arguments.

kinetekade:
1. With what did the first cell capable of sexual reproduction reproduce?

It sexually reproduced with its numerous identical twins.

More seriously, most protists are part-time sexual reproducers; they usually reproduce asexually, by dividing or budding. Their sort of sex is either conjugation (exchange of genetic material) or else meiosis followed by cell fusion. In the latter case, either the diploid or the haploid phases -- or both! -- can reproduce asexually.

And closer to home, the cells of multicellular organisms reproduce asexually most of the time.

2.How can mutations (recombining of the genetic code) create any new, improved varieties? (Recombining English letters will never produce Chinese books.)

Except that evolution does not produce drastic jumps like English->Chinese. Richard Dawkins has a classic illustration of how evolution really works by the construction of the phrase "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL" from a nonsense text string. All that's necessary is to make random changes, and then to accept the changes that look more like the target phrase, building on those.

3.Natural selection only works with the genetic information available and tends only to keep a species stable. How would you explain the increasing complexity in the genetic code that must have occurred if evolution were true?

Except that there is an abundance of counterevidence for that view of natural selection. Bacteria have been known to evolve the ability to eat a variety of artificial substances that they had not previously been able to eat -- and that had not been previously present in their environment. Nylon, for example, had not existed before 1935, yet some bacteria are now known to have nylon-digesting enzymes ("nylonases"). One of them was produced by a single "point mutation" of an existing enzyme.

4.When, where, why, and how did:
Single-celled plants become multi-celled? (Where are the two and three-celled intermediates?)

Some plantlike protists (algae) are colonial; they live in groups without being seriously specialized. And such groups can have two-celled and three-celled intermediates as they grow.

Single-celled animals evolve?

Those would be animal-like protists. I'm not sure what the difficulty is.

Fish change to amphibians?

Look at walking catfish and mudpuppies. These are fish that can crawl around on land; imagine such a fish becoming better adapted for living on land, and you'll get an amphibian.

Amphibians change to reptiles?

By pushing their tadpole-to-adult transition back into the egg, as some species of frogs have done. This can then be followed by such adaptations to dryness like less permeable skin.

Reptiles change to birds? (The lungs, bones, eyes,reproductive organs, heart, method of locomotion, body covering, etc., are all very different!)

True, it's a long way from a lizard to a bird, but there are plenty of intermediates in the form of carnivorous theropod dinosaurs. Feathers are modified scales; there is evidence of that in how their growth-control genes work. Bird hearts are four-chambered -- like crocodilian hearts; lizards have three-chambered hearts. Many dinosaurs, like the theropods, had been two-legged walkers, and some of the four-legged ones had outsized hind legs, as if their ancestors had walked exclusively on those legs. Also, theropods often had had birdlike feet, to the point that their footprints had originally been thought to be those of giant birds.

Flying is a more difficult problem, and one possibility is that ancestral birds had glided from trees in the fashion of "flying" squirrels. This gliding could gradually be transformed into powered flight, until birds could stay up in the air indefinitely.

5.How did the intermediate forms live?

Lots of "intermediate forms" do just fine -- consider such land-capable fish as walking catfish and mudpuppies. They may be inefficient land animals, but they could be the starting point of more efficient ones.

6.When, where, why, how, and from what did:
-Whales evolve?

From early hippopotamus-like animals. They spend more and more time in the water, and became adapted for living there, to the point that they re-acquired a very fishlike form and became incapable of returning to the land. There are even some interesting fossils from the Pakistan area of cetacean intermediates -- they had legs that are only partially turned into fins.

-Sea horses evolve?

Modified pipefish -- they grow shorter and fatter and curved.

-bats evolve?

Imagine an early rodent-ish animal that likes to live in trees and eat bugs. One problem is getting from tree to tree, and a way to do do that is to grow some skin flaps along one's sides for gliding -- which is what "flying" squirrels do. Eventually, gliding can be turned into powered flight.

Bats have very well-developed echolocation, and that also can be developed from simpler systems. All that is necessary is to chirp and listen for one's chirps' echoes.

-Eyes evolve?

From light-sensitive spots. All that is necessary is to pull in such a spot and create some sort of bubble in the skin -- an eyeball. That will create some crude focusing, which can be improved by selection pressure.

-Ears evolve?

Step by step, starting with slightly loose parts. Sound makes them vibrate, which can stimulate nerves. Other features of ears, such as middle-ear bones and external ears, are later additions, and are found only in certain groups -- only mammals have external ear trumpets.

-Hair, skin, feathers, scales, nails, claws, etc., evolve?

Skin? Every organism must have a surface. And multicelled organisms have cells specialized to be good surface cells, often including dying to make a protective layer.

Nails are specialized claws.

Claws are specialized scales, as are hair and feathers.

Scales are bits of skin specialized for being very hard.

7.Which evolved first how, and how long, did it work without the others)?

They often co-evolve, and many organisms only need some of supposedly essential features. Only mammals have ear trumpets, for example.

The digestive system, the food to be digested, the appetite, the ability to find and eat the food, the digestive juices, or the body's resistance to its own digestive juice (stomach, intestines, etc.)?

The "food" pre-existed; it's the unity of Earth-life biochemistry that enables some organisms to be food for others.

Bacteria and fungi have a simple way of eating: they soak up food through their cell walls.

This can be improved by releasing digestive enzymes and by traveling to some food source. This at first would be essentially random, but it can be modified to "move if one's hungry, but not if one's sated" and "release digestive enzymes only if there are indications of nearby food".

As to stomach acids, that is a vertebrate invention; their strength can be increased gradually, with stomach linings coevolving.

8.The drive to reproduce or the ability to reproduce?

The first reproduction was very likely automatic -- a side effect of a cell getting too big. This would later be systematized and better-regulated.

9.The lungs, the mucus lining to protect them, the throat, or the perfect mixture of gases to be breathed into the lungs?

The throat is a part of the digestive system; lungs evolved from outpocketings in it, and their mucus layers are also a later invention.

And why is air supposed to be "perfect"?

10.DNA or RNA to carry the DNA message to cell parts?

According to the "RNA World" hypothesis, the first molecule of heredity was RNA; DNA is a later invention, a modification of RNA for master-copy duty.

11.The termite or the flagella in its intestines that actually digest the cellulose?

Termites are descended from wood-eating cockroaches. They may initially have eaten rotten wood that is easy to digest, but once they start doing that, they could start letting wood-eating protists grow in their guts, supplying them with extra nutrition. And ultimately letting them eat more difficult-to-digest wood.

12.The plants or the insects that live on and pollinate the plants?

The plants were originally wind-pollinated; putting out some juice for insects to eat will then attract them. But as they drink, they get brushed with pollen, which can come off at the next plant.

13.The bones, ligaments, tendons, blood supply, or muscles to move the bones?

Muscles came first -- primitive animals like cnidarians are largely muscle, without a circulatory system or bones.

The circulatory system could have emerged from an out-of-place extra throat; hearts and throats have similar development-control genes. This would produce a heart and major blood vessels -- vessels which can sprout smaller vessels and smaller vessels.

Vertebrate bones are essentially mineralized cartilage; both of these evolved in order to provide stiffening in suitable places.

14.The nervous system, repair system, or hormone system?

Hormones are chemical-signaling systems, and cells already have those.

Repair system? Organisms tend to be self-repairing.

Nervous systems are originally networks of cells specialized to transmit electrical impulses.

14.The immune system or the need for it?

The need for it, of course. Which would become greater for bigger organisms. So as they grow bigger, they can evolve improved defense mechanisms.

15.How would evolution explain mimicry? Did the plants and animals develop mimicry by chance, by their intelligent choice, or by design?

Mimicry can easily be produced by natural selection -- this is known to happen to disease organisms, which often mimic their hosts' cell-surface proteins.

16.When, where, why, and how did man evolve feelings? Love, mercy, guilt, etc. would never evolve in the theory of evolution.

Some animals experience a variety of emotions, as dog owners know.

And emotions are how we experience reactions to various environment circumstances. Thus, if one sees some predator, it is best to either run away or try to fight that predator -- and be in the mood for doing so for awhile, so as to be sure that predator is no longer a threat.

*How did photosynthesis evolve?

In steps, possibly from phototropism. Certain molecules can respond to light, a response that trigger some internal-signaling mechanism that controls how a cell moves. This mechanism can be modified to extract energy from that response, thus producing simple photosynthesis.

And this simple photosynthesis can be modified to extract electrons from various materials. And ultimately water, thus producing the familiar oxygen-releasing photosynthesis.

These electrons are then fed into various biosynthesis pathways, which were developed in some very early ancestors. Which had originally gotten their electrons from different sources, like hydrogen sulfide.

*How did thought evolve?

Thought is mental modeling, which likely emerged as a substitute for doing trial and error. If one can do the trial and error with a mental model, one can avoid some of the trouble of the Real Thing.

*How did flowering plants evolve, and from that?

From non-flowering seed plants, though which ones are uncertain. Flower petals are leaves modified into advertisement signs for pollinators.

Also, do any of you have resources addressing the "Information theory?" That was brought up too, and I don't know enough about it to provide a sufficient response. Thanks!

Creationists misuse it; they usually avoid telling us what they mean by "information". I think that there is some stuff on that over at talkorigins.org

The definition in "information" in information theory is something precise -- the number of yes-no questions needed to distinguish a member of some set of entities from the others. The questions' answers are often called "bits", because true/false map onto the binary digits 1/0.

I'd have to know what they say about information theory before I can make any further comments.

Albion

Sorry, double post.

Lobstrosity

You've got to be kidding me. Do you think the cells in your body are getting it on with each other right now in a mass orgy of sex and carnal desire? Cells replicated by dividing. The first life forms were almost certainly some very simplified form of RNA that just copied themselves (or, more perhaps more accurately, were copied through physical processes) over and over again. Bacteria and other single-celled organisms reproduce simply through duplication. The daughter cells are identical to the parent cell save for mutations. This leads to evolution, but at a much slower rate (when scaled by reproduction rate) than sexual reproduction.

I'm not sure what the English to Chinese has to do with anything. All genes are written with the same four letters, so there's no need for new "kinds" of letters. You only need the four you've already got. The better analogy would be like recombining the English letters in an 8th-grade book report to produce a passage from a work by Shakespeare. It's certainly possible if your filter for rearrangement kept all mutations that made the book report more like Shakespeare while discarding all mutations that didn't. Such a filter is identical in function to the filter of natural selection, and clearly such a filter can allow for information to be added via these mutations. Mutations change the words that are writen and produce new genes. Clearly most will be bad because they will be changing genes that currently have a function, is there any reason to unversally proclaim that none can be improvements? That's like saying that there is no way to change a car such that it is improved. All of the components have a specific function, so changing any of them must hurt the car. This is obviously faulty logic. There is room for improvement and if you randomly mess with the components of the car for long enough you will inevitably come across a change that actually makes it run better.

I have no idea what you're asking here. Are you saying that evolution won't lead to an increase in complexity so how do I explain the increase in complexity evolution must have led to? It is sufficient to say that natural selection does not tend to keep a species from drifting genetically (I'm not sure what you mean by stable). Natural selection drives evolution which over time adds features to existing strands of DNA. This is an increase in complexity. Where's the confusion here?

I'm not a paleontoligist, so I have no idea when or where. The why is because natural selection at the time conveyed a survival advantage to those who made the change. Reproduction allows a given gene pool to randomly probe phase space and natural selection then prunes down that gene pool to favor certain individuals in phase space. Now repeat the process a few billion times and you get the large scale evolution you've seen on Earth. There's no complicated why about it. Change is randomly generated and then non-randomly selected. These changes are incredibly gradual. Anything can change into anything given "adiabatic" change over a long enough time. It's not a very complicated concept.

There's no such thing as an itermediate form. At every stage you have a "stable," viable species. It's not like you have a few quantized species eigenvalues and in order to go from one species to the next a leap is required. The spectrum is a continuous one. "Intermediate" has no meaning. I could easily say that right now every species on earth is an intermediate form that will provide the missing links between past species and future species. How can we tell at this point which features of species are not "fully" formed. Maybe our outer ears are only tiny fractions of what true, "good" outer ears will be. Then people will be asking where giant outer ears came from and how they could have suddenly just formed.

I think lpetrich covered the rest of the questions better than I could have, so I won't address them. Just understand that evolution is an incredibly gradual process. It's so gradual that supremely complex things (e.g. symbiotic relationships) can form over long periods of time.

Quote:

Also, do any of you have resources addressing the "Information theory?" That was brought up too, and I don't know enough about it to provide a sufficient response. Thanks!

There is no such thing as "information theory" in the realm of math or physics. It's an invention of computer science, which isn't technically a science.

tgamble

Single cells are asexual.

All life uses the same alphabet so the analogy fails. Which, by the way, is another bit of evidence for evolution. The universal genetic code.

mutations.

Aren't animals multicellular by definition?

http://members.aol.com/ps418/tran.htm
http://www.gcssepm.org/special/cuffey_00.htm
http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/fossil_record.htm

By not dying!

http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/whale_evolution.htm

RNA

These questiosn come from Kent Hovind, one of the more ignorant and dishonest of creationists. Ignorant, uneducated, dishonest, and just plain stupid he uses argument that other creationist groups abandoned years ago. He understands nothing of what he attacks.

pz

Not necessarily. Look into yeast mating types for one example of single-celled organisms capable of sexual reproduction.

Principia

Mind telling us which forum?