Coragyps

Not so. I'll find two articles this evening, one about mama birds jettisoning cookoo eggs, and one about coots counting and examining color of eggs, then rejecting ones that the neighbor laid in their nest. Getting dumped off into a pond in Saskatchewan in the springtime would make me worry, and I'm way past the egg stage.

pz

Hold on, he's almost got something. It's the concept of the "privileged embryo", originally formulated by Wolpert, that the embryo is in a unique position in which competition is alleviated. Embryos therefore have more latitude in how they accomplish a task -- what matters is the conditions that initialize development, and the end state, and what happens in between has a lot of slack.

I don't think Eric quite understands it, or he wouldn't be trying to use it as an example of "non-evolutionary" rules.

Oolon Colluphid

Hi Peez!

He got it from not being much informed of the topic of which he speaks . Thus:
Nope, in other words, Eric is heading towards the ‘no new information is added’ canard. All the info for making a spider web, bat wing, a multitude of eye designs, a flower and a brain, was present from the start. Since this is ludicrous, as I’m sure Eric would agree, I surmise that Eric thinks that therefore there’s something wrong in the state of evolution.

Eric, if I’m correctly understanding you, you seem to be tilting at a straw man. Nobody thinks the first single-celled organisms contained all that information.

BTW, Eric, welcome! Where abouts in Hants are you? As you’re ‘local’, I can probably find a spare copy of Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker you can have if you’d like, which will help sort you out on many of these matters.

Cheers, Oolon

Godot

Am I the only one seeing this as confusing the evolutionary fitness of an organism and the behaviour it exhibits?

Jim Larmore

It appears the majority of those posting here really believe in macro-evolution as an explanation for the origin of life on earth. I have some questions for those who truely believe in random chance evolution for life origins.
All of nature shows remarkable complexity in regards to intercellular structure and design i.e. protein or DNA. The structure of protein as it is exists in nature makes the probability of random/chance origins quite hard to accept. For example the average protein has some 300 amino acids hooked together by peptide bonds and are arranged in no certain "logical" sequences. These sequences have to be exact without mistakes for the protein to work, especially when it comes to enzymes. There are 20 amino acids that comprise all proteins in nature. For random chance to have worked you have to believe that these complex little molecules would have to have combined magically in the right sequence all at once and to have magically wound up in a cell membrane which is by the way protein and be stero-chemically correct . All of nature uses only left handed amino acids to build its proteins. Randomness by its nature should have produced both left and right handed amino acids , but we find none in all of nature. Its like flipping a coin thousands of billions of times and it always comming up heads as an illustration of how hard it would be for this to happen. As a matter of fact if you consider the probability of taking 20 amino acids and combining them exactly correct into a chain 300 long ( there are some much longer) you come up with a staggering figure thats impossible to comprehend, 1X10 to the 600 power. To give you some scope on how large this number is there are only 1x10 to the 25 power grains of sand on this planet, each time you add a zero you multiply that number by ten, its just to large to imagine. DNA is much more complex than this. There are over 300 billion combinations for the four nucleotides to hook up in the human genome. It take less than three bad hook ups to cause a fatal result in the animal it happens in , as a matter of fact science has never observed a usefull mutation in cellular biology yet. Mapping the human genome is reconded to be as significant an accomplishment as going to the moon. The chicken or the egg factor comes in here too when you consider the fact that to have DNA you have to have protein and to have protein used inside the cell you have to have DNA.
The question I have for anyone is this, explain how the complexity just mentioned could have been the result of random/chance evolution? Theres not enough atoms in the universe to be given an eternity of time to combine to cause a single protein to form little alone life. There are many agnostic scientists in genetic research but you won't find too many atheist working in cellular/genome research. Its hard to accept fiat creation but they definitely don't accept macro-evolution as an explanation for the origin of life.

I personally feel it takes more "faith" to believe in macro-evolution than it does to believe in fiat creation. :boohoo:

GunnerJ

Welcome to the IIDB, Jim.

Your comment is not pecifically on topic for the thread, so I've teken the liberty of starting a new thread to discuss your viewpoint.

Everyone, please take comments on Jim's reply to this thread:
Faith in macro-evolution?

-GunnerJ, E&C Moderator

Oolon Colluphid

[Reply removed to other thread -- Oolon]

Oolon Colluphid

Who's Marco, and what's he evolved?

Oolon

GunnerJ

Doheth.

Peez

<reposted in the "macro-evolution" thread>