You read the title and knew I was talking about squid skin, didn’t you? But really, this would make tattoos totally obsolete.
Science, make it so.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
You read the title and knew I was talking about squid skin, didn’t you? But really, this would make tattoos totally obsolete.
Science, make it so.
Doesn’t work with cats, but I try…
Glen Davidson
[yes of course I’m kidding]
So what? My skin changes colour when exposed to electromagnetic radiation.
I guess that explains why it is so rare to see squids at the tattoo parlors.
Do Cuttlefish have higher resolution, more depth, and more control, over the pigmentation in their skin than squid or is it about the same?
I recall hearing somewhere that Cuttlefish are the current champions in organic HD display.
May have just been XKCD.
Ah, there it is. 200dpi.
I wonder what it’s saying in squid?
“Ouch”
“That hurts”
“Stop that”
“No really, stop that”
“OK if you won’t stop, can I have some better music?”
Here you go:
http://people.howstuffworks.com/animated-tattoo1.htm
A Programmable Subcutaneous Visible Implant, or ‘Animated Tattoo’.
I’m holding out for the full color functional programmable chromatophores I deserve…also flying cars.
I remember seeing this sort of thing in Cyberpunk games and novels, always thought it would be cool.
Although it is the cybernetic EYES that I really want. Having augmented vision, able to go microscopic or telescopic, with a wider range of vision that human normal? That would be AWESOME.
Don’t know about a cybernetic nose, though..I’m not sure I want to be able to smell more things…
I’d already be happy with lenses that are fucking transparent instead of ultra-yellow.
That’s why I use Topol, the smoker’s lens polish.
David Marjanović@#9
Yellow lenses? Cataracts?
I’m just beginning to develop cataracts and I’m ready for intraocular lenses. Plus I’m myopic as one can be so I look forward to normal vision without glasses.
I fully support nature’s contributions to hallucinating. I find cuttlefish strobing videos particularly mesmerizing
Just inject yourself with some squid DNA and let the mutation run its course
I shall now employ the standard chordate trick of, when hopelessly outclassed, redefining the parameters of comparison.
True skin must have an epidermal and a dermal layer, and have dermal appendages.
So the cephalopod’s outer layer doesn’t count! Ha!
re katansi #12;
So, it would appear, does cuttlefish prey!
Hell, you can do this to humans, too. Just set up a cross-shaped electric current and before you can say “lawsuit”, a cross shows up on the student’s arm.
grumpypathdoc asked, “Yellow lenses? Cataracts?”
Our lenses do turn yellow over time with exposure to ultraviolet light. They also get stiffer and harder to focus. I’m nearsighted, but lately also presbyopic (“old eyes”) which means my focusing range is decreased. I have two pairs of varifocals: one for seeing far down the road and my car’s instruments and one for reading the computer monitor and books. I look forward (hah!) to being able to replace my lenses with squishy implants that will stay squishy and not fade.
There are lots or amazing and reactive things happening there. Sortof tugs on the imagination to think that complex pigmentation and patterning, and fantastic coincidental control mechanisms, would result from a very long series of random DNA replication errors that might have been separated by millions of years. I guess they have a long shelf life?
Usually, if I’m not mistaken, the changes occur to match circumstances and environment. How do they do that? Do they look around and think “I must be just like that!”
creationist txpiper, no coincidence is needed. Natural selection is not random.
No no no, it’s ‘grab a squid and hob into this teleporter’.
ERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT wrong
I wonder if you’re capable of realizing just how incredibly unnatural it is to ask such a question rhetorically.
That is to say, a regular mind, with natural human curiosity, asks that question, then tries to find out the answer. In our delightful modern age, this is incredibly easy – a few minutes of searching will give you, say, the the wikipedia page on chromatophores. A regular mind will be quite pleased with the acquisition of new knowledge – and if it is particularly interested in the subject, might spend more minutes, hours, days, or years learning more and expanding the sum of human knowledge.
However, a human mind corrupted by certain unnatural thought patterns will ask such a question, then instead of looking for the answer, thinks to itself, “Wow, my invisible magical friend sure is amazing, to have made such a thing.” Content with attributing the cause to their invisible magical friend instead of actually understanding the phenomenon, the person remains ignorant – but he has been carefully trained from childhood to be happy with ignorance.
It’s heartbreakingly sad to think that right now, people like you are training children across the world to be incurious and to value ignorance over knowledge.
Imagination is nice, but not required. We have evidence.
No fantasy. Real.
Coincidence not required, thanks to natural selection.
Still on this deliberately dishonest mischaracterization of evolutionary theory, I see.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
E PUR SI EVOLVES.
And how, exactly, does design* “theory” explain this adaption?
HOW, OH MIGHT MAKER, HOW????
The texpip almost always is.
What a meaningless statement. Everything is circumstance.
Sometimes.
Not by design. (Except, possibly, their own.)
As far as we currently understand, vision is involved, so it IS, actually, a matter of “looking”, and the skin changes themselves ARE neurologically (ie “thinking”) mediated, and when used for camoflage it IS a matter of imitating the environment.
So in its transparent attempt to snark, the texpip, in a spectacularly failed attempt at mockery, actually produces a fully plausible metaphor (aside from the ridiculous anthropomorphosizing metaphorization – which itself is a vivid demonstration of the texpip’s own single most noticeable intellectual limitation aside from the blatant lying).
Truly, pathetic.
We must therefore keep it occupied posting on this blog thread, so that it wastes its time and has less opportunity to poison young impressionable minds.
True, it is frustrating and painful to be continually exposed to its utterly boring, repetitive, unimaginative cycle of lies and inanities, a pattern repeated so often one can pretty much predict it in its entirety, but it is a sacrifice that we must all make, for the sake of the children!
Stevarious,
“a few minutes of searching will give you, say, the the wikipedia page on chromatophores. A regular mind will be quite pleased with the acquisition of new knowledge..”
Yeah, but the wikipedia page will only be able to tell what is there and what is known about it, not how it developed. I’m endlessly interested in that part. I don’t really understand why the idea that accidents produced all kinds of complex systems doesn’t arouse your curiosity. Was it a conscious decision to just quit asking questions about that and just give “thanks to natural selection”?
===
Amphiox,
“Coincidence not required…”
But of course it is. A system like this has a lot of processes and components. These would depend, in your view, on countless complimentary mutations occurring in different DNA sites. If they all weren’t happening simultaneously, the alterations would never be fixed in the population. It’s ridiculously coincidental.
“As far as we currently understand, vision is involved…it IS a matter of imitating the environment”
Yeah, but while the colors are spectacular, it does not involve color vision.
No you aren’t. You presuppose your imaginary creator. You don’t look at the evidence of how it came about via random mutation and natural selection. Quit lying to us. We have been onto your lies for years.
Citation to the peer reviewed scientific literature needed, not your fallacious (you haven’t proven your imaginary creator/deity exists) presuppositional OPINION, which is ALWAYS WRONG.
txpiper, I have a book recommendation for you: Finding Darwin’s God by Kenneth R. Miller.
That link should help you find it at many physical libraries and online bookstores.
“Citation to the peer reviewed scientific literature needed”
For what? Can you not figure out that multiple, interactive parts and systems would have to develop accidentally, but in tandem, coincidentally? Any slight unregulated alteration would wash out. They aren’t saved up in hopes of future helpful replication errors. Your natural selection concept is as friendly and helpful as Mr. Rogers, but not that helpful.
Your views demand randomness, so you’re stuck with random results. Perhaps you should have demanded citations that addressed problens before you ran right by them without ever noticing that there were any.
strange gods,
Does this book address the question I’m asking? If you comprehend it, why not just answer it right here? I read Sean Carroll’s ideas about opsins and gene duplication liberating a copy for further replication errors to alter (amazing fortuitness involved in that idea). But he didn’t write about the issue of how the necessary regulatory mechanisms would simultaneously occur. Do you understand the process? If you can’t put it into words, I doubt that the book you recommend deals with it.
It’s been several years since I read it, txpiper. So I can’t really summarize it for you like I could if I’d just read it last week. But I sincerely think you would find it interesting.
Sorry, it you need to show you are right with scientific evidence, not OPINION. Your assertion is OPINION, not science. And your OPINION will never be science. Either put up or shut the fuck up. Welcome to science, where your OPINION is meaningless.
Then refute this paper from the peer reviewed scientific literature with similar peer reviewed scientific literature, or shut the fuck up. Your OPINION isn’t science, and the science is right until show otherwise with MORE SCIENCE, not OPINION.
Believe it or not your stupidity is not a problem for scientists save for the political effect you have.
Nope. It may develop accidentally, but due to how natural selection actually works (as opposed to the way the pitiful liar texpip pretends that it works) it doesn’t have to.
Nope. Doesn’t have to be in tandem. This has actually been observed and demonstrated. Of course the texpip has already been shown many examples of this in prior threads. But, as usual, it as already cycled to its reuse-old-discredited-arguments-and-ignore-prior-refutations sequence of lies.
Nope. Again, previously demonstrated, and again, deliberately ignored.
Nope. Again, already demonstrated multiple times. Multiple examples of SUBSTANTIAL alterations already documented in the scientific literature which did NOT “wash out”. In some cases we even know why.
Not that the texpip cares about such subtleties, as it is too busy lying.
“Saved up” being the deliberately dishonest misrepresentation of what actually happens here.
Standard texpip mendacity. Already seen multiple times in previous appearances.
E PUR SI SELECTS.
E PUR SI EVOLVES.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Utterly pathetic.
The regulatory regions are duped, too.
—reg—coding region—
|
|
V
—reg—coding region——–reg—coding region—
If this happens:
—reg—coding region—
|
|
V
—reg—coding region——–coding region—
You’ve basically got dead code, a pseudogene that isn’t transcribed and will decay over evolutionary time.
No fortuitness was involved at all.
Another deliberate lie from the texpip. Give it a reference and it will distort it. Predictable as clockwork.
Shamelessly pitiful.
Finding Darwin’s God does not do a good job of summarizing regulatory logic — it deals with other issues. The book you want for that is Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful.
A fact which was demonstrated by scientists designing experiments using the theory of evolution to generate hypotheses to test, in which the cuttlefish can be tricked into mimicing the wrong colours, or failing to mimic colours it cannot see.
Yet another example of the utility of evolutionary theory, and how superior it is to design theory, which is an intellectually stagnate dead end that offers absolutely nothing to the further advancement of science or procurement of knowledge.
Thanks due to the texpip, again, for disproving its own contentions.
It figures.
txpiper has several misunderstandings. I was recommending FDG because it does handle “irreducible complexity”.
The texpip has spammed so many quotemines in its pathetic mendacious history that I would not be surprised at all if it has already read FDG, and already tried to spam a quote mine from it that is buried somewhere in the old Sciblogs archives.
The texpip doesn’t read references for knowledge. It reads things only to scan them for phrase fragments it can deliberately twist out of context to link-drop in support of its various lies.
PZ,
“The regulatory regions are duped, too.”
Well that is one lucky copy error. But the gene is still only a copy. It is useless while it waits for very specific errors to happen that result in very specific accidental alterations. This is what I loathe about evolutionary theory. It is not reasonable. It is endless stacked miracles. At what point do the odds against something happening start to count?
===
“Nope. Doesn’t have to be in tandem. This has actually been observed and demonstrated.”
What has actually been observed is that unnecessary baggage like sight is discarded, as in the case of cave species. If such a system is neutralized, then one ever-so-slight, useless modification will never make the cut. Neither will a dysfunctional gene dupe along with its useless redundant controls.
You really need to get a grip and realize that you are expecting rare, random and unrelated screwups to produce extremely complicated things. You can’t just invoke a selection fairy who is choosing from a catalog of mistakes. Use your freakin head and acquaint yourself with the statistical realities concerning mutations. Errors don’t result in organized complexity. What the hell is wrong with you?
“A fact which was demonstrated by scientists designing experiments using the theory of evolution to generate hypotheses to test, in which the cuttlefish can be tricked into mimicing the wrong colours, or failing to mimic colours it cannot see.”
Right. Very impressive, but Nerd will expect a citation.
It is a mystery. Real scientists find the ability to discern and replicate color without the benefit of color perception “puzzling”.
http://www.livescience.com/22365-squid-iridescent-rainbow-skin-changes.html
“In the end, the researchers hope to understand how these cephalopods decide without the benefit of color vision what hues they need to display.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/15/squid-skin-video_n_1784158.html
It isn’t even just about color displays.
“We’ve done controlled experiments on cuttlefish, which are related to octopus, and showed that just by visually looking at the fine texture of the background, they can reproduce that in the skin.”
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/05/139025765/squid-octopus-cuttlefish-masters-of-camouflage
You have to be talking about some big dog mutations, and lots of them, right?
It’s not a fairy. It’s a process. The process happens. It isn’t choosing with a brain; it just means that more offspring that have the “mistake” survive.
Obviously, it’s not actually a mistake, except metaphorically.
txpiper, you know perfectly well that you’ve never read a single paper or book on biostatistics. You have no knowledge of probability or statistics in and of themselves, let alone with regards to genetics, so you are in no position to command anyone else to “acquaint” themselves with what you refuse to learn a single thing about.
Says the guy who thinks that because his ignorance of taphonomy trumps physics, that the world is 6000 years old.
Good grief.
“you’ve never read a single paper or book on biostatistics”
I would be very interested to find such papers.
“his ignorance of taphonomy”
It isn’t my ignorance of taphonomy that is the issue, it was the expectations of the taphonomists. One discipline has concluded that another one was off by quite a few orders of magnitude.
Citation needed, your OPINION doesn’t count.
Google scholar.
No, it is your ignorance that is the issue. The ignorance and arrogance to think your OPINION equals science with facts and evidence. It doesn’t even come close. Liberturds and creatbots are the most arrogant and ignorant people on the earth. You are both.
No, it’s not just a lucky copy error. Duplication events do not pay any attention to the content of the region duplicated; one big chunk of the chromosome gets copied.
This happens all the time. Look up CNVs — copy number variants — you’re loaded with them. We’ve got extra copies of genes that do no harm, and sometimes the extra copies generate more protein, so they provide an advantage if the cell can use it.
Interesting thing about blind cave fish: it’s been found that the eyeless state is not the product of loss of genes, but of overexpression of a suppressor gene. Eyeless species evolve very rapidly, and it’s usually not by passive loss, but active selection for expansion of other gene domains…in this case, for expanded BMP, which generates larger jaws and ventral sensory structures, at the expense of Eya, the gene that triggers eye formation.
But I don’t know why I’m bothering to explain this…you don’t seem to care much about the evidence, and will just go flitting off to another of your many misconceptions.
It’s amazing how quickly those creasciolists out themselves as completely intellectually dishonest.
Now I know you’re lying. Do you know you’re lying?
In freaking 2006, I offered this link:
http://www.math.duke.edu/~rtd/Gbook/Gbook.html
That’s the page for “Probability Models for DNA Sequence Evolution”, by Rick Durrett, in case you’re too damn lazy to click.
And I know I reminded you of this more recently, although the comments for those threads are not up yet.
You’ve had 6 years to read up on the topic. Apparantly, rather than actually do so, you wandered off to taunt Muslims.
You haven’t bothered to learn, because you love ignorance. It looks like you also hate truth.
What the hell is wrong with you, indeed.
It is exactly the issue. You don’t know anything about taphonomy, and you make stupid arguments based on your ignorance.
Wrong from beginning to end. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Palaeontologists — those actually expert in the discipline of taphonomy — have not concluded that physicists and cosmologists are off by any magnitude at all.
Creationist morons, who don’t actually know anything about taphonomy, are the ones making that stupid argument, even though the palaeontologists themselves aren’t making it, and don’t accept it.
Amusingly enough, this also came up in 2006. And I even linked to the paper: Adaptive Evolution of Eye Degeneration in the Mexican Blind Cavefish.
Of course, txpiper/Phil Corn’s response was:
And more recently, when I asked about his older responses, he indicated that he had not changed his mind on any of them.
*sigh*
Still the argument from personal incredulity, txpiper? Really?
Yes. You really need to go do that, txpiper.
Well, when he does attempt to cite the literature, he dishonestly quotemines a paper. The quote from what I have seen is often a rhetorical question, and not part of the conclusion. The paper and conclusion invariably refute texpip in toto, which is the only way to read scientific papers. You can bluff with losing hands, but once folks know you always bluff, you always lose.
PZ,
“This [duplication events] happens all the time. Look up CNVs — copy number variants — you’re loaded with them. We’ve got extra copies of genes that do no harm, and sometimes the extra copies generate more protein, so they provide an advantage if the cell can use it.”
The several search result entries I read didn’t leave me with an impression that CNV’s are much different than mutations in general. If there noticeable consequences, they are what you would expect errors to produce.
“It is well known that errors during mitosis and meiosis can result in duplications and deletions of genes on a chromosomal level, which can lead to disorders.”
http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/Copy-Number-Variation-and-Genetic-Disease-911
Rather than being a developmental mechanism, gene duplication actually looks like it is more likely to corrupt than improve. I can easily understand the enthusiasm for the idea since it is hard to imagine the accidental formation of a single gene, much less thousands of them. But if you think about it, the copy and alter scenario depends on a big accident being followed by lots of subsequent smaller ones to produce something functional. Feasibility is still a big problem.
—
”Interesting thing about blind cave fish: it’s been found that the eyeless state is not the product of loss of genes, but of overexpression of a suppressor gene. Eyeless species evolve very rapidly, and it’s usually not by passive loss, but active selection for expansion of other gene domains…”
This does not sound like it involves mutations. As Owlmirror points out, I’ve previously expressed doubts about random errors being part of the picture of what happens with cave species. What is “active selection”? NS is just ill-suited specimens not surviving. It isn’t good decisions being made, which is what “for expansion of other gene domains” implies.
I don’t see losing sight and pigmentation as being much different than having your suntan fade. Such things are coming from a DNA molecule designed to adapt.
====
Owlmirror,
“That’s the page for “Probability Models for DNA Sequence Evolution”, by Rick Durrett””
I wasn’t able to access this. I did find a review of it by a guy named Yang, and though he liked it, he noted that ”the book does not discuss models of DNA sequence evolution used in molecular phylogenetics, as the book title suggests.”
—
”Palaeontologists — those actually expert in the discipline of taphonomy — have not concluded that physicists and cosmologists are off by any magnitude at all.”
You have it backwards. The Wikipedia entry for Taphonomy says:
”Both DNA and proteins are unstable, and rarely survive more than hundreds of thousands of years before degrading.”
The age of the Hell Creek formation was never doubted in anything I read, but some people did express surprise at bio-material still being intact after 65 (or 80) million years, which was an ignorable problem (just another miracle). The excitement was all about the evolutionary relationship with birds, though I don’t really understand why as there is mention of bird fossils in that formation.
You’re right. Magic clearly stretches the imagination less
“You’re right.”
I think so. Ideas that require belief in endless miraculous accidents should be rejected as meritless.
Straw men however are much easier to destroy.
Like creationism.
Kudos again to the texpip for once again refuting creation theory and providing yet more support to evolution, the only theory of biological diversity yet devised by humans that does NOT call upon miracles.
And this is why samples in question constitute a few nanograms worth of possible collagen fragments, out of what had originally been something like six to twelve tons of proteins and DNA.
Yep. They do rarely survive so long. That’s why there’s so little of it left by now.
Exactly as the theory of evolution predicts.
Once more the texpip demonstrates the validity of evolutionary theory.
Haha. A reworded version of the “why are there still monkeys” idiocy.
Pathetic.
No. But this has already been explained ad infinitum to the texpip.
So it is lying, yet again.
Pitiful.
No it doesn’t. But this has already been explained to the texpip many times in prior threads.
So it is lying, yet again.
Pathetic.
Which is why broken nonfunctional pseudogenes (the more likely outcome, corruption) in the noncoding (junk) DNA outnumber actual functional genes (the less likely outcome, functional change) by a factor of more than 10 to 1 in nearly all organisms that do not experience rapid-generation purifying selection for small genome size.
Exactly as the theory of evolution predicts.
Another round of applause to the texpip for once again demonstrating the superior validity of evolution theory over creationism.
Can the texpip taste sugar (human salivary amylase)?
E PUR SI DUPLICATES.
Can the texpip see red (human OPN1LW)?
Does the texpip have a large (sadly poorly used) brain (SRGAP2A,B,C and D)?
E PUR SI DUPLICATES, MUTATES, GAINS NEW FUNCTIONS.
E PUR SI EVOLVES.
1. No, it is more likely to neither corrupt nor improve significantly.
2. “Corrupt” and “improve” are relative terms. It depends on the environment. (Except when the result is outright dead or infertility, of course.)
3. “More likely to do X than Y” doesn’t mean Y doesn’t happen. It doesn’t even mean Y doesn’t happen with enough frequency for the purposes at hand. That’s up to you to demonstrate (hint: you’ll need more than your personal incredulity for that).
Huh? How the fuck is something that is constantly happening a “big accident”?
And to falsify an entire scientific discipline you still need to come up with something better than the argument from personal incredulity. As I keep telling you.
NS is also well-suited specimens reproducing more than not-so-well-suited specimens. Differential reproduction. When better suited individuals reproduce more, the genes they carry are being actively selected for. Don’t pretend we didn’t try to explain this concept to you before.
I see Txpiper still hasn’t shown any evidence for its imaginary creator/deity existing. That evidence isn’t found in what it thinks is the failure of evolution, but rather in direct and conclusive physical evidence, like the creator is found here: eternally burning bush coordinates. Anything else is imagufactured bullshit by Tex to keep from having to admit in its delusional mind it is WRONG. But its ignorance and arrogance, better known as simple egotism, simply can’t accept that idea.
Nightjar,
“NS is also well-suited specimens reproducing more than not-so-well-suited specimens. Differential reproduction. When better suited individuals reproduce more, the genes they carry are being actively selected for. Don’t pretend we didn’t try to explain this concept to you before.”
Well, you’ve made claims before. But looking at the evidence, it looks like NS just serves to maintain the status quo. It doesn’t appear to be a driving force that makes things happen. For instance:
“Each June on Tanzania’s Serengeti plains, animals resume a journey they’ve been making for millions of years.”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/phenom-jun06.html
See what I mean? Natural selection occurs all the time in herd animals like the wildebeest. The weak and infirm are weeded out. But no evolution is happening.
Why haven’t you refuted this paper using citations from the peer reviewed scientific literature that shows otherwise yet? Oh, that’s right, txpiper is so “smart” its unevidenced OPINION trumps science every time. So NOT THE CASE. Science is only refuted by more science, and txpiper’s OPINION is presuppositional fuckwittery. It can never, ever, touch the science. It is nothing but noise.
Dishonesty from start to finish, which appears to be when it dies and doesn’t go to heaven, since heaven doesn’t exist.
Still no evidence for your imaginary deity TXPIPER. Total evidence, logic, and rationality fail on your part. Cite the coordinates for the eternally burning bush or equivalent…
“Why haven’t you refuted this paper…?
The biggest reason is that when I click on the link, it says “content not found”. Perhaps I just can’t access it.
Link to schneider paper
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/14/2794.short310949
If natural selection is happening, evolution is happening.
You pathetic idiot. Just because some popular magazine writer says they’ve been making the journey for “millions of years” does NOT mean that they’ve been making it unchanged. The most characteristic Serengeti grazers, wildebeests, have evolved two separate species in less than one million years, and the more common species – Connochaetes taurinus “blue wildebeest” – currently has 5 recognized subspecies, which are in the process of evolving into 5 separate species.
Evolution IS happening, right before our eyes.
Well, yeah, idiot, they’re not evolving into whales, or aliens, or whatever you think gives you justification for your bizarre claim that:
Why, oh creator, why did you decide to poof into existence 6 different kinds of not-quite-identical gnus? Why wasn’t one kind sufficient for you? What lesson do you expect your slow stupid human creations to learn from your six special kinds of gnus ? Why do you leave us to infer Darwinian evolution from the observable process of evolutionary change in populations, if you really want us to believe in special creation by you ? Why can’t you see your way clear to explaining it to us ? Is English not one of your languages ? Why, oh creator, why ?
Stabilizing selection. A form of evolution. Predicted by evolutionary theory to be of the the most common short-term types of evolution of all.
And so we look, and lo and behold, it IS one of the most common type of evolution observed in nature in the short term.
Thanks to the texpip for once again bringing up evidence that supports evolutionary theory.
Oh, and for the regulars, I’m suddenly getting a gratuitous <br> added to the copypasta of the Schneider paper link in front of the paper #. Sorry about not properly previewing something that worked for years.
P.S.
txpiper –
LEARN TO BLOCKQUOTE, YOU RUDE PIG!
And not just a while ago the texpip was insisting that natural selection was impossible.
It cannot speak except to lie.
Utterly pathetic.
(But I suppose to see it admit that natural selection occurs “all the time” is progress of sorts).
Another standard texpip lie – the deliberate mischaracterization of what evolution actually means.
It’s been corrected before. It deliberately ignores those corrections whenever it decides to infest a new thread.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Simply pitiful.
But… but… crocoducks!
I notice all of Daniel’s posts got tossed from a different thread, suggesting he was dungeonized.
…yet the irritating and inane pipster remains.
isn’t it time he follow Daniel into purgatory?
The several search result entries I read didn’t leave me with an impression that CNV’s are much different than mutations in general. If there noticeable consequences, they are what you would expect errors to produce.
translation:
“I have no clue what this means, so I’ll just hand waive it away…”
fucking moron.
*sigh*
No, I’m not talking about claims I made, I’m talking about a concept I and others have tried to explain to you. You may disagree about its relevance and explanatory power, but first you have to understand the fucking concept. Differential reproduction. Do you understand what I mean by that, even if you disagree about its usefulness? I need to know that.
I mean, fuck. I hate to give up on people and I’m generally patient, but you are fucking hopeless, txpiper. You’re not even trying to understand, just looking for an opportunity to be an intellectually dishonest asshole. Seriously, I don’t know why I’m even bothering with your gibberish any more.
Wow it takes gonades to qutoe mine with the quote right above it
Christ what a liar!
I don’t know why I’m even bothering with your gibberish any more.
why is anyone?
his schtick is tired and old.
time to go bye-bye.
Miraculous events are riddiculous…what’s much more logical are ACTUAL miracles. Oh and everything is a miracle because that is far less silly than everything being miraculous!
To recap
Miracles (in the sense of beating a long odd in hind sight) are unacceptable…therefore it had to be a miracle!
“The most characteristic Serengeti grazers, wildebeests, have evolved two separate species in less than one million years, and the more common species – Connochaetes taurinus “blue wildebeest” – currently has 5 recognized subspecies, which are in the process of evolving into 5 separate species.”
You should go to a dog show. You’d go nuts at all the evolution that is going on.
===
“The genus Connochaetes, Lichtenstein, 1814, contains two extant species, the blue wildebeest (C. taurinus, Burchell, 1823) and the black wildebeest (C. gnou, Zimmermann, 1780). In recent years, forced sympatry in confined areas within South Africa has led to interbreeding between these taxa and to fertile hybrid offspring.”
http://www.sajs.co.za/index.php/SAJS/article/view/423/489
So, still pretty much wildebeests, even after a breathtaking divergence.
Not an example of natural selection.
What are you expecting? A monotreme?
Obviously he’s expecting wildezebras.
Nightjar,
<i."You may disagree about its relevance and explanatory power, but first you have to understand the concept. Differential reproduction. Do you understand what I mean by that, even if you disagree about its usefulness?"
Yes. I understand it. I just don’t believe it. I’m not feigning obtuseness.
NS is an abused concept. I’m surprised that you don’t detect that in the literature. “Selection Pressure” has become a cheap way to automatically get beneficial mutations in response to need. Why do you not have trouble with that? It is Lamarckism wearing a mask, but you give it a free pass.
I don’t care what your views are, or what you believe. But you are better than this.
txpiper wrote:
This I believe. No-one could convincingly pretend they were obtuse as you appear to be; they’d have slipped up by being reasonable at least once by now.
Divergence = evolution.
Nice to see the texpip, once again, concede the whole argument.
Nope. As has already been explained in prior threads.
Another recycled texpip lie.
Pitiful.
Nope, and again already explained before.
So another recycled texpip lie.
Pathetic.
Because that’s not what evolutionary theory actually says, but just another deliberate misrepresentation of the theory, and another recycled texpip lie.
Pitiful.
Nope. Again already explained.
Again, another texpip lie.
Pathetic.
Nope.
Yet another texpip lie.
Piteously pathetic.
So the texpip admits to deliberately misrepresenting evolutionary theory even though he actually understands it.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Just lying.
Reality is that which does not go away simply because you don’t believe it.
Unlike creationism.
E PUR SI EVOLVES.
Ah, here comes the smug condescension.
Phase three of the texpip cycle of intellectual dishonesty.
Predictable as clockwork.
Utterly pathetic.
As humans are still pretty much apes.
As dolphins are still pretty much whales.
As whales are still pretty much artiodactyls.
All still evolved.
I lol’d.
LEARN TO BLOCKQUOTE, FOOL.
LEARN TO BLOCKQUOTE, INCOMPETENT FOOL.
Right, you are that obtuse. Stupid, ignorant and arrogant. Typical of creobots and liberturds. Deliberately with malice aforethought won’t recognize the reality that refutes them on a daily, hourly, and minute-by-minute basis. Where is the scientific evidence to support your disbelief? Or show your imaginary deity exists? It isn’t found in quotemines, but rather in whole papers. Which always shows you wrong.
How the fuck could one get Lamarckism from Natural Selection? They’re not remotely the same thing.
Fuck this one is stupid.
what the fuck?
ever hear of ‘extinction’?
You’re an idiot. What is it you don’t believe in? Genes? Heritability? Variation? Reproduction? Maths? What? It has to be one of those things, for you to say you differential reproduction.
Heh. And to prove that you’re going to abuse it some more in the next sentences, aren’t you?
I’m (not) surprised you’re still refusing to understand that not everything everyone ever writes is supposed to be taken literally.
I’m (not) surprised you’re still pretending “selection pressure” is about something more mysterious than “changes in the frequency of alleles already present in the gene pool due to some individuals reproducing more than others in an environment where competition for resources is particularly intense”.
Note the already present in the gene pool part and be ashamed of your misinterpretation.
Of course I have trouble with that. Good thing it has nothing with the modern theory of evolution, eh?
Good thing I don’t give it a free pass, then, right?
Yes, of course I am better than the imaginary strawperson who believes in your made up, easy to demolish straw-arguments. Thanks, it’s nice of you to admit you’re not really arguing with me, but with someone that only exists in your head and is worse than me.
I also appreciate the admission that you don’t really care what my views are, you’re just going to keep on making shit up and ignoring everything I say. Have fun arguing with yourself!
At this point it might be easier to make a list of the Evolutionary concepts txpiper hasn’t mangled.
…
Well that was easy.
Nightjar,
“changes in the frequency of alleles already present in the gene pool due to some individuals reproducing more than others in an environment where competition for resources is particularly intense”.
That’s very easy to agree with, especially for me. But often, selection pressure is not used with the restriction of “already present” in mind.
But since you agree that it is not talking about gaining anything new, how would you explain situations when something new is acquired?
Gee fuckwitted, ignorant, and forgetful idjit. Random mutation followed by natural selection. Now, it is up to you to refute both scientific concepts using real science by citing the peer reviewed scientific literature with papers fully supporting your idiocy. Quotemining a paper is dishonesty and acknowledging we are right. Your OPINION isn’t and never will be science, and does nothing to refute the science. That is your own personal problem.
Still no evidence for your imaginary deity…. Just saying you are behind on your need to prove your deity/creator really exists with solid and conclusive physical evidence, like an eternally burning burning bush or equivalent. No creator/deity, no creation…Simple logic 101.
“Random mutation followed by natural selection.”
Well yeah, but the randomness necessarily requires lots of time, since it is well known that almost all the copy errors will have no effect, and the ones that do will be bad news. This means there should be long pauses in between the rare mutations that yield some slight advantage, which allows the alteration to become fixed in the population, right? Would that explain why some species, like the wildebeest, don’t really change much in hundreds of thousands of years?
Your OPINION is not evidenced by a citation to the peer reviewed scientific literature so *POOF*, it is dismissed as fuckwittery. YOUR OPINION IS NOT AND NEVER WILL BE SCIENCE. ONLY MORE SCIENCE REFUTES SCIENCE.
Now, where is your evidence for your imaginary deity/creator? Until you provide said conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary deity there is no alternative to EVOLUTION.
Yes, it is always used with that restriction in mind by everyone who knows what they’re talking about. Even if it’s not explicit (doesn’t have to be when everyone already knows what is meant). Natural selection acts on already existing variation. That was the whole point of Darwin’s work.
You’re now asking how genetic variation in a population arises. The answer is mutations, genetic recombination (think crossing-over) and sex. Mostly, anyway. As I’m sure you know, since you’ve asked this question so many times before and got answers along those lines.
And/or high mutation rates. And/or small generation times. Fixation rates play an important role too, and those are closely tied to selection pressures and therefore to the environment.
And don’t tell me it’s not enough for whatever your favourite example of a rapid evolutionary event is (whales, it seems), or that it is too much for whatever your favourite example of slow visible evolution is (wildebeests, it seems). You haven’t done the math, or bothered to look into the field where people who do that kind of math work. No one has to take anything of what you have to say on this seriously until you do that. Like Nerd likes to say, *POOF*, dismissed.
Oh, and:
So, just to make it clear, you do now understand what active selection is and agree that natural selection is not “just ill-suited specimens not surviving” like you were claiming previously on this thread?
“So, just to make it clear, you do now understand what active selection is and agree that natural selection is not “just ill-suited specimens not surviving” like you were claiming previously on this thread?”
No, I don’t really understand. When I saw that, I noted that it didn’t sound as if mutations were involved in the fish losing sight. If there were indeed no mutations, what makes selection go “active…for expansion of other gene domains…in this case, for expanded BMP, which generates larger jaws and ventral sensory structures”?
Also, when I did a search for “active selection” or “active natural selection”, I didn’t find anything that would indicate that it is common jargon. I have never seen the phrase used before, which is what prompted me to ask the question.
We know that. YOUR OPINION ISN’T SCIENCE, AND WILL NEVER BE SCIENCE. ONLY MORE SCIENCE CAN REFUTE ESTABLISHED SCIENCE.
Your personal incredulity does nothing whatsoever to science, nor does it make any scientist think you are anything other than a stupid and delusional fool. Do yourself a favor and fade into the bandwidth. You have no hope of changing anybody’s minds, because you offer no evidence/science, just opinion which is *POOF* dismissed as the fuckwittery it is.
txpiper:
Care to quantify this?
Or is ‘lots’ good enough for you? (Hint: it’s not good enough for people who are seriously studying the topic.)
Unless, of course, there are… lots of babies.
Actually, lack of selection pressure to change – that is, already being well-suited for one’s environment – is probably much more likely.
But, hey, I have a question: what’s the best way to tell if two animals developed from a common ancestor (like, say, dogs and wolves?) or were created separately?
To ask it in a slightly different way, can you give an example of two animals that are as similar as they can be while still definitively not being related? Please explain how you arrive at the answer, if you would.
(I’d say thanks in advance, but I strongly suspect you won’t give a cogent reply… but hope springs eternal.)
The second truthful statement the texpip has uttered all thread.
Progress?
And yet, this previously admitted AMATEUR NOVICE, who DOESN’T REALLY UNDERSTAND, sees it fit to lecture trained scientists who have spent their lives studying evolution and personally experiencing it on what natural selection can and cannot do.
There is no arrogance like the undeserved arrogance.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Quite. Stabilizing selection is indeed the most common form of natural selection. It actually doesn’t take very long at all for natural selection to optimize a trait – a new trait with a 1% advantage can be driven to fixation within 1000 generations (note how the theory of evolution produces quantifiable numbers like this, than can be observed and tested, while useless creationism gives jack squat), and once the optimized trait reaches fixation, any further changes that deviate from it will by definition be inferior, and thus natural selection, having already driven the population up the fitness peak, will work most of the time just to keep it there.
Note the deliberate omission of the word “almost” from after the “will”, dishonestly ignoring the fact that some mutations are indeed beneficial.
And of course beneficial mutations were discussed at length in prior threads, all, once more, ignored.
Another example of the texpip’s deliberate distortions of what evolutionary theory actually says.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Pathetic.
Here’s a fun game. True or False?
a) deformed red blood cells are bad news that shortens a human life span
b) deformed red blood cells are beneficial mutation that greatly increases survival
Trick question, both are true. For the same mutation.
Lots of time indeed. Several million years in some cases.
Which is EXACTLY WHAT WE OBSERVE, EXACTLY AS THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION PREDICTS.
More kudos to the texpip for bringing up yet more evidence in support of evolution theory.
No, selection pressure is never “not used” with the restriction of “already present” in mind. In fact, it is ALWAYS used with that “restriction” in mind. That’s why the theory is evolution by natural selection AND random mutation. Variation is continuously generated with every new generation.
Once more the texpip LIES about what evolution theory actually says.
Once more this was made utterly clear on previous threads.
Once more the texpip bears FALSE WITNESS against those of us who initially tried to discuss with it in good faith all those long threads ago.
Intellectually dishonest liar lies again.
Supposed faithful Christian BREAKS THE COMMANDMENT OF HIS SUPPOSED GOD yet again.
Utterly pitiful.
Albinoism is almost always bad news.
Yet Polar bears did quite well for themselves (before we fucked em up)
The average lifespan of a mammalian species is several hundreds of thousands of years. That is, by definition, the period of time during which a species remains generally stable, without huge change, before either going extinct or changing sufficiently to be regarded as a different species based on the species definitions used for fossil organisms (since the interbreeding criteria obviously cannot be applied).
This too, is precisely what the theory of evolution predicts. This is also over TWENTY TIMES longer than creationism posits the universe to have existed.
Congrats again to the texpip for bringing up yet another piece of evidence in favor of the theory of evolution.
Abused very much so by the texpip, who continually misrepresents and distorts it.
So finally the texpip demonstrates a shred of conscience and makes an admission of its many lies.
All mosquito species look the same…to non mosquitoes. To the mosquitoes they look as different as a lion to a house cat.
More BEARING FALSE WITNESS, this time against Nightjar.
texpip, hypocrite.
Utterly pathetic.
Nightjar,
”Yes, it is always used with that restriction in mind by everyone who knows what they’re talking about. Even if it’s not explicit (doesn’t have to be when everyone already knows what is meant). Natural selection acts on already existing variation.”
Well, I think that subtlety often gets lost. I remembered noticing in the paper about the antifreeze proteins:
“Antifreeze proteins (AFPs) in different polar marine teleost lineages arose under strong selection from late Cenozoic sea-level glaciation, which protects the fish from death from freezing”
”… these results strongly suggest that a genomic region (estimated at ∼12 kbp) containing the LdSAS-B gene and its immediate neighbor sequences (including LdCR1-3) was duplicated and translocated to a site between Synuclein and LIM domain binding 3b genes; from this, the primordial AFPIII gene evolved, and the large AFPIII locus arose from in situ gene family expansion under selection pressure from polar sea-level glaciation.”
They are saying that while there might have been a duplicate gene, neither the “evolved” gene nor the resulting new protein “arose” before the selection pressure of cold water. How is that not saying that selection pressure is causal?
===
”And/or high mutation rates. And/or small generation times. Fixation rates play an important role too, and those are closely tied to selection pressures and therefore to the environment.
And don’t tell me it’s not enough for whatever your favourite example of a rapid evolutionary event is…”
That reminded me of the lizard that developed the cecal valves in 36 years. In his post about it, PZ noted that:
”The cecal valves are an evolutionary novelty, a brand new feature not present in the ancestral population and newly evolved in these lizards. That’s important. This is more than a simple quantitative change, but is actually an observed qualitative change in a population, the appearance of a new morphological structure.
Evolution created something new, and it did it quickly (about 30 generations)”
But it wasn’t just the valves. Valves require an open-and-close mechanism, or they are worthless, and I would suppose there had to be some unique proteins involved. How would you fit the idea of randomness into something that happened this quickly?
“Albinoism is almost always bad news….Yet Polar bears did quite well for themselves”
Polar bears have black skin.
Still no citations to the peer reviewed scientific literture from txpip, so *POOF* everything it says is dismissed as unscientific fuckwittery without any intellectual and scientific value. NOTHING BUT NOISE FROM TXPIPER.
Science is only refuted by more science, and none was presented.
Txpip needs to be promoting his inane ideas, not talking about evolution. So TXPIP, where the fuck is your conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary deity. Every post without such evidence is acknowledging that evolution is true. Only by presenting the positive scientific evidence for your ideas can it be accept by the scientific community. And don’t forget to publish your ideas in the peer reviewed scientific literature. A Nobel prize is waiting for whoever comes up with a replacement for Evolution. Submission information for Science and Nature. Only a craven coward who knows they are wrong would fail to submit scientific papers. Which is you. More tacit acknowledgement Evolution is true. YOU ARE YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY ABOUT SHOWING THE TRUTH OF EVOLUTION….
txpiper:
…and as there are plenty of mechanism living things use to alter, move or otherwise actuate bits of their bodies, this isn’t an issue, but do go on…
Nope, just means they might have served some other purpose. It never stops being frustrating to see the old canard of “If it doesn’t work perfectly, it doesn’t work at all!” trotted out again and again. This is an incorrect statement – please learn why.
Protip: stop supposing, start looking things up. Quite frankly, you’re not very good at supposing.
Replicators are common.
Replications are common.
Generational variation is not common, it is assured.
But ok, I’ll ask again – quantify your objection. Stop saying “This would take like, a bazillion years”, do the math and show your work. If you cannot, please stop trying to draw conclusion in subjects you are not proficient in – you will often arrive at the wrong answers.
Right now, you’re essentially saying that NASA couldn’t have gotten to the moon because it’s wow, really, really far away! Like a really big number! Like, think of something big-big-superbig… this is even bigger!
. . .
Also, should I assume you missed my question:
Or are just ignoring it?
*sigh*
There are never “no mutations”. Just where do you think the different alleles are coming from? Mutations are constantly happening, at the mutation rate for that particular species and that particular genome region.
Oh, I don’t know, maybe the fact that the environment changed, and so did the probability of those particular mutations being fixed? Selection “goes active” when conditions change and there’s a need to adapt. The mutations are always there, happening, generating variation, so that when selection “goes active” it has something to act on. Get it?
Fair enough, but it should have been obvious that it was meant to contrast with “passive loss”, and to emphasise that positive selection was actually going on, as opposed to only passive genetic drift towards non-functional eye genes because being eyeless was not disadvantageous any more.
***
My dear, scientific papers are not written with you in mind. They’re meant to be read by people who understand the basics, and people who understand the basics understand each other just fine using the kind of language literally-minded you likes to object to. I do think textbooks should be more careful than they usually are, but scientific papers? No, sorry, whatever gets the message across to other scientists in fewer words is what is preferred. We’re not going to waste lines and lines of text explaining what everyone reading that paper should already know (’cause we don’t get unlimited space) just to avoid being quote-mined by creationists (’cause it will likely happen anyway).
Of course. IIRC (it has been a while since I read that paper) the gene that got duplicated itself already had some incipient antifreeze activity, and when the duplication event happened it was free to evolve further in that direction because mutations happening within one of the copies were no longer disrupting the gene’s main function (as long as one of the copies was maintained intact). Getting from the original protein to the new one, with improved antifreeze activity, was an incremental process that took more than one mutation. So of course it’s not likely the new protein would have arisen without the selection pressure of the cold water, the probability of those new mutations (each one incrementing the protein’s antifreeze activity) being all fixed due to genetic drift alone is much lower than them being fixed due to positive selection.
Only in the “causes beneficial mutations to be fixed” sense, not in the “causes beneficial mutations to occur” sense. IOW, fixation rates, not mutation rates.
Did you miss the part where I said I don’t give a flying fuck what someone who hasn’t done the math and knows nothing about population genetics thinks is too quick or too slow evolutionarily? Because I mean it. Stop whining, show your work, until then *POOF*, dismissed and all that.
QFT.
txpiper’s intellectual compadre
Oh crap. I missed all the fun.
Or rather… I spared myself a lot of rage about the breathtaking arrogance with which has been actively defending his ignorance for at least six years now.
No. By “ultra-yellow” I mean the “opposite” color to ultraviolet: human lenses absorb ultraviolet. People who have their lenses surgically removed see a bit into the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, because the receptors in the retina allow that; the limiting factor is the lens.
Obviously, lenses that lack this limitation are possible; it’s even normal for vertebrates to see into the ultraviolet spectrum.
Stupid Design!
Dude, we simply can’t work on everything at the same time. For some complex systems, it’s very well understood which mutations happened in which sequence and how they happened; for others, there are only parsimonious hypotheses, because the politicians don’t allocate enough grant money to researching everything at once.
Exaptation.
Finally look it up and learn what it means!!! We’ve already explained it to you mabye 20 times.
PZ,
“The regulatory regions are duped, too.”
Well that is one lucky copy error.
It’s no less probable than any other.
Do remember: DNA polymerase does not recognize codons or regulatory regions or anything. It just copies one nucleotide after another. Therefore, the start and end points of duplications are random. They need not, and usually do not, coincide with the beginning or end of a gene, because DNA polymerase has no fucking idea what a gene is.
Precisely because it is useless, mutations to it practically cannot be harmful, so, yes, it can “wait”.
You keep only taking one source of odds into account – while forgetting three others: gene duplication, time and population size.
And we keep telling you that for years and years.
And you keep refusing to even listen.
Do you know what that makes you?
An asshole.
Lenski.
What more do I need to say?
Again: DNA polymerase cannot read. Anything and everything can duplicate, and it does – look it the fuck up!
That’s how it seems to you, because you refuse to learn what we’re telling you about: your sources of error.
Asshole.
Who knows? You certainly don’t.
It’s really stupid how you think about such things in such general, even abstract terms – and then generalize from “more likely” to “with a probability of 100 %”.
*headdesk* It must involve at least one mutation in some regulatory region, and/or at least one in a protein that binds to such a region! How the fuck else could it work???
This isn’t bleeding obvious to you, because you have no fucking clue what a gene is or how it works. Where I come from, that’s highschool biology, so overcome the failure of the US education system already and read an introductory text!!!
What the fuck have you been waiting for these six years?
Liar!
We’ve been telling you for all these years that that’s only half of the picture!
The disadvantaged having fewer surviving fertile offspring than the average is natural selection. The advantaged having more surviving fertile offspring than the average is also natural selection!
For the 20th time (estimated).
Colander-for-brains.
And you never wondered why it says “rarely” and not “never”?
Because “rarely” is correct, but “never” would be false!
Besides, many proteins are a lot more durable than DNA. In very well preserved fossils like Archaeopteryx, claw sheaths have no trouble surviving 150 million years. Claw sheaths are thick layers of keratin, an especially hard, tough, and dry protein that is not easily attacked by bacteria or acids. (Have you never noticed that cats and even owls regurgitate hair? Snakes don’t, but they allow a lot more time for digestion.)
*headdesk* Birds are dinosaurs; they’re more closely related to Tyrannosaurus than birds + Tyrannosaurus are to Triceratops + Brachylophosaurus. It was nice to see the molecular evidence, if indeed it wasn’t contamination, confirm that.
(BTW, there are indeed bird fossils in the Hell Creek formation. They’re not from modern birds, though. Look up Avisaurus and Potamornis for starters.)
*headdesk*
As far as I know, UV changes the shape of a protein that binds to a regulatory region of a gene that (indirectly) makes melanin (the pigment) in the epidermis (the outer layer of the skin). Increased UV irradiation therefore causes, mechanically causes, increased transcription of that gene and therefore increased production of that melanin-making enzyme.
Now keep in mind that the epidermis constantly grows on the inside and dies and sloughs off on the outside. So, when UV exposure decreases and no new melanin is produced in the youngest, lowermost cells, sooner or later all cells with above-background melanin levels will have died and fallen off – the tan will have faded.
The DNA doesn’t change during this at all.
In the case of those cavefish, the DNA has changed. If you take such a fish and keep it in light, it will not shrink its face and grow eyelenses.
““?
You don’t see anything, because you refuse how to learn to even look!!!
…which makes you…
…an asshole.
You keep forming opinions on topics that you don’t even remotely understand the uttermost basics of.
No, that’s not the receptor for sweetness in the taste papillae; it’s the enzyme that cuts down starch to maltose, so that if you eat starch (bread for instance), you will sooner or later taste sweetness.
Problem with testing this: in the USA, bread usually contains sugar. It doesn’t over here.
Even those depend on the environment. Parasites commonly lose very basic abilities that would quickly kill a free-living organism.
See? has no idea how common copy-number variations are.
He has, in general, no idea how common mutations are.
When the environment happens to be stable, and when the organisms in question are already well adapted to that environment because they’ve been there for millions of generations, then yes: what is most commonly observed is stabilizing selection, which means that most mutations that aren’t neutral would be detrimental.
But other cases exist. Environments aren’t always stable, and the same populations haven’t been in the same environments forever.
You know*, that’s a vast oversimplification. Every ice age shifts the rainfall patterns and amounts quite drastically, and there’ve been 17 of them in the last 2 million years or so. And over that timescale, the fauna changes, too: Africa used to have bears, chalicotheres (look them up), deinotheres (ditto), and so on – that means different predators and different competition.
And how many million years now has the Serengeti been grassland? Three? Two and a half? Two?
* Well, no. You don’t, and that’s the problem.
What happened is that the Nerd included a space and a </br> tag in the link. A stupid mistake that you would have caught if you had bothered to look either at the status bar of your browser when you pointed at the link before clicking, or at the address bar after clicking.
Or didn’t you know that such stuff can’t occur in a URL?
Well, yeah. That is evolution – it’s just that the environments are maintained and changed artificially, by (at least in part) conscious decisions made by humans instead of, say, Milanković cycles or moving continents or other unconscious natural processes.
Incidentally, precisely this is Darwin’s big insight. That’s where he took the word selection from.
Not going to happen as long as zebras still exist. As long as they do, anything too similar to a zebra would have to compete with the zebras – and lose, because it’s not (yet) adapted to living like a zebra as well as the zebras are.
That’s why there weren’t any mammals bigger than a large dog more than 65 million years ago.
No, nobody claims or implies or secretly thinks that selection pressure can cause mutations. Biologists today are not Lamarckists and haven’t been for decades.
That you can’t imagine anything other than Lamarckism is your problem, yours alone. I suggest reading more – and for comprehension.
That you don’t know how common mutations are is your problem, yours alone. I suggest reading more – and for comprehension.
I also suggest listening when we say that you have 100 to 200 mutations that are strictly your own – mutations that both of your parents lack. The paper has been cited at you several times, go find it.
Have you noticed how you never try to quantify “lots”, “almost”, or “long”?
No, that’s due to stabilizing selection. Take that away by changing the environment, and you’ll see averages shift measurably from every generation to the next.
Yes, it has been done – with Galápagos finches, not with wildebeest. Look up Peter & Rosemary Grant.
(Which is also a point Darwin hammered on all the time, following Malthus.)
Ooh… define “species”.
Trick question.
Usually, no particular species concept is explicitly applied at all, and there’s often no consistency between researchers or even between different points in the same researcher’s career.
Again, scientific papers are written by scientists for scientists, not for laypeople like you. Therefore, they omit the obvious to save time and space – even if it’s not obvious to you.
1) First of all, “strongly suggests” is what scientists usually write where other people would use “prove”. It’s usually a massive understatement.
2) Learn how to use commas. There’s no comma behind “expansion”; therefore, they’re saying “the large AFPIII locus arose from in situ gene family expansion under selection pressure from polar sea-level glaciation”, but they’re not saying “the primordial AFPIII gene evolved […] under selection pressure from polar sea-level glaciation”.
3) What makes you think that “under selection pressure” means that selection pressure caused any mutations?
4) What makes you think that “arose” refers to the mutations, as opposed to the fixation in the population?
You’re not used to reading scientific papers, and it shows all the time.
Why?
For instance, can’t it simply be an expression of arterial valves in the gut? That would require mutations to the regulation of some gene, but it would not require a new protein at all. It wouldn’t be any more remarkable than the abovementioned amylase in our saliva – other primates have amylase only in their pancreas juice.
Thread won!
Internet won!
The more prestigious journals impose very strict limits of, like, three pages.
Many less prestigious ones have a (more generous) limit above which the authors have to pay a fee for every extra page.
That may look like a joke, but it’s literally true: Limbaugh, like txpiper, takes a topic, assumes everybody knows as little about it as he does, refuses to educate himself, and then pontificates. They’re both committing exactly the same fallacy.
ARGH! Sorry! It’s Formation with a capital letter. It’s a clearly defined technical term of stratigraphy! “Hell Creek Fm” is a proper name!
“you’re essentially saying that NASA couldn’t have gotten to the moon because it’s wow, really, really far away!”
Well, that was design engineers of all disciplines deliberately working towards an imaginable goal.
What your’re talking about is a blind process with no direction, no goal, and in my opinion, no reliable developmental mechanism.
I will be out of town for a while, but I’d like to hear your thoughts on this:
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/Biological_Chemistry/scientist/Tawfik/papers/(72)TokurikiTawfikCurrOpinStrucBiol2009.pdf
Gee, like the OPINION of a fuckwitted idjit who purposely misunderstands the science means anything to any scientist or science. You see TXPiper, your OPINION is meaningless and unscientific drivel, and always will be without evidence, not worth the consideration of any scientist even to comment on, much less refute. YOUR OPINION IS NOT AND NEVER WILL BE SCIENCE. YOUR UBER SKEPTICISM, IGNORANCE, AND ARROGANCE IS YOUR PROBLEM, NOT THAT OF SCIENCE AND SCIENTISTS.
Where is your publications show your imaginary deity exists and your whole theory laid out for criticism by the scientific community. Until you do that, shut the fuck up.
Every post txpiper makes without either new experimental evidence or citation to the peer reviewed scientific literture with be *POOF* dismissed as fuckwittery. Science is only refute by more science and txpiper knows that. His only excuse for not presenting real science is that the science refutes his presuppositions and he knows that. He tacitly acknowledges the truth of evolution every post he makes where he can’t use evidence from the peer reviewed scientific literature to refute evolution.
Likewise, evolution remains in force until an alternative scientific theory is published with appropriate evidence. Evidence that txpipers imaginary creator really exists. Which requires the equivalent of the eternally burning bush. Every post without providing such evidence txpiper is tacitly acknowledging evolution is true, and he knows that. Otherwise, he would shut the fuck up until he can provide said evidence.
Arrogant and ignorant loser writ large over every post by the proven liar and bullshitter.
Nerd, you need a break. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNQeKvVPPlc
What your’re talking about is a blind process with no direction, no goal, and in my opinion, no reliable developmental mechanism.
yeah, but even a really stupid designer could figure out how to get to the moon given a few billion years.
as to “reliable developmental mechanism”
this is just you refusing to pull your head out of your ass, as per usual.
why PZ lets you pollute anyting other than the zombie chamber is beyond me.
They are saying that while there might have been a duplicate gene, neither the “evolved” gene nor the resulting new protein “arose” before the selection pressure of cold water. How is that not saying that selection pressure is causal?
LOL
what a complete idiot.
A joke, but one with that point
Oh and that’s Bill O, not Limbaugh FYI.
No, you need to get your shit together and actually stop being stupid and OPINIONATED, and get scientific and literate. What is your problem? Other than you know you lie and bullshit, and your deity doesn’t exist without solid and conclusive physical evidence?
Your ideas, put it out there, and forget about evolution, or shut the fuck up…Submission information lurkers for real scientific journal that txpiper is utterly and totally scared to submit a paper to for some bizzaire reason, Science and Nature. Put up or shut the fuck up loser. You can shut the fuck at any time….
No it doesn’t, except for the deliberately intellectually dishonest liars like the texpip who purposefully misrepresent what evolutionary theory says.
More BEARING FALSE WITNESS by the texpip. “Arise” in evolutionary literature ALWAYS means “increase in frequency in the population to noticeable levels” – includes BOTH the mutation that produced the variant AND the selection process that amplifies, but makes no specific requirements for the timing of the two relative to each other.
This of course HAS BEEN EXPLAINED to the texpip before, but of course, the texpip just ignores that and continues to lie about it.
Pitiful.
The alternative being that the cecal valves were specially created within the last 30 years then? Well great! We actually have an example of the almighty’s creative act WITHIN RECENT HISTORIC MEMORY. The evidence of divine power should be bleedingly obvious.
This will be PROOF that creationism is correct!
Where is it?
*crickets*
HOW OH MIGHTY MAKER, HOW??????
EVERY NEWBORN ORGANISM HAS APPROXIMATELY ONE HUNDRED NEW, UNIQUE MUTATIONS. We know. We’ve MEASURED it. We can sequence whole genomes now, and compare parent to child.
ONE HUNDRED NEW MUTATIONS PER INDIVIDUAL PER GENERATION ON AVERAGE.
There are NEVER “no” mutations.
But this has already been explained to the texpip long ago.
It is doing its ignoring act once again.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Utterly pathetic.
MORE deliberate mischaracterization of what evolutionary theory actually says. It doesn’t have to be simultaneous (in fact it almost NEVER is), and this has been explained IN DETAIL, WITH CITATIONS for the texpip LONG AGO.
More LIES from the texpip.
Simply pitiful.
A omnipotent creator-entity poofing it all into existence instantaneously is EVEN MORE coincidental.
(Yet more kudos to the texpip for demonstrating the utter ridiculousness of creationism and the superiority of evolution as an explanatory mechanism)
A deliberately dishonest liar is no authority on what is or is not “reasonable”
No miracles. More deliberate misrepresentation of what evolution theory actually says.
Pathetic.
There has been some work done on this very question, in an attempt to explain why certain adaptions, easily invented and designed by humans, are never found in nature. Like macroscopic wheels with freely spinning axles, or skeletal systems composed of metals. Or fire-breathing dragons.
Evolution theory can produce estimations of the numeric odds against such configurations evolving, and generate the hypothesis that they are quite unlikely to be found to exist on planet Earth. Creationism, on the other hand, can offer no explanation for why such things don’t exist. Indeed, under a creationist scenario, such things POSITIVELY SHOULD exist.
Thus, evolution predicts that these things don’t exist. Creationism predicts that they do.
And we go look in nature, and what to we find?
They don’t exist.
Evolution wins again.
Yet more kudos to the texpip for bringing up YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE of why evolution is a superior theory to creationism.
Humans have one the longest gestation periods, longest intervals between reproduction, longest development times before sexual maturity, smallest litter sizes (average close to just one), and lowest per individual fecundity of all lifeforms on planet earth, and we produce 20 million babies per year.
There are ALWAYS lots of babies.
Yet another example of a patented texpip misrepresentation of evolution. Include two points (blind process, no goal) that are broadly true, stick a CLEAR LIE between them, a LIE THAT IT HAS ALREADY BEEN CALLED OUT ON MULTIPLE TIMES BEFORE.
Natural selection DOES have direction. It’s IN THE DEFINITION OF THE CONCEPT.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Utterly pathetic.
The opinion of a proven liar like the texpip is worth squat.
As it is, evolutionary theory can QUANTIFY how “reliable” or “unreliable” the mechanisms are, and thus calculate a FREQUENTLY said mechanisms will “work” to produce adaptive change and how frequently they fail.
From this we can estimate maximum and minimum times it would take for certain adaptions to appear.
And when we observe nature, what do we see?
Adaptions appear, invariably, WITHIN THE MIN-MAX timeframes that we predict them to.
Yet more evidence supporting evolutionary theory. More thanks to the texpip.
E PUR SI DEVELOPS.
E PUR SI EVOLVES.
Then the texpip needs to do the generous Christian thing and give Nerd the break he needs, by NOT LYING ANYMORE.
As you see lurkers with Amphiox’s astute post, TXpiper shows no ability to actually argue scientifically and remember what it learned during all losing arguments in the past. It can’t win one since its OPINION isn’t science, never will be science, and can’t refute the science of evolution. That is only done with more science, specifically either new experimental evidence, or citations to the peer reviewed scientific literature. Citations which aren’t quotemined, but where the whole article support txpiper’s fallacious and fuckwitted assertions. Which never happens either, due to txpipers arrogance and ignorance. Txpiper is the best walking advertisement for evolution, because with its unscientific and stupid behavior, at the end of the day shows he is wrong, and by default, evolution is stronger than before. His only hope is to shut the fuck up, but its arrogance and ignorance won’t allow that to happen. Pitiful.
Anything dissolved in water will have antifreeze activity. Even something like salt.
And what do duplicated genes produce? Proteins.
And what do proteins do in water? They dissolve.
Evolving antifreeze proteins is about as easy as observing the texpip lie.
The gut itself already has valves, like the lower esophageal valve, the pyloric valve, the ileocecal valve. And from the images I’ve seen of those cecal valves, they look like they’re composed of enlarged, extended folds of the inner walls of the cecum. And similar smaller folds, like the small intestinal plicae, are found literally everywhere in the digestive tract.
The genes that would need to have their regulation tweaked only need to be genes that are already expressed in the intestines to begin with.
Completely mindless rocks, blasted off the surface of mars by completely random impacts, into completely random orbits, have made that trip to earth, many times, in a few billion years. (And vice versa)
Oh look! Not one, not two, but THREE miraculous coincidences! It must be impossible! Meteorites on earth of martian origin must not exist!
And one of the easiest ways to increase the antifreeze potential of an incipient antifreeze protein is to increase its concentration.
And one of the easiest ways for the concentration of a protein to increase is to produce more or it, faster.
And one of the easiest ways to produce more of a protein, faster, is to have more copies of the gene for that protein.
The selection pressure for antifreeze efficiency actually feeds back and promotes preservation of the duplicated genes, as well as additional duplications in transcribable form. In other words, it is negative selection pressure against disabling mutations that turn duplicated genes into pseudogenes (which is the fate of most duplicated genes – hence one of the reasons why we have so much noncoding, nonfunctional DNA).
it’s like watching people desperatly trying to teach a chipmunk how to water ski
Google “directional selection”.
txpiper:
You did get that I was drawing a parallel between your disbelief in something that can be demonstrated to have happened because it was ‘too hard’ and someone else’s disbelief in…
No, you didn’t get that, did you. *sigh*
And has been noted earlier, your opinion means bupkiss unless and until you can back it up – which you either can’t or won’t.
It appears to be a paper describing changing variability ranges for evolving proteins. I’m not a biologist, nor mathematically well-educated (it’s been a long time since college), so the details don’t mean much to me. The conclusion, however, seems pretty straightforward: we don’t know everything about protein variability during evolution, so we should study it more, both for the purposes of agriculture and in tracing evolutionary lineages.
Why?
What are your thoughts on it?
(PS, given that I looked over suggestion, I don’t suppose you could – just out of politeness – answer my questions about determining if animals are related to each other? I’ll repeat it if you can’t find it. If your answer is “I don’t know” or even “I don’t want to answer”, that works.)
I really wish the comments on the Reactions from Kamloops thread from the old Pharyngula were up, because I’m pretty sure that the protein evolvability paper was brought up by txpiper during that thread and appropriately discussed there. Or maybe it was on another thread after the Kamloops (so comments also not up yet). What I know is that I’ve read that paper already and remember that at the time it was explained to txpiper at length just why it really, really didn’t help his case. Mainly by Amphiox, IIRC.
Why he is bringing it up again is beyond me.
Sorry, true.
Two options:
1) He has forgotten, having a colander for brains;
2) He’s trolling.
Which would be awesome.
Well, either way, I’m having fun and not making too big a fool of myself, so I hope he keeps it up.
. . .
Now I have this mental picture of a speedboat dragging a chipmunk across a lake at high speed, with a tiny, Mr. Bill-esque voice triling into the distance,
“HHHEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeellp….”
Txpiper is trolling if it isn’t here to learn, but rather to preach and attempt to spread doubt in evolution. Never mind without solid scientific evidence nobody will listen to its sorry ass. We just laugh and point at abject and irrelevant stupidity. Nobody will change their mind due to abject stupidity, incredulity, and lack of scientific evidence. This is creobot trolling, and I think fits tex to a tee. Thunderdome, and possible banhammer are in its future.
It can here to actually learn, if it actually attempts to learn (not being shown in the past or the present), and is attempting to integrate science into its world view. I don’t think so Tim.
If it’s here to truly discuss the science, it needs to up its game. No assertions without citations to the peer reviewed scientific literature, and all science references aren’t met with the blanket “I don’t believe it” of the creobot troll.I don’t think so Tim.
If its here to present a new theory, it needs to shut the fuck up about evolution and concentrate on its theory and the evidence that supports it. I don’t think so Tim.
“Nobody will change their mind due to abject stupidity, incredulity, and lack of scientific evidence.”
Of course they won’t. As I’ve pointed out before, people believe what they like.
You’ve listed three things here. The first, you are willing to apply to a very long list of really brilliant people like Newton, Pasteur and Henry Schaefer. I’m sure you’re a smart guy, but when you start declaring that these folks are abjectly stupid, while you are bright and objective, it is probably time to hit the reset button.
The incredulity accusation is learned behavior. I’ve never heard anyone in any ordinary life or professional situation use that as an argument. It is a not-so-candid admission that a claim is not realistic. It is the same with quote mining, when someone has recorded a candid statement, or an honest observation that is embarrassing. Things like this are nothing more than avoidance/distraction tactics.
The lack of evidence charge is the most interesting, considering the things that people of your persuasion readily accept. What evidence do you have for the self-assembly of super-complicated molecules that, in their formative environment, would serve absolutely no purpose? What makes you think that they would remain intact till they could serve a purpose? What do you actually know about the random formation of a DNA/RNA/protein system?
Do you accept that scientists have determined that there is a minimum gene set? What do you know about a biological world that permitted anything leading up to a LUCA to get by less with than that minimum?
What convinces you that random mutations could produce something as complex as liver function? Do you have empirical evidence that you’ve wound up with 100 billion neurons, each with thousands of synapses, all because of DNA replication errors? Could you point to any organized thing in the world you live in that is the result of accidents?
I think you are simply confusing science with what you like.
Then what the fuck are you doing here? No logic for that, unless you are trying to change minds. What a dishonest all the way down lying and bullshitting loser.
We don’t accept, we have evidence. You only pretend it doesn’t exist or doesn’t meet your inane standards. But we scientist know better, and you don’t. Your OPINION isn’t scientific, but rather religious. We know that. You can’t admit that.
Your claim is unrealistic. No deity, no creator, your, and good solid evidence to show we are right.
You ask these questions like they mean something. They don’t. Typical creobot confusion. Your confusion, not ours. Your pretenses are religious based, not scientific based, and you will lie and bullshit for your religion. As you show with every post containing said lies and bullshit. Which is every post.
No, you, the non-scientist, liar, and bullshitter deliberately tries to confuse what is and isn’t scientific. We scientists know better. And when it comes to specialists, I tend to listen to the experts. For law advice, lawyers. For medical advice, doctors. For tax advice, accountants. For science advice, scientists. The last people to ask for science advice are engineers and/or religious fuckwits like yourself.
Meaningless diversion attempting a logically fallacious argument by authority, but given the authorities existed before evolution was published by Darwin, makes you whole argument even more fallacious. Still dishonesty all the way down. That is why you aren’t listened to except to laugh at.
txpiper:
Please show, with citations and references, evidence that any god or gods exist. I’m even making it easy by not asking for evidence that the psychopathic genocidal Abrahamic god exists!
I appear to have had a brainfart or made a huge offer to Tpyos.
Third paragraph of mine in #148 should read:
Pure projection. Some of us actually try to believe what is accurate .
You’re STILL doing that shit?
You are beyond hope. Truly.
Because protein self-assembly is completely unprecedented (!). And the only alternative is magic. And those who believe that protein self-assembly is the answer are JUST AS BAD as those that believe in magic.
Beyond hope.
So, you still don’t grasp that “random mutations” are acted upon by natural selection? Your questions show a passing acquaintance with the literature but no actual comprehension. Despite all the biology you have a passing familiarity with, you still just don’t fucking understand what evolution is supposed to be. You still don’t understand that everything natural is produced by “accidents”, and some of the results are “complex”. unless you think the formation of the intricate patterns on snowflakes is the work of Wizards.
The only one here confusing science is you, tx. It’s all spin and selective ignorance with you. In order to arrive at the foregone conclusions that you personally prefer, while claiming that the people who support the consensus of actual scientific data suffer from the same myopic, biased decision-making process.
Beyond. Hope.
TROLIS! POŽEMYJE!
Another old lie of the texpip’s. Another deliberate distortion of what abiogenesis hypotheses actually say.
Previously refuted long ago. Once more ignored.
Same old, same old.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Utterly pathetic.
Minimum for DNA/protein based FREE LIVING life.
Explicitly stated by the scientists who did that work, but tellingly, deliberately ignored by the liar texpip.
BEARING FALSE WITNESS against legitimate scientists, yet again.
Simply pitiful.
The minimum gene set for any kind of self-replicating life is ONE.
What a proven liar known to deliberate distort and ignore the words of others claims to have “never heard” is irrelevant.
No it’s not. Except to proven liars like the texpip.
One of the most odious, disgusting, and pitiful self-justifications of blatant and transparently dishonest behaviour I have ever encountered.
Utterly pathetic.
This, coming from the dishonest liar who has consistently avoided presenting any evidence in favor of its preferred creationist theories, despite being asked MULTIPLE times, and repeated tries to distract from the truth of evolutionary theory with distorted misrepresentations, is rich.
Bankrupt hypocrisy all the way down.
Utterly pathetic.
Notice how the texpip, after infesting the Missouri thread for some time, has suddenly jumped back to this thread, which it had previously abandoned to jump to the Missouri thread.
But in neither jump has it actually changed anything it was saying, or referred in any way to anything specifically different between those threads, that might justify such a jump.
Other than the fact that it was getting creamed on the other thread.
This too is an old, standard, dishonest texpip trick, trying to jump to older less active threads to sneak in an argument unchallenged here to there.
(Notice how it NEVER, EVER dares to enter new and active threads, where lots of people are expected to be around to witness its pathetic dishonesty).
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Utterly pathetic.
Yes. It seems the texpip has sunk so low as to attempt to try to recycle citations now, rather than just its own refuted arguments.
I didn’t notice until I gave the thread a second read: tx’s latest is pretty much internet Gish Galloping. There are tons of thorough rebuttals here that tx had previously only given a passing nod to, settling for “refuting” half of a sentence or so. And what does tx do now? Shit out a few paragraphs that incoherently responds to one sentence that was pretty much just meant as an insult, and then shit out a few more paragraphs regarding completely new subjects for tx to be wrong about .
If you can learn anything, which I doubt, learn this txpiper: That is NOT a good debating tactic. At very least, it is not an honest one.
If txpip was truly trying to scientific, it would put forward its idea to explain biology, with appropriate peer reviewed scientific literature citations to support every claim it makes, including the existence of its (imaginary) deity/creator. A Nobel Prize is awaiting the person who comes up with a better scientific theory for biology than the theory of evolution. But then, failure to do this very thing expected of any scientist, and not attempting to publish his theory in scientific journals like Science and Nature, shows his lack of interest in really having a truly scientific debate. Dishonesty all the way down.
Which means it is attempting to refute science using pseudo-theological arguments (which can’t refute science, category error) like uber-skepticism, while duplicitously sounding sciency, typical of liars and bullshitters who know they have nothing to back up their assertions. PZ, please consider the Thunderdome for txpiper.
txpiper threadjumped ? Typical. His trolling was far more blatant over there.
Maybe the Thunderdome is the perfect sentence for it. It’s much harder for it to necropost and threadjump and Gish Gallop if confined to a single, perpetually active thread.
Then you should pay attention better.
Please don’t make assumptions about what we know based on what you have noticed – you’re not good at noticing things.
You keep saying “I don’t think that…” and we keep saying “That’s not sufficient to disprove anything. Show your work”. Stop doing the former, and we’ll stop doing the latter. It’s all in your hands.
None.
But the self-assembly of relatively simple molecules that have the properties of making more copies of themselves? The evidence is – literally – all around us.
Until someone puts forth evidence of some other force doing this, it serves as evidence for it being self-operating.
Do you have such evidence?
Show your work.
They don’t have a ‘purpose’, just the capacity to make more copies of themselves. And they don’t stay together indefinitely… they decay and are digested.
That is passed though a number of simpler steps along the way.
Why? What do you actually know about the formation of a DNA/RNA/Protein system?
Show your work.
I dunno, can you give a reference to or example of such a thing?
That it is not widely accepted by people who are capable of demonstrating that they have substantial proficiency in the field of biochemistry.
PS – you’re not one of those people – not yet – not until you show your work.
The fact that not one tiny wisp of evidence has ever been presented for any conscious force, action, or being that produced liver function.
Do you have such evidence?
Show your work.
We know that DNA replication errors, and gene expression changes, and chromosome mingling, produce changes in phenotypes. Our neural net is a change in phenotype over other, similar apes closely related to us.
Until or unless someone shows evidence for some conscious force, action, or being that causes changes like this in the general world, this theory works fine.
Do you have such evidence?
Show your work.
(Points to self). Yep.
Do you have evidence to the contrary?
Show your work.
(By the way, if you’re tired of reading “show your work” over and over, you could always just, you know… nah, never mind…)
One problem religious folks like txpiper have is they tend to think either/or. Either it’s evolution or creationism. But really, it isn’t just the two ideas. Creationism is not a scientific theory to begin with, so it isn’t in the running. To get there, it needs conclusive physical evidence for the creator. Something equivalent to the eternally burning bush. Nowhere to be seen. As Txpiper tacitly acknowledges by not showing any evidence for said creator. it is a creature after all, interacting with matter, so traces of its presence should be seen. Nothing seen of course, since it doesn’t exist.
So, if crebots like txpiper did disprove evolution, which is well neigh impossible with a million or so scientific papers backing evolution, it does absolutely nothing for the validity of their religious idea, and their religious idea still doesn’t come into play as a serious scientific theory. It will still be hanging out there in the breeze for everybody to still laugh at. That is why Txpiper needs to talk up his “theory” (rather religious idea) and bring evidence to bear to help set up this inane idea to become more scientific. And that all starts with showing us conclusive physical evidence for his creator. And that evidence isn’t found in the genes/DNA due to random mutation and natural selection occurring. The creator must be evidenced separately. We are waiting txpiper…
Note the deliberate use of veiled racist language there.
Pathetic.
What makes you right and biologists who actually study the fish wrong?
Because you’re suddenly an expert on fish reproduction in cave species?
The changes to the fish that led to blindness did so only secondarily. The primary change was to change the fish’s faces to make it easier for them to eat. That change was selected for — actively — since better nutrition leads to greater survival for parents and offspring.
In this case, “ill-suited” means fish with the ancestral trait of working eyes and faces that were not as good at gaining nutrition for themselves and their offspring.
Why would you be so stupid as to think that blindness, in general, is a “good decision”?
Blindness, in this specific case, is the result of mutation that has beneficial side effects in a completely lightless environment.
No decision is being made at all. Just mutation and selection.
Like hell.
If your stupid idea were true, then blind cavefish raised in sunlight would not be blind nor unpigmented. Since your stupid idea is not true, it doesn’t work that way.
Says the moron who knows nothing at all about DNA, let alone anything about how DNA might adapt, if it could.
What makes you right and every single geneticist in the world wrong?
======
What does that even mean?
I tested the link before posting it. It worked then, and it works now.
Or do you mean you weren’t able to get the entire book for free?
I always have to wonder, with you, whether you’re being stupid, or dishonest, or both.
I mean, maybe you were just stupid, and misread the damn text. Really, if you did, just say so. Say you were stupid and misread the text.
Because otherwise, you were fucking well dishonest, and quote-mined it.
Full text of that you so selectively quoted:
There is also a section on four-state nucleotide mutation/substitution models, but, apart from that, the book does not discuss models of DNA sequence evolution used in molecular phylogenetics, as the book title suggests.
I mean, really now. What the hell is wrong with you?
Your brain is backwards. Nothing I wrote there is contradicted by anything in the Wikipedia article on Taphonomy.
I note that “hundreds of thousands of years” is already two orders of magnitude greater than the YEC age of the Earth.
What makes you right and taphonomists wrong?
As I wrote…
It wasn’t intact, so no surprise could have been expressed at it being intact.
It was not an “ignorable”, and the damn papers that were written on what was found did not “ignore” anything.
Miracles are not invoked in science, except by creationist morons.
Yes, Dr. Schweitzer knows very well that the remnants of medullary tissue, precisely similar to that of birds, helps strengthen the evidence of the evolutionary relationship between tyrannosaurs and birds as related theropod dinosaurs.
I know you’re stupid, but I would hope you can get it through your stupid brain that related species can be found in the same formations precisely because evolution is not a ladder or chain, but rather a branching tree or bush of species.
======
Creationism is indeed rejected as meritless.
======
No, you don’t. Otherwise, you would not mischaracterize it as stupidly as you do.
No need to feign. You are obtuse, because you’re stupid. And you don’t want to not be stupid.
Natural selection is a fact.
No, mutations occur in every single damn generation. Selection pressure is a cheap way to get the benefical mutations to propagate through a population because those without them die without reproducing.
Because you have no idea what you’re talking about.
No, you moron, your stupid is Lamarckism wearing a mask.
Liar.
You want everyone’s views to be as stupid as your own.
You want everyone to believe the same damn stupid things you believe.
======
@David Marjanović:
Me, in 2006:
Of course, he’s stupid, so he didn’t read it, didn’t retain it, and didn’t want to even bother try learning. In one eye, and out the other.
Bionumbers has a small amount of variation from what I wrote, but the order of magnitude is about right:
Mutation rate per base pair per generation Human Homo sapiens ~2.5E-08 Mutation/bp/generation 100414 Nachman MW, Crowell SL....
Mutation rate per generation Human Homo sapiens ~1.1E-08 (6.8E-09 to 1.7E-08) Mutations/site/generation 105919 Roach et al., Analysis...
Mutation per base pair per generation (germline mutation) Human Homo sapiens ~1E-08 mutation/bp/generation 105813 1000 Genomes Project...
And you like being stupid, so you believe stupid ideas like a 6000-year-old earth, and an invisible fairy poofing animals from nothing, and DNA designed to adapt.
Some really brilliant people can be terribly stupid indeed, if their religious fanaticism makes them stupid. That covers Schaefer with regards to evolution, for certain, who is not only stupid about evolution, but also dishonest.
By the way, what makes the really brilliant Schaefer wrong about the age of the Earth, and you right?
I’ve seen nothing that indicates that Pasteur rejected evolution, despite the fact that he seems to have to been a more generic Spiritualist religious fanatic.
And Newton, in addition to being a religious fanatic, lived before Darwin, so his ideas about evolution are moot.
No, I wouldn’t call them abjectly stupid. Just stupid when their religious fanaticism drives them in that direction.
I don’t believe you. *smirk*
I don’t believe that, either. *smirk, again*
I agree that your failing to understand that a fallacy is a fallacy cannot be realistic.
Or in other words, you’re a dishonest asshole shitbag who will gladly lie by omission by removing context from what people actually write, because you hate truth and love stupidity and lies.
What does this even mean?
I know that we know more about the chemical environments that could lead to components of such a system than we do about a putative invisible person with magical superpowers that purportedly magically poofed everything into existence while leaving no evidence whatsoever of having done so, or of even existing.
Are you asking How did LUCA make a living?
Again, and again, and again, you ask questions but show no interest in reading discussion about potential answers. Because you love stupidity and lies, and hate learning, and hate truth.
The fact that selection would also occur, and kill off those organisms lacking a liver that could not cope with various poisons that the liver deals with?
Sure, when combined with selection: because all life shows common descent, so everything, including those organisms with no brain, minimal brain, small brain, somewhat larger brain, and so on. The difference between all those organisms and ourselves is in their and our DNA.
So all brains and synapses are the results of changes to DNA, and selection.
Life, various geological formations, the weather, etc.
Can you point to any invisible persons with magical superpowers?
I think you are confusing your own stupidity and dishonesty with what you like. Obviously, I am right, because you hate learning, and you hate being honest.
Anri,
“Show your work.”
Gosh, I’m not really sure what to show you. We’re talking a scenario not much different than a frog turning into a handsome prince, just allowing lots of time for lots of accidents to complete the transformation (excepting that the scientists think that there were two or three mass extinction events between the frog and the prince). If you’re inclined to believe in things like that, I’m not sure any work I might do to would really change your perspective. This http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/Genetic-Mutation-441 is a pretty good rundown on mutations. To hear people here talk about them, they sound like party favors, but they really aren’t. You’ll have to use your imagination to see countless billions of slightly beneficial, sequential, complimentary errors occurring.
txpiper:
Ok, let’s start with the question I’ve asked you at least twice, and you have ignored: What is the method for determining that two animals are not related?
Should you want to go further, describe the (let’s say) three most promising sources for genetic alteration under your model – if there are only two, or just one, that’s fine, so long as you describe it, rather than talking about other models. In other words, tell us how your model for animal diversity works, giving your best pieces of evidence for it, without mentioning evolution once. See if you can.
Lastly, once you’ve done this, tell us how your theory can be falsified. Ideally, you’d include a general circumstance, and then a counter-factual specific example.
That’s what I mean by showing your work.
But you know, just as well as I do, that you can’t do this. You keep twisting and wriggling, desperate to appear competent and knowledgeable, when you simply do not have the facts behind what you are claiming.
(I am cross-posting this to the Thunderdome, as this thread is about to go bye-bye. I imagine you’ll be to timid to engage there, as it’s still pretty young. But as I said, I’m having fun, so I’ll keep up this charade as long as you want.)
If it were truly an HONEST entity, the texpip would realize that this admission of utter incompetence means that it should be LISTENING, and NOT SPEAKING, on this subject which it is not really sure what to do, as it does not know enough to make anything resembling a cogent point.
But of course the texpip is not an HONEST entity.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Utterly pathetic.
And actually, that is. For anyone actually reading that for understanding it quite clearly supports absolutely everything everyone here has been saying about mutations, and absolutely and utterly destroys every point the texpip has dishonestly been trying to make about them.
We can thank the texpip once again for providing excellent evidence in favor of the theory of evolution and contradictory to creationism.
But of course the texpip will never realize this, as it doesn’t read for understanding. It only reads to find phrases it can twist and take out of context in order to further its agenda of misrepresentations and distortions.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Simply pitiful.
Then you should shut the fuck up as a person of honest and integrity (like any scientist in their professional work) would do. By not doing that, you show prima facie evidence you are nothing but a liar and bullshitter, preaching and not listening and learning. Except you have nothing whatsoever to teach us, as there is no coherent message or evidence to support that message. We require science, and that requires peer reviewed science, not your OPINION, which is unscientific bullshit. Make up your mind and be honest. Put up or shut the fuck up.
Txpiper, answer a question honestly. What to you hope to gain by making yourself appear to be an abject unscientific fuckwitted idjit?
I find it hard to believe that water just magically becomes invisible and weightless and floats back up into the sky to make more clouds! It’s just not possible! What are the odds that a thing could just become both invisible and weightless simultaneously, every single time? Have YOU ever seen anything just decide to become invisible, for no good reason? Neither have I! Therefore I can be certain that Thor makes the rain.
This is the argument from incredulity, the one you keep making. The insistence that because you don’t understand something (that you refuse to learn more about) it can’t be true, the non-sequitur that because the thing is wrong, your alternative “theory” (that has no evidence) must be correct… It’s so much hogwash. Someday, I hope you’re embarrassed by the words you’ve put on this page.
One more thing on the list of things you don’t understand
I repeat, the fact that you are unimaginative, uneducated and innumerate is not a problem for science.
I’ve got a different question. Txpiper, what is your explanation for the existence of sickle cell trait?
The article you linked to explains that we know the exact, single-base mutation which makes the difference between normal and sickled hemoglobins. As scientists. we can explain the occurrence of this single mutation as purely random, just one letter that happened to flip as a result of a chance cosmic ray, or whatever genetic accident. Further, we can explain its persistence in the population as a function of the benefit it confers when a person inherits a single copy of the mutated gene, in populations who live where malaria is endemic. We know that that persons unfortunate enough to inherit two sickle genes (one from each parent) have painful, shortened lives. We don’t curse god for causing sickle cell disease; it’s just one of the sad things the evolutionary theory predicts will sometimes arise, because mutations can’t “know” when and where they’re “needed” and when they’re not.
But I want to know about your worldview. How do you explain sickle cell? Do you deny that sickle cell is a genetic trait? If not genetic, then what is it? If yes, then how did it arise? Random mutation? Is that an acceptable explanation for even one evolutionary trait, at least one as simple and apparently obvious as this one? No? Not random? Planned/designed? Did your creator god wiggle its little fingers in some ancestor’s DNA and create that single mutation? No? Then what did it do? Yes, your god did it? Then how? AND WHY?
Explain it to us. Explain one single specific genetic thing to us. Just one.
Anri,
”What is the method for determining that two animals are not related?”
Immediately related? Reproductive compatibility. A little more distantly, in your enlightened view, you’re related to carrots.
”promising sources for genetic alteration under your model”
Your model is about starting with no genes at all, and gradually spiraling upwards by way of errors to a more complex DNA molecule with, depending on the species, thousands of genes.
The model I accept is reversed, beginning complex and in a state of degeneration, acknowledging the actual nature of mutations. Variation can occur as a loss of information, coerced by isolation or artificial selection. Dog and cattle breeds, for instance. But animals can also respond to environmental challenges with stunning adaptations that obviously have nothing to do with random mutations. Polar bears and brown bears can produce fertile offspring, with the former having acquired a very impressive array of special features in a short time frame, in a limited population. In so many words, DNA is reactive. What stimulates the reactions in all circumstances is debatable. But to think that insects, spiders, crustaceans, amphibs and fish all go blind and lose their pigmentation in caves all over the world because of random mutations is a sappy notion.
For all the noisy horse shit about what evolutionary theory can predict, it really has no strength at all. There is no correlation between genes or chromosomes and complexity. There is no reliability of outcome with some species stuck in stasis for tens of millions of supposed years, while others can acquire cecal valves in 30 generations. Your model is all over the place. The only reliable thing about it is the faith of the subscribers.
”how your theory can be falsified”
Demonstrate. Show how errors would add a mammary system to a mammal-like reptile. List the system components and take them on one by one. Brain function, circulatory accommodations, specialty proteins, delivery and production hardware, stimulation signals, the whole nine yards, start to finish. Show how everything accidentally developed simultaneously, or show why that wasn’t necessary by noting how the infants survived until the integrated system was minimally functional. And don’t ignore that the parent and the offspring required completely different sets of errors, one as provider and the other as recipient. Be meticulous. Use your imagination. Show your work.
both by number of species and general mass, most life is asexual
Not to mention by that definition lions and tigers are the same species
Notice how the texpip completely and deliberately evades this question.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Pitiful.
What a dishonest liar like the texpip thinks is “a sappy notion” is irrelevant.
Incidentally, for some of those species, the random mutations that have produced blindness and loss of pigmentation HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED. It is demonstrated FACT.
But of course the texpip doesn’t care about facts, only lies.
E PUR SI EVOLVES.
More deliberately dishonesty from the texpip. More deliberate distortions of what evolutionary theory actually says, seeing as these factors were never things evolutionary theory claims to be able to predict anyways, nor things of any relevance or importance to the questions evolutionary theory actually addresses. More BEARING OF FALSE WITNESS against evolutionary scientists.
More dishonest distractions to hide the simple fact that the texpip’s own “theory”, is utterly bankrupt intellectually.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Utterly pathetic.
Since we’re talking about evolution by natural selection of random mutations here, another deliberate lie.
Pitiful.
A model that tries to explain the existence of complexity by positing beginning with complexity by fiat is useless, and explains nothing.
Since evolutionary theory also includes this, but much more, this is yet another demonstration of why evolutionary theory is superior to the texpip’s “model” (that actually models nothing).
Except of course that THEY DO. And have been DEMONSTRATED SO. In some cases the EXACT MUTATION has been identified.
And what a known liar like the texpip claims is “obvious” is irrelevant.
Not at all it’s the similar to why sickle cell trait, became so pervasive in certain areas. Deleterious mutations are more common and will prevail if something else evens the playing field. In a sightless world it is actually an advantage not to develop eyes or pigment. There’s no longer a reason to select FOR sight or pigment so deleterious mutations build up. (also don’t know how impactful it would be but I imagine that it is at least a marginal benefit to NOT have to develop or support structures that aren’t needed, just from an energy cost POV?)
isolation you say? that never happens in nature!
In a sightless world an eye is nothing but a hole in the head. A soft, squishy, unprotected window that leads straight into the brain.
Except, mutations aren’t always bad. You have been repeatedly shown evidence for that. Besides, you haven’t shown any evidence for your imaginary deity/creator so your whole idea rest on a delusion. Nothing but vaporware. No reality until you provide that conclusive physical evidence for said creator. Which you can’t do. And you know that, or you would lead with said evidence. Which makes your idea nonsense, typical of abject delusional losers.
txpiper:
Since you will read things, but not well, I’m repeating this, so you can try again, this time with more correctness:
See the bolded bits?
Now watch:
See those bolded bits?
That’s where you couldn’t stop talking about evolution. Let’s revisit your central paragraph:
See that bolded bit?
That’s the only time you actually almost got close to describing, in positive terms, your model.
And when you did, what did you actually say? “DNA changes, I’m not talking about why.” That’s what I mean by showing your work. Talking about why. Talking about how. The mechanisms, the influences. Since, according to you, environmental influences acting on spontaneous structural changes in DNA are insufficient, where do the other changes come from? Be as specific as possible, please.
Also, follow-up question:
If A can reproduce with B, and B can reproduce with C, but A cannot reproduce with C, are A and C related? (And if you think I’m conjuring unrealistic hypotheticals, look up Ring Species.)
As a side note, you once again felt the need to pad your answer by talking about models other than your own. I’m not asking you what I think, I’m asking you what you think. If you consistently find that what you think is incapable of answering questions to your own satisfaction, in might be time to revisit it.
Sorry this got so long. Once again, cross-posting to the Tdome.
Hahahaha!
What “information” was “lost” between a wolf and a wolfhound, or a border collie?
Comrade Corn,
Your noble defense of the teachings of Trofim Lysenko is laudible. After all, as we all know, Lysenko’s work made the Soviet Union the agricultural powerhouse it is today.
What makes you right that these tens of millons of years did not exist, and the “really brilliant” Henry Shaefer wrong?
You don’t read and don’t understand the work that exists, so this would be pointless. You’re too stupid to be worth catering to.
It’s nice that the texpip FINALLY gets pinned down on its own model, something it has been asked from the beginning and deliberately evaded for all this time.
So now let’s compare the texpip’s “model” to evolutionary theory, one to one:
Evolutionary theory explains the development of complexity. Texpip’s model doesn’t. It just presupposes complexity at the beginning. So on this point it isn’t even an alternative to evolution at all. In fact, texpip’s model NEEDS evolution for it to work, as it REQUIRES complexity to already be there. So just as evolution presupposes the existence of life and therefore needs abiogenesis to precede it, texpip’s model NEEDS complexity, and thus NEEDS an explanation for complexity, of which evolution is the ONLY working alternative available.
So thus the texpip already, once again, provides YET ANOTHER REASON why evolution theory is superior. His OWN MODEL needs it.
This is ALSO in evolution theory, and is in fact an integral PART of evolution theory. So once again, on this point the texpip’s “model” is NOT an alternative to evolution theory, but merely an incomplete subset.
Furthermore the texpip’s “model” REQUIRES that EVERYTHING be in a state of degeneration. But we already have examples of the opposite. Examples which have already been given to the texpip. Some of these examples are small things, and it is quite true that they are rarer than the degenerative examples (which is also something evolution theory predicts), BUT THEY EXIST. And the texpip’s “model” requires that NONE OF THEM can exist. So a singular example falsifies the texpip’s model right here and now.
This too is PART of evolution theory, which states quite plainly that MOST mutations are either neutral or harmful and only a small minority constructive. So here AGAIN, the texpip’s “model” is NOT an alternative to evolution, but merely a limited subset.
And here AGAIN, the texpip’s “model” requires that NO mutations be constructive. And we ALREADY HAVE UNDENIABLE EVIDENCE of examples of mutations that ARE constructive. Again the are a minority, but that doesn’t matter, because evolution theory predicts that they should be a minority (as we observe), while the texpip’s model REQUIRES that they do not exist. But they do.
And so the texpip’s model is falsified ONCE AGAIN, and once again, evolution theory proves superior.
This TOO, is already a part of evolution theory. Once again the texpip’s “model” fails to be an alternative to evolution theory, and is, again, in fact, shown to be just a minor special case of evolution.
This TOO, is already a part of evolution theory. Animals can indeed respond to environmental challenges with stunning adaptions that do not need to have anything to do (immediately) with random mutations – it’s called phenotypic plasticity. But the texpip’s “model” doesn’t explain how or why animals possess this ability. It only presupposed that they do.
Evolution, on the other hand does explain how and why animals have phenotypic plasticity.
So again, we see that the texpip’s “model” is NOT an alternative to evolution and in fact NEEDS evolution to be true for it to work.
The texpip’s previous blatherings indicates that it accepts interfertility as evidence that two lineages are related. In other words, the texpip’s “model” accepts that Polar Bears and Brown Bears share common descent. Since this, too, is also a part of evolutionary theory, the texpip’s “model”, once again, fails to be an alternative to evolution theory in any way, shape or form.
So how did the Polar Bears acquire that “impressive” array of special features (presumably the Brown Bears just twiddled their thumbs and did nothing in the interim)? Evolution explaiins this. The texpip’s “model” doesn’t. It, again, just presupposes it.
So once again the texpip’s “model” fails as an alternative to evolution, and in fact is shown to REQUIRE evolution to fill in its own holes.
This TOO, is just a part of evolution theory, so once again, the texpip’s “model” is NOT an alternative to evolution at all.
And once again, the texpip’s “model” cannot explain how or why DNA is reactive. Why should it be? It’s just a dumb molecule. And we humans can synthesize DNA in the lab that is NOT reactive, so we KNOW it isn’t just a property of DNA itself. Some mechanism is required to make DNA reactive.
The texpip’s “model” provides no answer here. It just presupposes that it is. Evolution, on the other hand, explains why DNA is reactive and explains how DNA came to be reactive in this manner.
Thus, once again, we see that the texpip’s “model”, REQUIRES evolution to be true in order to work.
And so, the texpip’s “model” turns out not to be a model at all. It explains absolutely nothing and must presuppose absolutely everything.
At BEST it is just a tiny minor subset of evolution theory the REQUIRES the rest of evolution theory to be true to even have a chance at working. At worst it is already factually falsified by the simplest of observations.
For example, by the retention of lactase production into adulthood that is, more likely than not, found in the texpip’s own genome.
One small mutation in a regulatory sequence. NOT destructive (no gene damaged, original function of lactase in babies not affected). CONSTRUCTIVE (produces a protein at a time and place when previously it was not produced and did not exist). BENEFICIAL (got milk?).
One tiny mutation. Nothing fancy. Nothing earth shattering. Just a tiny little step, not a vast adaptive leap. But in the texpip’s “model” this cannot exist.
IT DOES. E pur si adult lactase production in humans.
Falsification test failed. “Model” disproven.
*POOF*
…looks like I shouldn’t be holding my breath.
Oh, well.
Gee, txpiper doesn’t even have the courage to say a creator brought things into being, just made vague handwavings. Almost like he knew he was lying and bullshitting, and was trying to mitigate the crime of fuckwittery. Pshaw, didn’t help. Dishonesty, irrationality, and nothing but unevidenced presupposition all the way down. Typical religious fool.
…for… crying… out… loud.
Dude. What if it’s learned behavior? What if you’ve never encountered anyone saying “that you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean it’s not true”? (Which would be odd, because adults tell children “you’re too small to understand this” all the time where I come from. But whatever.) Does that make it wrong?
Does “realistic” really equal “immediately plausible to txpiper”?
Really?
Then show us how.
About quote-mining, sure it’s true that politicians have said “I never said that, and you’ve quoted me out of context, evil journalist” ever since there have been journalists; but how do you go from there to quote-mining being impossible? The most famous example is the paragraph in the Origin where Darwin states how incredible it seems that eyes could evolve… before he spends four pages on explaining how it works in spite of this. Often creationists quote that paragraph and omit everything that follows.
A minimum gene set for a free-living organism. Anything with less isn’t a complete organism.
In an environment without organisms, there’s nothing that could eat it. So, there’s nothing inherently impossible about, say, an RNA world.
Where is your problem? I think it’s your limited imagination and your even more limited knowledge again.
It explains what kinds of mutations there are, and for each, it supplies the example that uneducated people like you are most likely to know. :-|
It’s not spiraling upwards or indeed anywhere. The diversity of life increases. Any twig of the tree can evolve in any direction – it just so happens that it’s difficult to become simpler than LUCA, because LUCA was at (or very near) the minimum complexity for an organism. So, increases in complexity beyond LUCA are possible, but decreases (much) below that of LUCA are not, making the whole thing a bit lopsided.
Hang on a second. Where did that complexity come from? And why is there no trace of it in the fossil record? Where is the 4-billion-year-old superman?
Why? Mutations that cause blindness happen all the time. Lots of humans are born blind!
There is. “R² < 1.00” doesn’t mean “0.00”.
Uh – of course there’s no reliability of outcome, because the outcome depends on the environment. When the environment doesn’t change for tens of millions of years, it causes stabilizing selection to keep going for tens of millions of years.
How can this be hard to understand?
Milk glands and sweat glands are practically the same.
Now consider:
– Monotremes don’t have nipples. Large areas of their bellies contain milk glands, and the hatchlings lick the milk up (they don’t, and can’t, suckle).
– Male mice lack nipples. They’ve found a way to switch nipple growth off when the level of some male hormone or something gets too high. We haven’t.
– There’s a bat species where all males give milk.
– There are human males that can give milk. They simply happen to produce a bit more prolactin than others.
Ponder this. Perhaps even use teh gugel.
And importantly, there’s no known correlation to the parents getting less light than usual. Evidence against your Lamarckism.
Notice again, how the texpip has deliberately mischaracterized what evolutionary theory says. It claims evolutionary theory says that there should be “reliability of outcome” between the degree of evolutionary change different species undergo, when evolution theory explicitly states that there SHOULD NOT BE SUCH RELIABILITY OF OUTCOME.
Notice also, that what evolutionary theory actually says about this, that “degree of evolutionary change will fluctuate with environmental pressure” constitutes a prediction. It predicts that wherever we see rapid evolutionary change, we should also see changing environmental conditions either ongoing or in the recent past, and where we see relative stasis, we should see a stable environment stretching back an extended period.
And THAT IS WHAT WE DO SEE. Cecal valves in 30 years? A recent transplantation to a NEW island with COMPLETELY DIFFERENT vegetation and food availability. Stasis for millions of years in the deep ocean? The DEEP OCEAN ENVIRONMENT HAS NOT CHANGED MUCH IN MILLIONS OF YEARS. Rapid change in fur colour, body morphology, diet, and hunting behavior? MIGRATION INTO A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT FILLED WITH SNOW AND ICE AND WITH NO VEGETATION WHATSOEVER FOR EXTENDED SEASONAL PERIODS WITHIN THE RECENT PAST.
The texpip’s “model”, on the other hand, offers no explanation whatsoever for the patterns observed in degree of evolutionary change between different species. It just has to be accepted as is. A mystery.
Useless.
txpiper:
Please, please, please, pretty-please with sugar on top, provide evidence for the existence of any gods (again, please note that I am making this easy; I am not asking for evidence for the existence of the psychopathic misogynistic genocidal Abrahamic god, any god will do).
Is txpiper back from vacation yet?
No?
…pretty long vacation there, folks.
Just sayin’.
Anri, txpiper thread-jumped.