Evolution

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HelloNiceToMeetYou
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by HelloNiceToMeetYou » Mon Feb 07, 2011 5:48 pm

Sory, But what does "EE" mean?

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Jarvamundo
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by Jarvamundo » Mon Feb 07, 2011 6:59 pm

electrical engineering...

sorry...

basically in order to make a square wave you can stack up various harmonics of sine waves.... see : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_series

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JaJa
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by JaJa » Tue Feb 08, 2011 6:41 am

Jarvamundo wrote:not quite EM radiation, but alternative lifeforms through changing ES potential environment
Changing the ES potential or simply making use of the potential. What would be the frequency of the ES potential, is that something that can be measured..?
I prefer a reorganizing antenna to take advantage of the available field.
Could it be that the antenna reorganize according to the signal. Just a whacky thought.

Oh... and the German vid... uhm... :?
Omnia in numeris sita sunt

mathew
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by mathew » Tue Feb 08, 2011 7:44 am

Great links Jarvamundo- thanks! :)

Alfred de Grazia-
Quantavolution theory maintains that the world from its
beginnings, including the world of life and humanity, has
changed largely by quantum leaps, rather than by tiny increments
over great stretches of time

http://www.grazian-archive.com/quantavo ... /intro.pdf
The wind.. in its greatest power, whirls. -Black Elk

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JaJa
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by JaJa » Tue Feb 08, 2011 8:50 am

Jarvamundo wrote:I prefer a reorganizing antenna to take advantage of the available field.
Additional thoughts Jarvamundo on receiving information and all that jazz;
http://www.holographicbrain.com/

Gazzaniga and others have pointed out that with voluntary movement, the neural activity which initiates it, begins before the apparent decision to move enters consciousness, perhaps as long as half a second before. This has been cited as evidence that there is no real free will. This is not absolutely conclusive, because there is still the possibility of various processes going on in parallel, coming together later. There may be an editing process occurring later on, making the final decision. There is evidence of such an editing function shown by the Phi phenomenon
Popcorn anyone...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_phenomenon

The phi phenomenon is an optical illusion defined by Max Wertheimer in the Gestalt psychology in 1912, in which the persistence of vision formed a part of the base of the theory of the cinema, applied by Hugo Münsterberg in 1916. This optical illusion is based in the principle that the human eye is capable of perceiving movement from pieces of information, for example, a succession of images. In other words, from a slideshow of a group of frozen images at a certain speed of images per second, we are going to observe constant movement
Omnia in numeris sita sunt

tholden
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by tholden » Tue Feb 08, 2011 9:02 am

Levatio wrote:Goodday all,

While reading the forum, I've come across several comments of people who dis-agree with the common evolution theory.....
Simplest place to start would be the question of human evolution...


No normal science theory is ever defended the way evolution is. What IS defended in that sort of manner are lifestyles, tenures, entrenched positions, and careers which have been built pyramid-style atop a base row which is sitting on quicksand. The people sitting ten or eleven rows of stones up don't like being told that the whole thing is unworkable.

What most people are unaware of is that the whole theory of evolution has been overwhelmingly refuted a number of times and via a number of totally unrelated arguments to such an extent that any normal science theory under the same circumstances would have been rejected and thrown out literally decades ago.

The first such disproof and the one which rightfully should have ended the debate involved fruit flies. Fruit flies breed new generations every other day so that running any sort of a decades-long experiment with fruit flies will involve more generations of them than there have ever been of anything even remotely resembling humans on our planet. Those flies were subjected to everything in the world known to cause mutations and the mutants were recombined every possible way; all they ever got were sterile freaks, and fruit flies. Several prominent scientists publicly denounced evolution at that point in time including the famous case of Richard Goldschmidt.

The failure was due to the fact that our entire living world is driven by information and the only information there ever was in the picture was that for a fruit fly. When the DNA/RNA information scheme was discovered, even if the fruit fly thing had never happened, evolution should have been discarded on the spot. But GIVEN the fact of the fruit fly experiments, somebody HAD to have thought to himself
"Hey, THAT'S THE REASON THE FRUIT FLY EXPERIMENTS FAILED!!!!!!"
The DNA/RNA system is an information code just like C#, Java, or C++. Information codes do not just sort of happen or appear amongst inanimate matter for no particular reason. In other words, there is no way in the world anybody should be believing in evolution 40 years after the discovery of DNA and, again, that's just one overwhelming disproof amongst a number of such. Again no legitimate science theory would ever survive such a history.

There is the question of the probabilistic odds against any sort of life forming from inanimate matter via any random sequence of events; the junk science reports we now read about "string" theory and "multiple universes" is basically motivated by a recognition of what the odds are against evolution in the one universe we actually have any evidence for.

And then there is the Haldane dilemma, which amounts to an understanding of the time spans which would be needed to spread ANY genetic change through any group of creatures. A very simple version of the thing is all most intelligent people should need:
Imagine a population of 100,000 apes or "proto-humans" ten million years ago which are all genetically alike other than for two with a "beneficial mutation". Imagine also that this population has the human or proto-human generation cycle time of roughly 20 years.

Imagine that the beneficial mutation in question is so good, that all 99,998 other die out immediately (from jealousy), and that the pair with the beneficial mutation has 100,000 kids and thus replenishes the herd.

Imagine that this process goes on like that for ten million years, which is more than anybody claims is involved in "human evolution". The max number of such "beneficial mutations" which could thus be substituted into the herd would be ten million divided by twenty, or 500,000 point mutations which, Walter Remine notes, is about 1/100 of one percent of the human genome, and a miniscule fraction of the 2 to 3 percent that separates us from chimpanzees, or the half of that which separates us from neanderthals.
That basically says that even given a rate of evolutionary development which is fabulously beyond anything which is possible in the real world, starting from apes, in ten million years the best you could possibly hope for would be an ape with a slightly shorter tail.

People who have carried out the math for real-world rates of substitution come up with it taking quadrillions of years for our present living world to have evolved in any fashion even if that were possible, which it isn't.

So evolution needs quadrillions of years... how much time do they (evolutionites) actually have? A very big part of the answer has been coming in lately in the form of blood, blood vessels, and raw meat turning up in dinosaur remains:

Image

In other words, Midrashic sources and Amerind oral traditions are basically correct in describing human interaction with dinosaurs just a few thousand years ago (there is no way raw meat and blood can survive for millions of years) and the thing we've heard all our lives about dinosaurs dying out 65M years ago is a bunch of BS.

A theory which needs quadrillions of years and only has a few thousand is basically FUBAR; no reasonably well educated person should ever buy into it.

What about humans, hominids such as the Neanderthal, and the stories we keep seeing in the news about some new human ancestor of the year which is supposedly going to save evolutionism, and what about the 30,000 and 200,000 year time frames involved in those stories?

In order to be descended from something via any process resembling evolution, at some point, you have to be able to interbreed with the something. Thus the curious total lack of any real evidence of modern man ever interbreeding with Neanderthals was always viewed as a big mystery particularly since there was evidence of the two groups living in close proximity for long periods. James Shreeve described the problem in an article published in Discover magazine in the mid 90s:
"Humans love to mate. They mate all the time, by night and by day, through all the phases of the female’s reproductive cycle. Given the opportunity, humans throughout the world will mate with any other human. The barriers between races and cultures, so cruelly evident in other respects, melt away when sex is at stake. Cortés began the systematic annihilation of the Aztec people--but that did not stop him from taking an Aztec princess for his wife. Blacks have been treated with contempt by whites in America since they were first forced into slavery, but some 20 percent of the genes in a typical African American are white. Consider James Cook’s voyages in the Pacific in the eighteenth century. Cook’s men would come to some distant land, and lining the shore were all these very bizarre-looking human beings with spears, long jaws, browridges, archeologist Clive Gamble of Southampton University in England told me. God, how odd it must have seemed to them. But that didn’t stop the Cook crew from making a lot of little Cooklets.

Project this universal human behavior back into the Middle Paleolithic. When Neanderthals and modern humans came into contact in the Levant, they would have interbred, no matter how strange they might initially have seemed to each other. If their cohabitation stretched over tens of thousands of years, the fossils should show a convergence through time toward a single morphological pattern, or at least some swapping of traits back and forth.

But the evidence just isn’t there, not if the TL and ESR dates are correct. Instead the Neanderthals stay staunchly themselves. In fact, according to some recent ESR dates, the least Neanderthalish among them is also the oldest. The full Neanderthal pattern is carved deep at the Kebara cave, around 60,000 years ago. The moderns, meanwhile, arrive very early at Qafzeh and Skhul and never lose their modern aspect. Certainly, it is possible that at any moment new fossils will be revealed that conclusively demonstrate the emergence of a Neandermod lineage. From the evidence in hand, however, the most likely conclusion is that Neanderthals and modern humans were not interbreeding in the Levant..."
And then in the late 1990s results of DNA studies of Neanderthal remains began to come in and cleared up the mystery:

http://www.expressindia.com/fe/daily/19 ... 55423.html
"He said his team ran four separate tests for authenticity - checking whether other amino acids had survived, making sure the DNA sequences they found did not exist in modern humans, making sure the DNA could be replicated in their own lab and then getting other labs to duplicate their results. Comparisons with the DNA of modern humans and of apes showed the Neanderthal was about halfway between a modern human and a chimpanzee."
That's right: the Neanderthal was basically an advanced ape whose DNA was almost exactly halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee, and we could no more interbreed with Neanderthals than we could with horses. Even the prestigeious PlosBiology system gave up on the idea (No Evidence of Neandertal mtDNA Contribution to Early Modern Humans).

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info ... io.0020057

Clearly that should have been the end of any talk about modern humans having evolved from hominids since all other hominids were significantly FURTHER removed from us THAN the neanderthal. Nonetheless evolutionites go on talking about a "common ancestor(TM) for both ourselves and Neanderthals, 500,000 years back. That of course is idiotic; it's as if somebody had discovered some reason why dogs could not be descended from wolves, and the evolutionites were to claim that therefore they (dogs) must be descended directly from fish.

But what about the time frames? We've seen that the time frames we read about for dinosaurs are totally FUBAR, what about the 50,000 and 200,000 and 500,000 year time spans you read about for supposed human ancestors? Do evolutionites have the sort of time they'd need to even be talking about hominid/human evolution?

Gunnar Heinsohn is best/brightest category in European academia and a frequent speaker at NATO gatherings since his population youth bulge theories predict political unrest with near 100% accuracy; he's also a major player in the ongoing efforts to reconstruct Med-basin chronologies. His "Wie Alt ist das Menschengeschlect" describes the problem with the dating schemes typically associated with Neanderthal studies:
Mueller-Karpe, the first name in continental paleoanthropology, wrote thirty years ago on the two strata of homo erectus at Swanscombe/England: "A difference between the tools in the upper and in the lower stratum is not recognizable. (From a geological point of view it is uncertain if between the two strata there passed decades, centuries or millennia.)" (Handbuch der Vorgeschichte, Vol I, Munich 1966, p. 293).

The outstanding scholar never returned to this hint that in reality there may have passed ten years where the textbooks enlist one thousand years. Yet, I tried to follow this thread. I went to the stratigraphies of the Old Stone Age which usually look as follows

modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)

Neanderthal man (homo sapiens neanderthalensis)

Homo erectus (invents fire and is considered the first intelligent man).

In my book "Wie alt ist das Menschengeschlecht?" [How Ancient is Man?], 1996, 2nd edition, I focused for Neanderthal man on his best preserved stratigraphy: Combe Grenal in France. Within 4 m of debris it exhibited 55 strata dated conventionally between -90,000 and -30,000. Roughly one millennium was thus assigned to some 7 cm of debris per stratum. Close scrutiny had revealed that most strata were only used in the summer. Thus, ca. one thousand summers were assigned to each stratum. If, however, the site lay idle in winter and spring one would have expected substratification. Ideally, one would look for one thousand substrata for the one thousand summers. Yet, not even two substrata were discovered in any of the strata. They themselves were the substrata in the 4 m stratigraphy. They, thus, were not good for 60,000 but only for 55 years.

I tested this assumption with the tool count. According to the Binfords' research--done on North American Indians--each tribal adult has at least five tool kits with some eight tools in each of them. At every time 800 tools existed in a band of 20 adults. Assuming that each tool lasted an entire generation (15 female years), Combe Grenals 4,000 generations in 60,000 years should have produced some 3.2 million tools. By going closer to the actual life time of flint tools tens of millions of tools would have to be expected for Combe Grenal. Ony 19,000 (nineteen thousand) remains of tools, however, were found by the excavators.

There seems to be no way out but to cut down the age of Neanderthal man at Combe Grenal from some 60,000 to some 60 years.

I applied the stratigraphical approach to the best caves in Europe for the entire time from Erectus to the Iron Age and reached at the following tentative chronology for intelligent man:

-600 onwards Iron Age
-900 onwards Bronze Age
-1400 beginning of modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
-1500 beginning of Neanderthal man
between -2000 and -1600 beginning of Erectus.

Since Erectus only left the two poor strata like at Swanscombe or El-Castillo/Spain, he should actually not have lasted longer than Neanderthal-may be one average life expectancy. I will now not go into the mechanism of mutation. All I want to remind you of is the undisputed sequence of interstratification and monostratification in the master stratigraphies. This allows for one solution only: Parents of the former developmental stage of man lived together with their own offspring in the same cave stratum until they died out. They were not massacred as textbooks have it:

monostrat.: only modern man's tools

interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and modern man's tools side by side

monostrat.: only Neanderthal man's tools

interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and Erectus' tools side by side

monotstrat.: only Erectus tools (deepest stratum for intelligent man)

The year figures certainly sound bewildering. Yet, so far nobody came up with any stratigraphy justifiably demanding more time than I tentatively assigned to the age of intelligent man. I always remind my critiques that one millennium is an enormous time span--more than from William the Conqueror to today's Anglo-World. To add a millenium to human history should always go together with sufficient material remains to show for it. I will not even mention the easiness with which scholars add a million years to the history of man until they made Lucy 4 million years old. The time-span-madness is the last residue of Darwinism.
Heinsohn is not putting an exact age on the Neanderthal die-out; what he IS stating is that there is no legitimate interpretation of existing evidence which would indicate that they died out any more than four or five thousand years ago and that is basically consistent with the thing about raw dinosaur meat.

That of course is nowhere remotely close to the time frames which any sort of an evolutionary scheme of modern man from hominids would require. We are left with three basic choices:
  • Modern man was created here from scratch, and recently.
  • Modern man was brought here from somewhere else in the cosmos.
  • Modern man was genetically re-engineered from one of the hominids, most likely the Neanderthal.
Those are your three basic choices and none of them involve evolution. Moreover the second and third choices merely amount to kicking the can a block or two down the road as far as how anything like modern man ever came into existence anywhere in the universe at all since the the same mathematical and probabilistic laws which prevent macroevolution on this planet would hold true anywhere else. The 17B years which supposedly intervene since the "Big Bang(TM)" wouldn't be enough for modern man to evolve in the universe even if that were possible which it isn't, and even if the Big Bang idea itself weren't just another bunch of BS like evolution, which it is.

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HelloNiceToMeetYou
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by HelloNiceToMeetYou » Tue Feb 08, 2011 9:40 am

Thanks, Jarv.. Not to be a know it all, but it will be simpiler for you to put "EEng". in the future. Just a suggestion lol

But thank you for explaining :lol:

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HelloNiceToMeetYou
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by HelloNiceToMeetYou » Tue Feb 08, 2011 9:48 am

Great articles Tholden, just wondering...What are your opinons on this, besides big bang and evolution is BS? Do you think something electrical in nature? Like how electrostatic fields can change DNA/RNA of a zygote? Something around those lines?

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starbiter
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by starbiter » Tue Feb 08, 2011 10:06 am

I don't think this has been discussed on this thread. Apparently creatures are quite plastic.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... ution.html

[...]
Researchers found that the lizards developed cecal valves—muscles between the large and small intestine—that slowed down food digestion in fermenting chambers, which allowed their bodies to process the vegetation's cellulose into volatile fatty acids.

"They evolved an expanded gut to allow them to process these leaves," Irschick said, adding it was something that had not been documented before. "This was a brand-new structure."

Along with the ability to digest plants came the ability to bite harder, powered by a head that had grown longer and wider.



The rapid physical evolution also sparked changes in the lizard's social and behavioral structure, he said. For one, the plentiful food sources allowed for easier reproduction and a denser population.

The lizard also dropped some of its territorial defenses, the authors concluded.

Such physical transformation in just 30 lizard generations takes evolution to a whole new level, Irschick said.

It would be akin to humans evolving and growing a new appendix in several hundred years, he said.

"That's unparalleled. What's most important is how fast this is," he said.


me again,

New conditions, new creatures.

michael
I Ching #49 The Image
Fire in the lake: the image of REVOLUTION
Thus the superior man
Sets the calender in order
And makes the seasons clear

www.EU-geology.com

http://www.michaelsteinbacher.com

tholden
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by tholden » Tue Feb 08, 2011 12:01 pm

HelloNiceToMeetYou wrote:Great articles Tholden, just wondering...What are your opinons on this, besides big bang and evolution is BS? Do you think something electrical in nature? Like how electrostatic fields can change DNA/RNA of a zygote? Something around those lines?
Basic hard cold reality is that our entire biological world is based on a gigantically complex information code and no natural process, electrical or otherwise, can create such a thing. In any reasonable scheme of things, intelligence has to arise FIRST and create biology. Having biology arise first (evolution) is clearly unworkable.

tholden
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by tholden » Tue Feb 08, 2011 12:29 pm

HelloNiceToMeetYou wrote:...just wondering......
One other piece of an answer more or less and you have to get this from logic and first principles and not from the Bible or any sort of ancient literature...

The RNA/DNA information code which forms the basis of all life appears to be the work of a single pair of hands.

Nonetheless when you arrive at a point somewhere back 6000 - 30000 years ago on our own planet the situation is significantly different from that i.e. what you appear to have at that point is the engineering and re-engineering of complex life forms being a sort of a cottage industry with numerous hands involved. There is no rational way to think that a benevolent God would create biting flies, chiggers, ticks, scorpions, or the myriad creatures of Pandora's box. Likewise there is no reason to think that an omnipotent God would need to go through 50 - 100 kinds of horses or elephants before getting to the one he wanted.

None of that involves evolution of course.....

JohnMT
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by JohnMT » Tue Feb 08, 2011 3:12 pm

Hi all,

I've had a tentative look at most of the posts so far on this most curious subject entitled 'Evolution'.

In reply and interjecting between posts, could anyone please tell me whether this so-called 'Evolution' phenomenon is actually true...or not?
Indeed, has ANYTHING actually evolved from the standpoint of human existence...and dare I say...acquired "knowledge"?

To put my question more simplistcally;

Whether the source be from what we apparently know about the Microcosm and indeed about the Macrocosm too, where does this 'Evolution' phenomenon stand?
Surely, on both scales, we are talking about infinity itself (fleas on the backs of fleas, ad infinitum)...so where does this 'Evolution' factor fit in to provide an adequate explanation as to the cause of our existence and indeed the Universe itself?

Apparently, us Human Beings (so we are told), "evolved" following the aftermath of the Chicxulub Alvarez asteroid impact dated some 65 million years ago in the Gulf of Mexico (NOT PROVEN!)
This "impact" event apparently destroyed the Dinosaurs en-mass, but the escaping burrowing "mammals" survived...and...believe it or not...our species, which is to say 'Homo Sapiens', evolved from these mammals!! albeit over just 65 million years or so.
This is actually taught in schools!

Okay, fine.
So, what is it that we are actually evolving into, given perhaps another 65 million years of this so-called 'Evolution' process?
If we are so distant today from the burrowing mammals which we apparently evolved from, given 65 million years of so-called 'Evolution', then I just cannot even begin to imagine how distant in form our futuristic descendents will be from us.
This is what the theory of 'evolution' actually lends towards.
Then, a further 65 million years from those 'evolved' creatures.....etc, etc

Remember, the Sun will not expand to become of 'Red Giant' size for at least another 3 to 4 billion years (its still got plenty of hydrogen to burn up you see), so we and our descendents (whatever they turn out to be) still have plenty of time to contemplate this 'evolution' phenomenon and make preparations to escape the ultimate fate of our planet and perchance Life itself.
HELP! :-)

Cheers,

John

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webolife
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by webolife » Tue Feb 08, 2011 4:26 pm

I've posted elsewhere at TB on the subject of evolution, but here are some summative thoughts I 'd love to answer questions about:
1. There's a huge evidenciary gap between the concepts of micro-evolution [genetic variability, adaptation, natural selection, speciation, extinction] and macro-evolution [phylogeny, "simple-to-complex", "bacteria-to-human"]. This gap existed in Darwin's day [Darwin's Enigma] and with the preponderance of fossil evidence available is wider today than then. Plenty of evidence for micro-... none for macro-evolution. Darwin did a nice job of overturning the "fixity of species" paradigm of his day, but his faith leap to macroevolution has never been substantiated.
2. Macroevolution is dependent upon spontaneous generation, panspermia, or both, or upon the belief that life has always existed, none of which premises are subject to objective scientific inquiry. Experiments in spontaneous generation of amino acids are analogous to throwing well aimed grenades into a pile of rubble in order to obtain a few [if any] correctly shaped bricks. On the assumption that more and more bricks can be produced in this manner, you just keep throwing grenades until there are enough bricks to assemble themselves neatly into the Empire State Building. If scientists were to create the precise conditions for self-sustaining biotic material to arise from abiotic chemicals, they would demonstrate only that it takes intelligence to create a living system.
3. As tholden correctly pointed out, the statistical probability of random natural mutations [the only kind known are deleterious] to be accumulated over billions of years transforming a mycoplasm [simplest known life form] to a human being [most complex life from] is "zero". Add the preposterously incredible yet necessary element of selection to this process and you have a miracle of universal proportions, not a scientifically investigatable concept.
4. Fossil evidence shows high levels of complexity from the get-go at the most base Paleozoic levels.
5. Furthermore, fossils indicate numerous "transgressions" from the "simple-to-complex" rule.
6. Still further, fossils of the "earliest" [according to the presupposed geologic time scale] fossils of any class of organsim are identifiable by indicative components of the modern classes. Ie, "nothing new under the sun". This is recognizing that new variations on old themes are discovered every year... but that's "micro-evolution".
7. Necessary timescales for the evolutionary process are grossly underestimated based on the low probability, yet largely overcalculated, due to flaws in the assumptions behind radiometic and other dating methodologies. These are subjects of another thread, but include both relative dating assumptions [superposition is demonstrably false], and absolute methods [variable decay rates, assumptions about starting ratios of parent/daughter elements, wide error margins in measured fractions, etc.]. In either case, there's just not enough time for the process to occur as described.
8. Macroevolution by microevolution is illogical. Only pre-existing viable conditions "survive" in the "struggle of life", no new information is ever introduced by this process. Only "new variations on old themes".
9. Genetic support [DNA research] for variation within genomes has not only demostrated that such variations can arise quickly in response to environmental stimuli, it has also demonstrated that such variations do not naturally occur across genomic boundaries [eg. from one family level to another]. The horizontal transmission of genetic information via viruses does not cause a family to transform into another family. Yet this kind of transformation must have happened hundreds of thousands of times if macroevolution is real.
10. Our current understanding of the protein synthesis process within cells shows that this most basic of all life attributes is irreducibly complex [also well rehearsed on other threads]. In addition to the amazingly complex yet elegant and information-rich DNA molecule and the RNA operators on it, in situ proteins are essential to operate a process by which all proteins are themselves built [Ie. there is no "chicken or egg"...] all must be present from the beginning.
11. As for micro-evolution, this is less about survive of the "fittest" than it is about survival of the average. So even if some exceptional natural "mutation" were to occur in a species, it would be rapidly extinguished. Meanwhile, modern studies of epigenetics demonstrates that there is tremendous variation potential within a genome for adaptability to a wide range of living conditions. This becomes diminished as populations become isolated and inbreeding predominates. This leads to speciation, the disinclination of two or more populations within a genome to be able to interbreed [by convention "new" species], and under extreme environmental stress, to extinction. This is the story of genetic variability, the fossil record, and of actual observation, and does not lead to macroevolution in any degree. Micro-evolution leads to the reduction of information, entirely consistent with entropy, while macro-evolution depends on the persistent steady flow of new information in a process that over time continues to accumulate, not only in one direct current toward order, but millions of times over in every "branch" of organisms in the so-called phylogenetic tree.
12. Honest evolutionary tree diagrams do include one good factual piece, ie. the dotted lines at branch joints indicating the lack of evidence of transitional fossils to connect that gap. As an earth science major, I sometimes jest that I majored in evolution... one of the historical geology classes I took at the UW was taught by a famous paleontologist who presented the fossil evidence comprehensively in such detail that the gaps were shown to be obvious, systemic, and systematic. I found myself with my jaw agape. It changed my mind about a theory I had been taught and just assumed to be true since at least the first grade. That class was 1973. In all my searches since then, the gaps have only continued to widen.
Truth extends beyond the border of self-limiting science. Free discourse among opposing viewpoints draws the open-minded away from the darkness of inevitable bias and nearer to the light of universal reality.

tholden
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by tholden » Tue Feb 08, 2011 7:08 pm

There's one other little thing you have to consider, assuming you accept the thesis of an elder solar system with Earth, Venus, and Mars in close orbits around one of the gas giants (most of the people on this board including myself actually DO accept that)...

Again ANY sort of a life from elsewhere in the cosmos theory is basically just kicking the can a block or two down the road for purposes of evolution since the laws of mathematics and probability work the same way anywhere else as they work here...

But you would have to consider the possibility of splash saltations. That is, at one of those points at which Earth and some other body, particularly Mars as per Ev Cochrane's version of planetary history, got too close to eachother, there is the possibility that large numbers of creatures from the other body could have just landed kersplash in some fairly large but shallow body of water here, and simply waded and/or swam ashore. That would in fact explain things like the Cambrian explosion and one or two of the other sudden saltations which our fossil record seems to indicate have occurred.

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Aristarchus
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Re: Evolution

Unread post by Aristarchus » Wed Feb 09, 2011 2:26 pm

starbiter's national geographic article wrote:Researchers found that the lizards developed cecal valves—muscles between the large and small intestine—that slowed down food digestion in fermenting chambers, which allowed their bodies to process the vegetation's cellulose into volatile fatty acids.

"They evolved an expanded gut to allow them to process these leaves," Irschick said, adding it was something that had not been documented before. "This was a brand-new structure."

Along with the ability to digest plants came the ability to bite harder, powered by a head that had grown longer and wider.
I wonder if this could be a case of horizontal gene transfer (HGT). However, Rhawn Joseph has suggested the following:
Genes, cells, and entire species undergo evolutionary apoptosis and are continually pruned from the tree of life. Programmed death is essential to life and evolution, and genetically programmed evolutionary apoptosis is one of the many causes of species death and extinction. Evolution and extinction can be likened to embryogenesis and metamorphosis as all involve the selectively turning on and off of specific genes and nucleotide sequences, the shedding of cells and tissues which are replaced, and dramatic alterations in the organs and skeletal muscular system. "Evolution" is under genetic regulatory control, in coordination with the biological activity of single celled prokaryotes (archae, bacteria, Cyanobactera), their donated and horizontally transferred genes (including those which gave rise to mitochondria), and the genetically engineered environment. The interaction between the environment and genetic activity, the secretion of chemicals, enzymes and gasses such as oxygen and calcium, regulates the emergence of new species, and the elimination of yet others--a form of evolutionary-apoptosis. Genes act on the environment, and the changing environment acts on gene selection, activating specific genes, silencing others, and giving rise to new species which emerge from the old, with entire populations of genes, cells, tissues, and species proliferating and others dying out.Like programmed cell death, extinction is often intrinsic to and necessary for the development, evolution, and metamorphosis of increasingly complex species.

Extinction, Metamorphosis, Evolutionary Apoptosis, and Genetically Programmed Species Mass Death

When a new species emerges, it is not completely unique but shares genetic, skeletal, neurological, and other physical similarities with other species, including ancestral species who have been eradicated. These commonalities include the skeletal system, the eye, heart, body and brain, and the genes which code for these organs and structures (Callaerts et al. 1997; Gehring and Ikeo 1999; Hadrys et al. 2005; Quiring et al. 1994; Salvini-Plawen & Mayr 1977; Sodergren et al. 2007). There are genetic commonalities and the presence of hundreds and thousands of highly conserved genes which in modern species, including humans, are shared with the genomes of even distantly related species (Snel et al. 2002; Mirkin et al. 2003; Kunin and Ouzounis 2003; Koonin 2003; Mushegian 2008; Bejerano et al. 2004), and which can be traced to common ancestors which died out over a billion years ago (e.g., Hedges & Kumar, 1999; Joseph 2009a; Wang et al. 1999).

Many of these highly conserved genes were were acquired from archae and bacteria (Yutin et al. 2008; Esser et al. 2004, 2007; Rivera and Lake 2004) via horizontal gene transfer, possibly over 4 billion years ago (Joseph 2009a).

Individual genes also undergo apoptosis often following an episode of gene proliferation and the duplication of the entire genome (Aravind et al. 2000; Dehal and Boore 2005; Durand 2003; Katinka et al. 2001; Moran 2002; Scannell et al. 2007; Wolfe and Shields 1997). Genes proliferate and compete for expression, with losers dying out and undergoing genetically programmed apoptosis (Joseph 2009a).

The entire genome has been duplicated repeatedly over the course of evolution, growing in size with genes proliferating and others dying out. Whole gene and whole genome duplication, coupled with gene loss and gene deletion, date back to the emergence of the first eukaryotic cells or their ancestors (Makarova et al. 2005).

Gene proliferation coupled with gene loss is a major feature of evolutionary processes which have given rise to distinct species and lineages (Aravind et al. 2000; Moran 2002). Genome analysis has revealed the extensive loss of genes after whole genome duplication in chordates (Dehal and Boore 2005; Durand 2003; McLysaght et al. 2002), plants (Soltis et al. 2008; Tuskan et al. 2006), and yeasts (Katinka et al. 2001; Scannell et al. 2007; Wolfe and Shields 1997).
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An object is cut off from its name, habits, associations. Detached, it becomes only the thing, in and of itself. When this disintegration into pure existence is at last achieved, the object is free to become endlessly anything. ~ Jim Morrison

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