Anti-Evolution Legislation Shows Descent With Modification

a reply to: Cypress

It's imaginary.

If a species can change X amount of times in 1000 years, it can change 10,000x in 1,000,000 years. Basic math and logic. More time = more change because the changes accumulate in succession. Big changes are not sudden, they are the result of various features and traits slowly changing over time. You can't just look at a shark and then look at a gorilla and ask how a primate could possibly come from a fish. You have to analyze each small gap step by step.

It seems that most deniers do not grasp the concept of accumulation, nor do they understand adaptation. I plan to bless everyone with a Christmas thread tomorrow that explains adaptation thoroughly. The argument that evolution is actually adaptation does not even make sense, yet I keep hearing it.

a reply to: SuperFrog

Is interesting, to find out how far this "anti evolution group has gone" they are actually a group of "citizens" that I am sure are been funded by religious right groups that are actually against science altogether.

They has been doing law sues calling themselves also The nonprofit Citizens for Objective Public Education, they want to modify the entire sciences classes in public schools.

They believe that public schools science classes are promoting atheism

But this America what can you expect this days.

originally posted by: NthOther
a reply to: spygeek

Did E. coli ever evolve into anything other than E. coli?

No. It mutated (predictably).

Not the same as a tyrannosaur turning into a hummingbird. It's suggestive of the possibility, and nothing more.

In a single study you would most certainly be correct in your statement and understanding... problem is your theory falls apart when you start to perform a long term in depth study of the bacteria and the associated mutations. If say you let the same experiment play out over say 1000 or even 10,000 generations (for the cells not us, just to be clear), allowing each mutation to play out and either thrive or die, it's very possible that you would see a genome that is VERY different from the one you started the study with. Now that sounds mildly impressive, it becomes even more impressive when you realize that all that would take place in less than a decade of research, and that bacteria has been around for as long as the planet (or close to it anyway).

See Evolution is rarely, if ever, about making big changes all at once. instead it's about making hundreds, thousands, or even millions of minute changes which culminate in a completely unique organism from the original, genetically similar for sure but unique enough to be considered a different species or subset. And while your example of a T-rex turning in to a hummingbird is quaint, it's unlikely since there is likely to much genetic difference to account for. It is far more likely that a dino of comparable size and structure evolved into the hummingbird and not some colossal dino like the t-rex.

originally posted by: NthOther

originally posted by: spygeek

people keep being shown the indisputable proof

Like what? Show me the proof that says evolution is an indisputable fact. Produce it. Don't send a handful of obscure sources that you have to piece together and contort to fit your assumptions after the fact.

I can do that with God. It doesn't impress me.

But then where is your indisputable evidence of god?

For a start, the Lenski Experiment is ongoing and has observed over 60,000 generations to date.

Secondly, it is not the only experiment being performed and not a single one of the other studies or experiments has produced contradictory results. The results of this experiment perfectly fit what we know about evolution and the predictions we can make, and they provide even more insights into the mechanicisms and nature of life on Earth.

Thirdly, a December 2015 paper examined the findings and drew the conclusion that the increase of fitness over time of an organism follows a power law model, rather than a hyperbolic model. This means that while the mean rate of evolutionary fitness gain declines over time as the organism becomes more specifically adapted to it's environment, there is no upper limit to mutation and modification. According to a hyperbolic model, there is a definable limit that cannot be overcome.

The abscence of an upper limit means that while biological evolution slows down over time, mutations can occur indefinitely, with nothing to prevent an organism diverging into another species who are reproductively incompatible with their genetic ancestors after millions of years. If a limit is found, you can say that "micro" and "macro" evolution are seperate processes. Without a limit, they are the same thing.

The reason bacteria were chosen for the experiement is partly because of the high rate of reproduction and their ease of culturing, but also because of bacteria's age as a species. They are one of the earliest organisms and represent life in one of it's most fundamental forms.

If you want to dispute or disprove evolution, find a barrier, a hard limit, a biological mechanism that acts as a wall preventing one species from becoming another. Also explain how life on Earth became so variably speciated, in a well educated, rigourously scientific manner.

Just saying, "we've never seen one animal becoming another" demonstrates an ignorance of not only evolutionary theory and what it postulates, but also of the very nature of life itself. In nature, "species" as we define them don't literally exist. In reality, life is one teeming whole, an interactive and interdependent biological mass. Everything turns into something that turns into something that grows into something, that interacts with something else, that adapts to something, that becomes something else. "Species" is a human term defined by us based on what we can tell about an organism, it is not a physical hard barrier that actually literally exists in nature. Life is a spectrum, not a monochromatic scale.

originally posted by: everyone


But then where is your indisputable evidence of god?

I had to chuckle, reading that your name is "everyone" asking this..