Posted on 02/01/2010 4:24:31 AM PST by decimon
JUST suppose that Darwin's ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth's history. It may sound preposterous, but this is exactly what microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe. Darwin's explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth.
At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer - in which organisms acquire genetic material "horizontally" from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species. This mechanism is already known to play a huge role in the evolution of microbial genomes, but its consequences have hardly been explored. According to Woese and Goldenfeld, they are profound, and horizontal gene transfer alters the evolutionary process itself. Since micro-organisms represented most of life on Earth for most of the time that life has existed - billions of years, in fact - the most ancient and prevalent form of evolution probably wasn't Darwinian at all, Woese and Goldenfeld say.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
The vast majority of modern chickens have no survival need to develop bigger and better wings as they spend their life in confined quarters and never live long enough to even learn how to fly. So their wings do not evolve. But where chickens are allowed to roam and run they do develop wings that can take them out of harm's way. For example, the chickens that roam around Luckenbach, Texas are famous for flying up into the big oak trees (and crowing annoyingly during the music). That's something a Pilgrim's Pride chicken could never do.
Why would they need to? If they stay right where the are, somebody comes and feeds them every day. If they flew away, they'd more likely be killed and eaten in the wild. For a domesticated chicken, there's no survival advantage in being able to fly.
Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island
In 1971, scientists transplanted five adult pairs of the reptiles from their original island home in Pod Kopiste to the tiny neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru, both in the south Adriatic Sea...I'd say that a brand-new structure that enables the animal to change its diet is more impressive than growing bigger wings.In 2004, however, tourism began to open back up, allowing researchers access to the island laboratory.
"We didn't know if we would find a lizard there. We had no idea if the original introductions were successful," Irschick said....
The transplanted lizards adapted to their new environment in ways that expedited their evolution physically, Irschick explained.
Pod Mrcaru, for example, had an abundance of plants for the primarily insect-eating lizards to munch on. Physically, however, the lizards were not built to digest a vegetarian diet.
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."
Man has been raising chickens since Adam and Eve and Alley Oop, and never kept them in cages until around 1960; the numbers which must have escaped in all that time have to be in the billions.
For all those escapees, being able to fly decently (as opposed to being to flap up into a tree with extreme effort once in a while) would be a gigantic advantage. It would let them escape predators better, and seek better conditions when necessary.
Again, the domestic chicken started out as a 1-lb jungle fowl and then got bred into a 7-lb meat bird with a 1-lb bird's wings. Geese are every bit as heavy as chickens and fly perfectly well because they have the wings for a 7 - 10-lb bird. If there was ANYTHING at all to Darwinism, somewhere in all those thousands of years and billions of escaped chickens, some few of them would have evolved the wing size they need to fly decently, and the progeny of those few would be overhead as you look up into the sky.
But in real life, it doesn't work that way. In real life, if you ever lose the tiniest bit of some complex trait, neither you nor any descendant of yours will ever see it again. Just like hair cutting: it's easy to cut off, and impossible to put back on.
Thus we see that the chicken lacks only the tiniest bit of the requirements for real flight and cannot evolve it, the question becomes:
How in hell can some dinosaur which doesn't have ANY of the things it would need to become a normal flying bird ever evolve ALL such things?
There isn't any answer to that. Face it: Evolution is a bunch of bullshit. It's a brain-dead ideological doctrine for idiots, and that's all it is and all it will ever be.
That may hold true for most of science. Unfortunately, the fossil record, the ToE, and origins seem to be exempt from other interpretations.
The *evolution is a fact* crowd won't hear of it.
This is not news. Certain bacteria and viruses have been known to carry snippets of DNA from one host to another and splice it in.
For example, when the Ice Ages began we saw wooly rhinos, mammoths, mastodons, caribou, and other species with fur coats consisting of long guard hairs and downy undercoats. Coincidence or jumping genetic material?
The implication is clear ~ the bacteria we need to find to try that again live in trees!
His mate, Brownie, was about as friendly as a seaslug ~ definitely not very bright, but she could lay an egg about 3/4 the size of a standard SMALL commercial grade egg.
These animals were about as close to the wild chicken you could find. We raised them outdoors with a small pen for their safety. They could come and go as they pleased. Brownie liked to lay her eggs at a small nest she'd built at the back step.
I'm afraid you guys lost me when you started talking about chickens that can't fly, and who have a difficult time surviving in urban environments, or on their own.
Some of my Salvadoran neighbors have made it a practice to catch wild chickens there for Sunday dinner.
What had happened about 25 years back was a truckload of live chickens crashed. The cages broke open and the chickens ran away.
If you want to submit an argument based on the premise that your BANTAM ROOSTER is representative of domestic chickens, go right ahead.
Source?
These critters managed to make it to South America!
BTW, there are "miniature" varities of all the common breeds ~ these guys have their own design peculiarities and mtdna ~
Used to be the correct scientific belief that if you lost a trait, you lost it and couldn’t get it back. Turns out that’s generally not true ~ epigenitic research reveals that genes can get turned off, and turned back on later. That’s how you get chicken with teeth!
I was thinking that something like a common domestic chicken might be more representative of domestic chickens.
This world lives on chicken ~ think of it as a handy portable refrigerator that operates on seeds and bugs and keeps meat fresh until it's needed.
I found it a suspicious assertion, because I am red/green colorblind, and my son is not.
Oh... where are they then? These billions of escaped chickens you seem to think are running around somewhere?
I thought it was fairly obvious that "in all this time" meant over the last 4000 - 6000 years or so of recorded history. Most of those chickens are dead. Old age, if nothing else...
The one place NONE of them are is directly overhead, at an altitude of 200' or more above ground level. THAT is the thing which cannot re-evolve.
Likewise you can play with the genetics and produce a chicken with teeth. What you won't manage to produce is a chicken which can kill and eat prey animals WITH those teeth. THAT, and flying 200' above the ground, are examples of what I mean by complex traits.
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Thanks decimon. |
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Wendy for something to be obvious it must also make sense.
But that is neither here nor there, since several posters (myself included) have provided for you demonstrated examples of evolutionary innovation where new capacities evolved that did not previously exist. From tricolor vision in primates to evolved lizards on an island to (yes) examples of flying chickens... these are not theoretical occurrences.
We can demonstrate these occurrences, so there is little need to wring hands over your chickens... that argument has already been mooted by the actual evidence.
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