Nobody is suggesting that the complex series of events in the lab were performed in nature.
Take another look at the figure I posted at #33. At the very top you can see a sequence of blue highlighted amino acids labeled 'DmUbx'. Thats the sequence in the fly, the one with the repressor fully functional. Now, move down that list until you see the one labeled 'AfUbx'. That's the sequence in the shrimp, the one that has no repressor function. Can you count how many amino acids are different in that region? I count 17.
You are saying that natural mutations, over the course of millions of years, could not account for these 17 changes.
Can you tell us why not?
I am not talking about the fossil record specifically, but here alive today. Most (if not all) of the forms found in fossils can be found in some altered state today, most of the forms (if not all) today can be found as fossils. Remember we are not talking about forms that died off due to natural selection, remember, we are talking about forms that had increased survivability over their precurssors.
I can use a software program to morph a picture of my daughter into a picture of a ladybug, and produce pictures of all the intermediate steps but demonstrating that in the lab is not reality, is it.
This is where I fall off the Evo train. There is a sort of beautiful poetry to imaging that God created this one self running mechanism and set it loose to produce the results today, but there is just too much evidence that he punctuated the mechanism with interventions along the way to ignore. IMHO
v.
I'll give it a try. Not that I don't give credence to the gradient concept you mentioned in your ealier post to me. I do, but it still says nothing about how all of the new genes that the gradient works with came about. In addition, the idea that the first cell came up with a gradient that just happened to have the potential to unfold itself into all of Earth's biota goes way above my credulity threshold. I am sure you feel the same way. What is left, Theistic evolution of some kind?
But I digress. The 17 gene changes that result in major morphological changes had about 543 million years to occur. Plenty of time for 17 changes. Except those are not the only changes needed to make a brine shrimp into a fly. Numerous other changes had to occur at various other stages of that process each one producing a viable organism superior to everything else around at some niche.
If ANY of those 17 changes produce deadly or even very deliterious changes, the whole process is impossible regardless of the time allowed. And they must occur in conjuntion with many other changes.
I don't think it is accurate to imply that only 17 changes were needed. That is only for this one little area. Nor do I think it is safe to assume that shrimp-to- flys made the transition in only 17 jumps. Do you? I would guess hundreds of thousands of intermediate organisms. That means there must be a large number of 'islands or viablility' in those gene combinations between those 17 examples. Simply put, no one has demonstrated that to be the case.