Posted on 02/19/2002 2:59:38 PM PST by Cameron
Then how can a trans-muted species EVER come into being? If cross fertilization does not produce a fertile offspring to propagate itself then where is mechanism for continued evolution?
I don't get the feeling that you're very familiar with models of speciation. It's about isolated subpopulations going their own way.
Cross-fertility is simply the most common test for whether a new species has arisen. When you've lost it, you have a new species. Hybridization can produce instant speciation in plants, but that's not the mechanism by which, say, humans diverged from apes or amphibians diverged from fish.
Here's a scenario:
Speciation by Punctuated Equilibrium.The Short Summary
A group of creatures gets isolated from the rest of their species. They can evolve easily, because they are a small group. Later, they spread and replace their parent species. Examples are known.
To begin with, there is no rule that commands a species to mutate and produce some new species. There are loads of species that have been around, unchanged, for millions of years. And of course, bacteria are still with us in great abundance. They haven't all developed into multi-cellular creatures. A new species probably won't happen unless a mutant group is separated from the parent stock, or if some disaster kills off the parent stock, etc. In the absence of something like that, all you'd have is a species with a lot of genetic variation in the population. But that variation is the potential for speciation if conditions warrant.
As for some species now going through the process, how in the world would you recognize it if you saw it? Are penguins on the way, millions of years hence, to becoming something else? What's to become of the ostritch? How about those "walking catfish" you sometimes read about? How many species of birds are there? Or beetles? And how many more will there be in 100,000 years? As I said, every species has the potential to produce mutated offspring. Some will eventually produce a new species, some won't. These things take time. From the fossil record, we can see that it's happened. There's no reason to assume that it has stopped. (Except perhaps in our own case, as it's very easy now for virtually every individual to survive and breed.)
I am sure that you would disagree but the above paragraph has the same reliance on "faith" and was written with the same religious fervor that a creatiionist exhibits when confronted with a question for which there is NO answer...yet. Fossil records are a very un-focused snapshot of the past in very specific locations and even those that are responsible for interpreting them admit that they come to conclusions based on assumptions that are being revised daily. I am not saying they are wrong, I am saying that those MOST educated in modern evolution do NOT take the absolutist positions of those laymen that have embraced the concept as an alternate religion. I am not arguing the traditional creationist position, I am looking at the gaps in both and see that MANY of those gaps could be the result of blind-spots and personal bias on both sides of the debate.
I can be a little slow. Finally, finally I understand your answer. The mules aren't the new species. As you point out, they aren't fertile with anything. The only reason there are mules around is that people keep interfering with the natural mating preferences of the animals involved.
That horses and donkeys can produce mules shows that they are far more related than, say, horses and caribou. The most common case is that different species, if they can be induced to try to mate (or artificially inseminated) are totally cross-infertile. That the mules are themselves are infertile shows that horses and donkeys are no longer the same species.
That I agree with and appreciate the time and links you have provided. I see no contradiction between evolution and intelligent design. I think the controversy lies in the definition of "intelligent". Someone made a wise comment earlier that if the existence of "God" is ever proven beyond faith it will be science that proves it. I happen to believe in God and that he has one hell of a sense of humor. Thanks for the discussion.
The proof is in the DNA. And the natural selection hypothesis is indeed falsifiable. Thousands of tests have been conducted and there have been no rejections. It is important to understand how hypothesis testing works. You make a prediction, you devise an experiment to test the prediction. All you can do then is either reject or accept the hypothesis. If you accept it you still haven't proven the hypothesis correct, you have only failed to disprove it. Evolution is still standing. Intelligent Design has failed every valid test (i.e., all its testable hypotheses have been rejected). Rejection is tantamount to proof that the hypothesis is false but there can be a statistical risk that you have falsely rejected a true hypothesis. This is not so for Intelligent Design because most of the tests do not depend on statistical analysis of the data for confirmation.
How much detail a person needs to understand that the accumulated differences between species in the functional and junk portions of the genome prove an evolutionary history and a common ancestry but preclude an Intelligent Designer depends on whether or not the person, A) knows anything about evolution and genetics in particular and biology in general, and B) is not already convinced that his Bible has given him all the answers he needs.
A complete comparison of Chimp and Human chromosomes will give you a map of every change that has occurred to both species since we had a common ancestor with the Chimp. The fact that each person's DNA (identical twins excepted) is unique to that person means that change occurs constantly and accumulates. Try explaining this to someone who has never even heard of meiosis. We understand the genetic material and how it is transmitted and we have the fossil record to show that life on this planet has changed continuously since it began so all we are doing now is filling in the details. There is currently no room for the Intelligent Designer unless his purpose was to fool us into thinking that natural selection occurred naturally. But then that leaves all our tools and methods useless to discover the artifice unless he slipped up and left a clue which is exceedingly doubtful given the expertise required to effect such an enormous charade.
It is just a waste of time to go into sufficient detail to explain this to people that think binary machine code (base 2) means that because DNA uses four nucleotide bases it is somehow a base four code. I would say that these folks are not running on all eight cylinders but for the fact that most of them only have one cylinder to begin with.
Well I liked your post until you started sermonizing in that last paragraph. Now I am just a poor old Texas engineer that loves to design things. I dissected frogs in high school and there is a mechanical equivalent for every part of that critter and given the time and inclination, I could produce a reasonable facsimile of a frog that acted "lifelike" but it would not be alive and no matter how many billions of years it sat, it will never be alive. Now, when you as a "high priest" of science can recreate, in your temple, the circumstances that ended in that simple frog then I will say that your arrogance and absolute faith in your personal dogma is justified.
Ah, but therein lies the rub. We see progressive new varieties of skulls in the fossil record just as we see progressive new varieties or automobiles buried in junkyards, yet we'd be foolish to say that there is literally zero evidence for the non-natural, unaided, non-intelligent origin of cars!
In other words, just because we see evidence of speciation does NOT mean that we see evidence of how said speciation was formed. Sure, it could have been natural (ala Evolution), but it could also have been un-natural (ala Intelligent Intervention).
It certainly isn't out of the realm of possibility that DNA can be designed and programmed via Intelligent Intervention (think, gene-splicing for an actual scientific example of this very thing already being done by Man), after all!
So let's not try to say that there is only one possible answer, and that answer is Evolution. We have clear evidence of gene-splicing by Man that shows that DNA can be programmed by an Intelligent Intervention, so clearly there are at least two possible explanations for speciation.
Am I clear enough on this point? Contrary to your claim, there is more than one game in town...
You summed it up in far fewer words than I could have. The sheer complexity of DNA coding speaks for itself.
That's patently false. What specific test has ID failed? Name it, please.
Intelligent Design has NOT failed every scientific test. Intelligent Design has in fact been proven to be able to program DNA (e.g. gene-splicing). Clearly an Intelligent process can program DNA because Man is already doing that very thing!
If an Intelligent Designer can program DNA, then it follows that Intelligent Design could be responsible for any or all known and observable speciation, pending further data and study.
That's a far cry from "failing every test"...
That's exactly the point! The 'mutant' here is the mule, yet that 'mutant' can't reproduce itself to perpetuate a line of 'mutants.'
You know how it feels when you can think something, yet can't articulate it? Well, your mentioning of the mule was the point I never could seem to articulate.
Indeed, thanks. Base-4 coding (A, C, G, and T codons), re-use of code (e.g. genes), storage of data, processing of data, error detection and correction, redundancy, fault-tolerance, and replication. It's enough to make a programmer jealous! DNA is sweet code.
Both could be true, particularly as people start tinkering with DNA. But we are faced with a situation where you have two open hypotheses, evolution and intelligent design/creation, both of which could be correct. We know life is a complex chemical system and not much else. Therefore, for all practical purposes, we are faced with selecting a single working hypothesis from the potentially infinite set of conceivable ones until such time as there is only one hypothesis left standing.
Fortunately, mathematics provides a formal solution for "best hypothesis" selection that will allow you to select the hypothesis most likely to be right. It doesn't make guarantees that the selection will be correct, but it does guarantee that it is the most probably correct. This bit of mathematics is more commonly known as "Occam's Razor", which was conjectured LONG before it was actually proven in mathematics. Occam's razor for the sake of this discussion basically states that the hypothesis with the fewest degrees of freedom is most likely to be correct. The reason I have to back the evolution hypothesis, knowing nothing else, is that it has one degree of freedom less then intelligent design. Therefore if my intent is to select the most rational hypothesis of the two, I am compelled to select evolution as the best working hypothesis because mathematics demands it. I might not even agree with it, but I would be a fool to deny that it is the most rational position lacking any bulletproof evidence for either side.
Please show me the specific degrees of freedom for both Evolution and Intelligent Design so that I can compare them side by side and see whether you drew your conclusion based upon real data.
I work in an auto parts plant near Detroit. The frog project probably wouldn't get approved in the current economic environment.
Because you are an engineer (mechanical, I assume) you are aware of the use of algorithms for the purpose of performing repetitive tasks reliably. Think of natural selection as an algorithm for sorting winning combinations. How are new combinations generated for sorting? What constitutes "winning?" I'll bet that using the Hatley-Pirbhai Method you could establish all the necessary requirements for evolving a frog from any chosen precursor organism in a specified number of generations. The problem is indeterminate unless you tie it to the natural world with some known parameters -- mutation rates for each of several dozen different kinds of mutations -- for example. Don't forget to include cross-species exchange of genetic material and viral transduction (rates were measured following the early experiments with recombinant DNA). In the end you might get a frog but you could just as easily get something else entirely. The path has many forks and the wrong one can lead to extinction or a completely different life form. Thankfully you don't really have to do this because the experiment has already been done and the frog is here to prove it. The data record of the experiment is the frog DNA itself.
What specific test has Intelligent Design failed? Name it, please.
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