A bone to pick: Missing link is evolutionists' weakest

It has been said that if anyone wants to see something badly enough, they can see anything, in anything. Such was the case recently, but unlike some ghostly visage of the Madonna in a coffee stain, this was a vision of our ancestral past in the form of one recently discovered prehistoric skull, dubbed Sahelanthropus tchadensis.

Papers across the globe heralded the news with great fanfare. With words like "scientists hailed" and "startling find" sprinkled into the news coverage, who couldn't help but think evolutionists had finally found their holy grail of missing links?

For those of us with more than a passing interest in such topics as, "Where did we come from? And how did we get here?," this recent discovery and its subsequent coverage fall far short of its lofty claims. A healthy criticism is in order.

Practically before the fossil's discoverer, the French paleoanthropologist Michel Brunet, could come out of the heat of a Chadian desert, a number of his evolutionary colleagues had questioned his conclusions.

In spite of the obvious national pride, Brigitte Senut of the Natural History of Paris sees Brunet's skull as probably that of an ancient female gorilla and not the head of man's earliest ancestor. While looking at the same evidence, such as the skull's flattened face and shorter canine teeth, she draws a completely different conclusion.

Of course, one might be inclined to ask why such critiques never seem to get the same front-page coverage? It's also important to point out that throughout history, various species, such as cats, have had varying lengths of canine teeth. That does not make them any closer to evolving into another species.

A Washington Post article goes on to describe this latest fossil as having human-like traits, such as tooth enamel thicker than a chimpanzee's. This apparently indicates that it did not dine exclusively on the fruit diet common to apes. But apes don't dine exclusively on fruit; rather, their diet is supplemented with insects, birds, lizards and even the flesh of monkeys. The article attempted to further link this fossil to humans by stating that it probably walked upright. Never mind the fact that no bones were found below the head! For all we know, it could have had the body of a centaur, but that would hardly stop an overzealous scientist (or reporter) from trying to add a little meat to these skimpy bones. Could it not simply be a primate similar to today's Bonobo? For those not keeping track of their primates, Bonobos (sp. Pan paniscus) are chimpanzee-like creatures found only in the rain forests of Zaire. Their frame is slighter than that of a chimpanzee's and their face does not protrude as much. They also walked upright about 5 percent of the time. Sound familiar?

Whether it is tooth enamel, length of canines or the ability to walk upright, none of these factors makes this recent discovery any more our ancestral candidate than it does a modern-day Bonobo.

So why does every new fossil discovery seem to get crammed into some evolutionary scenario? Isn't it possible to simply find new, yet extinct, species? The answer, of course, is yes; but there is great pressure to prove evolution.

That leads us to perhaps the most troubling and perplexing aspect of this latest evolutionary hoopla. While on one hand sighting the evolutionary importance of this latest discovery, a preponderance of these articles leave the notion that somehow missing links are not all that important any more.

According to Harvard anthropologist Dan Lieberman, missing links are pretty much myths. That might be a convenient conclusion for those who have been unable to prove evolution via the fossil record. Unfortunately for them, links are absolutely essential to evolution. It is impossible for anything to evolve into another without a linear progression of these such links.

The prevailing evolutionary view of minute changes, over millions of years, is wholly inadequate for the explanation of such a critical piece of basic locomotion as the ball-and-socket joint. Until such questions can be resolved, superficial similarities between various species are not going to prove anything. No matter how bad someone wants to see it.

Farmer is a professional artist living in Houston. He can can be contacted via his Web site, www.theglobalzoo.com

"The 18th and 19th centuries witnessed the rise of positive(evo-commie/nazi) sciences, and with this an intensification in skepticism about God and the claims of traditional religion, especially among the educated classes. This inclination became most marked after the publication of The Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man by the naturalist Charles Darwin. Darwin ascribed man's immediate ancestry to the anthropoids, supposedly through a process of gradual evolution. Man was no longer a creature made in the image of God, but merely a natural extension of certain lower forms of life, a refined gorilla, as it were. It was these circumstances, and this intellectual milieu, that led philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to declare that "God is dead" and to predict the rise of new and terrible manisfestations of barbarism in the century that was to come. As he put it, "For ... we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which have never yet been dreamed of ... there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth." The non-believer Nietzsche would agree wholly with the Christian believer Dostoyevsky about one thing: Without faith in God, all horrors, all of man's worst nightmares, would become possible. And so they did. What men... believe---really matters."

A polite response thank you.

I took the post as a "here's what's needed" list.

As I understand it, a gene must duplicate for there to be successful evolution because the existing beneficial traits must remain for the organism to be competitive in selection. I guess this would be a neutral mutation.

This duplicate gene must then survive -- which GK3 says is unlikley, a position, which I think, is not without logic.

The duplicate then must mutate again into a new beneficial trait.

Again, that's as I how I understand it.

The first question is has this been observed in sexually reproducing multi-celled creatures -- not just the genetic duplication, but the inheritance of the new gene and it's subsequent beneficial mutation?

The second question would be could this phenomena be expected at a rate to explain Earth's biodiversity given 3.8 billion years?

Evolution...Atheism-dehumanism---TYRANNY...

Then came the SPLIT SCHIZOPHRENIA/America---the post-modern age of switch-flip-spin-DEFORMITY-cancer...Atheist secular materialists through ATHEISM/evolution CHANGED-REMOVED the foundations...demolished the wall(separation of state/religion)--trampled the TRUTH-GOD...built a satanic temple/SWAMP-MALARIA/RELIGION(cult of darwin-marx-satan) over them---made these absolutes subordinate--relative and calling/CHANGING all the... residuals---technology/science === TO evolution via schlock/sMUCK science...to substantiate/justify their efforts--claims...social engineering--PC--atheism...anti-God/Truth RELIGION(USSC monopoly)--and declared a crusade/WAR--JIHAD--INTOLERANCE/TYRANNY...against God--man--society/SCIENCE!!

As I understand it, a gene must duplicate for there to be successful evolution

Nope. That's just an avenue that prevents a loss of information because the original gene is retained. Mutations happen all the time without prior duplication.

This duplicate gene must then survive -- which GK3 says is unlikley, a position, which I think, is not without logic.

It is without logic. A gene must always go with one gamete or another and has a 50% chance to be inherited by each child. Consider a man having a specific mutation 10 generations ago. If his descendents were prolific and he has 500 descendents now, ~250 will have the mutation (check family trees, 500 descendents is quite possible including in my family).

The duplicate then must mutate again into a new beneficial trait.

Or a survival-neutral one - it may only be beneficial in much different, or stressful, circumstances. Hundreds of traits have been traced in humans that provide no obvious enhancement to survival. Each side my own family tree contains several obvious (both sex-linked and non-) genetic mutations that each new generation gets to investigate when they discover them.

See above, numerous simple genetic traits in humans are tracable. Significantly beneficial or detrimental mutations are investigated even more closely. Some have been traced back to the original individual mutant. I'm surprised you even questioned this idea.

The second question would be could this phenomena be expected at a rate to explain Earth's biodiversity given 3.8 billion years?

That requires additional information about the past genetic material, the viral environment, and past rates of mutation.

This duplicate gene must then survive -- which GK3 says is unlikley, a position, which I think, is not without logic.

It is unlikely that this gene "survives" if it is harmful but if it is neutral the chance that it is spread in a population over time is not that low.

The duplicate then must mutate again into a new beneficial trait.

Exactly.

I'm sure it has been observed but I don't have any examples right at hand now but I think a websearch should turn up some examples.
Of course, once a gene is in the genome it will be inherited except if a new mutation occurs that deletes this particular gene (but this is really rare).

The second question would be could this phenomena be expected at a rate to explain Earth's biodiversity given 3.8 billion years?

Why not? You have to keep in mind that this is a parallel and not a serial process.
Additionally asexually reproducing organisms have very short reproduction cycles. Sexually reproducing organisms may not have such short reproduction cycles but they can better accumulate beneficial mutations because they exchange genetic material.

Exactly. A good example for this would be Huntington's Disease in the Lake Maracaibo region in Venezuela (it has been traced to one person). Though the mutation that causes HD is detrimental it is not going to disappear by itself because the symptoms start when it's bearer is between 30 and 50 years old. At this age most people have already children so HD doesn't really prevent them from having offspring.

This duplicate gene must then survive -- which GK3 says is unlikley, a position, which I think, is not without logic.

You've been around on these threads for months now at least. I wonder how you can not miss that there's no position of g3k's that hasn't been rebutted over and over and over and over. (Not necessarily by the same people, however, as at any given time some people are giving up trying to get through to him and some unsuspecting newbies are just stating.)

There seems to be some positive pressure to retain (and rapidly modify) ostensibly neutral duplication mutations.

To find out how the duplicate evolved, the researchers created nine designer mutant proteins, each with one of the nine amino acid changes that separate the duplicate from the original. Every change reduced the enzyme's ability to degrade double-stranded RNA--the enzyme's original job. This hints at a lack of negative selection. But statistical analysis showed that the duplicate gene evolved much faster than would be expected from random change, suggesting that positive selection was at work too, the team reports in the March 2002 issue of Nature Genetics.

That could possibly be because having a few working experiments going on at any given time increases a species's flexibility in the event the selection pressures change. Or maybe there was some other hidden functionality in that langur case.

Computer modeling so far says that purely neutral mutations do have a tendency to slowly die out over time, but then there are always new ones happening. Thus, at any given time, there tends to be more than one version of, say, hemoglobin floating around in a species.

The point was made that to account for some evolutionary changes in hemoglobin, one requires about 120 amino acid substitutions...as individual events, as though it is necessary to get one of them done and spread throughout the whole population before you could start processing the next one...[and] if you add up the time for all those sequential steps, it amounts to quite a long time. But the point the biologists want to make is that that isn't really what is going on at all. We don't need 120 changes one after the other. We know perfectly well of 12 changes which exist in the human population at the present time. There are probably many more which we haven't detected, because they have such slight physiological effects...[so] there [may be] 20 different amino acid sequences in human hemoglobins in the world population at present, all being processed simultaneously...Calculations about the length of time of evolutionary steps have to take into account the fact that we are dealing with gene pools, with a great deal of genetic variability, present simultaneously. To deal with them as sequential steps is going to give you estimates that are wildly out." (pp. 95-6)

Silliness at the Wistar Symposia, 1966.

Gore is basically using the Haldane's Dilemma argument, that there's not enough time to accumulate mutations before they die out. Medved and now PetiteMericco like to quote Walter ("Biotic Message" Remine) doing the same. It's bogus, as analyzed in painful detail here.

As I understand it, a gene must duplicate for there to be successful evolution . . .Nope. That's just an avenue that prevents a loss of information because the original gene is retained. Mutations happen all the time without prior duplication.

Of course. Duplication is a mutation.

But as I understand it, for evolution to occurr, necessary traits can't be lost or the organism will be at a selective disadvantage. Can evolution occur without gene duplication?

This duplicate gene must then survive -- which GK3 says is unlikley, a position, which I think, is not without logic. . . .It is without logic. A gene must always go with one gamete or another and has a 50% chance to be inherited by each child.

But remember, this mutation happened in one organism in significantly sized populaiton. The creature must survive to breed for this mutation to pass it on. And the offspring must survive to breed, also. Most offspring don't.

Even assuming survival, a neutral mutation is likely to die out according to GK3's calculations in Post 683? Unless these calculations are wrong. Can you show they -- or the premise on which they are based -- are wrong?

The duplicate then must mutate again into a new beneficial trait. Or a survival-neutral one -

Fair enough.

Don't be. Besides it just give you a chance to correct me. :-) So, we have an observation in humans of a gene duplication that has mutated into a gene containing a beneficial trait?

Your "data demon" must have been napping on that first link. (But it caught the other two.)

Everybody has a data demon. :-)

The Wistar link seems better to be described as a critique or counter-argument to Murray Eden's claims rather than a refutation. Carrier has a clear point of view, and one wonders if he is leaving perspective out in describing what happened at Wistar.

Eden, by the way, is someone to take seriously. He is Professor of Electrical Engineering, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was director of the Biomedical Engineering and Instrumentation Program, National Center for Research Resources until his retirement in 1994. There seems to be no indication anywhere as to whether he has changed or maintains his 1966 position.

The Haldane's Dilemma link might be better described as a syllogism. It confirms the concept has been advanced by a serious scientist, then presents scenarios showing ways in which it could fall short concerning evolution. I confess I did not read to the very end. I did note the link to Medved's site.

>While around 50 genes are involved in the construction and regulation of the canonical eubacterial only around 18-20 form the actual motor-switch/shaft/propellor complex.

First he cuts off more than half the problem.

No, the other genes are not relevant, since they do not deal with the creation and regulation of the three relavant parts of the system.

>But view it as a secretory structure, it is NOT IC, remove the filament and it still works, remove the hook and it still works, remove the motor and it still works, not as well as with the motor, but it still works.

One can view it as originating as a secretory structure and it continues to serve that function. However, without the motor there will not be movement. You also need the rotor and the system to regulate movement. All of them necessary for the system to work. This is not explained and it is left hanging by the author. So, no, it has not been shown to have arisen by stepwise evolution.

It seems you are missing the point. There are several species of bacteria that are unable to move, it is likely that the flagellum came about from the secretory structures that preexisted. Movement likely came later, as the flagellum began to evolve.

Also a question needs to be answered for the other steps - if the functions of other proteins were adopted by this system, what happened to the other functions? This is a deep problem with the gradual evolution model. If it is achieved by the adoption of already useful functions, what is performing those functions after they were adopted?

It's pretty obvious, in the cases of the things I have posted previously. They still perform their earlier functions, though perhaps evolved slightly from their prior task. That much seems evident given these papers.

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