Posted on 06/17/2002 3:10:50 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Maybe it's 'cause she's doing fine on her own?
Gene duplication appears to have occurred so many times that there must have been some initial advantage in some instances, even if the effects were indirect. Thanks for the links.
No one is "perfectly" adapted. Life is a constant struggle for survival. The fish are also getting faster and better at evading the seals, a drop in temperature ushers in an ice age.
The females would go right on selecting against any male which tried to adapt outside the species boundaries. Or is some females velociraptor supposed to have said to herself:
"Say, you know, that Alvin over there sure looks weird with those wings and that beak, but that's sure gonna be useful for flying some day...
That was funny, thanks for the laugh medved. Seriously, evolution doesnt argue that beaks and wings just spontaneously appear out of nowhere in one generation. We are talking about "simple" adaptations and improvements thereupon - longer claws, faster arms, thicker skin etc.
As for flight... this page offers a simple hypothesis for how flight may have evolved in birds.
From here.
One of the more spectacular examples is this one, which gore has seen and forgotten dozens of times. Other people have other implausible excuses for ignoring it.
Please read your first link and explain this.
The inconsistency of empirical evidence with Ohno's model prompts questions on the validity of some of the assumptions underlying this model. One major assumption, which was inherited by the subfunctionalization model, is that one gene copy is sufficient to perform the respective function, so that a gene duplication is redundant and has no effect on fitness [1,10]. This notion has been widely accepted, and often becomes one of the central postulates of models of duplicated gene evolution [3,7,26,27]. Should this be the case, however, a duplication event would only very rarely achieve fixation [28,29]; moreover, in the event that a duplication is slightly deleterious, it would be effectively prevented from achieving fixation [30]. Although the notion of duplication producing redundant genes is central to current theories of duplicated gene evolution, the short-term benefits of gene duplications are well known. This is illustrated by the numerous observations of adaptive gene amplifications in response to antibiotics [31,32,33], anticancer drug treatments and exposure to various toxins [34,35,36,37,38,39] or heavy metals [40,41,42,43,44], nutrient limitations [32,33,45,46,47,48,49,50], pesticide treatments [51,52,53], extreme temperatures [54,55] and symbiotic and parasitic interactions [56,57]. Combining this information with the observations that recently duplicated genes evolve under purifying selection ([21] and our present work), it seems reasonable to hypothesize that a majority of duplicated genes that achieve fixation in a population increase fitness when present in two or more copies in a genome and thus are subject to purifying selection from the moment of duplication. Recently duplicated paralogs appear to be a nonrandom group enriched in genes coding for proteins involved in different aspects of the organisms' interaction with the environment (see Additional data files). In particular, a substantial fraction of these paralogs encode (predicted) membrane or secreted proteins. |
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For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
An idea of how hard it would truly be for "proto-bird" (TM) to make it to flying-bird status can be gotten from the case of the escaped chicken.
Consider that man raises chickens in gigantic abundance, and that on many farms, these are not even caged. Consider the numbers of such chickens which must have escaped in all of recorded history; look in the sky overhead: where are all of their wild-living descendants??
Why are there no wild chickens in the skies above us???
A flying bird requires a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including flight feathers, wings, a special light bone structure, specialized flow-through design hearts and lungs vastly more efficient than ours, specialized tails and balance parameters, and a number of other things. Now, you can imagine the difficulty involved for something like a dinosaur which did not have any of these things to evolve them all, but the feral chicken
In other words, if there's any chance whatsoever of a non-flying creature evolving into a flying bird, then surely, surely the feral chicken, close as it is, could RE-EVOLVE back into being a flying bird. They're only missing the tiniest fraction of whatever is involved.
They've got wings, tails, and flight feathers, and the whold nine yards. In their domestic state, they can fly albeit badly; they are entirely similar to what you might expect of an evolutionist's proto-bird, in the final stage of evolving into a flight-worthy condition.
According to evolutionist dogma, at least a few of these should very quickly finish evolving back into something like a normal flying bird, once having escaped, and then the progeny of those few should very quickly fill the skies.
But the sky holds no wild chickens. In real life, against real settings, real predators, real conditions, the imperfect flight features do not suffice to save them.
In real life, if you ever lose the tiniest part of some complex trait or capability, you will never get it back. In the real world, if you lack the tiniest part of some complex trait or capability, then, other than possibly via some genetic engineering process, you will never get it.
Thus we see that "proto-bird" (TM) not only couldn't make it the entire journey which he is supposed to have, he couldn't even make it the last yard if we spotted him the thousand miles minus the yard.
The basic question is: How in hell is some velociraptor supposed to make it the thousand miles, if history proves that a creature which amounts to the final stage of such a development cannot make it the final yard of such a process?
Don't laugh. Such material is the main source of information for creationists.
You are the only one posting those comics here.
In the case of your first giant blue font selection, it describes a model of duplication mutation contraindicated by their study. Note that other models are indicated. Your other grouping looks like a big Tah-dah on "nonrandom." Many processes in nature, e.g natural selection, are nonrandom. Please show where it says either "Evolution does not occur" or "God operates here."
In the Beginning.
Big Daddy (Evolution).
Earthman (Adam & Eve).
I understand it, you obviously don't. You apparently support jennyp's argument that a neutral duplication will inevitably be fixed. That is the one contraindicated. As to the random are you now disavowing the Darwinian random mutation foundation?
More Jack Chick comics on line:
In the Beginning.
Big Daddy (Evolution).
Earthman (Adam & Eve).
AKA PatrickHenry personal library.
Why, please, enlighten me, sir.
At this point, you have left the realm of evolutionary theory. Evolution jettisons teleology.
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