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Mindless evolution?

Posted: Sun Jul 24, 2005 1:22 pm
by weaverweaver
Not all evolution is mindless may I point out. Evolution simply means, change in a population. Humans have changed many things...dogs, cats, birds, etc. directly and quite conciously. We have changed many things unconciously...roaches, bacteria, virus populations....through our medicines and poisons. We killed the ones or prevented their breeding but a few always remain that reproduce, making stronger and stronger lines. The evidence is still not visible and immediately reproducible to say the law of evolution (such as the law of gravity which is theory of gravity when talking about what makes it so) but pretty clear.
Mindless does not mean lacking greatness. The mindless flow of rivers and glaciers have made the Grand Canyon and Great Lakes respectivley.
With regard to macroevolution and evidence for it, there is such evidence.
Ring species are called such because they are species that can interbreed in one area but not in another. Example: salamanders or gulls.
There are gulls that exist in north America and Europe. These gulls are black billed in NA and white in Europe and cannot interbreed together. But go half way around the world and they can interbreed with each other and carry characteristics of each other. In other words, one species spread itself around the world, gradually changing. As members of the species either stayed or continued around the globe, they all had families in the place they stopped, occasionally moving as their ancestors did There is not enough traffic however to cause them to prevent speciiation (like humans who can interbreed with any other human). That is evidence of macroevolution.

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2005 8:06 pm
by LittleShepherd
Humans have changed many things...dogs, cats, birds, etc. directly and quite conciously.
Microevolution, change within species, in which no new genetic material is created, and no new viable species comes into being. Even the known crossbreeds are rare, are between species that are very similar already, have genetic complications that make surviving birth a huge event, and are either infertile or of extremely limited fertility.
We have changed many things unconciously...roaches, bacteria, virus populations....through our medicines and poisons. We killed the ones or prevented their breeding but a few always remain that reproduce, making stronger and stronger lines.
This has nothing to do with Evolution. And no change takes place. The bugs that already have an immunity survive and breed, producing whole lines of the bugs that are all immune to that substance. No new immunities come into being. No new genetic material comes into being. No new species is created. Not even over time. Not even close.
Ring species are called such because they are species that can interbreed in one area but not in another. Example: salamanders or gulls.
There's a very simple explanation for ring species. Loss of genetic material due to mutations(caused by radiation or otherwise). As the various groups of the species are separate, over time different groups go through different mutations, resulting is different kinds of loss of genetic material. Unlike normal differentiation within a species, these losses don't get spread through the whole of the species, and can cause certain difficulties with reproduction. This is due to genetic material being lost, not due to new genetic material or species coming into being. An example of this would be the elephant. The African and Asian elephants are very similiar, even having the same number of chromosomes, but their genetic codes present difficulties that make interbreeding them very difficult(though it has been known to successfully happen once).

All of the instances you mentioned do nothing to support macroevolution. At best they are neutral on the issue, and at worst they are unrelated altogether.

The Monkey Men of The American Continent

Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2005 8:40 pm
by tedstruk
Toasty debate....
Lets see, evolution is a predicament I have been put in because of applied science. I read Darwin....had a lot of problems buying it. I read Einstein, took a while but I got the idea. Maybe to Darwin evolution was a theory. Maybe to Eistine nuclear energy was a theory. So if there were native species of American-pithecanthropus, it's a theory to me....but it may be fact in the future. please read my book Ameriner-Hominidae its online in browser friendly media...http://www.ghostown-usa.org/FireMakers/ ... apter1.htm