And for their next act, the evolutionists will proceed to demonstrate how the cow evolved from the pine tree.
For those of you who'd like to play at home, here's a model of a cow, which when printed, will be made from the byproducts of a tree :)
Posted on 02/06/2002 5:59:35 AM PST by callisto
SEATTLE, Feb. 6 /U.S. Newswire/ -- A mutant shrimp is being claimed as "a landmark in evolutionary biology" that proves creationists wrong, but it's not. Whatever its implications for creationism, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, a senior fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash., calls the claim "greatly exaggerated," and describes the mutant shrimp as "an evolutionary dead end that tells us little or nothing about how insects might have originated."
A research team headed by William McGinnis at the University of California at San Diego just reported discovering a DNA mutation that produces shrimp without hind legs. Since shrimp normally have lots of legs, and insects have only six, the researchers claim they have discovered the genetic mechanism that caused terrestrial insects to evolve from aquatic ancestors hundreds of millions of years ago. The researchers also claim that this discovery undercuts a primary argument used by creationists against the theory of evolution, because it shows that major mutations do not result in dead animals.
The paper is being released today by the journal Nature.
Wells points out, however, that the mutation reported by McGinnis and his colleagues occurs midway through development, after the embryo is already a shrimp. "The mutation does not transform the embryo into anything like an insect, but only into a disabled shrimp. Whatever produced the first insect would have had to transform the embryo from the very beginning." Wells adds that critics of Darwinism have never claimed that major mutations result in dead animals, but only in animals that are less fit, and thus likely to be eliminated by natural selection. According to Wells, "this report does nothing to refute that criticism."
Wells says he is not surprised that the researchers are making so much of their discovery. "Evidence for the major changes required by evolutionary theory is lacking, so Darwinists often exaggerate the evidence to make the theory seem better supported than it really is."
And for their next act, the evolutionists will proceed to demonstrate how the cow evolved from the pine tree.
For those of you who'd like to play at home, here's a model of a cow, which when printed, will be made from the byproducts of a tree :)
That's *so* silly. After all, everyone knows that we all came from Adam & Eve and the Earth is only 6,000 years old....
National Geographic,
Scientific American,
99% of American school books,
......... [feel free to add more here]........
I'm so ashamed! Yes, my research was shoddy and ill-thought! The correct evolutionary tree for the Lombardy Poplar would be this:
For those of you still playing along at home, here some bonus pics. Here we can see the Lombardy Poplar caught in the act of evolutionary natural selection...
...And a rare shot of the Lombary Poplar installing the Internet, which he had just invented days prior...
None of which addresses the core issue of the press release - were the test results exaggerated or not? Why does it matter who the whistle-blower is, if the allegations have any merit?
Good question. I'll have to see when the new jounal is published online (theoretically today), since my institution has an online sub. Usually, they have a valid point if it makes it into a journal like nature, though.
Don't know if you can read this(subscription necessary?) Abstract (or at least the first paragraph):
A fascinating question in biology is how molecular changes in developmental pathways lead to macroevolutionary changes in morphology. Mutations in homeotic (Hox) genes have long been suggested as potential causes of morphological evolution(1,2), and there is abundant evidence that some changes in Hox expression patterns correlate with transitions in animal axial pattern(3) . A major morphological transition in metazoans occurred about 400 million years ago, when six-legged insects diverged from crustacean-like arthropod ancestors with multiple limbs(4-7_. In Drosophila melanogaster and other insects, the Ultrabithorax (Ubx) and abdominal A (AbdA, also abd-A) Hox proteins are expressed largely in the abdominal segments, where they can suppress thoracic leg development during embryogenesis(3) . In a branchiopod crustacean, Ubx/AbdA proteins are expressed in both thorax and abdomen, including the limb primordia, but do not repress limbs(8-11) . Previous studies led us to propose that gain and loss of transcriptional activation and repression functions in Hox proteins was a plausible mechanism to diversify morphology during animal evolution(12) . Here we show that naturally selected alteration of the Ubx protein is linked to the evolutionary transition to hexapod limb pattern.
1. Goldschmidt, R. The Material Basis of Evolution (Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 1940)
2. Lewis, E. B. A gene complex controlling segmentation in Drosophila. Nature 276, 565-570 (1978)
3. Carroll, S. B., Grenier, J. K. & Weatherbee, S. D. From DNA to Diversity (Blackwell Science, London, 2001)
4. Boore, J. L., Collins, T. M., Stanton, D., Daehler, L. L. & Brown, W. M. Deducing the pattern of arthropod phylogeny from mitochondrial DNA rearrangements. Nature 376, 163-165 (1995)
5. Friedrich, M. & Tautz, D. Ribosomal DNA phylogeny of the major extant arthropod classes and the evolution of myriapods. Nature 376, 165-167 (1995)
6. Aguinaldo, A. et al. Evidence for a clade of nematodes, arthropods and other moulting animals. Nature 387, 489-493 (1997)
7. Regier, J. C. & Shultz, J. W. Molecular phylogeny of the major arthropod groups indicates polyphyly of crustaceans and a new hypothesis for the origin of hexapods. Mol. Biol. Evol. 14, 902-913 (1997)
8. Averof, M. & Akam, M. Hox genes and the diversification of insect and crustacean body plans. Nature 376, 420-423 (1995)
9. Averof, M. & Patel, N. Crustacean appendage evolution associated with changes in Hox gene expression. Nature 388, 682-686 (1997) | Article
10. Panganiban, G., Sebring, A., Nagy, L. & Carroll, S. The development of crustacean limbs and the evolution of arthropods. Science 270, 1363-1366 (1995)
11. Abzhanov, A. & Kaufman, T. C. Crustacean (malacostracan) Hox genes and the evolution of the arthropod trunk. Development 127, 2239-2249 (2000)
12. Li, X. & McGinnis, W. Activity regulation of Hox proteins, a mechanism for altering functional specificity in development and evolution. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 96, 6802-6807 (1999)
13. Gonzalez-Reyes, A. & Morata, G. The developmental effect of overexpressing a Ubx product in Drosophila embryos is dependent on its interactions with other homeotic products. Cell 61, 515-522 (1990) | PubMed |
Evolution of a transcriptional repression domain in an insect Hox protein
RON GALANT AND SEAN B. CARROLL
Homeotic (Hox) genes code for principal transcriptional regulators of animal body regionalization. The duplication and divergence of Hox genes, changes in their regulation, and changes in the regulation of Hox target genes have all been implicated in the evolution of animal diversity. It is not known whether Hox proteins have also acquired new activities during the evolution of specific lineages. Amino-acid sequences outside the DNA-binding homeodomains of Hox orthologues diverge significantly. These sequence differences may be neutral with respect to protein function, or they could be involved in the functional divergence of Hox proteins and the evolutionary diversification of animals. Here, we identify a transcriptional repression domain in the carboxy-terminal region of the Drosophila Ultrabithorax (Ubx) protein. This domain is highly conserved among Ubx orthologues in other insects, but is absent from Ubx in other arthropods and onychophorans. The evolution of this domain may have facilitated the greater morphological diversification of posterior thoracic and anterior abdominal segments characteristic of modern insects.
Who'd they kill and what results were faked?
(In any case, I still think the evolutionists are grasping for straws ton support their theory that mutations explain everything.
For example, I notice their originally very excited claim that the valine-leucine switch at position eight in hemoglobin improves malaria survivability. Well, I would gladly take my chances with malaria rather than have sickle-cell anemia.)
Who's "they," and who did "they" kill?
I don't think it's significant at all. Embryonic development is all about timed sequential expression of genes. These segmentation and homeobox genes are dependent on morphogenetic gradients at precise points in development. Suppression of limb development simply can't occur at the beginning of development, it has to occur at that point in development when the normal sequences for limb development are activated.
Wells, trained as an embryologist, knows better. He seems to imply that genic suppression is not a critical factor in embryogenesis. I suspect he is bothered by the results in these papers.
Since you say that he trained as an embryologist--and even I know that genic suppression is important--what is that he said that made you think that he is minimizing the role of timed genic suppression?
(I am not sure that either one of us has understood the guy.)
I suspect he is bothered by the results in these papers.
Maybe he is. (I'm not, so maybe that's why I didn't assume he was disturbed.)
"The mutation does not transform the embryo into anything like an insect, but only into a disabled shrimp. Whatever produced the first insect would have had to transform the embryo from the very beginning." Wells adds that critics of Darwinism have never claimed that major mutations result in dead animals, but only in animals that are less fit, and thus likely to be eliminated by natural selection. According to Wells, "this report does nothing to refute that criticism."as if mutations which result in altered genic suppression during embryogenesis are not major determinants of organismal bauplan.
His reference to the shrimp's disability is mindful of the theory that bats evolved from rats via a gradual elongation of the medial digit of the forelegs, over zillions of generations, until they finally supported flaps of tissue as the leading edges of two useful wings. The problem with this theory is that the intermediate stucture which would characterize half a zillion of these generations would be neither a useable wing nor a useable foot.
And if natural selection is as powerful an engine as the evolutionists say it is, the half-zillion generations would provide more than ample time for natural selection to kill the crippled animal.
In other words, natural selection tends to prevent bridging from one (existing) species to another (prospective) species via mutation. Vaguely invoking plenty of time and astronomical numbers of one sort or another won't really help. The universe isn't old enough for all of this stuff to have happened. The bat-to-rat difficulty is only one such problem. There are billions more like it.
And the monarch butterfly really is completely inexplicable by standard Darwinian theory. It always will be.
(These problems constitute the reason why Stephen Jay Gould has abandoned standard Darwinian theory in favor of his "hopeful monster" theory. He finally noticed that the creationists' complaints concerning the standard theories of mutation and natural select are crushingly serious.)
Besides, the insurmountable problem concerning the mutation of rat toes to form bat wings also fits the more general complaint by creationists to the effect that mutations are virtually never benefic. They do disable.
I think an engineer would not say concerning the rat-to-bat theory "Well, that's what must have happened." Rather, he would model the scenario of interest using some best-case probabilities and say, "We cannot even say it might have happened. What we need to say is that it definitely didn't happen!"
You are making WAY too much sense to be included in OUR C vs E 'debates'.
BAAAA-HA-HA-HA-hA...
As for faking, the National Geographic hailed a bone structure a Darwinian vindication in 1999 because a dyno had a bird like bone, while this dinosaur bone structure had had a recent chicken bone attached to it. THey never mentioned the error even though it had be widely denounced.
The alternative reading would seem to be that you have given up on standard Darwinianism with gradual evolution--i.e., you are getting close to Gould's "hopeful monster" theory.
You can easily see the similarities in the earlier "proto" form. While scientists are still looking for the actual mechanism that caused the mutation to occur, Stephen Jay Gould conjectured that it is probably one of these three...
Whenever that kind of mindless, idiotic lie is posted, I respond with some of the same kind of "thinking," but in reverse. Look what creationism will do:
IS GOD A COMMUNIST? chapter & verse quotes from the holy bible.
SODOMY AND THE CLERGY. Supernaturalists exposed as pederasts, perverts, boy molesters, rapists, and murderers.
SWAGGART, A FALLEN CREATIONIST Remember this creationist?
And here's the truth about communism and evolution:
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko This guy, not Darwin, Was Stalin's biologist.
The crustacean doesn't have the thorax/abdomen distinction of the insects. It has multiple trunk segments. This trunk segmentation follows Hox gene expression in all arthropods.
Dawkins, true to form, claims that Gould's saltationalism is really, at heart, gradualism on a different scale.
The mutation to remove many of the legs is a simple and common mutation. The first time it happened, it resulted in a lame shrimp, which died off. But it happened quite often, and eventually, it happened to a shrimsect (shrimp in the process of evolving into an insect, that's NOT a scientific term!).
At some point along the shrimsect's evolutionary path, having only six legs--having this common mutation--was more beneficial than having a lot of legs, so the shrimsects with the mutation survived more than those without the mutation. In other words, not every mutation to occur along the path from shrimp to insect was a highly improbable one (although many must have been), some were more common, which makes evolution that much less statistically improbable.
The really big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that the dialectic is between evolution and religion. That's BS. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, so that the debate would be between the evolutionists, and the voodoo doctors: Dick Dawkins vs Jr. Doc Duvalier.
But the real dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.
Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...
To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
God hates IDIOTS, too!
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
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.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) The best example of that sort of logic in fact that there ever was was Michael O'Donahue's parody of the Connecticut Yankee (New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court) which showed Reggie looking for a low outside fastball and then getting beaned cold by a high inside one, the people feeling Reggie's wrist for pulse, and Reggie back in Camelot, where they had him bound hand and foot. Some guy was shouting "Damned if e ain't black from ead to foot, if that ain't witchcraft I never saw it!!!", everybody was yelling "Witchcraft Trial!, Witchcraft Trial!!", and they were building a scaffold. Reggie looks at King Arthur and says "Hey man, isn't that just a tad premature, I mean we haven't even had the TRIAL yet!", and Arthur replies "You don't seem to understand, son, the hanging IS the trial; if you survive that, that means you're a witch and we gotta burn ya!!!" Again, that's precisely the sort of logic which goes into Gould's variant of evolutionism, Punk-eek.2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:
They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
The whole mess is downright funny for those of us with a sense of humor, isn't it?
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