You are confusing correlations. The concern here is about an individual cell’s entropy. The individual code information per cell, or per codon, does not increase—it can only decrease as the plant or baby ages.
Hi everybody,
This thread is fascinating. There is so much in it. But there is at least one thing missing or at the very least not discussed enough. Why there is no more evidence of the evolution? Before I start, I want to say that I would want to be an evolutionist because it seems so logical! But the theory of evolution have to stand on his own legs. Even if there is no other good scientific solutions doesn’t make it valid by default!
So my point is that there is not enough intermediate species in the fossil records that we’ve found so far. My main argument is that I suppose that for every species that did appear in our fossil records we should have at the very least one intermediate specie or more. In some case it should be a lot more than one! Just take the example of the whale, the elephant, the giraffe or the man. In each case it could be argued that a lot of iteration had been needed to arrive at what we have today. Some of these iterations will have produced new species. Even in the case where those iteration will not have produced new species, a lot of variability will have been seen. Take the neck’s giraffe, how many intermediate “mutant” would have been needed to arrive at this point. The elephant trunk is an other example of a large number of intermediate “mutant” to arrive at this very complex organ. The blue whale is an other example of an extreme number of intermediate “mutant” to arrive at such an extraordinary animal. I write mutant because I don’t want to define all of those intermediate creature as new species as I don’t really know if it is the case or not. An other example is there is no link between Eohippus (a small dog-like animal that existed 50 million years ago) and its descendent Mesohippus (a sheep-sized animal that lived 30 million years ago).
The fossil records is mostly constituted of species that are not intermediate, or precursor for other species. Of course, it could be argued that we don’t know that yet. I agree with that. Where I diverge is if we do believe in evolution, we should found a greater diversity of fossil that we have found up to now. In fact, we should find mostly intermediate species, or at the very least a lot more diversity in what we’ve found. It seems based on articles that I’ve read that they are at least 5 millions species and maybe up to 100 millions species on our planet today. If for every specie that we have we have at least one intermediate or more, where are they?
Most of the time, specialist argue of the relative rarity of fossils. The special conditions needed to have fossils are few and far between, so that explain the relative dearth of fossils and especially the absence of missing links between them. I propose the exact opposite, if we need an intermediate specie or more for each one that we have today. It should be easier to find intermediate species. A corollary finding could be why today we do not observe more of these intermediate species. In fact, it could be argued that every living creature are intermediate species. But if it is so, the fossils records are not there to prove it and our day to day observation are short of concrete examples. So how can you prove evolution, when you can’t prove it based on fossil records or actual observation. I don’t like math that much, but lets say that 10 millions species exist today, and let’s say that the earth had 3.5 billions years to produce them. It means that we should produce a new specie every 350 years. Of course if we have 50 millions species it means a new species every 70 years. But since we need at least one intermediate specie to produce a new specie, because an intermediate specie will maybe have no practical use of the new mutation (an half trunk for an elephant or an half neck for a giraffe) we need an intermediate form or a new specie every 35 to 175 years. Of course, since very few of the mutation are beneficial. Maybe less than 1 in 1000 are beneficial if you believe what the the article below says
It means that we should observe a lot more mutation that we observe today. Since those mutation would produce some exterior change, as the trunk of the elephant, we should observe mutation every 12 to 60 days or so. Of course, it will be very difficult to observe those because there is just too much data. But for the casual observer the fact seem to contradict the observation. I have read a lot on this subject and so far I have see no proof of an actual new specie under the sun. More to the point we have a lot of extinct species in the fossil records that would prove that we need more new species from evolution than less. An other way of saying that is we should observe more variation in mutation and more creation of new species as we have seen up to date.
An other strange fact is some species does not seem to evolute at all. The Coelacanth did not change a lot for 410 millions years (Wikipedia). Shark are an other example of a species that did not evolute for a great period of time. So it is putting a greater pressure on the rest of the biosphere to produce more new species and thus mutate more rapidly. This problem of actual observation of evolution is not new. Even Darwin admitted it in 1859, when On the Origin of Species was first published, he described the lack of transitional fossils as “the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory”. Some have tried to explain this with some new theories about evolution to explain this absence of observable fact. They call it punctuated equilibrium and even some preeminent evolutionist are critical of it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium
That theory have been created in part to explain the absence of transitional form of life in the fossil records. But it my opinion, it does not matter if new species are formed rapidly or not as they’re should be always more transitional form of life as definite one. And for those of you who don’t like my English, forgive me as I am french .
Cheers!