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RE: Proving Evolution
Mutation and selection is a step.
Evolution is a series of a million steps or more.
If you believe one is possible, why is the other difficult to grasp?
The concept of a 'kind' is not a scientific one, so I have a feeling evidence will probably not work to change your mind.
Kind is just an English word I chose to indicate something you can see with your own eyes and look at biologically. The gist of my point is that bacteria mutating in a Petri dish doesn't logically mean that bacteria mutations led to new creatures which are definitely not bacteria.
Bacteria "evolution" in the lab is restricted to new kinds of bacteria which have a few differences. There is no evidence of algae becoming cockroaches, or ameba sprouting wings.
When you observe those especially with sexual reproduction and which cannot reproduce otherwise... the higher organisms ... you must conclude that sufficiently complex mutations will no longer be viable. They die out. Such a new creature must either be unable to reproduce (due to no sexually compatible peers) or they must line-breed to keep the novel mutations. That won't work too well, as the beneficial mutation may be recessive, so it may take a lot more breeding to express that.
Genetically, this type of thing is done by breeders who improve cattle and domestic animals and vegetable crops. But that's funny... the last I checked into breeding programs, they were (1) done with lots of oversight and purpose, and (2) they were done with the same species to deal with minor gene expressions.
So if modern breeding programs cannot purposely produce a new creature of a different kind, how could natural selection succeed blindly?
Time. The difference here, and it both my points, has been time.
St. Peter's Basilica took 144 years to build. According to your example, if you were a Roman citizen watching it be constructed, you would have to conclude that it is impossible to build such a complex structure, because you, personally, have never seen one completely built. You have only seen stages - perhaps the foundation, perhaps the columns going up. And of course, the individual steps can all be completed: foundations can be built; columns can be erected; murals can be painted, but obviously over a massive cathedral cannot be built over 144 years because you have no direct observation of such.
As it is with mutation, selection, and ultimately evolution between species, it requires time well beyond a human, or even modern humanity's, time on this planet.
Those breeders of dogs and bacteria could keep going and at some point would create a different species - but you would dismiss it since it is not a different 'kind'. It is still dog-like and therefore a dog''kind'.
But again, 'kind' is not a scientific term. It is an arbitrary one you created to denote a that dog-like species is not different than a dog despite their genetic differences, or a human is different than a primate despite having a lot of the same genetic material and evolutionary history.
I'd recommend checking out Ring Species and then consider adding time to the sudden fact that one species has become two.
And although natural selection may be blind, it is still a steady and constant force on a species' development.
Natural selection + Random Mutation + TIME
Regardless, I'm not going to change your mind, and facts will not change your mind. I would encourage you to really try and see reality for what it is though instead of putting up straw-man roadblocks such as 'kinds'.
The roadblock is having a step change being passed on to descendants. Your belief system has to include points of time in which, for example, one day a creature was born having a spine, or an exoskeleton, or a spleen, or a mammary gland. And then the miracle of scientific dogma states this: the creature survived, mated, and passed it on to its descendants, his ancestors died off immediately, and the newly evolved creatures lived happily ever after as a novel creature that is a different kind than the one which it evolved from.
Why should I believe in that miracle? What evidence would lead me to such a belief?
Why is there evidence for the mutations and genetics and not for passing on step changes?
To believe what you believe, I would have to have faith in the fossil record. This record is riddled with flaws and interpretive error. But even if I believed the fossil record in its entirety, I would begin to wonder whether simultaneous antecedents and descendants can be shown to have co-existed, and if not, why?
No, my fact system does not require a fully formed anything to just be created. Your straw man is invalid.
Spine - evolved from notochords
Exoskeleton - The beginnings of arthropods
Now, I don't have time to google everything for you, but suffice it to say, spleens and mammary glands evolved like the rest of the major organs from filtering organs and other secretion glands.
So, I'm not asking you to believe a miracle. As stated above, that is a crappy strawman argument. I'm asking you to believe facts.
Maybe you misunderstand evolution in its entirety - individual organisms do not evolve. Populations of organisms evolve. A beneficial trait is passed along a population. If natural selection promotes that trait, it will continue to appear in organisms with greater frequency and eventually become dominate in the entire population. So, a notochord was extremely advantageous. Then, in some species, that cartilage shifted to bone, and became advantageous in the environment for those creatures.
And the fossil record is just one entire line of evidence among many - genetics, geology, geography, developmental biology, fundamental physics of cellular membranes. There are so many smoking guns that you could honestly remove the 'fossil record' and still reach the proper conclusions if you actually looked.
Yet another strawman - to believe what I know is fact, you simply have to properly understand what evolution is and does. How it impacts populations, how it is impacted by natural selection, and ultimately how time comes into play.
Here is a very simple diagram that highlights my points:
Source
That's nice with the red-purple text. I like that.
Here's where the evidence for your belief system is, quite simply, missing.
Take a common, modern creature. Say the bottle-nose dolphin and greater apes ... the emperor penguin, the ostrich, and the osprey.... the alpaca and white-tailed deer ... the octopus and the starfish.
Now, if this creature descended from some other creature, identify it in the chain of evolution. First A, then B. In the example above, "red text" can be isolated either in the fossil record or in modern times to be distinct from the "blue text."
I would think that hundreds and thousands of such pairs can be discovered. I believe over 10,000 species are "discovered" every year. But the obvious problem is that at the top of the food chain, there is an antecedent problem. The old imaginary "common ancestor" that has been hypothesized for over 100 years in evolutionary pseudo-science.
Red-blue pairs. A handful of stable purple ones.
Fiction makes a lot of sense. It's entertaining to go see "natural history" museums with the bald faced fake history lessons, supported by artist renditions and reconstructions. Believing in fiction ... doesn't make it any more real.
A flow-chart (or hundreds of them) with hypothetical "chains" of the evolutionary fiction, like the ones appearing in biology textbooks: This is the purported evidence. The hypotheses are circular. The flowchart points to a proposition, and the proposition is said to be examples of evolution, while the evidence is missing and theoretical and assumed.
So when you conflate a "micro" version of evolution with the billion-year macro version of it causing the so-called fossil record, you have to do so based on assumption, belief, and ignoring alternative theories. Wouldn't you say that beliefs and ignorance are the hallmarks of religion and pseudoscience? If the shoe fits, wear it.
Don't you see? Evolution is a continuum. A spectrum.
The notion of a red/blue pair is an completely arbitrary one. Classifications are us simply drawing a line in the text and declaring something 'purple' or 'bluish', but ultimately that demarcation is made up.
Consider the evolution of language - you may have a ancestor language like Latin. Latin then branches to beget Franch, Spanish, English, Italian, etc.
Those demarcations are very easily seen as we've zoomed out, included time, and drawn those arbitrary lines. However, when Latin was first traveling around the globe, the Western speakers and Eastern speakers could probably still communicate, could probably interact just fine. But, with additional time, group isolation, and essentially random changes, they eventually became distinct.
As it is with biology. We are all still evolving and the demarcations we create are arbitrary. All the creatures are the planet are still red-ish or blue-ish on their way to something even more red-ish or blue-ish that may or may not help them survive against selection pressures within their environment.
And yes, I would agree that beliefs and ignorance are hallmarks of religious belief and psuedo-science. Traits you seem to be exercising in spades.
Have a great Monday!
The language metaphor is powerful if misguided.
It would be great for analogy if languages changed randomly, accidentally, and imperceptibly. On closer inspection, none of that is true.
Folks purposely coin new terms. They get tired of old language and pronounce things different. They accidentally overhear words and misuse them, too, but that is not random chance, it is due to the perception of vocal cues and mistakes.
In macro evolution, we would need to have the same kind of fluid changes of creatures happening through natural and random forces.
You move the goalposts to score.
Furthermore, language did not arise on its own at random. It would seem more scientific to presuppose that language was borne out of purpose and design, and whatever words you would intentionally eschew in a debate on evolution.
That was an unforced error on your part. Language is clearly not evolutionary in its creation story. It is rooted in purpose, and meaning, and defining the environment by fiat. It has living elements that direct both its genesis and its structure and its propagation through time and space. It cannot be disconnected from its creators (that is, presumably man) and its changing character (clearly driven by man).
To interpret the branching languages in the earth as an evolutionary process is too short-sighted and unscientific to not point out your egregious error. You might want to reconsider not just your analogy, but even use this as a meta-example of the creative processes at work in the earth.
Thanks for your insight! I liked the chart. I am somewhat a history buff.
I also liked how you deflected the search for the missing linked pairs... to a discussion in which missing links cannot or should not exist.