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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Emile Vidrine who wrote (232226)	5/10/2005 4:53:50 PM
From: neolib	Respond to of 1572954

The scientific evidence for common descent is overwhelming to anyone with an analytical mind. For starters ask yourself this: Why to humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, while the Old World apes have 24. Hint: Humans have a fusion event that fused two of the Old World ape chromosomes into one. More to the point, do you believe that DNA evidence is sufficiently good to be used for forensic and legal purposes? If so, kindly explain to me which mechanism prevents the same techniques from "proving" common descent in general?

To: Emile Vidrine who wrote (232226)	5/10/2005 7:35:17 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1572954

"We must observe one species evolving into a new viable species before we can elevate the evolutionary hypothesis to the level of a theory." Nonsense. That shows a complete lack of understanding of the relevant terminology. For example, no mutation is required to establish a new species. All it requires is something to separate two groups so they cannot interbreed. For example, there is a tufted ear squirrel that has one species on one side of the Grand Canyon and another on the other side. They are different species because they are separate and distinct breeding populations. There is no way for them to exchange genes, at least until some tufted eared squirrel equivalent of Evel Knievel comes along... Two, what do you think a mutation is? It isn't something out of a kid vid. Big changes, as you have noted, tend to be deleterious. But big changes aren't needed to drive evolution. Small, incremental changes are enough as long as they confer some advantage, or at least don't have any disadvantages. You also need an isolated breeding group, else the changes tend to get diluted. Which is one of the reasons that an isolated gene pool is considered to be another species. Look at what breeders can do. All dogs are very closely related, but their morphology is all over the map. Now true, it wasn't natural selection that made them that way, but there was a selection process. The net effect is the same. An aggressive program of selecting and culling can produce a new variety of almost anything in 20-30 generations. If that selecting and culling was done by natural processes we would have no trouble labeling the result as a new species. We don't do that for historical reasons, but...

To: Emile Vidrine who wrote (232226)	5/10/2005 10:02:12 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572954

"The idea that an organism's complexity is evidence for the existence of a cosmic designer was advanced centuries before Charles Darwin was born. Its best-known exponent was English theologian William Paley, creator of the famous watchmaker analogy. If we find a pocket watch in a field, Paley wrote in 1802, we immediately infer that it was produced not by natural processes acting blindly but by a designing human intellect. Likewise, he reasoned, the natural world contains abundant evidence of a supernatural creator. The argument from design, as it is known, prevailed as an explanation of the natural world until the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859. The weight of the evidence that Darwin had patiently gathered swiftly convinced scientists that evolution by natural selection better explained life's complexity and diversity. "I cannot possibly believe," wrote Darwin in 1868, "that a false theory would explain so many classes of facts."" actionbioscience.org