Natural Selection

Evolutionary scientists argue that natural selection provides the answer to why accidental chance mutations would result in the progressive evolution of life. The theory of natural selection requires progressive development at every successive step. However, random evolution and mutations cannot themselves process intelligent understanding and planning. Unthinking evolutionary process could never produce a half -formed eye as a transition in order to ultimately form a fully functioning eye. How could the complete eye have been produced by evolution through natural selection by step-by-step random mutations in gradual stages? Obviously, until the eye was fully functional it was of no value whatsoever.

It seems that evolutionists, whether consciously or unconsciously, have regarded the blind and inanimate forces of the environment, or nature as having the ability to create and think.

In other words, despite their denial of intelligent design, the theory of evolution actually requires an intelligent, purposeful mind directing the process at every one of the supposed millions of imaginary intermediate stages as if these incremental changes were following a plan to produce a new lifeform.

Originally posted by dj2becker
Evolutionary scientists argue that natural selection provides the answer to why accidental chance mutations would result in the progressive evolution of life. The theory of natural selection requires progressive development at every successive step. However, random evolution and mutations cannot themselves process intelligent understanding and planning. Un ...[text shortened]... rmediate stages as if these incremental changes were following a plan to produce a new lifeform.

However, random evolution and mutations cannot themselves process intelligent understanding and planning. Unthinking evolutionary process could never produce a half -formed eye as a transition in order to ultimately form a fully functioning eye.

And this is an assertion supported by compelling evidence from a reputable scieintist?

This wil be a laugh 🙄

Originally posted by dj2becker
Evolutionary scientists argue that natural selection provides the answer to why accidental chance mutations would result in the progressive evolution of life. The theory of natural selection requires progressive development at every successive step. However, random evolution and mutations cannot themselves process intelligent understanding and planning. Un ...[text shortened]... in gradual stages? Obviously, until the eye was fully functional it was of no value whatsoever.

This is a common misconception. You are assuming that the current human eye is the final stage in a well planned sequence resulting in the perfect eye. This is totally false. There are many many types of eyes and it would be wrong to say that one is more fully formed than another. There is no such thing as a half-formed eye and never was. The theory of evolution does not claim that there is.

until the eye was fully functional it was of no value whatsoever.
Again this is a misconception. Why do you think that it would have no value? Do you know what structures the eye evolved from? There are many many examples of light sensitive structures in nature starting with chlorophyl. Even plants can "see" light. This ability is usefull for almost all life forms and therefore it is expected that more sensitive and accurate methods for detecting both light and changes and diferences in light should evolve. Note also that it is by no means the only means that animals and plants have evolved for sensing thier environment in a highly accurate way. For example sonar (in dolphins and bats) electricity (in various types of fish) air movement (spiders and other animals) heat (some snakes) and so on.

In other words, despite their denial of intelligent design, the theory of evolution actually requires an intelligent, purposeful mind directing the process at every one of the supposed millions of imaginary intermediate stages as if these incremental changes were following a plan to produce a new lifeform.
Again you are wrong. Evolutionary theory does not talk about distink life forms which evolve from one to another with some sort of plan for how to get from one to another. Rather every single organism on the planet is a unique life form and every change made results in a new life form and the result of a large number of changes amoungst a groups of life forms that are capable of sharing thier genes (sexual reproduction) results in a gradual tendency for the genes which produce successfull life forms to be more widespread than those which dont. The overall result is more successfull life forms.

It seems that evolutionists, whether consciously or unconsciously, have regarded the blind and inanimate forces of the environment, or nature as having the ability to create and think.
Although it may appear to an uneducated person that the environment or nature is "thinking", this is untrue. Unless your definition of thinking is different from mine?
An uneducated person looking at the sand on the beach may believe that thought was required in order to carefull sort the grains of sand. Not so. Patterns, even complex patterns, are the norm in any system which follows rules.

[edit]
"blind and inanimate" was this a pun on the eye discussion in paragraph 1? 🙂

This discussion made me think of a question.
If we all evolved from the same starting point, why are there different species? A dog can't mate with a cat and produce offspring. If life started off as species X, wouldn't the first non-X thing die without any offspring?

DF

Originally posted by DragonFriend
This discussion made me think of a question.
If we all evolved from the same starting point, why are there different species? A dog can't mate with a cat and produce offspring. If life started off as species X, wouldn't the first non-X thing die without any offspring?

DF

First of all, early organisms did reproduce in the way that you describe.

Second, evolution is far more gradual then that (even with punctuated equilibria). Offspring are not much different than their parents. It isn't as if a some early hominid had two kids, a chimp and a human.

Originally posted by DragonFriend
This discussion made me think of a question.
If we all evolved from the same starting point, why are there different species? A dog can't mate with a cat and produce offspring. If life started off as species X, wouldn't the first non-X thing die without any offspring?

DF

It's not a bad question. During the early evolution of life there may have been several competing life models (i.e. possible multiple origins) which is certainly suggested by the existance of the archae, a distinctly odd group of organisms. However, the prokaryotes won over, and around 2 billion years ago a new form of life, the eukaryotes evolved. Thus, we pretty much all come from the sam ground stock. The reason for differences is really twofold, the first is a heterogenous environment. Resources are never spread equally across any area. The solar incidence here in New Zealand and that in Scotland are quite different. In winter, the day length here maybe around 10 hours and the temperature rarely falls below zero, in Aberdeen in Scotland the wintertime day length is around 6 hours, and the temperature is rarely above zero. These different conditions have differring organisms because those organisms are better evolved to those conditions and that requires genetic change. Kind of like the reason there are 4x4s, sports cars, busses and trucks - each has a different niche. Secondly is the fact that most organisms are not freely interbreeding due to geographic isolation. The world is a big place, an oak tree here in New Zealand cannot interbreed freely with an oak tree in Scotland (oak trees are in NZ because they were introduced by humans), thus gene transfer cannot occur. Any changes to the genes of a tree here will make it different to the trees in Scotland. It will evolve towards living at the more moderate temperatures here, whilst trees in Scotland will evolve towards living in the more seasonally extreme environment there. Since there is no way of genes becoming mingled between these two groups they'll start to genetically diverge. Eventually they'll be so different that even where they in the same place they couldn't interbreed.

twhitehead, good post. rec'd

Originally posted by scottishinnz
It's not a bad question. During the early evolution of life there may have been several competing life models (i.e. possible multiple origins) which is certainly suggested by the existance of the archae, a distinctly odd group of organisms. ...

I was under the impression that TOE had all life starting in one basic place and evolving from there. But, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that basic life became world wide before evolving very far. And then the geographic differences are what generated the different species. Is that correct?

DF

Originally posted by DragonFriend
I was under the impression that TOE had all life starting in one basic place and evolving from there. But, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that basic life became world wide before evolving very far. And then the geographic differences are what generated the different species. Is that correct?

DF

You've got to b careful here about merging different scientific theories and models. Evolution (which I think is what you mean by TOE - most people use this to mean Theories of Everything) does not give an explanation for the origin of life - only what happens to that life once it starts.
The origin of life is still a bit of a mystery for science - there are a few different models, but none of them have made any significant ground (yet) on building a useful picture of what might've kick started life on Earth. So, there may have been life originating in one place, or in many. In fact, if life begin via some natural process - which is an implicit assumption for the scientificall inclined - it might've begun independently in many locations on the early Earth.

And finally, geographic differences are one of the things that generates evolutionary differences over time.

Originally posted by DragonFriend
I was under the impression that TOE had all life starting in one basic place and evolving from there. But, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that basic life became world wide before evolving very far. And then the geographic differences are what generated the different species. Is that correct?

DF

DragonFriend look up this article on the late great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr who dedicated his life to answering the 'species problem': how could different species evolve from one common ancestor and as you say it is partly to do with geographic separation of isolates, please see on wiki and references therein 😉
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mayr
this is a very nice site too
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/a-z/Phyletic_gradualism.asp

I wrote this on another link:
Peripheral isolates of any species is the thing to grasp if you want to understand how new species arise. "Natura non facit saltum" was the classic dictum that nature does not make leaps implying a solely gradualistic mode for evolution.

We now know that macroevolutionary events appear to happen in an episodic pattern rather than this exclusively slow gradualistic pattern. The Cambrian explosion and the laying down of all the major body plans (bauplan) for the subsequent radiation of metazoans is a good example of a macroevolutionary event with just these properties. Climate crisis or catastrophism appears to wipe out large numbers of species leaving new niches to be exploited is a recurring theme in the story of how life evolved on this planet.

Gould and Eldredge's punctuated equilibrium model is often contrasted against the old Darwinian idea of phyletic gradualism but this is not a problem with the accepted fact that macroevolution has occurred merely a refinement of how these macroevolutionary events took place.

The creationists have of course seized on this to play to a scientifically uneducated crowd as catastrophism appears to atavistically feed into the psyche of these folk. Punctuated equilibrium was a development of Mayr's models of allopatric and sympatric speciation events where geographic isolation is crucial to how new species arise. Inbreeding and the accumulation of genes through consanguineous matings and the presence of rare alleles in new combinations very likely plays a major role in the genetics of how new species arise by deconstructing complex genotypes and regulatory/transcriptional networks unfurling new developmental programmes. This is very likely fatal in most instances but when selection favours a viable and reproducing entity by this mechanism it is destined to propagate further and on and on and over eons we begin to see how the original replicator of a self-replicating nucleic acid species could give rise to a sequoia, paramyxoviruses and apes all from a common ancestor in a unbroken ever branching tree.

A large interbreeding population has a homogenising effect however over geological deep time isolated populations can develop properties of "incipient species" and eventually become reproductively isolated and incapable of being homogenised back into the parental bauplan.

Originally posted by DragonFriend
I was under the impression that TOE had all life starting in one basic place and evolving from there. But, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that basic life became world wide before evolving very far. And then the geographic differences are what generated the different species. Is that correct?

DF

Best guess, essentially yes. There would be little selection benefit for specialising in the early evolution of life, although since there would have presumably been high rates of mutation (not so much of a problem for genetically 'simpler' organisms (or proto-organisms)) and little competition, huge variety could have arisen pretty early on. Indeed, the prokaryotes as a group (microbes) are far more genetically different from each other than the eukaryotes (which evolved under a set of conditions where selection pressures already existed, and were therefore, necessarily constrained to only a few variations, until the O2 conc. in the atmosphere got high enough to support the next big leap forward - multicellularity).

The simplest model to think of it is that proto-'life' came into being in one location and spread outwards from there (like rings on a pond) mutating and changing as it went, giving huge genetic variety over a geographically large area (with more similar organisms closer to each other, generally). Once this life had covered the oceans, competition kicked in, which reduced the number of 'flavours' of life down to a number of more genetically similar groups.

Originally posted by DragonFriend
This discussion made me think of a question.
If we all evolved from the same starting point, why are there different species? A dog can't mate with a cat and produce offspring. If life started off as species X, wouldn't the first non-X thing die without any offspring?

DF

Firstly species is nothing more than a human construct used for classification.
People have bread dogs into so many different forms that I am sure by now there are some that can no longer inter-bread (great dane and sausage dog?). This may be due to physical differences but in the case of horses and donkeys I believe it is due to genetic differences as well.
What I am saying is that speciation is an observable phenomena which has been observed directly.

Originally posted by twhitehead

People have bread dogs into so many different forms that I am sure by now there are some that can no longer inter-bread (great dane and sausage dog?).

A sausage dog would be the best dog "inter-bread", lol.

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
A sausage dog would be the best dog "inter-bread", lol.

Now you know what types of 'Hotdogs' the Chinese make.

Edit: That reminds me of the Chinese refugee that came to the States and bought a 'hotdog'.

He gave it one look, threw it away saying, "We don't eat dat part of dog". 😀

Originally posted by twhitehead
Firstly species is nothing more than a human construct used for classification.
People have bread dogs into so many different forms that I am sure by now there are some that can no longer inter-bread (great dane and sausage dog?). This may be due to physical differences but in the case of horses and donkeys I believe it is due to genetic differences as w ...[text shortened]... What I am saying is that speciation is an observable phenomena which has been observed directly.

If my understanding of biology is correct, then if a great dane and a saussage dog couldn't produce viable offspring (even if physically demanding!) then they could not be considered the same species. All breeds of dog are still Canis lupus familiaris, which is distinct from anything else (this might not be true for wolves, Canis lupus). Horses and donkeys can have offspring (ie mules), but the males are always infertile and the females almost always infertile. Hence they are different species. Lions and tigers can also have offspring, though they are always infertile. Anyway, if two animals can mate and regularly produce fertile offspring, then they are the same species, if they cannot then they are not.

Originally posted by corp1131
If my understanding of biology is correct, then if a great dane and a saussage dog couldn't produce viable offspring (even if physically demanding!) then they could not be considered the same species. All breeds of dog are still Canis lupus familiaris, which is distinct from anything else (this might not be true for wolves, Canis lupus). Hor ...[text shortened]... ly produce fertile offspring, then they are the same species, if they cannot then they are not.

I believe that dogs can breed with wolves, coyotes and jackals.