LK, would you care to comment? *I'm expanding my thinking about evolution but I can't buy the whole concept.
*
I follow along with the idea that it is exciting to look at embryology and to consider that if evolution happens, it happens here. *I can also see that there have been many discoveries including what the video calls the "recipe" for evolution. *But they took a "mouse gene" (something that turns on the 'make an eye' switch) *and put it into a fly and a fly's compound eye was produced, not the eye of a mouse (which would have been really surprising).
*
So it seems to me that although we do know more and more (and I imagine that knowledge comes from the various DNA and Genome studies) we still have a lot to learn.
*
Hello Sparrow,
Sorry for taking so long to get back to you on this. I found the video interesting, but because of its shortness regarded more like an abstract of a paper, introducing the central concepts if the paper and the conclusions reached.*
Hox genes appear to be important evidence for evolutionary relationships amongst the variety of life because of their ubiquity and the fact that relatively uncomplicated changes (mutations) in these genes can have dramatic effects that are not seen in many other genetic mutations, producing easily seen phenotypic changes. However, rather than their simple ubiquity as an indicator for life's shared heritage, it is the dramatic changes that hox gene mutations can lead to that seems to be evidence for evolutionary change: because *they can (relatively speaking) be so easily changed with significantphenotypiceffects, they seem to lend themselves inevitably to a major role in leading to evolutionary variation.
The evidence from developmental embryology further underlines this conclusion. Limb buds and pelvises in snake embryos - which may shrink or even vanish completely as the embryo continues to grow - are powerful evidence of the evolutionary heritage of these organisms. So when all the various threads of evidence are taken into account - the impact of HOX * genes, morphology, molecular genetic data, morphology, the nested hierarchy, the fossil record, biogeography, homologies, atavisms, vestigial features and probably a bunch of others *I've probably forgotten - the fact of evolution and common ancestry seems impossible to avoid.
*
The biggest problems I have with the idea of common design is that it seems to presume a designer who is limited in a way that, conventionally, the Christian God is not seen to be. Why would this omniscient, omnipotent creator be constrained to - metaphorically speaking - need to go into his backyard workshop and rummage in his various boxes of bits in order to make all primates look, to an hypothetical interstellar visitor, pretty much all the same when he could have made chimps, orangutans, gorillas and humans as different as he wanted. Also, the argument of common design seems to put the proponent of this idea in the position not only of knowing God's mind, but also of limiting God's creative powers to those of a metaphorical garage tinkerer. There seems no reason - other than a need to adhere to an idiosyncratically literalist interpretation of certain parts (but not all) of the Bible - not to postulate a much more likely scenario for such a divine creative force of simply setting up the conditions from which life could originate and develop entirely naturalistically, evolution being the mechanism for driving this development; a mechanism simultaneously powerful and immensely effective.
