droopfeather said:
First of all victor, Chimps being similar means nothing. Lots of things look similar but are not related.
Also, you aren't showing me evolution anywhere. Where are the frogs turning into horses or something? Transitional fossils? Living evolving forms? You are doing a poor job.
No. Chimps 'being similar' does indeed mean little.
-But chimps being almost identical on the genetic scale certainly
does mean something. -Or are you implying that god just mesed with our DNA to allow chimps for a laugh when he was feeling lazy?
I listed several transitional fossils in the 'textbooks' thread. Go and have a look, by all means.
Living evolving forms? again, look up the Galapogos and lake Tanganika (I really must look up that spelling) isolated ecosystems and their progeny.
Look up the evolved resistence to antibiotics and insecticides of common diseases and bugs.
Evolution is the changing of one species to another or something along those means, correct? If that is right, you have shown 0 evidence.
The speciation of fruit flies has been observed in controlled circumstances and many other speciation events have been recorded.
I do hate cut-and-pasting, but here are some events you may investigate at your leisure:
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Evening Primrose (Oenothera gigas)
While studying the genetics of the evening primrose, Oenothera lamarckiana, de Vries (1905) found an unusual variant among his plants. O. lamarckiana has a chromosome number of 2N = 14. The variant had a chromosome number of 2N = 28. He found that he was unable to breed this variant with O. lamarckiana. He named this new species O. gigas.
Stephanomeira malheurensis Gottlieb (1973) documented the speciation of Stephanomeira malheurensis. He found a single small population (< 250 plants) among a much larger population (> 25,000 plants) of S. exigua in Harney Co., Oregon. Both species are diploid and have the same number of chromosomes (N = 8). S. exigua is an obligate outcrosser exhibiting sporophytic self-incompatibility. S. malheurensis exhibits no self- incompatibility and self-pollinates. Though the two species look very similar, Gottlieb was able to document morphological differences in five characters plus chromosomal differences. F1 hybrids between the species produces only 50% of the seeds and 24% of the pollen that conspecific crosses produced. F2 hybrids showed various developmental abnormalities.
Drosophila paulistorum Dobzhansky and Pavlovsky (1971) reported a speciation event that occurred in a laboratory culture of Drosophila paulistorum sometime between 1958 and 1963. The culture was descended from a single inseminated female that was captured in the Llanos of Colombia. In 1958 this strain produced fertile hybrids when crossed with conspecifics of different strains from Orinocan. From 1963 onward crosses with Orinocan strains produced only sterile males. Initially no assortative mating or behavioral isolation was seen between the Llanos strain and the Orinocan strains. Later on Dobzhansky produced assortative mating (Dobzhansky 1972).
^A fruit fly speciation event. Plants and fruit flies tend to get experimented on regarding speciation a fair bit.
Selection on Courtship Behavior in Drosophila melanogaster Crossley (1974) was able to produce changes in mating behavior in two mutant strains of D. melanogaster. Four treatments were used. In each treatment, 55 virgin males and 55 virgin females of both ebony body mutant flies and vestigial wing mutant flies (220 flies total) were put into a jar and allowed to mate for 20 hours. The females were collected and each was put into a separate vial. The phenotypes of the offspring were recorded. Wild type offspring were hybrids between the mutants. In two of the four treatments, mating was carried out in the light. In one of these treatments all hybrid offspring were destroyed. This was repeated for 40 generations. Mating was carried out in the dark in the other two treatments. Again, in one of these all hybrids were destroyed. This was repeated for 49 generations. Crossley ran mate choice tests and observed mating behavior. Positive assortative mating was found in the treatment which had mated in the light and had been subject to strong selection against hybridization. The basis of this was changes in the courtship behaviors of both sexes. Similar experiments, without observation of mating behavior, were performed by Knight, et al. (1956).
Flour Beetles (Tribolium castaneum) Halliburton and Gall (1981) established a population of flour beetles collected in Davis, California. In each generation they selected the 8 lightest and the 8 heaviest pupae of each sex. When these 32 beetles had emerged, they were placed together and allowed to mate for 24 hours. Eggs were collected for 48 hours. The pupae that developed from these eggs were weighed at 19 days. This was repeated for 15 generations. The results of mate choice tests between heavy and light beetles was compared to tests among control lines derived from randomly chosen pupae. Positive assortative mating on the basis of size was found in 2 out of 4 experimental lines.
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Becoming resistant to antibiotics or pesticides is not evolution.
If it occurs via natural selection in a breeding population exposed to such treatment, of course it is! Natural selection is the very bedrock of volutionary process, and the creation of dominant populations resistent to certain chemicals (and thus of altered internal metabolism) over unresistent populations is a prime example of natural selection. As shown in a couple of the above examples, such natural selection can then lead to speciation; the creation of separate breeeding populations. Evolution in action.
It is worth noting that speciation caused by behavioural or physiological factors preventing successful mating between populations is every bit as effective as speciation via incompatible genetic structure (producing infertile young) between populations. the result is the same; diverging separate population groups, which is demonstrative of evolution once more.
Mutatation is not evolution.
Of course not, but natural selection of certain mutations in specific environmental conditions in a separate population within a species
is.
You give me some documented transitional forms, fossils, or whatever else you can find.
Done. Look here and in the thread mentioned earlier.
Also, why is the world being here and being extremely complex not good evidence of God? No one has really explained that to me.
How does randomness produce a complex, orderly world?
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Explain, then I will give my side. kthx
Evolution by natural selection produces excessive complexity because it possesses a great many factors encouraging the development (or rather, established developments) of certain genetic sequences but has very few mechanisms for 'slimming out' or reducing the complexity of the genetic code or, in many cases, useless organs.
A person's appendix is an evolutionary remnant of a formerly useful organ, for example. Since it has become useless, it has receded (due to no natural selection favouring it's growth or continued working order), but has not vanished entirely. A designer would have removed such an unnecessary (and potentially lethal) organ, but the evolutionary process is largely blind.
In the same way, ceteceans (whales) have vestigal, useless, fingers and many animals have vestigal tails they have no use for. In both cases, a designer would simplify the design for extra reliability.
Our genetic code, DNA and RNA both, is chock-full of deactivated and useless genes. Such excess complexity is prevalent in an evolutionary system, where there is no major advantage to getting rid of unwanted genes if they are 'turned off' or made useless in some other way. As a result, there is no selection criteria favouring their disappearance, and they stay.
A designer would opt for simplicity and would not throw in unnecessary rubbish. Your car engine is not full of loose nuts, bolts and gravel in odd corners, is it?
Now by all means present the direct evidence for creationism by an omnipotent being. I don't want this to be a one-sided debate.
-Try to avoid pseudoscience like sun-shrinking etc. I'm sure you don't need telling, but you'd be surprised how many people use it.