Creation vs. Evolution

[lamont]

Viruses are known to be very adept at mutation/adaptation. It's what makes them so difficult to defeat. No creationist argues against adaptation. What they argue against is small steps in genus/species leading to giant leaps into completely different classes, families, etc. In any case, the SIV/HIV is still a virus. You have not proven macro-evolution.

macro-evolution takes longer than the order of 10,000 years of human history to produce difference classes and families. you're looking at the end result of 4 billion years of evolution which is 5-6 orders of magnitude more time than all of human history. and within human history speciation has probably occured, but its difficult to prove since we would have to be able to assert that some animal which did not exist 10,000 years ago does exist now -- and proving a negative back to times when records were not well kept is impossible. we can do it for viruses like HIV because of their rapid evolution. for everything else it'll probably take another 1,000-10,000 years to start to scratch at the level of proof that you'd like. feel free to refuse to extrapolate and remain completely ignorant though...

 

[wreckchick]

GM, are you going to respond to my request for sources? Are you going to refute the notion that adaptation is an evolutionary process?

lamont, you can't forget that GM can't see macro-evolution because he's only dealing with < 10,000 years of earth history to draw from.

I so wish I could put up some photos for everyone showing some excellent depositional layering in floodplain. It would make stratigraphic dating a lot easier to explain.

R

 

[Warthaug]

I
A side note, I didn't want to bring it up really, but here goes... Chimps have 48 chromosomes to a humans 46 and share 98% of our DNA. Donkeys and horses have 62 and 64 chromosomes respectively and share less common DNA (the number escapes me at the moment) and can produce offspring. An experiment that will never take place but has crossed plenty of minds would be to see if chimps and humans can hybridize and the commonly accepted theoretical answer is yes. It would be ethically unsound to try it, but my money is on the probability it would work.

R

It's a little more complicated then that.

In order to be able to reproduce you need for the chromosomes from each parent to be able to pair up (pairing is based on the DNA sequence). If chromosomes can pair up, chances are you can make offspring. If chromosomes cannot pair up cells cannot successfully divide, and as such you cannot produce offspring.

In the case of donkey and horse chromosomes the major difference is that one of the chromosomes in horses has split to form two in the donkey (I may have that backward, it may have been a fusion of two into one). But aside from that the structure of the chromosomes is pretty much the same. As such the horse and donkey chromosomes can still align, and thus you can make mules.

Humans and chimps are a different story. As you mention, there is very little difference between us and chimps within genes - there is more of a genetic difference between some breeds of dogs then there is between humans and chimps. But unlike donkeys and horses, the differences between our & chimp chromosomes is quite a bit different. Rather than having one or two chromosomes which have split or merged, it looks more like someone took a pair of scissors, randomly cut our DNA into lots of pieces, and then randomly glued them together again. As such, if you map human chromosomes onto chimp ones, you'll find that each chimp chromosome consists of 2-4 "chunks" of different human chromosomes "glued" together.

Because of this you cannot get proper alignment of the chromosomes, and thus cannot get successful reproduction. For rather obvious ethical reasons this experiment has not been done, but we have done a similar experiment which basically tells us the same thing.

What we do is take a chimp cell and a human cell, and force them to fuse together (say, 2 blood cells, or liver cells, or whatever we have on hand). If the chromosomes in that cell are capable of aligning for proper cell reproduction, you'll see that the daughter cells contain all of the original chromosomes. If the chromosomes cannot align properly you'll see that the daughter cells contain only some of the chromosomes, and you'll find fusions, deletions and translocations within the chromosomes. Often, the resulting daughter cells are cancerous; that is, if they don't just end up dieing.

Bryan

 

[Warthaug]

In the midst of the bazillion posts in this thread, I completely forgot to rebutt an arguement I saw many pages back. The arguement was that people can't interbreed with close relatives because we're too genetically similar and it cause problems while other creatures can because there is more genetic diversity. This is false.

In fact, we can interbreed in the worst possible way which would be a parent/child cross and chances are nothing bad would happen. The only way offspring have negative chromosomal impacts is when there is a flaw in the genetic material that cause the bad thing. Consequently, if the mutation causes a GOOD thing, it's the fastest way to create more individuals with that positive trait. It's actually called line breeding and it's pretty popular in livestock and other domestic animals as well as in horticulture.

R

Absolutely correct. Problem with human inbreeding is that each and every one of us carries ~6 mutations which would be lethal if both our chromosomes carried the same mutation. On top of that there is probably another 30 or so mutation in each of us, which if found on each chromosome, would cause serious developmental defects. Normally, the chance of meeting someone with the same mutation is extremely rare, but if you're "keeping it in the family" the likelihood of your kids getting one of these bad genes on both chromosomes is pretty high. Hence, why closely-related couples tend to be somewhat infertile (lots of pregnancies end early due to those lethal genes) and have high rates of mental and physical disorders (thanx to those developmental genes finding their pairs).

Inbreeding has been a powerful tool for us scientists - we've created numerous strains of mice which are genetically identical - meaning that non-related mice have the exact same DNA (i.e. they are effectively twins). For example, you can take any C56/Bl6 mouse in, say the USA, and compare its genetic sequence to a C57/Bl6 in, say Germany, and you'd find that they are 100% identical. This is extremely useful as it ensures regularity between experiments, and between researchers. It's also very useful for when we add or remove genes from mice, as we know exactly what that mouse started with.

Bryan

 

[lamont]

lamont, you can't forget that GM can't see macro-evolution because he's only dealing with < 10,000 years of earth history to draw from.

I can't even wrap my brain around that one. I mean you can look at different H-R diagrams for clusters of stars and see a spectrum of ages that goes well beyond 10,000 years and you can look at the spectral lines in the stars to determine the elemental composition of the stars and its all uniformly consistantly -- globular clusters look just like they were created about 10+ billion years ago according to well understood laws of nuclear physics. You look at them and all the massive stars have peeled off and long since become supernovas / white dwarfs and you can come up with an age for the entire cluster based on the mass of the stars which have no yet peeled off to become red giants, and you can see in the red/blue giant branches over 10,000 years of stellar evolution right there.

But God is clearly just trying to trick astrophysicists and it was all made 10,000 years ago to look like it was 10 billion plus years old...

 

[wreckchick]

But God is clearly just trying to trick astrophysicists and it was all made 10,000 years ago to look like it was 10 billion plus years old...

Now you're starting to get it!

Bryan, thank you very much for clearing up the chimp/human cross-breeding issue. We used to talk about it in college, but coming from anthropology is not the same as speaking on a biological level.

I was more trying to point out that close breeding is only a problem if there are mutations, which we have, but more closely related individuals can interbreed with no consequence if the mutations are limited or non-existent as is the case with the mice you describe and cheetahs!

R

 

[redacted]

Please remember, for some, creation is not a theory or a hypothesis. It is an axiom.

 

[H2Andy]

The arguement was that people can't interbreed with close relatives because we're too genetically similar and it cause problems while other creatures can because there is more genetic diversity. This is false.

that was me (please keep in mind i am not an expert on any of these subjects)

i understand that the closer related the parents are, the more at risk a child is of receiving double recessive genes, which puts the child at risk of a number of diseases and genetic conditions which are "dormant" until two recessive genes pair.

the same is true of cheetahs, which is why they have reproductive difficulties and are very succeptible to some diseases.

also, don't forget there's ample proof that incest and close-relative sex leads to all sorts of nasty things, such as the genetic diseases of the Egyptian kings and various other monarchies that have chosen to "keep it in the family."

 

[wreckchick]

I was saying it was false that non-humans are less related than we are, not that I recommend dating your sister.

R

 

[Kevrumbo]

"We are all made of the stuff of stars"

(Everybody is a Star, Sly & the Family Stone;
Shining Star, Earth Wind & Fire)