• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Merged Icebear's Evolution Thread

Red Baron Farms said:
Perhaps it is a simple spelling error? Confusing allotrophy with allotropy, allotrophs with allotropes?
Click to expand...

What I was referring to was autopolyploidy or perhaps paleopolyploidy. I know that there are certain plants that have multiple copies of chromosomes so the duplication is easy to see. Presumably, all larger chromosome sets were created by partial chromosome duplication (duplicating only one chromosome at a time) rather than entire chromosome set duplication as we see with plants.
 
Last edited:
It's amazing. All you have to do is turn a frog into a backhoe, and the frog turns into a backhoe. How cool is that? I'm sure convinced.

By the way, I'm a bit late, but where IS the city of Gdansk? If you asked Lech Walesa and Gunter Grass, would you get the same answer? It's in Poland now, but once it was in Kashubia, and once it was in Germany, and I think it was in Pomerania for a while, and there was a point where as Danzig I think it was not in anything else. Of course you can say it's always been in the same physical "where," but that question of Icebear's seems quite pertinent, because we cannot even be sure what is meant by the question, much less the answer.
 
Last edited:
Way back at the OP, what situations in the fruit fly experiment were employed to stress the flies into developing a different fly due to a changed environment that some of them were exposed to? Control group, test group kind of science thing scientists do, ya know.
With no change in the environment, any species has no stress that would develop a different version to suit the unchanging environment.
Crocodilians survived the dinosaur extinction essentially unchanged, because their environment didn't change enough for a super-croc to dominate the species.
There has to be an environmental reason for an evolutionary change. No reason, no change.
 
I Ratant said:
Way back at the OP, what situations in the fruit fly experiment were employed to stress the flies into developing a different fly due to a changed environment that some of them were exposed to?
Click to expand...
Typically you have a control group not exposed to any known mutigens. Then you have various experimental groups exposed to one or more chemicals you suspect of being mutigenous. Fruit flies have some fairly well-known mutations that are fairly obvious (if it grows an extra set of wings, you can tell pretty easilyi!), making them useful for this sort of study. They also have relatively high mutation rates on their own, or at least it seemed that way to me back when I was talking to people doing these experiments, so you need the control group to test for spontaneous mutations with no environmental cause.

Crocodilians survived the dinosaur extinction essentially unchanged, because their environment didn't change enough for a super-croc to dominate the species.
Click to expand...
Well....kinda. They'd already gone through a culling process that they'd never recovered from, and the only ones left by the Cretaceous were the ones that were pretty extinction-resistant anyway (anyone who wasn't was already killed off). Triassic crocodilians are really cool, and it's almost disapointing that the dinosaurs won out in some ways.
 
I Ratant said:
There has to be an environmental reason for an evolutionary change. No reason, no change.
Click to expand...

Woops, missed this part. This is simply not true! A great deal of evolution (though exactly how much is still an open question) is simply random. It's one of the major findings in evolutionary biology in the past few decades: in order to determine what environmental change caused some evolutionary change you must first establish THAT an environmental change caused that evolutionary change. We have a number of null hyoptheses to test such claims against.
 
Dinwar said:
Woops, missed this part. This is simply not true! A great deal of evolution (though exactly how much is still an open question) is simply random.
Click to expand...

I assume you are talking about gene drift where the genes that make up a population change over time due to nothing more than random inheritance. This is theoretically true. However, it is difficult to come up with a good example that is not related to mating preference or environmental adaptation. Take the group of Siberian Snow Sheep, North American Stone, Dall's, and Bighorn Sheep. Is the variation due primarily to gene drift?

It seems doubtful to me that this would be responsible for more than a small amount of evolution.
 
icebear said:
Evolution is an ideological doctrine masquerading as a science theory.
Click to expand...

We know species change over time. We call that evolution. We know DNA variations are the blueprint for the changes, and that selection pressures eliminate unfit variations. We call that the theory of evolution.

What's wrong with it, specifically ?
 
barehl said:
I assume you are talking about gene drift where the genes that make up a population change over time due to nothing more than random inheritance.
Click to expand...
Actually, I'm talking about this:

Dinwar said:
It's one of the major findings in evolutionary biology in the past few decades: in order to determine what environmental change caused some evolutionary change you must first establish THAT an environmental change caused that evolutionary change.
Click to expand...

barehl said:
However, it is difficult to come up with a good example that is not related to mating preference or environmental adaptation.
Click to expand...
There are two potential reasons for this: either random effects are unimportant, or they are underreported. As I said in the quote above, it's not necessarily wrong to say that they don't happen very often--but this must be demonstrated, not merely assumed.

If you want to see the power of randomness in evolution, examine bottlenecks. Not the cause of them--the actual cause is usually environmental, but is always irrelevant. What I'm talking about is the effects. Bottlenecks increase the importance of random events in the evolution of a species, because any individual random event represents a much higher percentage of the events impacting that species than it would without the bottleneck. Think of it this way: if one mutation occurs in a species with 500 members it's a much more significant event than in a species of 50,000.
 
Can the forum be reconfigured so that if an originator of a thread does not post to that thread with a certain frequency the thread dies?
 
Puppycow said:
So at a minimum, the entire [fruit fly] life cycle from one generation of eggs to the next generation of eggs is at least 10 days, and usually more.

[...snip...]

In 100 years, you could get about 3650 generations. In 10 years, only 365.
Click to expand...
I haven't read the whole thread, so I may be repeating things, but what always amazes me is the basic inability of these creationists to use numbers.

So fruitflies managed not to evolve into something else in 4000 generations, whereas humans, in the last 4000 generations, (let's be absurdly generous, say 30 years per generation) evolved all the way from from "anatomically modern humans", to umm...



Sorry, lost my train of thought there.
 
Last edited:
H'ethetheth said:
I haven't read the whole thread, so I may be repeating things, but what always amazes me is the basic inability of these creationists to use numbers.

So fruitflies managed not to evolve into something else in 4000 generations, whereas humans, in the last 4000 generations, (let's be absurdly generous, say 30 years per generation) evolved all the way from from "anatomically modern humans", to umm...



Sorry, lost my train of thought there.
Click to expand...
.
What environmental factor would drive the fruit fly's evolution?
The introduction of GMO fruit?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom