• 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.

Something puzzling me regarding testing of evolution

Sunstar

Unregistered
S
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
123
I am a layman in all respects and i am confused a little by certain evolutionary theories. We know that once there were mammals that devolved back into fish and that fossil records are based on skeletons and not necessarily biological processes.

So i wanted to know what a clone was. Are clones built from DNA? And is it not true that DNA can be extracted from bones? Inside the cell is the DNA, and a piece of bone contains cellular properties, hence it must contain the DNA too? Is that right?

Then shouldn't it be possible to clone any ancient species with skeletal tissue in a laboratory? I don't see why not. You could find the different species in the bones, the different bacteria, and date them, and then find the original DNA and repduce the bacteria or organism.

And you could build up a zoo of extinct organisms and animals and check their evolutionary trends very well in order to determine the exact lineage properly. This could rule out or rule in the sudden appearance of mutations along the evolutionary lineage.

The implications for sudden mutations is quite important but not so important in the bigger scheme of things.
 
Sunstar said:
I am a layman in all respects and i am confused a little by certain evolutionary theories. We know that once there were mammals that devolved back into fish and that fossil records are based on skeletons and not necessarily biological processes.

So i wanted to know what a clone was. Are clones built from DNA? And is it not true that DNA can be extracted from bones? Inside the cell is the DNA, and a piece of bone contains cellular properties, hence it must contain the DNA too? Is that right?

Then shouldn't it be possible to clone any ancient species with skeletal tissue in a laboratory? I don't see why not. You could find the different species in the bones, the different bacteria, and date them, and then find the original DNA and repduce the bacteria or organism.

And you could build up a zoo of extinct organisms and animals and check their evolutionary trends very well in order to determine the exact lineage properly. This could rule out or rule in the sudden appearance of mutations along the evolutionary lineage.

The implications for sudden mutations is quite important but not so important in the bigger scheme of things.
Click to expand...
DNA begins to degrade the second the source dies, for cloning you need perfect and 'viable dna'
you may remember that in Jurassic park they accounted for this problem by using frog dna to fill in the gaps
;)

p.s. no mammal has devolved back into fish,
 
1. Fossils are not bones, they're mineral deposits where the bones used to be.

2. No mammal has ever "devolved" back into a fish. Where are you getting this erroneous idea?

3. This belongs in the Science forum.
 
Sunstar said:
We know that once there were mamals that devolved back into fish
Click to expand...

Where in the world did you hear that from?


Then shouldn't it be possible to clone any ancient species with skeletal tissue in a laboratory? I don't see why not. You could find the different species in the bones, the different bacteria, and date them, and then find the original DNA and repduce the bacteria or organism.
Click to expand...


As Marduk pointed out, you only get fragments from ancient DNA. The problem with trying to substitute other animals' DNA like they did in Jurassic Park is that you need a master blueprint of what the extinct creature's DNA looked like in order to know what to fill in. But we will never have that blueprint.

Steve S
 
Vortigern99 said:
2. No mammal has ever "devolved" back into a fish. Where are you getting this erroneous idea?
Click to expand...
I'm hoping he is confusing Whales with fish, if he isn't then its complete woo. If he is then he needs to study whales a tad more
:D
 
Sunstar said:
So i wanted to know what a clone was. Are clones built from DNA? And is it not true that DNA can be extracted from bones? Inside the cell is the DNA, and a piece of bone contains cellular properties, hence it must contain the DNA too? Is that right?

Then shouldn't it be possible to clone any ancient species with skeletal tissue in a laboratory? I don't see why not. You could find the different species in the bones, the different bacteria, and date them, and then find the original DNA and repduce the bacteria or organism.
Click to expand...

DNA will degrade rapidly upon death. By the time you're left with just the bones, you'll be left with fragments that will be, on average, less than 100 base pairs long. You will get a few longer ones, but they will be few and far between, and you have a snowballs' chance in hell of getting a piece 1000 base pairs in length.

However, to fully clone a being, you need a full set of chromosomes, up to ~250 million base pairs in length (for humans).

This is assuming you can perfectly purify the DNA from other waste and add the necessary coiling proteins (chromatines) back to it, which is currently beyond our technology, I believe. It is one thing that probably could be developed, but since 100% yield is highly unrealistic, you'll automatically need more copies - probably many more copies.

In short: because DNA degrades pretty much with all the rest of the body, it's not possible to clone a being that has been dead for very long.
If the being was frozen immediately upon death, there is a chance you might get something useful.

McHrozni
 
Our revered ancestors that we call fish came up on land and became mammals.
Some mammals went back into the sea... pakicetus for one, and -adapted- to the different environment by losing their legs, gaining flippers, but are still mammals.
Nothing 'devolves'.
Once nature tosses out a body plan, that particular body is lost forever.
Something else might find it can survive with a similar body plan, but it will be a different animal, just adapted to fit an environment that might be different than the one it started out in.
 
In the future we may be able to recreate genomes of extinct organisms. We aren't that far from it. Growing an organism from designer DNA isn't that far off either. But we aren't there yet for either of those two feats.

I don't quite get the OP question about clones and evolution theory. There is no contradiction there.
 
Sunstar said:
Then shouldn't it be possible to clone any ancient species with skeletal tissue in a laboratory? I don't see why not. You could find the different species in the bones, the different bacteria, and date them, and then find the original DNA and repduce the bacteria or organism.
Click to expand...

We currently dont have the technology to clone extinct creatures, even when viable DNA is avaliable. We have some excellent samples of DNA from the Tasmanian Tiger, which only went extinct in the 1930's - To date all efforts to bring this animal back have failed.
 
OK, i like McH and Ginger and the last poster's posts. I didn't mean to say that once a species was set on a course it didn't revert again. But yes, as someone pointed out, it was a type of whale. So if you would be so kind as to debunk the whale one, we could end this thread, or perhaps give it fuel in a kind of developing biogenetic cloning topic. Because as was said, and which i was half thinking of, maybe in the future we could isolate certain type of genetic codes to build organisms or even animals from them, and then track the evolutionary lineage more closely.
 
Ginger, there is no contradiction between clones and evolution theory. If that seemed apparent to you, it wasn't to me or maybe other people?

I merely said that if clones come from DNA then the DNa can be extracted from bones and then cloned.
 
McHrozni said:
Depending on what the word "devolves" means. Some organisms grew into simpler forms than their ancestors as time passed.

McHrozni
Click to expand...

There is no devolution in evolution.
Sometimes 'evolution' is confused with such things as greater complexity, or better, or more, or cleverer but that is erroneous.
A tapeworm got to be what it is by the same process as humans: it evolved.
 
there is no evidence that DNA is subject to a deteriorating process over time in bones. This totally conflicts with the idea that a certain configuration of chemicals makes a living organism.
 
Sunstar said:
But yes, as someone pointed out, it was a type of whale. So if you would be so kind as to debunk the whale one, we could end this thread.
Click to expand...

All whales evolved from land dwelling mammals. What is there to debunk?
It was the claim that fish evolved fom mammals that needed debunking, and that's been done.
 
Sunstar said:
there is no evidence that DNA is subject to a deteriorating process over time in bones. This totally conflicts with the idea that a certain configuration of chemicals makes a living organism.
Click to expand...

No, the two are not mutually exclusive.
 
kerikiwi said:
There is no devolution in evolution.
Sometimes 'evolution' is confused with such things as greater complexity, or better, or more, or cleverer but that is erroneous.
A tapeworm got to be what it is by the same process as humans: it evolved.
Click to expand...

Your analysis is stubbornly biased. You say that devolution doesn't exist even though you put it in inverted commas as if you didn't understand what was meant by it in the first place. no, devolution is the opposite of evolution in terms of progress. Natural selection doesn't specify that species that are unfit die off immediately. Indeed, there is good reason to think that species do revert to primitive forms.

It is comforting to think that evolution proceeds in a linear fashion but it is simply not even true.
 
kerikiwi said:
All whales evolved from land dwelling mammals. What is there to debunk?
It was the claim that fish evolved fom mammals that needed debunking, and that's been done.
Click to expand...


What you have just said here is a complete oxymoron.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom