Just when you thought it couldn't get any "better" ...

[Jorge]

Jorge,

What about the fact organisms CAN evolve through NS+RM to adapt to a CHANGING environment or to become MORE FIT in an existing environment

REQUIRES

that organisms MUST evolve through NS+RM and therefore de-adapt to a STATIC environment for which they are already the MOST FIT?




Jim

See my last post, just above, and try applying some honest reasoning.

Jorge

[seer]

Seer ...

But hold on a minute!!! It's not just a 1.8 billion-year, perfectly well-adapted ecosystem which would be required for such an incredible stasis - an ecosystem that was so stable (stable beyond reason!) that NO environmental opportunities (for Evolution) ever came up in those 1.8 billion years.

No, it's not just that. We must ALSO have no significant reproductive mutations of any kind let alone the accumulation of any of those mutations. IOW, even granting the absurd notion that an environment could remain "invariant" for 1.8 billion years, we also have to concede that after 1.8 billion years worth of generations (gazillions of generations!) there were NO REPRODUCTIVE MUTATIONS that carried forward.

Yes, I find this hard to believe.

[oxmixmudd]

See my last post, just above, and try applying some honest reasoning.

Jorge

Jorge,

'honesty' would be to admit the point. There is no requirement in evolution that animals change. From the beginning of the theory, changes are brought about by changes in the environment selecting from within the natural variation found in the species. With the discovery of DNA and genetics we found out how new elements could be introduced beyond what is available currently in a given population.

So for your (or others) enlightenment:

Why would natural selection 'select' for something other than what produces greater or equal fitness in an environment?

If you understand Darwin's proposal, and the current theory, you understand the answer is - it won't. So if an organism's environment doesn't change (which includes changes in potential predators or food supply) in a way that impacts the fitness of an organism, then there is no selective pressure to drive change in the organism itself, and that species' DNA will be locked into a random walk around that fitness plateau. If that random walk produces no observable morphological change, then the life form shows 'no change' in its fossil record. It is that simple, and someone as 'brilliant' as you think yourself to be should have no trouble 'honestly' assessing that fact.

Jim

[seer]

Jorge,

'honesty' would be to admit the point. There is no requirement in evolution that animals change. From the beginning of the theory, changes are brought about by changes in the environment selecting from within the natural variation found in the species. With the discovery of DNA and genetics we found out how new elements could be introduced beyond what is available currently in a given population.

So for your (or others) enlightenment:

Why would natural selection 'select' for something other than what produces greater or equal fitness in an environment?

If you understand Darwin's proposal, and the current theory, you understand the answer is - it won't. So if an organism's environment doesn't change (which includes changes in potential predators or food supply) in a way that impacts the fitness of an organism, then there is no selective pressure to drive change in the organism itself, and that species' DNA will be locked into a random walk around that fitness plateau. If that random walk produces no observable morphological change, then the life form shows 'no change' in its fossil record. It is that simple, and someone as 'brilliant' as you think yourself to be should have no trouble 'honestly' assessing that fact.

Jim

So Jim you believe that there have been environments that have remained static for 200 million years?

[firstfloor]

The null hypothesis is saying, if you compare it with a mechanical system, that a ball rolls into a valley and stays put. It is not difficult to understand. If the environment were to move to some other nearby state and eventually return we would expect the ball to move with it and return to the same spot. There are selection pressures in the niche environment that rein in genetic drift even while selection and genetic drift are continuous processes.

[oxmixmudd]

Seer ...

Here's what the Apostle Charles Darwin said in his 'Origins', 1861, p.88 :

"It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were."
.
.
.
Note that , "natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising ... every variation, even the slightest ..."


So now we are supposed to believe (yes, the word is BELIEVE) that the ecosystem of this organism was so perfectly well-adapted, so perfectly unvarying for 1.8 billions years (how many days and hours would that be?), that every variation, even the smallest, made utterly no difference, and which completely undermined - for long geological ages - the gradual process which Darwin assured us was "silently and insensibly working at every opportunity."

But hold on a minute!!! It's not just a 1.8 billion-year, perfectly well-adapted ecosystem which would be required for such an incredible stasis - an ecosystem that was so stable (stable beyond reason!) that NO environmental opportunities (for Evolution) ever came up in those 1.8 billion years.

No, it's not just that. We must ALSO have no significant reproductive mutations of any kind let alone the accumulation of any of those mutations. IOW, even granting the absurd notion that an environment could remain "invariant" for 1.8 billion years, we also have to concede that after 1.8 billion years worth of generations (gazillions of generations!) there were NO REPRODUCTIVE MUTATIONS that carried forward.


It's as I wrote earlier - these people want it not just both ways, they want it EVERY way - they will simply never, ever give up their beliefs - belies that are comparable to those of the most fervent Snake God worshipers found on planet Earth.

In short, a person has to completely give up logic, reason and intellectual integrity in order to be an Evolutionist.


Jorge

What Jorge is NOT considering is how long 1.8 billion years is. Just 10% of that time encompasses the majority of the time of the dinosaurs AND the entire reign of the mammals.

Is that not the problem, you ask?

No. Let's look at the other side of that same coin. This particular environment is a bit common and has likely been on the planet many billions of years. And this life form had, in just 10% of the time it's been around, more that sufficient opportunity to get itself nearly perfectly adapted to that environment. For perspective, this 10% is a span of time equal to the majority of the time of the dinosaurs AND the mammals!

Now, this kind of static adaption is a bit rare, but we have similar examples even in much more complex life forms - the crocodile and the shark to name two. These have found fairly static forms in MUCH less time.

It is then not so crazy after all Jorge. And you could figure it out IF you would think about it from the standpoint of possibility rather than from the standpoint of impossibility.

Jim

[phank]

And I think you would see more than a little change over 200 million years.

At the DNA level, I'm sure you would. At the "side-effect of a colony of microbes" level, not necessarily.

[oxmixmudd]

So Jim you believe that there have been environments that have remained static for 200 million years?

Consider the context of the word seer. In this context it means unchanged in terms of the adaptations necessary to be at peak relative fitness for a given organism.

And the answer to that is clearly yes. The crocodile has been around for 200 million years, and relative to it's correlation between morphology as preserved in the fossil record and its capacity to survive to reproduce, it's environment has remained effectively static.

But taking your out of context thrust and turning it back upon you: of course, the 'environment' at the center of some asteroids and meteorites has remained unchanged for more that 4 billion years, or more that 20X the 200 million years you find so impossible to imagine.

Jim

[seer]

But taking your out of context thrust and turning it back upon you: of course, the 'environment' at the center of some asteroids and meteorites has remained unchanged for more that 4 billion years, or more that 20X the 200 million years you find so impossible to imagine.

Jim

Asteroids and meteorites are irrelevant (they are dead rocks floating in space). Look, from what I have been reading this all goes back to when the continents were forming and the world's climate was drastically changing. It is hard to imagine that any earthly environment or ecosystem did not experience profound change in that period of time.

[Jorge]

Yes, I find this hard to believe.

Okay, I admit it, you are a much nicer, more diplomatic man than I am.

Me, I pull no punches. It's not just "hard to believe" (as you say with your measured diplomacy).
It is outright PREPOSTEROUS to expect that any rational, honest person would accept their idiotic lunacy. Yet they expect demand it without so much as flinching. The mind boggles!

Jorge

[oxmixmudd]

Asteroids and meteorites are irrelevant (they are dead rocks floating in space). Look, from what I have been reading this all goes back to when the continents were forming and the world's climate was drastically changing. It is hard to imagine that any earthly environment or ecosystem did not experience profound change in that period of time.

I hope you read my entire post and not just the last line. The last line was in kind relative to a context-free approach - as in your original question. When we speak of an environment being static IN THIS CONTEXT, we are not speaking of NO CHANGE in the absolute sense, we speaking of change as it affects the fitness of the organism. I gave you an example of a much higher level organism that has remained (essentially) unchanged for 200 million years - the crocodile. These are bacterial colonies where changes in morphology are much less obvious. So consider again what unchanged means in that context. It means that the remnants of the bacterial colonies look essentially the same as they did 1.8 billion years ago. Does that mean the environments remained unchanged across all that time? NO! it simply means that across all that time, these types of bacteria found themselves well adapted to all the environments they are found in, at least in terms of the kinds of colonies they form. These environments did not change as they related to the organism's fitness.

So why is that so hard to believe? There was water then. How different does a bacterial colony look as it adapts to changes in oxygen percentage, mineral content or salinity? Those changes would have been gradual over billions of years. There WAS water on the earth even 3 billion years ago. So a water environment has been around a long, long time. Is there a reason to believe these changes would force these kinds of colonies to NEED to change the kinds of colonies they produce to survive those changes? Perhaps these kinds of colonies allow the bacteria to insulate themselves from the environment in such a way they don't NEED to adapt to survive and thus there is no selective pressure to change AND significant pressure NOT to change as regards the type of colony formed.

Science follows the evidence. When the evidence flies against what is assumed to be, a scientists asks questions about what is assumed to be relative to what is observed. Often that leads to the discovery of flaws in the assumptions and/or to a new theory that explains all the evidence. What a scientists should NEVER do is assume he already knows the answer and so the contrary evidence can be ignored. In THIS case, it calls into question the assumption life MUST change over time in an observable way. An assumption not necessarily part of the original theory and which I pointed out to Jorge and which he is simply unable to grasp.

Jorge can't learn anything new about evolution because all he searches for are arguments he thinks he can use to debunk what he already KNOWS is not true. In him there is no real understanding of the theory.

Perhaps you can do better.


Jim

[seer]

These are bacterial colonies where changes in morphology are much less obvious. So consider again what unchanged means in that context. It means that the remnants of the bacterial colonies look essentially the same as they did 1.8 billion years ago. Does that mean the environments remained unchanged across all that time? NO! it simply means that across all that time, these types of bacteria found themselves well adapted to all the environments they are found in, at least in terms of the kinds of colonies they form. These environments did not change as they related to the organism's fitness.

OK Jim, I can only process one or two points at a time. So did these microbes experience mutations over this time? Millions and perhaps billions of mutations?

[oxmixmudd]

OK Jim, I can only process one or two points at a time. So did these microbes experience mutations over this time? Millions and perhaps billions of mutations?

Most likely.

Jim

[klaus54]

And really Jim what environment stays static for 200 million years? And in the 200 million years the creature is still undergoing random mutations - correct?

Random mutations acted on by natural selection in a static environment (your incredulity notwithstanding) will tend to keep allele frequency close to the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. The only factor of change would be genetic drift which would generate speciation or extinction if enough standard deviations from equilibrium. This would be unusual to happen in a few generations.

It's really not that hard.

Random is random, chance is chance -- right, Seer?

One-note Nellie.

K54

[seer]

Most likely.

Jim

Yet these are very small creatures - single cell - correct? You would think that with all those mutations, for all those million of years, you would see some serious morphological changes. I mean it can't take that much to change the body plan of such creatures.