Wander1963

First, let's be clear that the development of most different breeds of dogs isn't a result of natural selection, but rather human selection. Bloodhounds were bred to enhance and maximize their sense of smell. Bull terriers were bred to kill rats and, later, each other in pit fighting. Greyhounds were bred for speed; dachshunds were bred to pursue burrowing rodents; huskies were bred to pull dogsleds across miles of snow, etc. The list goes on and on.

And even more recently, many breeds of dogs have been bred to meet some "ideal" conformation at dog shows. For a while these "ideals" tended to create problems, such as the hip dysplasia in narrow-hipped German Shepherds. Fortunately, these damaging breeding trends have been recognized and are being walked back.

My point in bringing up dogs was to highlight the human influence on a species' development. If all the humans disappeared tomorrow, dogs would go feral. Many would die, but the tougher ones would survive. Great Danes might breed with German Shepherds, but not chihuahuas. We have artificially diverged dogs from their wolf origins into many breeds, and this is right on the edge of speciation - the point at which two populations cannot successfully breed.

(Having said that, I'd like to point out that many zoologists are now regarding speciation as an artifact of our human drive to classify and name everything. Back to dogs - the Great Danes can't breed with chihuahuas, but they can with a Labrador Retriever, which can with a terrier, which can breed with a chihuahua. So it's a spectrum, a continuum, in which one end can't breed with another, but both can with the middle.)

Darwin, in his Chapter 6, wondered about the lack of intermediate species - because he accepted the strict Linnaean classification of animals as separate species, though mutable through natural selection. We now have a bigger picture of life than was available to him, and we know that there are, and have been, many examples of intermediate species - especially across time. We can track the development of tyrannosaurs, for instance, from Daspletosaurus to Albertosaurus to T. rex - mainly an increase in size over the span of a few million years.

So Darwin's "missing intermediate forms" in many cases have indeed been found. If my hypothetical future paleontologist named Great Danes and chihuahuas as separate species of the dog family, based on their wildly divergent skeletons, the "intermediate forms" would be abundant.

MauiMoto Loc: Hawaii

Here's a chapter of geologist. You're not telling us anything we don't already know, I already have thousands of hours on both sides of the argument.

MauiMoto Loc: Hawaii

Talk about ridiculous crap, you believe we came from a rock. I don't care what you believe, you are the one who demonize people who believe we are created equal. Don't force your beliefs on us. So tell me, when everything is protected, and Monsanto controls all the food. What should the penalty be when someone burns a tree so they don't freeze to death when they can't afford heat, or refuses the mark so they can't buy any? You believe that the right to life is given by the state, so I'm sure I know the answer. Professing to be wise you have become fools.

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

Could you pass along the name and publisher of that book or magazine? If its from a magazine, which issue? Thank you.

MauiMoto Loc: Hawaii

Can't wait to see your pictures, I hope to see it myself someday. Buy this book while you are there, I'm sure they'll have it. Kent Hovind gave me this one. I'm only half way through mine and it has already answered questions I have had for decades.

Wander1963

I don't know what they've been telling you down at the Make America Hate Again rallies, but it's clearly some crazy stuff. Refuses the mark? Are you talking about some Antichrist fantasy? Because there's nothing like that in the Green New Deal. Nor about letting Monsanto control all the food. Nor about the right to life given by the state.

You need to stop listening to the crazy fools and do some real research - not just on far-right fringe websites.

By the way, who is your geologist and what is that book?

MauiMoto Loc: Hawaii

The book is 450 pages, the second image is the general layout of the book.
It covers different fields of science including genetics and astrophysics.

Wander1963

I said a RESPECTABLE GEOLOGIST. Walt Brown isn't a geologist, and no geologist in the world accepts his wacky "hydroplate theory." So no, that doesn't meet the standard of any objective proof.

Shutterbug57

So, in your dog example, what new genetic code info have humans introduced? Dog sperm and dog eggs, whether combined in the lab or naturally still produces dog babies. Different dams and sires may be chosen to accentuate different characteristics in the dog DNA, but you still get dogs every time.

I’m pretty sure that Darwin would not be satisfied with your dinosaurs got bigger, hence were a different species argument. Humans in the last 500 years got bigger, but are still humans. Largely this was due to nutrition changes - like in your finch example.

In all your examples you are confusing variations in kind, bigger dino’s & finches, dogs with different canine characteristics, with evolution. You have not answered my original question and shown me an example of one kind transforming into another kind as evolution requires.

Wander1963

Evolution is not based on human introduction of new genetic material. That's a recent development, as you obviously know. I doubt Darwin ever imagined direct manipulation of the genome would be possible. Evolution has been going on for hundreds of millions of years before humans existed.

Evolution is based on the accumulation of natural mutations in the genetic sequence - some beneficial, some negative - what used to be called genetic drift. Negative ones tend to die out; beneficial ones tend to prosper - what Darwin named natural selection.

In breeding different dogs for different characteristics, we have manipulated the canine gene pool - and to some extent artificially isolated breeds into separate gene pools through controlled breeding. (But not fully, because there are still plenty of mixed mutts out there.) If you were to put all the German Shepherds on one island, all the dachshunds on another, and so on, in a few thousand years you'd find that A) the dogs in each isolated population would have diversified to fill various niches, and B) there's a good likelihood that dogs from one island could no longer breed with those of another. They would have formed different species.

In nature, we've seen canines partitioned both by niche and geography, resulting in wolves, coyotes, foxes, dingoes, fennecs, dholes, jackals, and more. These are individual species, but all arose from the same canid ancestors. You can call them the same "kind" if it makes you happy, but that won't make crossbreeding viable.

The example of tyrannosaurs evolving into larger forms was deliberately brief, intending to show that speciation is, to some degree, a naming convention imposed on a continuum of organisms - in that example, a continuum across time rather than space or niche. I could have easily expanded the sample given to include older and more different forms such as Aublysodon, Lythronax, Alioramus, Gorgosaurus, Raptorex, and many more, but I thought three were sufficient to demonstrate the point. These quite demonstrably changed form as evolution requires - as humans also did, between Lucy and modern man.

Changes in the quality of nutrition will generally produce bigger and stronger individuals, as you mention, but that's individual development (ontogeny), not changes in the genome (phylogeny). In most cases, the five hundred years you mention aren't enough to see significant changes in the genome - though that finch study I referenced earlier, which you dismissed, actually was such a change. Such change usually takes tens of thousands of years, and there must be a survival pressure that makes the change beneficial. This is why we look to the fossil record, where we can compress time and see the changes across thousands of generations, or millions of years.

Wander1963

And here, for those brave enough to read it, is a detailed analysis of Walt Brown's book, "In the Beginning."

http://paleo.cc/ce/wbrown.htm

Still waiting for a respectable geologist...

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

interesting. I'll certainly take a look. I see that he has a PhD in mechanical engineering. What is his background in geology, genetics and astrophysics which are very different disciplines then mechanical engineering?

Wander1963

As far as there is any indication, he has no formal training in those fields. He apparently was an Army Ranger and held academic positions in the Air Force - both worth respect, but neither of which qualifies him in geology, genetics, or astrophysics.

He does seem to blissfully ignore some consequences of his postulated events - for example, he states that the waters bursting from under the earth would have had energy equivalent to 1,300 trillion 1-megaton bombs. This would have put enough energy into the biosphere to raise the temperature of the oceans to 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, which would have cooked Noah, his family, and all the animals in a matter of seconds. (In fact, the oceans would have boiled off, leaving the Earth a sterile and lifeless rock.)

For what it's worth, even prominent other young Earth creationists, including Answers in Genesis, find his ideas unbelievable.

He lists himself as the Director of the Center for Scientific Creation, a fine-sounding title until you learn that the Center has a staff of two - himself and his wife.

Walter Brown is the young Earth creationist equivalent of Erich von Daniken or Immanuel Velikovsky.

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

Whenever anyone claims expertise in any particular discipline I think it's reasonable to want to know their background and qualifications. I would expect to have that information if I was looking for a doctor to help me with a serious medical issue, or even a contractor to fix a structural deficiency in my house. I am always open to new ideas and different ways of thinking, but, I also expect a certain level of bona fides. I will do a little research on this book and it's author to see what others say about it.

MauiMoto Loc: Hawaii

That's another lie, like the claim that 98% of climate scientists agree..... That's not how science works. Science is what is observable and repeatable,which nothing you say is defined as scientific facts, theories stemming from theories that all life came from a rock. Now they are trying to convince us that life may have come from space, because only a damn fool would buy that it came from rocks, not even in a trillion years. And there are geologists in the book, all fields including mathematics. You need to watch the movie Expelled, maybe that will help... Probably not.