And we have discussed this triploid crayfish new species here in the past, but a good example how evolution is not solely dependent on mutations, and how new species can spontaneously arise in rapid fashion, even if not the norm. Clonal genome evolution and rapid invasive spread of the marbled crayfish | Nature Ecology & Evolution
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There are many, many transitional fossils. There are compelling sequences for the evolution of man, horses, and whales, to name a few examples. Which natural history museums have you visited to see fossils for yourself?
Ever heard of selective breeding (artificial selection)? Just look at dog breeds. Or visit the produce section of a grocery store.
We have shown OEC’s examples of observed speciation events in the past. They shrug them off by claiming they are still in the same created kind, which they also refuse to define in any objective or meaningful manner. Yet another case of Lucy pulling the football away.
This has been done as well.
IMO, any fruitful discussion between EC and OEC is going to need to address some basic concepts. I have always leaned towards using chimps and humans as model organisms for these concepts since much of the debate ultimately boils down to the question of human evolution.
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What features would a fossil need in order to be evidence of common ancestry between humans and chimps?
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What shared or derived genetic features would the chimp and human genome need in order to evidence common ancestry?
In my experience, OEC’s don’t have a meaningful answer to these questions. They are focused on protecting a dogmatic belief which means they will come up with ad hoc reasoning to deflect any type of evidence that is put in front of them.
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And always will-some deposits just haven’t been preserved. But what we have shows thing like a transition in morphology from Chesapecten jeffersonius to C. madisonius. Or from Limatula virginiana to L. hendersoni.
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Current changes in polyploidy of Campeloma, and sinistrality
are two examples in mollusks of very short-term speciation.
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I am sorry if you misunderstand my post. That’s not me. I was quoting Hugh Ross.
I found some of the posts were really informational. Thank you for all the replies.
As I am not a scientist myself, I do rely on trustworthy sources on the subject of sciences. Biologos and RTB are actually the two sources of science info that I found to be trustworthy backed by qualified scientists with the same faith commitment as I am.
This is what I have gathered so far about speciation divergent evidenced in nature or lab.
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OEC camp do not see two or more different species of finches , goatsbeard, or crayfish or orcas as different kind of animals because they look and function more or less the same. I went diving once on a lake at Kakaban island in Indonesia where I was among millions of non stinging Jellyfish. because of their isolation from the ocean, these jellyfish has lost their stinging abilities as it is no use to them anymore. But they look exactly the same as their counterpart in the ocean. They look like jellyfish.
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EC (biologos) see any different genetics composition in the same animal as different species as they might live in different kind of environment, eating different food or develop some different anatomies from their counterpart such as bigger beak, bigger wing etc even if these different species looks more or less the same.
That I think will be most helpful :
- At what point, the differences in species can be considered as different animal? (no longer speciation I guess since it has been shown to occur in nature and lab)
“More or less the same” is an entirely subjective judgment that they constantly move around to fit whatever situation they find themselves in. That’s the problem.
For living species that sexually reproduce, the dividing line between species is reproduction. If there is no significant interbreeding between two populations then they are separate species.
For fossil species, scientists will apply statistical tests to physical characteristics to see if there are two significantly different populations. This method has major flaws, but since we can’t determine who bred with who this is the best we can do. The same applies for asexual organisms like bacteria.
More to the point, the theory of evolution predicts that the line between microevolution and macroevolution should be blurred because it is a continuous process. Species can be hard to define because evolution happens.
I would love to see OEC’s answer this question with some objective criteria that could be applied to actual data.
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No, because changes that are considered “macro” changes take millions of years. All evolution requires reproduction, which requires an organism to reach sexual maturity and gestate young. You can’t speed that up. You can model the genetics of it on computers. The evolutionary model works just fine for explaining how we got from the genome of an ancestor species to the genome of a descendant species. Also, the discipline of evo-devo which looks at embryos and how genetics controls different developmental pathways in different organisms has given lots of insights. Turning on or off certain genes leads to predictable developmental differences.
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Fair enough. But it wouldn’t hurt one bit for you to visit a natural history museum, view fossils for yourself, and take advantage of any educational resources it offers.
So, hypothetically speaking, it should be possible to replicate macroevolution in a lab if it is within the domain of science. Let’s just say that our scientific knowledge on evolution and what it entails has advanced another 1000 years from now and this is the difference I take on the view between OEC and EC.
OEC : yes, the science has advanced another 1000 years, and yet we still have no clue how macroevolution has occurred. Yes, we know the progression of microevolution within the species (animals) and yet they are still the same animal despite how much we tweak the genes. (without adding new gene from outside) We still don’t know how a dog can turn into a tiger. It is outside the domain of science. (like the question how life began in the first place, or how the first cell formed)
EC : Yes, the science has advanced another 1000 years, and science has uncovered how these microevolution can turned into macroevolution. Not only we know how to turn a dog to a tiger (with only the tweaking of genes) and to other animals, we can also prove that in a lab by speeding up the process.
My point is that both OEC and EC see the same evidences today and reach a different conclusion, not based on scientific facts or proof of science, but based more on presumption of what had happened or could have happened.
How so, without a time machine? You can’t speed up a process that by definition requires a defined amount of time. The time it takes for a species to mature and reproduce cannot be sped up, no matter how much you know about science.
We know a good deal right now how macroevolution has occurred. We don’t need 1000 years. And it’s a gross misrepresentation of evolution that dogs turn into tigers. An ancestor species gives rise to related but distinct descendent species over many generations. Even species that seem very much “the same” as their ancestors have evolved over time.
I don’t think it’s really true that they look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions. I think there is a significant amount of ignoring evidence, misconstruing evidence, or denying evidence means what it clearly means going on. And when one scientist’s conclusions is based on where the evidence leads and another scientist’s conclusions are based on what they think the Bible requires, they aren’t both using science to come to their conclusions. It is simply not true that conclusions about evolution occurring are based mostly on presumption of what happened. A hypothesis maybe, but once that hypothesis is well-supported by observations and data and once that hypothesis makes testable predictions that are borne out by further investigation, it’s not in the realm of presumption anymore.
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So evolution isn’t based on scientific facts?
The problem is, as @Christy has pointed out, that your hypothetical OEC and EC have the facts wrong. As I pointed out earlier, in the case of many plants we can already say exactly how one species turned into another. In the case of most animals, we can already point to a large body of evidence showing that speciation occurred through the accumulation of mutations since two species shared a common ancestor.
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Hi Christy, when I read a book authored by OEC, I didn’t get the impression that the bible required them to hold to their position. On the contrary, they seemed committed to base their conclusion based on where the evidence lead. They are pretty much on level with the advance of modern science. The evidence lead them to punctuated equilibrium. That unexplained explosion of divergent species that occurred in such a short span of them
Sorry for that simplification or gross misrepresentation of evolution as I am not a scientist nor an expert in evolution. Based solely on my common sense and my limited knowledge, if macroevolution had occurred for millions of years thru genes mutation, then perhaps someday we know the how to tweak the genes not only to reverse engineer to common ancestor, but to other animals and in this case to any animals that share that common ancestor. Do you think it’s possible?
As pointed by the posts above, it seems that this kind of speciation is not convincing enough to prove that macroevolution is in the domain of science. (for OECs I mean)
it was pointed out by @ T_aquaticus that this speciation is not enough evidence for macroevolustion by proponent of OEC. It is still the same kind of plant.
Actually, animals can do that too.
The challenge is how to distinguish a new species (or higher category). In general, species are recognized as having some degree of reproductive isolation. But how much separation is enough? If two populations can freely interbreed, they are generally agreed to be conspecific. If they can’t interbreed at all, then they are generally agreed to be separate species. But there’s a huge continuum in between. If everything that a mallard has managed to produce a duckling with is the same species, there are not many different species of duck or goose. Some things can interbreed if put together, but do not naturally get together (e.g., lions and tigers). Obviously, asexual reproduction poses problems for such definitions.
The simplest case of quickly making a new species that is reasonably easy to do in lab and also happens often in the wild is polyploidy, often through hybridization. Plants do this all the time, but it is also known in many groups of animals. Hybridization and other processes can lead to offspring that has an extra set of chromosomes. They are not able to reproduce with the parent form(s), but may be able to reproduce asexually and/or with fellow polyploids. These are functionally new species produced in a single generation. The difference can be important – for some key schistosome host snails in Africa, different chromosome numbers have a big impact on whether the snail carries the parasite. An extreme example of this is the rabbage. As a cross between plants in different genera, it is essentially a lab-created new genus. It was intended to be a miracle of Soviet science feeding the world, but turned out to have cabbage roots and radish leaves. Rather more useful examples of polyploid hybrids include corn (maize) and wheat.
If you are looking for the amount of morphological difference, some mutant fruit flies do not have the right pattern of appendages to match being a proper insect.
Large changes are observed in lab experiments with bacteria. But in general, such change hasn’t been a major focus of experimental work. As already noted, it tends to take a while, and if you are trying to study genetics you don’t want to make something that can’t breed with your other lab populations.
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They are concordists and generally inerrantists. So yes, they have to make all scientific evidence that they accept work with a literalistic interpretation of some kind.
It’s a myth that the Cambrian explosion can’t be explained by the evolutionary model.
If by reverse engineer you mean identify the genetic changes that led from an ancestor species to a descendent species, then yes, I believe scientists can already identify which mutations controlled which developmental differences.
For example, this explains investigations in the genetics of whale evolution from land-dwelling quadruped mammals to fully aquatic mammals. Many of the adaptations can be identified in terms of mutations that turn genes off and on.
To dive deeper into the question, the team compiled a list of protein-coding genes in humans, who, as mammals, still share many genes with cetaceans. Then they looked for known mutations that would turn genes off, meaning they could no longer make whatever they were meant to. Once they had these, they narrowed the search down to genes that were turned off in cetaceans, but not hippopotamuses, their closest ancestors on land. Finding a gene inactivated in cetaceans but not hippos was a strong hint that the genetic loss was a result of, or led to, cetaceans becoming fully aquatic. They then looked at previously-published studies of gene function to see what these genes did.
In all, they found 85 genes that cetaceans lost right around 50 million years ago as they began to become fully aquatic, 62 of which had never been reported before. Some of the gene losses simply removed things that were no longer necessary, while others granted them new abilities by altering key bodily functions.
All I was saying was that even if species don’t diverge into very different life forms over millions of years, like a platypus or an opossum, modern species are still genetically different from their ancient ancestors that have very similar physical forms. All species are evolving over time, it’s just that not all species have significant selective pressure exerted on them to lead to major adaptations. This situation is just as predicted by the evolutionary model as major changes in species that are exposed to significant selective pressure.
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Maybe, but that would be biotech, and nothing to do with evolution.
Evolution is just as much about constraint as it is about possibility. Dogs and tigers are both mammals, and have a common ancestor. In both cases, a mammal evolved into a mammal. While we may not know what the distant future may hold for dogs and tigers, time does not rewind. Evolution does not predict that one would or could evolve into the other.