I would anticipate that Tom wouldn’t accept it, as it’s an existing structure in a different place.
Of course, the prevalence of reuse and revise argues strongly for evolution and against intelligent design.
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There are lots of structures we could explore from the time of the simplest cells to the extinction of the dinosaurs. But that time period gets all clouded up with the Genesis Flood scenario.
So my earlier post focused on structural changes that mostlly occurred after the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
While we may not have enough transitional forms in some cases, the “geological appearance” of some forms, coinciding with the “geological disappearance” of earlier forms will help close the gap.
Any explanation for the origin of biological structures has to take several facts into account.
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Common descent. Wherever new structures come from, they arise in the context of descent from earlier species. The genetic evidence for common descent is inescapable.
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New structures often arise gradually. Where we have an extensive fossil record, we can often trace the gradual appearance of some new feature. For example, we have nice fossil records of intermediate forms of whale blowholes and mammalian middle ear bones.
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Genuinely new structures are actually rare in the history of life. Both blowholes and middle ear bones, for example, are modifications of earlier structures, as are tetrapod limbs, bat and bird wings, whale flippers, and so on.
So, besides evolution of new features through mutation, what other explanations are being offered to explain new structures?
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show me the mutation involved with those lizards. My memory is there isn’t one…rather it’s phenotypic plasticity or possibly just an environmentally-triggered change in gene expression. btw, I can “dismiss” anything that doesn’t rise to the level of meeting the challenge. nothing wrong with that.
you are assuming that the “appearance of kangaroos” for example, did so via mutation. why would that count as a scientifically-validated example of what I asked for? you are merely assuming. so this is easily dismissed. I can show many scientifically-validated examples of mutations doing all kinds of things. Proven in the lab via the scientific method during the lifetime of the researchers.
there are no “gaps to fill” because mutation + selection is one big gap. There is no feature in the biosphere, nothing in biology that can be said to have arrived via mutation. Mutations are degenerative. They break things, disable things, eliminate things, etc…but they don’t build things.
I was waiting for you to say something like that.
The problem, of course, is you have no explanation for the appearance of Kangaroos at all!
Only the Evolutionary model explains the Kanga!
After the animals are released from the ark, presumably hundreds of different kinds of marsupials race to Australia before the massive island continent starts to move offshore hundreds of miles. They arrive there before any of the placental mammals can. And as Australia sets sail for the middle of the ocean, all the marsupials wave good by to the stunned placental mammals. Ha!
That is the only way to explain why we don’t find placental mammals mixed in with the marsupials there.
Whereas, the evolutionary scenario requiring continental movements over millions of years fits the data perfectly.
Like I said in my post, I’ve not seen any follow-up. Although it is unlikely that a single mutation led to the production of an entirely new structure, there were clearly inherited changes that allowed this lizard to produce the cecal pouch in order to adapt to its new diet.[quote=“supersport, post:25, topic:36626”]
btw, I can “dismiss” anything that doesn’t rise to the level of meeting the challenge. nothing wrong with that.
[/quote]
You can certainly dismiss any advice you want. I just offered the advice in case you were interested in constructive dialogue.
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this is a different topic of course. You are assuming that the continents did not move quickly of course. You are also assuming that kangaroos didn’t live on what is not australia from the beginning. They also lived in South America, as their fossils are there. Maybe they lived there in the beginning too. Regardless, there is nothing about any of this that proves evolution, common descent or that mutations can or did build kangaroos.
what do you mean, Curtis. I’m discussing it with you. You put up the lizards as a response to my challenge to show me a “mutation” that adds a new structure. Yet you haven’t presented a paper and you haven’t presented evidence that mutation was involved at all. Interestingly, upon being transferred to their new islands, the lizards also adapted their leg lengths, their toe lengths and other traits – all within just a few generations. Sounds like plasticity or epigenetics to me. But I think we are learning on this forum that your theory can’t really account for the appearance of anything. Not the origin of life and no feature in any creature in the biosphere. Astounding that so many people have bought into it it, huh…
One 1995 survey of almost half a million life scientists and geologists found that 99.85% accepted the evolutionary model. And that was before the genome project. Makes you think there might be some reasons, doesn’t it? 
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Doesn’t sound like epigenetics or plasticity to me. Plasticity should show up in the first generation. It could be epigenetic, but morphological changes like this are much more likely to be be genetic.
Do you have a reference for that?
My suggestion and follow-up comments were regarding your treatment of @sfmatheson, not our conversation about lizard cecal pouches.[quote=“supersport, post:31, topic:36626”]
You put up the lizards as a response to my challenge to show me a “mutation” that adds a new structure. Yet you haven’t presented a paper and you haven’t presented evidence that mutation was involved at all.
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This was an example of something close to what you were asking for. Like I’ve said (twice now), there has not been any follow-up on specific mutational changes. That being said, for these cecal pouches to manifest and to now be part of the modified lineage, there are almost certainly changes on the genetic level. Is there a “cecal pouch” gene that came into being in the last 30 years? I would say no. But is there some type of genetic change that now allows cecal pouches to form and for this characteristic to be inherited by progeny? I would say yes. Yes, there is quite likely genomic plasticity and epigenetics involved, but it is unlikely that this amount of change would occur without accompanying change at the genomic level.
Au contraire my good man.
Your assessment is actually the reverse of the timeline.
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Creationism and the flood scenario does not explain how only marsupials ended up in Australia, when there are many placental mammals that can move faster. . . . especially predators who would be happy to follow marsupials into the pristine hunting grounds of Australia.
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Of course, the only workable non-evolution scenario requires Australia’s departure into the ocean to be extremely fast. But, even with that, there really is no explanation for why no placental mammals didn’t join the marsupials in arriving on Australia.
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The flood scenario works not at all. While the only workable scenario is the Old Earth Evolutionary model.
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[quote=“supersport, post:25, topic:36626”]
show me the mutation involved with those lizards.[/quote]
Why on earth would there need to be a mutation? Why wouldn’t it be a whole bunch of existing alleles?
Where do you get this idea that evolution requires mutation?
[quote]My memory is there isn’t one…rather it’s phenotypic plasticity or possibly just an environmentally-triggered change in gene expression.
[/quote]That’s pretty easy to test. I’ll bet my house that it’s all heritable and that all the alleles that changed frequency in the population were already there.
Remember, the ratio of existing genetic variation to new mutations is about a million to one. That’s an empirical fact, not an interpretation, btw.
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Curtis, what exactly do you mean by “genomic plasticity”?
What’s the difference between a “mutation” and a mutation, Tom?
Sorry, I meant phenotypic plasticity, my fingers just did something on their own 
At some point, I read a hypothesis that the production of the cecal pouches was due to expression of genes that had been dormant recently in the lizard’s evolutionary history. If I recall correctly, though, this was more supposition than evidence-based. Bottom line - rather dramatic morphological changes (yes, several other changes, too) really don’t take place without some genetic changes, as well.
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All of the evidence indicates that they did and continue to move slowly. Do you know of any evidence to the contrary?