Most species originated at the same time?

George… What exactly are you saying here? This post almost looks like a spam post. I know that you’re trying to say something though specifically, maybe you could clarify?

Gonna remove this unless you can put a little more content in your OP.

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It links to a creationist/ID website.

@pevaquark I have a key quote or two I’m putting int below:

My title is a reference to how eager Creationists are to have science articles that support some of their views - - first they have to take the journal article out of context. < That’s MAKING the bait.

Then they have to reinterpret the bait so they can swallow it… followed by jubilance, and just maybe somersaults!

Here are some classic interpretations found in Tech Times:


.
.
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Instead of asking how the creation of most of Earth’s species were created more than 100,000 earlier than when the Bible says they were created, Creationist focus on the “click bait” that most of Earth’s animal species sprang up the same time as humans did !!!

Moved this over here as we began discussing this topic before. Plus it avoids the lack of content and just a link to a blog in the OP problem that we aim to enforce :sunglasses:

So you are arguing that creationists (and specifically here you mean young earth creationists) are using this paper as proof of instantaneous creation on days 5 and 6, being willing to swallow the 100,000 year timeframe? It’s clear that most of them seem not to understand the paper and the Evolution News article on the topic has a very misleading title.

All in all, I am personally face palming over this but it is a cool paper that I would like to learn more on the topic.

I accept your ruling… though I am already grieving a really cool thread name now deceased.

Joshua Swamidass doesn’t think much of the article. It would seem the lion’s share of the observatinos
they make are caused by the fact the Earth suffered 8 major glacial periods in 800,000 years (like the ticking of a giant clock, a glaciation every 100,000 years!).

If we are to take the 100,000 to 200,000 year time frame seriously, it is telling us that only a small portion of today’s current animals didn’t undergo “speciation in response to climate change” from before 200,000 years ago. And that most of the remaining creatures speciated during the 7th ice age or during the 8th ice age!

I think that’s pretty interesting, given that the requirement for speciation (if that’s what this paper is indeed saying-or at least an increase in genetic diversity from some kind of modest bottleneck?) is that populations do become isolated from one another- a great possibility during ice ages? Would I be reading to much into that? Probably.

@pevaquark

It goes back to a common complaint we hear from YECs… how come we can’t make new species out of thousands of generations of Fruit Flies in the lab!?!

Yes, let’s see:

  1. with ready supplies of food;
  2. constant climate control;
  3. no predators;
  4. no barriers to reproduction.

If we want to make those flies turn into SOMETHING ELSE, we have to change their food supplies, change their climate, bring in rivals for the food and predators (but not too many?).

Separation of sub-populations is certainly the classic explanation for speciation.

But if we see a reduction in species as well (which I think we do during these glacial periods), a population is being driven before it by a slow-motion block of ice!

Only the most robust and resourceful versions of each population are going to survive the “march of death” to the southern climes!

So where is the separation? The wall of separation is “death”! Where once there was a single population, by the end of the push to the south, there is still just one population… but it is much depleted. In fact, some groups probably didn’t have any long-term survivors! The groups that did have a surviving remnant seem to have picked up some new habits for eating, sleeping and so forth! This is not the time for a “two-fer” process… where a river splits a population in two , and how we have speciation going on with 2 different groups. We have speciation in front of the glacier … and dead bodies UNDER the glacier.

During the last ice age the ice sheets covered a relatively small part of the land surface, mainly in the extreme north and in high mountains. https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-edf25171733025b05724de405174cebc-c

As such I doubt this is an adequate explanation for the wide range of species all coalescing to the same time. Now a global flood …

@aarceng

I think the problem arises because of our sometimes cavalier use of time frames (or more specifically, MY cavalier use of time frames). The last glaciation (the 8th in 800,000 years) was not 100,000 years ago, the last ice age was at it’s peak about 24,000 years ago.

This means that the 7th glaciation peaked about 124,000 years ago. And the 6th glaciation peaked about 224,000 years ago.

These times probably fit the general information about the glaciations, much better.

@gbrooks9

Do not these facts support my contention that ecological change is the primary, not the only factor, in evolutionary change?

@Relates, you should get more sun! It seems you studiously avoid the one option I was looking
for in your sentence:

You list -
1] ecological change is the primary factor in evolutionary change.
And
2) ecological change is the only factor in evolutionary change.

If I had my druthers, I would add a third choice:

  1. ecological change and genetic change are the two leading factors in
    evolutionary change.

Here is my reasoning: If a population of black bears in Canada was suddenly being pushed down into new territory by a steadily advancing GIANT GLACIER…

the survivors are going to be outliers in their population. They are not just outliers because of their scintillating personalities, but because they have alleles that might not have even been used in their original ecology. And the only reason that population is now changing into a different kind of bear population is because the glaciation situation has steadily removed the reproductive individuals who were carrying less than helpful
configurations of alleles.

Ecology and Mutations are a hand-and-glove arrangement, or the clasping of two hands in a hand-shake.
Without mutations creating outlier alleles, if a population was only capable of making PERFECT COPIES of their chromosomes from generation to generation, then populations would simply live or die as one (all other things being equal). Without variation, which is produced through mutations, a population is ultimately doomed on a planet with inevitable swings in climate factors.

On the other side of the coin, @Relates, which is your favorite side, what if the ecological factors never change? That would also lead to virtually no evolutionary change – or at the very least, very slow change.
One of the reasons thousands of generations of fruit flies in science labs around the world haven’t mutated into birds (well, ONE of the reasons) is because laboratory conditions are INTENDED to be unchanging:

  1. lots of food;
  2. no predators;
  3. consistent climate;
  4. free reproductive access; and so forth.

Conclusion? You are, as always, right to look to changes in ecological factors as ONE of the drivers in evolution. But Mutation is the SECOND driver, in a system that is mostly two drivers.

And, Roger, I’ve asked around to the evolution academics in the English speaking world … they got the
word from you … they KNOW how important ecology is.

I thought of you when I was watching a PBS show recently that pointed out that the great extinction events were responsible to a large extent for the development of species, as they created a large number of open niches to be filled.

Thank you, Phil.

Need I add that the great extinction events were ecological changes that marked the end on one era and the beginning of another.

Without mutations you run out of variation quite quickly.

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Without ecological change there would be no need for mutations. This is why it is primary.

Variation is secondary because it acts in response to ecological change.

Without mutations there would only be survival and extinction with no morphological or physiological change. There wouldn’t be change without mutations.

Somebody here once explained that even with no new mutations, you could still have evolution with existing variation. (Evolution being a change in allele frequencies in a population.)

I don’t see how you could start with protists and end with vertebrates just by reshuffling existing protist alleles. I also don’t see how you could have shuffled the alleles in the genome of the ancestor we share with chimps and somehow get humans.

He meant that if mutations were to stop today.

If we began with the ecology of the protists and ende4d with the ecology of the protists, we would not have evolution.