No scientist believes that we evolved from chimps. Rather, chimps and humans share a common ancestor. I haven’t read the rest of your post.
Dear Beaglelady,
Thanks, that’s why I mentioned proto-chimp and not chimpansee 
Hi Ralphie,
Thanks! I will!
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So what is a proto-chimp? An ancestor of the chimpanzee line?
Well yea it’s something I came up with. So it’s just what you mentioned a common ancestor for chimps and humans. In my mind I called it a proto-chimp. Sounds catchy but it might not be scientifically correct.
It’s just to get the idea
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Yikes. Almost like a spike protein mutates and has new binding properties in a virus or something…
Welcome to the forum, @Jelte ! We all learn from these discussions and look forward to sharpening our understanding through the process.
I think you have company there, though there is a lot of difference in the details. Many of us hold philosophically or theologically to intelligent design, as we see God’s hand in all of creation, yet do not accept the organizational ID movement, due to distortions it introduces. Perhaps the idea of “random” is a hang up, and using the search function, you can find past discussions on that. In short, seemingly random processes are directed by external factors, which for Christians includes God. As Proverbs says, the lot is cast in the lap but the outcome determined by God.
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Individuals with bad or deleterious mutations could die out and not propagate or in other cases a slightly deleterious mutation in combination with a future mutation could result in a positive change.
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Yes. harmful mutations are usually recessive and are only expressed if you get the mutation from both parents. In some cases, getting a mutation from one parent (e.g. the sickle cell gene) actually confers a survival advantage–called a heterozygous advantage.
The problem is equivocation. The ID movement, like YEC and pseudoscientific atheism, routinely fall into the god of the gaps error. But ID in particular tends to shift around between id and ID. Promoting the difference between “God intelligently designed the universe and all that is in it, using the methods that He saw fit” and “All the ID movement claims are good and evolution didn’t happen” is critical for getting through to the public.
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Small mutations have about an equal chance of increasing or decreasing the effectiveness of the gene product, plus a rather high chance of having no effect at all (unless you count setting the genome up for a slightly different evolutionary trajectory). Large mutations might be positive or negative depending on whether the existing situation is good or bad.
Life is complicated. No one particular feature is always helpful; it depends on the environmental conditions, the level of competition, the level of predation, … So mutations cannot be unambiguously identified as beneficial. If conditions are good, then sticking with what already works is a sound strategy. But if conditions are hard, a change is likely to be in order.
Another complication is that there are many interactions between genes; many characteristics are not a simple Mendelian yes/no. Beneficial and harmful mutations may be dominant, or recessive, or co-dominant, or have a wide range of intermediate degrees of effect. Their influence may only appear under certain situations.
Experimentally, random mutations work quite well for producing new useful functions.
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Finding one particular needle in a haystack is not easy. But we have no reason to think that there is only one possible needle, and the haystack may have quite a lot of them.
If we randomly mix letters and hope to spell “dog”, it will probably take a while. But if we are looking for any useful set of three letters, it will happen much sooner, especially if we don’t limit ourselves to English.
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Not just every Christian would make that declaration. I appreciate your generosity.
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That’s the waiting time for two pre-specified mutations. It is not the waiting time for a mutation to create new transcription factor binding site (which is the subject of the article), as the authors make clear.
No, because natural selection removes the deleterious mutations.
Graur has retracted that argument in response to this paper,
Mutational Load and the Functional Fraction of the Human Genome | Genome Biology and Evolution | Oxford Academic, for which he was one of the reviewers.
Genetic entropy is process proposed by the creationist John Sanford, who argues that all organisms are subject to large numbers of very slightly deleterious mutations, ones with such slight effect that natural selection can’t weed them out. So they accumulate and cumulatively end up driving the species to extinction. Again, this is an argument incompatible with old life. It’s also an argument without any experimental or theoretical basis. There is absolutely no reason to think that mutations of very, very small effect would be biased toward being deleterious.
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A relatively quick and early appearance of phyla is actually more consistent with an evolutionary than a non-evolutionary model.
Not all animal phyla appear in the Cambrian. Some occur in older layers, and some of the soft-bodied ones are only known from younger material. But there is a concentration of first fossils of phyla during the Cambrian. The Cambrian is over 40 million years, though.
Under any pattern, the average age of first fossils of phyla should be older than for smaller categories. This is because phyla are larger groups. If I find a representative of any class of echinoderms, I have a record for Phylum Echinodermata. If I find a fossil that I can’t identify to class, but can tell it’s an echinoderm, I have a record for Phylum Echinodermata. So we should expect to see the first appearance of phyla be relatively early in the record. The first record for Phylum Echinodermata must be at least as old as that of any included class, and maybe older if there is something that can’t be assigned to class but can be assigned to phylum.
Evolution gives additional reason. Phyla are groups that split from each other earlier than classes or orders or the like. By definition, we don’t think of one phylum evolving from another, but rather from a shared ancestor likely to be generic with only the basic features common to both phyla. Groups which are very distinctive, but which evolved from within a phylum, are considered part of that phylum (for example, acanthocephalans are considered highly modified parasitic rotifers, not a separate phylum, in modern classification). Also, when they first evolve, members of a phylum probably won’t have all the features of later groups. So a fossil may be a generic early echinoderm, not assignable to class.
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Genetic entropy also runs into a major problem because it claims that organisms should be running into problems with too many mutations after a certain number of generations. But many organisms go through multiple generations per year. Many insects, weeds, and other organisms with short lifespans should be hitting problems with genetic entropy far before humans, if genetic entropy were a real thing. But insects did not go extinct within a thousand years of their creation.
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This is such an over-vibed concept. The only way it will ever be taken over in terms of ill-placed enthusiasm is if physicists one day, when carefully describing some principle, use the word “karma”.
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Any less than non-science has.
[In the title there are two redundant terms, Intelligent or Design, and Processes]
It’s one of those where {non, un, anti}-scientific straw men are knocked down ‘proving’ that nature doesn’t explain nature, therefore design is at work.
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Could you cite a source for that consensus?
List of currently recognized phyla with first fossil appearance:
Porifera: ~~650 MYA
Ctenophora: ~550 MYA
Cnidaria: ~580 MYA
Trilobozoa: ~570-540 MYA
Proarticulata: ~570-540 MYA
Saccorhytida: ~540 MYA (one species known)
Vetulicolia: ~520-500 MYA
Echinodermata: ~530 MYA (555 if Arkarua is one)
Hemichordata: ~510 MYA
Kinorhyncha: ~535 MYA
Priapulida: ~510 MYA
Loricifera: ~500 MYA
Tardigrada: ~520 MYA
Onychophora: ~530 MYA (debated, as most stem-panarthropods are onychophoran-like)
Arthropoda: ~540 MYA
Chaetognatha: ~540 MYA
Annelida: ~520 MYA
Bryozoa: ~485 MYA
Entoprocta: ~520 MYA
Brachiopoda: ~525 MYA
Mollusca: ~545 MYA
The remainder are generic enough that confident assignment is difficult:
Placozoa: no fossils known
Xenaceolomorpha: no fossils known
Nematoda: ~370 MYA
Nematomorpha: ~80 MYA
Micrognathozoa: no fossils known
Gnathostomulida: no fossils known
Rotifera: ~40 MYA
Gastrotricha: no fossils known
Platyhelminthes: ~380 MYA
Nemertea: ~340 MYA
Phoronida: no fossils known
Currently, there are 28 (or maybe 30) phyla; of those, six have never been found as fossils, five more are relatively generic worms, and definite members are known only from the Devonian, or more recent. Of the remainder, most appear between 550 and 500 MYA.
Most of this data is from The Invertebrate Tree of Life by Giribet & Edgecomb.
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If I remember correctly, many of such arguments put humans as starting to have problems with mutation buildup fairly soon. That puts the number of generations for having problems at about 200 (for a 6000-year time span with very long generations over the first 2000 years), or 15,000 for a 300,000 year history of humans. This would imply that no phyla other than mollusca, porifera, cnidaria, arthropoda, chordata, and echinodermata can exist, as all the others only have short (less than humans) life spans.
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