Complexity of gene codes (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, August 26, 2010, 01:24 (5012 days ago) @ xeno6696


> You make the same assertion as young-earth creationists here however, that the fossils in the Cambrian literally were the only appearing organisms in the record, that no previous forms of those creature existed. This is an argument that simply takes advantage of the fact that we have no complete link from every intervening generation from Archaea to now.-I agree. If you will carefully follow the discussion I've had with dhw, you will see I have made the point that other 'explosions' may still be hidden and awaiting discovery. It is interesting that the Burgess shale at Emerald Lake, Canada, was discovered by Walcott in 1909. Gould assumed in 'Wonderful Life' that this finding was one of a kind, and made very erroneous assumptions as a result. We arrive through very miraculous contingencies, to paraphrase him .......Conway-Morris went to shales in China, and you know the result. We have several different branches of ancentors before us (Notochordate forms), much less contingency, and more of a picture that evolution is driven. The point is, we have expanded our knowledge of the Cambrian Expl. and found no other explosions so far. 
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> The Dawkins whale series shows a series of differing forms, but large gaps between each one. There is no evidence of Darwin's step by step
 
> Fine. Then look at the evolution of horses which when I visited the Smithsonian this July, was pretty conclusive. Several (sometimes hundreds of ) thousands of years between each form. Your argument is identical to the creationists here. "Because we have gaps in the fossil record, and some of the gaps are far too short for it to have evolved by natural selection."-I am a form of creationist. I am not dismissing natural selection. Competition has to act on epigentic progress. I've said so to dhw. My point is that we have NEVER found any evidence of step by step. I think the reason is the rapid responses of epigentics creating new species which then face survival in the face of selection. Both processes are at work and work together.
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> This argument fails for the following reasons:
> 1. We must be able to demonstrate what the normal rate of mutation actually was; for this we can only go by modern measurements which just like weather--are far too recent to be able to accurately push backwards into the model. Only by comparing actual to expected can the argument be made that "it's just too fast."-Answered by the above comment. You misunderstand my thinking. 
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> 2. We must be able to demonstrate that the conditions during these periods were happening under some kind of balance--we need to be able to remove environmental and predatory conditions. This must be done because in order to establish "epigenetics" as the "prime mover" we need to be able to demonstrate change without selection pressure. Epigenetics can only be the cause of speciation if and only if it can create species without selective pressure. -This is exactly opposite my point of view. Epigenetics can drive speciation under pressures for adaptation.
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> > at 3.6 bya had to face enormous environmenal changes. The Earth was still cooling down, CO2 and O2 were still altering their levels enormously,'snowball' Earth was still to be experienced, etc. Without those initial adaptive abilities
> > it is unlikely life would have survived. I believe as research advances, it will be fully confirmed that the earliest organisms had adaptation built in. Your answer will be that we can only study living organisms now, and more simplistic organisms preceded what we see presently. That is no more proveable than my theory which views life as surviveable only if complete with good adaptive defenses.
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> The present evidence shows clear movement from uncomplex to complex. No research can be done of the kind you're talking about if we don't have access to the information needed for my points 1 & 2. Especially the environmental issues. Before you can demonstrate that the world was truly hostile to life, we need a really good example of what it actually was. Shapiro claims that we don't have a good enough picture of this.-Shapiro' book is about 25years old in publication, older than that in preparation. Presently, we do know a tremendous lot more about ancient climate, throuht ice core studies, etc. For example, Shapiro did not know about extremophiles at the writing of his book. I admire Shapiro, but you are misusing him.