Evolution: problems for Darwinism (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 16, 2022, 12:12 (736 days ago) @ David Turell

(Hippos and whales)

QUOTE: Both species are thought to have diverged from a common ancestor some 53 million years ago, but they share a number of anatomical features including hairless bodies, underwater parturition, lack of sebaceous glands, and the ability to detect both the intensity and directionality of sound waves under water.

Why “but”? Shared anatomical features are evidence that they did diverge from a common ancestor!

QUOTES: those 10 genes were silenced in whales some 16 million years before the same genes were inactivated in hippos! In other words, those same 10 skin genes were silenced independently in both lineages.
"Responding to these extraordinary findings, lead author of the study Mark Springer said, “None of the inactivating mutations that would have suggested a common aquatic ancestry are shared between these two lineages.”

I don’t understand. They had the SAME genes, and these were inactivated. How does that come to mean they didn’t originally share the same genes?

QUOTE: The silencing of these genes in whales and hippos must have occurred in a highly coordinated manner. For this reason, it’s simply amazing to think that the coordinated loss of the same 10 genes occurred independently in both whales and hippos over such a short period of geological time.

16 million years is hardly a short time, but what difference does the time make anyway? (See the next entry).Shared genes suggest common ancestry.

QUOTE: "Another issue these research findings unveil is the waiting time problem highlighted by scientists within the Intelligent Design movement. As a team of theorists from Cornell University pointed out some years ago, just two coordinated mutations in such long-lived creatures as hippos and whales would take 200 million years to occur by chance.”

We have long since agreed that in any context, the complexities of speciation by random mutations is unlikely, and this is where Shapiro’s theory of intelligent cells as the drivers of evolutionary change comes into its own. The time factor simply disappears, just as it does with the designer God theory (and of course ID-ers can attribute the invention of cellular intelligence to God). Meanwhile, if God did it, why did it take him so long? And if we follow David’s theory, why was the inactivation of 10 genes 16 million years apart an absolute requirement for the design of sapiens and our food supply?