Proteins, Apes & Us (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Saturday, April 07, 2012, 19:31 (4591 days ago) @ David Turell

I am no geneticist, so a lot of the nuances of evolutionary theory are lost on me, but things like this raise questions in my layman brain. Perhaps David can ellucidate further.-1)How can they distiguish with any certainty ages of deviation, such as Apes seperated from hominids 20mya, particularly if they are not certain which came first?-2)If all members of a phenotype have to deal with roughly the same environmental conditions, why should we not expect to see a vast number of similarities in their genetic code? I.E. If all land animals breathe oxygen through lungs, then the basic genetic structure for lungs for all such creatures should exist and should be roughly identical. -3)If a large portion of the genetic code deals with what happens before, or after a structure is in place, why should we not expect to see variations between them that would vary the rate of production and such? Obviously, an 800lb gorilla would need substantially more hemoglobin than a 200lb human. -4)If these variations are only to be expected, due to size, physiology, and environment, how do they explicitly imply genetic heritage from one group to another simply by the fact that they exist in each? I.E. If they are a requirement for life at a certain level, then no life could exist at that level without them. -5)How does any of this account for innovation in the genetic structure?-
To use a much simpler example, look at the automobile. All vehicles have combustion engines, tires, axles, and a number of other shared features that are necessary for being able to be used on the standard highway system. The laws of physics also make certain of these features, if not mandatory, then highly useful. Now, an evolutionist would say that because the wheel was discovered in ancient times, and the axle some time later, then the cart, the chariot, the wagon, the carriage, the model T, and then the Semi and Hummer. In a sense, they are correct in that one idea lead to another. What it wouldn't explain is all the intermediate changes that must happen. You could never turn a wheel into a chariot without some serious innovation, not just in the vehicle itself, but also in the environment, roads, animal husbandry, leather working, wood working, and metal working. Each of those things in turn would require major advances and inovations as well. These are all things which are outside the scope of the chariot itself. So, saying that the chariot, or the Semi, is the direct ancestor of the wheel is pure fanciful imagination. Even something like the switch between 2 wheels and four wheels is not a trivial matter. So how is it that geneticist and evolutist continually attempt to trivialise the changes that would have had to have occured for even the simplest of biological changes to have occured? -One of the things I often see used to support the theory of gradual change is when a scientist raises a culture of 5million(Or some similarly ridiculous number) generations of bacteria and notes a small single change. How does that work for creatures with longer life spans? 5 million generations of Hominid, or Canine would take significantly longer, and yet they proscribe the a greater variety and magnitude of changes to a drastically reduced population. Even IF you assume 20m years of human evolution and even IF you assume a lifespan of 35 years, you still only have less than 600k generations of homonid. If humanity started at the same time as the earth, you still would only have 115m generations at 35 years each. That number is reduced dramatically if the life span increases even a little. So how do we account for the vast number of itterations that would have had to have occured, when there is simply not enough time? How do the numbers work out when we know that there were global extinctions periodically throughout history? That is not even factoring in infant morality rates or those that died without breeding, or geographical seperation of the gene pool, none of which are modeled in these studies.

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.