I enjoy talking about evolution. What it’s about, how it works, and the nearly endless conclusions and consequences it entails. When talking about it or teaching evolution it can be so easy to miss things, and I certainly don’t know everything about it either, but rather then just shooting out a post I thought I’d give our excellent followers a chance to ask some questions, or propose a suggestion or two on things they’d like to know, and I’ll see what I can do. These can extend further into general biology as well, and be aware my expertise is mostly in plants.
Any one interested?
Withteeth
hessianwithteeth 
October 4th, 2014 at 4:37 am
Yes I am only if we can use it to teach and discuss amongst ourselves(you and me) before sharing to those outside us. Irrespective on how you recall it or how it dawns on you, Increase my passion for it for sometimes its a waning topic for me!
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October 3rd, 2014 at 11:12 pm
No question, but I watched the 2013 documentary The Unbelievers last night. It follows Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss on their talks across the world. Give it a watch if you can – intriguing stuff.
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October 4th, 2014 at 12:04 am
We watched it a bit, I found it a bit boring, but to each there own. Though I’m neither a fan of Dawkins or Krauss. Dawkins because he just keeps saying stupid things on twitter and his blog.
Though I just don’t like Krauss for how he handled a debate I was present at so that just me.
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October 6th, 2014 at 5:32 pm
I watched it when they were both present for discussion and I watched it again at home with my husband. It was rather bland. I expected more. I do like both Dawkins and Krauss but the film could have been more interesting.
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October 3rd, 2014 at 3:12 pm
I’ve read a lot about evolution, Spanish books of Arsuaga, Cela Conde, Ayala, Bermudez, and always it’s a very interesting matter.
But I don’t think that it’s needed to bring references to show that Evolution is true. I think at this point is no sense to argue about the validity of Evolution, in the same way that it would be a non sense to argue about if the Earth spins around the Sun. And anyway, fundamentalists will not be convinced by any scientific argument, so that is a lost battle.
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October 3rd, 2014 at 8:39 pm
Well you can hold those opinion and I won’t begrudge you, but here I’m aiming to be informative to those who want to know more about a subject that is confusing to many people, and a scope that go well beyond what many thinks it does.
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October 3rd, 2014 at 1:01 pm
Thoughts on this:
http://www.icr.org/article/8017/
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October 3rd, 2014 at 8:36 pm
Ah the creation institute, such a vile den of lairs and peddlers can be found no where else. The citations are very supiscious even though there is only 7 of them (three of them are notes not citations) There data does not come back up with how they actually got it, they mention a formula and little else. But what’s wrong with it other then I know the source to be the opposite of trustworthy and heavily biased? the equation doesn’t factor in evolution, or selection pressures that would reduce the number of mutations in mitochondrial DNA. hell in the formula which I’m hesident to say would be accurate at all, they don’t include any r values, as they would be different for different species and must be experimentaly determined, and compared with geologic and fossil data (for radioactive isotopic levels and the like).
Ya and the methods through out are spotty and ill explained. There’s a lot of hand waving and then random bit of data given with out explanation or proper reference.
Ah correct me wrong they do give an r value for humans, but it the citations they say that that data is based on a single gene, you can’t extrapolate the mutation rate of a genome from a single mitochondrial gene. Depending on how often it’s copied or how often it’s translated into messenger RNA.
Replies to the objections
1. Basically what going on here is there basically say our way better, and the other methods a void because they don’t directly mesure the mutions rates. Except neither do the methods the mention so, no you can ignore conflicting data because you don’t like it.
2. Gaaaaaaah! These people don’t know a damn thing about what they are talking about, I’m not a geneticist or a statistician by training and even i understand that there counter arguments are meaningless.
3. Hu? I don’t see why anyone would actually make that objection, I’m calling strawman fallacy and moving on.
4. “Our own in-house analysis revealed that most fossil DNA sequences are highly degraded and unreliable.”
Hahahaha. Two thing with this one. First their in house analyses are not trusted by anyone except them, because they have fudged or misrepresented data in the past or used method incorrectly, like radio-dating outside the use range of an object. Like carbon dating a million years old rocks, or using dating techinques that are inaccurate under a 100’000 to date rocks formed from recent lava flows.
5. They don’t seem to understand the terms there using or the presumably gentle version of the objection they are using. Plus there could be plent of other thing wrong with there claims, but it isn’t my field of expertise.
6. No it is not simply ad hoc, and even if it was you’d still need to account for it. Since it’s a strong objection. They’d need to show that heavy mutation they’re talking about could happen with out killing or significantly hampering the organism.
7. Umm there all phyla with in the same sub division, of the same subgroup, or the division of Eukaria. Genetically speaking the four species are all pretty closely related (yes we are pretty closely related to round worms (when looking at the whole tree of life), many out our genes are almost identical). Also with regards to ICR track record they could have easily cherry picked this tiny data set. And they did not give a number to how likely or unlikely it for this to be random chance. Another sign this isn’t based on proper scientific understanding.
“None of the above objections have yet to appear in peer-reviewed scientific literature” Because you don’t produce peer reviewed literature, and are not member of the scientific community for your inability to actually do proper science.
Back you you time
It a flashy sciencey sounding article, that makes lots of claims (A lot of claims, over 5, I stopped tracking them part way through. They should stick with one or two) But in this smorges borge of claims very little was given in the way of evidence. Sure pretty figures and posturing is there, but you can make up figures and well at the end of the day I don’t trust a damn thing IRC put out because they have a horrid track record of fudging data and making shit up. However I don’t like reviewing such articles. If you want a more through bashing of it, go to you tube find a you tuber like myles powers and ask them to review the article. This junk just annoys me.
If you want my honest opinion anything remotely affiliated with the ICR is not to be trusted, especially in all things relate to the sciences. But in regard to this article itself, they honestly didn’t give me enough information to draw a proper conclusion on it’s final validity, and they talked about to many different things in the article without sighting nearly enough research.
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October 3rd, 2014 at 12:16 pm
Some creationist who accept that evolution happened insist there has not been enough time for it to have happened without being guided (by God). They have no evidence for this guiding, but some refs on this topic would be helpful to show there is evidence there was enough time. Thx!
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October 3rd, 2014 at 8:40 pm
3.2 billion years is a long long time. But I can see if I come across something. You tube tend to be great Aron Ra probably has something.
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October 4th, 2014 at 6:29 am
An astoundingly long time. What I think would be an effective teaching tool, though, would be some kind of demonstration of the time needed for the more recently evolved species to have evolved. What I’m interested in is some kind of statistical simulation including rates of mutation, environmental changes, etc. that would show that the amount of speciation observed in the fossil record is quite reasonable given the time available. I’ve read a number of books (Coyne, Dawkins) and they only touch upon this aspect a little. I recall an experiment where fish were moved to a different location, and quite a bit of change was observed between generations, and another paper showing that it would take only about 10,000 (might have been 100,000) years for a mammal species to change in size from the size of a mouse to the size of an elephant.
Also, its not that just one thing (e.g., size) changes… lots of things change. Genes travel together. I could see how that would make evolution faster in some cases, but also how it could make it slower. Different selective pressures would favor different mutations, in some cases leading to concurrent changes in frequencies of multiple genes, in other cases hindering change in one gene distribution because of the negative consequences on the organism due to a different gene that is linked.
Does my question make sense?
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October 3rd, 2014 at 10:33 am
I wonder how we, as a species, will evolve? Insects rapidly develop immune systems to cope with insecticides and the like. Will we develop immune systems to cope with pollution and noise? Will we become shortsighted as we increasingly keep our vision fixed to tiny screens?
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October 3rd, 2014 at 8:44 pm
Well remember evolution happen to populations not individuals. the likely hood of our recent change to spending more of our time indoor and looking at back lit screens won’t affect us evolutionarily speaking possible ever.
However I can definitely write about this. But the short of it is, we aren’t really evolving anymore. We don’t have much in the way of selection pressures that would lead to population change. 🙂
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October 3rd, 2014 at 9:29 am
Do plants exhibit traits of Sexual Selection, like animals, or does that fall under Natural Selection?
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October 3rd, 2014 at 8:46 pm
Plants and sexual selection? Not so much, but plants do have really complicated sex so I’d be glad to dive into that instead. 😀
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