Is Darwin's Theory of Evolution True? Part 4.0

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Pope Benedict

In the book, Benedict reflected on a 1996 comment of his predecessor, John Paul II, who said that Charles Darwin’s theories on evolution were sound, as long as they took into account that creation was the work of God, and that Darwin’s theory of evolution was “more than a hypothesis.”

“The pope (John Paul) had his reasons for saying this,” Benedict said. “But it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory.”

Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory.

“We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory,” he said.
 
Corn in Mexico? That’s called selective breeding by humans and took a lot less time than other claims. I think some people are conditioned to use the word evolution when it’s not necessary.
 
rossum said:
Creationists are going to distort whatever arguments come up, and they’ve put me in company with luminaries like Stephen Jay Gould, so it doesn’t bother me a bit. Archaeopteryx is half reptile and half bird any way you cut the deck, and so it is a Rosetta stone for evolution, whether it is related to dinosaurs or not. These creationists are confusing an argument about minor details of evolution with the indisputable fact of evolution: Animals and plants have been changing. The corn in Mexico, originally the size of the head of a wheat plant, has no resemblance to modern-day corn. If that’s not evolution in action, I do not know what is.
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Better edit wiki.
 
vz71 said:
Not to sound snide, but I did ask you first.
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And I pointed out that your question had a hidden assumption that was incorrect.
But the way I figure it, if the majority of mutations are bad, then we should see at least as many examples of them as we do good mutation.
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Your figure wrong. The majority of mutations are neutral, about 70% to 80% IIRC. Most of the remaining 30% to 20% are deleterious. The lethal deleterious never get born/hatched so do not propagate. Non-lethal deleterious mutations will be reduced and eventually eliminated by natural selection.
After all, the good ones are are the exception.
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The good ones are initially rare, but are spread through the population by natural selection. By definition a beneficial mutation increases reproductive success. That increased reproductive success spreads the mutated gene through the population by inheritance to children, grandchildren etc. The process is rather like compound interest. As an example, take a stable population of 1000 organisms; on average each organism has one descendant in the next generation. Now let a beneficial mutation appear with a 1% advantage, so the mutated organism will have on average 1.01 descendants in the next generation. For comparison I include ten other mutated organism with a 1% disadvantage. Start with a population of 10 deleterious, 989 neutral (or unmutated) and 1 beneficial mutations. See what happens if we let the population reproduce for one thousand generations:
Code: 
Generation  Deleterious   Normal    Beneficial
----------  -----------   ------    ----------
     0         10.0       989.00          1.00
     1          9.9       989.00          1.01
    10          9.0       989.00          1.10
   100          3.7       989.00          2.70
   500          0.1       989.00        144.77
   700          0.0       989.00       1059.16
  1000          0.0       989.00      20959.16
That is why beneficial mutations are more common overall, they are initially rare, but they are amplified and spread by natural selection. You can also see that the deleterious mutation is eliminated and does not spread, despite it being more common initially. That is why inherited genes with the beneficial mutation are far more common in the population.

You can easily set up this calculation on a spreadsheet for yourself.

rossum
 
Techno2000 said:
What is causing all these so-called common ancestors to die out?They were good enough to survive and multiply until a so-called “environmental change” came along and mutated them into something new.But evolution is supposed to be so subtle that it’s hardly even noticeable.
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If a new species appears, which eats the same food that you are eating, and does it more efficiently, then your environment have changed very much for the bad. If they are eating a lot of your food, then you will starve.

rossum
 
Hugh_Farey said:
What is a fundamentalist? One whose defence of his position consists mostly of the denigration of his opponents and little actual consideration of his own point of view.
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Agreed, and what they don’t seem to recognize is that they do their cause for more harm than good because of their arrogance and sarcasm and willingness to demean anyone who dares disagree with them. But in the age of Trump, why should this surprise us.

BTW, thanks for your post on this.
 
rossum said:
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Techno2000:
What is causing all these so-called common ancestors to die out?They were good enough to survive and multiply until a so-called “environmental change” came along and mutated them into something new.But evolution is supposed to be so subtle that it’s hardly even noticeable.
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If a new species appears, which eats the same food that you are eating, and does it more efficiently, then your environment have changed very much for the bad. If they are eating a lot of your food, then you will starve.

rossum
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Sure… if the new species appeared overnight along with thousands of its new brothers and sisters that were bigger ,stronger and faster I could believe that.But evolution doesn’t work that way. It’s a slooow subtle hardly even noticeable change,that takes millions of years.
 
rossum said:
If they are eating a lot of your food, then you will starve.
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What food supply did the butterfly hog up to cause the demise of its previous incarnations? Or the pineapple, what kind insatiable appetite this thing must of had, to kill off its previous incarnations. How about the gluttonous doodlebug?
 
Honestly, that is the issue. Millions of years to go from A to B, and make sure you don’t die in the process.
 
rossum said:
The lethal deleterious never get born/hatched so do not propagate. Non-lethal deleterious mutations will be reduced and eventually eliminated by natural selection
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I guess none of the non-deleterious mutations made it to become a fossil.

I would be more convinced of random if there was a mistake recorded.
But billions of years later, we have no mistakes to show.
 
I’m a bit confused about your confusion, if I may say so. Any organism which doesn’t breed, or which has left no descendants alive today, is the best definition of an evolutionary failure. There is no way of distinguishing such an organism from one which did breed, or which has left descendants. Almost certainly, almost all of the fossils discovered so far are evolutionary failures. As indeed, are most of the organisms alive today.
 
Let’s expand on that. Organism must be compatible with the food supply and reasonably able to defend itself or run fast. Then we look at bees and flowers. How do bees find flowers? How do they know what to do with them? They can even tell other bees where the flowers are. Bee hives? Honeycombs? Humans, and bears, can eat honey. How is all that possible?
 
How does this work.Did the desert wait millions years for evolution to evolve its plant and animal ecosystem ? How can anything survive there if it has to first wait for evolution to give it the ability to survive there?
 
It’s just there. You know… it just happens. Wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense. Why would a plant end up in a desert as if it were designed for the environment? Like cactus?
 
If you have an evolutionary question, you will get a fair idea of what evolutionists think by searching for the answer on the internet, rather than just gasping incredulously. The parallel evolution of bees and flowers has been extensively studied, and quite satisfactorily explained, with some supporting evidence from the fossil record.
 
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