Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

Natural selection created the genome.

And you know all this how?
s Ive said repeteadly about you and Leadpipes, rarely correct but never in doubt.

Id like to see you come up with a work plan for determining the projected selection of polar bears as the ice retreats. You realize that all of what you just said reads like Creationist double -talk. Congrats, maybe therell be an exhibit of your stuff at the Cretion Park

so where does the IDer store this info?? In Loudon Va.?? WQere building more and more storage nodes there so we have enough room to enable us to enjoy cute pictures of cats.

Natural selection only kills. It does not create. Evolution is the evidence of creation.

In hardware that was constructed to store info. Some people use a paper and pencil, some use a hardrive in an operating computer system. The IDer obviously used the protiens in the DNA of a living organism. Is that not obvious?

Biological evolution uses the environment.

I see, yours is taking credit for nucleotides. Thats yer point is it?? Where do they get translated??
wow, it must be great not to be bothered with stuff like dimensional equivalencies and repeatability and statistical variance. Jut say that a god did it and youre off to receive yer Nobell Prize

Piss off you arrogant little clown. It's all bullshit, and you never provide a shred of evidence for your whacky claims--don't expect anyone else to meet a standard you won't meet yourself.

so theyre IN the DNA itself eh?
I learn and hopefully learn but I must be really getting a buncha crap from reading and asking.

Nothing is obvious, evidence merely supports something proof is for mathematics. You should, prhaps, stick to cosmetology.

Yes, he should be a hair dresser. He has an unlimited stock of mindless patter.

I think you are confusing confidence with arrogance. You and farmer are right i need to show the math.

Regardless of what it is called, scientists need to come up with hypotheses and theories to account for it.

As far as I know, these determinations were all made using modern DNA.

if they did the back calcs by using the data from a massive series of PCR's , then Im sure there will be plenty of comment as this goes further on around.

As far as "needing something new to account for it", Im not seeing anything as world shaking. genetic variability between species is still great enough to define new species. In some genetic expression like GULO or Hox genes, there are often many single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP's)that can control really different phenotypic expressions.
We had a discussion here about 5 or 6 years ago about evolution without significant genetic differences and using apomyxis. That was when SNP's and epigenetics became "fashionable"

The major rules in evolution (or at least what Id been taught are three
1You take something you already have, modify it a bit through time, and then do something entirely different with it (Your Hox genes may be remain structurally the same with a SNP or two, but you could have fins, fingers or wings .

2 When evolving something , life doesnt seek perfection, it doesnt seek anything in fact, so with its expression ,it settles for what works better than the other guy's AT THAT TIME AND IN THAT ENVIRONMENT, and the others just disappear by interbreeding or species apoptosis.

3 The more species within related taxa the greater the possibility for divergent and convergent evolution

That is a painfully incorrect conclusion to draw from the result of Natural Selection.

It must be obvious to you that if you remove selected elements from a group, that the group that remains has been altered by that same selection.

I don't know what you have to be confident about--you just make it up as you go along, and you throw in names of scientists or what you think are scientific terms to attempt to look wise and knowing. Intellectually, you are just whistling past the graveyard.

Roswell is absolutely correct. Natural selection is not a killer, and it is not a creator. It is just the name for an inevitable process. Any mutation, any gene which "turns on" and alters an organism to improve that individual's reproductive opportunity will have "selected" that individual for success and that species for improvement. It is not a conscious process, however. There are mutations which neither harm nor favor the individual, so that no selection takes place. Other changes do harm, and the individual is not harmed, but the members of the species with those characteristics will sooner or later, and likely sooner rather than later, will simply die out. The woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros are perfect examples of this process. Before the ice ages, their acquisition of more and heavier guard hairs were not a detriment to individuals in a temperate climate. When the ice ages set in, that hair was a definite advantage, and the process selected for individuals with more and heavier hair. When the ice ages ended, those individuals were doomed, and sooner rather than later. The rest of the mammoth, who never developed the heavy hair simply continued the slow process of becoming elephants. There is no evidence of purpose, and no evidence of design, and certainly no evidence of an intelligent entity playing around with the genomes.

As this discussion approaches its 10th anniversary here, and its author has been gone for a few years, imagine that some school districts would teach all the associated religious baggage in biology, would that prepare kids for college? Not without a massive mind flush.

Interestingly enough, College Biology and natural sciences dont deal with any of the "Thumpery" associated with our ID freind's worldviews. Colleges wont take time for any of it in class because theres so much to cover in the introductory and advanced classes that are fact, not supernatural speculation. Physiology, anatomy, ecology, systematics, biochem, all are based upon a clear evolutionary path.
Colleges that do not teach these units are in danger of losing science accreditation by their regions. Look at schools like Oral Roberts, Ave Maria, Liberty U (all colleges taught with a favored closed religious or political view), none of these colleges feature their biological sciences that lead a student to a degree in biology and thus they close off career opportunities for students. Regional accreditation of a learning program is needed for graduates to obtain licenses in many fields that require them.
So the religious Fundamental colleges and U's skirt the biological sciences and offer courses within larger survey titles. But guaranteed a kid will have big trouble getting into a similarly accredited grad school or med school.

Most religious colleges and Us today ARE accredited by their region, to live otherwise is a dis-service to their students.
I know that of the three unis I was associated with in my professional years, we did offer many courses and seminar seris of "histories of a particular science" and all offered degree programs in the HISTORY of SCIENCE.

I was looking up a list of unaccredited collges and most all are actually accredited within certain specific fields , like primary education, business , pre-law, etc.

ALSO,th Discovery Institute, a "think tank" is not accredited in the Northwest

I'm not sure what counts as worldshaking, but clearly some mechanism periodically causes most of a species to not pass on their genes, leading to a situation where all life is perpetually descended from a common ancestor in their species' recent past.

This has implications for human origins as well. DNA evidence that we are descended from a recent common ancestor shouldn't be taken as a clue pointing towards our species' origin. Rather it is just the result of the same process that regularly happens to all species.

These are called Genetic "Bottleneck's", and most are preceded by rapid environmental change, otherwise known as "disasters", like Meteor impacts or volcanic events.

The last big Genetic Bottleneck for humans was right around the eruption of Toba.

You know, high schools need to be accredited, too, and it's crucial for anyone expecting to attend university. My high school was not accredited, and that makes it hard to get into a good university. In the case of may students, it means attending a community college for a year and then hoping to transfer in. In my case, I was able to attend a summer session with the accreditation requirement waived, and then allowed to register for the fall semester based on my performance in summer session. I knew I wanted to major in history and hoped to have a double major in history and English literature (i.e., literature in the English language). In summer session, I took the maximum allowed hours in lit courses. I high school my "guidance counselor" (I use the term advisedly) gave me a standard list of books I would have to have read by the end of my university career. I rolled my eyes, but didn't say anything--I'd already read nine out of ten of them.

Despite the high quality of my education in the home, and the important reading in history and literature which I had done on my own, the lack of HS accreditation was a real stumbling block. Fortunately, a visit to the university hooked me up with a general advisor who suggested that I try enrolling for the summer session. The Dover case struck me first as "those poor bastards' prospects for a university education are at risk."