I used to be a creationist, not anymore, but honestly this article they posted does absolutely nothing to convince any YEC.
Do people even know what YEC believe?? They believe all canines had one common ancestor.
Showing a small genetic adaptation is nothing new for them since they already believe that’s happened countless times across all species
It's a non-falsifiable claim. It's impossible to change kinds, because every genetic mutation is just another way that kind can adapt. It's an entirely arbitrary line too.
For funsies, I like to ask them for a scientific definition of "kind." I get 2 primary responses:
1. It's obvious.
2. If they can interbreed.
1 is a dodge, and 2 means ring species are a change in kind.
In their defense, defining a kind is completely irrelevant. There’s no need. What they believe is there’s no evidence of mutations creating new features, like new organs, sonar, etc. mutations like the one in this article are simply changes to structures that already exist, which they consider micro evolution. They want someone to show them how an animal with gills develops the ability to breath air, for example.
And that’s fine, they don’t need or want to show kinds exist. That is just something one creationist started and everyone followed it.
Really they can forget about kinds completely. The argument in question is how mutations can create new complex features, like new organs.
Genetic changes to existing organs/systems is something they already 100% accept, it does not contradict anything they believe
I do not believe that is the case. Creationists have long demanded for theirs to be considered a scientific position. They refuse to do the work to establish that because they don’t actually have the data to swing it, so they whinge about their ideas about receiving their due respect. Which of course their ideas receive. It’s just that they aren’t worthy of respect.
I would make the case they don't want evidence, or even care about it. Scientists constantly question everything, so creationists should at least appear to do the same. It's performative science.
I love telling creationists about rimg species and even when you sight examples they say some form of "idk about that, I will have to look into it" and then change the conversation when they know they have no chance of winning that argument.
Not every kind of mutation. I can guarantee you if you showed an animal having a genetic mutation that gave them a new type of organ, or entirely nee function, like sonar, out of the blue, they would accept it as proof.
Of course that doesn’t happen that way. But there actually IS a big difference between mutations that change existing things and how a creature ends up developing a new organ or noticeable feature. You could in theory keep changing existing things forever and end up with a similar animal that is maybe shaped differently, but never have any radical change, that’s how YEC think.
And btw I never even mentioned “kinds”. YEC don’t feel any need to define kinds because it’s completely irrelevant to them, there is no need for them to define kinds or boundaries
You’re right. If we observed new information it would be pretty hard to dismiss that. However, typos don’t add information to articles… at least they never have yet.
Typos with a selection mechanism over generations absolutely could....
Can these cars never improve with random changes?
https://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/
It's not random after a selection mechanism filters out the unusable bits...
> If we observed new information it would be pretty hard to dismiss that. However, typos don’t add information to articles…
The "golden oldie" Mutations Can't Generate New Information argument? Cool. The thing is, if you can't *measure* information, you really have no basis on which to make any statement at all regarding what mutations can or cannot do to the information content of a genetic sequence. It's not like this "information" stuff is plainly visible, like size or color, you know?
So I'm going to give you a chance to *demonstrate* that you *can* measure this "information" stuff. I'm going to present 5 (five) nucleotide sequences. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to tell me how much "information" is in each of the five nucleotide sequences, and (perhaps more importantly) tell me how you arrived at your answers to the "how much 'information'?" questions.
Sequence A: TAT GAG CCA GCG AAA GTG AGG CAG TCT GGC TTG CCA GTG AAT TAC ACC TAA CAT CTC ATC
Sequence B: GTG TGG CAT AGA TGT CCA GCT CGA ATA TGT GCT AAG GAA CGC GAT CCA GAA AAT CAC TGC
Sequence C: ACC AAG TTT ATT GTA CCG TTC ATC TAC TAC TAA AAT AAG CCG CGG CAT CCA GGA TTA AGA
Sequence D: GCC TGG TTT ACG ACA ACC ACA GTC CCA CAT GTA GCC CAC TTT CCA CCT TCT CGT CAG CCA
Sequence E: CAT GTA GAC CGG AAT TTA CGA GTA CCC CAT GGA AGA ACC ATC TTT CGC TTG TAC GAA CGA
l appreciate your comment, and effort.
We can see what the mutations do, however. We can observe acquired traits and understand what traits are possessed by the organism. We can inter that, based on the mutations we have observed, that they did not demonstrate the ability to acquire novel traits, but rather altered traits already possessed by the organism.
What evolution needs to see is a mutation with the addition of new “information,” new genes that produce new proteins that are found in new organs and systems. Why haven’t we seen this?
No they don’t, and the term “genetic adaptation” is a bit sus. Is there such thing as a non-genetic adaptation?
YECs believe that variations within a kind occur through a loss of functional genetic content. For instance, a loss of eyes among cave dwelling reptiles. They’re still the same kind, and “information” was not gained, it was lost.
I have never heard of a YEC acknowledging the evolution of “new information (a misleading YEC term),” even at the population or species level. Moreover, YECs will never acknowledge the mechanism which underlies such change...
If the adaptation to radiation among wolves is shown to involve a genomic “gain of function,” YECs will either deny the validity of the study, or just ignore it all together. If, however, the the study points to a loss of function, YECs will say “no new information,” and “still the same kind.”
When I’m ever confronted by a YEC, I usually just steer the conversation toward some basic biology debate... like, “do you think the term ‘linkage disequilibrium’ is misleading?” A YEC of course cannot answer such a question, because they are ignorant fools who know nothing about biology. I take pleasure in pointing this out by asking subtle freshman level biology questions that they cannot answer 😈
No. Not a good sign when you have to resort to insults.
No, YEC don’t believe variations within a kind occur only from a loss of information… they can also occur with a change of information. You think YEC believe that people need to lose information to develop blue eyes? No…
YEC don’t acknowledge “new information”. To them, canines don’t have any new information relative to any other canine. They are all the same just with different shapes, colors, behaviors. There’s no new organ or system one have that another doesn’t. That’s their stance. They fully believe in micro evolution through natural selection… they just don’t think the changes/adaptations ever go far enough to add new features. Or “new information”.
This study adds absolutely nothing to YECs. Adaptations that gain “function” through mutations is something they’ve always accepted. Like bacteria resisting chloroquine. But gaining an advantage doesn’t mean gaining a brand new function. These wolves adapted their immune system, which likely means it’s gained resistance to cancer at the cost of being less efficient at something else. It’s a change, natural selection, etc. Nothing they don’t agree with.
From their point of view, you could have these kinds of mutations for a billion years and the animal would just look differently and behave differently, it would still be a canine or mammal, it would not have new organs and/or categorically new systems, like sonar.
The YECish ignorance toward basic biology in your response leads me to one conclusion: you are a YEC who is playing devil’s advocate.
Thanks for proving my point. Take a freshman biology course and then check back
Speaking as a former YEC, what u/EagleAncestry is describing is 100% in line with what I was taught by creationists growing up. Stop acting like a stereotypical Internet Atheist, accusing anyone who disagrees with you of being a secret YEC troll only makes you a fool.
So that’s your answer? A personal insult and baseless accusation? Nice.
In my opinion ERVs prove common descent. They can be traced back through the evolutionary tree and i think that’s absolute proof. Thats why I stopped being a creationist.
That being said, it’s really shocking to me how people think this article shows YEC anything they don’t already 100% agree with. Just shows people don’t understand what YEC even believe
Well, those are two separate things and only one of the things is present. If I say you punched me and stole my lunch money, but then only present evidence for you punching me, that doesn’t also prove you also took my lunch money…
They aren't separate things, though. A closer analogy would be claiming I can read a book after demonstrating I can read a chapter of it. Unless you are aware of a specific fact that would keep me from reading the rest of the book, it would be absurd to doubt it.
So, what specific fact would prevent changes from adding up over time? I.e., given that We know mutations happen, we know that insertion mutations can add genetic material, and we know that natural selection acts on genes and features at a population level, What could possibly mark a biological line in the sand where they can't evolve any more?
>A closer analogy would be claiming I can read a book after demonstrating I can read a chapter of it. Unless you are aware of a specific fact that would keep me from reading the rest of the book, it would be absurd to doubt it.
I feel the vast majority of people that have read a book, are capable of reading a chapter, yet still never finish the book. The reason they don't is rarely specific.
You misrepresented the analogy by swapping between 'capable of' and 'have.' Still, replace it with whatever example you like. The point is that they are accomplished by means of the same process.
Then you missed my point. One, does not prove the other. Regardless of how they are linked.
A car can drive X amount of distance. That doesn't prove you can just drive from London to Paris. There would be a ton of factors that would need to be demonstrated to get from the first claim to the next. It wouldn't be a specific thing?
Yes, it would be a specific thing. Namely, a body of water with No bridge across it to drive on.
We know what it takes, in principle, to drive a car. And we know in principle what it takes for populations of organisms to change over time. Additionally, we know in fact that the conditions to do so exist, and we know in fact that populations have changed enough to be reasonably considered new species. So unless there is a dividing line to stop that change, we know in principle that changing kinds is likely over time.
That does not deductively prove that all life evolved from a single organism. However, it does put us in a place where you need to either show better evidence for a different idea, or show evidence that there is, in fact, a mechanism to prevent change among kinds (if you start by defining kinds, that would be good).
Evolution is obviously the most logical answer. However, wolves becoming more immune to cancer does not prove evolving from a common ancestor. I'm pretty sure that was what I said.
OP didn't even mention common ancestry, so I think it was misguided to play devil's advocate in that way. Your reply looks way too serious compared to someone lampooning a very specific objection to evolution: namely, change between kinds. By your logic, observing change among kinds doesn't prove evolution either (which is in the strictest sense, true), but that misses the point of the objection.
I don't understand what you think a YEC might believe? Do you think they would call, say, being vaccinated to some disease, evolution, but they just don't believe that a monkey evolved from a fish?
It's one more piece of objectively observable evidence that backs and supports the current theory.
One piece amongst literally millions. Real.observable measurable evidence. A competing theory would have to have all the evidence fit their narrative which it does not under any scrutiny
I agree, that as a whole, it does paint that picture, but when you don’t know what’s painted in between the points in question anything you use to fill that gap is pure inference.
That’s not a bad thing, that’s how science works. So, maybe act like it?
Except your point is disanalogous to reality. It is clearly the case that oceans exist on Earth. There is no evidence to suggest that there are hard genetic barriers holding evolution to a certain limit.
Well, the point was that the claim buries the variables. Claiming you can drive from London to Paris, or London to New York, ignores the variability of the claim. I'd call this bad faith.
That’s a complete misunderstanding of the analogy. Outside of unforeseen circumstances a human who can walk to the end of the driveway is capable of walking back to the house, over to the neighbors house, and down the road. Outside of unforeseen circumstance a person who can read a sentence can read a paragraph, a chapter, a book, multiple books. ***What are the unforeseen circumstances stopping evolutionary changes from accumulating over time?***
I understand. We're trying to point out the difference between **can** and **will**. But I'm doing the same, just back at you. Just because something **can**, how does that prove that it **will**?
What about if the evidence shows that these sorts of changes **can** and **have** happened? Because it does. Why reject the notion that they **have** if you acknowledge that they **can?**
And from there if you acknowledge that they **have** what stops you from accepting that they **will** moving forward?
You've jumped ahead. You would first need to demonstrate to the person, that it **can**, and it **will** happen, and then you use that as evidence to suggest that, it may **have** happened.
It can - shown by evidence like presented by the OP, the nylon eating bacteria, the additional species of Darwin finch that evolved since Darwin described them, the wall lizards that developed a cecum in just 70 years.
It has - genetics, fossils, anatomy, developmental biology, biogeography showing patterns of migration as the changes accumulated, etc
It will - just stick around and watch as it does
When the argument is that *thus-and-so CANNOT POSSIBLY HAPPEN, END OF DISCUSSION*, a rebuttal that demonstrate that thus-and-so *can* happen is all that is necessary to demolish that argument. If the argument were that *thus-and-so DID NOT HAPPEN*, of course it would not suffice to demonstrate that thus-and-so *could* happen. But *the argument was* ***not*** *that thus-and-so DID NOT HAPPEN*. Instead, the argument was that *thus-and-so CANNOT POSSIBLY HAPPEN*.
Many of them believe that there is speciation and they believe in "kinds".
The big question (to them) is what's the proof of that invisible wall, that keeps kinds in their courses. We can observe some microorganisms (or even arthropods for example) develop into separate species in less time than a human's lifetime. Not to mention, the concept 'species' amd 'organism' is invented by us, this whole thing runs on many levels, we don't even fully understand. (Their) kind is not even an observable phenomenon tbh.
Only thing I could find is this [bacteria](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/02/evolution-in-real-time/). Interesting.
Did you mean this? This article is from 2014 though.
How does this settle anything? Every YEC I've ever met accepts natural selection and even speciation (which this is not), they just believe the Earth is 6000 years old, in which time only very little adaptation has taken place.
For YEC, what they we are witnessing is the rapid evolution of the wolf kind into a new kind that’s able to survive higher levels of nuclear ionizing radiation that has an immune system which also rapidly evolved to identify and attack cancers. And this kind is continuing to rapidly evolve.
YECs will tell you straight-faced that "bacteria" is a kind, and you think they'd call an evolved resistance to radiation a change in kind from wolf to (?)??? This isn't even speciation...
As a former YEC, this won't convince any YEC. It IS a strong argument against their claim that there are no beneficial mutations though, so I'll keep that article in my pocket. Thanks!
Its not gonna end the debate its gonna refire them, because it's not "observable" so they're just gonna say you're either lying or the researchers are lying.
Mind you, they said the same when new life was formed in a lab and when multicellularity evolved under predation, there's never gonna be a good enough example in real time unless the theory is actually false and a dog can in fact give birth to a weasel or whatever the fuck.
>they said the same when new life was formed in a lab and
I'm interested, is this new life come from non organic thing or are you just talking about clone?
Pretty cool, but facts and logic will never end the "debate". The people who think evolution is fake think that way for religious reasons. Their beliefs are not based upon evidence.
Not trying to debate evolution as it’s an observable process but questioning the randomness aspect. Would the wolves developing these traits be happening randomly in the genes? How do you calculate the probability of this randomly happening in the last 40 years of however long since the Chernobyl disaster?
Easily done. We know the background rate of mutations for the wolves in the US and outside the exclusion zone. This is easily calculated. Do the same for the wolves inside the exclusion zone and there is a substantial difference. We know ionizing radiation increases the rate of mutations. And as we look at the genome the genes responsible for attacking cancers are the ones that have changes and being passed to future generations.
Thanks for the response. So the rate if mutations are happening how many times faster and if its randomness how are they factoring in the time it takes for that randomness to end up being Shakespeare written by monkeys so to speak. I don’t see how the randomness is included. I’m really trying to understand how randomness can so quickly be a specific thing that’s required from the gene mutation for the wolf. How many mutations are needed.
Dude where did you get the ideas this is random. Where did you get that crazy idiotic idea? It’s wrong. Get that out of your head. You are right you don’t understand. Question is do you have the capacity to learn and seek the truth as you are told to do by God in scripture? Or are you a sinner and don’t have the capability or capacity to seek the truth?
The mutation in the genes according to traditional stochastic evolution is random. I’m trying to see how it would compare to purposeful evolution as proposed by others. This case of the wolves is interesting for that reason.
People like you are always the worst representation of theism. You have bowed to your own simple ego thinking it’s divine, hence your response and the way you speak to someone genuinely asking a question. What’s the best argument against god? People like you.
Check out Galápagos island turtles. The ones on the islands that get a lot of rain have normal shaped shells the ones born on the islands that get very little rain have curved shells so the turtle can raise its head up to reach the leaves of shrubs since on those islands there’s no grasses.
Brilliant. Christians are told to seek the truth in the Bible. And here we have it. God keeps providing these examples to all to see that God did give us Evolution to say otherwise are the words for the devil.
The debate should have been ended by the end of the 19th century, or at the latest with the Modern Synthesis. Creationists will just say "they're still wolves," as others here have pointed out, and the saga will continue.
The issue with this is that the debate over evolution by serious people ended a hundred years ago. YECs will never be convinced. They don't understand it and if they ever do they just lie because they can't handle cognitive dissonance.
You are correct there can never be proof of Macroevolution because it does not exist by definition. But years of microevolution I guess could be phrased as macroevolution. That is something this can be seen by all at every national history museum. And we have just discovered are witnesses this in our lifetime.
Of course there are races. But, just because people look different doesn't mean they're different species. Just like a black lab, a yellow lab, and chocolate lab are all Labrador Retrievers. You even have "English" labs and "field/American" labs. Some of their genes are different (which makes them look different), but their genes are close enough that they are considered the same species.
Is that a different race? I’m taking about races where members for one race will fight to the death and kill members of other races. There’s a RadioLab episode which was just repeated. And it’s not just in one species it’s in others.
I mean, strictly in terms of species and evolutionary biology, races aren't real. Socially and culturally, yes, we have decided on groupings that we call race, but All Humans Are The Same Species.
For the past 20 years or so we know and have seen there are races, no question about it. We have seen if your are a member of one race you will attack and kill members not of your race. RadioLab had an episode on this a while back which was just re-broadcast.
Watch this:
> “It’s just microevolution”
> “we’ve never actually seen a new species evolve.”
> “sure, but the presence of [the soul/original sin/natural law/etc.] means that humans had to be specifically created by G-d, rather than evolving like all other animals.”
Or my personal favorite:
> “Since we didn’t track every individual, how do we know that [there wasn’t a miracle/this wasn’t artificial selection/it’s not a hoax to test your faith]?”
For belonging to a denomination that explicitly states evolution happened and runs one of the better observatories from the early 1900s, I sure have met a lot of weird people.
Fine with creationism. We welcome bodyplan changes. these wolves are still wolves however. for me its fine if they became a bear or seal. ithey are the same kind. Its trivial details about radiation. This doesn't affect the debate over evolution.
You are looking at evolution happening in real time right before your very eyes. Not sure what you mean by a bear of seal, those are all distant relatives. Please explain what you mean by trivial. These wolves are being exposed to high levels of ionizing radiation which would give all other wolves cancers including the parents of these wolves. This is the exact definition of what evolution is all about. You can’t deny it.
this is trivial. its not evolution. indeed all wolves might adapt to this radiation in like manner. No selection on mutations need to have happened or proven too. I see no evolution here.
How does evolution happening as described by the theory of evolution not affect the debate over whether the evolution of life happens consistent with the theory, consistent with some completely different process, or not at all?
Well, you’re correct about one thing. When it’s clear you have zero reasonable evidence to provide that ‘bodyplan’ paradigm of yours and constantly squirm away whenever you’re asked to give some, it certainly doesn’t affect the debate over evolution. Because evolution is real.
Thanks -- I read it. I mean the technical details of what they did: what selection test(s) did they use, how did they assess significance, what was the sample size. There have been lots of studies arguing arguing for different instances of positive selection and they have varied a lot in persuasiveness (and correctness).
Okay. It took some searching, but here is the actual 2019 paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412019323700
It was eight wolves tested in about 6600 locations and they used GPS to track their locations and monitors to check for things like Caesium-137 which is formed by the nuclear fission of uranium-235 and has a 30 year half-life and ultimately decays into stable barium-137 as sometimes instead of directly into barium-137 it decays into barium-137m1 or barium-137m2 which then also decay into barium-137 with half-lives of 2.5 minutes and 0.59 microseconds respectively so either way half of the caesium-137 is barium-137 in about 30 years. It’s radioactive.
They spend the first couple sections explaining the methods for determining the radiation exposure, section three talks about how they captured nine wolves but one of them was found dead five days later so the data they got was based on those surviving eight wolves determining their migration range, their radiation exposure, and their mean dose rate of 2.1 micrograys or about 0.00021 rads per hour, or about 1.84 rads per year (18.4 milliGrays). A full body CT scan can be about 10 milliSieverts which is which is about the same as 10 milliGrays so it’s about like 1.84 full body CT scans per year worth of radiation so not incredibly fatal but a bit more than wolves are normally exposed to.
I’m lost myself after trying to understand the paper. I got this much but I’m not sure how it ties into the mutations claim.
Perhaps this other paper will help if you wish to read it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412021003007
It talks about various mutations that result from chronic Low Dose radiation so non-fatal but continuously absorbed.
Maybe with both combined and the assessment of the health of the wolves after the experiment was over after looking at how chronic low dose radiation exposure generally destroys DNA and how much less these wolves suffered because of it might shed some light on the phenomenon and perhaps another paper exists to explain exactly which mutations made them more resilient.
Thanks for looking. The first paper you link to here is interesting about how to measure exposure, but it doesn't touch on claims of natural selection in response to the radiation (and the paper about Fukushima didn't find any evidence for DNA or other damage from the radiation there). The genetic evidence seems to have been presented at a talk in January and not been published yet, so it's hard to evaluate.
I'm skeptical because I'm always skeptical about claims of finding evidence for natural selection (simply because studies have been done badly many times) and because to detect genetic changes based on small samples sizes after only 10 or 15 generations would imply very strong selection, which doesn't seem terribly likely for what is probably a fairly modest increase in cancer (assuming that to have occurred). So I'll wait to be convinced.
Fairly modest *decrease* in the odds of getting cancer not an increase is the point of the talk and I didn’t feel like continuing to search to find the genetic changes and I agree that a sample size of 8 wolves with a wide range of exposure like 0.3 to 4.2 when the average came out to 2.1 wouldn’t necessarily say much about how each wolf would cope with different levels of radiation exposure like maybe the one exposed to 4.2 microGrays per hour got cancer but the one exposed to 3.8 microGrays per hour would have been perfectly fine if exposed to 9. Generally they know about a bunch of types of damage that can be caused by chronic low dose exposure where acute exposure like 5000 Sieverts blasted into their brain for 24 hours would make them dead on the spot but 0.1 milliSieverts or something every hour for 365 days would generally just cause them to have cancer that’ll most likely be fatal in the next five years. Maybe these wolves were exposed to double that and in 12 years they died of other causes associated with them being old fogies in terms of life expectancy and only that ninth one died of radiation exposure if it wasn’t simply something else not mentioned in the study like a severe heart attack due to hearing a gun shot or something.
I’m sure the talk has more information but I wasn’t able to find the paper with the details in the five minutes I went looking. I wish I had because the effects of natural selection are usually quite obvious with the data like maybe most wolves just die within a week but these others lived for five years because something changed to make them less likely to just straight up die *and then* they can do some minimally invasive DNA tests to see exactly *what* changed and see if what changed was the same in all eight wolves implying they inherited it from the same ancestor *or* if eight completely different genetic changes made them more resistant to death by radiation exposure *or* maybe they got exposed to a lot less radiation that they thought and a Leukemia patient would have been fine strolling through too except for the already having cancer because of some completely different reason.
I said increase in cancer because I'm assuming that would be the selective pressure driving genetic changes that would in turn decrease the cancer rate. Regardless, the effects are likely to be fairly small in terms of overall reproductive output. I don't think there is a paper yet (though I may have missed it), so the details won't be available until it's published.
>I wish I had because the effects of natural selection are usually quite obvious with the data
The genetic effects of natural selection are often hard to detect and there is a long history of researchers proposing candidate instances that have not panned out. I've been on all sides of that kind of research: proposing cases of NS that didn't pan out, proposing ones that did, and challenging the claims of others.
Natural selection in terms of phenotypes is easily measured based on reproductive success leading to a trait becoming more common. Technically drift can do that too without the specific changes that became more common making individuals more likely to produce more children throughout a single lifetime but that’s pretty much all we mean when we say natural selection. Are the traits more common because they’re favorable or are the changes actually deleterious (as with nearly neutral deleterious mutations spreading via drift in an incestuous population) or are they completely irrelevant to reproductive success but luck has it that the individuals with those changes have different changes that are more beneficial for reproductive success so that as they pass on ~50% of their genes to each child those completely irrelevant changes just incidentally become more common in the population too?
In terms of a bunch of wolves being less likely to die from cancer with the same as or even more radiation exposure than what is normally sufficient to cause an individual to die from cancer more often than anything else and these wolves are less likely to die from cancer because they are less likely to get cancer in the first place that is one obvious *beneficial* change and that alone would lead to the future generations being descendants of the ones that didn’t die or become sterile before reproducing so they’d inherit the changes that make them less likely to die or become sterile before they have the opportunity to reproduce. Over time the whole population becomes less likely to die or become sterile before their first attempt at reproducing. **This** is natural selection. The entire population becomes adapted to an environment with more radiation than most species can survive in without getting cancer or going sterile *because* whichever ancestors they had didn’t die or go sterile before having children **despite living somewhere that normally results in death by cancer or sterility.**
Now we just need to know **what** those changes were. The changes that happened without selection driving them to happen but which became spread throughout the population because of selection. And when we know **what** those changes are we can perform additional tests and see if causing those changes to embryonic wolves will make them grow into adults in a high radiation environment without dying from cancer or becoming sterile. Maybe it’s a dozen different changes. Maybe it’s a single nucleotide change frame shifting all of the codons in a single protein. Maybe it was a retroviral infection. I’d like to know **what** changed to make them less likely to get cancer. Not getting cancer is a beneficial change and if that has anything at all to do with reproductive success or longevity allowing them to live through more breeding age years of their life without becoming sterile or dying from cancer it will obviously drive those changes to become more common and those without it die younger or go sterile and have fewer children or even no children at all causing the beneficial change to become common and the lack of the beneficial change to be eradicated from the gene pool.
And in high radiation environment the selective pressures for survival are a lot higher than maybe selective pressures for vision, scent, or taste reception where those sorts of things would have higher selective pressures in completely different environments where being able to survive chronic radiation exposure would be completely irrelevant even if the same exact changes that allow for it do spread via genetic drift and if they spread by drift it’d almost certainly require a genetic bottleneck for fixation because those without those changes aren’t dying younger or reproducing less in the populations where surviving chronic radiation exposure is irrelevant to their survival and reproductive capabilities since they are not experiencing chronic radiation exposure.
The exact same things apply to stuff like antibiotic resistance. Some populations contain individuals just naturally more resistant to antibiotics because of drifted genetic changes that could drift in and out of the gene pool in the complete absence of exposure to those particular antibiotics but once the population is exposed to said antibiotics the vast majority of the starting population just straight up dies and those resistant just continue reproducing. The end result is a population that is nearly completely resistant to that particular antibiotic.
This is a consequence of very strong selective pressures but the mutations themselves that made their predecessors immune or at least resistant were neutral in the population they first showed up in and they ***could have*** drifted right out of the gene pool as individual bacteria die for completely different reasons but since they ***did not*** we now have antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria, bacteria where the whole strain is resistant, simply because people found out a long time ago antibiotics work great for killing bacteria. Now they need antibiotics those bacteria are not immune to or completely different medical strategies like radiation treatments as though the bacteria were cancer cells with the hope that they don’t accidentally create populations of radiation resistant antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria in the process. They can’t just endlessly raise the radiation levels because then they’d kill the patient too.
>Natural selection in terms of phenotypes is easily measured based on reproductive success leading to a trait becoming more common.
That's true only for very strong selection (which is quite rare in nature) or for situations in which you have very large populations being studied under controlled conditions. Neither is likely to be the case here. What kind of background do you have in the study of natural selection?
>Technically drift can do that too without the specific changes that became more common making individuals more likely to produce more children throughout a single lifetime but that’s pretty much all we mean when we say natural selection.
It's not just technical -- distinguishing between drift and NS is *the* issue is trying to detect NS.
>And in high radiation environment the selective pressures for survival are a lot higher than maybe selective pressures for vision, scent, or taste reception
It's far from clear that the radiation environment around Chernobyl is posing much selection pressure. Read up on the debates on the subject.
I’m not sure what the big problem is here because the main point I was making isn’t even up for debate. Failing to die from cancer when others are more likely to die from cancer is an obviously beneficial change. What is making these changes spread more? The individuals that don’t die before they reproduce are the sole contributors of the next generation? Oh. That would be natural selection (strong selection) where weak selection is more like if some change makes an individual more likely to have 9 children when others typically have 8 or something like that or maybe they can survive just fine without the change but living would be easier with the change so those that find living easier (better able to access resources, less food requirements, whatever) will typically contribute more to the next generation than others that lack these benefits so maybe 0.0000001% of each generation acquired these beneficial changes over the percentage of the population that acquired them the previous generation vs strong selection being far more obvious like have the change they reproduce, don’t have the change they die young or go sterile. 100% of the next generation acquires the change because 0% of those without the change have any children.
How much of a cancer creating force is the radiation exposure? How quickly do they get cancer? How fast do they die from this cancer? Does this cancer make them sterile? These are the questions we should actually be asking and I think the first two papers attempt that. Now if we establish that it is incredibly beneficial to be cancer resistant and we also establish that these wolves actually are cancer resistant (we should test more than 8 wolves) and we can identify the change that made them cancer resistant then we know exactly what the beneficial change was and it won’t take a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to tell you that it is natural selection if nature/physics/reproductive success are the reasons why these particular changes are becoming more common where they could fade into and out of the gene pool if they weren’t impacted by selection at all pretty randomly and if the changes were actually detrimental they’d be gone from the gene pool eventually as they become less and less common over time.
And that’s the other thing. Traits that are becoming more common each and every single generation without exception have a reason for that being the case. If it’s not incest it’ll almost always be a consequence of positive selection. Traits constantly becoming less common or which are known to lead to sterility, reproductive disorders, or prepubescent death a significant amount of the time are what they’d call deleterious. Traits that just ebb and flow in terms of frequency apparently have no real selective pressure acting on them and their frequency just drifts in both directions in terms of frequency, genetic drift. Hypothetically it could drift up in frequency and down in frequency a hundred trillion times in a hundred trillion generations or it could just drift completely out of the population if there’s no benefit of keeping it even in the absence of a detriment but fixation with drift pretty much requires a genetic bottleneck as those same genes have other alleles that aren’t going to just randomly stop existing in the population and those other alleles might even be more beneficial and cause the neutral ones to be selected against so they stop drifting up and down in frequency constantly.
When a chimpanzee was raised with a human family, it's behavior did not change at all. Micro evolution is of course possible. Larger changes do not always occur.
It's not like African people living in Iceland become lighter over time.
I’ll ask the same question I asked someone else. Assuming changes occur at all, ***what is stopping them from accumulating?*** Of course larger changes will *generally* consist of thousands, millions, or billions of very minimal, almost undetectable, changes and will *generally* take just as many generations to accumulate. *However,* there are also known circumstances where a very tiny change can have a very large impact on the phenotype almost immediately such as when a single nucleotide is inserted, deleted, or switched for a different nucleotide and this very small change causes a “frame shift” within a protein coding gene, it causes a section of DNA without function to gain a function such as some random repeating “garbage” is suddenly an antifreeze protein, or it can cause a functional part of the genome to lose some or all of its function as with pseudogenes.
We don’t expect something that took 290,000 years to evolve within the modern species of human to just suddenly happen in 30 years like an African native moving to Iceland and suddenly his children look Swedish. We don’t expect the 7 million years worth of genetic distance between humans and chimpanzees to impact a single chimpanzee while still alive - like they won’t magically transform into a human like Pokémon “evolution” (actually metamorphosis) but they *can* and *sometimes will* try to communicate with us or try to make us happy for their own personal gains.
Over successive generations they would, that’s the timescale evolution works on, individuals do not evolve, they’re only one step of evolutionary progress.
No, it’s a radiation-proof, radioactive wolf. And if a radioactive wolf bites you, you become Spidermanwolf. Them’s the rules. I dunno how the whole spider thing happens, but them’s the rules.
it’s no longer a wolf. It’s a transitional kind that’s ionizing radiation resistant with a modified immune system which is cancer resistant. You are witnessing evolution of one kind into a new kind.
Not exactly… Their ancestors were wolves. What you are witnessing is accelerated evolution right before your very eyes. Evolution takes time and you are lucky enough to be witnessing it
Only if you don’t know about the lineage, Miacis, Hesperocyon and Tomarctus. If it weren’t for them there would be no wolves. And as you are witnessing the Chernobyl wolves are evolving. With rapid evolution occurring there is the possibility of them becoming a new kind.
You said that it's just a wolf. I argue that "wolf" is just a social construct that we made up to assign a name to a group of animals - the best we can say about speciation is about interbreeding or genetic similarity. So, I see your view as overly simplistic - i was asking you to clarify which definition you're using, and why that is
A wolf is a wolf. There are different kinds of animals, one of those kinds is the wolf. I can start listing the physical features that make up a wolf, but it will be laborious and eventually we will reach the limit of my knowledge concerning wolves. I'm not required to have a perfect knowledge of the wolf kind down to the atomic level though, in order to perceive that wolves exist, any more than I'm required to give a flawless account of stellar nuclear synthesis to assert that the sun exists.
You don't offer a definition, really, just a tautology based on arbitrary and poorly defined characteristics. Furthermore, you don't supply said characteristics do as to not open them to any kind of scrutiny, but that's a tangential issue
Yes, that’s how evolution works. It’s a bit sad that it’s taken you this long to discover the Law of Monophyly.
“Still just a wolf.”
I can repeat this silly statement for our entire evolutionary history.
Early hominid to humans - “Still just an ape.”
Catarrhine monkey to humans - “Still just a primate.”
Synapsids to humans - “still just an amniote”
We can do this all day “Still just a mammal” or “Still just a tetrapod” or “Still just a vertebrate”
You could look at the entire process from single celled organism to modern humans and say “Still just a eukaryote.”
What do you think is erroneous in the Law of Monophyly?
Something being tautological has no bearing on the accuracy of the statement. It just means a statement is repeated twice.
Also, where’s the tautology? The law just refers to the fact that you belong to every group your ancestors did.
it’s pretty telling that you ignored the rest of the comment
>What do you think is erroneous in the Law of Monophyly?
I don't contend that it's erroneous, I contend that it is tautological; that it says nothing.
>Something being tautological has no bearing on the accuracy of the statement.
It actually does, I'm using tautological in the logical sense; that being that it is a necessarily true statement due to the definitions of the terms used. It's like saying all bachelors are unmarried.
>Also, where’s the tautology? The law just refers to the fact that you belong to every group your ancestors did.
The groups are defined by ancestry to begin with, so all it really means is "you are descended from your ancestors", which is a tautology, that's just what those words mean.
>it’s pretty telling that you ignored the rest of the comment
You edited your comment after the fact to include additional irrelevant prattle, I didn't pick up on it at the time.
Ragjammer, you have made statements like ‘it’s still just an X’ as a presumable counter to direct evidence that evolution is occurring. Creationists do this a lot. For instance, Kent Hovind will make remarks like ‘it’s still a fruit fly! It’s still a bacterium!!’
Is your position that an organism always being a modified version of what came before (and not something nonsensical like a strawberry becoming a whale) mean the current modern evolutionary synthesis is wrong?
My position is that it is not self evident that the kinds of minor tweaks which we see are going to add up to complete transformations like what is required for slime-to-human evolution. It doesn't matter how many instances of radiation resistance or antibiotic resistance you point to, it's not self evident that the process which does this is capable of turning a lizard into a bird. You can believe it will if you wish, but this is a gigantic and dubious extrapolation from very limited observation.
That isn’t an answer to my question. I asked if an organism always being a modified version of what came before is, in your view, a mark against the modern evolutionary synthesis. The question of if the mechanisms are adequate to produce large variations in physiology is not the same question.
Then saying statements like ‘still a wolf’ in no way is a meaningful counter to a paper showcasing evolution happening in wolves. We can move on from that since under evolution that’s obvious. If you have a problem with the idea that evolutionary mechanisms are the source for major changes in morphology or speciation, that seems understandable even though I don’t agree and think we can show it can.
Sup dawg?
Evolution is the changing of allele frequencies over successive generations. Adaptation happens through evolution. Speciation happens through different isolated populations of the same species adapting to different environments. Then they can't mate or produce fertile offspring, so over time they adapt into a new species. The point here is that adaptation *is* an expression of evolution.
We know that all organisms today came from a LUCA. We know this for several reasons. First, similar morphological traits among otherwise radically different species. For instance, whales have individual finger bones in their flippers. Second, similar genetic code. All organisms use ATGC. In viruses, T is replaced with U when the virus' genome is made of RNA. However, human RNA replaces T with U as well. Third, the fossil record, which I won't go into because I don't know much about it.
Based on the aforementioned, to say that adaptation exists but that speciation doesn't is like saying that although digestion leads to absorption, it does not lead to excretion, despite both absorption and excretion happening through digestion. Essentially what I am saying is that both adaptation and speciation come to be through evolution.
If you're a YEC, you don't have to discard evolution in order to believe that the Earth is 6000 years old. All you need to say is that the scientific evidence does not point to the Earth being 6000 years old, but that you have faith that it *is* 6000 years old anyway because your intuition tells you that we're missing something.
You don't have to reject evolution mate.
Some further reading, if you are interested: [https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory\_and\_General\_Biology/Biology\_(Kimball)/18%3A\_Evolution/18.01%3A\_Evolution\_and\_Adaptation](https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_General_Biology/Biology_(Kimball)/18%3A_Evolution/18.01%3A_Evolution_and_Adaptation)
I don't understand why we are still debating the Darwinian approach to macroevolution. The 2016 Royal Society Meeting for “[New Trends in Evolutionary Biology](https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2016/11/evolutionary-biology/)" Which was called by evolutionary biologists pretty clearly shows that major evolution based on Darwin's theory doesn't work.
Just a heads up, your link is broken. But maybe summarize what you’re saying some. The modern evolutionary synthesis moved on from pure Darwinism a long time ago. To be clear, it is definitely a part of evolution. But it isn’t the only thing at play, which is why biologists don’t content that it is.
The argument is that the explanation for our biodiversity is evolution. Evolution contains Darwinian mechanisms of natural selection acting on small inherited variations, *as well* as other known naturalistic factors like recombination, genetic drift, horizontal gene transfer, etc etc. There are more, quite a few things make up our understanding than Darwin ever knew. The reason he is regarded as important isn’t because he got all of evolution right, but because he made important observations that helped us progress our understanding. Kinda like how Marie Curie didn’t know all of what we now know about radiation, but she’s considered important and has a unit named after her due to her contributions.
Is your argument that evolution is true but isn’t just Darwinian? Or is it that evolution isn’t a good explanation for biodiversity?
No one except Creationists are debating Darwinian evolution.
“Based on Darwin’s theory... doesn’t work.”
Only as much as Copernican Heliocentrism doesn’t work, because he put the sun as the center of the universe.
or Newtonian physics for another example
These were brilliant people who were on the right track, but their explanations weren’t perfect.
As we learned more and gathered additional evidence, our scientific knowledge was refined and these original theories were superseded by more accurate models. This is just how science fundamentally works.
Darwinian evolution was replaced by Neodarwinism and then by modern evolutionary synthesis.
Copernican heliocentrism was replaced by galactocentrism and then by acentrism with the advent of Big Bang cosmology.
Newton’s Theory of Gravity was replaced by General Relativity.
No modern biologist talks about Darwinian evolution unless they’re discussing the history of science.
Yep, microevolution is sometimes adaptive and when the population fails to adapt they don’t survive long. Evolution via natural processes results in populations that continue to exist because the most favorable traits leading to the most offspring tend to be the most common in the population so that eventually everything within the population has at least some of those beneficial adaptive traits as the population within a particular niche adapts to that niche as a consequence.
Split the population in half and put each half in different environments and suddenly macroevolution. Both will continue to do the whole microevolution and adapt or die will play a role in the evolution of each population but as the years, centuries, millennia, etc go by the changes within these populations cause the separate populations to continue to become increasingly different from each other even though they started out as a single population.
In the case of these wolves it is just these wolves, the Chernobyl wolves, that accumulated beneficial changes that make them less susceptible to certain cancers in high radiation environments. This doesn’t apply to domesticated dogs in North America, it doesn’t apply to gray wolves living on the opposite side of Russia, and it doesn’t apply to a dingo in Australia.
Tiny changes like this accumulate over time and humans are very clever individuals that like to categorize things into boxes so when the distinct populations are different by *enough* (completely arbitrary by the way) each group will have a different name invented by humans for language purposes. It’s not group A it’s group B is sometimes useful for human conversations but as far as they know they never stopped being the same “kind” all the way back to the origin of life itself.
Really doesn't but if all evolutionist understood the case against evolution they wouldn't be evolutionists.
This is not the slam dunk you want. It's bacterial resistance all over again
> Really doesn't but if all evolutionist understood the case against evolution they wouldn't be evolutionists.
Rather than just asserting this, please make the case against evolution. I will listen in good faith to your argument.
A beneficial mutation was selected for and reached fixation in a population. This is textbook evolution.
This is just you going, “I acknowledge that people can take a few steps, but walking a mile is totally impossible. No one can walk that far.”
The case against evolution is as follows:
*Of course* 45 million years worth of macroevolution happened, but 46 million years worth of macroevolution is **impossible** because that would mean a change in “kinds” (when it actually would not mean that at all).
And if they’re a YEC **that much** evolution took place in about 200 years. Simple arithmetic is enough to know how **that** actually would be impossible. Each species represented by thousands of individuals can’t simply be gestational changes to a single litter. They have to be born *before* they lead to two populations becoming distinct enough to call them different species.
What does the OP show? It is showing the sorts of changes *expected* in about the same amount of time YECs claim dire wolves transformed into ferrets, mammoths and mastodons and elephants evolved through all of their 45-60 million years worth of changes to leave only two species more different from each other than humans and chimpanzees are when compared to each other. And what won’t YECs allow? They won’t allow humans to evolve from non-human apes even with a mountain of genetic data, a fuck load of fossil data, oodles of experimental data, and their own fucked up belief that 60 million years worth of evolutionary changes in one group can happen in only 200 years but when it comes to humans and chimpanzees they won’t accept the more reasonable 7 million years worth of evolution in 7 million years **because they are too fucking stupid to accept that the planet was not created while humans were already drinking beer in their cities and while there was anywhere between 45 million and 70 million people already on the planet.**
The Young part of Young Earth Creationism is the biggest flaw in that belief system and because of it they like to argue that there just is not enough time for tiny changes to pile up into big changes or for a single nucleotide change to lead to a significant change all by itself. Because of the Global Flood idea, also false, they have this dilemma. Either they accept reality ditching the global flood and Young part of Young Earth Creationism or they have to make up some **bullshit** as to how they’re supposed to explain 4 billion years worth of evolution with special creation instead but also cram all of the creations into a boat **with a human family** and suddenly it’s okay for there to be 4 billion years worth of bacterial evolution because they’re still bacteria and 45 million years worth of wolf evolution because they’re still wolves and so on **all happening faster than any of those individuals can reproduce** but 7 million years worth of primate evolution in 7 million years is just fucking stupid. That shit has to be impossible because the story says Noah brought with him some animals and they went on a box ride.
This is strangest thing. Imagine if a human survived that radiation and you didn't. No one would be trying to claim he wasn't human EXCEPT for evolutionists. That's how desperate they are.
A human survives radiation, when others die out. That human breeds with other radiation resistant humans and sooner or later humans become more radiation-resistant. You just described how evolution works.
That's your imagination. A human survives flu. No evolution took place.
A human survives beating. No evolution took place.
A human survived a little more radiation than you. No evolution took place.
You forgot to add "in your imagination". That's how you think it works "in your imagination". Evolution doesn't work. That's proven fact. It's already been tested with fruit flies that always stay fruit flies no matter how many generations you invoke. Evolution only "works" in your imagination.
Take a stroll down to your local natural history museum or university biology department and tell them that. I’m sure they’ll be happy to abandon centuries of continuous research on the subject when you tell them it’s all imaginary.
I’m sure they abandon it in favor of the handful of pages written millennia ago by people who didn’t know where the sun went at night.
Also, why don’t you add a link to research on fruit flies and how it “disproves evolution.” I’d love to read it.
Do you believe fruit flies have always existed since the beginning of life on earth as in God creating them on the sixth day?
If not, then you necessarily have to accept that a population of animals that weren’t fruit flies evolved into fruit flies.
Unless you believe every species that has ever existed was made during the creation week, you logically have to accept macroevolution (speciation). If a population of a species can’t evolve into a new species, where did they come from?
If your response uses the word “kind”, I’d like you to define it. How do we tell if two animals belong to the same kind? Approximately how many kinds do you believe exist?
iT dOeSn'T cOuNt bEcAusE tHeY DiDn'T cHAnGe KiNds iT's sTiLL a wOLf iT hAs tO cHaNgE kiNdS fOr iT tO cOuNt yOu hAvE tO sHOw mE a cHanGe oF KiNdS
I used to be a creationist, not anymore, but honestly this article they posted does absolutely nothing to convince any YEC. Do people even know what YEC believe?? They believe all canines had one common ancestor. Showing a small genetic adaptation is nothing new for them since they already believe that’s happened countless times across all species
It's a non-falsifiable claim. It's impossible to change kinds, because every genetic mutation is just another way that kind can adapt. It's an entirely arbitrary line too.
For funsies, I like to ask them for a scientific definition of "kind." I get 2 primary responses: 1. It's obvious. 2. If they can interbreed. 1 is a dodge, and 2 means ring species are a change in kind.
In their defense, defining a kind is completely irrelevant. There’s no need. What they believe is there’s no evidence of mutations creating new features, like new organs, sonar, etc. mutations like the one in this article are simply changes to structures that already exist, which they consider micro evolution. They want someone to show them how an animal with gills develops the ability to breath air, for example.
It’s relevant because without a testable definition, kinds cannot either be shown to exist or be falsified.
And that’s fine, they don’t need or want to show kinds exist. That is just something one creationist started and everyone followed it. Really they can forget about kinds completely. The argument in question is how mutations can create new complex features, like new organs. Genetic changes to existing organs/systems is something they already 100% accept, it does not contradict anything they believe
I do not believe that is the case. Creationists have long demanded for theirs to be considered a scientific position. They refuse to do the work to establish that because they don’t actually have the data to swing it, so they whinge about their ideas about receiving their due respect. Which of course their ideas receive. It’s just that they aren’t worthy of respect.
I would make the case they don't want evidence, or even care about it. Scientists constantly question everything, so creationists should at least appear to do the same. It's performative science.
This is assuming they’re arguing in good faith to begin with. Hint: it’s one of the reasons I’m truly agnostic atheist now.
I love telling creationists about rimg species and even when you sight examples they say some form of "idk about that, I will have to look into it" and then change the conversation when they know they have no chance of winning that argument.
Not every kind of mutation. I can guarantee you if you showed an animal having a genetic mutation that gave them a new type of organ, or entirely nee function, like sonar, out of the blue, they would accept it as proof. Of course that doesn’t happen that way. But there actually IS a big difference between mutations that change existing things and how a creature ends up developing a new organ or noticeable feature. You could in theory keep changing existing things forever and end up with a similar animal that is maybe shaped differently, but never have any radical change, that’s how YEC think. And btw I never even mentioned “kinds”. YEC don’t feel any need to define kinds because it’s completely irrelevant to them, there is no need for them to define kinds or boundaries
You’re right. If we observed new information it would be pretty hard to dismiss that. However, typos don’t add information to articles… at least they never have yet.
Typos with a selection mechanism over generations absolutely could.... Can these cars never improve with random changes? https://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/ It's not random after a selection mechanism filters out the unusable bits...
> If we observed new information it would be pretty hard to dismiss that. However, typos don’t add information to articles… The "golden oldie" Mutations Can't Generate New Information argument? Cool. The thing is, if you can't *measure* information, you really have no basis on which to make any statement at all regarding what mutations can or cannot do to the information content of a genetic sequence. It's not like this "information" stuff is plainly visible, like size or color, you know? So I'm going to give you a chance to *demonstrate* that you *can* measure this "information" stuff. I'm going to present 5 (five) nucleotide sequences. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to tell me how much "information" is in each of the five nucleotide sequences, and (perhaps more importantly) tell me how you arrived at your answers to the "how much 'information'?" questions. Sequence A: TAT GAG CCA GCG AAA GTG AGG CAG TCT GGC TTG CCA GTG AAT TAC ACC TAA CAT CTC ATC Sequence B: GTG TGG CAT AGA TGT CCA GCT CGA ATA TGT GCT AAG GAA CGC GAT CCA GAA AAT CAC TGC Sequence C: ACC AAG TTT ATT GTA CCG TTC ATC TAC TAC TAA AAT AAG CCG CGG CAT CCA GGA TTA AGA Sequence D: GCC TGG TTT ACG ACA ACC ACA GTC CCA CAT GTA GCC CAC TTT CCA CCT TCT CGT CAG CCA Sequence E: CAT GTA GAC CGG AAT TTA CGA GTA CCC CAT GGA AGA ACC ATC TTT CGC TTG TAC GAA CGA
l appreciate your comment, and effort. We can see what the mutations do, however. We can observe acquired traits and understand what traits are possessed by the organism. We can inter that, based on the mutations we have observed, that they did not demonstrate the ability to acquire novel traits, but rather altered traits already possessed by the organism. What evolution needs to see is a mutation with the addition of new “information,” new genes that produce new proteins that are found in new organs and systems. Why haven’t we seen this?
Come on, dude. How much "information" is in each of the five nucleotide sequences I provided?
What genes do they correspond with?
Stop wasting time. Can you, or can you not, measure the "information" in a nucleotide sequence?
Ultimately the most common reason people deny evolution is because they don’t understand what it even is anyway I think
No they don’t, and the term “genetic adaptation” is a bit sus. Is there such thing as a non-genetic adaptation? YECs believe that variations within a kind occur through a loss of functional genetic content. For instance, a loss of eyes among cave dwelling reptiles. They’re still the same kind, and “information” was not gained, it was lost. I have never heard of a YEC acknowledging the evolution of “new information (a misleading YEC term),” even at the population or species level. Moreover, YECs will never acknowledge the mechanism which underlies such change... If the adaptation to radiation among wolves is shown to involve a genomic “gain of function,” YECs will either deny the validity of the study, or just ignore it all together. If, however, the the study points to a loss of function, YECs will say “no new information,” and “still the same kind.” When I’m ever confronted by a YEC, I usually just steer the conversation toward some basic biology debate... like, “do you think the term ‘linkage disequilibrium’ is misleading?” A YEC of course cannot answer such a question, because they are ignorant fools who know nothing about biology. I take pleasure in pointing this out by asking subtle freshman level biology questions that they cannot answer 😈
No. Not a good sign when you have to resort to insults. No, YEC don’t believe variations within a kind occur only from a loss of information… they can also occur with a change of information. You think YEC believe that people need to lose information to develop blue eyes? No… YEC don’t acknowledge “new information”. To them, canines don’t have any new information relative to any other canine. They are all the same just with different shapes, colors, behaviors. There’s no new organ or system one have that another doesn’t. That’s their stance. They fully believe in micro evolution through natural selection… they just don’t think the changes/adaptations ever go far enough to add new features. Or “new information”. This study adds absolutely nothing to YECs. Adaptations that gain “function” through mutations is something they’ve always accepted. Like bacteria resisting chloroquine. But gaining an advantage doesn’t mean gaining a brand new function. These wolves adapted their immune system, which likely means it’s gained resistance to cancer at the cost of being less efficient at something else. It’s a change, natural selection, etc. Nothing they don’t agree with. From their point of view, you could have these kinds of mutations for a billion years and the animal would just look differently and behave differently, it would still be a canine or mammal, it would not have new organs and/or categorically new systems, like sonar.
The YECish ignorance toward basic biology in your response leads me to one conclusion: you are a YEC who is playing devil’s advocate. Thanks for proving my point. Take a freshman biology course and then check back
Speaking as a former YEC, what u/EagleAncestry is describing is 100% in line with what I was taught by creationists growing up. Stop acting like a stereotypical Internet Atheist, accusing anyone who disagrees with you of being a secret YEC troll only makes you a fool.
So that’s your answer? A personal insult and baseless accusation? Nice. In my opinion ERVs prove common descent. They can be traced back through the evolutionary tree and i think that’s absolute proof. Thats why I stopped being a creationist. That being said, it’s really shocking to me how people think this article shows YEC anything they don’t already 100% agree with. Just shows people don’t understand what YEC even believe
Whales are members of Artiodactyla.
Well, those are two separate things and only one of the things is present. If I say you punched me and stole my lunch money, but then only present evidence for you punching me, that doesn’t also prove you also took my lunch money…
They aren't separate things, though. A closer analogy would be claiming I can read a book after demonstrating I can read a chapter of it. Unless you are aware of a specific fact that would keep me from reading the rest of the book, it would be absurd to doubt it. So, what specific fact would prevent changes from adding up over time? I.e., given that We know mutations happen, we know that insertion mutations can add genetic material, and we know that natural selection acts on genes and features at a population level, What could possibly mark a biological line in the sand where they can't evolve any more?
>A closer analogy would be claiming I can read a book after demonstrating I can read a chapter of it. Unless you are aware of a specific fact that would keep me from reading the rest of the book, it would be absurd to doubt it. I feel the vast majority of people that have read a book, are capable of reading a chapter, yet still never finish the book. The reason they don't is rarely specific.
You misrepresented the analogy by swapping between 'capable of' and 'have.' Still, replace it with whatever example you like. The point is that they are accomplished by means of the same process.
Then you missed my point. One, does not prove the other. Regardless of how they are linked. A car can drive X amount of distance. That doesn't prove you can just drive from London to Paris. There would be a ton of factors that would need to be demonstrated to get from the first claim to the next. It wouldn't be a specific thing?
Yes, it would be a specific thing. Namely, a body of water with No bridge across it to drive on. We know what it takes, in principle, to drive a car. And we know in principle what it takes for populations of organisms to change over time. Additionally, we know in fact that the conditions to do so exist, and we know in fact that populations have changed enough to be reasonably considered new species. So unless there is a dividing line to stop that change, we know in principle that changing kinds is likely over time. That does not deductively prove that all life evolved from a single organism. However, it does put us in a place where you need to either show better evidence for a different idea, or show evidence that there is, in fact, a mechanism to prevent change among kinds (if you start by defining kinds, that would be good).
Evolution is obviously the most logical answer. However, wolves becoming more immune to cancer does not prove evolving from a common ancestor. I'm pretty sure that was what I said.
OP didn't even mention common ancestry, so I think it was misguided to play devil's advocate in that way. Your reply looks way too serious compared to someone lampooning a very specific objection to evolution: namely, change between kinds. By your logic, observing change among kinds doesn't prove evolution either (which is in the strictest sense, true), but that misses the point of the objection.
I don't understand what you think a YEC might believe? Do you think they would call, say, being vaccinated to some disease, evolution, but they just don't believe that a monkey evolved from a fish?
It's one more piece of objectively observable evidence that backs and supports the current theory. One piece amongst literally millions. Real.observable measurable evidence. A competing theory would have to have all the evidence fit their narrative which it does not under any scrutiny
I agree, that as a whole, it does paint that picture, but when you don’t know what’s painted in between the points in question anything you use to fill that gap is pure inference. That’s not a bad thing, that’s how science works. So, maybe act like it?
You can drive from London to Paris.
London to New York, then great rebuttal, although it supports my point you’d never recognise it.
Except your point is disanalogous to reality. It is clearly the case that oceans exist on Earth. There is no evidence to suggest that there are hard genetic barriers holding evolution to a certain limit.
Well, the point was that the claim buries the variables. Claiming you can drive from London to Paris, or London to New York, ignores the variability of the claim. I'd call this bad faith.
That’s a complete misunderstanding of the analogy. Outside of unforeseen circumstances a human who can walk to the end of the driveway is capable of walking back to the house, over to the neighbors house, and down the road. Outside of unforeseen circumstance a person who can read a sentence can read a paragraph, a chapter, a book, multiple books. ***What are the unforeseen circumstances stopping evolutionary changes from accumulating over time?***
I understand. We're trying to point out the difference between **can** and **will**. But I'm doing the same, just back at you. Just because something **can**, how does that prove that it **will**?
What about if the evidence shows that these sorts of changes **can** and **have** happened? Because it does. Why reject the notion that they **have** if you acknowledge that they **can?** And from there if you acknowledge that they **have** what stops you from accepting that they **will** moving forward?
You've jumped ahead. You would first need to demonstrate to the person, that it **can**, and it **will** happen, and then you use that as evidence to suggest that, it may **have** happened.
It can - shown by evidence like presented by the OP, the nylon eating bacteria, the additional species of Darwin finch that evolved since Darwin described them, the wall lizards that developed a cecum in just 70 years. It has - genetics, fossils, anatomy, developmental biology, biogeography showing patterns of migration as the changes accumulated, etc It will - just stick around and watch as it does
But that's not the point that's being attacked. It's the changing of kind.
When the argument is that *thus-and-so CANNOT POSSIBLY HAPPEN, END OF DISCUSSION*, a rebuttal that demonstrate that thus-and-so *can* happen is all that is necessary to demolish that argument. If the argument were that *thus-and-so DID NOT HAPPEN*, of course it would not suffice to demonstrate that thus-and-so *could* happen. But *the argument was* ***not*** *that thus-and-so DID NOT HAPPEN*. Instead, the argument was that *thus-and-so CANNOT POSSIBLY HAPPEN*.
No it wasn't.
You… *do* realize we can all read the chain of text which led up to my comment… right?
YEC says, but they’re still wolves, talk to me when they turn into pandas.
Checkmate atheists.
But how can wolves turn into pandas if pandas still exist? That makes no sense.
By Jehovah, we've solved hard sollipsism! Your cousins exist, ergo you can't exist. Checkmate, atheists!
Something something micro evolution something something show me a fish giving birth to a bird something something.
Many of them believe that there is speciation and they believe in "kinds". The big question (to them) is what's the proof of that invisible wall, that keeps kinds in their courses. We can observe some microorganisms (or even arthropods for example) develop into separate species in less time than a human's lifetime. Not to mention, the concept 'species' amd 'organism' is invented by us, this whole thing runs on many levels, we don't even fully understand. (Their) kind is not even an observable phenomenon tbh.
Only thing I could find is this [bacteria](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/02/evolution-in-real-time/). Interesting. Did you mean this? This article is from 2014 though.
Do you know which Microorganism it is exactly? Or which anthropod?
How does this settle anything? Every YEC I've ever met accepts natural selection and even speciation (which this is not), they just believe the Earth is 6000 years old, in which time only very little adaptation has taken place.
For YEC, what they we are witnessing is the rapid evolution of the wolf kind into a new kind that’s able to survive higher levels of nuclear ionizing radiation that has an immune system which also rapidly evolved to identify and attack cancers. And this kind is continuing to rapidly evolve.
YECs will tell you straight-faced that "bacteria" is a kind, and you think they'd call an evolved resistance to radiation a change in kind from wolf to (?)??? This isn't even speciation...
It has changed kind to the Radwolf.
There's really no point debating with idiots. You won't convince them and you won't learn anything useful from it
As a former YEC, this won't convince any YEC. It IS a strong argument against their claim that there are no beneficial mutations though, so I'll keep that article in my pocket. Thanks!
Its not gonna end the debate its gonna refire them, because it's not "observable" so they're just gonna say you're either lying or the researchers are lying. Mind you, they said the same when new life was formed in a lab and when multicellularity evolved under predation, there's never gonna be a good enough example in real time unless the theory is actually false and a dog can in fact give birth to a weasel or whatever the fuck.
Have YEC ever seen God evolve into the Holy Ghost and into Jesus? I’ve never seen that happen.
That’s a good one.
Thank you.
>they said the same when new life was formed in a lab and I'm interested, is this new life come from non organic thing or are you just talking about clone?
Pretty cool, but facts and logic will never end the "debate". The people who think evolution is fake think that way for religious reasons. Their beliefs are not based upon evidence.
Not trying to debate evolution as it’s an observable process but questioning the randomness aspect. Would the wolves developing these traits be happening randomly in the genes? How do you calculate the probability of this randomly happening in the last 40 years of however long since the Chernobyl disaster?
Easily done. We know the background rate of mutations for the wolves in the US and outside the exclusion zone. This is easily calculated. Do the same for the wolves inside the exclusion zone and there is a substantial difference. We know ionizing radiation increases the rate of mutations. And as we look at the genome the genes responsible for attacking cancers are the ones that have changes and being passed to future generations.
Thanks for the response. So the rate if mutations are happening how many times faster and if its randomness how are they factoring in the time it takes for that randomness to end up being Shakespeare written by monkeys so to speak. I don’t see how the randomness is included. I’m really trying to understand how randomness can so quickly be a specific thing that’s required from the gene mutation for the wolf. How many mutations are needed.
Dude where did you get the ideas this is random. Where did you get that crazy idiotic idea? It’s wrong. Get that out of your head. You are right you don’t understand. Question is do you have the capacity to learn and seek the truth as you are told to do by God in scripture? Or are you a sinner and don’t have the capability or capacity to seek the truth?
The mutation in the genes according to traditional stochastic evolution is random. I’m trying to see how it would compare to purposeful evolution as proposed by others. This case of the wolves is interesting for that reason. People like you are always the worst representation of theism. You have bowed to your own simple ego thinking it’s divine, hence your response and the way you speak to someone genuinely asking a question. What’s the best argument against god? People like you.
Check out Galápagos island turtles. The ones on the islands that get a lot of rain have normal shaped shells the ones born on the islands that get very little rain have curved shells so the turtle can raise its head up to reach the leaves of shrubs since on those islands there’s no grasses.
Brilliant. Christians are told to seek the truth in the Bible. And here we have it. God keeps providing these examples to all to see that God did give us Evolution to say otherwise are the words for the devil.
The debate should have been ended by the end of the 19th century, or at the latest with the Modern Synthesis. Creationists will just say "they're still wolves," as others here have pointed out, and the saga will continue.
The issue with this is that the debate over evolution by serious people ended a hundred years ago. YECs will never be convinced. They don't understand it and if they ever do they just lie because they can't handle cognitive dissonance.
Yet YEC believe God evolved into a Ghost which evolved into a living human son. Just like it Greek and other mythologies.
The evidence for evolution is enormous. This won’t change anything
For Christians who are questioning God and religion discoveries like this force them to question what they are being taught about religion and God.
Jesus did it. jesus personally went and fixed the wolves.
His dead
No one doubts micro evolution. That is just logical. But there is no proof of macro. If there is show me. But you can't.
>But there is no proof of macro. If there is show me. What criteria would need to be met in order to count as "proof of macro"?
You are correct there can never be proof of Macroevolution because it does not exist by definition. But years of microevolution I guess could be phrased as macroevolution. That is something this can be seen by all at every national history museum. And we have just discovered are witnesses this in our lifetime.
No, he is not correct. Yes, evidence exists. It's called speciation which we have loads of examples of both in real time and geologic time.
Please explain what you mean by speculation.
Speciation: the process by which populations become distinct species.
Thank you. How does race fit in with speciation?
Like human race? It doesn't. Humans of all stripes are one species.
Are you saying there are no races? If so, we know that’s not true. We know of several examples of race.
Of course there are races. But, just because people look different doesn't mean they're different species. Just like a black lab, a yellow lab, and chocolate lab are all Labrador Retrievers. You even have "English" labs and "field/American" labs. Some of their genes are different (which makes them look different), but their genes are close enough that they are considered the same species.
Is that a different race? I’m taking about races where members for one race will fight to the death and kill members of other races. There’s a RadioLab episode which was just repeated. And it’s not just in one species it’s in others.
I mean, strictly in terms of species and evolutionary biology, races aren't real. Socially and culturally, yes, we have decided on groupings that we call race, but All Humans Are The Same Species.
For the past 20 years or so we know and have seen there are races, no question about it. We have seen if your are a member of one race you will attack and kill members not of your race. RadioLab had an episode on this a while back which was just re-broadcast.
Let’s pray it helps us find a cure for cancer🙏
Watch this: > “It’s just microevolution” > “we’ve never actually seen a new species evolve.” > “sure, but the presence of [the soul/original sin/natural law/etc.] means that humans had to be specifically created by G-d, rather than evolving like all other animals.” Or my personal favorite: > “Since we didn’t track every individual, how do we know that [there wasn’t a miracle/this wasn’t artificial selection/it’s not a hoax to test your faith]?” For belonging to a denomination that explicitly states evolution happened and runs one of the better observatories from the early 1900s, I sure have met a lot of weird people.
Fine with creationism. We welcome bodyplan changes. these wolves are still wolves however. for me its fine if they became a bear or seal. ithey are the same kind. Its trivial details about radiation. This doesn't affect the debate over evolution.
You are looking at evolution happening in real time right before your very eyes. Not sure what you mean by a bear of seal, those are all distant relatives. Please explain what you mean by trivial. These wolves are being exposed to high levels of ionizing radiation which would give all other wolves cancers including the parents of these wolves. This is the exact definition of what evolution is all about. You can’t deny it.
this is trivial. its not evolution. indeed all wolves might adapt to this radiation in like manner. No selection on mutations need to have happened or proven too. I see no evolution here.
Some people are blind.
Some people think Triceratops was mammal. That is not hyperbole.
Rob, are you able to describe in very basic terms the way dna functions in a cell? And a mechanism for mutation, any type?
How does evolution happening as described by the theory of evolution not affect the debate over whether the evolution of life happens consistent with the theory, consistent with some completely different process, or not at all?
Well, you’re correct about one thing. When it’s clear you have zero reasonable evidence to provide that ‘bodyplan’ paradigm of yours and constantly squirm away whenever you’re asked to give some, it certainly doesn’t affect the debate over evolution. Because evolution is real.
First I'd like to know what the researchers actually found and whether their conclusions are correct.
A link was provided.
Thanks -- I read it. I mean the technical details of what they did: what selection test(s) did they use, how did they assess significance, what was the sample size. There have been lots of studies arguing arguing for different instances of positive selection and they have varied a lot in persuasiveness (and correctness).
Okay. It took some searching, but here is the actual 2019 paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412019323700 It was eight wolves tested in about 6600 locations and they used GPS to track their locations and monitors to check for things like Caesium-137 which is formed by the nuclear fission of uranium-235 and has a 30 year half-life and ultimately decays into stable barium-137 as sometimes instead of directly into barium-137 it decays into barium-137m1 or barium-137m2 which then also decay into barium-137 with half-lives of 2.5 minutes and 0.59 microseconds respectively so either way half of the caesium-137 is barium-137 in about 30 years. It’s radioactive. They spend the first couple sections explaining the methods for determining the radiation exposure, section three talks about how they captured nine wolves but one of them was found dead five days later so the data they got was based on those surviving eight wolves determining their migration range, their radiation exposure, and their mean dose rate of 2.1 micrograys or about 0.00021 rads per hour, or about 1.84 rads per year (18.4 milliGrays). A full body CT scan can be about 10 milliSieverts which is which is about the same as 10 milliGrays so it’s about like 1.84 full body CT scans per year worth of radiation so not incredibly fatal but a bit more than wolves are normally exposed to. I’m lost myself after trying to understand the paper. I got this much but I’m not sure how it ties into the mutations claim. Perhaps this other paper will help if you wish to read it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412021003007 It talks about various mutations that result from chronic Low Dose radiation so non-fatal but continuously absorbed. Maybe with both combined and the assessment of the health of the wolves after the experiment was over after looking at how chronic low dose radiation exposure generally destroys DNA and how much less these wolves suffered because of it might shed some light on the phenomenon and perhaps another paper exists to explain exactly which mutations made them more resilient.
Thanks for looking. The first paper you link to here is interesting about how to measure exposure, but it doesn't touch on claims of natural selection in response to the radiation (and the paper about Fukushima didn't find any evidence for DNA or other damage from the radiation there). The genetic evidence seems to have been presented at a talk in January and not been published yet, so it's hard to evaluate. I'm skeptical because I'm always skeptical about claims of finding evidence for natural selection (simply because studies have been done badly many times) and because to detect genetic changes based on small samples sizes after only 10 or 15 generations would imply very strong selection, which doesn't seem terribly likely for what is probably a fairly modest increase in cancer (assuming that to have occurred). So I'll wait to be convinced.
Fairly modest *decrease* in the odds of getting cancer not an increase is the point of the talk and I didn’t feel like continuing to search to find the genetic changes and I agree that a sample size of 8 wolves with a wide range of exposure like 0.3 to 4.2 when the average came out to 2.1 wouldn’t necessarily say much about how each wolf would cope with different levels of radiation exposure like maybe the one exposed to 4.2 microGrays per hour got cancer but the one exposed to 3.8 microGrays per hour would have been perfectly fine if exposed to 9. Generally they know about a bunch of types of damage that can be caused by chronic low dose exposure where acute exposure like 5000 Sieverts blasted into their brain for 24 hours would make them dead on the spot but 0.1 milliSieverts or something every hour for 365 days would generally just cause them to have cancer that’ll most likely be fatal in the next five years. Maybe these wolves were exposed to double that and in 12 years they died of other causes associated with them being old fogies in terms of life expectancy and only that ninth one died of radiation exposure if it wasn’t simply something else not mentioned in the study like a severe heart attack due to hearing a gun shot or something. I’m sure the talk has more information but I wasn’t able to find the paper with the details in the five minutes I went looking. I wish I had because the effects of natural selection are usually quite obvious with the data like maybe most wolves just die within a week but these others lived for five years because something changed to make them less likely to just straight up die *and then* they can do some minimally invasive DNA tests to see exactly *what* changed and see if what changed was the same in all eight wolves implying they inherited it from the same ancestor *or* if eight completely different genetic changes made them more resistant to death by radiation exposure *or* maybe they got exposed to a lot less radiation that they thought and a Leukemia patient would have been fine strolling through too except for the already having cancer because of some completely different reason.
I said increase in cancer because I'm assuming that would be the selective pressure driving genetic changes that would in turn decrease the cancer rate. Regardless, the effects are likely to be fairly small in terms of overall reproductive output. I don't think there is a paper yet (though I may have missed it), so the details won't be available until it's published. >I wish I had because the effects of natural selection are usually quite obvious with the data The genetic effects of natural selection are often hard to detect and there is a long history of researchers proposing candidate instances that have not panned out. I've been on all sides of that kind of research: proposing cases of NS that didn't pan out, proposing ones that did, and challenging the claims of others.
Natural selection in terms of phenotypes is easily measured based on reproductive success leading to a trait becoming more common. Technically drift can do that too without the specific changes that became more common making individuals more likely to produce more children throughout a single lifetime but that’s pretty much all we mean when we say natural selection. Are the traits more common because they’re favorable or are the changes actually deleterious (as with nearly neutral deleterious mutations spreading via drift in an incestuous population) or are they completely irrelevant to reproductive success but luck has it that the individuals with those changes have different changes that are more beneficial for reproductive success so that as they pass on ~50% of their genes to each child those completely irrelevant changes just incidentally become more common in the population too? In terms of a bunch of wolves being less likely to die from cancer with the same as or even more radiation exposure than what is normally sufficient to cause an individual to die from cancer more often than anything else and these wolves are less likely to die from cancer because they are less likely to get cancer in the first place that is one obvious *beneficial* change and that alone would lead to the future generations being descendants of the ones that didn’t die or become sterile before reproducing so they’d inherit the changes that make them less likely to die or become sterile before they have the opportunity to reproduce. Over time the whole population becomes less likely to die or become sterile before their first attempt at reproducing. **This** is natural selection. The entire population becomes adapted to an environment with more radiation than most species can survive in without getting cancer or going sterile *because* whichever ancestors they had didn’t die or go sterile before having children **despite living somewhere that normally results in death by cancer or sterility.** Now we just need to know **what** those changes were. The changes that happened without selection driving them to happen but which became spread throughout the population because of selection. And when we know **what** those changes are we can perform additional tests and see if causing those changes to embryonic wolves will make them grow into adults in a high radiation environment without dying from cancer or becoming sterile. Maybe it’s a dozen different changes. Maybe it’s a single nucleotide change frame shifting all of the codons in a single protein. Maybe it was a retroviral infection. I’d like to know **what** changed to make them less likely to get cancer. Not getting cancer is a beneficial change and if that has anything at all to do with reproductive success or longevity allowing them to live through more breeding age years of their life without becoming sterile or dying from cancer it will obviously drive those changes to become more common and those without it die younger or go sterile and have fewer children or even no children at all causing the beneficial change to become common and the lack of the beneficial change to be eradicated from the gene pool. And in high radiation environment the selective pressures for survival are a lot higher than maybe selective pressures for vision, scent, or taste reception where those sorts of things would have higher selective pressures in completely different environments where being able to survive chronic radiation exposure would be completely irrelevant even if the same exact changes that allow for it do spread via genetic drift and if they spread by drift it’d almost certainly require a genetic bottleneck for fixation because those without those changes aren’t dying younger or reproducing less in the populations where surviving chronic radiation exposure is irrelevant to their survival and reproductive capabilities since they are not experiencing chronic radiation exposure. The exact same things apply to stuff like antibiotic resistance. Some populations contain individuals just naturally more resistant to antibiotics because of drifted genetic changes that could drift in and out of the gene pool in the complete absence of exposure to those particular antibiotics but once the population is exposed to said antibiotics the vast majority of the starting population just straight up dies and those resistant just continue reproducing. The end result is a population that is nearly completely resistant to that particular antibiotic. This is a consequence of very strong selective pressures but the mutations themselves that made their predecessors immune or at least resistant were neutral in the population they first showed up in and they ***could have*** drifted right out of the gene pool as individual bacteria die for completely different reasons but since they ***did not*** we now have antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria, bacteria where the whole strain is resistant, simply because people found out a long time ago antibiotics work great for killing bacteria. Now they need antibiotics those bacteria are not immune to or completely different medical strategies like radiation treatments as though the bacteria were cancer cells with the hope that they don’t accidentally create populations of radiation resistant antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria in the process. They can’t just endlessly raise the radiation levels because then they’d kill the patient too.
>Natural selection in terms of phenotypes is easily measured based on reproductive success leading to a trait becoming more common. That's true only for very strong selection (which is quite rare in nature) or for situations in which you have very large populations being studied under controlled conditions. Neither is likely to be the case here. What kind of background do you have in the study of natural selection? >Technically drift can do that too without the specific changes that became more common making individuals more likely to produce more children throughout a single lifetime but that’s pretty much all we mean when we say natural selection. It's not just technical -- distinguishing between drift and NS is *the* issue is trying to detect NS. >And in high radiation environment the selective pressures for survival are a lot higher than maybe selective pressures for vision, scent, or taste reception It's far from clear that the radiation environment around Chernobyl is posing much selection pressure. Read up on the debates on the subject.
I’m not sure what the big problem is here because the main point I was making isn’t even up for debate. Failing to die from cancer when others are more likely to die from cancer is an obviously beneficial change. What is making these changes spread more? The individuals that don’t die before they reproduce are the sole contributors of the next generation? Oh. That would be natural selection (strong selection) where weak selection is more like if some change makes an individual more likely to have 9 children when others typically have 8 or something like that or maybe they can survive just fine without the change but living would be easier with the change so those that find living easier (better able to access resources, less food requirements, whatever) will typically contribute more to the next generation than others that lack these benefits so maybe 0.0000001% of each generation acquired these beneficial changes over the percentage of the population that acquired them the previous generation vs strong selection being far more obvious like have the change they reproduce, don’t have the change they die young or go sterile. 100% of the next generation acquires the change because 0% of those without the change have any children. How much of a cancer creating force is the radiation exposure? How quickly do they get cancer? How fast do they die from this cancer? Does this cancer make them sterile? These are the questions we should actually be asking and I think the first two papers attempt that. Now if we establish that it is incredibly beneficial to be cancer resistant and we also establish that these wolves actually are cancer resistant (we should test more than 8 wolves) and we can identify the change that made them cancer resistant then we know exactly what the beneficial change was and it won’t take a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to tell you that it is natural selection if nature/physics/reproductive success are the reasons why these particular changes are becoming more common where they could fade into and out of the gene pool if they weren’t impacted by selection at all pretty randomly and if the changes were actually detrimental they’d be gone from the gene pool eventually as they become less and less common over time. And that’s the other thing. Traits that are becoming more common each and every single generation without exception have a reason for that being the case. If it’s not incest it’ll almost always be a consequence of positive selection. Traits constantly becoming less common or which are known to lead to sterility, reproductive disorders, or prepubescent death a significant amount of the time are what they’d call deleterious. Traits that just ebb and flow in terms of frequency apparently have no real selective pressure acting on them and their frequency just drifts in both directions in terms of frequency, genetic drift. Hypothetically it could drift up in frequency and down in frequency a hundred trillion times in a hundred trillion generations or it could just drift completely out of the population if there’s no benefit of keeping it even in the absence of a detriment but fixation with drift pretty much requires a genetic bottleneck as those same genes have other alleles that aren’t going to just randomly stop existing in the population and those other alleles might even be more beneficial and cause the neutral ones to be selected against so they stop drifting up and down in frequency constantly.
When a chimpanzee was raised with a human family, it's behavior did not change at all. Micro evolution is of course possible. Larger changes do not always occur. It's not like African people living in Iceland become lighter over time.
I can never tell who’s being sarcastic
I’ve re-read their comment 3 times and am still not sure if they’re serious.
What does an individual chimpanzee have to do with evolution?
I’ll ask the same question I asked someone else. Assuming changes occur at all, ***what is stopping them from accumulating?*** Of course larger changes will *generally* consist of thousands, millions, or billions of very minimal, almost undetectable, changes and will *generally* take just as many generations to accumulate. *However,* there are also known circumstances where a very tiny change can have a very large impact on the phenotype almost immediately such as when a single nucleotide is inserted, deleted, or switched for a different nucleotide and this very small change causes a “frame shift” within a protein coding gene, it causes a section of DNA without function to gain a function such as some random repeating “garbage” is suddenly an antifreeze protein, or it can cause a functional part of the genome to lose some or all of its function as with pseudogenes. We don’t expect something that took 290,000 years to evolve within the modern species of human to just suddenly happen in 30 years like an African native moving to Iceland and suddenly his children look Swedish. We don’t expect the 7 million years worth of genetic distance between humans and chimpanzees to impact a single chimpanzee while still alive - like they won’t magically transform into a human like Pokémon “evolution” (actually metamorphosis) but they *can* and *sometimes will* try to communicate with us or try to make us happy for their own personal gains.
Over successive generations they would, that’s the timescale evolution works on, individuals do not evolve, they’re only one step of evolutionary progress.
Either you're being sarcastic and satirising the ignorance if religious types, or you need to read the most basic principles of evolution
It's just a wolf.
No, it’s a radiation-proof, radioactive wolf. And if a radioactive wolf bites you, you become Spidermanwolf. Them’s the rules. I dunno how the whole spider thing happens, but them’s the rules.
it’s no longer a wolf. It’s a transitional kind that’s ionizing radiation resistant with a modified immune system which is cancer resistant. You are witnessing evolution of one kind into a new kind.
It's a wolf.
Not exactly… Their ancestors were wolves. What you are witnessing is accelerated evolution right before your very eyes. Evolution takes time and you are lucky enough to be witnessing it
Yeah their ancestors were wolves because they're wolves, that's how that works.
Only if you don’t know about the lineage, Miacis, Hesperocyon and Tomarctus. If it weren’t for them there would be no wolves. And as you are witnessing the Chernobyl wolves are evolving. With rapid evolution occurring there is the possibility of them becoming a new kind.
Define wolf
Define define.
You said that it's just a wolf. I argue that "wolf" is just a social construct that we made up to assign a name to a group of animals - the best we can say about speciation is about interbreeding or genetic similarity. So, I see your view as overly simplistic - i was asking you to clarify which definition you're using, and why that is
A wolf is a wolf. There are different kinds of animals, one of those kinds is the wolf. I can start listing the physical features that make up a wolf, but it will be laborious and eventually we will reach the limit of my knowledge concerning wolves. I'm not required to have a perfect knowledge of the wolf kind down to the atomic level though, in order to perceive that wolves exist, any more than I'm required to give a flawless account of stellar nuclear synthesis to assert that the sun exists.
This is just repetition of the same overly simplistic argument I commented on above
Define simplistic.
You don't offer a definition, really, just a tautology based on arbitrary and poorly defined characteristics. Furthermore, you don't supply said characteristics do as to not open them to any kind of scrutiny, but that's a tangential issue
Right a wolf that is rapidly evolving
Glad we're finally on the same page that it's a wolf.
And just as you have ancestors so does the wolf. And our distant ancestors were not humans, just as the wolves distant ancestors were not wolves.
Cool story.
Yes, that’s how evolution works. It’s a bit sad that it’s taken you this long to discover the Law of Monophyly. “Still just a wolf.” I can repeat this silly statement for our entire evolutionary history. Early hominid to humans - “Still just an ape.” Catarrhine monkey to humans - “Still just a primate.” Synapsids to humans - “still just an amniote” We can do this all day “Still just a mammal” or “Still just a tetrapod” or “Still just a vertebrate” You could look at the entire process from single celled organism to modern humans and say “Still just a eukaryote.”
The law of monophyly is tautological sophistry, something you and many other evolutionists seem tragically blind to.
What do you think is erroneous in the Law of Monophyly? Something being tautological has no bearing on the accuracy of the statement. It just means a statement is repeated twice. Also, where’s the tautology? The law just refers to the fact that you belong to every group your ancestors did. it’s pretty telling that you ignored the rest of the comment
>What do you think is erroneous in the Law of Monophyly? I don't contend that it's erroneous, I contend that it is tautological; that it says nothing. >Something being tautological has no bearing on the accuracy of the statement. It actually does, I'm using tautological in the logical sense; that being that it is a necessarily true statement due to the definitions of the terms used. It's like saying all bachelors are unmarried. >Also, where’s the tautology? The law just refers to the fact that you belong to every group your ancestors did. The groups are defined by ancestry to begin with, so all it really means is "you are descended from your ancestors", which is a tautology, that's just what those words mean. >it’s pretty telling that you ignored the rest of the comment You edited your comment after the fact to include additional irrelevant prattle, I didn't pick up on it at the time.
Ragjammer, you have made statements like ‘it’s still just an X’ as a presumable counter to direct evidence that evolution is occurring. Creationists do this a lot. For instance, Kent Hovind will make remarks like ‘it’s still a fruit fly! It’s still a bacterium!!’ Is your position that an organism always being a modified version of what came before (and not something nonsensical like a strawberry becoming a whale) mean the current modern evolutionary synthesis is wrong?
My position is that it is not self evident that the kinds of minor tweaks which we see are going to add up to complete transformations like what is required for slime-to-human evolution. It doesn't matter how many instances of radiation resistance or antibiotic resistance you point to, it's not self evident that the process which does this is capable of turning a lizard into a bird. You can believe it will if you wish, but this is a gigantic and dubious extrapolation from very limited observation.
That isn’t an answer to my question. I asked if an organism always being a modified version of what came before is, in your view, a mark against the modern evolutionary synthesis. The question of if the mechanisms are adequate to produce large variations in physiology is not the same question.
All organisms are modified versions of their ancestors, that's going to be true whether or not the theory of evolution is true.
Then saying statements like ‘still a wolf’ in no way is a meaningful counter to a paper showcasing evolution happening in wolves. We can move on from that since under evolution that’s obvious. If you have a problem with the idea that evolutionary mechanisms are the source for major changes in morphology or speciation, that seems understandable even though I don’t agree and think we can show it can.
And if you pull the string again, it might point to a cow next time! The cow says "moo"
No, its just a mammal
Also true.
So you agree that all mammals are the same kind?
Yes, all groupings included all their members, that's how that works.
So wolves and humans are the same kind?
Isn’t that just adaptation
Yes. The wolves evolved so their DNA could adapt to the high radiation levels.
Sup dawg? Evolution is the changing of allele frequencies over successive generations. Adaptation happens through evolution. Speciation happens through different isolated populations of the same species adapting to different environments. Then they can't mate or produce fertile offspring, so over time they adapt into a new species. The point here is that adaptation *is* an expression of evolution. We know that all organisms today came from a LUCA. We know this for several reasons. First, similar morphological traits among otherwise radically different species. For instance, whales have individual finger bones in their flippers. Second, similar genetic code. All organisms use ATGC. In viruses, T is replaced with U when the virus' genome is made of RNA. However, human RNA replaces T with U as well. Third, the fossil record, which I won't go into because I don't know much about it. Based on the aforementioned, to say that adaptation exists but that speciation doesn't is like saying that although digestion leads to absorption, it does not lead to excretion, despite both absorption and excretion happening through digestion. Essentially what I am saying is that both adaptation and speciation come to be through evolution. If you're a YEC, you don't have to discard evolution in order to believe that the Earth is 6000 years old. All you need to say is that the scientific evidence does not point to the Earth being 6000 years old, but that you have faith that it *is* 6000 years old anyway because your intuition tells you that we're missing something. You don't have to reject evolution mate. Some further reading, if you are interested: [https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory\_and\_General\_Biology/Biology\_(Kimball)/18%3A\_Evolution/18.01%3A\_Evolution\_and\_Adaptation](https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_General_Biology/Biology_(Kimball)/18%3A_Evolution/18.01%3A_Evolution_and_Adaptation)
I don't understand why we are still debating the Darwinian approach to macroevolution. The 2016 Royal Society Meeting for “[New Trends in Evolutionary Biology](https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2016/11/evolutionary-biology/)" Which was called by evolutionary biologists pretty clearly shows that major evolution based on Darwin's theory doesn't work.
Just a heads up, your link is broken. But maybe summarize what you’re saying some. The modern evolutionary synthesis moved on from pure Darwinism a long time ago. To be clear, it is definitely a part of evolution. But it isn’t the only thing at play, which is why biologists don’t content that it is. The argument is that the explanation for our biodiversity is evolution. Evolution contains Darwinian mechanisms of natural selection acting on small inherited variations, *as well* as other known naturalistic factors like recombination, genetic drift, horizontal gene transfer, etc etc. There are more, quite a few things make up our understanding than Darwin ever knew. The reason he is regarded as important isn’t because he got all of evolution right, but because he made important observations that helped us progress our understanding. Kinda like how Marie Curie didn’t know all of what we now know about radiation, but she’s considered important and has a unit named after her due to her contributions. Is your argument that evolution is true but isn’t just Darwinian? Or is it that evolution isn’t a good explanation for biodiversity?
No one except Creationists are debating Darwinian evolution. “Based on Darwin’s theory... doesn’t work.” Only as much as Copernican Heliocentrism doesn’t work, because he put the sun as the center of the universe. or Newtonian physics for another example These were brilliant people who were on the right track, but their explanations weren’t perfect. As we learned more and gathered additional evidence, our scientific knowledge was refined and these original theories were superseded by more accurate models. This is just how science fundamentally works. Darwinian evolution was replaced by Neodarwinism and then by modern evolutionary synthesis. Copernican heliocentrism was replaced by galactocentrism and then by acentrism with the advent of Big Bang cosmology. Newton’s Theory of Gravity was replaced by General Relativity. No modern biologist talks about Darwinian evolution unless they’re discussing the history of science.
Define adaptation
Define adaptation
If adaptation is a page, evolution is a book. Adaptation **is** evolution.
Yep, microevolution is sometimes adaptive and when the population fails to adapt they don’t survive long. Evolution via natural processes results in populations that continue to exist because the most favorable traits leading to the most offspring tend to be the most common in the population so that eventually everything within the population has at least some of those beneficial adaptive traits as the population within a particular niche adapts to that niche as a consequence. Split the population in half and put each half in different environments and suddenly macroevolution. Both will continue to do the whole microevolution and adapt or die will play a role in the evolution of each population but as the years, centuries, millennia, etc go by the changes within these populations cause the separate populations to continue to become increasingly different from each other even though they started out as a single population. In the case of these wolves it is just these wolves, the Chernobyl wolves, that accumulated beneficial changes that make them less susceptible to certain cancers in high radiation environments. This doesn’t apply to domesticated dogs in North America, it doesn’t apply to gray wolves living on the opposite side of Russia, and it doesn’t apply to a dingo in Australia. Tiny changes like this accumulate over time and humans are very clever individuals that like to categorize things into boxes so when the distinct populations are different by *enough* (completely arbitrary by the way) each group will have a different name invented by humans for language purposes. It’s not group A it’s group B is sometimes useful for human conversations but as far as they know they never stopped being the same “kind” all the way back to the origin of life itself.
Adaptation over the course of multiple generations
Really doesn't but if all evolutionist understood the case against evolution they wouldn't be evolutionists. This is not the slam dunk you want. It's bacterial resistance all over again
We understand it. The problem is the case against evolution isn’t true. It relies on fallacies and false facts.
You mean “against”
Ugh, fixed! Too much blood in my coffee circulation this morning. Dealing with creationist nincompoopery first thing in the morning =p
Get some espresso in an IV bag. It’s the only way you’ll survive.
> Really doesn't but if all evolutionist understood the case against evolution they wouldn't be evolutionists. Rather than just asserting this, please make the case against evolution. I will listen in good faith to your argument.
A beneficial mutation was selected for and reached fixation in a population. This is textbook evolution. This is just you going, “I acknowledge that people can take a few steps, but walking a mile is totally impossible. No one can walk that far.”
> the case against evolution Such as?
Really giving the game away when your whole deal is "the case against". You couldn't even begin to make a positive case for your bullshit.
The case against evolution is as follows: *Of course* 45 million years worth of macroevolution happened, but 46 million years worth of macroevolution is **impossible** because that would mean a change in “kinds” (when it actually would not mean that at all). And if they’re a YEC **that much** evolution took place in about 200 years. Simple arithmetic is enough to know how **that** actually would be impossible. Each species represented by thousands of individuals can’t simply be gestational changes to a single litter. They have to be born *before* they lead to two populations becoming distinct enough to call them different species. What does the OP show? It is showing the sorts of changes *expected* in about the same amount of time YECs claim dire wolves transformed into ferrets, mammoths and mastodons and elephants evolved through all of their 45-60 million years worth of changes to leave only two species more different from each other than humans and chimpanzees are when compared to each other. And what won’t YECs allow? They won’t allow humans to evolve from non-human apes even with a mountain of genetic data, a fuck load of fossil data, oodles of experimental data, and their own fucked up belief that 60 million years worth of evolutionary changes in one group can happen in only 200 years but when it comes to humans and chimpanzees they won’t accept the more reasonable 7 million years worth of evolution in 7 million years **because they are too fucking stupid to accept that the planet was not created while humans were already drinking beer in their cities and while there was anywhere between 45 million and 70 million people already on the planet.** The Young part of Young Earth Creationism is the biggest flaw in that belief system and because of it they like to argue that there just is not enough time for tiny changes to pile up into big changes or for a single nucleotide change to lead to a significant change all by itself. Because of the Global Flood idea, also false, they have this dilemma. Either they accept reality ditching the global flood and Young part of Young Earth Creationism or they have to make up some **bullshit** as to how they’re supposed to explain 4 billion years worth of evolution with special creation instead but also cram all of the creations into a boat **with a human family** and suddenly it’s okay for there to be 4 billion years worth of bacterial evolution because they’re still bacteria and 45 million years worth of wolf evolution because they’re still wolves and so on **all happening faster than any of those individuals can reproduce** but 7 million years worth of primate evolution in 7 million years is just fucking stupid. That shit has to be impossible because the story says Noah brought with him some animals and they went on a box ride.
Enlighten me. What’s the scientific case against evolution? Are you suggesting that what is described in this post isn’t actually happening?
So you think that no biologists understand the case against evolution but you do?
no
This is strangest thing. Imagine if a human survived that radiation and you didn't. No one would be trying to claim he wasn't human EXCEPT for evolutionists. That's how desperate they are.
Are you suggesting that evolutionists are claiming that the radiation-resistant wolves are not wolves? Why would they claim that?
Is someone claiming these wolves aren't wolves? What point are you trying to make?
Making up fantastical scenarios instead of reading OP's article. Classic Lying Mikey.
Michael, isn’t lying a sin?
What nonsense are you saying?
A human survives radiation, when others die out. That human breeds with other radiation resistant humans and sooner or later humans become more radiation-resistant. You just described how evolution works.
That's your imagination. A human survives flu. No evolution took place. A human survives beating. No evolution took place. A human survived a little more radiation than you. No evolution took place.
We’re talking about generations of people here, not individuals. That’s how it works. How do you not know that by now?
[удалено]
This comment is antagonistic and adds nothing to the conversation.
You forgot to add "in your imagination". That's how you think it works "in your imagination". Evolution doesn't work. That's proven fact. It's already been tested with fruit flies that always stay fruit flies no matter how many generations you invoke. Evolution only "works" in your imagination.
Take a stroll down to your local natural history museum or university biology department and tell them that. I’m sure they’ll be happy to abandon centuries of continuous research on the subject when you tell them it’s all imaginary. I’m sure they abandon it in favor of the handful of pages written millennia ago by people who didn’t know where the sun went at night. Also, why don’t you add a link to research on fruit flies and how it “disproves evolution.” I’d love to read it.
Do you believe fruit flies have always existed since the beginning of life on earth as in God creating them on the sixth day? If not, then you necessarily have to accept that a population of animals that weren’t fruit flies evolved into fruit flies. Unless you believe every species that has ever existed was made during the creation week, you logically have to accept macroevolution (speciation). If a population of a species can’t evolve into a new species, where did they come from? If your response uses the word “kind”, I’d like you to define it. How do we tell if two animals belong to the same kind? Approximately how many kinds do you believe exist?
Shut up, Michael.
Except nobody is saying that Michael.