Evolutionists: Please Explain

Mark, please explain in full detail exactly how God created the universe. Did you just will it, and *poof*, it was there? Did he create other energies first, and then react them to produce matter? I want the exact mechanism that he used.

What, you don't know? Then it must not have happened!

I admit that I have NO IDEA how asexual reproduction evolved into sexual reproduction. But this no more means it didn't happen that not knowing how God made the universe means he didn't make it.

 

Er, sex creates genetic variation. Somatic body cells for humans have 46 chromosomes, or 23 "pairs". Each of these pairs will contain one allele for a given gene. When sex cells are formed, they have only 23 chromosomes - they are missing one homologous pair for each. This, in addition to other means (crossing over), creates genetic variation in an offspring. Thus, if the environment changes, then some of the organisms will be able to survive, because they're different and some will adapt better to the surroundings.

In contrast, with asexual reproduction, each individual is the same genetically, and a change in environment can literally wipe them out. This is not to say that asexual reproduction is necessarily bad; if the organism is well-suited to its environment, then you don't want change and genetic variability is not ideal. Asexual reproduction is also more efficient, so to speak.

Sorry for the excess detail that you probably didn't need. I actually have a biology exam tomorrow on this very topic and they say that if you can communicate your knowledge, then you have a good grasp of it.

 

I'm tired of the whole arguement, people. If anybady comes up with something new (instead of repeating the "same old, same old", email me.

In Christ,
Trotter

 

I find it ironic that you say that I took you out of context. Anyone can compare the statements and see that I was very specific about what I said. Words mean things, and I think you don't quite grasp that concept.

ADD is most definitely a medical problem, and there are scads and scads of research to prove this. Again, I say that your lack of belief in common knowledge is staggering.

Many of us on the board wish that you would apply this statement of yours to your own reading of the Word.

 

the answer is simple 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 The same was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
John 1:1-3

Now here is the problem as I see it. Jesus was the creative agent, the details were given to a writer by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost who recorded it. We have two options, accept it as written or try our best to figure out another way since God's word must not be true. This seems harmless enough (other than misleading someone) until we consider 31 Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.
Matt 12:31
IMO one can blaspheme the HG by declaring that what He had a writer to pen is not accurate, as much as some would like to believe it the bible was not written at the whim of man Almighty God had it recorded just as it pleased Him.
Murph

 

Ah, all is sweetness and light on the western front...

Mark, evolutionists are at a total loss when it comes to really explaining the so-called evolution of sex. They can get as far as bacteria swapping some genetic material, but that is a FAR cry from a multicellular organism having only half the necessary chromosomes in its sex cells and the means wherewith to combine with the opposite sex to produce a viable cell with a full complement of genetic material!

Here are some quotes from Michal and Levin's The Evolution of Sex (1988) -- a compilation of material on this subject published by Sinaur Associates, Inc.

A survey of evolution biologists would doubtless come up with a consensus that the elucidaton of the selective pressures responsible for the origin and maintenance of sex is a "big" (maybe the "biggest") unsolved problem in evolutionary biology...there is no consensus about where its solution lies...no clear solution emerges. [p. vii]

and

...the costs of sex to the individual are usually high and these costs are unlikely to be compensated for by benefits to the species...the costs of sex are explicit and borne by individual organisms, while the postulated benefits of sex have been vague and not readily modeled. The crises involving the question of sex can be seen clearly in this contrast between the costs and benefits of sex. [p. 2]

Contrary to an earlier statement in this thread that sex encourages evolution by producing diversity, although diversity is expressed within the limits of the existing genome, evolution is hindered by sex. The combining and recombining of sexual material generation by generation tends to produce stability in a population, and not change. Mutations are usually quickly weeded out. Nor is there ANY evidence in any sexually reproducing organism of any mutation building on another mutation to produce any change in form or function. And evolution depends on this!

Please note the following from Sex and Evolution by G.C. Williams, 1975, Princeton University Press:


The primary task for anyone wishing to show favorable selection of sex is to find a previously unsuspected 50% advantage to balance the 50% cost of meiosis. Anyone familiar with accepted evolutionary thought will realize wht an unlikely sort of quest this is. We know that a net selective disadvantage of 1% would cause a gene to be lost rapidly in most populations, and sex has a known disadvantage of 50%. The problem has been examined by some of the most distinguished of evolutionary theorists, but they have either failed to find any reproductive advantage in sexual reproduction, or have merely showed the formal possibility of weak advantages that would probably not be adequate to balance even modest recombinational load. Nothing remotely aproaching an advantage that could balance the cost of meiosis has been suggested. The impossibility of sex being an immediate reproductive adaptation in higher organisms would seem to be as firmly established a conclusion as can be found in current evoutionary thought. Yet this conclusion must surely be wrong. All around us are plant and animal populations with both asexual and sexual reproduction.

Bell, in 1982, in The Masterpiece of Nature: The Evolution and Genetics of Sexuality [University of California Press] spends quite a bit of time arguing against what he himself admits on pp. 77-78:

Sex...does not merely reduce fitness, but halves it. If a reduction in fitness of a fraction of one per cent can cripple a genotype, what will be the consequence of a reduction of 50%? There can be only one answer: sex will be powerfully selected against and rapidly eliminated wherever it appears. And yet this has not happened.

And despite all these problems, they still believe it evolved.

Somehow.

Some way.

In direct opposition to both evidence and logic.

Not to mention in direct opposition to God's Word.

And NNE has even the slightest clue how on earth any organism managed to develop the ability to produce cells with only half the genetic complement along with the necessary equipment for exchange, so that some organism of the same type, but a different sex, who also managed to develop a cell with half the complement, was able to be produced.

As I said in the beginning, this is a FAR distant cry from a couple of bacteria exchanging some gentic material. Those bacteria have the full complement of genetic material each. They start that way and end that way.

They do not produce half-copies of themselves in order to combine with half-copies of another cell...

Mark, they are blowing dust all over the place and simply declaring it happened. It couldn't and it didn't.

 

Er, sex creates genetic variation. Somatic body cells for humans have 46 chromosomes, or 23 "pairs". Each of these pairs will contain one allele for a given gene. When sex cells are formed, they have only 23 chromosomes - they are missing one homologous pair for each. This, in addition to other means (crossing over), creates genetic variation in an offspring. Thus, if the environment changes, then some of the organisms will be able to survive, because they're different and some will adapt better to the surroundings.

In contrast, with asexual reproduction, each individual is the same genetically, and a change in environment can literally wipe them out. This is not to say that asexual reproduction is necessarily bad; if the organism is well-suited to its environment, then you don't want change and genetic variability is not ideal. Asexual reproduction is also more efficient, so to speak.

Sorry for the excess detail that you probably didn't need. I actually have a biology exam tomorrow on this very topic and they say that if you can communicate your knowledge, then you have a good grasp of it. </font>[/QUOTE]I knew that. Question is, does Mark know that? Also, if life only has to last for about 10,000 years (day of creation until Christ returns) who cares about a little genetic variation coming along in that short a time?

 

I hope Brett does well on his test, because he is wrong about some of what he said. Here is the part I am responding to:

Er, sex creates genetic variation. Somatic body cells for humans have 46 chromosomes, or 23 "pairs". Each of these pairs will contain one allele for a given gene. When sex cells are formed, they have only 23 chromosomes - they are missing one homologous pair for each. This, in addition to other means (crossing over), creates genetic variation in an offspring. Thus, if the environment changes, then some of the organisms will be able to survive, because they're different and some will adapt better to the surroundings.

In contrast, with asexual reproduction, each individual is the same genetically, and a change in environment can literally wipe them out. This is not to say that asexual reproduction is necessarily bad; if the organism is well-suited to its environment, then you don't want change and genetic variability is not ideal. Asexual reproduction is also more efficient, so to speak.

1. Sex does not 'create' variation. Sex allows the possible variations already within the population genome to express.

2. Variations tend to go back and forth until some section of the population is wiped out due to some sort of natural selection (which, by the way, is NOT an evolutionary idea or mecca!)

3. In asexually reproducing organisms there are hot spots of rapid (again, 'back and forth') mutations which provide the variation needed in a population to survive environmental changes. Thus, it is never a guarantee that the daughter cells will exactly resemble the parent cells.


I do agree with him, however, as do so many biologists, that asexual reproduction is vastly more effecient. And that brings us back to the original question -- regarding the impossibility of sexual reproduction having been a matter of evolution.

 

So sex propogates variation; sorry for the lack of precision.

When did I say otherwise?

True, but that mitosis creates genetically identical daughter cells is generally true.

By the way, I think I did fairly well on the test... There were 35 multiple choice and 15 short answer. Other than a couple of weird multiple choice, it was pretty good - I think I got a 90%.

 

Ah, long time no see! Hope you're feeling better . .

It really doesn't matter to us Theistic evolutionists whether or not it is completely a natural phenomenon for the evolutionary path to develop chromosones and sex or whether it took God's intervention.

We have here the classic Helenistic Quote mining. Helen searches far and wide for whatever lines she can find that supports her idea of the moment and quotes it as if nothing else exists in the realm of human thought. Here she finds a biologist who is willing to express his ignorance on the benefits of sex for the organism and assumes all the rest of science is equally ignorant. And note the date. Not the latest word, to be sure!

Modelling of the benefits of sex has become easier since 1988, we all know about the explosion of computer availability since that time. My advice to all the readers of this material is to disregard anything about the benefits and cost of sexual selection that does not take the insights of computer modelling into account.

Here we have a recurring theme of Helen's to the effect that there are fixed limits to diversity that keep species within their "kinds". There is no biological evidence for any such limit.
We also have the raw statement that evolution is "hindered" by sex, but no mention of how it does this hindering.

That would, of course, be HARMFUL mutations, not the beneficial ones. Sexual recombination favors the weeding out of HARMFUL mutations. It does this by swapping more of them into some unfortunate individuals and less of them into more fortunate individuals, and then the selection process of life does its thing.

There's lots of evidence for just that, but Helen ignores it.

Please note again how far back in time she has to go to find this stuff

If you are stuck with a bad mutation, a 50% chance of getting rid of it in your offspring might be a good thing, don't you suppose?

Since the computer simulations have shown it works out ok, nobody is complaining like this any more. This material is all way out of date.

Incremental steps, one at a time, of course. Genetic swapping first. Then elimination of risk elements, making it safe. Then isolation of genetic components to make them the only things swapped. Bundling of components as part of that. The tighter the bundling, the closer we get to having chromosones. Swapping itself would be incrementally proceding from a random process to more and better controls. An accidental doubling of the bundle/chromosone sets the stage for sending over one while keeping the other.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it? The point being, incremental stages are certainly possible all up and down the line.

It DID happen, so it must have had SOME WAY to happen. If it is truly physically impossible, then perhaps God intervened with a miracle to help the process of evolution along. Who are we to tell Him what to do? But I have faith that God is smart enough to design the whole thing into the laws of nature. Surely none of us thinks that would be above and beyond the ability of God, do we? Ah, I thought not.

 

One more where I cannot stand it and have to get the question out in the open. (I'm trying to let go, I really am. Some things just scream to get pointed out.)

You quote Michod and Levin above. Do they think that the evolution of sex is impossible?

The book is out of print and my local library does not have a copy, so I cannot go see what they have to say for themselves. But when I Google the title, I find that it has a lot of citations on the issue and that it is often either required reading or even the text for college level biology classes on the evolution of sex. So somehow I dubt that the authors you cite believe it to have not happened.

I also noticed that the quotes were from the preface and the introduction. It strikes me that in context that the authors may have been merely introducing the some of the current problems that the authors intended to cover in the articles selected for the book. The book is almost 15 years old and I imagine that the articles are even older. I suppose that the state of the art has advanced in the interim.

But unless the authors actually think that the evolution of sex did not happen, quoting them as if they did seem problematic to me. It is why I hate quote mining. It is too easy to make people sound like they think something that they do not really think. The whole is needed or at least the context. And in this case, given the use of the text, it seems likely that the authors accept the evidence that sex evolved.

 

The evolutionary mathematics behind sex is very interesting. As the study of biological evolution merges further with automata theory and complexity theory, I predict that the development of two sexes will come to be seen as almost inevitable in a genetically evolving ecology.

The math suggests that there should be large populations of asexual organisms, smaller populations of two-sex organisms, and very few if any populations of three-sex organisms. This is exactly what we see in the real world, and therefore a prediction of evolutionary science is confirmed.

-Neil

 

Prediction? Uh, confirmed observation, maybe, but correctly counting what exists is not predictive.

 

Well, Paul, if you don't have any other responses, attack me personally. That always works for some of you!

You wrote: "It really doesn't matter to us Theistic evolutionists whether or not it is completely a natural phenomenon for the evolutionary path to develop chromosones and sex or whether it took God's intervention."

...and I realized that it is the theistic evolutionist who is really appealing to the "God of the gaps." Wherever there is a gap in human interpretation, stick God. He'll do in a pinch until you get a better answer...!

I didn't have to search 'far and wide' for Michal and Levin's book. The material is right there in the introduction to it.

Nor does the item have to do with the benefits of sex in many ways, but with what this thread is about: the evolution of sex. Evolutionary theory declares that the primary goal of any organism is to pass on its genes. Sexual reproduction divides this goal in half, so to speak, and thus should not have been 'selected for', even assuming that there was some way an organism would somehow have reproductive cells with only half the required genetic material. Think about that, Paul. How did that happen?

Oh, by the way, about computer modeling. It means nothing where evolution is concerned, as the computer programs require an intelligent programmer to set them up and are normally set up with a distinct goal in mind -- both items of which are denied by evolutionary paradigm.

You then wrote, "Here we have a recurring theme of Helen's to the effect that there are fixed limits to diversity that keep species within their "kinds". There is no biological evidence for any such limit.
We also have the raw statement that evolution is "hindered" by sex, but no mention of how it does this hindering."

First of all, every bit of breeding experience and experiments indicate limits within biological kinds, especially where animals are concerned. Secondly, your claim of 'no mention of how it does this hindering' shows you obviously do not understand what I wrote and quoted later in my post regarding the 50% disadvantage. I suggest strongly that you take a course in population genetics, or at least read a book on the subject before you accuse me of not backing up my statement. The fact is that you did not understand what the quotes I used meant.

Going through your response, please be aware that sexual reproduction does not discriminate between good and bad mutations. Most get weeded out. The bad ones, however, seem to be accumulating in all species now. That is called genetic load. The list of damage done to humans which is attributed to bad mutations, many of which are heritable, seems to be growing. Keep your eye on science and health news. I don't think you will find I am wrong here. Bad mutations are NOT weeded out and when one considers the tremendous number of harmful mutations with the one or two oft-cited (by evolutionist apologists) beneficial mutations which seem to be present, I would say that your knowledge of sexual reproduction and mutations needs to mutate upwards!

YOu said there is lots of evidence I am ignoring regarding the building of one beneficial mutation on another in a sexually reproducing organism which will produce a new form or function. Please enlighten me. I don't want what-if stories, though; I want actual known cases. Thank you.

Sorry about the 1975 publication date. The book was new when it was a text for me!

About the 50% disadvantage, you missed the point entirely. We are not talking about individual mutations, but about the evolution of sexual reproduction itself, remember?

Your what-if story about 'incremental changes' producing cells with half the requisite chromosomes has nothing to do with reality, I'm afraid. It is purely a product of your imagination without anything in the real world remotely tending to support your story. Please remember, we are NOT talking about bundling, but about halving the requisite number of chromosomes and somehow, presumably at the same time, developing the physical tools and functions which would permit the combining of these half-complements into a new cell with the full complement of genetic material.

To UTEOTW -- of course they don't think the evolution of sex was impossible. They spend the entire book trying to get around what they stated in the introduction! Nor is it 'quote mining' to show that even those who write a text about it admit to some severe problems. They did and they do.

 

True; I stand corrected. The mathematics does give the capability of predicting what we see, but it was actually developed from observation and hence is a confirmation and not a prediction.

Computer models of evolution are no less valid than computer models of weather systems, etc. Just because a computer model of a weather system required the ability of a programmer, that doesn't mean it can't do a reasonable job at predicting how a real weather system behaves.

Many Christians (like me) who believe in evolution, believe that it was God's means of bringing life and mankind into existence using natural laws. We can understand the mechanics of the weather, etc. as purely natural phenomenon, while at the same time believing that they are directed by God's providence. I see no barrier -- either of science or of faith -- which keeps me from approaching evolution the same way.

-Neil

 

Now let's lay the vileness of the evolutionary theory bare.

UTEOTW tells us that all life started out asexual, but these asexual organisms started rubbing against one another and exchanging DNA. Eventually this activity, by some trick of magic, results in offspring but, to use UTEOTW's words, "without sexual differentation."

So what you have now is two organisms of the same sex reproducing and these organisms are pretended by UTEOTW to be the remote ancestors of humanity.

Therefore, according to UTEOTW's theory, the human race started out as asexual, then became homosexual, and finally evovled into heterosexual creatures. How utterly vile and utterly contrary to the words of the blesed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who said,

"From the beginning of the creation God made them male and female."

Mark Osgatharp </font>[/QUOTE]Sometimes an evolutionist in another forum will post a extreme, ridiculous post as a parody of a creationist mind set in order to produce a laugh. The trouble with that technique is there will come along a creationist post that outdoes all such efforts at parody and be perfectly serious. This is a perfect example of that problem.