More "Proof" of Evolution
The naysayers will continue on their narrow, fragile path of oblivion, but for the rest, herein is an interesting, in depth look at the evolution of the cat, heretofore a tough species to classify. I accept that this is merely a "scientific theory", but even that is more, much more, than the other "suggestion, (opinion, idea, hope, wish?)" can say. Besides the cat evolution story, note the time frame used, up to 11 million years ago! Considerably longer (almost 20 times) than the "other" idea of "life" beginning around 6,000 years ago, and this is only referring to the cat; the world itself has been estimated at up to 1 billion years old, and man at a couple million, but hey you knew that already didn't you.
About nine million years ago - two million years after the cat family first appeared in Asia - these successful predators invaded North America by crossing the Beringian land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska, a team of geneticists writes in the journal Science today.
About nine million years ago - two million years after the cat family first appeared in Asia - these successful predators invaded North America by crossing the Beringian land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska, a team of geneticists writes in the journal Science today.
This new history of the family, known as Felidae, is based on DNA analyses of the 37 living species performed by Warren E. Johnson and Stephen J. O'Brien of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues elsewhere.
Before DNA, taxonomists had considerable difficulty in classifying the cat family. The fossil record was sparse and many of the skulls lacked distinctiveness
Then, in 1997, Dr. Johnson and Dr. O'Brien said they thought most living cats fell into one of eight lineages, based on the genetic element known as mitochondrial DNA.
Having made further DNA analyses, the researchers have drawn a full family tree that assigns every cat species to one of the lineages. They have also integrated their tree, which is based solely on changes in DNA, with the fossil record. The fossils, which are securely dated, allow dates to be assigned to each fork in the genetic family tree.
Knowing when each species came into existence, the Johnson-O'Brien team has been able to reconstruct a series of at least 10 intercontinental migrations by which cats colonized the world. The cheetah, for instance, now found in Africa, belongs to a lineage that originated in North America and some three million years ago migrated back across the Bering land bridge to Asia and then Africa.
Sea levels were low from 11 million to 6 million years ago, enabling the first modern cats, to spread from Asia west into Africa, creating the caracal lineage, and east into North America, generating the ocelot, lynx and puma lineages.
The leopard lineage appeared around 6.5 million years ago in Asia. The youngest of the eight lineages, which led eventually to the domestic cat, emerged some 6.2 million years ago in Asia and Africa, either from ancestors that had never left Asia or more probably from North American cats that had trekked back across the Bering land bridge.
Sea levels then rose, confining each cat species to its own continent, but sank again some three million years ago, allowing a second round of cat migrations. It was at this time that the ancestors of the cheetah and the Eurasian lynxes colonized the Old World from the New.
Cat fossils are very hard to tell apart, because they differ mostly just in size, and the DNA data emerging over the last decade has helped bring the field from confusion to consensus, Dr. Wozencraft said.
posted by D. Coder | 2:52 AM
8 Comments:
You state:
"The fossils, which are securely dated, allow dates to be assigned to each fork in the genetic family tree."
[securely dated]- Since when? This is a theory based on another theory. Bringing the probability of the accuracy of the first theory down.
http://www.creationministries.org/faq.asp#8
10. Doesn’t Radiometric Dating prove that the earth is billions of years old?
Not at all! The only thing that these dating methods have proven is that they (Carbon, Ar-K, Isochron, etc.) are completely unreliable. They are also non-scientific. Science is defined as knowledge derived from the observation, testing and study of evidence. These dating methods make several non-observable and non-repeatable wild guesses (assumptions) in order to arrive at “old dates”.
Take Ar-K dating as an example. Potassium 40 decays into argon 40. In Ar-K dating, scientists can accurately measure the amounts of these elements in a rock. By assuming the rate of decay of Potassium to Argon (in Ar-K dating) has always been the same, an estimate is made as to how long it took to form the amount of argon present. It's assumed that no argon was present when the rock being dated first formed. However, no one was there to observe how much argon was in the rock when it was made. Thus the whole process is nothing more than a guessing game. There are from 11 to 23 such wild guesses associated with the radiometric dating methods. Other assumptions, such as that the rock was never contaminated with argon from another source, equally invalidates the dates given.
I said it was only a "theory" didn't I? And besides this is about using DNA to prove evolutionary CHANGES in cats NOT necessarily when it occurred; only that it had occurred.
But why is it that words such as "unreliable, non-scientific, wild guesses, assumptions, guessing game, invalidates" etc. are readily used by some people to describe the "theory of evolution" yet when it comes to the even less tenable, or rather completely untenable "creation" suggestion, these same people ascribe to it as if it were able to be proven, gospel, pardon the pun.
Assuming all dating procedures are 95% in error (which I and most others doubt) that still puts the age of man and other life at more than the "creation" idea. So the evolution theory would have to be more than 95% "off" to even come close to that of the creationism idea. Doubtful I think.
And by the way, if creationism were even remotely provable don't you think there would be a HUGE push for it to be taught EXCLUSIVELY in our schools as opposed to accepting the compromise of "side by side" teaching of both? I mean please, if petitions can go around to try and prevent a lousy TV show (the book of daniel) from airing, don't you think something like evoltion would have resulted in that many more petitions? Yet I have seen none!
Why not accept as I do that there is room for both? after all doesnt it also say somewhere that "one day is as a thousand...." something or another? Meaning, to god, time is irrelevent or perhaps even nonexistant? So god did perhaps create all (or most) forms of life in HIS time, not ours. And that which he did not create he "Allowed" to evolve.
God is certainly not "creating" "test tube babies" yet he "allows" it to happen.
Amen my ever evolving brother
Proof for a "Young Earth"
http://www.creationministries.org/faq.asp#12
What evidences support a young earth or universe view?
Actually the vast majority of ways to date things reflect a young world view. Helium escapes rocks quickly, geologically speaking. Yet rocks in the deepest strata layers still have lots of helium in them. Helium is being produced by the second via radiometric decay, and enters the earth’s atmosphere. There is no known way for appreciable amounts of helium to escape the atmosphere. Yet the amount of helium in earth’s atmosphere can only account for about one-half million years. (If God made the atmosphere with zero helium to start).
Many planets are still hot although losing heat faster than they receive heat. They can’t be old. The sun is shrinking. This causes a host of problems for old age believers. One is that as the sun shrinks, its gravity weakens. Earth’s orbit around the sun is held in place by the sun’s gravitational pull. If we were a fraction closer to, or further from, the sun, life could not exist on earth. The solar system can’t be old.
The earth’s magnetic field has weakened by 6% over the past 150 years. At this rate, extrapolating backwards, the field strength would have been that of a magnetic star about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. The oceans are 3.6% salt and the level of salinity is increasing. At the present rate, the water would have gone from fresh to 3.6% salt in about 5,000 years.
There are about 1,200 minerals on earth. Each can be measured as to amounts existing in and entering into the seas. These all point to a young ocean. Sediments on the sea floors accumulate via continental erosion. Studies of the amounts indicate a youthful ocean.
very intriguing indeed!
yet when using helium as a "guide" you say it can only account for a half million years - that is still considerably longer than than the 6,000 years estimated by some.
and the weakening of the earths magnetic field by 6% over the last 150 years - i can only wonder how much if any of that is attributable to our continued disreguard for and destruction of the earth and thereby her delicate "balance"? this would also affect salinity (global warming = more evaporation etc.), and erosion.
in any event, good points and I thank you.
Many evolutionists say that humans developed from "swamps". The following is an interesting article.
Swamp Thing
To help understand Urey’s point, imagine a lifeless swamp a few billion years ago that "wishes" to generate life. It will have to build some proteins, the building blocks of life. Proteins are chains of amino acids. Assume that by some unknown process your swamp is able to generate amino acids. By natural generation, half of the amino acids will be left-handed, the other half right-handed.
But right-handed amino acids damage protein structure, so your swamp will have to find a way to get rid of them. Most biological proteins are strings of one hundred or so left-handed amino acids, assembled in exactly the right sequence. The sequence has to be exact, or the protein’s shape changes; change the shape significantly and you destroy the protein’s biological value.
As your swamp lines up its amino acids just so, it has to keep them from reacting with each other and with water, oxygen, calcium, magnesium, and a host of other chemicals—even though amino acids are highly reactive with many substances. Your swamp must also protect its amino acids from ultraviolet light, because UV light denatures protein. Since the sun is above the horizon roughly half the time, UV light is present roughly half the time.
All these factors make it hard for a swamp to produce a protein. Even if it did, one protein would not be enough. It would take about two thousand different proteins to make the simplest imaginable one-celled organism, and it would have to make all two thousand in virtually the same instant. Why? Because proteins and amino acids get rancid within hours of exposure to oxygen and/or ultraviolet light.
The chemical odds of two thousand proteins arising spontaneously in this way have been estimated by Darwinians at approximately one chance in ten with forty thousand zeroes after it. That is about as close to statistically impossible as can be, no matter how many billion years you wait for it to happen.
And to make matters worse, for spontaneous generation no help can be expected from evolution, because chemicals don’t evolve. Neo-Darwinism requires DNA to pass on information to descendants. But your swamp is nowhere near ready to produce DNA. Small biological proteins don’t have descendants for natural selection to choose between.
Your swamp also needs to create sugars and fats—but again, as with amino acids, not just any sugar or fat will do. Biological sugars must be right-handed, since left-handed ones sabotage biological structures. Statistically, right- and left-handed sugars form naturally in equal quantities. And biological fats must be the cis form, even though the mirror image trans form is the chemically stable type preferred by nature. Your swamp needs cis fats to make cell membranes, but trans fats—the type nature prefers—damage or destroy cell membranes. And as you might expect, cis and trans are found in equal amounts. So your swamp has to find a way to get rid of the left-handed sugars and the trans fats.
It also needs to produce a genetics system. It is probably impossible to assemble the components of DNA in the lab, even with high-priced technicians and modern equipment. Indeed, some parts of the DNA molecule have never been synthesized by human chemists. Is it reasonable to think these parts could be synthesized in a lifeless swamp?
Other parts of the DNA molecule cannot be synthesized in water. They must be synthesized dry, then somehow introduced into a water-based living creature without being destroyed on contact with water. No mere human scientist knows how to do that.
To make matters more complicated, DNA does not function unless it has several dozen regulatory proteins present. These are produced by DNA, but must be present before DNA can actually produce them. You need the whole genetic system all at once. There is no value in having just part of it. Asking the genetics system to produce itself and its autoregulatory proteins simultaneously is like asking your neighbor to become her own grandmother.
The need for the whole genetics system all at once (and not by small increments accumulating over time, as demanded by Darwinian theory) led a biological probability conference some years ago at the University of Paris to conclude, "We believe there is a considerable gap in the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. We believe this gap to be of such a nature [that] it cannot be bridged with the current conceptions of biology" (Schutzenberger in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, pp. 73, 75).
Darwinians are not deterred. In the words of George Wald, my old biology professor at Harvard University, "The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative [was] to believe in a single primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position. For this reason, many scientists a century ago chose to regard the belief in spontaneous generation as a ‘philosophical necessity.’ . . . Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing.
"I think a scientist has no choice but to approach the origin of life though a hypothesis of spontaneous generation" ("The Origin of Life," Scientific American, August 1954, p. 46).
It would seem "scientific facts" have been replaced by "articles of faith" and "philosophical necessities." But let us get back to science.
Confronting Creation’s Complexities
Darwinism Isn’t Fit to Survive
By Robin Bernhoft
This Rock
Volume 14, Number 7
September 2003
http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/2003/0309fea3.asp
I really DID thoroughly enjoy reading that detailed explanation, and will have my "neo doctor" examine it for accuracy later hopefully. she has already pointed out some errors.
Meanwhile, where its stated " It would seem "scientific facts" have been replaced by "articles of faith" and "philosophical necessities." But let us get back to science.------- I'll wholeheartedly agree with it given the alternative that a "supreme intelligence (that science refuses to accept) created ALL.
BUT, can you accept the equal truth that organized religion can NEVER accept ANY OTHER theory than its own (even IF proven), for the SAME reasons? Even though its own "belief" is even more impossible to "prove
Actually I was waiting for your response...
Science is proving something from "facts" - not "theories"
Faith - is believing what can't be proved.
So I, and many others, would say that Science - when it comes to "evolution", at least, is masquerading as "religion"
I started out replying by finding a definition for theory. Simple right? WRONG, I got only a headache rather than a "definitive" defintion. It seems the definition of theory ranges from NOT fact to FACT! Go figure.
Anyway it did lead me to other things as my research SOOO often does.
For now, Ill just use your statements as "fact" and say that if Faith - is believing what can't be proved, then those who TOTALLY accept as irrefutable truth anything on "faith" alone, have absolutely no business denying anyone elses claims on anything, let alone scientists who at least try to prove their ideas...
more when my headache goes away.
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