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A better understanding of the evolution of horses.

WiYC asserted that Niles Eldredge 'refuted' horse evolution. Eldredge was arguing against the outdated idea of horses evolving in a straight line progression. Eldredge and other paleontologists would argue that the fossils point to a more complicated bushy tree of fossils with the only surviving member being the modern horse.

From the Horse Evolution FAQ on TalkOrigins:
"As new fossils were discovered, though, it became clear that the old model of horse evolution was a serious oversimplification. The ancestors of the modern horse were roughly what that series showed, and were clear evidence that evolution had occurred. But it was misleading to portray horse evolution in that smooth straight line, for two reasons:

1. First, horse evolution didn't proceed in a straight line. We now know of many other branches of horse evolution. Our familiar Equus is merely one twig on a once-flourishing bush of equine species. We only have the illusion of straight-line evolution because Equus is the only twig that survived. (See Gould's essay "Life's Little Joke" in Bully for Brontosaurus for more on this topic.)
2. Second, horse evolution was not smooth and gradual. Different traits evolved at different rates, didn't always evolve together, and occasionally reversed "direction". Also, horse species did not always come into being by gradual transformation ("anagenesis") of their ancestors; instead, sometimes new species "split off" from ancestors ("cladogenesis") and then co-existed with those ancestors for some time. Some species arose gradually, others suddenly.

Overall, the horse family demonstrates the diversity of evolutionary mechanisms, and it would be misleading -- and would be a real pity -- to reduce it to an oversimplified straight-line diagram."

Re: Enough montificating - Where is your evidence?

WiYC said:
"Antibiotic resistant bacteria evolution:
Why is it that NO bacteria have been discovered that possess more complexity and … why are they still bacteria?"

Do you have a source for that? I am sure that you have done an exhaustive search of all of the scientific literature showing that no bacteria has ever evolved greater complexity. Maybe you should rethink that in light of bacteria that developed the ability to consume recently developed nylon oligoemrs. I am sure that you have a creationist explanation for nylon eating bacteria.

"2 Bacteria that eat nylon

Well, no, they don't actually eat nylon; they eat short molecules (nylon oligoemrs) found in the waste waters of plants that produce nylon. They metabolize short nylon oligomers, breaking the nylon linkages with a couple of related enzymes. Since the bonds involved aren't found in natural products, the enzymes must have arisen since the time nylon was invented (around the 1940s). It would appear this happened by new mutations in that time period.

These enzymes which break down the nylon oligomers appear to have arisen by frameshift mutation from some other gene which codes for a functionally unrelated enzyme. This adaptation has been experimentally duplicated. In the experiments, non-nylon-metabolizing strains of Pseudomonas were grown in media with nylon oligomers available as the primary food source. Within a relatively small number of generations, they developed these enzyme activities. This would appear to be an example of documented occurrence of beneficial mutations in the lab."

Re: Enough montificating - Where is your evidence?

WiYC said:
"Antibiotic resistant bacteria evolution:
Why is it that NO bacteria have been discovered that possess more complexity and … why are they still bacteria?"

Perhaps you better read this FAQ at TalkOrigins. There are plenty of examples of increased complexity evolving.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB102.html

The theory is yours so the burden of proof is yours - 'Nylon-eating' bacteria

In regard to your comment:
"Since the bonds involved aren't found in natural products, the enzymes must have arisen since the time nylon was invented (around the 1940s). It would appear this happened by new mutations in that time period."


This 'evidence' is purely based on the evolutionary presupposition that they were NEVER there to begin with. Without proof of that , you are back to the bacteria still being nothing but more bacteria that are NO MORE complex.

"Interestingly, Yomo et al. also show that it is highly unlikely that any of these genes arose through a frame shift mutation, because such mutations (forward or reverse) would have generated lots of stop codons. This nullifies the claim of Thwaites that a functional gene arose from a purely random process (an accident)...
P. aeruginosa is renowned for its ability to adapt to unusual food sources—such as toluene, naphthalene, camphor, salicylates and alkanes. These abilities reside on plasmids known as TOL, NAH, CAM, SAL and OCT respectively. Significantly, they do not reside on the chromosome (many examples of antibiotic resistance also reside on plasmids).
The chromosome of P. aeruginosa has 6.3 million base pairs, which makes it one of the largest bacterial genomes sequenced. Being a large genome means that only a relatively low mutation rate can be tolerated within the actual chromosome, otherwise error catastrophe would result. There is no way that normal mutations in the chromosome could generate a new enzyme in nine days and hypermutation of the chromosome itself would result in non-viable bacteria. Plasmids seem to be adaptive elements designed to make bacteria capable of adaptation to new situations while maintaining the integrity of the main chromosome...
It seems clear that plasmids are designed features of bacteria that enable adaptation to new food sources or the degradation of toxins. The details of just how they do this remains to be elucidated. The results so far clearly suggest that these adaptations did not come about by chance mutations, but by some designed mechanism. This mechanism might be analogous to the way that vertebrates rapidly generate novel effective antibodies with hypermutation in B-cell maturation, which does not lend credibility to the grand scheme of neo-Darwinian evolution."
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v17/i3/bacteria.asp

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Replying to:

WiYC said:
"Antibiotic resistant bacteria evolution:
Why is it that NO bacteria have been discovered that possess more complexity and … why are they still bacteria?"

Perhaps you better read this FAQ at TalkOrigins. There are plenty of examples of increased complexity evolving.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB102.html

You really should stop quoting AIG in general and Don Batten in particular.

Don got his head handed to him at TalkOrigins. It doesn't appear that he got much of anything right.
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/apr04.html

Batten's claims were answered specifically and thoroughly.

Read the link I gave you. He went point by point showing that Batten was wrong on every count. You have brought Batten's work in several times and there is one commonality. It is shoddy. The same was seen in his whale articles.

You know better

Did you forget again? You know how this works:

Give us ONE example only and then we will debate it and go on to another if you so choose.


By the way, did you throw in the towel on the 'nylon-eating' bacteria?

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Replying to:

WiYC said:
"Antibiotic resistant bacteria evolution:
Why is it that NO bacteria have been discovered that possess more complexity and … why are they still bacteria?"

Perhaps you better read this FAQ at TalkOrigins. There are plenty of examples of increased complexity evolving.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB102.html

You have been given plenty of examples

And you have failed to respond effectively to any of them.

Batten was refuted thoroughly, point by point.

I think you should read the link I gave you. As usual, Batten provides no scientific content, only specious claims. The science establishes that this characteristic evolved both in the wild and in the lab.

Again, you know better - New deal

This is the deal:

ALL postings that include links only for rebuttals without commentary or copied quotes directly pertaining to the issue at hand will be deleted.

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