In article <473fc549@news.povray.org>, war### [at] tagpovrayorg says...
> andrel <a_l### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> > The physiology is so mind boggling similar that the only explanation is
 
> > a common descent.
> 
>   "I can't think of any other explanation" is no proof. Really strong
> evidence yes, but no proof.
> 
Congratulations, you just described why we consider ***every*** 
scientific theory ever devised to be the best explanation for the data. 
Now, if you could just get past that and recognize that there are a huge 
number of theories that you are not complaining about which have similar 
"gaps" and are actually "less" well understood and/or explained than 
evolution, we might get some place useful.

And just to be clear, its not just huge similarity, its huge similarity 
with, in some cases, identical genes. This doesn't make sense without 
common descent, because in many cases a gene that does X in a whole mass 
of species like apes is **not** identical in birds, and yet, you can 
place the human gene into the bird, or the bird gene into a human (well, 
and chimp or the like, since doing it to a human wouldn't be ethical), 
and they would still work. This means that the two genes where **once** 
the same, and the mechanisms they interact with are common to both, but 
that they differ due to which branch of the tree they are in. Now, you 
might try to argue that this would make sense, since they exist in 
morphologically similar species. You would be right, if the genes in 
question had anything **at all** to do with morphology. Its even more 
absurd an argument when you find it in species that are known to be 
related via those genes, but which are not at all similar to each other, 
like say a crocodile and an emu, or something. Why would they both share 
a common gene? And even worse when you can trace the steps that the 
genes went through to get from one form to the other, or from an earlier 
form to both of the new ones.

All the evidence points in one direction and one direction only, so the 
only thing the people that question it have is complaints about stuff 
they don't understand in the first place, or assertions that its all 
some coincidence. Until/unless some evidence shows up that starts to 
suggest the later though, like entire sets of genes showing up in two 
completely different species, with no possible means they could have 
both derived them from an earlier common version, or two identical sets 
(rather than single genes, which sometimes can show up in two dissimilar 
species), with no common ancestor that "could" have shared them, its 
going to continue to point in only one direction. And by entire sets, I 
mean like finding dogs that inexplicably starts growing feathers, which 
have a great number of changes in the coding for them from hair, and no 
virus or other mechanism that contains the same genes, can infect both 
birds and dogs, and can reasonably explain the sudden appearance of the 
trait.

Put simply, when every change you find is the equivalent of a lot of 
tiny single letter on a page, and you don't see entire paragraphs or 
chapters appearing out of no place, and you "do" see the same single 
letter changes in all closely similar species, its kind of hard to argue 
that the only explanation is that something came along and changed 
"huge" numbers of genes to get the results. Case in point, it was once 
thought that chimps and humans where only 90% similar genetically, then 
they changed that to 98%, they now think its closer to 99%, and 
virtually ****every single**** difference they have found that counts is 
nothing but developmental changes. I.e., when certain genes turn off and 
on. There are some differences, like a single chemical change to one 
gene that exists in ***every species*** from birds, to reptiles, to 
mammals, etc. There are only a handful of species that have this tiny 
mutation. One is humans, while most of the others are parrots. What does 
it code for? They suspect, since it changes the development of neural 
pathway development for sounds, it codes for something humans and 
parrots have in common, and all others, including chimps, lack, the 
capacity to use symbolic logic. Parrots can do it, chimps can't, which 
is why chimps can learn what words "mean", but have no capacity to 
invent new ones, while parrots have shown the ability to take existing 
words and combine them into new ones, which describe new things that 
they never encountered before.

And again, its a change or *one single* chemical, not some huge chain of 
things, like needed to grow a fin instead of a hand.

-- 
void main () {

    call functional_code()
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

<A HREF='http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=16130551'>Get 3D Models,
 
3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

Post a reply to this message