Asyncritus

The earliest living organisms known are the cyanobacteria (called blue-green algae once upon a time). If anyone knows of anything earlier, please let me know. They're there in the pre-Cambrian, in huge quantities. Now here's a marvellous thing. These cyanobacteria can do 2 miraculous things. 1 They can fix nitrogen and make it available to other life forms and 2 They can photosynthesise. They also possess DNA, that miraculously complex substance, and let's not mention all the hugely complicated biochemical machinery needed to respire, reproduce, and perform the normal functions of life, all of which require proteins, which contain fixed nitrogen. Now here are your problems. 1 Nitrogen fixation is an enormously difficult thing to do - because nitrogen is the most unreactive gas known (apart from the rare gases like helium , xenon etc) Haber and Bosch only discovered how to do this in 1912, and they used temperatures of 400C, high pressures, and sophisticated catalysts. They got Nobels for their discoveries. http://thomashager.n...test-invention/ Other than that, nitrogen only combines with oxygen in nature at the temperature of lightning flashes (40,000C). Now here are the most primitive organisms known - or nearly the most primitive - and here they are fixing nitrogen, at ambient temperatures yet. How did they manage to figure out that little thing? 2 Without fixed nitrogen, DNA is impossible - because nitrogen features in a big way in the structure of the molecule. The nucleic acids all contain nitrogen which has been fixed, and without the nucleic acids, DNA is a non-starter. But in the pre-Cambrian, nitrogen could not be fixed in any quantities without the cyanobacteria. (Apart from a few other restricted cases, like the bacteria in the root nodules of legumes, which didn't exist in the preCambrian). But without the fixed nitrogen, the cyanobacteria cannot exist. So which came first? This is an infinite loop: no bacteria, no fixed nitrogen; no fixed nitrogen, no bacteria. So mitochondria? Wrong question. How did the cell walls and the great biochemical processes originate, is more apposite. The cyanobacteria also photosynthesise, meaning they possess chlorophyll. Now in case you don't know, chlorophyll is one of the most remarkable substances known, and the process of photosynthesis is nearly miraculous too. It is fiendishly ingenious: Melvin Calvin and his merrie men got Nobels for figuring out how it works. Now how did a brainless bacterium figure out how to do that???? Does the whole thing not simply scream creation, design and magic?

Lungfish are extant. Lung breathers are everywhere. Therefore lungfish cannot be ancestors of lungbreathers: and in any case, the 'lungs' of lungfish are completely unrelated and dissimilar to what we would call proper 'lungs'. They are devoid of the complex structures (such as bronchioles and alveoli) which make up the average lung. It is therefore NOT entirely plausible that a lungfish could 'evolve' into a lung breather. If they did, then they would not be here any longer. These hypothetical common ancestors simply do not exist. If they do, then where are they? I don't wish to derail this debate, but would like to ask where the 'common ancestors' of the zillion or so species in the Cambrian are. Not to mention the 'common ancestors' of the cyanobacteria in the preCambrian. You remind me of Gould's statement that if evolution is indeed taking place, then there ought not to be anything like species. Since there are about a billion or so species, all clearly described and properly classified, with many thousands more waiting in the wings from the palaeontologists, then your statement is less than accurate. The argument presented in 'How Does Instinct Evolve?' is an extremely basic one. It acknowledges your point that instinct is untaught, and presents many examples of behaviours which have catastrophic consequences for evolution, which can offer no explanations of how such behaviours may have arisen. They are untaught, and are yet demonstrably present in many creatures which perform unbelievable feats: of navigation, for example. However, the book makes an undiscovered or unmentioned point which you touch on in the next paragraph, and which is totally ruinous to evolution, and which has never been addressed anywhere. You are perfectly correct, but have you realised that you have singlehandedly just ruined the whole theory? Where did the information/ instinct powering breathing come from? Without it, the very first organism was dead before it started. I will leave you to answer that one.

Your vocabulary seems somewhat restricted, so I'll do my best not to confuse you If X exists today, then it can't be the ANCESTOR of Y. That simple enough for you? If X is COMPLETELY UNRELATED to Y, then X cannot be the ANCESTOR of Y. That is the definition of UNRELATED. Therefore fish cannot be the ancestors of lung breathers. Tiktaalik is not a 'transitional' between fish and tetrapods which are lungbreathers. My 'claim' about instinct is hardly a claim. It must be obvious to all lung breathers that it is a basic fact. Here's X with gills. Zap. It becomes, all of a sudden Y with lungs. Does it know what to do with the lungs? Should it stay in or get out of the water? What's this diaphragm thing anyway? Those are questions Y has to KNOW the answer to - or it's dead, because it will keep sticking its head under water (since it thinks its a fish) and drown. Therefore, since there's nothing round there to teach it what to do with lungs, the instinct was implanted complete and entire. But that's a creationist statement. There's lots more like it here: www.howdoesinstinctevolve.com. Perhaps you'd like to have a look. The author claims that it is the most ruinous argument against evolution ever posed.

Huh?

If the fish are extant, that simply proves that they have not evolved, and are in no way ancestors of lung breathing animals. So that fails to help your case. Incidentally, fossil lungfish, extraordinarily like the modern ones have been found nearly a couple of hundred million years old. How true! If they are 'completely unrelated', then they did not descend from water breathing structures. There's no relationship. You obviously haven't heard about the wreckage wrought on the Tiktaalik theory! They found tetrapod tracks some 18 million years older than Tiktaalik. Some ancestry there! (The report is in Nature, Jan 2010). You are the one making the blatantly obvious statements. You said they are 'completely unrelated', and you're right. It must be obvious to anyone with a minimum of biological knowledge that a gill and a lung have precious little to do with one another. A gill needs submergence - a lung is the diametric opposite. A lung breather can hold its breath underwater, a gill breather actually breathes underwater. A gill breather dies out of water. A lungbreather is designed to breathe out of water. The instinctive requirements of gill breathing and lung breathing are entirely different, and there is no possible transition between the two things. Instincts, being immaterial, cannot be and are not subject to the normal evolutionary mechanisms.

There's a great deal of latitude (I suppose some cranks would say ' wide semantic range') in the use of the term 'evolution'. Biologically speaking, the word is used to describe the fact that there is 'variation' between individuals of the same species, then extended to such things as 'ring species', and to the limited amount of speciation that has been observed to occur (usually where there is a considerable amount of forced inbreeding, such as happened in the Hawaiian islands. Darwin's finches are a good example of this. There are all sorts of beak shapes and sizes in the 'finch' group, which resulted in the classification of several species as species. All this probably resulted from inbreeding in the restricted area of the Galapagos islands. Gould, for example calls this 'reproductive isolation'. This is called 'evolution', and to that limited extent, it is obviously valid. It is when we attempt to extrapolate these extremely scarce, and highly limited (numerically speaking) examples into accounting for the existence of the zillion or so species which existed in the past, and exist today, that the term 'evolution' runs into severe difficulties. I imagine what most people would think of when they use or hear the word 'evolution' in a biological context is something like the way fishes evolved into tetrapods, or reptiles into birds: both of which are alleged to have taken place despite the astronomical difficulties involved. To overcome these astronomical difficulties, the 'long time' explanation is given - as if length of time can make the impossible possible. Dawkins, for example, describes the bats in 'The God Delusion' quite splendidly, and in a manner worthy of any creationist. He points out the sheer magnificence of their echolocating systems, saying words to the effect that biophysical engineers would a. envy, and b. be extremely hard put to duplicate such systems. He's right - because even today, the US military and doubtless others, are busy trying to copy the bats' echolocating systems, so far superior are they to the current US technology, and we all know how deadly and effective those are! So you pays your money, and takes your choice. Limited 'evolution' - or unlimited optimism?

A recent 2008 paper, "Retroviral promoters in the human genome," in the journal Bioinformatics (Vol. 24(14):1563–1567 (2008)) discusses the fact that "Endogenous retrovirus (ERV) elements have been shown to contribute promoter sequences that can initiate transcription of adjacent human genes. However, the extent to which retroviral sequences initiate transcription within the human genome is currently unknown." The article thus "analyzed genome sequence and high-throughput expression data to systematically evaluate the presence of retroviral promoters in the human genome." The results were striking: We report the existence of 51,197 ERV-derived promoter sequences that initiate transcription within the human genome, including 1743 cases where transcription is initiated from ERV sequences that are located in gene proximal promoter or 5' untranslated regions (UTRs). […] Our analysis revealed that retroviral sequences in the human genome encode tens-of-thousands of active promoters; transcribed ERV sequences correspond to 1.16% of the human genome sequence and PET tags that capture transcripts initiated from ERVs cover 22.4% of the genome. These data suggest that ERVs may regulate human transcription on a large scale. (Andrew B. Conley, Jittima Piriyapongsa and I. King Jordan, "Retroviral promoters in the human genome," Bioinformatics, Vol. 24(14):1563–1567 2008) From this it is obvious that the theory that ERVs represent 'junk DNA' and are residues left by unknown viral infections, is pure nonsense. If the ERVs have such extensive functions, then it is clear that they must have been there from the beginning - otherwise transcription and translation would have been seriously impaired, and in all likelihood could not take place. Species extinction would have followed in short order, and the human species demolished. This leaves the common descent from some proto-human-chimpanzee theory high and very dry.

If all the above is more or less correct, then how did an aquatic, gill-breathing fish become an air-breathing tetrapod as is sometimes alleged?