Here's a universal truth: arguing with a troll is pointless

there is no amount of logic that cannot be circumvented by a quick rant, cut-and-paste, or change of subject.

Just best to ignore and laugh...although sometimes I don't take my own advice. Bad me! Bad me!

My posts are not to cause anger or stir people up.
Just giving another option.

If I'm wrong, everyone dies.
If I'm right, untold millions live forever.

Just becuase I don't respond to *every single* jab doesn't mean I give up.
Sometimes I just say "have a nice day" and leave in peace.

I think I've made some very bold statements.
Many of which stand on their own.

Just because most of the world is not currently engaged in war at the moment isn't proof of "good government".


KT

time doesnt really exist, it's just something humans invented to keep track of events. you can say man lives for thousands of years on a different scale.

time exists, but we have created a somewhat arbitrary system for tracking it. It starts to get weird depending on your frame of reference though...

Well. married men, anyway.

b : a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder.

It dissipates. It speeds up the entropy process.

I think not. But you`ve amused us :cool:

Aurel

more pure comedy gold!

That would spell theories, but it does not really matter: at the masters level, you are not supposed to write peer reviewed papers. Thanks God :cool:

Aurel

At least with physics, mother nature tells you when you are wrong, right away. The main problem with most other science is that nothing tells you, with an in your face answer, that your are dead wrong. That feedback makes for good learning. Without the feedback you tend to get people that think they know the answers, when they do not.

I have written peer reviewed articles for publication in scientific journals. I happen to dislike writing, but like math. Why? because the English language is so screwed up as to be almost nonsensical. Why worry about spelling when there are no standards for spelling, always an exception here, there wherever. This is typical for engineers and scientists. Just like the inconsistencies in evolution, when everything doesn’t make sense, do not regard it highly.

Back to the subject at hand, evolution.

Can someone give me a single example, just one of a form of macro evolution. You know, like a fish becoming a man or a dog becoming a bird or vise versa. Challenge issued!

I can't help the one track minds of some people on this thread. I have repeatedly stated that religion is totally consistent with evolution, yet I continue to read responses that ignore this. Why?

not mine but you get the the point


What is macroevolution?

In science, macro at the beginning of a word just means "big", and micro at the beginning of a word just means "small" (both from the Greek words). For example, a macrophage means a bigger than normal cell, but it is only a few times bigger than other cells, and not an order of magnitude bigger.

In evolutionary biology today, macroevolution is used to refer to any evolutionary change at or above the level of species. It means the splitting of a species into two (speciation, or cladogenesis, from the Greek meaning "the origin of a branch") or the change of a species over time into another (anagenesis, not nowadays generally used). Any changes that occur at higher levels, such as the evolution of new families, phyla or genera, is also therefore macroevolution, but the term is not restricted to the origin of those higher taxa.

Microevolution refers to any evolutionary change below the level of species, and refers to changes in the frequency within a population or a species of its alleles (alternative genes) and their effects on the form, or phenotype, of organisms that make up that population or species.

Another way to state the difference is that macroevolution is between-species evolution of genes and microevolution is within-species evolution of genes.

There are various kinds of dynamics of macroevolution. Punctuated equilibrium theory proposes that once species have originated, and adapted to the new ecological niches in which they find themselves, they tend to stay pretty much as they are for the rest of their existence. Phyletic gradualism suggests that species continue to adapt to new challenges over the course of their history. Species selection and species sorting theories claim that there are macroevolutionary processes going on that make it more or less likely that certain species will exist for very long before becoming extinct, in a kind of parallel to what happens to genes in microevolution.


The history of the concept of macroevolution

In the "modern synthesis" of neo-Darwinism, which developed in the period from 1930 to 1950 with the reconciliation of evolution by natural selection and modern genetics, macroevolution is thought to be the combined effects of microevolutionary processes. In theories proposing "orthogenetic evolution" (literally, straight line evolution), macroevolution is thought to be of a different calibre and process than microevolution. Nobody has been able to make a good case for orthogenesis since the 1950s, especially since the uncovering of molecular genetics between 1952 and the late 1960s.

Antievolutionists argue that there has been no proof of macroevolutionary processes. However, synthesists claim that the same processes that cause within-species changes of the frequencies of alleles can be extrapolated to between species changes, so this argument fails unless some mechanism for preventing microevolution causing macroevolution is discovered. Since every step of the process has been demonstrated in genetics and the rest of biology, the argument against macroevolution fails.

Non-Darwinian evolutionists think that the processes that cause speciation are of a different kind to those that occur within species. That is, they admit that macroevolution occurs, but think that normal genetic change is restricted by such proposed mechanisms as developmental constraints. This view is associated with the names of Schmalhausen and Waddington, who were often characterised as being non-Darwinians by the modern synthesis theorists.

The terms macroevolution and microevolution were first coined in 1927 by the Russian entomologist Iurii Filipchenko (or Philipchenko, depending on the transliteration), in his German-language work Variabilität und Variation, which was the first attempt to reconcile Mendelian genetics and evolution. Filipchenko was an evolutionist, but as he wrote during the period when Mendelism seemed to have made Darwinism redundant, the so-called "eclipse of Darwinism" (Bowler 1983), he was not a Darwinian, but an orthogeneticist. Moreover Russian biologists of the period had a history of rejecting Darwin's Malthusian mechanism of evolution by competition.

In Theodosius Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species, he began by saying that "we are compelled at the present level of knowledge reluctantly to put a sign of equality between the mechanisms of macro- and microevolution" (1937, page 12), thereby introducing the terms into the English-speaking biological community (Alexandrov 1994). Dobzhansky had been Filipchenko's student and regarded him as his mentor. In science, it is difficult to deny a major tenet of one's teachers due to filial loyalty, and Dobzhansky, who effectively started the modern Darwinian synthesis with this book, found it disagreeable to have to deny his teacher's views (Burian 1994).

The term fell into limited disfavour when it was taken over by such writers as the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt (1940) and the paleontologist Otto Schindewolf to describe their orthogenetic theories. As a result, apart from Dobzhansky, Bernhardt Rensch and Ernst Mayr, very few neo-Darwinian writers used the term, preferring instead to talk of evolution as changes in allele frequencies without mention of the level of the changes (above species level or below). Those who do are generally working within the continental European traditions (as Dobzhansky, Mayr, Rensch, Goldschmidt, and Schindewolf are) and those who don't are generally working within the Anglo-American tradition (such as John Maynard Smith and Richard Dawkins). Hence, the term is sometimes wrongly used as a litmus test of whether the writer is "properly" neo-Darwinian or not (Eldredge 1995: 126-127).

The term has been revived by a number of authors such as Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, the authors of punctuated equilibrium theory (see Eldredge's 1992 Macroevolutionary Dynamics ), but there is a tendency in these authors to revert to the orthogenetic view that something other than within-species processes are causing macroevolution, although they disavow the orthogenetic view that evolution is progressing anywhere.


Conclusion

There is no difference between micro- and macroevolution except that genes between species usually diverge, while genes within species usually combine. The same processes that cause within-species evolution are responsible for above-species evolution, except that the processes that cause speciation include things that cannot happen to lesser groups, such as the evolution of different sexual apparatus (because, by definition, once organisms cannot interbreed, they are different species).

The idea that the origin of higher taxa, such as genera (canines versus felines, for example), requires something special is based on the misunderstanding of the way in which new phyla (lineages) arise. The two species that are the origin of canines and felines probably differed very little from their common ancestral species and each other. But once they were reproductively isolated from each other, they evolved more and more differences that they shared but the other lineages didn't. This is true of all lineages back to the first eukaryotic (nuclear) cell. Even the changes in the Cambrian explosion are of this kind, although some (eg, Gould 1989) think that the genomes (gene structures) of these early animals were not as tightly regulated as modern animals, and therefore had more freedom to change.


References

Alexandrov, DA: 1994. Filipchenko and Dobzhansky: Issues in Evolutionary Genetics in the 1920s. In The Evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky, ed. MB Adams, Princeton University Press.

Bowler, PJ: 1983. The Eclipse of Darwinism, Johns Hopkins University Press

Burian, RM: 1994. Dobzhansky on Evolutionary Dynamics: Some Questions about His Russian Background. In The Evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky, ed. MB Adams, Princeton University Press.

Dobzhansky, Th: 1937. Genetics and the Origin of Species, Columbia University Press

Eldredge, N: 1992. Macroevolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches and Adaptive Peaks, McGraw-Hill

Eldredge, N: 1995. Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate, Weidenfeld and Nicholson

Goldschmidt, R: 1940. The Material Basis of Evolution, Yale University Press

Gould, SJ: 1989. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, Norton

Certainly not conclusive in any way. In other words, hogwash. Just one big MIGHT or MIGHT not statement.

Also lacks evidence to back up statements. If all the evidence is micro, and all the macro is just an extrapolation, without backup.

Frankly, you're an idiot if you think that macroevolution is a fish turning into a man. Is your name really Kent Hovind?

I challenge you to learn what macroevolution is in the first place.

Jim goes down to the college and meets the dean of admissions, who signs him up for the four basic classes: math,
English, history, and logic.

"Logic?" Jim says. "What's that?"

The dean says, "I'll show you. Do you own a weed eater?"

"Yeah."

"Then logically because you own a weed eater, I think that you would have a yard."

"That's! true, I do have a yard."

"I'm not done," the dean says. Because you have a yard, I think
logically that you would have a house."

"Yes, I do have a house."

"And because you have a house, I think that you might logically have a family."

"I have a family."

"I'm not done yet. Because you have a family, then logically you must have a wife."

"Yes, I do have a wife."

"And because you have a wife, then logically you must be a heterosexual."

"I am a heterosexual. That's amazing, you were able to find out all of that because I have a weed eater."

Excited to take the class now, Jim shakes the dean's hand and leaves to go meet Bob at the bar. He tells Bob about his classes, how he is signed up for math, English, history, and logic.

"Logic?" Bob says, "What's that?"

Jim says, "I'll show you. Do you have a weed eater?"

"No."

"Then you're a queer."

Aurel

snow..

Stick to the math...Your debating skills and knowledge of life sciences is sorely lacking.

You fail to grasp the concept of hundreds of millions of years with minute changes resuting in observable biological change. And, no one will ever convince you otherwise.

Oh...BTW...the concept of "time". Eliminate physicality and time is meaningless because the objective of time is to measure change. Physical objects change position, condition, etc. In a non physical universe with nothing to measure..you get the picture....

Entropy..an end state where energy level throughout a system is uniform. Adding energy to an entropic state results in an inbalance which will be restored at a future time with the entire system once again at equlibrium but at a higher level than before.

What is to learn, it is a crock of *****...utter nonsense.

If we didn't come from fish, what did we come from?...If you fundamentalist evolutionists would keep your stories straight, perhaps we that disagree could understand what in the fuk you were talking about.

Didn't the story book of evolution., a favorite of Hitler, suggest your ancestors crawled out of the water?

We crawled out and continued to evolve, at least most of us. Some trolls were reluctant to use the gray matter between their ears and were left behind. We refer to them as the Null species, a complete dead end in evolution (a dead end in reason, rationality as well as truth, too).

Plagiarists should not enter adult conversations that require credibility.