Tens/Hundreds of millions of years too little for life forms' adaptations?

[LostSheep]

Hello all,

This question is meant or evolutionists and others informed about biology, zoology and natural selection/mutation. I have been perusing the www.creationmoments.org web site and have seen many, many instances of life forms here on earth having very unusual adaptations for feeding/mating/surviving etc. Many of these adaptations are very specialized and quite far from what I might have conceived out of my own imagination

My question is: can anybody who is informed on these matters give me some sense as to how all these adaptations could have arisen successfully out of tens/hundreds of millions of years of evolution? In other words, am I not really understanding the enormity of the time span involved here, because I feel skeptical (I grant that I'm not really informed on the matter) that even tens/hundreds of millions of years could have caused the wonderful adaptations I have seen documented on this creationmoments web site.

I have also heard of a book which I think is entitled "Deep Time". Has anyone read this book (I may have an incorrect title unfortunately, but I think the title is at least similar), and do you think this book sheds any light on this question?

Thanks

[Ursus maritimus]

In other words, am I not really understanding the enormity of the time span involved here, because I feel skeptical (I grant that I'm not really informed on the matter) that even tens/hundreds of millions of years could have caused the wonderful adaptations I have seen documented on this creationmoments web site.

May I ask why you are skeptical? Is there something concrete that gives you good reason to be skeptical, or is it just a feeling that you have?

Anyway, have you tried Google? I wouldn't be surprised, though, if there weren't a lot on the internet about these things. Sometimes there is not getting around spending several hours in a good university library.

[LostSheep]

Is there something concrete that gives you good reason to be skeptical, or is it just a feeling that you have?

Yes, I suppose it is just a feeling I have, though I believe I have an informal and unexpert feeling about complexity from being a software engineer.

By the way, I found out the correct title of the book I mentioned. It is:
"In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life"
by Henry Gee

[wattsr1]

Hello all,

This question is meant or evolutionists and others informed about biology, zoology and natural selection/mutation. I have been perusing the www.creationmoments.org web site and have seen many, many instances of life forms here on earth having very unusual adaptations for feeding/mating/surviving etc. Many of these adaptations are very specialized and quite far from what I might have conceived out of my own imagination

My question is: can anybody who is informed on these matters give me some sense as to how all these adaptations could have arisen successfully out of tens/hundreds of millions of years of evolution? In other words, am I not really understanding the enormity of the time span involved here, because I feel skeptical (I grant that I'm not really informed on the matter) that even tens/hundreds of millions of years could have caused the wonderful adaptations I have seen documented on this creationmoments web site.

I have also heard of a book which I think is entitled "Deep Time". Has anyone read this book (I may have an incorrect title unfortunately, but I think the title is at least similar), and do you think this book sheds any light on this question?

Thanks

I am unsure LDDS, but there may be a problem of perspective here, based on the wording of your question.

To an extent the problem is not so much “how did all these adaptations arise … over hundreds of millions of years”. Rather, it is “how did one adaptation arise over hundreds of millions of years”. Explain one and you kind of explain the others. My reason for saying this, is that the earth is composed of not just one environment to which animals have had to adapt, rather it is composed of millions of environments and animals find different solutions to adapt to these different environments.

Your question reads a bit as if you see all these adaptations happening in a serial fashion when in reality they happen in both a serial fashion and a parallel fashion. The serial fashion is that species go extinct through time and new species arise through time. The parallel fashion is that this is happening in parallel across the millions of differing environments on earth at any one time. Look at what is happening to day. Species are going extinct in parallel, not necessarily serially. And this is happening we think, because many different environments are being destroyed in parallel, not necessarily serially.

How do animals adapt? Darwin’s explanation of random changes to the genes of animals and these changes being selected for by the differing environments in which the animals find themselves, is by far the most widely accepted scientific theory which accounts for these many differing and adaptations.

Over the past year I have thrown up some essays (maybe hard reading – they were hard research and writing for me) which explain bits and pieces of research undertaken regarding this. The essays can be found at:-

http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/sh...ad.php?t=93298

Currently I am working on another essay titled “Plugging Darwin’s Gaps”. It discusses research that can now be done, thanks to developments in genetics, to show how a molecule (a gene or gene product, a protein) can evolve though intermediate stages. It even tackles the issue of tightly interacting genes and proteins and it appears that things are not as impossible as may seem.

A problem can be that when a gene mutates to a “better”* gene, interactions with other genes come into play which moderate exactly how “fit” that “better” gene really is. It would appear to stop most paths from a gene to a “better” gene from being accessible (in a Darwinian sense) to evolution. However, some paths actually do get through. The really interesting case occurs with genes that interact in a lock and key sense. How can these evolve new functions in a Darwinian manner? That is, how can a random mutation which may hit a lock, still enable the associated key to work, until the key itself changes? Again, it seems that this can happen. The lock and key genes duplicate and then other genes come into play to help the lock and key system move forward step by step in a Darwinian sense. However I have a lot more reading and head scratching to do before I post that essay.



Deep Time? The book to which you refer is, I suspect:-

“Deep Time” by Henry Gee. Gee was an editor on the board of Nature. He was one of the key players in a field developed back in the 1960s and 1970s. That field was called “cladistics”. Basically, Gee and others resurrected an idea put forward by another scientist named Hennig back in the 1950s.

If this is the book you are thinking of, then I do not think it addresses your question. Rather it is about classifying animals in a manner that is more objective than that used before the introduction of cladistics – say in the decades leading up to the 1960s. During those decades, scientists would tend to look at a transitional fossil as representing a direct link between a putative ancestor and a supposed descendant based on some notion of what happened in evolution to make this link. The renegades claimed that this was bad science and set out to stop this practice by resurrecting and updating Hennig’s method.

Let Gee tell the story (It is a very readable book):-

Given the ubiquitous chatter of journalists and headline writers about the search for ancestors, and the discovery of missing links, it may come as a surprise to learn that most professional palaeontologists do not think of the history of life in terms of scenarios or narratives, and that they rejected the story-telling mode of evolutionary history as unscientific more than thirty years ago. Behind the scenes, in museums and universities, a quiet revolution has taken place.

The architects of this revolution sought ways to discover the pattern of the history of life that are free from subjective, untestable stories. If it is fair to assume that all life on Earth shares a common evolutionary origin, it follows that every organism that ever existed must be related to every other. We are all cousins. Every goanna and gourami is a cousin of every gecko and ginkgo that has ever lived, or will live in the future. This must be true, even though we can neither tell who was whose direct ancestor, nor justify any scenarios to support assertions about an ancestry and descent.

Before we can understand the history of life, we need to find the order in which we are all cousins, the topology or branching order of the tree of life. This can be done without having to make any prior assumptions about cause and effect or ancestry and descent. These branching diagrams, which look, misleadingly like genealogies, are proper scientific hypotheses which can be tested by examining the strength or likelihood of alternative orders of branching – different orders of cousinhood – in light of the anatomy of the organisms in whose relationships we are interested. As long ago as 1950, a German entomologist called Willi Hennig used these simple principles as a basis for a new way of looking at the living world: Hennig sought to understand creatures in terms of how they shared characteristics with one another, independently of time, rather than in terms of their histories of ancestry and descent. Henning called his philosophy “phylogenetic systematics’, but it came to be known as ‘cladistics’ and its practitioners inevitably, as ‘cladists’. The branching diagrams cladists drew up to represent orders of cousin-hood between organisms – patterns of relationship – became known as ‘cladograms’. (1)


Regards, Roland

* By “better”, I do not mean “better” in some moral or ethical sense. I mean that the gene is more fit for a particular environment in which an animal lives. That is, the animal which carries that gene is more likely to survive, more likely to reproduce, more likely to have more children, more likely to have fitter children, etc.


Reference

Henry Gee, “Deep Time: Cladistics, The Revolution in Evolution”, Fourth Estate, London, 2001, pages 5 and 6.

[LostSheep]

Thank you wattsr1, for your thoughtful reply, and thanks for taking so much trouble and time for us in creating your essays.

[wattsr1]

Thank you wattsr1, for your thoughtful reply, and thanks for taking so much trouble and time for us in creating your essays.

Those essays were for me too LDDS.

You guys give me a reason to reasearch and try to understand what the Glenns, the TGMs, the Sylas, the Roys, the Dr GHs, etc. are trying to tell us about how the world works.

So thank you and for your kind words.


Regards, Roland

[TheGreenMan]

Those essays were for me too LDDS.

You guys give me a reason to reasearch and try to understand what the Glenns, the TGMs, the Sylas, the Roys, the Dr GHs, etc. are trying to tell us about how the world works.

So thank you and for your kind words.


Regards, Roland

Thanks for including me in that list.

I also think you do a great job in your posts. I think you get some of this stuff better than I do, especially when it comes to history and philosophy of science. You certainly put more time in to your posts than I do!

[shunyadragon]

Hello all,

This question is meant or evolutionists and others informed about biology, zoology and natural selection/mutation. I have been perusing the www.creationmoments.org web site and have seen many, many instances of life forms here on earth having very unusual adaptations for feeding/mating/surviving etc. Many of these adaptations are very specialized and quite far from what I might have conceived out of my own imagination

My question is: can anybody who is informed on these matters give me some sense as to how all these adaptations could have arisen successfully out of tens/hundreds of millions of years of evolution? In other words, am I not really understanding the enormity of the time span involved here, because I feel skeptical (I grant that I'm not really informed on the matter) that even tens/hundreds of millions of years could have caused the wonderful adaptations I have seen documented on this creationmoments web site.

I have also heard of a book which I think is entitled "Deep Time". Has anyone read this book (I may have an incorrect title unfortunately, but I think the title is at least similar), and do you think this book sheds any light on this question?

Thanks

The others have ansered some of the questions that I was going offer as a Geologist. I also like the book 'Deep Time.'

I believe in God and creation, but also realize as a scientist that evolution and a history of the earth and the history of the universe iin terms of billions years, is the best fit of the evidence, and in fact the evidence is uneqivable, there are no theories or options out there that are contenders. I also realize that there is no argument either way in the natural evidence for God the Creator or a natural existence without God.

Your question of how there are so many different life forms in an endless diversity of environments is a good question. Evolution is opportunistic in the drive for survival either by design or by natural cause and we find life forms wherever possible in every environmental nique that there is nutrients and energy sources. These species often live evolutionary trails of adaptaion that we can follow in fossils or in existing life forms. Yes, all the questions concerning evolution have been answered, but the evidence for evolution has never been falsified by contrary evidence.

[Jorge]

Hello all,

Okay, I'm 'one' of 'all'.

This question is meant for evolutionists and others informed about biology, zoology and natural selection/mutation.

1. I'm not one of those but then, I am 'one' of 'all' so, which is it?
2. The way the above is worded sort'a implies that "evolutionists are informed about biology, zoology and natural selection/mutation." That's a bad assumption, LDDS.

My question is: can anybody who is informed on these matters give me some sense as to how all these adaptations could have arisen successfully out of tens/hundreds of millions of years of evolution?

Seriously, their answers always boil down to that they believe it must've happened (somehow) since, after all, "here we are!" and since the starting premise is "it had to have happened", they then concoct all manner of imaginative scenarios as to how it could have happened. As you will often hear, to them it's not, "did it happen" but rather "how did it happen". Imagination under the guise of science then takes over.

Here's the catch : whatever they propose will be unfalsifiable (unless you happen to have a time machine parked in your garage). Yet, their proposals as to how it happened go under the heading of "science" and often gets published in Nature and Science. Go figure.

Jorge

[Barry Desborough]

Seriously, their answers always boil down to that they believe it must've happened (somehow) since, after all, "here we are!" and since the starting premise is "it had to have happened", they then concoct all manner of imaginative scenarios as to how it could have happened. As you will often hear, to them it's not, "did it happen" but rather "how did it happen". Imagination under the guise of science then takes over.

Here's the catch : whatever they propose will be unfalsifiable (unless you happen to have a time machine parked in your garage). Yet, their proposals as to how it happened go under the heading of "science" and often gets published in Nature and Science. Go figure.

Jorge

Actually, the whole thing (all of science) is based on the principle that we choose the simplest, most sensible possible explanation we can come up with, and check to see if it works. If it doesn't work, we adjust the explanation or reject it (as happened to YEC some 200 years ago) and we try to find a different one. It's not a matter of believing anything in a philosophical sense, but it's a bit cumbersome, always referring to every scientific theory as being philosophically provisional in principle, especially the ones that have been shown to be consistent with many independent lines of evidence and inconsistent with none over a century and a half of intensive investigation. It is precisely as 'imaginative' as the theory that you have a head, and as unfalsifiable as the theory that yesterday was the day before today, and actually happened.



Now the result of taking the simplest, most sensible explanations to account for the way the world works can challenge the imagination. It is difficult to get our heads around the age and the vastness of the universe. It is difficult to envisage the sheer number of organisms that have inhabited earth's biosphere and how many times opportunities for generating novel genetic configurations have arisen. It is not over tens or hundreds of millions of years, but thousands of millions of years. Re. our limited imaginations, Darwin put it well:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound. (Darwin 1872, 143-144)

Darwin's simple, sensible, mind-boggling explanation has been borne out. http://darwiniana.org/eyes.htm

[LostSheep]

Okay, I'm 'one' of 'all'.

1. I'm not one of those but then, I am 'one' of 'all' so, which is it?
2. The way the above is worded sort'a implies that "evolutionists are informed about biology, zoology and natural selection/mutation." That's a bad assumption, LDDS.

Jorge,
I surely meant no insult to creationists here. As I said: "evolutionists and OTHERS informed on such matters". I was actually HOPING to hear from creationists also on this issue. I was only hoping to get an explanation that would make sense to me about how all these myriad (truly enormous number of adaptations -- most of which are very complex) could arise out of "only" tens/hundreds of millions of years. I was not (and do not) intend to become a skeptic. I only wanted to hear if evo-ists had a consistent viewpoint on this issue.

Jorge, I really believe you have MANY good ideas on this subject, and I saw your thread about how you wish to prevent any believers from falling away due to skepticism induced by evo/scientific explanations, and I really support you 100%. I thank you Jorge, from the bottom of my heart.

Sorry about the misunderstanding.

[Storico]

LDDS, I'll let anyone else take it up if they'd like to, but in the "evolutions and others", you're going to get those who both believe in God and who accept evolution. Theistic evolutionists generally posit that there's a balance between what we see having happened, and the means by which it could have happened. We theistic evolutionists tend to say that God, or someone/something outside of nature with a supernatural component, is what or who has guided evolution.

[Ursus maritimus]

I only wanted to hear if evo-ists had a consistent viewpoint on this issue.

Do you think that the evo-ists' viewpoints are inconsistent on this issue?

I can understand if you have a question about something (don't we all!), but I get the feeling that you think that there is a problem somewhere. I apologize if I'm wrong.

[LostSheep]

I can understand if you have a question about something (don't we all!), but I get the feeling that you think that there is a problem somewhere. I apologize if I'm wrong.

I apologize in turn. Like I said in a previous post in this thread, I DO feel there is a problem with this explanation, but it is just a FEELING I have -- I can't quantify it or prove anything. Many of these organisms' adaptations I found are ones I could not have imagined. Like I also said, I have an intuitive (not expert) feeling about complexity due to my career as a software engineer, and I just don't feel like even hundreds of millions of years are enough time for the kinds of adaptations I've seen to have occurred.

Unfortunately I can't quantify or prove anything. I was just looking for an answer that would tell me if evolution had a good answer for the question in the OP.

[Barry Desborough]

I apologize in turn. Like I said in a previous post in this thread, I DO feel there is a problem with this explanation, but it is just a FEELING I have -- I can't quantify it or prove anything. Many of these organisms' adaptations I found are ones I could not have imagined. Like I also said, I have an intuitive (not expert) feeling about complexity due to my career as a software engineer, and I just don't feel like even hundreds of millions of years are enough time for the kinds of adaptations I've seen to have occurred.

Unfortunately I can't quantify or prove anything. I was just looking for an answer that would tell me if evolution had a good answer for the question in the OP.

I worked as a software engineer for 20 years. My inuition is not the same as yours. However, intuition is not a good guide in this matter. It is necessary to examine the evidence.