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Do you believe that natural selection ever moves an organism from more complex to less complex?

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Do you ever see natural selection of an organism go from larger to smaller.

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If natural selection is unbiased in that it does not care either way it manifests itself (larger or smaller, complex or less complex), how do we determine that one fossil that is smaller is such and such an age. And the larger is such and such an age if all we have to go on is the type and size?

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Why does is seem we say that natural selection is unbiased but yet it appears the move forward is more complex and larger.

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Does the survival of the fittest mean you can have less smart and less complex and less larger? Any examples of this being so? Thank you.

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Why does is seem we say that natural selection is unbiased but yet it appears the move forward is more complex and larger.

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Is there a thing called Carroll's Law?

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Call it Carroll's law, because what I've learned is this -- those doomed to extinction and other severe career implications as a result of rapid change, are usually the least receptive to a message as to the reality of their impending doom. They would prefer to escape rather than adapt to reality.

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The control regions of the genes (switches that change an existing pattern of gene activity into a new pattern of gene activity) are crucial, as Carroll makes clear, and one gene can have many control regions.

Carroll emphasizes that individual animals are made up of similar parts, such as vertebrae, bones in fingers and spots on butterfly wings, and that modular construction played an important role in evolution. He is a supporter of Williston's law, which states that "in evolution . . . the parts in an organism tend toward reduction in number, with the fewer parts greatly specialized in function."...

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WHAT ABOUT THE HUNDREDS OF SCIENTISTS "OPPOSING DARWINISM" ?

IDers, and IDnet-NM in particular, deliberately and repeatedly confuses the concept of "evolution" - the descent of many varied species from common ancestors - with the concept of "Darwinism' which is the gradual unfolding of variations by natural selection espoused by Charles Darwin in 1859. IDnet-NM purposely equates any and all criticisms of Darwin's original work with criticisms of the idea of "evolution" itself.

From IDnet-NM's http://www.nmidnet.org/new_mexico_speaks.htm :
In the preface and first chapter of his book, Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, [Robert] Carroll makes some extraordinary statements about pervasive problems in the history of life constructed from examination of the fossil record compared to the history predicted by Darwin. He even criticizes textbooks for perpetuating this false history. Here is Carroll.

"Instead of showing gradual and consistent change through time, the major lineages appear suddenly in the fossil record, already exhibiting many of the features by which their modern representatives are organized."

"..few fossils are yet known of plausible intermediates between the invertebrate phyla, and there is no evidence for the gradual evolution of the major features by which the individual phyla or classes are characterized"

"Progressive increase in knowledge of the fossil record over the past hundred years emphasizes how wrong Darwin was in extrapolating the pattern of long-term evolution from that observed within populations and species."

Carroll indeed makes such statements. But, he was talking about the state of evolution as it was known in Darwin's time -1859. In the fourteen decades since, we've made many new discoveries. Carroll points out that continental drift has had a huge impact on the course of evolution over time scales of hundreds of millions of years, yet it was not even accepted until about 1960. Yes, there are indeed gaps in the fossil record, but these can be caused by several mechanisms, including migration and mutations in regulatory genes. If a species evolves in one region, and then migrates to a new region, the fossil record would show a "sudden appearance" of the species in the second region. For example, future New Mexican scientists might uncover evidence of a "sudden appearance" of Africanized Killer Bees in New Mexico, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The bees evolved, all right, but in Africa, not in America. Their "sudden appearance" in New Mexico is no more mysterious than the "sudden appearance" of distant relatives during holiday seasons.

Carroll also discusses how mutations in regulatory genes - genes that control other genes, like the homeobox (Hox) genes - can produce massive changes in body plans, using conventional hereditary mechanisms. Carroll indeed takes issue with Darwin's predictions, because these were primarily derived from observations of living creatures alone, and did not take into account what we've learned from hundreds of millions of years worth of fossil data. Carroll writes in his preface "Although Mendelian and population genetics are important for understanding the mechanics of evolutionary change, behavior and external factors of the physical and biological environment are more significant in determining the rate, direction, and nature of change over long periods of time."

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Originally posted by beskeptigal

Evo Devo is evolution de-evolution...

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Originally posted by Dave W.

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Originally posted by beskeptigal

Evo Devo is evolution de-evolution...

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Evo-Devo refers to the wedding of evolution with developmental biology, actually. Very interesting stuff.

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Originally posted by Bibleland

The Lost World Museum will begin its mission starting April locally (Syracuse, N.Y.). We will be showing some object that will help people understand the nature of mutations in their role of developing the race from Lucy till today. Matter of fact I have a piece of information I'm trying to see if it is true. Maybe you can help. In Marvin Lubenow's book Bones of Contention he states that evolutionists state that 5,000,000 mutations took place over 3,000,000 years to bring "Lucy" to where we are today. Anyone ever heard that number before? Is it less? Is it more?
We hope to open the museum in the late summer or fall of 06. The blog has been chronicling the events that lead up to present day on the how's and why's. www.lostworldmuseum.com If interested we just added a "subscribe to this blog" feature so everytime a new piece of the Museum's puzzle is placed you'll get informed as fast as the trilobite got his complex eye's in the cambrian explosion.

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Branches that are a group of three lines rather than one solid bar indicate that the group is not monophyletic. Generally, we try to avoid non-monophyletic groups in the Tree of Life. However, we sometimes need to work with them, if we want to divide the diversity of a large group into manageable pieces in the absence of phylogenetic hypotheses. In the following tree, group A is non-monophyletic, indicating that Group B's closest relative is actually a subgroup of Group A, but we don't know which subgroup that is.

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DNA Shows Neandertals Were Not Our Ancestors

Neandertals and modern humans diverged genetically 500,000 to 600,000 years ago, suggesting that though they may have lived at the same time, Neandertals did not contribute genetic material to modern humans.

the Neandertal sequence branches before the divergence of the various human mitochondrial DNA lineages, but after the split from chimpanzees.

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Review: Bones of Contention
The book Bones of Contention, by Marvin Lubenow (1992), is considered by many creationists to be the definitive creationist treatment of the claimed evidence for human evolution. To his credit, Lubenow has read a large amount of the scientific literature on human evolution, and his book stands up well compared to the gross incompetence of other creationist authors such as Duane Gish and Malcolm Bowden who have written on the same topic. By any other standards, the book fails badly and will not convince anyone familiar with the details of the literature on human evolution.

The major theme of Bones of Contention is that the various species of hominid cannot form an evolutionary sequence because they overlap one another in time.

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Figures for the average brain size of modern humans tend to vary between sources, but a typical value is 1350 or 1400 cc (cubic centimetres). The following figures should convey a feel for the normal range of variation in human skulls. Burenhult (1993) states that the 90% of humans fit in the range 1040-1595 cc, and that the extreme range is 900-2000 cc. S.J. Gould, in "The Mismeasure of Man", reviewed a 19th century study by Morton of 600 skulls which ranged from 950 to 1870 cc (and 25% of this sample was of small-statured Peruvians, so the figure of 950 cc is, if anything, lower than it might be for 600 randomly selected humans). Morton also catalogued his skulls by race, with the lowest average for any racial group being 1230 cc.

Various sources, some of them creationist, give lower limits for human brain size of 900 or 830 cc. The prominent British anatomist Sir Arthur Keith in 1948 gave 855 cc as the lowest known human brain volume (compared with 650 cc as the then highest known brain volume for a gorilla). Normal humans with even smaller brains have been found, but they are very rare. Microcephalics, who are subnormal in intelligence, can be as low as 600 cc, but this is a pathological condition and such skulls cannot be considered normal.

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