Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Another that belongs in the Evolution blog.

 Evolutionary Biology is an amusement I indulge from time to time.  They discuss many things biological that can clearly be discussed without the slightest reference to evoltion and yet they always have to tack it on at some point and carry on as if it were relevant.  You can discuss the mesentery, the membrane that holds together the internal organs of many creatures, without any reference whatever to evolution.  It apparently has interesting properties that have never been fully appreciated.  You don't need evolution to think about those things.  

But then someone mentions Junk DNA and vestigial organs and they have to discuss them as products of evolution --  Junk DNA MUST have a function you see, because after all it's such a huge percentage of the genome evolution requires it.  I dunno, in reality not much actuall function has been found in these otherwise normal-looking genes.  The chemistry is so complex it can still show some signs of life I suppose, long after having lost the normal coding function of a gene, which suggests SOME sort of continuing function of a different sort, though what that function might be is purely speculative.  Something more like rigor mortis comes to my mind but then I'm no biologist.  And it's Evolution that requires the function so they'll turn even rigor mortis into a function to fit the theory if they have to.  (Funny though, some evoltuionists think that just as dead genes it supports evolution, being a record of former evolutionary experiments in the long history of evolutionary change.  Or maybe they've realized that one didn't work, I haven't kept up with it).    

They seem also to think that what are called vestigial organs have a function too.  Organs the creature can apparently survive well enough without.  Seems to me that they could have lost their function and still go on sort of more or less doing something or other even though it's no longer a necessary something or other.    Oh well.   These things are such wonderful evidence for Creationism and against Evolution but oh well, oh well.  All life is running down as it were, the whole planet is running down as it were, the cosmos is running down as it were, all that is evidence for the Biblical accounts of Creation, Fall and Flood, not Evolution.   It all implies a formerly perfect biological system that has lost its functions over the millennia as Death took over through the Fall.   Stages of death over time you could say, the Flood being one gigantic death that all by itself could have brought about Junk DNA in the ensuing centuries.  A long litany of loss is the most likely explanation for what we actually see.

I was pondering again how each creature certainly seems to demonstrate a Species coherence that belies the whole idea that Species evolved from other Species.  Well there are many reasons that idea is bogus but I'm thinking at the moment of how you can often see a structure that defines each that remains quite recognizable through all the variations within a particular Species.  You can always tell a cat from its skeleton, can't you?  Or a dog.  Distortions can occur but the basic structure is reocgnizable.  Many other parts may vary according to the way the DNA gets sexually combined, but something in the basic structure remains definitive of the catness of cats, the dogness of dogs and so on. Birds too..  Penguins don't look a lot like other birds on the surface but they sure do in their skeletons.  Ostriches too.  Yep and the trilobiteness of trilobites, yep, I hope I'll get to spend some time putting that one together some day if I live so long.  Or maybe we'll get to do such things in the Millennium.  That would be fun.

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