Sunday, November 29, 2020

Ticking Off the Main Points Around Why Evolution Can't Happen

At some point way back when, it hit me that evolution -- meaning of course microevolution since there is no other kind --  proceeds by selection, and only by selection, not just what is formally known as Natural Selection, but all the ways that new phenotypes become characteristic of populations are really a form of selection.  By which I mean a portion of the gene pool is selected, most commonly by simple geographic separation, ideally isolated so that gene flow is prevented, and over some number of generations having to do with the number of its founders, it will develop a blended phenotype.  There's probably a name for it but i do't know the name, it's the look that develops from the set of gene/allele frequencies possessed by the founders of the population.  Yes in reality there is likely to be some continued or resumed gene flow and hybrid zones, because reality is messy, but the principle I'm getting at is most clearly illustrated where there is perfect reproductive isolation and only the members of the new population breed together.  \
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That was certainly the case with the Pod Mrcaru lizards.  There were no other lizards on the island where they were released.  The ten founders were the sole source of the genes from which the population developed its own peculiar characteristics, the large head and jaws, and the digestive system to go with them.  

The point I keep making in relation to the validity of the Toe is that selection reduces genetic diversity.   It's the only way a new population with a new appearance can come about, even a new "species," but the only way you can get there is by losing genetically, which is hardly good news for the ToE.  You can't get it by adding anything.  All you get that way is individual changes, even a whole population of different individuals; but unless some of those individuals are selected and isolated you aren't getting evolution..  But the idea of evolution is the creation of new "species" and that means whole populations that are internally more or less homogeneous phenotypically, while differing distinctly from parent populations, and selection is how that comes about.  

Selection can be the mere emigration of a random portion of a population, a random selection of individuals, to a new location some distance from the parent population.  In fact I don't know why this isn't on that list of "mechanisms of evolution" at UC Berkeley's Evolution 101 website.  They've got migration, mutation, genetic drift and natural seletion.  Migration is the same as gene flow, and the migration is the rejoining of two populations.  It's rather an awkward concept that doesn't really say what it means.  And it's really migration OUT of a population to form a new daughter population that is the real "mechanism of evolution".  Well, genetic drift is another form of it, in which the isolaselection ahd isolation occur withihn a parent population without any movement outside of it but it's clearer to think of the movement out of the gene pool  Migration INTo a population isn't evolution.   If it all blends together you could call it evolution, but then what's happening is a form of selection, some alleles dominating others, even some possibly evently dying out of the population altogether.  It isn't evoljution until a gene pool is selected and inbred, and its own gene/allele frequencies are blended into a new group phenotypic appearance.  

Natural Selection as usually understood is probably very rare.  A familiar description is of the removal of a trait or set of traits by a predator, selecting a different set of traits to proliferate because it can survive the predation.  White moths survive against white bark because the birds can't see them, while mottled moths will be picked off leaving the white ones.  But against mottled bark the white ones are picked off and the mottled moths proliferate.   It isn't just the alleles for those characteristics that are affected of course, because it is individuals that are being picked off and individuals possess genes for all the creature's characteristics so that whatever mix they possess is also lost when the individual is lost.  After a number of generations of this change from white to mottled and maybe even back again, the whole gene pool should be genetically depleted, perhaps even approaching a condition similar to clones.  Natural Selection of this sort is genetically costly, and it leads to less ability to evolve, again just what the ToE does not need..  

Of course my arguiment is that any selection is genetically costly, and that eventually, through a number of popujlation splits that bring about the formation of new daughter populations. any creature could eventually reach a state of genetic depletion.  

THE FAST TRACK TO GENETIC DEPLETION IS BOTTLENECK
That state is of course best illustrated by the endangered species, cheetahs and elephant seals for instance.  Bottleneck is really just a drastic form of selection.  Some kinds of domestic breeding may have been as drastic.  The cheetah came through a natural bottleneck of some sort, in which their numbers were drastically reduced, and the elephant seal's bottleneck was brought about by human predation, hunters who nearly destroyed the whole species.  But when protected its few survivors were able to resttore their population to great numbers, despite their being geneticallyh depleted.  The cheetah has also survived and continued to reproduce but it's reprodictively compromised and remains endangered.  

In discusseions I've ahd about this it is usually denied that the genetic depletion brought about by bottlenecks has anything in common with the effects of less drastic selection as I talk about it.  The only difference I see is that bottleneck is a faster route to the same end.  A series of selections would ultimately lead to the same genetic condition.  It's always the trend though it may not become serious until a number of poulation splits have occurred.  The example I like to give is "ring species," in which new populations form from earlier  populations by moving into new geographic areas away from the parent population.  In the new location their collective set of gene/allele frequencies eventually bring about a new "species."  

(I put the word in quotes because "species" is such a vexed term.  It's simply the Greek word for "kind" and any distinctive population, parent, daughter etc., is a "kind."    

THE TERM "RACE"
By the way, I'm pretty sure I've seen the term "race" used to refer to creatures other than human beings but it's probably an older form that's no longer in favor and I'd have to look it up.  It had no controversial connotations originally, it was just a word for the subspecies that form new characteristics in isolation from a parent population.  A race of penguins perhaps?  A race of beetles?  I don't know.  Anyway now there is all this controversy and the claim that there is no such thing as race.  All that means is that the term has come into disrepute, because of racism, but its original use was perfectly objective.  Now we're just to say"population?"  That one is so generic it's meaningless.   I think the clearest terminology is "Species" and "subspecies."  Or if you insist on "Population," then also use "subpopulation."  Or "parent population" and "daughter population." 

The need is to be able to say clearly what group descended from what group.   However, none of this nomenclature is appropriate when talking about people.  People aren't animals though of course that's what the ToE says we are.  Referring to us as "species" really grates on me.   "Race" may be fraught with cultural problems but it's still the clearest term to designate the biological differences between people groups.  I guess you could use "tribe" in some contexts, but the point is to be able to point out the biological differences brought about by genetic isolation.   At least in discussions like this one.  Maybe happily it's not of much use otherwise. 

"SPECIES" TERMINOLOGICAL CONFUSION
 The nomenclature is always a problem,  If you talk about a "species" of penguin you muddy up the whole idea of what a species is in the Linnaean sense.  I dismantle some of the Linnaean system with my way of putting things together as it is.  Or maybe the idea is muddy to begin with.  I'm for designating Bird as a Species myself.  Because I think most likely all birds come from an original pair of birds, all of them from the ostrich to the penguin to the buzzard to the hawk to the starline.  They are morphologically the same creature, and probably genetically also.  If you can look at DNA and tell what creature it belongs to, Bird should be identifiable, as is dog as is Cat..   Some groups would take more thought.  Maybe  Rodent is a species as I'm talking about it because of shared morphology.   I'm looking for shared sharacteristics that belong only to a particular group.   I suppoe any group of characteristics I choose would be disputed, but I do have a very definite idea about it.  Getting it into words may be a problem though.   It's morphological distinctions I have in mid, that much I know.  A rodent always looks like a rodent, they all have a certain skeletal structure in common, they do not look like any other creature.  All cats share a skeletal structure, from the tiget to the lion to the mountain lion to the panther to the housecat.  And it is not shared by dogs, all of which have their own skeletal structure, from the chihuahua to the Great Dane, and also include wolves and foxes.  Seems to me these are the groupings that should be called Species.  If there is a way to identify the genome of each that would help.  Divisions of Species can then be called "subspecies."  

If every daughter population is called a "species" it  then gets used as evidence for evollution.  People still think microevolution is evolution or evidence of it.  That's why this argument that there is a natural limitation to evolution is important.  If the formationm of new populations with their own characteristic traits always occurs through the loss of genetic diversity,  as I'm arguing it does, then what is normally considered to be evolution, the production of such new phenotypes that get called "species" is contrary to the necessary condition for further evolution.  Once you've reached fixed loci for most genes in a subspecies you've reached a point beyond which further change is impossible.  The cheetah and the elephant seal serve as examples for that.  If mutation could restore their genetic diversity it would have by now.  But also if you restore genetic diversity you also lose the speices.  Breeders must know this as they've had to compromise on their desire to produce pure breeds in order to preserve an animal's health, so they breed back genetic diversity into their breeds trying not to destroy their essential characteristics.  But it's a compromise.  The pure breed is the desired end product, the breed with the most fixed genes, or homozygous genes, but that's the condition that produces the most health problems for the animal.  Which is the cheetah's problem.  In the cheetah's case it can't breed with any other cat so it's stuck unless a beneficial mutation comes along.  Dogs don't seem to have that problem, they can continute to breed with other dogs in any case, so at the cost of losing some of their purebred characteristics their health can be preserved or restored.  

SELECTION 
Domestic breeding of animals is an example of selection of course, Artifical Selection.  Darwin made use of his own experience of breeding pigeons as the selection of chosen traits to be bred, which can become the basis of a distinctive new creature, as the process or mechanism that must also happen in nature to explain the variety found there.  This he called Natural Selection.  His observation of the many varieties or "species" of finches is a famous one.  Also the Galapagos turtle.  his basic reasoning is still followed by biologists.  In the case of the finches he reasoned that their different beaks came about by their being limited to the kinds of food that a particular beak could best eat.  He observated that finches with different beaks ate different kinds of food and reasoned that the food selected the beak as it were, that is the food caused the finch to develop the kind of beak needed to eat it.

NATURAL SELECTION BY ENVIRONMENTAL PRESSURE...
This same kind of reasoning is used to explain the Pod Mrcaru lizards.  It is reasoned that their larger head and jaws and tougher digestive systems evolved to adapat to the tougher kinds of food in their new island home.  The lixards that could eat the tougher food would have the better chance of survival and reproduction and so would pass on their genes and that's how the new population developed.

...VERSUS RANDOM SELECTION
That's pretty much classical Darwinism but I don't think that's how it happens in reality.  I think that the new gene frequencies shared among the founding ten individuals simply brought out the larger head and jaw because they just happened to occur in higher frequenciy than the alleles for the original sized head and jaw,.  The new traits worked their way through the entire population over some number of generations until they characterized the entire population.  The people who had released them originally came back to check on then thirty years later and were very surprised to find the whole population so changed in such a short period of time by evolutionary standards.   Evolution supposedly takes millions of years.  That's what is supposedly shown in the fossil record.  But instead of the food's dictating the evolution of the head and haw, it seems more likely to me that the head and jaw came first, the simple repeated recombination of a limited set of allele frequencies shared among the ten founders.  The genetic changes then led the lizards to food that their new heavier jaws could now easily eat  It wasn't that the food they'd eaten when they were part of the parent poulation back on the mainland wasn't available on the island, it's that their new heavier head and jaws could now handle the tougher food, so they gravitated to it.

I think that's what happened with Darwin's finches also.   The finches split into spearate populations and became reproductively isolated from each other and  each split would produce a new daughter population from a few individuals which together possessed a new set ofgene/allele frequencies that would produce a new style of beak.  That beak would enable the bird to eat a particular kind of food.  There are beaks that are suited to digging insects out of tree bark, beaks that can crunch hard nuts or something like that, beaks that do best with soft berries.  I don't know what all the range of beaks and food is but I know there are a lot of different beaks in the finch species and that they define the sort of food each subspecies prefers.  Again, instead of this being the food's calling the shots and the bird having to adapt, I think it efar more likely that the beaks developed from the splitting of the population determine the food eaten.  Again, this is a random selection of a particular, usually smaller, set of individuals that share a new set of gene/allele frequencies that eventually blend together to give the new population a characteristic kind of beak, and proably other traits as well but it's the beak in focus at the moment.  It's the beak that adapts them to a particular kind of food.    It's selection but it's selection brought about by normal sexual recombination within a randomly selected pool of gene frequencies that bring out a type of beak/  As tje mew population continues to breed together in isolation from other finches, their shared genetic material produces the ultimate character of the whole population over time,   The new beak selects the food it is best adapted to.  The environment, the food, does not do the selecting.  The classical case that requires the animal to adapt to the environment occurs occasionally, such as in the example of the black and white moths, and the black and tan pocket mice, but it must be very rare.   

Ring Species illustrate the principle I'm getting at.  This is a series of populations of a particular species that develop as daughter populations each from the previous population, that happen to form around a geographic barrier of some kind until there are many subpopulations of this one species, and each differs from all the others.  If I'm right, the farther you go around the ring in the direction the animals went, the less genetic diversity you should find along with the phenotypic changes you also find from population to population.  It ought to be detectable by analyzing the DNA.  The genetic direction should be to more fixed genes which means less genetic diversity as alleles drop out of the population.  And in some cases perhaps, more dramatic phenotypic characteristics will also be the case.  Maybe.  Because new combinations of alleles can bring out all kinds of interesting variations.   Chipmunks around the Sierra Nevada mountains, salamanders around a California valley, seagulls around the north Atlantic, greenish warblers in northern Europe -- not sure what the barrier is there.   Such a series of populations formed from other populations is particularly evident when there is such a barrier around which they can form, but they also illustrate the principle of how creatures change simply from geographic separation.    The idea that the new population changes in response to the new environment really doesn't hold up when there's nothing particularly different about each new environment from the others.   The changes are driven by genetics as an emigrating set of individuals  takes part of a gene pool to a new location.  I really think this must be the most common way new subspecies develop.  It's a lot more benign than the scenario of the struggle for survival pictured by the ToE where the creature most fitted to a given environment survives and reproduces in greatest numbers while others less well fitted eventually disappear.   Even in this challenging fallen world competition isn't as bloody as the AToE pictures it.

I've used the Wildebeest as an example.  It has two or three populations that differ from ne another.  The main or largest population is more or less brown, one of the others is called "blue" to describe its hide, and it's smaller and I think has different shaped antlers.  This is the kind of thing that would happen if a few of the brown ones just wantered off and got lost and started their own daughter population.  Their new set of gene frequencies in this case brought out the blue hide and the size difrence and the antler difference from the original
There is also the example of the Jutland cattle which I don't remember very well, but the idea is that a large herd split into four isolated smaller herd that in isolation each developed  their own distinctive peculiarities over a matter of years just from the new pool of gene/ allele frequencies possess among the original founders of each separate population.  That's just another illustration of my point, that variation even to the creation of new "species" or really subspecies, is simply a matter of the reproductive isolation of a portion of a gene pool.  No dramatic reason for it, no predator, no scarcity of food, no hostile environment, just reproductive isolation of a new set of gene/allele frequencies.   Period.

If we just notice the variety of types of human beings that have formed tribes in isolation from each other all over the world we see the same genetic situation there too.  Each group over some number of generations develops its own distincive appearance unlike any of the other groups.  Biblically it's how we got all the races of human beings.   There is something called the Table of Nations based on the geneaologies of Noah's family given in scripture, that outlines how the Noah's descendants spread out around the world some years after the landing of the ark in the Middle East.   The children of Japheth went  North into Russia and west into Europe, the children of Shem spread around the Middle East and possibly to Asia, the children of Ham went into Africa.  I'm not sure which group went to India and Asia.   But the point is that each group developed its own characteristic population identity over time simply by blending its own gene/allele frequencies.  

AND EACH DAUGHTER POPULATION IS GOING TO HAVE SOME DEGREE OF REDUCTION OF GENETIC DIVERSITY.  THAT'S HOW NEW PHENOTYPES, SPECIES, DEVELOP.  THAT'S HOW YOU GET NEW BREEDS, YOU LOSE THE GENETIC MATERIAL FOR OTHER BREEDS.  

Same principle of geographic migration and isolation would have brought about all the various subspecies of every animal that had been on the ark too,.

BOTTLENECK DOES THE SAME THING, ONLY FASTER
And speaking of the ark it always comes up in discussions that such a drastic bottleneck sas the Flood, in which only eight human beings and a pair or seven animals were all that survived, hould have made all such further changes impossible.  It took me a while to think all this through.  At first I thought there must have been an enomrously bigger genome in the original species, indlucing humans, but then I reread a creationist book, drat I may not be able to remember the title or the author, I hope it comes back to me.  Anyway they presented a hypothetical Mendel's square from light AA to aa to dark BB to bb  show how ordinary genetics could explain how all the different skin colors found across all humanity could have been possessed by our original parents Adam and Eve.  Since it isn't all just light and dark but also shades of color they could also have had other genes for skin color.  Many genes for one trait is quite common.  Anyway I saw from that presentation how very possible skin tone could derive from a single genome.  So I didn't have to imagine any special kind of genome after all, just a genome that had a full complement of genetic possibilities, meaning no junk DNA for instance.  

HOMOZYGOSITY
This is the crux of the whole situation I'm talking about.  each of us may have homozygous genes for some trait or another.  I have homozygous bb for blue eyes, someone else may have homozygous BB for brown eyes, and many will have the heterozygous Bb which is also brown because the B is dominant.  Perfectly common way the alleles get distributed among people.  Or animals.  But what has happoened with the endangered cheetah is that it has so many homozygous genes for its salient traits it can'[t breed with any other kind of cat.   Same with purebred animals, at least those bred in the days before the dangers to health of the animal through the drastic method of breeding for a given trait or set of traits.  Purebreds were defined as having a great many fixed loci or fixed genes or homozygous genes for the desired traits.  This wouldn't be a problem in the original Created world but it is a problem in our fallen world.  In any case homozygosity is how traits get fixed in a population.  And homozygosity is the result of bottlenecks.   That is why the question comes up about the ark since the Flood certainly created genetic bottlenecks for all living things.

It may have been working through that Mendel's square for skin color based on the book -- Creation  Science I think now though I still can't remember its author --  I began to realize that although greater homozygosity would of course be the result of a bottleneck, back at the   -- oh I remember now.  That book said that we now have something like 7% heterozygoisty so that a bottlneck now would esily reduce genetic diversity to the drastic level of tghe cheetah.  But in the days of the ark, all the creatures saved would have had much greater genetic diversity than any creature has now.  Every gene in the original parents at the Creation would have been heterozygous, and hopmozygosity would develop through sexual recombination in individuals.  On the ark there would still have been a great percentagle of heterozygosity left in each creature so that further variation was possible.  that's how they could have been the progenitors of every variety of living things we see today.  They would not have had the enormous genetic diversity of the original parents but they would still have had enough for the variation that occurred when they all spread out after the FLood.  I don't know how much.  30%?  70%?  Wild guessing.  But a lot more than we have now.  
THEREFORE, although the Flood bottleneck would have led to much reduced genetic diversity, meaning much more homozygosity, it wouldn't even be particularly noticeable since great variation would have continued for each Species.  
Not sure how this works exactly, but my guess is that mutations destroying homomzygous genes that then spread through a population could be a big contributor to the death of genes or Junk DNA.


JUNK DNA
Yes I think Junk DNA IS junk, genes that have died, representing characterestics no longer possessed by the organism, including the loss of things like the appendix and other "vestigial" organs, but also no doubt hundreds or even thousands of capacities and traits we can't even imagine.  Capacities once possessed that have been lost over the millennia because of the Fall that introduced death and disease into the world, many no doubt lost in the Flood.  Mutations are probably the biggest cause now. I think  of mutations as a disease process due to the Fall.  Anything that is a ':mistake" which is how mutation is described, has to be the product of the Fall.  If mutations occasionally produce something new and viable, that's just because it hit on a particular chemical sequence, probably one that had been lost before anyway, nothing really new.  

SPECIATION
This idea is ridiculously bogus.  The idea is that a subspecies branches off a parent population and becomes unable to breed with that population and this makes it a new Species.   My guess is that if you analyzed the DNA of these new "Species" you'd find that they have many fixed genes and are low on genetic diversity compared to the parent population.  In other words they are just another isolated race or variety or breed of that population or Species that has formed in isolation from others of its kind.  It may not be as genetically depleted as the cheetah or the elephant seal but my guess is it has to be genetically reduced.  The term "speciation" implies something from which further evolution could be launched, it implies a point at which one Species can become another Species, according to the ToE, but genetically it can't happen.  If it hasn't reached an absolute end ot its ability to vary further it hasat least reached a poitn of less ability to produce variations, far from the expectation generated by the term "speciation " as defined in the context of the ToE/.  

SOME IMPLICATIONS OF WHAT I AM ARGUING HERE:
  • Species were originally created separately.  What  creationists call Kinds in an attempt to distinguish them from the Species of the ToE   My provisional definition of a Species iw first of all morphological identity, which I would have to spell out eventually for each Species, and secondly genetic.  I assume each is definable by its shared genome, but what that looks like I don't know.  Since geneticists and biologists think in evolutionary terms they aren't looking for what I'd be looking for.
  • Each Species was created with a genome unto itself, with perfect DNA that always replicated without making any mistakes in copying, no junk DNA, every gene functional for some important purpose of creative variation or protection, health, strength etc. 
  • If there had been no Fall every living thing would have been immortal and disease-free, and reproduction would produce endless new varieties or subspecies, while the original parents continued alongside them, never dying.
  • The original genome of each individual Species possessed by the original parents, contained the possibility of an enormous number of variations, every kind of every Species we see now and some uncountable number of others that either died or never got born. 
  • Those others went extinct or never could exist because so many possible allele combinations died out, certainly many subspecies died in the Flood.  Maybe even whole Species.  Well, the Trilobites are one of those.  
  • In this fallen world of disease and death  none of the original parents of any Species is still alive, nor any of those preserved on the ark, nor any of the generations up to present time.  So that when a particular line of variation/microevolution is pursued out to its limits it is vulnerable to disease and extinction, whereas in theoriginal Creeated world before the Fall it would reach that genetic limit without any threat.  Thousands and thousands of such lines of variation could be generated from any original set of parents, just because God loves variety I would have to suppose.   Perhaps we'd have automatically colonized all the other planets if we ran out of room.  They would not have been dead planets as they are now.
  • .
SUMMATION OF THE ARGUMENT
  • Evolution, meaning any kind of phenotypic variation at the population level, is powered by selection and no other "mechanism"
  • Selection means the isolation of a portion of a population either randomly or by intention or necessity, either by separation from the parent population or within it (which is Genetic Drift)
  • Selection always trends to the reduction of genetic diversity, and at the extremes to genetic depletion
  • This reduction means the increase of homozygous genes in the population as alleles for competing traits are ultimately eliminated and those for the selected traits become fixed
  • Selection can be immediate or drastic as in bottleneck and founder effect or a slow accumulation over many population splits
  • The Theory of Evolution assumes an endless ability for a Species to continue to vary, even to the eventual formation of an entirely new Species, even by Natural Selection, but this is impossible.  Selection reduces genetic diversity even to the point of genetic depletion which makes further evolution impossible.  The very mechanism that brings aqbout the phenotypic changes taken for evidence of cpmtinuous evolution actually make it impossible.  Evolution defeats Evolution.
  • Any addition of genetic material into a populatoin interferes with the formation of a daughter population or new species or subspecies, such as gene floow between the parent and evolving population or mutation  There is no evolution where there is addition.  Gene flow is just the reintroctuion of formerly reduced or eliminated alleles.  Mutation may or may not add something that's actually new.  But both interfere with the process of evolution because that cess requires eproductive isolation.   Even the formation of hybrid populations only happens with selection and isolation of the reintroduced alleles.   If the isolation isn't perfect you may still get soe population change but imperfect population homogeneity
  • Mutation is often made to bear a burden it can't really bear.  It is assumed to be the source of all functioning genetic material, the engine that drove the formation of DNA in the first place.   It's assumed, it can't be proved because it can't happen in reality.  Mutation is a destructive event, a mistake.  It destroys a perfectly functional allele to replace it with another, and the new one is usually either deleterious or "neutral," meaning doesn't change the product although it changes the chemical sequence of the original functioning allele to no good purpose.   Very very rarely it has a "benetificial" result in that it produces a new function. First, all it an do is produce a new form of whatever the gene does.  If it governs fur color it will produce a fur color, apparently a new one.  It can't change what the gene does.   And it brings about this change in function by destroying what was porbably the perfectly viable functioning allele  it replaced.  And it probably isn't new, it is probably just the reemergence of a formerly lost function by the accidental fortuitous recreation of a chemical sequence that had been lost at some time in the history of the species.  And then it has to be selected in order to spread in the population and replace the function it displaced at the the population level.   Such a messy business cannot possibly be how DNA came about in the first place.  This ought to be obvious.
  • So all the variety we see in Nature is brought about by the variability of genes built into the genome of each Species.  It can't vary anything but what is already programmed into each gene,   And as new traits get established the alleles for those traits become fixed and the competing alleles drop out, which is the reduction of genetic diversity that fuels the phenotypic change.  It is essential to phenotypic change.  You don't get that population level change that gets called a new species unless it occurs.    Resumed gene flow could in many cases bring them back but then you lose the character of the Species that was supposed to be the evidence of evolution.   
Yes I know I keep repeating myself, though I hope I do it with enough variety of expression to overcome some of the resistance.  I'm trying to unseat an entrenched paradigm and the resistance to such efforts is often insurmountable even if mostly a matter of completely irrational devotion rather than an attempt to grasp the reasoning against it.

Beyond this argument there is also the geological argument about the absurdity of identifying a discrete horizontal slab of sedimentary rock with a unit of geological time in which supposedly unique events occurred as the fossils of a unique set of living things appear in this rock, while a different unique set of living things appear in a different kind of sedimentary rock above and below it.   tje cpmtact betweem tje tpw rpcls os pftem razpr sjar[ amd straight which suggests something other than a time period but the equation nevertheless persists.  If only the fossils of reptiles whow up in one layer and only the fossils of mammals show up in the compoletely diferent rock above it this is taken for evolution from the reptile to the mammal.  I don't know how the absurdity of this is lost on the scientists who accept it.    And of course there's a lot more to say about this but this post is already too long.

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Sometimes people talk about "cultural evolution" as if it exists and has something in common with Darwinian theory.  I don't get it.   Just noting it for now.

I know I shouldn't come back and add to posts later but an afterthought so often just needs to fit into what I've a;readu written.  So i apologize but later versions of this may be different in some ways, mostly new elaborations..  

  I'll try at least to come back and correct typos and my horrific run-on sentences.