re: Evolution: Missing link found. Fish => Tetrapod

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but the BILLIONS of mutations required to take a simple, proto-organism and result in human beings, lions, whales, mosquitoes, etc., etc., resulting in the creation of all those species is EXTREMELY unlikely.

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Unlikely to you perhaps

And perhaps it is unlikely and why presumably most planets don't have any advanced civilizations

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Unlikely to you perhaps

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Where did the genetic information contained in the original proto-organism on Earth come from?

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Sorry, but science disagrees with you.

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In what way? They assume these mutations occurred (or that millions upon millions of adaptive changes, simulating mutative change) to answer questions in the fossil records, because they have a preconceived notion of what happened.

I don't. I don't know how or why it happend. I'm still stuck at the beginning and I would just like the answer to that - where did the original batch of genetic information - in otherwords the vital information to pass on to the subsequent generation (remember - organism one popped in out of thin air - no mother, no father, no nothing) - so how did it make Organism 2? And what information did it pass on?

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The information didnt COME from anywhere.

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That really does take a leap of faith, doesn't it?

Of course it came from some where - it had to be contained, at the molecular level - in other words the instructions to make the wing bigger, or longer or more "feathery" - HAD to come from somewhere (the parents - either a recessive on one, or the result of some combination) and that means it must have been present, in some form, at the very beginning. This is particularly true if the change itself is going to (ultimately) result in a new species, because this new trait is going to have to get passed down to subsequent generations.

And that is the question I keep asking. The genetic code is exactly that a code - or more precisely a language - at the very least a blueprint/recipe for subsequent cellular production. I do not deny that external forces can cause traits to arise and others to be suppressed - but the genes for those traits are existing in the parent organism - or it is a flaw in the replication that rearranges the information in a new way, generating a new instruction (akin to a mutation).

In our limited scope, we have not witnessed the large changes argued by scientists. However, if you want me to take the leap of faith that all these changes occur - can you not even postulate from whence the information needed to make such changes originated?

quote: If one of those ways produces a wing (or wing-like early version), and it confers some reproductive advantage

Advantage of a proto-wing? Please elaborate.
What advantage is gained from a foot becoming a proto-wing? I don't think it would increase running speed.

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In our limited scope, we have not witnessed the large changes argued by scientists.

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Well of course not. What are you, 30ish, 40ish? You can't possibly view evolutionary changes that occurred over the course of millions of years over the course of a single person's lifetime.

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can you not even postulate from whence the information needed to make such changes originated?

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But there are theories out there. I'm not even sure what angle you're arguing from to be honest. Are you trying to assert a religious argument? An "intelligent design" argument?

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However, "natural" physical mutations that just suddenly occur based on need, seem much harder to buy in to.

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There is nothing "suddenly" about it, and none of it happens because of a need, either.

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Why did the alleles and genes of a particular fish decide it needed the body as a hole to have legs and be able to breath out of water? How did it even know what it needed? Can alleles and genes have intelligent thought to even understand what it needs and why it needs it?

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You are not understanding the process from the get-go. There is no "deciding", there are no "needs", and there is no particular path evolution takes. Evolution has no particular goal or end result, it is just the process by which organisms change and adapt.

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I could probably be safer if I didn't have to drive everywhere, why don't my gene's/alleles mutate to give me the ability to have wings and fly?

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Hands are pretty fricking handy.

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As far as the monkeys evolving into humans, why do we not see a middle ground today?

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Monkeys did not evolve into humans, monkeys and humans have a common ancestor. And we have found partial skeletons of several of these intermediate forms between the common ancestor and modern humans.

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We can see a baby, watch it grow into a child, then into a young adult, then into a full grown adult. At any given time, I can see any stage of this growth process on our planet for most any species. Why are there ONLY 100% monkeys/chimps and ONLY 100% humans?

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Why lump all monkeys/chimps/etc into one category? If you do that, you have to lump humans into that, too, since we are all primates.

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Where's the in between? If evolution was/is occurring, shouldn't there be middle stages evident today?

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Every species that we see today is an "in between" what it once was and what it will become. The evidence is everywhere.

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You're right. Scientists have never thought of any of this. You got em!

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Kind of funny. Until yesterday scientists had a different premise as to origins of tetrapods. One day, and the postulates change. Yet yesterday, according to many here, all aspects of the field were settled. Totally worked out.

In fact, when I pointed out there were details or oddities of evolution we don't quite have nailed down, one poster retorted "have you submitted these oddities to relevant anthropologist for review or for further scrutiny? If not, why not?" Just find it interesting, that same poster would likely respond to this thread positively without remotely understanding the irony.

Again, the science is great. People drawing their personal extrapolations without factual support, not so much. The news today was a break through. Good stuff!

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"Most planets"?

What other planets do you know of that do?

And how can you say "most" when we are only aware of the smallest fraction of planets in existence?

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I would say that it's not a stretch to say that most planets aren't capable of sustaining life

It's just a guess really

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Are there examples of those mutations happening now? I haven't heard of any. Not saying you're wrong, because what you said makes perfect sense. I was just curious as to why we have all these theories about evolution, mutations (positive as relative to the environment), etc... yet we don't see it in action today. (Reference my baby to adult transformation example).

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To see any sort of "action" on the scale you apparently want to see would take hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. However, you still have a tailbone, but no tail. Many snakes have vestigial leg and pelvic bones that serve no purpose. Many people have their wisdom teeth removed, which is probably evidence that our jaws were once larger and had room for them. These days our brains are getting larger and jaws smaller, but apparently the number of teeth is taking a little longer to fall out of the gene pool (though many people never get them, myself included).

You keep thinking that it's impossible for a human to one day evolve wings, and that's probably true. But that is not evidence that disproves evolution. You have to think very far back to when and why wings may have been advantageous. Imagine a small animal that had evolved to walk upright (perhaps because being able to see over tall grass gave it an advantage of predators), so over time its front legs began to wither away. We still see evidence of similar bone structure in wings as we see in arms and legs, with "fingers" and "elbows". If the animal had hair, maybe one day some mutant was born with feather-like hair, which may have kept him warmer during winter, or was seen as attractive as all hell to the females and he was able to reproduce like mad. His offspring were likely to have a similar trait, so they kept reproducing at a faster rate than the old hairy version. After a long, long time, these two-legged two-winged animals began to spread and inhabit new areas, perhaps where there were cliffs or hills or something where they could spread out their wings and glide a bit. Well, shite, this is even better for avoiding predators, so the guys with bigger wings and stronger muscles were now fricking like crazy. The bigger the wings and the better you could flap them, the better your odds of survival (and they probably had all the lady creatures creaming their feathers). After another long, long time, these guys could actually just start flapping and get themselves off the ground! Well, frick, now they're untouchable.

After that, there aren't many more advantages to having wings that are much bigger or stronger, so the population would likely "stabilize" on this form for a really, really long time. Those older, hairy creatures were probably around for a long time themselves, and a few of them might have even fossilized, and we might have even found one millions of years later. Fossilization, though, is a very rare event, probably less than one in a million, and our chances of actually finding them are probably similarly slim. It does happen, though, but we will likely only ever find some of the more "stable" forms of creatures. So, there might have been 100 billion of the hairy ones, and 100 billion of the upgraded flying version with big wings instead of small front legs, and smaller, lighter bodies, but maybe there were only a billion or so of those "in-between" guys, and we may never find a fossil of one.