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Insects and the Flood


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I was thinking about something that bothered my last night.

Some of you may have heard about how the Bombadeer beetle, or other creatures with unique characteristics that refute evolutionary process, for example the long neck of the giraffe:

It is my understanding that the giraffe has two different organs in it's neck, 1 to keep blood in the brain, and another to keep blood from flowing into the brain, these two organs must both be present in order for the giraffe not to die when raising and lowering it's head. therefore the 2 organs and the neck of the giraffe must "evolve" at the same time. I have often heard this used to debunk darwinian evolution.

 

1. where did the multitude of insects we get come from if the flood destroyed everything.

2. if Noah only took 2 of every kind of animal, how in the world do we end up with a giraffe with a long neck and all these other complex creatures, especially knowing the limits of micro evolution? 

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Bugs float really well, and since there would have probably been many floating mats and flotsam and jetsam, carcasses and such that bugs would float on and survive on. Noah didn't take any fish, either, he took all that had the breath of life in it's nostrils. Insects breathe through their skin.Also, there were probably numerous living throughout the ark itself, feeding off the droppings of the animals, helping keep it a bit cleaner.

As for the giraffes, these are the two the Lord brought to the ark. Of course there would be no evolution, but paleontology shows the truth that there was once a much wider variety of animals than we have today-a lot more types of, say elephants, all kinds of weird variations, but we only have two today, the African and the Indian elephants. Again, the flood probably brought that to be the case-since space was limited, only two of most animals were brought a male and female. Maybe the African and Indian are just the two variations we got from the two brought aboard the ark. Same with Giraffes. However, notice all the kinds of sheep and goats and deer-these are all clean animals, so they were brought in sevens, seven males and seven females, so maybe there was a much wider variety brought, and interbreeding would account for all the varieties we see today.

Raising goats, I know it doesn't take long to get something new. If, say, you had seven male goats and seven female goats. Say, the Lord wanting variety, brings seven variations of females, and seven variations of males. Then they breed, maybe just after the ark closes. Knowing God's plan is to repopulate the earth, and especially wanting many for sacrificial purposes, hence, clean animals, He would probably have blessed the breedings of the goats and they would all take, and all have the maximum number, which seems to be about 5. Gestation is five months, so in five months, you have up to 35 new babies, added to the 14 originals, you get 49 goats. Then, we switch, the males jumping their fences to breed females of a different 'breed'-after say two months of raising their babies. So now, about a month after the Ark has rested, you have another 35 babies, but they have different characteristics, being cross-bred. 84 goats total, from an original 14, and 35 are now slightly different from the originals, so now, you get your males and females running off in small herds, again directed by God's hand, something I don't believe He left to random chance, and now we have numerous different breeds racing off to populate the cleansed earth, and as they go, there might be more variations between them. It would not take long to populate with that sort of thing.

Now, add to them the sheep, and the cattle and the deer and antelope and the various other 'clean' animals, and you can see where the amazing variations there came from, very quickly, while things like horses and elephants and such, we see much less variation, especially animals that have a long gestation period and only bear one offspring per one or two years, and cannot bear until they are a few years old, as opposed to goats and sheep which technically, can become pregnant at about 6 months, and males can impregnate at about 4 months. Quick and efficient!

So to sum up-the larger animals had greater variation before the flood, created that way, but it was lost when the flood came, and bugs lust lived on, and from, whatever was floating in the water until the flood waters dropped away.

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In addition to UM's excellent points, here's a fantastic article on a Noah's Ark feasibility study that should answer most questions you have on that one: http://creation.com/how-did-all-the-animals-fit-on-noahs-ark

Additionally, I would caution against the use of micro-evolution because it still implies evolution is a real phenomenon. Evolution (be it micro or macro) assert a gaining of genetic information through mutation. Rather, what we see with speciation within the created kinds is a loss of genetic information that differentiates between species we know of today.

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I'm sure God put them on the ark Jordan.. Hey did your Dad and Grandmother get saved last Sunday? I sure did pray for them

sadly no :(

In addition to UM's excellent points, here's a fantastic article on a Noah's Ark feasibility study that should answer most questions you have on that one: http://creation.com/how-did-all-the-animals-fit-on-noahs-ark

Additionally, I would caution against the use of micro-evolution because it still implies evolution is a real phenomenon. Evolution (be it micro or macro) assert a gaining of genetic information through mutation. Rather, what we see with speciation within the created kinds is a loss of genetic information that differentiates between species we know of today.

Micro evolution is seen in the finches. 

Each organism has a limited ability to adapt and change. 

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Micro-evolution, so called, is merely variations within a species. DNA allows for various modifications, and when those modified animals mate, more modifications are possible. There is some mutation possible, as well, though in a wild setting, they are always negative. Like albinism: in pets, various animals, it can be beautiful and make them worth a lot of money, but for many animals, it limits them in the wild. Like snakes, makes them more visible to predators, and to their prey, alike. And for other animals, makes them more light sensitive and tendency to bad eyesight. So generally speaking, mutations are bad, but variations are built-in and nothing wrong with them. That's how I have Boer goats, which are a variety borne out of Nubians, Angoras, and some other goats, a variation. Built into the genetics. Not evolution, just another goat.

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On micro-evolution, not exactly. The variation is never due to added genetic information. What you see with finches is more of a sorting and subsequent loss of genetic information. When a species becomes isolated in a particular environment, the genes most effective for survival are the ones that end up becoming expressed. Rather than gaining a mutation to survive in a particular environment, less effective genes are essentially bred out. Consider the attached graphic of finch beak alleles where "T" (large/thick beak) is the dominant trait and "t" is recessive. If the available food supply cannot be collected or eaten with a small beak, the "t" will ultimately die out and "T" will eventually be the only available trait to be expressed. This is an example of how the loss of genetic information is what produces variation and not the addition of it. Speciation occurs when enough genetic material is lost from a population so as to be distinct from another previously identical population. You don't need a compromise with evolutionary theory to explain the variation in kinds or the diversity of species.

7488beaks.jpg

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On micro-evolution, not exactly. The variation is never due to added genetic information. What you see with finches is more of a sorting and subsequent loss of genetic information. When a species becomes isolated in a particular environment, the genes most effective for survival are the ones that end up becoming expressed. Rather than gaining a mutation to survive in a particular environment, less effective genes are essentially bred out. Consider the attached graphic of finch beak alleles where "T" (large/thick beak) is the dominant trait and "t" is recessive. If the available food supply cannot be collected or eaten with a small beak, the "t" will ultimately die out and "T" will eventually be the only available trait to be expressed. This is an example of how the loss of genetic information is what produces variation and not the addition of it. Speciation occurs when enough genetic material is lost from a population so as to be distinct from another previously identical population. You don't need a compromise with evolutionary theory to explain the variation in kinds or the diversity of species.

7488beaks.jpg

If variation within kinds of organisms only ever comes about through loss of alleles from a population, doesn't this mean that there should never be more than four alleles for a given gene in a population of a kind? In the hypothetical example above, there are just two, but for some genes there are dozens or hundreds of alleles known about.

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If variation within kinds of organisms only ever comes about through loss of alleles from a population, doesn't this mean that there should never be more than four alleles for a given gene in a population of a kind? In the hypothetical example above, there are just two, but for some genes there are dozens or hundreds of alleles known about.

In short, you're correct. This is a very simplistic example of how loss of information leads to a certain expression of traits. In reality, there would be several letters with various levels of dominance. Human eye color, for example, has three different alleles (B - brown, G - green, b - blue). It's chart would look something like this:

2geneeyecolorgenotypetable.gif

As you can see, even adding 1 allele variation gets a little cumbersome to look at which is why I used such a simplistic chart for the beaks. What should be immediately clear, though, is that blue eyes can only result from a complete absence of both B and G allele because they are dominant. This brings me to the answer for your first statement. Variation does not only come through a loss of information, but also through allele combination. This will sound a little backward, but in truth lack of variation is what comes from a loss of information. Take, for example two parents, one with blue eyes and one with brown:

 Bb
BBBBb
bBbbb

They will be capable of producing both brown- and blue-eyed children and you will see variation within the population. Since both brown and blue alleles are present, there is variation. However, if you have two blue-eyed parents, the only possible outcome is blue because there is only one allele at play:

 bb
bbbbb
bbbbb

If you extrapolate this to a larger population, you'll see that a group of people that only have blue eyes, you know that there has been a complete loss of both the brown and green alleles. This is the same process that is at play in Darwin's finches that started this line of discussion. There likely existed the capability of variation at one point, but as the populations were isolated, the variation within each population was truncated and resulted in static speciation even though they are all of the same created kind. The point is, that the speciation did not occur through random mutations (which is what both micro- and macro-evolution assert). Organisms don't adapt and change through a gain of information, they simply lose the ability create varied offspring and so only one possible trait becomes expressed.

 

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Thanks, TheSword--really appreciate you taking the time to put together such a thorough response.

Implicit in all these examples is the idea that alleles are only ever being lost: a population has some amount of alleles at a given point in time and all the variation we see (phenotypes) after that time is caused by recombinations of existing alleles, and moreover alleles are getting lost over generations through fixation and other means.

My question is, if alleles are only ever persisting or being lost (i.e. no new alleles post-creation), and if for some kinds of animal there were only 2 individuals brought aboard the ark (4 alleles per gene) or two pairs (8 alleles), and for clean kinds there were seven pairs (28 alleles), how is it that some genes are observed to have many more alleles than that?

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Thanks, TheSword--really appreciate you taking the time to put together such a thorough response.

Implicit in all these examples is the idea that alleles are only ever being lost: a population has some amount of alleles at a given point in time and all the variation we see (phenotypes) after that time is caused by recombinations of existing alleles, and moreover alleles are getting lost over generations through fixation and other means.

My question is, if alleles are only ever persisting or being lost (i.e. no new alleles post-creation), and if for some kinds of animal there were only 2 individuals brought aboard the ark (4 alleles per gene) or two pairs (8 alleles), and for clean kinds there were seven pairs (28 alleles), how is it that some genes are observed to have many more alleles than that?

Wow, that is an excellent and astute question and one I don't think I've ever gotten before. It's not often someone makes me stop and think on an academic level, so thanks for that. The answer is actually kind of simple. What we've left out of this conversation so far is that there is a possibility in addition to an allele persisting or being lost, and this is an allele being damaged. A great example is human blood types which has three possible allele's (A, B, and O) that produce four different blood types (A, B, AB, O). The intriguing thing is that the O allele is, functionally, a damaged A allele that will not allow production of A traits on the outside of cells.

This might sound a little bit odd, but denying evolution via a gain of genetic information through mutation does not necessarily mean we should deny that mutation never happens. Indeed, it happens all of the time, but it is deleterious or damaging. If a damaged allele is copied and propagated, it results in a different gene expressions, but that does not make it a new allele and it certainly does not add information to the genome.

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