You talkin' to ME? rickolasnice :D
Elephants are not direct descendants of Mastodon so maybe you are talking convergent evolution?
You need to keep in mind that species is ONLY a human term. Nature has no such thing. There is nothing in what I said to disallow evolution OF a species so having descendants that look different is no different to what happened to the Galapagos finches - which was NOT Evolution but adaptation.
Unintelligent Design allows for fairly significant changes and also gets rid of logical problems arising from Evolution as it is preached. e.g. the Owl butterfly where the folded wing shape clearly resembles a reptile head and the eye spot is placed to enahnce the effect. That reptile just happens to be the predator of the bird that likes to eat owl butterflies.
The problem is, the 'eye' has to develop all at once. It can't be a dark spot that slowly becomes an eye simply because the dark spot would breach the normal camo of the butterfly - any butterfly with a dark spot would tend to live a very much shorter life, thus removing the genes from the butterfly gene pool. Some of them even have the markings of the mouth around the edge of the wing.
Unintelligent Design is not just a spur-of-the-moment thing, it is an holistic explanation I 'evolved' (I like puns) over some years and it reaaches into very recent research in biology and include epigenetics.
A comment above about Lamarck is factually incorrect. Lamarck's ideas have recently been proven correct - environment CAN and DOES affect heredity. The grandmother research proves it and epigenetics gives the mechanism.
Most Evolutionists look at DNA as the be-all and end-all of heredity and see it as some kind of brain of the cell. Nothing could be further from biology. DNA is a blueprint and that's all. It gets read when needed and outside environment can choose which parts to read and even how the parts get interpreted.
There's also a basic issue to do with mutation itself. DNA is made of A-T-G-C base pairs. A can only pair with T and G can only pair with C. For a mutation to create a new gene, it has to affect BOTH parts of the pair simultaneously or it simply breaks the bond and the error gets repaired before reproduction. So one has to ask, just how do mutations cause viable changes in a species if A. it is highly probable the result will be a transcription error (at best) and B. if it's in a reproductive cell, the error will get repaired anyway?
I was talking to Meth.. but ok..
I know the Mastadons were not a direct descendent of elephants and no, that's not what convergent evolution is.. Mastadons shared a common ancestor with elephants (probably the other one i said.. can't remember now.. haven't slept. I was pointing out that, when you look at the fossil records, going backwards you stop seeing elephants but those 3 i mentioned, go back further and you see a slightly different looking animal, etc etc..
A species is defined as being able to produce fertile offspring.. it does have a place in nature.. Lions and Tigers, for example, are so closely related that they can produce offspring, just not fertile.. Are you denying that Tigers and Lions have a direct common ancestor and have since evolved from it?
Why did the butterflies wings have to evolve all at once? One mutation = looks slightly like a lizard head. Next beneficial mutation = looks slightly more like a lizard head.. etc etc That's assuming that half of or most of the beneficial mutations were because it made them look lizard like.. Most of it probably came down to camouflage whereby some would have the beginnings of the eye by chance.
And I'm sorry but why couldn't a dark spot appear first? You're thinking to big a steps.. a darker shade.. or whatever.. Remember.. genetic mutations don't necessarily have to benefit the species, sometimes they just happen.. if it doesn't impede their chances of survival they're all good.
People seem to forget that the fully formed (or up to date) trait didn't need to and probably didn't evolve with the final result due to one thing (such as the owl).. i haven't slept so can't think of a specific example i'll be back later.
If, by the Lemarck comment you are referring to epigenetics then they're pretty different.. His theory was basically "if a species needs something (like a longer neck) it will adapt to (which is wrong, for a start) and that the parent can do something to alter its dna to pass down.. Now i know that's almost what epigenetics is, it's not. Epigenetics is turning genes that are already there- on or off. To go from having a horse size neck to a giraffe size neck the DNA needs to go through some changes.
Although some of the finches could technically be classified as the same species, i doubt they all are.. And even if they all are, it doesn't mean they always will be.. If you can accept that their DNA has altered (which it has, btw) which has led to different beak shapes and sizes, songs, colours and foods, why not that eventually, they will no longer be able to produce fertile offspring? To produce fertile offspring your DNA needs to match up pretty damn well.. but if they continue to ignore the other species, or if a barrier were to come between them, their DNA will eventually change so much they are not compatible.
Again - I take you back to the lion and the tiger. So genetically similar they can produce offspring. But because the offspring is not fertile, they are different species. Now what about panthers, cheetahs, cougars etc etc? Or are you denying they share a common ancestor?
Look through the fossil records and you see creature a 7 billion years ago, creature b that looks a hell of a lot like creature a 6 billion years ago, creature c that looks a lot like b etc etc.. Now lets look at the DNA.. Our DNA closely matches those of other great apes, implying we share a common ancestor, just like your your DNA will be very similar but not the same as your grandma's..
When the problem in the theory arose - that humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes while other apes have 24 - it was hypothesised that one of ours must have fused together.. and low and behold
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_2_(human)
I mean come on.. is it so hard to conceive that, given the fact you seem to accept genetic mutations happen, that given enough time one animal can become modern day chimpanzee and the other a bononobo? Or that one species, through some kind of separation (river, canyon, whatever), will eventually evolve into both the raccoon and the red panda?
You are assuming that a mutation to DNA will affect only one side of the ladder? You may be right, I don't know.. There are many ways DNA could mutate without it needing to change two base pairs (although this obviously happens).. As far as i know it normally involved editing a gene.. that could be missing some of the the code, adding code or editing the code that's there.. even RNA makes mistakes when copying code, and no the error is not always spotted and corrected.. We have no idea how often RNA does this.
So you are denying mutations occur? Ummm.. you ever seen someone with different skin colour? Different eye colour? Hair colour? Can you eat dairy products? Do you see 100 times more colours than every one else? Are you genetically immune to malaria? What about HIV?
This is not turning genes on and off.. The Delta 32 mutation deletes a portion of gene.. 332 or something like that which leads to the immunity of HIV. The others, for the most part, is adding a new gene or changing the code of an existing one.
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The humans DNA changes with every new generation.. it may be indistinguishable from the previous but the changes are there.. We are not the same species as the one/s that lived 1 million years ago.
Ha.. I apologise.. Am quite obviously on stims and haven't slept.. 8)
