An interesting perspective, surely. However, it is an arguable point.</p>
<p>I’ve noticed that many religious conservatives tend to hold an impossibly blind sighted prejudice toward homosexuals. Now, that’s not to say that all religious people are against homosexuality, but I wonder if this is an example where one religious ideal contradicts another.</p>
<p>While the bible may state that homosexuality is wrong (but from what I understand from the work of biblical scholars, the interpretation of various passages may be up for debate), it’s quite obvious that there are many people out there who would want to use religion to justify a personal unrelenting prejudice.</p>
<p>While one of the commandments states, “Love your neighbor as yourself”, I wonder how religious institutions can, as so many of the mainstream religions do now, actively deny the gay community not only their civil rights, but any attitude with even a semblance to respect while so blatantly ignoring such a well known commandment.</p>
<p>I can’t fathom how religious parents are disowning gay children, how many hate crimes are committed against homosexuals by those who believe in God, and most of all, I can’t understand how religion would dare to propagate such heinous acts when they boast ideals regarding unconditional love and happiness.</p>
<p>Perhaps, for many religious followers, it’s easier to pick and choose:</p>
<p>
One of the passages used to justify racism in the 19th century.</p>
<p>Now, something that I found quite ironic:
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I sincerely appreciate the bible. But I can only appreciate it when I, like many of those who follow the text, pick and choose the passages closest to me. I, for example, would rather try my hardest to love somebody than judge and hate. From my perspective, there is no rhyme or reason to the bible in contemporary life. Perhaps in the past, these passages may have been more relevant. Perhaps fish and shellfish back then were strange creatures and quickly condemned as “abominations”, as were homosexuals.</p>
<p>In my opinion, while society continues to evolve, biblical texts are becoming more and more outdated.</p>
<p>It’s certainly an extremely interesting question, however. Is it the teachings of Christ that are misguided, or is it the Church?</p>
<p>I view science and religion as very much the same thing. They both try to explain the world in which we live. While science uses method and logic, religion is based on hope and faith. Which is more important to society? Both have proved positive. But I’d say only religion has obvious negatives.</p>
<p>You can’t justify those things Biblically*.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This statement is a little vague. What is the “unconditional love and happiness” that we (if you’re talking about Bible-believing Christians) boast of?</p>
<p>We believe that God loves everyone. We try to love everyone ourselves. We do not believe that everyone will be happy, regardless of their actions.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Maybe so, but to do so and to claim that the Bible is God’s word would be dishonest. As for the verse you mentioned, this was at a time when slavery was common throughout society. The old testament law put certain restrictions on the system to avoid various abuses (in particular to ensure that all the Hebrew families remained independent, without one taking over the inheritance of another).</p>
<p>At any rate, I’d reject slavery more by logic than by Biblical verses.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>things weren’t called “detestable” simply because they were strange, they were called that because they were “unclean”, not to be associated with by the Jews. A discussion of God’s possible motives behind the various laws, and how they relate to modern Christianity, would fill whole books.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the Hebrew word translated “abominable” is NOT the same in those two verses. In the case of the shellfish, the word is one which is used exclusively to refer to unclean foods and such things as rotting animal carcasses. The word used to refer to homosexuality is used to refer to things which are “detestable” in the moral or religious sense, such as idol worship and human sacrifice.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In my opinion, while society continues to evolve, it gets further and further from the truth of the Bible.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think this is answered by comparing the good and bad of various church actions with how well supported they are by the Bible.</p>
<p>*I suppose I should clarify that by “civil rights”, I mean the rights I consider to be God-given to all humans, which does NOT include many things our society seems to consider “rights”. However, if I don’t think those things are rights for homosexuals, I don’t think they are rights for me either.</p>
I’m more of a science man myself, but I think I have to play devil’s advocate here: while religion and science have both contributed well to society, it’s not only religion that has had unfavorable results. Science has marred society just as much as religion. Think of the atomic bomb, germ warfare, etc, etc.</p>
<p>
Well, I would think that “love your neighbor as yourself” would deter parents from disowning their children and would promote people of faith to at least show some sort of kindness to others, whatever their sexual orientation. </p>
<p>
I’m not entirely sure how homosexuality can be equated with idol worship or human sacrifice.</p>
<p>
It’s possible that your definition of the truth and my definition of the truth may differ slightly here, so I’ll agree to disagree.</p>
<p>
Well, as previously stated, people tend to pick and choose passages from the bible. How can we deem who is right and who is wrong when there exists so many people with differing views of biblical texts? Who, exactly, is right?</p>
<p>No human is. But to see who is closest to being right, you have to compare what they say with what the Bible actually says. By doing so, you can form your own opinion, which won’t be right either, but which, if well thought out, will be pretty close.</p>
<p>The more levels of translation and interpretation between you and the original Word, the further you are from the truth, usually.</p>
<p>Okay, I have been quite occupied and have not been in Internet forum mood lately, so I apologize for delaying this response for so long. I’ll go back a bit and address statements that are quite dated. The quoted material that I have selected to respond to may not be in the order in which it appeared in the discussion.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>All of this creationist propaganda is patently wrong. I must admit, though, MosbyMarion, you certainly do have quite a capacity for producing deviously distorted “scholarship” on scientific matters. It’s also very crafty of you to cloak yourself in the rhetoric of science and simultaneously misrepresent or distort the findings of evolution while disputing it with superficially plausible, antiscientific argument.</p>
<p>Firstly, stating that “no new genetic information is produced” in populations is a complete falsehood. Mechanisms include horizontal gene transfer, genome and gene duplication, recombination from sexual reproduction (the redistribution of large quantities of alleles from two separate lineages), and mutation. Regarding the latter, distinctions among deleterious, beneficial, and neutral mutation can only be ascertained based upon environmental context and reproductive benefit. For instance, bacteria placed within a sample of streptomycin will typically perish. But in the instance that a beneficial mutation is developed that confers resistance to streptomycin, that portion of the population will obtain selectional gains and come to predominate the population. However, a mutation for streptomycin immunity in the lack of its presence will typically be neutral or potentially aversive, so there are no absolutes regarding what is beneficial and what is not. One can actually do a variation of the experiment in a high school laboratory. If one places a species of bacteria on agar jelly suffused with streptomycin, the bacteria will invariably abate until the entire population is dead. However, if one places the bacteria upon the antibiotic-free end of a streptomycin gradient, mutation will eventually arise until there exists an entire population immune to the antibiotic.</p>
<p>Proceeding further with such an example, there are certain species of bacteria that actually mutate further to actually consume certain antibiotics that initially sought to disrupt its metabolism, such as the Enterococcus-vancomycin pairing. This is not simply a byproduct of selectional gain from a previously atypical trait but rather a mutation in the genetic material. </p>
<p>The most important concept to obtain from this is that entire populations of bacteria would not die if the trait already existed somewhere among the members of the population. Hence, new genetic material is being created through mutation, which may be derived from multiple underlying biological sources: copy errors in DNA replication or meiosis, epigenetic sources (radiation, mutagenic substances), transposons, viruses, and somatic hypermutation.</p>
<p>Your assertion that intermediate species are completely lacking (an old creationist chestnut) is patently dishonest. If you think about it, every fossilized specimen is a transition between one thing and another. The evolution from chimpanzees to modern-day Homo sapiens is well-documented. Sahelanthropus tchadensis is considered as the first intermediary species, and, to name a few additional transitional fossils, Ardipithecus, Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo erectus (which encompasses Homo georgicus, Homo ergaster, Homo pekinensis, and Homo heidelbergensis), Homo antecessor, archaic Homo sapiens, and modern Homo sapiens. </p>
<p>I have explained the cleaner fish-grouper symbiosis on multiple occasions yet you surface it for dispute once again. It is an extremely egregious assertion to simply state that you cannot rationalize how such a mutualistic arrangement is evolved so it must invalidate the entirety of evolution. Mutualism and commensalism are present throughout ecosystems (crocodile-Egyptian plover, hermit crab-sea anemone, ant-acacia tree, oxpecker bird-hippopotamus) and there is nothing fundamentally inconceivable or unnatural about them. </p>
<p>I’ll briefly address more common creationist arguments:</p>
<p>“Evolution is only a theory, not a fact.”</p>
<p>When evolutionary biologists address the central tenet of modern biology as the “theory of evolution,” they are not expressing reservations regarding its validity. The argument stems from a misunderstanding of the sense in which ‘theory’ is used. Those who dismiss evolution with the misguided argument that “even evolutionary biologists are unsure of its truth by calling it a ‘theory’” typically view ‘theory’ in the sense of “a supposition to account for an observation or to speculate the underlying principles of a subject.” However, that is quite contrastive to the way in which biologists, or any group of scientists, use the term – not in the center of the hierarchy of factual certainty between mere hypothesis (for the sake of investigation) and scientific law. </p>
<p>Rather, ‘theory’ is used in the sense of “an intimately corroborated accumulation of concepts that indicate relationships among observations of empirical phenomena and integrate a collection of circumstances to explain a particular set of occurrences or a conceptual framework that embraces confirmed hypotheses, facts, and scientific laws and includes, when possible, the use of mathematical abstractions typically articulated as quantifiable elements.” In essence, the theory of evolution is used in the same sense as atomic theory, the heliocentric theory, and the theory of relativity.</p>
<p>Evolution is ‘fact,’ or an assertion that is verifiably true. Testable hypotheses only reach this stage of certainty by surviving rigorous evaluations and empirical assessments, which evolution has repeatedly. The evidence from the wide array of scientific circumstances – molecular data, biogeography, homology, biochemistry, genetics, the fossil record, and so on – testify to the reality that the biology of our planet has been modified over time and the diversity of it all is inextricably linked, not a collection of specific instances of divine oeuvre. The evidence is unequivocal, abundant, explicitly present, and overwhelmingly conclusive.</p>
<p>It is also worth noting that not all evidence for evolution is indirect and incapable of observation – as was the case for the atom and basic subatomic particles when they were essentially codified as scientific reality. We have observed speciation, natural selection, genomic mutation, and genetic cross-over, among other elements of evolution.</p>
<p>This is a blanketed dismissal of evolution that patently ignores the fact that, in the historical sciences, hypotheses may be verified whether they accord with physical evidence and attain the capacity to posit verifiable predictions about the future. These days, most creationists note that microevolutionary events have been confirmed in the laboratory, including studies on plants, cells, and fruit flies, and accounting for observations in speciation and natural selection. </p>
<p>One of the most famously demonstrated cases was that conducted by George W. Salt of UC-Davis and William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico who partitioned a random assortment of Drosophila melanogaster into distinct groupings on the basis of environmental preference. After separately breeding them for 35 successive generations, the resulting extent of speciation produced genetically and reproductively dissimilar varieties that refused to intermingle and procreate when newly exposed to each other. For a more precise account, please visit the paper encoded within the hyperlink below:</p>
<p>Before you baselessly dismiss the fact of observable speciation events (transformations from one species to the another typically resulting in reproductive isolation and genetic distinction) that result in the introduction of new genetic traits, there are approximately 90 scientific papers listed in the “References” section in the above citation substantiating the findings to derail any indiscriminate dispute you might have.</p>
<p>”Even many evolutionary biologists aren’t sure of their ‘theory.’" </p>
<p>Evolutionary biologists are no less passionate about the validity of biological evolution than I happen to be. Actually, I am not particularly attracted to the use of “passionate” in this sense since it seems to imply some sort of zealous, partisan relationship when, in essence, it is quite the contrary. Evolutionary science would not have hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed articles and papers and the abundance of evidence (in the forms of observational, experimental, chemical, and physical proof) in its favor if it wasn’t correct. </p>
<p>I can definitively assure that no reputable biological publication contains an article espousing an antievolutionary argument. To anticipate the stereotypical retaliation that the scientific community unfairly dismisses such “evidence,” the reality is that few creationist/intelligent design manuscripts are even presented. </p>
<p>Published papers authored by anti-evolution writers typically expound evolutionary issues that presently stand as unresolved and perplexing rather than commencing some ill-founded assault or inserting the baseless presumption that evolutionary uncertainty irrefutable points to a supernatural causation. Every fashionable creationist argument that has ever been presented to the scientific community for has been evidentially refuted in one way or another. Although creationism, intelligent design, and antievolutionary sentiment may lazily compensate for scientific ignorance, preserve fundamentalist religious dogma, maintain childhood duperies, fulfill emotional cravings, or satisfy latent ideological agenda, they have absolutely no means of contributing to the technical base of modern or scientific thought.</p>
<p>”Even ‘evolutionists’ don’t agree on their ‘theory’ and these disagreements just show how poorly supported the ‘theory’ is.”</p>
<p>I would like to precede this with a brief remark on semantics. I commonly see the term “evolutionist” specifically used by creationists more than any other distinct faction and I am not greatly fond of it. First of all, I fully realize that it is often conveniently used simply for the sake of succinctness – for condensing “evolutionary biologist” into a single designation. However, too often, it irrationally implies that “evolutionists” are a distinct clique of academics following some idealistic school of thought similar to a structuralist or solipsist. Expressed a different way, it is as if it has some sort of philosophical connotation. But even more dishonestly, the “ist” is commonly employed as a suffix denoting an ideologue to a belief system – in essence, spinning evolutionary biologists as individual adherents to an ideological doctrine, which is profoundly inappropriate. To fully articulate the basic point, I am no less an evolutionist than I am an atomic theorist, heliocentrist, or gravitationist.</p>
<p>But to address the heart of the matter, the italicized statement is a commonly employed and fallaciously designed argument. Evolutionary biologists do regularly discuss diverse topics, including phylogenetic relationships, recent publishings, and the relative influential strength of various causal mechanisms. Such active communication is a vital component of every academic branch. But they are all fundamentally united by a single overarching certainty: that evolution is a factual phenomenon and a universal biological principle.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, dishonest creationists will typically take any quotable assertion (typically from the field’s foremost authorities) out of their proper contextual relationship and erroneously display it as a preposterous fundamental quibble over evolution itself. But placed in its common setting, the criticism of evolution will almost invariably prove illusory.</p>
<p>Creationists speciously believe that it is mathematically infeasible that anything as intricate as a protein, cell, wing, or human being could have possibly sprung up by “random chance.” Evolution does indeed contain a inherent level of chance, as through the randomized degree of mutation that accumulate to produce novel traits. But chance itself is not the determinate factor that facilitates modified descent. In fact, evolution is quite the opposite. Natural selection is the predominantly overriding mechanism of evolutionary change by perpetuating adaptive alterations while eradicating undesirable features. </p>
<p>To better illustrate this point, this is often accompanied by a common analogy. If one were to type out Shakespeare’s phrase “TOBEORNOTTOBE” on a keyboard at the rate of one thirteen-letter phrase per second (the length of “to be or not to be” excluding spaces), it could very well take as many as 78 billion years to produce the verbatim response. However, during the 1980s, Richard Hardison wrote a computer program that reproduced letter sequences randomly while preserving the positions of letters that were properly situated (an analogical emulation of natural selection). </p>
<p>With Hardison’s program, “TOBEORNOTTOBE” was constructed, on average, in 335.2 iterations, a slight deviation from the theoretical value of 338. These 335.2 repetitions consumed less than ninety seconds. Constructing the entire play (Hamlet) took less than four-and-one-half days.</p>
<p>The fundamental message is that so long as the forces of selection remain invariable, evolution proceeds in a specific direction and produces intricate biological structures in relatively brief durations of time (although quite extensive in terms of the typical human lifespan).</p>
<p>One of the most common public quibbles with biological evolution is that it is difficult to comprehend how such primitivity could have organized itself into relatively convoluted organisms. But such fails to consider the power of gradual accumulation through natural selection. The mind has a difficult time comprehending period of time that even mildly exceed the human lifespan. We cannot quite grasp a comparatively brief time period of 1,000 years, let alone the 3.5 billion years of Earth’s biotic existence.</p>
<p>This is Hardison’s program for anyone who is interested:</p>
<p>10 REM 1984 R. HARDISON
11 PRINT “RANDOMIZING ALPHABET”
12 PRINT “WRITE HAMLET, KEEPING”
13 PRINT “SUCCESSES.”
14 PRINT :; REM N-COUNTER: # OF TRIALS
15 REM T=COUNTER:REUSE “TO BE”
16 PRINT “SUBROUTINE TO
17 PRINT “RANDOMIZE AND SELECT”
18 PRINT “LETTER”
30 N = 0
40 FOR G = 1 TO 10
50 T = 0
60 GOTO 80
70 X = INT (26 * RND (1)) + 1: RETURN
80 GOSUB 70
90 N = N + 1
100 IF X = 20 THEN PRINT “T”: IF X = 20 THEN GOTO 120
110 GOTO 60
120 N = N + 1
130 GOSUB 70
140 IF X = 15 THEN PRINT “O”: IF X = 15 THEN PRINT : IF X = 15 THEN GOTO 160
150 GOTO 120 160 N = N + 1 170 GOSUB 70 180 IF X = 2 THEN PRINT “B”: IF X = 2
THEN GOTO 200 190 GOTO 160 200 N = N + 1 210 GOSUB 70 220 IF X = 5 THEN PRINT
“E”: IF X = 5 THEN PRINT : IF X = 5 THEN GOTO 240 230 GOTO 200 240 T = T + 1
250 IF T = 2 THEN GOTO 460 260 N = N + 1 270 GOSUB 70 280 IF X = 15 THEN
PRINT
“O”: IF X = 15 THEN GOTO 300 290 GOTO 260 300 N = N + 1 310 GOSUB 70 320 IF X
= 18 THEN PRINT “R”: IF X = 18 THEN GOTO 340 330 GOTO 300 340 N = N + 1 350
GOSUB 70 360 IF X = 14 THEN PRINT “N”: IF X = 14 THEN GOTO 380 370 GOTO 340
380 N = N + 1 390 GOSUB 70 400 IF X = 15 THEN PRINT “O”: IF X = 15 THEN GOTO
420 410 GOTO 380 420 N = N + 1 430 GOSUB 70 440 IF X = 20 THEN PRINT “T”: IF
X
= 20 THEN PRINT : IF X = 20 THEN GOTO 60 450 GOTO 420 460 PRINT “N=”;N;” KEYS
PRESSED TO WRITE ‘TO BE OR NOT TO BE’" 470 PRINT “FOR”;G;" RUN(S) OF PROGRAM"
480 PRINT 490 NEXT G 500 END 510 REM IF THE PROGRAM WERE 511 REM WRITTEN TO
INCLUDE 512 REM PUNCTUATION MARKS ETC. 513 REM THE PROGRAM WOULD 514 REM
TAKE LONGER, BUT WOULD 515 REM STILL NOT BE PROHIBI- 516 REM TIVE 517 PRINT
518 PRINT “WITH 3000 RUNS, THE MEAN” 519 PRINT “# of trials=333” 520 PRINT
“THE MEAN TIME REQUIRED” 521 PRINT “WAS .14 MINUTES TO PRINT” 522 PRINT
“TOBEORNOTTOBE” </p>
<p>Source: Upon the Shoulders of Giants by Richard Hardison</p>
<p>”If humans came from apes, why are there still apes?”</p>
<p>This is one of the oldest and most stereotypically misinformed questions in the creationist arsenal and it is quite unfortunate that such a naively conceived question is puzzling to so many individuals who aren’t sufficiently educated in rudiments of the science. Many creationists enjoy asking it since it appears so superficially baffling, but it displays a elementary illiteracy of what evolution actually establishes. Foremost, humans are not directly derived from monkeys – they share a common ancestor. </p>
<p>Speciation occurs through divergence from existing species – an evolution in which separate populations are divided into separate environments (i.e. continents). After many several generations apart, sufficient dissimilarities will inevitably present themselves and remain permanently distinct.</p>
<p>”If the universe is proceeding towards a state of greater entropy, there is no conceivable way that evolution could create increasing magnitudes of complexity.”</p>
<p>First, to ensure that semantics coincide, it is worth noting that the entropy should be defined in its thermodynamic sense as a property designating the degree to which mechanical work is inaccessible from the thermal energy contained within a system – rather than its simplified, figurative sense of “disorder.”</p>
<p>The argument is a distortion of the points stipulated by Second Law of Thermodynamics. If it were true, snowflakes, mineralized crystals, and other ordered non-biological entities would be untenable formations as well since they, likewise, originate from a selection of disorder parts. </p>
<p>The entropy of a system may indeed decrease insofar as other physical, quantifiable properties within the system are counterbalanced to accommodate the change. This is accomplished through the sun’s process of nuclear fusion. Energy in the Earth’s atmosphere, provided by means of solar energy, more than offsets the requirement necessary for increasing complexity.</p>
<p>”To me, life is so complex that it couldn’t have possibly come about through evolution or without my sky-fairy/ies intervening.”</p>
<p>All creationists are fundamentally united by this central slant that life seems much too elaborate to understand without the element of divinity. But how tenable is it to provide an “it seems to me” argument to stand as a scientifically valid truth?</p>
<p>Creationists typically attempt to “validate” this statement of the
“self-evident” nature of divine creation by presenting a laundry list of biological examples that are ordinarily difficult to answer due to the lack of scientific progress – thus attempting to overwhelm and stump opponents. Or they hand-select a variety of certain perceivably insoluble accounts and speciously conclude that the lack of a satisfying biological explanation (by their standards, not scientific guidelines) implies complete invalidation. </p>
<p>But immediately, one should recognize this as fallacious on multiple accounts. Eagerly leaping to conclusions on the basis of a lack of evidence or an insufficiently convincing explanation is a faulty generalization – that is, using the lack of evidence from one side to “evidence” the other. Secondly, the evolution that is indisputably confirmed as characteristic of other species provides numerous cases where the generalization folds – namely, when exceptions are ignored. Also, its provides an argument from ignorance by claiming that since X has not yet been definitively proven, X must be false.</p>
<p>I’ll expand upon this argument regarding the fatuous concept of “irreducible complexity” by inserting another lie commonly perpetuated by creationists.</p>
<p>Creationists commonly assert that the eye is a structure that could not possibly have been constructed by means of the processes of natural forces. By their interpretation, the human eye’s ability to provide such a stunningly vivid account of the world external to the observer is only possible through the precise arrange of its parts. Intelligent design advocates (erroneously) contend that the structure is “irreducibly complex” – that it could not have conceivably been present in a more primitive form without invalidating the entirety of its function.</p>
<p>But that’s not what the empirical evidence demonstrates. Researchers have identified primitive eyes and photo-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom, of which the evolution may be pursued by means of comparative genetics. And in various families of organisms, eyes appear to have evolved independently from the gradually accumulating complexity from primitive photoreceptors although a single ancestral photosensitive origin is, of course, most probable. </p>
<p>The same line of spurious reasoning is shown as it commonly relates to the wing. To them, the forces of natural selection could not have plausibly constructed a transitional form that satisfied the criteria necessary for evolutionary propagation – what good is half a wing? But this is untrue on account of the fact that even if a wing is too tenuous or structurally modest to provide flight or is inadequate relative to the size of the organism (and thus inhibits any type of willful aerial mobility), it will still provide benefit. To provide a simple example of one possibility, if the creature falls from the top of a tree (with half a wing), it will supply enough drag to provide for a harmless descent. If it falls with 51% of a wing, it can fall from a taller tree and so on. </p>
<p>But it is a false impression that complex structures or supremely organized novel features are unnaturally conceived. Research efforts in cellular automata and nonlinear systems demonstrate that unsophisticated, desultory processes can produce tremendously intricate features. </p>
<p>And in May of 2010, biologists constructed the first synthetic organism consisting entirely of prearranged artificial ingredients, finally deflating the timeworn, unwavering, and enormously ludicrous conceit that a deity or an overriding supernatural controlling force is necessary to generate life. </p>
<p>”Mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce any new traits.”</p>
<p>Here is your interpretation of the mutation concern, MosbyMarion:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is a flagrantly misconceived, yet very stereotypical, interpretation. On the topic of genomic mutation, creationists and evolutionary biologists will agree on the fundamental concept that mutation is relatively infrequent, stochastic, and largely unfavorable. But creationists process that information and regurgitate it with an erroneous inference (see above quote) that is wholly misrepresentative of what actually occurs. </p>
<p>The bacteria-streptomycin example stated earlier is a particular instance of point mutation – single alterations at particular nucleotides in the DNA. Bacteria placed within a sample of streptomycin will quickly perish while those exposed to the antibiotic across a concentration gradient will eventually develop immunity through mutation that modifies the catalytic functions of the bacteria’s ribosomes. </p>
<p>Mutations in Hox genes, which direct bodily segmentation and the placement of anatomical features (wings, legs, antennae, and so forth), may clearly provide selectional benefit if the transmutation is potentially gainful in the context of the environment. One such point mutation, Antennapedia, as the name implies, is the outgrowth of legs in place of antennae in Drosophila melanogaster. The appendages aren’t useful and therefore the mutation has no capacity to direct evolutionary change (hence the mutation occurs periodically in the species but is by no means inherited), but it does indeed indicate that simple genetic mutation may furnish a type of complexity in an organisms “design.” But the relevant point is that relatively sizable evolutionary changes can occur on the basis of simple alteration in regulatory genes. A team of researchers at UCSD demonstrated the role of Hox genes in evolutionary change:</p>
<p>If you care for an addition relevant example, I’d recommend looking into the mutation of the receptor ligand complex which governs sperm-egg fusion.</p>
<p>In humans, mutation has verifiably produced beneficial outcomes for the sake of organ health and disease resistance. A mutation in coagulation factor VII has decreased the risk of heart attack for those that possess it. The entire immune system relies on various forms of genetic mutation to produce the antibodies required to confer resistance to infectious disease. Perhaps the most frequently cited instance is the 32 base pair deletion CCR5, which confers complete HIV resistance in homozygote carriers and provides postponed onset in heterozygotes. It’s high prevalence among the European population is most likely explained through it’s potential selectional benefit during the Bubonic Plague during the fourteenth century. Whatever the cause, it is clear that the mutation was driven by an increased mutation rate in response to a pandemic or prevalent indisposition that was primarily confined to the European continent. The mutation is entirely absent in those that have been native to the African continent before the outbreak (where the disease never reached) and consequently, some African nations have two-fifths of their population afflicted by HIV/AIDS.</p>
<p>It is also certainly worth noting that evolution is not merely limited to point mutation. Molecular biology has identified other causative mechanisms of hereditary change that transcend beyond the common citation of the inheritance of beneficial mutation, which broaden the perspective on the methods in which increasing “complexity” is attained. Functional modules within genes may be spliced and combined in entirely novel ways. ([Source](<a href=“http://www.pnas.org/content/100/26/15428.full]Source[/url]”>http://www.pnas.org/content/100/26/15428.full)</a>) In terms of large-scale change, genes may be duplicated into an organism’s DNA through chromosomal amplification, which are then free to mutate into genes that produce new, complex features. </p>
<p>Chromosomal fusion occurred in the genus Homo to produce what is known today as human chromosome 2, which involved rearrangement of large segments of DNA and conveyed selectional advantage. Such accelerated divergence from our sapient ancestors made populations of intermediary species less likely to interbreed, thereby preserving genetic dissimilarities and guiding the process of speciation.</p>