Contender's Edge (@ContendersEdge)

@[email protected] @CynicalBroadcast I am afraid you have misunderstood my reasoning. I did say that there are limitations to any genetic blue print, but I never said that there could not be errors or corruption within the replicating process. It is those errors and corruptions that cause things like Down Syndrome and cancer but errors and corruptions do not constitute as being added information; just a corruption of what is already there and when errors and corruptions occur during the replicating process, then that means the replicating process is not operating in the way it was originally designed. How Stephen J. Gould is able to demonstrate DNA heritability with paleontological evidence is beyond me. DNA is largely absent from the fossil record and while there have been many cases of soft tissues being discovered within fossils, even the amount of soft tissues from the record are not necessarily enough to demonstrate DNA heritability. This can only be best done by way of genetic and breeding experiments involving living creatures. A dog to cat scenario and changes over millions of years may seem dissimilar but if you think about it, the only difference is that instead of the scenario happening in one generation, it can still happen gradually over a long period of time through small changes that grow ever larger according to evolutionary theory. The therapsids, being a greater mystery than even the dinosaurs may have been touted in the past to be intermediaries, but presently no longer. According to evolutionary theory, they never even made the leap from reptile to mammal, but became extinct before then. As to what there was about the therapsids that would lead anyone to think that they were an intermediary of anything, I do not know. We do not know if they were warm or cold-blooded or if they gave birth or laid eggs. As for the half-dozen human species, as I have mentioned before, they do not qualify as being intermediates due to several factors involving each. If evolution says nothing about the origin of life, then it cannot tell us anything about how any life form originated. I've not enough space to address everything in this entire reply, but once again to clarify my position on DNA and insertion mutations, no new information can be added to DNA. DNA can lose information and errors and corruptions can take place, but new information cannot simply just appear. There has to be a biological mechanism for that and the solution will not be found in the insertion mutation proposal since according to how even you described it, such a tendency is an internal occurrence; an error or corruption in the replicating process. And besides, it does not even make sense to call that which is an internal act an insertion of anything since insertion always involves an external act.