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The Bible, Creationism, and Prophecy (part 1)
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......the only thing WRONG with your analogy is that ALL six billion computers were tightly specified and intelligently designed......and equally the keys that I stroked were EACH intelligently and specifically chosen by me.....so your analogy actually PROVES the absolute requirement for APPLIED INTELLIGENCE where a specific functional result is to be obtained!!!!:DMark Hamill wrote: »There have been posts made before showing why this type of maths doesn't apply. Basically your looking at the odds in the wrong direction. Think of it like this: Lets say that there is 6 billion people in the world and lets say there are 6 billion computers in the world. Well the odds that you, 1 person from that 6 billion, used your computer, 1 from that 6 billion, to make your last post is 1 in 36,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1/36 quintillion) and this ignores the odds of you being at your computer at the right time, logging onto the right webiste, going to the right page, pressing each of the right keys etc. But obviously you did, and thats despite the astronomical odds of it happening.
Your analogy is describing a CREATIVE activity.....and NOT a Spontaneous Evolutionary one!!!!:eek::D0 -
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Recent mtDNA and Y-Chromosome analysis have confirmed that the 300 or so Mlabri People alive today are descended from one woman and less than four men.....In sum, genetic, linguistic, and cultural data all suggest a founding event in the Mlabri, involving a single maternal lineage and 1–4 paternal lineages some 500–1,000 y ago
That's not actually the same thing. Lineage often refers to a group, not just an individual.0 -
I came across another interesting article about the issue of Evolutionist 'Creeps' and 'Jerks' recently, and I would like to share the following neat summary of the current desperate state of Evolutionism with you all:-
"The embarrassing intellectual debacle of evolution is in fact well explained in the prestigious British news magazine the “Economist” (December 2004 issue, article "Repeat after me") which describes the two current and conflicting schools of thought. On the one side we have the "Creeps" who believe, like Darwin and Dawkins, that evolution must have taken place gradually and over vast ages of time in order to lend the process any shred of possibility -- and on the other side we have the "Jerks" , the "punctuated equilibrium" pundits who think that evolution must have taken place in jumps, in order to explain the absence of "intermediate” or “unfit” forms in the fossil record.
It would take someone very severely unfamiliar with the scientific method to consider a scientific debate to be in any way a bad thing, let alone a hole in a theory... And, as you point out, neither side is challenging the theory of evolution.Although both groups believe with absolute assurrance that evolution DID happen, they have no credible mechanism to explain HOW it could possibly have happened.
Don't be so silly. There's tons of evidence. Scientists never adopt a model as theory unless there is. They have no need nor motive to do so either. You appear to either be unwilling to look at at the evidence or simply unable to understand it. There's clear motive for that.They simply assume that it happened – and un-informed lay people believe them! The situation is in fact much like that in the Hans Anderson fable of the king’s new clothes, which had inane courtiers praising and comparing the finery of a garments that did not actually exist
What a wonderfully rubbish analogy. It suggests that we cannot measure the effects of evolution. Complete crap. The data on this is available for all to see and, most importantly, to reproduce for themselves.....and you can read all about how a 'died in the wool Darwininst' STOPPED being a 'Creep' and a 'Jerk' ..........and discovered "the self Developing Genome" which, amongst other things, FULLY EXPLAINS post-Creation Speciation!!!!!:D
http://www.creationfoundation.co.uk/Evolution/e4.html
So, you've based your entire post on the above link... right down to your "quote" from the Economist. Thorough. I also note that this article wheels out the classic quote from Darwin in which he appears to show incredulity that the eye could have evolved. Curiously creationist texts never quote the sentence just after that, in which he utterly refutes this.....so here we have a conventional scientist (and Evolutionist) who has discovered a revolutionary NEW speciation mechanism......but nobody is 'beating a path to his door'.......as Evolutionists would have us believe would happen when somebody discovers a new scientific breakthrough in our understanding of life processes.......because "the self Developing Genome" doesn't 'fit' in with Orthodox Darwinism.....and is supportive of Creation!!!!!:eek::D
That's hilarious. You and your source have missed the point by a mile or so. I can't say I've ever heard of this fella, but he seems an honest enough type. What he's describing is not at all incompatible with Darwinian evolution. We already know that the genome itself modulates copying errors (not exclusively though- mutation may be mediated by external sources). That's why the HIV and Influenza viruses are so hard to vaccinate against. Their polymerase enzymes (which are generated by their genome) are more error-prone than many other species. Thus mutations occur rapidly. Such mechanisms occur at a lower rate in larger organisms. That other genes might mediate similar effects would be very interesting but not at all in conflict with evolution.
And nobody is beating a path to his door eh? Rassoulzadegan is well-published in his own right and is well-cited. Nobody is trying to silence him, nor even ignore him. Quite the contrary in fact. Check out the journal Cell (the highest impact journal in Biology), volume 128, issue 4. It's a comprehensive review which references Rassoulzadegan as well as the many others working in epigentic inheritance. Only Nature, the worlds most prominent science journal (but which covers physics and chemistry also), would be a bigger publication.The above article describes the discovery of "the self Developing Genome" as follows:-
"...just such an orchestrating, or "gene switching", mechanism has now been discovered in dogs -- and can explain how one ancient pair of dogs could have made possible all the breeds we now have. (Editor's note: Ancient Jewish tradition has it that Noah called them "Rover" and "Lassie".)"
......."Rover" and "Lassie"....I just love it.....now WHY didn't I think of that!!!!:D:eek:
So what? So modern dogs evolved from a small number of individuals? That's in the theory of evolution. The presence of epigenetics in canines does not really change anything.....and the final 'nail in the coffin' of Spontaneous 'Goo to You' Evolution is provided in a recent article as follows:-
There you go again with Spontaneous Evolution. Except now you're trying to say that a part of evolution which could actually be called "spontaneous" (ie epigenetics) is somehow the "nail in the coffin of Spontaneous Evolution". That makes no sense at all."A recent article of the above title in the British "New Scientist" magazine (27 May 2006, page 16 ) says: "Another direct challenge has been posed to one of the cornerstones of biology, Mendel's laws of inheritance" -- which state that the characteristics of a particular offspring are dictated by dna, by the combination of dominant and recessive genes in the two parents.
The laws of inheritance challenged in a two year old New Scientist article? Wow. I shouldn't have to point out that New Scientist are very far from a reliable source. These are the same people who published a credulous article on what was effectively a perpetual motion machine a couple of years back. I love the magazine, but they've got a sensationalist bent.
If you actually were to read up on epigenetics (or even try reading a website without a creationist agenda) you'd find that Mendel's laws are quite safe. Epigenetics does not imply that inheritance is not dictated by DNA. Epigentic inheritance is merely a layer of complexity over simple genetic inheritance. It's existence does not contradict standard inheritance, as there's no reason why both cannot occur to varying extents in the same system. To suggest that epigenetic inheritance invalidates Medelian inheritance would be similar to suggesting that magnetism invalidates gravity. Different processes which may work alone or together.
Basically, Rassoulzadegan's work does not undermine evolutionary theory in any way. Nor would he claim that it does.However, in direct violation of Mendel's laws, researchers at a university in Nice, in France, have now discovered in breeding experiments involving mice with brown tails and spotted tails that even after several generations, puppy mice may be born with spotted tails when neither parent possesses the relevant genes."[/b][/i]
Rassoulzadegan's work is certainly interesting and it's a new piece of the theory of evolution (in animals), not an alternative to it. It's certainly an alternative means of generating variation, and an alternative means of inheritance. The basis of all of this is still the genome. The output, the phenotype, is still subject to natural selection.
I say "in animals" above, as this is a phenomenon (paramutation) which has been known about in plants and has been a part of the theory of evolution since the 1950s. Check out the work of Royal Alexander Brink (Royal is actually his first name). He demonstrated this in maize in 1958. And Evolution survived. Wow.The article also summarises the irony of Theistic Evolutionists proposing (non-Biblical) Divine intervention to 'rescue' the Theory of Materialistic Evolution from it's obvious invalidity and impossibliity....
"....And so the search for a credible creative mechanism continues – and it seems unfortunate that some Christians, blinded by science, so kindly try to let evolutionists off the hook of their own error by suggesting that perhaps God did make it happen that way by a series of guided miracles, when the Bible and the facts of life on earth tell a different story.":D
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The bible tells a different story, the facts do not. Nobody ever said that we'd never discover more details that work within the framework of evolution. As to gaps in the theory... some people would love to insert God into every uncertainty in science. That's not some sympathetic effort to help out the poor confused scientists, it's opportunism and wishful thinking. Evolution needs rescuing only in the eyes of those who have trouble understanding it.0 -
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....to answer your question let me quote from the cited report (emphasis mine):-That's not actually the same thing. Lineage often refers to a group, not just an individual.
"Both the mtDNA and the Y-STR data therefore indicate that the Mlabri underwent a substantial reduction in population size about 500–800 y ago (and not more than about 1,300 y ago, if the mtDNA and Y-chromosome data reflect the same event)."
and
"Therefore, if the Mlabri were derived from a population with the same mtDNA diversity as the Akha, the population had to be reduced to not more than two unrelated females, in order to completely eliminate mtDNA diversity."
and
"The results of this analysis were that at most 3–6 individuals (depending on which hill tribe the ancestral population resembled most in terms of Y-STR diversity) could have been present after the size reduction, otherwise, with greater than 95% probability, more than two Y-STR types would have been retained."
So the MAXIMUM size of the founder population was 2 women and 6 men.....and the most likely founder population was the ONE boy and ONE girl that were originally expelled by the Tin Prai tribe 500 years ago.:cool::)0 -
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.....and for the mathematicians on this thread.....here is a worked example of how the Spontaneous Evolution of functional proteins is a mathematical impossiblility!!!
http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/molecular_biology_03.html
http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/molecular_biology_04.html
http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/molecular_biology_05.html
http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/molecular_biology_06.html
Those calculations assume that atoms do not follow bonding rules, that nucleotides do not follow bonding rules and most confusingly, that proteins are ever generated randomly. Which they aren't. They're transcribed from genetic code. Following... rules. Whats the probability of finding an object exactly on the floor when it falls off your table? Pretty high... coz it's following rules. In this case, if you take the laws of gravity out of your assumptions, suddenly the probabilities of finding your object on the floor look bad. There are equal chances of finding it at all equidistant points in space. But these predictions are bull**** because they make incorrect initial assumptions.0 -
......the only thing WRONG with your analogy is that ALL six billion computers were tightly specified and intelligently designed......and equally the keys that I stroked were EACH intelligently and specifically chosen by me.....so your analogy actually PROVES the absolute requirement for APPLIED INTELLIGENCE where a specific functional result is to be obtained!!!!:D
Your analogy is describing a CREATIVE activity.....and NOT a Spontaneous Evolutionary one!!!!:eek::D
My analogy shows what happens when you forget about all the rules that apply to a situation when you try to calculate the odds of that situation happening (eg the fact that you only have access to a very small number of computers, that no-one else will write a post in the same way as you etc) The numbers go nuts. This, as AtomicHorror states, is based on incorrect assumptions about what those rules are. The people who did the maths on those links don't seem to understand anything about atomic bonding, proteins, thermodynamics, genetics, (ie. the rules), required to make any conclusion on how likely/unlikely any molecule is to form.0 -
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And nobody is beating a path to his door eh? Rassoulzadegan is well-published in his own right and is well-cited. Nobody is trying to silence him, nor even ignore him. Quite the contrary in fact. Check out the journal Cell (the highest impact journal in Biology), volume 128, issue 4. It's a comprehensive review which references Rassoulzadegan as well as the many others working in epigentic inheritance. Only Nature, the worlds most prominent science journal (but which covers physics and chemistry also), would be a bigger publication.
I should include the full details for that article, left a few out...
VL Chandler (2007) Cell. 2007 Feb 23 volume 128, issue 4, pages 641-5
"Paramutation: from maize to mice"
If you want primary papers, you can also check out Pubmed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez) for numerous papers by Rassoulzadegan and others who are researching the area actively.
The conspiracy of silence doesn't exist.0 -
I'm preparing one of those tiresome point-by-point rebuttals of the creationist article linked by J_C. I'll post it a bit later today. The amount of garbage in the article is pretty overwhelming. Essentially nothing new other than the bizarre seizing upon paramutation as some kind of "new discovery" that refutes Darwinian evolution.0
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This is a big one, sorry...
I've quoted various parts of the creationist article;
Wonderfully misleading. The book, cited as having been written by “confirmed evolutionist” Hough, is in fact a poorly-regarded attack on Darwinian evolution. You’d be hard-pressed to find many copies in print and Hough’s back catalogue, from which we assume his former status as a “confirmed evolutionist” must have been derived, cannot be found anywhere at all.Anonymous Creationist wrote:"Creeps" and "Jerks" -- an Overview of the Crisis in Evolution
Preposterous Nonsense
Confirmed evolutionist Derek Hough, highly respected author of “Evolution – A case of stating the obvious”, is one of an increasing number of scientists who now regard Charles Darwin’s theory that the staggering variety of life on earth was accidentally created by blind Natural Selection acting on tiny variations or random mutations in reproducing cells as utterly "preposterous" (his word).
The quote by Darwin (with the part Creationists conveniently neglect to quote in bold), goes:Anonymous Creationist wrote:The Human Eye and the Hand of God
Oddly, although even Darwin himself admitted that the idea of the complexity of just the human eye being created in such a fashion was “absurd in the highest degree”, he still felt forced to embrace such insanity!
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.
Quoting out of context is just one of the cheap word games that critics of Evolution are forced to resort to. I guess if you can't refute the science, there's not much left for you.
And yet he brings musings about God into his book. Further, his grasp of epigentics (the core of his argument) is solid enough, but he makes leaps that he fails to support with any actual experimental evidence. This undermines the status of his ideas as “hypothesis” let alone theory. As to him having ever been a “true believer”, I see no evidence of that at all. Hough himself even goes so far as to state that he dreamt up his rebuttal of Darwinism in less than hour.Anonymous Creationist wrote:Derek Hough’s rejection of Darwinism, after having been a “true believer” of missionary zeal for many years, has nothing to do with the Bible or geology or rock strata or fossils or extinct life forms or the age of the earth.
We’ve known about this level of complexity for decades. Regulatory genetics, post-transcriptional and translational mechanisms, organelle genetics, epigenetics… this is not new stuff to anyone other than a science undergraduate. There’s nothing in any of this that undermines evolution.Anonymous Creationist wrote:It is just that with the discovery of the micro-structure of the cell and its constituent chromosomes, genes and DNA and RNA molecules, biologists now realize that even supposedly "primitive" organisms have an inner complexity far more massive than anything Darwin ever dreamed of when he literally trembled with fear as he tried to close his mind to the absurd improbability of the human eye having been created by the accidental process of evolution rather than by the hand of God.
Find me a good mathematician or physicist who agrees with that unsourced assertion. Who was it that accused biologists of “sheer arrogance”? Not a physicist certainly. They understand that there is nothing random about their science or ours. Chaotic perhaps, complex certainly. Randomness is a myth.Anonymous Creationist wrote:DNA Copying Errors
According to Hough, the chance of any plant or animal cell having been developed by the fortuitous combination of zillions of DNA copying "errors" is just not credible, especially to mathematicians, who, he says, regard the acceptance of such impossibility thinking by biologists as ignorance and “sheer arrogance”.
An analogy from the School of J_C. The analogy is flawed in several ways:Anonymous Creationist wrote:The possibility is, he asserts, about as likely as "throwing ten tons of scrap metal into the air and having it come down as an aero-engine". Clearly mindful of the desperate and highly publicized claims of his more illustrious fellow believer, he then comments:“No, Mr Dawkins, you would not get an aero-engine in a thousand years, not in a million years, not in the total age of the universe”.
1) “Scrap metal” implies randomness. Nucleotide combination and replication are not random.
2) The only law of physics acting in the analogy is gravity, brining our scrap metal back to earth. There’s no force present in the analogy that could ever cause interaction between the parts in the air or on the ground. In chemistry there are dozens of laws acting to make our nucleotides interact in an ordered fashion.
3) To imagine that scrap metal could turn into a complex machine in a single step (by chance over time) is not analogous to evolution at all. Evolution is an incremental process acting according to rules, not an instantaneous and random process.
The analogy is thus invalid. This is the poor quality of the author’s reasoning. The reason this man’s book is unpopular is because he would make himself the intellectual equal of Dawkins, when in fact a reasonably good science undergraduate could construct a logical rebuttal to his arguments.
Evolution is testable. There’s no faith there. The facts support it otherwise biologists would not consider it valid. They have no motive to support a theory that does not fit the facts. At the very least this is because they would keep finding their results contradictory and consequently their day-to-day jobs would be difficult and fruitless. This aside, the acclaim for bringing down a major theory would be enormous and very desirable.Anonymous Creationist wrote:The Missing Mechanism
Nevertheless, Hough reaffirms his faith that "evolution" MUST somehow have occurred, because the only alternatives are magic and divine creation, and he is not prepared to accept either of those. And so the search for a credible creative mechanism continues – and it seems unfortunate that some Christians, blinded by science, so kindly try to let evolutionists off the hook of their own error by suggesting that perhaps God did make it happen that way by a series of guided miracles, when the Bible and the facts of life on earth tell a different story.
Christians who would let scientists “off the hook” are merely searching for places to put God. Their motive is not altruistic or sympathetic but entirely based on fear.
Firstly, scientific debate is never embarrassing and it is certainly not undesirable. It is the cornerstone of science. If this current debate actually constituted a Khunian scientific crisis, it would actually be quite exciting. In fact, there hasn’t been a crisis in Evolutionary Theory in over a century. Secondly, the competing “theories” are not even mutually exclusive. It is very obvious that evolution proceeds at different “speeds” under differing circumstances. It is the extents to which these extremes occur that is under debate. Far from a crisis, whatever wishful thinking creationist would suggest. Even if it were so, this would merely be evidence of science doing what it does- self correcting.Anonymous Creationist wrote:The "Creeps" versus the "Jerks"
The embarrassing intellectual debacle of evolution is in fact well explained in the prestigious British news magazine the “Economist” (December 2004 issue, article "Repeat after me") which describes the two current and conflicting schools of thought. On the one side we have the "Creeps" who believe, like Darwin and Dawkins, that evolution must have taken place gradually and over vast ages of time in order to lend the process any shred of possibility -- and on the other side we have the "Jerks" , the "punctuated equilibrium" pundits who think that evolution must have taken place in jumps, in order to explain the absence of "intermediate” or “unfit” forms in the fossil record.
How are these for mechanisms:Anonymous Creationist wrote:Although both groups believe with absolute assurrance that evolution DID happen, they have no credible mechanism to explain HOW it could possibly have happened.
Natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow, Mendelian inheritance, epigenetic inheritance, paramutation, mutation, mitochondrial gene inheritance… all experimentally verified and thus credible. It can’t be helped if certain people are unable or unwilling to do the very basic research needed to understand these mechanisms. In the age of Wikipedia it’s actually inexcusable.
I refuted this bit when J_C quoted it. The analogy assumes that we can’t measure the mechanism of evolution. We can. No assumptions are being made as Evolution has been tested.Anonymous Creationist wrote:They simply assume that it happened – and un-informed lay people believe them! The situation is in fact much like that in the Hans Anderson fable of the king’s new clothes, which had inane courtiers praising and comparing the finery of a garments that did not actually exist.
The “intellectually honest Hough” (must we play such word games?) is stating the blindingly obvious. If life were not so complex we would hardly need a theoretical framework to explain its emergence and development. We’ve always known that genomes have a self-developing quality. This is not news.Anonymous Creationist wrote:The Self Developing Genome
The intellectually honest Hough therefore postulates the necessary existence of a "self developing genome" -- a complex controlling mechanism in cells that somehow orchestrates and regulates the DNA copying process in order to prevent "errors" and the creation of “unfit” forms that would then have to be weeded out by a process of natural selection. The genome, Hough predicts, is "likely to consist of a complex multi-hierarchal process which will astound us with its ingenuity"..
To get a fossil of a species, you need lots of individuals. Fossilisation is rarely successful. The fossil record is light on unfit mutants because they tend to die without becoming a large population. Despite this, there’s loads of them in the fossil record and, more importantly, currently alive. Pick a genetic disease. There’s your unfit organism. “As of 3.45pm today” the editor is ignoring or re-interpreting anything he’d rather not see. He has a motive to do so, since he’s afraid Biology is going to kill his God. I’d be much more worried about the Physicist to be honest, but I guess you have to start somewhere.Anonymous Creationist wrote:Again, he is trying to explain why the fossil record does not demonstrate the accidental existence of zillions of "unfit" organisms, the discovery of which Darwin said would be essential to the truth of his theory and that he predicted would very soon be found. (Editor's note: As of 3.45pm today they have still not been found!)
Also, to be pedantic, nobody has ever predicted a zillion anythings. A zillion is a non-specified value and would never be used in a scientific prediction.
Black and white thinking on Hough’s behalf belies a serious lack of understanding of both epigenetics and Mendelian inheritance. The processes aren’t mutually exclusive. Indeed epigenetic inheritance does not confer changes that persist and so can only explain a minority of inheritance effects. The notion that there is “purpose” behind epigenetics is wild speculation. How would Hough suppose we measure such purpose? Why, if there is purpose behind mutations, are the majority of them detrimental?Anonymous Creationist wrote:Meaningful Mutations
If Hough is correct, then it becomes clear that “mutations”, the sudden unexpected changes in organisms, which result in the famous four-leafed clover, for example, or Mendel’s smooth and wrinkly peas, are not due to accidental “DNA copying errors” as cells divide and multiply, as has long been accepted, but are purposefully generated by an astonishing meta mechanism – the “Self Developing Genome” -- which can actually respond to the needs and pressures of the organism's environment.
Panspermia, if it ever occurred, would not be in conflict with Darwinian evolution. It would mean that abiogenesis did not occur on Earth, but would force us to determine where it actually did occur. The most likely non-earth source of genetic material is another body within our solar system. As to whether such panspermia originated from another star system- fairly unlikely (it’s a long shot at a tiny target). Another galaxy, incredibly unlikely. A parallel universe, it is speculation as to whether those even exist. Editors note: this is not serious science at all and to suggest that it is can only be described as an outright lie. Folks.Anonymous Creationist wrote:But where does Derek think the first magical self developing genome came from? Since it must be far too complex to have possibly evolved on earth, he suggests that it must have arrived on a comet from a distant galaxy, or one of the infinite number of parallel universes envisioned by cosmologists! (Editor's note: Please do not laugh, folks. This is serious science, not your usual creationist nonsense!)
Gene switching is not news. Small population origin of species is part of evolution. Taking all of that and jumping to Noah’s ark is laughable.Anonymous Creationist wrote:Gene Switching
Astonishingly, however, the "Economist" article reports that just such an orchestrating, or "gene switching", mechanism has now been discovered in dogs -- and can explain how one ancient pair of dogs could have made possible all the breeds we now have. (Editor's note: Ancient Jewish tradition has it that Noah called them "Rover" and "Lassie".)
Even more than what? We already knew how complex life was… You want to insert “God did it” into the equation to simplify matters? ****ing hell.Anonymous Creationist wrote:The Technical Accuracy of Genesis
If God did indeed engineer such mechanisms into all "kinds" of organisms, as he clearly did, then evolutionists now have even more massive complexity to explain the origins of.
If this is a reference purely to paramutation, it’s not a new discovery. It’s been an established mechanism and part of Evolution since 1958. If this is a reference to Hough- there are no new discoveries in his work. He hasn’t done any experiments. He’s read a bunch of papers and joined the dots to show a picture of whatever he likes. Anyone who would take Hough’s book as evidence or research has no idea how science works. His book constitutes a hypothesis at best.Anonymous Creationist wrote:Meanwhile the new discovery serves to confirm the scientific accuracy of the Genesis account
Evolutionary theory would actually be disproven if we observed fruit flies becoming dogs over any time scale, especially over the period of decades. It’s too short a time period for the required number of changes. If though, you’d like to see evidence of actual speciation in the lab (using bacteria which have a quick generation time) check out:Anonymous Creationist wrote:-- namely that all the organisms we now know are simply breeding variations of the set of "kinds" of organisms that God originally created -- which is why dogs will continue to be dogs, and roses continue to be roses, no matter how exotic they become, and why endless breeding of fruit flies has produced only more fruit flies.
Lenski et al. (2008) PNAS USA Jun 10; volume 105, issue 23, pages 7899-906
I would also point out that demonstrating speciation (which has been done) is not needed for us to validate “macro-evolution” since we can easily see chance mutations shared between dissimilar species which could only have occurred due to common ancestry. Retroviral insertions are the classic example.
There’s no evidence to support Genesis, just tons and tons of evidence to refute it. This evidence comes with no motive. Nobody wants to kill God, an afterlife would be real nice thanks. It’s only the fear of the biblical literalist which produces motive to deny centuries of science in favour of a book that might have been written by anyone along with “science” that proceeds from a non-falsifiable hypothesis.Anonymous Creationist wrote:Micro and Macro Evolution
In summary, although variation within "kinds", sometimes called "micro-evolution", is a fact of life and has generated new varieties over the centuries, as Darwin observed and as is evidenced by every seed catalog and book on cattle breeding – "macro-evolution", the creation of new "kinds" of organisms has never taken place, and is simply wishful thinking on the part of those not willing to accept the simple truth of the Genesis account.
I’d also once again point out that there is no clear definition of “kinds” so the assertion that new kinds have never evolved is meaningless. I’d also re-iterate that we don’t need to demonstrate speciation in order to validate large scale evolution.
Whatever those books tell us, we have never measured the human spirit or anything resembling a soul. Thus the “fact that there is more to man and animals, than mere atoms and molecules” is unsupported a couple of thousand years of observations.Anonymous Creationist wrote:The Nature of Life
All of this discussion of the physical structure of organisms does of course ignore the fact that there is more to man and animals, than mere atoms and molecules -- and that there is more to intelligent life and consciousness than repetitive, self-sustaining chemical processes and organic electronic circuitry. Because, as the Bible tells us in both Old (Job 32:8, Ecclesiastes 12:7) and New (1 Corinthians 2:11) Testaments, there is a non-physical element in man, a human "spirit" that imparts intellect and which departs at death and returns to God who gave it -- and the inspired Solomon suggests that the situation may be just the same with animals (Ecclesiastes 3:21)..
There are many transitional forms present in the fossil record. Unstable phenotypes tend to exist in small populations and for short periods of time, so it’s hardly surprising that they tend to be more rare in the fossil record. Yet we still see them. Since entirely “unfit” organisms would not reproduce and thus exist for a few generations in a single location, we would be even less likely to see fossils of these. We can see them alive today though and the fossil record is constantly being filled in.Anonymous Creationist wrote:Extinct Forms and Fossils
Extinct and exotic organisms, not discussed above but evidenced in the fossil record, were always complete and fully functioning forms, not “unfit” rejects -- and their significance is discussed in the accompanying article on this web site, “Genesis, Genes & Geology”.
Debated to death here. Crap.Anonymous Creationist wrote:Some of those extinct organisms, such as the woolly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger, for example, were evidently variants on still-extant forms and lived in the pre-Flood world that lasted from Adam to Noah. Others, often exotic, grotesque and even gigantic, were simply part of the earth's flora and fauna in the mysterious and violent pre-Adamic world -- a totally separate creation that scientists and also the Bible account suggest was catastrophically destroyed, leaving the earth in the state of utter desolation described in the very first verses of Genesis.
Sure… the reason why so many people look at evolution and accept it is due to ignorance. Yet these same ignorant folks reject the wisdom that is creationism. It must be everybody else who is wrong, not the creationist. After all, a book says they’re right. A book written over the course of several thousands of years by an unknown number of authors with unknown motives and mental health states, working on lore passed down through written and oral traditions, translated through multiple languages and compiled selectively during the dark ages. That’s got to be more reliable than stuff you can set up and measure for yourself, hasn’t it?Anonymous Creationist wrote:Embarrassing Admissions
As a result of the shameful connivance of the mass media, the BBC in particular, and the peddling of evolutionary myth in every biology text book and encyclopedia, encouraged by the scientific ignorance and intellectual capitulation of too many religious leaders, evolutionists have understandably but erroneously assumed that the battle against the Bible and divine creation has finally been well and truly won.
Hough says this. Name someone credible. While we’re at this business, let’s remember that stuff that people say, or can be misquoted on is one thing. Their primary literature, the data, is entirely another. Let’s see if we can find an actual paper which implies that evolution is “unproven, simplistic nonsense”.Anonymous Creationist wrote:As a result, they have now began to crawl out of the trenches and foxholes, so to speak, to make an astonishing and embarrassing admission -- namely that the theory of evolution is unproven, simplistic nonsense.
I imagine you’d say that about anyone willing to speculate about God.Anonymous Creationist wrote:Derek Hough's book is a prime example, and should be required reading for every Christian person.
Denton… one-time Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute. An Intelligent Design proponent who now wants the Discovery Institute to remove his name from their website and stop quoting him.Anonymous Creationist wrote:Also recommended are: "Evolution: a Theory in Crisis", by Michael Denton…
This fellow appears to be a commentator on topics as wide-ranging as psychology, economics and biology… perhaps they’re a number of different Gordon Rattray Taylors. At any rate, Taylor’s core argument in this book was merely that he considered Natural Selection to be insufficient to explain the variety of life that exists. He maintains that a wider theory of life remains to elucidated. As Relativity expanded on Newton, he states. The creationists would of course neglect to note that this would leave Evolution intact in a wider context (and we fully expect this to occur some day), just as Newtonian gravity is still intact but to be regarded in a wider context.Anonymous Creationist wrote:and "The Great Evolution Mystery", by Gordon Rattray Taylor.
I rebutted this earlier. Essentially New Scientist hyped up a phenomenon which is not incompatible with Evolution and our creationist friend misunderstood it really badly.Anonymous Creationist wrote:ADDENDUM -- Mendel would turn in his grave . . . A recent article of the above title in the British "New Scientist" magazine (27 May 2006, page 16 ) says: "Another direct challenge has been posed to one of the cornerstones of biology, Mendel's laws of inheritance" -- which state that the characteristics of a particular offspring are dictated by dna, by the combination of dominant and recessive genes in the two parents.
However, in direct violation of Mendel's laws, researchers at a university in Nice, in France, have now discovered in breeding experiments involving mice with brown tails and spotted tails that even after several generations, puppy mice may be born with spotted tails when neither parent possesses the relevant genes. The researchers suggest that in addition to DNA, the action of which is govnerned by Mendel's laws, molecules of RNA may also be transferred in the reproductive process and be instrumental in passing on genetic information not present in the DNA in the genes, a kind of back-door delivery. How it does this is not known, but the team leader stated that "such oddities are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg".
Much like the myth that humans use only 10% of their brains, the notion of “junk DNA” is very badly misunderstood by most outside of biology and is quite behind the times. The function of non-function-coding DNA is not at all casually dismissed. It is in fact an active area of research. Some non-coding DNA is vitally structural, some is transcribed to form transposons, some was inserted at random by viruses but lost function over time. Work on the area has been published in Nature Genetics. Far from being dismissive, this is the mark of a “hot topic” in biology.Anonymous Creationist wrote:Meanwhile, the lay observer could be forgiven for assuming from the confident assertions of evolutionists of the likes of Richard Dawkins, who declare non-believers in the gospel of Darwin to be literally insane, that "Evolution" already has all the answers -- even claiming DNA to be the source of mind, personality, consciousness, emotion and instict. The simple fact is that, despite their wild speculations, science does not even understand the function of most of the DNA found in cells, casually dismissing it as so much genetic waste of "junk".
The quote above implies considerable arrogance on behalf of biologists, yet the author could not take the most basic step and determine whether biologists really do disregard “junk DNA”. They clearly don’t.0 -
AtomicHorror, does the job I'm far too lazy to do.
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Out of curiosity are there any full lectures by Ken Ham available for viewing on the web0
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http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ken+ham&search_type=&aq=0
Mostly seems to be people making fun of the goon.0 -
There aren't many. Judging by the negligible amount that's available on youtube, I'd imagine that Ham has a team of creobots crawling the site, issuing DMCA takedowns against anything that infringes on what he believes he holds copyright over. His jailed creationist colleague Kent Hovind certainly has done that.Out of curiosity are there any full lectures by Ken Ham available for viewing on the web
The unfortunate result being that only DMCA-compliant material is up on youtube, and all of that is pisstakes. As one sows, so shall one reap, I suppose.
BTW, the guy who dropped mission STS-124 onto the runway at KSC last week is named Ken Ham, but he's Ken the astronaut, not Ken the Beard. There must have been more than a few people surprised to hear who was driving the space shuttle at the time...
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.....I'm glad that you got all that off your chest.......but I must say that I would prefer to read something that is less labyrinthine and easier to understand.................like the writings of James Joyce!!!!:pac::):DAtomicHorror wrote: »This is a big one, sorry...
I've quoted various parts of the creationist article;
Wonderfully misleading. The book, cited as having been written by “confirmed evolutionist” Hough, is in fact a poorly-regarded attack on Darwinian evolution. You’d be hard-pressed to find many copies in print and Hough’s back catalogue, from which we assume his former status as a “confirmed evolutionist” must have been derived, cannot be found anywhere at all.
The quote by Darwin (with the part Creationists conveniently neglect to quote in bold), goes:
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.
Quoting out of context is just one of the cheap word games that critics of Evolution are forced to resort to. I guess if you can't refute the science, there's not much left for you.
And yet he brings musings about God into his book. Further, his grasp of epigentics (the core of his argument) is solid enough, but he makes leaps that he fails to support with any actual experimental evidence. This undermines the status of his ideas as “hypothesis” let alone theory. As to him having ever been a “true believer”, I see no evidence of that at all. Hough himself even goes so far as to state that he dreamt up his rebuttal of Darwinism in less than hour.
We’ve known about this level of complexity for decades. Regulatory genetics, post-transcriptional and translational mechanisms, organelle genetics, epigenetics… this is not new stuff to anyone other than a science undergraduate. There’s nothing in any of this that undermines evolution.
Find me a good mathematician or physicist who agrees with that unsourced assertion. Who was it that accused biologists of “sheer arrogance”? Not a physicist certainly. They understand that there is nothing random about their science or ours. Chaotic perhaps, complex certainly. Randomness is a myth.
An analogy from the School of J_C. The analogy is flawed in several ways:
1) “Scrap metal” implies randomness. Nucleotide combination and replication are not random.
2) The only law of physics acting in the analogy is gravity, brining our scrap metal back to earth. There’s no force present in the analogy that could ever cause interaction between the parts in the air or on the ground. In chemistry there are dozens of laws acting to make our nucleotides interact in an ordered fashion.
3) To imagine that scrap metal could turn into a complex machine in a single step (by chance over time) is not analogous to evolution at all. Evolution is an incremental process acting according to rules, not an instantaneous and random process.
The analogy is thus invalid. This is the poor quality of the author’s reasoning. The reason this man’s book is unpopular is because he would make himself the intellectual equal of Dawkins, when in fact a reasonably good science undergraduate could construct a logical rebuttal to his arguments.
Evolution is testable. There’s no faith there. The facts support it otherwise biologists would not consider it valid. They have no motive to support a theory that does not fit the facts. At the very least this is because they would keep finding their results contradictory and consequently their day-to-day jobs would be difficult and fruitless. This aside, the acclaim for bringing down a major theory would be enormous and very desirable.
Christians who would let scientists “off the hook” are merely searching for places to put God. Their motive is not altruistic or sympathetic but entirely based on fear.
Firstly, scientific debate is never embarrassing and it is certainly not undesirable. It is the cornerstone of science. If this current debate actually constituted a Khunian scientific crisis, it would actually be quite exciting. In fact, there hasn’t been a crisis in Evolutionary Theory in over a century. Secondly, the competing “theories” are not even mutually exclusive. It is very obvious that evolution proceeds at different “speeds” under differing circumstances. It is the extents to which these extremes occur that is under debate. Far from a crisis, whatever wishful thinking creationist would suggest. Even if it were so, this would merely be evidence of science doing what it does- self correcting.
How are these for mechanisms:
Natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow, Mendelian inheritance, epigenetic inheritance, paramutation, mutation, mitochondrial gene inheritance… all experimentally verified and thus credible. It can’t be helped if certain people are unable or unwilling to do the very basic research needed to understand these mechanisms. In the age of Wikipedia it’s actually inexcusable.
I refuted this bit when J_C quoted it. The analogy assumes that we can’t measure the mechanism of evolution. We can. No assumptions are being made as Evolution has been tested.
The “intellectually honest Hough” (must we play such word games?) is stating the blindingly obvious. If life were not so complex we would hardly need a theoretical framework to explain its emergence and development. We’ve always known that genomes have a self-developing quality. This is not news.
To get a fossil of a species, you need lots of individuals. Fossilisation is rarely successful. The fossil record is light on unfit mutants because they tend to die without becoming a large population. Despite this, there’s loads of them in the fossil record and, more importantly, currently alive. Pick a genetic disease. There’s your unfit organism. “As of 3.45pm today” the editor is ignoring or re-interpreting anything he’d rather not see. He has a motive to do so, since he’s afraid Biology is going to kill his God. I’d be much more worried about the Physicist to be honest, but I guess you have to start somewhere.
Also, to be pedantic, nobody has ever predicted a zillion anythings. A zillion is a non-specified value and would never be used in a scientific prediction.
Black and white thinking on Hough’s behalf belies a serious lack of understanding of both epigenetics and Mendelian inheritance. The processes aren’t mutually exclusive. Indeed epigenetic inheritance does not confer changes that persist and so can only explain a minority of inheritance effects. The notion that there is “purpose” behind epigenetics is wild speculation. How would Hough suppose we measure such purpose? Why, if there is purpose behind mutations, are the majority of them detrimental?
Panspermia, if it ever occurred, would not be in conflict with Darwinian evolution. It would mean that abiogenesis did not occur on Earth, but would force us to determine where it actually did occur. The most likely non-earth source of genetic material is another body within our solar system. As to whether such panspermia originated from another star system- fairly unlikely (it’s a long shot at a tiny target). Another galaxy, incredibly unlikely. A parallel universe, it is speculation as to whether those even exist. Editors note: this is not serious science at all and to suggest that it is can only be described as an outright lie. Folks.
Gene switching is not news. Small population origin of species is part of evolution. Taking all of that and jumping to Noah’s ark is laughable.
Even more than what? We already knew how complex life was… You want to insert “God did it” into the equation to simplify matters? ****ing hell.
If this is a reference purely to paramutation, it’s not a new discovery. It’s been an established mechanism and part of Evolution since 1958. If this is a reference to Hough- there are no new discoveries in his work. He hasn’t done any experiments. He’s read a bunch of papers and joined the dots to show a picture of whatever he likes. Anyone who would take Hough’s book as evidence or research has no idea how science works. His book constitutes a hypothesis at best.
Evolutionary theory would actually be disproven if we observed fruit flies becoming dogs over any time scale, especially over the period of decades. It’s too short a time period for the required number of changes. If though, you’d like to see evidence of actual speciation in the lab (using bacteria which have a quick generation time) check out:
Lenski et al. (2008) PNAS USA Jun 10; volume 105, issue 23, pages 7899-906
I would also point out that demonstrating speciation (which has been done) is not needed for us to validate “macro-evolution” since we can easily see chance mutations shared between dissimilar species which could only have occurred due to common ancestry. Retroviral insertions are the classic example.
There’s no evidence to support Genesis, just tons and tons of evidence to refute it. This evidence comes with no motive. Nobody wants to kill God, an afterlife would be real nice thanks. It’s only the fear of the biblical literalist which produces motive to deny centuries of science in favour of a book that might have been written by anyone along with “science” that proceeds from a non-falsifiable hypothesis.
I’d also once again point out that there is no clear definition of “kinds” so the assertion that new kinds have never evolved is meaningless. I’d also re-iterate that we don’t need to demonstrate speciation in order to validate large scale evolution.
Whatever those books tell us, we have never measured the human spirit or anything resembling a soul. Thus the “fact that there is more to man and animals, than mere atoms and molecules” is unsupported a couple of thousand years of observations.
There are many transitional forms present in the fossil record. Unstable phenotypes tend to exist in small populations and for short periods of time, so it’s hardly surprising that they tend to be more rare in the fossil record. Yet we still see them. Since entirely “unfit” organisms would not reproduce and thus exist for a few generations in a single location, we would be even less likely to see fossils of these. We can see them alive today though and the fossil record is constantly being filled in.
Debated to death here. Crap.
Sure… the reason why so many people look at evolution and accept it is due to ignorance. Yet these same ignorant folks reject the wisdom that is creationism. It must be everybody else who is wrong, not the creationist. After all, a book says they’re right. A book written over the course of several thousands of years by an unknown number of authors with unknown motives and mental health states, working on lore passed down through written and oral traditions, translated through multiple languages and compiled selectively during the dark ages. That’s got to be more reliable than stuff you can set up and measure for yourself, hasn’t it?
Hough says this. Name someone credible. While we’re at this business, let’s remember that stuff that people say, or can be misquoted on is one thing. Their primary literature, the data, is entirely another. Let’s see if we can find an actual paper which implies that evolution is “unproven, simplistic nonsense”.
I imagine you’d say that about anyone willing to speculate about God.
Denton… one-time Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute. An Intelligent Design proponent who now wants the Discovery Institute to remove his name from their website and stop quoting him.
This fellow appears to be a commentator on topics as wide-ranging as psychology, economics and biology… perhaps they’re a number of different Gordon Rattray Taylors. At any rate, Taylor’s core argument in this book was merely that he considered Natural Selection to be insufficient to explain the variety of life that exists. He maintains that a wider theory of life remains to elucidated. As Relativity expanded on Newton, he states. The creationists would of course neglect to note that this would leave Evolution intact in a wider context (and we fully expect this to occur some day), just as Newtonian gravity is still intact but to be regarded in a wider context.
I rebutted this earlier. Essentially New Scientists hyped up a phenomenon which is not incompatible with Evolution and our creationist friend misunderstood it really badly.
Much like the myth that humans use only 10% of their brains, the notion of “junk DNA” is very badly misunderstood by most outside of biology and is quite behind the times. The function of non-function-coding DNA is not at all casually dismissed. It is in fact an active area of research. Some non-coding DNA is vitally structural, some is transcribed to form transposons, some was inserted at random by viruses but lost function over time. Work on the area has been published in Nature Genetics. Far from being dismissive, this is the mark of a “hot topic” in biology.
The quote above implies considerable arrogance on behalf of biologists, yet the author could not take the most basic step and determine whether biologists really do disregard “junk DNA”. They clearly don’t.
.......now, let me think........ where did I leave that copy of Ulysses??????:D0 -
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.....I'm glad that you got all that off your chest.......but I must say that I would prefer to read something that is less labyrinthine and easier to understand.................
I was pretty clear. Not much jargon. If you require clarification I would be genuinely glad to explain further.0 -
......as 'pisstakes' go......it's hard to beat 'Goo to You via the Zoo Evolution'!!!!!!:eek::pac::):D
When you use that term, people don't understand what you mean. Perhaps you should actually say what you mean in exact language. When debating a topic in science, it helps to use scientific terminology where possible.0 -
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.......please don't.......my head is still 'spinning' after reading your previous reply!!!!:DAtomicHorror wrote: »I was pretty clear. Not much jargon. If you require clarification I would be genuinely glad to explain further.0 -
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......so you accept that 'Goo' (primordial cells) DIDN'T evolve into you (and other Humans) via the 'Zoo' (or intermediate life-forms).....progress at last!!!:eek::DOriginally Posted by J C
......as 'pisstakes' go......it's hard to beat 'Goo to You via the Zoo Evolution'!!!!!!
robindch
Indeed it is -- one wonders why you constantly obsess about such a weird, unscientific idea, as unsupported by evidence as your own equally strange beliefs are!0 -
[/B]......so you accept that 'Goo' (primordial cells) DIDN'T evolve into you (and other Humans) via the 'Zoo' (or intermediate life-forms).....progress at last!!!:eek::D
He very obviously didn't know what you meant- how could he? If you will insist on using a proprietary language to discuss science, people will misunderstand. Your intention, I assume.0 -
BTW, the guy who dropped mission STS-124 onto the runway at KSC last week is named Ken Ham, but he's Ken the astronaut, not Ken the Beard. There must have been more than a few people surprised to hear who was driving the space shuttle at the time...
Quite the mental image! Would you trust a man with such a tenuous grasp on science (and reality) to land your space-craft?0 -
.....I'm glad that you got all that off your chest.......but I must say that I would prefer to read something that is less labyrinthine and easier to understand.................like the writings of James Joyce!!!!:pac::):D
.......now, let me think........ where did I leave that copy of Ulysses??????:D
Pathetic. Go back to the hole you crawled from, you do not even have the decency to read what the man wrote, no wonder you're completely out of your depth, like all creation "scientists". Don't embarrass yourself further.0 -
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Nah. Think I'd prefer Ken the Beard to stay in orbit.AtomicHorror wrote: »Quite the mental image! Would you trust a man with such a tenuous grasp on science (and reality) to land your space-craft?0 -
Why is JC allowed to repeatedly use misleading terminolgy when it has been pointed out to him on numerous occasions that what he is doing is misleading?
MrP0 -
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Why is JC allowed to repeatedly use misleading terminolgy when it has been pointed out to him on numerous occasions that what he is doing is misleading?
MrP
For the same reason that we allow nonChristian posters to use misleading terminology on this board. You are free to challenge him and argue against his terminology, just as we are free to challenge and argue against those who use terminolgy such as 'homophobe' in a misleading way.0
This discussion has been closed.
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