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Still More Evidence for Evolution
Uche writes: "Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have uncovered the first genetic evidence that explains how large-scale alterations to body plans were accomplished during the early evolution of animals."
When we finaly evolve into apes. Hollywood doesn't lie, right?
Meanwhile, I'm feeling very special with the banner ad up the top asking me if Im selling to New Zealand. Geotargeting, eh? Though, one wonders, if given that I'm in NZ already, shouldn't I be seeing ads asking me if I'm selling somewhere else? ooooohhh screws with the mind... help....
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Evolution is accepted as fact by scientists and thinking people. It is no more or less a theory than physics or astronomy.
Many details of evolution are not understood, particularly the genetic mechanisms. This new discovery helps answer some of those questions, but it doesn't make evolution any more "real" than it already is. It's possible we haven't discovered every moon or even every planet in our solar system, but that doesn't mean the sun may actually revolve around the earth after all. We're pretty sure we haven't found all of the subatomic particles, and we still don't agree on what makes gravity, but physics is still secure and we don't expect the Red Sea to part on its own.
Accepting Creationism means tossing out all of established science. Creationism is the adversary of all science, not just Darwinian evolution.
You can view this logical fact with such a simple situation as cave fish. When eyesight does not help determine the survival of the animals the gene pool dilutes and eye sight has gotten worse and worse to the point where eyes themselves are hardly formed. Since we have discovered genetics there is really no logical arguement against it.
so does this mean the drug of the future is going to allow you to really fly by mutating the right genes and thus wings appear on your back? If so I'll volunteer for human trials.
The article only refers to the repressor genes, (i.e. 6 legs instead of 12). But the creature still has to go through the slow process of developing legs itself in order for the gene to have some effect. It also doesn't explain how appendages like for instance wings on that fruit fly came along. They would have to start somewhere and I can't see how wings could be useful in any but their mature form. They wouldn't be needed to slow an insects fall(as they are small enoguh not to be hurt) and I can't see a pair of fans growing the muscle control and speed necessary to flight. What steered the evolution of the fruit flies to lead them to functioning wings?
I stole this Sig
How, exactly, does a body mutant reproduce to perpetuate its unique body type?
and this one...
Doesn't it seem that these scientists are going out of their way to discredit creationists? While the real bible-toting creationists constantly rail about the godlessness of science and the inherent evil they see in the theory of evolution, I always thought that the scientific view would be to let the results of solid research speak for themselves. A thinking person would be able to decide for himself what to make of the whole debate. These two paragraphs really disturb me. They clearly desire not only to further the study of evolutionary processes, but also to denigrate those who hold onto the creationist point of view for dear life (no pun intended). This seems to be way too over the top for my liking. Is it necessary to drag down opposing viewpoints while making your own best case? It's almost as though they actually see the by-the-book creationists as a threat to their cherished beliefs. Certainly, creationists feel that way about what science has shown us since the days of Darwin. Is it necessary to stoop to the same tactics?
Thank you, O Lord, for creating these wonderful genes which allow macroevolution to take place.
The tendency to relocate the act of creation just before the first-proposed-event is called the doctrine of the God of the Gaps. Wherever we don't know something, some religious thinkers will stick God in as a place-keeper.
./configure --with-booklungs --with-antennae --no-fishybits \
--legs=6 --enable-experimental-wing-thingies
make critter
./critter -buz
Just happened like a week or two ago.
The creationists mostly lied the whole time.
1) They misaplied the 2nd law of thermodynamics very poorly by treating a race of species as a closed system. A few chemist and myself (a physics major) were very upset at these outright lies.
2) They denied the existence of any transitional fossils, and basically said that scientists were arranging bones and fossils how they wanted to see them.
3) They made false accusations against radioactive dating that haven't applied sense the birth of the field.
4) And finally they had to make up for logical loop holes by stating that early man was far superior to present man, and that in the begining all species existed at once, including the dinosaurs.
5) In all of the debate, they only had one true argument, and it was a bad argument at that. Guess what that argument was? "Positive" mutations haven't been reproduced or observed in the laboratory, therefore they do not exist, therefore evolution is false. And this article is about just that.
Before the debate, I thought it would be interesting to see why someone would believe in creation. Afterwards I was a bit depressed. I had no idea how far a person would go to decieve themself and perpetuate a lie. I felf very sorry for the young teenagers that came with their church group. They were being raised by liars.
One of the debaters agrugment was based on the very results that this article brings up. I know if he saw this now, it would not change his opinion one bit. He has no reason, he creates what ever psuedo reason needed to calm the conflict between his arogant soul and his mind. I bet he doesn't even know that his words are lies.
Any way, I thought I would share this with you people. I don't know what can be learned from this, but anyway, good luck in this sad and ignorant world maya.
The irreducible complexity issue has been addressed at length by Richard Dawkins and others. In fact the author the paper you linked to and one of his books are discussed by Dawkins.
The mousetrap analogy is false. Remove any part and the mousetrap ceases to function as a mousetrap. It does not cease to exist, though. A horse may be born with a pair of stubby wings. The horse can't fly, but as long as the wings don't lessen the horse's chances at survival and reproduction the wings don't do that horse any harm. Mutations and adaptations don't have to be advantageous; they can be neutral, or even disadvantageous if they are offset by other factors. The widespread survival of Americans with genetically-based diseases is an example of an ofsetting environmental factor.
Read some Richard Dawkins books for an expert's refutation of the irreducible complexity issue.
Many years in the future, a bunch of scientists manage to contact God.
"God," they go on to say, "we no longer need you. Anything you can do, we can do. We know now how everything works."
"Is that so?" God responds. "Well, in that case, how about a contest? You create a man, and I'll create a man and we'll see which turns out better."
"Agreed," the scientists repond.
"But," God continues, "you'll have to do it like I did and create a man from the dirt."
"Not a problem," the scientists chortle, knowing enough to be able to resequence basic elements into complex structures like DNA. So, in unison, the scientists get out their beakers, bend down, and scoop up some dirt.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," God says. "You get your own dirt."
My point? Evolution is a non issue. The real debate is in the origin of the framework by which everything evolves. Scientists playing with DNA can make pretty much anything happen. But they still can't create matter with a thought.
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Is this to counter that earlier posting of a story from the UK, that asked if humans stopped evolving? Nice timing, in any event.
Using DNA analysis, the same species of a shrimp in the Gulf and Pacific, seperated by Panama, are diverging. When one from the pacific and gulf are placed in proximity, they do not identify the other for mating, etc.
Another DYK tid-bit: somehow, in "human"-ancestors DNA, probably before reptiles, a simple, single cell organisms' DNA "mixed" w/ our ancestors, giving us an immune system. The scaling up, from one to multicellular organisms was one of the biggest leaps forward in evolution, the others are probably the formation of cells, sexual dimorphism and plant/animal cells differentiation. The truth is that there are no "lost links," as it would be virtually impossible to find the ancestry of every individual animal to every single ancestor (and "species"). 99.9999% of soft tissue does not end up in the La Brea Tar Pits or get preserved, we will have to live with some holes in genetic history, but we will get a clearer picture over time.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
For more info about the library head here: http://libraries.ucsd.edu/services/info/struct.htm l
Mr. Spleen
Behe refutes this refutation here.
Best,
-jimbo
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This particular problem has frequently been pointed out by creationists, but evolutionists have dismissed it as a non-issue. Until now. Now when they have found an answer to the problem, it suddenly makes sense to address the issue.
So a creationist claim that evolutionists cannot answer is irrelevant. A creationist claim that evolutionists can answer is relevant.
Interesting!
Now granted, we don't know the chain of mutations that may have led to this, but that's not the point, it's only to show that this isn't implausable, which is what Behe is trying to argue. He makes some interesting points, but I don't think he makes his case.
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Yep, it's pretty simple.
Just because something is irreducably complex *now* does not mean it was irreducably complex at the point at which the crucial beneficial change was made which allows the current behaviour.
Evolution can break down a complex interaction of simple non-necessary "actors" into a simpler interaction of necessary "actors", as easily as it can produce the extra "actors" in the first place.
Evolution is the process of harmonisation of an organism to its natural surroundings, with the additional constraint of fitness. "Fitness" can mean dumping things that aren't necessary because you can do the job easier another way now.
An example, your appendix: At one point it was presumably useful (perhaps even necessary). Now it's an atrophying organ with no discernable purpose, or side-effects when removed.
So, in summary, the author makes the assumption of linear progress in time. This is a false premise, and his argument therefore does not hold. To get from A to B, evolution (remember, this is random chance followed by population migration) could might easily go A,G,F,E,D,C,B.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The mousetrap analogy is false. Remove any part and the mousetrap ceases to function as a mousetrap. It does not cease to exist, though. A horse may be born with a pair of stubby wings. The horse can't fly, but as long as the wings don't lessen the horse's chances at survival and reproduction the wings don't do that horse any harm.
Behe's key point is that irreducible complexity can be found at the molecular level. Also, because the wings are not selected for, as they offer no advantage, natural selection can not work to change the wings into something useful.
The reason that Amercians with genetically-based diseases survive is due to human ingenuity and compassion, not evolution.
Best,
-jimbo
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Unfortunately, while the scientists presuppose the existence of matter in your argument, you presuppose the existence of a God that can create that matter. No one wins this argument, like any other of this sort.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I find it amusing why most scientists seem to always try and prove evolution, rather than looking for the truth and the bigger picture.
I mean, why doesnt anyone take any notice of what is written in the Bible, and the evidence for its scripture?
For example, Noahs ark has been found. It size and position is exactly as described in the bible. Nobody cares except those who are looking for truth.
A much more simple example would be the existance of Jesus Christ. Well, there is no doubt he existed, is there? History is based on his existance.
I refuse to believe that all life on earth was a fluke. Out of nowhere, pure chance, fluke. What rubbish.
If it was a fluke, Then why is it, that no man has ever shown how the first living thing on this earth, came to be? Should the depth of the makeup of even simple living things, be clue enough to conclude: Life was not a fluke. Life has order and design.
It's already happening!
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
It's a shame that UCSD found it necessary to refer to the creationist bugbear. Creationism has been dead and buried for well over a century except in the USA, where it lives on as a political movement impervious to scientific discussion. Scientists should deny it the courtesy of appearing to take it seriously.
I am a PhD student in zoology, and I have an article in press about the phylogeny of winged insects. There are several theories about how wings originated, and where each steps is useful.
It has been suggested that wings were solar panels, turned into gliders and later, wings.
A theory that i find more plausible is that wings developed from gills in aquatic insects, and the transitional stages were used for skimming the water surface. Such gills are found on living insects like mayfly larvae, and they already have all the musculation and control nerves in place.
It's been, what, a little over a week sice IDEA (the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Club, which is apparently "An Affiliated Chapter of the IDEA Center") brought some guy to UCSD to explain how evolution is wrong. sigh.
Yes I have heard this argument before, I believe this is similar to the improbability drive if I am not mistaken, any improbable event is probable correct?
P.S. not to say it doesn't happen but DNA has three methods to fix mutations, its really not as common as you are leading others to believe.
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance" -Confucius
Just skimming it, I have two points, one philosophical, one scientific:
- Behe points out that some of Darwin's arguments avoided the question of origins for some biological processes (e.g. eyesight) because the science of the time wasn't equipped to address them. I'd argue things aren't any different now. We're working on a vastly smaller scale and are much better informed, but the issues he tackles are on the far frontiers of structural biology and molecular evolution.
- There are cases where protein motor function exists without being used for real motion. Quite a few articles have been published on the "proton pump" ATPase. This is considered a classical example of a molecular motor, but its function is entirely different from dynein or myosin. This doesn't mean a thing, except that Behe is drawing too many conclusions with his argument of irreducible complexity; it seems very premature to say that the component proteins could not have arisen independently. There are many examples of large conformational changes in proteins, not necessarily having anything to do with locomotion on any scale.
Behe's work is interesting; he raises important questions that are well worth addressing. I think he's a little too eager to declare the issue resolved in favor of molecular design, though. I can't argue that evolution presents a well-formulated answer to these problems, but I don't see any reason why it can't or won't, eventually.
Behe's response to talk.origins is here.
Best,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
"Just because something is irreducably complex *now* does not mean it was irreducably complex at the point at which the crucial beneficial change was made which allows the current behaviour. " Last time I checked a dictionary, irreduceably means that it cannot be broken down into smaller parts, i.e. that if it is irreduceably complex now, it has always been irreduceably complex since the beginning of time.
rm -rf
Darwin's Black Box Review
h .htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/publish. html>). Specialists far more competent than me have analyzed the numerous and gross deficiencies in Dr. Behe's flatulent arguments in considerable technical detail (see especially ahref=http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/dave/Behe.htmlhttp://w ww.cbs.dtu.dk/dave/Behe.html>), so there would be an emptiness in my remarks if I were to try to emulate them. If I am to add anything to the discussion, I am forced to choose to look at the book from a different perspective. The perspective I shall adopt is that of misrepresentation, for that quality pervades this book at every level.
The book basis its premace on six fallacies:
Fallacy one: There is a boundary between the molecular world and other levels of biological organization.
Fallacy two: The current utility of a given feature (molecular or otherwise) explains "why" the feature originally evolved.
Fallacy three: Unless we can identify advantages for each imaginary gradual step leading to a contemporary bit of biochemistry, we cannot invoke a Darwinian explanation.
Fallacy four: Molecular evolution: "a lot of sequences, some math, and no answers."
Fallacy five: There is a conspiracy of silence among scientists concerning the failure of Darwinian explanation.
Fallacy six: The evolution of complexity is unaddressed and unexplained.
More: Darwin's Black Box Review
Behe's empty box
"Behe's colossal mistake is that, in rejecting these possibilities, he concludes that no Darwinian solution remains. But one does. It is this: An irreducibly complex system can be built gradually by adding parts that, while initially just advantageous, become-because of later changes-essential. The logic is very simple. Some part (A) initially does some job (and not very well, perhaps). Another part (B) later gets added because it helps A. This new part isn't essential, it merely improves things. But later on, A (or something else) may change in such a way that B now becomes indispensable. This process continues as further parts get folded into the system. And at the end of the day, many parts may all be required."
"The point is there's no guarantee that improvements will remain mere improvements. Indeed because later changes build on previous ones, there's every reason to think that earlier refinements might become necessary. The transformation of air bladders into lungs that allowed animals to breathe atmospheric oxygen was initially just advantageous: such beasts could explore open niches-like dry land-that were unavailable to their lung-less peers. But as evolution built on this adaptation (modifying limbs for walking, for instance), we grew thoroughly terrestrial and lungs, consequently, are no longer luxuries-they are essential. The punch-line is, I think, obvious: although this process is thoroughly Darwinian, we are often left with a system that is irreducibly complex. I'm afraid there's no room for compromise here: Behe's key claim that all the components of an irreducibly complex system 'have to be there from the beginning' is dead wrong."
[b]The Fallacy of Conclusion by Analogy[/b]
When it comes to explaining science to the public, analogies and metaphors are essential tools of the trade. We all can better understand something new and unusual, when it is compared to something we already know: a cell is like a factory, the eye is like a camera, an atom is like a billiard ball, a biochemical system is like a mouse trap. An A is like a B, means A shares some conceptual properties with B. It does not mean A has all the properties of B. It does not follow that what is true for B is therefore true for A. Analogies can be used to explain science, but analogies cannot be used to draw conclusions or falsify scientific theories. Yet Behe commits this fallacy throughout his book.
For example:
[ol][li]A mousetrap is "irreducibly complex" - it requires all of its parts to work properly.
[li]A mousetrap is a product of design.
[li]The bacterial flagellum is "irreducibly complex" - it requires all of its parts to work properly.
[li]Therefore the flagellum is like a mouse trap.
[li]Therefore the flagellum is a product of design.
More: Features: Behe's empty box
Publish or Perish
On page 179 of Darwin's Black Box Michael Behe claims:
"There has never been a meeting, or a book, or a paper on details of the evolution of complex biochemical systems."
He closes the chapter with this ludicrous statement:
"In effect, the theory of Darwinian molecular evolution has not published, and so it should perish"
(Did someone say publish or perish?: The Elusive Scientific Basis of Intelligent Design Theory)
To be honest, I suspect that the extent of detail Behe is demanding would require a combination cutting-edge biochemistry lab and a time machine. How else can science fully recover, for example, every single step in the evolution of the bacterial flagellum that took place billions of years ago?
More: Publish or Perish
Review of Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box (1998)
For those who have not already encountered this book or one of its numerous reviews, let me simply say that the author sets out to argue that the organic world is so complex, particularly at the level of molecular biology and biochemistry, that Darwinian evolution cannot possibly have led to it. As evolution cannot produce irreducibly complex systems (the blood-clotting process, for instance, the biochemist's analogue of the eye), they must be the outcome of the activities of an Intelligent Designer. In other words, the book is a tiresome reworking at the molecular level of the timeworn "design" argument.
So much has already been written by reviewers of this book that it seems unnecessary to add anything more (go to ahref=http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/publis
More: Review of Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box (1998)
Sig goes here
The referred article (link to a lecture to the CS Lewis society) claims to provide examples of structures so complex & singular in purpose as to have to have been intentionally designed, and not to have evolved. They must have all their component parts to function at all, and so could have no evolutionary predecessor.
Unfortunately, this article and its examples are inadequate. Just because you cannot imagine how something could have evolved, doesn't mean that it couldn't have done so.
The author of the referred article insists that we understand each part of the structures which he describes as irreducibly complex, but he also implicitly presumes that he completely understands their history, and that it's completely linear. In fact, his whole argument hinges on his understanding the entire history of these "irreducibly complex" structures. That actually begs the question. You can't presume history to prove that same history.
I'd like to use his own mousetrap example (of something that couldn't have evolved) to counter his point.
Imagine a springlike structure with a completely different function, perhaps a stiff spine for protection. Imagine then that there are circumstances where that structure catches slightly while under tension, but can be released with some force. Ever had a sticky accelerator pedal?
Once that catching proves evolutionarily useful, then it might eventually develops into a relatively sophisticated release mechanism.
The mousetrap would not have been only a mousetrap through all of its evolutionary history.
In fact, I suspect that there are multiple mousetrap like structures out there in the biological world.
In the game of Life, there are what is known as Garden of Eden patterns, because there is provably no way that these things could have developed from any predecesor structure based on the rules of the game. In real life, we don't know all the rules.
Oh, and: Fundmentalist materialist? Are you trying to be insulting by calling me a fundamentalist? I'm certainly foolish for indulging in a scientific argument with someone for whom religious tenets are postulated as facts.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
I think that would be two oxymorons in one paragraph. To you sir, I take my hat off.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
I read somewhere that they started out as radiators. Proto-insects, it is suggested, had raisable and lowerable fins on their backs as a way to control loss of excess heat. These evolved up to the size at which returns start to diminish (moving heat into the fin becomes too hard), which, by a fortunate coincidence, is just about big enough to be of some use in steering a descent when falling. This is valuable because it allows the proto-insect to (a) land the right way up and (b) pick a landing spot (on a leaf instead of the forest floor for instance). From there, they evolve to become bigger and more movable so as to steer better, then glide, then fly.
I haven't read "Darwin's Black Box", and I am a fan of both hideous complexity and Darwinism(I am a biologist after all ;-)
I highly recommend reading The Touchstone of Life as a fantastic explanation for the evolution of the cell from the ground up. In reality, a lot of it is about feedback, but read the book yourself. One of the best pieces of biological thought I've ever seen. It's not meant to be a refutation of Creationism as far as I can tell (the author is too well established to care about that) but rather, a genuine explanation as to how information grows to create life naturally.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I think he's a little too eager to declare the issue resolved in favor of molecular design, though. I can't argue that evolution presents a well-formulated answer to these problems, but I don't see any reason why it can't or won't, eventually.
That's pretty much the science version of "the check's in the mail", isn't it?
Behe answers your point thusly:
"I agree with the commonsense point that no one can predict the future of science. I strongly disagree with the contention that, because we can?t guarantee the success of intelligent design theory, it can be dismissed, or should not be pursued. If science operated in such a manner, no theory would ever be investigated, because no theory is guaranteed success forever. Indeed, if one ignores a hypothesis because it may one day be demonstrated to be incorrect, then one paradoxically takes unfalsifiability to be a necessary trait of a scientific theory. Although philosophers of science have debated whether falsifiability is a requirement of a scientific theory, no one to my knowledge has argued that unfalsifiability is a necessary mark."
(http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_philosophicalob je ctionsresponse.htm):
Best,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
The Science Against Evolution homepage:
http://www.ridgenet.net/~do_while/sage/
I'm embarassed to admit it, but they're from my hometown- Ridgecrest, CA. They're constantly advertising in our local papers, and it gets pretty annoying at times.
lol thanks I couldn't stop laughing out loud, that was great. :)
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance" -Confucius
PS, reread some of the other refutations, they make the point better than I did. But more importantly, where did I say that such a thing was common? And just because something is improbable doesn't mean it can't happen... In fact, I can point out all kinds of wildly improbable things that still happen every day. That's one of the problems of looking at evolution in a purely probalistic sense, sometimes the sheer numbers involved can easily overwhelm what would at first seem extremely unlikely.
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Then you are misunderstanding what I wrote. What you say is true of a single indivisible object, but last time I checked, even amoeba were made of several quarks.
The word "complex" in the phrase "irreducably complex" should serve to signify that this is a collective system, and therefore my analysis applies.
The concept is very simple: A->B can be gained via a roundabout route. Once there, the roundabout route may disappear because of lack of use, or we may not recognise it, or what started out as A and B are now C and D so we're looking for the wrong thing.
This is really rather easy stuff. I'm not the one placing arbitrary limits on evolution here...
Physicists get Hadrons!
All of them have been shown to readily ignore pieces evidence that directly contradict their arguments, or worse, their arguments are based on false assumptions (see some of the other threads going on about Behe already).
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
I don't pretend to understand this article, because my understanding of creationism and macro-evolution while better than most, is still inadequate.
Still, from what I could gather this still doesn't address some fundamental questions.
This deals with information already present. We are still lacking the fundamental information to make evolution credible - where did these genes that control all others like a master switch come from? This is working with information already present, which a creationist (I presume) would just argue were from the initial creation. Macro-evolution still needs to explain how these creatures came to this state.
Another problem is that when dealing with mutations we don't gain information, we only change.
All this article does is counter a small % of the arguments presented against evolution, while at the same time providing even more evidence of the intricacy and amazing design of the initial creation. This shouldn't, as far as I can tell, be trumpeted as such a breakthrough.
I would love someone to enlighten me if I have missed a major point.
This isn't true at all really. Granted, we might never have zapped an E.coli with enough UV light to make it grow arms, but we've certaintly gotten plenty of positive function out of mutations in labs.
For instance, there is a well known tool in microbiology known as the "Temperature-Sensitive Mutant". A good way to get one of these is to zap it with UV or some other mutagen to induce a random point mutation (change in one nucleotide). This could alter the gene product just enough to make it non-functional at high temperatures, making the organism more sensitive to the environment than it was in the wild type form. This new sensitivity is a gain in function for the organism. It might not be beneficial, but it is a demonstrable gain of ability for the organism.
Another example would be oncogenes, which aren't always active, but can be activated via mutations, causing cancer.
There's some foddder for your next debate. Remember, a positive gain in function may wind up killing the organism, which is one reason why evolution takes so long. But random mutations certaintly have been shown to have an affect beyond deletion of the gene.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Hold on, hold on.
That mousetrap *isn't* reliant on all the components. Someone could hold the hammer and spring back, wait for a mouse and then let go. Without the need for a holding bar or catch. (You could argue all the way back to just having a metal bar, but I can't be arsed)
That wouldn't work very well, as the mouse would tend to notice you sitting there. So, add a holding bar to hold the trap open. Perhaps even have a piece of string that you could pull from a distance. The mouse would sometimes knock the holding bar and cause the hammer to fall. Add the catch and you may get a better success rate, but only after a period of evolution would the catch be as efficient as the modern mousetrap is.
OK, so it seems pretty unlikely, but that's the whole thing about evolution - over a long enough period some weird things can happen. Random mutations happen all the time - ask your local antibiotics manufacturer - and history is *very* long.
Oh, unless you think that the world is only 6,000 years old. Which a quick analysis of Numbers would refute (try taking the ages of people when they begat their children and adding them up).
If you're going to try and argue science, then you'll need to come up with better examples. Argue faith as much as you like - I don't have a problem with that. But if you want to be taken seriously as a scientist you're going to have to try a darn sight harder.
How silly! "Open your minds" indeed...
Now, there's no way of telling if the happenings in the above rant is due to some 'divine' will. I am convinced that there are more mechanisms involved than we have been able to chart out. We may only have scratched the surface of what space/time/dimensions/energy/light/gravity etc. is all about. It may make perfect sense some time in the future, or it may not. A common thread in all civilisations from as far back as we know seem to be the need to explain the unexplicable by referring to some god-person or similar. It gives us the security that we need. The constructed idea-framework that religions provide gives many a peace of mind that I personally envy them sometimes. However, it seems very clear to me (as can be explained by the nature of the human mind) that it is just that - a constructed framework of ideas.
-Kris
Oh, I forgot to mention
Philip Johnson
Mark A. Ludwig
By the way, the Perloff Book is a bit less technical and will absolutely amaze you, guaranteed. You might want to start with it. Denton's book is a tougher read, but it is absolutely excellent.
I know I shouldn't have been so vulgar with my post, but I get sick and tired of the arrogant assholes who think that anyone who doesn't swallow evolution hook, line, and sinker must also believe the earth is flat.
And what really irks me is when they have the unmitigated gall to assert that evolution is as a much a scientific fact as gravity. As if I can make a fly mutate into an elephant as easily as I can drop an apple and watch it fall!
For all you folks who think that, you are WRONG, and your pathetic fools too. But don't take my word for it. READ A FEW BOOKS THAT DEMONSTRATE THE ABSURDITY OF PURELY NATURALIST EVOLUTION.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
No you didn't read my comment, if you even take into account a very unreasonable amount of mutation in a gene, the math still doesn't add up, to quote that some guy in the post below:
"we assume a human-chimpanzee primate generation time of 15 years, and take the standard mutation rate of 1 mutation per 109 bp, then how many years ago did humans and chimps diverge? If we ridiculously assume that every mutation gets fixed into the resulting population, and no mutations are selected out, then humans and chimps diverged about 300 million years ago"
this is not a resonable number by any account and thats assuming 1 mutation per 109 base pairs which is ridiculous. I suggest you reread a basic biology book about genetic expression.
as for your other comment hence mine about the improbability drive, i.e. hitchikers guide, which was my point that unless you assume the improbable is probable you are incorrect.
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance" -Confucius
Statements like, "Evolution is accepted as fact by scientists and thinking people. It is no more or less a theory than physics or astronomy."
What would you have said when all thinking ppl, said that the earth was flat?
Just because something is supported by the majority does NOT make it fact. Understand this and you'll have a crack at making some real discoveries.
"It's possible we haven't discovered every moon or even every planet in our solar system, but that doesn't mean the sun may actually revolve around the earth after all."
True but the earth revolving around the sun has nothing
to do with your beliefs.
"Creationists (usually) base their conclusion on a religious, rather than scientific conclusion."
Well, the article based its theory on evolution in an
effort to explain macroevolution. So what's your point?
"They misaplied the 2nd law of thermodynamics very poorly by treating a race of species as a closed system. A few chemist and myself (a physics major) were very upset at these outright lies"
Umm..whether or not this is true. William Thomson was the a founding father of thermodynamic and he was a Creationist/Christian. He also created the Kelvin scale for absolute temparatures amongst some other electrical scales and the modern view of energy. His full name was Lord Kelvin William Thomson. He was wrong about some things but who isn't?
"Accepting Creationism means tossing out all of established science. Creationism is the adversary of all science, not just Darwinian evolution."
Why?
As I stated above Kelvin Thomson was a Creationist. As was, James Clerk Maxwell who was the father of modern physics, Edward William Morley who measured the speed of light, Georges Lemaitre who showed that the universe was expanding. This is only a few that I know of. So throw them out and live in the Dark Ages.
Please think. I'm not saying that you should believe this or that but not to just believe what "authorities" say.
Those are the sort of ppl that look like fools in half a century. Everything that is stated as fact does not necessarly hold up against time.
Interesting find, but I'll want more then this evidence alone.
Also the arguments agains macro-evolution like they are made in this article where never really considered or even noted as serious, and now they have some minor evidence that they think can break the argument it's taken seriously?
As it stands right now, macro-evolution is still a dogma.You're free to believe it, but is't not science! The scientific answer is: We don't know!
What I cannot create, I do not understand
And what really irks me is when they have the unmitigated gall to assert that evolution is as a much a scientific fact as gravity. As if I can make a fly mutate into an elephant as easily as I can drop an apple and watch it fall!
So you're saying that because the theory of evolution postulates the common descent of elephants and flies from an ancestor that lived many hundreds of millions of years ago, you should be able to do the same feat as easily as dropping an apple? The theory of evolution doesn't say that you or I or anyone can quickly change an animal's genome in any kind of reasonable way. Quite the opposite, evolutionary theory postulates that the way that nature has developed complex organisms is through an ancient interplay between the chain of organisms and the environment, each changing and shaping the other.
We can, however, track mutations over time in the genetic makeup of all kinds of organisms, and we can do computer simulations of mutation and selection that demonstrate the principle. If you can demonstrate the theory of evolution on a computer and you can demonstrate the theory of gravitational attraction through a mathematical simulation, perhaps they are not so different as you think?
For all you folks who think that, you are WRONG, and your pathetic fools too. But don't take my word for it. READ A FEW BOOKS THAT DEMONSTRATE THE ABSURDITY OF PURELY NATURALIST EVOLUTION.
The thing is, I have read a whole bunch that try to demonstrate that, and I've not yet found one that was at all convincing. If you know of a book that demonstrates the absurdity of naturalistic evolution, by all means do share.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
As has been brought up elsewhere in this thread, Homo sapiens out-competed all other hominids on the playing field, and I suspect this is due in no small part to our ingenuity and compassion. However, when we Americans finally do die, 75% of the time it's either caused or largely promoted by a genetic problem. Much like the cave fish with vestigial eyes, though, if perfectly-functioning islets of Langerhans don't figure that prominently in one's relative reproductive success, glitches that prevent them from working properly will be propagated.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
So what about the garden of Eden then? After all, that's pinpointed too (See Gen2.10-14) very specifically, but there's no garden and no angel with a flaming sword there.
And how about any record of the Israelites as slaves in Egypt? The only one we've got is a mention of Israel on a stele talking about them after they had formed their nation. No mention of plagues or mass exodus to the wilderness, and certainly no mention of an army drowning in a parted Sea.
Well, Roman records have no mention of this man, nor do Jewish records outside of the Bible itself, so I suppose there is some doubt that he did exist. I'm willing to take it as a fact that he did exist though, but even then, how accurate is what we have? He says many times that the disciples will see the Kingdom of God come, and that he is the messiah. Of course, in Matthew he also rides in to Jerusalem on both a donkey and a colt at the same time (now that takes talent!) in order to fulfill the author's interpretation of Isaiah. None of the gospel texts were written until well after his death, and they all seem to stem from another source (known as "Q") that is lost to us.
And, most importantly, like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament does not seem to be written with historical accuracy in mind, but rather a thematic goal to impart to the audience. So asking about Jesus' existence is almost a silly thing, because what matters is whether or not the theme is correct, which is very much open to interpretation. Same goes for the Hebrew Bible (although that one seems to have been fulfilled with the establishment of Israel).
You are welcome to believe what you will, as am I, but if you are so concerned about looking for the truth of life, I wouldn't recommend closing your mind to things like scientific evidence. Presuppositions (including the existence of God) really get you nowhere. In addition, learn about the historical and political contexts in which the scriptures that you cite were written. They may give you some new perspectives on the texts themselves.
Well, we haven't shown how life itself came to be because it's kind of difficult. Try it and you'll see. But we've made some incredible progress there, if you'd look at the literature you might be surprised. The depth of makeup does not really tell us anything because just about any natural system is complex. It's the designed ones that are generally simple. Plus, both UNIX and life itself teach us that you can get an enormous degree of complexity from relatively simple systems interacting.
Overall, you are correct in saying that life has order. It has to, otherwise it wouldn't work. Design though, is another matter. A mountain or river doesn't really have any design (you might say it does, but not in the way that life might) but it still functions and has order. A river allows water to flow to a given point (order) and a mountain blocks movement across certain vectors (also order).
None of this denies the existence of a God at all though. Darwin himself believed in God. A scientist is trying to find out about the mechanisms of the world, not necessarily what put them there.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I think you're missing the point. This sort of thing isn't really taking a stand on the issue you're talking about, although we all tend to jump right to that anyway. Like you said, it can't be proven (or at least, we have absolutely no conception as to how to prove it right now) but what they are finding is the mechanism by which these things happen.
Before you discount the importance of this in the face of "God/No God", think of this: where would we be if Newton hadn't told us that, yes, the universe does have rules. Pasteur told us that, yes, there is something tangible (not just "sin") that causes disease. It might not directly be addressing your fundamental question, but it is an important thing to answer for both sides of the debate, as well as anyone in the middle or way out in left field. If you're looking to understand God or the Universe or something else entirely, discoveries like these help to realign your perceptions about how the world works in very jarring and enlightening ways. You don't have to go around believing you got the plague because you were a bad person, even though you thought you did everything right. You don't have to believe that there was a storm because you were destined to wind up at the bottom of the ocean for that affair you had. You can believe these things if you want to, but you gain the freedom and knowledge to make a more informed decision than our ancestors were able to make.
That, in my opinion, is the ultimate form of progress.
This does not really impact the fundamental question that you're addressing at all, nor does it take away from the beauty of the world around us. Indeed, I think things like this only serve to enrich both, and I find it sad that most people use these sorts of findings just to deconstruct the world for science or God.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Currently, increasing resistance means that regimens of up to four drugs are needed for several months to cure tuberculosis, mainly due to the decades of antibiotic misuse (eg, all the doctors prescribing them for colds), and the frequent treatment failures due to fact that people who get TB tend to be, well, not the most cooperative of patients...
You'll find some of these peoples writings by searching for 'evolution' on this site:
http://www.khouse.org/
I'm afraid that their simplistic and biased arguments aren't really worth the effort reading.
Okay, but he's arguing in that link you gave before that the "irreducible complexity" of molecular motors negates evolution and proves intelligent design. That's my objection. If he were instead to say that "current knowledge of molecular evolution does not explain the existence of these structures", I'd agree. He's taking the stand that the debate is over, when in fact our knowledge of the subject isn't necessarily any less primitive than Darwin's knowledge of vision.
By the way, how does one investigate intelligent design theory? You thinking about something like in "Contact" (not biology, but same idea)?
Why don't people have the common sense enough to realize that the actions of God as perceived by something as simple as a human would appear to be the very thing we've named 'evolution?'
Also, why are so many religions so Earth Racist? Life didn't begin here. It began billions of years before our galaxy even existed.
Now, on the other hand, Human consciousness seems to be something special and I hope that it is.
It'sa shame we don't spend more time trying to figure out what we are and where we are going on a mental and spritual level instead of spending time thinking about what we are going to wear when we go to the mall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
a) A part or particle considered to be an irreducible constituent of a specified system.
b) The irreducible, indestructible material unit postulated by ancient atomism.
Oh, look, atoms once were irreducible. Guess they must still be.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
All the evidence I need is right here. My cow-orker on the next desk is running it right now under FreeBSD on his Sony Vaio!
"What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death."
Well, I really need to get some sleep, but I'll take a quick try at getting through to you.
Let's consider the protein synthetic apparatus. This is the mechanism by which protein is produced. Guess what it's made of.
Protein. That's right, the mechanism that produces protein in your hoodwinked brain is itself made of protein. Why is that significant? Well, ask yourself the question, how did the protein in the mechanism that produces protein get produced? Can you see where I am headed?
Oh, I know you've got it all figured out, but I can assure you that you are completely wrong. Proteins are not just random slime. They are extremely precise arrangements of hundreds of amino acids. If even one of them is out of order, you often get a disease, such as sickle-cell anemia.
So the mechanism that produces protein is an extremely precise machine that is itself made of protein. How did it originate? What produced the protein in the protein-synthetic apparatus? Did it originate with "random" proteins. Ya, I know you've got it all figured out in your little mind, but the problem is that your "random" proteins do not exist. Oh, I know, they once existed, but now they are all gone. Isn't that too bad. The story always seems to be the same, doesn't it?
I can just imagine an evolutionist as a prosecutor in a murder case. We have no evidence for murder and we haven't found the murder weapon, but we know it exists because it was used to murder the victim. Therefore let's just assume that we have it in front of us. OK, now we have the evidence we need to convict. Sounds convincing to me!
Michael Denton's explains this all brilliantly in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Read it extremely carefully THREE TIMES and if you are lucky you will be jolted out of your ignorance.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
I studied a biology degree. There were three creationists on my course. The university had to accept them onto the course, so as not to be accused of religous bias. They were awarded degrees as well, although the examiners had to give their coursework and exam papers special treatment to take into account their beliefs.
Personally, I think creationists should simply be banned from studying any biological science at degree or higher level. This may seem a bit extreme, but to allow a creationist to study a biology degree is like allowing someone who doesn't believe 1+1=2 to study a mathematics degree.
I just wanted to provide a link to the graphic used to illustrate what these scientists claim to have discovered.
. jp g
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/graphics/images/mchox2
Do they purport that this genetic switch creates the numerous organs required to allow flight, including a complete set of wings, as well as creating the numerous changes in the brain to allow flight to be controlled? Does it create the numerous changes to the articulation of nearly every visible limb on the illustrated insect's body? If not, isn't this illustration sophism at it's very worst?
Hey slashdotters! Try looking at this article half as critically as you would a press release from Microsoft.
... so that we can give our kids the needed tools to spot, analyze, and tear apart ALL intellectual fraud and pseudoscience.
:-)
Along those same lines, I would expect to teach:
o) geocentricism, "the moon landings hoax/nasa big lie", "mars face", etc. in astronomy
o) flat earth in geography
o) "free energy", "100mpg carburetor" in physics
o) "breast enlargement pills","penis enlargement pills" in sex ed
o) all the current all-natural/herbal/psychic/magical/religious "cures" in the "health food"/"alternative medicine"/"complimentary medicine" industry.
etc etc etc.
Most of the effort in current teaching methods seems to be emphasis on teaching existing theories, and little to no effort is given on how to dissect and examine "alternative" claims for validity.
That is the whole point, science is about what finding your own model of reality and checking it against reality. In fact that is kind of an evolution to let go of idear that do not match reality and accept with out bias reality as it is.
Don't be a fundamentalist or an extremist,
"You will know reality and it will set you free [from dogma]!"
What I cannot create, I do not understand
You actually sound like a thinker, I find that cool. You might enjoy this link, it has quite an interesting argument Re: whether or not there ever was a historical Jesus behind the gospel stories.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I'd present a historical argument against this, if science is still working on the real one.
A few hundred years ago, God was creating organisms. Then, through the magic of vivisection (ugh), we started to understand conception and development and the scientific explanation of how a organism comes to be. So God made the jump to creating species, and Creationism has been in retreat ever since. Did God hand-make species? No, that's natural selection. Species types? Dig some more through the fossil record... and that's still natural selection. Hmm, so what about natural selection itself? Inheritable characterists, surely such a transfer of essence bears the mark of the divine? No again, genetics turns out to be a relatively straightforward molecular process. Ah hah, molecules! God created the complex molecules! And if the response to that is "We'll get back to you, give us a few decades.", well so?
They will get back to you, eventually. And the Creationists, if they wish, can move the bar again. God can keep getting smaller and smaller, that's in His nature, and there will always be a scientific frontier, that's its nature. You can point to it and say "God is there!", and no one will be able to say otherwise. For a few years anyway, until it ceases to be the frontier.
Creationism will never be fully disproven, but how many times does the same basic theory have to be debunked and rewritten before you get the idea?
About that "irreducibly complex" moustrap...
:)
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
A more closed mind I may never meet.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
At no point did the majority think the earth was flat. The flat earth theory comes from arguments between creationists and darwinists at the start of the battle. The creationists used fossils to claim evidence for a great flood and said these were the animals that were not on the ark. The darwinists pointed out that they had died for other reasons and said the people were as stupid as people who believed in a flat earth. Even in the middle ages sailers and fishermen often sailed beond the horizen and never fell off the edge. The flat earth theyory was never widly held or accepted as fact at any point in history.
evolution is accepted as fact because it works it explains what exists and doesnt. The amount of evidence for it is huge. It is fact in the same way the f=ma is fact or einstines theory of gravity is fact. They have been tested and shown to work.
> Last time I checked a dictionary, irreduceably means that it cannot be broken down into smaller parts, i.e. that if it is irreduceably complex now, it has always been irreduceably complex since the beginning of time.
You have fallen for Behe's trick. He gives a precise meaning to "irreducible complexity", but he gives it a name that will lead the casual reader to think it means something other than what his definition says. (I suspect that this is deliberate deceit on his part, though of course I can't prove it.)
His actual definition is "if you remove a part it quits working properly". It does not follow from that definition that something that is IC has been IC since the beginning of time. Next time you're in a building with stone archways you might want to ask yourself whether they meet Behe's definition of IC, and then ask yourself how they were built.
The whole "intelligent design" form of creationism is just a collection of smoke and mirrors designed to mislead the unwary.
And it's targeted at the unwary rather than at critical thinkers, because it's part of Johnson's "wedge strategy" for sneaking creationism into the public education system in the USA. That requires a political win, not a scientific win. And that's fortunate for them, because they aren't doing any science -- they're just going through the motions in hopes of fooling the masses and the courts.
People who want to know what's going on with Behe, Johnson, irreducible complexity, intelligent design, and the wedge, and all that stuff, should visit the talk.origins archive and browse the FAQs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is nothing more than spin doctoring. What Behe hopes his audience doesn't know is that real science starts with the evidence and builds a theory to explain it; he, OTOH, has started with his 'theory' and is now fishing around for evidence to support it. (He has offered a few catches, but they have all been refuted.)Thou quotest Behe thusly:
I agree that any scientific result is subject to being discarded if new evidence conflicts with it. But that's not Behe's position at all: Behe doesn't have any scientific result to begin with, because scientific results are the results of evidence.
Behe just wants a blank check, "Accept my theory now, and I'll muster some evidence for it someday." Alas for him, no scientific theory has ever come about in the absence of evidence. He might just as well be arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It seems like opinion here at slashdot is quite prejudiced to evolution. The thing is, science is about thinking, it's not about believing about what some guy in a white coat says.
Lets distinguish between micro evolution and macro evolution. Micro evolution is a fact, experiments have demonstrated that if you take very small simple lifeforms, put them in two lakes, wait a bit and put them back together then they will not be able to breed. Through a few hundred generations of small mutations they've separated into two seperate species.
Now macro evolution is another thing. This conjecture claims that if you take a simple organism and wait a few hundred millions of years then you have some chance of getting a human being. I find this somewhat harder to believe. Let me insert a disclaimer at this point that I'm definitely not a creationist.
Let me illustrate my point. Computer scientists know that if you take a complicated system and insert a small alteration in one part of the code then that alteration is likely to affect other parts of the system (and introduce 100's of hard to track bugs). This is a small change done by a thinking programmer mind you, not a random change.
Now lets apply the theory of macro evolution to computer science. Lets take the code for Linux 0.93 as a starting point. Write a small piece of code that introduces random changes in the code.
If the code refuses to compile, undo the change and compile again. A compiled piece of code "survives" if it does better than the previous generation: ie. crashes less, runs faster etc. I know that this is a bit simplified but I think that the central argument is there, after a billion of such generations we would not have a great operating system. Simply said, evolution does not scale .
This is why I find it difficult to believe that at some stage we did not have a stomach, then one generation introduced a stomach cell (which is useless by itself) and after a million more generations we have arrived at a fully functional stomach. What about the 999,999 generations which had a nonworking stomach? The theory of evolution simply does not explain how components of complicated systems such as humans were created.
Why do most people here think that evolution is a shut case? I really don't think that matters are so simple.
And just as a parting shot, there's always the old "where are the in-between animals?" question which this article carefully ignores.
Large mutations in a species would probably make the animal VERY vulnerable (ie. loosing limbs). I'm thinking they would have to mutate multiple times in only several generations. The likelyhood of us finding 3-4 animal fossils out of the billions of "normal" fossils isn't probable. So we havn't...
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Michael Denton's explains this all brilliantly in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Read it extremely carefully THREE TIMES and if you are lucky you will be jolted out of your ignorance
Two thorough refutations of Denton's facts and methods are here and here.
Denton's flawed and dishonest methodology is exposed in this discussion of proteins:
At the molecular level, Denton discredits himself by quoting Emile Zuckerkandl to show that "it is now generally conceded by protein chemists that most functional proteins would be difficult to reach or interconvert through a series of successive individual amino acid mutations"(Denton, 1985, p. 320). Zuckerkandl's quote (Zuckerkandl, 1975, p. 21) seems quite damning to the casual reader, but when one reads the entire article, one finds out that Zuckerkandl largely contradicts Denton. By Zuckerkandl's analysis, most advanced functional proteins cannot interconvert directly, and cannot be reached by some saltational mechanisms, but that they certainly can each be reached through gradual evolution from a common ancestor.
If Denton is the best that creationist can produce, statements like "I can assure you that you are completely wrong" need a firmer foundation.
In all of the debate, they only had one true argument, and it was a bad argument at that. Guess what that argument was? "Positive" mutations haven't been reproduced or observed in the laboratory, therefore they do not exist, therefore evolution is false. And this article is about just that.
What about antibiotic resistant bacteria? A relatively quick case of evolution in action. Obviously not a positive mutation from our viewpoint - but a positive one from the organism's viewpoint.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Found an article that nicely describes antibiotic resistance and evolution:
From the FDA Web site The Rise of Antibiotic Resistant Infections:
The increased prevalence of antibiotic resistance is an outcome of evolution. Any population of organisms, bacteria included, naturally includes variants with unusual traits--in this case, the ability to withstand an antibiotic's attack on a microbe. When a person takes an antibiotic, the drug kills the defenseless bacteria, leaving behind--or "selecting," in biological terms--those that can resist it. These renegade bacteria then multiply, increasing their numbers a millionfold in a day, becoming the predominant microorganism.
[Insert pithy quote here]
So, uh, when and why did morality evolve? Surely it's better to screw over everyone else so I can win the Darwinian race? Why do people cooperate?
Just a little question.....
I'm European.... Not that I believe that you could realy call anyone really European.But we have had the Romans, the Spanish (cathaolic) inqusition, the Nazis we have had our share of extremist and selfrightious groups... However many of us are also childeren of the people who where the Romans, the Spanish (cathaolic) Inqusition, or the Nazis.
;->
It hard to be hardlined and see the world in black and white only if you have so much history to deal with.
Also things tent to move more slowly and being dutch with much more communication... Nothing is really deside anymore, we agree upon a common plan and that is it then. It's just to hard to agree on religious and political and other dogmatic idears so in most cases we make a exception for those.
This is however not really european, it's dutch. I mean in Greace and in France many religious groups are restricted just because the officials are of another group. That is just bad, and de european courts agree, but nothing much happens. This is a very sad time to be an European.
Americans seem to use to be irrational. The current president thinks very much in black and white. We on this side don't have the luxery of ignorence anymore, everything is and are shades of grey now.
My view is that microevolution is working.
Also: God created the universe and de planet earth a long long time ago, a really long time ago. Then God made the planet in 6 periodes like it is, and right now we are living in the 7th periode (I guess a creation day is a bit longer then 24hours)... and by the time the 7th day ends God will have restored the world to what would have been had Adam not sined. Humans will be perfect and life forver in peace and happyness... Just think of the progress that would be posible then!
Also I think that God created the species after their kind. However, Mozes defines a specie as follows: Two individuals are of the same kind/specie if and only if they share a common ancestor. Evolutionist do not see it that way
What I cannot create, I do not understand
never looked at DNA synthesis (or RNA transcription for that matter). There's also the argument that if some superbeing had put this all into place he wouldn't have fucked up so much and left a 10**5 chance of mutation. After all, he'd have to see his original creation as perfect right? Pitiful creationists, hate em.
On the other hand, I think a lot of evolutionists are neodarwinistic, they have this idea that everything happened via random mutations and natural selection, which is contrary to all the other processes of life. Where's the tight feedback loops? Where's the error correction? This is something truely worth criticising and the Gaia people do a good job claiming that co-operation and retro-viruses pay a much bigger part than most evolutionists make out.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Agreed, but the number of changes required to get from verion 1 to version 2 increases (I would speculate exponentially) with the complexity of the system.
Lets suppose that I would have a better chance of surviving with an eye at the back of my head. Such a mutation simply would not happen within one generation, it requires to many patches.
This leaves the fundemental problem of what happens to the generations in between for whom the changes are not beneficial. According to survival of the fittest, they do not survive. Then how do complicated changes happen?
A horse may be born with a pair of stubby wings. The horse can't fly, but as long as the wings don't lessen the horse's chances at survival and reproduction the wings don't do that horse any harm. Mutations and adaptations don't have to be advantageous; they can be neutral, or even disadvantageous if they are offset by other factors.
But a horse with little stubby wings would be at a disadvangage, it's that much more weight/muscle whatever that their body has to produce and carry around that doesn't do anything... It is my understanding that that is why humans, for example, don't have tails; even though it would slightly improve our balance, it's mostly just excess mass, and a tail-less human would be lighter and faster and need less food, and therefore more likely to survive.
--
Benjamin Coates
There isn't much successful reproduction in prison.
--
Benjamin Coates
Actually I won't speak for the theory known as creationism, but the general idea behind such thoughts.
I'm personally both an atheist and I view evolution as a well established fact. This new discovery does nothing for me, except fill out a few holes. It also does nothing for the genereal idea of "creationism", except it might discredit people foolishly trying to argue creationism through science or lack of evidence, when they should have gone the path below:
God could just have created the world like this. Look at it as a test. He could have created evolution, people and filled us up with memories, yesterday (or a minute ago), if there were such a being as God. I don't think anything ever can proove the non-existance of God. Of course prooving the existance, would require some seriously visible signs of Godly intervention, which hasn't happened yet.
As someone else has mentioned, science gives people a choice. We no longer have God as the only explanation for everything.
Perhaps you should open an introductory molecular biology textbook before making up an example like this?
http://www.donarmstrong.com
So explain Psychology, you conscious (if you have one), human compassion, why we can talk, why we have a great capability to learn and a drive to achieve...
But you say, oh apes can talk and can learn, and have compassion. And I say, you are correct, so can my dog. But neither has made any great advancements in scientific research lately, and my dog likes to go pee on my fence on regular basis.
In children, this attitude is cute and interesting. In philosophers, it's part of the trade. In adults making a reasoned argument, it's ingenuous and artificial.
Please snap out of it.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
OKay.
I can't breath underwater or fly. That means fish and birds are the result of some supreme spark plug changer?
I can't trail long bits of poo out of my ass as I swim about in a bowl placed on a television - dear god why am I so neglected!
These things came about because they gave those creatures a competitive advantage in changing climates. So they survived, shagged, had some babies that were like them. etc...
We got smart, elephants got big, mice got small, toads can sleep for months, sea monkeys can survive in packets of salt for YEARS, rabbits do it all the time, tutles live for centuries, spiders have eight eyes.
I seriously can't see where you get the idea that you need there to be some Human Centric All Powerful Dude out there somewhere to explain all that. Seriously!
OK, so there is a complex body plan that can be turned on by switching a gene.
Now, if ths body plan has been turned of for a long time. How did this plan evolve?
Think about it, when this plan is inactive there is no selective pressure on this plan at all! How come it still turns out to produce a fully functional body?
---------
I'm more confused than ever
I am not a biologist. I am a computer scientist. However, I can explain to a 10 year old why P=NP would mean the death of RSA.
I would like to have a laymans explanation of how complex systems can be brought about by small mutations? Especially since importing the idea into something a
a coder would understand simply would not work. Maybe my idea is too simple, if so why don't we get a biologist to tell us how macro evolution works, get a Beowulf cluster and make some cool complex software by starting with a "Hello World" program and introducing small random changes?
Personally I think the theory is okay but still needs to find a lot of answers to questions.
Okay a bug has an adaptable plan for growing a number of legs. Where did that plan come from?
Evolution by natural selection works by killing off segments of a population that are distinguished by genotype. Evolution by natural selection is no longer a significant factor in human evolution in the developed world because the vast majority of people who are born live to an age where they can reproduce and pass their genes to the next generation. Evolution by sexual selection is still a factor, but this is being mitigated by surgical and chemical enhancements (like breast implants and rogain). One can have sexual characteristics that did not come genetically.
Since evolution by natural selection and sexual selection are becoming less of a factor we will see the rise of a force not mentioned by Darwin -- Evolution by Self Selection. This means that it will be people who REALLY REALLY LOVE children will be the ones who reproduce the most. Along side the Self Selected population we will also have those who reproduce because they are too careless or lack the self control to use birth control. The big question is -- are these genetic traits that will be passed on to the next generation and alter the mental character of the human species?
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
I wonder if they can prove someday that in the presence of a scientific theory, emotionally oriented people evolve selective blindess/deafness.
Ha. You Heathens. Go to Hell.
Everybody knows that God created the world in six days. YHWH calls it "Release Candidate One". He stayed up for six nights with a pack of RedBull coding this pig and then released it for beta testing. On the seventh day, he let the project languish on sourceforge and hasn't touched it since.
Speaking as a European, it really amazes me to think that in the USA there are still people and even entire state institutions which do not accept the theory of Evolution. I just hope these religous nutters are very few and far bettween?
Hitler liked to drink Coffee! That's why people who drink coffee are evil dictators... Or something.
Man Needs God Like Birds Need Helicopters
So they've finally found the genetic equivalent of an #ifdef and other such instructions to the compiler, eh? Is anyone who knows anything about programming honestly surprised?
I still have three questions, though. First, is it possible for a Hox gene to suppress another Hox gene? Second, are the Hox genes only responsible for suppression, and if so, what genes, if any, are responsible for activation/enhancement? Third, is it possible that there is some mechanism whereby genes can "tell" if they're inbread, and if they are does this mechanism induce more rapid mutation (i.e. transcription errors) in either the initial cell divisions or in the reproductive cells during adult life? The first two seem more likely, the last one, not so much.
I wonder if they'll find the monkey-man gene? "God, schmod, I want my monkey-man!" --Bart Simpson
BlackGriffen
I'll believe in evolution when another animal besides man builds a CAT scan machine.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
My friends and I have been batting this one around, maybe you can help. It concerns how one gets from a primordial soup full of replicators (see 'The Selfish Gene', by Richard Dawkins) to something like a cell, way before anything like a regulator gene.
.5%, you go through each of the 62 characters / genes in an agent, roll the dice, and if it comes up .5% or less, you mutate that character.
Every environment can be thought of as presenting a utility function to the organisms that inhabit that environment. Dawkins gives an example of the following utility function:
Try to see if a population of organisms can "discover" the line of poetry "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper." You'll note that there are 29 possible choices for each letter (26 letters + commas + periods + spaces). And in the above string, there are a total of 62 characters. So, to present the power of evolutionary theory, Dawkins imagines a population of agents randomly initialized to 62 characters. One of these might be:
"jkdzcn43asdf lkjasdfhaokjshfla ksdhfoiuykjahs, asdasd. sdfsdf."
you can imagine that each agent reproduces unequally based upon how well it does given the utility function -- in this case, the utility function returns an integer from 0 to 62, where 0 indicates no letters match and 62 represents a perfect match for the entire sentence. Each generation is exposed to mutation in the Dawkins example, though one could easily add crossover (which implies sexual reproduction) and inversion. The code is roughly:
1) initialize X agents in a population to random strings of length 62
2) write a function where each agent reproduces unequally based upon how well it optimizes the utility function given above. This choice matters, but not a lot. For our purposes, imagine that every organism below some threshold X has a 10% chance per time period of dying outright. And every organism above this threshold has a 10% chance of replicating.
3) After step 2 (which represents one tick on the clock), expose each organism to genetic operators. Mutation is simple: pick a % chance Y (where Y is small; if it is too large, you lose information too quickly) for each character in an agent (or gene if you prefer) to mutate to a random character. Thus, if Y is equal to
4) repeat steps 2 and 3 until you see equilibration of your population.
After a bit, it should be obvious to you that most of your agents will approach the correct sentence, whatever their starting values. Further, not all of the organisms in a population will ever be at the "right" outcome, given mutation in step 3.
So what does this tell us? Simple math helps out. To optimize the utility function above is simple, and we know this because we can compute the number of steps it would take to optimize it. Couple of points:
1) the function Dawkins uses (outlined above) is separable. No character / gene depends upon any other character / gene to determine the utility of its expression. This is huge. Think about it until you get a smile on your face. For real organisms, this is NOT the case (i.e., genes are non-separable). This is why evaluating the results of the genome project is ugly. If we had, for example, one gene acting alone to determine intelligence, it would be easy to detect / modify. Sadly, multiple genes acting in concert determine intelligence, and modifying one gene in the set changes the value for the entire set.
2) The number of steps needed to optimize the above function is 29 * 62 = 1798, which is an extraordinarily TINY search space.
3) If the characters / genes were non-separable, as they are in real organisms, things are quite different. Worst case is completely non-separable -- i.e., every character depends upon the value of every other character for evaluation under the utility function. In this case, you have 29^62 (where the '^' represents the exponent function). Obviously, this is a freaking HUGE number. Even low levels of non-separability (e.g., pairs of genes that depend upon each other to produce a trait) generate huge search spaces.
The fraud of Dawkins is thus simple. He proposes a set of operators that
define his theory of evolution -- unequal reproduction, crossover, mutation,
and inversion, and illustrates their efficacy (i.e., the "success" of the
theory) on a simple toy problem. The ugliness, however, is that solving
separable problems, which is the class of utility functions Dawkins uses
to "test" his theory, is trivial. Everything / anything works well on them,
and there is no real way for any given theory to fail on this class of
utility functions. The other, more interesting class, which has the
property of being an analog to REAL ORGANISMS WITH REAL GENES is when the
utility functions are non-separable, and the theory / set of operators
Dawkins proposes has NO success searching the spaces induced by this type of
utility function.
It is as if I set up a craps game, you come to play, and the rules are, I
win all double sixes and you win everything else. You commence to roll
double sixes until I have all the money in the world. I assert that the
dice are not loaded.
The dice for complex life are loaded somehow, or we don't understand the
mechanisms of genetics. The existence of these regulator genes simply begs
the question.
None of this, of course, displaces evolution as the best fit for the
available evidence.
Karl
The second derivative of the space-luck curve is infinite at my nexus, at least on the pong axis.
What fascinated me the most about the article (I'm long past the evolution vs. creation argument, having endured a creationist biology/chemistry teacher in high school) was that it was funded by a group dedicated to finding out about limb deformities in children.
It makes me wonder if at some point we'll be able to grow new limbs for people who lose them or don't have them at birth. I remember some research long ago into the mechanisms by which frogs(?) grow new limbs after losing them, but I guess this discovery takes that research much further.
You can read the paper at http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/dynapage.taf?file=/n ature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/index.html (free registration required).
The work is significant because it describes how a specific set of relatively small number of changes in the genes of many-limbed arthopods produce the major changes in body design the result in the siz legged insects. Anyone familiar with genetics (and software) can theorize small changes in code can produce large changes in results; these folks have done the hard slogging to investigate a specific instance of it actually occurring.
BTW, I find the creationism/evolution flames are getting a little out of control. I'd be interested in hearing an opinion of the actual work from someone with some expertise.
Gentry's haloes are a good start; the absence of intermediate fossils launched Punctuated Equilibrium (which otherwise has no leg to stand on); simple maths shows that it's impossible anyway and the list of ``reasons to suggest it is incorrect'' rolls on towards the horizon.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Evolution is not a religion, evolution (as the process that originates new species by means of natural selection is popularly known) is a theory that can be studied, tested, analyzed, scrutinized and even opossed and that eventually, based in all the evidence we currently have, we can reasonably expect that is going to be to be probed to be a law of nature (once human history spans 5000000 years and if there are any living beens that had developed naturaly, surely we will be able to document those changes. Damn, I whish I would be alive to see the last idiotic creationist accept he is wrong).
For goodness sake, don't never ever again use the words "evolution" and "I believe" in the same sentence.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
So explain Psychology,
I see your point. God MUST have created us, because of Psychology!
you conscious (if you have one),
You either mean consciousness (self-awareness), which other animals have been shown to have; or conscience, (awareness of right vs. wrong), which is part of abstract reasoning which does indeed make humans unique. I'll give you that, even though some researchers believe otherwise. But your argument wasn't that humans were unique, was it?
human compassion
Define compassion. Some humans have it, some don't. Will humans ever be able to live more peacefully than, say, deer? I doubt it, but one can only hope.
why we can talk,
Hmm. This is one of the arguments used to bolster evolutionary theory.
why we have a great capability to learn and a drive to achieve...
Because it increased our chances of survival in ancient times?
But you say, oh apes can talk and can learn, and have compassion. And I say, you are correct, so can my dog. But neither has made any great advancements in scientific research lately
You mean like the research you are currently discounting out of hand?
and my dog likes to go pee on my fence on regular basis.
Um, my arguments end here.
-bp
bp
Speaking of large-scale changes in a species, has anyone read Darwin's Radio, by Greg Bear (ISBN:
0345435249)? The plot revolves around how such changes occurred (and are occurring) in our own
species. I quite enjoyed it.
- Brian.
"Dance like it hurts. Love like you need money. Work when people are watching." - Dogbert.
Interesting stuff, but doesn't "Hox" seem awfully close to "hoax"?
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
For being such an accepting crowd, you all sure have a great way of stereotyping a very large diverse group of people. Not only that, but Creationist are also the majority. (Creationist != Christian, there are many more religions which believe in creation.)
Any comment that starts off by saying "Ha, damn those creationist bastards, they're all stupid and don't believe in science.", makes you look about as intelligent as the cockroach in my bathroom.
Intelligent conversation and discussion can only occur when you throw away all your stereotypes before stepping up to the table. Some philosopher talked about this once, but basically, you are supposed to try your best to approach the situation without making any assumption about the person/people with whom are you discussing, how it will benefit you, etc. You go in and debate for the purpose of the issue.
Bah.
What?
hehe, that one was funny :-)
... and the world is 4000 years old.
Yes all what you believe is true.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
So they say they've found it and everyone accepts it as fact now. But I didn't see any listed evidence and no experiments proving this happens. Therefore it can't be reproduced and proven.
Was the article just too high level?
The best recent book I've come across on this is "Sudden origins: fossils, genes, and the emergence of species" by Jeffrey H. Schwartz, 1999 New York Wiley.
Mr. Schwartz does a good job of canvassing most of the current theories and takes a fairly comprehensive look at neoteny. My contention is geeks are the most infantile people on the planet. Ostensibly I need do no more than point to slashdotters and their posts. It follows geeks are at the forefront of evolution. I rest my beer case.
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
the early evolution of animals.
animals are the expressions of genes
gene's evolve, animals don't
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Note: IANA Creationist (I used to be, but I'm feeling much better now). I'm more of an origins agnostic; since it really doesn't make any difference what I believe happened back then, I see no need to believe any of it until someone can produce a live, unimpeachable witness. I'm not planning on holding my breath.
This answers my primary objection to evolutionary theory, which coincidentally happens to be the worst bit of sloppy thinking among evolutionists. "Survival of the Fittest", I think, is a marvelously succinct description of entropy acting on living creatures. Those best suited to resisting destruction in a given situation do so. The sloppy thinking comes from the fact that many evolutionist assume the evolutionary mechanism exists, without providing proof; that something is generating countless variations on the theme to continue to have the fittest survive and the not-so-fit weeded out. Minor genetic variations, even by selective breeding, hasn't been capable of jumping the species gap, which the theory of evolution states must have happened, not once or twice, but thousands of times. Until now, the best suggestion I've heard is the "infinite monkeys" theorem (i.e. "given enough time, anything can and will happen," a sloppy application of probability theory). This evidence clearly shows how one could go about jumping from species to species with minimal change and reasonable probability.
My only other objection is minor, but it should be considered: it takes two to tango for many species, so how do you get two or more critters with the same mutation in one place to breed with one another and start a new species? Since our current understanding of genetics indicates that one species cannot breed with another except in limited cases, this is the last question I think evolutionary theory needs to answer before it can truly be considered unassailable. Maybe there's a certain kind of radiation that only borks the Lox genes and maybe a few others, while leaving the rest alone. Maybe aliens did it. Maybe it's all a government conspiracy and the world only existed since last Thursday.
It don't matter to me, no matter what happened way back then, I'm still going to be late to work if I don't hurry. ^_^;;;
"few" == 100%, AFAIK
----
WWJD...For a Klondike Bar?
So to me (regardless of some people's debate ethics), creationism is more intellectually honest than evolutionism.
Kneht
(please note my use of "isms" to indicate general world-views, not specifics.)
"Are you on some kind of medication?"
"No"
"Well, you should be."
--Bean
for all the leg-suppressing genes to get there in the first place. It found a mechanism for one gene to suppress others (the leg-suppressing genes) which control body plan. When this one gene mutates, a gaggle of other genes activates, causing major evolutionary changes. This provides one step in the chain of things which must happen, but not all. A complete theory of speciation or macro-evolution will also provide a mechanism for:
a) ensuring that the mutated creature can reproduce, either through asexual or hermaphrodidic reproduction (most likely) or through an identical mutation in another member of the species of the opposite gender happening within the fertile lifetime of the first member, and in the same general location (Note that these can't be identical twins in a non-hermaphroditic species because you need opposite-gendered pairs to reproduce)
b) ensuring that many genes together would randomly mutate (the leg-suppressing ones), showing no evidence in the phenotype, only to be revealed at a later point in time by the single control gene's mutation.
These are not insurmountable barriers to the theory, afaik, but they must be at least addressed if you want to enter into a debate with anyone with critical thinking skills.
http://pythonisito.blogspot.com/
By 'irreducibly complex' I take it you mean (by analogy) 'given the completed building, it is hard
or impossible to deduce the scaffolding configurations and prototypes that existed during the design and building stages'
John_Chalisque
See, who says you can't find good science in the back of comic books!
Ah, the lowly Artemia; with what anticipation one awaited the arrival of those lovable Sea Monkeys. And now they are handmaids of science.
I always knew they'd be good for something.
The closer you are to the code, the happier you are. - Ancient Geek Proverb
I thought it was JHVH1. Praise Bob!
The whole "intelligent design" form of creationism is just a collection of smoke and mirrors designed to mislead the unwary.
Maybe. For the seriously skeptical, however, it's wise to keep the possibility that it's correct in mind, even if it's not your favorite belief (note the last word).
Creationism *isn't* a scientific theory, because it is irrefutable. There is no concievable observation that could contradict it, because the creationist could just say "It's important to God's plan that you observe that, so He put it there for you to observe". It is not even difficult to come up with a reason why it might be part of God's plan. One obvious one is that it's there because rational minds that choose not to have faith in God need some alternative explanation (else they couldn't choose disbelief). If that doesn't float your boat, we can always fall back on "God's mind and plans are beyond our comprehension."
Okay, so creationism isn't a scientific theory, no matter how much misguided people want to say it is. So what? It's a logically viable explanation (don't believe me? Just try to disprove it with logic). Occam's razor can't touch it either -- what could be simpler than one all-powerful force directing everything? An incredibly long chain of random events is more appealing to some people and less to others, but it's hard to argue that it's *simpler*.
The simple fact is, that science is a belief system just like any religion. In it's purest form, science requires that we only accept whatever can be known by logical deduction from independently repeatable observations. Religion takes a different approach, one that allows for knowledge to be received by revelation (which is also a sort of observation, but not necessarily independently repeatable). And whether or not you buy into revelation, it's pretty reasonable to think that there may be truths out there that cannot be determined through scientific methods.
Science is currently a very popular belief system, but that has obviously not always been the case, and not because people were stupid or uneducated. Many theologians both today and throughout history are/have been highly educated and very intelligent.
To summarize: It takes Faith to believe that science is the One, True Way to perceive Truth. I don't have that faith. I find science very useful, and accept that the oft-repeated observations are correct and the theories are sufficiently correct to be highly useful, but I also keep open the possibility that other truths exist which will never be found via scientific means. Where other ideas contradict observations, I discard the inconsistent ideas, but creationism, for example, can easily be construed in a way that does not conflict with observations.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
It's been abridged by so many people in so many eras so that it would suit their own designs...I mean, the King James version?? I think that if anyone will want to use the Bible for evidence, they need to get an un-abridged copy...i.e. the original...otherwise, it's all just heresay and conjecture.
This will get modded down as flamebait, but here goes...
http://www.drdino.com/cse.asp?pg=250k
The link above is to a standing offer (since 1990), anyone can present emperical evidence for the general theory of evolution and recveive 250,000 US dollars. I dare you to browse http://www.drdrino.com/ with an open mind and just think about it. Yes, I mean you.
Isn't it funny how that bible states that the earth is round? and this was written in the bible when the earth was still considered to be flat.
;)
;)
Could you cite the scriptures this is in? And in any case, what's your point? It's not as if people couldn't observe the world around them and draw their own conclusions about Nature. For example, you can see the tops of a ship's sails before you see the rest of the vessel. Gazing out to the sea, you can observe a slight curve to the horizon. I hope you aren't implying that the Bible predicted or introduced the idea of a spherical world. If anything, the Church flat-out rejected the idea of a spherical planet for hundreds of years.
People are so gullable these days. Because some scientist somehere says something, everyone believes it, without question. Especially when he says something that supports evolution.
I'd say something nasty about religion here, but I won't. Let's just say that I think faith requires more gullibility than scientific reasoning. However, I do agree that when a scientist publishes a study, it generally gets more attention than some random Joe publishing one on his own. Of course, that's because science is more empirical and objective, something I don't believe religion is associated with much.
How can you predict what happend some 12 billion years ago? The weather is bearly accurate to more than one day, and yet evolutionists claim they know what was in the earths atmosphere billions of years ago.
Through evidence left behind and through an understanding of how things work now. Are you saying that our estimates of the sun's age are wrong? That we can't date rock? We can, with an ever-increasing degree of accuracy, uncover more and more detail about the past. Predicting the future is also becoming more and more accurate. Your example of the weather is pointless, because weather is about as chaotic and unpredictable as you can get. You will notice, though, that our predictions are...for the most part...accurate to the point where we can plan our schedules out to a week. That is, unless you live in Texas.
People dont want to believe that there is a being somwhere in the heavens that is superior to them, a being that created them and the universe. This being is able to create the universe, and all that is in it, from giant starts, to microscopic life in six days.
Maybe some people can't fathom the notion that their religion may be wrong. Just a thought.
"All mankind is at the mercy of a handful of neurotics". - Norman Douglas
There's nothing oxymoronic about "belief in atheism". Atheism requires just as much belief as theism does. "Belief in agnosticism" is pretty close to being an oxymoron, but you could argue that "I believe that I don't know" is still non-paradoxical statement. In fact "I believe that I don't know" is probably the most skeptical position possible :)
One more nit: Technically, an oxymoron consists of just two words, so neither "science for creationism" nor "belief in atheism" are really oxymorons.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
o) all the current all-natural/herbal/psychic/magical/religious "cures" in the "health food"/"alternative medicine"/"complimentary medicine" industry.
Well, I'm sorry that you find "Health Food" so obnoxious...
I'm not a creationist, I have a Bachelors degree in Applied Physics, and a Masters Degree in software engineering. Just so that you don't think I'm an irrational sucker.
I'm from the UK, but I'm living in the US these days. When I moved here I was perfectly capable of drinking regular British milk. I didn't have any trouble with American milk either.
After about six months I could no longer drink American milk. Something in it makes me ill pretty quickly, I won't go into details. However, I can drink Organic American Milk without any problems.
If I wasn't a "Rational Scientific Type" I would assume that non-organic milk is bad and that organic milk is good. It's an easy assumpition to make. As it is, I am pretty certain that there is something in American milk, that isn't in British milk, and isn't in Organic milk. This makes me suspect that it's a hormone or additive that isn't allowed in the UK.
Now, tell me again that "Health Food" is bad. It may be that it is no better for you than non health food in most cases. But in some cases it is a "cure".
If you want proof of this, come around here with a pint of milk, a pint of organic milk, and enough money to compensate me for the incredible discomfort that you are about to put me through...
Z.
-- Under/Overrated is meta-moderation, and therefore is Redundant.
The same thing can be said for creationism. The same way that you refute the proof about evolution can be used to refute the proof of your religous beliefs. I can look at what you say is proof of creationsism and simply ignore it, just as you can look at proof of evolution and simply ignore it.
Both are built upon faith. They are just faith in diferent things. Although, I have to say that you are ignoring what it is to be a Christian, if that is your religion. Because, Christians follow the teachings of Christ.
Jesus, was known to consort with anyone and taught people to refrain from judging people. So, by judging the belief and people that have faith in evolution, you are going against the teachings of Jesus. You have no right to do that, you simply have no right to judge.
Only GOD could judge a person by their actions, you proclaiming otherwise puts you at odds with GOD. So, if you dislike the idea of evolution, simply do not believe in it. I am not judging you, simply stating the facts.
A real Chrisian would never judge a person, because that is what Jesus taught. I think he said something along the lines of, "Let he who has never sinned cast the first stone."
I am not a Christian, simply someone that my family is attempting to convert. I only know what information they feed me and that is one thing that they really stress to me.
--
.sig seperator
--
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
> Isn't it funny how that bible states that the earth is round? and this was written in the bible when the earth was still considered to be flat. Isn't that interesting? Think about it... Now, how on earth could that get into the bible? And it wasnt by pure chance, unlike the theory of evolution which depends puerly on chance.
There are a few possible answers to this. If I felt contrary, I could say that the "Earth=round" was inserted into the Bible after the fact. Maybe it was a lucky guess. Perhaps it really was divine inspiration. The point is that it's not compelling evidence that it's divine inspiration. Oh, and evolution doesn't rely solely on chance. That's an extreme oversimplification, usually only used when one is trying to "straw-man" the theory.
> People are so gullable these days. Because some scientist somehere says something, everyone believes it, without question.
No argument here, although I'd extend it to anyone with a real or perceived claim to authority or expertise.
> How can you predict what happend some 12 billion years ago? The weather is bearly accurate to more than one day, and yet evolutionists claim they know what was in the earths atmosphere billions of years ago.
You have a skewed idea of the definition of "predict" if you think one needs to predict the past. The reason the weather long ago is better known than the weather tomorrow is that the long ago has already happened. Scientists can tell what the Earth's climate was like long ago by seeing the evidence of its effects. When meteorologists predict the weather, they're merely taking what they have and extrapolating educated guesses.
> When Charles Darwin came up with the theory of Evolution, not only did the world not believe it, but neither did he. As i see it, the theory of evolution was made up to create a substitute belief to creation.
Whether he believed in it or not is irrelevant to whether it's consistent with the evidence. And, as I see it, it was put forward as a theory to explain biological diversity in the Galapagos Islands.
> People dont want to believe that there is a being somwhere in the heavens that is superior to them, a being that created them and the universe. This being is able to create the universe, and all that is in it, from giant starts, to microscopic life in six days.
Based on the fact that 95% of the world believes in said higher power, I'd say that people do want to believe in a higher power.
> People dont understand how this is possible, and so they create a theory, which allows them to deceive themselves into thinking that they are the superior being. They dont want to have to submit to the one and only true God, they want to do their own thing, which is evil.
Apologies, but this is just nonsense. Firstly, nobody who follows the theory of the origin of the species thinks they they are the controlling factor in that origin, so your claims they they're thinking they are the superior being is incorrect. Second, "the one and only true God" is not science, it's religion, so it can't be applied to the theory of origins in any meaningful way.
> I'm not providing much scientific evidence here for creation, but, any critical person, should be able to see that the theory of evolution is only a THEORY.
You seem to imply that because it's a theory, that it's necessarily wrong. The theory of relativity is also considered a theory, but it has stood up to much experimentation. "Theory" means "not yet proven" but should not be extrapolated to mean incorrect. It's more appropriate to say that theories are incomplete.
> How can we, who dont even understand life, who cant create life in a controlled enviroment, claim that life came about by chance?
There are two points here. First, nobody on Earth can explain why gravitation works. Nobody knows the reason why massive bodies attract one another. To say, however, that this means we can't discuss gravitation in a meaningful way is just silly. We discuss gravity by examining its effects on our universe. We discuss evolution the same way.
Second, I don't personally know anybody who claims that life "came about by chance", and this is the classic straw man argument about evolutionary theory. All this statement demonstrates is that you haven't actually read or studied the theory, because your statement demonstrates gross misunderstanding of the mechanisms of evolution. I won't go into the gory details unless you wish me to do so, but suffice it to say you're badly misinterpreting evolutionary theory, and it ruins your argument.
> With all of our intelligence, we have not been able to create life in a lab, and this is with inteligent input. There was no intelligent input in the theory of evolution. Just chance.
Refer to my statements above about incomplete understanding, and about the "evolution=chance" argument. I will add here that not being able to create life in a lab has no bearing to this discussion, because it assumes that because we haven't done it yet, we never will, and because we don't understand it now, we never can. A mere one hundred years ago, nobody could build a heavier-than-air flying machine, or a computer, or a television, or any of a thousand other things. We learn. It's what we do best.
Virg
Maybe God created a World that looks like the result of billions of years of evolution.
Or maybe God created a world that is the result of billions of years of evolution. I'm not particularly religious, but it has always amazed me that so many people apparently believe that a very old Earth/Universe and biological evolution somehow preclude the existence of a higher power. The last time I checked, biology (and the natural sciences in general) was in the business of answering the "how" questions. It makes no attempts to answer the "who" or "why" questions.
Certainly, if a person believes in an all-powerful God, then said person must (by definition) believe that said God would be capable of creating life by employing evolutionary processes. If you were an engineer charged with populating a planet, would you design a species, wipe the drawing board clean, and start from scratch to design another species that is 99% similar to the one you just got done with? I know I wouldn't, and I'm just a lowly code monkey.
I'm an apathetic agnostic, but as far as I can tell, this whole "evolution versus creation" debate is the biggest non-issue in recent history since, by and large, they are the same thing. Oh, I'm aware that there are problems with evolution if you are one of these Biblical literalists who believe that every last word of the Bible is 100% true and that the Universe is 6,000 years old. But I've always been under the impression that these folks constitute a small (but vocal) minority of American evangelicals. Certainly, the Christians that I talk to consider these folks to be a bit of an embarassment.
The "rift" between science and religion (to the extent that there is one) is largely a creation of militant fundamentalists and militant atheists taking pot-shots at each other from opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence. To the rest of us, there is a large middle ground that has more than enough room to hold us comfortably.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
evolution is accepted as fact because it works it explains what exists and doesnt. The amount of evidence for it is huge.
It's alright if this is your view, but I would bring to light several academicians and scientists whose own research would show that this simply is not true. While there is evidence supporting evolution, I would not categorize it as 'huge'. Indeed there are several 'huge' holes in the theory. Namely, an incomplete succession of fossil records between Neanderthal Man and Homo Sapiens; until now, a lack of macro evolutionary methods that fit with the theory; and the fact that there is no evidence for any macro-evolutionary changes in the past 150-200 years. While true that most scientists accept the theory of evolution to the point that it is a point of study in most high school biology classes, that does not make it fact. In my opinion, fact can only be established by a person who has all knowledge and the power to comprehend all things. Everything else is based on perspective and is therefore inherently flawed.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
"There's nothing oxymoronic about "belief in atheism". Atheism requires just as much belief as theism does."
Not that tired old piece of claptrap again. For your information, atheism is the absence of belief in deities.
If atheism is a belief, then health is a disease.
The discovery presented in the article explains how a species can make what they call macroevolutionary changes (read: big changes) in the design of their bodies. The example they give is a bug with lots of legs changing into a bug with only a few legs by changing only one part of its genes. "this could be accomplished with relatively simple mutations in a class of regulatory genes, known as Hox, that act as master switches by turning on and off other genes during embryonic development" What I don't get is: if macroevolutionary changes occur by the Hox turning off existing genes and then turning on other existing genes, then that means that the genes that produced the new feature, the gene that was turned on, had to allready be there from the beginning.
...is I can't tell which group has the most and bigger assholes in it... the Atheists or the Cristians. In my experience, the Atheist group is the group that is more (negatively and abrasively) vocal than the Christians.
Regardless of what you believe, the tennants of the Bible are a good guide to live by. Simply by living according to the Ten Commandments promotes a better, less stressful, more peaceful life. I personally believe that people can do what they want as long as it doesn't negatively effect others. Believe what you want. You are welcome to express those beliefs to me but if I don't hold with them, go about your way and leave me be - there is no reason to then criticise me for what I believe. Unfortunately, it seems that few other people also believe this.
As to someone earlier who spoke of mistranslations, I had a Hebrew scholar tell me before that, just like any other language, Hebrew changes over the years. Idioms and vernacular interpretations did exist in ancient Hebrew that are different than would be interpreted even a few hundred years ago. One issue we discussed was the Commandment "Thou shalt not kill." He said that the word used for "kill" in the original texts could have actually meant "murder", which can put a bit of a different meaning on that Commandment.
Anyway, I just find it mildly amusing that I see far more posts from Evolutionists flaming Cristians than the other way around.
Let's just say that I think faith requires more gullibility than scientific reasoning.
Why do you have to contrast faith with science? I think they are two halves of a whole, the spiritual essence of man and the reasoning essence. I think faith is not about "gullibility" (if that's a word), but rather the acknowledgement that we are imperfect and we strive towards an ideal, which we'll never reach, but through striving we become "better," however you want to interpret this.
And the fact of the matter is, regardless of how sophisiticated your weather prediction science is, you don't know what's going to happen to you tomorrow. Period. Life's like that -- you don't know whether you are going to be hit by a car tomorrow (God forbid!).
Maybe some people can't fathom the notion that their religion may be wrong.
But how can you say, how can you unbiasedly (now I'm making up words) determine what is wrong and what is right from some kind of an independent position? Are you God?
Bush Lies Watch
You can send an E-mail to Senator Hochstatter from a form at: Senator Hochstatter
Keep your hands off OUR God.
Can't we share? :)
Best,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Okay, you've convinced me. From now on, schools should teach creationism and evolution at the same time. Included in the classwork:
The creation of the earth by Odumare (Yoruba cosmology).
The creation of the earth by Atum (Egyptian Cosmology).
The creation of the earth by Izanagi and Izanami (Japanese Cosmology).
The creation of the earth by Nzame (Bantu Cosmology).
The creation of the earth by Phan Ku (Chinese Cosmology).
The creation of the earth by the Annunaki (Assyrian Cosmology).
The creation of the earth by Ulgen Tenger (Mongol Cosmology).
The creation of the earth by Papa and Rangi (Maori Cosmology).
And so on, and so on...
I figure it would only take a few months to cover each creationist expanation. Of course, the students could be learning Biology during that time, but that wouldn't be as useful, would it?
I agree that any scientific result is subject to being discarded if new evidence conflicts with it. But that's not Behe's position at all: Behe doesn't have any scientific result to begin with, because scientific results are the results of evidence.
Behe gives exceedingly detailed examples of bio-molecular structures that fit his notion of being irreducibly complex. That is his evidence. His hypothesis is falsifiable if anyone can give a plausible sequence of mutations that conform to natural selection and can result in these structures.
No one has done that. At best they say "we might be able to give you one sometime in the distant future". That's not very impressive "evidence".
Best,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Has anybody out there read Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio? This discovery of control genes in action in an evolutionary time-frame (their existence was already known - concrete examples were missing, though) makes the thesis of Bear's book even more interesting.
SPOILER'S FOLLOW
Well, actually, it's not a huge spoiler. Part of his idea for the book is that evolution is a bit more self-controlled than the standard version of evolution (gradual accumulation of kazillions of tiny changes). The existence of proof that mutations in certain control genes can introduce relatively large-scale changes in relatively short time-frames fits in nicely with his idea.
It's definitely a good book and stimulation reading. It was an interesting experience to read his theorizing and then turn around and see some actual science producing something that might fit into his ideas.
Sigh. My id isn't prime. 2 2 2 2 2 3 5 313
I think you summarized the situation nicely.
So God made the jump to creating species, and Creationism has been in retreat ever since.
Until recently. Intelligent design is the counter attack.
And it has not been ineffective. Otherwise the scientists in the article at the source of this thread would not be so concerned about answering the objections put forth by "creationists".
Best,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
I have seen at a lot of "folk science" being used in the comments and a little in the article. Folk science is using science as a proof to support their view of the world, ie their belief system. Note it is not science, and is being used by both sides.
The discovery is an amazing one and does have direct application to the theory of evolution. It strengthens the theory. It does not put a nail in the coffin of young earth creationism, and it does not prove that "Naturalism" is correct. Those arguments are in the realm of "folk science".
One needs to be aware of the blinders we put on ourselves. We need to continue to test our beliefs to see if they are reasonable with the evidence at hand. Science is a wonderful tool to help determine truth in this world, and it should be used. However, science is required to make assumptions (IMHO usually very reasonable) about the world we see, so one must be careful in how one uses science to determine truth.
"Isn't it funny how that bible states that the earth is round? and this was written in the bible when the earth was still considered to be flat."
The Bible is a funny,inconsistent and greatly altered book in general. But the bible's authors believed the earth to be flat.
The view in Genesis was that of a flat eath protected by a firmament dome.
Danial speeks of a tree growing in the center of the world.
Revelations speeks of angels at the four corners of the earth.
Google for "flat earth" and bible and you find
sites like:
http://infoweb.magi.com/~godfree/flaterth.html
He's taking the stand that the debate is over, when in fact our knowledge of the subject isn't necessarily any less primitive than Darwin's knowledge of vision.
He does NOT take the stand that the debate is over. (Don't remember this link location but) He says plainly that his hypothesis is falsifiable if anyone can give a series of mutations plausible under natural selection that can give rise to his "irreducibly complex" structures.
By the way, how does one investigate intelligent design theory? You thinking about something like in "Contact" (not biology, but same idea)?
Behe actually sites SETI as an example of trying to identify designed phenomena. It seems reasonable that we take some of the same principles to identify whether biological structures exhibit evidence of design.
Best,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Don't forget:
o) Income Tax
;)
Just because science has yet to establish how something evolved millions of years ago when it appears irreduceably complex today is not evidence for "intelligent design", much less any flavor of creationism.
Just because science might be able to prove that something evolved sometime in the future is not evidence that the thing evolved.
I'm annoyed by morons who make vapid arguments then accuse others of not thinking.
Best,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
> People dont want to believe that there is a being somwhere in the heavens that is superior to them, a being that created them and the universe [...] in six days.
:)
Some guy came down from a mountain and said a burning bush told him how the earth was formed. The story incorporates several parts of the story that his Sumerian relatives had told him (Gilgamesh).
I will not accept any theory blindly, evolution, creation or otherwise. You must consider the credibility, date, and author of any theory before accepting anything. Please read Genesis again. It's funny
Bias Disclosure: I am a Christian and Biblical Creationist.
The article opener claims that this finding can explain how sea creatures could evolve into insects. That isn't what it explains at all.
So they change a key gene or two and the shrimp lose some legs. SO WHAT? As useful as this may prove to be for gene therapy and all, this does not explain away the Creationists' argument!
To my knowledge, no evolutionist claims that insects were the first land animals. An animal that can survive in a marine environment just cannot migrate to land, no matter how many legs it has.
To explain away the Creationists' argument, not only does a candidate mechanism such as this have to be found, but there must be a detailed explanation of which changes occurred, to which species, in what order, and how the resulting creatures could survive in either land or water.
The evolutionists still have a lot of work to do. If a shrimp loses legs and gills, and absorbs oxygen through the skin, can it still survive in water long enough to go ashore?
Whenever I get in a discussion with evolutionist types, they often respond with an attitude of over-skepticism. Stuff like, "I won't even consider this belief system without absolute proof!" Are those same people now criticizing Creationists for not bowing before this non-proof?
Now as for myself, I have very little knowledge of Biology (just high school level), but I'm no dummy. I know all about the black and white moths, and the drug-resistant bacteria, and the Galapagos finches, and all that. No one I know, Creationists included, doubts that variations occur over time. But I for one reserve the right to doubt an idea like evolution, that if true would completely invalidate my world-view, without more evidence than we currently have.
NOTE: I did not say that I have no doubts about Creationism. I have quite a few, not the least of which is the "Starlight & Time" problem. But that's another topic.
My point in summary: Lots of you Slashdot types love the stance of universal skepticism, but everybody believes something they can't prove. Evolution may be yours, or atheism, or astrology, but Creationism is mine.
LAMP hosting on Debian, SSH, no bandwidth cap, PayPal accepted - http://secondbrainhosting.com/
I think that the whole evolution idea is interesting. I see the theory of evolution being two theories in one. I see it as being alleles change over time roughly equating to if the frequency of redheads per capita changing being termed evolution. This is where most of the evidence for evolution comes in. There is a second interpretation (really the first historically) that has to do with speciation and the "Origen of Species" roughly equating to if homo erectus changes over time to homo sapiens being termed evolution. I find one supported by experimental data and one supported by sparse physical data. I find one a matter of science that has no conflict with theology and one a matter of interpretation that has aspects of theology. I think speciation is a religion in itself and that there are two entirely different ideas combined in evolution. I think that there is one theory of evolution that is being applied to the old hypothesis of evolution.
I might think of myself as a creationist, but creation is not really science. I think creationism is more of scientific philosophy. The only place science really comes into play is the interpretation and refutation of already established data. As a science student, I have a problem with creation being taught in school science classes because it doesn't comply with the scientific method. How do you emperically prove that man was created?
heavy women were considered highly attractive. If you don't believe me, watch a movie with Mae West
Say I watch a movie with Mae West. That is, I download the movie over the Internet, and the bits travel over the Mae West router. Result: All the star actresses in this movie are thin because nearly all the movies I can find on eDonkey are relatively recent.
This illustrates a problem with the English language's instrumental construct, such that "with" can refer to "containing" which you probably meant (movie with Mae West == movie starring Mae West) or to "using" (watch a movie with Mae West == watch a movie via Mae West).
ObEvolution: I'm surprised that with the "evolution" of huperchildity, language hasn't become any more precise.
Will I retire or break 10K?
nice troll.
No, I am certainly not a Ruckman-ite. I have many disagreements with his beliefs.
John 17:20
?-|||-----x<*))))><
cultural prefrences still exhibit selective breeding. What does this mean? Human beings will continue to become more intelligent, probably taller, and probably more beautiful.
More intelligent yes, more beautiful yes, but taller not necessarily, as for one thing, humanity of AD 2001 is a tool-using species, with machines to do work and platform shoes to make up for deficiencies in physical appearance, and for another, some people are attracted to the disabled. Even the "more intelligent" part is in question: what if the human race forks over the next couple hundred millennia, leaving the cuter (as in Precious Moments cute) but slightly less intelligent people above ground, where they become herbivores, and putting the slightly more intelligent people below ground, where they evolve night vision and a taste for the flesh of those above ground?
This is how the human race will have evolved in the year A.D. 802701 if the late H. G. Wells has his way.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Here's a revised comment that I posted in a past article dealing with evolution:
u ments.htm for more reasons
Some problems with the theory of evolution:
1. There is no true physical evidence. All the physical evidence points to things unrelated to evolution itself. See below for the points on this.
2. It doesn't explain the origin of dimensions (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc). It also doesn't explain the origin of time. Time is a linear single-dimensional direction. People are always at only a single point on the entire time scale, and cannot see beyond that. How could evolution have created time if time would have been needed in the evolutionary process?
3. The Big Bang theory doesn't explain the origin of the large mass of exploding matter
4. None of the measurement methods are anywhere near accurate, for example, carbon dating
5. Why would creatures evolve to sexually reproduce instead of just developing an ability to copy themselves?
6. If the big bang sent matter flying in all directions, then the formation of planets and solar systems would not work because of the inability for the matter to slow down in space and generate orbital patterns. If other bodies became attracted by gravity to other bodies, then a thrust force would be needed to create an orbit; instead they would collide. Gravity alone would not solve this problem, since for an orbit to be created a downward gravitational pull is needed PLUS a tangental velocity across the surface so that the object ends up in an eternal fall.
7. Since the moon is slowly moving away from the Earth (look in the news, online stuff, etc. There's plenty of proof), then 3 billion years ago the moon would have been inside the earth.
8. How did the sun start a massive fusion reaction all by itself and why didn't the other planets start their own also? What made the sun a 'sun' and what made a planet a 'planet'?
9. According to biographies of Charles Darwin, he was originally a Christian, who became too analytical and fell away from his faith, thus creating his own 'creationist' theory. But, before he died, he declared his theory as false and went back to his original Christian faith.
10. If humans evolved from monkeys, then why do monkeys still exist? It can't be because the monkeys diverged; since then the species of monkey that is alive today would have had to reverse its evolutionary development in order to become what it was then, now.
11. Why haven't scientists been able to pinpoint where the human subconscious is located in the brain? They have never found where all the long-term information is stored, and they've already mapped out every part of the brain. The person's brain doesn't grow when they become smarter; size is not part of it. (the reason is that it's not in the brain, it's in the spirit, which is a 4-dimensional object. How much information can be stored in a 4-dimensional object? infinite amounts.)
12. Something cannot be created out of nothing in the third dimension because of the limitation of time. A supreme being (God), since he would have created the dimensional structure and time itself, would not be restricted to the tight boundaries of time (time is the 4th dimension), and would thus have no beginning or end (people cannot imagine being beyond the restrictions of time, so they cannot really understand the meaning of the word infinate.
13. Where did the explosive compounds come from that made the large amount of matter from the big bang explode? What ignited them?
14. Anybody knows that when you burn paper that you end up with carbon soot. Explosions cannot create things; they destroy things.
15. Why are there many languages? If people evolved, wouldn't they all communicate the same? Why would they want segregation? Would you want to abandon English and go make up your own language?
16. What's the purpose of life if people just die and then that's it? Also, sex is for reproduction, and what's the point of reproduction if the produced living beings have no point of existence?
17. Life itself is not a physical object; if people evolved they would be able to create life with their bare hands. Define life. What is it? What makes it possible? Shoving cells together and starting chemical reactions does not create life; if it did then we would have our own created beings in labs.
18. Who or what created mathematics? How about the simple ability of calculation and relational mathematical structures? People 'discover' mathematical principles, but who originally developed them? It's like writing computer apps in the C++ language. The language had an origin, and people learn about it. What if there was no original creator of the language, and it just suddenly got 'discovered'?
19. Who or what created the laws of physics?
Some easy facts:
The world is approximately 7000 years old
Dinosaurs never existed; the fossils found are from animals that died from the flood.
People have found that the soil layers show a sudden massive death of beings. I don't have time to show the proof for everything about the flood, but if you look for it, it's there.
Evolution. The ignorant's excuse for everything.
Visit a site I found, http://www.geocities.com/evononsense/creation_arg
I am a born again Christian who has seen and read proof that God created the world and all the people in it. Not just from the Bible, but even in modern science such as physics. The truth and facts are all layed out plain as day, but since the majority of the world, including the US is not Christian, that makes most people ignorant fools. To declare yourself Christian, you must have a personal relationship with Christ and have accepted him. A reply asked what's the name of my 'god', and my answer is that he is the I Am.
I hate Microsoft, I hate government corruption, I hate evolution.
Ignorance is bliss.
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
The zelots tend to believe a bit more passionately, and are louder, so are heard out of all proportion to their numbers.
Behe doesn't adequately answer Orr's criticism. Orr shows how natural selection can evolve into an "irreducibly complex" system. Behe's reaction is to say that said systems are not irreducibly complex -- but ignores the fact that they meet his definition.
Any population of organisms, bacteria included, naturally includes variants with unusual traits--in this case, the ability to withstand an antibiotic's attack on a microbe. When a person takes an antibiotic, the drug kills the defenseless bacteria, leaving behind--or "selecting," in biological terms--those that can resist it.
Notice that the resistant bacteria were already ther. The antibiotic only selected for them, it didn't evolve or create them.
Best,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Not only that, but Creationist are also the majority. (Creationist != Christian, there are many more religions which believe in creation.)
You don't determine the truth by majority vote.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I'm glad to see that some Slashdot readers are able to comprehend that religion (in this case Christianity) does not necessarily exclude evolution as a method for God's creative process.
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
I guess it's ok then to treat lucky lumps of carbon like yourself with no more dignity than other lumps of carbon like trees, bacteria, coal, diamonds, etc.? I guess Hitler isn't morally distinguishable from an antibiotic or a coal furnace?
Or am I missing your point?
Best,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Why stop at banning people from universities based on their beliefs? Let's burn one of those "Darwin fish with legs" symbols on their lawns to make our point! Heck, let's round them all up and make a big bonfire out of them before they can infect anyone else!
Woohoo! Discrimination rocks!
Best,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
But I can see the point about evolution !=progress from that evil Harry Potter who opressed the poor and built the depressing Potterville
No, that's not Harry Potter. That's Henry Potter, but it's close enough to get me thinking of possible connections. Anybody else?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Oh, I didn't realize that C++ compilers fell together by random chance, with no guiding intelligence! I'll bet Bjarne Stroustroup will be downright disappointed about that, eh? Think about what the hell you are saying.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
Has it occurred to you that evolution is the result of objective study and experimentation?
Glory be, I has seen the light! It's all so clear to me now! Silly me, of course nothing is ever taught in a university that's not true! How could I have thought otherwise?
Thanks to the clarity, lucidity and irrefutability of your argument, the scales have fallen off of my eyes! I once was blind but now I see!
Best,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Read the book yourself please. At least read chapters 11 and 12. I have read a couple of supposed "refutations" of Denton, and they have both demonstrated a complete failure to comprehend what he wrote. By the way, Denton is a self-professed agnostic.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
I find that many Slashdot folks tend to be very knowledagable on computer matters and issues, but man of them demonstrate an abysmal ignorance on the "theory of evolution." It's not my field, but I've read several books on it, including at least two on the pro-evolution side. The pro-evolution side is a fraud and a farce. How many anti-evolution books have you read, Mr. open-mind?
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
"Still more evidence Earth is round" or "Still more evidence light has a finite speed"?
I'm the stranger...posting to
How disgusting to have cockroaches in your house. I would have thought 'intelligent' people would have no cockroaches in their home.
PS This comment is due to my utter loathing of cockroaches (Thankfully I can still speel the word).
òò òó óò óó ôô õõ öö øø
atheism is the absence of belief in deities
Naw, atheism is the belief in absence of deities. The word itself could mean either, athe-ism or a-theism.
> Most of the "evidence" I've seen for
> macro-evolution is pretty questionable at best.
Methinks that your problem is that you, like so many people out there, know nothing about evolution by natural selection but somehow reckon that can issue authoritative statements on what is, or is not, evidence.
> Someone explain to me, for instance, how such
> an intricate device such as the eye evolved
> randomly.
This pet objection from creationists has been so thoroughly debunked so many times in so many books that I find it surprising that anybody still is coming up with it. Have you tried to read any of the standard textbooks on the subject?
> It couldn't have come together piece by piece, > since anything less than a full eye would be
> useless and "selected" against
Wrong! Partial sensitivity to light, as compared to no sensitivity at all, is an obvious source of adaptive advantage, in the right environment, and will be naturally selected.
You realize that you know nothing about the subject?
> So a mutation, somewhere along the way,
> produced a full-fledged functioning eye?!
Strike three! Such macromutations are not possible.
You are out! Do you still think that you don't need to to read something about the subject?
> Color me skeptical.
No, color you ignorant - an altogether different state of affairs. Skepticism involves a certain degree of savvy whic is not present here.
I would like to contribute to your learning process, letting you know that, not only has the eye been evolved by natural selection, but it has been evolved several times, independently: you might enjoy learning that invertebrate eyes (like those of squids) are totally different from vertebrate, or insect eyes.
The 'organic' label just means the farmer used traditional non-factory non-synthetic-chemical means to nourish the crops. The crud that gets into our food in the name of profit (does anyone think DES or polonium are food groups?) does indeed cause some people acute problems. More importantly, factory farming methods create artificially low prices by sloughing off ecological expenses as 'external costs' - ADM, Allis-Chalmers, Monsanto, etc. don't get billed for the millions of tons of topsoil that washes uselessly down the Mississippi every year.
With organic farming, you get real feedback as to whether your enterprise is sustainable. Trash the land, and your farm won't produce. Pumping up your 'stock value' (crop production) with external nutrients and usurped water will just lead to an Enron-style crash of your system (farm/environment). If that happens, it's more than retirement accounts that suddenly contain nothing - it's a few billion hungry tummies asking where 'America's Breadbasket' went.
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
A theory is an idea or belief that has been concocted by a scientist to explain a portion of the universe. Until this theory can be wholly proven or wholly disproved the scientist and others that believe in that matter have faith that they are correct.
The same can be said for people of religion. They have faith that what they believe in is the truth of existence. However, there is very little that can be proven. Many of the theories simply are untestable by our current levels of technological advancement. Does that mean that we will never be able to test religous theories? No, we may one day be able to test those theories and prove or disprove their truths.
The Pope himself has stated that evolution is a very good theory. He followed that up by saying that God started/created evolution. This was decreed by the Pope only a few years ago. Look it up, or choose to ignore that actual fact, like many Christians do.
Who is to say that the Pope is wrong? It is very possible that evolution was created by God, it is possible that evolution simply happened through ways we have yet to be able to fully explain. The major difference is that we have better prove of evolution than we do of God.
Once again, that does not mean that there is no God. It is just something that we currently are unable to prove or disprove. The faith in the existence of God is to great to simply dismiss. We just need sound methods or proving or disproving God's existence.
One way that would prove that God exists is for him/her/it to show up on international TV and simply say, "Hey, I am God. Check this out..." (Waves hands) "Here is a new species." Until then, people simply have to have faith that God exists. One day, we may have another method of proving whether or not God exists, right now that is all we can hope for.
Believing in something can be a strong thing and simply cannot be denied. Whether that is the theory of God or the theory of anything. Until it is proven to fully be truth and is more than simply words, all you can have is faith in what you believe.
I am not claiming either as being fully correct or fully incorrect, I am merely sharing my beliefs on these subjects.
--
.sig seperator
--
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Were you interviewed for PBS by Alan Alda? I remember seeing some program he hosted which detailed exactly this theory.
"Naw, atheism is the belief in absence of deities."
Sorry to burst your bubble, AC, but you're wrong.
"The word itself could mean either, athe-ism or a-theism."
No. For your information, the word atheism is known to derive directly from the Greek word atheos, which in turn comes from the Greek prefix a- meaning "the absence of-" (c.f. apolitical, atheoretical) plus the Greek word theos meaning "god".
That's known as etymology. It's a fact. Now it's also a fact that there is no meaningful word or word fragment "athe", no matter how much you might like one to exist.
this outlines all my beliefs
l en .pdf
http://www.edition-fatal.de/isbn3935147082-quel
aliens rule this world and the illuminati are its agents... prove me wrong!
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
The Law of Gravity is easily defensible. If you drop a rock, it will fall. That can be endless proven, which makes it easily defensible.
The great flood that the Bible speaks of could very easily be the creation of, I believe either the Red or Black Seas. There is great evidence that one of those two seas were very quickly created incredibly quickly by either an earthquake or something causing a mountainous area to rupture allowing seawater to rush into a low-lying lake area.
However, the Great Flood does little to explain the existense of practically any of the creatures living in Australia or the Galapagos Islands. It doesn't explain why there are some many variations in Human beings. It also doesn't explain why the Chinese have written word that dates back much farther, by several thousand years, than the Bible. Which, if I am not mistaken would be when the Great Flood occurred.
Explain to me what the Bible says about those things.
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
From now on, schools should teach creationism and evolution at the same time. Included in the classwork: [a half-dozen-plus creation mythologies]
You forgot the halflings' creation myth. But seriously, I wonder why school literature classes don't teach comparative mythology. At the high school I attended, the mythological curriculum was restricted to the Greek myths, presumably so they could lead from that into Homer's epics.
Will I retire or break 10K?
For those of you with proof that evolution does take place, theres a creationist guy offering $250,000 for it. Enjoy.
http://www.drdino.com/cse.asp?pg=250k
There are very few "creationists" who would argue that evolution in the sense of adaptation or survival of the fittest does not occur. The big question is, can something as complex as a human being really evolve from a single celled creature in the mud, no matter how much time. I agree with PingXao in the sense that it has always seemed odd to me that evolutionary scientists get so bent out of shape by creationists. There is a lot of irony in that. Not to mention it is not very scientific.
NO, the creationist paradigm creates fragmentation and human discord
it has been the biggest creater of human suffering and still creates suffering
everyday in the form of WAR, IMPEDING MEDICAL SCIENCE, CONDEMING BIRTH CONTROL, and many other ways. Disproving creationism is important and will aid
in humanity taking RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR ACTIONS, by taking subjective and
dogmatinc beliefs out of the picture. Once the "higher cause" has disappered we are
forced to look at ourselves as the soul creater of "good or bad" acts. We lose our
justifications and our ability to be outsource our "sin" knowing that forgiveness is a prayer away.
The majority of them reuse the same arguments. As noted in some other posts, they revolve around broken logic and misapplication of physical laws, such as the laws of thermodynamics.
Occasionally, some points are brought up that at first glance, are not clear why they are wrong. The most oft-quoted is that of the irreducability. The analogy today is that petrol tankers carry are petrol powered, therefore it is impossible for these to exist.
I am not a biologist, but I am a physicist. I do not always I admit, read all the evidence and make up my own mind on everything, because there isnt time. Evolution is often thought of as a "great debate" or some such thing, as if the "debate" hadnt ended decades ago. For this reason, most people in scientific circles have spent much time reading themselves.
When it comes down to it, the arguments for and against are rather irrelevant, as there is such an overwhelming amount of evidence, such as fossils, genetic evidence and so forth that support Evolution. So no matter which way you argue it, I can point to the AIDS virus and say "Behold! It mutateth at 1% per year!", and trace the evolution of animals back in time.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
But isn't this precisely why we have peer review? While one, two, or even ten scientists might delude themselves into seeing something that's not here, eventually someone is going to come around and see things for what they really are. That's the great thing about science, unlike bible *cough* theory, is that it keeps evolving ;-).
Just my $.02 that's likely to get lost in the /. noise:
First, just so everyone knows where I'm comming from, I was raised a creationist. And in the past I've been a devote creationist that would try to "debate" with others to promote my point of view -- thinking that if you believed in evolution you were an atheist. However, as I have matured (a little bit, not much), I can say that my own beliefs have evolved.
I don't understand anymore this animosity that Christians and Evolutionist have between each other -- this fierce compitition. When I read the Genesis account (first few chapters) and get all the imagery out of my head that I was raised with (the presuppositions so to speak) I see a very general story that is not intended to be a science text book. I think details are purposely omitted because the point of the book is not for us to know exactly how everything came into being, but to understand that a supernatural being created it and the relationship that we have to this being.
Christians that are threatened by evolution don't have a true concept of the omnipotence of an all powerfull God (or Yahweh, Jehovah, Cosmic Spirit, or whatever name you attach). Think about it, if you had unlimited processing power and data, you could drop thousands of pieces of paper from a plane at 10K feet and know exactly where each paper would land. Moreover, now assume that you can control all of the variables (wind speed/direction, ordering of papers, turbulance, etc) -- then you would be able to cause each of these papers to land where you wish them to land. Now, back up to the Big Band (or whatever started the Universe). Assuming that all energy and matter that exists in the universe today was involved in the Big Bang (to my knowlege science has not found any exceptions to the law of conservation of energy and matter). Now lets assume there's an all powerful being that causes this Bang and sets up all the variables to Its liking. This being, in theory, could then foreordain the entire universe as we know it today in a single instance at the time of the Big Bang. To the Creationist, all of this appears to be the work of God, Its creation. However, to the Evolutionist, all of this appears to be the work of chance (just a question for thought, but is anything really random? Or do we just label events as random when they become too computationally complex?). Add to this that God is outside of time (exists in all of time at all instances at once) and you realize that there's more the the Genesis account than meets the eye! I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think that science and the Bible are mutually exclusive.
Now, on the flip side, I don't understand why some scientists are so bent on disproving the Bible and slamming Christians -- almost a fear of Judeo-Christian beliefs (well...maybe I do, there have been and still are some pretty crummy people that call themselves Christans). The Bible was written by over 40 authors from 3 continents and from various backgrounds (kings, prophets, common folk, political prisioners, etc) and it was written over a span of 1500 years! What a wealth of knowlege and wisdom it contains. Some claim that it contains a meta-narrative of a God trying to reconcile a relationship with mankind. If nothing else it contains history and 1500 years of culture and living experiance. How you choose to read it is where faith comes into the picture. It's just a shame that there are all of these debates about the Bible and Science, but very few people actually read the Bible (including Christians) even though it is classic literature and a great read once you understand the context/culture/timeline in which it was written.
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
This is not evidence of macro-evolution. No new information was created, only repetition of existing information. If the mutation had created say a wing (on a wingless creature), or an eye (on an eyeless creature), this would be evolution. For now all we have is more information on a how a particular gene functions.
It doesnt matter what all you creationist think, you have nothing but word of mouth and outlived myths! No one in the history of mankind has ever been able to do anything metaphysical. Dont you get it, the scientific method requires actual proof, actual objective reality, end product like the computer your looking into. Religion is a joke by these standards. I challenge Jesus, god, shiva and thor. Strike me dead right now!! hehe. When science clones a neandrathal man will you still have doubts. Just consider yourselves lucky enough to live in a country and time where religion does not control government and lucky enough to see science unfold our genetic evolution. Creationist are gonna cry when their god is viewed as a silly myth and tradition. "big brother Jesus" who makes life feel secure and meaningful gets placed in the same lockbox as thor, zeus and the 1000 other gods that have gone by the wayside. Have the balls to stand up and analyze the world with your chest out, uncontrolled by what mama and preacherman said. Once you can break that hold it all seems ridiculous. I've wasted to much of my life already pissed off about peoples desperate need for religion and the blind faith which hurts all of us.
Oh, I didn't realize that C++ compilers fell together by random chance, with no guiding intelligence! I'll bet Bjarne Stroustroup will be downright disappointed about that, eh? Think about what the hell you are saying.
Get a grip. You said the following:
So the mechanism that produces protein is an extremely precise machine that is itself made of protein. How did it originate? What produced the protein in the protein-synthetic apparatus? Did it originate with "random" proteins. Ya, I know you've got it all figured out in your little mind, but the problem is that your "random" proteins do not exist. Oh, I know, they once existed, but now they are all gone. Isn't that too bad. The story always seems to be the same, doesn't it?
He was responding to this by giving you an analagous circumstance, where a (simpler) mechanism existed that allowed for bootstrapping of the system. When the more complex system built on top of the simpler became complete enough to build itself (the C++ compiler in his example) the earlier scaffolding was no longer needed.
This is also the primary refutation of Michael Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" thesis, which I have indeed read in full.
No one suggests that the complex protein, DNA, and RNA system spontaneously self-assembled in a single step. Creationists who throw around impossibly large numbers to show the Vast improbability of that happening are indeed correct. The only way that such a phenomenon could be explained without saying "god did it" is to accept one of the following:
It's that last possibility that most scientists working in the field believe to be the most likely. All you need to trigger the evolutionary feedback loop is some configuration of chemicals that can make it more likely that a simliar configuration of chemicals will be produced in the immediate vicinity. Once you've got that, then any change that makes the replication process more efficient will 'catch', and life is off to the races. Eventually, the more refined replication process may lose the pieces that were needed at the beginning, and wa-la, you've got a C++ compiler (RNA, DNA, proteins) that can compile itself (reproduce) without keeping the vestigal pieces that made the production of the compiler a simpler task.
That's complex, surely, but if you have water and energy and carbon compounds and a billion years of time, who's to say it's impossible? The most primitive, fragile form of life imaginable would still be life so long as any kind of replication, no matter how slow, fragile, or inefficient, was there.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
As for predicting what happened billions of years ago: of course its hard. We are mealy humans, we try to scrounge up clues and come up with a reasonable explanation. I think it is very likely that evolution is right but I doubt we'll ever be able confirm with 100% assurance since that would require a time machine.
What you fail to comprehend is that if you disprove evolution it automatically proves that creationism is true. There may be another explanation which we limited humans cannot see. See Plato's allegory of the cave if you don't understand what I mean by that.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't
(1) marsupials got off the ark at Mt Ararat with everybody else,
(2) kangaroos and koalas can't swim across an ocean,
(3) there wasn't enough continental drift for australia to be accessible by land, and
(4) there's been no significant speciation, evolution or genetic drift,
it's a real stumper as to how these critters got to australia and nowhere else.
I play Nerd-Folk!
infidels.org has a ton of newspaper artilces from germany proving that hitlers belief was largley catholic, although on the occult side. fact of the matter is that religious intolerance has killed more people then almost all other events combined, even though stalin did some pretty severe genecide. So discard what you heard at church and actually read history, oh I forgot, your religious you believe what your told regardless of facts
That argument assumes that chimps haven't evolved over the time since divergence.
Evolution cites a common ancestor, and not that when a population diverges, that one evolves and the other does not.
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Here it is for ya: dogs.
They evolved - the selection pressure was human choice, but from a standpoint of actual evolution, that doesn't matter. And, the small types can no longer reach to mate with the huge types. If all the intervening sized breeds were to go extinct, it would be physiologically impossible for them to exchange genes - they would be different species.
Wow.
;-P
All of this creationism hot air. But on Slashdot? Isn't this a technodweeb's paradise? A science geek's home?
Whenever a debate on evolution springs up on the net, does some appointed sentinel of the far right ring the clarion call of Christian Fundamentalism and call forth a vanguard of babbling halfwits running to the scene of the crime to proclaim The Truth?
I'm really sorry. Mod me troll, mod me flamebait. I know it is no good to throw a pail of water on the idea of commentary on a website devoted to comments. But this is Slashdot, isn't it? We believe in science and tech here, no?
Look, some guidelines for non-creationists, as I see it, for whatever it is worth:
Don't talk to them.
PLEASE! Don't take the bait! They only relate babbling pits of tomfoolery to your mind. You can not reason with them! Every pound of logical heft you hurl in their direction will be replied with immediately by 10 pounds of so much clangityclank of the brain that you will only be left dumbfounded by the psychology of it all. The point is to not engage them. Because engaging them will not allow their ideas to die the ignoble historical death their ideas deserve. The dustbin of history must not be disturbed, as it is already disturbed enough as it is. The more you try to persuade them to reason, the more you breathe life into a sinking ship. Your pleas for reason will only be replied with with flim flam.
They mean well, and that is their problem. But they can't get their brains past a bad idea. They must justify it, by any means possible. So the harder and harder you blow against them, the harder they hold their cloak of belief. Stop blowing, let time and solitude relax their grips on their insanity.
I hear some primitive tribespeople fear having their pictures taken because they think the camera steals a bit of their soul. So if they don't see a camera, they don't get excited. And when their backwards beliefs are not challenged, they live peaceful, harmless lives. In other words, don't show creationists cameras. Get it?
After all, Al Qaeda is nothing more than a Muslim Fundamentalist backlash against the "decadent West." New ideas are dangerous. Progress is disturbing to some people. Some do not accept new, and better ideas. They instead cling to old, crazy ones and get very defensive about it. They frame it in absolutes, that evolution goes against God, for example. Evolution does not go against God. Science is not allied against religion. Any forward-thinking religious person can incorporate evolution into their world-view without evolution challenging their beliefs. It will, in fact, enrich their understanding of the world, deepen the mystery of life by making more clear the complexity of it all, and therefore, eventually, reaffirm their belief in God. But all of this assumes an open mind. Unfortunately, there are a lot of closed ones.
Don't show creationists cameras!
Leave them to their strange ways. Left in peaceful backwards isolation, they will eventually go the way of the Dodo, no irony intended. Right now their numbers are too large and the voraciousness of their passion too disturbing in the USA to be considered harmless. They are quite harmful, to the education and intelligence of all of our children. Give it time, many years, and they will fade away into history. Someday, decades from now, creationism will sound almost cute and harmless, like we laugh at the Spanish Inquisition in Monty Python skits.
Until then, they are just a massive pain in the ass. Please, ignore them! Here on Slashdot, and in the rest of your life. Your intentions are good in trying to challenge them in honest debate, but please, just walk away from them. There is no winning, just lots of hot air for you to inhale.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What are the chances of two such mutations happening in a complex organism that needs another organism to reproduce? NOT GOOD!
Kosh - Ambassador of the Vorlon Empire
A characteristic need not be necessary for it to be available for exploitation by evolution. Some species of organism might be wandering around with a vestigial crest for a while,m and because it isn't actually a disadvantage, it doesn't get bred out. But once having a crest is an advantage, you can bet your bottom dollar that examples of the organism with the crest will become more prolific, and teh crest will get larger too, to the point where it gives the most advantage with the (relatively) least cost. The point is that natural selection removes disadvantages, it doesn't add advantages. Mutation/variation adds advantages and disadvantages.
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Well, according to a 7th grade geography book I've looked at....Glaciers move uphill!!
The book was poorly written or you are misstating the interpretation.
Glaciers carve valley walls in the same way water erode stream channels. The flow on the valley walls is from side-stream erosion.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
God came down from the moon where he lives. and told everybody that thay where created alians from the planet nubboblyeas I deevolved a creationist to day.
A bit like chasing a rainbow - and the rainbow still exists.
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Now you'd think, perhaps incorrectly, that a technically-oriented forum would tend to attract those with a scientific, empirical bent. But it appears that slashdot also appeals to the religious sort of nutjob - the person whose rational faculties are so far gone they actually believe in Creationism or refuse to accept the evidence of evolution.
Really now, why bother listening to folks like this? It's clear they're as off their bloody rockers as the loons who talk about being abducted by aliens. Write them off as candidates for the funny farm, entirely without credibility, and mod them down to "pathetic, mad losers". Interesting for a laugh, but nothing more - certainly not worth investing the energy to argue with.
These sad little fools belong in the 13th century. Leave them there while the rest of us move on into the 21st.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
For your first point, about eyesight, a computer model has been produced which shows that an eye-like structure can be evolved from a single light sensitive cell/region in relatively little time. (400,000 years).
The model starts with a flat region of cells. Over time, random changes following a few known possible mutations take place (eg a cell can become more light senstive, or the region can become more curved, etc.). The computer runs a few tests on the resulting structures, and selects those that do the job of "seeing" best. After 400,000 simulated "years", the simulation produces a spherical cavity with an iris-like opening and, most astounding, a lens. A lens with a variable refractive index (like our own).
I first discovered this example in a book entitled Nature's Numbers, by Ian Stewart. The point made is that while half an eye isn't useful in evolutionary terms, a half-developed eye can be.
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> Behe gives exceedingly detailed examples of bio-molecular structures that fit his notion of being irreducibly complex. That is his evidence. His hypothesis is falsifiable if anyone can give a plausible sequence of mutations that conform to natural selection and can result in these structures.
Sorry, but you have been misinformed. A readily accessible reference is here.
Several times Behe has staked a claim, had it refuted, and responded with "No? Well, how about this one?" The result has been an (apparently) infinite postponement of the evidence.
So again I say: his claims are not derived from evidence; he made his claim and is offering a series of guesses as 'evidence'. He is not even meeting the scientist's responsibility to scrutinize his own evidence carefully before running to the press with it. Meanwhile, he has not retracted his claim; he feels entitled to an infinite number of tries.
That's pseudoscience. Real science works forward from the evidence to the theory. Behe can't very well do that, since he never had any evidence to work from, just some lame claims that were only good enough to mislead the uninformed.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
yes this was assuming 98% of the genetic material was the same, I only left that out to make the point that mutations do not accurately predict what science tell us, i.e. evolution, and thus either something that we do not know has occured or well you get the point.
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance" -Confucius
You know, there is a scientist somewhere who says he can detect silicone leaked from breast implants showing up in patient's bloodstreams... And the *only* ones who believe him are the lawyers who stand to make money and the women who are trying to figure out why their joints aren't as good at 40 as they were at 18.
When Charles Darwin came up with the theory of Evolution, not only did the world not believe it, but neither did he.
This is another bit of evangelical christian propaganda taking a bit of what he said out of context and ignoring the body of evidence of Darwin defending his conclusions... But in any case, it doesn't matter whether what Darwin said is completely correct or if he believed it. Contrary to what hard line creationists think, Origin of Species is not a scientific holy book. Science moves on and keeps discovering, improving and adding to its body of knowledge.
any critical person, should be able to see that the theory of evolution is only a THEORY
The rules of science are pretty clear cut... Whatever your idea is it must be testable, repeatable and falsifiable. The requirements for something to move from not being a theory anymore aren't so clear, but if evolution is testable, repeatable and falsifiable it isn't really a theory, it moves into the accepted body of knowledge.
Case in point, why is Einsteins Relativity called "Theory", when Relativity has never not been observed?
With all of our intelligence, we have not been able to create life in a lab, and this is with inteligent input.
General Electric patented an oil eating microbe it had developed for reducing the ecological devastation from oil spills in the ocean. No organism like it is known to have previously existed. I recently saw a program on the Soviet biological weapons program where they developed a virus which caused a myelin-like gene expression which the immune system attacked. After recovering from the infection, affected rabbits died of complications from their immune system attacking the myelin around their nervous system. This certainly didn't exist before. In both cases the intended function of the new life was determined before starting the lab work to create it. Was it created from scratch? No. Was it evolved through selection and a little genetic engineering? YES.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
as a biology person i have a couple of comments:
1.)don't listen to most of these authors. dawkins is about promotion and controversy not facts. read something by theodosius dobzhanski or stephen j gould if you want to learn something.
2.)for all of the evolutionist out there: do really know how complex our bodies are? think of all of the events needed to wake up in the morning and get your coffee. all of the cortical activity (like the waking up, moving, sensing where you are, remembering the coffee, controling muscles (like the lungs) and such) alone is staggering. thats not even taking into account the heart and all of the other organs that are working as well. don't be so quick to discount intelligent design because things are very complex and even though we are not perfect, we do have lots of mechanisms to keep from breaking down.
3.)for all of the creationists: don't forget that the bible is fallible. it was not the red sea that moses parted but rather the reed sea. and don't forget that the jews spent a long time in babylon and managed to pick up their lore (like the great flood becoming the story of noah).
later
The new religion.
It has thousands of over-zealous followers.
These followers believe what the higher-ups (the Priests of science, to follow the analogy) tell them blindly without thinking for themselves.
These new scientists have their own form of the crusades: to belittle and scoff at individuals who choose to believe in older, non-scientifically-based religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
Fear the new scientists, they are the most close-minded people you will ever find.
All atheists I know believe that they are 100% correct in all their blind theories. The theories of science are just as unfounded and based on blind faith as the old religions.
Fear the person who tells you that they are a scientist and bashes your beliefs, for they are the real religious zealots, following their new religion of theoretical evidence.
Anyone that belittles another person for their beliefs is an idiot. Regardless of what religion they belong to. I'm POSITIVE that this will get modded down as troll, because most of the psuedo-intellectuals on slashdot are the people I am talking about. People that laugh and say there is no such thing as God. I say there's no such thing as an atom. Show me one. Pick one up. Taste it. Smell it. What? You can't? Well, I can't taste touch or smell God either, but I believe He is there. It's the same thing.
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
Yes, but the rainbow isn't where you see it.
I love it how when a creationist perpetuates biblical inconsistancies in a manner which is an attempt to counter scientific theories which have evidence to support themselves (opposed to writting in an old book), Darwinists/Evolutionists come in to correct the given gullable individual en mass...
Sorry to burst your bubble, AC, but you're wrong.
Webster, American Heritage, and WorldNet would disagree.
Despite anyone's opinion atheism is a belief. The belief that God does not exist. Because God cannot be proven or disproven, theism and atheism are both beliefs.
Has anyone else noticed that this is just about the most comments I've seen posted on here since 9/11. Nothing like a good old fashioned Evolution/Creation debate to ramp up the page hits. Not even Microsoft can compete.
"Occam's razor can't touch it either"
...
Actually, no, that is a very incorrect statement.
By introducing creationism you push the real issue under the rug. Evolution is actually far, Far, FAR simpler.
With creationism you have many extra complications like the nature of the intelligent creator (as It is now the immediate cause) and about the actual process of the Devine transforming thought into action into being.
You cannot simply devide time between before and after creation and then claim that creation is simple because after creation is simple, when however during creation
These are the people having the most children. We are doomed.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Thursday, February 7, 2002.
Internet wire service.
Scientists throughout the world today announced key new evidence that supports the theory of gravity.
"The data is pretty conclusive," stated noted scientist Ferlin Husky.
In a multi-generational experiment, scientists over the last 100 years have prayed to a variety of gods and animal totems, tried mental telekinesis, and crossed their fingers that creationists worldwide would suddenly be hurled from the Earth and sent on a trajectory that would take them into a fiery encounter with the sun. However, according to Husky, there are still a number of creationists left on Earth.
"They are really pulling down the average intelligence of the world," noted Husky, "and so we thought if they were just hurled into space, the rest of us could get along with more interesting matters. Also, we're sick of hearing that crap about the second law of thermodynamics."
In Husky's analysis of the results, it appears that the force known as gravity is holding the creationists to the Earth. So far, scientists have not found a way to directly modify the theory of gravitiy to eject creationists from the planet.
"We would still have to use rocket propulsion to get rid of them all," said Husky. "That is a compelling reason to think the theory of gravity is sound."
But, some creationists disagree. Phillip Johnson, an out-of-work attorney, responded.
"Those scientists are bamboozeling the public again. We Christians are not held to the Earth by some scientific theory. Gravity is nothing but a lie. It is God's love and compassion that holds us to the Earth."
Johnson later added, "Can I borrow a dollar for bus fare?"
1. I have read many times in this forum that the argument against evolution that states that there have never been any positive mutations observed is a bad one. I have yet to read, however, any reason for this arguement being bad. I could understand completely if it had been called untrue, but it has been called "bad." Despite the many time I have seen this arguement called "bad" I have never seen any logical reason given for its "bad"ness. Is it fallacious? Does it not address the issue being discussed? In what way is it bad? 2. It has been stated many times on this forum that this article disproves the arguement of creationists that no positive mutation has ever been observed. Upon careful reading of the article it is clear that this is not true. The article states the large mutations have now been observed not beneficial ones. The arguement of creationists that the article refuted was that there was no way for major changes in body structure to come about without the simultaeneous mutation of many different genes. The article no where states that the observed mutation was in any way beneficial to the crustacean in question.
I'll look to like if looking liking move...
Hogwash. Atheism is not about belief, it's about lack of belief. Please people can you understand that one simple point.
It's about lack of belief, NOT about belief.
People who don't believe in a god are atheists, but not all atheists believe gods don't exist.
Oppossums and rat oppossums are found in the americas. (group names: didelphids, caenolestids)
I play Nerd-Folk!
Is the insistance on refering to God as "He". If this is the creator of the universe it's sex is pretty much irrelevant. Now this may just be a short falling of the English language (not having a suitable gender neutral reference, "it" not really being Kosher) but it just seems odd.
If this thing is the supreme being then it is almost definitely beyond human comprehension. Kinda like the size of the universe. We can say it's very big but a real comprehension (not just a measurement, a real relative understanding) of it's size is beyond us. So this supreme being is going to need to bring itself down to something we can comprehend. Exactly what this is is really quite irrelevant. It could be male, female, short and funny looking, a toaster or even a guy on cable tv with a bad hair style (although this is kinda unlikely). Anything we can comprehend bears no resemblence to what It actually is. So insisting that It be refered to as He is ludicrous.
As for the argument of "it says so in the Bible", when the bible was written people didn't have any greater comprehension abilities than we do now. Think manifestation, think role of females in society at that time. Do the maths.
Anyway. (-1 Offtopic) Continue flaming. Nothing to see here.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
I don't think milk counts as "health" food. If you a truly "Rational Scientific Type", you would realize that cow's milk is for calves, not humans.
cpeterso
IIRC, the volkswagen Lupo (a commercially available car) does about 3 liter / 100 km, so while pretty nifty, it doesn't look impossible.
And it's 'carburator'.
1. Light sensor.
2. Transmission of results of light being sensed.
3. Reception of the transmission
4. Interpretation of the transmission.
Duh. Nobody told this idiot that light receptors cells are modified neurons? You get the lot for free in one go.
Well of course he was. The neat thing about science, as opposed to say creationist xians, is that you're allowed to revise the theory as new evidence comes forward.
Dawin didn't know anything about molecular genetics - it'd be stupid to take his word as dogma. But evolutionist don't - which is why the modern evolutionist synthesis is such a powerful and successful theory.
Easy. If say the ancestor of a shrimp has 20 pairs of legs, but a mutation with 3 pairs of legs could swim just as well, then the 3 pairs of legs mutation will have a selective advantage because the shrimp needs less energy and resources to keep itself alive and reproduce. It hence would tend to be selected for over the 20 pair original.
You'll notice of course that the 3 pair shrimp could be less well adapted to whatever the niche of the 20 leg pair shrimp was and still out-compete the 20 pair shrimp just so long as the advantage of needing less resources and reproduces faster outweighs whatever advantage the 20 pair shrimp has an an individual
Lots of variations you can play on this one - the above assumes that to 20 and 3 leg pair shrimp continue to live in exactly the same ecological niche - which ain't necessarily so
What, like crytals? Entropy only applies to a closed system. The earth isn't (clue: that big yellow thing in the sky helps things along)
I'm still shaking this can with springs and gears in it hoping for that random chance of a watch to come out of it. And waiting on those monkeys to randomly type up a novel or even just a silly comic strip.
You know, it's difficult to believe that people still use this old chestnut. If we had to create life by random chance in the way you imply then yes, you would be correct.
But we don't, it simply doesn't work like that.
Trying to convert religious people is harder then pulling a pacifier out of a 6 month old babies mouth, but essentially the same. Anyways, this URL is dirty as hell but pretty funny for those interested. Anyway interested in researching the debate. check infidels.org, lots of good stuff. If your a christian, you owe it to yourself to challenge your belief. If your an atheist and can find some evidence for religion, let me know
. ht ml
http://www.theonion.com/onion3712/healing_light
and respond. However, your reply has some of the flaws that I hear Creationists so often criticized for: responses to phantom claims, hidden assumptions, begging the question, and abject insult. Mind you, some of what you say I agree with and always have, but I think a lot of your speech is exaggerated.
First the petty stuff:
I note your assumption that I am not a scientist. It reveals your attitude. I suppose Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from a top-ranked US university qualifies me in some way as a scientist. I disclaimed already that it does not qualify me as a biologist or biochemist, but still.
Did you read the article? Perhaps your vaunted knowledge of biology will disagree, but the article claimed that this genetic mechanism could facilitate advances in medicine.
Not only does this statement reply to something I did not say, it's a misrepresentation of the push for Creationism in education. As an aside, the real reason for the push is to guarantee that students are aware that some people disagree with evolution and why. All they want is a descriptive (not persuasive!) treatment of both schools of thought in the classroom. If evolution is so obviously true this should not be a problem.
Yes, there are some wackos who want evolution excluded from the classroom. But you and I agree that is contrary to free thought. Excluding either one, then, is contrary to free thought. (Or are "free thinkers" the people who agree with you?) Many textbooks already give brief treatment to both Creationism and panspermia, though usually with a persuasive tone rather than a descriptive tone.
What's that supposed to mean? This isn't "agree to disagree", which I hate, this is debate. I see no more reason to follow your world-view than you see to follow mine.
And now the not-petty stuff:
This isn't a response; it's a restatement of my challenge. I said we don't have all the evidence that would be required for complete proof, and your reply is that we're working on it. It's a valid statement, but it's not a rebuttal; it's an agreement!
I don't have any incontrovertible proof either. We're working on it. I won't bother with Bible quotes, because only people that believe in God, and Jesus, and believe what Jesus stood for accept what it says. Apparently you don't, so there's no point in talking about it from that angle.
That was no argument of mine, for what it's worth. But what I would argue is that when you drastically change certain essential traits in an organism, you affect its survivability in its environment. The Creationists want to see demonstrable evidence that this mechanism can operate without dooming the organisms to extinction.
"Extraordinary" is in the eye of the beholder. I think that Darwin's theories are extraordinary. I can just as easily say there are a "preponderance" of facts that back up Creationism, and neither of us is going to do the months of investigation to post links to it all. So in my mind this is just rhetoric, not argument.
LAMP hosting on Debian, SSH, no bandwidth cap, PayPal accepted - http://secondbrainhosting.com/
but in the case of HIV, for example, those variants are known to appear at a strinkingly high rate as a result of mutations. Any population will naturally include variants with unusual traits, but those variants do also change over time, and new ones come into being. Read this.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
For some clear, simple, lucid counterpoints to the Homeobox genes being the proof of punctuated equilibria, see this PDF or this updated paper.
For those too tired of this discussion to read the papers, print them and read them later. They're worth it, especially the PDF one.
John 17:20
On the topic of the Ten Commandments, what does "Thou shalt not kill" mean? It doesn't say, "don't kill people", does it? So, if you must be a literalist, you had better be a vegetarian, and don't think of killing that cockroach!
How very Christian of you.-J
To a smaller size, that is... "Sir, this 2 bit IBM hardisk is out latest model. The new inbuilt compression algortihm allows it to store unlimited number of files. It even has an extra bit for backup!"
They don't think that "atheism" comes from the Greek prefix "a-" plus the Greek word "theos"???
...And you know what? No-one's come up with a single argument that's completely logically coherent yet. No-one.
News to me, sunshine, and I bet it's news to them too.
And if you think a god, any god, can be proven, then why don't you just step right up and try. If you had anything even vaguely resembling a clue about linguistics, theology or anything else for that matter, you'd know that the field of apologetics has been striving to come up with a conclusive, logical proof of the existence of a deity, any deity, way back to the origins of philosophy in Ancient Greece.
But, as they say, fools rush in. So go ahead, chfleming. Tell you what, I'll even cut you some slack. Start small. You don't even have to start off with this so-called "logical proof" of yours. Start by just providing the breathlessly waiting world with a definition of your god that is not logically incoherent.
But I won't hold my breath waiting for it.
[obligatory Simpsons misquote]
Homer: Do you want it done right, or do you want it done fast?
Marge: Well, like every American, fast!
I certainly don't pretend to know who truly won that election. File the results with Nixon's missing tape and the location of Jimmy Hoffa ;)
-J
I was pointed to the following article that was a response to this one.
t s# comment
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/622816/pos
It points out that this new 'discover' is not all it cracked up to be, which was my initial reaction from reading it.
Two more things please:
1. Don't call evolution or creation 'science 'please. They simply are not. Check out the meaning somewhere.
2. Please try and understand the creation argument BEFORE you start refuting it. I'd bet that most people here posting about the 'lunatic creationists' wouldn't have a clue what their actual arguments are. There are exceptions, so please ignore this if you are one of them.
Many have argued smaller or larger points, but everyone involved in this debate should realize that all arguments are based on presupposition, and when you debate the points at hand without addressing the suppositions behind them, you will almost never get anywhere.
That being said, these are my attempts at meta-thinking -- not more intelligent, just bigger picture.
Assumption: The theory of evolution, in its basic form is composed of Time, Chance, and Matter.
So is it Time, Chance and Matter that supposedly account for us right now?
Laws of Physics
If we were created by chance, how do we now have a stable system? Why is up up and down down and why aren't they changing from moment to moment? You think this world with all it's repeatable laws came from a system based on chance? Oh things have slowed down now and are at a near stand-still? How is that? By chance? If we came from chance -- then we continue to be chance, and so there can be no meaning to life but chance and no laws in our world at all. This is the logical conclusion of a world created by chance -- that we still exist by chance and are held together moment by moment by chance.
Morality
Time nor Chance nor Matter give us morality. You think it's wrong to kill? The fact that we exist according to evolutionary world-view is just chance. If the evolutionist has some standard, by chance, it is relative to you in that moment of time and you have no basis for imposing it on others. You may feel that there are absolute right and wrong, and I would agree with you, but you couldn't explain why that is in a chance universe.
Feelings
Do I really love someone? I really hate someone! What? You have no basis for this thinking in your world-view. Feelings are just random firings of your brain which exists by chance (see assumption) and may cease to exist in the next moment. How real is that?
A universe by design can account for Laws. A designer can account for morality. A designer can account for feelings.
No system other than a deistic system (one including a god) can account for what we see around us. Within that scope I subscribe to Christianity because I see more evidence for it.
Do you subscribe to a chance worldview? How is that? You can't account for your worldview.
Joel
Great, six fingers, we'd be able to count up to 4096 on our hands. It's an historical occurrence as well.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
-J
But its there nonetheless.
To take the analogy further, its everywhere, its just when you get close to it, you can only see the bits further away.
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He didn't kill 200x10^6 because he was a Darwinist. He caused the deaths of 200x10^6 people because he was a very naughty boy. He may have used evolutionary theories to support his evilness, but, like all science, ToE carries no inherent moral implications. Thats up to the user. Do you really believe that if Hitler had never heard of the ToE, that he wouldn't have done what he did? He also twisted Nietzche's philosophy to his own ends, but have you ever read it?
WTF? 10 mins on /. and I'm defending Hitler!?!!?
This place _really_ scares me.
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There's a paper in the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience from Stuart Firestein's group at Columbia that provides some really interesting evidence from a very different angle. Some background: mice are animals that rely heavily on olfaction, or their sense of smell. Over half their brain is dedicated to it. In "lower" mammals (or however you want to look at it), the sense of smell is also very important (dogs, cats, etc.) For humans, however, smell is not as important. We don't smell predators coming or track prey by scent; we use vision (and a huge portion of our brain is dedicated to it).
Anyway, In this article they do a rigorous analysis of the data on olfactory receptor (OR) genes from the recently acquired mouse genome compared to the data from the human genome project. I forget the exact numbers, but mice have about 1000 OR genes. Humans have about the same number, but something like 75% of ours are pseudogenized. Basically, this means they've been converted to pseudogenes, or sequences in the genome that obviously used to be functional genes but have mutated to a nonfunctional state. This much was known before. In this paper, however, they use techniques based on similarity of sequences to group the mouse OR genes into families and subfamilies. Then they group the human OR genes into the same families. To sum up what they found, if you were to take a random group of say six mouse OR genes, there will be five or six human genes that are the human counterparts of those mouse genes (over 90% of human OR genes have a mouse gene that's over 95% identical at the protein sequence level, and 77% have a mouse gene that's over 99% identical, so reliable identification is not a big issue). However, within that group of five or six human genes, all but one of them has been converted to a pseudogene. They find this over and over again. There's only one functional gene in each group. Each group, BTW, can be thought of as sensing when a certain class of feature is present on a molecule. In an analogy to vision, it would be like if mice could see different shades of six types of red, but we could see only shades of one.
Okay, here's an evolutionary explanation. A long time ago humans were monkey-like animals. Before that, dog-like animals, before that mouse-like animals, etc. Whatever animal we used to be, it was heavily dependent on a highly-developed sense of smell for survival (hence an entire 2% of our genome being dedicated to it--think about that). However, as we progressed evolutionarily, having an exquisitely sensitive and precise sense of smell became less and less important, but smelling things in general was still necessary. The genes mutated and mutated, but if the last member of a family became pseudogenized, that would compromise our ability to smell molecules with a certain class of molecular features (by analogy, if we couldn't see red at all), and those pre-humans would die. As a result, we're left with the HIGHLY nonrandom distribution of working genes. I want to point out that while this could be written off as "microevolution," consider two things: #1- all humans on earth will turn out to have >98% identical OR genes. #2- I say this because that nonrandom of a pattern with that many genes involved would take a LONG time to evolve, or at least a lot longer than humans have been on different continents. Almost certainly longer than we have been Homo sapiens.
Can anyone come up with a non-evolutionary explanation that explains 1) why so many of the genes are pseudogenized, 2) why the selection of which genes are pseudogenized is so highly nonrandom and optimized for the real world? I'm not asking for a critique of my evolutionary explanation, as the reasoning as I've presented it is not intended to be bulletproof. However, I do think that the underlying model is correct and I don't think there's any better explanation.
When the sports suits here of this, there will eventually be no way to block a dude with 12 limbs.
Table-ized A.I.
Individuals don't evolve. Populations do. Environmental factors don't produce the new species, they merely (?) select for them. The changes are caused by mutation and other forms of variation.
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and the frequent treatment failures due to fact that people who get TB tend to be, well, not the most cooperative of patients...
What does this mean?
An example elsewhere in biology of possible pre-wings is the *flying squirrel*. It does not actually fly, but can glide from tree-to-tree to excape danger using its skin flaps between the hind and fore legs.
One could imagine that if the forest slowly dried up and the trees got further and further apart, then more muscle control over the skip flaps could eventually lead to sustained flight, and thus a bat-like prototype perhaps.
This is just speculation, but at least we have candidate "missing links" WRT fliers.
The conceptual leap (pun) is relatively small.
Table-ized A.I.
Judge not lest ye be judged.
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Perhaps a little light reading would inform this debate.
h tm
This site outlines some of the major arguments involved in the proof/disproof of God's existence:
http://www.philosophyonline.co.uk/pages/proofs.
The argument the subject article primarily concerns is the Teleological.
Faith and science, or more appropriately, faith and reason are both required to come to a true understanding of God.
:) ...There are also signs of a resurgence of fideism, which fails to recognize the importance of rational knowledge and philosophical discourse for the understanding of faith, indeed for the very possibility of belief in God...
From yours truely
Faith without reason is weak and subject to manipulation. Reason without faith is like trying to drive from Maine to California without a map. You might get there, but your chances are slim.
Why do you have to contrast faith with science?
Because I see religious faith and objective science as mutally exclusive endeavors. In my mind, faith implies emotional belief without provable evidence, while science implies logical belief with provable evidence. While it is arguable that I have faith in science, I will say that any faith I have in it is supported by the conclusions science offers and constantly refines. You can't prove faith. You can prove gravity exists and Earth is spherical.
And the fact of the matter is, regardless of how sophisiticated your weather prediction science is, you don't know what's going to happen to you tomorrow.
Which is true. But with what we have learned from science, I can make better decisions in the future regarding outdoor plans. If you had the choice of simply guessing what the weather were to be like tomorrow verses learning there is a 75% chance of thunderstorms, which would you choose? I'd go with the guys in the building who devoted their lives to learning about weather patterns.
But how can you say, how can you unbiasedly (now I'm making up words) determine what is wrong and what is right from some kind of an independent position? Are you God?
Everyone is biased to some degree or another. However, I have the ability to determine what is right or wrong, because I have my own set of ethics. Therefore, I have no need for a higher authority to determine them for me. Are YOU Gawd? My position is independant. I think for myself, and I'm not implying you do not.
"All mankind is at the mercy of a handful of neurotics". - Norman Douglas
It most certainly does.
Mutation, for example, is almost universally bad - especially in terms of the immediate survivability of the organism suffering the mutation, such as Sickle Cell Anaemia - yet somehow lots of this badness is supposed to accumulate together to make improvements, and without leaving any trace of the steps in between.
Lots of creatures (and processes within creatures) have no sensible path from what was supposed to have been its ancestor, across a metabolic ``death chasm'' to a functional system which would be highly destructive to the organism if at all incomplete (immune systems being a classic example). How did the organism cross the gap? Obviously, some kind of planning must be involved, yet there is no such mechanism even postulated in evolutionary theory, mostly because doing so would attract condemnatory cries of ``teleology!''
I have many more examples, but not many more minutes.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Giving me the argument he used to sell his idea to the arian race does not show that without that method he would not have found another way to sell his ideas.
He would have just expanded on his "they killed christ" line, or found another one.
Anyway, none of this points to Darwinism being evil or wrong, only Hitler.
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Venereal diseases are a pretty direct counterexample to that assertion.
And what has the Vatican got to do with Christianity, to say nothing of common sense?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The flood is plausible, and corroborated by several accounts across the world.
Don't gewt me wrong, I'm not saying God did it.
But, at the end of the last ice age, 10K years ago (shit, thats 4k before the earth existed) there would have been significant climate change, not to mention a lot of ice melting.
There's also the theory (supported by Einstein) that uneven ice formation round the poles caused massive simultaneous tectonic plate movement, which would result in climate change (as much as 15 degrees C in a 50 year period) and cause tidal waves, tsunami, lots of rain, and mass extinction of certain species, like the woolly mammoth.
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To expand on the above and others:
Anicent Hebrews believed that earth, (the ground, not Earth) was a flat circle with mountains at the edges, the sky and heaven above and Sheol (the underworld).
Hence, "circle of the earth" Which is what Earth appears to be when you're sitting on it and you can look around 360 degrees.
Remember folks the Bible is not a science textbook and science textbboks are not religious texts. The Bible explains theological issues not scientific ones. While it has been used by some to support scientific claims, the Bible does not make those claims itself.
It is like reading "animal farm" and saying it proves or infers the theory of relativity or string theory or whatever theory your church/group/commune decides is essential.
Christians shouldn't bother with it, because it is not our field.
I for one know that this plane of existance we live in seems very well designed from a technical perspective.
Did Christ say follow me and we will get those nasty scientists?(I belive it was something more like fishing for men)
The most outspoken in any group can sometimes make the whole group look absurd. I hope that I haven't done that just now.
--Jim
Nope. You've described agnosticism. Look it up.
Atheism is disbelief. Not lack of belief. Disbelief.
Agnosticism is the belief that God's existence is not known.
People who are agnostic but call themselves atheist ('cause agnostic sounds too wishy washy) have been trying to redefine the term by introduction notions of "weak" atheism (really agnosticism) and "strong" atheism (real atheism).
Just because some people want to redefine a word doesn't mean I have to buy into their "claptrap".
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You don't need to play with his math, let alone get into the discussions which test most humans' problems with large numbers, infinities and probabilities, in order to see that Dawkins's reductionism leads to vast oversimplicications and faulty thinking.
His selfish gene argument simply falls apart the moment you realise that not just individual genes but combinations of genes, whole organisms, populations and ecosystems all have to be viable in order for any to survive.
Still we must not undervalue Dawkins's intellectual contribution. Beyond the selfish gene sidetrack, he also brought us memes which are a really useful idea, albeit also reductionsist.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
How many times do you need to be told that the purpose of science is not to give you absolute truths?
Who said anything about needing absolute truth? OTOH, why believe something that's false if you can find the truth? Take whatever you can get, analyze it, throw out what doesn't work, wash, rinse, repeat.
It's called critical thinking. I highly recommend it. I also recommend learning to discourse like an adult, rather than a 16 year-old.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Yah, we're talking a very, very small fraction of a percent uphill, and the rest downhill. Uphill is waaaaaaay outvoted.
No, that gene was borrowed... and the bacteria are designed to do that.
I take it that you don't like the concept of irreducible complexity? No, I'm not parroting anything. Black Parrot does that. (-:
True, but it's even more true (if that's possible) the the organism has to survive with the part-features; even more so, in order to survive for very long, the part-features have to avoid burdening the creature until enough miracles happen that the part-feature becomes whole (else the creatures without the part-feature will out evolve it). While this is happening, the feature has to be spread throughout the population, and the un-part-featured are ``trying'' to do the same thing.
As if that all wasn't enough, I'm describing part-features which are lethal to the organism. Say we have three kinds of organism, original, half-featured and full-featured. What do you do when the intermediate feature would be instantly lethal?
Now consider that each of these part-features has to be transmissible as well, and we're well into the realms of fantasy. Hey, lookit all them zeroes, all lined up!
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
As you correctly pointed out this is not macro-evolution. No information was gained. But I will address your points all the same. Creationists, infact scientists well into the time of Darwin, looked at the simularity in different kinds as a sign of a single creator. I say you have a simular example here. We were all created with DNA as our information store. Men and animals have very simular functions, and we live biochemically in the same world. In order to function in the same ecosystems we would have to be simular. As to your reference as to why we have so many pseudonized genes, are geneticists truely certain those genes are pseudonized? There is still alot of work to be done in the field, infact we have barely scratched the surface. There was a time not too long ago that "scientists" believed there were over 100 vestigual organs in the body. Today, that term is not used, or with trepidation. Even the appendix was found to have a use. Don't you believe it is possible that different uses may be found for these pseudonized genes in the future? In fact, geneticists are counting on it. When the genome project finally numbered the genes in a human, they found allot less than they expected. Thus, they theorized that perhaps genes are more complex than we originally thought. As for your second question (ignoring the first answer), nature seems highly organized, but physics says everything is moving towards chaos. In fact this can be seen in many processes, and life itself depends on some of these processes. So, I would argue that the highly non-random psuedomization of genes argues against evolution and natural processes. It actually points to an intelligent designer.
Where on earh were you told that an eye requires those 4 items to confer an advantage? That's just plain wrong.
This whole 'eye' that creationists use is so old and debunked that I didn't even think it was used anymore. Aparently it is because someone rattled it on to you, apparently.
For a really nice summary of evolution, and variations of eye structure take a look at Chapter 5 of "Climbing Mount Improbable". Its a really nice chapter that simply and clearly explains the benifits gained from structures less-advanced than the human eye.
As another replier to your message pointed out, a modified neuron that reacts to light gives a wonderful advantage to species thats (for example) food source is depentand of photosynthesis. When these light seneative cells are collected on a slightly cupped surface, they is some limited directional sense to the light detection. Further gains are had by cell sensitivity to particular wavelengths (color). protective coverings to the cells (eventual lenses), additional cell clusters (3d sensing), etc.
So my anonymous friend, you were told wrong when someone preached to you about what is required for an eye to achieve some advantage. Evolutionary advantages are typically small changes for small gains. The history of the eye is no exception, and evidence supports this.
"Just because some people want to redefine a word doesn't mean I have to buy into their "claptrap"."
Reality check. Language is not and has never been set in stone. The meanings of words are in a constant state of flux. Just because you don't like a definition doesn't mean it's not the case.
Just as an aside, swillden, are you an atheist/agnostic/disbeliever? I'd bet large sums the answer's no. How then can you claim to speak with any authority whatsoever on exactly what is and is not believed by other people?
And even if Mr Webster's particular definition, as opposed to, say, the OED, is taken to be the be-all and end-all (and there's no reason why it should), you're still wrong. Do explain exactly how "the belief that God's existence is not known." is the same thing as "the absence of a belief in the existence of deities".
Glaciers can and do move 'up hill' when pushed upwards from the glacial mass below and behind. I'm sure that's what the book was talking about. If the book gave you the impression of giant magical ice-cubes forging their way up hills like so many charging rhinos, well, chalk it up to lackluster writing. I shudder to think of the images that popped into your head when you read about 'tectonic plates'... ; ) Apologies if your post was just a joke.
**>>BELCH
As you correctly pointed out this is not macro-evolution. No information was gained.
Well, in a sense this is as close to direct evidence of macroevolution as one could ever get. It's vestigial DNA from when we were a dramatically different species. I guess I should rephrase that and say that if you believe in microevolution (which is directly observable), and it's easy to see how pseudogenization of that type would occur by microevolutionary means, this is evidence of microevolution occurring on a macroevolutionary time scale. So I should change my earlier claim and say that this is evidence for macroevolution.
As to your reference as to why we have so many pseudonized genes, are geneticists truely certain those genes are pseudonized? There is still alot of work to be done in the field, infact we have barely scratched the surface.
Yes, they are pseudogenes in that they do not code for functional proteins. That we have barely scratched the surface is a common misconception--at this level of analysis, the questions are fully understood in directly experimentally demonstrable ways that no one can argue. Comparing the problem of computationally finding new genes (as in the # of genes in the genome) to finding new members of a large gene family with high sequence homology is like comparing a needle in a haystack to a needle in a box of toothpicks. As far as the number of genes in the genome goes, we still don't know how many there are, and people in the biology community weren't really that surprised by the (preliminary) results, contrary to what the press latched onto. No offense or anything, but you're obviously not a molecular biologist, and your questioning the methods of the experiments and molecular biology in general is analogous to saying that the speed of light could never be measured since it's just so unimaginably fast, timing circuitry and lasers still aren't really understood, and it wasn't that long ago that physicists thought that light propagated through ether with infinite velocity. There's no point questioning the data. Your closing statement is very interesting, but I don' understand how you reached your conclusion. Nonrandom pseudogenization argues for a highly SELECTIVE process. Two good possibilities would be intelligent design or evolution (but not nonselective genetic mutation, which could cause these changes on a microevolutionary time scale). The question is, why would an intelligent designer create nonfunctional genes? The only answer I can think of is to create the false impression that evolution had taken place. The alternative explanation, of course, is that evolution actually did take place.
The question is, why would an intelligent designer create nonfunctional genes?
Your answer was "to create a false impression that evolution had taken place". Take a look at this article. I would be interested to here an evolutionist microbiologist's view on it.
That article raises a couple of valid points and several misleading half-truths. I should say that this is not my specialty, but it is something I know a bit about. First of all, no one claims that pseudogenes are entirely non-functional, only that they don't code for functional proteins. They can contain regulatory sequences for other genes that are still functional. The "evolutionary" argument that they should have been taken out of the DNA is misleading because it's really only true for single-celled organisms. There are three reasons (that I can think of) this is false for mammals. First, kinetics. It would take a lot longer for a gene to be excised than it would to be pseudogenized. Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it never will. Second, remember that pseudogenes are not necessarily useless, they just don't code for functional proteins. They can still contain regulatory elements absolutely critical to the survival of the organism. The third and most important reason is that it is not evolutionarily advantageous for organisms like humans to have genetically unstable genomes where things like excision of random chunks of DNA happen frequently. It is for some organisms--HIV is a good example. I forget the exact numbers, but something like half of HIV viruses floating around in the blood are actually infectious, and the reason why is because the rate of mutation is so high. However, one virus can have thousands of offspring in hours, so the high rate of mutation doesn't prevent it from replicating and is actually advantageous to the virus (and disadvantageous to HIV patients). Viruses use their genome extremely efficiently, and you would never find pseudogenes there. However, humans replicate slowly, and if our genome is unstable it leads to cancer and death, so the DNA is actually not used very efficiently. Like a hard disk that's 10% full and never gets defragmented, there will be clusters around containing deleted files, or pseudogenes. The tradeoff is that it's very reliable. Anyone who understands enough molecular biology to write useful articles on things like pseudogenes knows these things.
In any case, this is all irrelevant because mammalian olfactory receptor genes have certain special traits that make them exempt from these arguments. Think about some random genes. They've got some homology to other things, there might be two or three different genes for fairly similar enzymes or whatever that have maybe 50% sequence identity. In mammalian OR genes, you have about 1000 of them that are practically identical, with a couple of hypervariable regions that code for the binding pocket of the odor molecule. In addition, they all have no introns, meaning that each of them is one contiguous piece of DNA. In the article it says that you can't rule out translation to useful proteins by sequence information alone. There are certain far-fetched cases in which this could be true, but this is clearly not the case for OR genes for the reasons discussed above. If there are premature stop codons or frameshift mutations, that gene will not make a functional protein, and we can tell that it isn't "meant" to be that way because we basically know what the gene "should" look like since there are nearly 1000 of them that are nearly identical. To be fair, there are people out there trying to make all kinds of crazy arguments based on weak data from cross-species sequence homologies or pseudogenes or whatever, but this particular example is pretty much unassailable on those grounds.
About 85% of the US population is Christian. If I recall correctly, this is about the same as it was 30 years ago. I would venture to say that most Christians probably are born and die as Christians. Many very intelligent and very wise people are/were Christians. Do you think that you know something that they do/did not? Just because a person does not understand something does not mean it isn't true.
What do you suppose the degree of correllation is between the idealogies of people who are non-Christian is as opposed to those who are Christian? Don't you think that if a particular ideal is found not to bear in truth, that it would be discarded by those who hold it?
I suppose that if I were to approach religious belief from a purely macro and logical perspective, I would choose my religion based on the level of prosperity enjoyed by the cultures that adopted it. I wonder what religion would historically best pass this test?
It means that they're usually drunks/drug abusers/homeless/etc, and can't be counted on to take all their pills properly. If they don't get sufficient antibiotic levels, or stop taking them b/c they feel better, resistant TB can develop easily, then spread.
"There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: 'Let us be friends.' It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: 'Lut us agree not to step on each other's feet.'"
The only ones I've found on the 'net, such as ev.p, have massive fundamental flaws in their operating assumptions. Also, no less than Walter ReMine agrees with me. Don't confuse genetic load and genetic cost. Have a hack at really solving Haldane's Dilemma while you're there.
No, but we will claim, backed by figures provided by fervent evolutionists, that the mechanisms in question are nothing like enough - even under ideal conditions and given lots of dumb evolutionary assumptions about dates and the like - to produce the results we observe today.
The conclusions to which you refer are not based on evidence, they are based on a collossal and theoretical house of cards, made necessary by a Gnostic base philosophy.
We will also ask: when we have observed varved rock establishment in real time (with pictures), why do evolutionists prefer theory to observation as an explanation for the origin of varved rocks? (more pictures here, same story, different location, strata not as clear). And when mammalian remains are found in rocks dated at 280Ma old...?
If you're serious about this, I can easily bury you in pictures (my budget doesn't extend to actually flying you to site, which is what the usual toromanura demands amount to) of many other sites directly showing either processes in action which geology prefers their own theories for, or out of place fossils and formations.
What's your specialty? We can probably find something that's right up your alley. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I've heard a lot about the controversy of Creationism vs. Evolutionism. I've heard a lot of people talking ignorantly for and against both sides. I just have a few points to put out there.
If you wanna flame me, or discuss something, you can email me at Mike_Nicholaides@hotmail.com
The first and most important, although seemingly unrelated and irrelevant unless you hear me out, is this: Jesus Christ came to this earth, fully man, fully God, to pay for our sins, so that we can have a close and fulfilling relationship with the perfect God, a relationship that will change the way you act, speak and treat others. How is this related? If you don't believe this, then it's pointless to argue for creation, or even for an evolutionary view that includes a "higher power". If you don't believe this, then it doesn't matter.
Regarding religion being seperated from science:
It's foolish for there to be any separation there at all. Think about it. Everyone knows that there have to be absolute truths. Science and mathematics are based on this. If you argue against absolutes, I don't understand how you can call yourself someone who argues logically. So anyway, if you believe your religion to be true, then logically, it would have to be concurrent with science. So if science and your religion don't agree, then one of them is obviously wrong. Well, any number of arguements and discoveries won't persuade anyone either in direction. All I can tell you is that Jesus came to make ALL things new, by sacrificing himself for us because he loves us that much. That includes our messed up relationships, our messed up lives, and our bad habits that hurt other people.
Next, regarding higher powers: Some people have told me how they believe SOMEONE out there started this whole mess we call the universe. So what? Why does that even matter? "You gotta serve somebody," said Dylan. If your not serving the living God, who lives within you if you only believe in his son, Christ, then anything or anyone else you serve and anything else you do will be empty and unfulfilling, leaving your life without meaning.
Well, that's all for now. Also, I don't mind flame mail.
http://ablegray.com
My biggest question in evolution is how the number of chromosomes changes in a species and that species can still mate and produce viable offspring. Is there something that explains this?
thanks
Honestly, i don't understand this argument. I have extensively read the KJV, the NJKV, and the NIV. While there are many differences in the language, the meaning is the same. If you could give me an example comparing the KJV with others and showing how the others are corrupt, i'd appreciate it. I will say, however, that the KJV is the most poetically beautiful translation. Compare Psalm 32 and revelation 1:6-8.
:)
By the way, i don't understand why my above post was rated as Offtopic. Flamebait, troll, whatever, but it certainly wasn't offtopic. I was showing how the bible refutes evolution. That of course you believe in the Bible as the inerrant, infallible Word of God. If you don't, nevermind.
Goodbye karma.
to pass their genes on? Last time I checked it's the poor, the uneducated, etc people on welfare or people in third world countries that have the majority of children. The rich and "elite" are having fewer and fewer...
Use the Z-modem protocol between Information Superhighway routers to compress the plaintext. ~LordOfYourPants
The difference is that in the solar system, certain dependable laws apply which TEND to make certain events more likely. Gravity is a good example - without it everything would just drift about, only encountering other things by chance - the likelihood of all the right ingredients for life coming together in the same place would be miniscule - and even if they did, without gravity, they wouldn't stay there. This is one tiny example from billions that could be given.
Within the closed universe of your shaken metal can there are very few elements. Nothing can be added, nothing can be changed except that the elements in your can will be broken down by the shaking.