......We are obviously talking about normal time........
What you call "normal time" is gravity time. However the ages of millions of years are measured by radioactivity and other techniques based upon the atom. Tree rings, such as those from the Bristle Cone Pines in the White Mountains of California measure time by the yearly seasonal cycle, as clocked by gravity. The oldest of these has about 6000 such rings.
Atomic time and gravity time are not the same measurement in the same way that inches and centimeters are not. There is an equivalency between the two, which in the case of length is linear, but in the case of time is non-linear. Many, if not most things in nature are non-linear. So then is it such a surprise that the relationship between time scales is non-linear?
Even today, atomic time MEASUREMENT is still slowing down slightly against gravity time measurement. We are now in the nearly flat portion of this non-linear curve. Since 1967, when time measurements were changed from gravity to atomic time, it has been necessary occasionally to manually adjust the atomic time standards to keep track with the motion of the earth. For high precision, the non-linear relationship is still noticeable and the two time scales must be re-synchonized occasionally.
Nowadays, in every day life, the discrepancy won't make you late for work. However, if King Tut of Egypt, had worn a modern quartz watch, he would have noticed at the end of a year, that it was slow compared to the position of the sun or that old grandfather pendulum clock in his palace.
So in gravity time the earth is less than 10,000 years old. But yes, in atomic time, it indeed measures out to about 5 billion.
.....How does an acorn becoming an oak tree not violate the second law of thermodynamics.....
An Acorn has programmed into it all the needed instructions on how to make an oak tree.
(..So, life is designed because all complex things are designed and all complex things are designed because some complex things are designed?..)
So give me an example of a complex man created system, that was not designed but came about by the same probabilistic processes that you think also brought life into existence. So yes, all structure, whether man made or natural contains information and exquisite balances. Salt crystals or snow flakes are made of atoms that arrange themselves according to the characteristics of the underlying atomic structure and forces. These energy levels and underlying structures are not a probabilistic, random accidents.
There are many fundamental relationships in nature that are essential to life. The electromagnetic force holds the electrons to the nucleus and the atoms to each other. If this were a little smaller, the atoms could not combine to form molecules since the latter would fall apart too readily. A larger force would prevent atoms from "sharing" their electrons in order to form molecules. Either way, there could be no life.
The strong nuclear force holds the inner parts of all atoms together. If this nuclear force were slightly less, then the larger atoms would not hold together to make heavy elements. A stronger force would make hydrogen (and thus water) rare.
The fact that the proton has exactly 1836 times more mass than an electron, makes life possible. Water is the only naturally occurring liquid that expands in volume. It also has the highest latent heat, both as liquid or vapor of natural substances. If water behaved as most other liquids do, there would be not life. This property of water is not accidental.
If you ask me to believe that all the above and so many more complex design elements we find in the natural world are nothing more than probabilistic, random happenstances, you have a lot of faith in chance.
I believe that the computer you are now using was first conceived in many intelligent minds.
In the same way I also believe that everything in the natural world was created by a transcendent Creator God, in whose unfathomable mind every tiny detail first arose.
.....There's no physical law that I'm aware of......
There is the law of information, in that matter and energy alone don't generate information. The third and vital ingredient to any system, whether alive or not, is thought and planning.
(..Why, then, is it sensible to generalize from complex systems that are human designed and act as though a rule that applies to the minority of systems definitely applies to the majority?..)
Why, then, is it NOT sensible to generalize from complex systems that are human designed and act as though a rule that applies to the minority of systems definitely applies to the majority?
We see this at work every single day of our lives. Left alone, your room/house gradually gets messier and messier. It becomes increasing random. This is an effect of the second LAW of thermodynamics. To reverse this natural process, that affects living and non-living things requires two things. 1- A certain amount of energy. 2- Thought and planning.
Energy alone is not enough. There is no probabilistic process, applying any amount of energy, that will restore your room to the order it had, the last time you finished cleaning it up. You think about where to put your stuff, what to keep and what to toss.
The DNA, like a disk drive, stores code written by a programmer, for a specific purpose. ALL code only comes from a mind. Nobody has ever shown that code can come from any other source. Only a mind creates for a purpose.
The ancients assumed (believed) the sun is a giant camp fire. Then Einstein came along with his famous equation and humans built a hydrogen bomb. So then the solar campfire was upgraded to a thermonuclear fire. That's what we assume (believe) today.
Thermonuclear reactions produce lots of neutrinos. However, the number of those little particles we actually measure and how many we should be measuring if indeed the sun is a giant controlled fusion reactor, is way different. The number we measure is far too small. There are some rather convoluted explanations for this, but it really still is very much a puzzle why we don't measure more neutrinos.
It has been pretty well established, that heat moves from the hotter to the cooler region. If the interior of the sun is hot enough for fusion (about 20-25 million deg) it is conceivable that by the time the energy gets to the surface, the temperature could have cooled to the 6000 degrees we measure there. Now how is it then that as we move away from the surface of the sun, to its corona, the temperature we measure rises to 3 million degrees?
According to the way heat normally behaves, it should get steadily cooler as the distance from the sun increases. If fusion is truly the source of the sun's heat, then somehow, the laws of thermodynamics are turned on their head or for some unknown reason don't apply to this situation with the sun.
Maybe, we still don't REALLY know what powers the sun. Which of course makes the whole article pure speculation.
.....Define "complex" in a quantifiable way and that shouldn't be a problem.......
I'll give a couple of examples. A747 airliner is more complex than a Cessna 180 single engine airplane.
A bird is more complex that a bee.
Complex systems generally contain more parts that must all function correctly, in order for the system to operate correctly.
Nobody and nothing can "evolve" a Cessna into a 747 without the input of thought and energy. Neither can a bird evolve from a bee by probabilistic means over lots of time.
Someone put lots of thought and energy into 747s and 180s. Someone also put lots of thought and energy into birds and bees.
....Your comment is not a response to mine at all.......
It is a response to your questions whether I am a "young earther" or not. What you are asking is like: "do you believe that the distance between SF and LA is 737 kilometers? to which I reply, no, I believe it's 458 miles.
It depends on how you define a "year". Time used to be scientifically, as well as commonly, defined as the as a period related to the time the earth took to orbit the sun once. That changed in 1967. in 1967 the Thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures defined the second of atomic time in the International System of Units as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. You can read about all that stuff here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second
By the atomic clock, the earth is indeed billions of years old. When rocks or anything is measured by radiological dating, the atomic time scale applies. By the gravity clock, the earth is somewhere in the neighborhood of only 10,000 or less years old.
So I guess in the scientific sense I am an "old earther" and in the common everyday sense I am a "young earther". All time statements need to be qualified by what time scale this time is measured in. It's similar to distance measurements specifying meters or inches. The BIG difference is that in distance measurements, the relationship between the units system is linear, which is not the case of the two time scales.
.........Does your interpretation of the Bible say/require the Earth to be less than say 50,000 years old? Or do you accept that the Earth is a lot more than 50,000 years old?........
That depends on what clock you choose to measure time with. We measure time by counting some sort of motion. All motion is controlled by forces between the bodies in motion. We commonly use two forces; gravity and the electric force. Gravity controls the motion of the earth or certain devices, such as a pendulum. The electric force controls radioactivity, atomic vibrations, emission of light from atoms, among other things.
We assume that these controlling forces are constant over the time of measurement or if not, the rate of change over time can be known. The equations for gravity do not contain any reference to time, whereas the atomic equations do. Both forces are subject to certain "constants" which we assume to be indeed invariant. It turns out that there is evidence that one constant governing the atom (Planck's constant) is not constant over large periods of time. Very few things in nature are absolutely constant over time. Because gravity depends only on mass, and has no time dimension associated with it, a reasonable assumption (belief) is that this force is indeed invariant.
The two time scales appear to be related. There is evidence from the light of distant galaxies that shows that the atomic clock slowed down in a cosecant-squared relationship against the constant gravity clock.
Therefore as measured by any process related to atomic behavior, the earth is indeed billions of years old. If you take the gravity clock, then the earth has made fewer that 10,000 trips around the sun. So indeed radioactivity shows that the oldest rocks are some billions of years old.
I believe that there is no conflict between what the Creator tells us in His book, the Bible and what we study in the book of His creation via science. It is in the interpretation of both books we have difficulty, because both books were written by the transcendent eternal One, whereas we are finite, mortals and cannot grasp either the message in creation nor the Creators written communication in all of their depths of meaning.
He tells us in His book, interestingly in His definition of what love is:
"Our knowledge is incomplete and our ability to speak what God has revealed is incomplete. 10 But when what is complete comes, then what is incomplete will no longer be used. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I no longer used childish ways. 12 Now we see a blurred image in a mirror. Then we will see very clearly. Now my knowledge is incomplete. Then I will have complete knowledge as God has complete knowledge of me. 13 So these three things remain: faith, hope, and love. But the best one of these is love." ( I Corinthians 13:9-13)
So while still here on Earth we may agree to disagree in how we interpret the Bible and the book of creation. That disagreement need not prevent us from loving each other as humans and all of us stand in awe and adoration of the God that exists and loves us more than we can imagine or know at present.
.....There are some identical chunks at identical locations that appear in both humans and in chimps, and found in no other species on earth.......
So how does that prove that people descended from chimps or other apes? It also can be interpreted that the writer of the DNA program for humans used little sections of chimp code for similar protein building instructions in many other life forms. There are similarities in the proteins found in various life forms, so why should the code instructions for their manufacture not be similar also?
It's like a spreadsheet program re-using snippets of code already used before in a word processor. There is also plenty of low level code, usually part of the OS, which is used in almost every program. No program uses every line of code in the OS, so why should there not be unused code in DNA?
(..there are chunks found in humans and ALL primates,..)
That shows that there are similarities of construction or programming. It doesn't prove descent or ancestry. The designers of computer software re-use working and debugged code in many programs. Why should the designer of life, who is much greater than all software designers put together, not also build a huge software library of code routines to use wherever such code produces the desired results?
All the evident similarities you attribute to ancestry and descent, as per evolution, can also be interpreted as common design elements the Creator used all throughout living systems.
Automobiles, airplanes, computers, in fact every system designed by people, have many elements in common. Nobody proposes to teach, because of these commonalities, that all these systems descended from some common ancestor, as in the evolutionary sense.
Every time you bring up some evidence with which to assert that this shows that Z descended from Y, I can equally say, no, all that shows is that the designer used certain parts of the design of Y also in Z. The evidence tells nothing of which came before or after.
You just happen to interpret and believe that all the evidence points to sequential evolutionary development. I happen to interpret and believe that exact same evidence points to a designer and that the evidence doesn't necessarily give us many clues as to the timings and sequences.
Evolutionists have no way of getting an answer to the question: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Those of us who believe that God is the Designer and Creator can't tell that either, just by looking at the physical evidence. However those who believe in God, also believe that He communicated to mankind. As a small part of that communication he gave us some additional, although very cryptic, information about beginnings. In His written record about Creation, He plainly tell us that he first made all living creatures, which would include chickens, with the ability to reproduce.
Evolutionists attribute all development of life in its awesome complexity to time and chance rather than thought and planning. Time and chance have not and will not ever bring something as simple as a modern airliner into existence. A single living cell has far more components that must all work correctly, in order for that cell to function, than even the biggest, most modern airliner.
I'm sure you'll admit that an airliner or computer embodies much human thought, planning and energy. Those of us who believe in God, also believe that the evidence shows careful thought and planning embodied in all of the huge variety of living things.
Evolution or Creation -- it's all only a matter of belief.
Kind-- A group of people or things having similar characteristics.
In biology, kind and species are mostly, but not always congruent and are often used interchangeably. Any given species will always be of the same kind. However not all kinds are always considered to be of the same species. Species are defined to be limited to being able to exchange genes and capable of interbreeding. Organisms within a kind are very similar in many key aspects, but may not be able to interbreed.
(..Just because we measure minor movements in mountains now doesn't mean..)
Yes but we can measure these movements TODAY, whereas we cannot observe the changes needed to evolve a fruit fly into a bee. Science is about what is observable today, not what somebody conjectured may have happened by the magic of time, millions of years ago.
..... it predicts that larger morphological differences take much too long to be observed........
There you have fallen back onto the magic ingredient of time. Evolution teaches that given enough time, a frog can turn into a prince.
Some fairy tales give the magic formula "frog+kiss=prince". In tall tales with an evolutionary twist (mislabeled science) we are told that "frog+time=prince". The magic of time can eventually even turn a rock into a prince.
You can read the tale in school "science" text books in our public schools. All children's tales, including this one begin far, far in the past:
Billions of years ago, (not in a galaxy far far away, but right here on earth) torrents of rain washed minerals from the rocky land into the pre-biotic soup of the warm seas where organic molecules called amino acids eventually (eventually is code for a really long time) formed. Amino acids are the basic building blocks of all life, sort of like the bricks of a house.
After much time, (magic) these molecules organized themselves into single celled organisms, such as simple bacteria. Some of them, called algae, in time managed to somehow become able use sunlight to get energy. Some of these became plants. We are told, these algae were the long ago ancestors of roses, sunflowers and 300 foot tall redwood trees.
Eventually (after lots more time) some of these single celled life forms made colonies, some of which specialized and multicellular forms showed up, which after even more time evolved into animals like worms, snails and after more time, (magic) some became fish.
Some of these dwellers of the sea after several million years evolved to be able to also live on land. When the tide went out, some of them were left on the beach and figured out (smart, they had tiny brains by now) how to breathe air for a while. These are called amphibians. This is where the frogs get on stage.
After more time some of these liked the land and evolved to live entirely on land. They found they could make a good living there, eating plants and each other. After a lot more time (magic) some even figured out how to fly. These first became reptiles, some of which could fly and then after more time, evolved into birds, which are much better fliers, partly because they somehow grew feathers and figured out how to regulate their body temperatures independent of their environment.
In time, (more magic) some evolved to become mammals such as dogs, cats and even monkeys and apes. Eventually after more still more time, one or more of these apes became human at last. (man was the result of the most powerful magic time ever worked)
Of course it was inevitable that sooner or later (more time) one of these evolved men would become a prince. After all, occasionally some men do become princes without getting a kiss from a maiden. Again, it is only a matter of time.
There you have it, a modern fairy tale, how a rock becomes a prince. Many have the audacity to label such fiction as science. The magic ingredient necessary to turn a frog (or even a rock) into a prince, is not some beautiful maiden's kiss, but time, unimaginable amounts of time. THAT is called science, taught in schools?
Science is about what we observe to be happening today, not what someone thinks may have happened over long periods of time, long ago. Your faith in the magic of time is not science. Evolutionists, in their belief system, ascribe the omnipotence of God in creation to time instead. Time thus becomes god.
....I could write a genetic algorithm based program which would proceed from simple to complex...
Indeed you could. I assume you are an intelligent person and not operating at random on a statistical basis such as evolution does. The program should continue to function even without the constant intervention of the programmer unless you are Microsoft, worried about "piracy" that is.
(.. the only people threatened by evolution are fundamentalists..)
Maybe some of them are. It seems though that some atheistic evolutionists are even more threatened by the possibility that there may be a God after all, to whom they will have to give an accounting of how they lived their life here on earth.
Drosophila speciation events have been extensively documented since the seventies.
That is correct and in ALL cases there was never anything else but Drosophila produced. No other flies, let alone wasps, ants bees and other insects were ever made from all these experiments. That sort of thing just doesn't happen today, and it never happened in the past either.
Statistical similarities don't show descent of one kind of life form to another any more than statistical similarities in a number of decks of cards show that one deck of card descended from another. The similar probabilistic behavior of a number roulette wheels doesn't mean that one evolved from another. All that says it that all roulette wheels have similar design characteristics and therefore are expected by their DESIGNERS to behave according to similar probabilities.
(..The key point is that they are testable predictions..)
That's exactly the big failure of evolution. So far all test to make new or combine different life forms into radically new and different life forms has failed. No ant and cockroach or any other creatures have ever been combined into a new viable insect. In great/. tradition of automobile analogies: Nobody has ever taken a motorcycle, a bicycle and a baby buggy and evolved them into an automobile. Cars all have much in common. They have engines, wheels, windshields etc. Does that mean all cars descended from a common ancestor or does it simply mean they all follow certain design principles?
(..If the DNA for a rabbit enzyme were found more similar to the human than to the chimp enzyme, then evolutionary theory would be out the window..)
In many ways, pigs are genetically more similar to humans that apes. So then according to that idea, people descended from pigs.
You have enough faith to believe in evolution. Good for you! I can't muster that much faith in randomness, probability and time having made the world as we now see it. I do have enough faith to believe that a very big God, a transcendent, omnipotent, timeless Creator God, who purposefully called everything, including you and me into existence.
.......GPS satellites must take into account relativistic effects of spacetime curvature from Earth's gravitational field........
How are the relativistic effects due to speed separated from the relativistic effects of gravity? There is a definite, measurable relativistic effect due to the speed.
Mercury is rather close to the sun. Its orbit could also be affected by atmospheric and electric/magnaetic effects from the sun. Since the electric force is 36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity, only a small offset from perfect electrical charge balance between Mercury and the sun could also affect its planetary orbit.
Space is not an insulator, but is filled with speeding charged particles from the sun. These flowing currents cause Northern lights. At times these electrical outbursts from the sun mess up our communications and power grids. It stands to reason that a much closer body, such as Mercury would be affected much more strongly by such electrical forces. There is also the possibility of simple frictional drag from the outer reaches of the sun's atmosphere. All these forces, as well as gravity, may combine to cause Mercury to be a bit erratic in tis orbit.
..Evolution explains the past and describes the present and predicts the future..
So what will ducks, platypuses, fish, monkeys and people evolve into next? Has the theory of evolution ever predicted an organism that came into being from some other organism, that we have actually seen occurring today? Has anyone ever been able to make a new, completely different life form by combining two or more existing ones according to the supposed "predictions" of evolution? Name just ONE verifiable prediction that can be shown today, the same sure way as combining hydrogen and oxygen, thereby making water.
(..How do you show experimentally which gun the bullet came from?..)
You do an experiment in the present. You shoot each gun and compare bullets thus shot with the bullet from the victim. You get fingerprints off each gun and compare with possible suspects' prints. In the end though, the jury has to decide whether to BELIEVE the prosecution or the defense.
You can't do experiments to determine whether some reptiles were the ancestor of some birds. The past left RECORDS behind, but all records whether human or natural have to be interpreted. Then you have to decide whose interpretation to BELIEVE. There are ancient human records, such as the Bible, the Babylonian Tablets and many other records. Just like these records, so too the fossil record, is interpreted by humans and believed or disbelieved by other humans.
I just happen to disbelieve the currently in vogue interpretation of the fossil record, just as you disbelieve the Bible record.
...There is every reason to expect that fossils will be found in the future...
Of course there is, but nobody has made a fossil today, from a recently deceased life form. Go ahead, make me a fossil today.
(..On the other hand, evolutionary theory makes detailed predictions as to just how close the DNA sequences will be in different species..)
When I study a computer program, I too can make predictions of how this code will likely show up in other, similar programs with the same goals and execution patterns. Same can be said for the DNA code.
(..So all of the evidence supports the prediction of evolutionary theory that it is all part of the same process..)
So all the evidence shows that the processes that execute the DNA programs follow certain predictable rules, just like the processors in the computer in your computer. The designer of these processors is no more irrational than the the engineers at Intel that designed the x86 in your computer.
(..The genetic algorithms don't use the genetic code..)
Any computer codes express and embody logical or mathematical algorithms. So of course also the codes stored in DNA express algorithms of protein and other molecular synthesis. Computer algorithms and the code that executes them always originate with a human programmer. Why is it so far fetched to theorize that DNA codes and algorithms also come from a higher, non-human programmer?
(..They are recognizable viruses--diseases--that are known to insert themselves into the DNA..)
Even there, humans mimic nature. Human made virus code also inserts itself into other human generated code.
(..But it was the scientists, armed with a theory that makes real predictions..)
So what will ducks, platypuses, fish, monkeys and people evolve into next? Has the theory of evolution ever predicted an organism that came into being from some other organism, that we have actually seen occurring today? Has anyone ever been able to make a new, completely different life form by combining two or more existing ones according to the supposed "predictions" of evolution? Name just ONE verifiable prediction that can be shown the same sure way as combining hydrogen and oxygen, thereby making water.
The fact that evolution makes absolutely NO predictions that can be observed today, shows that it is not science, but a belief system that tries to explain how life originated with out reference to an originator.
......Speciation has been documented in both natural and artificial settings......
That is an outright lie! Just because some minor changes are made in some organism, doesn't prove that birds can evolve from reptiles or that apes are human ancestors.
Experiments with fruit flies have shown that no matter what mutations are made to happen, the offspring, if any, are still only and forever fruit flies. This true for EVERY life form. If they are still able to reproduce, they only reproduce their own kind.
There can be many species within a given group. Cats and dogs are fundamentally different. There all sorts of dogs and myriads of cats. However, call cats make only more cats and all dogs produce only more dogs. Nobody has ever evolved a cat and a dog into a ??cog?? or whatever, have they?
You may believe that alligators can (by the magic of time) evolve into eagles, or monkeys become men, but that isn't science, like physics and chemistry or even experimental biology, but a fancy fairy tale for children. Fairy tales are fun. Just don't label them as science and teach them in science class.
.....and evolution is undeniable, just like chemistry......
In chemistry and physics I can do experiments TODAY to DEMONSTRATE their concepts and principles. I can show that H2O is formed from hydrogen and Oxygen. I can drop a brick on your big toe to convince you of gravity and momentum. You can stick you finger into a live light socket and get a good feel for electricity.
Evolution is all about the past. Nobody can do experiments in the past.
How do you demonstrate that a bird can descend from a reptile? How can you show experimentally that an ape is the ancestor of any human? You can't, but have to BELIEVE somebody's interpretation of the purported records. The fossil record, just like any record of the past, must be interpreted. Then you may believe a particular interpretation or not. It's just the same as having to believe someone's interpretation of the Bible or Babylonian clay tablets or other ancient records.
....Presence of particular fossils in strata of particular age.......
That is not a prediction for the future. It is just something we find. Btw, nobody has ever made a fossil today. Nowadays, when an organism dies it doesn't make a fossil, but simply decays.
(....Patterns of sequence similarity in DNA of different species corresponding to predictions of common descent via natural selection....)
The natural selection baloney in this case is just an INTERPRETATION of the genetic data. Is it not possible, that just as any good programmer, the writer of the genetic code was careful to write it in such a way that snippets could be used over again in various applications. He wrote extensive code libraries that are use repeatedly in all life forms where applicable. Clever I'd say!
(....Evolution of novel enzymatic activities in microorganisms (e.g. nylonase) Evolution of resistance to antibiotics and antivirals.....)
That use of the word "evolution" is not the same as when it is used to fool people into believing that birds came from reptiles and people descended from apes. That sort of evolution I call adaptation. We all know that is tested and real.
(....Ability of genetic algorithms based on natural selection to solve problems in mathematics and engineering design....)
It shows that the writer of the genetic code also knows a lot about engineering and design in physics and chemistry. I wonder where he got His degree?
(.....Genetic evidence of gene duplication and repurposing......)
Again, the reuse of code for similar functions. There is no need to re-invent the wheel for each protein or other construct. Just re-use different parts of the same code base already known to be debugged and working. Smart human programmers do this all the time. Why should the Author of the life code not be even much smarter?
(.....Presence of endogenous retrovirus DNA remnants in multiple species....)
That sounds like debugging code that was not removed by the author, but simply commented out so it is no longer executed. Human programmer do that also sometimes.
So again, what predictions for the FUTURE does evolution make?
.....genetics that shows we are related to an orange, but not as closely as we are to insects, dogs, and chimps........
That is the common INTERPRETATION. It could just as well that the writer of the genetic code was at least as smart as the human writers of code. He used snippets of working and debugged code in other applications for similar proteins and other structures. Smart, isn't it, to write re-useable genetic code?
.... how do you know that 20 million years ago an alien battle did not create the Sierra Nevada mountains?......
Because we can still actually measure that the mountains are growing TODAY. We can measure how far part of California moves north each year. Your descendants 20 million years from, living on the part of California west of the San Andreas Fault, will be up where Alaska is today. That of course assumes that things will keep moving at the rate we measure today.
We cannot observe evolution today. We cannot even artificially make evolution happen by our best efforts.
.....And I guarantee you that no organism can reproduce itself in such a ridiculously short time.........
I guess you stumbled over by poor choice of the word generations. What I had in mind is how many viruses you get in even a short time. Even if a virus duplicates itself only 5 times in on hour, that comes, theoretically, to about 2^22000+ viruses in a six month experiment.
If there is a dramatic change, there should also be many of the changed viruses. In all such experiments with any life form, we have never seen the kind of dramatic changes theorized by evolutionary teaching.
Experiments and observations is real science. Conjecture about how things came to be is belief. You may enough faith to believe in evolution. I do not.
....After thirty-five generations, the two groups and their offspring were isolated reproductively.....
From the article you cited. So what? They could or would no longer reproduce. OK. but they were STILL fruit flies. The did not become bees or even some other kind of fly. The were and will ALWAYS be fruit flies.
You can breed all sorts of cats and they will always remain cats. You can also breed all sorts of dogs and they will never be anything OTHER than dogs.
There are distinct groupings of life forms which cannot be crossed, from one group to another no matter what. That is a fact that is demonstrated every day. These groupings do not always fall within the commonly accepted definition of species.
Evolution is faith based, same as any religion. A person can BELIEVE in evolution the same way someone can believe in God.
....And just what is the nature of this "large, unbridgeable gap" that cannot be crossed you're referring to?.......
Just as I wrote. One example is reptiles and birds. Evolution textbook tech that reptile evolved into birds. That is one example of a HUGE gap that cannot be demonstrated to have happened. Even smaller gaps are STILL enormous. Bees to ants or ants to bees, flies to cockroaches or cockroaches to flies.
You can believe in evolution like that. I find that takes more faith than I can muster.
.......Can you point me to a scientific paper that backs up your claims that animals cannot evolve into other species?..........
Evolutionists claim this happened in the past. Maybe you can show me a paper that reports where someone has observed in our time, that even a virus has evolved into some other kind. Viruses produce millions of generation in a short time. If the claim of evolution were scientifically true, someone, somewhere should have been able to do a simple thing, such as mutating a herpes simplex into herpes zoster or, a bigger jump, say a HIV into a polio virus.
So far, AFAIK nobody has shown that this sort of evolution in fact takes place.
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......We are obviously talking about normal time........
What you call "normal time" is gravity time. However the ages of millions of years are measured by radioactivity and other techniques based upon the atom. Tree rings, such as those from the Bristle Cone Pines in the White Mountains of California measure time by the yearly seasonal cycle, as clocked by gravity. The oldest of these has about 6000 such rings.
Atomic time and gravity time are not the same measurement in the same way that inches and centimeters are not. There is an equivalency between the two, which in the case of length is linear, but in the case of time is non-linear. Many, if not most things in nature are non-linear. So then is it such a surprise that the relationship between time scales is non-linear?
Even today, atomic time MEASUREMENT is still slowing down slightly against gravity time measurement. We are now in the nearly flat portion of this non-linear curve. Since 1967, when time measurements were changed from gravity to atomic time, it has been necessary occasionally to manually adjust the atomic time standards to keep track with the motion of the earth. For high precision, the non-linear relationship is still noticeable and the two time scales must be re-synchonized occasionally.
Nowadays, in every day life, the discrepancy won't make you late for work. However, if King Tut of Egypt, had worn a modern quartz watch, he would have noticed at the end of a year, that it was slow compared to the position of the sun or that old grandfather pendulum clock in his palace.
So in gravity time the earth is less than 10,000 years old. But yes, in atomic time, it indeed measures out to about 5 billion.
.....How does an acorn becoming an oak tree not violate the second law of thermodynamics.....
An Acorn has programmed into it all the needed instructions on how to make an oak tree.
(..So, life is designed because all complex things are designed and all complex things are designed because some complex things are designed?..)
So give me an example of a complex man created system, that was not designed but came about by the same probabilistic processes that you think also brought life into existence. So yes, all structure, whether man made or natural contains information and exquisite balances. Salt crystals or snow flakes are made of atoms that arrange themselves according to the characteristics of the underlying atomic structure and forces. These energy levels and underlying structures are not a probabilistic, random accidents.
There are many fundamental relationships in nature that are essential to life. The electromagnetic force holds the electrons to the nucleus and the atoms to each other. If this were a little smaller, the atoms could not combine to form molecules since the latter would fall apart too readily. A larger force would prevent atoms from "sharing" their electrons in order to form molecules. Either way, there could be no life.
The strong nuclear force holds the inner parts of all atoms together. If this nuclear force were slightly less, then the larger atoms would not hold together to make heavy elements. A stronger force would make hydrogen (and thus water) rare.
The fact that the proton has exactly 1836 times more mass than an electron, makes life possible. Water is the only naturally occurring liquid that expands in volume. It also has the highest latent heat, both as liquid or vapor of natural substances. If water behaved as most other liquids do, there would be not life. This property of water is not accidental.
If you ask me to believe that all the above and so many more complex design elements we find in the natural world are nothing more than probabilistic, random happenstances, you have a lot of faith in chance.
I believe that the computer you are now using was first conceived in many intelligent minds.
In the same way I also believe that everything in the natural world was created by a transcendent Creator God, in whose unfathomable mind every tiny detail first arose.
.....There's no physical law that I'm aware of ......
There is the law of information, in that matter and energy alone don't generate information. The third and vital ingredient to any system, whether alive or not, is thought and planning.
(..Why, then, is it sensible to generalize from complex systems that are human designed and act as though a rule that applies to the minority of systems definitely applies to the majority?..)
Why, then, is it NOT sensible to generalize from complex systems that are human designed and act as though a rule that applies to the minority of systems definitely applies to the majority?
We see this at work every single day of our lives. Left alone, your room/house gradually gets messier and messier. It becomes increasing random. This is an effect of the second LAW of thermodynamics. To reverse this natural process, that affects living and non-living things requires two things. 1- A certain amount of energy. 2- Thought and planning.
Energy alone is not enough. There is no probabilistic process, applying any amount of energy, that will restore your room to the order it had, the last time you finished cleaning it up. You think about where to put your stuff, what to keep and what to toss.
The DNA, like a disk drive, stores code written by a programmer, for a specific purpose. ALL code only comes from a mind. Nobody has ever shown that code can come from any other source. Only a mind creates for a purpose.
The ancients assumed (believed) the sun is a giant camp fire. Then Einstein came along with his famous equation and humans built a hydrogen bomb. So then the solar campfire was upgraded to a thermonuclear fire. That's what we assume (believe) today.
Thermonuclear reactions produce lots of neutrinos. However, the number of those little particles we actually measure and how many we should be measuring if indeed the sun is a giant controlled fusion reactor, is way different. The number we measure is far too small. There are some rather convoluted explanations for this, but it really still is very much a puzzle why we don't measure more neutrinos.
It has been pretty well established, that heat moves from the hotter to the cooler region. If the interior of the sun is hot enough for fusion (about 20-25 million deg) it is conceivable that by the time the energy gets to the surface, the temperature could have cooled to the 6000 degrees we measure there. Now how is it then that as we move away from the surface of the sun, to its corona, the temperature we measure rises to 3 million degrees?
According to the way heat normally behaves, it should get steadily cooler as the distance from the sun increases. If fusion is truly the source of the sun's heat, then somehow, the laws of thermodynamics are turned on their head or for some unknown reason don't apply to this situation with the sun.
Maybe, we still don't REALLY know what powers the sun. Which of course makes the whole article pure speculation.
.....Define "complex" in a quantifiable way and that shouldn't be a problem.......
I'll give a couple of examples. A747 airliner is more complex than a Cessna 180 single engine airplane.
A bird is more complex that a bee.
Complex systems generally contain more parts that must all function correctly, in order for the system to operate correctly.
Nobody and nothing can "evolve" a Cessna into a 747 without the input of thought and energy. Neither can a bird evolve from a bee by probabilistic means over lots of time.
Someone put lots of thought and energy into 747s and 180s. Someone also put lots of thought and energy into birds and bees.
....Your comment is not a response to mine at all.......
It is a response to your questions whether I am a "young earther" or not. What you are asking is like: "do you believe that the distance between SF and LA is 737 kilometers? to which I reply, no, I believe it's 458 miles.
It depends on how you define a "year". Time used to be scientifically, as well as commonly, defined as the as a period related to the time the earth took to orbit the sun once. That changed in 1967. in 1967 the Thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures defined the second of atomic time in the International System of Units as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. You can read about all that stuff here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second
By the atomic clock, the earth is indeed billions of years old. When rocks or anything is measured by radiological dating, the atomic time scale applies. By the gravity clock, the earth is somewhere in the neighborhood of only 10,000 or less years old.
So I guess in the scientific sense I am an "old earther" and in the common everyday sense I am a "young earther". All time statements need to be qualified by what time scale this time is measured in. It's similar to distance measurements specifying meters or inches. The BIG difference is that in distance measurements, the relationship between the units system is linear, which is not the case of the two time scales.
.........Does your interpretation of the Bible say/require the Earth to be less than say 50,000 years old? Or do you accept that the Earth is a lot more than 50,000 years old?........
That depends on what clock you choose to measure time with. We measure time by counting some sort of motion. All motion is controlled by forces between the bodies in motion. We commonly use two forces; gravity and the electric force. Gravity controls the motion of the earth or certain devices, such as a pendulum. The electric force controls radioactivity, atomic vibrations, emission of light from atoms, among other things.
We assume that these controlling forces are constant over the time of measurement or if not, the rate of change over time can be known. The equations for gravity do not contain any reference to time, whereas the atomic equations do. Both forces are subject to certain "constants" which we assume to be indeed invariant. It turns out that there is evidence that one constant governing the atom (Planck's constant) is not constant over large periods of time. Very few things in nature are absolutely constant over time. Because gravity depends only on mass, and has no time dimension associated with it, a reasonable assumption (belief) is that this force is indeed invariant.
The two time scales appear to be related. There is evidence from the light of distant galaxies that shows that the atomic clock slowed down in a cosecant-squared relationship against the constant gravity clock.
Therefore as measured by any process related to atomic behavior, the earth is indeed billions of years old. If you take the gravity clock, then the earth has made fewer that 10,000 trips around the sun. So indeed radioactivity shows that the oldest rocks are some billions of years old.
I believe that there is no conflict between what the Creator tells us in His book, the Bible and what we study in the book of His creation via science. It is in the interpretation of both books we have difficulty, because both books were written by the transcendent eternal One, whereas we are finite, mortals and cannot grasp either the message in creation nor the Creators written communication in all of their depths of meaning.
He tells us in His book, interestingly in His definition of what love is:
"Our knowledge is incomplete and our ability to speak what God has revealed is incomplete. 10 But when what is complete comes, then what is incomplete will no longer be used. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I no longer used childish ways. 12 Now we see a blurred image in a mirror. Then we will see very clearly. Now my knowledge is incomplete. Then I will have complete knowledge as God has complete knowledge of me. 13 So these three things remain: faith, hope, and love. But the best one of these is love." ( I Corinthians 13:9-13)
So while still here on Earth we may agree to disagree in how we interpret the Bible and the book of creation. That disagreement need not prevent us from loving each other as humans and all of us stand in awe and adoration of the God that exists and loves us more than we can imagine or know at present.
.....There are some identical chunks at identical locations that appear in both humans and in chimps, and found in no other species on earth.......
So how does that prove that people descended from chimps or other apes? It also can be interpreted that the writer of the DNA program for humans used little sections of chimp code for similar protein building instructions in many other life forms. There are similarities in the proteins found in various life forms, so why should the code instructions for their manufacture not be similar also?
It's like a spreadsheet program re-using snippets of code already used before in a word processor. There is also plenty of low level code, usually part of the OS, which is used in almost every program. No program uses every line of code in the OS, so why should there not be unused code in DNA?
(..there are chunks found in humans and ALL primates,..)
That shows that there are similarities of construction or programming. It doesn't prove descent or ancestry. The designers of computer software re-use working and debugged code in many programs. Why should the designer of life, who is much greater than all software designers put together, not also build a huge software library of code routines to use wherever such code produces the desired results?
All the evident similarities you attribute to ancestry and descent, as per evolution, can also be interpreted as common design elements the Creator used all throughout living systems.
Automobiles, airplanes, computers, in fact every system designed by people, have many elements in common. Nobody proposes to teach, because of these commonalities, that all these systems descended from some common ancestor, as in the evolutionary sense.
Every time you bring up some evidence with which to assert that this shows that Z descended from Y, I can equally say, no, all that shows is that the designer used certain parts of the design of Y also in Z. The evidence tells nothing of which came before or after.
You just happen to interpret and believe that all the evidence points to sequential evolutionary development. I happen to interpret and believe that exact same evidence points to a designer and that the evidence doesn't necessarily give us many clues as to the timings and sequences.
Evolutionists have no way of getting an answer to the question: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Those of us who believe that God is the Designer and Creator can't tell that either, just by looking at the physical evidence. However those who believe in God, also believe that He communicated to mankind. As a small part of that communication he gave us some additional, although very cryptic, information about beginnings. In His written record about Creation, He plainly tell us that he first made all living creatures, which would include chickens, with the ability to reproduce.
Evolutionists attribute all development of life in its awesome complexity to time and chance rather than thought and planning. Time and chance have not and will not ever bring something as simple as a modern airliner into existence. A single living cell has far more components that must all work correctly, in order for that cell to function, than even the biggest, most modern airliner.
I'm sure you'll admit that an airliner or computer embodies much human thought, planning and energy. Those of us who believe in God, also believe that the evidence shows careful thought and planning embodied in all of the huge variety of living things.
Evolution or Creation -- it's all only a matter of belief.
.....How do you define kind? ...
Kind-- A group of people or things having similar characteristics.
In biology, kind and species are mostly, but not always congruent and are often used interchangeably. Any given species will always be of the same kind. However not all kinds are always considered to be of the same species. Species are defined to be limited to being able to exchange genes and capable of interbreeding. Organisms within a kind are very similar in many key aspects, but may not be able to interbreed.
(..Just because we measure minor movements in mountains now doesn't mean..)
Yes but we can measure these movements TODAY, whereas we cannot observe the changes needed to evolve a fruit fly into a bee. Science is about what is observable today, not what somebody conjectured may have happened by the magic of time, millions of years ago.
..... it predicts that larger morphological differences take much too long to be observed........
There you have fallen back onto the magic ingredient of time. Evolution teaches that given enough time, a frog can turn into a prince.
Some fairy tales give the magic formula "frog+kiss=prince". In tall tales with an evolutionary twist (mislabeled science) we are told that "frog+time=prince". The magic of time can eventually even turn a rock into a prince.
You can read the tale in school "science" text books in our public schools. All children's tales, including this one begin far, far in the past:
Billions of years ago, (not in a galaxy far far away, but right here on earth) torrents of rain washed minerals from the rocky land into the pre-biotic soup of the warm seas where organic molecules called amino acids eventually (eventually is code for a really long time) formed. Amino acids are the basic building blocks of all life, sort of like the bricks of a house.
After much time, (magic) these molecules organized themselves into single celled organisms, such as simple bacteria. Some of them, called algae, in time managed to somehow become able use sunlight to get energy. Some of these became plants. We are told, these algae were the long ago ancestors of roses, sunflowers and 300 foot tall redwood trees.
Eventually (after lots more time) some of these single celled life forms made colonies, some of which specialized and multicellular forms showed up, which after even more time evolved into animals like worms, snails and after more time, (magic) some became fish.
Some of these dwellers of the sea after several million years evolved to be able to also live on land. When the tide went out, some of them were left on the beach and figured out (smart, they had tiny brains by now) how to breathe air for a while. These are called amphibians. This is where the frogs get on stage.
After more time some of these liked the land and evolved to live entirely on land. They found they could make a good living there, eating plants and each other. After a lot more time (magic) some even figured out how to fly. These first became reptiles, some of which could fly and then after more time, evolved into birds, which are much better fliers, partly because they somehow grew feathers and figured out how to regulate their body temperatures independent of their environment.
In time, (more magic) some evolved to become mammals such as dogs, cats and even monkeys and apes. Eventually after more still more time, one or more of these apes became human at last. (man was the result of the most powerful magic time ever worked)
Of course it was inevitable that sooner or later (more time) one of these evolved men would become a prince. After all, occasionally some men do become princes without getting a kiss from a maiden. Again, it is only a matter of time.
There you have it, a modern fairy tale, how a rock becomes a prince. Many have the audacity to label such fiction as science. The magic ingredient necessary to turn a frog (or even a rock) into a prince, is not some beautiful maiden's kiss, but time, unimaginable amounts of time. THAT is called science, taught in schools?
Science is about what we observe to be happening today, not what someone thinks may have happened over long periods of time, long ago. Your faith in the magic of time is not science. Evolutionists, in their belief system, ascribe the omnipotence of God in creation to time instead. Time thus becomes god.
....I could write a genetic algorithm based program which would proceed from simple to complex...
Indeed you could. I assume you are an intelligent person and not operating at random on a statistical basis such as evolution does. The program should continue to function even without the constant intervention of the programmer unless you are Microsoft, worried about "piracy" that is.
(.. the only people threatened by evolution are fundamentalists..)
Maybe some of them are. It seems though that some atheistic evolutionists are even more threatened by the possibility that there may be a God after all, to whom they will have to give an accounting of how they lived their life here on earth.
....Really? No localized increases in complexity can happen without thought?......
That's right. Can you give an example where anything moves from simple to complex without the input of energy and though to direct that energy?
To clean your messy room, you apply energy of muscle directed by the thoughts in your brain.
..from your talkorigins link on Drosophila..
/. tradition of automobile analogies: Nobody has ever taken a motorcycle, a bicycle and a baby buggy and evolved them into an automobile. Cars all have much in common. They have engines, wheels, windshields etc. Does that mean all cars descended from a common ancestor or does it simply mean they all follow certain design principles?
Drosophila speciation events have been extensively documented since the seventies.
That is correct and in ALL cases there was never anything else but Drosophila produced. No other flies, let alone wasps, ants bees and other insects were ever made from all these experiments. That sort of thing just doesn't happen today, and it never happened in the past either.
Statistical similarities don't show descent of one kind of life form to another any more than statistical similarities in a number of decks of cards show that one deck of card descended from another. The similar probabilistic behavior of a number roulette wheels doesn't mean that one evolved from another. All that says it that all roulette wheels have similar design characteristics and therefore are expected by their DESIGNERS to behave according to similar probabilities.
(..The key point is that they are testable predictions..)
That's exactly the big failure of evolution. So far all test to make new or combine different life forms into radically new and different life forms has failed. No ant and cockroach or any other creatures have ever been combined into a new viable insect. In great
(..If the DNA for a rabbit enzyme were found more similar to the human than to the chimp enzyme, then evolutionary theory would be out the window..)
In many ways, pigs are genetically more similar to humans that apes. So then according to that idea, people descended from pigs.
You have enough faith to believe in evolution. Good for you! I can't muster that much faith in randomness, probability and time having made the world as we now see it. I do have enough faith to believe that a very big God, a transcendent, omnipotent, timeless Creator God, who purposefully called everything, including you and me into existence.
.......GPS satellites must take into account relativistic effects of spacetime curvature from Earth's gravitational field........
How are the relativistic effects due to speed separated from the relativistic effects of gravity? There is a definite, measurable relativistic effect due to the speed.
Mercury is rather close to the sun. Its orbit could also be affected by atmospheric and electric/magnaetic effects from the sun. Since the electric force is 36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity, only a small offset from perfect electrical charge balance between Mercury and the sun could also affect its planetary orbit.
Space is not an insulator, but is filled with speeding charged particles from the sun. These flowing currents cause Northern lights. At times these electrical outbursts from the sun mess up our communications and power grids. It stands to reason that a much closer body, such as Mercury would be affected much more strongly by such electrical forces. There is also the possibility of simple frictional drag from the outer reaches of the sun's atmosphere. All these forces, as well as gravity, may combine to cause Mercury to be a bit erratic in tis orbit.
..Evolution explains the past and describes the present and predicts the future..
So what will ducks, platypuses, fish, monkeys and people evolve into next? Has the theory of evolution ever predicted an organism that came into being from some other organism, that we have actually seen occurring today? Has anyone ever been able to make a new, completely different life form by combining two or more existing ones according to the supposed "predictions" of evolution? Name just ONE verifiable prediction that can be shown today, the same sure way as combining hydrogen and oxygen, thereby making water.
(..How do you show experimentally which gun the bullet came from?..)
You do an experiment in the present. You shoot each gun and compare bullets thus shot with the bullet from the victim. You get fingerprints off each gun and compare with possible suspects' prints. In the end though, the jury has to decide whether to BELIEVE the prosecution or the defense.
You can't do experiments to determine whether some reptiles were the ancestor of some birds. The past left RECORDS behind, but all records whether human or natural have to be interpreted. Then you have to decide whose interpretation to BELIEVE. There are ancient human records, such as the Bible, the Babylonian Tablets and many other records. Just like these records, so too the fossil record, is interpreted by humans and believed or disbelieved by other humans.
I just happen to disbelieve the currently in vogue interpretation of the fossil record, just as you disbelieve the Bible record.
...There is every reason to expect that fossils will be found in the future...
Of course there is, but nobody has made a fossil today, from a recently deceased life form. Go ahead, make me a fossil today.
(..On the other hand, evolutionary theory makes detailed predictions as to just how close the DNA sequences will be in different species..)
When I study a computer program, I too can make predictions of how this code will likely show up in other, similar programs with the same goals and execution patterns. Same can be said for the DNA code.
(..So all of the evidence supports the prediction of evolutionary theory that it is all part of the same process..)
So all the evidence shows that the processes that execute the DNA programs follow certain predictable rules, just like the processors in the computer in your computer. The designer of these processors is no more irrational than the the engineers at Intel that designed the x86 in your computer.
(..The genetic algorithms don't use the genetic code..)
Any computer codes express and embody logical or mathematical algorithms. So of course also the codes stored in DNA express algorithms of protein and other molecular synthesis. Computer algorithms and the code that executes them always originate with a human programmer. Why is it so far fetched to theorize that DNA codes and algorithms also come from a higher, non-human programmer?
(..They are recognizable viruses--diseases--that are known to insert themselves into the DNA..)
Even there, humans mimic nature. Human made virus code also inserts itself into other human generated code.
(..But it was the scientists, armed with a theory that makes real predictions..)
So what will ducks, platypuses, fish, monkeys and people evolve into next? Has the theory of evolution ever predicted an organism that came into being from some other organism, that we have actually seen occurring today? Has anyone ever been able to make a new, completely different life form by combining two or more existing ones according to the supposed "predictions" of evolution? Name just ONE verifiable prediction that can be shown the same sure way as combining hydrogen and oxygen, thereby making water.
The fact that evolution makes absolutely NO predictions that can be observed today, shows that it is not science, but a belief system that tries to explain how life originated with out reference to an originator.
......Speciation has been documented in both natural and artificial settings......
That is an outright lie! Just because some minor changes are made in some organism, doesn't prove that birds can evolve from reptiles or that apes are human ancestors.
Experiments with fruit flies have shown that no matter what mutations are made to happen, the offspring, if any, are still only and forever fruit flies. This true for EVERY life form. If they are still able to reproduce, they only reproduce their own kind.
There can be many species within a given group. Cats and dogs are fundamentally different. There all sorts of dogs and myriads of cats. However, call cats make only more cats and all dogs produce only more dogs. Nobody has ever evolved a cat and a dog into a ??cog?? or whatever, have they?
You may believe that alligators can (by the magic of time) evolve into eagles, or monkeys become men, but that isn't science, like physics and chemistry or even experimental biology, but a fancy fairy tale for children. Fairy tales are fun. Just don't label them as science and teach them in science class.
.....and evolution is undeniable, just like chemistry......
In chemistry and physics I can do experiments TODAY to DEMONSTRATE their concepts and principles. I can show that H2O is formed from hydrogen and Oxygen. I can drop a brick on your big toe to convince you of gravity and momentum. You can stick you finger into a live light socket and get a good feel for electricity.
Evolution is all about the past. Nobody can do experiments in the past.
How do you demonstrate that a bird can descend from a reptile? How can you show experimentally that an ape is the ancestor of any human? You can't, but have to BELIEVE somebody's interpretation of the purported records. The fossil record, just like any record of the past, must be interpreted. Then you may believe a particular interpretation or not. It's just the same as having to believe someone's interpretation of the Bible or Babylonian clay tablets or other ancient records.
....Presence of particular fossils in strata of particular age.......
That is not a prediction for the future. It is just something we find. Btw, nobody has ever made a fossil today. Nowadays, when an organism dies it doesn't make a fossil, but simply decays.
(....Patterns of sequence similarity in DNA of different species corresponding to predictions of common descent via natural selection....)
The natural selection baloney in this case is just an INTERPRETATION of the genetic data. Is it not possible, that just as any good programmer, the writer of the genetic code was careful to write it in such a way that snippets could be used over again in various applications. He wrote extensive code libraries that are use repeatedly in all life forms where applicable. Clever I'd say!
(....Evolution of novel enzymatic activities in microorganisms (e.g. nylonase) Evolution of resistance to antibiotics and antivirals.....)
That use of the word "evolution" is not the same as when it is used to fool people into believing that birds came from reptiles and people descended from apes. That sort of evolution I call adaptation. We all know that is tested and real.
(....Ability of genetic algorithms based on natural selection to solve problems in mathematics and engineering design....)
It shows that the writer of the genetic code also knows a lot about engineering and design in physics and chemistry. I wonder where he got His degree?
(.....Genetic evidence of gene duplication and repurposing......)
Again, the reuse of code for similar functions. There is no need to re-invent the wheel for each protein or other construct. Just re-use different parts of the same code base already known to be debugged and working. Smart human programmers do this all the time. Why should the Author of the life code not be even much smarter?
(.....Presence of endogenous retrovirus DNA remnants in multiple species....)
That sounds like debugging code that was not removed by the author, but simply commented out so it is no longer executed. Human programmer do that also sometimes.
So again, what predictions for the FUTURE does evolution make?
.....genetics that shows we are related to an orange, but not as closely as we are to insects, dogs, and chimps........
That is the common INTERPRETATION. It could just as well that the writer of the genetic code was at least as smart as the human writers of code. He used snippets of working and debugged code in other applications for similar proteins and other structures. Smart, isn't it, to write re-useable genetic code?
.... how do you know that 20 million years ago an alien battle did not create the Sierra Nevada mountains?......
Because we can still actually measure that the mountains are growing TODAY. We can measure how far part of California moves north each year. Your descendants 20 million years from, living on the part of California west of the San Andreas Fault, will be up where Alaska is today. That of course assumes that things will keep moving at the rate we measure today.
We cannot observe evolution today. We cannot even artificially make evolution happen by our best efforts.
.....And I guarantee you that no organism can reproduce itself in such a ridiculously short time. ........
I guess you stumbled over by poor choice of the word generations. What I had in mind is how many viruses you get in even a short time. Even if a virus duplicates itself only 5 times in on hour, that comes, theoretically, to about 2^22000+ viruses in a six month experiment.
If there is a dramatic change, there should also be many of the changed viruses. In all such experiments with any life form, we have never seen the kind of dramatic changes theorized by evolutionary teaching.
Experiments and observations is real science. Conjecture about how things came to be is belief. You may enough faith to believe in evolution. I do not.
....After thirty-five generations, the two groups and their offspring were isolated reproductively.....
From the article you cited. So what? They could or would no longer reproduce. OK. but they were STILL fruit flies. The did not become bees or even some other kind of fly. The were and will ALWAYS be fruit flies.
You can breed all sorts of cats and they will always remain cats. You can also breed all sorts of dogs and they will never be anything OTHER than dogs.
There are distinct groupings of life forms which cannot be crossed, from one group to another no matter what. That is a fact that is demonstrated every day. These groupings do not always fall within the commonly accepted definition of species.
Evolution is faith based, same as any religion. A person can BELIEVE in evolution the same way someone can believe in God.
....And just what is the nature of this "large, unbridgeable gap" that cannot be crossed you're referring to?.......
Just as I wrote. One example is reptiles and birds. Evolution textbook tech that reptile evolved into birds. That is one example of a HUGE gap that cannot be demonstrated to have happened. Even smaller gaps are STILL enormous. Bees to ants or ants to bees, flies to cockroaches or cockroaches to flies.
You can believe in evolution like that. I find that takes more faith than I can muster.
.......Can you point me to a scientific paper that backs up your claims that animals cannot evolve into other species? ..........
Evolutionists claim this happened in the past. Maybe you can show me a paper that reports where someone has observed in our time, that even a virus has evolved into some other kind. Viruses produce millions of generation in a short time. If the claim of evolution were scientifically true, someone, somewhere should have been able to do a simple thing, such as mutating a herpes simplex into herpes zoster or, a bigger jump, say a HIV into a polio virus.
So far, AFAIK nobody has shown that this sort of evolution in fact takes place.