If what you say is true, then why did she say this?
some fairly remarkable conditions must have existed
What's remarkable about fossilisation? It's happened a lot, y'know? And if the whole bone was fossilised, what was left after dissolving the minerals?
when Dr Mary Schweitzer [...]dissolved away the minerals, she found something extraordinary inside.
What? She dissolved away the minerals and found minerals?
If you still don't get it, look at the pictures. You don't seem to be reading what you're quoting. Another example:
She discovered transparent, flexible filaments that resemble blood vessels. There were also traces of what look like red blood cells; and others that look like osteocytes, cells that build and maintain bone.
Hmmm. Transparent, flexible? Sound like fossils to you?
And of course she's not claiming that they are what they so obviously are. Firstly, she doesn't want to believe it herself, and secondly she'd immediately be pilloried by her peers. I notice that MSU's "Dinosaur Jack" Horner isn't exactly falling over himself to be noticed on this one, either. Now consider this:
the T. rex died, 68 million years ago
What? With a calendar in its hand?
One of the skeletons in evolution's closet is that we know that radioisotopic dating can break big time - mothods often contradict each other, and get the dates for known, historical, recorded events badly wrong - in fact, the original calibration for it was index fossils, the ranges for which have all long since been extended enormously and which were first pulled out of somebody's butt to fit into a preconceived, unmeasured geological column.
Next, you seem to be fallaciously assuming that fossilisation is slow. About 250km south of here is a fossilised water wheel. Fossils form fast. They have to. If they formed slowly, the animal would be scattered and broken down by scavengers and bacteria.
Even opalised fossils can form fast - as can any opal. There's a bloke who makes them in vegemite jars a bit east of here. He's gotten so good at it that he's stopped, for fear of breaking the natural opal industry. He can produce black opals on demand, opals with inclusions, control the "crackiness" of them, the whole enchilada.
Science generally only progresses when the scientists realise that something important is wrong. "It's not what you know that hurts you, It's what you know that ain't so" as Will Rogers put it.
There's something about Mary, and that something is impeccability. She doesn't want to believe what she's seeing, but she's reporting it nevertheless. She's not been "tainted" with the faintest breath of Creationism or ID or any other suspicion of heresy in the cult of Evolution. This is going to make what she finds much harder to deny.
What's wrong with the theory on the table at the moment is that it's a castle in the clouds. Most of the data is fine, but most of the interpretation depends upon assumptions which are either known to break in a variety of ways, or have never been proven. To further confuse the situation, many people fail to distinguish between data and interpretations. 68 million years is not a datum, it's an interpretation.
This absolut[e]ly requi[re]s that the original groups are in fact the same species
...is not true. Tigers and lions are quite different species, yet we occasionally have Tigons and ligers (and even wilder crosses like leopards). Dolphins and killer whales are also different, yet we occasionally have wholphins. And so on.
The salamanders are more interesting. How do you know that it took 300,000 years for them to divide into sub-species? What makes you certain of the direction of their migration? What makes you certain that Death Valley has been as it is for a third of a million years? What makes you certain that there is no ancestor species, from which all of the current subspecies descended? How can you be sure that the subspecies are literally unable to mate, rather than simply separated by changes in breeding practices or preferences?
A real feat would be robots that could self replicate with their only material inputs being, say, raw minerals and energy. That would be closer to what bacteria do.
This chart amazes me. It's a highly simplified (many commonly understood steps left out, etc) summary of roughly 2% of the known biological pathways at a specific level and common to more or less all cells. There is a companion chart linked from it which shows a different level. Some of the molecules which get a mere by-line on the chart contain many thousands of atoms apiece.
...reminds me of somebody waiting for the freight train to come before crossing the tracks. Or possibly Nisodemus holding off the police car in Diggers, or the snotty reporter and his big white X in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall as the whole thing comes apart in their hands.
...I do so enjoy saying it this way. I even have a cap with this on it somewhere...
On the western branch the most southern species has genetic information that does not exist in any other sub-species of the ring. The only way this could happen is if the information was created as the species "evolved".
Wwwwwwwwwwwwwrrrrrrrrrrrong!
Thank you for that opportunity.
Two possible paths to that situation that involve no true evolution at all, no increase in useful information, merely selection from existing genetic material, are:
the Western branch are the originals; or
there is a common ancestor with at least as much information as the Western branch.
They may not be the only two.
While we're on salamanders, where does the Korean one fit in?
...Groundhog Day, but of course that wasn't to be released for another 12 years.
Our little munchkins (5.5yob and 4yog - and, come to think of it, 15yog as well) quite enjoy watching Ever After, but probably not because of Drew's looks. (-:
It seems as though you are accepting the fundamentalist position of a strict, literalistic reading of a translation of scripture as being the only possible position. It is only in the last couple of centuries in the U.S. that this has been so, and it is due to a particular brand of Christianity that has grown up in the U.S.
OK, let's see if we can work this out together, shall we?
The Pope was given his authority by whom? Well, according to the RCC, by Peter, a Disciple of Jesus Christ. So their authority derives from this bloke called Jesus, who said: "Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'?" (Matthew 19.4-5).
He also said, "Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all." (Luke 17.26-27).
OK, so Jesus himself accepted a literal reading of Genesis and quoted it with obvious approval. He also accepted a literal interpretation of Noah's flood.
Worse, and pay careful attention to the exceptions here, "For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him." (Colossians 1:16).
This establishes the literal reading as the default from about 2000 years ago, from the lips of the nominal founder (real Papal history is somewhat less streamlined than the RCC is prepared to acknowledge) and the texts available in between Genesis and Matthew continue to support the concept.
You really don't know anything about Catholicism, do you?
Really? What's a Black Mass and which branches of the Church commonly perform it? Who was "transformed" into Pope Z________? Who deserves "the leaden bullet"?
Next time you make "predictions" like this, it would be nice if you tell the rest of us.
I did. None of it seems to remain in available archives. I'm sure there'd be several copies on the WayBack Machine, but finding them might be an issue.
What contradicting evidence?
If you want impressively scientific terms, here is one of many. If you like simple, short and sweet, try animals like the platypus. No non-platypus ancestor candidates. At all.
Wrong. Note specifically that this document was published by the Inquisition (no shit, it still exists, the formal name for it is still The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as it was when they were torching and torturing people wholesale):
In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process - one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence - simply cannot exist because 'the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles....It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence' (Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).
Evolution works by the frequencies of different genes and gene sequences changing due to changing external conditions.
For Darwin's Finches, at least, they change right back when the abnormal conditions are relaxed.
The post I replied to (was it yours, AC?) was trying to make the case that, because some of the precise phenomenologies had not been quite understood, it means that all of evolution is nonsense.
That's quite a common straw-man you have there; let me knock it down for you.
It's because certain (many) precise phenomenologies are well understood that we know evolution is nonsense. Take, for example, Mary Schwietzer's stretchy T Rex fossils so recently unearthed in Montana. We understand processes like diffusion quite well, and those processes show us that T Rex bones containing "stretchy" and "squishy" organics are nothing like 68Ma old. Yet if evolution as we know it is to be true, those bones must be very old.
The evolutionary community's best shot at a rationalisation so far has been a guess that the fleshy bits were somehow mysteriously polymerised by some unknown process. I don't know what you'd call that on Planet Materialism, but here on Planet Reality we call that wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking also assigns stuff likethis to the domain of pure chance, shaped by circumstances which were also formed by pure chance. Do bear in mind that the linked diagrams have undergone draconian simplification. The paperwork which accompanies the (no longer available) dead-tree version of these says things like "there are many more pathways than can be shown on a reasonably sized chart" and "in general, we desisted from showing detailed reaction mechanisms". These diagrams refer to two specific levels of activity and only cover "the most important" pathways common to essentially all cells. Earnst Haeckel thought of cells as simple bags of slime, but we no longer have that excuse.
Life may very well be possible with many different sets of molecules.
Unprovenconjecture. Living cells are not simple little tinker toys, boy.
After the Miller-Urey experiment, Stanley's so far spent the rest of his life trying to make the other necessaries, and has so far discovered that (1) you can't; and (2) the conditions for his original experiment have never existed.
He has discovered no such thing as (1), any more than the thousands of man hours that went into attempts to fly prior to the Wright brothers proved that flight couldn't be achieved.
No. I wasn't talking about "hasn't proven", I'm talking about "has shown that it won't work". He has walked through all of the possible alternatives and come up dry.
Stanley is attempting to compress phenomenon that occurred over millions of years and in oceans of water into a test tube. That may or may not be possible.
Each of the events Mr Miller is attempting to stimulate will take place in an instant, if at all. It is in the nature of the experiment that you make any one step of the process happen in that instant instead of strung out over billennia. The original process got as far as Step One for a few, very simple chemicals. It turns out that the chemical energy path from squat to Step One is pretty much downhill all the way, but the same path then turns seriously uphill for a very long time after that. It also turns out that Step One for many of the other required molecules is some distance up that hill.
As for your heap of other evidence, as you work through the pile, you will notice that every single piece is inferred, none of the evidence is direct observation. As soon as you have an inferral, you have assumptions, one of which is gradualism and another, more basic of which is materialism.
It requires them to have at least a screwdriver, and taking apart a machine is a good deal harder to do surreptitiously than simply rebooting from a CD or Flash stick full of network-killing junk.
Yes, nuclear physics could have drastically changed over time
Or the starting conditions could be way different than have been so far surmised, or there could be any number of ways of dicking with nuclear physics that we know nothing about. Flood of an otherwise insignificant particle? Shrug. Point is, nobody was there with a video camera, all that we have today is assumptions.
This is illustrated by the totally wild dates which often result when rocks of a known age (as in, someone was there) age are dated. The isotopic clocks should read roughly zero, and don't. This demonstrates quite simply and clearly that radioisotope dating doesn't work for the null case, so why would you rely on it for more complicated cases? She's a no make a sense.
There is nothing about the T. Rex bone that is "fresh." "Not rock" != "fresh off the butcher block".
"Stretchy" and "squishy" is a heck of a lot fresher than it ought to be. The ability to squeeze fluid out of some of the tubes involved is a whole lot different from merely "not quite rock yet". Even gas diffusion effects would have dried that up or effectively fossilised it long ago, if it was indeed from 68Ma ago.
Translation: some parts of this one sample appear to have gone through some weird polymerization, rather than what we consider to be normal fossilization.
Go back and read what he said, not what you wish was there. Not only is his statement entirely suspicion (ie, not based on even a cursory personal examination) but the whole thrust of Mary's report is that the fresh organics did not polymerise at all and did not fossilise either.
Repeat after me: there is no evidence at all for weird polymerisation, it is just wishful speculation from someone who hasn't examined the sample.
There was not one sample, but at least two separate samples at that site.
This is far from the only elephant in evolution's room, it's merely recent and obvious. It only takes one clear demonstration that evolution cannot work to disprove this Atheist's creation myth, and you're facing such.
you haven't explained why his suspicion is implausible
The onus is on you to show his random suspicion to be plausible, is it not?
There's a whole herd of elephants in evolution's room, stampeding around, and the snowballing of speculation which you've participated in here is exactly how that peculiar blindness is achieved.
...but I recall a similar situation. I taught a lady to use WordStar on an Osborne 1, the office manager for a politician in Midland, Western Australia. She demonstrated that she knew what was going on. The next day, it was all gone. All of it. Every keystroke, every process.
So I taught her again, watched her run through the process, hung around for an hour making sure she had it all sorted out, no worries. Went home.
The next day, it was all gone again. Hello, square one. And again. And again. Every. Single. Time.
No problems with anything else in the office, it all ran smoothly, she just woke up WordStarless every morning. <shrug>
Slashdot Mirror
If you still don't get it, look at the pictures. You don't seem to be reading what you're quoting. Another example:Hmmm. Transparent, flexible? Sound like fossils to you?
And of course she's not claiming that they are what they so obviously are. Firstly, she doesn't want to believe it herself, and secondly she'd immediately be pilloried by her peers. I notice that MSU's "Dinosaur Jack" Horner isn't exactly falling over himself to be noticed on this one, either. Now consider this:What? With a calendar in its hand?
One of the skeletons in evolution's closet is that we know that radioisotopic dating can break big time - mothods often contradict each other, and get the dates for known, historical, recorded events badly wrong - in fact, the original calibration for it was index fossils, the ranges for which have all long since been extended enormously and which were first pulled out of somebody's butt to fit into a preconceived, unmeasured geological column.
Next, you seem to be fallaciously assuming that fossilisation is slow. About 250km south of here is a fossilised water wheel. Fossils form fast. They have to. If they formed slowly, the animal would be scattered and broken down by scavengers and bacteria.
Even opalised fossils can form fast - as can any opal. There's a bloke who makes them in vegemite jars a bit east of here. He's gotten so good at it that he's stopped, for fear of breaking the natural opal industry. He can produce black opals on demand, opals with inclusions, control the "crackiness" of them, the whole enchilada.
Science generally only progresses when the scientists realise that something important is wrong. "It's not what you know that hurts you, It's what you know that ain't so" as Will Rogers put it.
There's something about Mary, and that something is impeccability. She doesn't want to believe what she's seeing, but she's reporting it nevertheless. She's not been "tainted" with the faintest breath of Creationism or ID or any other suspicion of heresy in the cult of Evolution. This is going to make what she finds much harder to deny.
What's wrong with the theory on the table at the moment is that it's a castle in the clouds. Most of the data is fine, but most of the interpretation depends upon assumptions which are either known to break in a variety of ways, or have never been proven. To further confuse the situation, many people fail to distinguish between data and interpretations. 68 million years is not a datum, it's an interpretation.
Unfortunately, this:...is not true. Tigers and lions are quite different species, yet we occasionally have Tigons and ligers (and even wilder crosses like leopards). Dolphins and killer whales are also different, yet we occasionally have wholphins. And so on.
The salamanders are more interesting. How do you know that it took 300,000 years for them to divide into sub-species? What makes you certain of the direction of their migration? What makes you certain that Death Valley has been as it is for a third of a million years? What makes you certain that there is no ancestor species, from which all of the current subspecies descended? How can you be sure that the subspecies are literally unable to mate, rather than simply separated by changes in breeding practices or preferences?
...quit typing earlier in the day.
lappyvator.cyberknights.com.au
...lappivator.cyberknights.com.au, please let me know if you improve the design.
...about 12 hours before I first read of this.
...reminds me of somebody waiting for the freight train to come before crossing the tracks. Or possibly Nisodemus holding off the police car in Diggers, or the snotty reporter and his big white X in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall as the whole thing comes apart in their hands.
Thank you for that opportunity.
Two possible paths to that situation that involve no true evolution at all, no increase in useful information, merely selection from existing genetic material, are:
- the Western branch are the originals; or
- there is a common ancestor with at least as much information as the Western branch.
They may not be the only two.While we're on salamanders, where does the Korean one fit in?
...we should expect Microsoft to sue IBM for incorporating Microsoft-entangled parts of OS/2 into Linux?
...Groundhog Day, but of course that wasn't to be released for another 12 years.
Our little munchkins (5.5yob and 4yog - and, come to think of it, 15yog as well) quite enjoy watching Ever After, but probably not because of Drew's looks. (-:
The Pope was given his authority by whom? Well, according to the RCC, by Peter, a Disciple of Jesus Christ. So their authority derives from this bloke called Jesus, who said: "Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'?" (Matthew 19.4-5).
He also said, "Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all." (Luke 17.26-27).
OK, so Jesus himself accepted a literal reading of Genesis and quoted it with obvious approval. He also accepted a literal interpretation of Noah's flood.
Worse, and pay careful attention to the exceptions here, "For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him." (Colossians 1:16).
This establishes the literal reading as the default from about 2000 years ago, from the lips of the nominal founder (real Papal history is somewhat less streamlined than the RCC is prepared to acknowledge) and the texts available in between Genesis and Matthew continue to support the concept.Really? What's a Black Mass and which branches of the Church commonly perform it? Who was "transformed" into Pope Z________? Who deserves "the leaden bullet"?I did. None of it seems to remain in available archives. I'm sure there'd be several copies on the WayBack Machine, but finding them might be an issue.If you want impressively scientific terms, here is one of many. If you like simple, short and sweet, try animals like the platypus. No non-platypus ancestor candidates. At all.
It's because certain (many) precise phenomenologies are well understood that we know evolution is nonsense. Take, for example, Mary Schwietzer's stretchy T Rex fossils so recently unearthed in Montana. We understand processes like diffusion quite well, and those processes show us that T Rex bones containing "stretchy" and "squishy" organics are nothing like 68Ma old. Yet if evolution as we know it is to be true, those bones must be very old.
The evolutionary community's best shot at a rationalisation so far has been a guess that the fleshy bits were somehow mysteriously polymerised by some unknown process. I don't know what you'd call that on Planet Materialism, but here on Planet Reality we call that wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking also assigns stuff like this to the domain of pure chance, shaped by circumstances which were also formed by pure chance. Do bear in mind that the linked diagrams have undergone draconian simplification. The paperwork which accompanies the (no longer available) dead-tree version of these says things like "there are many more pathways than can be shown on a reasonably sized chart" and "in general, we desisted from showing detailed reaction mechanisms". These diagrams refer to two specific levels of activity and only cover "the most important" pathways common to essentially all cells. Earnst Haeckel thought of cells as simple bags of slime, but we no longer have that excuse.
No. I wasn't talking about "hasn't proven", I'm talking about "has shown that it won't work". He has walked through all of the possible alternatives and come up dry.Each of the events Mr Miller is attempting to stimulate will take place in an instant, if at all. It is in the nature of the experiment that you make any one step of the process happen in that instant instead of strung out over billennia. The original process got as far as Step One for a few, very simple chemicals. It turns out that the chemical energy path from squat to Step One is pretty much downhill all the way, but the same path then turns seriously uphill for a very long time after that. It also turns out that Step One for many of the other required molecules is some distance up that hill.
As for your heap of other evidence, as you work through the pile, you will notice that every single piece is inferred, none of the evidence is direct observation. As soon as you have an inferral, you have assumptions, one of which is gradualism and another, more basic of which is materialism.
It requires them to have at least a screwdriver, and taking apart a machine is a good deal harder to do surreptitiously than simply rebooting from a CD or Flash stick full of network-killing junk.
...are going to have a slipstreamed CD? Or a BSD VPC host to install it under?
Stupid, I know, but welcome to real life.
This is illustrated by the totally wild dates which often result when rocks of a known age (as in, someone was there) age are dated. The isotopic clocks should read roughly zero, and don't. This demonstrates quite simply and clearly that radioisotope dating doesn't work for the null case, so why would you rely on it for more complicated cases? She's a no make a sense."Stretchy" and "squishy" is a heck of a lot fresher than it ought to be. The ability to squeeze fluid out of some of the tubes involved is a whole lot different from merely "not quite rock yet". Even gas diffusion effects would have dried that up or effectively fossilised it long ago, if it was indeed from 68Ma ago.
Repeat after me: there is no evidence at all for weird polymerisation, it is just wishful speculation from someone who hasn't examined the sample.
There was not one sample, but at least two separate samples at that site.
This is far from the only elephant in evolution's room, it's merely recent and obvious. It only takes one clear demonstration that evolution cannot work to disprove this Atheist's creation myth, and you're facing such.The onus is on you to show his random suspicion to be plausible, is it not?
There's a whole herd of elephants in evolution's room, stampeding around, and the snowballing of speculation which you've participated in here is exactly how that peculiar blindness is achieved.
Which WP suite is groing the fastest, in terms of screens graced rather than boxes sold? Which has the brightest future?
...but I recall a similar situation. I taught a lady to use WordStar on an Osborne 1, the office manager for a politician in Midland, Western Australia. She demonstrated that she knew what was going on. The next day, it was all gone. All of it. Every keystroke, every process.
So I taught her again, watched her run through the process, hung around for an hour making sure she had it all sorted out, no worries. Went home.
The next day, it was all gone again. Hello, square one. And again. And again. Every. Single. Time.
No problems with anything else in the office, it all ran smoothly, she just woke up WordStarless every morning. <shrug>
...start here.
If time weighs heavily on your hands, adding a second, massively simplified, child-oriented interface to The GIMP would be nice.
...but aren't Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg honking great content archives?
They're not children's books, but are childrens' books always the best medium? What stands in the way of extending Gutenberg to include those, anyway?
They all have it at home. You're insisting that the Ed Dept make sure that the Greenlanders have enough ice.
-1, Outsightful