I hate to nitpick (*sigh* no I don't), but the Newton is a measure of force, not mass, and doesn't make a whole lot of sense when describing a planet... What would that be, the gravitational force Earth exerts on itself? That would be zero.
What really happens is that there are X sperm and Y sperm. Actually, XY is only what happens in most mammals. There are at least three other prominent sex-determination systems among biological organisms, including X0 (females have two X's, males have one), ZW (W encodes femaleness), and Haplodiploidy (gametes develop into males, zygotes into females): See here for more information.
Reptilian gender is environmentally, not genetically, determined. Of course, dinosaurs weren't strictly reptilian. Nevertheless, Crichton was not describing the XY system. He was using his knowledge of exotic sex-determination systems that aren't commonly known among laypeople in order to spin a good yarn.
I do agree his work is rife with pseudoscience. But this one isn't that inaccurate.
If I had a dime for every evolutionist that stormed angrily out a conversation with me I'd be a wealthy man. There is a gigantic lack of objectivity on both sides now, and unfortunately it's become a war rather than a discussion. I will grant that many a supporter of evolution will enter into debate having already decided that they will not listen to their opponent but be intent on convincing them that their opinion is right. Not many debates are won that way, but because there are so many creationists who just spout the same empty rhetoric and don't respond to their objections, many honestly just don't care.
There is no doubt in my mind that evolution is the only theory for the diversity of life that comes close to being scientifically admissible. However, I understand that the reverse is true for you, and so I hope that through discussion we can at least engender greater understanding of each other's position.
That being said, many scientists have as their life goal the prospect of moving evolutionary theory one step forward. Many of them have just as much emotional investment in evolution as any religious zealot does in their respective religion. Of course! Scientists are always interested in advancing the field, and understanding the world around them as completely as possible. For many of them, even the religious ones, "goddiddit" just isn't "good enough". Even for them, "HOW goddiddit" is a much more worthwhile endeavor to be pursuing and most religious evolutionary scientists would say their studies give them further respect and awe for God. Much of science is standing on the shoulders of giants.
As for the emotional investment, most scientists come to accept evolution as the best scientific explanation for the data we have after years of intense study and verification for themselves in the laboratory. Of course there's going to be some emotion there. But most scientists would willingly admit defeat if they saw irrefutable evidence that completely overturned all of evolution.
Scientists who are merely indoctrinated evolutionists just going with the flow make for terrible scientists. Among respected biologists there are few.
If it weren't for creation science, however, we'd still be wondering why a human fetus appears to have gills and a tail! Haeckel's research was quickly exposed as a fabrication by mainstream scientists. A couple screw-loose scientists do not a death knell for a theory make.
It is an incorrect statement that microbiology depends one iota on evolutionary theory. Of course much of the observations are seen through that lens, but it is no more directed by evolution than any other field of science. Observation of any kinda is never dependent on current theory; In fact, it is observation that buries them when incorrect. It is a correct statement to say that nearly every field of modern biology depends on the theory of evolution. Most of the bases for biological research experiments assume the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution is consistent with biological research and continues to produce useful results in the scientific and medical community. Heck, every field of science is dependent on some core theories. Just like astrophysics, relativity, and quantum mechanics are dependent on the Big Bang.
Just as it is observation that falsifies hypotheses, it is also observation that validates a currently accepted hypothesis. Biological experimentation that shows certain evolutionary hypotheses to be incorrect means that evolution has a chance to be modified and reshaped, not buried. Observation is absolutely dependent on accepted scientific theories. Otherwise, how would you be able to even begin to explain what you observed?
Interestingly, I've had a reverse experience to yours. I was an evolutionist who, through sifting through information over the years, has discovered that evolutionary science does not come even close to a convincing argument for it's status in the scientific world. Incidentally, what *is* your point of view on all this? All you've done so far is argue against mainstream science. You say you aren't a creationist but you sure sound like one.
The big bang is similar. Believing that an infinitessimally small bit of infinitely dense mass that not even time could escape from suddenly explodes into the known universe of its own accord is every bit as beleif oriented that something or someone willed it into being. No, it's totally and completely based on evidence. The red shift shows that all matter in the universe is receding from itself. Particle physics experiments suggest that all forces and energy were at one point unified. The big bang even predicted cosmic microwave background radiation, which was a major problem with the theory until it was recently discovered. No, this is not just some half-cocked idea, this is well-tested, verified extrapolation from known data. Evidence just keeps piling in that continues to confirm the big bang happened.
Trust me, I've read all the critical anaylsis of the bombardier beetle on both sides, and I've come away with this: Both sides ask the other for imagination. The question is, which one is more probable to you? I simply can't conceive of non-intelligent DNA randomly "conferring," as you say, the ability to use these two chemicals as a defense mechanism. I really must say that an evolutionist trying to explain how this could have occurred is it's own form of entertainment. The creationists definitely have a leg up on this one because it frankly makes much more sense that there was a design in mind. What's more probable? An omnipotent giant (or highly skilled alien or flying spaghetti monster) poofed a bajillion organisms into place then left behind zero trace of his existence whatsoever? Or that the bug's ancestor, who had the two chemicals already, as well as the mechanism for ejecting it (a scent gland), accidentally mutated a small reservoir into which the two could flow and combine before ejecting it? Do I have to spell out what I think the more likely alternative is?
"I can't conceive of something happening non-randomly" is argument from incredulity. The evolutionist does not ask for imagination. The evolutionist says, look at the evidence and decide for yourself. Evolution is rife with organisms taking something and re-using it for an alternate purpose.
As for how the evolutionist explains how it occurred, yes, it's conjecture. But it's a valid counter to "this just couldn't possibly happen". The evolutionist says, "well, I disagree, and heres one way it could have happened." You don't need to know exactly how something happened to know it nevertheless happened.
Evolution has always been considered a species moving forward, but since we've never observed new, usable, beneficial information being added to a species, the definition was conveniently made that evolution is ANY change at all. In order to survive evolutionary theory has had to become increasingly microscopic as the major and most obvious questions have become impossible to answer. Nope. Evolution has been about describing how one species changes into another. It's not about moving forward or progress. Social darwinianism and "survival of the fittest" are a corruption of the theory. Evolution is not receding. If anything, it's increased in sophistication in scope over the last century. There's never been an "oops-backpedal" moment. The only constant in evolution is that it is always tending towards being suited to the organism's environment.
For example evolution WAS abiogenesis until our origin became problematic to explain and it became it's own logos. Actually, Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, not On the Origin of Life. Read it sometime. The point of evolution has always been how life evolves from life. It has never attempted to describe life from non-life. Abiogenesis is a strawman.
Appealing to authority? I was reponding to your comments that there was basically scientific consensus on evolution. I was just countering what was your appeal to authority. If you look at evolutionary theory as it has "evolved" over the last 25 years or so, you will find there have been many flaws that require it to redefine itself as a science. Frankly, just saying "these people say it is true" isn't a valid reason for accepting something. Not to mention, your claim that "many scientists disagree with evolution" is a fabrication.
However, when people say "the scientific consensus is that evolution is the best model for the data as we understand it", the unspoken part of that is that the scientific community verifies its claims through independently verifying repeatable experiments, peer review, and years and years of adaptation and refinement. In other words, we have not just the opinion of somebody who seems knowledgeable, but decades of intense research and development and refinement and discovery by people who understand this crap on a level far deeper than you or I. How do you think the scientific community came to a consensus on evolution in the first place? They don't just get together and hold a vote on which theory "feels" best.
Scientists are not hell bent on preserving evolution as though it were a pet theory, the evidence just repeatedly points to it. Yes, some scientists get emotional, but you have to realize, these people are utterly, and completely, convinced of the truth of evolution in the first place, and they usually came to that conclusion through intensive study, not indoctrination.
And hell, many of the modern theories of medicine are *based* on evolution, which predicted the rapid mutation of antigens in response to antibiotics. So even if it's not entirely true, you can hardly say it isn't useful.
The moment someone posits a working hypothesis that negates the necessity of evolution as a theory, and holds up to rigorous scrutiny, testing and falsification, and proves as robust and lasting as evolution, then that hypothesis will give evolution a run for its money.
Every scientific theory goes through stages of refinement as more data is discovered and the theory is adapted to fit the data. These are not egregious gaping holes. This is how scientific theories are formed.
Also, the fact that you continue to differentiate theory and law says to me that you don't understand how the scientific process works. There is no "status" of scientific tenets. Ideas don't graduate from hypothesis to theory to law. That has never once happened. There was never Einstein's General Hypothesis of Relativity, or Newton's Third Theory of Motion. As Isaac Asimov once said, "Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." "Theory" in a scientific sense just doesn't mean the same thing laypeople say when they use it.
I have no problem with creationism being taught in a religous setting, but it is not science and does not have a place in science classes. AFAIK, it has never produced a single hypothesis that wasn't either untestable or testable and falsified. But if you can prove me wrong, then by all means.
I think you've dismissed probability far to simplistically. For instance, if there have been trillions of permutations and as such billions of mutations over the years, we should be tripping over transitional forms in our back yard as each stage of a new, propogating transitional form would then again need to go through trillions of permutations before arriving at one new beneficial or new peice of information. Arriving at an entirely new species should provide us with such a rich fossil record that we would without question have a scientific law on our hands. The transitional forms are completely separate from probability. I think you're confounding the issue. You must concede that there are trillions of organisms and that there have been trillions of generations among the ones that reproduce quickly, like bacteria. That's roughly an octillion of opportunities for organisms to accidentally happen upon a more beneficial mutation. It's a massive parallel processing operation. Plenty of chances, much more so than probability studies call for.
And the reality is, probability studies are a strawman set up to knock down abiogenesis in hopes that it in doing so evolution will also be invalidated. It is not necessary to prove abiogenesis beyond a shadow of a doubt for evolution to be valid. For evolution to be valid, all that is necessary is to observe evolution in action around us. Granted, you do not believe this is so, and of course, in that case, abiogenesis seems like a nail-in-the-coffin for evolution. Understand, first you have to convince people that evolution is not going on around us before you can convince them that abiogenesis disproves evolution.
As for transitional forms, I would ask you what these "transitional forms" would look like and why nothing we now have qualifies. Certainly archaeopteryx is a primitive bird that still retains certain reptilian traits.
The fact that we don't have a copy of every single generation that has ever existed between two known specimens is simply due to the fact that fossilization is a flaky process. Not everything gets preserved neatly for our perusal. Since fossilization is pretty random, stabler organisms, whose genes prove highly beneficial and become widely propagated, are simply more likely to be preserved.
As for why we don't have a billion transitional forms right now, that's simply not how evolution works. Life doesn't just mutate into a billion different permutations of life-forms. Natural selection prevents this from happening. Mutations are small and only result in drastic, divergent changes over many, many generations, and divergence usually only happens two population groups are isolated from one another. Otherwise, genetic drift tends to affect the species population as a whole.
On the other hand, one could make a case for the variety of genetic variance among living species as a concrete example of transitional forms. But I suspect you will scoff at this suggestion.
We're trying to tackle *way* too many topics at once here. I'll take each topic and respond in kind.
True, evolution in the modern sense is not the same as abiogenesis. However, to separate the two is way too convenient. Abiogenesis is a "logos" that unfortunately sheilds many evolutionists from having to deal with the massively imporobable nature of evolution itself. It doesn't prevent one, though, from having to connect the dots from the beginning of life on the planet to where we are now in the midst of observable biology. The fascination with evolution no doubt stems from the fascination with origin, and if evolution were ever observed the field of abiogenesis would certainly not be around for long. Again -- I think modern science speaks for itself when it comes to evolution actually happening in modern times (See here for an example of a bacterium re-evolving a removed gene in a lab) and would in no way invalidate abiogenesis. Evolution cannot account for life starting, and that's why it's a separate area of concern. Suppose you saw a running automobile engine. Through observation, you could potentially determine all sorts of things about it without having to know that it requires an electrical spark from the ignition switch to kick-start the process. By no means would you assume that the process by which the engine is currently running is the same as the process that started it.
No, evolution and abiogenesis are separate concerns. Evolution is a current, ongoing process.
I served in the military to defend your right to think like you want I respect that. But that means you defended people's right to do things that you believe to be an affront to God. Military service does not give you the right to tell civilians what's right and wrong.
my right to express what I think about it. Then say you believe that type of speech is disrespectful to your God and find it in poor taste. I will at least respect that but I will be free to disregard it.
However, you might be better served picking your battles more wisely. I'm pretty sure God is more pissed off about stuff like crime, poverty and injustice than a bunch of people saying his name the wrong way.
It's definitely not good code. And again I state, no argument there. I think we disagree upon the degree of severity of that particular snippet you posted. Had it been an isolated case (and that's how I took it in context of your original post -- I understand now that it was all over...), and among generally OK code, you might possible agree with me to a greater extent.
Honestly, though, those wouldn't stand out to me as gloriously awful code in an ocean of bad code. And no, I wasn't criticizing you of bitching though I apologize if it came across that way. I usually save my bitch sessions for real gems like when a coworker denormalized one table into another one five times, then repeated the business logic in the code five times, in order to ensure that the relation always had exactly five members, rather than just write a damn commit hook.
Sorry but that sounds like a defense of it to me. Again, just disagreeing about the overall severity of that isolated instance. I don't make a habit of defending bad code but I do try to put myself in the bad coders' shoes and try to figure out what their thought process was. For instance, maybe he had a weak grasp of pointers and was trying to write *i=0 and *j=1 from something he saw online and didn't exactly understand why, and found out that moving the asterisk over one resulted in compiling code and figured that was correct. Whatever. I wasn't there.
Someone spent time making this code hard to understand, and they were PAID to do it. That in my book is unforgivable. Not a lot different to a mechanic you're paying to fix your car purposefully doing damage to other parts of it. I haven't seen the code, but I would *suggest* not to attribute to malice what can easily be explained by incompetence. Though I would certainly not want this particular coder working on a team with me.
I do want to make clear, however, that the last thing I'm trying to say is bad code is OK and I apologize if I have come across as hostile in doing so. And the only thing we appear to disagree on is perhaps how severe one isolated instance of that particular code would be.
As I said, an additional nucleotide is not new information. A nucleotide is a nucleotide is a nucleotide.
Disagreed. The information in DNA is encoded in its individual nucleotides, just like the information in a computer is encoded in its bits. Their purpose is conveying information about how the organism is to be built.
Nucleotides encode protein structure. A single insertion, deletion, or translation (e.g. changing A to G) in a critical location is enough to either subtly or completely alter the structure of a protein. If this confers an advantage; say, the ability to avoid being destroyed by an organism's immune response, it will propagate into future generations rather quickly. However, I know you disagree on some point of this I'm not entirely clear on so I will not belabor it any longer.
In order for the first protoplasm to become any of the modern species it had to do much more than simply become multiples of itself.
Maybe, maybe not. But that's the realm of abiogenesis and not particularly relevant to a discussion of whether evolution happens.
Someone born with 6 fingers does not have additional DNA from someone with 5.
Well, because the DNA for "finger" is there already. But the DNA encoding how many "fingers" get built is, at a minimum, altered.
As far as influenza goes, as I explained before, a particular strain becomes resistant because a mutated version that does not secrete the common enzyme targeted by an anti-body are the only ones to survive.
But that's an oversimplification. Immune systems detect invaders by means of certain key identifiers, like proteins on the virus's surface. It's not like we have two kinds of "influenza" and "resistant influenza". There are many different strains each with their own unique DNA, which cannot come about by simple deletion and "shuffling" (which doesn't occur in viruses anyway since they reproduce asexually). A mutation that alters the structure of the identifying protein might be sufficient to render that virus effectively invisible to the body's defense mechanism. But once a body gets wise to an invading virus, or doctors develop a vaccine, it will learn to identify it and the virus will lose the competitive advantage, until a further mutation renders them resistant again. It's a constant, ongoing process and not one that can be explained simply by shedding a protein or two. Eventually, there would be nothing left for the virus to do.
They have not created new information, they've in fact lost information that has, in effect made them more resistent (this is in a nutshell).
I think I've demonstrated why I think this is not the case, but that's the thing. Evolution doesn't necessarily involve the addition of novel DNA. It's not necessarily about becoming "bigger", "better", "more complex", etc. It's about natural selection applied to random changes, whether they're up (insertion), down (deletion), and sideways (translation). Just because a nucleotide or two are added or altered at random doesn't mean they aren't meaningful.
I know we disagree on the point that nucleotides are, in essence, information. Meaning. Data. For clarification, when does a nucleotide cease being a nucleotide and acquire meaning? It must, at some point, or else DNA is just there to look pretty.
If I have to qualify myself scientifically then I expect you to do the same. Please explain to me how you think influenza has evolved and tell me the new information created by mutations within a strain.
Fair enough. I think I've done this sufficiently above. I'm not necessarily asking for qualification, but clarification. For example, it's not clear to me why a nucleotide isn't information, or why a new nucleotide isn't new DNA. Granted it's a really, REALLY small amount of new DNA but if DNA is just nucleotides strung together, it almost seems like a question of semantics. If changing a nucleotide changes what a resulting protei
Yet you hyprocrtically decide to impose your own rather backwards set of ethical coding rules on me. Talking about your opinions regarding code maintenance practices hardly qualifies as imposing, let alone hypocritical.
No, you assumed that usage. It was critical as in vitally important. Where I am the word critical is used in that idiom all the time. My bad. After all, people do assume things from time to time. Retracted.
I didn't touch the code and wouldn't unless I had to. Unfortunately it's destined to be replaced in a completely different language. At that point it will make no sense whatsoever to make a verbatim translation of that cryptic crap. Of course. I wouldn't dream of suggesting carrying over badly designed code into a rewrite.
We all inherit bad code, and we all "bitch about it". Just one more line down you accuse me of thinking any opinion that disagrees with mine is that of a moron. You came out immediately hostile. I have merely expressed my opinion and you have taken offense.
After a while maintaining someone else's crap, you expect to see bad code. Curiosities like i*=1 may elicit an "oh come on" response but they're nothing to write home about.
There are plenty of other opinions that differ from mine that I respect, but certainly not yours. There is really no need to get nasty and I'm not going to continue this discussion if you keep it up.
No I just call a coder that insists on defending REALLY bad code is a moron. I'm not "insisting on defending" the sample you provided. Frankly, I don't think it's god-awful-horrible to the degree you do. Yeah, it's bad. Yeah, it's unnecessary. But on the whole its effect is *maybe* one of a couple wasted cpu cycles and a minor headache (and one heavily flamed slashdot poster). I haven't seen the rest of the code, and obviously I'm not defending the entirety of this person's code.
You on the other hand don't see a problem with code that looks completely crap and for no reason - in fact you're defending it because the compiler will probably optimize it. I never said I don't see a problem with it. I do think it is bad code. We could be having this conversation without the attempts at bullying me.
You blame others for your narrow interpretation of their words (ie. critical) and take zero responsibility for failing to clarify. Again, I don't make a habit of pointing fingers, and I find your defensiveness and hostility ridiculously out of proportion to the issue at hand.
An added nucleotide is not added information. How? Nucleotides are information. Saying it doesn't make it so.
It is replication of identical information. Identical to what? Even if it's identical the one next to it, it becomes novel in its context. GATC mutating to GATTC has a *new* T element in it. It's new information.
I never said additive mutations didn't exist. I said mutations that resulted in NEW DNA information don't exist. How are additive mutations *not* mutations resulting in new DNA? Please explain.
The fact that you so quickly jumped to the conclusion that I was talking about creation makes me think that maybe you haven't given any creedence to any other science you may be afraid of. Ad hominem attacks. Frankly secular opponents to evolution are quite few and far between and I daresay it's interesting to speak with one. After posting I did determine he was a supporter of panspermia, and I retract that argument. However, plenty of Creationists rally behind Crick in support of their anti-evolution stance (which was the basis for my erroneous belief), and the fact that he co-discovered DNA doesn't lend credibility to your own arguments. Creationists are also big fans of No New Genetic Information. If you're going to make those arguments, you'd better qualify your position or you're going to be mistaken for a creationist quite frequently.
The reality is ALL modern biology is understood in light of the evolutionary model. If you have an alternative where all the pieces fit into place just as nicely, I'd like to hear it. Panspermia is the only other non-evolution model I've heard of.
This is a big reason why evolution has not been proved. Until you (at least) explain to me how influenza gaining antibiotic resistance, despite having all the necessary components (mutation + selection + propagation) is *not* evolution, and explain how successive losses of information, while potentially advantageous in the short term, don't confer a massive disadvantage to a species in the long run, you have yet to convince me that evolution is "unproven".
However, the fact that you differentiate between Theory and Law demonstrates a misunderstanding of the terminology. The Theory of Relativity is not just speculation. Neither is Evolution. Nearly every scientist independently agrees that evolution is the most consistent model for the scientific data we have.
The question of our origin is far too important to pigeon hole yourself before considering all the scientific data out there. OK. What scientific data contradicts the current evolutionary model?
Most science is agenda-oriented on any side of the issue whether we like it or not Actually most scientific theories gain credibility based on their demonstrated predictive ability, not politics and groupthink. Plenty of obscure scientific theories have gone mainstream based on their ability to better cope with new data.
Writing cryptic code that makes no sense is most certainly not something a compiler can catch. Actually, modern compilers are quite adept at optimizing arithmetic, so "i*=0;" could very likely become something like "and eax 0" and "j*=1" would probably be discarded. Which is very likely what the code you replaced it with would compile to. It has nothing to do with whether the code is sensible.
It's not what the computer does that's important in this case, its the maintainability of the code. Earlier you stated: "This was in some rather critical code." I assumed you meant cpu-critical, not maintenance-critical. That's usually what people mean when they say critical.
If the code *works*, is *critical*, and is in *production*, then unorthodox code be damned; you don't want to be a hero. Throw in a "wtf" comment and leave it be.
I was the poor sap that had to try to figure out how that program works - that wasn't the most cryptic line either. I've inherited shitty code too. Unless it's really atrocious, you don't bitch about it. You fix it if it needs fixing, and you move on.
The fact that you don't understand any of this Quite the broad assumption. I take it you think everyone who disagrees with you is a moron?
speaks volumes for the quality of your programming. The quality of my programming speaks for the quality of my programming.
Replication errors are not evolution. Correct. Evolution is mutation plus selection plus propagation. Replication errors are mutation. Mutations that occur in germ cells (e.g., spermatozoa and ova) that produce advantageous changes in future generations are selected and eventually become part of the population. You're right, organisms do not willfully create novel data. The added data is accidental. If the result is positive, however, it quickly disperses throughout the entire population.
There are many things which appear to have evolved or appear to be evolving like influenza, but the fact is that they are not. You're shifting your argument now. First you said that additive mutations didn't exist. I pointed out replication errors. Now you're objecting on the grounds that they aren't strictly evolution?
There is nothing in observable science that can be confirmed to be a gain of DNA information! And now you're restating something I've for which I've offered a challenge (replication errors), which you've failed to address. Observing just a single added nucleotide in a subsequent generation that's absent in a previous one is bona fide confirmation. This has been observed. Yes, it's small. Yes, it could easily be detrimental. But on the off chance that it's beneficial, it will in just a few generations propagate itself throughout the population. That is evolution.
And if Francis Crick (discoverer of DNA) is correct, it is impossible. Crick was a known creationist and has an agenda. It's like saying "If creationists are correct, then evolution is impossible." Yes, I agree. But it's a vacuous statement. It means nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah crap. I got the episode right, but I should have linked to the quotes section.
Replacing one word in a well-known quote from a TV Show is wit?
I hate to nitpick (*sigh* no I don't), but the Newton is a measure of force, not mass, and doesn't make a whole lot of sense when describing a planet... What would that be, the gravitational force Earth exerts on itself? That would be zero.
Reptilian gender is environmentally, not genetically, determined. Of course, dinosaurs weren't strictly reptilian. Nevertheless, Crichton was not describing the XY system. He was using his knowledge of exotic sex-determination systems that aren't commonly known among laypeople in order to spin a good yarn.
I do agree his work is rife with pseudoscience. But this one isn't that inaccurate.
There is no doubt in my mind that evolution is the only theory for the diversity of life that comes close to being scientifically admissible. However, I understand that the reverse is true for you, and so I hope that through discussion we can at least engender greater understanding of each other's position.
As for the emotional investment, most scientists come to accept evolution as the best scientific explanation for the data we have after years of intense study and verification for themselves in the laboratory. Of course there's going to be some emotion there. But most scientists would willingly admit defeat if they saw irrefutable evidence that completely overturned all of evolution.
Scientists who are merely indoctrinated evolutionists just going with the flow make for terrible scientists. Among respected biologists there are few.
Just as it is observation that falsifies hypotheses, it is also observation that validates a currently accepted hypothesis. Biological experimentation that shows certain evolutionary hypotheses to be incorrect means that evolution has a chance to be modified and reshaped, not buried. Observation is absolutely dependent on accepted scientific theories. Otherwise, how would you be able to even begin to explain what you observed?
"I can't conceive of something happening non-randomly" is argument from incredulity. The evolutionist does not ask for imagination. The evolutionist says, look at the evidence and decide for yourself. Evolution is rife with organisms taking something and re-using it for an alternate purpose.
As for how the evolutionist explains how it occurred, yes, it's conjecture. But it's a valid counter to "this just couldn't possibly happen". The evolutionist says, "well, I disagree, and heres one way it could have happened." You don't need to know exactly how something happened to know it nevertheless happened.
However, when people say "the scientific consensus is that evolution is the best model for the data as we understand it", the unspoken part of that is that the scientific community verifies its claims through independently verifying repeatable experiments, peer review, and years and years of adaptation and refinement. In other words, we have not just the opinion of somebody who seems knowledgeable, but decades of intense research and development and refinement and discovery by people who understand this crap on a level far deeper than you or I. How do you think the scientific community came to a consensus on evolution in the first place? They don't just get together and hold a vote on which theory "feels" best.
Scientists are not hell bent on preserving evolution as though it were a pet theory, the evidence just repeatedly points to it. Yes, some scientists get emotional, but you have to realize, these people are utterly, and completely, convinced of the truth of evolution in the first place, and they usually came to that conclusion through intensive study, not indoctrination.
And hell, many of the modern theories of medicine are *based* on evolution, which predicted the rapid mutation of antigens in response to antibiotics. So even if it's not entirely true, you can hardly say it isn't useful.
The moment someone posits a working hypothesis that negates the necessity of evolution as a theory, and holds up to rigorous scrutiny, testing and falsification, and proves as robust and lasting as evolution, then that hypothesis will give evolution a run for its money.
Every scientific theory goes through stages of refinement as more data is discovered and the theory is adapted to fit the data. These are not egregious gaping holes. This is how scientific theories are formed.
Also, the fact that you continue to differentiate theory and law says to me that you don't understand how the scientific process works. There is no "status" of scientific tenets. Ideas don't graduate from hypothesis to theory to law. That has never once happened. There was never Einstein's General Hypothesis of Relativity, or Newton's Third Theory of Motion. As Isaac Asimov once said, "Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." "Theory" in a scientific sense just doesn't mean the same thing laypeople say when they use it.
I have no problem with creationism being taught in a religous setting, but it is not science and does not have a place in science classes. AFAIK, it has never produced a single hypothesis that wasn't either untestable or testable and falsified. But if you can prove me wrong, then by all means.
And the reality is, probability studies are a strawman set up to knock down abiogenesis in hopes that it in doing so evolution will also be invalidated. It is not necessary to prove abiogenesis beyond a shadow of a doubt for evolution to be valid. For evolution to be valid, all that is necessary is to observe evolution in action around us. Granted, you do not believe this is so, and of course, in that case, abiogenesis seems like a nail-in-the-coffin for evolution. Understand, first you have to convince people that evolution is not going on around us before you can convince them that abiogenesis disproves evolution.
As for transitional forms, I would ask you what these "transitional forms" would look like and why nothing we now have qualifies. Certainly archaeopteryx is a primitive bird that still retains certain reptilian traits.
The fact that we don't have a copy of every single generation that has ever existed between two known specimens is simply due to the fact that fossilization is a flaky process. Not everything gets preserved neatly for our perusal. Since fossilization is pretty random, stabler organisms, whose genes prove highly beneficial and become widely propagated, are simply more likely to be preserved.
As for why we don't have a billion transitional forms right now, that's simply not how evolution works. Life doesn't just mutate into a billion different permutations of life-forms. Natural selection prevents this from happening. Mutations are small and only result in drastic, divergent changes over many, many generations, and divergence usually only happens two population groups are isolated from one another. Otherwise, genetic drift tends to affect the species population as a whole.
On the other hand, one could make a case for the variety of genetic variance among living species as a concrete example of transitional forms. But I suspect you will scoff at this suggestion.
No, evolution and abiogenesis are separate concerns. Evolution is a current, ongoing process.
However, you might be better served picking your battles more wisely. I'm pretty sure God is more pissed off about stuff like crime, poverty and injustice than a bunch of people saying his name the wrong way.
Honestly, though, those wouldn't stand out to me as gloriously awful code in an ocean of bad code. And no, I wasn't criticizing you of bitching though I apologize if it came across that way. I usually save my bitch sessions for real gems like when a coworker denormalized one table into another one five times, then repeated the business logic in the code five times, in order to ensure that the relation always had exactly five members, rather than just write a damn commit hook. Sorry but that sounds like a defense of it to me. Again, just disagreeing about the overall severity of that isolated instance. I don't make a habit of defending bad code but I do try to put myself in the bad coders' shoes and try to figure out what their thought process was. For instance, maybe he had a weak grasp of pointers and was trying to write *i=0 and *j=1 from something he saw online and didn't exactly understand why, and found out that moving the asterisk over one resulted in compiling code and figured that was correct. Whatever. I wasn't there. Someone spent time making this code hard to understand, and they were PAID to do it. That in my book is unforgivable. Not a lot different to a mechanic you're paying to fix your car purposefully doing damage to other parts of it. I haven't seen the code, but I would *suggest* not to attribute to malice what can easily be explained by incompetence. Though I would certainly not want this particular coder working on a team with me.
I do want to make clear, however, that the last thing I'm trying to say is bad code is OK and I apologize if I have come across as hostile in doing so. And the only thing we appear to disagree on is perhaps how severe one isolated instance of that particular code would be.
As I said, an additional nucleotide is not new information. A nucleotide is a nucleotide is a nucleotide.
Disagreed. The information in DNA is encoded in its individual nucleotides, just like the information in a computer is encoded in its bits. Their purpose is conveying information about how the organism is to be built.
Nucleotides encode protein structure. A single insertion, deletion, or translation (e.g. changing A to G) in a critical location is enough to either subtly or completely alter the structure of a protein. If this confers an advantage; say, the ability to avoid being destroyed by an organism's immune response, it will propagate into future generations rather quickly. However, I know you disagree on some point of this I'm not entirely clear on so I will not belabor it any longer.
In order for the first protoplasm to become any of the modern species it had to do much more than simply become multiples of itself.
Maybe, maybe not. But that's the realm of abiogenesis and not particularly relevant to a discussion of whether evolution happens.
Someone born with 6 fingers does not have additional DNA from someone with 5.
Well, because the DNA for "finger" is there already. But the DNA encoding how many "fingers" get built is, at a minimum, altered.
As far as influenza goes, as I explained before, a particular strain becomes resistant because a mutated version that does not secrete the common enzyme targeted by an anti-body are the only ones to survive.
But that's an oversimplification. Immune systems detect invaders by means of certain key identifiers, like proteins on the virus's surface. It's not like we have two kinds of "influenza" and "resistant influenza". There are many different strains each with their own unique DNA, which cannot come about by simple deletion and "shuffling" (which doesn't occur in viruses anyway since they reproduce asexually). A mutation that alters the structure of the identifying protein might be sufficient to render that virus effectively invisible to the body's defense mechanism. But once a body gets wise to an invading virus, or doctors develop a vaccine, it will learn to identify it and the virus will lose the competitive advantage, until a further mutation renders them resistant again. It's a constant, ongoing process and not one that can be explained simply by shedding a protein or two. Eventually, there would be nothing left for the virus to do.
They have not created new information, they've in fact lost information that has, in effect made them more resistent (this is in a nutshell).
I think I've demonstrated why I think this is not the case, but that's the thing. Evolution doesn't necessarily involve the addition of novel DNA. It's not necessarily about becoming "bigger", "better", "more complex", etc. It's about natural selection applied to random changes, whether they're up (insertion), down (deletion), and sideways (translation). Just because a nucleotide or two are added or altered at random doesn't mean they aren't meaningful.
I know we disagree on the point that nucleotides are, in essence, information. Meaning. Data. For clarification, when does a nucleotide cease being a nucleotide and acquire meaning? It must, at some point, or else DNA is just there to look pretty.
If I have to qualify myself scientifically then I expect you to do the same. Please explain to me how you think influenza has evolved and tell me the new information created by mutations within a strain.
Fair enough. I think I've done this sufficiently above. I'm not necessarily asking for qualification, but clarification. For example, it's not clear to me why a nucleotide isn't information, or why a new nucleotide isn't new DNA. Granted it's a really, REALLY small amount of new DNA but if DNA is just nucleotides strung together, it almost seems like a question of semantics. If changing a nucleotide changes what a resulting protei
After a while maintaining someone else's crap, you expect to see bad code. Curiosities like i*=1 may elicit an "oh come on" response but they're nothing to write home about. There are plenty of other opinions that differ from mine that I respect, but certainly not yours. There is really no need to get nasty and I'm not going to continue this discussion if you keep it up. No I just call a coder that insists on defending REALLY bad code is a moron. I'm not "insisting on defending" the sample you provided. Frankly, I don't think it's god-awful-horrible to the degree you do. Yeah, it's bad. Yeah, it's unnecessary. But on the whole its effect is *maybe* one of a couple wasted cpu cycles and a minor headache (and one heavily flamed slashdot poster). I haven't seen the rest of the code, and obviously I'm not defending the entirety of this person's code. You on the other hand don't see a problem with code that looks completely crap and for no reason - in fact you're defending it because the compiler will probably optimize it. I never said I don't see a problem with it. I do think it is bad code. We could be having this conversation without the attempts at bullying me. You blame others for your narrow interpretation of their words (ie. critical) and take zero responsibility for failing to clarify. Again, I don't make a habit of pointing fingers, and I find your defensiveness and hostility ridiculously out of proportion to the issue at hand.
The reality is ALL modern biology is understood in light of the evolutionary model. If you have an alternative where all the pieces fit into place just as nicely, I'd like to hear it. Panspermia is the only other non-evolution model I've heard of. This is a big reason why evolution has not been proved. Until you (at least) explain to me how influenza gaining antibiotic resistance, despite having all the necessary components (mutation + selection + propagation) is *not* evolution, and explain how successive losses of information, while potentially advantageous in the short term, don't confer a massive disadvantage to a species in the long run, you have yet to convince me that evolution is "unproven".
However, the fact that you differentiate between Theory and Law demonstrates a misunderstanding of the terminology. The Theory of Relativity is not just speculation. Neither is Evolution. Nearly every scientist independently agrees that evolution is the most consistent model for the scientific data we have. The question of our origin is far too important to pigeon hole yourself before considering all the scientific data out there. OK. What scientific data contradicts the current evolutionary model? Most science is agenda-oriented on any side of the issue whether we like it or not Actually most scientific theories gain credibility based on their demonstrated predictive ability, not politics and groupthink. Plenty of obscure scientific theories have gone mainstream based on their ability to better cope with new data.
If the code *works*, is *critical*, and is in *production*, then unorthodox code be damned; you don't want to be a hero. Throw in a "wtf" comment and leave it be. I was the poor sap that had to try to figure out how that program works - that wasn't the most cryptic line either. I've inherited shitty code too. Unless it's really atrocious, you don't bitch about it. You fix it if it needs fixing, and you move on. The fact that you don't understand any of this Quite the broad assumption. I take it you think everyone who disagrees with you is a moron? speaks volumes for the quality of your programming. The quality of my programming speaks for the quality of my programming.