@rosborne979,
I would really like to hear Lf expound on what he feels are the problems with evolution (and probably neo Darwinian theory). Im sure many in science feel the same way but are too busy working on trying to find answers rather than just yelling at the traffic as if these problems are insoluble and therefore lethal to evolutionary theory.
PS, there was a good show on PBS recently about CRSPR Cas9 and with it, a good summary of the history of gene editing since the 70's.
I wished the ID guys were listening in when one of the researchers, a lady from the MIT Lincoln Lab, stated that"its really not hard once we understood the ways chemicals react" After all DNA is just another chemical compound and obeys the (reaction) laws.
@farmerman,
farmerman wrote:Arizona isnt a buncha hillwilliams bt even they can have their dumass politicians who wish to upplant science with religion.
We have them in spades throughout our state government. We have voucher programs which can provide up to $7800 per student towards tuition for private and parochial schools. We also have dollar for dollar state tax rebates for contributions made to certified school tuition organizations which provide scholarships to students enrolled in Arizona private schools. This essentially allows Arizonans to redirect up to $1100 (joint filers) of their state income tax to religious schools.
From our local newspaper's political cartoonist, David Fitzsimmons.
@mesquite,
How does so many morons get elected into office? Some wants to force their religious' beliefs into our educational system without realizing how ignorant they are about evolution.
@rosborne979,
Quote:When you say "problems in the theory", are you talking about as yet undiscovered details to the theory, or are you talking about conflicts with the evidence? Because there are no conflicts with the evidence, and if you think there are, you should give us some examples because we would love to explore those in more detail.
Read Darwin's book. He was personally troubled by the evidence of the Cambrian explosion. It violates the fundamental principal of his theory. Since his day the Cambrian evidence has only gotten more challenging to Evolution.
If you are really interested, read 'Darwin's Doubt'. It details this problem in great detail. If you have something specific you are wondering about I’d be glad to discuss it.
@Leadfoot,
Leadfoot wrote:Read Darwin's book. He was personally troubled by the evidence of the Cambrian explosion. It violates the fundamental principal of his theory. Since his day the Cambrian evidence has only gotten more challenging to Evolution.
We've come a long way since Darwin's time, and we now know that the Cambrian explosion does not in any way violate the fundamental principal of his theory. Darwin was concerned about the apparent rapidity of the changes, but he didn't have accurate data on the timeline, which is actually much longer than he was aware, and he also didn't understand the diversity rebound from extinction events which occur due to the opening of new environmental conditions.
Your statement that the Cambrian evidence has only gotten more challenging to Evolution is simply wrong, and sounds more like the reciting of creationist propaganda than it does an understanding of the scientific literature on the subject.
@rosborne979,
Quote:Your statement that the Cambrian evidence has only gotten more challenging to Evolution is simply wrong, and sounds more like the reciting of creationist propaganda than it does an understanding of the scientific literature on the subject.
I see you have adopted farmerman's approach to the discussion. Just say it isn’t true and 'you are a religious nut so I don’t have to take your argument seriously.
Thanks, I think we're done now.
@Leadfoot,
Creationists nd Intelligent Design Creationists have been trying to create a false belief that there was a "sudden appearance" of organisms with hard parts in the fossil record, and therefore they fill this "gap" with a preposterous notion that a Creator was involved. Meyers has really never been accused of being an objective scientist as much as a "CDI huckster" in the Henry Morris style of Flood geology and creating a really unevidenced belief that Darwin was even involved in the "creation of a "CAmbrian Explosion" attributable to Darwin's "dilemma". Darwin had enough atual rrors in his work, for example, without knowing a bit about genetics and the preservation of traits in the genome, he was convinced that traits become "wroded" with successive generations. Of course we know he was all wet about this yet Mwyeres goes picking on something he has no real qualifications to expound over.
Lee and Soubriers work is a good refutation of Meyers crappola. Its reasonably derived and accurate wrt the fossil record
Lee et al., Rates of Phenotypic and Genomic Evolution during the Cambrian Explosion, Current Biology (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.07.055 With secure dated evidence that the "Cambrian Explosions" initiation was somewhere about 586 My (the existence of Dickensonia nd a few other fossil "protoarthropods" even predate this value), Lee et al say that the 'rates of evolution within the post Grenvillean pre CAmbrian to the basement Cambrian fall well within the rates of evolution in other geologic eras and stages.
at least Lf is beginning to read,Too bad he, like many FOX viewers, seem to gather his information from a bunch of CIDers.
(The NCSE has recently announced that, since the guys like Myers and Dembski and Austen have returned to concepts of "Sudden appearance" OEC ism, and crap like "Flood Geology" theyve (the NCSE) has decided to add the sobriquet of "CReationism" to the title of "Intelligent Design" Hence, the CID
Congratulations folks. And BTW why is it that you cant ever seem debate anyone without using your normal passive aggressive style of name calling
@farmerman,
By the way, the very term "Cambrian Explosion" is a term that post dates Darwin's first edition of the "origin of Species..." by about 100 years. A Creationist writer (Fritz Ridenour) coined the term in 1968. So claimng that Darwin was even aware of a Cambrian "explosion" is a bit of a stretch.
Adam Sedgewick coined the term Cambrian and "basal Cambrian" and Darwin was aware of the early metazoan life that appeared in the Cambrian and Silurian .
DArwin had no "Dilemma" about sudden appearance invalidating his "Theory". He was (rightly so) convinced that with the discovery of more fossils in time, we would see that the issue of "SUDDEN APPEARANCE" that the Creationists and the CIDers have created , would be nothing more than a problem with the , then, gaps of the fossil record. (Once again cience had to get involved so the twits of the CIDers wouldnt start hailng another falshood.
The CIDers really want their readers to remain dumb and docile and to accept what they have to recite to their "flocks" as truth.
@farmerman,
Chapter 10 of Darwin's first edition was titled,
"On the Imperfections of the Geological Record"... In it,Darwin was most concerned about how normal earth processes like deposition and "denudation of sediments" which limited the full visibility of the fossil record and that accounts for much of the apparent'' SUDDEN APPEARANCE" of species , more advanced than their antecedents .
He was somewhat annoyed at Charles Lyell, who, after championing the "imperfections of stratigraphy", became a spokesman for Creationism and catastrophism. The history of "Naturl Philosophy" is fraught with imprfections of its own record too. Charles Lyell sits as an example of a pre Victorian "Michael Behe"
Again for newcomers who may have missed this earlier...
==============================================
A proof or disproof is a kind of a transaction. There is no such thing as absolutely proving or disproving something; there is only such a thing as proving or disproving something to SOMEBODY'S satisfaction. If the party of the second part is too thick or too ideologically committed to some other way of viewing reality, then the best proof in the world will fall flat and fail.
In the case of evolution, what you have is a theory which has been repeatedly and overwhelmingly disproved over a period of many decades now via a number of independent lines reasoning and yet the adherents go on with it as if nothing had happened and, in fact, demand that the doctrine be taught in public schools at public expense and that no other theory of origins even ever be mentioned in public schools, and attempt to enforce all of that via political power plays and lawsuits.
At that point, it is clear enough that no disproof or combination of disproofs would ever suffice, that the doctrine is in fact unfalsifiable and that Carl popper's criteria for a pseudoscience is in fact met.
Once again for anybody who may have missed this earlier:
The educated lay person is not aware of how overwhelmingly evolution has been debunked over the last century.
The following is a minimal list of entire categories of evidence disproving evolution:
The decades-long experiments with fruit flies beginning in the early 1900s. Those tests were intended to demonstrate macroevolution; the failure of those tests was so unambiguous that a number of prominent scientists disavowed evolution at the time.
The discovery of the DNA/RNA info codes (information codes do not just sort of happen...)
The fact that the info code explained the failure of the fruit-fly experiments (the whole thing is driven by information and the only info there ever was in that picture was the info for a fruit fly...)
The discovery of bio-electrical machinery within 1-celled animals.
The question of irreducible complexity.
The Haldane Dilemma. That is, the gigantic spaces of time it would take to spread any genetic change through an entire herd of animals.
The increasingly massive evidence of a recent age for dinosaurs. This includes soft tissue being found in dinosaur remains, good radiocarbon dates for dinosaur remains (blind tests at the University of Georgia's dating lab), and native American petroglyphs clearly showing known dinosaur types.
The fact that the Haldane dilemma and the recent findings related to dinosaurs amount to a sort of a time sandwich (evolutionites need quadrillions of years and only have a few tens of thousands).
The dna analysis eliminating neanderthals and thus all other hominids as plausible human ancestors.
The total lack of intermediate fossils where the theory demands that the bulk of all fossils be clear intermediate types. "Punctuated Equilibria" in fact amounts to an attempt to get around both the Haldane dilemma and the lack of intermediate fossils, but has an entirely new set of overwhelming problems of its own...
The question of genetic entropy.
The obvious evidence of design in nature.
The arguments arising from pure probability and combinatoric considerations.
Here's what I mean when I use the term "combinatoric considerations"...
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, the specialized system which allows flight feathers to pivot so as to open on upstrokes and close to trap air on downstrokes (like a venetian blind), a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
I ask you: What could be stupider than that?
Fruit flies breed new generations every few days. Running a continuous decades-long experiment on fruit flies will involve more generations of fruit flies than there have ever been of anything resembling humans on Earth. Evolution is supposed to be driven by random mutation and natural selection; they subjected those flies to everything in the world known to cause mutations and recombined the mutants every possible way, and all they ever got was fruit flies.
Richard Goldschmidt wrote the results of all of that up in 1940, noting that it was then obvious enough that no combination of mutation and selection could ever produce a new kind of animal.
There is no excuse for evolution to ever have been taught in schools after 1940.
Chuck Darwin himself said that if anybody could ever demonstrate a single feature of a living creature which could not conceivably have arisen step-wise via mutations with each step representing some sort of an advantage over the previous, than his theory would crash and burn.
There is more than one choice for such a feature but,of all the things which could never possibly evolve, my pick for #1 is flight feathers.
Consider feathers, which come in more than one form. Down feathers serve for insulation and are not that much different from hair or fur. An evolutionist could talk about fur mutating into down feathers and not sound totally stupid. But flight feathers are so totally different from down feathers that you'd need TWO mutations to get to them i.e. one mutation to get from fur to down feathers and then another to get from down feathers to flight feathers.
Flight feathers involve a complex system of barbules and hooks as the image shows to create the strength needed to bear weight. Down feathers don't have any of that stuff.
Flight feathers are asymmetric (one side shorter than other) and they pivot so as to open and let air pass through on upstrokes and close again on down-strokes and the short side is the locking side.
The question is, what kind of a mutation would cause down feathers to mutate into flight feathers ONLY ON THE CREATURE'S ARMS where they will be needed after other mutations turn those arms into wings??
Evolutionism basically amounts to a belief in magic. Flight feathers are one of the most easily grasped instances of this, but there are others which are just as bad.
Evolutionism was the philosophical cornerstone for Nazism, Communism, and all the eugenics programs and poor laws.
There actually are false religions and flavors of junk science which are relatively harmless; evolution is not one of those.
The basic tenets of evolutionism are:
1. Survival of the fittest is the only moral law in nature.
2. He/she who dies with the most offspring is the winner.
That also says that the role models for the evoloser are the serial rapist and the welfare mother, Paul Bernardo and Mrs. Williams.....
@Leadfoot,
Sorry Leadfoot. Your claim was incorrect. So I said so. And it sounds like Creationist Propaganda. It just does. So I gave you that info as a bonus just because I like you.
I didn't call you names and I didn't even call you a Creationist. I just pointed out the error and the similarity to other errors of a similar nature.
@gungasnake,
If you buy any of these "gungasnorks" it shows how easily you will buy anything (like a bridge to Cuba). Hes still screwing with whether his Lysenkoist thinking carries his own brand of science into the 19th century.
Weve easily debunked everything gunga has posted before (many many times). He is only posting for newbies who may have inquiring minds.
Gunga plays a neoconservative Fundamentalist Christian who believes in a woorldwide Flood, a Genesis based abiogenesis, and other anti-cience.
Our Constitution gives protection to beliefs in anything we wish to believe, (whether it bears any evidence or not) Gunga is one of our poster chilluns.
@farmerman,
farmerman wrote:Gunga plays a neoconservative Fundamentalist Christian who believes in a woorldwide Flood, a Genesis based abiogenesis, and other anti-cience.
I don't think Gunga does the Genesis based abiogenesis thing. I think he believes the earth was manipulated by extra-terrestrials, like they tweaked primate genetics or something like that. He also wraps it up into some type of Purple Saturn thing, like a Saturn cult or something. I don't remember the details, but suffice it to say that Gunga's view of things is pretty far from mainstream Christian views.
@rosborne979,
his worldwide flood and "genesis like age of the planet" is where i get his worldview . Im not bettin on it though. I find him entertaining , but not instructive.
