Georgia Takes on 'Evolution'

It's been funny for a while now, FM . . . i been laughin' since he introduced the non-word "evolutionism" . . .

i missed that set,
This has gotta be a put-on. is it April Fool yet?
He seems to be another one who is "mutation centered" in evolution. Hey medved, read mayrs books, or Goulds last text. Youll get the idea about such mechanisms as
sEX doubles the possibilities

genetic diversity in the gene pool

short tandem repeat alleles


etc etc


as gould said'genes are just a means of bookkeeping evolution , not the cause. whenever favorable mutations occur, its usually in response to an environmental change , or else it may lie 'in reserve" until a favourable phenotype responds to an environment.

data supports evolutionary theory Creationism doesnt have any basis in evidence. Every piece of evidence that a Creationist or Intelligent Design proponent likes to use, can be easily dismissed by an undergraduate student in the life or geo sciences.

that is , of course, assuming they werent trained in georgia. Can you im,agine any kids trying to get into Stanford in biochem with such a foundation in Georgia science?

Ah Georgia . . . let's sing everybody ! ! !

Eatin' goober peas
Eatin' goober peas
Oh my, how delicious
Eatin' goober peas . . .

what the hell IS a goober pea? Since this was a Civil war tune, could it be a bastardization of crowder pea?

does anybody but me give a rats ass?

its a peanut, Boss . . .

oh.















never mind

I'm trying to think of anything I wrote which would elicit this response, and I'm coming up blank. Claiming the other guy said something he didn't say and "refuting" it is basically lying.

The claim that neanderthal DNA is roughly "halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee" is fairly common since several researchers made it and you could find more than one attribution pretty easily. Likewise, visually, you only need look at pictures of neanderthal skulls to comprehend that they were roughly halfway between us and apes.

There is no disagreement amongst scientists over the fact that to be descended from something, at some point, you have to be able to interbreed with it, and there is no disagreement that humans never interbred with neanderthals, and that always used to be a big mystery before the DNA analyses. James Shreeve's "The Neanderthal Peace" article pretty much describes the state of knowledge prior tothe DNA tests.

Again, the fact that the neanderthal is in no way ancestral to modern man leaves nothing on the planet which we could plausibly be descended FROM, since all other hominids are further removed from us than the neanderthal. That is simple logic which evolutionists do not wish to face.

It is really ill-mannered to refer to someone as a liar, simply because your short-term memory is shot.

The big lie which is being promulgated by evolutionists is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.

The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God Hates IDIOTS Too...

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, 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.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:



You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

• It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be
  proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the
  missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed
  that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was
  proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't
  BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the
  logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could
  as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner
  was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her.
  In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's
  great for fantasies...
  
  
  
  
• PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of
  genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw
  Deliverance...
  
  
• PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger
  groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like
  requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions
  of years.
  
  
• PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically
  adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are
  globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
  
  
• For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal
  to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in
  overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the
  heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few
  thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter,
  a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and
  it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out
  over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into
  one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the
  salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
  

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:



They don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"


They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:



Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?

You called FM a liar, and i pointed out that he had indeed responded to something you had written. You don't respond to that, you just go off on another of your pseudo-scientific rants (probably borrowed wholesale from a crackpot creationist web site). You're behaving in a rude, ignorant, pushy manner, and you expect responses? Get a clue.

Your original statement:



implies that I claimed that neanderthals were closer to chimpanzees than they were to us, which is basically a lie. The claim is that they were genetically about halfway between humans and chimpanzees. Visually they were closer to humans, as Jay Matternes' reconstructions indicate.

Don't make lying a part of your debating tactics, and you won't get called a liar.

You haven't yet called me a liar, although it won't surprise me if you do.

Your inability to distinguish one member from another in this thread further undermines your credibility, if indeed, you had any left after your hogwash rants.

you didn't answer my question.


I'm not selling any religions here, you can pick your own. What I do claim is that you could pick ANY religion, and you'd be better off than believing in evolution(ism). In other words, it isn't hard to improve over a brain-dead ideological doctrine which stands everything we know about mathematics and probability theory on their heads and has been responsible for wars and pogroms killing over a hundred million people in the bargain.

Well, as a flattlander and kind of close relative to Mr. Neanderthal - my wife was interbreeded there - I'm very much amused! :wink:

Responsible for pogroms killing over a hundred million people . . . you're a candidate for psychiatric certification, if you truly beleive that.

Here Bubba, i'll give you a shot. I know a little about history, and have always had an interest in military history. Care to give specific examples of evolution theory being resonsible for "wars and pogroms killing over a hundred million people in the bargain?"


(Dime to a dollar he mentions Hitler, any takers?)

Ha, you corrected it!

I try to move fast, when i can, Walter . . .

.... especially, when offering money

med ved, I didnt lie, I was paraphrasing you. You do have a short termmemory problem, perhaps I should have used quotes on my post your post made it seem that scientists" agree" that neanderthals were about halfway between chimps and humans and you know that this is just garbage. No credible scientists said that . You made it seem that Paabo said it and he didnt. The research on Neander DNA showed that the DNA had more to link it to humans than any other genus. Of course there are differences . Thats why h neanderthalenses was given a separate species name. the defining term species is based upon sexual isolation (or did you not know this)
Evolution does not presuppose interbreeding, with the next species down on the bush. so are you making this **** up? cause your blather isnt even worth responses.
Man evoved from a common ancestor with apes and humans. we did not interbreed with the apes, we share common ancestors.

im not going to argue the fossil record with you fella, because . you have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA of what you speak. The concept of punctuated equilibrium is a hypothesis developed to explain an artifact, one that was based upon apparent gaps in the fossil record . Niles eldredge and jay Gould came up with the hYPOTHESIS. Over the years it was a working model (not a religion). some late news is that We dont favor it much anymore because in- depth sampling with tighter formational control has shown that most fossils do have intermediates and what was listed as fossil gaps were really sampling gaps. , > Even so it waS NEVER AN ISSUE THAT REFUTES EVOLUTION. IT WAS A HYPOTHESIS OF MECHANISM.
Youre really hanging on to strings. the fossil record of the cetaceans is a screaming example of the evolution of modern whales. We now have many examples of many fossils from many differing environments that show how many species developed, overlapped in time , and some disappeared, while those that further adapted to deep water environments, made it into the big 4 genera of whales of today. very few gaps remain and gods need not apply
As we see it,science attempts merely to explain the data at hand, not as you, make it try to fit only your Creation "hypothesis".
Youre flat wrong to say that evolution has been discretited , this is like saying that atomic theory has similarly been discredited.On the contrary, there are no notable scientists who are creationists, maybe Mike BEHE, but his field is really chemistry and hes just playing word games trying to level his deep religious beliefs with some field of science hes not well trained in.

you , sir , like to wallow in your ignorance of the basic sciences. I recognize some of your pronouncements. i see them at public hearings on the teaching of "alternative ideas of the rise of life on the planet",
Using big orange letters and clips from creationist pages makes me think that you dont spend much time critically reviewing your understandings of the subjects .it doesnt work on me and many of the others here. getting back to the original topic, Creation teachings have no business in a science curriculum, unless we want our kids to be unprepared for any futures in biology .
By the bye , most of the strict Creqation Science types have morphed to intelligent Design, so that they could sneak past the secular test for schools. i see that youre an Orthodox Floodist. i didnt think there were many of your type left.
I do have to admire your persistence of your beliefs even when opposed by the rising tide of data and evidence that refutes your claims. Creationism is pretty much irrelevent to science, but creationists , by keeping their arguments in front of the school boards are wasting a lot of valuable time by requiring that the sciences even having to defend thheir evidence. we took your people apart in Pa and most other states, but the camel is still trying to get in the tent by these continuous idiotic arguments that you come up with.
Im usually a lot more compassionate and kind about arguing with creationists, but since youve started the ad hominem crap, I guess we can just have fun.

set, the typical Creationist ploy is to ridicule with outrageous argument, best heard in an auditorium spoken by Duane Gish (hes like a Billy sol Hargus of science). Ive been called a lying evolutionist in front of school ed board meetings. The first guy who raises his voice to 75db, loses. i think mr medved(like his tv alter ego) speaks best to an audience of ignorant closed-minded blind followers of creation doctrine, not a bunch of skeptics.