132
   

Why do people deny evolution?

 
 
Quehoniaomath
 
  0  
Mon 4 May, 2015 02:43 pm
@JLNobody,
Quote:
People may DENY evolution, as an ideological (fantastical) act, in the sense that they reject what they understand to be a simple hypothesis, but they do not, and cannot, REPUDIATE it as the complex body of theory that serves effectively to organize much evidence from many disciplines of the physical and natural sciences. It is not "the theory of evolution"(as in a simple testable hypothesis); it is "evolutionary theory" consisting of many falsifiable hypotheses and empirical generalizations organized around a working assumption of natural selection.
~

Do I understand correctly that you feel that (macro) evolution is really true?
spooky24
 
  0  
Mon 4 May, 2015 05:35 pm
@Quehoniaomath,
Seems to me that you know nothing at all about '"evolutionary theory". There is no doubt the we evolved from Australopithecus africanus however we have so little information to work with. 40 odd pounds of bones for two million years of time.

With the discovery of proto humans and the proto ancestor it seem to throw the whole out of Africa theory out the window.

It's a fascinating science however mostly it's the study of things we will never know-ever.
Quehoniaomath
 
  0  
Wed 6 May, 2015 12:31 pm
@spooky24,
Quote:
Seems to me that you know nothing at all about '"evolutionary theory". There is no doubt the we evolved from Australopithecus africanus however we have so little information to work with. 40 odd pounds of bones for two million years of time.

With the discovery of proto humans and the proto ancestor it seem to throw the whole out of Africa theory out the window.

It's a fascinating science however mostly it's the study of things we will never know-ever.


What makes you think I know nothing at all?

raprap
 
  1  
Wed 6 May, 2015 08:30 pm
@Quehoniaomath,
Quehoniaomath wrote:
What makes you think I know nothing at all?

The sounds you make when you open your mouth.

Rap
0 Replies
 
FBM
 
  0  
Wed 6 May, 2015 08:35 pm
@JLNobody,
JLNobody wrote:

People may DENY evolution, as an ideological (fantastical) act, in the sense that they reject what they understand to be a simple hypothesis, but they do not, and cannot, REPUDIATE it as the complex body of theory that serves effectively to organize much evidence from many disciplines of the physical and natural sciences. It is not "the theory of evolution"(as in a simple testable hypothesis); it is "evolutionary theory" consisting of many falsifiable hypotheses and empirical generalizations organized around a working assumption of natural selection.


Good point.
0 Replies
 
gungasnake
 
  0  
Wed 6 May, 2015 08:56 pm
@FBM,
Specter clearly does not understand some of his own topic items. There really are problems involved in eating plants which contain roundup-related chemicals and there really are reasons to suspect that some of the vaccines they're trying to force on the population may cause autism in children. Autism existed in 1957 but it was awfully damned rare.
0 Replies
 
hingehead
 
  2  
Thu 7 May, 2015 06:47 am
If you want to deny something it's best not to choose Evolution or The Holocaust. You'll look silly. Way to much evidence for both.
izzythepush
 
  0  
Thu 7 May, 2015 07:14 am
@hingehead,
Considering whose post yours follows, you might want to add the Srebrenica Massacre to that list.
0 Replies
 
gungasnake
 
  -1  
Thu 7 May, 2015 08:29 am
@hingehead,
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 anti-functional 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.
parados
 
  2  
Thu 7 May, 2015 11:04 am
@gungasnake,
gungasnake wrote:

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.


And evolution doesn't meet your satisfaction but you post about guns, faces, and other things being found on Mars that do meet your satisfaction.

There is such a thing as critical thinking. When someone proves they don't have that ability, it makes it hard to take them seriously.
0 Replies
 
Frank Apisa
 
  0  
Thu 7 May, 2015 11:18 am
@gungasnake,
Ya almost had me on board, Gunga...but you left out the grassy knoll.

You do that damn near every time.

Without a mention of the grassy knoll...this all becomes bunk...and you know it.

How could someone put so much work into a post as you did with that...and leave out the grassy knoll.

And don't even start me on Area 51!
farmerman
 
  1  
Fri 8 May, 2015 04:20 am
@Frank Apisa,
GOOD TO BE HOME AGAIN

I think layman is posing a "groundswell" that jut isnt happening. Stuff like genetic drift etc, had been posed decades ago nd then it went in an out of favor . Now its back in nd still, theres not a shred of real evidence to support the neutral theory kerfuffle.

The only arguments that could really support most of neutral evolution is "Irreducible Complexity"> Only problem with that is that its never been shown to even exist. All the examples of IC have been debunked .

I wonder whether Meyers wasnt actually Quote mined.
farmerman
 
  1  
Fri 8 May, 2015 04:31 am
@gungasnake,
Quote:
there is only such a thing as proving or disproving something to SOMEBODY'S satisfaction.
There are forensic standards regarding "preponerance of the evidence" (In most cases, preponderance implies the "Weight" in support.


Like anything, in the face of huge piles of vidence, you can deny, but you just look kind of silly.

I believe the reasonably educated layman is more intelligent than gunga would believe. Denial takes an effort of pushback that is usually derived of some mythological worldview, nothing more.

So, by posting pictures of morons or cartoons of denial, doesnt , in the least, add any support to the gungish view . All evidentiary support he tries to cobble together is either based on fraud, lies, or just plain 'Scientistic" fairy tales
0 Replies
 
Frank Apisa
 
  0  
Fri 8 May, 2015 04:34 am
@farmerman,
Hey, FM. Good to see ya back.

Pennsylvania and A2K are the better for it!
Wink
farmerman
 
  0  
Fri 8 May, 2015 04:37 am
@Frank Apisa,
I barely left the state, just a few tens of miles into NY.
Theres so much goddam gas up there its amazing the whole place doesnt go up. It used to be that science dictated where we drill for oil and conventional gas. Now with the fracking, we drill closer to pipelines and screw the science. Its all over the map.

And we still have two or three untapped gas fields beneath what were presently playing with.

Were up to our asses in gases
rosborne979
 
  0  
Fri 8 May, 2015 04:40 am
@farmerman,
farmerman wrote:
I barely left the state, just a few tens of miles into NY.
Theres so much goddam gas up there its amazing the whole place doesnt go up.

Why is there so much gas up there? Is it from ancient peat bogs or does it come from an older source?
Frank Apisa
 
  1  
Fri 8 May, 2015 04:42 am
@farmerman,
farmerman wrote:

I barely left the state, just a few tens of miles into NY.
Theres so much goddam gas up there its amazing the whole place doesnt go up.



And outside of Albany, some of it is fuel for cars and trucks!

Frank Apisa
 
  1  
Fri 8 May, 2015 05:16 am
@Frank Apisa,
Aside from the joke about the gasbags in Albany...

...I am shocked that there is lots of gas in New York.

Wouldn't have thought it.

You folk gonna turn this into a New York state industry?
layman
 
  0  
Fri 8 May, 2015 05:51 am
@farmerman,
Quote:
Stuff like genetic drift etc, had been posed decades ago nd then it went in an out of favor . Now its back in nd still, theres not a shred of real evidence to support the neutral theory kerfuffle... I wonder whether Meyers wasnt actually Quote mined


Heh, see for yourself, Farmer. I gave the link, didn't I? Easy to just say "not a shred of evidence," and all, but... I sometimes wonder if by "quote mining" you just mean quoting somebody saying what they said. Here's some more from PZ Myers:

Quote:
First thing you have to know: the revolution is over. Neutral and nearly neutral theory won. The neutral theory states that most of the variation found in evolutionary lineages is a product of random genetic drift. Nearly neutral theory is an expansion of that idea that basically says that even slightly advantageous or deleterious mutations will escape selection — they’ll be overwhelmed by effects dependent on population size. This does not in any way imply that selection is unimportant, but only that most molecular differences will not be a product of adaptive, selective changes...

This is just one example of an important concept that is overlooked when your education in evolution focuses solely on one simplistic version of the mechanisms of change. If you didn’t know it, it’s not your fault; I graduated from high school never having the ‘evolution’ word uttered even once by a teacher, so if you’ve heard about natural selection, you’re one up on me. But we can do better. That the high school level of instruction in evolutionary biology is stuck at around 1930 is a bug, not a feature, and we should aim to improve it.


http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/02/14/the-state-of-modern-evolutionary-theory-may-not-be-what-you-think-it-is/

layman
 
  0  
Fri 8 May, 2015 06:21 am
@layman,
The significance of the neutral theories was denied, hotly contested, and trivialized by the Neo-Darwinists for decades. They unloaded all their guns, and now they're out of ammo. According to PZ, they lost.

So what? Who really cares? Not me. Neo-Darwinism is not my religion, as it is for some.
0 Replies
 
 

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