Evolution - Who wants to KNOW?

They still sound like almost the same thing.

wandeljw, thank you for welcoming me to the forum.

Farmerman, what I refer to is humans have to have a "crackpot" give them some kind of "answers" so humans can then know exactly what direction they may turn to start getting answers through science.

Lizards with feathers, horses with human heads, flying horses. Why should anyone take any of these "things" seriously? oy, aren't they imaginary, like leprechaens and fairies?

But, folks, I don't think I mentioned metaphysics as a connection with evolution, or creationism? What I did say is there has been "someone" who has connected the two theories, evolution and creation.

So, I will bow out of philosophy & debate and continue to read what the experts say about the same thing.



Planet Earth is now in the lower stages of adolesence.....Neale Donald Walsch, "The New Revelations."

Edgar Casey's Synthesis of Creation and Evolution:

"God desired self-expression and desired companionship; therefore, God projected the cosmos and souls. The cosmos was built with music, arithmetic, geometry, harmony, system, and balance. The building blocks were all of the same material - the life essence. It was the power of God that changed the length of its wave and the rate of its vibration which created the patterns for multitudes of forms. This action resulted in the law of diversity which supplied endless patterns. God played on this law of diversity as a pianist plays on a piano - producing melodies and arranging them in a symphony. Each design carried within it the plan for its evolution."

Yeh yeh yeh, and the Tooth Fairy comes at night and the Easter Bunny carries a basket. How can Edgar claim to have created a synthesis between Creation and Evolution, when the very first assumption is anti-scientific.

Why do people insist on proclaiming "what God wants", and then trying to connect observations to it. We had a Tsunami recently, did God do it to punish people, to test people, or just to clean the beaches. Or maybe it was just a Tsunami, caused by an Earthquake, which happen from time to time.

God desired self expession... God wanted companionship... God loved... God needed, God wanted, God did this, God did that. Those things don't sound Godly at all. They sound like the hopes and dreams of flesh and blood people, not Gods.

rosborne,

so many viewpoints have been expressed on this thread that i wanted to give edgar equal time.

(if edgar's statement is inconsistent with the principles of naturalism, he may not have been aware of it.)

What you and Cayce are talking about isn't evolution.

The theory of evolution basically says that the first one-celled animals arose from dirt which just got lucky somehow or other and that all other life forms have arisen from that original lucky dirt via a combination of mutations and "natural selection"

Natural selection of course in real life is a destructive process and not a constructive one, i.e. you could no more create a new species with "natural selection" than you could construct a building with a wrecking ball.

Mutations, of course in real life all have names such as Downs Syndrome or Tay-Sachs Disease.

Those two observations taken together pretty much mean that the entire theory of evolution is a bunch of BS but, then, the evolutionists response is:

Edgar Casey (Cayce) reincarnated himself and insisted he was talking about evolution.

Simplisticly stated, but basically correct. Evolution, in a general sense does include abiogenesis, even though Darwin's theory of the Origin of species by means of natural selection, doesn't deal with abiogenesis.

Evolution in a very general sense also implies that atoms evolved from high energy particles, and that planets evolved from the debris from stellar evolution.

Biology in turn evolved from the compounds and conditions present on the ancient Earth. Once replicative molecules had accumulated, then natural selection began to effect the proportional success of the chemical duplication process.



Natural Selection, as the phrase implies is a non-random factor (selection), so your statement is not only wrong, it's completely backwards from the truth.



They also have names like Opposable Thumbs, large brains, feathers, hollow bones, compound eyes, lungs, etc. Are you trying to malign random mutation by selecting those mutations which you don't like? What's that supposed to prove?



Since your original assumptions are twisted and incorrect, your conclusions are also twisted and incorrect. Garbage in, Garbage out. Simple.

This might cure the confusion:

http://id-www.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/battson/stasis/home.html

In real life, a destructive process like natural selection is an agency of stasis and not an agency of change. It's precisely the opposite of what evolutionists need it to be.

for the link


I wonder what percent precambrian species we have found? 50%? 40%? 30%? Probably even lower.

And please explain to me this Gunga if not some form of evolution?



And don't use b.s. that its wrong since it's from talkorigins.com. I can show u CAT scans of most of those skulls and show you the paths of the bones from synapsid reptiles/therocephalians to mammals.

Design changes from year to year occur in automobiles the same way they used to occur in living forms.

You and your source are falling into the old trap of interpreting all evidence of change as evidence of EVOLUTIONARY change.

Of course. In order to do otherwise we would need *evidence* of change from another source, and so far, we have none.

Would you care to provide some evidence for us to consider? And I'm talking *evidence* here, real physical evidence, not just someone's fanciful stories no matter how hallowed and ancient the parchment they are written on.

Natural Selection is a filtering mechanism, not an agent of change or of stasis.

How can it be destructive? Destructive to what?

This is something I've seen posted on FR and Libertypost a couple of times:



Henry Gee
Monday February 12, 2001
The Guardian


The potentially-poisonous Japanese fugu fish has achieved notoriety, at least among scientists who haven't eaten any, because it has a genome that can be best described as "concise". There is no "junk" DNA, no waste, no nonsense. You get exactly what it says on the tin. This makes its genome very easy to deal with in the laboratory: it is close to being the perfect genetic instruction set. Take all the genes you need to make an animal and no more, stir, and you'd get fugu. Now, most people would hardly rate the fugu fish as the acme of creation. If it were, it would be eating us, and not the other way round. But here is a paradox. The human genome probably does not contain significantly more genes than the fugu fish. What sets it apart is - and there is no more succinct way to put this - rubbish.

The human genome is more than 95% rubbish. Fewer than 5% of the 3.2bn As, Cs, Gs and Ts that make up the human genome are actually found in genes. It is more litter-strewn than any genome completely sequenced so far. It is believed to contain just under 31,780 genes, only about half as many again as found in the simple roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans (19,099 genes): yet in terms of bulk DNA content, the human genome is almost 30 times the size.A lot is just rubbish, plain and simple. But at least half the genome is rubbish of a special kind - transposable elements. These are small segments of DNA that show signs of having once been the genomes of independent entities. Although rather small, they often contain sequences that signal cellular machinery to transcribe them (that is, to switch them on). They may also contain genetic instructions for enzymes whose function is to make copies and insert the copies elsewhere in the genome. These transposable elements litter the human genome in their hundreds of thousands. Many contain genes for an enzyme called reverse transcriptase - essential for a transposable element to integrate itself into the host DNA.

The chilling part is that reverse transcriptase is a key feature of retroviruses such as HIV-1, the human immunodeficiency virus. Much of the genome itself - at least half its bulk - may have consisted of DNA that started out, perhaps millions of years ago, as independent viruses or virus-like entities. To make matters worse, hundreds of genes, containing instructions for at least 223 proteins, seem to have been imported directly from bacteria. Some are responsible for features of human metabolism otherwise hard to explain away as quirks of evolution - such as our ability to metabolise psychotropic drugs. Thus, monoamine oxidase is involved in metabolising alcohol.

If the import of bacterial genes for novel purposes (such as drug resistance) sounds disturbing and familiar, it should - this is precisely the thrust of much research into the genetic modification of organisms in agriculture or biotechnology.

So natural-born human beings are, indeed, genetically modified. Self-respecting eco-warriors should never let their children marry a human being, in case the population at large gets contaminated with exotic genes!One of the most common transposable elements in the human genome is called Alu - the genome is riddled with it. What the draft genome now shows quite clearly is that copies of Alu tend to cluster where there are genes. The density of genes in the genome varies, and where there are more genes, there are more copies of Alu. Nobody knows why, yet it is consistent with the idea that Alu has a positive benefit for genomes. To be extremely speculative, it could be that a host of very similar looking Alu sequences in gene-rich regions could facilitate the kind of gene-shuffling that peps up natural genetic variation, and with that, evolution. This ties in with the fact that human genes are, more than most, fragmented into a series of many exons, separated by small sections of rubbish called introns - rather like segments of a TV programme being punctuated by commercials.

The gene for the protein titin, for example, is divided into a record-breaking 178 exons, all of which must be patched together by the gene-reading machinery before the finished protein can be assembled. This fragmentation allows for alternative versions of proteins to be built from the same information, by shuffling exons around. Genomes with less fragmented genes may have a similar number of overall genes - but a smaller palette of ways to use this information. Transposable elements might have helped unlock the potential in the human genome, and could even have contributed to the fragmentation of genes in the first place (some introns are transposable elements by another name). This, at root, may explain why human beings are far more complex than roundworms or fruit flies. If it were not for trashy transposable elements such as Alu, it might have been more difficult to shuffle genes and parts of genes, creating alternative ways of reading the "same" genes. It is true that the human genome is mostly rubbish, but it explains what we are, and why we are who we are, and not lying on the slab in a sushi bar.

I see. So you're suggesting that gene swapping by viruses is the alternate mechanism of change which we see happening in the evolutionary history of organisms.

I find evidence of gene swapping by viral infection very interesting, but it's still part of the Evolutionary process. It isn't "guided by any intelligence". Whether genes change because they mutate, or because they are swapped by viruses, the results still generate random changes which are filtered by Natural Selection.

All you've done here is suggest an additional component to the variability of genetic structure, and most scientists would probably agree that there could be more mechanisms of change than we are currently aware of. Many mechanisms were discovered after Darwin, but none of them invalidate the theory, they only made it stronger because Natural Selection had more variation to work with.

What the man is saying is that we humans show every sign of having been engineered in much the same manner in which we ourselves have begun to engineer new kinds of crops.

No, that's not what he's saying.

He's saying that the tool we use to accomplish gene insertion (viruses), may also accomplish gene insertion under natural conditions as well.

The big difference is that we select, plan and control those gene insertions. Viral activity in the wild is a natural (non-controlled) occurance.

So, now that we've identified the mechanisn which you suggest leads to change, we're back to my original question:



Are you trying to tell us that viral gene swapping has occurred through artificial control in the past as your "automobile" analogy above suggests?

You need to sign up for some sort of a reading comprehension course. If the author were making the claim you suggest he'd not have used the word "disturbing" since that would not disturb anybody:



In fact he specifically states that the kinds of things he's talking about would be difficult to explain via evolution:



The author uses the word "disturbing" precisely because the findings do indeed tend to blow the standard evolutionist paradigm.

Since you seem to be fond of selective awareness, here's a selection from the article you quoted:



But no matter how you interpret the author's concerns, nowhere does he imply that the gene swapping is controlled in an artificial way, as you have done with your "automobile" analogy.

Did I misinterpret your meaning with the "automobile" analogy? What were you implying with that?

His automobile analogy to the genome would only have relevance if the snke understands that certain auto components have been retained since the autos invention and others have been discarded. The human genome retains the major sequential elements of aerlier forms , so the original "mammalian" type species have their genomic patterns still extant in our sequence. The "notochord" first seen in the Pikia of the Burgess Fm has a genomic pattern that involves 3 little codon sequences in all vertebrates.
Also, snake fails to re,member that theres a fifth nucleotide , Uracil (U) which shows up only in RNA and is thought to. like the "junk" DNA, to be a "place holder" for whole other gene sequences to replicate in a string.


Hes repeating Margulis very hypothesis that genomes were captured and shared in the eukaryotic world and in earlier prokaryotes. Even the Intelligent Designers stipulate to something like this , ad, by the way, the ID crowd has , on record , defined their beliefs to include evolution. Sorry snake , but your gang is defecting from the main mechanism upon which this thread had been begotten.