Evolution? How?

Eorl wrote:

Biliskner, why do you not find out what the theory of evolution is? Study it properly?

I have. (have you read the previous 15 pages on this thread?)

If you want a proper discussion, you start with one argument and then tell me what I haven't "studied properly" etc.

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That link is not looking at the theory properly and ignores what is required to develop a new species.

Mutations can occur all the time and the genetics of each fly is subtly different anyway but then the flies need to be separated and kept apart each generation and then submitted to different environmental variables over a vast amount of time. The life span of the fly doesn't necessarily shorten the time required as much as proposed by these self confessed creationists who are quoting a source from the 1960's as their most solid proof.

Eventually you will have two flies that can no longer breed with each other...two new species.
Generally this takes a long time, whether you are talking fruit fly or not.

Like I said, go find out about evolution FROM A NON-CREATIONIST SOURCE so you actually know what you are talking about.

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Eorl wrote:

Eventually you will have two flies that can no longer breed with each other...two new species.

what the? anyone else understand that?
if no breeding = extinction. two new species? umm...yes.

I've read all of Richard Dawkin's The Blind Watchmaker.
Then I read AiG and Behe.
(yes this was when I was thinking of "converting" from Evolution to Creationism)...

so... so far you've provided nothing. lucky i didn't just do one of my "tortured rants" and end up wasting all my time... w00t.

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Eorl wrote:

That link is not looking at the theory properly and ignores what is required to develop a new species.

Mutations can occur all the time and the genetics of each fly is subtly different anyway but then the flies need to be separated and kept apart each generation and then submitted to different environmental variables over a vast amount of time. The life span of the fly doesn't necessarily shorten the time required as much as proposed by these self confessed creationists who are quoting a source from the 1960's as their most solid proof.

"Not looking at the theory properly".......

http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/10mut10.htm

"X rays have been used to increase the mutation rate in the fruit fly by 15,000 percent. All in all, scientists have been able to "catalyze the fruit fly evolutionary process, such that what has been seen to occur in Drosophila is the equivalent of the many millions of years of normal mutations and evolution."

"Even with this tremendous speedup of mutations, scientists have not been able to come up with anything other than another fruit fly. Most important, what all these experiments demonstrate is that the fruit fly can vary within certain upper and lower limits but will never go beyond them. For example, Ernst Mayr reported on two experiments performed on the fruit fly back in 1948."

Eorl wrote:

The life span of the fly doesn't necessarily shorten the time required as much as proposed by these self confessed creationists who are quoting a source from the 1960's as their most solid proof.

Are you saying experiments conducted in 1948 are invalid?
That's a new one for evolution.

Eorl wrote:

Eventually you will have two flies that can no longer breed with each other...two new species.
Generally this takes a long time, whether you are talking fruit fly or not.

translate: "takes a long time" = you'll never see it in your lifetime.

correct?

nice falsification. gg.

Eorl wrote:

Like I said, go find out about evolution FROM A NON-CREATIONIST SOURCE so you actually know what you are talking about.

if you're gonna mock me, do it with some truth (even half-truths), and we'll all be impressed.

black velvet, if you please.

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Bilinsker

So what happened on your particular Damascene Road that caused you to turn away from enlightenment towards primitivism and myth?

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Quote:

Biliskner wrote:
Eorl wrote:

Eventually you will have two flies that can no longer breed with each other...two new species.

what the? anyone else understand that?
if no breeding = extinction. two new species? umm...yes.

No, a whole population over here...and a whole population over there, two given members of which can no longer breed with each other. Did you deliberately misunderstand that?

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Quote:

"X rays have been used to increase the mutation rate in the fruit fly by 15,000 percent. All in all, scientists have been able to "catalyze the fruit fly evolutionary process, such that what has been seen to occur in Drosophila is the equivalent of the many millions of years of normal mutations and evolution."

I don't like the science of this at all, the "equivalent of the many millions of years of normal mutations and evolution" has been greatly trivialised and oversimplified. Evolution is not caused by mutation alone or indeed by radiation alone.

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There are holes in evolutionary theory, and the process is not fully understood. It is constantly being refined.

As soon as someone presents a theory that has 1% as much credibility, I'll be listening and so will the entire scientific community.

Creationists of course already have the answer and need only find questions and evidence that fit that answer at the exclusion of all else as irrelevant.

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Eorl wrote:

I don't like the science of this at all, the "equivalent of the many millions of years of normal mutations and evolution" has been greatly trivialised and oversimplified. Evolution is not caused by mutation alone or indeed by radiation alone.

Evolution is not caused by mutation alone or indeed by radiation alone? huh? then what is it caused by? some sort of Aristotelian "innate" 'adaptation'? Changeling? or are you invoking divine intervention?

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Steve (as 41oo) wrote:

Bilinsker

So what happened on your particular Damascene Road that caused you to turn away from enlightenment towards primitivism and myth?

What Anonymous said, that:

Evolutionists are always dogmatic and get "personal" real quick. That was sus, esp. after 3 years of reading and trying to understand it. The questions I had are exactly the same as you have seen in the 20 odd pages in this THREAD (alone) and the responses have been EXACTLY the same, so what you guys are saying to me will not/have not been the first time that i've heard it (surprised?). I've even had, "why are you questioning Evolution? It's so obvious!" obvious? err... yes, that's what my math teacher told us when we all didn't understand basic trigonometry.
Needless to say, Creationists didn't really *care* (in comparison) whether you insulted them for being Creationists or if you just "said what you wanted to"; they just listened, even more so when one was attempting to have a ... " civilized debate". The latter was attractive, obviously (that much IS obvious.)

Like I said, I found AiG, and I read Behe, and that made it (i read Behe 'cos I was writing an essay titled: "Evolution, Complex or Irreducibly Complexities?" so yes my opinion was objective - or 'as objective' as one can be - it was contrasted with Dawkin's Blind Watchmaker.)

FYI, (for the record) I have Jesus Christ believing Christians friends who take Darwinism's Evolution as God's mechanism for creation, and that's fine - I didn't *need* to investigate Creationism, the dogma just pee-ed me up the wall ---- Evolution is not falsifiable.

Popper mightn't be a Christian (?), but his paradigm on Falsification techniques on science can lead "us" (the world) far and beyond.

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I see, I think.

So what you are saying is that you found trigonometry difficult to understand at school, you got pissed off with evolutionary theory because thats hard too [real science is often hard] so you took the easy route via religion where you can believe or reject as much or as little as you like.

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Bilk is being intentionally obtuse. If hes taken genetics as he claims , then he is conveniently just "reinterpreting" research to fit a preconceived worldview. Its refreshing to see how one includes all the work of the 1940s as "recent"

There are over 3500 species of fruit flies, with new allopatric species identified routinely. Kaneshiro et al found that even the drosophila (considered a morphometrically stable species like many diptera) can evolve rapidly over about 20 generations . Its quite common.

Why they did research using drosophila in the 1950s was a total diferent world.They were using the concept of Mendelian genetics to look at inheritability of traits.Exposing them to masses doses of radioactivity is kind of Lamarkian.Nowadays we use them to develop software to map genomes and to identify actual "domains" of genes and to see how the concept of jumping genes (transposons) actually cause rapid copying and translation of entire gene sequences into coding sections of genomes.We use their genome to develop parallels between how genomes are economically preserved and how the actual coding sections are relatively mutation-free. Drosophila is like a living computer. But to say that these little buggers dont evolve is really an example of all the simple headed doctrinaire Creationist urban legends.

I am glad that my own personal worldview allows me to take in new data and process it so that I can modify or substantiate the most plausible and scientifically defensible explanations related to the appearances and extents of species through time.
Its hard for me to conceive how such believers in All the Creationist mumbo jumbo can , at the same time, appear to follow discoveries in natural sciences and genetics, with interest and still maintain their own silly conclusions. I know that the vast majority of Creationists are diletantes who only "spot quote" their own Wu Li Masters and never question or defy their Duane Gishs or Mike Behes

A recent series of finds of late Permian, early Jurassic fossils of proto synapsids and therapsids and amphibians have been found in S Australia. A great jumble of species like Allosaurus , Mormoops, struthiomimids, and early dromaeosaurs were found in an area that, until now , was thought to only contain really early species (Ediacara fauna) or late Mesozoic fossil species of multituburculate , monotreme, and marsupial mammals.
Now, we see that in the supercontinent, before Gondwana broke off, we had a lively assemblage of animals who were hanging on to a stratigraphic sequence that is at least 70 million million years later than was earlier realized.Its like Australia was either the place of species origin or a refuge for many late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic animals. Very new stuff and , like the Florenses "hobbits" it sheds some very interesting new data on evolutionary mechanisms.

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Anon wrote:

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Disprove the theory? I was under the impression it was not a scientific law, and nothing more than a conjecture. As such nothing has been proven for me to disprove. It's akin to a court case, in which the prosecution who has the burden of proof, asks the defense to prove that their client is innocent.

Thanks for proving one thing. You have no idea of how science works. If you can't show why the theory doesn't work then you are not doing science. You are simply lobbing bombs from the back row.

Science is not a "court case" where you assume that the science is not guilty. There is no assumption of "guilt" or "innocence" in science. Rather there is a question of does it fit the facts or not. This is simple scientific procedure that you should have learned in grade school. If the theory is not valid show why it isn't valid, be specific, present verifiable facts to support your claim. Or perhaps you can propose a different theory that fits the facts better.

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I see that Bilk has admittedly based his views partly upon the writing of Behe in his "Darwins Black Box"
If we would ask you to critique Behe, would you see the intended "Huckster" language he uses therein?
First, Behe uses "Irreduscible Compexity" (IC)as a definition. In other words, hes defined that which he "feels" is unevolvable as "IC". Doesnt the circularity of that even furrow your brow. As far as his examples of the flytrap, blood clotting. He s been dismissed by many scientists whove published extensively on the subjects that Behe said "were not in any scientific literarture"
In 1997 , just after Behes book was received by Creationists, a grad student at Santa Cruz did a literature search on evolution of these Complex (IC) systems and , that grad student found over 13K citations on subjects like blood clotting and development of enzymatic cascades.

Also Behe is fond (as is Bilk) of comparing natural systems to manufactured products (venus flytrap to mousetrap) when the evolutionary model of the flytrap is easily found by comparison to closest realtiveswhich dont have the "mousetrap" feature but instead, contain a slowly moving glauberous stolon and trigger. So a modification by evolution , (by selected parts) can be developed without resorting to IC dogma.

Buried deeply within Behe is a stipulation that Ive always found a bit troubling to his "hypothesis". Irreduscible Complexity requires a system to be fully functional with all its parts from the getgo (Of course thats his definition , not his finding) BUT, Once IC has established the form, Behe then says it can be modified through time (so he says it cant evolve to get there, but once a system is "created" , it can evolve ) might I say DUUUHHH?

Behe continues the "gap theology" referrals . Hes gotta be really concerned that, since the publication of his book scientists have removed many more "gaps" in the fossil record for such animals as whales,
proto aves, dragonflies, therapsids, monotremes, and cichlid fish.Gaps keep shrinking and problems for ID ers keep growing.

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evidence re evolution is like a court case in that its a forensic exercise where science is used to uncover evidence.
You are right though parados, anonymouse does appear to be basically ignorant of how science works or what the word "theory" means in a scientific context.

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Anon wrote:

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Scientists have to constantly alter it to hold fast to an immutable theory i.e. from Darwin's gradualism to Gould's punctuated equilibria. With that said, evolution is a theory, ergo a belief. This has been verified constantly in this thread and by evolutionists themselves who state they believe in evolution.

Again, you prove you have no understanding of science. The purpose of science is to change or discard theories when facts disprove the current version of the theory. The belief is in the underlying process that science is. I "believe" in the theory of evolution because all credible science points to it. I don't believe we have all the answers on evolution but the basic principle continues to stand up to all attempts to discredit it as a theory. I also believe in the theory of gravity because all science points to that as well. Does gravity not exist in your world just as evolution doesn't exist?

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I have no problem of what you choose or do not choose to believe. I have a problem when it it wears the mask of fact when it isn't.

I agree completely with you on this one. You are free to believe whatever you want. You are NOT free to claim your vision is fact or that the opposite side is not fact. You are required under the rules of science and logic to disprove the other side by presenting a case other than just saying "it ain't so". The problem I have with you Anon is that you hide behind a mask of "intelligence" that is completely false. You don't use logic. You don't use science. You simply claim something isn't true because it isn't reproducable. That would mean that you are not real since I can't reproduce you.

You are "ignorant, stupid or insane" if you think that your argument in any way provides a different theory or disproves the existing one.

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cicerone imposter wrote:

An absolute skirt around your q. LOL

Yeh, I noticed that. A very wordy example of a spceious argument, liberally strewn with a rehash of old unsupported claims. Another waste of time.

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Biliskner wrote:

Eorl wrote:

Eventually you will have two flies that can no longer breed with each other...two new species.

what the? anyone else understand that?

Yes. I did. Eorl is right. Evolution is about populations, not individuals. Lots of "plowboys" understand this, why don't you?

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Individuals acquire fitness so that populations can evolve-Mayr

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Bili,
Several points here.
First, I get real tired of your playing the "martyred Christian." We are not disagreeing with you because you are "Christian" but because you are not intellectual by any sense of the word.

I find it hilarious that you brought up - "Newton and Lebniez (Clarke), you'll see some apt examples of them giving their scientific mechanics, debating it with each other..." I have yet to see you actually make an argument or debate on the scientific mechanics yet. Instead you you just post sources that are ridiculous when examined.

Case in point.

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oh yeah, they change alright, just not as magical as some might think evolution to be.

http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/10mut10.htm

Interesting article that states.

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A NEW SPECIES IS NEVER PRODUCED

The most interesting thing about this article is that the author doesn't seem to understand what the word "species" means. A species is one that can't breed with another. That has been created in laboratory experiments. If you would care to discuss the scientific mechanics of fruit fly speciation or what the definition of "species" is. then lets do it. Simply changing the meaning of words to prove yourself right is NOT a debate.

This may be the first witnessed instance of a non lab produced evolution of a new animal species. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3790531.stm Other instances over time of speciations http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html

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If you want a proper discussion,

Let us know when you do want a "proper discussion". You have not presented any evidence or a rational argument yet. When we dispute points from "answersingenesis.com" you just ignore our logical arguments and change the subject to something else.

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Are you saying experiments conducted in 1948 are invalid?
That's a new one for evolution.

Experiments in 1948 are invalid when new experiments prove those conclusions to be not valid. The problem is you take the conclusions of a single study and attempt to apply it to all other studies as if it is an undisputable fact.

Some simple answers to some of your questions http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/fruit_fly.html

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I didn't *need* to investigate Creationism, the dogma just pee-ed me up the wall ---- Evolution is not falsifiable.

This one makes me laugh. Evolution is like gravity. Until you can show me a better explanation, and provide more science than supports the prevailing theory, I will stick with the prevailing theory. You seem to think that because we request actual science from you that we are dogmatic? No, it is called "thinking." Faith is something you can't provide any evidence for. Science is something you can. The science is there for evolution at the moment. NO amount of "faith" on your part can dispute that science.

Interesting that you would demand I provide proof that AIG isn't a peer review journal when you have ignored the over 2000 words I have already written disputing statements made there. Perhaps when you refute my previous statements we can discuss AIG more. Until then let me show you AIG isn't a peer reviewed journal with a single sentence.

AIG does not publish any letters or pieces that point out innaccuracies in other pieces on their website.

Every peer review journal I know of does that. It is what "peer review" means.

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Evolution? How?

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