Evolution? How?

Setanta wrote:

I can play the definition game, too, "real life"--and your pomposity is tedious and predictable.

From Answers-dot-com :

a·the·ist (ā'thē-ĭst) pronunciation
n.

One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.

Note the crucial little two letter word which i have there highlighted--or.

Playing games with definitions and links online is truly stupid. It can be worked to the advantage of just about any assertion. If your reading comprehension had admitted of it, you'd have noticed that i noted to Zipp Clue US of A, that some atheists deny the existence of gods, and some don't..............

The really tedious thing is when you insist that redefining words is in the interest of communication. The standard definition of "atheist" and "evolutionist" are what most folks use, if they want to talk to someone other than themselves.

So if you you want to get back on topic, perhaps you can pull out the calculator and address the population problem that evolutionists face, as stated earlier:

real life wrote:

If humans have existed for only about a couple million years as postulated and the population growth rate were a paltry 0.01% (far below the rate needed to sustain a population) then how many humans would there be today?

You wanted to address specific instances of circumstantial evidence which would tend to disqualify evolution or support creation, right? Well, address it. If the human race is really a couple million years old, where did all the people go? Should be a lot more of 'em around. Do the math.

0 Replies

real life wrote:

I don't think that it's any secret that I believe God created the world. We've been talking about it for hundreds of pages.

Yes, but exactly *how* do you think God created the world?

As we've already belabored, simply stating that God created the world does not detail anyone's belief.

For example, how old (approximately) do you think the Earth is? How old do you think the Universe is?

For example, I think the Universe is approximately 13.5 billion years old, and I think the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old.

And please don't answer my question, with a question.

0 Replies

real life wrote:

If humans have existed for only about a couple million years as postulated and the population growth rate were a paltry 0.01% (far below the rate needed to sustain a population) then how many humans would there be today?

This has got to be the dumbest implied argument I've ever seen. You do know that people die don't you? And you do know that environmental pressures can throttle population growth rates not only to zero but to negative values don't you?

Have you forgotten about natural disasters? Tsunami's, Earthquakes, plagues?

Well here's one you obviously don't know about: The Toba eruption 70 to 75 thousand years ago may have reduced the human population to only a few thousand individuals.

Toba catastrophe

Now you do the "math". Start from 1000 individuals 75k years ago and don't forget about the Bubonic plague, the indonesian tsumami, the christian crusades and countless other wars and population forces.

0 Replies

real life wrote:

The really tedious thing is when you insist that redefining words is in the interest of communication. The standard definition of "atheist" and "evolutionist" are what most folks use, if they want to talk to someone other than themselves.

I see . . . if you don't agree with the definition used by any particular source, you declare it, ex cathedra, to be non-standard, and proceed to insist upon your canonical definition. That "evolutionist" appears in anyone's dictionary is simply evidence of the extent to which canting creationists have spewed the term forth in the attempt to create an impression that such a being exists. A theory of evolution is not an ideology, such as is the concept of theistic creation, and therefore, the term evolutionist is meaningless.

Quote:

So if you you want to get back on topic, perhaps you can pull out the calculator and address the population problem that evolutionists face, as stated earlier:

Once again, there is no such thing as an evolutionist, except in the fevered and perfervid imaginings of a canting creationist. This is not a problem, and not one which anyone faces. I've already pointed out that you ignore real issues of birth rates, death rates and life expectancy. Death rates can be affected by catastrophic events which we know to have occurred--such as the plauges of Europe in the late middle ages, when a third or more of the population were wiped out. Additionally, life expectancy is an average, and the average is dragged down by the deaths of infants and pre-reproductive children, among whom the mortality rate was the highest--so you have not posed a problem, you've attempted to create the illusion of a statistical problem, without having given due consideration to the wealth of factors which would have a significant effect on such a calculation. Basically, you're whistiling in the dark on this one.

Quote:

You wanted to address specific instances of circumstantial evidence which would tend to disqualify evolution or support creation, right?

No. That is a calculated lie on your part. At no time have i asked you to provide circumstantial evidence "which would tend to disqualify evlution." You don't need any encouragement to make such an attempt, and are never discouraged by the lack of a forensically valid argument on your part.

You were the one who contended, without a plausible argument, that both a theory of evolution and a contention of supernatural creation have neither of them anything more than circumstantial evidence. Soley for the sake of continuing the discussion, i stated that i was willing to stipulate this, while reserving any ultimate agreement with what i consider to be an absurd and flawed contention.

Soley for the sake of the question which you will desparately do anything to avoid answering, i stipulated to your circumstantial evidence hilarity. And it is on that basis that i have repeatedly asked you to state whether or not you believe that the diversity of live forms on the planet today are a product of a creation, and if you do, to provide your circumstantial evidence that this is the case.

Your attempt to create an unassailable syllogism about the putative number of humans who should be in existence today is not only predicated upon an oversimplistic and statistically false equation, it is yet another attempt to do anything to avoid answering the simple question which i posed, using the terms upon which you insisted.

Do you assert that a creation is the best explanation for the diversity of life forms on this planet? If so, what is your circumstantial evidence that this so?

0 Replies

Are you inadequate online? Are you feeling inferior because you have no education? Are you so stupid that no one will respond to you? When they do respond, is it only point out your errors in spelling, grammar and logic? Would you like to become the life of the thread? Then be a troll! Yes, now you too can be a real internet troll!

Trolls always have a good time, and their posts get lots of responses. As a troll, you're sure to be the center of attention. Other trolls will praise your posts. Never again will your comments be ignored, merely because you don't know what you're talking about. And as a troll, you'll enjoy the power you have to ruin any thread just by showing up and trolling. Oh, the fun!

Trolling is easy. It's simple. And the beauty of it is ... you don't have to know anything! Here's a complete catalog of an evolution troll's intellectual inventory. Just print out this toolkit, and use one or two items at random every time you post. Don't worry if someone refutes you. Just repeat your earlier post. Then keep on trolling! They'll go crazy! Guaranteed!

http://img468.imageshack.us/img468/8906/evotrolltoolkit6fo.jpg

Note of admission: This isn't mine. I stole it (shamelessly) off the web -timber

0 Replies

0 Replies

hee hee, where didst you dig that one up timber?

real life-where to begin. You realize that we have Ev'-i'dense, that, during the gestation period of Homo, s.s., there have been a number of "correctional events" in the environmenta that have blotted out anywhere erom 60 to well over 90% of the genetic variability . These evnts , such as the "Toba catstrophe" and teh late Cascadian eruption have had effects upon population rates. ALso, the predictive rates of population growths are a variable. Raup (90) and Raup and Stanley (71) have done more complete jobs of explaining how population dynamics occurs.

Retrograde Motion, I purposely avoided that because I, like most others, are beginning to think that theres not much behind the curtain with you real life>
Whats the point in making the retrograde case? Why does this cause a problem for an orthodox evolutionist.
Evolution isnt a belief, its a synthesis based upon provable facts and evidence. Whats in your wallet? (I dont see a damn thing)
You wanna go head to head, lets trot out evidence and Ill leave you in the dust before you get started making up "Creationist facts"

I may have had a discussion about whether you believed in Creation, but your last entries , at least to me, remove all doubts that you are a literal Creationist. That I find a hoot. Youre unarmed dude.
Your entire belief system is based upon unsubstantiated and data-free gibberish and you know it.

0 Replies

Quote:

I see . . . if you don't agree with the definition used by any particular source, you declare it, ex cathedra, to be non-standard, and proceed to insist upon your canonical definition. That "evolutionist" appears in anyone's dictionary is simply evidence of the extent to which canting creationists have spewed the term forth in the attempt to create an impression that such a being exists.

I'm sorry chaps.I have used the term as you know.But I had no intentions like that.I used it as a shorthand,to save effort.I thought everybody would understand what I meant.I don't think such a being exists at all just like no socialists exist or existentialists or scientists.We are all just gals and guys and no isting about it.
My use was simply for logistical purposes and I would like to distance myself from any other use for any purpose whatsoever.I was trying to save fellow posters from having to read through thousands of lines of what some might think was pure garbage if I was to carefully and scientifically try defining what I meant.

0 Replies

Hey, people, is spendius back-peddling? Sounds like he's now on the defensive.

0 Replies

rosborne979 wrote:

real life wrote:
If humans have existed for only about a couple million years as postulated and the population growth rate were a paltry 0.01% (far below the rate needed to sustain a population) then how many humans would there be today?

This has got to be the dumbest implied argument I've ever seen. You do know that people die don't you? And you do know that environmental pressures can throttle population growth rates not only to zero but to negative values don't you?

Have you forgotten about natural disasters? Tsunami's, Earthquakes, plagues?

Well here's one you obviously don't know about: The Toba eruption 70 to 75 thousand years ago may have reduced the human population to only a few thousand individuals.

Toba catastrophe

Now you do the "math". Start from 1000 individuals 75k years ago and don't forget about the Bubonic plague, the indonesian tsumami, the christian crusades and countless other wars and population forces.

Hi Ros,

Did you decide this was 'dumb' before, or after, you did the math? I think it likely that you didn't even attempt the math. You simply made up your mind to resist at the outset.

----------------------------------

Yes, obviously people die. And yes I know about natural disasters. Why do you think I gave a net population growth number? And why do you think it is purposely set far lower than actual population growth numbers that we know today? And still with all of that, the human population would have to be much higher today than it is if humans emerged a couple million years ago.

It is quite interesting that you propose a near extinction of the race as your only solution to this. Do you propose a near extinction of all other life at the same time? What evidence supports this?

Assuming no other near extinction events, the population at that point would still have had to be many times more than the number that inhabit the planet today. Do the math from Lucy '3 million years ago' to 75,000 years ago-- the postulated Toba event--- and you are still left with an impossible scenario. In fact, I'll let you drop a couple dozen or so 0's from your answer and you're still not even close.

And if this large number of humans died after the Toba event, where are the bodies? We have found skeletal remains far 'older' than 75,000 years haven't we? And where is the evidence, artifacts, etc for this huge number of folks who perished due to Toba? This number of people would require large civilizations, cities, innumerable artifacts and skeletal remains should be abundant. We are talking a number of people many times the number that inhabit Earth today. If they (nearly) all perished after Toba then where is the evidence of these large numbers of people?

--------------------------

Interesting quote from your link:

Quote:

......and genetic evidence suggests that all humans alive today, despite their apparent variety, are descended from a very small population.....

Hmmmm now where have I heard that before? All humans descended from a very small group.....from just 1 geographical location......let's see......

0 Replies

Noah!

0 Replies

cicerone imposter wrote:

Noah!

I see you haven't been sleeping in class, after all, CI.

0 Replies

farmerman wrote:

Whats the point in making the retrograde case? Why does this cause a problem for an orthodox evolutionist.

Explanations such as the one here:

Quote:

The Nebula hypothesis. Probable sequence of steps in the formation of the solar system. (a) Gravitational contraction of a rotating gas cloud leads to a dense central region (eventually forming the Sun) and a more diffuse, flattened nebula. (b) Dust particles from the nebula settle onto a disc. (c) Accretion of dust into numerous small planetesimals, each a few kilometers in diameter. Collisions between planetesimals lead to capture, disintegration, or deflection of their orbits. (d) Eventually larger bodies capture the smaller ones. Uncondensed gas is blown away by the "solar wind"; this process may begin in earlier stages.

from http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/lectures/evolution_star/evolution_star.html

postulate that the planets originated from a spinning or rotating area surrounding the sun.

Earth, Mars, Saturn, and Neptune all have an axis tilt very close to the same value and rotate in the same direction. (If axis tilt were purely a random factor --- a 1/360 chance--- then these 4 gathered so close together are difficult to explain.) However several planets actually are observed to rotate in the opposite direction.

If the planets were 'spun' out into their orbits as postulated, they should all have the same direction of rotation, should they not? A very basic law of physics, it seems to me, would indicate that objects released from a spinning object such as the postulated solar cloud should all rotate in the same direction.

0 Replies

real life wrote:

Hmmmm now where have I heard that before? All humans descended from a very small group.....from just 1 geographical location......let's see......

Well, count yourself lucky that I introduced you to the Toba event because you now have new evidence for the story of Noah. Except that it all happened 75k years ago. So much for Usher's 4k year old Earth.

The evidence for a population collapse associated with the Toba eruption has become quite strong in recent years, especially with the advent of genetic sequencing. But none of this is necessary to demolish your population arguments, they are absurd for any number of reasons, only a few of which have already been listed.

You need to pluck another argument from your bag of creationist bologna. This one isn't worthy of you. Find something that's less obviously flawed.

0 Replies

real life wrote:

If the planets were 'spun' out into their orbits as postulated, they should all have the same direction of rotation, should they not?

Unless they were impacted by another massive object... which we know happens... and which (theory predicts) would happen more frequently and with larger objects back in the early solar system.

Are we going to leave biological evolution and move on to stellar mechanics now?

0 Replies

real, you're extrapolating backward from the last century or so when you think about population increase, and it just doesn't work, because the last century has been really anomalous in terms of human population, largely because of improvements in public health and agriculture.

No population grows unchecked. No animal can grow beyond the limits of its food supply. Which is why we're not overrrun by billions of chipmunks or bears or tigers. The carrying capacity of the land imposes limits. Until humans developed agriculture, hunter-gathering imposed strict limits. Agriculture expanded them, but there were and still are strict limits. You know all those biblical famines? They wiped out millions of people. Still do in areas with weak infrastructure where foods can't be transported to the area.

Disease wiped out millions more. Until the 20th century, cities were population sinks--people died of density-dependent diseases faster than they reproduced. The only way the population stayed constant or grew was by continual in-migration from the countryside. Europe took three centuries ffor its population to recover to pre-Black Death levels. And plagues and diseases (smallpox, e.g., took a huge toll)swept everywhere until the last century. When Europeans conquered the Americas, diseases wiped out about 95% of the indigenous population--an extreme example, but diease wiped out billions of us. Childbirth too was the greatest cause of death for women until the last century--far eclipsing any other cause and making being a woman far more hazardous than being a man. Public health and sanitation changed all that for most of the world (including the developing countries) in the 20th century.

In other words, you and most people have completely forgotten how precarious life has been for most of our history. Human increase was by no means a given and by no means linear, and not always with a positive sign. So "doing the math", even at .01% is an exercise in totally meaningless demographics. It's just pulling a figure out of a hat, with no correspondence to reality.

And the human genetic crunch does not correesond to any extinction event in other animals--its just us. There was a similar crunch amongst cheetahs, but nowhere around the same time, for example. To simplify, it's calculable by looking at the genetic variability in humans today, which is very small as compared to most species, and comparing that with the mutation rate, and calculating how long it would have taken to produce the observed figure. And that comes out about 100K. Genetically it's completely absured to think a population of 12 or 8 or whatever it was allegely in the ark 4300 years ago would have that genetic diversity today (or wouldn't have inbred so much with so many recessives that we wouldn't all be dead today).

0 Replies

It is really sad to see that "real life" succeeds in distracting the thread with nonsense about celestial mechanics and false syllogisms about population growth. You know, folks, we should all insist that "real life" put up or shut up--that he produce his circumstantial evidence that a direct creation is responsible for the variety of life forms on this planet, as opposed to an evolutionary process.

0 Replies

real life wrote:

Hi Ros,

Did you decide this was 'dumb' before, or after, you did the math?

Before of course. Why would I waste time doing math on a flawed premise.

By the way, before you slither onto a new path, would you mind telling us how old you think the Earth is, and how old you think the Universe is. Approximate numbers are fine. Don't worry, they are not right/wrong answers, they are only your opinion. I can sense that you are probably embarassed by what you have to tell us, but we can at least accept your answers as your opinion.

0 Replies

Well, now, given unrestricted access to unlimited living space, provided with medical technology equivalent to today's, in the presence of sufficient food, shelter, and clothing, and the need to do nothing but breed and raise offspring, then, yeah, humans woulda long, long ago overrun the planet, exploding into an impossibly large population in very short order. And so woulda deer, dodo's, pandas, and wooly mamoths. The simple fact of the matter is that like everything else on the planet, humankind is subject to natural laws - the very same natural laws that see to it pandas aren't swarming through Manhattan today. Initially, human population growth had to be, and was, subject to the exact same environmental limiters which act on all biota. The growth rate would have been on average very low, though exceptions here and there would have occurred; higher than average growth in a pocket over here, negative growth in a pocket over there, but overall, just as with any other critter in its natural environment, the rate of population growth for humans would have been just barely, if at all, above break-even for by far the greatest part of humankind's history. With the rise of civilization somewhere around 5 or 6 Millenia ago, stemming from advances in formalized agriculture and structured social organization, human population growth began a long climb to somewhere around the .03% per annum rate, where it sat for several thousand years, the planet's human population expanding from the neighborhood of around 50 Million or so in 5000 BCE to perhaps 200 Million by 1 CE. Over the next millenium or so, a slight increase in the growth rate began to take effect, reaching perhaps 0.1% per annum, the result of exploration and agricultural expansion, and by the end of the Middle Ages - the 14th Century, more or less, the human population may have reached something in the vicinity of double its 1 CE level, or perhaps 400 million, give or take a hundred million. From the middle 14th through the middle 17th Centuries, due to environmental factors, human population pretty much stabilized at that level, the growth rate expanding hardly at all, some even theorize it actually declined some in the face of famine and pestillence. It is estimated the bubonic plague killed off anywhere from a quarter to a third of Europe's population during its 15th Century peak, something which could not but have had a depressive effect on overall population growth. Beginning in the 17th Century, The Industrial Revolution and its attendent Urbanization provided the means for the exponential growth of the human population. In the past 500 years, the human population ramped from perhaps 5 or 6 hundred Million to today's 6 Billion neighborhood.

This is so. How do I know? Archeology, anthropology, and history tell me so. And besides, pandas aren't a pest species in Manhattan.

0 Replies

Setanta wrote:

It is really sad to see that "real life" succeeds in distracting the thread with nonsense about celestial mechanics and false syllogisms about population growth.

I'm not so sure it's a total waste. Each "distraction" adds a little bit to our image of what RL believes (or portrays as his belief). And ever so slowly the patchwork irrationality of a very interesting person (whacko) is starting to emerge from the mist. I love B-Movie Scifi where they wait until the very end to show you the guy in the cheap Troll suit. Smile

0 Replies

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know