Posted on 05/26/2012 9:47:00 PM PDT by eekitsagreek
BS. There are no fossils of hybrid homo sapiens, it was another "suddenly appeared" phenomenon Homo sapiens are a distinct species with a beginning point.
You should continue past calculus. Just sayin'. You have your ridiculous beliefs and I have mine, Mine makes sense from a probability mathematical point of view and well yours don't.
Question: Should evolutionary processes be described as an analog system or a discrete system? If you don't understand my question then I rest my case. Evolution is nothing but conjecture and speculation and quite frankly ridiculous.
I wanna see, me too me too!
I have reread central va's post several times now and see no such assumption. Looks to me like he is questioning natural selection as an adequate explanation. Your lottery example is another argument to knock down a straw man of your own creation. You seem to have a habit of doing that, hand picking your inferences and definitions to create an argument that no one is making. You do it repeatedly as if any argument against evolution is an argument for creationism. I call it blowing smoke.
There is no theory of science that requires that a challenge of the theory must offer an alternative theory, yet you persist in attacking an alternative of your choice as if its either a choice between evolution or the alternative. I may have missed one or two, but I haven't seen any posting questioning evolution on the basis of some other theory. Most of the challenges are based on mathematics, information theory and a sprinkling of good old common sense. If one branch of science is inconsistent with another, only one can be right and I have lot more faith in the integrity of mathematics and information theory than evolution. It seems to be your belief that if someone believes in a different theory to explain the origin of species, that disqualifies from making any criticism of evolution and worse, makes their motives immoral. Wow! When does the heretic burning start?
Behe's work raises serious questions about the viability of evolution just as a mathematician's would, yet you dismiss them as somehow unqualified because they don't have your understanding, or shall we say belief, in evolution or training in the life sciences. And of course, you use math, and that is supposed to cover the mathematical objections to evolution?
By the way, I did a lot more reading about horse evolution and found most of the disputes are within the evolutionist community. How many times do species need to be reclassified, trees redrawn and pictures arranged to fix what was supposed to be "settled?" It has become so ludicrous that even species names are changed to fit the evolutionary model. Eohippus is a great example of name tampering that may eventually backfire anyway. At least there are some evolutionists with enough integrity to admit the answers are missing or there are some major problems to be solved.
I don't have a degree in the life sciences, thank God, or I might be in that universe of small minds that defend their theories by devious and disingenuous means. Shall I dare say such behavior is that of a charlatan?
I don't agree with that either. I think Homo Sapiens did suddenly appear 250,000 years ago and I have no idea why. It was divine? I don't know, but it was no evolutionary process.
So you view Steve Gould as an idiot, along with Eldridge, Myer, and everybody else involved in the Punc-eek movement?
People majoring in science typically take the mathematics courses that are most relevant to their discipline. Most biological functions that I am familiar with can be described by a logarithmic/exponential function, and I am completely capable of deriving equations as I need them. The only benefit to having taken calculus is that I can follow equations in discussions of biophysics. In any case, I believe I adequately refuted the assertion that life sciences are completely devoid of mathematics, even if my math background did not prepare me for a career in aerospatial engineering.
The ability to plug data into spread sheets or programs for statistical analysis does not qualify a person as having an understanding of higher mathematics. That doesn't cut it.
In practice, you have to understand the mathmatics before you can plug the numbers into Excel or SPSS. Otherwise, you can plug numbers in all day, but you'll never know whether your results are valid or even close to plausible. I should mention that during the time I shared an office with a statistician, I never once (in several years) saw her calculate statistical functions by hand. She always plugged the numbers into some program (usually SPSS).
If I recall, it was evolutionist Julian Huxley that pointed out that evolution theory had a huge flaw from a purely probabilistic viewpoint, though he remained a believer. Others have added to and reinforced his work.
The "probabilistic flaw" is only an artifact resulting from the assumption that the "endpoint" was the intended goal of evolution all along. When you consider it from a more scientific point of view--that any species can fill a particular niche as long as it has certain characteristics, then the evolution of a species to fill a niche is almost inevitable. For evolution to occur, it is only necessary for DNA to mutate, for the DNA repair systems to fail to repair the DNA, and for the mutation to be neutral or to confer an advantage. These events happen rather frequently.
The general concensus is that Cro Magnon, the first form of homo sapiens, appeared around 45K years ago and he appeared with his technologies and artwork fully formed from day one.
Now, you could either believe that God created Cro Magnon man here on Earth at that time, or you could go looking for saltation theories which I don't really want to get into here other than to note that no saltation theory (man from elsewhere) does anything for evolution since the laws of mathematics and probability work the same way everywhere else in the universe as they do here.
But the hell of it is this. If you want to believe in saltations, then you need at least two of them, i.e. for Cro Magnons, and then again for the Bible antediluvians. The two groups were genetically and biologically the same or close enough to neglect any differences, but the cultures and technologies were totally different. Adam and Eve and their relatives were metal technology people from day one while some of the Cro Magnon descendants went on using stone tools until very recently when they were forced out of it by neighboring peoples.
Everything except logic apparently, which is the most valuable thing you'd get as a math major. A firm grasp of logic is generally enough to prevent people from becoming evolosers.
Evolution study/theory is really a subset of genetics and genome mapping which is arguably pure mathematics.
Two mental notes you might want to make... One is that the question of evolution is basically ORTHOGONAL to any sort of a question of left vs right politics; the evolosers on conservative forums like FR and those on DU or any leftard forum are indistinguishable when discussing evolution, there is no test you could devise which could differentiate them. The other mental note which I’ve made is that you will encounter people who appear to be paid shills or propagandists on these forums, and who just keep on like the energizer rabbit no matter what sort of logic or well-reasoned arguments anybody might ever provide them with. There’s no test you could devise, for instance, which could differentiate our exdemmom here from Tokyo Rose or Axis Sally if one of them were being tasked to simply put out the party line for evolution and evoloserism on a perpetual basis.
Bull! I have written programs and designed spreadsheets that perform massively complex analysis and it takes no more than about 20 minutes to teach people how use them, and these were business people. All they had to know is what data belonged where and few simple rules for data integrity testing. It is nothing but minor league math. I've written programs for engineers and it made no difference whether they knew the math or not as long as I did. They too required very minimal training to use the software. Using that software does not make anyone more or less competent in mathematics. Exponential decay and growth functions can be looked in up in a math textbook. That's no big deal.
The "probabilistic flaw" is only an artifact resulting from the assumption that the "endpoint" was the intended goal of evolution all along.
Wrong again! No such assumption was necessary. The endpoint is what it is, no different than calculating the number of dice rolls to get a 7, 8, 9 or any other number I want to test as an endpoint. There is no goal, just a result and how long it might take to get it.
If you are testing a particular endpoint, how is that not a goal? "No goal" would be calculating the number of dice rolls necessary to get "a" number, not "this" number.
How do you know he doesn't? You can't label someone a charlatan unless you have specific evidence. I might vehemently disagree with one of Richard Dawkins books, but I can't call him a charlatan simply because I disagree with him, or even if he is wrong. And simply pointing out that he makes a living doing something as evidence he is a charlatan says a lot more about your lack of morality than his.
Choose a complex system, go to www.PubMed.org, search for evolution of that system: voilà, thousands of references pop up.
And very, very few have anything to do with any sort of evolutionary explanation of the steps involved in the evolution of any complex biochemical system. But I can put in any topic and the word "evolution" and get 100,000 hits. The abstracts are understandable. But when it comes to actually detailing how these molecular machines came into existence, I can't find anything. Pick one from Behe's book, or do I need to list them for you?
As I have already pointed out, proteins evolve through DNA mutations. I believe I have also pointed out many types of DNA mutation that occur.
I think we are all familiar with the 3rd grade explanation.
Well, no offense, but it *is* complicated. You're basically challenging me to put several PhD dissertations' worth of material into a single forum post, and it can't be done. Again, no offense, but I am sorry that you do not have the scientific background to understand that I already did refute Behe's "charge" at least twice, and again above.
LOL. So if I need something between the third grade explanation and your dissertation I am out of luck? That is called "avoiding the question." You didn't even know what Behe's charge was until I explained it to you, and you had already proclaimed him a charlatan. Scoffing is not an argument.
A goal implies a result achieved by some deliberate action or plan. We set goals to obtain a result. There is no particular way I can roll the dice to get the result I want. The process of rolling the dice could care less about my goal, and the outcome is independent of how I roll the dice. If rolling a 7 is my goal, I won’t get it any faster or slower just because I made it a goal, but only because of the probability of the roll and how fast I can throw the dice. Because 7 is a possible enpoint, I can calculate a probability.
Yes, but you're calculating the probability of a particular endpoint. Like with what you say about evolution, where you're calculating the probability of ending up with homo sapiens. If you start from scratch and figure out the probability of a specific endpoint (like humans), yeah, the number looks astronomical. But evolution doesn't care about ending up with humans. If you calculate the probability of ending up with something viable--which is all evolution cares about--the number gets a lot smaller.
To use exDemMom's analogy: if you calculate the odds of me winning the lottery, the numbers are huge. But if you calculate the odds of someone winning the lottery, they're not nearly so scary. I'm not sure if there's a similar analogy for dice, since they have a limited, predefined set of outcomes. Maybe something like, rather than calculating the odds of rolling a 7, calculating the chances that someone in a roomful of people would have whatever number you threw, regardless of what the number was.
I’m familiar with Chiroptera. What’s the other order?
I assume you’re talking about bats. The two kinds are the ordinary small insectivorous bats we see everywhereas well as the vampires, all of those have carnivore teeth, and the larger fruit bats. If you want to believe bats evolved, you have to believe they evolved twice, the two groups aren’t related. In real life, however, there is no fossil evidence of anything you’d call ancestral to any sort of bat.
For whatever logical reason would I want to waste time and money studying mathematics that I'll never use, and will forget within a few months anyway?
*You* might try to take some basic biology classes. Once you understand the theoretical and empirical basis for evolution, you might learn how to *appropriately* assign probability functions to the analysis of evolutionary mechanisms.
Question: Should evolutionary processes be described as an analog system or a discrete system? If you don't understand my question then I rest my case. Evolution is nothing but conjecture and speculation and quite frankly ridiculous.
We don't typically discuss biology in terms of data processing systems. Evolution is an ongoing and continuous process, the mechanisms of which are acting on every cell in your body at this instant. Evolution is only "ridiculous" if you have decided that, no matter what, you're going to interpret a moralistic Bible book as if it were a literal account of events.
For whatever logical reason would I want to waste time and money studying mathematics that I'll never use, and will forget within a few months anyway?
*You* might try to take some basic biology classes. Once you understand the theoretical and empirical basis for evolution, you might learn how to *appropriately* assign probability functions to the analysis of evolutionary mechanisms.
Question: Should evolutionary processes be described as an analog system or a discrete system? If you don't understand my question then I rest my case. Evolution is nothing but conjecture and speculation and quite frankly ridiculous.
We don't typically discuss biology in terms of data processing systems. Evolution is an ongoing and continuous process, the mechanisms of which are acting on every cell in your body at this instant. Evolution is only "ridiculous" if you have decided that, no matter what, you're going to interpret a moralistic Bible book as if it were a literal account of events.
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