Posted on 10/11/2002 9:02:01 PM PDT by gore3000
This is, of course, the same fossil record that (unmistakably) shows the mesonychus morphing into Shamu.
Then you wrote: This is, of course, the same fossil record that (unmistakably) shows the mesonychus morphing into Shamu.
Note that you are again refusing to state or to deny the obvious truth that eohippus grew and became more horse-like. Although you no doubt know that eohippus is well documented with a number of intermediate steps in its growth.
post #621
Your questions are ill-formed and my response to them remains, absolutely not. If you rephrase your original question into -- Is there an "unbent" ancestral chain linking the "eohippus" fossil with the modern horse?, I would answer, I doubt it, but I do not reject it.
Looks like English to me.
I answered absolutely not. I said "questions", note the plural, and "them", again note the plural.
Here are your questions.
Yes, I agree that "eohippus was dead long before there was a horse," for the trivial reason that once the animal grew to where it is called the horse it is no longer called eohippus. But the eohippus: 1) got much larger over time in a well-represented series of fossils; and 2)eventually evolved into the horse.
You obviously deny #2 above. Do you also deny #1? (That eohippus grew several-fold?) Or is it that the little eohippi were killed first by the flood?
Clearly, I answered your growth question. Now if you can show me eohippus, and only eohippus, fossils that in a systematic and time dependent manner increase in size, I might accept your assertion. Of course that means that any fossil named other than eohippus(Hyracotherium) is not to be included in this sequence.
Do you believe that there were full-size horses (over, say 50 inches tall) 50 million years ago? If not, then didn't the horse "evolve"? And if so, then are there any 50 million year old full-size horse fossils? Why not? (Perhaps the Earth isn't 50 million years old?)
Why all these questions? I already answered you on evolution by virtue of my mention of llamas and camels. What I do not believe is the Darwinian explanation.
To end the discussion I will answer your last questions definitively
Well, I find saying the rosary takes my mind off it.
Absolutely correct and for the reasons given in my post#563 which you did not copy:
So all that could take over a whole population is a largely beneficial mutation. Problem with that is for any new feature, for any new function, indeed for any new gene you would need a multiplicity of mutations. These are not all going to occur at once. Since neutral and slightly beneficial mutations will die off very quickly and only spread to very few individuals, this accumulation of mutations is impossible and therefore evolution is impossible.
One beneficial mutation is not impossible though highly unlikely as you yourself admit. However several beneficial mutations, all of them working towards the same goal, occurring at random is totally impossible. Just one would constitute a miracle. The millions of them that would have been necessary to account for all the diverse features of the millions of species alive right now as well as the progress from bacteria to human is utterly impossible that is why the only rational explanation is intelligent design.
There is such a theory and it has been discussed many times on this site, it is called intelligent design. It has been proven many times to be true and it at the same time proves evolution to be false. The bacterial flagellum is the most famous proof, however there are many more. The story in the article about Newton is one. In fact it has been proven through since then, that is why atheists are proposing an infinite amount of universes as the explanation for our universe. Another proof is the impossibility of abiogenesis which I show in the above article. Another proof is that biologists call the developmentat process whereby one cell multiplies into 100 trillion cells in exactly the correct place, of the exactly correct type during development a program. That is a trifecta against materialism and no one can refute it.
It is your insults and those of your evolutionist friends which lower the level of discourse on these threads. Long before I ever joined these threads people on FR considered the crevo threads despicable because of all the insults and slimes in it.
It is always the evos that start the ad-hominems and continue to indulge in them. It is very seldom that the evos get into an honest discussion and always when they lose - as you have now, start insulting those who proved them wrong.
There is plenty to discuss in the article above, there is plenty which evolutionists need to refute for their theory to be true. I do not see them even touching upon what is mentioned in the article.
Then, my child, it isn't science, as science cannot "prove" anything. You also might want to reference the scientific journals that support the above contention.
And you draw this conclusion because you've studied paleontology and its methods?
I have seen enough lies from paleontologists to make the above quote. Nebraska man, a total 'ancestor of man' derived from a couple of pig's teeth. Piltdown man, a fake which was kept alive for 40 years till a better substitute for man's ancestry was found. A couple of teeth 10,000 miles away and 20,000,000 years called an ancestor species of a toothless species. Turkey DNA being mistaken for Dinosaur DNA - and the nonsense is still on the web. The first primate, a pair of ankle bones miraculously connected to a lower jaw found ten years before a thousand miles away. Lucy, a supposed human ancestor whose face is a jigsaw puzzle more than 50% plaster.
So yes, I have much evidence that paleontology is utter garbage and to a large extent a lie. But the larger problem with paleontology proving evolution is that it simply cannot prove anything. Paleontology is about dead animals, about partial remains, a bout a few bones here and there. It cannot prove evolution because of the many things it cannot tell us. It is a reductionist practice which allows just about anything to be connected to anything else. It is like a jigsaw puzzle with all square pieces - you can join the pieces any which way you wish.
To see why paleontology cannot prove evolution, look at the species in the article. Could paleontology tell us that euglena had an eye, chloroplasts and was an animal? No. Could paleontology tell us the mode of reproduction of the wasp above? No. Could paleontology tell us that the platypus had mammary glands? No. Could paleontology tell us that the butterfly was reborn? No.
Paleontology misses the most unique, interesting and important features of a species. It does not tell us how they lived, functione or even in most cases how they reproduced. All of these are very important, extremely important to determine descent of one species from another and paleontology cannot provide the evidence for it. Therefore paleontology, what evolutionists stake their whole theory on, cannot prove descent. It can only make false assumptions based on totally insufficient evidence.
An interesting admission for an evolutionist! If all the dots are subject to revision, it seems to me that the dots prove nothing at all!
Then you haven't been paying attention.
If all the dots are subject to revision, it seems to me that the dots prove nothing at all!
Wrong, idiot. The dots aren't subject to revision, the context is.
DNA is a reality beyond metaphor
David Baltimore
The drumbeats get louder as we approach the day when the first draft of the entire structure of the human genome is to be announced. Pundits appear on television shows, trying to tell the public what this means. Many are my good friends. But I must tell their dirty little secret.
They are not telling the whole story. They have all decided that the real meaning of this achievement is so wrapped up in technical detail that the only way to convey the truth is through metaphor. So they tell the world that the genome is like a book, with words, sentences and chapters. Or they say that it is the periodic table for biologists, assuming that laypeople will have heard of this key organizing principle of chemistry. But these and other metaphoric links miss the real story. The genome is like no other object that science has elucidated. No mere tool devised by humans has the complexity of representation found in the genome.
So let me try the harder, but richer and more honest, approach. Let me try to explain what the genome really is. To do that, I need to start at the chemical level and then take on the more complex notion of coding. Structurally, the genome is just a huge string of chemical units broken up quite arbitrarily into anywhere from 3 to a few hundred individual packages, the chromosomes. This one-dimensional string of linked chemical units is abbreviated, DNA, and we need not worry about its detailed architecture. We can also ignore the packaging and treat DNA as one long string of 3 billion units. When we say that the genome has been sequenced, we mean that we know the chemical composition of each of the units as they occur in the sequence. Actually, at each of the 3 billion positions along the string there can be only one of four chemical units, abbreviated as A, T, C and G. So the genome is a string of these four units in some particular sequence that goes on for 3 billion letters. The closest analogy is to a computer code which is a gigantic string with only 2 letters at each position.
Why not then be satisfied with this computer code metaphor? Mainly because the meaning of a computer code is not common knowledge so the metaphor conveys very little to many people. But also because the metaphor does not communicate the richness of coding systems buried in the seemingly monotonous string of letters.
Coding implies a method of transforming the coded information into some useful form. The computer in front of me now is doing this so effectively that I never see the code. Similarly, the cells of the body can decode DNA so effectively that until the 1950’s no one knew that there were codes controlling living systems. The remarkable thing about the DNA code is that it is decoded in multiple ways, all interdigitated with each other in the string of letters in DNA. The most discussed are coding regions that specify the sequence of proteins. Proteins are the actual machines that do the work of the body. The protein-coding regions are all that is captured by most metaphors for DNA. DNA as a book implies that all DNA has are letters that transform into words, the meaningful units of language, and that words are like proteins. But the regions of human DNA that encode proteins are only a few percent of the 3 billion-long string of letters. Most of it does other things. What are these other things?
The DNA code can specify the sites and nature of many different events. While we don’t know them all, there are easily 10’s of others aside from the sequence of proteins. For instance, DNA does not encode proteins directly, it uses an intermediary chemical string called RNA. Each RNA encodes one protein so an RNA is a form of packaging of the DNA string into meaningful, bite size pieces. But then the DNA must have a code for where to start an RNA, and where to end an RNA. The RNA is not used as a direct copy of DNA but rather is processed by destroying parts of it, modifying other parts and putting special structures at each end. There is code for each of these events.
What reads these codes for processing RNA? Protein machines do it–they interpret the coded sequence and follow its instructions. Each modifying machine carries its own decoders. In some cases they even carry very specific pieces of RNA because the code is most easily read by another RNA. There are from a few to many tens of processing codes associated with each gene in the genome.
But that is only the beginning of the story. Another whole family of decoders determine which RNA is made in which cell of the body and at what amount. This is probably the most important code of all because it is what specifies the individual functions of the cells of the body. The red cells of our blood carry oxygen to our tissues because the gene for the oxygen carrier, hemoglobin, is copied into a huge amount of RNA in developing red cells. But it is copied in no other cell because no other cell needs that protein. Thus, there is machinery in a red blood cell and only there that can read the code surrounding the hemoglobin gene. There are some 50,000 genes in the genome and that story can be told for each one. Some make RNA in all the cells of the body because they are "housekeeping genes". Others are found in some types of cells but not others. The brain has probably hundreds of different cell types and each must differ from the others by the pattern of RNA’s found in the cell.
We call the code for determining which genes make which RNAs in which cells, the regulatory information in the DNA. There is lots of it but it is hard to recognize and it is a particular challenge to those trying to read the codes in DNA to decipher the regulatory information.
Then there are many other codes in our DNA. The number of cells in the body increases when we grow by one cell dividing into two. When such cell division occurs, it is crucial that each cell get a full complement of the DNA instructions. So the DNA needs code to specify its own partition among the daughter cells. Also, the DNA must duplicate itself. DNA is a double helix that separates into its two constituent parts when it duplicates. A big protein machine carries out that process and responds to coded information in the DNA itself.
Basically, DNA directs everything that happens in the cell and does it with a daunting variety of interdigitated coded information. The sequence of the genome lays bare all of that but only the continuing efforts of the thousands of scientists trying to decipher the individual codes will bring out the full richness of information hidden away in the string of units provided by the sequencers. And, to make it all much harder, the meaningful coded information is tucked away in a sea of parasitic DNA. Just as plants and animals are infested with parasites, so is DNA. The parasites are DNA themselves that can duplicate itself and insert throughout the DNA. They, and other forms of DNA that are thought to be accidental junk, form the vast majority of our genome. We would love to ignore it all but often it is hard to tell important DNA from junk and there is always the suspicion that we may have underestimated the importance of what we call junk.
Modern biology is a science of information. The sequencing of the genome is a landmark of progress in specifying the information, decoding it into its many coded meanings and learning how it goes wrong in disease. While it is a moment worthy of the attention of every human, we should not mistake progress for a solution. There is yet much hard work to be done–even the genome we have today is a first draft that needs elaboration. It will be the work of at least the next half-century to fully comprehend the magnificence of the DNA edifice build over 4 billion years of evolution and held in the nucleus of each cell of the body of each organism on earth.
Nope. "Proof" is not within the lexicon of science. Of course, in gore3000ese "evidence" = "absolute proof" so I'm not inclined to take your objections and claims all that seriously. Of course, if you stand by those definitions, then by virtue of the existence of evidence for evolution, it must have been proven absolutely. I also have evidence that you are a liar, a coward, and a hypocrite, meaning that those contentions are also absolutely proven. (Note to moderator: Previous sentence is statement of fact, not personal attack.)
The bacterial flagellum is the most famous proof, however there are many more.
And here I thought The Beak of the Finch was the most famous proof. I haven't read the book yet, but I have seen several fascinating reviews. Did you happen to glimpse them?
The story in the article about Newton is one.
Don't even bring up Newton. He's a charlatan, a fiend, and totally dishonest creature not fit to pick scabs from a diseased baboon. His theories of gravity have been thoroughly discredited, and no one bothers to use them anymore. There are more proofs against Newton than I can count. The wildly elliptical orbit of Mercury proves without a shadow of a doubt that Newton created his idiotic laws of motion to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church. All astronomical discoveries since 1827 have disproven Newtonianism.
Which reminds me, in your rush to insult you left this question unanswered.
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