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To: Jehu
mimicry and symbiosis, parasites and mitosis.

I've already given you a perfectly reasonable explanation of symbiosis that you give no reason for rejecting other than that it upsets your religious pre-dispositions. No doubt next year you'll still be saying that no-one has ever explained symbiosis to you from the POV of ToE.

You continue to shout that no transitional forms exist in the fossil record despite having been shown references to numerous TFs. Amusingly you attack Arch'rix as a TF on the grounds that some biologists think it is a bird and others think it is a reptile. Difficulty in classification is exactly what one would expect with a TF; like the ape skulls that scientists think are TFs while creationists all give them different human/not-human classifications. (the creationist credo being that no ape skull can be difficult to classify, difficulty in classification is a defining characteristic of transition)

What is your problem with the other phenomena that you mention? Let us imagine the highly intelligent being from the planet "designia" who has never heard of or seen evolution, and tell him how it works by fixing tiny alterations that improve fitness in the gene pool while rejecting tiny alterations that are deletrious and allowing drift through tiny alterations that are neutral. I would expect that creature after some long thought to predict that mimicry and symbiosis, parasites and mitosis would occur.

Curiously the things you see as an argument for design I see as an argument against design. Why would a designer make a stick insect good at mimicry while its predators are good at discernment? The ToE explains this as an arms race between the species. A designer would just make the insect less good at mimicry and the predators less discerning. There's no need to make them good at it. Nature is over-designed from the POV of an aware designer.

But nature is rather poorly designed as well as overdesigned from the POV of an aware designer. Obvious improvements can be suggested for (eg) the human body but evolution has not found these because no evolutionary intermediates on the pathway to the improvement that aren't deletrious exist. This wouldn't be a difficulty for your designer though so why don't our bodies work in a more sensible way to achieve their effect with less complexity and innefficiency?

You have to believe there is magical pixie dust within nature itself

No, you are the one who wants to believe in supernatural intervention, not me. The whole point of ToE is that it says there isn't any pixy dust (as I think you know which begs the question why do you word your attack that way). As you have said most mutations or miscopyings aren't beneficial, but natural selection works to select for those which are beneficial (however rare they are) and to select against those which are deletrious (however common they are). You never talk about natural selection do you? The real way in which competing phenotypes select for the continuation of the genotype that caused them. You characterize the whole process as random without acknowledging that nature is a selection engine forever culling the less fit and promoting the reproductive prospects of the more fit.(fit being a value-free term in this instance)

Why don't you find out EXACTLY the complexities of any symbiotic relationship

It wasn't that complex all the way back. It got that way through many generations of gradually increasing co-operation as the increased symbiosis improved the reproductive chances of individuals in both species.

777 posted on 12/21/2004 12:52:26 AM PST by Thatcherite (Conservative and Biblical Literalist are not synonymous)
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To: Thatcherite

What they mean when they say they have never seen a transitional is no one can "prove" to them that this is the node of the branch.

They, as usual, refuse to infer that there was a more transitional form slightly prior to the one we find.

It is the same as saying no one has ever observed speciation or that microevolution and macroevolution are the same underlying process. They won't admit that the difference between species is so slight as to be undifferentiable to the layman. If you can get through this barrier, their argument reverts to macroevolution is different than micro because there is no explanation of how one mammal is a cow and another is a horse.

Of course the explanation is there for anyone to see, but
there are none so blind as those that will not see.


778 posted on 12/21/2004 6:17:17 AM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
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To: Thatcherite
Natural selection can create NEW genes? By its definition it can only select from what exists. So I guess all life must have been a giant goo of all the genes there ever were, and selection has differentiated it all, finally into us. This is magical goo IMO, but just the properties of nature for you.

And that all this information...and it IS information, it IS a CODE...must have been inherent in matter from the beginning, it just took a hierarchy of complexity, from subatomic, to a multitude of chemical elements, to combinations of elements, all mixed in the right proportions with gravity, electromagnetic force, strong and weak forces...to produce the NATURAL biochemical forces for life to come about...then for the conditions of environment and competition for resources so that an (unmathmatically definable force) called "natural selection" could emerge to seemingly arbitrarily operate on this highest hierarchy of matter...over time..lots and lots of time.

To produce life which exhibits purpose and desire and a WILL to survive, which has a mysterious feedback loop to "natural selection," that "unknowingly," "uncaring," pushes life to its best, to the highest complexity imaginable (the human brain) so we could develop atomic weapons and annihilate ourselves and all other life, because the force that made us that was based on the absolutely keen force? desire? necessity? to survive and pass on our genes (which are not conscious are they?).

Seems to be bent on creating? producing? randomly arriving at? a being (collection of unaware biological processes) that can kill off the whole thing. Marvelous!
806 posted on 12/21/2004 10:54:11 AM PST by Jehu
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