Posted on 07/23/2006 9:36:42 AM PDT by tomzz
Assuming macroevolutionary scenarios were possible (they aren't), the question arises, how much time would you actually need for them? The basic answer to that question is known as the Haldane Dilemma, after the famous mathematician and population geneticist J.B.S. Haldane who published his work in the mid 1950s. The basic answer is that you would need trillions and quadrillions of years, and not just the tens of millions commonly supposed. Walter Remine puts a simplified version of the idea thusly:
Imagine a population of 100,000 apes or “proto-humans” ten million years ago which are all genetically alike other than for two with a “beneficial mutation”. Imagine also that this population has the human or proto-human generation cycle time of roughly 20 years.Imagine that the beneficial mutation in question is so good, that all 99,998 other die out immediately (from jealousy), and that the pair with the beneficial mutation has 100,000 kids and thus replenishes the herd.
Imagine that this process goes on like that for ten million years, which is more than anybody claims is involved in “human evolution”. The max number of such “beneficial mutations” which could thus be substituted into the herd would be ten million divided by twenty, or 500,000 point mutations which, Remine notes, is about 1/100 of one percent of the human genome, and a miniscule fraction of the 2 to 3 percent that separates us from chimpanzees, or the half of that which separates us from neanderthals.
That basically says that even given a rate of evolutionary development which is fabulously beyond anything which is possible in the real world, starting from apes, in ten million years the best you could possibly hope for would be an ape with a slightly shorter tail.
But nobody ever accused evolutionists of being rational. Surely, they will argue, the problem might be resolved by having many mutations being passed through the herd simultaneously.
Most of the answer involves the fact that the vast bulk of all mutations are harmful or fatal. ANY creature which starts mutating willy nilly will perish.
So much for the amount of time evolutionists NEED (i.e. so much for the slice of wonderbread on the bottom of the basic evolutionist time sandwich. What about the slice on the top of the sandwich, i.e. how much time do they actually HAVE?
Consider the case of dinosaurs, which we are told died out 70 million years ago. Last summer, scientists trying to get a tyrannosaur leg bone out of a remote area by helicopter, broke the bone into two pieces, and this is what they found inside the bone:
This is the Reuters/MSNBC version of the story
That meat clearly is not 70 million years old; I've seen week-old roadkill which looked worse.
In fact, we appear to have one state named after a dinosaur, Mississippi being a variation of the Ojibway name "Mishipishu", which means "water panther", or stegosaur. DeLoria notes that Indian traditions describe Mishipishu as having red fur, a sawblade back, and a "great spiked tail" which he used as a weapon.
In fact you find pictures (petroglyphs) of Mishipishu around rivers and lakes and Lewis and Clark noted that their Indian guides were in mortal terror of these since they originally signified as much as "One of these LIVES here, be careful".
The pictograph at Agawa Rock at Lake Ontario shows the sawblade back fairly clearly:
and the close-eyed will note that stegosaurs did not have horns; nonetheless such glyphs survive only because Indians have always gone back and touched them up every couple of decades, and the horns were added very much later after the creature itself had perished from the Earth.
You add the questions of other dinosaur petroglyphs and Ica stones and what not into the mix and it seems fairly obvious that something is massively wrong with the common perception that dinosaurs died out tens of millions of years ago.
That is basically what I call the evolutionist time sandwich. They need trillions or quadrillions of years, and all they have is a few thousand.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Darwiniac faith summed up in 3 words.
Name calling is a prideful thing.
prideful thing
I request that you stop posting to me if you have a problem posting without insults.
Mississippi, From an Indian word meaning “Father of Waters”
Absoluetely! There's a lot of fundamental reseach to be done:
1) Does he sit on a throne when he performs his miracles, or does he stand up and make sweeping arm gestures?
2) Does he utter a mystical incantation? If so, is it in Hebrew or English?
3) Does he use angels to make the new species appear (perhaps carrying them down in divine carts or something) or does He make them just pop into place?
4) What *is* the deal with the whole "angels on the head of a pin" thing anyway?
Lots of work to do...
Pithecophaga jefferyi
Endangered
This endangered species has been proposed as the national bird of the Philippines. Dependent on the undisturbed rain forest where it preys on monkeys, squirrels, and other small mammals.....
EVOLUTION: Fairy tales for the uninformed
You haven't answered about Astronomy yet. And of course that silly "physics" thingy. That goes against God's word. And "chemistry." Heretics!
C'mon Race. Is platitudes all you have?
I see this was relegate to "chat" where you are indeed allowed to open by begging the question (a logical fallacy, the CR/IDer stock in trade).
More proof about who uses insults in place of reasoning or argumentation.
He/she can keep posting that kid of stuff -- it makes it more fun when they start off like that: "Evo's just insult."
No, the "Father of Waters" would be the Mistersippi.
Sorry ... old joke. Couldn't resist.
Obviously, I was the target of an attempted baiting. Sad, really.
I am using the passive voice so as to avoid pinging anyone I don't wish to correspond with.
And more insults from the anti's.
I want to know the mechanism that allows angels to shrink down that much to dance on a pin-head.
I bet it would be a killer app. Think of the possibilities!
Actually Mistersippi invented the nonspill cup for toddlers.
And somehow there's no hypocrisy there at all! Unimaginable!
I bet it would be a killer app. Think of the possibilities!
Think outside the box. Enlarge the pin.
Your argument that ID does not promote the Supernatural is false. The motives of all the ID proponents are clearly based on a supernatural, Christian god. Here are actual quotes from leading ID proponents:
William Dempski, ID proponent, Fellow at Discovery Institute "Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners do not have a clue about him." - Intelligent Design, p. 210
"My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ." - Intelligent Design, p 206.
"But there are deeper motivations...... When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed...And so there is a cultural war here. Ultimately I want to see God get the credit for what he's done - and he's not getting it." - address given at Fellowship Baptist Church, Waco, Texas, March 7, 2004
"Certainly as Christians we believe there is an angelic hierarchy - it's not just that there's this physical material world and there's God. There can be various hierarchies of intelligent beings operating, God can work through what can be called derived intelligences - processes which carry out the Divine will, but maybe not perfectly because of the fall." - (Ibid.)
"Accordingly, intelligent design should be understood as the evidence that God has placed in nature to show that the physical world is the product of intelligence and not simply the result of mindless material forces. This evidence is available to all apart from the special revelation of God in salvation history as recounted in Scripture." - Why President Bush Got It Right about Intelligent Design, 2005
Phillip Johnson, DI Fellow and founder, presumed author of the infamous Wedge Document: "This isn't really, and never has been, a debate about science, it's about religion and philosophy." - World Magazine, November 30, 1996
Admitting that the entire purpose of the Wedge strategy is religious: "If we understand our own times, we will know that we should affirm the reality of God by challenging the domination of materialism and naturalism in the world of the mind. With the assistance of many friends I have developed a strategy for doing this....We call our strategy the "wedge." - Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, 1997, pp. 91-92
"The Intelligent Design movement starts with the recognition that "In the beginning was the Word," and "In the beginning God created." Establishing that point isn't enough, but it is absolutely essential to the rest of the gospel message." - Forward to Creation, Evolution, & Modern Science, 2000
"We are removing the most important cultural roadblock to accepting the role of God as creator." - LA Times, March 25, 2001
"This is a way of phrasing the issue that ought to bring together Protestants of different views young-earth believers and the scriptures, old-earthers who interpret Genesis differently,.... In the beginning was the word. In the beginning God created. True or false." Kansas conference, June, 2001
"Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools." - American Family Radio, January 10, 2003
"The subject is not just the theory of evolution, the subject is the reality of God." - Hank Hanegraaf's "Bible Answer Man" radio program, 12/19/2004
Casey Luskin, ID Proponent, writes for DI:
"Obviously, the question comes up, 'Who is the designer?' Well, the leadership [of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) clubs] will promote the viewpoint that the God of the Bible is the designer." - Evolution critics meet to create strategy, The Plain Dealer, 07/29/02
Stephen C. Meyer,director and Senior Fellow of the DI: "I think the intelligent designer is God." - Nightline, 8/10/05
Nancy Pearcey: "If the broader impact of Darwinism was to remove Christianity from the sphere of objective truth, then the broader significance of the Intelligent Design movement will be to bring it back. By providing evidence of God's work in nature, it restores Christianity to the status of a genuine knowledge claim,... - Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, 2004
Discovery Institute: The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which western civilization was built. - The Wedge Strategy, Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture
"Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. Bringing together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature. [Note: The original version of the Wedge document phrased this last part as "have reopened the case for the supernatural."]" - Ibid
"Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialistic's worldview and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." - Ibid
Michael Behe, ID author, an expert witness at the Dover, PA trial: "To a person who does not feel obliged to restrict his search to unintelligent causes, the straightforward conclusion is that many biochemical systems were designed. They were designed not by the laws of nature, not by chance and necessity; rather, they were planned..." - Darwin's Black Box, 1998
"By "intelligent design" I mean to imply design beyond the laws of nature. That is, taking the laws of nature as given, are their other reasons for concluding that life and its component systems have been intentionally arranged? In my book, and in this essay, whenever I refer to intelligent design (ID) I mean this stronger sense of design-beyond-laws." - Philosophical Objections to Intelligent Design, 2002
"I think that we are all descended from some single cell in the distant past but that that cell and later parts of life were intentionally produced as the result of intelligent activity. As a Christian, I say that intelligence is very likely to be God." - Can You Believe in God and Evolution?, Time, 2005
Standard fare. Logical Fallicies and Ad Hominem attacks. When one doesn't have any real arguments on one's side, one resorts to subtrefuge via disengenous statements.
And a frequent opening gambit is Projection: Ascribing unto others that which is one's own weakness.
Isn't it intersting TToE articles never start with "Despite what those doo-doo head Creo's say..."
Most TToE articles deal with the subject matter at hand. The only time they deal with anti-science perspectives is when they are trying to preserve scientific knowledge and pursuit and keep the USA from being even more dumbed down.
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