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.
Lots of italics there...italics god.
Unfortunately, like every other such example, 3733 isn't even settled in the circles of evolutionary dogma; its rightful place in the charts is far from obvious and irrefutable, even among the most faithful evolutionary apostles. As should be the case, since it's almost certainly just a human skull. Hint: There are MANY variations in the shape of the human skull, even today.
Like I said, there are NO obvious transitional fossils. Not one. Amusing that stuff like this is the best you can come up with, when Darwin's own writings made it clear that the fossil record should now be OVERFLOWING with them.
MM out.
No problem. I understand that you are totally opposed to transitionals, so, to you, none exist or can exist. Your belief has gotten in the way of any learning you might have acquired.
The lurkers will be able to decide who is putting up the best argument. I posted a nice hominid fossil and a chart showing its likely placement (identified in the label as a "best guess,") and you just state that it can't be a transitional because those things don't exist, no how, no way. You provide no evidence, no rational argument, just an unsupported statement.
And your comment, "There are MANY variations in the shape of the human skull, even today." And there are many more of humans and hominids and hominoids when you go back into the past. I have studied them--half time, six years of grad school, two of my specialties fossil man and human osteology. And you? From whence does your august learning come? (From your posts, it seems you are doing apologetics, rather than science.)
So, for your viewing pleasure:
Site: Nariokotome, West Turkana, Kenya (1)
Discovered By: K. Kimeu, 1984 (1)
Estimated Age of Fossil: 1.6 mya * determined by Stratigraphic, faunal & radiometric data (1, 4)
Species Name: Homo ergaster (1, 7, 8), Homo erectus (3, 4, 7, 10), Homo erectus ergaster (25)
Gender: Male (based on pelvis, browridge) (1, 8, 9)
Cranial Capacity: 880 (909 as adult) cc (1)
Information: Most complete early hominid skeleton (80 bones and skull) (1, 8)
Interpretation: Hairless and dark pigmented body (based on environment, limb proportions) (7, 8, 9). Juvenile (9-12 based on 2nd molar eruption and unfused growth plates) (1, 3, 4, 7, 8). Juvenile (8 years old based on recent studies on tooth development) (27). Incapable of speech (based on narrowing of spinal canal in thoracic region) (1)
Nickname: Turkana Boy (1), Nariokotome Boy
See original source for notes:
Source: http://www.mos.org/evolution/fossils/fossilview.php?fid=38
Some prominent scientists who were believers: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo,Descartes, Bacon, Newton, Boyle, Farraday, Mendel, Pasteur, kelvin, Maxwell,Planck, Einstein and Pauli. I appreciated finding this short list in Coulter's recent book.
Usually, people quote Einsteins as denying he believed in a personal God. What he meant by this is unclear but in his personal correspondence that quantum mechanics was not true as his inner voice from the "old one" told him. He also has famously said "God does not throw Dice" in respect to this theory.
Of course there have also been any number of "proofs" of evolution including Piltdown Man (after 40 years proved to be a fraud), Haekel's pictures demonstrating embryology supported evolution (He faked them, but they still are in text books and the photographs debunking them are not), the "Archaeoraptor" supposedly the missing link between birds and dinosaurs also was proved to be a hoax.
My point is many scientists have been people of faith. My other point is a number of other "scientists" have moved heaven and earth as well as hoaxes and frauds to prove the existence of their theories. If their theories were so convincing why did they feel impelled to lie?
If Karl Popper's test is applied--science requires the ability to test and prove the hypothesis wrong--then surely religion as commonly conceived is not scientific and neither is "scientific socialism," psychoanalysis and also evolution. All of these probably have merit and can be conceived as "carving nature at her joints" but there is no way to test them let alone disprove them.
Good argument for putting everything in the "natural" pile, though if a third party had planted the wallet in his hand while everyone was distracted, the accused could be speaking the truth. To him, it may have seemed to have been "magic", especially since, as you said, he needed it. He may go to jail, but does that mean the jury came back with the correct verdict?
BTW, the wallet was actually the property of the accused, though he couldn't prove it & the accuser was the one who had lied.
Is this the kind of science you want? That's what the Discovery Institute has promised.
Ah, getting rid of all these fund-sucking "intellectual elites" will be a boon to the 340,000 preachers, priests, imams, mullahs, pastors amongst us in the USA, who are so productive.
This will open the door for the Flying Spaghetti Monster theory. Altho I am sympathetic to Pastafarians, it competes with my Pixie Theory of Everything, including Faith and Science.
Getting rid of these "scientists" is the first step in ending the Federal Reserve, Marxist, Nazi, secular humanist, Darwinist plot to fluoridate the water supply. And necessary to save civilization for Christianity.
IDists say the darnest things: Ray Mummert, a creationist from Dover, Pennsylvania, said in 2005, "We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture."
"Members of the secular scientific community take their moral and intellectual purity to attack 'intelligent design'. Vested in white lab coats, they appear as high priests of the god of Reason, they defend their model of intractably atheistic Darwinism. It would be easier to accept the priestly purity of the scientific caste, however, if its members didn't routinely descend from high-mindedness to promote an atheist world view."
"The Darwinist elites are those who hate and fear America. Like termites eating away at the foundations of American Civilization, they feed us on evolution and materialistic philosophy that undermines Christianity."
From another forum: "you insist in clinging to the completely disproven religion of evolution (otherwise known as the "I-can-have-any-kind-of-sex-I-want-to" faith).
Nobody could make this stuff up!
Total BS. You should not be doing all your research on the creationist websites. They are feeding you full of false information.
(Writen by Irving Gordon)
I can't recall my Mother, I don't remember Dad
Mister and Mississippi was all I ever had
Oh, I was born to wander, oh, I was born to roam
And Mister and Mississippi made me feel at home.
CHORUS
Oh, I was born to wander, oh, I was born to roam
And Mister and Mississippi made me feel at home.
My cradle was the river, my school a river boat
My teacher was a gambler, the slickest one afloat
My teacher was a gambler, the slickest one afloat
He taught me not to gamble on a petticoat.
CHORUS
Oh! Betty Mae, I love you, I love you Betty Mae
I love you like a barefoot boy, loves a summer day
The way a wand'ring gypsy, loves the changing scenes
Just like the restless river, loves old New Orleans.
CHORUS
I'd love a tiny village, a quite country town
A house, a little garden, with kiddies runnin' 'round
I'd be a faithful husband, I'd be a trusting friend
Until I heard that steamboat, comin' 'round the bend.
CHORUS
Except for casino owners. Of course, randomness has its own laws; and if molecules exist, randomly generated events are just a predictable as deterministic.
You are right. Like some of the Biblical gods, the italics god sometimes screws up. The italics-satan causes innocent folk to omit the /i tag. Insidious. Fortunately, the italics god has never started any wars, never burned anyone at the stake, and never damns anyone to more than momentary torment.
From you post #205...this line just had me laughing...
"Idists say the darnest things: Ray Mummert, a creationist from Dover, Pennsylvania, said in 2005, "We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture."
Good comedy...
Now, tomzz, you were informed that those pictures of dinosaur meat had the scale removed., to make them look much larger than they actually are. Yet you keep posting the altered versions. I wonder why you think you need to post altered images to make your point?
By who, and with what sort of credentials?
Thanks for the ping!
"Science has no means for measuring the supernatural, so it must exclude it."
A while ago there was a report of a scientific experiment where certain patients were prayed for, and others were not. The poster boasted that the ones that had been prayed over had a better recovery rate. All well and good ...
But, I had the audacity to ask "who was being prayed to ?"
Christ ? The Virgin Mary ? St. Joseph of Asprin ? Bhudda ?
It would seem to be an obvious scientific question about a scientific experiment, but the answer was not forthcoming, nor did I ever here of any followup experiments.
Very curious considering the supposed "success" of the first try at measuring the supernatural.
You claim to have studied the "dino meat" fossils with enough care to have formed a conclusion of their worth. Therefore you would have run across a statement of their actual diminsions.
This is a total strawman. The question is not whether some scientists were theists (of course, many scientists, like other humans, have religious beliefs), the issue is whether they believed in the pseudo-science of ID or were evolution-deniers. Of course, half your list lived before the Theory of Evolution was proposed. So they don't count.
It's very funny that you mention Pasteur--his idea of the Germ Theory of Disease was fiercely attacked by priests and preachers who claimed that there could not be "invisible entities that were usurping the hand of God." Pasteur and his successors firmly rebuted the "demon possession theory of disease." Ministers don't preach much about this nowadays--religion, it seems, evolves!
If their theories were so convincing why did they feel impelled to lie?
In my Post 179, I showed how prominent IDists have lied repeatedly about what their objectives and motivations truly are, not to do good science, but to promote a sectarian faith.
The Piltdown man was a fraud perpetrated on science NOT by science. The fraud was unmasked by scientists--ID and anti-evolutionists contributed not a single iota of evidence to discovering it. The same with "Archaeoraptor". Haekel's drawings were inaccurate, but there is no evidence that he consciously initiated a fraud. They are NOT in modern textbooks, except as an illustration of earlier ideas.
But the amusing thing is that many of the ideas of his time have been verified--mammalian fetuses do undergo a series of developmental stages in which earlier evolutionary features are present--not quite the same way that Haekel presented them, but it is still true that human fetuses do develop phyrangal arches and proto-tails.
Your information is faulty. I explained this to you within the past week on another thread.
Neanderthal is not an ancestor to Homo sapiens. That is accurate. But your mistaken notion that other hominids were farther removed from H. sapiens than Neanderthal is absolutely false.
Going back from modern humans there are a succession of archaic human species, all within genus Homo. You have species like H. ergaster and H. habilis for example. Earlier you have the Australopithecines.
It is a serious error to assume that because we are not descended from Neanderthal, we aren't descended from any other species and that this is a serious blow to evolution!
It doesn't take much; if you would spend just a little time studying evolution you wouldn't make such blatant errors.
Take a look at the chart again.
Source: http://wwwrses.anu.edu.au/environment/eePages/eeDating/HumanEvol_info.html
This is a classic statement from the evolution-deniers. IDists offer not a single laboratory study, not a single field observation, not even a single measurement of anything to support their position. Not a single positive contribution in any scientific discipline from an ID perspective. Not a single medical discovery. Never discovered a single fossil. It is a remarkable record of negative attacking and failing to take responsibility.
ID is entirely negative. Entirely "to prove what ain't" in their view, entirely based on attacking science and evolution. The IDist is like Tom Lehrer's wonderful lyrics: "When correctly viewed, everything is lewd."
I've begun to see that IDists are merely filled with fear, fearful of the beauty of the natural world, fearful of using the human mind to puzzle out how the world works, fearful for their religious doctrines. With all this fear, no wonder they are always so negative and have nothing positive to offer to scientific inquiry.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.