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.
Casino owners absolutely love statistical predictability. They predict that for every one who goes home richer, two will go home poorer. For every dollar bet, they will get on average 1/5th of it. Their prediction makes them very rich.
The foolish ones are those who pray, listen to psychics, have lucky charms, etc., who think they will beat predictability.
Naw, what you should have noted is the true size of the flakes you keep hilariously referring to as meat. The pics you keep posting are blown up images taken from under an electron microscope.
*the link is over a year old but describes what the flakes actually are. medularry bone tissue. 5th paragraph describes the demineralization process used
1) it is not meat
2) they are so small that not even a biting fly could make a snack out of it
Maybe you can help Behe write a sequel to "Darwin's Black Box".
Call it Pandora's Box: The Startling Secret Origins of Man Made Flies, Mosquitos and Ticks
Cute. Makes my point. The "Christian science" of the Christian Scientist Church is, of course, nothing like what IDists are arguing for. "Jewish science" was an epitaph used by Hitler. Islamic science is on creationism and ID exactly the same as fundamentalist Christians. Any Baptist sermon attacking evolution could move into a fundamentalist Mosque without changing a word.
Were the prayers all believers or were some of them nonbelievers? How were prayers outside of the study blocked from praying for the control group?
Did the patients know which group they were in? Did they know they were part of a study?
Was additional study blocked by a court? A study of this nature was proposed by someone associated with the University of Minnesota. I heard about the proposed study after a suit was filed by an atheist group to block it. A Madison (Wisconsin) court was going to hear the case. I never found out how the court ruled, but since the hearing took place in an atheist friendly venue & I haven't heard any more about it, I could guess.
I clicked on your links. Words almost fail me. Looks like a site started up by a bunch of whiny bitter creationists that got banned. They seem a bit psychotically obsessed with us.
Sometimes looks can be deceiving. This is not one of those cases. :)
Good questions, something a scientific person would ask, but as I said, I never heard of it again -
A court order NOT to pray for someone ? That I'd like to read !
The court couldn't block the praying. However, it could block collecting data and publishing results by anyone associated with the state school. Data gathered & results submitted for publication by any religious organization would be naturally suspect.
Still would be interesting - a court ordering that certain scientific research cannot be conducted ?
That decision would make mighty good reading ...
It would seem though that the atheists would want to see the testing proceed, and the religious folks would be the ones to block it.
"Distribute the mead!"
I agree.
a court ordering that certain scientific research cannot be conducted ?
Bright line between church & state, you know the gig. The court wouldn't be ruling that the study couldn't be done, just that no public funds or facilities could be used to do it.
That decision would make mighty good reading ...
I'd do a search on it for you, but a good portion of my searches tend towards being like stereotypical female shopping expeditions. I may forget what I went to the store to buy. ;o)
It would seem though that the atheists would want to see the testing proceed, and the religious folks would be the ones to block it.
Most of us religious folks would see no reason to block it. As far as I know, there's no way to scientifically quantify the faith of someone else. God answers all prayers, but sometimes His answer is no. Rationalize in, rationalize out, pretty sure you've heard that one. If you think you haven't heard of it, I'll decipher my shorthand.
Meanwhile, someone motivated to join an atheist group, gotta think we're dealing with true believers. Correct public policy would have a higher priority than scientific inquiry.
Is mead best sipped or chugged?
Creationists Discovered all those sciences, and Creationists brought them all into the modern age.
Evolutionists have taken over and gone almost nowhere we already weren't. The only exception is better machines. No real discoveries.
In fact, the more we know of the chemistry of the cell, the more we see evolution is impossible.
"The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers.
The researchers asked the members of three congregations — St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City — to deliver the prayers, using the patients' first names and the first initials of their last names."
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.
"Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.-- Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer
And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested."
...
"The problem with studying religion scientifically is that you do violence to the phenomenon by reducing it to basic elements that can be quantified, and that makes for bad science and bad religion," said Dr. Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia and author of a forthcoming book, "Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine."
DNA provides further proof of Evolution. Where do you get your science from?
"Surprising as it may seem, there was little sustained opposition to Darwin's book on the grounds that it directly challenged the account of creation in Genesis. Learned biblical study since the Enlightenment had encouraged Christians increasingly to regard the early stories as potent metaphors rather than literal accounts.
"The real challenge of Darwinism for Victorians was that it turned life into an amoral chaos displaying no evidence of a divine authority or any sense of purpose or design.
"One of the most well-known aspects of the Origin of Species controversy is that Darwin kept out of the limelight. He never enjoyed public debate, hated confrontations in which his honour or honesty might be called into question, preferred to stay quietly at home in the background, and was content to let others wave the flag more vigorously than he felt able to do himself. Privately, he believed that disagreements between scientists were generally fruitless. The underlying story is more complex. Darwin kept in close touch. Even though he stayed put at Down House, a barrage of correspondence was despatched and received daily. He used letters to persuade and to influence. He used them to get favourable reviews, correct mistakes, arrange translations and produce revised editions. Without this extraordinary correspondence, rising to a peak of some 500 letters a year after Origin of Species was published, his theory would have sunk. He was helped by the rapid development of the Victorian postal system and the expanding infrastructure of empire..."
url for Janet Browne's book: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/scienceandnature/story/0,,1826019,00.html
Most see DNA/RNA as a total disproof of evolution:
"At that moment, when the DNA/RNA system became understood, the debate between Evolutionists and Creationists should have come to a screeching haltI.L. Cohen, Researcher and Mathematician
Member NY Academy of Sciences
Officer of the Archaeological Inst. of America
Darwin Was Wrong - A Study in Probabilities
New Research Publications, 1984, p. 4
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