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.
Whoa buddy, hold your horses! And please do try to follow what I have posted to you, it is in your own interest. I suggest you re-read my post to which your copy & paste screed is a remarkable non-sequiter.
What I have been addressing in my posts to you is very straightforward: you are repeatedly posting items (not always with a nominated source) which demonstrably bear false witness. I have pointed out two specific instances (Crick and Darwin) where the material you have posted is completely inaccurate and deliberately intended to mislead. I do not believe it is your intent to publish falsehoods. I have no reason whatever to doubt your integrity and do not do so; where I have pointed out where material you published is demonstrably and deliberately falsified, I have done so in order to give you an opportunity to make an appropriate correction and to distance yourself from such erroneous material.
I have no reason to doubt your good intention and personal probity--but your continued refusal to distance yourself from material that is demonstrably dishonest does your credibility great harm.
I have shown you, in two instances, that the material you are quoting from creationist websites is every bit as dishonest as the forged documents Dan Rather waved around in a disgusting attempt to impugn President Bush's integrity. I think you owe it to yourself to acknowledge that the material I have indicated in your previous posts is in serious error; but that is ultimately a matter for your own conscience.
As for the latest wad of stuff you've posted in irrelevant reply; it is nearly as distorted and unreliable as your previous howlers. Read a lot of Popper, do you? Quite a number of crationists like to Mis-quote Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions in the mistaken belief it 'refutes Darwin', which is very interesting because there is quite a debate between the philosophies of Kuhn and Popper. You are declaring for Popper, we presume? Could you enlighten us as to why you favour Popper over Kuhn? But in your own words, please -- so we can at least be persuaded you actually read something other than creationist sound-bites.
To sum up: after your courtesy retraction of the misleading quotes in your previous posts which I have pointed out to you, please do enlighten us with your own personal readings and understanding of the contrasting schools of thought of Kuhn and Popper.
I'm looking forward to Kuhn v. Popper internal-creationist debate, myself!
Karl Popper isn't the problem here.
The post you were responding to is a butchered and incoherent account of Popper by...Russell Kranz.
Nope, I'd never heard of Russell Kranz, either. Google would indicate he is a 7th Day Adventist--but that's about it.
What you said.
These things just get too tangled.
Scientists are not used to dealing with blatant dishonesty, and often say things that are easy to quote out of context.
Darwin suffers from misuse more than most because he often began a discussion by making the best case for the opposition.
The business of natural selection being inaccessible to experimentation is ancient history anyway. Lots of methodologies in biology are new within the last decade or two.
Yer funny. Reason in, reason out & visa versa. While my understanding about many topics may be rusty and/or antiquated, my understanding about ToE came from science books. Do you need me to preface all of my posts to you with a strong disclaimer? WARNING, I make no claim to being an expert in many areas which I am interested.
I didn't say the whole story has been told, but that it is being told ("telling").
Noted.
One of hundreds of peer-reviewed articles showingf how DNA is confirming more aspects of TToE and filling in additional information.
No doubt.
You think God just shoved a bunch of nearly identical DBA in chimpanzees and humans?
Have you ever dealt with any design engineers? Disclaimer - I am not an engineer.
I don't make statements out of the blue, nor do I make "but it seems to me" statements when I am dealing in area which I am familiar with yet not an expert. I know I what I am saying is scientifically correct before I post.
Ditto. Do you think it is possible to see a push for any adjustment to the current continental drift model as life science gains greater hard evidence to back up its migration maps?
You know, I've re-read your posts here, and I am still worried that you still really don't get what is important about your goof in post #65. So let's just briefly look at that one again, because I would really like you to see what you have unwittingly done.
In post #65, you stated:
Finally, Francis Crick, discover of DNA and a Nobel Prize winner said "the probability of life originating at random is so utterly miniscule so as to make it absurd." Like many atheists he believes that extraterrestials sent living cells to earth.
I pointed out, in reply to your post, that the quote allegedly from Francis Crick is in fact from Fred Hoyle. It's very easy to see how you slipped up on the old copy & paste, because the misquote that is from Crick appears on lots and lots of Creationist websites (and often, next to Hoyle). That quote, which you intended, is:
"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle" and is indeed from his book Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature 1981, p. 88
OK, this is where the fun really starts. Copy part of this quote from Crick, say "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now" and Google it. You will hit quite a few pages, without exception Creationist websites, with this self-same quote from Nobel-prize winner Francis Crick appearing to proclaim his own Creationist creed. Pretty convincing, yes?
Well, read the book itself! Here is the full sentence, and the sentence immediately following:
"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions."
I have added the bolding to the end of the sentence which all of those Creationist websites omit.
Why do you suppose they abridge that sentence, and omit the one immediately following? Do you suppose they are trying to save bandwidth? Or could it just be that they are deliberately doctoring the quote, as shamelessly as Mr. Rather's forgeries, in order to misrepresent? In order, in fact, to lie?
You stated in your post #329, that you found
the simple biblical explanation of human existence does much greater justice to freedom, moral responsibility, equality. the dignity of man, conscience, truth and other values than any explanation based upon the survival of the fittest
I read the Bible, too. It is the basis of my own faith. I read it often and find therein wisdom, beauty, guidance, and comfort. And a grave injunction against bearing false witness.
And it as bearers of false witness that I charge the various creationist websites from which you and others have scooped up so much misleading nonsense to dump on this thread.
Cross-disciplinary research is not unknown. I have seen life science and physical science interdisciplinary research studies done in various colleges and Universities (I worked at several Universities for a total of 20 years).
Yours is an intuiging idea.
Now I have to go backwards through the thread to see if we were argung (or intently discussing)!
Complete the context bookmark.
Reminds me of a movie reviewer -- Medved? -- who was "quoted" in an ad as saying "this is the best movie I ever saw" when the rest of the quote was " ABOUT A CGI GIANT SNAKE" or something very similar. The rest of the review basically said he hated it.
Alas, as a demonstration on the importance of scale, I wanted to post here the link to the 'Meat or Accident? website--but it seems to exist no more. It was a quiz wherein one had to guess if a given photograph depicted something suitable for the table or should be shipped to emergency. It only worked because there was no indication of scale.
Pity how some neat stuff like that website just disappears.
And none of those sites that I have looked at even bother to consider that Crick is writing about abiogenesis, not evolution....
It really is a game of whack-a-mole
How many times must you get banned before you get the message, Ted?
My comment had to do with some eastern & "new age" beliefs, instead of current common western beliefs. Think in terms of reports by twins "knowing" when harm has come to their other twin, something nearly impossible to reliably document.
If you are in trouble and you call your parents to "deliver me from evil ( send me money )" you have some expectation that you MAY be "delivered", although you may not.
If you are in trouble and you call your parents to "deliver me from evil ( send me money )" you have some expectation that your parent MAY be tell you to get a job or to cut back on expenses. It may not be the kind of relief you wanted, but if you need that kind of attitude adjustment, sending immediate relief could be harmful to you.
If you DON'T call them, odds are they will not spontaneously decide to send you a check for no reason.
Is the only measure of your relationships material?
I poked you with a sharp stick.
"My comment had to do with some eastern & "new age" beliefs,..."
Sorry, I suppose I should have used my phychic powers to guess that.
"...you have some expectation that your parent MAY be tell you to get a job or to cut back on expenses."
My parents taught me common sense when I was young - Do you normally use prayer in the hopes that God will bring you some ?
Feel free to toss me a Darwin honerable mention. My typing is currently left handed hunt & peck, cuz I broke my right arm. Need further explanations of any of my short hand, just ask.
My parents taught me common sense when I was young - Do you normally use prayer in the hopes that God will bring you some ?
???
Sorry about your arm ...
A plea to "deliver me from evil" is not a request for instructions as to how you could deliver yourself from evil ( common sense ) , or how to get along with evil - it is a cry of "Please get me out of this ! send lawyers, guns and money ! "
Prayer for someone's recovery may not be answered at all, but I certainly would not expect God to answer it with " go take him to a doctor. "
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