I don't believe in Evolution at all, I only believe in Creation. But I don't know that days have always been limited to 24 hours, or that an hour has always been limited to 60 minutes. God may have changed all that when He created life.
Obviously, there is much physical evidence to dispute the argument that God created the universe in six days some 6,000 years ago. The religious response to that seems to be that God created a "mature" universe that looks to us like it is billions of years old when in fact it is not.
My question, then, is why would God try to trick us like that? Seems a bit cruel to me, and conflicts with my understanding of a God who loves those he created in his image. So, to the extent one believes that God had a hand in creating the universe, it seems one must acknowledge that the six days mentioned in Genesis are a metaphor for the eons of time that have passed since creation.
Evolution: "An elaborate intellectual edifice built on very few facts"
I suppose he will do until they can get somebody smart on the project. Maybe somebody who's not stymied by complicated stuff like subtraction, addition's tricky pal.
Wow! His bulb must burn mighty dim. Either that or he's simply lying about his "smug" expectations on opening Dawkins' book to make his "witness" more appealing to the sheeple.
Without all the psycho-babble this is exactly what ID is stating. The more into the mircobial world we go the more pronounced that life is not random or by chance.
My God the writer COMPLETELY missed the point of Dawkins' example.
Cumulative selection is the key to understanding evolution. No one in their right mind (except creationists) argues that proteins and other macro-molecules arose in one step.
Evolution by its very definition postulates that these processes occured gradually.
Why is this simple concept so repeatedly misunderstood?
Never mind that we are not yet able to detect a planet the size of the earth at a similar distance from a similar star, even if that star were as close as Alpha Centari, Epsilon Eridani or other very very nearby stars.
IOW, if we were near one of those nearby stars, we couldn't detect the earth!.
I'm sorry, but you presume incorrectly. How could anybody get a PhD in biology when they are capable of committing a howler like this?
This is not what evolution says happens for proteins, and I defy any creationist to find a serious biologist that would support this guy's version of evolution of proteins.
This is standard creationist rhetoric - putting up a fraudulent strawman, and claiming that's what evolution means.
bump
Confessions of a Trueborn Liberal
By Timothy G. Standish
I'm a liberal. I realize that publicly "outing" myself like this could mean that I will be labeled and marginalized by conservatives, but I can't help it-I was born this way. I'm incapable of leaving the prevailing dogma unquestioned; I'm skeptical of the pronouncements of leaders and, frankly, hope that they are wrong.
Being a true liberal means that I am frustrated by conservatives who masquerade as liberals, I call them pseudo-liberals. These pseudo-liberals give us real liberals a bad name. The problem with pseudo-liberals is that they live in very small ponds. Within the pond, a different orthodoxy may be held than in the big bad ocean. Pseudo-liberals think they are being true liberals when questioning the orthodoxy in the little pond by simply presenting the orthodoxy out in the "ocean." In other words, they are not questioning the real orthodoxy; they are piling on against the unorthodox little pond view. A true liberal honors little-pond views. That does not mean accepting every detail, but it does mean embracing the fact that differing views exist and should be respected as a challenge to any hegemony of the real majority. Pseudo-liberals are simply devious bullies when they cloak themselves in the garment of a minority while fighting to impose the majority view on real minorities.
While proudly wearing the liberal badge, pseudo-liberals may argue enthusiastically, and sometimes incoherently, for trendy ideas in both science and theology. How is this liberal? In the context of science, there is little doubt that evolution is the prevailing orthodoxy. In addition, the minority who question this orthodoxy out in the "ocean" may be subject to withering hyperbole, find their employment and social status threatened and-even worse-they may be labeled as conservatives! It seems strange to hear people calling themselves "liberals" while kowtowing to the majority and attacking free thinking about evolution.
I am a scientist who is open to questioning current scientific dogma; thus I am a true liberal. The same would be true of liberal theologians; they would be willing to question popular ideas in theology: things like the higher critical approach to understanding scripture or the flawed idea of theistic evolution. It is pseudo-liberal theologians who simply embrace these currently popular views and act as if they are introducing new ideas for those of us in the little pond of Seventh-day Adventism to embrace. It is embarrassing to see pseudo-liberal theologians join hands with their close cousins, the pseudo-intellectuals, contorting their theology in an effort to cloak fuzzy thinking in the weighty mantle of modern science. This wholesale surrender of one academic discipline, theology, to another, science, is both humiliating and unwarranted.
The Adventist Church needs more liberals like me and you--if you are willing to join me-- liberals who embrace different ideas because they are better; liberals who reject conservative pseudo-liberal parroting of old ideas trawled from the great big intellectual ocean. Those ideas were long ago evaluated and rejected. Imagine the positive change our church would see if there were more real liberals, people with the intellectual confidence to question prevailing ideas in the fallen world where we live and work. I believe that it will be a fully liberal church that sees the ultimate liberal, Jesus Christ, returning in clouds of glory.
Dr. Timothy Standish is a research scientist at the Geoscience Research Institute.
Thanks.
NO!! This misrepresents Dawkins's evolutionary algorithm. Contrary to the author's claim, Dawkins's "weasel" example does *NOT* "lock in" any letter which happens to get "lucky". Instead, a "fitness function" merely grades each attempt on how *many* letters it happens to have right, PERIOD. It's like a game of "warmer, colder". Nonetheless, even without any direct feedback on which letters are correct in which positions, the evolutionary process *still* arrives at the target string in an incredibly short period of time. This models how evolution shapes proteins by merely "grading" (via natural selection) those organisms which are better or worse on a survival basis (imagine nature "saying", warmer, warmer, colder... as individuals vary in a population, where "warmer" means you survive and reproduce more effectively, and "colder" can mean you die early).
For a taste of just how *much* evolution can speed up things over purely random processes, here's an older post of mine:
Or are you one of those who insist that a room full of monkeys with keyboards can write the complete works of Shakespeare?
In theory? Yes they can, if you're willing to wait long enough (where "enough" is an amount of time that boggles the imagination). In practice (by simple random output)? No they can't.
But they can do it pretty quickly and easily if a replication and selection process is involved.
You wanted to see a calculation, so let's do one.
Consider the Shakespeare phrase, "If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me." That's 109 characters (including spaces and punctuation). Upper and lower case letters, plus digits and puntuaction, make up a pool of about 70 different characters. This means that the odds of producing the Shakespeare phrase in one random trial is 1 out of 70109, or 1 in 1,305,227,939,201,292,014, 528,313,176,276,968,928,001, 249,110,077,400,839,115,038, 451,821,150,802,274,449,576, 205,527,736,070,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000.
Needless to say, that's a big number. It's so huge that if every atom in the universe (about 1080 of them) were a computer capable of making a billion (1,000,000,000) random trials per second, the expected time required to produce the above line from Shakespeare would be 2,585,011,097,170,911,314,802,759,827,024,569,612,393, 783,728,161,759,843,736,212,615,624,189,581,658,716,078, 309,043,891,309 times the expected lifespan of the universe. That's close enough to "never" in my book.
But that's for *purely* random production process. How much do you think an evolutionary process could cut down that figure? Knock a few zeros off the end, maybe?
Well let's try it. Using an evolutionary process, which couples random variation with replication and selection and *nothing* else, the above Shakespeare phrase can be produced on a *single* computer (mine), using a breeding population of 1024 character strings in a whopping... 15 seconds (using this applet):
Generation: 0Hmm, 15 seconds is a hell of a lot faster than zillions of times the lifespan of the universe, isn't it? Evolution sped things up (compared to a purely random process) by a factor of more than 10195 -- that's a "1" followed by a hundred and ninety-five zeros, or: 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000.
Tries <= 1024
Best Critter: "xSeOSEpc3Lm6rnRWnpFYL?QEDY7a67XlfRoJ0e8Len'X'1u'BhdrNqSNaXr7kVjondNozkf2CH9d96SaI?'f43M.CUGJ5XHbqfeR.UJP'tgNP"
Score (0 is best) 101Generation: 100
Tries <= 26624
Best Critter: "vf,ioV c3RKlooioifBFQXh, PeHTskof!oJ0e,Lrn'X'1u BhkchESNaXr kVjo dNozpanSI div1Qwi8h taQ,jswMkk,us1S'ugYtmm7."
Score (0 is best) 72[...]
Generation: 1115
Tries <= 286464
Best Critter: "If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me."
Score (0 is best) 0Checked 286464 critters in 15 seconds == 19097 tries/sec.
Lesson: Even simple evolutionary processes are *incredibly* more efficient and effective than simple randomness alone. Evolution can *easily* accomplish things which would be *impossibly* improbable by purely random means.
Who could possibly dream up a description more suited to the philosophy of evolution than millions of monkeys, one of which finally arrives at the truth.
What is missing from the equation is the meaning behind that sequence of letters. Monkeys typing randomly are doing just that, so even if they typed out a whole volume of Shakespeare, unless there were a design in place for interpereting the sequence of letters they are just random letters.
Maybe Bill Maher shold read this book!