Darwinist Ideologues Are on the Run

Ichneumon:-- male/female genders do *not* have to arise at the same time.

But it would be pretty useless if they did not arise at the same time. They would have died out in one generation so the mutation would have been lost.

Metmom, you just lost a lot of respect. Your point is superficially obviously true, but Ichneumon addressed it, and explained clearly in terms that a layman can understand why it is false, in the very post that your responded to. I expect more than mindless anti-evolution sloganeering from you. That comment from you lumps you in with the hicks who were hiding when God handed "reading comprehension" around.

Go back and read Ichneumon's post again, this time for comprehension. In fact if you genuinely want to understand why biologists overwhelmingly accept evolution read all of Ichneumon's science posts in this thread and on his profile page. Very carefully. Take as long as it needs, or you are selling your own faith short. If you cannot be bothered to do that, then how is your disbelief in evolution really any more considered than the YEC ignorami?

You have, right here in this thread, an expert who will answer pretty much any question that you care to pose about ToE, and who is willing and capable of teaching you. He'll be very polite and helpful if you don't ask stupid questions that he has already addressed (extremely rude on your part) How many people ever get that opportunity? But you pass all of that up with a sniffy ignorant canard, because you'd rather not learn. Sad, sad, sad.

Will and Krauthammer. Bwahahahahaha!

Ichneumon obviously isn't an armchair scientist. Most of the material he posts he wrote himself, and when he quotes from others he makes it plain. His knowledge is obviously deep and detailed. Do you advocate affirmative action for those who don't have his knowledge and ability? Is it somehow unfair that he understands this stuff 1000x better than those who reject it on the basis of a few lies from a Moonie, or a charlatan biochemist?

If you are a Christian (like myself), just realise that scientists have a metaphysical bias in their line of work. You can look at the same facts and evidence from a theistic perspective and reach different conclusions.

Creationists (whether you are one or not) come up with this particular canard repeatedly.

Once more....

Science isn't just conducted by looking at the facts and arriving at conclusions. Looking at facts is the first part of the process, and arriving at conclusions is the last. There's a whole slew of stuff imbetween, that creationists tend to ignore. The construction of multiple hypotheses. The formation of predictions of as-yet-unmade observations that would confirm the hypotheses. The formation of falsification tests from as-yet-unmade observations that would falsify the hypotheses. Attempts by other experts to blow your work out of the water. Theories like evolution have survived 150 years of this. To talk about "looking at the same evidence and reaching different conclusions" is just hogwash that reveals that you don't understand how science actually proceeds. Tell me, what "before the fact" predictions has creation science ever come up with? What observations would disprove ID? What further research does ID suggest? Why isn't the DI doing any research?

You very frequently misread and misunderstand things.

You are confusing comprehension with independent thought. I don't see everything through the murky prism of evolution as you do.

Feel free to demonstrate that I'm wrong by describing its function. We'll wait.

For what? You say it's useless until I point out a function at which point you move the goal post and say "Oh, I never said it had to be totally useless, etc." It's another example of evolutionists setting up a question where either answer "agrees" with the theory.

Sorry, no, we prefer things that aren't transparently silly to a five-year-old.

You mean like EVOLUTION? ROFL

A FIVE-YEAR-OLD can look at a watch and tell you it didn't come together by shaking a bunch of watch parts in a bag.

A FIVE-YEAR-OLD can look at a sand castle and tell you it wasn't created simply by the action of waves and sand.

A FIVE-YEAR-OLD can look at a log cabin and tell you it wasn't made by a bunch of logs randomly falling in a forest.

And a FIVE-YEAR-OLD can certainly look at himself/herself and know that he/she doesn't have a monkey for an uncle.

But of course you have all the "answers" as long as they don't conflict with your theory of evolution. EVERY DAY scientists discover things they didn't know or change their minds about something they thought they knew , which is why it's quite problematical to assume that they've finally got it figured out, whether it's tonsils, the coccyx, the appendix, goose bumps, etc.

So were Neanderthals human or were they not human?

So When is Common Descent at Risk Observationally?

This brings us to a significant problem. How is the theory of common descent put at risk observationally?

One way of conceiving the empirical content of common descent (CD) is according to the following schema:

(a) CD + Independent auxiliary theory Observational expectation

Here, common descent yields observational consequences via the "inferential medium" of independently derived theories. In developmental biology, for instance, we observe that disruptions of ontogeny are (generally speaking) increasingly severe or deleterious the earlier they occur. The reason, as Van Valen argues, is that development "ramifies out; later developmental decisions depend on earlier ones which are much fewer and have consequences which interact."[26] Earlier developmental decisions or events are thus "entrenched" relative to what lies causally downstream from them, and carry a heavier "generative" responsibility. As Leo Buss puts it,

It is axiomatic that a random alteration introduced early in ontogeny will likely be manifested in a cascade of subsequent morphogenetic events, whereas a modification introduced later in ontogeny can have relatively minor effects. The validity of this interpretation can hardly be doubted. A random error in the manufacture of the central processing unit of my computer would unquestionably preclude any hope of my using it to write, while the various marketing decisions reflected in the design of the exterior case have provided me with only minor inconveniences.[27]

We might adopt Wimsatt's nicely evocative term, “generative entrenchment" (GE), to describe this theory.

What follows when generative entrenchment is coupled theoretically with common descent? D.T. Anderson argues that

the highly integrated stepwise nature of animal development [GE] causes it to be in many respects an extremely conservative process. Basic developmental events established during the early evolution of a group are maintained repetitively over hundreds of millions of years, since any change in them would spell extinction.[28]

This may be represented schematically as

(b) CD + GE Conservation of early development

But as we have just seen, early development – in the vertebrates, for example (not to mention throughout the Metazoa generally) – looks pretty diverse, not highly conserved. "Eggs, cleavage, gastrulation and germ layer formation are very different in amphibians, bird and mammals" note Rudolf Raff and his colleagues.[29] (Raff, as some of you may know, is a leading researcher in this area.) Thus, there must be some way, Raff et al. conclude, of escaping the functional constraints entailed by generative entrenchment – because, plainly, "early development does evolve, and sometimes dramatically."[30] Surveying the similar conclusions of Keith Stewart Thomson, Van Valen concurs:

One heretical conclusion which Thomson comes to must, I think, be accepted. This is that evolution occurs at all stages of development, often at early stages of programs leading to the adult. His most conclusive argument for this reminded me a bit of Descartes: Early development does often change; therefore it can....At least such evolution can no longer be rationally dismissed as Goldschmidt's folly.[31]

What has happened to the auxiliary theory, generative entrenchment? It seems to have gone to the wall, blindfolded, for a last cigarette:

(c) CD + GE ? Non-conservation of early development

In this schema, which reflects the practice of evolutionary theorists, it is generative entrenchment that is imperiled by the observations, not common descent. The problem now however is that common descent's empirical content, vis-á-vis the phenomena of development, is indeterminate. One really can't say what follows observationally from the theory.

The grounds for the view that "early development does often change" are, of course, almost wholly comparative. That is, given common descent, the existence of radically differing ontogenetic patterns is prima facie evidence that early development can indeed evolve. It then becomes a research problem to learn by what mechanisms early development can be freed from its functional entrenchment.

Experimental evidence that "early development does often change" has not been readily forthcoming, however. As Jeffrey Levinton observes,

As a general rule, major developmental mutants give a picture of hopeless monsters, rather than hopeful change. Epigenetic and genetic pleiotropy both impart great burden to any major developmental perturbation....The cyclops mutant of Artemia is lethal. The homeotic mutants of Drosophila melanogaster suffer similar fates....But any geneticist interested in major developmental mutants would be delighted to find viable hopeful monsters in the laboratory, given the various tricks usually necessary to keep developmental mutants in laboratory cultures. But, alas, major developmental mutants are invariably sickly and show pervasive deformities. From both theoretical and empirical points of view, hopeful monsters have led only to hopeless mooting.[32]

Under common descent, however, our responsibility for discovering the mechanisms of macroevolution is not discharged

http://www.arn.org/docs/nelson/pn_darwinianparadigm061593.htm

There's more to the article, which I found very interesting. If you keep an open mind.

http://www.nwcreation.net/wiki/index.php?title=Brian_Spitzer_criticizes_Johnson_response

You may want to do a little "fact-checking" yourself, Mr. Gonzalez.

I am pleased to see you gather an occasional prime.

So were Neanderthals human or were they not human?

They weren't modern humans.

How are modern humans defined?

If you have some evidence the articles he posts are not of Ichneumon's authoring, please present it.

Chirp Chirp Chirp.

A malicious accusation, followed by complete silence when challenged to corroborate it.

I'm just shocked, shocked I tell you, to see such behavior from our self-ordained purveyors of morality.

How are modern humans defined?

Humans that fall within the broad range of variation of the existing normal human population. Neanderthals in general fall outside that range. Were they a different species? Hard to say, but probably not, at least not by the normal biological species definition.

You appear to expect humans to wear a bar code defining them as either human or not human. Biology isn't like that. Categories are fuzzy.

Seems to me defining a human wouldn't be so difficult. And I just don't understand the differentiation between modern human and whatever else you would call them. If there is no specific delineation, wouldn't there be overlaps?

"to see such behavior from our self-ordained purveyors of morality."

Odd to see a professor bring up morality when discussing science. What would morality have to do with science?

Odd to see a professor bring up morality when discussing science.

I'm not discussing science, I'm discussing malicious false accusations from creationists. Creationism, of course, has nothign to do with science.

Seems to me defining a human wouldn't be so difficult.

Which is why abortion is such an uncontroversial issue?

Well, I assume we would agree that an unborn child in this century would be a human, no?

Well, I assume we would agree that an unborn child in this century would be a human, no?

At what stage of development?

Seems to me defining a human wouldn't be so difficult.

This is an issue that I have explained to you at considerable depth before but I'll explain it again for the lurkers. It is possible to define a a species at an instant in time, but the definition of each species changes over time (most of the most dyed-in-the-wool creationists accept that simple observation, indeed the Noah's Ark story demands it to gain even the thinnest patina of credibility) due to the fact that children are not identical copies of their parents. If you geographically separate a species into two non-contact groups they will drift apart genetically even if their environments aren't selecting for different characteristics. At some point the two groups will become distinct species, no longer capable of interbreeding, but who can say exactly when it occurred? As I've told you several times before, the fuzziness of the species concept is a *prediction* of the theory of evolution, and it is borne out by ample real-world observations. Given a set of old hominid bones creationists cannot agree amongst themselves if they are human or non-human. Scientists are unsurprised at this failure, since this inability to categorise past individuals into modern species is exactly what you would expect, yet creationists should be very disturbed at it. Creationists don't seem to worried at the failure of the real world to match their beliefs though, and that is because they don't actually conduct any real science, or make any predictions, or make any attempt to falsify their beliefs.

Oops, I was too quick before I realized you two both got the same initials.

medicalmess, mineralman, murraymom, metmom ...

It's getting confusing out there.