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.
Yes, that's it.
Why does it need a response? It's like asking you whether you have stopped having sex with your daughter.
Your so-called problem bears no resemblence to anything asserted by biologists.
Because it is simplified in favor of evolution to show the difficulty of the number of differences between the "proto human" gene and a human gene and 10 million years to get from the one to the other.
You're not really bringing up Piltdown are you?
Piltdown proves that Scientific rigor will eventually identify frauds (and that one was a simple one for money).
Religion OTOH has no such rigor. Just ask the cash-masters at the "Church" of Scientology.
You really don't want to go down the road of hoaxes. There have been more hoaxes successfully perpetrated in the name if religion than ever in science -- and science tells the truth about its hoaxes.
Piltdown is an example of successful science.
It sounds like an Economic model. Like the economist on the desert island with canned goods and nothing else from the ship: "assume we have a can opener."
I'm well aware of the fact that neither I nor anybody else is going to convince hardened evolutionists of anything, that's not the point here. The point is that C.S. Lewis was right in saying that, above all else, the devil cannot tolerate being mocked, and the world needs to learn to laugh at the theory of evolution, and comprehending that it requires trillions of years and only has a few thousand or tens of thousands at most, as as good a place to start as any.
I'm betting DungeonMaster can't even point out the one mountain-sized error in the scenario. Not that there's only one, but the first one is like stepping out of an airplane without a parachute.
I'll give you a better straight line than that; here, this is a chicken:
Come on, let's hear it, tell us all what a liar I am for calling such an obvious non-chicken a chicken....
I would call it an image of a chicken, but that's just me.
I don't recall bringing up the subject of chickens.
IOW you don't know what the subject at hand, you can't defend your position, so you use some random quote from a non-scientist to make what should be a scientific point (and within the realm of religion and Christianity I have great respect for C.S. Lewis). And that you actively are working with the devil in spreading his main trade: ignorance. Willfull ignorance at that! His favorite!
I can probably come up with a good Ghandi quote -- does that mean I win the thread?
What's wrong with it. Remember, it's intentionally simplified and leaned in favor of evolution. Keep that in mind and tell me the flaw.
Evolution doesn't need things leaned in its favor. this scenario isn't evolution. It's a creationist's fantasy. You cannot find anything like this in anything written by a biologist. It's crap.
If you can't be more specific I will assume you don't know. I notice you are putting out a lot of emotion though which tells me something else.
I really don't care what you think. People who are not completely ignorant of biology will recognize at least one ludicrous error in the scenario in post number one. People who don't see it and yet continue to think they are smart enough to overturn hundreds of years of science are simply nuts.
Nevermind.
Imagine that evolution is driven by magic elves, with the power to mutate genes, and create new species. But everyone knows there's no such thing as magic elves, so therefore evolution is false.
Which line do I stand in to collect my Nobel prize?
Unfortunately, you have assumed two things. First, you assume that Evolution is not a theory but a fact, and a scientifically proved fact as well. The simplest test requires the ability to prove your hypothesis wrong. There is nothing in this thread that could be rigorously and scientifically tested.
Second, you assume people who are not convinced of the fact of evolution are somehow all primitive Neanderthals who are superstitious and unfamiliar with logic and scientific rigor.
Please do remember Carl Linnaeus determined similar phyla in the late 18th century. He was the father of taxonomy. Also remember, for as long as we have recorded history man has bred animals and plants to obtain better varieties of the same species. Both Linnaeus and human experience saw relationships between species and the possibility of changing phenotype by controlling for the genotype.
Insofar as I can determine the core beliefs of Darwinism include: (1)Spontaneous occurrence of life by chance; (2)Mutations that provide new species and phyla; (3)Natural selection results in the survival of the fittest (this seems to be a form of circular reasoning); (4)And, all of the above are spontaneous, unplanned and of unquestioned validity.
You have a right to your assumptions and opinions. I am still awaiting one experiment showing a new species evolving out of an older one. To date no one has so observed. All the photographed skulls, horse progression pictures and so forth are nothing more than an assumption one led to another.
Even when Darwin wrote his masterful work Christians had experienced the enlightenment and were inclined to rate some old testament stories as examples of truth clouded by myth. For many of us evolution does not challenge our faith but we do note that environmentalism is a form of faith and is the current faith taught in our schools and colleges.
We are not as stupid and superstitious as you presume.
No point in going further. You don't know what a scientific theory is, so you really aren't qualified to discuss the topic.
get some learning and then get back to me.
We are not as stupid and superstitious as you presume.
No, just willfully ignorant. Or in your case, apparently, unwillfully ignorant.
Most other paleoanthropologists were already ignoring Piltdown because it did not fit the South African finds which started coming up in 1924.
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