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.
Which trials, be specific? Even Senator Iselin could give a specific number.
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Starting with your link, within two clicks I found the above absurdity
So you agree that the Earth is about 4.5 x 109 years old, that the Cambrian is about 0.5 x 109 years ago, the mesozoic ended about 65 x 106 years ago, etc etc?
No, you have utterly failed to understand my original post.
So let me endeavour here to explain it again. I have said nothing about whether Darwin was correct or not; my post was exclusively addressing the fact that you have completely misrepresented what Darwin said. Look again at your original post, #60; here are your words:
Finally, Darwin himself admitted he had no good explanation as to how an eye evolved. He anticipated future records would prove this.
As I have demonstrated, this is entirely false: this is in my post #308 (wherein I jumbled the HTML formating, for which I apologise; I supplied a correction to this in post #310). Your grotesque misrepresention of Darwin's actual words is unworthy--unless you are Dan Rather.
Whether you find Darwin's case convincing or not is beside the point here at the moment. I am pointing out to you that, before you can evaluate Darwin's theory, you might just actually need to read some Darwin. You might actually need to make a little effort to find out what the Theory of Evolution says before you pronounce that it is wrong. You might actually consider that some of the websites from which you gather mangled quotes are neither accurate nor honest, so you should check your sources. This would protect you from some of the egregious errors, outrageous quote-mining and utterly absurd misrepresentations which appear in a large number of posts in these threads.
If one wishes to counter Darwin's arguments, one is obliged to at least read Darwin in the first instance. If one is instead content, as it rather appears in this present instance, to forgo that effort in favour of lapping up the deliberate misrepresentations and outright lies which are the commonplace of creationist websites, then one can have neither credibility nor persuasiveness.
Now, there are further misrepresentations in your post #60; again, let me invite you to correct them yourself, if you wish to be taken seriously in this discussion.
Virginia, if you think disagreeing with any of those statements somehow equates to "denial of the fundamental principles of physics," you are most definitely not one to be lecturing on science in any way. That's the penultimate example of a false premise, and the EXACT tactic used constantly by liberals against anyone who happens to disagree with any of their sacredly held beliefs.
MM out.
"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"It's obvious. They prayed to his noodliness, The Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Supposedly no one knew who they were praying for.
Not by acquaintance. Just the first name and initials of their last names.
Ahh!
An invisible woman in the sky.
"Must be a Mom thing."
Scroll way back & take a look at the questions I asked after you raised the topic. Consider an expanded version of the placebo affect.
Your answer would seem as if you have already decided that prayer simply dosen't matter.
Prayer matters in the same way that calling my parents matter. How do I explain it? Prayer may or may not affect what happens to us, but it will change our way of looking at what's happened.
Archimedes Plutonium?
Is the theory of evolution scientific?
Not according to the eminent philosopher of science, Professor Karl Popper This is all the more interesting because Charles Darwin was an Englishman and Dr Karl Popper is an adopted Englishman with a string of scientific accomplishments that fill half a column in the International Who’s Who. After a hundred years of evolution, what does this respected scientist think of his countryman's theory?
Not much that Darwin would like.
"Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory," Popper says, `but a metaphysical research programme."1
Popper's views are widely respected in Europe and particularly in England, where he has come to be regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Sir Peter Medawar rates him as "incomparably the greatest philosopher of science that has ever been."2 Another well-known mathematician and astronomer says, "There is no more to science than to its method and there is no more to its method than Popper has said." Popperian influence can be seen in medicine, in art even in politics and theology. Leading politicians have expressed their indebtedness to him.
Not a Law
Professor Popper is severely critical of attempts to turn evolution theory into scientific fact. "There can never be a law of evolution," he wrote in one of his earlier works.3 "The idea of a law which determines the direction and character of evolution is a typical 19th century mistake arising out of the general tendency to ascribe to the natural law the functions traditionally ascribed to God."4
What happened then, he says, was this: "The earlier, naturalistic revolution against God replaced the name God by the name Nature. Almost everything else was left unchanged. Theology. the science of God, was replaced by the science of nature. God’s laws by the laws of nature. God's will and power by the will and power of nature (the natural forces) and later God's design and God's judgment by natural selection. Theological determinism was replaced by naturalistic determinism, that is. God's omnipotence and omniscience were replaced by the omnipotence of nature and the omniscience of science."5
Demarcation
Why has Popper separated evolution from science and assigned it to the realm of metaphysics? According to Popper's principle of demarcation, only those theories which are open to empirical falsification are scientific. That is, unless there is a way to prove a theory wrong there is no way to prove it is right. As he puts it: "Statements or systems of statements in order to be ranked as scientific must be capable of conflicting with possible or conceivable observations."6 Science deals with matters that can be tested empirically and are potentially falsifiable. "Since we should call empirical or scientific only such theories as can be empirically tested, we may conclude that it is the possibility of an empirical refutation which distinguishes empirical and scientific theories."7 (By empirical, Professor Popper means that which can be tested by the senses - weighing, seeing, touching, tasting, measuring, etc.)
Now, philosophical or metaphysical theories are empirically irrefutable by definition, There is simply no way to test them in laboratory conditions, Popper is prepared to admit that the line of demarcation is not absolutely sharp. There are degrees of demarcation - well-tested theories, hardly testable theories and nontestable theories. The latter, he insists, do not belong to science: "Those which are non-testable are of no interest to empirical scientists. They may be described as metaphysical."8
And it is in this "non-testable" category that Popper places evolution, Science is just not equipped to deal with the question of origins. "The search for the law of "unvarying order' in evolution cannot possibly fall within the scope of scientific method, whether in biology or sociology."9
Why?
Simply because if the evolution of life on earth did occur, it was a unique historical process which cannot be tested because it is unrepeatable. "We cannot hope to test a universal hypothesis nor find a natural law acceptable to science ifwe are forever confined to the observation of one unique process. Nor can this observation of one unique process help us to foresee its future development."10
Repeating Itself
In several of his later lectures Professor Popper finds fault with the theory of evolution on the grounds that it is tautological; it repeats itself.
Natural selection explains evolution in terms of the survival of the fittest, But he points out that this is really no more than saying, "Those that survive are those that survive. Darwinism, therefore, "is by no means a perfect theory."11 When all is said and done, "neither Darwin nor any Darwinian has so far given an actual causal explanation of the adaptive evolution of any single organism or any single organ. All that has been shown is that such explanations might exist (that is, to say) they are not logically impossible."12
Evolutionists often try to rescue their theory by adopting a device which makes it irrefutable. By pushing back the frontiers of time, anything becomes probable. Dr. Popper objects strongly.
"Statistical explanation must operate in the last analysis with very high probabilities. But if our high probabilities are merely low probabilities which have become high because of the immensity of the available time, then we must not forget that in this way it is possible to explain almost everything. Even so, we have little enough reason to conjecture that any explanation of this sort is applicable to the origin of life."13
Popper also returns to his argument about the tautological nature of Darwinism. "At first sight, natural selection appears to explain the evolution of variety - and in a way it does; but hardly in a scientific way."" Adaptation or fitness is defined by modern evolutionists as survival value and can be measured by actual success in survival: there is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this."14
Metaphysical Differences of Opinion
Yet, despite his criticism Popper thinks Darwin's theory has been valuable in encouraging some very real and practical researches. That is why it has been so widely accepted. There could be another reason too. It was the first non-theistic theory that was convincing. "Theism was worse than an open admission of failure, for it created the impression that an ultimate explanation had been reached."15
At this juncture, Karl Popper makes a very interesting comment. "Now to the degree that Darwinism creates the same impression it is not very much better than the theistic view of adaptation." "It is therefore important to show that Darwinism is not a scientific theory, but metaphysical."'6
So what for the last hundred years has appeared as a conflict between religion and science is simply a difference of metaphysical opinion. No doubt Popper's insistence on the nonscientific nature of evolution will come as a surprise to those who cling to outmoded definitions of science, You don't settle metaphysical disputes in the laboratory. On the issue of origins the last word definitely does not belong to the scientists.
It now looks as if the whole evolution/creation question will have to be reappraised in the light of purpose and meaning. I, for one, am convinced that when it comes to providing man with a metaphysical framework in which to view his living experience, 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.
REFERENCES
1 Karl Popper, Unended Quest (Glasgow: Fontana, Collins. 1976), p.151.
2 BBC Radio 3, July28, 1972. a Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1972), p.108.
4 Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutation (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1972), p.340. 5 Ibid., p.347. 6 Ibid., pp.38.39. 7 Ibid., p.197. 8 Ibid., p.257.
9 Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, p.108. 10 Ibid. 11 Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) p.242. 12 Ibid., p.267. 13 Popper, Unended Quest, p.169. 14 Ibid., p.171. 15 Ibid., p.172. 15 Ibid. COMMENT: No matter how loud you shout or demean others you just have metaphysical, not scientific, explanations for your convictions. Go to www.creationism
"I have changed my mind about the testability and logical status of the theory of natural selection; and I am glad to have an opportunity to make a recantation. My recantation may, I hope, contribute a little to the understanding of the status of natural selection."-- Dr Karl Popper (Dialectica, vol. 32, no. 3-4, 1978, pp. 339-355).
I also find this--"My recantation"--AN UNUSUAL WAY FOR A PHILOSOPHER OF SCIENCE TO DESCRIBE HIS THINKING. More like a statement made in the middle ages to avoid a charge of heresy. He was teaching at The London School of Economics (?)and must have stirred considerable academic controversy.
He never did "recant" his opinions on psychoanalysis or scientific socialism. I don't think he opined on Scientology and Thetans but then I could be wrong. Scientology may some day recant as well. It does have "science" in its name and this might obviate the current assumption of metaphysical content. We will have to get someone to "recant" and then we will be certain we have a science and not a religion.
Being familiar with psychoanalysis helps me to understand "recant." After all Wittgenstein allegedly rescued psychoanalsyis by: "A more important question lies at the root of the two above: How can Wittgenstein call Freud's therapeutic method a mythology and acknowledge that his own technique is also a mythology in a similar sense -- for neither are based in science -- yet that both his and Freud's views either produce knowledge or clarify the nature of certain problems. In other words, how can Freud's therapeutic methodology, if it isn't backed by science, produce knowledge?"
Here are three places where you posted these pictures previously, and in every case, your assertions were rebutted.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/1646185/replies?c=914
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1645332/replies?c=35
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1638408/replies?c=19
If you are, as several FReepers have alleged, the Notorious Mr. Ted Holden, then it appears that not only do you avow several completely ridiculous scientific theories, but you also seem to be less than completely honest.
"It's obvious."
LOL -
So tell me, did the congregation of St. Paul's Monastery pray to Christ or to St. Paul ?
"Not by acquaintance. Just the first name and initials of their last names."
But the test results supposedly showed "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."
Therefore they saw NO effect, but since the test conditions say nothing about having any test groups composed of non-strangers, I cannnot see how this result was obtained.
OK, I'll bite. What in the world is a "philospher of science?" It sounds like Peter Venkman's degree.
I can tell you that he isn't a scientist. Why should we care what one shyster (I assume him to be one since he is passing his drivel off and clearly getting paid for it).
Appeal to Authority (much less Non-Authority) doesn't carry much weight for those of who know logical fallacies.
You the guy who says that gravity is different than it used to be?
I agree BTW: My scale keeps showing a higher number than it used to. Ahh, the good old days when observed gravity was a constant Force that could be counted on.
"Consider an expanded version of the placebo affect."
Dosen't work, unless you have determined that prayer ( like a placebo ) has no effect.
You don't even need a test group for that - simply tell one group of patients that they are being prayed for by hundreds of people. If it works as a placebo, then they should do better.
"Prayer matters in the same way that calling my parents matter"
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 DON'T call them, odds are they will not spontaneously decide to send you a check for no reason.
"Popper challenged some of the ruling orthodoxies of philosophy: logical positivism, Marxism, determinism and linguistic philosophy. He argued that there are no subject matters but only problems and our desire to solve them. He said that scientific theories cannot be verified but only tentatively refuted, and that the best philosophy is about profound problems, not word meanings. Isaiah Berlin rightly said that Popper produced one of the most devastating refutations of Marxism. Through his ideas Popper promoted a critical ethos, a world in which the give and take of debate is highly esteemed in the precept that we are all infinitely ignorant, that we differ only in the little bits of knowledge that we do have, and that with some co-operative effort we may get nearer to the truth.
"Nearly every first-year philosophy student knows that Popper regarded his solutions to the problems of induction and the demarcation of science from pseudo-science as his greatest contributions. So I would like to mention some other aspects of Popper's work that are sometimes neglected. Popper's work is important not just to those who agree with his new bold solutions, but to everyone who recognizes the importance of the problems that Popper discovered, analysed and reformulated in a way that allows a solution. (Anyone who doubts the importance of"getting the question right", of revealing the web of sub-problems of a problem and their disparate connections to apparently unrelated domains, should consult the history of Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem.) To take just three examples, the problems of verisimilitude, of probability (a life-long love of his), and of the relationship between the mind and body will never look the same now that Popper has made important progress in charting the intricate structure of these problems and in offering at least partial solutions. Yet there are books on the mind/body problem, for instance, that simply do not mention Popper's work (for more on this attempted "refutation by neglect", see the introductory reading list).
"Popper was a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the British Academy, and Membre de I'Institute de France. He was an Honorary member of the Harvard Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, and an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics, King's College London, and of Darwin College Cambridge. He was awarded prizes and honours throughout the world, including the Austrian Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold, the Lippincott Award of the American Political Science Association, and the Sonning Prize for merit in work which had furthered European civilization.
"Karl Popper was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965 and invested by her with the Insignia of a Companion of Honour in 1982.
"Sir Karl Popper, who died on 17th September 1994, will continue to stimulate the best minds through his work, which now has a life of its own.
PS: He mentored many including George Soros. Soros may be a liberal but he has run a successful hedge fund. His bonus last year was $780 million. The URL for the above is: http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~tkpw/intro_popper/intro_popper.html
PS: He mentored many including George Soros. Soros may be a liberal but he has run a successful hedge fund.
So, running a hedge fund makes one an expert on evolution?
Mel Brooks was right about what a "Stand-up Philospher" is.
If I was you, I wouldn't quote him again.
Claim CA211.1:
According to philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper, a theory must be falsifiable to qualify as scientific. Popper (1976, 151) said, "Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research programme."
Source:
Response:
- Popper's statement of nonfalsifiability was pretty mild, not as extensive as it is often taken. He applied it only to natural selection, not evolution as a whole, and he allowed that some testing of natural selection was possible, just not a significant amount.
Moreover, he said that natural selection is a useful theory. A "metaphysical research programme" was to him not a bad thing; it is an essential part of science, as it guides productive research by suggesting predictions. He said of Darwinism,And yet, the theory is invaluable. I do not see how, without it, our knowledge could have grown as it has done since Darwin. In trying to explain experiments with bacteria which become adapted to, say, penicillin, it is quite clear that we are greatly helped by the theory of natural selection. Although it is metaphysical, it sheds much light upon very concrete and very practical researches. It allows us to study adaptation to a new environment (such as a penicillin-infested environment) in a rational way: it suggests the existence of a mechanism of adaptation, and it allows us even to study in detail the mechanism at work. And it is the only theory so far which does all that. (Popper 1976, 171-172)Finally, Popper notes that theism as an explanation of adaptation "was worse than an open admission of failure, for it created the impression that an ultimate explanation had been reached" (Popper 1976, 172).
- Popper later changed his mind and recognized that natural selection is testable. Here is an excerpt from a later writing on "Natural Selection and Its Scientific Status" (Miller 1985, 241-243; see also Popper 1978):
When speaking here of Darwinism, I shall speak always of today's theory - that is Darwin's own theory of natural selection supported by the Mendelian theory of heredity, by the theory of the mutation and recombination of genes in a gene pool, and by the decoded genetic code. This is an immensely impressive and powerful theory. The claim that it completely explains evolution is of course a bold claim, and very far from being established. All scientific theories are conjectures, even those that have successfully passed many severe and varied tests. The Mendelian underpinning of modern Darwinism has been well tested, and so has the theory of evolution which says that all terrestrial life has evolved from a few primitive unicellular organisms, possibly even from one single organism.
However, Darwin's own most important contribution to the theory of evolution, his theory of natural selection, is difficult to test. There are some tests, even some experimental tests; and in some cases, such as the famous phenomenon known as 'industrial melanism', we can observe natural selection happening under our very eyes, as it were. Nevertheless, really severe tests of the theory of natural selection are hard to come by, much more so than tests of otherwise comparable theories in physics or chemistry.
The fact that the theory of natural selection is difficult to test has led some people, anti-Darwinists and even some great Darwinists, to claim that it is a tautology. A tautology like 'All tables are tables' is not, of course, testable; nor has it any explanatory power. It is therefore most surprising to hear that some of the greatest contemporary Darwinists themselves formulate the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology that those organisms that leave most offspring leave most offspring. C. H. Waddington says somewhere (and he defends this view in other places) that 'Natural selection . . . turns out ... to be a tautology' ..4 However, he attributes at the same place to the theory an 'enormous power. ... of explanation'. Since the explanatory power of a tautology is obviously zero, something must be wrong here.
Yet similar passages can be found in the works of such great Darwinists as Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and George Gaylord Simpson; and others.
I mention this problem because I too belong among the culprits. Influenced by what these authorities say, I have in the past described the theory as 'almost tautological', and I have tried to explain how the theory of natural selection could be untestable (as is a tautology) and yet of great scientific interest. My solution was that the doctrine of natural selection is a most successful metaphysical research programme. It raises detailed problems in many fields, and it tells us what we would expect of an acceptable solution of these problems.
I still believe that natural selection works in this way as a research programme. Nevertheless, I have changed my mind about the testability and the logical status of the theory of natural selection; and I am glad to have an opportunity to make a recantation. My recantation may, I hope, contribute a little to the understanding of the status of natural selection.Links:
Brush, Stephen G. 1994. Popper and evolution. Reports of the National Center for Science Education 13(4)-14(1): 29. http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/8401_popper_and_evolution_9_10_2003.asp
I have yet to see what evidence leads one to believe there is an invisible entity in the sky.
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