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.
So your guess is what, that this T-Rex was alive 10-12 thousand years ago ?
If you are taking the creationist side, then we have no possible yardstick to measure 60 million years - nothing whatsover has existed that long. And everything that IS fossilized occured with in that time span also, so it does not take that long.
If you are taking the evolutionist side, then T-Rexs existed basically unchanged for 60 million years untill just recently.
By excluding one possibility that currently falls outside of study of science (the man in the sky), his reason *may* be taking him down the incorrect path.
If the theory of evolution fits the facts, it isn't surprising he will go with it, as opposed to 'believing' something in the absence of observation but rather swallowing whole the superstition of others.
ToE "fits the facts" for philosophical reasons... the possibility of all "supernatural" explanations have to be excluded, as they fall outside of the realm of all "real" science. The study of science has fallen into a circular argument, favoring one philosophy over all others.
Two judging bodies are sitting in a room. One side is open to the possibility of a supernatural & the other side knows there is no such thing.
A piece of the puzzle is brought into the room to be evaluated by the judging bodies, to see which pile the evidence gets thrown on. A portion of those on the side of a supernatural possibility will claim that the evidence clearly belongs in their pile. A portion will vote that it belongs in a middle pile. One hundred percent of those in the other governing body will vote that it belongs in their pile.
I believe that all of the evidence belongs in the middle pile & anyone that claims it must be put on either of the other piles is doing so for purely philosophical reasons. Least I know my position is based on my beliefs...
Your beliefs in the absence of evidence reflect a strong case of the piles.
I'm not exactly a young-earth creationist. What I believe to be the case is that once you admit the possibility of even one cosmic catastrophe such as the flood at the time of Noah, then basically all of the assumptions which dating schemes are based on go out the window. Bob Bass once redid Lord Kelvin's heat equations for the Earth with a maximal figure for radioactive elements included in the calculation, and came up with a maximal age of about 200 million years for the planet. I have a hard time seeing how you could square that with dinosaurs being around 60 million years ago.
Wrong. "The other side" knows there is no way to measure the supernatural using the methods of science. Big difference.
LOL As does yours.
"Natural Selection is basically an agency of stasis and not change, and that is a major problem for evolutionists. Natural selection weeds out anything an iota to the left or right of the norm for a given species as you note"
Ignoring for second that the above statement is completely wrong, let's assume its true. If God is responsible for any changes in humans or animals and evolution requires that everything stays the same, how does God create dwarfs? What method does God use to create changes, and why are scientists able to track conditions, such as dwarfism, to genes in both parents?
Fine; there's no problem then, as there is no evidence for Noah's flood at the appointed time of about 4350 years ago.
I stacked the deck in that specific governing body for a reason that had nothing to do with the scientific method.
"What I believe to be the case is that once you admit the possibility of even one cosmic catastrophe such as the flood at the time of Noah, then basically all of the assumptions which dating schemes are based on go out the window."
Why ? A flood could have occured with any effect whatsoever on the fossils that were laid down millions of years before. Would a flood somehow change radioactive decay rates ?
So this Bob Bass took Lord Kelvin's numbers, which were supposed to be some sort of proof, and revised them.
Who is to say that Bob Bass neglected to consider something in his computations that would extend it by a few more decimal places ?
The author of this article uses a lot of your same arguements - do you agree with him that dinosaurs and therefor their fossils, are all younger then a few tens of thousands of years old ?
http://designeduniverse.com/th/agesofearth/
As for this thread, the original poster should prepare for fervent attack by the resident evolutionists. They have no remotely credible answer for the problem posed by the reality that the incredible majority of all mutations are detrimental, not beneficial. And when they don't have answers, their standard response is IDIOT! Or, "learn about creation in Sunday School, but keep it out of science class." Or any of their other mind-numbingly boring and tired retorts.
Here's reality: Were Darwin alive today, he himself would laugh at his own theory. For he recognized that the big gaping hole in it was the lack of transitional fossils. Not goofy nonsensical claims of transitional evidence that we see today, not lineups of ape and human skulls that purport to be a sequence, not composite fossils assembled from myriad fragments, but real and unambiguous and OBVIOUS transitionals. Darwin knew that for his theory to be true, the fossil record would have to be FILLED with such transitionals. And he assumed that as the methodologies and technologies of archaeology improved, that explosion of obvious transitionals would indeed be forthcoming. Reality, of course, is that here we are 150 years later, and there's still not ONE such obvious transitional to support the theory as it is worshiped today. Not a single solitary ONE. Anyone with a modicum of intellectual objectivity would at a glance know that the theory just doesn't mesh with the evidence. Not at all.
Unfortunately, Satan's blinders are thick and tight, now worn even by some Christians who relegate the history of the Bible to allegory and metaphor only, because they're so afraid the world will snicker at them if they elect to go with what God said instead.
Here's something worthy of snickering: In Job 40:17, the behemoth was discussed, including the description he moves his tail like a cedar. According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the behemoth discussed in the Bible was a huge animal, possibly the hippopotamus.
A hippo had a "tail like a cedar?" Riiiiiight.
MM
No, but whatever caused the flood could easily have changed the ratios or regular to radio carbon on the planet. Radiocarbon dating depends on those ratios having always been as they are now.
Likewise having heavy metals near the surface of the Earth due to impact events would mean that dates derived from those metals would be good for the metals and that was all.
Bookmarkie thingy...
How big is God? How do you measure him?
Sure I can understand variations on a theme, hair or eye color, but the creation of new species, of new organs takes much more than a minor variation. It takes a lucky mutation, (ok even a lucky series of mutations over a very long time), most of the mutations that occur today also have another name, birth defects.
You guys keep saying there are no transitions, NOT ONE.
Here is a transitional (a real handsome one too). Note its position in the chart which follows (hint--in the upper center):
Site: Koobi Fora (Upper KBS tuff, area 104), Lake Turkana, Kenya (4, 1)
Discovered By: B. Ngeneo, 1975 (1)
Estimated Age of Fossil: 1.75 mya * determined by Stratigraphic, faunal, paleomagnetic & radiometric data (1, 4)
Species Name: Homo ergaster (1, 7, 8), Homo erectus (3, 4, 7), Homo erectus ergaster (25)
Gender: Female (species presumed to be sexually dimorphic) (1, 8)
Cranial Capacity: 850 cc (1, 3, 4)
Information: Tools found in same layer (8, 9). Found with KNM-ER 406 A. boisei (effectively eliminating single species hypothesis) (1)
Interpretation: Adult (based on cranial sutures, molar eruption and dental wear) (1)
See original source for notes:
Source: http://www.mos.org/evolution/fossils/fossilview.php?fid=33
Source: http://wwwrses.anu.edu.au/environment/eePages/eeDating/HumanEvol_info.html
Airplanes don't reproduce.
Yes, I have it on bookshelf. Almost spooky, isn't it?
Who is Ted Holden? Did I miss a thread?
Good question. How would you go about doing it?
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