Posted on 09/24/2001 1:12:24 PM PDT by ThinkPlease
Tonight is the beginning of the Evolution Series on PBS. I thought I'd open up some threads of discussion here prior, during and after the telecast of the episodes.
Here's PBS's homepage for the telecast:
And Here's something from the Discovery Institute, who is evidently irritated about turning down free publicity on the telecast. (They were offered time on the final night of the telecast, and turned down PBS.)
The US moon landing used the theory of gravity to get us there.
It does have a theory, and it is as well "proven" as any other scientific theory.
Really? Interesting, so how about telling us exactly what the theory of evolution is and how man descended from monkeys, cockroaches and pond scum. I am dying to hear.
That's correct but the selection isn't that random.
The selection does not help until the gene is functional. Now to get a functional gene by mere chance the odds are tremendously large, greater than the chance of winning the lottery 8 times in a row for a small gene and a much greater order of magnitude for many of the totally essential genes which are much larger. Add to this that a human has some 30,000 more genes than the smallest, simplest one celled creature and you can see that for evolution to be true you would need some 30,000 miracles and since evolution denies God, you could not summon His help.
Which episode did you watch?
Episode #2 (hours 3&4) featured the narrator repeatedly saying phrases like: "scientists think..." "scientists believe....." and so forth.
I am not speaking of your flawed definition of species. I am speaking of clear things called mutations. They are definite things. They are changes in the DNA sequence which do not depend on a particular definition. They are "rolls of the dice". Since they did occur, they can occur and they can occur together, not likely, but they can occur. Now the reason for this hike in the park is to elucidate the nagging connection between probability, "entropy", information and the unlikely events required to either change one life form into another or to create life. "Mutations" can occur without regard to natural selection. Natural selection does not exist without the mutations. There is a non-zero probability of human DNA mutating into chimp DNA or vice-versa using mutations alone. There is a zero probability of that occurring using natural selection alone.
Now that we have established your non-acceptance of mutations alone producing a 2% difference what remains to be determined is exactly how many mutations above the 2% difference you deem necessary for natural selection to work. Or is every mutation a "keeper"?
</marquee up></marquee up></marquee up></marquee up> OK?
...and the shark, and the blowfish, and I believe that roaches too have been shown to be hundreds of millions of years old too, of course there is also my favorite species the platypus which has been proven not to have changed in some 100 million years.
That's right. They've been futily combing the Earth to find one for 150 years now and, at this point, you have to assume this abject failure is due to the fact that there aren't any.
Another of the Clintonian "it's old news so it does not matter" responses. You folk need to get more inventive or I may get bored and stop responding to these threads.
What I said was PROOF against evolution. What you say is a mantra. You and your evo friends keep repeating the same nonsense that evolution is proven science but always fail to give any proof of it or to refute statements disproving it. Stop the banal responses and prove me wrong.
What do you mean by "direct vicinity"? Blue and green are separated by turquoise etc. etc.
Now answer the questions I asked you.
Believing that demands that we toss everything we know about modern mathematics, logic, and probability theory in the toilet. The problem is not between evolution and religion; it is between evolution and mathematics. You have to toss the one or the other since the two are altogether incompatible.
Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some axpect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...
To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
God hates IDIOTS, too!
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) The best example of that sort of logic in fact that there ever was was Michael O'Donahue's parody of the Connecticut Yankee (New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court) which showed Reggie looking for a low outside fastball and then getting beaned cold by a high inside one, the people feeling Reggie's wrist for pulse, and Reggie back in Camelot, where they had him bound hand and foot. Some guy was shouting "Damned if e ain't black from ead to foot, if that ain't witchcraft I never saw it!!!", everybody was yelling "Witchcraft Trial!, Witchcraft Trial!!", and they were building a scaffold. Reggie looks at King Arthur and says "Hey man, isn't that just a tad premature, I mean we haven't even had the TRIAL yet!", and Arthur replies "You don't seem to understand, son, the hanging IS the trial; if you survive that, that means you're a witch and we gotta burn ya!!!" Again, that's precisely the sort of logic which goes into Gould's variant of evolutionism, Punk-eek.2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:
They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
You are totally dishonest. In post#121 in answer to why there were no transitional species you said:
"Everyone is indeed transitional"
You insult me for asking you to give proof of your statement. Clearly all you can do is insult and lie. If everyone is transitional the fossil record should not show a single jump between species, it should not show two fossils that are in any way alike. It should show a vast cornucopia of totally different bones. It does not show that. It shows bones found thousands of miles apart and tens of millions of years from each other which are clearly the same. The fossil record disproves evolution.
No, it is only PROOF to a close minded individual that can't think for himself and would rather believe ancient folklore because of an inability to think rationally and logically.
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