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.)
Almost as good as Longitude. (Almost.)Other than that, it was spectacular. The format was similar to the production of Longitude that aired on PBS a year or two ago, a costume drama interspersed with interviews and explanations. It was every bit as well done, too, I might add.
Is this purposeful deception? Is lottery odds a euphemism for BS figures? I don't know where you got that 1/5,000,000 figure but thats off by incredible orders of magnitude.
Just working with crude figures here, the human genome has approximately 100,000 genes. 2% of 100,000 is 2,000. So let's take the probability of a human gene mutating exactly into a chimp gene and call it x. Your odds of a human spontaneously giving birth to a chimp would then be x^2000. I trust I don't need to explain to you just how unlikely that would be.
Now although that is quite unlikely to occur in one generation, remember evolution isn't evolving towards a goal. Nothing says a primatelike ancestor had to become a human. That's just what happened. For example, go flip a coin 1000 times and write down the sequence. The odds of getting that exact combination of heads and tails is vanishingly small, but it happened. This is not a contradiction.
Thanks - I must have missed it, and will watch for it in future episodes, as I do think it is important for the scientists to maintain that evolution is a theory.
I don't think 'ATHEIST' is exactly the term you want for Chuck Darwin; the word I'd use is 'DRUG DEALER'.
You've heard of the Medelin Cartel, El Pino, Pablo Escobar, the Pagans, and all of the other drug dealers of our times. The truth is, all together they probably don't add up to a hill of beans compared to the operations of the British empire in the last century. At least one major eastern city was set up for no other reason than to serve as a conduit for Indian opium into China and an entire war was fought to protect the opium trade.
Now, you don't need to be Albert Einstein to comprehend that for a supposedly Christian nation to be engaging in this sort of business must have created at least two problems on an organizational level. One was the question of motivating men to fight and die for such causes: "For God, Bonnie Queen Vickie, and the Opium Trade, CHARGE!!!!!!" probably wouldn't get it...
The other problem which springs to mind immediately would be that which the CEO or chairman of the board of the East India Company must have faced in conducting board meatings. Picture it:
"Gentlemen, I have some good news, and I have some bad news. The good news is that profits are up 73.2% on a volume of trade which has increased 27% over the same three-month period last year, and that all of our operations appear to be running smoothly. Indigenous peoples of India, Burma, China, and several other areas with a propensity to cause problems are now happily stoned out of their minds on our products, and are causing no further trouble.""The bad news is that we're all probably going to spend the next 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years roasting on a barbecue pit for this shit..."
Now picture Charles Darwin walking into this scene and telling all of these people that they're sitting around worrying over nothing, and that the only moral law in nature is "The Survival of the Fittest". Can you not see all of those peoples' eyes lighting up, their hair standing straight up, and somebody screaming "By Jove, I think he's got it?"
I mean, it doesn't even matter what led Darwin to devise the theory of evolution. In any normal time or set of circumstances, he'd have either been laughed to scorn, hanged, or burned. He succeeded precisely because he solved several major problems for the Godfathers of 100 years ago. In other words, there's more than a little truth to my claim that someone has to be stoned to buy off on this BS.
Carol Hugunin, a biologist on the staff of 21'st Century Science recently wrote an article titled:
Noting:
"For more than a century, Darwin has dominated the biological sciences, but his hypothesis for the evolution of life does not cohere with natural history and leads to a philosophical morass."
What would you figure the final fall-back position of the evolutionists will eventually be after it finally reaches the point at which they cannot even talk about evolution without inviting laughter and ridicule?
I fully expect, within the next five years, to hear from the talk.origins crowd and others like them, something like:
"Well, Darwin may not have been much of a scientist, and evolution was obviously a crock of BS, but Darwin was basically a good boy who simply went wrong, and he treated his dog good and his mother loved him..."
Don't believe it. The Bible itself tells us that is unlikely:
17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
Hugunin delves into the social and political melieu which spawned Darwinism, and the story which emerges is somewhat different from the picture evolutionists would have us see of Darwin, to say the least:
In an entry to his diary dated October 1838, the affable Darwin tells exactly how he came up with this hypothesis:
"I happened to read for amusement Malthus On Popula- tion, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-con- tinued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favor- able variat{ons would tend to be preserved, and un- favourable ones to be. destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at least got a theory by which to work."Parson Thomas Malthus, an economist working at the British East India Company college in Haileybury, England, had insisted that population (of men and of other living crea- tures) tends to expand geometrically, while food supply ex- pands arithmetically. Hence, the Malthusian world is so arranged that in the natural course of things, horrible crises must occur as population presses against fixed resources. This cycle can be alleviated only by the depopulating effects of "vice and misery"-that is, nonreproductive sexual activity and death-dealing poverty. To cull the human flock, neo- Maithusians advocated active social measures beyond accep- tance of starvation and disease.
The original full title of Darwin's 1859 opus, it should be noted, is
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, went a step further than Malthus in explicitly proposing that the human race should be culled on the basis of the inferiority of certain sub- groups, thus winning his title as the father of British eugenics. With the support of T.H. Huxley, Darwin's publicist, Darwin's son Leonard wrote The Need for Eugenic Reform, "dedicated to the memory of my father. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could towards making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book."
As for Malthus, publication of his dogmas led to the enact- ment of the 1830s Poor Laws in England, which abolished "outdoor relief"-the equivalent of today's welfare pay- ments-and forced the unemployed into workhouses,. where they slaved for scant rations of food until they took sick and died. This was the practical corollary of Malthus's precept that charity (or, even worse in his view, policies of elevating a na- tion's per capita living standards and productive capabilities) would simply lead to disastrous overpopulation.
Like Alexander von Humboldt, Malthus and the East India Company knew that statecraft can transmit the benefits of sci- entific progress throughout society. The United States was al- ready a living example of geometric expansion of new re- sources when Malthus assembled his Essay Humboldt and his associates devoted themselves to promoting that statecraft, while the Malthusians devoted themselves to opposing it.
Malthus's collaborator Sir James Mackintosh at Hailey- bury was the father-in-law of Darwin's cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood; Charles himself married his Wedgwood cousin and lived on his wife's Wedgwood wealth. The Darwin- Wedgwood~cIan were among the leading merchant-banking clans with immense control over colonial raw materials.
Can we simply ignore those dark, Malthusian thoughts, or are they perhaps relevant to the scientific issues? It is generally said that Darwin synthesized and subsumed the work of the scientists such as Humboldt who preceded him, but can this be the case, when we consider how at variance their funda- mental assumptions really are?
Man, in Darwins view, is just another beast and thus the human herd might be culled (via eugenics) just as one might cull a herd of cattle. And once one tries to justify eugenics, in- evitably the claim is made that some groups of men, for rea- sons of skin color, reIigion or whatever - are more fit than another.
Compare Darwinian eugenics to Alexander Humboldt's view: Humboldt insists that man and human civilization are of a higher order that is not dominated by the same kind of law- fulness that characterized the evolution of life up to that point.
Humboldt, Dana, and others of the continental science tradi- tion assert not only that man is the crowning glory of the process we call evolution, but also that man goes beyond this, taking evolution into a different, a higher realm.
This is very much a hot issue today. The much publicized book The Bell Curve, for example, by scientists Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, claims that human beings of darker pigmentation are just not as "fit" as those of lighter pigmenta- tion. The research for the book was supported by The Pioneer Fund, which had its start in the eugenics movement of the first half of this century. Before World War II, Harry Laughlin, leader of the Pioneer Fund, wanted the "lowest" 10 percent of the human population sterilized, in order to better build a race of human thoroughbreds. Laughlin and his Fund distributed Hitler's propaganda films in American schools, while Hitler put the Darwinian implications of eugenics into practice in slave labor camps.
Other contemporary researchers with a eugenics theme in- clude neuroscientist Xandra Breakerfield at Harvard University, who is trying to prove that violent behavior is genetic, while others are trying to prove that homosexual behavior is genetic.
At this point, it ought to be clear that no scientist studying something as broad as the origin and evolution of life can to- tally avoid issues that have political, philosophical, and reli- gious connotations. As much as such scientists might want to stay out of politics, the political questions are raised because of the very nature of the underlying assumptions adopted.
If you're going to spew this stuff at least get your facts straight. Okay I realize that's impossible. Murray and Herrnstein's studies showed that asians actually score slightly average on standardized tests than caucasians. Asians have darker pigmentation so that pretty much blows your mindspew out of the water. Also, I don't believe they had any studies to measure "fitness", their studies were confined to characteristics measurable by tests.
Your statement, and its implications are a false tautology. It says, because it exists and because it is part of nature then it is possible and nature did it. This is a complete fallacy. There is no goal in chaos. There is no purpose in it. There is however a goal and a purpose in a gene. It needs to function, to do something which is not being done already by another gene, and to do it better than it is being done already. You cannot achieve that by random chance.
Corrected version.
Corrected version #2.
"False tautology?" A rose is not a rose? (Tautologies are never false.) You're just bandying the words about meaninglessly here. Forget arguing C vs E. Take a logic class, or elementary geometry.
Cite: Is this another of your B.S. claims that you'll not prove?
Corrected version #2.
Good point, ID would actually have to say something to lie. But since it doesn't actually say anything, it can't lie, it just meanders around, saying nothing.
It's not my fault you cannot see what everyone else is seeing. I suppose you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink. Willful ignorance is a horrifying trait to have.
You for the most part have answered reasonably, therefore what was your purpose in leaving out the most important part of my statement, namely
(actually the odds are much worse, but you figure them out, and be careful, random things have no direction)
Now, given that your coin flipping sequence has occurred, and not being privy to the execution of that sequence, what does the result allow you to say about how that sequence was achieved?
As to your X2000 figure, I mostly agree, however does a 1999 gene difference count? How about a 1998 or 1997 or 1996 or 1995, when does the sequence become chimp/human?
Leaving aside your obvious error of lumping all "evolutionists" into one category, I shall answer that: God. But then that answer wouldn't fit with your repeated either/or assertions about Christianity/evolution.
You have a problem: you obviously are convinced evolution is false. But, at the same time, you read religious people out as "atheists" if they ARE persuaded. Your posts say to me, "Believe as I do or be damned to eternal hell fire."
Perhaps you should be courteous enough to pass on a few of your responses so that those of us who are sincerely trying to find areas of consistency between what we see and what we believe can follow the threads. Those posts have become just noise and interfere with learning (including learning of legitimate criticisms of the show).
There is a poker contest in Las Vegas. The sponsors do not tell me how many players/games are involved, but they assure me that there will be a royal flush dealt in the week of the contest. I go to observe the games on Tuesday. If I stay for a full day, what are the odds that I will see a royal flush?
Starting to get a little embarrassed at what you said? Here it is again from your post 74.
They [scientists] ___ASSUME___ that knowledge is possible, that sense experience is reliable (epistemology), that the universe is regular (metaphysics), and that scientists should be honest (ethics). HahahahaThe underbars, capitalization, and cackle are all yours. It looks like the kind of letter to the editor somebody writes to the local paper after he's been busted for drugs and is swearing there was never any evidence. Maybe you're hoping nobody knows what epistemology is?
Now, here's how I characterized your argument:
[Your post] basically justifies ignoring the amazing preponderance of evidence for evolution on the grounds that its all experience and thus perception and thus unreliable and thus we really don't know anything so maybe we really were made in 6 days 6K years ago . . .All I did was cut through the bull. You're claiming that scientists are dumb enough to think it is possible to know something useful and have confidence that they know it. You, on the other hand, have figured out that it's all a dream. Thus, you sit back and cackle at the fools. Lest anyone not hear, you type "Hahahaha" on your computer keyboard, which text becomes visible on the computer screens of others through a process which would have mystified anyone who lived more than a century or two ago.
Your allegedly superior insight offers nothing so useful as the teats on a boar hog. Who needs it?
Lets be incredibly generous and say half-chimp. 1/x^1000 is still unbelievably remote. Remember we know x is MUCH greater than 2 (50% chance of the mutation occuring). Yet even 2^64 is so remote as to be impossible for all practical purposes.
Natural selection is extremely powerful.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.