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Living dinosaurs
abc.net.au ^
| 9/30/2002
Posted on 10/01/2002 8:32:43 AM PDT by SteveH
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To: VadeRetro
More on Missing Intermediates
It was only a relatively short time ago that evolutionists denied the existence of any real gaps in the archaeological record. When you stated the obvious, they asked you to quote a mainstream evolutionist to back your allegedly ridiculous claims up. Stephan J. Gould therefore took a courageous risk with his career, in proposing a theory in the 1970s called punctuated equilibrium ( punk-eek ), which openly admitted large gaps in the fossil record. And while many evolutionists have bitterly and regularly attacked Gould for this, including Dawkins, it is fortunate for Gould that the response of his fellow scientists was not wholly hostile, and his career does not appear to have suffered as a result. In fact, his original paper has become quite celebrated in some quarters.
So, there are no fossil remains of intermediates. But as a thought experiment, what would they hypothetically have looked like?
Well, Denton in his book Evoltuion a Theory in Crisis provides a description of the best current guess for brids. It basically consists of a flightless bird hopping around trying to catch flies, and SOMEHOW, slowly developing wings to jump a little bit higher each time. A number of problems spring to mind with this thesis.
Firstly, light feathers are totally different from down feathers or feathers used for insulation; they involve an exquisite system of cross-latched barbules and shapes which are totally different from those of down feathers. Moreover, a flight feather would be totally useless for anything other than flight, and so the odds would be massively weighted against a creature which did not have them to begin with ever developing them. There would be no reason for it. The odds of it happening would be an infinitessimal, basically one divided by some gigantic number. Likewise with the development of arms into wings; that would actually be disfunctional prior to the day the creature flew and, again, the odds against such a development for no particular reason are astronomical. We DO have several kinds of birds such as ostriches with vestigian wings, but again these are descended from birds which flew and are not in some process of evolving INTO flying birds. They are developing OUT of being flying birds. Flying birds likewise require highly specialized bone structures, tails, hearts, lungs, and general balance parameters, all of which are totally different from those of other creatures, any of which would be antifunctional prior to flight. Developing any one of these things prior to being flight-capable would require overcoming gigantic odds. The odds of ALL of these things developing from scratch thus, which is required by the notions of evolution of flying birds, thus amount to several infinitessimals MULTIPLIED TOGETHER. The entire age of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen. In fact, assuming one such feature had developed by chance, by the time the next one did, the first would, in all likelihood, still having been antifunctional during the time that the the next was evolving, have de-evolved. The only other possibility from the point of view of evolution would be to have all necessary functionality for flying birds arise via mutation on the same day, which is a miracle whether God did it, Ra did it, or (as an evolutionist claim for such a thing would have to amount to) Loki (luck) did it.
The funny thing is that scientists believe in evolution(ism) because they wish to rule out what they see as the "supernatural" alternative, while in fact they have created the supernatural alternative in their requirement for endless violations of probabilistic laws. Thus, we observe that any change to a substantially different kind of creature with new kinds of organs, an entirely new set of system integration requirements for those organs with both old and other new organs, and a new plan for life, is seen to be a zero-probability event, both statistically and programmatically.
And thats just the macro part of avian evlution. Denton also discusses the micro-bilogical features of an intermediate. This is much harder hitting, and evoltuionists are 100% clueless on how this transition happened. And do not tell me the first bird could have been a glider - the flight principals are totaly different for powered and unpowered flight. In all honestly, I do not think there is a valid intermediate form for a bird - it is mathematically and physcially impossible, both on a microbiological level AND a macroscopic system level. Period.
Molecular Intermediates: Proof of evolution, or yet another nail in the coffin?
In the 1960s scientists began to figure that not only did animals differ at the morphological level in terms of their gross anatomy, but that they also varied at the molecular level. So evolutionists reasoned, by analysing the molecules, DNA, proteins, etc, we should be able to uncover the precise evolutionary relationships between species. And indeed, it has been revealed that all animals on this planet have astonishing similarities at the molecular level which point irrefutably to there being some common process behind the appearance of life on this planet. We can also say with great confidence that microevolution and population genetics have now moved from the status of theory, to a well established and understood scientific fact.
However, the problem has been no clear molecular intermediates have been found between any of the previously established classes of organisms. All we have is extensive tables of isolated classes of molecules, none of which shed much light on how one turns into another. For the full details I refer you to chapter 12 of Denton's book Evolution a Theory in Crisis. I refuse to reproduce large chucks of it for you, because he deserves to make money from his excellent text. But, he does take you through protein, RNA, haemoglobin, nucleic acid, and other molecules to demonstrate this point. The traditional evolutionary sequence of cyclostome - fish - amphibian - reptile - mammal, is shown to be an exploded myth. Mammals are as close in molecular terms to cyclostimes, as fish and amphibians! Traditional text book favourites for evolutionists such as the lung fish, are shown to exhibit no molecular signs whatsoever of their alleged critical intermediate status!
Chandra Wickramasinghe has compared the neo-Darwinian account of evolution to saying that all of world literature came from the book of Genesis by occasional typos and paragraph swapping. The mechanism discussed here is analogous to stipulating that every text along the way was viable as literature. Such gradualistic series have not been shown to be possible in written text or computer programs. Nor have they been shown to exist in biology. If this is how new genes are supposed to evolve, the mechanism remains to be demonstrated.
Theory of Evolution: Click to return to main evolution page
To: f.Christian
To: VadeRetro
Heya Vade. Long time since I've been on. Man, I admire your tenacity.
Y'know I rememberchuckling along with one of these threads more than a year ago when a reply from a creationist had me falling off my chair laughing. Paraphrasing:
"The distance between galaxies and dating of rocks were all put there by God! It was made to look that way, but it's only 6000 years old!"
I needed a new keyboards after that one.
Besides, everyone knows that the world was created a week ago tuesday.
Keep fighting the good fight!
Regards
To: f.Christian
So, there are no fossil remains of intermediates. But as a thought experiment, what would they hypothetically have looked like?Theoretically, hypothetically, they would look like the pictures I get screeched and jabbered at for posting over and over and over and over when people say dumb stuff like this in deliberate ignorance of the evidence.
To: Northeast
It is rather funny, isn't it? I suppose I could get a life . . . (Nah!)
To: VadeRetro
No evidence(body)---No Truth(crime)....just circumstantial ravings---CARTOONS!
To: f.Christian
I mean, I post
this, and PiltdownPig, member since Tuesday before last says, "You posted that AGAIN?"
I'll stop posting it when the bludgeon-with-ignorance crowd stops pretending it doesn't exist. Same with all the rest of the evidence.
To: VadeRetro
The Mentality of Evolution
There seems to be a cart before the horse attitude i.e. evolution has occurred, that's a fact ( it is never stated who proved this fact ), therefore we just need to twist the evidence until it fits our pre-conceptions. Of course, science is supposed to look at the evidence, and then derive the theory, but as Karl Popper admitted, the theory of evolution has never been a scientific theory due to its lack of testability, so normal scientific standards do not and have never applied to the theory of evolution. It has always been an emotional issue and not a scientific one - on all sides it must be stated in fairness. The main difference is that the worshippers of mechanistic reductionist Newtonian materialism try to pretend they are objective, when in reality most of them are not. The following extract from Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial puts it quite nicely:-
It is likely that Darwinist gradualism is statistically just as unlikely as Goldschmidt's saltationism, once we give adequate attention to all the necessary elements. The advantageous micro mutations postulated by Neo-Darwinist genetics are tiny, usually too small to be noticed. This premise is important because, in the words of Richard Dawkins, "virtually all the mutations studied in genetics laboratories which are pretty macro because otherwise geneticists wouldn't notice them are deleterious to the animals possessing them." But if the necessary mutations are too small to be seen, there will have to be a great many of them (millions?) of the right type coming along when they are needed to carry on the long-term project of producing a complex organ.
The probability of Darwinist evolution depends upon the quantity of favorable micro mutations required to create complex organs and organisms, the frequency with which such favorable micro mutations occur just where and when they are needed, the efficacy of natural selection in preserving the slight improvements with sufficient consistency to permit the benefits to accumulate, and the time allowed by the fossil record for all this to have happened. Unless we can make calculations taking all these factors into account, we have no way of knowing whether evolution by micromutation is more or less improbable than evolution by macromutation.
Some mathematicians did try to make the calculations, and the result was a rather acrimonious confrontation between themselves and some of the leading Darwinists at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia in 1967. The report of the exchange is fascinating, not just because of the substance of the mathematical challenge, but even more because of the logic of the Darwinist response. For example, the mathematician D. S. Ulam argued that it was highly improbable that the eye could have evolved by the accumulation of small mutations, because the number of mutations would have to be so large and the time available was not nearly long enough for them to appear. Sir Peter Medawar and C. H. Waddington responded that Ulam was doing his science backwards; the fact was that the eye had evolved and therefore the mathematical difficulties must be only apparent. Ernst Mayr observed that Ulam's calculations were based on assumptions that might be unfounded, and concluded that "Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred.
To: VadeRetro
[T]he bludgeon-with-ignorance crowd placemarker.
To: Northeast
Besides, everyone knows that the world was created a week ago tuesday. Do you know someone that believes this? LOL!
To: VadeRetro
I'll stop posting it when the bludgeon-with-ignorance crowd stops pretending it doesn't exist. Same with all the rest of the evidence. Darwinian Predictions and Data
To: f.Christian
To: VadeRetro
We need a civil rights revolution/LIBERATION...
specious/martian/alien preferences/BIAS---
have destroyed/DUMB DOWNED---
human/American life...rights---society/SCIENCE/values!
To: Heartlander
Answered Tares on
parallel line reconstructions here just today.
It looks especially funny to me that creationists argue that nothing is an ancestor of anything else, draw the chart of initial appearances as various items floating on air (vertical parallel lines), then use the chart as evidence to support their malfeasance in drawing it that way in the first place (i.e, as proof that there are no transitional forms).
For a guy who "isn't a creationist," you have all the neurological symptoms.
To: VadeRetro
"No one doubts the improbability of events. Your existence is highly improbable. So is mine. Think of all the events in just the past 100 generations which could have caused any of our ancestors to behave differently than they did. Yet all the past events happened, naturally, step by step, and here we are, so mere improbability is not much of an issue."
"The facts upon which evolution theory is based are rather well established. Mutations happen. They really do. And new species appear over time, really. And they appear in form and DNA to be related to pre-existing species. No joke, that's the evidence. In every generation, those best suited for the game of life are most likely to breed the next generation. Mutation and natural selection. And time, lots of time. They're the stuff of evolution."
"The results are always going to be seen as improbable in retrospect, but that's how things happen. It's such a reasonable explanation that there's no need to wave it all away and grasp instead for an external "designer" for whom there is no evidence at all.
"So I don't see ID as an "honest attempt" to deal with improbability. Rather, it's a clever attempt to confuse the poorly trained public with slick (but unscientific) patter."
353 posted on 9/19/02 2:24 PM Pacific by PatrickHenry
To: f.Christian
Every once in a while you post something I can agree with. Is that a test to see if I'm reading?
To: VadeRetro
Kapt kangaroo science?
To: VadeRetro
From your linked post
Creationists take the real data, picture B, and draw vertical parallel lines from each point. That's done for lawyering purposes, and its done in studied ignorance of all the obvious evidence for relationship between fossils.
You missed the point, the imaginary ‘dotted’ lines being drawn by Darwinists. Beyond this, you state “So why aren't we allowed to infer that what looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, lays eggs and flies isn't a duck?” Sure you are allowed to infer, but are others?
From your linked post:
Anomalocaris has several features of worms (circum-oral ring, lobopods), as well as features of arthropods (the segmented, plated specialized appendages). It is evidence that some line of worms somewhere gave rise to arthropods. It is but one of many lines of evidence pointing that way, all of which tend to support and confirm each other. Did you know, for instance, that hatchling insects look like little lobopod worms? Why should that be? Sort of reminds you of how hatchling frogs look like little fish.
For a guy who "isn't a creationist," you have all the neurological symptoms.
Can you say – Projection?
To: Heartlander
Poster cult of dumbdowned halebopps!
To: Heartlander
Are those your real arguments? Count all the
coulds?
What does it mean when you say you're "not a creationist?" Are you claiming not to be a YEC? If you are, that should make a big difference in your tolerance level to mainstream science, but it clearly does not. What are all these silly games?
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