Charlie the Coelocanth says, "Deep, cold water is deep, cold water."
Posted on 03/13/2002 4:47:26 AM PST by JediGirl
Are you saying being stuck at a local maximum is not a valid analogy?
Gee, maybe you should publish -- there might be a Nobel Prize in it. No wait, you claim you've "proven evolution to be false" when arguing with what can only be considered evolution's third string and then you only claim victory only after twisting words, obfuscating facts and flat-out lying. The lurkers on these threads know the score. They've seen you in action and know your posting history.
You know in your heart of hearts that faced with the big boys of evolution -- the biologists who've spent their lives studying the subject -- you'd have your tail-end handed to you on a platter. That is why you'll never publish in a peer-reviewed journal; that's why no creationist will publish in a peer-reviewed journal. You'd be crushed and the scientific community wouldn't even break a sweat. The creationist community really is a bunch of cowards unwilling to put their "theory" to the test because they already know the outcome, even if they won't admit it to themselves. Every biologist, or for that matter any scientist, who puts his pet theory up for peer review has more testicular fortitude in his little finger than you ever will.
You keep claiming to have some scientific training, but you keep using unscientific terms like "macro-evolution" and "devolution" and asking for things like "stronger proof." Methinks you haven't cracked an honest-to-goodness science treatise since your father told you your high school biology class was the work of the devil.
This reminds me of a civil rights activist who attacks the missle defense system as being anti-black.
Oh my Junior, insulting your friend! You guys must be getting really desperate!
Back to the facts. Do you have a better explanation than your friend 'the third stringer' for different systems "evolving" at the same time by random mutation? Perhaps you could find an answer from a 'first stringer' in your list-o-links.
Nice picture, however repeating the statement which I just refuted does nothing for your side. Here's the refutation again in case you wish to argue against it:
what happened to mutations? Certainly these species were not perfect. There could have been numberous improvements to them that would have been helpful - a smarter brain, better fins, changes to make it reproduce more or better. Clearly there are many possible changes which mutations could have achieved (especially in such a long, long time) to make it more fit? Heck, you know, as a matter of fact, that is how punk-eek works, a species improves itself in a secluded habitat and through super-evo transformation takes over the world! Clearly these species had enough time to do so. Or are you perhaps trying to tell us poor fools uninitiated in the church of evolution that the demi-god Darwin told this species "you shall not mutate any more, you are fit enough already and you have not been chosen to be the ones to take over the world"?
Wrong on all counts! I have never claimed anything about myself for one thing. As to devolution, I find in my dictionary:
devolution, n, 1. transference from one individual to another as a. a passing or devolving (as of rights) upon a successor b: delegation or conferral to a subordinate c: the surrender of powers to local authorities by a central government 2. retrograde evolution: degeneration.
As to macro-evolution, this is a term which is often used in regards to evolution. Since Darwin, evolutionists have tried to confound two different kinds of changes in species - adaptational changes and transformational changes. No one argues with adaptational changes. Even the most virulent anti-evolutionists do not deny that species adapt to different environments and situations. What the whole evolution debate is about though is transformational changes. Species transforming themselves into other species. I (and many others) use the terms micro-evolution and macro-evolution to distinguish from these two kinds of changes. BTW I note lots of articles discussing macro-evolution in your list-o-links in post#650 on this thread!
Here's the refutation again in case you wish to engage your mind: local maximum on a fitness landscape. You said you didn't know what it was. Did you find out? Regards.
Evolution as put forth by Darwin was already coevolution. Darwin had never heard of a point mutation. More on what the real model says in 680 to Aquinasfan. (I mention you in there on something you haven't answered yet.) Nobody has seriously proposed a model in which all changes necessary for a new function must be done serially, with one fully complete and fixed in the population.
OK, that's actually a pretty good decription of "Haldane's Dilemma." Haldane, a sober enough scientist, made a bad model of how things work back in the fifties, realized it would evolve very, very slowly, and asked, "Where did I go wrong?" Creationists like Walter Remine and medved have been pretending ever since that nobody knows. Many changes happen in parallel in a diverse population. From A Page on the Wistar Symposia:
The point was made that to account for some evolutionary changes in hemoglobin, one requires about 120 amino acid substitutions...as individual events, as though it is necessary to get one of them done and spread throughout the whole population before you could start processing the next one...[and] if you add up the time for all those sequential steps, it amounts to quite a long time. But the point the biologists want to make is that that isn't really what is going on at all. We don't need 120 changes one after the other. We know perfectly well of 12 changes which exist in the human population at the present time. There are probably many more which we haven't detected, because they have such slight physiological effects...[so] there [may be] 20 different amino acid sequences in human hemoglobins in the world population at present, all being processed simultaneously [Note: if he sounds a little vague, it was 1966, although you'd probably still have to guess. -- VR]...Calculations about the length of time of evolutionary steps have to take into account the fact that we are dealing with gene pools, with a great deal of genetic variability, present simultaneously. To deal with them as sequential steps is going to give you estimates that are wildly out." (pp. 95-6)So many creationist arguments are against strawmen that not only don't reflect current thinking, they don't reflect the view of sober science ever. That stuff Aquinasfan posts which is just the Duane Gish parody of punk-eek. "One day a dinosaur gave birth to a bird! But where was there another bird for it to mate with?"
Yours reflect the actual theory of evolution with similar accuracy, although you do seem to make up a few of your own strawmen. Points for creativity, anyway!
What do you want to know?
My point was you mischaracterized science -- greatly shortchanged its richness.
It gives us questions, riddles, conundrums, challenges, inisghts, errors, mistakes, ideas, explanations, wrong explanations, right explanations, cures, cures that just help but don't cure, attempts at cures that do nothing... etc... and on and on.
And I do not work for Dell. Why did you ask that?
I give you the hysterical historical narrative. I discovered FR in 98 while the Lewinsky scandal was brewing. I remember being rather shocked when what we now call a "crevo" thread started and I saw Luddites young-earthing all over the place, spray-painting the walls of science. I immediately realized that this sort of thing gives conservatism a bad name with people who wear shoes most days of the week.
So I dived in, although my technical background came mainly from subscribing to Scientific American and reading/writing a lot of bad SF. (My never-used degree was in Psychology, which I've come to realize is "all a crock," as a character on one of the Newhart shows put it.)
It became a hobby. I didn't know the answers to some of the stuff people were trying to baffle me with, but the trick is to simply ask yourself if you're convinced. If you are, admit it. If you're not, say why not.
So, something like three years later, I'm mainly arguing to keep Luddite Know-Nothing pseudoscience out of the classroom. There's no point in falling further behind the world in science education.
What do I believe about God? I've been an agnostic since before I knew the word. How do you even kid yourself you can know about that stuff?
But I do know the universe is very old and that macroevolution happens.
I'm making my point to Aquinasfan as best I can in my fumbling way. I have attempted to socratically help you express any reservations, corrections, caveats, and therefore's you may have concerning same. I have also suggested to you that your initial perception, to the extent that you have managed to express yourself, may have been a victim of an unintended ambiguity on my part.
You have not responded with good faith to my well-intended overtures. Your condition will not improve until you want to say something.
Oh my Junior, insulting your friend! You guys must be getting really desperate!
These guys would be third-stringers at best in anything, not just evolutionism, and in the case of evolutionism, it doesn't get any beter going to the second and first string. Guys like Wendell Bird, Alexander Mebane, or Behe would make monkeys out of the Goulds and Eldredges of the world in any sort of a neutral court and I fully expect something like that, a second Scopes trial in America, to happen within the next two years. When it does, the day of public funding for evolution will be over.
We could give Aquinasfan benefit of the doubt and assume that he is wondering about the evolution of reproductive barriers where geographic isolation is not a determining factor for speciation.
First, organisms in which drastic genetic upsets create a reproductive barrier, such as polyploidy in plants, normally have asexual methods of reproduction.
Second, genetic mutations lead to a progression of reproductive isolation. The first mutation is somewhat isolating, a further mutation leads to male gamete insterility, a further mution leads to female gamete insterility, and so forth. Thus, at each level, there is opportunity for reproduction within a group of like or near-like individuals.
Third, major genetic mutations, for instance, chromosome fusion, are not necessarily the cause of reproductive isolation and are carried forward in the next generation as rare mutations, initially.
If a mutation is sufficiently large to cause instant reproductive isolation and there is no asexual option, the organism simply doesn't reproduce.
I don't think there is anything of value forthcoming. Remember, this is the same individual who confused thalidomide effects with germ-line mutations in humans and rode AndrewC's wave of biochemistry in pretense at metabolic pathway knowledge.
It's all hollow bluster.
There certainly never has been so far. All heat, no light.
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