Posted on 03/13/2002 4:47:26 AM PST by JediGirl
Are you sure that's not a disproof of design?
I am positive. A Creator would have no problem at all making each species a little bit differently. Evolution on the other hand would have a big problem making each gene different in each species. For one thing it takes a lot of evolutionary time to do so, for another, why should it? If it works, what reason would there be according to "survival of the fittest" to change it? None at all.
On the one hand you say that isolation is not necessary on the other you say that isolation is the way to go for spreading a mutation. Sounds contradictory to me. Sounds like you are trying to take both sides of the question - if it is isolated then you have evolution, if it is not isolated then ------ you have evolution.
VEry lame response. All it amounts to is "if it happened it must have been evolution because we know that the answer to a question can never be God did it". Circular reasoning Vade, that is the question we are trying to answer and you just showed that you cannot refute my statement.
Maybe you would like to try again: Now you have random mutations working together to achieve a goal! Do these random mutations talk to each other? Do they know what the goal is? Do they have a plan for making the organism more fit?
Can you READ??? Do you know the difference between "makes possible" and "increases the chances"???
Are mixed drinks "less fit" than other drinks???
Dear sir, do you ever read the entire posting, or do you pick out a few words here and there and argue against them to claim victory -- you sort of remind me of the Japanese holdouts from WWII occassionally still found in the Pacific (quick, medved, excerpt that line above, but make sure you don't take it in context!).
The "half-wing half-arm" as you would call it served a very useful function -- it allowed for the rapid climbing of trees to escape predators, a theory, by the way, you "commented on" only two months ago on these threads, so I know you are not unfamiliar with it. Just to enlighten you, a researcher watched young birds with half-formed wings flap those half-wings while climbing trees. After a bit of observation he saw the flapping of these protowings was holding the bird to the trunk, allowing the bird to run with ease up its side.
I've noticed something on these threads: whenever anyone comes up with a rational explanation for something you immediately chime in with a diatribe on that explanation never being observed. But when the rational explanation is supported by evidence, you either ignore it, claiming you never saw it, or you twist it saying it doesn't apply to extinct animals. One must come to the conclusion that:
1) There is more than one person masquerading as gore3000, and the individuals involved do not keep one-another apprised of the current state of the argument;
2) gore3000 is a realtively unsophisticated string of code consisting of a search function and a standard stock of replies (this theory is bolstered by your choice of screenname and your inability to update your replies between threads);
3) gore3000 is a relatively unimaginative (remember, imagination is the tool of the devil) individual who considers outright lying to be alright as long as one does it for God. In this case, I don't want to be anywhere nearby when you go to meet your maker.
Aside from your adoption of more colorful fonts (which seems to be all the rage in creationist circles), your diatribes have not changed one iota since the first day you posted on these threads. You are an example of why Christianity is on the outs throughout most of the world -- why Europeans are abandoning it in droves. You refuse to see the evidence in front of, instead clinging stridently to an increasingly untenable position. When the undecided see the evidence before them, and then here how that evidence means nothing because Godidit, they are going to dismiss the latter view as primitive and irrational. The Roman Catholic Church (Praise the Lord) having been burned by the Galileo gambit, understands that interpretation of Scripture cannot fly in the face of evidence or the Church becomes irrelevant and is replaced by something else. This is why the Catholics interpret Scripture in light of the evidence and why it continues to be the largest church both inside and outside the U.S. Fundamentalist Christian denominations (by which I mean those who take the first book of the Bible as being a word-for-word, no ifs, ands or buts, literal account of how things were done) have made very little headway in regions where science is understood.
If Christianity is to survive, it needs to get with the times. This does not mean abandoning its core teachings -- those are timeless. What it means is, if the evidence is overwhelming that a literal interpretation of Scripture is wrong, then either Scripture is wrong (which is the conclusion many of the undecided draw) or the interpretation of Scripture is wrong. You seem to tread a third path -- that the evidence is wrong, or that a cabal of Satan-worshipping scientists faked the evidence even though no conspiracy could be maintained with the literally tens of thousands of individuals involved. Continue fighting your rearguard action -- I'm sure it makes you feel good -- but a thousand years from now the fundamentalist movement will have joined the long list of extinct heresies.
Thanks for mentioning that. I remember reading in Darwin on Trial something about the genetics and morphology not corresponding.
Again, a nice story. But where are the transitional fossils? As time goes on, the fossil record looks even worse for microevolution than it did during Darwin's time. Besides being "gappy," you have the problem of unevolved, "living fossils" like the coelecanth and the horseshoe crab.
Which is my point. It's a fully formed, integrated functional, creature as are all other creatures and fossils that I have ever seen. And like the archaeopteryx, it probably exited the fossil record the same way it came in.
There are two problems with the theory of variation through micromutation, the overwhelming lack of evidence in the fossil record and the lack of an even remotely plausible mechanism for beneficial variation. Other than that, it's a great theory.
Do you consider your back to be "half formed?" Honestly? Do you ever wonder why human beings suffer from back problems? Our backs are not fully developed for an upright stance. Our legs are pretty much nearly fully adapted (we do have problems with our knees which are related to this), and of course our arms are "fully adapted and integrated."
As a matter of fact, I do have a bad back. 8-o But even if I grant your point, the fact remains that the human body is an example of a "high-functioning," staggeringly complex design. I have a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, and taken simply from a mechanical point of view, the human body makes the space shuttle look like a tinker toy in terms of comparative mechanical complexity.
Also, your example is a case of "dysteleology" as William Dembski phrases it, and is more a problem for theology than natural science. (The section I quoted above is worth at least a quick read.) The term "Intelligent Design" is not to be taken to mean "optimum design," but rather design by an intelligent agent. For example, although I know that the AMC Pacer is not an example of optimal design, I know that it was designed by an intelligent agent and not by chance.
Yes, that's one way to look at it. And I had looked at it that way for decades, as it was the only "scientific theory" regarding animal/human origins that had been presented to me. But since reading Johnson's Darwin on Trial, I have found the evidence for ID to be much more compelling. In this case, in the exampes you cite, all of these creatures function very well in their particular ecological niches, and could just as easily be pointed to as examples of design.
We all know the story. What we need is evidence. Either fossil evidence or a remotely plausible mechanism for explaining the rise of staggeringly complex creatures, like human beings.
No, they are more fit! They have to be. They are the result of intelligent design!
OK, then once again the theory is faced with the problem of the "gappy" fossil record. Where are the countless "micro-transitional" forms?
Another problem remains. According to the theory, at some point one creature in the "daughter population" must mutate sufficiently to become "reproductively isolated" from the "parent population." But at the same time this same creature would become "reproductively isolated" from the rest of the "daughter population," unless another member of the daughter population happened to mutate similarly and simultaneously.
LOL! Ouch.
I consider the above a compliment Junior. You see, while there are a myriad amount of lies there is only one truth. I am glad you admit that I am consistent.
Now as to the reptiles with wings, you seem to forget that a wing is quite different from an arm. It has a lot more bones for one thing. The bones are a lot lighter (in fact the bones of birds are a lot lighter than those of other animals). You also need a beak in order to feed when you do not have arms. In short, flight seems to require an almost complete change of the organism. These changes need to be simulataneous and they change the habits and way of life of the organism in many ways. They also would take a large amount of time to occur which make the species less fit while it occurred. Your supposition has a lot of holes in it Junior as is not backed up by the transitional species which would be necessary to show this to have actually occurred.
Yes. "Design" explains everything. And nothing. Tell me, if everything is a design, brought about by these wonderful, invisible cosmic designers, what is your explanation for harmful mutations? They are consistent with the theory of evolution, but they shouldn't exist in a "designed" biosphere.
And they do that despite all the modern non-mammalian species running and flying around that gore3000 can name with hammer-anvil-stirrup earbones. Show those evos no mercy, gore! Start naming them!
Evolution says that mammary glands on a dinosaur would be stunningly unlikely. Please do not skip this next question, it's very revealing of what's going on here. Do you understand what you are arguing against, evolutionary theory, well enough to say why mammary glands on a dinosaur are basically excluded? (Here it is again. Evolution has something to tell us. In ID/creationism, anything goes.)
. . . we do not know if they had scales, feathers, green skin, brown skin, purple skin,
There are instances of skin impressions.
. . . we do not know if they were warm blooded or cold blooded and a hundred other characteristics which are very much a part of a species . . .
In many cases, we have bone evidence of warm-bloodedness in later dinosaurs. There are many things, such as just for one example whether two similar creatures would have been sexually compatible or had completely speciated, it cannot tell us. So what? You want too much for the incompleteness of the available data. That's a problem for all serious theories equally.
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