Theory of 'intelligent design' isn't ready for natural selection

Additional: If you have the good fortune to not be in California, find yourself a ferret. EVERYTHING they do is "for the hell of it."

The house down the street is a rental. One of the twentysomethings who live there has a pickup truck with a "F**K BUSH" bumpersticker. They recently got a dog who they chain up in the yard. The dog likes to play with things, throwing them up in the air with its mouth. They got a UPS package yesterday. The dog had the contents strewn about the lawn in an hour. Good dog.

"Rather, it will be a predictable, controllable, but rather comfortable mediocrity and sameness. They will create a vanilla person, a Styrofoam cutout, a robot or pliable person directed by those who THINK they know what is best for mankind."

"Eventually, excellence and achievement will only be acceptable or allowed for those who have scrambled to the top of the collectivist heap. The new utopians, the collectivists, are not about freedom, but rather seek to make mankind willing slaves to their worldview."

make mankind willing slaves to their worldview...evoo-doo-ology---witchcraft!

The holocaust was wrong because millions of innocent people were murdered. Why is this a problem?

When a female dolphin comes into season, a male alliance often 'kidnaps' her for some days from the group in which she lived. The males then swim with her, one on either side.... Nor are her suitors especially gentle with her. They chase her when she tries to escape, hit her with their tails, charge, bite and slam their bodies into her to keep her going where they want. ...

A little like Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd.....

My favorite storm left the power off overnight. I was in a library. I couldn't see anything. I couldn't even see the door. Rates right up there with snow days.

My guess is that human evolution will no longer be taught in schools when rational people start to point out that Darwinism was one of the foundations of Nazism.

Actually, a corrupt version of paganism/Darwinism called Theosophy formed the philosophical basis for Naziism. According to Theosophy, humanity was descended from one of several races of telepathic giants, and the Aryan race was the most advanced of those descendents.

Humans are the only species that will do something simply for the hell of it.

Cats (including tigers) have been known to hunt and kill simply for the joy of it (not consuming the kill afterward). I often catch my cats and dogs playing with balls, pieces of string, or various small items that have fallen to the floor. My cats set ambushes for each other -- not to kill each other, but for the shear joy of giving the other cat a thorough scare.

Most play is training for life.

Your cats are cooperating in honing their hunting skills.

I take it a human posted this ...

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

Show me something OTHER than the "Space-tiem continuum." It is valid to assuem that things for which there is neither evidence nor workable theory do not exist... contingent upon revision with further evidence.

I don't need to. Neither position, that there either is or isn't something beyond the space-time continuum, is scientifically valid. I don't need to prove one to disprove the other, as both conclusions fall outside the realm of science.
It is not valid to assume that science can describe all of reality, and that therefore reality beyond science does not exist. When you do, you've wandered off into tautology.

One can derive morality usign the scientific method.

Try it. You'll soon be making arbitrary and unscientific pronouncements.

One can examine theology using the scientific method.

To what end?
Theology involves matters on which science is necessarily silent.

Religion is an expression of the "divine," typically with big dollpos of worship/fear thrown in. Making use of the scientific method is no more religious than driving a car to work is making a religion out of driving. Science is simply a tool... a vastly useful tool, one that fits all circumstances, but nonetheless a tool.

When one attempts to use that tool to indicate an absence of the Divine, typically with big dollops of pride, science becomes an idol, a theology of its own.
In other words, science needs to remain secular. Neither Theism nor Atheism qualifies, only agnosticism is secular.

Some useful references:

Major Scientific Problems with Evolution

EvolUSham dot Com

Many Experts Quoted on FUBAR State of Evolution

The All-Time, Ultimate Evolution Quote

"If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all came from slime. When we died, you know , that was it, there is nothing..."

Jeffrey Dahmer, noted Evolutionist

Social Darwinism, Naziism, Communism, Darwinism Roots etc.

Creation and Intelligent Design Links

Evolutionist Censorship Etc.

Catastrophism

Big Bang, Electric Sun, Plasma Physics and Cosmology Etc.

Finding Cities in all the Wrong Places

Given standard theories wrt the history of our solar system and our own planet, nobody should be finding cities and villages on Mars, 2100 feet beneath the waves off Cuba, or buried under two miles of Antarctic ice.

Intelligent Versions of Biogenesis etc.

Talk.origins/Sci.Bio.Evolution Realities

Those who find medved's endlessly repeated essays and links useful will also be delighted with these:

TIME CUBE .
The Earth is Not Moving!.
Earth Orbits? Moon Landings? A Fraud! .
Flat Earth Society Homepage! .
Christian Answers Network.
Creationists' Cartoons .
Institute for Creation Research.
The Current State of Creation Astronomy.
Answers In Genesis .
THE MOON: A Propaganda Hoax .
CRANK DOT NET.

The big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion whicih operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.

The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

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 aspect 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 them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her. In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's great for fantasies...
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:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

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?




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Splifford the bat says: Always remember:

A mind is a terrible thing to waste; especially on an evolutionist.
Just say no to narcotic drugs, alcohol abuse, and corrupt ideological
doctrines.

Some of us don't need a scary man in the sky to tell us what's right & wrong

That was Stalin's posiiton.

Consider the "proto-bird" (TM), a favorite amongst evolutionists.

This poor little creature is supposed to have somehow survived a thousand generation process during which it had neither functional arms, nor functional wings, during which it had enough flight feathers to look weird and be laughed at, but not enough to fly, a light enough bone structure to be kicked around on beaches, but not light enough to fly, and was generally an outcast, pariah, ugly duckling, and effortlessly free meal for every predator which ever saw it for 1000+ generations before it ever succeeded and flew.

An idea of how hard it would truly be for "proto-bird" (TM) to make it to flying-bird status can be gotten from the case of the escaped chicken.

Consider that man raises chickens in gigantic abundance, and that on many farms, these are not even caged. Consider the numbers of such chickens which must have escaped in all of recorded history; look in the sky overhead: where are all of their wild-living descendants??

Why are there no wild chickens in the skies above us???

A flying bird requires a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including flight feathers, wings, a special light bone structure, specialized flow-through design hearts and lungs vastly more efficient than ours, specialized tails and balance parameters, and a number of other things. Now, you can imagine the difficulty involved for something like a dinosaur which did not have any of these things to evolve them all, but the feral chicken

already has all of these things!!!!!

In other words, if there's any chance whatsoever of a non-flying creature evolving into a flying bird, then surely, surely the feral chicken, close as it is, could RE-EVOLVE back into being a flying bird. They're only missing the tiniest fraction of whatever is involved.

They've got wings, tails, and flight feathers, and the whold nine yards. In their domestic state, they can fly albeit badly; they are entirely similar to what you might expect of an evolutionist's proto-bird, in the final stage of evolving into a flight-worthy condition.

According to evolutionist dogma, at least a few of these should very quickly finish evolving back into something like a normal flying bird, once having escaped, and then the progeny of those few should very quickly fill the skies.

But the sky holds no wild chickens. In real life, against real settings, real predators, real conditions, the imperfect flight features do not suffice to save them.

In real life, if you ever lose the tiniest part of some complex trait or capability, you will never get it back. In the real world, if you lack the tiniest part of some complex trait or capability, then, other than possibly via some genetic engineering process, you will never get it.

Thus we see that "proto-bird" (TM) not only couldn't make it the entire journey which he is supposed to have, he couldn't even make it the last yard if we spotted him the thousand miles minus the yard.

The basic question is: How in hell is some velociraptor supposed to make it the thousand miles, if history proves that a creature which amounts to the final stage of such a development cannot make it the final yard of such a process?

One can't derive morality or theology from science, as science is necessarily agnostic.

When you you make the attempt, you make science your religion, just as the Creationists have asserted. You fuel their fire.

I hate being forced to post the obvious, but it appears that Euthyphro must again be asked:

Does God approve of a thing because it is moral, or is a thing moral because God approves of it?

For more, click here.

Out of the mental gulags, out of the anti-God, anti-human, one-world-fits-all multiculturalism and diversity, gender politics and all the rest, freedom did not emerge. Rather a blind, silent, frightened, intimidated conformity and stagnation, nowhere more apparent than on university campuses at this very moment."

I speak Russian just well enough to have heard and read some of the stories about how life under the commy sistem really was, which is a lot worse than most people imagine, and led to situations which are almost unimaginable to westerners.

Ever heard the story about the Moscow sausage plant and the jury of 12 cats back around 88 or 89?

I hate being forced to post the obvious, but it appears that Euthyphro must again be asked:

Does God approve of a thing because it is moral, or is a thing moral because God approves of it?

Dunno... His ways are not our ways.

Is there Morality Apart From God?