Missing-link fossil wasn't a fish -- it has a pelvis

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | Thursday, July 4, 2002 | David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

[Phil V.]

A fossil previously mistaken for the remains of an extinct fish turns out to hold the earliest known creature to have emerged from the Earth's waters and walk on land some 350 million years ago.

This ancestor of every four-limbed, backboned animal living today -- the first creature clearly designed to walk on land, with forward-facing feet -- fills a major gap in the evidence for the evolution of vertebrates from sea to land, scientists say.

[PatrickHenry]

Let us examine the following post and emphasize the slime:

Actually what this thread shows is what a bunch of losers evolutionists are. What a bunch of sore losers. Only a bunch of losers like yourselves would spend your lives insulting people because you know that your atheistic theory of evolution is a blatant lie. Only a bunch of losers like yourselves would use so blatantly dishonest modes of discussion as you do. Only a bunch of losers like yourselves would conspire to trash thread after thread with insults, irrelevancies and garbage so that people will not see the true statements of your opponents. Only a bunch of losers like yourselves would willfully waste their lives ignoring the truth. Therefore since all of you have worked so hard for it I hereby give all of you the following award:
[Sore Loserman pic]

1536 posted on 7/15/02 3:01 PM Eastern by gore3000

The question is -- after the slime is subracted, is anything left?

[PatrickHenry]

[f.Christian]

8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.
Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving ‘desirable’ (adaptive) features and eliminating ‘undesirable’ (nonadaptive) ones.

But the raw material on which natural selection acts is random copying errors (mutations). If evolution from goo to you were true, we should expect to find countless information-adding mutations. But we have not even found one.

As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times.

An example would have been nice.

As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence ‘TOBEORNOTTOBE.’ Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet’s). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare’s entire play in just four and a half days.

These computer programs have been widely popularized by the atheist Richard Dawkins, but are a lot of bluff. Such simulations as Dawkins, and now Rennie, propose as ‘simulations’ of evolution work towards a known goal, so are far from a parallel to real evolution, which has no foresight, hence a ‘Blind Watchmaker’. The simulations also use ‘organisms’ with high reproductive rates (producing many offspring), high mutation rates, a large probability of a beneficial mutation, and a selection coefficient of 1 (perfect selection) instead of 0.01 (or less) which parallels real life more accurately. The ‘organisms’ have tiny ‘genomes’ with minute information content, so are less prone to error catastrophe, and they are not affected by the chemical and thermodynamic constraints of a real organism.

For more information, see this refutation of Dawkins’ book Climbing Mt Improbable, Weasel Words and Dawkins’ weasel revisited. Also, in the coming issue of TJ (16(2)), we will have an article about a more realistic computer simulation, which will be downloadable (i.e. the program) from the AiG Web site, which shows that the goal is NOT reached if realistic values are programmed, or it takes so long that it shows that evolution is impossible. For a refutation of the whole idea of computer simulations of evolution, particularly in the guise of genetic algorithms, see Genetic algorithms—do they show that evolution works?—all these problems also apply to the simplistic ‘simulation’ Rennie writes about.

Also, when it comes to the origin of first life, natural selection cannot be invoked, because this requires a self-reproducing entity. Therefore chance alone must produce the precise sequences needed, so these simulations do not apply (see Q&A: Probability). And a further problem with the alleged chemical soup is reversibility, intensifying the difficulty of obtaining the right sequence by chance—see Could Monkeys Type the 23rd Psalm.

[general_re]

The question is -- after the slime is subracted, is anything left?

No. Hence, my logic is irrefutable - it does not exist...

[f.Christian]

10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.
On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations (changes at precise positions in an organism’s DNA)—bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example.

This is a serious mis-statement of the creationist argument. The issue is not new traits, but new genetic information. In no known case is antibiotic resistance the result of new information. There are several ways where an information loss can confer resistance—see Anthrax and antibiotics: Is evolution relevant? We have pointed out in various ways how new traits, even helpful, adaptive traits, can arise through loss of genetic information (which is to be expected from mutations). See for example, Beetle bloopers.

Mutations that arise in the homeobox (Hox) family of development-regulating genes in animals can also have complex effects. Hox genes direct where legs, wings, antennae and body segments should grow. In fruit flies, for instance, the mutation called Antennapedia causes legs to sprout where antennae should grow.

Once again, there is no new information! Rather, a mutation in the hox gene results in already-existing information being switched on in the wrong place. See also Hox (homeobox) Genes — Evolution’s Saviour? and Hox Hype — Has Macro-evolution Been Proven? The hox gene did not produce any of the information that results in the complex structure of the leg, which in ants and bees includes a very complex mechanical and hydraulic structure by which these insects stick to surfaces—see Startling stickiness.

These abnormal limbs are not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic mistakes can produce complex structures, which natural selection can then test for possible uses.

Amazing—natural selection can test for ‘possible uses’ of ‘non-functional’ (i.e. useless!) limbs in the wrong place. Such deformities would be active hindrances to survival.

Moreover, molecular biology has discovered mechanisms for genetic change that go beyond point mutations, and these expand the ways in which new traits can appear. Functional modules within genes can be spliced together in novel ways. Whole genes can be accidentally duplicated in an organism’s DNA, and the duplicates are free to mutate into genes for new, complex features.

Gene duplication, polyploidy, insertions, etc. do not help — they represent an increase in amount of DNA, but not an increase in the amount of functional genetic information—these create nothing new. Macroevolution needs new genes (for making feathers on reptiles, for example).

In plants, but not in animals (possibly with rare exceptions), the doubling of all the chromosomes may result in an individual which can no longer interbreed with the parent type—this is called polyploidy. Although this may technically be called a new species, because of the breeding isolation, no new information has been produced, just repetitious doubling of existing information. If a malfunction in a printing press caused a book to be printed with every page doubled, it would not be more informative than the proper book. (Brave students of evolutionary professors might like to ask whether they would get extra marks for handing in two copies of the same assignment.)

Duplication of a single chromosome is normally harmful, as in Down’s Syndrome. Insertions are a very efficient way of completely destroying the functionality of existing genes. Biophysicist Dr Lee Spetner in his book Not By Chance (see graphic, right) analyses examples of mutational changes that evolutionists have claimed to have been increases in information, and shows that they are actually examples of loss of specificity, which means they involved loss of information (which is to be expected from information theory).

The gene duplication idea is that an existing gene may be doubled, and one copy does its normal work while the other copy is redundant and non-expressed. Therefore it is free to mutate free of selection pressure (to get rid of it) . However, such ‘neutral’ mutations are powerless to produce new genuine information. Dawkins et al. point out that natural selection is the only possible naturalistic explanation for the immense design in nature (not a good one, as Spetner et al. have shown). The proposal is that random changes produce a new function, then this redundant gene becomes expressed somehow, thus comes under the selective process and is tuned.

It’s all a lot of hand-waving. It relies on a chance copying event, genes somehow being switched off, randomly mutated to something approximating a new function, then being switched on again so natural selection can tune it.

Furthermore, mutations do not just occur in the duplicated gene; they occur throughout the genome. Consequently, all the deleterious mutations have to be eliminated by the death of the unfit. Mutations in the target duplicate gene are extremely rare—it might represent only 1 part in 30,000 of the genome of an animal. The larger the genome the bigger the problem. This is because a larger the genome, the lower the mutation rate that can be sustained without error catastrophe, which means one has to wait longer for any mutation, let alone a desirable one, in the duplicated gene. There just has not been enough time for such a naturalistic process to account for the amount of genetic information that we see in living things.

Dawkins and others have recognised that the ‘information space’ possible within just one gene is so huge that random changes without some guiding force could never come up with a new function. There could never be enough experiments (mutating generations of organisms) to find anything useful by such a process. Note that an average gene of 1,000 base pairs represents 41000 possibilities — that is 10602 (compare this with the number of atoms in the universe estimated at ‘only’ 1080). If every atom in the universe were an experiment every millisecond for the supposed 15 billion years of the universe, this could only try a maximum 10100 of the possibilities. So such a ‘neutral’ process cannot find any sequence with specificity (usefulness), even allowing for the fact that there may be more than just one sequence that is functional to some extent.

So Dawkins and company have the same problem as the neutral selection theory advocates. Increasing knowledge of the molecular basis of biological functions has exploded the known ‘information space’ such that mutations and natural selection, with or without gene duplication, or any other known natural process, cannot account for the irreducibly complex nature of living systems.

Comparisons of the DNA from a wide variety of organisms indicate that this is how the globin family of blood proteins evolved over millions of years.

This is an inference from similarities interpreted under the materialistic paradigm. There is no actual demonstration that hemoglobin (with four polypeptides) evolved from myoglobin (with one polypeptide), or any adequate explanation of how the hypothetical intermediates would have had selective advantages. In fact, it’s far more complicated than Rennie implies. The a- and b-globin chains are encoded on genes on different chromosomes, so they are expressed independently. This expression must be controlled precisely, otherwise various types of a disease called thallassemia result. Also, there is an essential protein called AHSP (Alpha Hemoglobin Stabilizing Protein) which, as the name implies, stabilizes the a-chains, and also brings it to the b-chains. Otherwise the a-chains would precipitate and damage the red blood cells. AHSP is one of many examples of a class of protein called chaperones which govern the folding of other proteins.12 This is yet another problem for chemical evolutionary theories—how did the first proteins fold correctly without chaperones, and since the chaperones themselves are complex proteins, how did they fold? See The Origin of Life: A Critique of Current Scientific Models (PDF file).

[gore3000]

The question is -- after the slime is subracted, is anything left?

You are correct, after all the slime from evolutionists, all the ad-hominems, all the personal attacks, all the placemarkers, all the irrelevant tete-a-tetes between evolutionists are taken out this thread would be a 1000 posts smaller. You sure can dish it out but you cannot take it when someone tells the truth about your despicable tactics. Whine, whine, whine. If you could take the 'h' out of your whines you would have yourself one of the biggest wineries in the country.

[VadeRetro]

Mikey_Mike's 514: Since I have been here I must say that the Creationists have overwhelmingly swayed me to their side by presenting factual information, answering posts/challenges, and being respectful to others no matter how difficult it may be.

The above is clear evidence for an alternate universe connected to our own only through these threads. In that world, creationists overwhelm with factual information. They never dodge, distract, or distort. They are unfailingly respectful in the face of every manner of immature and spiteful attack by the scummy evos.

Kinda reminds me of the Planet of the Apes movies, only not so realistic.

[VadeRetro]

Perhaps we must have awards for each category....

I like this. It then becomes possible to win the Triple Crown of Creationist Blather.

[f.Christian]

11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.
A straw man, because creationists accept new species arising within the kind, since reproductive isolation can be the result of information loss. See What is the Biblical creationist model? for more discussion on kinds and speciation.

Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species.


Indeed, creationists point out that the allopatric model would explain the origin of the different people groups (‘races’) when the confusion of languages at Babel induced a separation of small population groups which spread out all over the Earth. See How could all the races come from Noah and his family? and One Blood (right). Of course, the different people groups are NOT reproductively isolated and are still a single biological species.

Creationists also point out that the montane (mountainous) topography of the Ark’s landing place would also be ideal for geographical isolation. This would allow much post-Flood diversification from comparatively few (~8,000) kinds of land vertebrates, by splitting up the original high genetic variety.

Note that the reproductive isolation is an informationally negative change, even if beneficial, because it blocks the interchange of genetic information between populations.

Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, …

Yes, it is the best studied, but these studies show that it has nothing to do with evolution of more complex life forms! All we observe it doing is removing information, not adding it.

… but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms.

But this endosymbiosis theory has many problems, e.g. the lack of evidence that prokaryotes are capable of ingesting another cell and keeping it alive, and the large differences in genes between mitochondria and prokaryotes. See Did cells acquire organelles such as mitochondria by gobbling up other cells?

Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.

Mainly because evolutionists reject the possibility of proof of the supernatural a priori—see these admissions from evolutionists Lewontin and Todd.

[longshadow]

Just do not get started on how to determine the circumference of a non-circular ellipse!

Yes; trying to explain the rudiments of Conic Sections to G3k is frustrating.... somewhat like what happens when you tell a farm hand with a third grade education to urinate in the corner of the silo..... around and around and around he goes; where he'll stop, nobody knows!

[VadeRetro]

In another universe G3K's post might be factual, on-point, and surprisingly respectful given how we behave. I'm still working on the theory.

[Junior]

The above is clear evidence for an alternate universe connected to our own only through these threads.

As I am now rereading the collected works of Douglas Adams, this does not seem so terribly strange...

[Iota]

>>>I read gore3k because he's at least entertaining. With Ted you get the same stuff over and over again. Blah.<<<

See, I'm just the opposite. I stopped reading Gore months ago, once I figured out that, underneath it all, he's doing the same thing over and over again:

1) Quote or recite 5-10 facts about evolution (that may even be true). ("Humans have lots of genes . . .")

2) Draw an anti-evolution conclusion that is utterly unconnected to those facts. (". . . which disproves evolution".)

3) Repeat.

Even Gore's insults are repetitive and unimaginative. Medved, on the other hand, aside from those three or four spams, offers a different take most of the time. So I continue to check him out.

[f.Christian]

Originally the word liberal meant social conservatives(no govt religion--none) who advocated growth and progress---mostly technological(knowledge being absolute/unchanging)based on law--reality... UNDER GOD---the nature of GOD/man/govt. does not change.

These were the Classical liberals---founding fathers-PRINCIPLES...

stable/SANE scientific reality/society---industrial progress(no evolution...none---ever)

...moral/social character-values(private/personal) GROWTH---scientific expertise(not evo--whack moonie marx-darwin-zombie swill)!

[Gumlegs]

G3K may be a living form of the color blue, but clearly he/she/it can never be described as "hyper-intelligent>"

[f.Christian]

Originally the word liberal meant social conservatives(no govt religion--none) who advocated growth and progress---mostly technological(knowledge being absolute/unchanging)based on law--reality... UNDER GOD---the nature of GOD/man/govt. does not change.

These were the Classical liberals---founding fathers-PRINCIPLES...

stable/SANE scientific reality/society---industrial progress(no evolution...none---ever)

...moral/social character-values(private/personal) GROWTH---

scientific expertise(not evo--whack moonie marx-darwin-zombie swill)!

[longshadow]

With Ted you get the same stuff over and over again. Blah.

Point well taken. When we set up the criteria for the various "Most Ignored FReeper" categories, we must be sure to specify that within the "Acerage" category, repeat SPAMS only count ONCE.

This, of course, will knock Teddy out of contender status in that category, though he could still win the "Ignored by More FReepers than any Other" category.

[Gumlegs]

You are correct, after all the slime from evolutionists, all the ad-[sic]hominems, all the personal attacks, all the placemarkers, all the irrelevant tete-a-tetes between evolutionists are taken out this thread would be a 1000 posts smaller.

And if we stopped posting material you are incapable of understanding, there would be no posts at all!

[Gumlegs]

Deja vu ... you?

[BMCDA]

I read gore3k because he's at least entertaining. With Ted you get the same stuff over and over again. Blah.

With g3k you also get the same stuff over and over again, the cycles are only much longer until he repeats himself. However with the entertainment value of his posts you have a point ;-D