Evolution discussion

[One Brow]

Science magazine said this: “Species do indeed have a capacity to undergo minor modifications in their physical and other characteristics, but this is limited and with a longer perspective it is reflected in an oscillation about a mean [average].” So, then, what is inherited by living things is not the possibility of continued change but instead (1)*stability and (2)*limited ranges of variation.

I'm sorry, but some random quote of some random magazine just doesn't hold up compared to the ten of thousands of pages of scientific papers that say otherwise.

Thus, the book Molecules to Living Cells states: “The cells from a carrot or from the liver of a mouse consistently retain their respective tissue and organism identities after countless cycles of reproduction.” And Symbiosis in Cell Evolution says: “All life .*.*. reproduces with incredible fidelity.” Scientific American also observes: “Living things are enormously diverse in form, but form is remarkably constant within any given line of descent: pigs remain pigs and oak trees remain oak trees generation after generation.”

Again, random quotes sans context.

And a science writer commented: “Rose bushes always blossom into roses, never into camellias. And goats give birth to kids, never to lambs.” He concluded that mutations “cannot account for overall evolution—why there are fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals.”

That roses always create seeds that will becomes roses *is* evolution. Goats giving birth to lambs would be a miracle, not evolution. There are many other mechisms in evolution besides mutation.

Now those were quotes from "educated" evolutionists!

YOUr science writer needs a better education, or more honesty. The others, I have no reason to think they mean what you claim they mean based on small quote mines.

The matter of variation within a kind explains something that influenced Darwin’s original thinking about evolution.

Please define what a "kind" is in some meaningful way. Otherwise, talking about "kinds" is just gibberish.

 

[One Brow]

Not contradictory at all. You know that part "you set up a few conditions" and "You repeatedly generate" and "You keep repeating"...that's the intelligent design part.

In nature, the environment sets up the conditions, without intent or intelligence. Reproduction creates the new generations, without intent or intelligence. Selection occurs, without intent or intelligence. So, if you acknowledge evolutionary design is possible at all, denying evolution in living things is self-contradictory.

Think of specified as useful patterns. The sculpted rocks of Mt. Rushmore may not have a use besides tourism, but the faces they were copied from do.

Nice try to divert the topic. However, the Man in the Mountain also had an eye, nose, etc. Again, we know one was designed, and the other not, by the simplicity in the designed monument.

Under your random/accidental system there is no reason to expect that the first place our eyes appeared were on the front of our faces. Why don't we have ancestors with eyes at the end of each boob or knee? or on the back of their heads? The existence of clunkers like that would really lend some credibility to your crazy *** theory.

Actually, it would undermine it. Eyes developed long before long before boobs and knees.

But seriously, you seem to be implying that any existence of "flaws" in the system negates intelligent design. The only thing "flaws" negate are purity/perfection in the design/useful pattern.

Most ID advocates not not seeking to put forth the Incompetent Designer. I fully acknowledge that if you think life might have been designed by an Incompetent Designer or a Malicious Designer, than the inferior construction of living things is no bar. However, since either of those designers is consistent with any state of affiars, they can not be evidenced, either.

You need to change that "does" to "did."

I'll work on that.

That was an interesting conflation of a point you never made and a point I did.

I attempted to make that point earlier. I'll try to do better.

Formula (*) asserts that the information in both A and B jointly is the information in A plus the information in B that is not in A. ... Either way. If you have 2 seperate books with the same story or if there are two copies of the story in one book the formula accounts for both.

What the formula does not account for is the processing environment. If program A has output B in some computing environment X, it may have an entirely different output C in computing environment Y. It's not just A that contributes to B, it's both A and X. As such, B can have information derived from X that is does not exist in A, and may even have information that is not present in A or X alone, but only when the two are joined together.

The formula is just wrong in saying that laying two copies of at text, end-to-end, produces no new information. Every measure of information in use says the amount of information increases.

You notice how you had to add an intelligent force into the equation ("you") in order to produce useful information. Same thing holds true for all of our biological parts/systems.

I fully acknowledge that the division algorithm is a designed process. However, my point was that you can't claim that something is not produced by a process simply because it is not produced in any particular step. This is just as true of useful information as it is of division.

OB: Yet, the two copies laid end-to-end still has more information.​

... your conclusion hasn't been backed up with logic.

It's very basic information theory. 01100110 has more information than 0110. 0110011001100110 has still more.

I don't think it was useful...

It served, and still serves to some degree, the same purpose as Mt. Rushmore.

That is one of the most bizarre answers I've ever seen...it is like a 50 ft. wookie.
Yes human language changed over time but it originates from an intelligence source...the human mind...are you really going to deny that humans are intelligent beings?

Who directed the changes? ID is not just a claim of intelligence, but one of intelligent direction. There was no one person or group who directed the change from Old English to Middle English or Latin to Romanian. Everyone just spoke the language they learned, with small differences due to their own particulars and peculiarities (random variation). The variations that were pick up by others (reproduction) either were preserved or let go (selection). No one decided which changes to make.

The appendix was more useful hundreds of years ago when we weren't city dwellers.

How so? Not everyone today is a city dweller or has significant city-dweller ancestry. Are you saying their appendixes work differently?

So in conclusion all your "vestigial" arguments are as useless as your stories about bears falling into the ocean and becoming whales.

So, you think is an organ has any sort of use at all, no matter how poorly done, duplicated, and inefficient it is at that task, it's not vestigial? I don't think you understand the term.

I hope I made that huge *** response more readable for you, one brow.

Very much so. Thank you.

 

[green]

I'm sorry, but anyone that argues that God disproves science or science disproves God is an idiot. Hawking said it best:

"There is a probably apocryphal story, that when Laplace was asked by Napoleon, how God fitted into this system, he replied, 'Sire, I have not needed that hypothesis.' I don't think that Laplace was claiming that God didn't exist. It is just that He doesn't intervene, to break the laws of Science. That must be the position of every scientist. A scientific law, is not a scientific law, if it only holds when some supernatural being, decides to let things run, and not intervene."

When it comes to science, God is irrelevant. IF God exists, he follows the laws of science. If you believe in the Bible, Jesus didn't snap his fingers then magically walk through walls. He did it following the laws of science. Jesus didn't say abracadabra and magically walk on water. He did it manipulating the laws of science. He didn't shuffle a deck of cards, then feed thousands from a few fish, he did it following the laws of science (which, we are close to being able to replicate with 3-D printing).

This is a stupid debate, because it is irrelevant.

 

[One Brow]

Well you can call it different but to me they are advanced.

I see no reason to treat your mystical claptrap as any better than anyone else's.

Hagfish of today is basically the same as 300 mil years ago. There is a reason they are called living fossils.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23254938

If hagfish had been unchanged, there would be no need to create a pan-cyclostome pattern. Present-day hagfish would be that pattern.

There are 77 species of hagfish. Do you really think they are all identical?

They are the only known living animals that have a skull but not a vertebral column. Along with lampreys, hagfish are jawless and are living fossils; hagfish are basal to vertebrates, and living hagfish remain similar to hagfish 300 million years ago.

A 'living fossil" is an oxymoron, and thus quite popular with the media, but not with scientists. Hagfish have been evolving for 400 million years since our lineages separated. The notion that they would not experience massive change is almost magical.

 

[One Brow]

You would still have to come up with, demonstrate, show, or answer: "If this animal "evolved" how did it happen?" No theories, concepts, experiments have ever held water when you ask those questions of any kind of life in the animal kingdom!

The problem is not that evolutionists lack an answer, it's that there are so many possible answers, and no reliable way to choose between them.

As far as experiments holding water, that applies to the initial standard you set. Science never has, and never will, lay claim to the absolute truth. If that's your standard, I agree it will never be met.

 

[One Brow]

Just curious. We have already seen evolution take place (what was that like white moth species whose habitat was blackened due to coal being burnt and they slowly became black to not stand out so much to predators ((white creatures on black surfaces, hard to hide)), do you think humans have reached the pinnacle point of their evolutionary progression? What stressors would bring about a genetic change in our lax, kush lifestyles? Would it be possible, considering the vast diversity of geographic location of humans to make any biological change to be evident in all humans?

There is no pinnacle. There is just change. No one knows how humans will change in the future. To predict that would require knowing what earth will be like for the next 100,000 years.

Genetic changes happen with or without stresses.

Yes, it's possible. Consider that the ability to drink milk as an adult is a very recent change, and very wide-spread.

 

[One Brow]

These Darwiniacs glued black and white moths to blackened trees to show how black moths in a polluted England were "more fit" then light moths against being eaten by birds.

This happened for textbook pictures, not in the experiments.

The problem was that the moths only came out at night and so had no need to hide from birds while they rested on the undersides of branches,

Only a small percentage of the moths would rest under branches, and a bright white moth is still more visible at night resting on a blackened tree than a black moth.

 

[One Brow]

Yes, Darwiniac's have managed to confuse a lot of people, as to what Darwin's theory actually is, by labeling small differences in populations "micro-evolution."

There is no difference in quality between "micro-evolution" and "macro-evolution", just quantity. Accepting the former but not the ladder is like believing in rungs, but not in ladders.

https://amultiverse.com/2013/05/29/drink-like-a-fish/

 

[One Brow]

But was the peppered moth evolving into some other type of insect? No, it was still exactly the same peppered moth, merely having a different coloration. Hence, the English medical journal On Call referred to using this example to try to prove evolution as “notorious.” It declared: “This is an excellent demonstration of the function of camouflage, but, since it begins and ends with moths and no new species is formed, it is quite irrelevant as evidence for evolution.”

On Call seems to be confused about what evolution would say, which is that the new moths would still be moths. What else would they be?

As Evolution From Space says: “We doubt, however, that anything more is involved in these cases than the selection of already existing genes.”

Evolution From Space seems to be confused about what evolution would say, which is that previous existing variations are being selected. What else would it be?

In any event, the insects remained of the same kind. They were not evolving into something else.

What is a "kind"?

 

[PearlWatson]

I trust that every last scientist on the planet is not in on a giant con job because they're actually satan worshipers or something. They could be wrong. It wouldn't hurt my feelings.

That's the second time an atheist has gone beyond their usual claim of consensus to absolute and total agreement among scientists. All I have to do is name one scientist who doesn't buy it to refute your delusion that everyone agrees with Darwin's crazy *** story. At least when you stuck with consensus you were on safer although dogmatic ground.

 

[PearlWatson]

a bright white moth is still more visible at night resting on a blackened tree than a black moth.

If there ain't any predators to see them it has no baring on their "fitness" for survival.

There were black and white moths before pollution and there was black and white moths after.

If you continued to support this idea that nature knows how to deal with pollution you would also undermine the entire "climate change" movement. Ooops.

 

[PearlWatson]

There is no difference in quality between "micro-evolution" and "macro-evolution", just quantity. Accepting the former but not the ladder is like believing in rungs, but not in ladders.

Scientism is wonderful like that. They zero in on little things and extrapolate to huge proportions.

Because the desert is flat the whole earth must be.

Because there is local warming that must mean the whole damn world is warming.

Because there are different colored moths then we all must have come from a fish.

You can't see how ridiculous you all are.

The "ladder" slip was amusing.