Evolution...

[quote]Originally posted by LouisBooth
"Evolution is believed by the vast majority of scientists whose fields touch on it even lightly, and by a fair number of Christians. "

Well, so was leeching..what's your point?


Leeching was never scientific. Please find the dates of the find use of leeches and compare it to the introduction of Aristotle's works in Europe.

No, you misunderstand the razor, it states the less assumptions the better, ie the answer that is most likly is right. This is the case with evolution because you have to make many many assumptions to make it work, and I would say, good science doesn't work like that.


Evolution makes three assumptions:
1) inherited genetic variation
2) competition for limited resources
3) lots of time

It turns out that all three assumptions are true. Evolution logically follows from those assumptions.

Creation requires a miracle for every species created.

Oh no, leeching coming up in this thread too.

Actually, leeches are still used in medicine today.
They are applied to the area of a limb reattachment after the operation in order to keep blood flowing.

Some species of bacteria are now resistant to antibiotics. They showed favorable mutations. (I'm not a specialist in the field though, so if you want more details I'll have to point you to more informed sources...)

The entire business of designing medicines uses the principles of natural selection that some theists here (inexplicably) deny.

Why are scientists now concerned about the American over-use of antibacterial products? Because it only kills the bacteria it is able to kill. The bacteria it cannot kill remains and multiplies, eventually making the 'antibacterial' product ineffective.

The same concepts are used in the HIV 'cocktail' drugs. There are many HIV mutations, and scientists use this fact, combined with the power of natural selection, to contain HIV.

The same concepts have been used to design computer programs since the 1950's when an IBM research scientist created a world class checkers program, not by teaching it how to play world-class checkers, but by designing a dozen or so novice programs that were designed to mutate, compete, and breed. After many generations, his creation had mutated into a world class checkers program -- a program that the programmer could no longer beat.

The same concepts, like it or not, apply to us big, multicellular lifeforms. Why do you think fish that have adapted to live in caves often have non-functioning eyes? Because, above ground, any mutation that damages the eye damages the odds of reproduction. In a cave, eye mutations do not impact reproductive success, and thus, over time, it becomes utterly non-deviant for those fish to have inoperative eyes.

It's time to stop fighting windmills, people. When your doctor prescribes you antibiotics, and warns you that no matter what you *must* consume them all, do you listen, or do you dismiss him as an 'evolutionist'? The reason you must consume all your antibiotics is because, if you don't, the hardy few will survive and reproduce, leaving only the hardy, leaving you in a much worse predicament than the illness you started with.

We do have documents that support creation. I think that almost every religion has somekind of creation account. Whouldn't true science allow for research of the claims of these religions? To my knowledge they do not look into any creation account. From the get go God is not real. True science dictates that this is a false assumption. Why doesn't science try to proove there is a God and a supernatural realm? Yes, there is now some research in this area. The point is that science is antichrist from the get go.

Concerning genetic adaptation:
Quote
"The odds are 10(with 161 zeros behind it) to 1 that not one usable protein would have been produced by chance in all the history of the earth, using all the appropreate atoms on earth at the fantastic rate they describe"
"The probability of forming one protein molecule by chance is 1 in 10(with 243 zeros behind it)"

This is an interesting point, but it misses a crucial point about science: Science has never, ever, tried to make claims about God. It can't. However, how exactly would you propose that scientists "look into" creation accounts? Say we take the old "six thousand years old" figure. We have a couple thousand years of history, and we can study objects of known age, and we can show that certain compounds change over time. (Carbon 14, for instance.)

Given this, we can find objects which appear to be well over six thousand years old.

Thus, the best available data we have suggest that the world is *older* than that.

This is the point at which the theory is flagged as "not very likely".

This happens to scientific theories all the time; it's how we improve the state of the art. At one point, people generally believed that women were not as intelligent as men. When we developed ways of testing "intelligence", we found that women are just as smart as men, possibly smarter. The old theory got thrown out; it was no longer reasonable to accept it.

However, most creation stories *can't* be tested. One of the points of the scientific method is that you don't use a theory that you can't test for; if you can't describe how the world would be different if this theory were false, there's no point in trying to find out; it's no longer a scientific theory at all.

This is called "falsifiability". If I have the belief that the cat dish is empty, I can propose a test: I'll go look. This means that, however humble it might be, this theory is a reasonable scientific one. By contrast, if I hypothesize that God occasionally comes to earth in human form to play Skee Ball, there's not much I can do to test this theory. There's no test I can describe that would show this not to be the case. Thus, I can't do anything about it; it's not science.

Every time someone comes up with numbers like this, I laugh. We don't have nearly enough information to be that precise. For that matter, every few years, we come up with a new data point showing that the probabilities are different.

We simply don't know how likely or unlikely this would be. We don't even have a good way to find out. We've verified, trivially, that you can get simple basic proteins by putting simpler chemicals in a test tube, occasionally zapping it, and waiting. We don't know how long it would take to make more complicated things - but the planet appears to have had a billion years to try.

One key point of science: If you have a theory that says something is unlikely, and you observe that it's happened more than a few times, the theory is probably wrong.

Yes, beneficial mutations have been observed. It is a standard bacteriology experiment, going back fifty years to Dobzhansky.

The common example is the evolution of a bacteria to become resistant to an antibiotic. No, this isn't 'merely adaptation', because the protein coding necessary for this trait simply wasn't present in the beginning population of the bacteria.

You can start with just ONE bacterium, from a population with known DNA sequence. Grow this bug into a population of millions, then introduce an antibiotic. Whoops, they all died! Try again. After a few tries, you'll actually get a case where a few bacteria DO survive. These grow into a population that is resistant to the antibiotic.

The DNA can be analyzed afterwards, and a duplication+mutation will have produced a new protein which provides resistance to this antibiotic.

Another great example is the nylon eating bacteria, described here


What do you creationists really think about evolutionary biologists, that they are all involved in some great conspiracy? Get real.

Evolution is even taught as sound science at places like Southern Methodist U, and Baylor Baptist college. Go find the websites for those colleges if you don't believe me.

Dobzhansky, didn't he do the fruit fly experiments? If I remember right even He acknowledged that most mutants are more of less disadvantageous as refering to fruit flys.

The bacteria experiments are interesting. They can be used to put up a decent arguement. This would show that mutations can happen and survive. It could be deduced that if it can happen in bacteria then it can happen for species too. Still no proof though.

some of you up to date seeming to be scientists answer this: My sources are from 86'. Carbon dating is not acurate. It's based on a uniformed rate of decay of the elements. For example, and candle will burn at a specific rate of decay, but if a window is opened and a breeze of air blows on the candle then the candle will burn faster. Now, if we look at Genesis and the story of Noah when it rained, many beleive that the rain came from a canopy of water that surrounded the earth. This would be like an open window and would have changed the rate of decay. In other words, carbon dating would be ineffective.

Carbon dating isn't used except for organic matter from less than 50k years ago.

What is used to date the age of the earth is a variety of radioisotope methods using long-life isotopes such as uranium and argon.

And the best of these methods make no assumptions about initial concentrations of the parent isotope. The isochron method measures two daughter isotopes, and one is used as a check against the other.

As far as the actual decay rate being constant--this is based on the weak nuclear force, I believe, and this force has many other observable effects.

If this force were varying even the tiniest amount, it would have been noticed over the 40 or 50 years it has been measured. And it would have tremendous effects on astronomical observations, too, since it governs solar fusion processes too.

I think this is a twisting around of Hoyle's bogus argument against abiogenesis. He tries to argue against self-assembly of a complete cell, which is a pure straw man.

We actually know the odds of a 'usable protein' being produced by chance are 100%. A huge variety of amino acids are found in the pre-biotic tails of comets, and in meteorites such as the Murcheson meteorite that landed in Australia in the late 1960's. This find made the creationist attacks against the Urey-Miller experiment (lightning in a jar) in the 50's just irrelevant. The odds are 1 in 1.

From these amino acids, the chances of a simple self-replicating proteing arising by chance are around 1 in 10^40. Seems quite unlikely, but in a decent sized pond of water, it could actually happen in just a few years. Or it might take a million years. Either way, once you have a self-replicating molecule, and a limited environment, you WILL get evolution.