Today at 05:35 PM Jeptha said this in Post #143
[lucaspa]Ah, the Icons of Evolution nonsense. Wells never argued that peppered moths didn't live on birch trees. Instead, he tried to argue that they didn't live on the trunks. He was wrong. Several studies have documented that 2/3 of the time, peppered moths are observed on the trunks of birch trees.
JEP: Whether they do or dont is probably not important. But if we are going to get into the details of the Biston betularia example, lets look at really what happened. Nothing. That population didnt evolve into anything.
The example wasn't one of speciation. Instead, it was an example of natural selection altering a population in a particularly visible way. So your complaint is irrelevant. There are examples of speciation in the literature to illustrate that point.
Now. If you can show that these moths morphed into bumble bees or something via the evolution fairys sprinkling of her pixie dust, you might have a good example of evolution.
Well, you are going across class lines, but I can give examples of speciation. This is a particularly good one in the lab:
1. G Kilias, SN Alahiotis, and M Pelecanos A multifactorial genetic investigation of speciation theory using drosophila melanogaster Evolution 34:730-737, 1980. Got new species of fruit flies in the lab after 5 years on different diets and temperatures. Also confirmation of natural selection in the process. Lots of references to other studies that saw speciation. Now, when the researchers checked the difference in
coded DNA between the new species, they found a difference of 3%. Since chimps and humans differ by less than 2%, this is more change than between humans and chimps.
Another good study of speciation in the lab, by hybridization this time, is:
2. Speciation in action Science 72:700-701, 1996 A great laboratory study of the evolution of a hybrid plant species. Scientists did it in the lab, but the genetic data says it happened the same way in nature. Follow up paper in PNAS
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/95/20/11757
Another mistruth. The original lineage of the horse looked like a "ladder". That model for evolution has indeed been falsified (or rather, was never realistic to begin with) and that evolutionary lineage look like branching bushes. But the horse lineage is particularly well studied and the lineage known.
JEP: It is not known.
6. PD Gingerich, Paleontology and phylogeny: patterns of evolution of the species level in early Tertiary mammals. American J. of Science, 276: 407-424, 1980. Transitional series between species of early horses linking "higher" taxa. web site for horse evolution:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/
Niles Eldridge has come out stating this example is simply fraud as have others: When challenged to produce a series of fossils demonstrating the transition of one species into another, the 4-3-1 toe evolution of the horse is frequently presented as evidence....
This is
not a quote from Eldredge, but a quote from the website, which does
not say it is quoting Eldredge. False witness, Jep. Now,
if you really "follow Christianity", how is it you don't know the 9th Commandment?
http://www.mbowden.surf3.net/evol.htm
These are the opinions of mbowden (whoever that is) and not that of Eldredge. You tried for Argument from Authority again. The quote from Simpson goes back to what I said: the old "ladder" displays from the 1940s. Those are inaccurate.
JEP: Yet the last time I taught high school science this exact same example was in the textbooks. Can you explain why, after it has been known to be fraud for almost 50 years?
Yes, textbooks are very resistant to change. Of course, how long ago were you taught? Perhaps it was 50 years ago.
However, newer textbooks, particularly Miller's, have been corrected.
ID was taught in the 1700s and 1800s. The best expression of it is in Willam Paley's Natural History: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature published in 1802.
JEP: Not as ID.
As ID. Paley was just a
little more open about the identity of the ID. ARN isn't at all shy about identifying the ID. Paley and ID are both teaching the same thing: the Argument from Design.
And you can thank us creationists because we brought you most of the science you use in the lab today.
That you can't justify. Most of what we use in the lab today came after creationism was falsified by 1831. I have seen
nothing that ID has contributed to science. ID is never used in biomedical research, but evolution is used all the time. In fact, if evolution were not true, all the advances in medicine over the past 50 years could not have happened.
However, did creationists contribute to science before 1831? Yes. Most of the geological column and fossil succession was done by creationists. Early biogeography was also done by creationists. In fact, it was creationists that falsified both creationism and ID.
Then why do IDers not accept Raelianism? Go to the ARN website. No IDer really thinks that the "designer" is anything other than Yahweh.
JEP: I would suppose that some do.
Find one. If that is so, then you should be able to produce a paper on ARN that discusses the possibility of an ID other than God. I haven't seen one. Perhaps you can find it.
You so misunderstand ID that you seem to think it is a denomination of a religious movement. Ive met IDists who are Christians, Jews and Muslims. Go over to ARN and you will meet some who are agnostic.
I've been to ARN. Only Berlinski is said to be an agnostic. I'm talking about the "scientists" who are IDers, not the rank and file.
Creationism is a scientific theory. It was the scientific theory prior to 1831. It is a falsified theory.
JEP: Nope. If it is, then please state this theory and the evidence it is based on.
Also please list the evidence that was used to falsify it.
The theory is that 1) the earth is less than 20,000 years old, 2) the Flood accounts for all the geology on the planet, 3) each species is created in its present form and can't change.
Look for the works of Thomas Burnet, John Woodward, and William Whiston. Strict creationism got falsified by 1800 in that naturalists realized that not
all geological features could be explained by a Flood. They modified the theory and had the Flood explain successively fewer and fewer deposits. You can see that in the writings of William Buckland, Adam Sedgwick, and Louis Agassiz, for example. Creationism in the form of unchanged species was promoted by Richard Owen and Blythe, among others.
For a summary of the evidence used to support the theory and the evidence that eventually falsified it see
Genesis and Geology by Gillespie or
The Biblical Flood by Davis A. Young or you can see Young's paper "The Biblical Flood as a Geological Agent: A Review of Theories" in The Paleontological Society Papers, volume 5, October 1999. You can order a copy from
www.ncseweb.org
Now, what counts for a theory is the evidence that falsifies it. You can always find supporting evidence if that is what you are looking for. The evidence that was once thought to support creationism is now explained by other hypotheses/theories. So there is now no evidence that is explained
only by creationism.
Jeptha, a theory doesn't stop being science because it is falsified. It merely moves from the short list of currently valid theories to the very long list of falsified theories.
Uh, both your websites refer to a creationism journal, which you say is not science.
JEP: These are creationist who study ID and freely admit they are creationists. Nothing wrong with honesty, is there?
These are all young-earth creationists. Gish is one such. Therefore they don't fit your view of ID. It looks like you want it both ways: creationism is out but you want whatever they say in support to count. These people diasvow ID because it does not accept a young earth or Biblical Flood.
Are there particular papers you want us to look at? Otherwise, you have a journal devoted to creationism and advocating creationism, which you say is not science. Any "ID" they use is within creationism and subordinate to it.
I disagree. I understand ID quite well. I've read the real ID literature: Creation Hypothesis, Mere Creation, Darwin's Black Box, Darwin on Trial, No Free Lunch. When ID makes testable statements -- such as irreducible complexity or complex specified information -- those ideas/statements are falsified.
JEP: I dont doubt your intelligence. But if you think that irreducible complexity or complex specified information as in Dembskis EF have been falsified, then I would love to give you the opportunity to show me how.
Happily. I was giving the summary of my conclusions. You want how I reached them.
Let's start with CSI. Dembski claims this cannot happen without intelligence. Right? Dembski also admits that proteins are complex. So, while reading my old biochemistry text, I found this (note the date):
"In more recent work, Fox and his colleagues have shown that basic proteinoids, rich in lysine residues, selectively associate with the homopolynucleotides poly C and poly U but not with poly A or poly G. On the other hand, arginine-rich proteinoids associate selectively with poly A and poly G. In this manner,
the information in proteinoids can be used to select polynucleotides. Morever, it is striking that aminoacyl adenylates yield oligopeptides when incubated with proteinoid-polynucleotide complexes, which thus have some of the characteristics of ribosomes. Fox has suggested that proteinoids bearing this sort of primitive
chemical information could have transferred it to a primitive nucleic acid; the
specificity of interaction between certain proteinoids and polynucleotides suggests the beginning of the genetic code." A. Lehninger, Biochemistry, 1975, pp 1047-1048
Complex because they are proteins, specified because they only bind to particular oligonucleotides, and information. Complex, specified, information. All arising from chemical reactions not influenced by an intelligent entity. That falsifies CSI.
The rest in the next posts.
It's too bad that you are condemned to ignorance because of the false beliefs of those that run your school. Well, you can kiss a career as a medical doctor goodbye. 
