2005 Top Award for Evolution -AAAS

SamCJ said:

Spoken like a drunken wrestler. I doubt you will cite evidence to support your conspiracy theory.

Click to expand...

It's as extant as your sarcasm detector.

Does it resemble your Godless theory?

Click to expand...

And it has as much predictability as intelligent design conjectures - none.

SamCJ said:

My question is why do biologists need to beleive in the randomness of mutations in order to study the chimps genome?

Click to expand...

Why do scientist need to assume attractions between objects in order to come up with the formula Fg = (m1 ∙ m2)/d^2?

SamCJ said:

... because I don't get it.

Click to expand...

Sounds about right.

I've been answering your posts in previous threads and if there's one thing I don't get is why you don't get it.

SamCJ said:

I can study an motor in a car to learn how to repair a motor on a lawn mower. I do not need to know anything about how they came to be. All I have to know is that they have lots of similarities that could be helpful in understanding what is wrong with the bad one. If that transfer of knowledge can work for intelligently designed things like cars and lawn mowers, why is it necessary to posit randomness for biological things to transfer knowledge of one to knowledge of the other?

Click to expand...

What randomness? Natural selection isn't exactly random.

Besides, what's the big deal with learning how things work, why they work, and where they came from? You may not enjoy learning, but others do...so why **** in their cornflakes? Don't forget that we have come so, so far technologically in the 30,000 years or so of civilization...that's not a whole lot of time.

Our understanding of the world has gone from superstition to space exploration, and we will be eventually heading out further into the cosmos to achieve a deeper understanding of the solar system, galaxy, and universe.

If everyone were to accept god at face value we would never have gotten to where we are. In this respect, religion is a major burden on society's advancement; though I doubt that without it we would be better off.

Telling people that we shouldn't continue to learn about the universe because it interferes with your quaint view is a very dangerous road to take. Who knows, we may find something that supports your views.

SamCJ said:

Please refer to the link where I have mentioned gravity, or admit you have lied.

Click to expand...

No lie, just an analogy.

the theory of gravity is as much of a "no-god" theory as evolution, so I assumed you would have a similar issue with it.

Essentially I was making a joke out of your previous thread.

Quasicentennial said:

The Ten Commandments. God's laws written from the past are still relevant today and no lawyer or judge can see anything wrong with them. If you find anything wrong with God's laws then you can refute creationism concocted by ordinary people who believe that life after death is possible.

Click to expand...

Which version of "God's Ten Commandments" and what does this have to do with the OP or the fact that it assumes a randomness which is other than random?

SamCJ said:

Your joke is humorous only to others of your ilk. I consider this argument a serious matter and do not apprciate being the butt of your jokes.

Click to expand...

I don't appreciate you ignoring my post. I took the time to make it and try to be reasonable with you, you could do the same.

Quasicentennial said:

The Ten Commandments. God's laws written from the past are still relevant today and no lawyer or judge can see anything wrong with them. If you find anything wrong with God's laws then you can refute creationism concocted by ordinary people who believe that life after death is possible.

Click to expand...

Man, what?

SamCJ said:

The overwhelming majority of evolutionists here are atheists, and they fervently believe the the mutation that must begin every change in a species occurs randomly and by some physical mistake rather than by an intelligent cause. There is scant evidence to support this view because the occurrence of the mutation cannot be observed. They posit some defect in the replicating mechanism, but they have not observed that either, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they have not observed such a defect improving survivability of the species through the process of natural selection. Natural selection is not random, but that is besides the point. The required mutation is considered by atheists to whom I directed my question as random. Are you an atheist?

Click to expand...

I am not an atheist, I'm taking a neutral stance on the existence or non-existence of gods. I'm skeptical, but I won't deny existence.

I'm not a biologist so I'm by no means an expert on the mechanisms behind genetics, but as far as I understand a child will obtain traits common to both parents, and may have some random mutation which may or may not be helpful to the creature. This would suggest that the random mutation is not a large part of evolution, but rather the traits from the parents are a more telling aspect. If the traits it obtains work well together and are succesfull at keeping it alive and breeding, some of the traits will be carried into the next generation, and through a filter-like process of elimination, the bad traits will be evolved away and the good traits improved upon, eventually ending up in a different creature.

Random mutations caused by errors or disease are a factor in evolution, but they certainly aren't the only thing influencing change.

Does this relate to my question somehow? I am suggesting in opposition to the claims of AAAS, that biologists can study the chimpanzee genome and perhaps use that knowledge for the benefit of mankind without excluding the possibility of an intelligent cause of the differences between chimps and mankind. Your comment seems to side with my tentative position on this subject.

Click to expand...

what you said in your earlier post...

I can study an motor in a car to learn how to repair a motor on a lawn mower. I do not need to know anything about how they came to be. All I have to know is that they have lots of similarities that could be helpful in understanding what is wrong with the bad one. If that transfer of knowledge can work for intelligently designed things like cars and lawn mowers, why is it necessary to posit randomness for biological things to transfer knowledge of one to knowledge of the other?

Click to expand...

The way you worded this post suggests that you believe that there is an intelligence behind evolution and that you are scared to find out that there isn't. Biology still has a long way to go before evolution and genetics are fully understood, but if you give it time, stronger conclusions will be drawn. Perhaps they will find mechanisms that cause a seemingly random outcome. Remember: Quantum mechanics is also driven by probability rather than solid answers.

The point of evolution is not just to learn how to perform better medicine, but to understand our origins. And while it may not be important to you, it is important to us as a species to understand where we came from, and where we might be going. Creationism attempts to tell us where we came from, but I believe it's a bit of a lazy way of doing it. It may have been acceptable 2,000 years ago when our technology wasn't as developed to say "God" to things we don't understand..but now we are able to find the reason for things to happen and how they came about. If we were to just say "God" to everything, we would never get anywhere.

I am enthralled by the achievements of science and do not want to impair the ability of scientists to continue their successes in the future. If you are not an atheists and you have read Dembski and Behe objectively, you must agree, I think, that there is credible evidence that the differences between species, and particularly the differences between man and other organism is a result of an invisible intelligent hand. The methods they use to discuss the evidence appear to me to be legitimate science. The atheists here claim otherwise, but there are no compelling arguments that I have seen to justify the exclusion of the possibility of intelligence. Those atheists have a clear agenda. They have adopted no-God as their religion and they do not want anyone using their scientific methods to discover his existence. I understand where they are coming from because I am not far from being an atheist myself, and I too am afraid God might exists and may be unhappy with my attitude about him. If he does exist and if the universe is his creation, it is undeniable that he is more powerful and smarter than I am.

Click to expand...

Good. But it does sound like you are coming from a frightened creationist standpoint, rather than a neutral one. Keep in mind that as more study is done, it may, in fact, be revealed that God is the cause. I find it unlikely, but it's not impossible. The universe is a crazy place.

SamCJ said:

A very flawed analogy, unless you can demonstrate that gravity acts randomly.

Click to expand...

Can you demonmstrate that evolutionary theory states that evolution is random? I bet not. As such, a good analogy.

It is as much a "no-god" theory only to a fundamentalist atheist.

Click to expand...

So evolution when accepted by a theistic evolutionist becomes a "god" theory? Since the theory doesn't change from TE to atheist, it is fairly reasonable to assume that the theory is agnostic, and it is NOT just a "no god" theory.

Your joke is humorous only to others of your ilk. I consider this argument a serious matter and do not apprciate being the butt of your jokes.

Click to expand...

Awww, bless!

"Butt" seriously...

This is a serious matter, if only because of the amazing lack of scientific knowledge that most people have on the subject. Personally I know science reasonably well, and I know that at no point does it take a "god" or "no god" stance anywhere. The theories in science are independent of any deity and only assume that the evidence points to what it seems to point to, e.g. that 12000 year old carbon dated organic matter is actually in the region of 12000 years dead, rather than some other date due to supernatural interference from some unspecified and undetectable entity. Unless you believe that god is a trickster out to fool everyone, then this is surely a reasonable assumption.

This is why fundamentalism is very much a minority among people in general, and less so the more scientific education one recieves (there are many threads which link to this correlation). The idea that all of science is wrong becomes quite ridiculous when you actually look into science in depth and understand the methodology used to develop theories.

SamCJ said:

I can study an motor in a car to learn how to repair a motor on a lawn mower. I do not need to know anything about how they came to be. All I have to know is that they have lots of similarities that could be helpful in understanding what is wrong with the bad one. If that transfer of knowledge can work for intelligently designed things like cars and lawn mowers, why is it necessary to posit randomness for biological things to transfer knowledge of one to knowledge of the other?






You are adding to the opposing arguments I have had with others, and I will look into these things when I have time, but as I said before, whether or not mutations are actually randon or intelligently directed is not relevant to my question. They may well be random, and for purposes of the question, I will assume that they are random. The question is what role did knowledge of the mutations being random as opposed to intelligent play in the study of the chimpanzee's genome? In absence of a better explanation, it seems to me that the chimps genome could have just as well been studied by the biologist even if he believed erroneously that the differences between chimps and humans were a result of intelligent design.



You lose me with "Hence."




May Santa bless you, look over you and bring your children many gifts.

Click to expand...

Gidday SamCJ,


I am still having some trouble understanding the exact nature of some of your questions, so my apologies. I shall write this in hope that I am answering you.

SamCJ said:

I can study an motor in a car to learn how to repair a motor on a lawn mower. I do not need to know anything about how they came to be. All I have to know is that they have lots of similarities that could be helpful in understanding what is wrong with the bad one.

Click to expand...

But SamCJ, science is not, and never was, just restricted to this kind of thing i.e. making rockets, understanding how cars work in order to repair them. Scientists/humans also want to know how the cars came to be.

With respect to all things we see in nature, we wish to know origins as much as we wish to know processes as much as we wish to know structures. Thus, with respect to atoms, we wish to know what they look like, that is their structure; we wish to know how they are held together; and we wish to know how they originate. With respect to rain, we wish to know what rain is and what it looks like; we wish to know what it is that allows it to exist within a cloud and then fall from the cloud; and we wish to know where it comes from in the first place.

SamCJ said:

If that transfer of knowledge can work for intelligently designed things like cars and lawn mowers, why is it necessary to posit randomness for biological things to transfer knowledge of one to knowledge of the other?

Click to expand...

I am still struggling to understand exactly what you are asking here. Let me paraphrase you to see if I understand you:-

What you seem to be asking is “If I can learn how a car works, and use this knowledge to fix a car, then why cannot I learn how a cell works to use this knowledge to explain how a cell changes”?

At this point I do not see how your analogy is reasonable at all.

Intelligence can easily explain how cells change (evolve). But intelligence can easily explain why rain falls, how rain originates, what rain really is. And intelligence can easily explain how atoms are held together, how they came to be etc.

That is, intelligence can explain anything and everything.

However, and this is one reason why Judge Jones weighed in against ID - the intelligence is untestable. Importantly, Jones said that he cannot argue that ID is not true. However, he said that, as it currently stands, ID is totally untestable. And he agreed that notions of variation, random mutation and non-random mutation are all scientifically testable. That is, the processes behind evolution are observable.

Now it just could be that we are mistaken, that random mutation and non-random mutation have nothing to do with changes (evolution?) in animals across time. It just could be that random and non-random chemical and physical processes have nothing to do with the origin of rain. It could be that physical forces have nothing to do with the reason why atoms hold together or how they originate.

It could be that an intelligence (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent) actually holds all atoms together for all time, using his/her direct action. Maybe rain forms because the supernatural intelligence actually pulls water molecules from the sea, rivers and lakes and, with his/her supernatural fingers, joins them together to make clouds. Then when it comes time to rain, he/she pushes the drops from the clouds. It could be that this supernatural entity, on deciding to create a new animal, uses an animal already existing and, with his/her fingers pulls a molecule or two of DNA apart and resets them so that a new animal will later form when those DNA molecules are expressed.

However, if you wish to go down this path and have your idea accepted then you must:-

a) demonstrate that this supernatural entity exists and
b) show that the entity actually behaves in the manner you believe.

Science does not accept ID because, despite what ID claims, neither a) nor b) have occurred. As Jones noted, ID does not argue positively for itself. It argues negatively against evolution. That is, ID says to evolution “You cannot explain this, therefore ID did it.”

As Jones noted – such is not sound science.

Against this, we do know that our cells contain an enormous amount of genetic diversity. We do know the causes of this diversity. These are observations that scientists make on a daily basis. We do know that this diversity gives rise to variations amongst animals. This too can be observed. We are beginning to observe that this diversity can also give rise to new species. We also observe changes in animal life both across space and through time. We would like to explain how this came about.

Darwin and Wallace offered a solution – in part. Mendel offered a solution in part. The combination of Darwin’s and Mendel’s ideas (neo_Darwinism) is considered by most scientists to be the best explanation for those patterns we really do see in living organisms and extinct ones.

Neo_Darwinism was accepted by Jones to be scientific, because like all other science, it was a theory that could be tested. Various parts of the theory could be tested, individually.

If you read the scientific literature, journals are full of tests for conventional evolutionary ideas. Duplication of genes and chromosomes has been observed. It is hypothesized that such could be important in evolution because one gene would function normally while the other gene evolves towards a new function. This hypothesis is being tested by looking to see if remnants of old genes can be found in the genome of animals. And it would appear that structures which look like old genes can be found. So the hypothesis gains credibility.

Until very recently, and I mean in the past year, the exact molecular mechanism for speciation was unknown. Speciation is very important for evolution. Tests on fruit-flies have been able to demonstrate one mechanism for speciation – a change in the allele of one gene in a species which causes death in the child males, if the parent ties to back breed with its sibling species.

Tests and experiments such as these are being done daily and reported daily. ID, that is, the postulate of an intelligence that does all of this, does no similar testing simply because the notion of the ID has not been defined in such a manner that it can be tested.

In science, you explain things by using that which you know about and can know about. You do not explain things by using that which you do not know about. You do not explain things by using ideas which are completely speculative. You do not do so with respect to the rain and atoms. You do not do so with respect to life.

If you wish to do so with respect to life, then why do you not do so with respect to rain and atoms?

What I am asking, is why are you not consistent in your use of methodological framework?

And by the word “speculative” I am not meaning “wrong” or “untrue” or “non existent”. I mean that you just cannot say one way or the other. You have no evidence, one way or the other. This is why Jones wrote that he was not saying that ID was not true. What he was saying is that ID is like “life on Mars”. Maybe, maybe not. We just do not know.

However, with respect to life on Mars, we can test the idea. Even now, with out looking at Mars closely enough, we can bring observations to bear to intelligently discuss the likelihood of life and to design equipment to test the idea out. So life on Mars is, ultimately, very different to ID.

SamCJ said:

You are adding to the opposing arguments I have had with others, and I will look into these things when I have time, but as I said before, whether or not mutations are actually random or intelligently directed is not relevant to my question. They may well be random, and for purposes of the question, I will assume that they are random. The question is what role did knowledge of the mutations being random as opposed to intelligent play in the study of the chimpanzee's genome? In absence of a better explanation, it seems to me that the chimps genome could have just as well been studied by the biologist even if he believed erroneously that the differences between chimps and humans were a result of intelligent design.

Click to expand...

It is here that I also have some trouble understanding your question:-

SamCJ:- … what role did knowledge of the mutations being random as opposed to intelligent play in the study of the chimpanzee's genome?

It depends on what you mean by “study”.

If by study you mean “sequencing the genome”, then probably random mutations vs intelligence played no role.

If by study you mean “explain why the chimp genome is so much like ours, yet different nevertheless” then random mutations vs intelligence played a big role in answering this question. See above for why this is so and why Jones himself came down so heavily in favor of the mainstream and was so damning of the IDers.


So when you write:-

SamCJ:- it seems to me that the chimps genome could have just as well been studied by the biologist even if he believed erroneously that the differences between chimps and humans were a result of intelligent design.

then of course you are correct – depending on the kind of study being done.

However, as I said above SamCJ, scientists want to study genomes in more ways that just see what they look like. Scientists also wish to determine how they how they work and how they originated. It is so with cars. We don’t just study cars for the sake of repairing them. Ask any car enthusiast who is also interested in history. How and why the car originated is just as much a valid study as is how the car works in case I should have to fix it.

SamCJ said:

You lose me with "Hence."

Click to expand...

Hopefully my long essay has not lost you even more.

SamCJ said:

May Santa bless you, look over you and bring your children many gifts.

Click to expand...

Ha! These days the children are too old. The grand-children had a great time though. That is what makes the day a pleasure.

Hope you day was/is a great one too.


Regards, Roland

SamCJ said:

I see some things wrong with them.

They have left out God's first commandment to Adam and Eve: Multiply and be fruitful.

They leave out: Nurture your minor children.

They leave out: God helps those who help themselves.

They leave out: Work hard to help your neighbor continuously by obtaining a reasonable compensation.

This should be enough flaws for the moment, or do you disagree with my additions?

Click to expand...

I hope you aren't making the claim that your additions are biblical references. For one, "God helps those who help themselves," is a maxim from a Poor Richard's Almanac penned by Benjamin Franklin.