Creationists: Explain your understanding of microevolution and macroevolution

[Phred]

which again would be my point, the observations show something else is constraining changes within stable viable ranges that would not be set by purely random mutations.

Survival of the fittest says nothing about survival of the fitter or even the 'as fit as the previous generation'

"Stabilizing selection (not to be confused with negative or purifying selection[1][2]) is a type of natural selection in which the population mean stabilizes on a particular non-extreme trait value. This is thought to be the most common mechanism of action for natural selection because most traits do not appear to change drastically over time.[3] Stabilizing selection commonly uses negative selection (a.k.a. purifying selection) to select against extreme values of the character. Stabilizing selection is the opposite of disruptive selection. Instead of favoring individuals with extreme phenotypes, it favors the intermediate variants"

^ as above, the observation that not much seems to change over time is agreed upon- and we agree that extremely deleterious mutations would obviously be selected out more quickly..

So what does that leave us? 'Intermediate variants' is an interestingly vague choice of words- because they of course would not be entirely neutral, they would always still lean deleterious if left to random mutation, because there will always be infinitely more ways to degrade a biological design than improve on it. Even if only slight, these would be the changes that would accumulate-
survival of the fittest still operates, but in this case means; survival of the least degraded version of previous generations.

"survival of the fittest" isn't a concept that comes from evolution. It's from popular magazines.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

"survival of the fittest" isn't a concept that comes from evolution. It's from popular magazines.

Well sure, it's a popular term for the process of natural selection (of genes more fit for the organism's environment)

Different term, same concept

Call it what you will, the substance of the point is that 'the fittest' or 'best adapted' or 'most suitable' genetic traits selected in a population, would not necessarily be more fit or better adapted than the previous generation- even though that is often strongly implied.

 

[Phred]

I have no problem with that, I always like a good analogy to work with!
So the players have a goal, they act with the anticipation of scoring goals and winning the match.. with this advantage yes, small gains can add up to large ones

But according to ToE, there is no anticipation or goal, just random error- so our players must run in random changing directions- running out of bounds has them called off (extinct) and so the entire team ends up out of play before a touchdown is scored- again aka entropy.

I think there is a form of unintentional bias involved here, everything we do is in anticipation of a future consequence- and so it is very hard to strip this intuition from our thought experiments.

You're taking an analogy meant to point out that small things add up to big things and mangling it. In football there is a goal. In evolution there is not a "goal of evolution" but each individual has a goal, that's to have offspring. Organisms are not evolving TOWARD something. And this drives you insane because you desperately desire a god managing everything so you lose your mind over the idea that a process can happen and it can cause highly complex results but not be aimed TOWARD things. This seems completely wrong to you. So you reject it at every possible turn. But small things add up. There are no mechanisms in nature to prevent their adding up. So once a little bit of code is added to DNA it stays there.

that was certainly the prediction in Darwin's time, that events like the Cambrian explosion

You do know the "Cambrian Explosion" lasted for 541 MILLION years. Right?

would turn out to be mere artifacts of an incomplete record- to be filled in and smoothed out later. But the opposite unfolded - these events have become ever more explosive, followed by long periods of stasis and/or extinction- very little evidence of slow gradual improvement as renowned Paleontologist David Raup noted:

"We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn't changed much... We have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time."

"In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general. these have not been found-yet the optimism has died hard and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks."

Every fossil, every creature is a transitional. You still seem to want the mythical half-wing or half-leg and that will never happen. No creature will ever be less than fully functional, fully able to hunt, fight and fly, leap or run. The constant drumbeat of demanding your misunderstanding of evolution before you'll believe it never ends.

So I think the aspect of faith is important here, that we acknowledge our beliefs as such.
'blind faith is faith which does not recognize itself'

You do that. I accept knowledge for what it is. It's not faith. Life evolved. That's the phenomenon that has been observed. The Theory of Evolution explains HOW it evolved. If we're wrong about that it won't because a magic man in the sky created everything at once.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

You do know the "Cambrian Explosion" lasted for 541 MILLION years. Right?

Well I know I'm the guy that 'doesn't care about facts' but..

The Cambrian explosion or Cambrian radiation[1] was an event approximately 541 million years ago in the Cambrian period when practically all major animal phyla started appearing in the fossil record.[2][3] It lasted for about 13 – 25 million years

Let him without sin cast the first stone

 

[Guy Threepwood]

You're taking an analogy meant to point out that small things add up to big things and mangling it. In football there is a goal. In evolution there is not a "goal of evolution" but each individual has a goal, that's to have offspring. Organisms are not evolving TOWARD something. And this drives you insane because you desperately desire a god managing everything so you lose your mind over the idea that a process can happen and it can cause highly complex results but not be aimed TOWARD things. This seems completely wrong to you. So you reject it at every possible turn. But small things add up. There are no mechanisms in nature to prevent their adding up. So once a little bit of code is added to DNA it stays there.

Again I was raised atheist and remained so for about 30 years, I understand the intellectual gratification of reducing reality to a handful of immutable laws- as was held for physics for so long

the 'wishful thinking' argument cuts both ways- I'm interested in what actually happened- whatever the implications

Every fossil, every creature is a transitional. You still seem to want the mythical half-wing or half-leg and that will never happen. No creature will ever be less than fully functional, fully able to hunt, fight and fly, leap or run. The constant drumbeat of demanding your misunderstanding of evolution before you'll believe it never ends.

how about just a short necked Giraffe (which was an ancestor)? that would be a good place to start- I'm sure that's not hard to find

You do that. I accept knowledge for what it is. It's not faith. Life evolved. That's the phenomenon that has been observed. The Theory of Evolution explains HOW it evolved. If we're wrong about that it won't because a magic man in the sky created everything at once.

Which is more supernatural, a rabbit spontaneously appearing in a hat for no particular reason?
Or simply being put there by a 'magic man'?

Though I think we have some room for common ground, there are other alternatives

 

[Phred]

Which is more supernatural, a rabbit spontaneously appearing in a hat for no particular reason?
Or simply being put there by a 'magic man'?

There is nothing "supernatural."

Though I think we have some room for common ground, there are other alternatives

Life evolved. If you don't accept that it did we're pretty much at an impass.

 

[Hans Blaster]

Again I was raised atheist and remained so for about 30 years, I understand the intellectual gratification of reducing reality to a handful of immutable laws- as was held for physics for so long

Do you think physics has been adding new laws willy-nilly lately? Or think the laws are flexible now?

 

[Guy Threepwood]

Do you think physics has been adding new laws willy-nilly lately? Or think the laws are flexible now?

No it broke free of the Victorian age reductionist model eventually- but it wasn't easy- notions of mysterious unpredictable guiding forces underwriting physics was still considered the realm of supernatural pseudoscience long into the 20th C. I'm old enough to remember a physics teacher who still held on to steady state as Hoyle did until his death in 2001.

as Max Planck- pioneer of quantum mechanics (and skeptic of atheism) said: science progresses one funeral at a time. I think mainstream biology will see a similar breakthrough eventually.

 

[Ophiolite]

as Max Planck- pioneer of quantum mechanics (and skeptic of atheism) said: science progresses one funeral at a time. I think mainstream biology will see a similar breakthrough eventually.

Alternatively your views may vanish from the planet for the same reason.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

Alternatively your views may vanish from the planet for the same reason.

belief in Darwinian evolution is around 20% in the US I believe according to Gallup

I think it's a lot higher in England- Darwin being something of a local hero?
But we're talking about a country that apparently can't win at the games it invented

 

[Hans Blaster]

No it broke free of the Victorian age reductionist model eventually- but it wasn't easy- notions of mysterious unpredictable guiding forces underwriting physics was still considered the realm of supernatural pseudoscience long into the 20th C. I'm old enough to remember a physics teacher who still held on to steady state as Hoyle did until his death in 2001.

It still is. I'm not sure what your vague claims are. Physics is still a fundamentally reductionist field -- working with the minimum number of forces.

Physics at this point is basically:

* The standard model of particle physics covering the strong and weak nuclear forces and the electromagnetic force.

* General relativity covering gravity, space expansion, etc.

* Some unexplained leftovers, like dark energy, dark matter and a lot of arbitrary constants in the above models that probably derive from a unified model of both GR and the other physics.

At the deepest level, efforts in physics are largely about increasing reductionism.

This doesn't have anything to do the the OP topic, but your comment on physics seems indicative of woolly thinking.

 

[Ophiolite]

belief in Darwinian evolution is around 20% in the US I believe according to Gallup

Despite that shamefully low value I still have a fondness for the USA. A any rate the majority of the population in the USA and in the rest of the world lack the skills and knowledge with which to assess the validity of evolutionary theory. The resistance from Creationists to providing some of that education has not helped matters.

I think it's a lot higher in England- Darwin being something of a local hero?

I imagine it is, but not because Darwin is a local hero. At any rate science is not decided on the basis of popular polls. A scientific consensus is a consensus of persons who are experts in the field. What Joe Public thinks is irrelevant. (And before some egotist complains that is patronising, I qualify as Joe Public for just about any scientific discipline or finding.)

But we're talking about country that apparently can't win at the games it invented

No. You are talking about the country that won sufficient games to qualify for last stages of the competition, then played well enough over the next several games to reach the final. I was talking about evolution. The only connection is that the physical and mental skills we evolved on the plains of Africa are well suited to playing football. The social skills we developed are well suited to enjoying watching it with colleagues. The cautious attitude to strangers that served us well through most of our evolutionary development can be a negative when two group of colleagues, strangers to each other meet. If you understood evolution you would already know this.

By the way, for the purposes of football I'm not English. For the purposes of evolutionary studies I am partly English.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

This doesn't have anything to do the the OP topic, but your comment on physics seems indicative of woolly thinking.

if insults are the most graceless form of conceding defeat, this forum is like shooting the proverbial fish in the barrel, next?

 

[Guy Threepwood]

Despite that shamefully low value I still have a fondness for the USA. A any rate the majority of the population in the USA and in the rest of the world lack the skills and knowledge with which to assess the validity of evolutionary theory. The resistance from Creationists to providing some of that education has not helped matters.

So we're 'uneducated plebs' yet have led the world in almost every scientific field you can think of for a century or more. hmm- there may be something to that:

The Wright brothers were high-school dropouts
Thomas Edison was home schooled
and Bill Gates flunked college ...

I'd say there is a healthy respect for practical demonstrable science regardless of the status of the person v the opinions of learned academics agreeing with each other in dusty institutions!

I imagine it is, but not because Darwin is a local hero. At any rate science is not decided on the basis of popular polls. A scientific consensus is a consensus of persons who are experts in the field. What Joe Public thinks is irrelevant. (And before some egotist complains that is patronising, I qualify as Joe Public for just about any scientific discipline or finding.)

As above it depends on what you call an 'expert'

I think the Wright brothers proved themselves to be experts in developing powered flight with the limited technology they had.

Hoyle was an 'expert cosmologist'... who declared the big bang to be religious pseudoscience and rejected it to his death in 2001...

No. You are talking about the country that won sufficient games to qualify for last stages of the competition, then played well enough over the next several games to reach the final. I was talking about evolution. The only connection is that the physical and mental skills we evolved on the plains of Africa are well suited to playing football. The social skills we developed are well suited to enjoying watching it with colleagues. The cautious attitude to strangers that served us well through most of our evolutionary development can be a negative when two group of colleagues, strangers to each other meet. If you understood evolution you would already know this.

By the way, for the purposes of football I'm not English. For the purposes of evolutionary studies I am partly English.

Sorry I couldn't resist- I'm not a big soccer fan but I like watching the big matches in any sport. They did a great job getting to the final and I was rooting for England. Win or lose it was genuinely uplifting to see Wembley crammed with fans- ... and singing God's praises no less!

No excuse for not winning Wimbledon in nearly a century though...
Does anyone else even have a grass court to practice on?!

 

[Hans Blaster]

if insults are the most graceless form of conceding defeat, this forum is like shooting the proverbial fish in the barrel, next?

Your responses are hard to parse. Do you think I was "conceding defeat"? (I have't really [or is it even at all] been in this thread, so I'm not sure how "defeat" could possibly apply to me.) Are you the fish? Was there an insult? Are you responding to my post, but talking mostly of others? I can't tell

 

[Ophiolite]

So we're 'uneducated plebs' yet have led the world in almost every scientific field you can think of for a century or more. hmm- there may be something to that:

Strawman. "The majority of the population in the USA and the rest of the world."

• You know what majority means
• You know that the majority of the population receive scant education, frankly in anything until they actually start working.
• So please don't play strawman card with an innocent look on your face. It's disingenuous.

The Wright brothers were high-school dropouts
Thomas Edison was home schooled
and Bill Gates flunked college ...

I'd say there is a healthy respect for practical demonstrable science regardless of the status of the person v the opinions of learned academics agreeing with each other in dusty institutions!

As above it depends on what you call an 'expert'
I think the Wright brothers proved themselves to be experts in developing powered flight with the limited technology they had.

You have chosen to think that in my lexicon educated means a formal, academic education, with alphabet soup after their surname. It isn't. Some people are autodidacts, most don't have the inclination to take it so stratospheric levels.

Also, I note that none of your examples are scientists. We were talking the science of evolution. All three of your examples were engineers. (If we reject the notion that Edison was something of a plagiarist.) Your one scientist example was Hoyle. Hoyle should have stuck to nucleosynthesis, for which - as an aside - I note that I think he should have the Nobel Prize. I don't see what point you are trying to make about his continuing distaste for Big Bang theory.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

Strawman. "The majority of the population in the USA and the rest of the world."

• You know what majority means
• You know that the majority of the population receive scant education, frankly in anything until they actually start working.
• So please don't play strawman card with an innocent look on your face. It's disingenuous.

You have chosen to think that in my lexicon educated means a formal, academic education, with alphabet soup after their surname. It isn't. Some people are autodidacts, most don't have the inclination to take it so stratospheric levels.

Also, I note that none of your examples are scientists. We were talking the science of evolution. All three of your examples were engineers. (If we reject the notion that Edison was something of a plagiarist.) Your one scientist example was Hoyle. Hoyle should have stuck to nucleosynthesis, for which - as an aside - I note that I think he should have the Nobel Prize. I don't see what point you are trying to make about his continuing distaste for Big Bang theory.

I know what majority means. And I know what it means when you say "The resistance from Creationists to providing some of that education has not helped matters."
The USA clearly leans more religious and has more creationists than most Western European countries and many other parts of the world (a historical flight from religious oppression being part of that) yet has led practical science during the same time... was the point

There's no need to constantly go to the accusations of being 'disingenuous' as your footnote says:
"If you have not understood what I have posted the fault is probably mine. Ask for clarification. I expect the same courtesy from you."

But having talked face to face with many on both sides that I know and love, I really don't think I'd pick any team for being 'more educated' in any sense - rather they just have different perspectives .

I do think that proponents of creationism and intelligent design can sometimes be more informed on the details of natural history than proponents of Darwinism - simply because you have to at least go beyond 'well that's the academic consensus' to be skeptical of an academic consensus...

I just had 'Phred' tell me I didn't care about facts- and then assure me that the Cambrian explosion lasted for 541 millions years!

I'm sure he's an intelligent guy- I'm not even going to accuse him of 'woolly thinking' - but clearly he is not on terribly familiar terms with the timelines of evolutionary history. And that's fine- he probably has more important things to do!

As do I unfortunately (not as fun) appreciate your thoughts, must run.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

Also, I note that none of your examples are scientists. We were talking the science of evolution

That was my point, they had practical experience v academic qualification, which proved more productive in forwarding the science of powered flight. I wouldn't even call them 'engineers' by today's definition- if I were stuck on a desert island with a broken down boat, a qualified engineer, and old Joe from the local lawn mower repair shop... I'd suggest we eat the engineer first!

The same applies to evolution, we already had experienced skeptics in Darwin's time- people who had been conducting practical scientific experiments for generations, and already knew about the limitations of selection pressures acting upon random variation. They were not scientists either, they were called 'farmers'

 

[Subduction Zone]

That was my point, they had practical experience v academic qualification, which proved more productive in forwarding the science of powered flight. I wouldn't even call them 'engineers' by today's definition- if I were stuck on a desert island with a broken down boat, a qualified engineer, and old Joe from the local lawn mower repair shop... I'd suggest we eat the engineer first!

The same applies to evolution, we already had experienced skeptics in Darwin's time- people who had been conducting practical scientific experiments for generations, and already knew about the limitations of selection pressures acting upon random variation. They were not scientists either, they were called 'farmers'

Of course farmers could not find these supposed "limits". No one has as of yet. Farmers work on a very small time scale. The sort of changes that you seem to think that are needed would actually refute the theory of evolution. In other words you are relying on a strawman.

 

[Hans Blaster]

The same applies to evolution, we already had experienced skeptics in Darwin's time- people who had been conducting practical scientific experiments for generations, and already knew about the limitations of selection pressures acting upon random variation. They were not scientists either, they were called 'farmers'

The problem with this argument, is that once knowledge of genetics was applied to the breeding of crops, the improvements were rapid. (I'm not talking of gene alteration technologies, just ordinary cross breeding.) Practical knowledge had accomplished much, but so much more was available once the underlying mechanisms of inheritance were understood and cataloged.