Evolution/Creation on Trial

pat34lee · Jul 17, 2015

paulm50 said:
It misses so many obvious points it's comical. It then presupposes that what did happen didn't. And never offers an alternative.
If Creation is right, a god like being lived on Earth constantly changing and morphing the creatures here. Over the course of billions of years.

Wrong. Nothing changed and morphed as you say. God is still here as all creation is part of him. And only thousands of years have gone by.

pat34lee · Jul 17, 2015

lasthero said:
What's to explain? Nothing about either of these creatures violates the hierarchy. They might have some features that superficially LOOK like those found in other creatures, but there's a difference between looking like something and actually being like something

What is their lineage? Where are the rest of the animals like them?

pat34lee · Jul 17, 2015

Loudmouth said:
We have many ID/creationists here claiming that DNA has information that only a designer could produce, yet when faced with a simple 100 base DNA sequence they can't do anything with it. Seems that all ID/creationists have are empty assertions.

Simple? Translate some hieroglyphics and Chinese text for me. Those are simple.

pat34lee · Jul 17, 2015

Loudmouth said:
So let's see the same thing for the cars. Come up with the physical characteristics that separate each car, and show how they can produce an objective phylogeny. Show how one feature is more important than others when producing the phylogeny.

Start here and work your way forward toward higher technology with each of them.
You can follow each part, showing how tires evolved, frames, bodies, engines, batteries, etc.

Also check out the following picture:
http://www.chuckstoyland.com/national/history/01 FORD 8x10 1.jpg

whois · Jul 17, 2015

justlookinla said:
Most people believe evolution happens.

i would objectify this by saying most people believe evolution is the most logical, rational, and sane, cause of lifes diversity, but do they actually believe it.
i've found things about evolution that makes me question the entire paradigm.
quotes from various scientists have completely smash my faith in the concept.
it seems to me that evolutionists will go to any length preclude any mention, or even a hint, of a god.

Many don't believe Darwinist evolution happens though and many scientists challenge the view.

yes, correct.
koonin is one such scientist, and he knew it would garner the hate of his peers for making the stand, read the link on my profile for proof of this.

klutedavid · Jul 17, 2015

Hello Bhsmte.

Do you mind if I comment on this statement of yours.

I said that 99% of Phd biologists, agree with evolution.

There is no real alternative to evolutionary biology in the education system, so of course
they would agree. They have been deeply conditioned into the ideology of science itself, thats
what the education system is designed to do.

Where I have issues with the scientific explanation of everything it seems, from the Big Bang
through to the evolution of mankind. Is that there appears to be a number of assumptions
and axioms, that are sown into the fabric of these scientific explanations. Yet they are rarely
advertised, probably for good reason.

The first and greatest assumption that science by default accepts, is that there is no
interference in the natural world by God. Science is forced to hold this assumption,
otherwise, if a God did interfere in nature, then any study and measurement of nature
would be at best be an unreliable exercise.

The second assumption that science must hold onto at all cost. Is that all events in the
distant past occurred at the same rate, and over the same time period, exactly the same
as these events occur in the present era. If these events in the past took place in a shorter,
or longer time frame, then the time frames for dating would be erroneous.

For example, it is assumed by science that strata layers, are laid down over vast periods
of time. Science has no absolute method for dating these strata layers, that is without
the assumption of an initial uniform concentration. Decay rates of isotopes, e.t.c.,
must also be uniform. There is no room in science for any non uniformity in the distant past.
In science, because it is an ideology, must hold a myriad of assumptions to be true.
If the assumptions are not true, then the conclusions of science would be erroneous.

The Cadet · Jul 17, 2015

Smidlee said:
Living systems are a lot more complex than simple computer programs. Evolutionist can not back up their claims that evolution has to produce a nested hierarchy they can only assume it.

This is fundamentally wrong and I have shown you the evidence numerous times. At this point, I'm just going to stop engaging with you, because it's pretty clear you aren't going to understand this. A nested hierarchy only makes sense in the context of vertical gene transfer and divergent populations. I'm sorry, but at this point this is mathematically proven - in order to see this sort of parsimony within separated populations, it requires either insane random chance or for those populations to have diverged in the past. You can test this yourself using random mutations in a DNA string and cladistic algorithms. I welcome you to do that. Find situations where the cladistics algorithm doesn't produce a natural, parsimonious nested hierarchy with divergent ancestral populations, or does with completely unrelated strings. You just can't do it, and we know exactly why.

Justatruthseeker said:
Why, it only took me 10 seconds to find that and a hundred others.

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-4156-7_19

I'm not quite sure what this paper is saying, but it doesn't seem to be "mutations are non-random".

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1098-2264(199602)15:2<77::AID-GCC1>3.0.CO;2-0/abstract

This one does, but it's talking about cancer, not reproduction, which offers fundamentally different challenges. We know the mutations that lead to cancer are not entirely random; that's how we can classify certain things as carcinogenic or not!

Why would a random mutation form a nested hierarchy - it's random, we would expect to see chaos

Because this randomness is, to some extent, conserved. It's not like the whole genome fluctuates wildly with every generation. Keep in mind we're talking about populations, not individuals, and at a population level, some mutations will be selected against and some mutations will be kept. Although even in vastly simplified models, where such things as gene conservation are not taken into account, you will still get consistent nested hierarchies, as the CDK007 video makes perfectly clear.

So at the beginning, we have one population. This population undergoes various mutations. Then, that population splits, and all of the mutations thus far are conserved by each of the two groups. Then, each of these groups undergoes various mutations. Now, consider a separate group, which started with the same genetic material but was completely distinct from the start. It undergoes random genetic mutation. Will its genetics appear similar to the other group? No. Given the random nature of the mutations themselves, similar mutations might be selected for (assuming these groups had the same selection pressure), but you will not end up with the same pattern of similarities and differences that you would among the first group, or its divergent branches. However, those divergent branches will show a pattern of similarities, because they both got those specific mutations from their shared ancestor.

This is a large part of why this:

when nested hierarchies are observed to occur in breeding pairs

Is not a viable model. These nested hierarchies occur far, far above the level where your proposed mechanism would work.

You do realize the only empirical observation we have is of breed mating with breed producing new breeds (variation) within the species, do you not?

The fact that we can observe this nested hierarchy throughout all of nature, and that it concords with morphology, with individual genes, with embryology, with ERVs... All of this is empirical observation that points to one thing and one thing only: common ancestry. Yes, in the last few hundred years that we've been looking, we haven't seen massive divergences in morphology. We wouldn't expect to. But to claim that there is no empirical observation of common ancestry as a result is completely wrong and ignores the strongest and most important evidence evolution has to offer.

joshua 1 9 said:
Now lets look at what the Brooker says: "Obviously we cannot take a time machine back 4 billion years and determine with certainty how these events occurred", This approach has led researchers to a variety of hypotheses regarding the origin of life, none of which can be verified".

Abiogenesis is a field in its infancy; actually establishing what the first lifeforms looked like is almost impossible, given that they were almost certainly microscopic soft cells that would not leave much in terms of fossils. Brooker is right; the origin of life is still largely an unknown. This does nothing to detract from the theory of evolution, which deals with life after it has started to exist.

Here is something about "catastrophic floods have periodically had a major impacts". Interesting that catastrophism finds its way into the Biology book.

Catastrophism is well-accepted at this point, as it's blatantly obvious that catastrophic events can have massive regional or global effects. Volcanic activity pulled us out of snowball earth; a meteor impact killed off the dinosaurs; Yellowstone erupting could spell the end of human civilization... However, none of this grants any credibility to the long-debunked idea that sometime in the last 10,000 years there was a global flood. The difference between things like the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs and that global flood is that we can find strong, independently verifiable evidence of the former, while the latter should have left a ton of evidence, but somehow didn't leave any trace of its passing whatsoever.

Then we look at the "Cambrian explosion occurred in which there was an abrupt increase". So what does catastrophism and explosions have to do with slow gradual change over time? Here we are told: "The cause of the Cambrian explosion is not understood".

The Cambrian explosion was an "abrupt increase" in geologic terms. It lasted around 20-25 million years. That's not some sudden explosion, and there's nothing about it that requires any sort of supernatural explanation. The cause is, as stated, not understood, but again, it's hardly a critique of evolution that we don't know everything about prehistoric earth.

Terms like we cannot determine with any certainty, none can be verified, may have formed, may have originated, may have evolved, the cause is not understood. I do not think biology is so sure of what they believe. I see no indication at all of a 99% agreement. Just the opposite actually.

What you're missing is that none of the things we're unsure about are particularly crucial to the theory. It's like not knowing the exact mass of the meteor that struck the dinosaurs - does that somehow pose a problem for Newtonian mechanics? No, of course not. The precise origin of life has nothing to do with the theory of evolution. The cause of the cambrian explosion is tangentially linked, and may offer us some insight, but the fact that we don't know exactly why there was such an increase in complex multicellular life is not significant to the core of the theory.

It's this core - descent with modification, genetic mutation, and universal common ancestry - which has such complete agreement. The exact formation of the taxa, the precise evolutionary history of every lifeform on earth, the exact mechanisms of genetic change, the taxonomy of long-extinct relics known only by a few skeletons... these are all things we can examine with evolution's help, but the fact that we don't know everything is not a contraindication to those core ideas, as every single piece of evidence we have ever uncovered fits the theory.

"a precise definition of species is not always possible". Yet evolutionists love to gourd Christians over what their definition of a kind is. Yet they do not seem to have any real definition of their own.

This is because the concept of "species" is necessarily fuzzy. The line between species A and species B in the same genus is generally not a line; it is a continuum, and understanding speciation merely in terms of "can they interbreed" is a flawed way of looking at it - sure, a lion and a tiger can interbreed, and even produce halfway fertile offspring, but in the wild, they almost never will - they are geographically separated, and don't want to interbreed. Given more time and geologic separation, this ability to create viable offspring may disappear entirely, but drawing a hard line at that point will be exceedingly difficult.

The concept of a "species" is to an extent necessary to discretize nature. However, what we're inherently doing is placing hard lines within a continuum, and that's always going to be problematic. However, there are numerous criteria we can look for when trying to judge whether or not something is a species. "Kind" isn't even well-defined, but even if it were, it leaves no room for correction or nuance, and certainly not for the rainbow spectrum of life we see.

klutedavid said:
There is no real alternative to evolutionary biology in the education system, so of course
they would agree. They have been deeply conditioned into the ideology of science itself, thats
what the education system is designed to do.

The "ideology" of science? Science is not an ideology. It's an epistemology. It is a way of knowing things. Furthermore, it is the only consistently reliable way of knowing things that I am aware of. The application of science has moved us from a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers on the savanna to essentially the dominant lifeform on the planet. The reason we teach science is because of how universally and demonstrably useful it is.

The first and greatest assumption that science by default accepts, is that there is no
interference in the natural world by God. Science is forced to hold this assumption,
otherwise, if a God did interfere in nature, then any study and measurement of nature
would be at best be an unreliable exercise.

I agree - if there was a supernatural element, we could never rely on anything to be consistently true. You know what's funny about that? We can rely on things to be consistently true. Gravity never spontaneously stops working for a while. Humans never give birth to dogs. There's never an organism with saltwater taffy where its chromosomes should be. So basically, the fact that science works is a very strong indication that there is no significant supernatural interference in nature.

Okay, okay, leaving the humor behind, science works from the basis of methodological naturalism. That is, it makes the very basic assertion, "If there is a supernatural cause for something, we have no way of investigating that cause", and draws from that conclusion that it should only examine natural causes. This cannot be ignored. If we allow for the supernatural, we're just stuck. We have no idea if that aspirin actually worked, or if it was just god fiddling about, and maybe tomorrow it will cause blood to shoot out of your ears. So while science accepts that it is possible that the supernatural exists, it goes forward under the (entirely justified) assertion that only natural causes can be examined.

Indeed, if it didn't, it probably wouldn't work as well as it did. Supernatural explanations for what we observe in nature consistently fail. They, without a single exception, are either proven wrong (Lightning is gods being angry, this drought is because of god, this plague is demons and we need to pray, epilepsy is demon possession) or are left in the position where they cannot possibly provide any evidence for their assertion (god as the prime mover, etc.).

The second assumption that science must hold onto at all cost. Is that all events in the
distant past occurred at the same rate, and over the same time period, exactly the same
as these events occur in the present era. If these events in the past took place in a shorter,
or longer time frame, then the time frames for dating would be erroneous.

...What? Science makes no such assumption. Just for example, it's often claimed that science "assumes" that C14 rates were the same in the past... But it doesn't. In fact, we know that C14 rates were different in the past, and we calibrate our dating methods to account for that. Don't take this personally, but you seem to have a very, very weak grasp on what science is and what the method says. Before you go about criticizing the methods that have built this modern civilization, without which you would not be able to disparage it to the whole world at near light-speed, maybe you should learn a thing or two about it.

Smidlee · Jul 17, 2015

USincognito said:
Please. Do go on. Explain to us the magical component that makes human DNA substantially different from the DNA of our fellow animals or plants, fungi, etc.

No, it's a fact. This however:

Is not a fact. If you put human DNA into a chicken egg, it simply won't do anything.

Just like when you put a PS4 disc into a PC or PC disc into XboxOne. The plastic of the DVD can be made out of the same material and the same kind of bumps on the back. You need the right software and hardware.

USincognito said:
What gets attacked are Creationist and IDist mischaracterizations of what ENCODE actually found.

You must have missed the debate over ENCODE results since it's obvious that Dan Graur and others attack the very ones who published the results who are evolutionist.

Smidlee · Jul 17, 2015

The Cadet said:
This is fundamentally wrong and I have shown you the evidence numerous times. At this point, I'm just going to stop engaging with you, because it's pretty clear you aren't going to understand this. A nested hierarchy only makes sense in the context of vertical gene transfer and divergent populations. I'm sorry, but at this point this is mathematically proven - in order to see this sort of parsimony within separated populations, it requires either insane random chance or for those populations to have diverged in the past. You can test this yourself using random mutations in a DNA string and cladistic algorithms. I welcome you to do that. Find situations where the cladistics algorithm doesn't produce a natural, parsimonious nested hierarchy with divergent ancestral populations, or does with completely unrelated strings. You just can't do it, and we know exactly why.

You think your you-tube cartoon is real evidence ? What about when the evidence doesn't fit the evolutionist tree when they call co-evolution? Evolutionist has to be very selective in which genes to used as example or they will come up with the wrong tree.

http://www.nature.com/news/gorilla-joins-the-genome-club-1.10185
"But the genome sequencing has thrown up surprises, too. The standard view of the great-ape family tree is that humans and chimps are more similar to each other than either is to the gorilla — because chimps and humans diverged more recently. But, 15% of human genes look more like the gorilla version than the chimp version."

Oops!

JasonClark · Jul 17, 2015

It won't be to long before creationism claims science for it's own, it's trying now.

This is how it might go:
Everything science says is proof of god because god put all the ideas into scientists heads, what more proof do we need? god is behind everything so it stands to reason god is behind science, in future anything science reveals is gods way of revealing it to us, so science only backs up creationism and science is creationism's friend.

Then:
The next thing that will be proof of creationism is the things science can not find, if science can not find them it's because god does not want science to find them so god reveals these things through our minds, which will make the things we imagine just as real as if science had found them, all that's happened is god has revealed them in a different way.

And then:
God is science and all scientists are without knowing it creationists doing gods work, the things scientists say that are against creationism is not god talking through them but the devil, the good things are from god and the bad things are from the devil, all science is from god unless it's from the devil, our creationist leaders will tell us which is which.

Smidlee · Jul 17, 2015

JasonClark said:
It won't be to long before creationism claims science for it's own, it's trying now.

Science doesn't equal "truth" and truth is what it's all about. "Where did man come from?" "Who is man?" is important questions that all mankind asked and doesn't belong to one group of people including the so called intellectuals.

JasonClark · Jul 17, 2015

Smidlee said:
Science doesn't equal "truth" and truth is what it's all about. "Where did man come from?" "Who is man?" is important questions that all mankind asked and doesn't belong to one group of people including the so called intellectuals.

That's the difference between science and religions, science tries to find out the answers and religions make something up and say it's the answer.

How did that big rock get on top of that mountain? the great Ju Ju put it up there,
while that might be an answer I think you will agree it's not the answer.

Creationism can not beat science so science must be made to be part of creationism.
It won't really matter what creationists do because creationism is dying and by the next generation they will be a fringe cult of no consequence.

The Cadet · Jul 17, 2015

Smidlee said:
You think your you-tube cartoon is real evidence ?

It's a demonstration of a mathematical theorem. How this actually applies in reality is another matter, but the idea that descent from modification does not necessarily form a nested hierarchy is simply untenable. I'm sorry, but if you don't get this, you need to do some background reading. Here's a start: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/clad/clad1.html

What about when the evidence doesn't fit the evolutionist tree when they call co-evolution? Evolutionist has to be very selective in which genes to used as example or they will come up with the wrong tree.

http://www.nature.com/news/gorilla-joins-the-genome-club-1.10185
"But the genome sequencing has thrown up surprises, too. The standard view of the great-ape family tree is that humans and chimps are more similar to each other than either is to the gorilla — because chimps and humans diverged more recently. But, 15% of human genes look more like the gorilla version than the chimp version."

Oops!

Actually, they don't. There's no particular reason why any given gene should necessarily be more or less similar. It's the overall pattern within the entire genome. It's entirely reasonable to think that when gorillas diverged, certain genes were conserved between them and the human ancestors, while that gene mutated in the chimpanzee lineage, for example. Also, you neglected to point out that most of those were in non-coding regions. I humbly submit that given that you know nothing about cladistics and very little about genetics, you might be misinterpreting the results of this study.

JasonClark · Jul 17, 2015

pat34lee said:
Wrong. Nothing changed and morphed as you say. God is still here as all creation is part of him. And only thousands of years have gone by.

For you just saying that is enough to make it true. How?

whois · Jul 17, 2015

JasonClark said:
It won't be to long before creationism claims science for it's own, it's trying now.

see?
this is why the debate on evolution will never get anywhere, there is always someone, somewhere, willing to throw the "creationism" curve ball.
yes, there may be a god, but "god" is not the only "other" alternative.
OTOH, what if there was a god, would it really change anything?
would genes mysteriously stop doing their thing?
seriously, i think we need to focus on the present, learn all we can about how living things become what they are.
research in this area can definitely solve every one of todays world problems.
space drive without any engines?
sounds fantastic, but that's exactly what molecular biology promises if applied correctly.
we could even reduce the populations agricultural footprint to almost zero.
todays research has enormous potential, but not if we give up and say god did it.

joshua 1 9 · Jul 17, 2015

The Cadet said:
However, none of this grants any credibility to the long-debunked idea that sometime in the last 10,000 years there was a global flood.

Yes Noah's flood was not global. Noah was commissioned by God to save one biodiverse eco system. BUT that ecosystem spread to the whole world. It was through Noah's descendants that the plants and animals in that eco system spread to the world. It was through Noah (descent with modification) that the earth was populated from the Eden we find in the Tigris Euphrates river valley in ancient Mesopotamia. If people cannot see how one is a shadow and a type of the other then they need to pray for God to open their eyes so they can see His plan and purpose.

Here is a random article on how agriculture spread to the world from the middle east {Eden}

By 3500 B.C., agricultural

peoples in the Middle East could support sufficient numbers of non-cultivating

specialists to give rise to the first civilizations. As this pattern spread to

or developed independently in other centers across the globe, the character of

most human lives and the history of the species as a whole were fundamentally

transformed.

http://history-world.org/agriculture.htm

Clearly Science and the theory of Evolution provides overwhelming evidence that the Bible is true. Clearly something special took place in Adam and Eves Eden that was different from the other Edens we find in the world. We see God's purpose and intent and how He does things. Before we knew what God did, now evolution shows us HOW He did what He did.

joshua 1 9 · Jul 17, 2015

JasonClark said:
This is how it might go:
Everything science says is proof of god because god put all the ideas into scientists heads, what more proof do we need?

Romans 1:20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

We can look at creation from the beginning. We do not have a time machine but God has given us evidence of what He has done from the beginning of the world and from the beginning of creation.

SteveB28 · Jul 17, 2015

klutedavid said:
Hello Bhsmte.

Do you mind if I comment on this statement of yours.

And may I comment on yours?

There is no real alternative to evolutionary biology in the education system, so of course
they would agree. They have been deeply conditioned into the ideology of science itself, thats
what the education system is designed to do.

Any respectable education system should include the principle of attempting to maximise those understandings which most closely comport with the reality of the world around us. This is exactly what the scientific process has been designed to do.

Where I have issues with the scientific explanation of everything it seems, from the Big Bang
through to the evolution of mankind. Is that there appears to be a number of assumptions
and axioms, that are sown into the fabric of these scientific explanations. Yet they are rarely
advertised, probably for good reason.

Why do I feel that we should prepare ourselves for some misrepresentation?

The first and greatest assumption that science by default accepts, is that there is no
interference in the natural world by God. Science is forced to hold this assumption,
otherwise, if a God did interfere in nature, then any study and measurement of nature
would be at best be an unreliable exercise.

There is no such 'assumption', any more that there is an assumption that fairies or leprechauns don't interfere in the natural world. Or that Ra doesn't carry the sun across the sky each day. The scientific process focuses upon those things it can observe, not those that it can't.

The second assumption that science must hold onto at all cost. Is that all events in the
distant past occurred at the same rate, and over the same time period, exactly the same
as these events occur in the present era. If these events in the past took place in a shorter,
or longer time frame, then the time frames for dating would be erroneous.

Again, no assumption is made. We observe what is before us. In addition, we observe those things from the past for which there is evidence! There is simply no evidence for an 'altered past', so why would we expend energy attempting to observe it?

For example, it is assumed by science that strata layers, are laid down over vast periods
of time. Science has no absolute method for dating these strata layers, that is without
the assumption of an initial uniform concentration. Decay rates of isotopes, e.t.c.,
must also be uniform. There is no room in science for any non uniformity in the distant past.
In science, because it is an ideology, must hold a myriad of assumptions to be true.
If the assumptions are not true, then the conclusions of science would be erroneous.

I've said all I need to say about the claims of 'assumptions'. All that needs to be added is this:

You obviously wish to cast doubt on the effectiveness of the scientific process. Yet, isn't it amazing how well such a 'faulty' system has added to our knowledge since its inception!?

joshua 1 9 · Jul 17, 2015

whois said:
research in this area can definitely solve every one of todays world problems.

The next thousand years in man's history will be a wonderful time to be alive here on Earth. A lot of sickness and disease will be eliminated and there will be no more war.

Isa 11:6 The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.

whois · Jul 17, 2015

joshua 1 9 said:
The next thousand years in man's history will be a wonderful time to be alive here on Earth.

maybe.
it will not be easy to purge society of greed, hate, and jealousy.
all societies that i'm aware of have their own brand of nationalism and patriotism, this in itself leads to a number of conflicts.

A lot of sickness and disease will be eliminated . . .

OTOH, molecular biology can lead to devastating plagues, engineered to eradicate "the enemy".
the biggest problems i see is to resist the urge to prolong lifespans and the creation of "the master race".

. . . and there will be no more war.

the atomic bomb has already done that.
there will never be another "world war", if there is, it will be the last thing the human race will do.

are there solutions in sight?
sure there are, but only if people come to realize a few basic facts.
the very first fact is that you cannot line people up along a wall and shoot them because they possess "undesirable" traits.
the second fact is that all societies possess these types of people and we must make room for them.
but i digress.

carry on!

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