• Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.

Evolution via random mutations is impossible

tas8831

Well-Known Member
May 5, 2017
5,611
3,999
56
Northeast
✟101,040.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Married
No its true but that's an old quote from 1979 I think its actually worse now lol.
For you, yes:

... “most or all of the Creationists are devout fundamentalist Protestant Christians. Many of them testify that they adopted their creationist positions in childhood, long before their professional training, and have not wavered since.”...“I have always accepted the Bible as God’s unchanged and unchangeable word.”

- same 1979 source

Your copy-pasted from a YEC site quote is dishonest.
 
Upvote 0

tas8831

Well-Known Member
May 5, 2017
5,611
3,999
56
Northeast
✟101,040.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Married
No if you go back and read it in the context and specifically the context just below it you will see I was not saying that at all. This is a common problem when someone's goal is just to pick apart another and really have no care for what is actually being said. I was responding to someone else who seemed to be implying this and I just restated to clarify that is what he meant.


I did go back and look.

You are just weaseling.
 
Upvote 0

tas8831

Well-Known Member
May 5, 2017
5,611
3,999
56
Northeast
✟101,040.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Married
Well since you want to be insulting I will take the rodeo clowns bow here and just ask this. Does the fact that many crystal structures of different materials, start out forming with similar features, mean they have to have a common ancestor?

Are crystals alive and do they pass on genetic material?

NOPE. FAIL.
There is nothing scientific about looking at the way a human embryo develops and the way a bird embryo develops and claiming they must be related because you see similar features.


So you are just dismissing what you do not understand - a pretty common thing among the anti-science crowd.

If you were alive maybe 90 years ago, you might have a valid argument.

Problem is, things progress. We have genetics now - we ca see what bird and chicken embryos develop the way they do because they have similar genes. And we can trace the alterations via the accumulation of mutations, gene duplications, etc.

You clearly put more thought into your anti-science claims than most on here, but you are still arguing from a position of ignorance, no matter how many extra paragraphs you include in your replies.



I see rodeo clowns in the clouds and Elvis in my pancake batter too.
You joke, but it is true that evangelicals see Jesus in tortillas and such and consider them miracles.

Unlike such rubes, in science, we need something a bit more tangible.

Here you go, bro - a free developmental embryology text. Lots of sciency stuff for you to ignore, reject, or denigrate!

Developmental Biology. 6th edition.
Evolutionary Embryology - Developmental Biology - NCBI Bookshelf


Some of the results of this search of the text may be useful for you. But I doubt it.
 
Upvote 0

pitabread

Well-Known Member
Jan 29, 2017
12,920
13,373
Frozen North
✟344,333.00
Country
Canada
Gender
Male
Faith
Agnostic
Marital Status
Private
Who Steve Miller? I would think you would want to be careful bringing him up since he was the guy that came up with the best evidence for biogenesis and it was ... well he backed off of it. I'm pretty sure he is still atheist but not sure he believes in evolution anymore. That'll happen.

Click on the link ---> Project Steve

My post will make more sense then. ;)
 
Upvote 0

pitabread

Well-Known Member
Jan 29, 2017
12,920
13,373
Frozen North
✟344,333.00
Country
Canada
Gender
Male
Faith
Agnostic
Marital Status
Private
ID can and does make observable testable predictions all the time.

Where and by who? Are these published anywhere?

I've read a lot of ID literature and I can tell you from experience that they don't have much in the way of any kind of unified body of thought from which to make scientific, testable predictions from. Unless there is some sort of repository of ID literature out there I am completely unaware of, I'm not holding my breath over this claim.

Obviously the baseline of our human experience is what we must draw from. We know how "human" designers act when designing things and therefore this is the base of our understanding. By observing human designers we observe the following four basic features found in design.

I went through this list and there are a few major caveats with it:

1) Too many vague qualifiers, no real scientific rigor. For example, you use the word "often" a bunch of times, but there is no indicator as to what that means. Does it mean 50% of the time? 80%? 99%?

2) There are no measurements to support any of your assertions. You give a couple examples, but examples by themselves aren't particular useful in trying to quantify a particular phenomena.

3) What you list ignores a whole gamut of human output. You see design as a result of deliberate, careful planning. Starting with a goal. Drawing up blueprints. Creating things with a specific purpose. Etc. However, it ignores the entire gamut of creative expression and particular that which runs on the artistic side. Often we also create things with no real goal, purpose or intended function. Sometimes we build things just for the sake of building it.

3b) It also ignores cases whereby humans use unconventional design processes, for example genetic algorithms. Such approaches can and do result in output that can baffle the original designers of said algorithm.

4) Generally if you want to draw up a hypothesis with predictive tests, there needs to be specific constraints and/or cause-effect relationships by which specific outputs can be predicted and observed. With biological evolution we can identify specific mechanisms and consequently constraints when it comes to things like gene flow, changes to genotypes and phenotypes, and/or responses to environmental pressures. For example, we could hypothesize about natural selection occurring based on specific environmental effects, and then test to see if those environmental circumstances were present. But a lot this requires having an understanding for the mechanisms by which things work (i.e. evolutionary changes), and that is something flat-out don't have for an Intelligent Designer. Unless you are specifically restricting this to human design and manufacture.

We can convert these observations into a working hypothesis that predicts what we should observe if something is designed.

The below hypothesis unfortunately speaks to what I mentioned earlier; that rather than be predictive, it'st just post-hoc rationalization arguing that a designer did things the way they happen to do things.

On top of that it makes a number of specific assumptions about the designer's intentions that we have no way of validating, as I will go into.

1. We predict that if life is the product of design it will have several parts arranged in patterns in such a way to perform specific functions.

I honestly don't see how this would be any different than what we would expect from biological evolution.

2. We predict that if life were the product of design then forms found in the fossil record will appear suddenly with already developed large amounts of information. And that any change from its first appearance in the fossil record to its disappearance will be none to very minimal. That the fossil record will not display a gradual progression of life over time in any one geological region. We also expect to see examples of information transfer, processing, and recall in living organisms and their genes.

First, the term "information" is vague. Generally information gets used with respect to quantity of DNA, but for fossils where we don't necessarily have any DNA. Thus, I have no idea what "information" you are referring to.

Second, we do observe patterns in the fossil record owing to the fact that lifeforms appear at different geological ages throughout Earth's history and there are examples of development of different features. If the fossil record was completely mixed up with all lifeforms (modern and extinct) appearing at the same time since the beginning of the planet's history, then you might have a point here. But the geological record doesn't bear that out.

Third, there is no reason to assume a designer would be constrained in any such manner as to how they decided to create individual lifeforms. The only way we could identify such constraints is if we also knew the mechanism by which they created things.

3. We predict that if life is the product of design that we will observe very similar designs redeployed many times in not only the functional physical structures but also in the DNA gene codes themselves of all life.

Again, this doesn't seem any different than what we'd expect with biological evolution. The difference though is that while we'd expect this from evolution due to mechanisms of hereditary constraint, a designer would have no such constraints. In fact, I'd argue that if lifeforms were truly independently designed we might expect the exact opposite: all sorts of funky, chimeric organisms with no indications of hereditary constraint whatsoever.

4. Finally we predict that if life is the product of design, that many things believed to serve no purpose or have no understood purpose (often considered vestigial organs and or junk DNA) will be discovered to perform valuable functions in the future.

This makes an implicit assumption that the designer would have tried to be as efficient as possible, but we have no reason to assume this is true. Unless you can tell me why the designer would have needed to create a fully functional genome and support that with evidence, this doesn't qualify as a prediction of anything.

(It's also worth noting that creationists make blatantly contradictory arguments about things like "junk DNA". Some creationists argue that it's the product of corrupted genetic change over the years and therefore while it may have once had a function, it no longer is functional. While others are arguing the exact opposite: that the entirety of the genome is fully functional and we just don't know how yet.)

All of these predictions are observed in the physical evidence.

Like I said, it seems that your "predictions" are nothing more than post-hoc rationalization to argue for "design" based on what is already observed. And in this particular case, it's life that appears to have resulted via biological evolution.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0

BradB

Newbie
Jan 14, 2013
491
124
✟37,216.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Republican
This is precious. I find it entertaining when,

Again demeaning and insulting. If you wanted me to read anything past this point then you probably should have led with a little more couth.
 
Upvote 0

BradB

Newbie
Jan 14, 2013
491
124
✟37,216.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Republican
Where and by who? Are these published anywhere? .

Here are a couple off the top of my head.

"Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds." by D. Axe, Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 341 (2004): 1295-1315.

Ø. A. Voie, "Biological function and the genetic code are interdependent," Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, Vol 28(4) (2006): 1000-1004.

David L. Abel & Jack T. Trevors, “Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models," Physics of Life Reviews, Vol. 3:211–228 (2006)

W.-E. Lönnig & H. Saedler, "Chromosome Rearrangements and Transposable Elements," Annual Review of Genetics, 36 (2002): 389-41

Dynamic genomes, morphological stasis and the origin of irreducible complexity, Lönnig, W.-E. Dynamical Genetics, Pp. 101-119

"Inventions, Algorithms, and Biological Design," By John Bracht, CiteSeerX

"Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors," by D. Axe, Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol 301:585-595 (2000).
 
Upvote 0

tas8831

Well-Known Member
May 5, 2017
5,611
3,999
56
Northeast
✟101,040.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Married
Again demeaning and insulting. If you wanted me to read anything past this point then you probably should have led with a little more couth.

If you want me to read anything that you write, it would help to be competent in the area in which you are pontificating.

Pita deconstructed your over-lengthy just-so story far better than I have the patience to do.
 
Upvote 0

tas8831

Well-Known Member
May 5, 2017
5,611
3,999
56
Northeast
✟101,040.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Married
David L. Abel & Jack T. Trevors, “Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models," Physics of Life Reviews, Vol. 3:211–228 (2006)

THE David Abel?

David Abel, Director, The Gene Emergence Project, Department of ProtoBioCybernetics & ProtoBioSemiotics

The Gene Emergence Project is one of the programs of The Origin-of-Life Science Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)3 science and education foundation with corporate headquarters near NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center just off the Washington, D. C. Beltway in Greenbelt, MD. 113 Hedgewood Drive, 20770-1610 Fax 301-441-8135


Sounds impressive? Where is this amazing scientific foundation housed?

In.. a house:

oolsign.jpeg


So impressive...

I had to laugh:


Dr. Abel is supported by grants from The Origin of Life Foundation, Inc., a US 501-(c)-3 science foundation.

"DR.Abel" is a veterinarian, by the way. And the 'grant' he got from the 'Foundation' that he is the only member of? Hmmm....
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Ophiolite
Upvote 0

Ophiolite

Recalcitrant Procrastinating Ape
Nov 12, 2008
9,194
10,089
✟281,761.00
Country
United Kingdom
Faith
Agnostic
Marital Status
Private
W.-E. Lönnig & H. Saedler, "Chromosome Rearrangements and Transposable Elements," Annual Review of Genetics, 36 (2002): 389-41
I'm confused. You offered this paper in support of your contention that "ID can and does make observable testable predictions all the time."

Now for this paper to provide that support the following would have to be true:
  • The authors would have to be proponents of ID, or specifically investigating an ID claim.
  • The paper would have to demonstrate that a claim, unique to ID, was supported by the evidence.
My confusion arises from the fact that neither of these conditions appears to have been met. This causes me to suspect all of the examples you have given, but let's take them one at a time. Please explain.

Aside: (But one I would welcome an answer to.) Have you read each of these papers or did you retrieve them from an ID source? There is no problem if it is the latter, I just want to know what level this discussion is at.

Note: It is an interesting paper. It appeals to my personal prejudices, since it looks with some favour on the concept of quantum evolution, proposed by George Gaylord Simpson (one of the founders of the Modern Synthesis) and reconfigured as punctuated equilibrium by Gould and Edlredge. I can just about see how a warped and misread interpretation of the paper, done with one eye closed and an Transient Ischemic Attack in progress, might think it was somehow related to ID.
 
  • Like
Reactions: tas8831
Upvote 0

pitabread

Well-Known Member
Jan 29, 2017
12,920
13,373
Frozen North
✟344,333.00
Country
Canada
Gender
Male
Faith
Agnostic
Marital Status
Private
Here are a couple off the top of my head.

Have you read all of these? Care to pick one and explain the testable hypothesis and how it relates to intelligent design of living organisms?
 
  • Agree
Reactions: tas8831
Upvote 0

Speedwell

Well-Known Member
May 11, 2016
23,928
17,626
82
St Charles, IL
✟347,280.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Other Religion
Marital Status
Married
Would you forward this video on to them for me? Thanx Particularly minute 9:20
I wouldn't put much faith in a guy who claims the title of "Doctor" based on a diploma he paid $50 for. In any case, at 9:20 he completely misrepresents Darwin. Knowingly? Or out of ignorance, I couldn't tell you.
 
Upvote 0

Jimmy D

Well-Known Member
Dec 11, 2014
5,147
5,995
✟277,099.00
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Married
Would you forward this video on to them for me? Thanx Particularly minute 9:20

No doubt they’ll scrap their embryology courses and research programmes when they see Ken Sham’s critique of 19th century science.

Behave.

Have you looked into modern embryology, it’s moved on a bit since Haeckel’s day.
 
  • Like
Reactions: tas8831
Upvote 0

SkyWriting

The Librarian
Site Supporter
Jan 10, 2010
37,281
8,501
Milwaukee
✟411,038.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Non-Denom
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Others
Evolution via random mutations is impossible

I am unconvinced by explanations of how random mutations operating with natural selection can account for the complexity of chemical biological life. The basic answer I encounter is that calculating the probability is too complex, and so it is merely assumed that randomness was sufficient. But if something unproven and unseen is the cause, why object when people claim that God intervenes (which is also unprovable)?

I should mention: I believe in evolution. If it can be demonstrated that random mutations is sufficient, I will wholehearted accept it.

How about assuming nothing is random, but all planned and engineered by an infinitely intelligent designer?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Tayla
Upvote 0

SkyWriting

The Librarian
Site Supporter
Jan 10, 2010
37,281
8,501
Milwaukee
✟411,038.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Non-Denom
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Others
The genetic record allows us to trace the history of evolution. We can look into the evolution of various structures through the genes that code for them. Hence, the process is far from something 'unseen'.

Genetic variability/variation is something which is easily observed in the current world. So again, 'unseen' is an inaccurate description of it. You need to understand the difference between the fact of evolution and the theory of evolution.

Science does not work by 'proof'. So, to say that something is 'unproven' is meaningless. What science does is develop hypotheses that match the real world. In some cases these hypotheses are so well supported that we can have full confidence that they are correct. E.g. that the world is approximately spherical, that the Earth orbits the sun, and that evolution has occurred.

That you are 'unconvinced' by something does not argue against it unless you are able to produce an argument not based on ignorance. How well do you understand the Theory of Evolution? The evidence of your posts in this forum suggests that you don't understand it at all.


Since nothing is random, then there is no case for it.
 
Upvote 0

AnotherAtheist

Gimmie dat ol' time physical evidence
Site Supporter
Aug 16, 2007
1,225
601
East Midlands
✟146,326.00
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
In Relationship
Since nothing is random, then there is no case for it.

I have re-read my post that you quoted and read your reply, and I have no idea what point you are trying to make. Can you please explain.
 
  • Agree
Reactions: Brightmoon
Upvote 0

Speedwell

Well-Known Member
May 11, 2016
23,928
17,626
82
St Charles, IL
✟347,280.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Other Religion
Marital Status
Married
Since nothing is random, then there is no case for it.
Random means simply "predictable by no known algorithm*" and many phenomena fit that description.

*Sokolnikov & Redheffer, The Mathematics of Physics and Modern Engineering (a standard handbook in my day).
 
Upvote 0