Evolutionists and credentialism

[Vene]

I see. There's one more question I need to ask, but it's probably obvious. If evolution is caused by mutations, does that mean that there is a mutation to make things smarter?

Yes and no. There are both environmental factors and genetic factors that determine an individual's intellect. But, all of our organs (including the brain) are the result of our genes. And (more or less) every single trait we have is the result of a mutation occurring at some point in time. As for a specific mutation in humans that make an individual smarter than others, I don't know. The problem is that it's hard to measure intelligence. One person may be very good at working through mathematical problems and concepts, but be clueless when it comes to mechanical issues. Whereas a musician may be a musical genius, but not understand the first thing about chemistry.

 

[flatworm]

I see. There's one more question I need to ask, but it's probably obvious. If evolution is caused by mutations, does that mean that there is a mutation to make things smarter?

Short answer: yes.

Detailed answer: Intelligence is a lot harder to define and measure than say, size. Most psychologists today would argue there are many different kinds of intelligence, or at least many different facets of it. There are many mutations that will affect an individual's performance in one or more cognitive tasks. Humans are particularly good at things like symbolic abstraction and the acquisition of language. Other animals, though, are capable of cognitive feats that humans can only dream of, like being able to home in on their breeding grounds from far away even though they haven't been their since birth.

 

[Cabal]

This is a big horn sheep. Are you kidding me. Man made that into a sheep that produces wool.

Look it has hair not wool. It's a lot taller. Brown not white and you say this all happened in a few thousand years. And primitive man is the one that did it. That is a load if I have ever heard one. There is no way man made the fluffy little sheep we have today. Just Garbage.

God Bless
LT

Conditioning/training?

Goodness, this isn't even evolution you're having trouble with.....

 

[huldah153]

And why you're at it, explain why your God is a deceiver for placing the same ERVs in the same spots of the genome of the rhesus monkey and chimpanzee.

It's not deceptive, because it was never God's intention for Darwinism to exist as a scientific theory. Had the ERVs been discovered in these spots without the Darwinian paradigm, scientists would not have assumed that they denote common descent. Instead, scientists would have interpreted the data in a totally different light, and concluded that God made them that way.

 

[Vene]

Alright, I got a response to part of the post. Too bad that I didn't get any evidence of anything.

It's not deceptive, because it was never God's intention for Darwinism to exist as a scientific theory. Had the ERVs been discovered in these spots without the Darwinian paradigm, scientists would not have assumed that they denote common descent. Instead, scientists would have interpreted the data in a totally different light, and concluded that God made them that way.

God gave both chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys the remnants of a mutated viral infection in the exact same spot in the genome? Why would He create them with a false history? Or did the first chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys immediately receive their infections immediately after they were created, synthesize viral DNA in the exact same spot in the genome and mutate in the exact same way as to render the gene functionless? That's a pretty big coincidence. Especially when those markers appear in in more than just two species, but all monkeys, apes, and even humans. And since we are discussing science, and everything in science needs to be evidenced, where is the evidence of your god creating everything like this? And the Bible is no more evidence of Jehovah than the Bhagavad Gita is evidence of Krishna.

 

[Michael1975]

Short answer: yes.

Detailed answer: Intelligence is a lot harder to define and measure than say, size. Most psychologists today would argue there are many different kinds of intelligence, or at least many different facets of it. There are many mutations that will affect an individual's performance in one or more cognitive tasks. Humans are particularly good at things like symbolic abstraction and the acquisition of language.

By intelligence, I mean big brains. I mean our capability of things overall.
Is it possible to get bigger brains through mutation?

Other animals, though, are capable of cognitive feats that humans can only dream of, like being able to home in on their breeding grounds from far away even though they haven't been their since birth.

Does this count as intelligence? I would have thought that it is memory.

 

[Logicalthinker]

All kinds of questions just get rehashed over and over. Evolutionist seem to think they are smarter. They all talk down to anyone that does not agree with there point of view.

There would be no new science if everyone believed the scientist

But a lot of times scientists are wrong or just don't know, but act like they know.

Here is some examples.

Dogs are color blind and only see in 2 dimensions.

Whatever. I would like to see the dog they interviewed. One bark for yes and two for no. If they can not look through a dogs eyes and use their brain to interpret what it sees they don't have a clue. It would be silly to watch a dog pounce 4 feet in front of their prey, because of no depth perception. lol They obviously have depth perception which would mean they see 3D not 2D.

The Earths core is molten magma.

They don't really know. No one has ever been there. It could be a mineral that has never been seen and can withstand great pressure without melting. We just don't know. But scientist claim that there right. The theory is plausible , but there is no physical evidence.

The expanding Universe. There is new proof, it is not expanding and accelerating. That puts a hole in the Big bang and the way we look at the universe. More like a Big I don't know what happened, but I'll make it sound good.

This is one web site. do a search on google for non expanding universe. You'll get tons of other plausible theories.

http://www.geocities.com/newastronomy/


If a tree falls in the woods does it make a noise? According to my science teacher, it doesn't. Whatever. What makes humans so special, if we don't here it or see it. It must not exist. Of course the tree made a huge crashing noise.

So it comes down to Scientists are imperfect humans that don't know every thing and should humble themselves to new ideas.

Flatworm

All of your answers are plausible. But all lake scientific observation. We don't see it happen. We did not see the universe cool off and create hydrogen. Which than pulled together and made stars.

We did not see the bighorn get evolved by man to a fluffy wool sheep
We did not witness the inter breeding of fowl to make chickens.
According to science, if we were not there, It must not exist.

God Bless
LT

 

[Cabal]

It's not deceptive, because it was never God's intention for Darwinism to exist as a scientific theory. Had the ERVs been discovered in these spots without the Darwinian paradigm, scientists would not have assumed that they denote common descent. Instead, scientists would have interpreted the data in a totally different light, and concluded that God made them that way.

Ooh, I love this one. Need to dig out that video on youtube that explains this point much better, but anyway, I'll give it a shot.

The odds of just 4 of these things being common by chance to the genotypes of two species is a fairly astronomical figure, nevermind there are thousands of these things common to hundreds of species.

The odds of it happening by evolution (passed on from generation to generation, maintained through speciation right up until the modern human genome) are:

1.

That's right: 1. As in 100% will definitely occur, if evolution is true.

So much for that old chestnut about evolution being nothing but "random chance".....

 

[flatworm]

This is a big horn sheep. Are you kidding me. Man made that into a sheep that produces wool.

Look it has hair not wool. It's a lot taller. Brown not white and you say this all happened in a few thousand years. And primitive man is the one that did it. That is a load if I have ever heard one. There is no way man made the fluffy little sheep we have today. Just Garbage.

Domestic sheep are probably not descended from North American Bighorn sheep but from Asiatic wild sheep, but the difference is academic.

I see you're just going to ignore the information I posted about the Russian Silver Fox domestication experiments? Within 50 years they went from wild stock to a population with different coloration, vocalizations, and tame enough to sell as pets.

Have you ever heard of Pomeranians? The breed was derived from sled dogs by English breeders into the current form that fits in your jacket pocket - all within the last couple hundred years.

As for the wool, it forms the undercoat which you won't see in this picture. In addition, there are breeds (called the "hair breeds") of domestic sheep that do not grow wool, which tend to be more popular in tropical climates.

Ignorance plus bull-headedness do not equal a logical argument.

 

[flatworm]

By intelligence, I mean big brains. I mean our capability of things overall.
Is it possible to get bigger brains through mutation?

Yes.

Does this count as intelligence? I would have thought that it is memory.

Memory is generally considered one facet of intelligence. IQ tests in particular try to test, among other things, working memory (i.e. the amount of information you can hold in your head and consider at the same time).

 

[Michael1975]

Yes.



Memory is generally considered one facet of intelligence. IQ tests in particular try to test, among other things, working memory (i.e. the amount of information you can hold in your head and consider at the same time).

Have there been any recent cases of mutations giving offspring bigger brains? I just don't understand this concept. An accidental change in the genes of offspring actually make it smarter? Does that mean that anytime now a human can be born with a larger brain and once he/she reproduces repeatedly, more of the next generation would have bigger brains?

 

[flatworm]

[deleted double-post]

 

[flatworm]

All kinds of questions just get rehashed over and over. Evolutionist seem to think they are smarter. They all talk down to anyone that does not agree with there point of view.

It's hard to avoid sounding condescending when someone who was unaware of the existence of nuclear fusion or wild sheep claims to know better than the experts in physics and biology.

There would be no new science if everyone believed the scientist

Except for all that produced by, you know, scientists.

But a lot of times scientists are wrong or just don't know, but act like they know.

As opposed to those who insist their religious dogma constitutes knowledge?

Here is some examples.

Dogs are color blind and only see in 2 dimensions.

Please cite a scientific source that claims dogs see in two dimensions.

Whatever. I would like to see the dog they interviewed. One bark for yes and two for no. If they can not look through a dogs eyes and use their brain to interpret what it sees they don't have a clue.

We know dogs are colourblind because their cone cells possess only 2 different colour-sensitive chemicals to humans' 3 and birds' 4. That makes them the equivalent of red-green colourblind in humans.

The Earths core is molten magma.

They don't really know. No one has ever been there. It could be a mineral that has never been seen and can withstand great pressure without melting. We just don't know. But scientist claim that there right. The theory is plausible , but there is no physical evidence.

First, the inner core is solid; the outer core is liquid.

Second, there is physical evidence. Seismic waves reflect off the interfaces between the layers. It's an unavoidable part of the basic mathematics of travelling waves. Also, liquids don't transmit shear waves the way solids do, so we can tell which layers are solid and which liquid.

The expanding Universe. There is new proof, it is not expanding and accelerating. That puts a hole in the Big bang and the way we look at the universe. More like a Big I don't know what happened, but I'll make it sound good.

This is one web site. do a search on google for non expanding universe. You'll get tons of other plausible theories.

http://www.geocities.com/newastronomy/

This is why you shouldn't get your physics education from geocities. The Shapiro effect is known as the Shapiro delay for a reason. The cause is relativistic time distortion, not a reduction in the light's velocity. It does not cause redshift.

So it comes down to Scientists are imperfect humans that don't know every thing and should humble themselves to new ideas.

Says the guy who rejects modern science and clings to millenia-old fables.

All of your answers are plausible. But all lake scientific observation. We don't see it happen. We did not see the universe cool off and create hydrogen. Which than pulled together and made stars.

Actually, we're still seeing stars forming today. Further, we can still see the leftover radiation from the cooling of the universe, called the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.

We did not see the bighorn get evolved by man to a fluffy wool sheep
We did not witness the inter breeding of fowl to make chickens.
According to science, if we were not there, It must not exist.

Nonsense. Science says no such thing- only creationists do. Of course, they never apply it to their own beliefs.

So - were you present when your God poofed the universe into existence?

 

[flatworm]

Have there been any recent cases of mutations giving offspring bigger brains? I just don't understand this concept. An accidental change in the genes of offspring actually make it smarter? Does that mean that anytime now a human can be born with a larger brain and once he/she reproduces repeatedly, more of the next generation would have bigger brains?

Bigger brains don't necessarily correlate with higher intelligence. There's actually a serious hypothesis that our large brains evolved primarily to radiate heat in the hot African savannah rather than to make us smarter, and our upright posture was to present less area to the sun. People don't talk about it much, but thermoregulation is another thing that human do better than most animals in hot climates.

The whole idea of mutations leading to greater intelligence shouldn't be such a mind-blowing idea. Do you accept that the children of two smart people will probably be smarter than the children of two stupid people? Intelligence is at least partially hereditary. If the basic inherited information is changed, then why is it so hard to imagine intelligence could change?

 

[Chalnoth]

Have there been any recent cases of mutations giving offspring bigger brains? I just don't understand this concept. An accidental change in the genes of offspring actually make it smarter? Does that mean that anytime now a human can be born with a larger brain and once he/she reproduces repeatedly, more of the next generation would have bigger brains?

Only if the bigger brain gives said person an advantage in the mating game. Anyway, I doubt we would know a new mutation that increased brain size in humans if it happened. There's so much variation among humans today, and only quite small changes are going to be survivable, such that it seems manifestly unlikely that any such change would be detectable. At least, not at the present time.

I think it'd be more fruitful, then, to look at past mutations, instead of current ones. Mutations that separate us from chimpanzees. Many geneticists have been looking rather hard at the human genome for areas in our genes that have been positively selected for. These regions are known as HAR's, short for "human accelerated regions," and we have found a number of these, and yes, some of the genes that changed significantly between us and chimpanzees are active in the brain. This is an area of current research, though, and I suspect the arguments are still ongoing and the evidence to be rather subtle.

But for evidence that some of our genes give us bigger brains over some other potential gene combinations, one need look no further than microcephaly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcephaly

Microcephaly is a disorder where there is a particular mutation in one of the genes that is active in brain development. A destructive mutation in this gene causes the person's brain to be much, much smaller than normal.

 

[Split Rock]

All kinds of questions just get rehashed over and over. Evolutionist seem to think they are smarter. They all talk down to anyone that does not agree with there point of view.

No, they think they know more about the subjects they study than someone who has apparently forgotten everything they ever learned about science in high school.

There would be no new science if everyone believed the scientist

This makes no sense whatsoever.

But a lot of times scientists are wrong or just don't know, but act like they know.

Do you mean like someone who makes claims about the origin of elements without knowing about nuclear fusion? Or about domesticated species without knowing about artificial selection?

Here is some examples.

Dogs are color blind and only see in 2 dimensions.

Whatever. I would like to see the dog they interviewed. One bark for yes and two for no. If they can not look through a dogs eyes and use their brain to interpret what it sees they don't have a clue. It would be silly to watch a dog pounce 4 feet in front of their prey, because of no depth perception. lol They obviously have depth perception which would mean they see 3D not 2D.

Dogs lack the cells required to see colors. You see, scientists actually do research to find out things like... what cells in the eye are required to see color. Funny huh? They should probably have stuck to trying to interpret scripture to figure out such things. Then, they could come up with ridiculous comments like you do; for example that anyone thinks dogs have no depth perception.

 

[uberd00b]

Many, such as Kurt Wise, have PhDs in relevant fields. If it takes a moron to believe in creationism, then why do scientists with PhDs adhere to it?

Because their religion tells them to, and for no other reason. These people are hampered by adherence to a demonstrably false religious belief, they're unable to make good decisions on this subject because they have to believe a certain thing happened. They are told that faith is the most important thing, more important that what is actually real, and this places them at odds with reality. This is why they are just about always proven wrong without fail. Their religion forces them to reject reality, it is not an honest position.

I won't go down the 'Expelled' route and a claim a persecution complex. But just because ninety-nine percent of scientists are evolutionists does not make evolution true.

Of course not, the vast amounts of evidence and the fact that we've observed evolution happening are big pointers in that direction though.

 

[Baggins]

I'll take this one.

The Earths core is molten magma.

They don't really know. No one has ever been there. It could be a mineral that has never been seen and can withstand great pressure without melting. We just don't know. But scientist claim that there right. The theory is plausible , but there is no physical evidence.

The Earth's core is not molten magma, I don't know where you got that idea from but even a cursory glance at wikipedia would have set you straight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_interior

If you are fed up with scientists talking down to you and acting as if they are more intelligent than you you would do well to show that you are an intellectual equal. Not checking basic facts before posting suggests that you have some way to go.

It is actually quite easy to check the state of the interior of the earth, by looking at the passage of seismic waves through the earth's core we can tell which layers are solid and which liquid. We can measure the average density of the earth by its gravitational affects on other bodies, we can measure the density of the earth's crust and upper mantle directly, this, along with our models of planetary formation allow us to make accurate predictions about what the earth's is composed of

If a tree falls in the woods does it make a noise? According to my science teacher, it doesn't.

I find that difficult to believe, unless you went to a private Christian college or had a very dim teacher or both

So it comes down to Scientists are imperfect humans that don't know every thing and should humble themselves to new ideas.

Creationism isn't a new idea, it is a very old idea and was falsified hundreds of years ago. Scientists are always open to new ideas, that is why science leads to progress and continues to do so.

We did not see the bighorn get evolved by man to a fluffy wool sheep
We did not witness the inter breeding of fowl to make chickens.
According to science, if we were not there, It must not exist.

By this logic Christianity isn't true because we didn't witness Jesus resurrecting from the dead.

Congratulations your "logic" has just killed off your religion.

 

[ChordatesLegacy]

I'll take this one.

By this logic Christianity isn't true because we didn't witness Jesus resurrecting from the dead.

Congratulations your "logic" has just killed off your religion.

By the same logic; there way defiantly no witness’s to the Ten Commandments being struck into rock.

There is not even a single copy of the original writing.

So the only conclusion using creationist logic.

The bible is wrong, because no one witnessed it’s creation

 

[Michael1975]

I find that difficult to believe, unless you went to a private Christian college or had a very dim teacher or both

Why does it being a Christian college change how smart teachers are?

Creationism isn't a new idea, it is a very old idea and was falsified hundreds of years ago. Scientists are always open to new ideas, that is why science leads to progress and continues to do so.

When was creationism ever falsified?

By this logic Christianity isn't true because we didn't witness Jesus resurrecting from the dead.

Congratulations your "logic" has just killed off your religion.

No, he hasn't. Jesus was resurrected from the dead. In fact, I was watching an interesting argument on this not too long ago...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c47Zd2AyeCg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5VE1lE0rzo&feature=related

Btw, there were 10 judges. 5 philosophers and 5 proffesional debate judges voting on debate techniques. 4/5 philosophers voted for Habermas (the Christian) while the last 1 was undecided. 3/5 debate judges voted for Habermas while 2/5 votes for Flew (the Atheist). Anthony Flew also began to express deist views soon after.