Genesis is a lie. Question for christians...

[Montalban]

This is what we mean when we say "evolution is blind".

I agree that evolution is 'blind' in that sense. Oddly though that Darwin himself decided to illustrate this by referring to pigeon breeders AND Richard Dawkins also advocates using biomorphs as a tool for showing this as well - both missing the point of their own theory.

A trait does not determine whether an animal will successfully breed - the fact that it successfully bred meant the trait was useful.

How does a seal having brown fur help it successfully mate?

We cannot predict the future, we can only judge by looking at the results.

That's what I said

I remember having this same pointless conversaion several months ago.

I always am intrigued when people enter discussions to say that there's no point to it.

 

[Montalban]

So you're not arguing that we shouldn't accept evolution, you're just arguing that we shouldn't accept evolution because some of the evidence for it in the past turned out to be fradulent.

Really? That's news to me. Like a lot of your summations of my posts

 

[chris4243]

The tautology isn't gone. Whatever surives survies is a tautology!

Exactly! And tautologies are, by definition, necessarily true but (strictly speaking) uninformative. All that we know about math, is either something we arbitrarily made up, or a tautology. Anything that can be proven to be a tautology in math, is called a theorem and is completely uninformative (for example, the fact that the sum of the angles of a triangle in Euclidean geometry add to 180 degrees, is a tautology aka totally uninformative). Even though all theorems are tautologies and strictly speaking uninformative, they are treasured by mathematicians and all kinds of theorems are taught to students in school and college. Everything you "learned" about Euclidean geometry, for example, is just the 5 postulates and a bunch of useless, tautological theorems.

Anyways, saying "of course that is true I already knew that" isn't a very good argument against something.

 

[Montalban]

Exactly! And tautologies are, by definition, necessarily true but (strictly speaking) uninformative.

That's the problem with Darwin is that his theory is best decribed by this... which others and I have noted in the posts just prior one cannot say what is a trait that is suited to survival

All that we know about math, is either something we arbitrarily made up, or a tautology. Anything that can be proven to be a tautology in math, is called a theorem and is completely uninformative (for example, the fact that the sum of the angles of a triangle in Euclidean geometry add to 180 degrees, is a tautology aka totally uninformative). Even though all theorems are tautologies and strictly speaking uninformative, they are treasured by mathematicians and all kinds of theorems are taught to students in school and college. Everything you "learned" about Euclidean geometry, for example, is just the 5 postulates and a bunch of useless, tautological theorems.

You can at least predict things using maths

I disagree that Euclidean geometry is a tautology

Anyways, saying "of course that is true I already knew that" isn't a very good argument against something.

Who said that?

 

[chris4243]

Well certainly designers often go off previous models - for economy of sharing the same parts.

Exactly my point! This plus the fact that the technology has progressed in the past several decades proves that there is no analogy between car designs and the phylogenetic tree of organism classification.

I'd tend to go with 'lazy' as I personally can't be bothered coming up with a more complex chart that means exactly the same thing anyway - only that it has more branches.

Ah, but fundamentally changing something is rather the opposite of exactly the same thing. As philadiddle reminded you, you can't really put cars in a phylogenetic chart without arbitrarily making the whole thing up and being unable to defend one organization over another. The whole thing gets even worse when you consider that as you hinted at before, the parts involved will for convenience have their own, and completely independent, organization that does not match that of the tree.

But not only do living things arrange nicely into phylogenetic trees, so do all their parts (whether as individual genes, or physical traits). See the difference?

 

[Montalban]

Exactly my point! This plus the fact that the technology has progressed in the past several decades proves that there is no analogy between car designs and the phylogenetic tree of organism classification.

So you're saying that there's no relationship between a species and its ancestors?

Ah, but fundamentally changing something is rather the opposite of exactly the same thing. As philadiddle reminded you, you can't really put cars in a phylogenetic chart without arbitrarily making the whole thing up and being unable to defend one organization over another.

The tree of life diagram is also arbitary.

I'm not saying that life didn't evolve in a 'similar' pattern to a particular tree diagram but the diagram itself is a descriptor of the pathway and as such is based on our knowledge of the pathway, not the pathway itself, and as our knowledge changes so must the descriptor. Therefore the descriptor isn't how life evolved but our best guess of how it evolved

But not only do living things arrange nicely into phylogenetic trees, so do all their parts (whether as individual genes, or physical traits). See the difference?

So do cars

 

[shernren]

For the lurkers, we have empirically observed less-fit beings survive before, putting to rest any notion that "survival of the fittest" is a tautology.

In theory, competition between asexual lineages can lead to second-order selection for greater evolutionary potential. To test this hypothesis, we revived a frozen population of Escherichia coli from a long-term evolution experiment and compared the fitness and ultimate fates of four genetically distinct clones. Surprisingly, two clones with beneficial mutations that would eventually take over the population had significantly lower competitive fitness than two clones with mutations that later went extinct. By replaying evolution many times from these clones, we showed that the eventual winners likely prevailed because they had greater potential for further adaptation. Genetic interactions that reduce the benefit of certain regulatory mutations in the eventual losers appear to explain, at least in part, why they were outcompeted.
​

Second-Order Selection for Evolvability in a Large Escherichia coli Population

 

[shernren]

In any case, tautologies are perfectly fine. "Either it is raining, or it is not raining" is not only a perfectly sensible statement, it is one we refer to whenever we reach for our umbrellas.

And to anyone with even basic training in logic it will be clear that everything Montalban believes is tautologous, anyway. (Hint: place a pair of quote marks judiciously.)

 

[chris4243]

But you made a purely nonsense 'statement' which cannot be responded to intelligently. By contrast, I gave you, in no uncertain terms, exactly what evolutionary theory has been touting by it's proponents for about 150 yrs and yet you pretend that it is not a legitimate request.

I know what evolutionary theory predicts, and I see the facts fit it nicely. I don't need to prove evolution to myself, not anymore, since I did that a couple of years ago. The reason I'm asking you for specifics is because I believe that you don't understand the predictions made by evolution and that in your request for evidence is asking for something that is forbidden by the theory of evolution. Therefore, I am asking you for specifics so that if I do give you the correct answer to your question you won't then complain that it isn't what you asked for. I do this because of my previous experience arguing with creationists (or for that matter, having argued as a creationist myself).

To clarify what I am asking for, fill in the following statement:
According to the theory of evolution/common descent, (name a creature) evolved into (name another creature) within the time frame of (amount of time). The evidence I would expect to see were this true, is (number of distinct intermediate fossils [taking into account the number of species there are, the completeness of fossils discovered, and the number of fossils discovered to date]). Alternately, I might expect to see (description of trait) evolve under laboratory conditions of (describe) with a population size of (number) over (number) generations.
If you could fill in those statements I would have an idea of whether anything I could say would satisfy you, or if you don't actually understand the theory but are just pretending to (the last sentence would involve some rather drastic guessing, but if your guess is off by many orders of magnitude it would also say something).

Basically, I'm trying to find out whether you're like the atheist demanding to see the corpse of Jesus as evidence that He resurrected, or like the atheist demanding to see the empty tomb of Jesus as evidence that He resurrected. In the first case, I'd tell you that you're looking for the wrong thing, in the second case I'd try to show you something along the lines of what you want.

For the same period of time I mentioned above, I watched neo-Darwinians deliberately change defintions with a clever twist on words to escape the harsh reality of their false position: Evolution itself has changed as I already pointed out. 'Entropy' changed from 'a measure of disorder' to 'dissipation'. 'spontaneous generation' changed to 'chemical evolution' and that has changed in recent times to 'abiogenesis'...further obscuring the real meaning in the mind of the unsuspecting general public. 'Species' has changed so many times that now one could claim that over a dozen different meanings depending on what one is promoting. How convenient.

And it is things like this that make it seem to me that you're like the atheist demanding to see Christ's corpse. Science, as you would know if you studied the subject, is nothing more than a close approximation to reality, and changes as more information is assimilated to even more closely fit reality. This is as true in biology as it is in physics. Words change definition as well, for example the meter has been redefined multiple times to be more useful or more accurate. New words are made to describe new concepts (or new twists on old concepts). And the theory of evolution predicts that "species" is an artificial, man-made classification that might only coincidentally match reality. That you cite some very strong evidence for evolution as a flaw in evolution makes me suspect you don't know what you're talking about. As I said before, you seem to me as the atheist demanding to see Christ's corpse, stubbornly refusing to listen to the Christian telling him that according to Christianity he won't be able to find it and should be looking for the empty tomb instead.

 

[chris4243]

But then your counterpart says the unbelievable: "Prove me wrong -- create the branched graph you claim exists in car model designs.."

Talk about missing the point? Sometimes those, uh, persons....leave me with my mouth hanging open in stunned disbelief. The WHOLE POINT was that cars did not evolve. They were intelligently engineered throughout the entire existence of the car industry!

Looks like we finally, sort of, agree on something. Since cars were intelligently designed, they won't fit into a phylogenetic tree like living creatures do -- the graph of car designs wouldn't look like the "tree of life".

 

[Montalban]

For the lurkers, we have empirically observed less-fit beings survive before, putting to rest any notion that "survival of the fittest" is a tautology.

In theory, competition between asexual lineages can lead to second-order selection for greater evolutionary potential. To test this hypothesis, we revived a frozen population of Escherichia coli from a long-term evolution experiment and compared the fitness and ultimate fates of four genetically distinct clones. Surprisingly, two clones with beneficial mutations that would eventually take over the population had significantly lower competitive fitness than two clones with mutations that later went extinct. By replaying evolution many times from these clones, we showed that the eventual winners likely prevailed because they had greater potential for further adaptation. Genetic interactions that reduce the benefit of certain regulatory mutations in the eventual losers appear to explain, at least in part, why they were outcompeted.
​

Second-Order Selection for Evolvability in a Large Escherichia coli Population

How can they be 'less fit' if they survived? What more is there to survival than survival?

 

[chris4243]

You can at least predict things using maths

No, you cannot. You can make stuff up, and you can know stuff (and you can prove that you know stuff). You can't predict in maths that 1 + 1 = 2, you can define 1, 2, +, and =, so that it is necessarily true 1 + 1 = 2.

I disagree that Euclidean geometry is a tautology

Not all of it. Euclid's 5 postulates are arbitrarily made up, baseless, unprovable statements.
"Let the following be postulated":

1. "To draw a straight line from any point to any point."
2. "To produce [extend] a finite straight line continuously in a straight line."
3. "To describe a circle with any centre and distance [radius]."
4. "That all right angles are equal to one another."
5. The parallel postulate: "That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles."

Everything else in Euclidean geometry is tautologies. For example, the statement "In Euclidean geometry, if a convex polygon has n sides, then its interior angle sum is given by the following equation: S = ( n −2) × 180°." is a tautology that tells you nothing that you didn't already know. To prove a theorem is true, you need to prove that it tells you nothing you didn't already know.

All things in math consist of three categories (everything in each category is synonymous with everything else):
1) arbitrarily made up statements such as postulates, axioms, definitions, premises, assumptions, etc: these are considered true for no other reason than that someone said so, and no attempt is made to prove them.
2) things known to be true, such as theorems and tautologies; theorems are proved to be true by showing that they can be deduced from or are equivalent to a tautology
3) things that are known to be false, such as contradictions (which are the negation of a tautology).

Anyways, saying "of course that is true I already knew that" isn't a very good argument against something.

Who said that?

You called "survival of the fittest" a tautology, which means that you said that you knew it has to be true and that it tells you nothing you didn't already know. A tautology is a statement of the form "If A then A" or "A or not A" -- by logical necessity, both true and technically uninformative. Note however, that all theorems in mathematics are just fancy tautologies, which technically are no more informative that "A or not A".

 

[shernren]

How can they be 'less fit' if they survived? What more is there to survival than survival?

This.

 

[chris4243]

So you're saying that there's no relationship between a species and its ancestors?

I'm saying that there is when talking about living things, but not when talking about cars. Car design doesn't fit into a phylogenetic tree.

The tree of life diagram is also arbitary.

So you're saying that it is an arbitrary choice that birds aren't included in the branch of the phylogenetic tree labeled "primate", or that it is arbitrary that whales aren't included as one of the insects? There may be some arbitrariness* in the tree of life, but mostly it is arranged as it is because the overwhelming similarities make that particular arrangement useful. I mean, if you included whales among the insects whenever you're talking about insect traits you'd have to go "except the whale", or "but only the whale has that trait" which would get annoying pretty quickly.

*Having studied phylogenetic trees, I expect a few changes to be made occasionally because of how the first ones were constructed. The older trees were constructed based on a few physical similarities, the principle of parsimony, and assumptions about traits evolving or disappearing. The newer ones are constructed off thousands of times more data in the form of nucleotide sequences.

 

[Montalban]

No, you cannot.

Of course you can! Else bridges would all fall down because they'd made them too weak!

 

[Montalban]

I'm saying that there is when talking about living things, but not when talking about cars. Car design doesn't fit into a phylogenetic tree.

Because you say so?

So you're saying that it is an arbitrary choice that birds aren't included in the branch of the phylogenetic tree labeled "primate", or that it is arbitrary that whales aren't included as one of the insects?

Actually if you wanted to re-classify birds you could

 

[Montalban]

This.

A link?

I wonder how we survived without it

 

[chris4243]

Of course you can! Else bridges would all fall down because they'd made them too weak!

Yes, you can make predictions about bridge-building -- but that is because engineering is a branch of science. Where did you get the idea that engineering is a branch of math?

 

[chris4243]

Because you say so?

Many creationists have claimed an analogy between car design and the tree of life. No creationist has made a chart showing cars in a nested hierarchy like organisms are in the tree of life. I personally have examined the question, and found that car models don't fit into a nested hierarchy in the same way organisms do.

So, not just because I say so but because I've worked out that it is true. You can check for yourself if you don't believe me.

Actually if you wanted to re-classify birds you could

Sure you could reclassify them, but if you included birds among the primates they'd stick out as extremely different.

 

[Montalban]

Yes, you can make predictions about bridge-building -- but that is because engineering is a branch of science. Where did you get the idea that engineering is a branch of math?

Where'd you get the idea that they don't use maths in engineering?