Merged Icebear's Evolution Thread

[Shalamar]

I mean, you've got an ideological doctrine which needs quadrillions of years and only has a few thousand or a few tens of thousands, tops: how retarded does somebody need to be to actually BELIEVE that kind of BS??

Another take on the subject (evolution vs Rastafari):

http://able2know.org/topic/184841-1

In other words, an apples2apples comparison (a religion which works on the same sort of intellectual level as evolutionism).

No. Only about 2 or three billion years. Evolution is true, after all, no belief needed. It will continue to putter along regardless.

However, even if evolution were false, what would replace it? 'Creationism' has absolutely no evidence to back it, beyond a couple thousand year old book written by bronze age shepherds.

Creationists work from a false premise 'Evolution is wrong, because it conflicts with this ancient book. Let us go find evidence to show how evolution is wrong, and ignore anything that says evolution is true'.

So, in order to replace evolution, you must ignore it. Ignore all the evidence in favor of it, ignore all the work done for it, and ignore it's predictive power. You must instead work on proving some alternate theory to be true. How does it explain the diversity of life? How does one explain the DNA shared by living things? How does it explain the experiments done today? What predictive power does it have, and how can we use it to better our understanding of the vastness of life that exists on this rock?

Unless you can do that, you have nothing. All you have is intellectual dishonesty, and the ability to cling to a bronze age book to show that evolution is 'wrong' and a 'lie'.

 

[Cainkane1]

The Haldane dilemma describes one kind of time problem which evolutionists enjoy ignoring.

Walter Remine’s simplistic explanation of it goes like this:



In a rational world, that should be as far as most people need to read. That basically says that even given a rate of evolutionary development which is fabulously beyond anything which is possible in the real world, starting from apes, in ten million years the best you could possibly hope for would be an ape with a slightly shorter tail. People who have tried to work the numbers for more realistic rates of substitution speak of quadrillions of years...


The other kind of time problem which evolutionists have and don't like to talk about has to do with soft tissue turning up to an increasing extent in dinosaur remains.

http://kgov.com/dinosaur-soft-tissue

https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=hadrosaur+soft+tissue&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8


There is zero possibility of the kinds of tissue these articles describe lasting for even one million years, much less for tens or hundreds of millions as we've been indoctrinated to believe.

Ok so why does genetics and the fossil record support evolution? Leaving out human evolution entirely we see many other species have a near complete fossil record of their evolution. Horses and whales being a good example.

Creationists are good at pointing out unknown factors concerning evolution while ignoring the glaring problems you have when you propose intelligent design. If indeed there were an intelligent designer the designer would have done a better job than evolution which is a hit or miss proposition. Raising questions even questions even questions that can never be answered does not disprove evolution.

When it comes to evolution there are many mysteries that lacking a time machine probaby will never be resolved.

I've heard arguments pro and con concerning the so called discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur fossils. Ok lets have an example? Submit this soft tissue to an intense scientific examination and lets see if thats what it really is.

I believe the scientists who say dinosaurs went extinct hundreds of millions of years ago. I believe that even if soft tissue has actually been found which I doubt. If there is soft tissue then some incredible preservation came about. Anythings possible.

Ok if humans and dinosaurs ever existed at the same time then when in our history did they go extinct? How did it happen? The extinction dinosaurs would have been a major event in human history. There are no dinosaurs mentioned in the epic of Gilgamesh which predates the bible. Some creationists claim the bible talks about dinosaurs but the descriptions don't match the descriptions of known species of dinosaurs. I mean nowhere in the bible is a T-Rex described. Why are there no descriptions of dinosaurs in other ancient texts? They aren't in the vend avesta. They aren't in the Norse legends and they aren't mentioned in ancient Chinese texts. There are mentions of dragons but if these apparently easily slain creature were not just some myth where are the tropies? I mean if these creatures were slain out of existence by ancient heros then why is there no trophy head of a dragon? Heck if I were a knight and I killed a dinosaur I'd keep a memento.

I'll tell you something else youd be hard pressed to find soft tissue in a creature thats been dead for 5000 years. Has anybody dug up an elephant thats been dead that long ever found soft tissue?

When you compare the science of evolution to the so called creation science then creation science falls short. You got more problems than we do.

 

[icebear]

Ok so why does genetics and the fossil record support evolution?

It doesn't.

"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing'
evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the
most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record.
Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does
not provide them ..."

David B. Kitts, PhD (Zoology)
Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum
Evolution, vol 28, Sep 1974, p 467

"The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps;
the fossils are missing in all the important places."

Francis Hitching
The Neck of the Giraffe or Where Darwin Went Wrong
Penguin Books, 1982, p.19

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major
transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our
imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been
a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
"Is a new general theory of evolution emerging?"
Paleobiology, vol 6, January 1980, p. 127

"...Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when
they say there are no transitional fossils ... I will lay it on the line,
there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight
argument."

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist,
British Museum of Natural History, London
As quoted by: L. D. Sunderland
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 89

......

 

[Shalamar]

It doesn't.

And yet it does, despite your denials.

What alternative do you propose? What overwhelming evidence do you have to support it?

 

[icebear]

Simple ignorance is one thing, but I really hate seeing people totally in BONDAGE to ignorance, and jref seems to have a problem which is a bit worse than usual...

 

[Shalamar]

Simple ignorance is one thing, but I really hate seeing people totally in BONDAGE to ignorance, and jref seems to have a problem which is a bit worse than usual...

Perhaps you should let go of your ignorance, and really try to understand what you are desperate to deny?

What alternative do you have? What evidence is there to support it?

 

[ravdin]

What would it take to convince you that you are wrong?

Haldane's answer to that question was evidence of rabbit fossils in the Precambrian era.

 

[Pixel42]

Transitional Fossils.

 

[CriticalSock]

Crocoduck in 3...2...

 

[Shalamar]

Transitional Fossils.

I'm sure those won't count. We need a crocoduck!!! Or the half-ape, half human hybrid!!!! Or the bird with arms, or only half wings!!! They would have to be half of one species, and half of an entirely unrelated species!!!!!

My extra exclamation points show it must be true!!!!

 

[DC]

I mean, you've got an ideological doctrine which needs quadrillions of years and only has a few thousand or a few tens of thousands, tops: how retarded does somebody need to be to actually BELIEVE that kind of BS??

Another take on the subject (evolution vs Rastafari):

http://able2know.org/topic/184841-1

In other words, an apples2apples comparison (a religion which works on the same sort of intellectual level as evolutionism).

LOL you are so ignorant. just be happy there are enough smart and educated people that make live so easy like it is.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Evolution only happens in tiny, isolated areas.

I like this new game.

 

[Cainkane1]

A single BENEFICIAL mutation at a time. That's the assumption evolution works with. The vast and overwhelming bulk of all mutations are harmful or fatal or, best case, don't really do much of anything.

Not it doesn't. There can be several working survival mechanisms in evolution and there usually are. The developement of life is way more complex than just a few factors.

 

[Dinwar]

Imagine a population of 100,000 apes or “proto-humans” ten million years ago which are all genetically alike other than for two with a “beneficial mutation”.

Populations never have only one genetic difference. Modern evolutionary theory focuses on population genetics and fitness space--meaning that we acknowledge the fact that populations have a range of genetic differences, and that "beneficial mutation" is an extremely complex term to define.

Imagine that the beneficial mutation in question is so good, that all 99,998 others die out immediately (from jealousy),

The highlighted part shows that the person speaking simply isn't honest.

The max number of such “beneficial mutations” which could thus be substituted into the herd would be ten million divided by twenty, or 500,000 point mutations which, Remine notes, is about 1/100 of one percent of the human genome, and a miniscule fraction of the 2 to 3 percent that separates us from chimpanzees, or the half of that which separates us from Neanderthals.

Imagine that! If you artificially limit mutations to one per generation, you need very long time spans to get anywhere with evolution! The implication that humans evolved from chimps is intentionally dishonest, by the way--in reality both chimps and humans evolved from a common ancestor at some point in the past, so we can expect 1,000,000 genetic differences (each population accumulating 500,000 over ten million years) by this nonsensical hypothetical.

Some light reading:

http://www.genetics.org/content/156/1/297.abstract The assumption of one mutation per generation is nonsense. The assumption of even one beneficial mutation per generation is nonsense. There are about 175 mutations per person. Even if only 1% of all mutations were beneficial, EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING would have one beneficial mutation EVERY SINGLE GENERATION.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee%E2%80%93human_last_common_ancestor Here's a discussion of the human/chimp last common ancestor. I haven't confirmed the arguments, but it seems that 10 ma isn't as unreasonable as you think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock Here's a concept you haven't touched on, icebear: we can estimate when evolutionary change occurred thanks to neutral mutations in organisms. Those mutations aren't selected for or against, meaning that they accumulate through time randomly. These have been compared against morphology and paleontological data (the study I'm most familiar with here is on cetaceans; look at the thread on taxonomy as a rigorous science to see more on that study) and most of the time the results match pretty well. So we actually have hard evidence for when mutations occurred. The question isn't "Can these mutations happen fast enough?" Rather, the question is "What explains the observed rate?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_principle If you really want to get into the math regarding mutation fixation, this is the equation to use. It's deceptively simple, but extremely powerful.

As for your quote by Gould, I can assure you that Gould believed that the fossil record demonstrated the history of evolution. His quote is out of context. It was describing why a gradualistic, Uniformitarian model of evolution doesn't work--while proposing another model. The fossil record DOES show the history of evolution and supports evolutionary theory. It's just that it's not what we expected at first. There's a world of difference between that and what you're saying.

By the way, I'm still waiting for you to support your accusations that I'm a liar and a coward.

 

[Cainkane1]

It doesn't.

Yes it does. The similarities in the DNA structures of humans and apes proves a common ancestor. Many many other factors prove evolution to be a scientifically provable fact.

 

[dafydd]

Simple ignorance is one thing, but I really hate seeing people totally in BONDAGE to ignorance

Don't look in the mirror if it upsets you so much. I notice that you are studiously avoiding the point about variations in canines. Enjoy your short time here.

 

[Cainkane1]

A single BENEFICIAL mutation at a time. That's the assumption evolution works with. The vast and overwhelming bulk of all mutations are harmful or fatal or, best case, don't really do much of anything.

When it comes to mutations most but not all of them are harmful. The creature with the bad mutation fails to thrive or reproduce whereas the creature with the good mutations enjoys better survivability. Thats evolution. Your argument is ripped to shreds by good science.

 

[Madalch]

That's the opposite of what Gould, Eldredge and the rest of the punc-eekers are saying, i.e. that evolution only happens in tiny, isolated areas. It's also a fact that evolution is supposed to be driven by mutations and you'd never get the huge numbers of mutations in nature that you'd get in controlled experiments DESIGNED to produce as many mutations as possible.

"Tiny and isolated" means one thing when one is designing an experiment,and quite another when you're talking about ecosystems and populations.

 

[dafydd]

One version:

http://able2know.org/topic/121664-1

Evolution is a dead theory walking. Nobody with brains and/or talent believes in it any more.

Linking to a crank website will not help your case. How few brain cells does one need in order to believe in Creationism?

 

[dafydd]

I like this new game.

There is something about this site that attracts the woos.