Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
Nope. That has to be the weakest definition of controversial that I have ever heard.
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A simple case for intelligent design
- Thread starter leroy
- Start date
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
That is the problem. You are not open minded and you refuse to learn. If you like we can start with the basics. Not my version of the basics, I will be providing links. So far you have only shown that you do not understand either the scientific method or scientific evidence. After we go over those then we can move on.
This is not "my evidence" by the way. Why do you constantly try to twist things? It indicates an inability to support your claims.
What alternative is there?
Every feature and change we examine turns out to be a product of known, automatic evolutionary mechanisms.
We're saturated with evidence. There are whole libraries of evidence. Researchers present new evidence daily, in papers, journals, &c.
There are none so blind...
My apologies. I missed these sources. Can you steer me to this article you reference?
The only controversy is about details, usually at the frontiers of research. The fact of evolution by natural selection is not in controversy.
links?
First, God is not an explanation, it's an agent. An explanation describes the steps of a process; the mechanisms involved. Goddidit doesn't do that.
Goddidit is just an assertion of agency.
2nd: God is unnecessary. It's an extraneous addition to a natural, demonstrated, observable, sufficient explanation.
Why do you feel this need to add completely unnecessary and untestable complications to a robust theory?
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
He presented the old canard "Scientists who dissent from Darwinism". A misleading tract that got a few signatures. Most of them not from scientists in the field and worse yet when some people realized the fraud that it was the group would not remove their signatures.
So real scientists came up with "Project Steve". This tract supported the theory of evolution and cold only be signed by people with the name "Steve" in some form or other and were in pertinent fields of study:
Project Steve
As of March 9 2018 they had 1424 signatures.
And since that was far from being a scientific paper it can be refuted by something as basic as a ten year old YouTube video:
This man both looked into who signed that work and those that tried to remove their signatures.
Now you know what he was referring to and it has been well refuted to boot.
You asked for an article showing that complexity arises through mutation and natural selection. That was given. Yes, some claim mutation alone is sufficient for the observed variations. That is shown wrong through computer simulations. And *no* evidence points towards evolution being guided. In fact, the observed evolutionary lines in the fossil record show the opposite. Even Carroll's book on vertebrate evolution goes through the evidence against guided evolution.
No, actually, it does not. Furthermore, you promote an explanation that isn't taken seriously by *any* of the scientists (directed evolution). The rejection of that option isn't controversial at all.
gnostic
The Lost One
I am not a biologist, so I can only say what I have read in my reading from my cousin’s old biology textbook that I had borrowed, back 2003-04, so what little private research I did back then, don’t make me expert, nor a biologist.
My qualifications are civil engineering and computer science, so my background in science (applied science) are mostly confined specific physics and mathematics, relating to civil (Newton’s mechanisms, eg gravity, force, velocity, etc) and computer (eg electricity, electronics, electromagnetism (eg understanding concept of laser and radio waves for wired and wireless network), optics (reflection and refraction in fibre optic).
Since my main areas involved most specific areas in physics, neither courses involved much of biology (in civil engineering we did require understanding of woods being used as building materials, so some basic understanding the properties of different types of woods, are needed, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge regarding to biology in civil engineering).
Anyway, back to that borrowed textbook. I had only read his textbook so I can understand the arguments between the two factions that support evolution and creation. You see, I had joined my first forum in 2003, before joining Religion Forum in 2006. They were computer programming forum (called Free2Code), with only small sections on other subjects, like music, politics and religion.
Back then (in 2003), I didn’t know anything about evolution, and while I have read the Bible (in the early 80s), I didn’t know there was a group called Creationism and called themselves Creationists.
So in order to understand why the two groups were arguing about these subjects, I did some reading on evolution.
My point is that I am not a biologist, so anything I write about evolution, is only limited to what I have so far from textbook that only covered the basics on evolution.
Anyway, I never understood why there were so many different families, genera and species of plants and animals, and of corse dinosaurs, but it all began clicked together, and as time went by, I began to agree with science in evolutionary biology and theory than the biblical creation.
Between the time I was a teenager (when I first read the Bible at 15 (1981), when my sister had already joined the church, a bible that she gave me that year) to early 2000, there was no evolution this, no creationism that. I was completely unaware of the debates raging between the two sides. In 2000, I had become agnostic, although I didn’t know I was an agnostic or anything about agnosticism, until joining Free2Code.
I began doubting the Bible before I even became aware of evolution and creationism. It wasn’t Genesis creation that first made me doubt the validity of Bible. It was the so-called signs or prophecies that the bible and what the church taught about Jesus. But that’s getting off-track.
Anyway, my point is that despite not being an expert I did learn something new about biology that I didn’t know about before. I am telling you all, because you need to give me some leeway, if I do make some mistakes.
My understanding is this regarding to evolution and biology in general.
The existing theory of evolution, covered all 5 known alternative mechanisms, and explains all five:
- Natural Selection
- Mutations
- Genetic Drift
- Gene Flow
- Genetic Hitchhiking
What you labeled as “controversial”, are merely based on reading a number of your replies, leroy, is your lack of basic understanding of the concept (which in this case, the theory of evolution, and specifically to that of Selection and Mutations, and your continuous misrepresenting what they say, and what are probable and possible.
There are no magic or miracles involved, and no invisible powerful being, which people called “God”, or other labels, like “Creator”, or the more recent, “Designer”.
It is the magic and miracles involved that god created the world, and human from dust, that’s a controversial. It the invisible all-powerful and all-knowing being, that’s the controversial. It is the Intelligent Designer, who is also invisible like God, supposed designing everything including life, that’s controversial.
My point is that there are no more evidences for the Designer as there are no evidences for Creator or for God, that’s what make both Creationism and Intelligent Design.
Like god, the Designer required just personal belief and blind faith, not scientific evidences. You cannot observe or measure or test the Designer anymore than believers can observe, measure or test God.
For that reason alone, make the Intelligent Design unfalsifiable (and therefore unscientific), as well as controversial. I think there is more controversial in believing that dust or soil (silt or clay soil) magically transforming into human being (like that in Genesis or the Qur’an or the myths of Ziusudra/Atrahasis/Utnapishtim) than natural selection.
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Bear Wild
Well-Known Member
To understand evolution it is always best to take it step by step. Arguing the change from worm to man or other extensive changes requires so much more understanding and is used be creationists to misrepresent the information by leaving out the detail in between. So before you can argue evolution do you understand the concept of variation? This is critical for any further discussion since without it you cannot discuss evolution intelligently. With variation is the understating that genetic code is the is the cause for the variation. So to you accept this concept?
gnostic
The Lost One
As I said before, leroy, I am no expert in biology, and therefore no expert in evolution. I cannot give you cite you sources, from biologists, because I don’t have the time to find these sources for you.
But since you have claimed that you accept evolution, but not Natural Selection and Mutations, I can give you an example, which you can look up yourself, if you are really willing to learn more.
But from my past experiences with discussing and debating with creationists, they are wilfully ignorant, meaning their biased make them unwilling to learn from their mistakes.
I think you are confusing individuals learning to adapt to new environment (which isn’t evolution) and population over time changing, to suit the environment, which can involved hundreds, to thousands or tens of thousands of generations, for such changes to be noticeable.
Since I understand more on Natural Selection than on Mutations, so my example on Natural Selection is on bears.
Based on what I can gather, before the more recent Ice Age (known as the Quaternary Glaciation or the Pleistocene Glaciation), the brown bears existed, both in the New World (North American continent) and the Old World (Eurasian continent).
What you need to understand, that during these recent glacial periods, that the ice sheets didn’t cover every regions, so while the Earth was globally cooler than previous epochs and era, the ice sheets only covered certain regions.
For instance, not all of Central Europe (eg modern Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Czech Republic, etc) was covered by ice sheets. In Germany, only the northern region while the rest are uncovered, but when you reached Swiss Alps, this higher elevation was covered in ice sheet, but not the surrounding lower elevations.
Anyway, back to the bears. Since not every areas/regions were covered from ice sheets, life continued for the brown bears the same as always - they are active in warmer seasons, but during the winter, they would hibernate.
But for the brown bears that were trapped in the ice sheets, where a glacial period can last for thousands of years to tens of thousands of years, with no summer season in the year, these brown bears had to adapt in these colder conditions or die out.
This didn’t happen magically or overnight, but as time moved forward, newer generations of brown bears, began to adapt better, physically and socially, as in change in life style.
Now all bears swim, to certain extent, but they are not natural swimmers. And most bears tends to prefer to wade in more shallower water than swim in deeper water, and they tends to stick to rivers or lakes, avoiding the seas.
But as I said, the brown bears that chose to live in ice sheets and more polar regions, they not only had to change some of their physical characteristics, but also their lifestyle. Hence, the brown bears slowly diverged from other brown bears, and became what we now called polar bears.
And it more than just whiteness of their fur. Underneath the hair and fur, their hide are still brown and dark. The color or white of their fur, giving them natural camouflage, since the ice they lived among is also white, which give the ability to sneak on their prey, usually seals, sea lions and walruses, but they sometimes managed to catch and eat penguins.
But the thickness of their fur, provided better protection from the cold, being more wind proof and more water proof than the fur of contemporary brown bears.
As I said, their main diets were and are sea lions, walruses and seals, which all have physically high body fat contents. As you should know, in high school biology, body fat insulate the bodies of animals from the cold. And polar bears have the tendency to consume more fat in their diets than the brown bears and black bears.
Consuming fat, not only keep their bodies warm, but also give the polar bears the advantage of being able to swim in icy water, including the seas. Polar bears are better swimmers than southern cousins. Also their paws have changed, which allow them paddle more efficiently in water than the brown bears, as well as their paws have better grips on snow and ice than the brown bears.
As I mentioned before, there could centuries or thousands of years with no summer seasons for those living in ice sheet covered regions, so polar bears have to hunt any time of the year, so no hibernation in the winters, like those brown bears.
The polar bears diverged from their sister species, some 600,000 years ago, during the height of the Ice Age. Since, they lived in mostly in the polar and arctic regions, spending lot of time on floating ice, finding fossils of polar bears are difficult, because they are not often buried under sedimentary rocks, where fossilisation more often take place. The oldest fossils of the polar bear found only dated to 130,000 years ago, but the mtDNA of polar bears and brown bears, showed that the divergence occurred further back in time than the fossil found.
The divergence between these two species, the changes took generations for it to occur. The polar bears didn’t have white furs overnight; it took hundreds of generation. They didn’t get larger in size, or different types of jaws, paws, and being to retain body fat, in a “poof”, magic. The polar bears didn’t become instantly better hunters and swimmers in the arctic and ice covered regions than cousins.
All this, is example of natural selection, but if you want more, then you are going to look it up yourself. And it is excellent example, because it showed how they are related, but at the same time, showed how they differ because of natural selection. No God or Designer made them that way.
But since you have claimed that you accept evolution, but not Natural Selection and Mutations, I can give you an example, which you can look up yourself, if you are really willing to learn more.
But from my past experiences with discussing and debating with creationists, they are wilfully ignorant, meaning their biased make them unwilling to learn from their mistakes.
I think you are confusing individuals learning to adapt to new environment (which isn’t evolution) and population over time changing, to suit the environment, which can involved hundreds, to thousands or tens of thousands of generations, for such changes to be noticeable.
Since I understand more on Natural Selection than on Mutations, so my example on Natural Selection is on bears.
Based on what I can gather, before the more recent Ice Age (known as the Quaternary Glaciation or the Pleistocene Glaciation), the brown bears existed, both in the New World (North American continent) and the Old World (Eurasian continent).
What you need to understand, that during these recent glacial periods, that the ice sheets didn’t cover every regions, so while the Earth was globally cooler than previous epochs and era, the ice sheets only covered certain regions.
For instance, not all of Central Europe (eg modern Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Czech Republic, etc) was covered by ice sheets. In Germany, only the northern region while the rest are uncovered, but when you reached Swiss Alps, this higher elevation was covered in ice sheet, but not the surrounding lower elevations.
Anyway, back to the bears. Since not every areas/regions were covered from ice sheets, life continued for the brown bears the same as always - they are active in warmer seasons, but during the winter, they would hibernate.
But for the brown bears that were trapped in the ice sheets, where a glacial period can last for thousands of years to tens of thousands of years, with no summer season in the year, these brown bears had to adapt in these colder conditions or die out.
This didn’t happen magically or overnight, but as time moved forward, newer generations of brown bears, began to adapt better, physically and socially, as in change in life style.
Now all bears swim, to certain extent, but they are not natural swimmers. And most bears tends to prefer to wade in more shallower water than swim in deeper water, and they tends to stick to rivers or lakes, avoiding the seas.
But as I said, the brown bears that chose to live in ice sheets and more polar regions, they not only had to change some of their physical characteristics, but also their lifestyle. Hence, the brown bears slowly diverged from other brown bears, and became what we now called polar bears.
And it more than just whiteness of their fur. Underneath the hair and fur, their hide are still brown and dark. The color or white of their fur, giving them natural camouflage, since the ice they lived among is also white, which give the ability to sneak on their prey, usually seals, sea lions and walruses, but they sometimes managed to catch and eat penguins.
But the thickness of their fur, provided better protection from the cold, being more wind proof and more water proof than the fur of contemporary brown bears.
As I said, their main diets were and are sea lions, walruses and seals, which all have physically high body fat contents. As you should know, in high school biology, body fat insulate the bodies of animals from the cold. And polar bears have the tendency to consume more fat in their diets than the brown bears and black bears.
Consuming fat, not only keep their bodies warm, but also give the polar bears the advantage of being able to swim in icy water, including the seas. Polar bears are better swimmers than southern cousins. Also their paws have changed, which allow them paddle more efficiently in water than the brown bears, as well as their paws have better grips on snow and ice than the brown bears.
As I mentioned before, there could centuries or thousands of years with no summer seasons for those living in ice sheet covered regions, so polar bears have to hunt any time of the year, so no hibernation in the winters, like those brown bears.
The polar bears diverged from their sister species, some 600,000 years ago, during the height of the Ice Age. Since, they lived in mostly in the polar and arctic regions, spending lot of time on floating ice, finding fossils of polar bears are difficult, because they are not often buried under sedimentary rocks, where fossilisation more often take place. The oldest fossils of the polar bear found only dated to 130,000 years ago, but the mtDNA of polar bears and brown bears, showed that the divergence occurred further back in time than the fossil found.
The divergence between these two species, the changes took generations for it to occur. The polar bears didn’t have white furs overnight; it took hundreds of generation. They didn’t get larger in size, or different types of jaws, paws, and being to retain body fat, in a “poof”, magic. The polar bears didn’t become instantly better hunters and swimmers in the arctic and ice covered regions than cousins.
All this, is example of natural selection, but if you want more, then you are going to look it up yourself. And it is excellent example, because it showed how they are related, but at the same time, showed how they differ because of natural selection. No God or Designer made them that way.
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leroy
Well-Known Member
So what makes a "theory " controversial?
leroy
Well-Known Member
I don't reject natural selection. I am skeptical of the idea that natural selection together with random mutatios can account for the complexity of life
leroy
Well-Known Member
Yes I accept the concept
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
Arguing over details is hardly "controversial" in the sense that you try to use the word. In a murder case it really does not matter that much if the accused stabbed the victim 20 times or 21 times. The "controversy" that you are talking about is smaller than that.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
No, you are not skeptical. That is the wrong term to use. A skeptic accepts evidence. You are denying science is all.
gnostic
The Lost One
You do realise that Mutations and Natural Selection are two different mechanisms, don’t you?
Not all natural selection involved mutations.
And as everyone who know more about biology than you and I, Natural Selection isn’t random, and Mutation isn’t random too, if you understand how either or both mechanisms work.
I don’t mind that you disagree science, because skepticism is good and part of the science work, but real skepticism used by science, required evidences, not just opinions.
Now, I don’t expect you to provide evidences, since you are not scientist, so if the alternative is for you have information, like a source or two that provide scientific data, that agreed with your opinion.
But the better solution I think is that I really seriously think you can learn from others here (the members who know more about biology than you do), because some have already explained to you why neither mutation, nor natural selection, are random. But it would seem that you refuse to learn from your mistake.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
Focusing on the fact that individual mutations are random is as foolish as focusing on every car accident as being random. Auto insurers do not insure only one driver and bet everything on that policy. They insure populations of drivers. They can predict very accurately what sort of accidents will happen. Denying evolution by focusing on the random nature of mutations is roughly the same as claiming Geico cannot make a profit by focusing on the random nature of auto accidents.
In a population there will be range of variation that arises as time goes on. That is guaranteed by the random nature of mutations. That gives selection a range of traits. Some will be more optimal than others. Those will be selected for.
In a population there will be range of variation that arises as time goes on. That is guaranteed by the random nature of mutations. That gives selection a range of traits. Some will be more optimal than others. Those will be selected for.
leroy
Well-Known Member
Sure some articles suggest that evolution by natural selection and random mutations is true, and other articles propose some other mechanism.
This is why we can savelly say that there is a controversy
How can I deny evidence, if you haven't provide any ?
leroy
Well-Known Member
Care to quote my mistakes ? I neves said that natural selection is random
And I said that mutations are not suppose to be biased towards a goal (this is what I meant by random)
leroy
Well-Known Member
Scientists are debating on the mechanism that causes worm to man evolution.
1 Some say random mutations and natural selection
2 Others say random mutatios and genetic drift
3 Others say natural genetic engineering
4 Others say epigenetics
5 Others say "I don't know" but number "1" seems probably wrong.
This is what I mean by controversy, and quite honestly this is what everyone means by controversy.
So do you now accept that evolution by random mutatios and narural selection is controversial?
leroy
Well-Known Member
https://dissentfromdarwin.org/resources-for-students/why-is-darwinian-evolution-controversial/#fn10
This article explain why is evolution by random mutatios and narural selection controversial.
?
http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/Shapiro.1992.Gentica.NatGenEngInEvo.pdf
This paper provides an alternative explanation to evolution by natural selection and random mutations . He suggests that adaptative mutations are not random but a product of a guided process that he calls natural genetic engineering.
Perhaps the author of the paper is correct, perhaps he is wrong, but the point is that alternative explanations are discussed in science.
That is wrong, one can say that Egyptians where responsable for building the pyramids even if one can't describe the steps.
Not to mention that you can't describe the steps ether
It is not an asertion it is a conclusion driven from what we know , we know that specified complexity can only come from a mind and we know that life is specified and complex
Granted, if you show that evolution by random mutatios and natural selection is a robust theory, God would be unnecessary