Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
Please, you have no idea how to understand the links that you use.
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Can Randomness and Chance cause the Evolution of life?
- Thread starter shunyadragon
- Start date
james bond
Well-Known Member
Again, epigenetic inheritance goes beyond Darwin's process of genetic mutation and natural selection. There's been an incredible number of findings since 2005. We should be hearing more as researchers come up with new findings. This is a net positive for creationists in their battle between creation science and evolution (atheist science).
In cased you missed it, these are ancestors of the family of the giraffes. These are family members with a definite short necked and intermediate size neck members of this family of potentially many species across Eurasia and Africa.world wide. The short necked
You go what you asked for a short necked ancestor of giraffes.Your dishonest selective citation without context is not acceptable. Note the bold. The short necked okapis (O. johnstoni) are direct ancestors of modern giraffes. The intermediate sized neck giraffe S. major is one of a possible number of species that are 'near direct ancestor' intermediates.
From: 7-Million-Year-Old Fossils Show How the Giraffe Got Its Long Neck
"In every way, it's intermediate," said study first author Melinda Danowitz, a medical student at the NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine. "It's completely between the two living species."
The researchers also examined how S. major held its neck. The findings are preliminary, but based on the position of the bones, it appears that S. major held its neck vertically, as a giraffe does, instead of horizontally, as a cow does, they said.
The researchers also noted that S. majoris not a direct ancestor of the giraffe. "It's near the direct ancestor," Solounias said. "But the direct ancestor has not been found yet."
Your Creationist religious perpetual motion 'arguing from ignorance' of the fallacy of the half-life argument of imaginary gaps without any qualifications in science documents you have been busted. Your God fearing fundamentalist belief reveals itself in spades with your Christian 'Intelligent Design' argument. Fess up your a Bible tottin' Creationist!?!?!?!
Interesting challenge for all atheists and agnostics, including @Revoltingest , Michael Denton (if he is out there) who claim to support 'Intelligent Design.' The was also one more atheist on this site that claimed to believe in 'Intelligent Design,' and his cover was blown when he cited the Bible in a dialogue with me.
If 'Intelligent Design' is the explanation for the life on earth, than what is this intelligent Source that these pseudo atheists and agnostics propose could be source of life on earth.
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Bizzaro Limarkian foolishness!
Yet Darwin's theory is not only still alive and well,but considered more certain now than in Darwin's day in large part because of the advances in biology since then. Creationists might object to this theory because it contradicts their religious beliefs, but that is irrelevant to the scientific community and to lay non-creationists familiar with the evidence in support of it as well.
Why would we toss out a theory that accounts for and unifies multiple observations, has never been falsified though is falsifiable, has successfully predicted many things that have been found, and can be applied to daily life to improve the human condition for one that can do none of those things and can't be used for anything?
Do you recommend that the scientific community do that - toss out a scientific theory that works for a religious belief that does nothing?
Why would that be relevant? Are you implying that that would be an argument against the giraffe evolving from an ancestral species? We've found multiple hominin fossil, some of which may be ancestral and some branches from our lineage that went extinct without leaving descendants. Identifying one as a cousin rather than an ancestor does not argue against human evolution from non-human ancestors.
Except that creationism has lost that battle even though it hasn't quit fighting it yet. Such is the nature of faith based belief.
Audie
Veteran Member
When I saw this response, I was kind of annoyed,
like, are you being deliberately obtuse, trying to make what I
said sound stupid, or what. Of course, I dont know,
so I guess I will just answer.
A: of course not, that would be rediculous.
However- in saying he was an atheist, you
did leave out the detail of his being raised by
a preacher.
So he had the seed planted deep. A person
making a temporary escape and then falling back
into magical thinking is common as cockroaches.
If all his "philosophy" (a poor substitute for training
as a jet pilot, equally poorin biology) endec up
at "god", quelle surprise!
Trotting out "Flew the Atheist" will convert
none but the sycophants.
The point is every person has a complicated upbringing from both his parents and his society.
I didn't mention/know/care that his father was a preacher. There are probably 101 other things that influenced him too and I can't try to sort all that out.
The problem is it remains an anecdotal testimony by an individual with virtually no background in the biological sciences. Your still erroneously comparing 'opinions' with scientific falsifiable theories in the justification of 'Intelligent Design,' because you anecdotally claim that life is 'unbelievably complex.'
The Freudian psychological reasoning of why Flew believed as he did is not really relevant to the discussion.
Let's back up.
I thought thread was about 'Can Randomness and Chance cause the Evolution of life?
My opinion is 'No' to that question. I find it extremely unlikely based on the fantastic chance of DNA to form through just those functions (randomness and chance). I also don't believe it occurred strictly in that manner from sources outside of science (teachings of advanced masters, etc.).
Now, I believe science must answer 'it isn't known' to the question.
So what is your beef with me? It almost seems like you are itching for a debate with the Christian Intelligent Design proponents.
I am giving my opinion as one who respects science but thinks its reach is limited and I learn from other wisdom traditions too.
Yes and I am responding to your posts which dodge around the subject in a fuzzy way.
You missed the full meaning and conclusion of the thread and the opening post, as well as the sources cited.
Randomness does not exist in the natural world as a cause of the outcome of events such as DNA replication, therefore it cannot cause anything.
You are 'arguing from ignorance' and proposing that something that is not observed to exist that science must address the fact that it is not observed. Randomness is not observed as the cause of any outcome of cause and effect events.
You brought it up as an issue and I responded. You brought up the problem you consider complexity, which you 'believe' cannot be explained by natural processes, which is the main argument for 'Intelligent Design.'
Simply and bluntly there is no basis for 'Intelligent Design' in science.
The problem is you proposed that the difference between your view and science is a matter of 'opinion' which is not accurate.
The link between the question of randomness in nature is often linked with the claim that natural causes cannot explain the complexity of life in nature, therefore 'Intelligent Design' is the best explanation. The problem is that randomness is not an observed cause of anything in nature
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james bond
Well-Known Member
Evolution is faith based belief, too. Creation scientists and I think that the battle favors creation due to epigenetic inheritance showing how wonderful a design God made and that it will favor creation because majjor phenotypic changes can occur without Darwin's mutation ideas and slow natural selection.
Isn't 20,000 years a very small window to view evolutionary change at the macroevolutionary level?Can Randomness and Chance cause the natural evolution of life?
For that matter, can randomness and chance cause anything?
This common banner of Creationists promoting 'Intelligent Design' and claiming natural evolution cannot happen because of randomness and chance in natural events. Is the variation in the outcomes of cause and effects truly random?
What is the relationship between cause and effect and the variation in the outcomes in nature. Can we have the complexity of life we have today evolve from simplicity?
What are the known causes of life and evolution?
Does random and chance occur in nature? If so how?
First reference:
The chaos theory of evolution By Keith Bennett
Forget finding the laws of evolution. The history of life is just one damn thing after another
That is not to say that evolution is random – far from it. But the neat concept of adaptation to the environment driven by natural selection, as envisaged by Darwin in On the Origin of Species and now a central feature of the theory of evolution, is too simplistic. Instead, evolution is chaotic.
Adaptationism certainly appears to hold true in microevolution – small-scale evolutionary change within species, such as changes in beak shape in Galapagos finches in response to available food sources.
However, there is still huge debate about the role of natural selection and adaptation in “macroevolution” – big evolutionary events such as changes in biodiversity over time, evolutionary radiations and, of course, the origin of species. Are these the cumulative outcome of the same processes that drive microevolution, or does macroevolution have its own distinct processes and patterns?
. . .
Palaeoecologists like me are now bringing a new perspective to the problem. If macroevolution really is an extrapolation of natural selection and adaptation, we would expect to see environmental change driving evolutionary change. Major climatic events such as ice ages ought to leave their imprint on life as species adapt to the new conditions. Is that what actually happens?
Our understanding of global environmental change is vastly more detailed than it was in Lyell and Darwin’s time. James Zachos at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and colleagues, have shown that the Earth has been on a long-term cooling trend for the past 65 million years (Science, vol 292, p 686). Superimposed upon this are oscillations in climate every 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 years caused by wobbles in the Earth’s orbit.
Over the past 2 million years – the Quaternary period – these oscillations have increased in amplitude and global climate has lurched between periods of glaciation and warmer interglacials. The big question is, how did life respond to these climatic changes? In principle, three types of evolutionary response are possible: stasis, extinction, or evolutionary change. What do we actually see?
To answer that question we look to the fossil record. We now have good data covering the past 2 million years and excellent data on the past 20,000 years. We can also probe evolutionary history with the help of both modern and ancient DNA.
The highly detailed record of the past 20,000 years comes from analyses of fossilised tree pollen from lake and peat sediments. Tree pollen is generally recognisable to the level of genus, sometimes even species, and the sediments in which it is found can easily be radiocarbon dated.
. . .
Research on animals has come to similarly unexpected conclusions, albeit based on sparser fossil records. For example, palaeontologist Russell Graham at Illinois State Museum has looked at North American mammals and palaeontologist Russell Coope at the University of Birmingham in the UK has examined insects (Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, vol 10, p 247). Both studies show that most species remain unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps longer, and across several ice ages. Species undergo major changes in distribution and abundance, but show no evolution of morphological characteristics despite major environmental changes.
That is not to say that major evolutionary change such as speciation doesn’t happen. But recent “molecular clock” research suggests the link between speciation and environmental change is weak at best.
Die hard
Molecular clock approaches allow us to estimate when two closely related modern species split from a common ancestor by comparing their DNA. Most of this work has been carried out in birds, and shows that new species appear more or less continuously, regardless of the dramatic climatic oscillations of the Quaternary or the longer term cooling that preceded it (Trends in Ecology and Evolution, vol 20, p 57).
What of extinction? Of course, species have gone extinct during the past 20,000 years. However, almost all examples involve some degree of human activity, either directly (think dodos) or indirectly (large mammals at the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago).
. . .
If environmental changes as substantial as continent-wide glaciations do not force evolutionary change, then what does? It is hard to see how adaptation by natural selection during lesser changes might then accumulate and lead to macroevolution.
I suggest that the true source of macroevolutionary change lies in the non-linear, or chaotic, dynamics of the relationship between genotype and phenotype – the actual organism and all its traits. The relationship is non-linear because phenotype, or set of observable characteristics, is determined by a complex interplay between an organism’s genes – tens of thousands of them, all influencing one another’s behaviour – and its environment.
Not only is the relationship non-linear, it also changes all the time. Mutations occur continually, without external influence, and can be passed on to the next generation. A change of a single base of an organism’s DNA might have no consequence, because that section of DNA still codes for the same amino acid. Alternatively, it might cause a significant change in the offspring’s physiology or morphology, or it might even be fatal. In other words, a single small change can have far-reaching and unpredictable effects – the hallmark of a non-linear system.
Iterating these unpredictable changes over hundreds or thousands of generations will inevitably lead to evolutionary changes in addition to any that come about by the preferential survival of certain phenotypes. It follows that macroevolution may, over the longer-term, be driven largely by internally generated genetic change, not adaptation to a changing environment.
The evolution of life has many characteristics that are typical of non-linear systems. First, it is deterministic: changes in one part of the system, such as the mutation of a DNA base, directly cause other changes. However, the change is unpredictable. Just like the weather, changes are inexorable but can only be followed with the benefit of hindsight.
Second, behaviour of the system is sensitive to initial conditions. We see this in responses to glaciations in the Quaternary period. The exact circumstances of the beginning of each interglacial determine the development of the whole period, leading to unpredictable differences between interglacials (Quaternary Science Reviews, vol 14, p 967).
Third, the history of life is fractal. Take away the labelling from any portion of the tree of life and we cannot tell at which scale we are looking (see diagram). This self-similarity also indicates that evolutionary change is a process of continual splitting of the branches of the tree.
Fourth, we cannot rewind, as Stephen Jay Gould argued in Wonderful Life. Were we to turn the evolutionary clock back to any point in the past, and let it run again, the outcome would be different. As in weather systems, the initial conditions can never be specified to sufficient precision to prevent divergence of subsequent trajectories.
Life on Earth is always unique, changing, and unpredictable. Even if certain patterns can be dimly discerned, our ability to do so diminishes with time, exactly as for the weather. Consider any moment of the geological record of life on Earth: to what extent were the changes of the next 10 or 100 million years predictable at that time? With the benefit of hindsight, we might be able to understand what happened, and construct a plausible narrative for those events, but we have no foresight.
This view of life leads to certain consequences. Macroevolution is not the simple accumulation of microevolutionary changes but has its own processes and patterns. There can be no “laws” of evolution. We may be able to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the evolution of any given species or group after the fact, but we will not be able to generalise from these to other sequences of events. From a practical point of view, this means we will be unable to predict how species will respond to projected climate changes over next century.
. . .
We still have much to learn about how life evolved but we will not develop a full appreciation until we accept the complexity of the system."
99% of all the scientists support evolution beyond a reasonable doubt, supported be 150 yearsof solid scientific research.Speculation based on a religious agenda offers no objective verifiable evidence to support. You can't even cite any peer reviewed academic publications to support this fantasy.
No, the evidence indicates evolution is a continuous process with no specific time line between one species and another. Any time span 20,000, 50,000, 100,000 or millions are arbitrary and not meaningful.
Recent evolution and adaptation of the Coywolf demonstrates a new canus species that is adapting to changing relationships with human environment. Coywolf has a genetic relationship to wolves, coyotes, and domestic dogs(small amount), but does not normally bred with other species and subspecies of canus, The Red wolf of Eastern North Carolina is a varition of the Coywolf.
The evolution of the dog is another example where Dogs no longer normally bred with wolves their ancestors and have become Canus domesticus.
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Audie
Veteran Member
"Battle"?
Some of us will be more impressed with "Creation scientists" if they ever manage to come up with
something that contradicts the ToE.
One thing to disprove it.
No, creationism and evolutionary science are fundamentally different pursuits borne of different epistemologies. The latter is evidence based, the former faith based. That is why they come to such radically different conclusions. They are different methods for deciding what is true. And they have very different track records.
Adding gods to scientific theories doesn't make them work better. It gives them no more explanatory or predictive power.
Naturally, creationists disagree, but they are making a religious objection, which carries no weight in science.
I understand that you have your beliefs, and that they are important to you. They likely guide and comfort you, and give your life centering and purpose. Of course, all of that can be accomplished without a god belief as well.
And I understand that this science contradicts your beliefs, and that you feel the need to try to diminish its impact on culture.
But you've probably also noticed that the creationists are unable to do that.
I've asked several what they recommend that the scientific community do. For example, should they throw out Darwin's theory and say instead that God created the kinds as the Bible teaches? What exactly are the creationists advocating. Should the scientists defund and close the abiogenesis research, and perhaps redirect those dollars to the Discovery Institute?
The problem that the creationists face is that even if creationism were in some sense historical fact and could be demonstrated to be so, it remains an idea that can be put to no practical use, which is untrue for the theory of evolution.
Thus, right or wrong, the creationist movement brings nothing to the table.
Darwin was not even aware of genes. That came about a decade later with Mendel.
Uh, that entire claim consists of nothing but fantasy unleashed. Up to and including the idea that there is such a thing as "creation science" or, for that matter, "atheist science".
Audie
Veteran Member
Oh I dont know, it was not ALL fantasy. What about that lame and moldy bit of equivocation he led off with, about "faith"?
Why would anyone even come up with the idea that
they are the same?
There is at least a faint tinge of humour in it that the
goddists evidently dont think their "faith" in god is
any way better or higher than the "faiith" of them dirrrty evos in their satan-inspired lies.
My guess why the meme that faith in a god (unjustified belief) is the same thing as faith that your car will start up the next time you try to turn it over as it has the last two hundred times you tested it (justified belief) was propagated was as part of the school wars - trying to get creationism into public school text books. It sounds like part of an argument that it is improper to discriminate against one kind of faith over another.
This may also be why they like to call evolution a religion. How can they let one religion into the schools and not theirs?
Another word battle they fight is to try to define atheism too narrowly. If they can derogate the term enough that people just don't want to use the word atheist to in reference to their unbelief in gods, and limit those that do to those that make the faith based assertion that there are no gods, which moth atheists fell no need to do and understand makes claims of knowledge that they cannot possibly have, then they can come up with some artificially small estimates of the prevalence of atheism, keeping it seeming like an extreme view and thus marginalizing atheists.
Of course, all of this assumes that there are reasons for these semantic battles - that they don't arise for no reason. The vector of these word games in venues like this one isn't necessarily in on the plan. He needn't know why he is being taught to repeat these ideas.
Audie
Veteran Member
Probably he does not.
We see a lot of the same ideas, "ideas" that is, put
forth over and over. Nothing ever original, nothing they
worked out by-gasp- thinking.
"Atheism is a religion"
"I dont have enough faith to be an atheist".
Cliche after cliche, and one moldy pratt after another.