Evolution has been observed... right?

[tas8831]

You are committing the logical fallacy of ad honimen [sic] and argument by assertion.

As you are the local self-implied expert on logical fallacies, can you explain how showing that a person is misrepresenting himself and misrepresenting science in a discussion ON science is an ad hominem?

AD HOMINEM:
(of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining.

If your take on science is in error, then pointing this out is not ad hominem. If you are employing argument via accusation of logical fallacy, then pointing this out is not ad hominem for it is addressing your tactics.

Every now and then, a creationist such as you shows up on forums like this. Thinking that just by labeling everything a fallacy that you will somehow emerge a victorious champion of ancient middle eastern stories, oblivious to the fact that you just ignore evidence in order to play a game.

 

[tas8831]

You aren’t describing evolution. You are describing adaption.

Argument by assertion, Citation please.

Adaptation is epigenetic in nature. It is essentially just a flipping of switches that are already in the DNA. Meaning: the organism already has the contingencies built into it’s code to adapt to different circumstances by undergoing change.

Argument by assertion.
Citation please.

Evolution, in contrast, is claimed to be capable creating new genetic code to unlock new capabilities that do not currently exist in that organisms DNA.

Define "new genetic code".

Argument by assertion. Citation please.

There is no observation of this ever happening. It is just speculation.

Argument by assertion.

And please do not engage in the burden of proof fallacy.

 

[tas8831]

You have failed to provide any logical arguments for why your "examples" meet the criteria of evolution rather than the concept of adaptation.

You only argued via assertion in your very first post.

YOU defined adaptation epigenetic - remember?

"Adaptation is epigenetic in nature. It is essentially just a flipping of switches that are already in the DNA. "

If you want to employ your idiosyncratic definitions, then you need to live by them.

You wouldn't want to be seen as disingenuous, would you?

Also - some of those epigenetic 'switches' are not "in" the DNA, so you might want to brush up before pretending to be an expert.

 

[tas8831]

You are committing the fallacy of a false equivalence.
Shuffling of existing information around is not the same as creating new information.

Argument by assertion,
And you are committing the fallacy of pretending to possess knowledge that you do not.

When you wrote that quip above, you merely rearranged the letters of the alphabet, therefore, your quip above is literally no different - according to your logic - than the sentence I am typing now.

I can shuffle the lines of a code in a computer program around but that's not going to create a new function.

Argument by assertion and a poor analogy.
That may be the case in a computer program, perhaps, but it is now quite obvious that you lack an understanding of genetics.

All I need is one example to prove your mere assertion incorrect. As you do not seem very competent in the area of actual (as opposed to the dopey 'genetics via analogy' that people like you tend to employ) genetics, I have bolded the relevant parts:

Group II Introns Generate Functional Chimeric Relaxase Enzymes with Modified Specificities through Exon Shuffling at Both the RNA and DNA Level
Abstract
Group II introns are large self-splicing RNA enzymes with a broad but somewhat irregular phylogenetic distribution. These ancient retromobile elements are the proposed ancestors of approximately half the human genome, including the abundant spliceosomal introns and non-long terminal repeat retrotransposons. In contrast to their eukaryotic derivatives, bacterial group II introns have largely been considered as harmful selfish mobile retroelements that parasitize the genome of their host. As a challenge to this view, we recently uncovered a new intergenic trans-splicing pathway that generates an assortment of mRNA chimeras. The ability of group II introns to combine disparate mRNA fragments was proposed to increase the genetic diversity of the bacterial host by shuffling coding sequences. Here, we show that the Ll.LtrB and Ef.PcfG group II introns from Lactococcus lactis and Enterococcus faecalis respectively can both use the intergenic trans-splicing pathway to catalyze the formation of chimeric relaxase mRNAs and functional proteins. We demonstrated that some of these compound relaxase enzymes yield gain-of-function phenotypes, being significantly more efficient than their precursor wild-type enzymes at supporting bacterial conjugation. We also found that relaxase enzymes with shuffled functional domains are produced in biologically relevant settings under natural expression levels. Finally, we uncovered examples of lactococcal chimeric relaxase genes with junctions exactly at the intron insertion site. Overall, our work demonstrates that the genetic diversity generated by group II introns, at the RNA level by intergenic trans-splicing and at the DNA level by recombination, can yield new functional enzymes with shuffled exons, which can lead to gain-of-function phenotypes.
​

That was just in the first 3 or 4 returns I got with a 30-second Google search.
I suggest that rather than a misplaced pomposity, a reliance on phony 'fallacy' charges, and an unwarranted confidence in the rantings of creationists that you actually grow some humility and stop with the pretense.

 

[tas8831]

Adaptation is epigenetic in nature. It is essentially just a flipping of switches that are already in the DNA. Meaning: the organism already has the contingencies built into it’s code to adapt to different circumstances by undergoing change.

"It's a fallacy of bait and switch because you're taking things that have been true and lumping it in with things that haven't been proven true, and then trying to claim they are all equally proven true."

 

[tas8831]

Which is totally different than it happening by chance, no matter how you spin it.

The variation arises in the first place via natural, 'random' means.

 

[tas8831]

Well we feel sorry for all of us because we are getting culled. Worried about our grandchildren! There will be nothing left thanks to Statism

Conspiracy nonsense is so cool... So woke...

 

[SkepticThinker]

Change within a certain kind of animal doesn't equal macro evolution. And if this always works, then every species would get better. In reality, many go extinct.

Hmm, so why did your God invent a bunch of animals that couldn't survive on the planet - 99.9% of which have gone extinct? It sounds like this god has no idea what "he's" doing.

 

[AlexanderG]

Thanks.
Have you noticed how the creationists don't explain their position, but defend whatever it is by criticizing the ToE, however badly?
Apparently they haven't anything supporting their position, so attempt a black-or-white dilemma, assuming that if they can discredit the ToE, creationism is proven.

This is a good point. I see this a lot in apologetics, in anti-evolution tactics but also in presuppositional scripts, cosmological arguments, and more.

It's a classic Argument from Ignorance fallacy, where the approach is "If you can't provide a comprehensive alternative explanation, or you don't know, then my unsupported explanation is correct by default and I need show no supporting evidence for it." Anyone who takes a step back can readily see why this isn't a good tool to distinguish between imaginary ideas and real things. It's merely a tactic to keep the burden of proof shifted away from their lack of evidence, when all they have are emotional appeals and circular reasoning.

And yeah, their cringey lack of understanding about science and biology doesn't help, either.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Like I often have to say on this site, for me, my faith is enough to not worry about the details. Unscientific, yes I’m sure, and I don’t expect to be convincing any atheist. But my faith will always take precedent before any scientific evidence I may be presented, as close minded as that sounds.
For example, I’m a YEC. My belief (which I believe has been mischaracterized in Last Thursdayism) is that God simply created an aged universe with fullly evolved species already, but He did it 6000 years ago. I come to this conclusion because my faith in literalism, but also there is evidence of an old earth. So, I try to logically coincide the two, and this is how I do it.

So this about sums it up?

"Faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have evidence."
-Matt Dillahunty

 

[Wildswanderer]

PLEASE! Stop it with this "give birth to another species" nonsense. This has been explained to you a hundred times!
Coding changes accumulate.

No matter how much time passes or how many tiny changes accumulate, that does not add more information.

 

[ratiocinator]

Adaptation is epigenetic in nature.

Are you actually trying to define it as such? Because that would be at odds with pretty much everybody, including creationists.

It is essentially just a flipping of switches that are already in the DNA. Meaning: the organism already has the contingencies built into it’s code to adapt to different circumstances by undergoing change.

This is just factually untrue. Take the classic example of the Peppered moth. It was an actual genetic mutation: Famous peppered moth's dark secret revealed

Evolution, in contrast, is claimed to be capable creating new genetic code to unlock new capabilities that do not currently exist in that organisms DNA.

There is no observation of this ever happening. It is just speculation.

Again, this is just factually incorrect. There are plentiful examples. For example, we got trichromatic vision by duplication and subsequent mutation: https://genome.cshlp.org/content/9/7/629.long

There are endless other examples of well evidenced new genetic information:-
Evolution myths: Mutations can only destroy information | New Scientist
CB102: Mutations adding information

 

[ratiocinator]

No matter how much time passes or how many tiny changes accumulate, that does not add more information.

False. See my previous post above.

 

[SkepticThinker]

How many times have I dismissed your empty rhetoric as unsubstantiated nonsense? I only deliberately ignore your posts when you dish up the same excuses....none of which address anything I have said with real evidence.


You could have fooled me....science likes to state all its opinions as if they were proven facts that cannot be contested....gathering and testing data, can never address science's first premise, for which it has absolutely nothing to back up its assertions. Stating that something "might have" happened is not the same as stating that something "must have" happened because science says so....what arrogance!
Science is not my god or my religion.


It will still be a movie screen, no matter what color it ended up....do you understand that? There is absolutely no real substantiated evidence for evolution of the 'macro' kind. Hiding behind adaptation like it explains the process is nonsense because every single "repeatedly tested" experiment ever undertaken by scientists never took any creature outside of its taxonomy.

This is where we get the whole ridiculous "whale evolution" scenario by suggesting that the four legged furry creature Pakicetus was actually a "whale", because you could not call him anything else...otherwise your chain of evolution snaps and falls in a heap.

What do you notice about this graph? Do the math and tell me why the whales that we see today have basically remained unaltered for 34 million years...whilst the others morphed spectacularly in just a few million years?
What do you see regarding the lines representing "common ancestors" that go back 65 million years? Not one of them is identified......they "must have" existed because evolution cannot stand if they don't. So where are they? There must be countless millions of them that supposedly were responsible for branching out to become every species of creature on this earth......so where are they? How could they all be missing?


The song and dance is not nearly so entertaining as the scientists having to resort to insults instead of evidence.
By stating that I have no concrete evidence to support my assertions, don't you have to wonder why you have have none either? If science can virtually kill God, then it must have the goods....so far I haven't seen anything but educated guesses about what "might have" happened all those millions of years ago.
Who turned "might have" into "must have" I wonder?
God is not dead to those of us who see through the smoke and mirrors.


They might accumulate some traits different from their cousins on other continents, but they will never become something else. Darwin did not see any change in species, just adaptations in the same creatures he knew from the mainland. None were becoming something else.


They will still be moths....and there may be more varieties...but they will all still be moths. None of them will have morphed into some other creature with invisible "common ancestors".


Ah...this old recurring chestnut.....creation taken over eons of time is not "magic"...it never was. The Creator is the inventor and producer of the materials he used for the living creatures he created. He fashioned them deliberately and thoughtfully to co-exist in perfect harmony with the habitats he created before they were even here.....well prepared in advance to receive them with food supply and water supply...along with all the mechanisms required for reproducing their "kind"......inbuilt genetic roadblocks would prevent one "kind" from wanting to mate with another....each instinctively knew who was a suitable mate. These creatures all came fully programmed to do as they were created to do. Instinct has never been fully explained by science, has it? How is it possible to be born with an inbuilt "program"...without a programmer?

Sorry but your protests are falling far short of the certainty that science offers for its 'ideas masquerading as scientific facts'.....I'm not buying what you are selling. You can if you wish....

You need some new material.

Try starting with talking points that aren't 50 years old.

 

[Wildswanderer]

Speciation:

Observed Instances of Speciation
Some More Observed Speciation Events

Speciation is accepted by creationists. So who are you arguing with?

BTW, the Bible doesn't teach that species are fixed and unchanging.
This isn't evidence that everything descended from a single common ancestor in a process that took millions of years.

 

[SkepticThinker]

I do know when animals reproduce they make the same kind of animals. Dogs do not make cats and horses do not make cows. But over millions of years one cell animals made thousands of different kinds of animals?

They don't make clones though, right?

 

[SkepticThinker]

Of course a dog egg grows into a dog and a chicken egg grows into a chicken. Nothing odd there. But an egg from one species growing into a different species? Very scientific.

Um, I think you need to take a course in reproduction if you're under the impression that dogs lay eggs.

 

[SkepticThinker]

When that particular environment constantly changes, of course it's random. An animal adapts to work in a certain environment and then environment changes...said animal goes extinct.

So you acknowledge that the environment is doing the selecting?

Well, that's a start.

OMG! That's so important! Thank you for pointing that out!

Says the person clearly not interested in learning about something he's completely ignorant about but still chooses to talk about it authoritatively anyway.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Sounds like he is employing a version of the Fallacy of the False Dichotomy.

Isn't it comical when this brand of creationist shows up - trying to 'defeat' everything by simply declaring it some sort of logical fallacy. This is what people that do not understand the evidence rely on.

Oh yeah. Declaring everything your opponent says to be some kind of fallacy so you can dismiss it all without ever having to address it. My favorite brand, especially coming from the crowd that mines logical fallacies for all they are worth.

Just once, I would love to see one of these guys come on and clearly address what science says and coherently list their objections, evidence for those objections and the reasoning they employed to arrive at that position.

Scientist claim A, B, C, and D. This is what I understand and here is X, Y, and Z that I think supports my position. This is why I think that.

But the funny thing is, if they get to that level of understanding while still maintaining their religious beliefs, they end up as me and on the side of science. That probably scares them more than trying to understand the science.

 

[Wildswanderer]

So you acknowledge that the environment is doing the selecting?

Well, that's a start.

Says the person clearly not interested in learning about something he's completely ignorant about but still chooses to talk about it authoritatively anyway.

I'm about ready to put you on ignore due to the constant insults. Another one who has nothing to say.