The Believabliltiy of Evolution

[cladking]

Is that the extent of your "science"?

In a nutshell.

At least in an eggshell, eh?

 

[ppp]

So this is invisible to reductionistic science. To see a non-reductionistic view you must step outside of it.

When you don't have an answer to the question posed, there is no need to fashion a cheap goad to hide the fact. On those occasions staying silent will suffice.

 

[ppp]

All individuals are equally "fit" and merely different.

Pshaw

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

There are several reasons that this study does not support your contentions.

You asked for an experiment that shows gradual change. I gave you one.
As predicted, you dismiss it. Even though it is exactly what you asked for.

Chiefly among which is I have repeatedly said that change in MAJOR SPECIES occurs suddenly just like all change in all life. I have several times specifically stated that for many reasons this doesn't apply to the simplest fauna including bacteria and viruses. I made this perfectly clear the first several times I said you have no evidence for a gradual change but believers don't listen or try to communicate, they lecture. This is because minor species always have very short generations and most exist in micro-niches that can not be controlled or measured. Additionally this "experiment" spanned only some 30 years; a blink of the eye compared to the "fossil record" to which YOU want to extrapolate the results.

So you want to see the result of an experiment that lasted for 5 million years or something?



I'm not even going to bother explaining to you how your request and objection is utterly intellectually dishonest.

Bottom line: you have received exactly what you asked for. Any objections you are raising now is no more or less then moving the goalposts.

The "niche" was almost certainly not controlled. Products like glucose-limited medium DM25 vary greatly over even short periods. It is likely that most of the subtle changes over the 30 years were simply tracking changes in their media. Many many different processes and materials are used to make even the simplest products and these change suddenly again and again just like living things.

None of the original 12 populations was able to grow on citrate. Generation 0 of all 12 was a single population arbitrarily split in 12.

A combination of multiple mutations, happening in different generations, gave 1 of the 12 population a brand new metabolic pathway that allowed it to grow on citrate. As that increased their food supply, a population explosion occurred.

This is exactly what you asked for. An experiment showing gradual change.

So yeah.......

One of the big problems here is we're looking at 65,000 generations in an unnatural and essentially unchanging niche. Temperature, food, and most relevant parameters were little changed during this time. No natural niches are, ever will, or have been like this.

Which matters not. The evolution of this brand new trait that opened up a brand new metabolic pathway occurred according to the exact principles that evolution theory lays out. Mutation + selection.

The ability to grow on citrate gave it an advantage over its peers as it had more food available. And in the blink of the proverbial eye, this trait achieved fixation and spread throughout the entire population.

Exactly how evolution theory says traits evolve and spread.

"ALL" natural niches change dramatically in every generation and even seasonally. But , more importantly over so many generations there is likely to be an entire reset of the biosphere.

In reality, environmental changes take their sweet time. Whenever changes are to sudden, death and mass extinction follows.

It is logical to assume that larger organism are more resilient and more resistant to change than simple ones

Funny. The opposite is actually true.

There's this saying... it's not a "law" but it certainly is a pattern.
And that saying is: "Every couple dozen million years, everything that weighs more then 20 kilograms, dies"

unless "survival of the fittest" is real so assuming that these results can be extrapolated to lions or whales is simply a circular argument.

This statement of yours leads me to believe that you don't really understand what "fit" means in that sentence.

Even were it true every individual tiger can certainly withstand larger changes to its environment than e coli.

//facepalm

Where on earth did you get that idea????
You think tigers are better at survival then e. coli bacteria? That they are better equipped in dealing with big environmental changes? FOR REAL?

And environments of major species are far larger so a tiger suddenly without its favorite prey can simply go to a new area or it might suddenly die.

There are many reasons this can not legitimately be extrapolated to prove "survival of the fittest" and I'd be happy to discuss them but I'm guessing I'm already reaching out to deaf ears.

By this point, I'm as good as certain that you wouldn't be able to properly explain what the statement "survival of the fittest" in evolutionary biology actually means, if your life depended on it..............

 

[Valjean]

Take just one idea, that intelligent apes somehow stumbled on how to start fires. There are millions of these kind of flukes that have to happen for evolution to be correct.

And millions of these chances do happen every day. Every day of every organism's life is a card shuffle. Add the fact that useful adaptations and discoveries get passed on preferentially, and the deck's stacked.

Life can only come from other life.

People keep making this statement, but that's not evidence it's true. It's your personal belief, and the evidence -- which you're clearly not familiar with -- is against this.

All we’ve ever observed in nature and everything we know about biology confirms that life always comes from other life.

No, that's not true either. We observe the components of life arising all the time, through simple chemistry. We also observe them assembling themselves together.
Watch some YouTube videos on chemical evolution.

We have observed speciation numerous times; species adapting and changing enough that they can no longer interbreed. There is no magic involved.
Observed Instances of Speciation
Some More Observed Speciation Events

"The evolution of intelligent life is a wildly improbable fluke, research by Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute showed.
Not that I agree with the article that life came about through evolution, but if it could, it would have to be a highly improbable fluke. The odds are astronomically against it.

Everything is wildly improbable. The chance of any particular rock being found in my front yard is incalculably improbable.

The chance of being dealt a royal flush, in a particular suit, are 2,598,960 to one. Now go get a deck of cards, shuffle, and deal yourself five. What is the possibility of the hand you just dealt yourself?
Answer: 2,598,960 to one. Wildly improbable!

How many random dice rolls would it take to get straight sixes with a dozen dice? (I'll let someone else work out the arithmetic, but it's a lot)
Now, borrowing some of the known mechanisms of evolution, you should be able to do it in just a few minutes.
Do you not understand this?

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Which came first the chicken or the egg.

The egg, as chickens evolved from non-chicken yet egg laying ancestors.

The egg necessarily came first because chickens come from eggs by definition.

Actually, if you would rephrase the question to "what came first, the chicken or the chicken egg", then the correct answer is: neither.

But more importantly, what does this have to do with the origins of life?
Do you understand that by the time egg-laying organisms were around, life had been evolving for more then 3 billion years? During those 3 billion years, there were no multi-cellular organisms.

At some point you merely have to acknowledge that something is fundamentally different than what gave rise to it

Why?
Abiogenesis doesn't conclude that at all.

I would suggest that "life" exists when consciousness arises. "Consciousness" is just another of myriad things that can be described as a miracle or a result of the hand of God.

Is a bacterium "conscious"? If you say "yes", then I'm going to ask you how you define "consciousness", because how everyone else defines that, it only occurs in multi-cellular animals that have a brain.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Nonsense.

No.

This is merely logical extrapolation with very little experimental and no observational support. This is a belief.

Nope.
You should read up on abiogenesis. More specifically the things that are actually known about it. Which is a lot more then any creationist is willing to acknowledge.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

You're getting there but the odds against a specific individual are more remote than winning lotto trillions of times in a row.

Is it?

Show your math.

I won't be holding my breath.

 

[Valjean]

But God breathed life into them. Life from the source of all life.

If you're going to continue preaching this, please supply some evidence.

Science is actively exploring the mechanisms by which life arises. Religion doesn't propose any mechanism, just a mechanic.

You say life only comes from life, yet go back +4 billion years and there was no life on Earth. So how did it get here, with no life to generate it.

Goddidit? No! -- that's not how, it's who. How did God do it -- that's the relevant question.
Physics?, chemistry? -- or magic? Now you've already denied the possibly of physics or chemistry, so what does that leave?
Think about it. You're seriously proposing magic as statistically more probable than known, observable -- and observed -- chemical processes.

"God breathed life into them" -- that's magical nonsense.

 

[gnostic]

You entirely missed the point. It's easy for science to mis interpret the evidence.

Creationists will do any (or combination) of the following, they will:

• always misinterpret the evidence,
• often misunderstand the evidence,
• or don’t know what the evidence are,
• frequently ignore the evidence,
• deliberately misrepresent the evidence and data,

Ken Ham and Kent Hovind do all of the above.

Creationists are not known for their brilliance in science, nor for their intellectual honesty.

 

[Valjean]

The assumption that the layers represent time periods is just an assumption...

No, it's evidenced.

So you aren't interested in the research that supports what I said. Shrug.

I'm interested. Please provide some.
Personally, I don't think there's a scrap of evidence for an invisible personage doing things by magic.

Lol, the " science" of the past is riddled with assumptions.

But science tests it's assumptions, doesn't it? It actively tries to disprove or rule out each one, so only the tested, well-evidenced ones remain.
Religion actively resists testing, or even questioning. Religion relies on faith, ie: unwarranted belief.

 

[Valjean]

Yes belief that everything came from nothing so much more intelligent.

Science does not claim everything came from nothing. You're showing your ignorance again.
Dan from Smithville pointed out this tendency in post #2167.

It's YOU claiming something came from nothing; that life the universe and everything was just miraculously breathed into existence by an eternal, magical, yet invisible being.

"The researchers said that the unlikeliness of the series of “evolutionary transitions” that led to intelligent life means it is likely to be “exceptionally rare”.

They believe that there is between a 53% and 96% chance that humans are alone in our Milky Way galaxy, Discover magazine reported.

Research earlier this year made it seem a little more likely that humanity might be all alone in the universe after a scan of 10 million stars found not a whisper of alien life."

If evolution is possible why isn't it happening all over the universe?

Maybe it has. We don't have sufficient astronomic or exploratory data for scientists to make the assumptions you cite.

I have asked myself this question a million times. If there is no life in the rest of the universe, why is there no evolution seen in the rest of the universe? I can't figure it out. Can you?

I can
How many other planets have we explored, looking for life?

 

[Valjean]

I have asked myself this question a million times. If there is no life in the rest of the universe, why is there no evolution seen in the rest of the universe? I can't figure it out. Can you?

I can
How many other planets have we explored, looking for life?

 

[Valjean]

Do you assume that the seasonal processes and conditions we observe today have always been the same?

What about cataclysmic events?
A single event, like a hurricane, can deposit many sedimentary layers at once, for example.

Physics has always been the same. The dating doesn't rely on constant conditions.
How does a singe event lay down the same, dated layers, everywhere in the world? When has anything even remotely like this ever been observed? By what mechanism could it have happened?

And don't give me this World Flood nonsense.

(And why is AronRa making a rude gesture???)

 

[Valjean]

Of course, as far as we know this is the only planet where God created life.

"As far as we know" being the operational phrase.....

 

[Valjean]

All individuals are equally "fit" and merely different.

Your sentence is circular. It's a tautology but tautologies in isolation have no meaning and no relevancy.

Not following. How does natural selection work if not by differential selection of natural variants?

 

[cladking]

You asked for an experiment that shows gradual change. I gave you one.
As predicted, you dismiss it. Even though it is exactly what you asked for.

Hilarious.

You think 30 years is a "gradual change".

So you want to see the result of an experiment that lasted for 5 million years or something?

Yes!!!

But like all things it might be possible to perform a test or experiment that would show a gradual change. It is your responsibility. You are the one making outrageous claims and circular arguments.

For example you could find a series of whales' legs turning gradually into flippers in the same stratum. You'd think with all the animals on earth and the century and a half biology has had to find them that they'd have some sort of evidence instead of none at all.

Whenever changes are to sudden, death and mass extinction follows.

Give that man a cigar.

You think tigers are better at survival then e. coli bacteria?

You hit an e coli on the head with a hammer and it will die every time.

Of course being eaten is harder on the tiger.


I seriously doubt you are trying to understand anybody's viewpoint but your own.

 

[cladking]

The egg, as chickens evolved from non-chicken yet egg laying ancestors.

Another assumption. It's probably true but is still an assumption.

Abiogenesis doesn't conclude that at all.

Then chemicals live.

Is a bacterium "conscious"?

Yes. "Consciousness" is a gift from God/ nature that allows individuals to succeed and procreate.

 

[cladking]

Show your math.

Define the terms, I'll show the math.

 

[cladking]

Not following. How does natural selection work if not by differential selection of natural variants?

There's no such thing as "natural selection". For the main part the survival of every individual is based on chance, consciousness, and the genes plus experience that forms that consciousness.

Sometimes alertness is critical and other times it's reflexes or speed but every time it's chance. Individuals are usually very different but each is a product of its genes and consciousness. While some are more suited to one environment than another the simple fact is that there is an ideal environment for every individual and that individual will have the best odds of success in the environment. Off spring don't result from more fit parents they result from sex between healthy individuals. They each contribute genes that improve the probability of the survival of the species but they do that only by assuring the off spring have more diverse genes than either parent.

We believe that there is a gradual change in species caused by "survival of the fittest" but the reality is niches don't last long enough for much gradual change to manifest. Real change occurs suddenly in between niches.

"Evolution" is a circular argument based largely on Darwin's mistaken assumption that populations remain relatively stable. The reality appears to be that major changes result from population bottlenecks where survivors are "selected" for unusual behavior. Think of Burgess Meredith reading in the vault. A species of humans arising from thousands of spelunkers or oyster divers would be very different than the current species (homo omniciencis).

There's just no such thing as "natural selection". It is a product of reductionistic science and part of circular reasoning.