Agnostic75 said:
There is enough time according to most experts. Jerry Coyne, Ph.D., biology, is a well-known, and distinguished biologist, and college professor. He has an article about that topic at There’s plenty of time for evolution « Why Evolution Is True. Would you like to critique the article?
Fredcow9 said:
I found his idea interesting however it doesn't make sense that this should occur in an intelligent way (proposed model) as to by the biological interactions at hand. Evolution is not inteligently occurring, in other words genes are responding to the here and now correct? So given there's no forsight so to speak how would these populations all jump the gun at once? I found this quote from a respomse paper interesting:
"Wilf and Ewens argue in a recent paper that there is plenty of time for evolution to occur. They base this claim on a mathematical model in which beneficial mutations accumulate simultaneously and independently, thus allowing changes that require a large number of mutations to evolve over comparatively short time periods. Because changes evolve independently and in parallel rather than sequentially, their model scales logarithmically rather than exponentially. This approach does not accurately reflect biological evolution, however, for two main reasons. First, within their model are implicit information sources, including the equivalent of a highly informed oracle that prophesies when a mutation is "correct," thus accelerating the search by the evolutionary process. Natural selection, in contrast, does not have access to information about future benefits of a particular mutation, or where in the global fitness landscape a particular mutation is relative to a particular target. It can only assess mutations based on their current effect on fitness in the local fitness landscape. Thus the presence of this oracle makes their model radically different from a real biological search through fitness space. Wilf and Ewens also make unrealistic biological assumptions that, in effect, simplify the search. They assume no epistasis between beneficial mutations, no linkage between loci, and an unrealistic population size and base mutation rate, thus increasing the pool of beneficial mutations to be searched. They neglect the effects of genetic drift on the probability of fixation and the negative effects of simultaneously accumulating deleterious mutations. Finally, in their model they represent each genetic locus as a single letter. By doing so, they ignore the enormous sequence complexity of actual genetic loci (typically hundreds or thousands of nucleotides long), and vastly oversimplify the search for functional variants. In similar fashion, they assume that each evolutionary "advance" requires a change to just one locus, despite the clear evidence that most biological functions are the product of multiple gene products working together. Ignoring these biological realities infuses considerable active information into their model and eases the model's evolutionary process."
(Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, Ann K. Gauger, Robert J. Marks II, "Time and Information in Evolution," BIO-Complexity, Volume 2012 (4).)
Your thoughts? Do you feel these genes could consistly perform this function time and time again as if being directed by an intelligent force? Otherwise I don't see an example of this in the natural world.
I assume that most experts would say that what you said did not even come close to adequately refuting Coyne's article. You did not say anything about the complex mathematical theory that he mentioned, which is an important argument that you did not discuss since you do not understand it.
William Dembski's writings on evolution have been widely rejected by most experts, and you certainly do not understand much of his writings on evolution.
I am an agnostic, not an atheist, and not a naturalist. Therefore, I am not claiming one way or the other that intelligence does, or does not cause evolution. All that I am doing is claiming that most experts say that common descent is true, not how, or why evolution occurs. If a God exists, he is free to cause evolution to occur at whatever speed he wants it to occur.
I am an amateur, and I do not know a lot about biology, and I do not think that you do either. I accept the opinions of a large consensus of experts since I am not aware of any good reasons to reject their knowledge, intelligence, and education.
Would you be willing to have some public Internet debates with some experts in biology who support common descent, and some geologists who oppose the global flood theory, and some experts who oppose the young earth theory?
Do you object when people who know very little about biology accept creationism?
Henry Morris, Ph.d., Institute for Creation Research, was an inerrantist. He once said that “the main reason for insisting on the universal Flood as a fact of history and as the primary vehicle for geological interpretation is that God’s word plainly teaches it! No geologic difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture.” (Henry Morris, ‘Biblical Cosmology and Modern Science,’ 1970, p. 32-33.
Stanton Jones, Ph.D., psychology, and Mark Yarhouse, Ph.D., psychology, are conservative Christians. They wrote a book about homosexuality that is titled 'Homosexuality, The Use of Scientific Research in the Church's Moral Debate.' Chapter 4 is titled 'Is homosexuality a psychopathology?' After discussing a lot of scientific issues in that chapter, the authors conclude with the following paragraph:
"Finally, we have seen that there has never been any definitive judgment by the fields of psychiatry or psychology that homosexuality is a healthy lifestyle. But what if it were? Such a judgment would have little bearing on the judgments of the Christian church. In the days of Nero iit was healthy and adaptive to worship the Roman emperor. By contemporary American standards a life consumed with greed, materialism, sensualism, selfishness, divorce and pride is judged healthy, but God weighs such a life and finds it lacking."
Morris, Jones, and Yarhouse all have, or had a Ph.D. in science, but implied that the Bible alone is sufficient evidence to accept the global flood theory, and to reject homosexuality. Do you agree with that? If so, your supposed interest in science is bogus.
