You can find a loon in every flock. That doesn't mean the whole flock is crazy.
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Zero probability for Evolution
- Thread starter questfortruth
- Start date
You can find a loon in every flock. That doesn't mean the whole flock is crazy.
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
What do you mean by population? The entire species or just a regional population?
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
It means you don't have to buy into the ToE to work in genetics.
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
That selective breeding. Nothing natural about that selection.
ratiocinator
Lightly seared on the reality grill.
This is simply false (creationists can't even define 'kind' clearly). We can even see remnants of our ancestors our current genome. You know humans have a mutated version of the gene for making egg yoke, for example?
Firstly, this is irrelevant to the point. If it was as clear cut as you claimed, they all would be (or at least the vast majority). Secondly, how many are there in who agree with you and how many of those don't have a glaringly obvious religious vested interest?
ratiocinator
Lightly seared on the reality grill.
Whoosh! It proves the principle. It doesn't actually matter what or who makes the selection. If humans do, you get what humans want, if it's the environment, then you get what is good at survival in the context of that environment - and that is evolution.
ratiocinator
Lightly seared on the reality grill.
I thought you said you'd looked into the theory of evolution and knew about it......?
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
Such as...?
I believe 50% of what you just said is true. Guess which 50% it is.
Hint: I've observed you constantly coming in here crying about how you got rejected, leading to one conclusion.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
Again, mutation creates variability within a given gene pool, and then natural selection and genetic drift take over from there. But with hybridization, we speed up the process that nature itself may have provided on its own anyway.
We know how basic genetics works, and some of the early scientists who were experts in genetics were one's conducting experiments along these lines who were Christians. You may be familiar with some of their names already, but here's a link whereas you can see that there's a lot more: Christianity and science - Wikipedia.
Understanding and accepting evolution, which is simply no threat whatsoever to Christianity, is what most Christian theologians do indeed accept, but ignorance very much is a threat. I was brought up to believe that "evilution" was a farce, only to discover in my late teens that I was being misled by the fundamentalist church I grew up in. In college, that got reinforced through my studies in biology and eventually anthropology, so I left that church and joined different church in my early 30's that doesn't see basic science as being a threat to one's Christian faith.
Again, the ToE is simply not at all a threat to one's Christian faith if they have a pretty good understanding of Christian theology.
OK, but how does selective breeding actually work?
The mutations that occur are seen by humans and we either let those individuals breed or not. We select from those changes that appear.
The only difference with natural selection is that it is the environment that kills off some individuals, thereby not letting them breed. That is adaptation AND selection.
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Reproductive isolation is enough. It isn't necessary, but it is enough.
ecco
Veteran Member
When you say things like: "Can X become Y..." you are just giving another example of your ignorance of ToE. Why do you feel you have to continually remind us of this fact?
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
John C. Sanford is an American plant geneticist known for his inventions, scientific papers, and advocacy of intelligent design and young earth creationism. Wikipedia
Born: June 28, 1950 (age 71 years)
Known for: Gene gun, publications, patents
Field: Genetics
Education: University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Minnesota
Wildswanderer
Veteran Member
There's simply no evidence this works.
In fact, one has to suspend common sense to believe it could.
"To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence!"
Quite the contrary. We *know* mutations happen. And we know that survival depends, in part, on genetics.
And that is enough to *guarantee* that evolution happens, leading to large scale changes over the course of generations.
This is shown because *whenever* simulations are set up, these two things are enough to lead to large scale changes. The *only* exceptions are when the mutation rate is too small or environmental change happens too fast. in both cases, species tend to go extinct.
And if it was a *purely* random process, this would not happen. It is the *combination* of random mutation along with (non-random) natural selection that leads to higher complexity.
No, random mutations increase the variation in a species.
What changes the average is natural selection. But, while the average changes, the variance decreases.
Then, mutation produces new variation around the new average.
ratiocinator
Lightly seared on the reality grill.
You really do need to say who you're quoting. This is Michael Denton from the book "Evolution: A Theory In Crisis", published way back in 1985 and which has been widely condemned as nonsense by people who understand the subject.
This quote alone speaks volumes about his ignorance (or misrepresentation, I can't say which). Of course it's impossible that the complex DNA we observe today could have been composed by a purely random process - but nobody thinks that is what happened. Natural selection isn't random.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
Here's a wild guess....
A priori religious beliefs prevent him from taking the slightest of efforts to try and understand.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
Thanks, but let me post this:
In it [his book], he claims that natural selection's being the cause of biological evolution (which he calls the primary axiom) "is essentially indefensible"...
Mainstream evolutionary biologists disagree with Sanford's ideas. Kimura himself disagrees with Sanford's interpretation of the mutation distribution, excluding beneficial mutations because they would have too large an effect, not an insignificant one. However, Sanford defends his interpretation of Kimura's mutation distribution figure as being more accurate than Kimura's original meaning...
Formerly an atheist from the mid-1980s, Sanford has looked into theistic evolution (1985–late 1990s), Old Earth creation (late 1990s), and Young Earth creation (2000–present). An advocate of intelligent design, Sanford testified in 2005 in the Kansas evolution hearings on behalf of intelligent design, during which he denied the principle of common descent and "humbly offered... that we were created by a special creation, by God".
He stated that he believed the age of the Earth was "less than 100,000" years. Sanford uses an analogy to illustrate evidence of design — that of a car versus a junkyard: "A car is complex, but so is a junkyard. However, a car is complex in a way that is very specific — which is why it works. It requires a host of very intelligent engineers to specify its complexity, so it is a functional whole." Intelligent-design advocate William Dembski cites the accomplishments of Sanford as evidence of the scientific status of intelligent design, since Sanford is a specialist in genetic engineering and a Courtesy Associate Professor in Horticulture. -- John C. Sanford - Wikipedia
When one lets religious faith dominate objective science, it no longer is science. I positively can guarantee you that he cannot use the "scientific method" to establish Divine creation as the latter is a matter of faith, not objectively-derived evidence. If it were the latter, it would have been broadcast every day of the week to prove God exists.
In brief, he simply is no longer working from a scientific paradigm.
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