A most promising anti-evolutionist

[Oolon Colluphid]

Originally posted by Charles Darwin:
No religious thinking huh? Just the facts, right? Tell me, what is it about this sentence that you don't understand:

Originally posted by Oolon: Thus it’s odd that the creator gave all birds their efficient through-flow lung system.

That is a religious claim. Understand?
Um, let me see... :rolleyes: :banghead:
Of course it’s a religious claim! It is the creationists’ claim, tested! :rolleyes: “I am taking the hypothesis -- that there is a designer behind living things’ complexity -- and testing it. If there is a designer of great intellect and abilities, what should we see in nature. And what should we not see -- what observations might refute it.”

Specifically, it’s odd that an intelligent creator should give all varieties of birds their efficient through-flow lung system, yet gave a hugely substandard one to bats and other mammals.

I’m sorry if that’s a bit complicated for you to follow <shrug>.

When you tell me about your creator
My creator. My creator. :rolleyes: :banghead:
and use this as evidence for evolution, then you are subjecting me to your personal religious mythology. Get it? Your post is full of it.
Sorry pal, but it’s you who’re full of it.

Are we supposed to assume that you are not promoting some sort of theistic alternative? That you doubt evolution, yet do not think that goddidit is therefore the answer? It’d certainly be a first, especially for one claiming in their profile to be a Christian.

Why then the typical creationist attacks: the misunderstandings and plain ignorance (“the mythical horse sequence convinced many a lay person for the better part of a century before it was finally admitted to be, well, ... mythical”), the straw men (“But since allele frequencies do change, therefore the giraffe came from the fish?”), the out-of-context quotes (Eldredge, Carroll)? Pretending that you think otherwise is sly in the extreme.

‘Full of it’ is right. Go on then, run away. And don’t show your face round here again, nor mention the topic, unless you’re prepared to defend your notions.

TTFN, Oolon

[Muad'Dib]

Originally posted by Charles Darwin
People, sorry but I have to quit out. I've tried to respond to all posts, but I know I've left a few dangling.

I'm sorry to see you go, CD, but I know it takes a lot of time and energy to respond to so many people, especially when you're the only one being addressed.

To make things easier if you ever decide to come back, I'll put my question in the form of a multiple-choice answer, and you're welcome to address just this one and ignore my previous posts.

Question. Which of the following is closest to your opinion on scientific fact?

(a) There is no claim made about the world or the universe made by any branch of science that is supported enough to be called a scientific fact.

(b) There are claims made about the world or the universe that concern the present time that are supported enough to be called scientific facts (perhaps in, say, physics), but no statement about the past can possibly fulfill this criterion.

(c) There are claims made about the world or the universe that are supported enough to be scientific facts, and some of these concern the past (perhaps in, say, astronomy). However, common descent is not one of these.

(d) There are claims made about the world or the universe that are supported enough to be scientific facts, and if you squint common descent is another one, but the religious and social ramifications of common descent are such that we should be careful not to teach it even if it turns out to be correct.

Sorry about that, but I trust I got my main points across. I think a lot of people are still hungry for clarification, but that's because the perspective is different. Let me elaborate....

Judging by your response to Happy Wonderer, you bring to the table some additional concerns that biologists I've interacted with don't. Specifically, the attitude here and elsewhere is that if something turns out to be a fact, it should be taught regardless of the consequences, and if it turns out to be fallacious, it should not be taught solely for that reason, not because of any consequences of teaching it.

The Christian biologists I know are no exception (I did my undergraduate work where every biologist was a Christian). They see evolution (including common descent) as a markedly beautiful example of God's creative power--after all, it's nice to design something, but much harder to design something that helps design itself. Further, they opt for Tillich's view that Christian theology should categorically opt for truth above safety, and as such they teach evolution because they're convinced by the evidence for it.

The people here have the same "truth above safety" attitude. If something is a fact, we think it should be taught in the appropriate setting. If it is not a fact, then we want to reject it on that basis, and on that basis alone.

For better or worse, that is the perspective here, and hopefully having that out on the table will lead to more effective communication.

Take care,
Muad'Dib

[Charles Darwin]

Originally posted by Oolon Colluphid
Um, let me see... :rolleyes: :banghead:
Of course it’s a religious claim! It is the creationists’ claim, tested! :rolleyes: “I am taking the hypothesis -- that there is a designer behind living things’ complexity -- and testing it. If there is a designer of great intellect and abilities, what should we see in nature. And what should we not see -- what observations might refute it.”

Specifically, it’s odd that an intelligent creator should give all varieties of birds their efficient through-flow lung system, yet gave a hugely substandard one to bats and other mammals.

I’m sorry if that’s a bit complicated for you to follow <shrug>.


My creator. My creator. :rolleyes: :banghead:

Sorry pal, but it’s you who’re full of it.

Are we supposed to assume that you are not promoting some sort of theistic alternative? That you doubt evolution, yet do not think that goddidit is therefore the answer? It’d certainly be a first, especially for one claiming in their profile to be a Christian.

Why then the typical creationist attacks: the misunderstandings and plain ignorance (“the mythical horse sequence convinced many a lay person for the better part of a century before it was finally admitted to be, well, ... mythical”), the straw men (“But since allele frequencies do change, therefore the giraffe came from the fish?”), the out-of-context quotes (Eldredge, Carroll)? Pretending that you think otherwise is sly in the extreme.

‘Full of it’ is right. Go on then, run away. And don’t show your face round here again, nor mention the topic, unless you’re prepared to defend your notions.

TTFN, Oolon

I'm sorry, this is so elementary that I'll have to respond. *In general*, I will not respond, but I cannot let so basic a misconception go by. You wrote:

Originally posted by Oolon: Thus it’s odd that the creator gave all birds their efficient through-flow lung system.

This is a religious claim. I don't care if you believe in that creator or not; I don't care what creationist you are referencing or testing. That's irrelevant. You are telling us that for that creationist's creator to do such as thing is *ODD*. That is a religious claim. This is *YOUR* religious claim, not the creationists.

[DMB]

Charles: you have really disappointed me. All this crap about evolution=religion. Everyone here has been trying to get you to discuss the science and you have persistently avoided such basic things as what constitutes a scientific fact.

Oolon was quite legitimately looking at the creationist claim that intelligent design can be regarded as a scientific fact. He was not bringing in any religious beliefs he may have, whatever they may be. Many creationists claim that there is such an entity as "creation science". How is a sceptic to criticise it? Apparently any mention of a supposed "creator" is religious, according to you.

And then we get this
AP Wire (May 14, 2009). Researchers at Cambridge University today announced that evolution must be false. Despite overwhelming evidence for evolution, and its being held as a scientific fact for over a century now, evolutionists have failed to locate even a single atavism. "We're sorry to have to jump horses in mid-stream like this," lamented Charles Darwin, great-great-great-great-great grandson of the inventor of evolution, "but above all else we must maintain our scientific integrity. I guess creationism really is true."
Even supposing your first premise (there exist no atavisms) were true, no-one would leap to the conclusion that therefore creationism must be true. Do think about the logic of this.

[God Fearing Atheist]

Originally posted by Charles Darwin
Great question, but first you are twisting what I said. I said "quite specific." I was not referring to mere preferential targeting with a local segment. I was talking about specific areas within specific chromosomes. As for the odds, that would be very interesting to look into. Unfortunately, the results depend heavily on what site specificity and preferential targeting one assumes. Evolutionists, of course, assume none, so the odds are astronomical even for just one homologous HERV.

There is no evidence to my knowledge, Charles, that a provirus ever perfers *a* specific locus. If there is evidence for this, cite it.

I, like everyone who accepts evolution, do not "assume [no integration specificity]"; for an example, please refer back to the post you just responded to.

Now there is an awful lot of places to insert Charles. Millions and millions of them. Are you seriously telling me that the same one will insert at the *same* location in a different species? Without evidence, it really strains my credulty.

-GFA

[God Fearing Atheist]

Well, chromosomal fusion is a good explanation for human chromosome 2, but chromosomal fusion does not entail evolution. Indeed, if evolution is true we must say that the fusion event occurred after the human-chimp split

Hey Charles, did you miss the part where DB mentioned that human 2 has an identical G-banding structure with chimp 2q and 2p?

And of course it happened after the split. So what?

-GFA

[Charles Darwin]

Originally posted by God Fearing Atheist
There is no evidence to my knowledge, Charles, that a provirus ever perfers *a* specific locus. If there is evidence for this, cite it.

I, like everyone who accepts evolution, do not "assume [no integration specificity]"; for an example, please refer back to the post you just responded to.

Now there is an awful lot of places to insert Charles. Millions and millions of them. Are you seriously telling me that the same one will insert at the *same* location in a different species? Without evidence, it really strains my credulty.

-GFA

All kinds of site preferences have been found, including *a* specific locus. I'm sorry I don't have the references handy. Regading your "millions and millions." Well, that's a key question. The effective number may be a whole lot less than that depending on preferences.

[Charles Darwin]

Originally posted by God Fearing Atheist
Hey Charles, did you miss the part where DB mentioned that human 2 has an identical G-banding structure with chimp 2q and 2p?

And of course it happened after the split. So what?

-GFA

Yes, I'm aware of the homology between the respective human and chimp chromosomes. So what? There are myriad homologous characters between those 2 species; why is this one so special?

[Doubting Didymus]

What a pity charles is leaving. I attended another lecture yesterday evening, and those always fill me with more ideas. The lecture was a revision from previous years, and involved a bit of cambrian fossil identification and a whole lot of vertebrate skeletal comparisons. We spent half an hour poring over a replica of an archaeopterix fossil (the famous one), comparing it to extant lizard and pidgeon skeletons. Great stuff.

In any case, the relevant thing was about charles' and my current point of contention; multiple phylogeny confirmation. There's yet another set of phylogenetic trees that is mostly independant from both morphology and genetics, which is the biogeography trees from the breakup of gondwana (and pangea, but we were dealing with gondwana because its better). The breakup of the continents predicts its own ancestor trees. Australia and New Guinea, for example, (meganesia) broke from the rest of the supercontinent before they split from each other, and the same is true of south america. This predicts another double nested heirarchy (meganesia in a nest, broken into meganesian components, ditto for south america and relatives) which common descent expects should confirm standard relatedness trees.

Guess what? Not only do extant natives of the areas confirm this tree through both anatomical and genetic comparison, so too do the fossils from those areas. It even works, time and time again, for individual species groups. Ratite (flightless) birds and hylid (southern hemisphere treedwelling) frogs both confirm the tree, as does almost every other species group (This does not work so well for flying birds, obviously, because they follow totally different migration rules). So this is another example of a phylogenetic tree sourced independantly that matches the rest of them. Under creationist models, there is no reason at all to expect species from any given continent to be more related to each other than to similar species on other continents, let alone for this relatedness to confirm predictions drawn from plate tectonics.

[Urvogel Reverie]

Originally posted by Doubting Didymus
What a pity charles is leaving. I attended another lecture yesterday evening, and those always fill me with more ideas. The lecture was a revision from previous years, and involved a bit of cambrian fossil identification and a whole lot of vertebrate skeletal comparisons. We spent half an hour poring over a replica of an archaeopterix fossil (the famous one), comparing it to extant lizard and pidgeon skeletons. Great stuff.




A cast of one of the Archaeopteryx fossils? Splendid! Which one though--they're all famous. I would guess either BMNH 37001 or HMN 1880.

Urvogel Reverie

[God Fearing Atheist]

Uh oh. Dont encourage him, DD.

Ol' Urvogel will go on forever. ;)

-GFA

[Darwin's Beagle]

According to his post, Charles has decided to lurk and not respond to posts. That is not much of a difference really because he didn’t respond to much in the first place. I do not plan to respond point by point to Charles but to summarize what I think his arguments were and to respond in a general way why I think they were wrong and in some cases hypocritical.

Charles asked why is evolution a scientific fact. Obviously, not all of EVOLUTIONARY THEORY is a scientific fact. There are a large areas that are under intense debate. But just as obvious SOME PARTS of evolutionary theory is a fact. The factual part is descent with modification. Species change into other species over geologic time.

What is meant by scientific fact? Charles says it doesn’t matter what definition one uses, he’ll agree to just about anything reasonable. The definition most often used in this thread for a scientific fact is a hypothesis that is supported by sufficient data as to make any other hypothesis unreasonable. Charles has indicated that he accepts this. However, whenever anyone points out that the data actually DOES make it unreasonable to accept any other hypothesis Charles seems to call that religion.

In response to descent with modification as being the reasonable explanation to Human Chromosome 2 data and any other explanation being requiring ad hoc and hand-waving explanations , Charles says:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Hand-waving and ad hoc explanations huh? Fundamentalists believe they are right and everyone else wrong; and not just wrong but irrational. Only evolution provides a reasonable explanation. And hence it is a fact. But of course it was assumed to be a fact before the evidence was even examined. Which explains why evolutionists are unable to conceive of alternate explanations.

Well, chromosomal fusion is a good explanation for human chromosome 2, but chromosomal fusion does not entail evolution. Indeed, if evolution is true we must say that the fusion event occurred after the human-chimp split. So why is evolution "The only reasonable explanation"?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Charles says that “Fundamentalists” (and by this he means evolutionists [another pinging of the irony meter]) rely upon considering evolution a fact before they can interpret the data as being evidence for evolution. This is silly. It IS evidence for evolution and STRONG evidence for evolution regardless of whether you believe in evolution or not.

Charles next claims that such thinking makes it impossible for evolutionists to conceive of alternate explanations. But WHAT alternate explanation did Charles have in mind? He never says, but the answer is pretty obvious – Special Creation. If this is the case, evolutionists HAVE thought up that alternate explanation. It was the dominate one BEFORE it was replaced by evolutionary theory. If Charles really wants us to consider it on a scientific basis then I have no problems with it. How would Special Creation explain the data? God could have made primates with the same chromosome structure. Early on a human could have had a chromosomal fusion in one of its sex cells and passed this on to the rest of humanity. Possible? Yes. Reasonable. No. Why not? Because it raises questions based on what we know that makes God seem a devious for no apparent reason. God is making it falsely look like species evolved in what appears to be a blatant attempt at deception. Now if Charles REALLY wants us to consider Special Creation on a scientific level he is opening up his (NOT OURS) religious beliefs to scientific scrutiny.

Let’s look at some more of the questions that arise when one takes a SCIENTIFIC look at Special Creation. Charles will naturally object saying that we are injecting religion into the discussion. But that is only because Special Creation is religious, and to examine a religious proposition as an alternate possibility to a scientific one NECESSARILY entails religious beliefs.

The first problem with Special Creation is the logic of it the first place. Why would the creator make a system in which the only way a large part of it can survive is to EAT another large part. Ecosystems can roughly be divided into producers (plants and photo- and chemosynthetic prokaryotes), decomposers (other bacteria and fungi) and consumers (animals such as us). Of those groups, the ONLY one that is not needed for a stable ecosystem is the consumers. Why couldn’t God have made animals with photosynthetic capabilities like those of plants so we wouldn’t have to be dependent upon the eating of plants and other animals for our existence? There does not seem to be any answer to this other than, he could have. On the other hand, evolutionary theory says that this system once developed was maintained and expanded because there was a niche there to exploit.

There are certain organisms whose life cycles raise serious questions about any designer who would have intentionally designed them that way. The gall midges of the insect family, Cecidomyidae, reproduce both sexually and asexually by parthenogenesis. Gall midges like humans have two sets of chromosomes, one normally derived from their mother and the other from their father. It is in the process called meiosis that sex cells (the egg and sperm) have their genomes reduced to a single set. During parthenogenesis the egg of the mother does not undergo meiosis, instead an egg with the mother’s full set of chromosomes matures into a new individual.

The normal mode of reproduction for the gall midges of this family is sexual. The adult mother goes off and lays her eggs on a mushroom for the larva to feed on. Sometimes the mushroom has a lot of eggs on it in which case the larva develop naturally, fly off and look for a mate to continue the cycle. On other occasions there may be only a few eggs on the mushroom. Thus, the mushroom is capable of sustaining vastly more larva. What happens next makes sense from an evolutionary point of view – it vastly increases the genome of the individual gall midge in the next generation – but is it a reasonable thing for an intelligent creator to have developed? Faced with an excess of food, eggs in the mother begin to mature. But what do these eggs use as food? They eat the mother from the inside out. If there are very few eggs on a large mushroom, this process can go on for several generations.

If one were to believe that God had no choice in the matter, that the only way possible for Him to allow the midges to rapidly reproduce parthenogenetically was to have the larva eat the mother, then why did He allow aphids to do essentially the same thing except in this case, the larva also feed off the same plant as the mother. In the case of aphids, both mother and offspring are allowed to live long aphid lives. Perhaps, you believe that God made gall midges where they do not feel the pain. However, insects definitely have neurons that respond only to painful stimuli (same as we do). The behavioral response to these stimuli is to try and do what ever can be done to avoid it. Insects will learn to avoid situations that lead to painful consequences just like we do. There is simply no reason to think the gall midges do not feel the pain of being eaten from the inside out.

What is more, is that this type of thing is NOT uncommon. The beetle, Micromalthus debilis does much the same thing except that occasionally the mother will lay an egg that is a male. She carries the male larva on her back for about four days before he inserts his mouthparts into her genital aperture and eats her … again from the inside out.

There are parasitic wasps that have hosts ranging from caterpillars to tarantulas that sting the host, paralyzing it. The host is then drug into a nest and the wasp lays eggs on the paralyzed host who use the still living host as their own food larder. Furthermore, the venom the moths use tend to be venom that affects the muscles. There is no reason to believe that the host isn’t feeling every excruciating moment of being eaten alive.

Now, I do not care particularly much about gall midges. And I have even been happy to spot some parasitic wasps in our garden figuring that they will help with our caterpillar problem. But, it would scare the hell out of me if I thought that my future was under control of a being that intentionally created such an intrinsically cruel system.

Charles might interject here that this may be well and fine but it does nothing toward proving evolution is a fact. He would be wrong. It goes a long way to showing Special Creation is untenable. It is also data that is well explained by evolutionary theory. If alternate explanations are untenable, but evolutionary explanations fit well, then it IS data that helps to show evolutionary theory to be a scientific fact.

This is the point of the data that Charles dismisses with just as being evolutionary religion on suboptimal design. The scientific data presents insurmountable problems for Special Creation and Charles knows it. That is why he has failed to give us any alternate explanations. He REALLY doesn’t want us to subject Special Creation to scientific evaluation. Here is what he says:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Now is a good time to revisit the question of what a "scientific fact" is. Or in this case, what it is not. One thing a scientific fact is not is a fact that entails religious reasoning.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

He wants us to exclude religion from science, but at the same time he chides scientists for not being able to come up with alternative explanations which presumably include religious explanations. Well, he can’t have it both ways. Which is it? Do we exclude religion from science and ONLY look at naturalistic explanations, or do we take a scientifically critical look at Special Creation as well? It doesn’t much matter. If we look at the evidence from naturalistic explanations descent with modification becomes the only reasonable option. If we look at the evidence with respect to Special Creation it is unreasonable and by default descent with modification becomes the only reasonable option.

The next technique of debate that Charles has used is to avoid addressing the data as presented. Instead he comes up with other data that do not fit the bill as well. He tries to avoid debate on these by acknowledging there are consistent explanations inherent within evolutionary theory.

When endogenous retrovirus (ERV) data is used to support phylogenetic trees he brings up an example of an ERV that is found in both gorillas and chimps but not in humans. Since humans are considered more closely related to chimps than are gorillas, how does evolutionary theory explain this? From a cladistic standpoint the explanation is simple. If you look at humans and chimps as a clade and gorillas as an out-group, then the fact that chimps have a feature that is also found in gorillas indicates that feature is primitive. In other words, the common ancestor of chimp and humans had the ERV and it was deleted in humans sometime after the split.

The next thing we need to do is ask ourselves if this makes sense. We know that from annealing studies we get a chimp – human genome concordance of 98.2% while from studies comparing direct sequences the concordance drops to 95%. The difference between these two techniques appears to be due to insertion/deletions (indels) of the genome. That is a significant percentage of indel genome. This suggests that it is indeed reasonable to think it could have happened that way.

Now looking at the rest of the ERV data we see that phylogenetic trees produced by this technique agree with phylogenetic trees produced by completely independent methods to a significance of 1 in 10^41 power. That is highly significant and says that these phylogenetic trees are real.

Charles would undoubtedly complain that I am ignoring a number of mismatches which according to him are all over the place. We are NOT ignoring the mismatches. All we are NOT doing is not ignoring the data that supports evolutionary theory. Phylogenetic analysis takes ALL the data into account and creates the best tree. When ALL the data is taken into account from several different independent lines of investigation the results are such that there is agreement to an astoundingly significant figure.

But doesn’t Charles have a point? If a piece of evidence supports a theory, doesn’t that imply that opposite observation refute the theory? This does have some superficial logic to it, and Charles plays this to the hilt. But let’s have a Charles-like conversation to show the fallacy:

C-like: I am trying to find out why you think gravity is a scientific fact.

Me-like: The evidence for it overwhelming if you take a book, hold it out at arm’s length, it will fall down. Everything with mass is attracted to other things with mass.

C-like: I am amazed you would say that. If I let go of a helium balloon it goes up not down. Two protons have mass, but they repel each other.

Me-like: The helium balloon is less buoyant than the surrounding air. It rises up like bubbles do in water, but it still stays around the earth so it experiences gravity. The protons presumably feel a gravitational attraction to each other but they also feel an electromagnetic repulsion which is 10^40 times greater. This repulsion will mask the gravitational attraction. Any NON-CHARGED objects should attract each other.

C-like: Sure there are explanations, but they are untenable. CFC’s from spray cans are denser than air but they manage to get themselves all the way up to the ozone layer. Rockets sometimes do leave the earth. Scientists have found that galaxies are speeding apart from each other at faster rates the further apart they are. Gravity cannot account for this so they postulate Dark Energy (note: the only reason they postulate this is because they already believe that gravity must exist).

Me-like: You are not making any sense. The CFCs take 10 or more years to make it from the surface of the earth into the ozone layer. It takes that long because they are SLIGHTLY heavier than air and must be uplifted there by storms and the like causing turbulence in the atmosphere. Rockets have to expend a great deal of fuel to OVERCOME gravity. I’m not a physicist so I’m not sure what to make out of Dark Energy but the evidence for gravity is so strong Dark Energy still doesn’t make me any less confident that gravity exists. What is your alternate theory, that God pulls everything down to the earth with his own hands? That may be logically possible but it is not reasonable.

C-like: I do not have any alternate theory, but I can see that you are highly religious when it comes to gravity. You make highly speculative assumptions that require all sorts of handwaving. You sweep away the data that does not support your ideas.

Clearly, the complete data has to be judged on its merits and with respect to alternate theories. If the data OVERWHELMINGLY supports one theory AT THE EXPENSE of all others, then one is justified in considering it a scientific fact. So long as there is no data that are unexplainable by the theory and there is an overwhelming body of independent data that converges to the conclusion the theory is correct then one is justified in considering it a scientific fact. There is no religion involved here. There isn’t even any dogma since scientific facts are subject to review with the accumulation of new data.

Does descent with modification rise to this level? Absolutely! The fossil evidence in which organisms in adjacent bedding planes are more similar to each other than they are in more separated bedding planes points to descent with modification AND away from any other (especially Special Creation). The data from ERVs which taken in total converge on phylogenies made from sequence homologies in protein and DNA as well as morphological criteria points only toward descent with modification and away from Special Creation. The data from suboptimal design points toward descent with modification and away from Special Creation. The data from biogeography showing the distribution of animals points toward descent with modification and away from Special Creation. The data from embryological similarities points toward descent with modification and away from Special Creation. The data from comparative anatomy points toward descent with modification and away from Special Creation. The data from field biology points toward descent from modification and away from Special Creation.

Is there any data that points toward Special Creation and away from descent with modification? Charles, I suppose would say that the complexity of organisms points toward Special Creation and away from descent with modification. I do not agree. Computer modeling has shown that quite complex features can be built up by natural selection. Artificial selection in animal husbandry and various other pieces of data have shown that real organisms can be changed sometimes quite radically and over a short period of time (relative to geologic periods). For me this is sufficient to not give complexity a large weighting in contrasting the theories. Theistic evolutionists, however, may want to include the possibility that the complexity was still produced by descent with modification but with God’s tweaking it along at certain intervals. Unguided natural selection and natural selection with some theistic guidance are alternate explanations for the complexity observed in nature and fit the other data better than Special Creation.

In short, there is OVERWHELMING evidence that points to descent with modification and away from Special Creation. There is LITTLE to NONE that goes the other way. Therefore, descent with modification DOES reach the lofty heights of scientific fact. That does not mean that we rule out other possibilities, but it does mean that any new facts that arise SHOULD BE interpreted in light of descent with modification. If descent with modification should turn out to be false, then there will become a point in which new facts CANNOT be interpreted in that light (an example of such a fact would be the unequivocal finding of a Precambrian rabbit fossil). Only if such an unlikely event as that happen (or a gradual preponderance of evidence pointing in some other direction accumulate), should we look around for another theory.

Regards,

Darwin's Beagle

[Doubting Didymus]

Originally posted by Urvogel Reverie
A cast of one of the Archaeopteryx fossils? Splendid! Which one though--they're all famous. I would guess either BMNH 37001 or HMN 1880.

Urvogel Reverie

Sorry, I haven't the foggiest clue about the paleontological codename. You will know it when I find a picture of it. It was the really famous one, I know it as the 'london archaeopteryx'.

Aha! I've found a picture.

http://www.howe.k12.ok.us/~jimaskew/archbird.gif

We also had a cast of a pterosaur fossil. The er... famous one. ;)

[Urvogel Reverie]

Originally posted by Doubting Didymus
Sorry, I haven't the foggiest clue about the paleontological codename. You will know it when I find a picture of it. It was the really famous one, I know it as the 'london archaeopteryx'.

Aha! I've found a picture.

http://www.howe.k12.ok.us/~jimaskew/archbird.gif

We also had a cast of a pterosaur fossil. The er... famous one. ;)

That's a picture of a cast of HMN 1880--the Berlin Archaeopteryx, which was unearthed in 1877 and resides in the Humboldt Museum. The Berlin specimen would actually have been a better one to look at than the London specimen, for general purposes. Below is a diagram of the London specimen, BMNH 37001:

http://www.dinohunters.com/images/archaeo.jpg

Urvogel Reverie

[Doubting Didymus]

Hmm... I've been thinking of these two the wrong way around. The berlin archaeopteryx, which I mistakenly thought was the london same, was indeed the cast we studied.

[Charles Darwin]

Originally posted by markfiend
Duh. That is the point. If evolution is *not* true, why do the molecular phylogenies agree so well with the morphological ones?

Forget it. I am rapidly coming to the POV of Happy Wonderer.


Reading but not responding isn't so easy. There are a couple of subthreads I'd like to respond to, in order to clear up what seem to me to be obvious misconceptions, this being one of them.

Let me try to explain it again. Even evolutionists agree that created things can form nested hierarchies so this shouldn't be controversial.

Consider a set of 6 objects with wheels; 3 autos and 3 mopeds. You divide them into 2 groups, one group of 4-wheeled objects (the autos) and the other group with 2-wheels (the mopeds). Now you look at the steering device (steering wheel or handle bars). You figure a way to measure similarity, and you find that the 2-wheeled objects are much more similar to each other than to all the 4-wheeled objects. And likewise the reverse is true: the 4-wheeled objects are much more similar to each other than to all the 2-wheeled objects. You are constructing a tree.

Now imagine you had more objects (more autos and mopeds) and more levels. As you work your way along you will eventually start to run into characters that one clade fails to contain. You may compare the windshields of the autos, but the mopeds have no windshield. What a coincidence! All the 4-wheeled objects have windshields of some sort and none of the 2-wheeled objects do.

Now you can imagine that it won't always divide up so cleanly. When you compare trunks you find that they are ubiquitous in the 4-wheeled objects, but non totally absent in the 2-wheeled objects. Some mopeds have small storage trunks behind the seat. Hmm, there seems to be some convergence here. Sound familiar?

Make sense? Now as I said earlier we shouldn't stretch the analogy too thin. Obviously there are fundamental differences between biology and inorganic machines.

[Charles Darwin]

Originally posted by Darwin's Beagle
According to his post, Charles has decided to lurk and not respond to posts. That is not much of a difference really because he didn’t respond to much in the first place. I do not plan to respond point by point to Charles but to summarize what I think his arguments were and to respond in a general way why I think they were wrong and in some cases hypocritical.

Charles asked why is evolution a scientific fact. Obviously, not all of EVOLUTIONARY THEORY is a scientific fact. There are a large areas that are under intense debate. But just as obvious SOME PARTS of evolutionary theory is a fact. The factual part is descent with modification. Species change into other species over geologic time.

What is meant by scientific fact? Charles says it doesn’t matter what definition one uses, he’ll agree to just about anything reasonable. The definition most often used in this thread for a scientific fact is a hypothesis that is supported by sufficient data as to make any other hypothesis unreasonable. Charles has indicated that he accepts this. However, whenever anyone points out that the data actually DOES make it unreasonable to accept any other hypothesis Charles seems to call that religion.

In response to descent with modification as being the reasonable explanation to Human Chromosome 2 data and any other explanation being requiring ad hoc and hand-waving explanations , Charles says:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Hand-waving and ad hoc explanations huh? Fundamentalists believe they are right and everyone else wrong; and not just wrong but irrational. Only evolution provides a reasonable explanation. And hence it is a fact. But of course it was assumed to be a fact before the evidence was even examined. Which explains why evolutionists are unable to conceive of alternate explanations.

Well, chromosomal fusion is a good explanation for human chromosome 2, but chromosomal fusion does not entail evolution. Indeed, if evolution is true we must say that the fusion event occurred after the human-chimp split. So why is evolution "The only reasonable explanation"?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Charles says that “Fundamentalists” (and by this he means evolutionists [another pinging of the irony meter]) rely upon considering evolution a fact before they can interpret the data as being evidence for evolution. This is silly. It IS evidence for evolution and STRONG evidence for evolution regardless of whether you believe in evolution or not.

Charles next claims that such thinking makes it impossible for evolutionists to conceive of alternate explanations. But WHAT alternate explanation did Charles have in mind? He never says, but the answer is pretty obvious – Special Creation.

Oh please. It is clear that the alternate explanation for the human chromosome is chromosomal fusion. You, nonetheless, insist that the explanation must entail evolution. This is not science.

Originally posted by Darwin's Beagle
The first problem with Special Creation is the logic of it the first place. Why would the creator make a system in which the only way a large part of it can survive is to EAT another large part. Ecosystems can roughly be divided into producers (plants and photo- and chemosynthetic prokaryotes), decomposers (other bacteria and fungi) and consumers (animals such as us). Of those groups, the ONLY one that is not needed for a stable ecosystem is the consumers. Why couldn’t God have made animals with photosynthetic capabilities like those of plants so we wouldn’t have to be dependent upon the eating of plants and other animals for our existence? There does not seem to be any answer to this other than, he could have. On the other hand, evolutionary theory says that this system once developed was maintained and expanded because there was a niche there to exploit.

There are certain organisms whose life cycles raise serious questions about any designer who would have intentionally designed them that way. The gall midges of the insect family, Cecidomyidae, reproduce both sexually and asexually by parthenogenesis. Gall midges like humans have two sets of chromosomes, one normally derived from their mother and the other from their father. It is in the process called meiosis that sex cells (the egg and sperm) have their genomes reduced to a single set. During parthenogenesis the egg of the mother does not undergo meiosis, instead an egg with the mother’s full set of chromosomes matures into a new individual.

The normal mode of reproduction for the gall midges of this family is sexual. The adult mother goes off and lays her eggs on a mushroom for the larva to feed on. Sometimes the mushroom has a lot of eggs on it in which case the larva develop naturally, fly off and look for a mate to continue the cycle. On other occasions there may be only a few eggs on the mushroom. Thus, the mushroom is capable of sustaining vastly more larva. What happens next makes sense from an evolutionary point of view – it vastly increases the genome of the individual gall midge in the next generation – but is it a reasonable thing for an intelligent creator to have developed? Faced with an excess of food, eggs in the mother begin to mature. But what do these eggs use as food? They eat the mother from the inside out. If there are very few eggs on a large mushroom, this process can go on for several generations.

If one were to believe that God had no choice in the matter, that the only way possible for Him to allow the midges to rapidly reproduce parthenogenetically was to have the larva eat the mother, then why did He allow aphids to do essentially the same thing except in this case, the larva also feed off the same plant as the mother. In the case of aphids, both mother and offspring are allowed to live long aphid lives. Perhaps, you believe that God made gall midges where they do not feel the pain.

Amazing. Why in the world would I believe that? No, wait, I don't want to know; I give. You obviously have strong religious feelings, and there is nothing wrong with that, but they are not open to scientific debate.

Originally posted by Darwin's Beagle
However, insects definitely have neurons that respond only to painful stimuli (same as we do). The behavioral response to these stimuli is to try and do what ever can be done to avoid it. Insects will learn to avoid situations that lead to painful consequences just like we do. There is simply no reason to think the gall midges do not feel the pain of being eaten from the inside out.

What is more, is that this type of thing is NOT uncommon. The beetle, Micromalthus debilis does much the same thing except that occasionally the mother will lay an egg that is a male. She carries the male larva on her back for about four days before he inserts his mouthparts into her genital aperture and eats her … again from the inside out.

There are parasitic wasps that have hosts ranging from caterpillars to tarantulas that sting the host, paralyzing it. The host is then drug into a nest and the wasp lays eggs on the paralyzed host who use the still living host as their own food larder. Furthermore, the venom the moths use tend to be venom that affects the muscles. There is no reason to believe that the host isn’t feeling every excruciating moment of being eaten alive.

Now, I do not care particularly much about gall midges. And I have even been happy to spot some parasitic wasps in our garden figuring that they will help with our caterpillar problem. But, it would scare the hell out of me if I thought that my future was under control of a being that intentionally created such an intrinsically cruel system.

Charles might interject here that this may be well and fine but it does nothing toward proving evolution is a fact. He would be wrong. It goes a long way to showing Special Creation is untenable.

OK, I'll bite. My curiousity has gotten the better of me. Why do your religious beliefs dictate that God would not create these things you describe above?

Originally posted by Darwin's Beagle
The scientific data presents insurmountable problems for Special Creation and Charles knows it.

The only thing I know in this regard is that the scientific data presents insurmountable problems for your personal religion. I wonder, where did you gain such knowledge of God? You obviously feel confident you know just what He would and would not do. So confident that your truth applies to us all. You must have some theological truth available to you.

Originally posted by Darwin's Beagle
When endogenous retrovirus (ERV) data is used to support phylogenetic trees he brings up an example of an ERV that is found in both gorillas and chimps but not in humans. Since humans are considered more closely related to chimps than are gorillas, how does evolutionary theory explain this? From a cladistic standpoint the explanation is simple. If you look at humans and chimps as a clade and gorillas as an out-group, then the fact that chimps have a feature that is also found in gorillas indicates that feature is primitive. In other words, the common ancestor of chimp and humans had the ERV and it was deleted in humans sometime after the split.

Regards,

Darwin's Beagle

Please read more carefully. The human homologous locus contains an *intact pre-integration site.* The whole point of why these data are so interesting is that they serve as irreversible markers. They don't just get deleted and leaving no trace.

[Oolon Colluphid]

I'm sorry, this is so elementary that I'll have to respond. I cannot let so basic a misconception go by.
Originally posted by Charles Darwin
Originally posted by Oolon: Thus it’s odd that the creator gave all birds their efficient through-flow lung system.

This is a religious claim.
<sigh>
What is it about ‘thus’ that you do not understand? ‘Thus’ means ‘it follows that’. Therefore, consequently. Since X, then Y.

Okay, let’s try an analogy.

It is claimed that a well-known ‘psychic’ can bend spoons with the power of his mind. The hypothesis is that it’s his super-natural powers that make said phenomena happen.

But what happens when we take the proposed hypothesis -- the power of an individual’s mind over matter -- and test it? What are we to make of the powers when they show unexpected limitations? Are there any elements of the phenomenon that are not predicted by the hypothesis?

Thus it is odd that the ‘psychic’ can only bend the spoons after having handled them, however briefly.

Thus it is odd that he can bend spoons, but not pound coins.

Thus it is odd that he can bend the spoons by touching them with his fingers, but not with, say, his nose.

Thus it is odd that magicians can replicate the phenomenon (perhaps not with the finesse of the ‘psychic’, but in all its particulars nevertheless).

If the hypothesis were correct, none of these other facts would be likely; nothing about the hypothesis leads us to expect these limitations on the guy’s ‘mind-over-matter’ abilities.

Am I therefore making a religious claim?

Similarly, say, nuclear fusion at room temperatures is claimed. But if this were really the case -- if the explanatory hypothesis were correct -- then it is odd that X, Y and Z factors are also involved, and that the observations can be explained by simpler means.

Am I therefore making a religious claim?

The comparison with creationism / intelligent-designism is not just an an analogy, it is a homology.

The claim is that nature was designed. That may or may not be a religious claim. But the evidence offered is scientific evidence -- evidence from the natural world, ie the complexity of living things -- and hence the hypothesis becomes scientifically testable.

Thus, therefore, it follows that, consequently... if the explanatory hypothesis were correct, we should not find blatantly poorly designed features in nature: materials wastage, excessively convoluted designs, irrelevant features (eg a coccyx being made of little separare-then fused bones and having an extensor coccygis muscle), and so on. These things are exactly like the psychic having to handle the spoon. The designer has apparently been unexpectedly limited.

Therefore we can reject the hypothesis as being the correct explanation, even if we don’t have an alternative.

I note too that the evidence for the designer is the complexity of living things -- such as bat echolocation. Now, who was it who mentioned that in this thread?
I don't care if you believe in that creator or not; I don't care what creationist you are referencing or testing. That's irrelevant. You are telling us that for that creationist's creator to do such as thing is *ODD*. That is a religious claim. This is *YOUR* religious claim, not the creationists.
No. It is not. It is YOUR claim.

Exhibit One: Do you now deny saying the following?
Anyone familiar with today’s sonar or radar systems knows the immense complexity involved with such systems: the problems of sensing the echo in the presence of the transmitted signal which can be billions of times stronger, of filtering out spurious signals such as echoes of older transmissions, of combining the echo information with knowledge of your own motion, and so forth. Yet the bat’s detection abilities are superior to those of the best electronic sonar equipment. To think that things like this just happen to occur via a series of mutations is not scientific thinking.
So were you making a religious claim then, or a scientific one?

Am I reading too much into this when I conclude you think it could not have evolved? Hardly.

Am I reading too much into this when I conclude you think it therefore must have been designed? Maybe, but not much of a maybe.

So I responded with:

“The designer was clever enough to make echolocation. Okay... but maybe, Charles, you could explain why this same creator gave bats a respiratory / lung ventilation system that is ten times less efficient than that of birds?”

Whether your claim is religious or scientific: either way, it is refuted by other observations. Evolution explains them easily; your ‘it-couldn’t-have-evolved’ explanation-vacuum (or creationism) does not.

So, answer the goddamned question.

TTFN, Oolon

[Jack the Bodiless]

Charles:

You are (again) entirely ignoring the extent of the evidence which supports the evolutionary "Tree of Life" of common descent.

Your analogy simply does not hold. In particular, there are no transitional forms between vehicles with a specified number of wheels: in your analogy, you should be able to find the remains of vehicles with 2.5 or 3.5 wheels. Furthermore, you should be able to demonstrate that the chemical composition of paints, plastics and rubber are broadly consistent across all cars and all motorcycles, but notably less so between any car and any motorcycle.

And there are vehicles which are quite different to any other, whereas there aren't any complex organisms which "just appear from nowhere" in the fossil record: every creature has ancestors as far back as the Cambrian Explosion at least. Even if there's currently a gap in the record where a creature's immediate ancestor should be, we can see the resemblance with more distant ancestors.

And multiple means of classification produce the SAME family tree, to an extent that cannot possibly be explained by Special Creation.

You still have not begun to explain why this should be so. I think it's rather obvious that you know Special Creation is scientifically bankrupt, which is why you're being so coy about it.

Also, you have erroneously accused markfiend of a "misconception", whereas the only actual misconception here is that Special Creation has any relevance at all to real-world biology. Again, you seem to know this: I note that you haven't given any reason at all why it should be given consideration. There is no evidence that supports it: nothing that makes it even vaguely plausible. And you haven't even begun to address the problems with it.

There is only one reason why Special Creation is even being suggested: the Bible. As we already know that the Bible is erroneous (for reasons that have nothing to do with evolution), the "Bible theory" is already falsified: scientifically, it is useless.

[Jack the Bodiless]

Amazing. Why in the world would I believe that? No, wait, I don't want to know; I give. You obviously have strong religious feelings, and there is nothing wrong with that, but they are not open to scientific debate.
Waaait a minute:

You propose Special Creation as a SCIENTIFIC theory, then cry "religion!" when we discuss it.

...So you are advocating ATHEISTIC Special Creation?

Please explain how this would work.

[Jack the Bodiless]

Please read more carefully. The human homologous locus contains an *intact pre-integration site.* The whole point of why these data are so interesting is that they serve as irreversible markers. They don't just get deleted and leaving no trace.
I'll let the professional biologists here give a more detailed answer to this one.

But one thing immedately strikes me: will you accept "God fixed the problem in humans" as an explanation?

Remember, it isn't evolution that you are arguing against: it is common descent.

Please explain why this is incompatible with Theistic Evolution.

[markfiend]

Originally posted by Charles Darwin
Reading but not responding isn't so easy. There are a couple of subthreads I'd like to respond to, in order to clear up what seem to me to be obvious misconceptions, this being one of them.

Let me try to explain it again. Even evolutionists agree that created things can form nested hierarchies so this shouldn't be controversial.
:banghead: Are you being deliberately obtuse?

Consider a set of 6 objects with wheels; 3 autos and 3 mopeds. You divide them into 2 groups, one group of 4-wheeled objects (the autos) and the other group with 2-wheels (the mopeds). Now you look at the steering device (steering wheel or handle bars). You figure a way to measure similarity, and you find that the 2-wheeled objects are much more similar to each other than to all the 4-wheeled objects. And likewise the reverse is true: the 4-wheeled objects are much more similar to each other than to all the 2-wheeled objects. You are constructing a tree.
OK, but if I choose to group by steering device first, then by number of wheels, it is no less valid a tree than the other way round.

Now imagine you had more objects (more autos and mopeds) and more levels. As you work your way along you will eventually start to run into characters that one clade fails to contain. You may compare the windshields of the autos, but the mopeds have no windshield. What a coincidence! All the 4-wheeled objects have windshields of some sort and none of the 2-wheeled objects do.
Yeah. Right. A quick google image search on "moped" found me this:
http://www.polizei.niedersachsen.de/dst/pdbs/oeffentlichkeit/bilder/moped.jpg
Is that, or is that not a windshield?

Now you can imagine that it won't always divide up so cleanly. When you compare trunks you find that they are ubiquitous in the 4-wheeled objects, but non totally absent in the 2-wheeled objects. Some mopeds have small storage trunks behind the seat. Hmm, there seems to be some convergence here. Sound familiar?

Make sense? Now as I said earlier we shouldn't stretch the analogy too thin. Obviously there are fundamental differences between biology and inorganic machines.
:banghead: Yes. Inorganic machines are designed. Biological organisms are not.

OK you can make a tree of "vehicles driven with an internal combustion engine". But just to take two traits, vehicle type (motorcycle, sports car, SUV, saloon car, truck, etc.) and engine type (2-cylinder, 4-cylinder, 6-cylinder, V-8, V-12) I could decide that engine type was more important than vehicle type so I have:

2-cylinder contains some motorbikes, lawnmowers
4-cylinder contains other motorbikes, some sports cars, most saloon cars, some trucks, most SUVs
6-cylinder contains some saloon cars, some sports cars, some SUVs, some trucks
V-8 contains some sports cars, a few saloon cars, some trucks
V-12 contains some sports cars, some trucks.

An alternative and equally valid heirarchy is this:

motorcycles some 2-cylinder, some 4-cylinder
sports cars some 4-cylinder, some 6-cylinder, some V-8, some V-12
SUVs some 4-cylinder, some 6-cylinder
saloon cars some 4-cylinder, some 6-cylinder, a few V-8
etc.

The phylogenies we get in biological systems are analogous to finding that all motorcycles and only motorcycles are 2-cylindered, all saloon cars and only saloon cars are 4-cylindered, all SUVs and only SUVs are 6-cylindered, all sports cars and only sports cars have V-8 engines, etc. But we do not see this because as designers, humans can put any engine into any vehicle.

Human-made designs are modular, in that a component from one system can be put into a completely unrelated system. On a trivial level, this computer has the same mains power-plug as my hair-dryer, which are completely "unrelated" and made by different manufacturers.

So if I wished to design a flibbijig that "fed" off mains AC electricity, I would use the existing design of the mains-plug, rather than starting afresh and coming up with a plug that performs the same function but through a completely different design. In biology, we have numerous systems with the same function but completely different structures. (The eye is one example, as below) Interestingly enough, we also have examples (in molecular biology) of systems with similar structures that have wildly different functions. (One example is the close structural similarity between secretory pores and the base of the flagellum.)

The point of the "design" hypothesis is that a designer could have given bats the same, more efficient breathing system that birds have, but they have the breathing system of all other mammals. A designer could have given vertebrates the more efficient squid/octopus eyes, but vertebrate eyes are "inside out" when compared to the squid/octopus eye.

Edit to add: Jack The Bodiless managed to get three posts in during the time it took me to type this one!

[lpetrich]

"Charles Darwin" ought to tell us what would falsify the special-creation hypothesis. What would indicate that special creation had never happened?

[Happy Wonderer]

Yeah. Right. A quick google image search on "moped" found me this:


Pointless correction department: I think that is a photo of a BMW motorcycle, note the placement of the cylinder heads. Here is a moped with a windshield:

http://www.mopedarmy.com/img/gallery/motobecanewind.jpg

HW

(Kawasaki W650 owner.)

[Charles Darwin]

Originally posted by Oolon
Okay, let’s try an analogy.

It is claimed that a well-known ‘psychic’ can bend spoons with the power of his mind. The hypothesis is that it’s his super-natural powers that make said phenomena happen.

But what happens when we take the proposed hypothesis -- the power of an individual’s mind over matter -- and test it? What are we to make of the powers when they show unexpected limitations? Are there any elements of the phenomenon that are not predicted by the hypothesis?

Thus it is odd that the ‘psychic’ can only bend the spoons after having handled them, however briefly.

Thus it is odd that he can bend spoons, but not pound coins.

Thus it is odd that he can bend the spoons by touching them with his fingers, but not with, say, his nose.

Thus it is odd that magicians can replicate the phenomenon (perhaps not with the finesse of the ‘psychic’, but in all its particulars nevertheless).

If the hypothesis were correct, none of these other facts would be likely; nothing about the hypothesis leads us to expect these limitations on the guy’s ‘mind-over-matter’ abilities.

Am I therefore making a religious claim?

No.

Originally posted by Oolon
The claim is that nature was designed. That may or may not be a religious claim. But the evidence offered is scientific evidence -- evidence from the natural world, ie the complexity of living things -- and hence the hypothesis becomes scientifically testable.

Thus, therefore, it follows that, consequently... if the explanatory hypothesis were correct, we should not find blatantly poorly designed features in nature: materials wastage, excessively convoluted designs, irrelevant features (eg a coccyx being made of little separare-then fused bones and having an extensor coccygis muscle), and so on. These things are exactly like the psychic having to handle the spoon. The designer has apparently been unexpectedly limited.

Therefore we can reject the hypothesis as being the correct explanation, even if we don’t have an alternative.

Your logic is valid. I cannot deny your claim that there are aspects of biology that offend you, and your sense of what a creator would do. I'm sure you can build a lengthy list of items in biology that, for you, rule out creation. Your logic will be valid and I will be powerless to argue otherwise. And that's the point. You have decided what God should and shouldn't do. This is not to say that there aren't others on your side. Most religions consist of more than one person. But don't fool yourself that this isn't your religion. You are using it as your reasoning for why creation is false. Don't blame it on the others.

You are building your beliefs on a religious position. I don't quite know where it came from. I've no doubt you heard it somewhere. And you believe it. You believe that God would not make "excessively convoluted designs." If you did not believe this was true, then you would not use it to refute creation.

I don't use alchemy to refute chemistry. I reject alchemy, but I do not confuse it with chemistry. Everyone here can agree on this because it is a scientific issue. But your argument about why creation is wrong works only for people who agree with your religion. These people are evolutionists.

Or let me put it a different way. If I were to ask you why you believe that God would not use "excessively convoluted designs," you would have a difficult time responding without making further religious claims. Your only option (which you have been doing here) is to claim that it really isn't your own position, but rather it is the position of those other guys, and you are merely testing their position. But in that case, you are making the claim that this is the only alternative; that is, the belief of those guys, whom you have chosen as your target, is the only possible description of God and nature. If they are wrong, then we have refuted creation, period. But, of course, this too is a religious claim. Thus it is disingenuous for you to say that you don't believe in that position, but that you are merely analyzing it and testing it. No, you very much believe in it. You believe that God, *if* He were to create the species, would not make "excessively convoluted designs." That is a religious claim.

Originally posted by Oolon
Exhibit One: Do you now deny saying the following?

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anyone familiar with today’s sonar or radar systems knows the immense complexity involved with such systems: the problems of sensing the echo in the presence of the transmitted signal which can be billions of times stronger, of filtering out spurious signals such as echoes of older transmissions, of combining the echo information with knowledge of your own motion, and so forth. Yet the bat’s detection abilities are superior to those of the best electronic sonar equipment. To think that things like this just happen to occur via a series of mutations is not scientific thinking.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So were you making a religious claim then, or a scientific one?

Am I reading too much into this when I conclude you think it could not have evolved? Hardly.

No, you are not reading too much. But what does that have to do with religion? I'm afraid I don't follow. How does my claim that echolocation makes the idea of the species arising via natural selection acting on random biological variation terribly unlikely, equate to religion?

Originally posted by Oolon
Am I reading too much into this when I conclude you think it therefore must have been designed? Maybe, but not much of a maybe.

So I responded with:

“The designer was clever enough to make echolocation. Okay... but maybe, Charles, you could explain why this same creator gave bats a respiratory / lung ventilation system that is ten times less efficient than that of birds?”

It is a perfectly legitimate religious question. And I can see that it is highly relevant to this thread because refuting creation is an important step for you guys. But I hope you understand that, whereas I am fully prepared to debate science with you, I am not going to make any headway when it comes to religion. If you believe that God should not have designed the bat that way, then more power to you, good luck. I'm not going to convince you otherwise. If you say that is not really your religious belief, that you are merely testing a belief you have heard, then I say you have successfully disproven that belief. But so what? If you go the next step and say you have refuted creation (as you already have so said), then you have made a religious claim.

Originally posted by Oolon
Evolution explains them easily.

Oh, really? I hadn't heard that. How does evolution explain echolocation easily?

[Jack the Bodiless]

You are building your beliefs on a religious position. I don't quite know where it came from. I've no doubt you heard it somewhere. And you believe it. You believe that God would not make "excessively convoluted designs." If you did not believe this was true, then you would not use it to refute creation.
Incorrect.

Belief in common descent is built upon the evidence for common descent. It is NOT built upon any "belief that God would not make excessively complicated designs".

You seem to be having difficulty separating discussion of what WE believe from discussion of what YOU believe.

However, discussion of "what God would do" is relevant when attempting to discuss what YOU believe. Which is what Oolon was doing.

Evolution is fact, not religion. Common descent is also fact, not religion. Special Creation, however, is both religious and non-factual. It is ruled out by the overwhelming factual evidence that common descent has actually occurred.

An analogy: consider a pebbled beach, on which several million pebbles have become graded by size due to wave action (or so we propose). But you have a predisposition to believe that the pebbles were tossed out of the sea by bored scuba-divers, and seek to support your belief by pointing to a pebble that is out of sequence.

It isn't necessary to speculate on the strange motivation and mental state of the scuba-divers when discussing OUR theory: only YOURS. And it is erroneous to suggest that WE base our theory on assumptions regarding the motives of hypothetical stone-throwing scuba-divers. We merely note that wave-sorting is an ongoing process that explains what we see to an amazing degree of accuracy (and that we can explain your misplaced pebble without abandoning our theory), whereas you have no adequate explanation whatsoever for the appearance of the beach.
No, you are not reading too much. But what does that have to do with religion? I'm afraid I don't follow. How does my claim that echolocation makes the idea of the species arising via natural selection acting on random biological variation terribly unlikely, equate to religion?
It is a false claim, made only because of your religious agenda. This is evident from your ongoing inability to explain why echolocation makes evolution "terribly unlikely". It is a statement of faith, nothing more.
Evolution explains them easily.

Oh, really? I hadn't heard that. How does evolution explain echolocation easily?
Yes, you HAVE heard that. It has already been addressed on this thread.

...Or are you arguing that you are somehow unable to personally echolocate (a hearing disorder, perhaps), even though the rest of us can manage it just fine? Is this why you perceive even crude echolocation as "terribly unlikely"?

[Happy Wonderer]

Originally posted by Charles Darwin
How does my claim that echolocation makes the idea of the species arising via natural selection acting on random biological variation terribly unlikely, equate to religion?
Originally posted by RRoman
But I think Charles Darwin should first tell us what he thinks evolution is.
Originally posted by Charles Darwin:
The theory that the origin of the species can be explained as the result of natural forces and laws at work.


Is there a possible explanation for echolocation as the result of non-natural forces and non-natural laws that can not be construed as religion? Or has your position changed, and you are simply arguing that there is some other naturalistic mechanism at work?

hw

[GunnerJ]

I don't use alchemy to refute chemistry.

Neither is Oolon. To use your analogy, he is using alchemy to refute alchemy, by following alchemy's claims to their logical conclusion.

[Charles Darwin]

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Charles Darwin
How does my claim that echolocation makes the idea of the species arising via natural selection acting on random biological variation terribly unlikely, equate to religion?
Originally posted by RRoman
But I think Charles Darwin should first tell us what he thinks evolution is.
Originally posted by Charles Darwin:
The theory that the origin of the species can be explained as the result of natural forces and laws at work.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Originally posted by Happy Wonderer
Is there a possible explanation for echolocation as the result of non-natural forces and non-natural laws that can not be construed as religion? Or has your position changed, and you are simply arguing that there is some other naturalistic mechanism at work?

hw


Good point. I stand corrected; however, with this caveat. My religious claim (ie, that evolution is terribly unlikely and therefore echolocation in all likelihood arose from NOT from a natural process) is based on the scientific evidence.

[Charles Darwin]

Originally posted by markfiend
:banghead: Are you being deliberately obtuse?


OK, but if I choose to group by steering device first, then by number of wheels, it is no less valid a tree than the other way round.


Yeah. Right. A quick google image search on "moped" found me this:
http://www.polizei.niedersachsen.de/dst/pdbs/oeffentlichkeit/bilder/moped.jpg
Is that, or is that not a windshield?


:banghead: Yes. Inorganic machines are designed. Biological organisms are not.

OK you can make a tree of "vehicles driven with an internal combustion engine". But just to take two traits, vehicle type (motorcycle, sports car, SUV, saloon car, truck, etc.) and engine type (2-cylinder, 4-cylinder, 6-cylinder, V-8, V-12) I could decide that engine type was more important than vehicle type so I have:

2-cylinder contains some motorbikes, lawnmowers
4-cylinder contains other motorbikes, some sports cars, most saloon cars, some trucks, most SUVs
6-cylinder contains some saloon cars, some sports cars, some SUVs, some trucks
V-8 contains some sports cars, a few saloon cars, some trucks
V-12 contains some sports cars, some trucks.

An alternative and equally valid heirarchy is this:

motorcycles some 2-cylinder, some 4-cylinder
sports cars some 4-cylinder, some 6-cylinder, some V-8, some V-12
SUVs some 4-cylinder, some 6-cylinder
saloon cars some 4-cylinder, some 6-cylinder, a few V-8
etc.

The phylogenies we get in biological systems are analogous to finding that all motorcycles and only motorcycles are 2-cylindered, all saloon cars and only saloon cars are 4-cylindered, all SUVs and only SUVs are 6-cylindered, all sports cars and only sports cars have V-8 engines, etc. But we do not see this because as designers, humans can put any engine into any vehicle.

Human-made designs are modular, in that a component from one system can be put into a completely unrelated system. On a trivial level, this computer has the same mains power-plug as my hair-dryer, which are completely "unrelated" and made by different manufacturers.

So if I wished to design a flibbijig that "fed" off mains AC electricity, I would use the existing design of the mains-plug, rather than starting afresh and coming up with a plug that performs the same function but through a completely different design. In biology, we have numerous systems with the same function but completely different structures. (The eye is one example, as below) Interestingly enough, we also have examples (in molecular biology) of systems with similar structures that have wildly different functions. (One example is the close structural similarity between secretory pores and the base of the flagellum.)

The point of the "design" hypothesis is that a designer could have given bats the same, more efficient breathing system that birds have, but they have the breathing system of all other mammals. A designer could have given vertebrates the more efficient squid/octopus eyes, but vertebrate eyes are "inside out" when compared to the squid/octopus eye.

Edit to add: Jack The Bodiless managed to get three posts in during the time it took me to type this one!

OK, I give. You have ignored the key points of my post and responded with non sequiters [I said that even evolutionists accept the point, and you responded "Are you being deliberately obtuse?"], question-begging ["Yes. Inorganic machines are designed. Biological organisms are not."], and irrelevant examples ["But just to take two traits ..."].

There's not much more that I can say by way of explanation, so I'll agree to disagree and let you have the final word on this sub thread.

[Charles Darwin]

Originally posted by Jack the Bodiless
An analogy: consider a pebbled beach, on which several million pebbles have become graded by size due to wave action (or so we propose). But you have a predisposition to believe that the pebbles were tossed out of the sea by bored scuba-divers, and seek to support your belief by pointing to a pebble that is out of sequence.

It isn't necessary to speculate on the strange motivation and mental state of the scuba-divers when discussing OUR theory: only YOURS. And it is erroneous to suggest that WE base our theory on assumptions regarding the motives of hypothetical stone-throwing scuba-divers. We merely note that wave-sorting is an ongoing process that explains what we see to an amazing degree of accuracy (and that we can explain your misplaced pebble without abandoning our theory), whereas you have no adequate explanation whatsoever for the appearance of the beach.

One minor problem though, everything we know and understand about science gives strong support to a naturalistic origin of the pebbles; but everything we know and understand about science tells us that it is terribly unlikely that things like echolocation just arose. No, I'm afraid it is not I who has the non scientific motives.

[Charles Darwin]

Originally posted by lpetrich
"Charles Darwin" ought to tell us what would falsify the special-creation hypothesis. What would indicate that special creation had never happened?

A compelling scientific explanation for the origin of species.

[lpetrich]

CD's echolocation argument closely parallels the common creationist eye argument -- and it has the same resolution. High-quality echolocation systems, like high-quality eyes, are elaborations of low-quality echolocation systems and eyes, as the case may be.

Embryonic development provides some clues as to the origin of eyes. Their development is started by the same genetic system in all the animals tested, one which includes the famous gene Pax-6. Those tested include flatworms, which only have eyespots, fruit flies, which have compound eyes, and vertebrates, which have camera eyes. That kind of eye can be formed in a simple way: pulling back the light-detecting part and making first a crude pinhole camera, and then a lens camera -- which is roughly what happens in camera-eye embryonic development.

The genetics behind bats' echolocation capabilities has not been explored as much, but as genetics techniques advance, that may eventually become easily feasible.

[Charles Darwin]

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazing. Why in the world would I believe that? No, wait, I don't want to know; I give. You obviously have strong religious feelings, and there is nothing wrong with that, but they are not open to scientific debate.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Originally posted by Jack the Bodiless
Waaait a minute:

You propose Special Creation as a SCIENTIFIC theory, then cry "religion!" when we discuss it.

Where did I do that? Let's stop making things up, OK?

[Jack the Bodiless]

"Charles Darwin" ought to tell us what would falsify the special-creation hypothesis. What would indicate that special creation had never happened?

A compelling scientific explanation for the origin of species.
This would NOT falsify the special-creation hypothesis.

I have already given you the explanation that most Christians find compelling: Theistic Evolution. God did it, but common descent was involved.

You reject this for religious reasons, I presume? Because it doesn't involve special creation, right? You haven't given any scientific reason to reject it.

As I keep trying to point out to you, the alternative to special creation is common descent. The evidence says that common descent happened. Therefore the same evidence is saying that Special Creation did NOT happen.

Thus, Special Creation is false.
One minor problem though, everything we know and understand about science gives strong support to a naturalistic origin of the pebbles; but everything we know and understand about science tells us that it is terribly unlikely that things like echolocation just arose. No, I'm afraid it is not I who has the non scientific motives.
The problem with this statement is that it is not actually true.

You are again asserting without evidence that there is some sort of "problem" with echolocation. But there isn't. Can you explain WHY echolocation is a problem? Of course not. We all have it, it initially requires no special equipment other than ears and vocal cords, and the subsequent refinement of echolocation is no more mysterious than the refinement of vision.

And we know that evolution is fact, just as we know that wave-sorting is fact. We can observe the process.
Waaait a minute:

You propose Special Creation as a SCIENTIFIC theory, then cry "religion!" when we discuss it.

Where did I do that? Let's stop making things up, OK?
How can we possibly discuss Special Creation scientifically, when there is no scientific evidence to support it? We must venture into religion to discuss it, and you then accuse us of having "strong religious views"!

[Muad'Dib]

Originally posted by Charles Darwin
<snip>
I am fully prepared to debate science with you
<snip>

Hi Charles,

It's good to see you back. Perhaps you'd care to answer my question? I'll post it again for your convenience.

Question. Which of the following is closest to your opinion on scientific fact?

(a) There is no claim made about the world or the universe made by any branch of science that is supported enough to be called a scientific fact.

(b) There are claims made about the world or the universe that concern the present time that are supported enough to be called scientific facts (perhaps in, say, physics), but no statement about the past can possibly fulfill this criterion.

(c) There are claims made about the world or the universe that are supported enough to be scientific facts, and some of these concern the past (perhaps in, say, astronomy). However, common descent is not one of these.

(d) There are claims made about the world or the universe that are supported enough to be scientific facts, and if you squint common descent is another one, but the religious and social ramifications of common descent are such that we should be careful not to teach it even if it turns out to be correct.

Regards,
Muad'Dib

[Soralis]

Well, I'll start off at a point which you agreed to earlier, that small changes happen within populations over time.

Conclusion: Given that those individuals that are well-suited to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce than are those that are poorly-suited to it, the genetic makeup of populations is expected to change over time, as traits which make their bearers well-suited to the environment become more common and traits which make their bearers less well-suited to the environment become rarer. This process is called evolution.

[i]Originally posted by Charles Darwin:
But evolution is not equivalent to this process. In other words, what you have described is only part, and the non heroic part, of evolution. Coloration changes in moths, or beaks changing shapes in birds are examples of this process you describe. But with evolution, we have to have microbes changing into monkeys. But this is what evolutionists are forced to do. In order to show that their idea is a scientific fact, they must take a minimalist approach where the theory becomes essentially equivalent to evolution on a small scale, which of course, is a scientific fact.

Now, if you agree that small changes can happen over a short period of time, and these changes are cumulative, and the rate of change remains positive overall, then it logically follows that larger changes would happen over a longer period of time. Agreed?

If so, then that just leaves a few possibilities with the above statement that would make the first statement not lead to the conclusion that larger changes would happen:

1. If the changes are not cumulative, then they wouldn't add up over time, they would just be changes made upon some base state, and small changes would always be small changes.

As this applies to genetics, it could have been a valid argument a century ago, when it wasn't known that DNA was the molecule of heredity, or what the structure of DNA was, or how it functioned, or that living organisms shared the same structure of DNA and heredity, and just differed by the sequence of their bases. Since changes that happen, happen within DNA (with multicellular organisms, this would only work with changes in gametes, since otherwise they wouldn't be passed on, or apply to the organism as a whole, since just some of it's cells would have that change), they are heritable.

From that, it can be shown that changes are cumulative, and are not simply changes from a base state, since every change basically produces it's own new base state to make changes from.

2. If the rate of change overall decreases over time, then it wouldn't follow that just because there are small changes now, that there would be larger changes later. If it were constantly decreasing, it would have to be by quite a bit. Such as if the rate were cut in half each generation, the variation would only approach double the initial amount of variation. Although it would still increase over time, it wouldn't pass double the initial variation. Another possibility is if the variation simply stopped at some point.

The first idea, that it would have to decrease all the time, doesn't match up with what we've seen of the mutation rate of the DNA with other organisms, either within generations of an organism, or overall, over time. Furthermore, it would lead to an almost absurd level of mutation in the past.

If it stopped at some point, then that would be a valid reason to conclude that larger changes over time. However, that would also mean that the mutation rate would have started up again just recently for us to measure it, and so even if this prevented larger changes from happening in the past, it's not preventing them from happening anymore.

3. This sort of falls in with the previous two, but if changes are more likely to reverse themselves, go back to previous sequences then they are to make different changes, then that would lead them to returning to a base case.

If you're considering genetics however, this is quite unlikely to be the case. Since an organism that has a specific genome, that had a change from a previous genome, has no sort of genetic memory that would remember what the genome was before the change. a mutation would still happen randomly, so the chance of it changing back to the way it was before, changing that specific change back to the way it was before would be quite improbable, since a change would have to happen at that specific place, and specifically change it back to the way it was previously, over all other possible changes.

Of course, that's with the individual, rather then the population. Within the population, changes away from some base could be removed from the gene pool, by them simply not reproducing, especially if the change makes them less likely to do so. Although from what has been observed in the lab, and in nature, that effect is usually less then what would be needed to compensate for the rate of change. Not to mention that it would just happen with changes that made for a lesser chance of producing more copies of the change, and would be the opposite for changes that had a greater chance of producing more copies that would survive, instead of just changes away from some base case.

Going to some things that are more specific about evolution:

There's the idea that species could fall under #2 above, preventing too much change from happening, by making it so that organisms that are too different to interbreed with many of the organisms wouldn't be able to reproduce, or would have a disadvantage.


Except that tends to not work with what we've seen in nature, since there's more of a gradual continuum, an organism that was too different to reproduce would die off, but gradual differences allow for two different groups to perhaps not reproduce with each other, but still have another group in common they can reproduce, between them. A good example of this was brought up before, with ring species:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/05/2/images/l_052_05_l.jpg

Which is a really good example of how speciation would work, since these groups can reproduce with other groups they share in common, but not with each other, simply by different changes in different areas, those that are closer together sharing more of a common history. And if the groups they share in common were to die off, by all definitions, they would be different species, unable to reproduce with each other. And so it provides for a good reason why species wouldn't slow or stop changes from building up over time, and evidence for #2 not applying here.

If you have some other arguments that I missed, that would cause a possible problem with this idea, it would be good to hear them. The same goes if you see any specific problems with my logic or sources of evidence or such. (specific, in other words not just that you think of it as a belief, or an argument from incredulity. :) If you think those are the case, then point out specific issues that point to that)

[Darwin's Beagle]

Charles says
++++++++++++++++

Oh please. It is clear that the alternate explanation for the human chromosome is chromosomal fusion. You, nonetheless, insist that the explanation must entail evolution. This is not science.

+++++++++++++

Jeez Louise, I have explained things to you in pretty simple terms, yet you still seem to not have a clue! Let’s get simpler then. Chromosomal fusion is NOT the ALTERNATIVE explanation to that of evolutionary theory. It is THE EVOLUTIONARY EXPLANATION for it. The reason that Human Chromosome 2 has the same G-banding patterns as do Chimp Chromosomes 12 and 13, and has telomeres and an extra centromeric segment in the middle is because the Human Chromosome 2 fused from chromosomes derived from a common ancestor as that of the Chimp.

The thing that needs an alternative explanation to is the similarities between the chimps and humans in their chromosomal structure. There is no reason for it based on function. Perhaps, though you can come up with one. IF as you have implied in previous posts (but disingenuously avoided saying directly) that you would like for scientists to consider Special Creation as an alternative then you MUST come up with an alternate explanation.

For someone who continually tells us what science is NOT, it would be nice if you had a clue of what science is. The idea of ALTERNATE EXPLANATIONS IS INTEGRAL TO SCIENCE.

Charles says
++++++++++++++++

Amazing. Why in the world would I believe that [gall midges of the family Cecidomyidae may feel no pain when being eaten from the inside out by parthenogenetic offspring]? No, wait, I don't want to know; I give. You obviously have strong religious feelings, and there is nothing wrong with that, but they are not open to scientific debate.

+++++++++++++++++

My argument is of course completely irrelevant IF you do not hold out Special Creation as the alternative to descent with modification. It is true that you have not directly stated that you do, however, certain responses have implied that is your position and until you say otherwise it is the only assumption we have to work with. I think it is time for you to either shit or get off the pot and go home. What is your alternative to descent with modification?

Again making the assumption that your alternative to descent with modification is Special Creation then contrary to you assertion that religious beliefs are not open to scientific debate, they are. They have to be. It is the height of hypocrisy to claim otherwise.

Since your analytical skills seem to be non-existent I will explain in detail why that argument is relevant IF you do consider Special Creation as the alternative to descent with modification. It shows data that make the idea of Special Creation untenable. A major tenet of Special Creation is that the creator is intelligent. Intelligence implies a purpose. Does life look like it was purposefully created? The obvious purpose of this adaptation in gall midges is to increase a midges contribution of its genome to succeeding generations. This purpose ONLY makes sense in light of evolutionary theory, however. If a creator intentionally made the gall midge life cycle like that then he seems to have gone out of his way to be cruel. This is incompatible with other aspects of creation and makes no sense on the part of the creator.

Charles says
++++++++++++++++

OK, I'll bite. My curiousity has gotten the better of me. Why do your religious beliefs dictate that God would not create these things you describe above?
++++++++++++++++

It has nothing to do with my religious beliefs, it has to do with the tenets of Special Creation. IF you are going to suggest Special Creation as your alternative to descent with modification then you are a fool if you think it is above scientific criticism. A major tenet of Special Creation is that the Designer is intelligent not psychotic.

Charles says
+++++++++++++++

The only thing I know in this regard is that the scientific data presents insurmountable problems for your personal religion. I wonder, where did you gain such knowledge of God? You obviously feel confident you know just what He would and would not do. So confident that your truth applies to us all. You must have some theological truth available to you.
+++++++++++++++

If the only thing you know is that “scientific data presents insurmountable problems for [my] personal religion”, then you know nothing. I have no personal religion and thus there cannot be any scientific data for or against it to present any problems.

As for the second part of the above paragraph you are displaying your hypocrisy again (unless of course you tell us specifically that you have an alternative to descent with modification other than Special Creation). You chide scientists for their inability to consider alternative solutions but then you start screaming like a rat caught in a trap by its testicles because your presumed theory is given scientific consideration. The claims I make are not so much about God as they are about an INTELLIGENT DESIGNER. You are saying that I may be wrong in those claims. Fine. How so? Show me why it would be reasonable to believe an intelligent designer would do it that way.


Charles says
++++++++++++++++++

Please read more carefully. The human homologous locus contains an *intact pre-integration site.* The whole point of why these data are so interesting is that they serve as irreversible markers. They don't just get deleted and leaving no trace.

++++++++++++++++++

Thank you for motivating me to get up off my lazy butt and go re-read the paper. I last read it over 3 years ago and it was good to go over it again. Your assertions that there is an endogenous retrovirus (ERV) that occurs in chimps and gorillas but not in humans is wrong. The paper you reference only deals with HUMAN ERVs (HERVs) so by definition all the ERVs they looked at were found in humans.

The HERV you are referring to has been named HERV-K(C4). It is missing in chimps and gorillas and is found in humans. If this is all there were to it, then it would present no problem to evolutionary theory. Cladistics would say that the viral insertion occurred after the chimp/human split. However, there is more to it. HERV-K(C4) is found in the African Green Monkey (an old world monkey), and orangutans (an ape). Thus, the original insertion comes even before the split of old world monkeys and apes. That means that HERV-K(C4) must have been eliminated not once, but twice. Once when gorillas split from the chimp/human clade and again when the chimps split from humans. On the surface that appears to be a very strange thing to have happened.

What do the authors have to say about this? First they note that the HERV is located in a particular gene, C4B. Independent results suggest that C4B arose by gene duplication before the HERV insertion took place. They also note that there are other alleles in the C4 gene complex. They suggest that these alleles could have “homogenized” with the C4B allele leading to gene conversions multiple times.

What is gene conversion? Sexually reproducing organisms are diploid. They contain one set of chromosomes from their mother and a second set from their father. During the course of an organism’s lifetime it is likely to have damage to its genome. There are several proteins that are specialized for DNA repair. When a large segment of the DNA on one chromosome is damaged there is a DNA repair enzyme that takes the homologous chromosome and uses it as a template to repair the damage. If it is a mutated gene that is damaged and the homologous chromosome has the wild type gene then the mutant gene gets converted to the wild type.

Thus, what the authors think is the most likely explanation for the finding is that there was a conversion of the C4 gene containing the ERV to the C4 gene without the ERV. This still seems to be strange. Do they have any supporting evidence for this assumption?

The authors report finding conversions fairly often. They report finding conversions in 4 of the six HERVs they found conversions in four of them. They also note that both alleles of the C4 gene (the one with and the one without the HERV) have been isolated in multiple species. This makes the explanation plausible; it could have happened that way. But frankly, I am not thrilled with the explanation.

I do tentatively accept it, however. Why? Because I cannot come up with a better explanation. Charles would undoubtedly say that the reason I cannot come up with a better explanation is because I am “religiously” wedded to evolution. But, in reality it is the other way around. The reason he wont accept it is because he is religiously (note I do not have to use the quotation marks here) wedded to Special Creation.

To illustrate that, let’s do exactly what Charles says science doesn’t do, let’s look at the evidence in the light of Special Creation (which until he tells us otherwise is his alternative explanation). How does special creation explain the fact that HERV-K(C4) is found in old world monkeys, orangutans, and humans but not in chimps and gorillas? Could these retroviruses have become independently incorporated into the same place in this variety of organisms? This is even more unlikely than the gene conversion scenario mentioned above. That means that they must have been placed there by God. That seems like a strange thing for God to do, placing a useless and potentially harmful retrovirus into the genome of an organism. Then there is the question of why did God put in all those other retroviruses that DO fit so well with evolutionary theory? Overall, Special Creation explains this data even worse than does evolutionary theory.

Charles has been eagerly pointing out what science is not. He has done this from a position of ignorance of science. This is a common problem with creationists. They love to point our problems for evolutionary theory and never get around to realizing that the problems they point out are even bigger for creationism.

Regards,

Darwin’s Beagle

[Charles Darwin]

Originally posted by Muad'Dib
Hi Charles,

It's good to see you back. Perhaps you'd care to answer my question? I'll post it again for your convenience.

Question. Which of the following is closest to your opinion on scientific fact?

(a) There is no claim made about the world or the universe made by any branch of science that is supported enough to be called a scientific fact.

(b) There are claims made about the world or the universe that concern the present time that are supported enough to be called scientific facts (perhaps in, say, physics), but no statement about the past can possibly fulfill this criterion.

(c) There are claims made about the world or the universe that are supported enough to be scientific facts, and some of these concern the past (perhaps in, say, astronomy). However, common descent is not one of these.

(d) There are claims made about the world or the universe that are supported enough to be scientific facts, and if you squint common descent is another one, but the religious and social ramifications of common descent are such that we should be careful not to teach it even if it turns out to be correct.

Regards,
Muad'Dib

Thanks for the resend. I'm trying to go along with what I understand to be the evolutionists operating definition of "scientific fact," so (c) is my position. I realize that some philosophers might cringe prefering (b) or even (a).

[wade-w]

Originally posted by Charles Darwin
Thanks for the resend. I'm trying to go along with what I understand to be the evolutionists operating definition of "scientific fact," so (c) is my position. I realize that some philosophers might cringe prefering (b) or even (a).

CD, what is your position on this? The question is not what is your understanding of what the "evolutionists" think. You've already shown that you have a very poor grasp of that, and refuse to amend that lack.

[Jack the Bodiless]

I'd also like to know what "scientific facts" in physics are supposedly more certain than either evolution or common descent?

There's far more evidence for both of those than for the existence of the electron, for example. Yet most physicists consider electrons to exist. Is the existence of electrons solid enough to be considered a "scientific fact"? This is far from clear.

What clearer "facts" are there in physics? Basic Newtonian laws of motion? We now know that they break down at relativistic velocities (and other similarly extreme conditions, such as time dilation due to intense gravitation), so they're not as universally "true" as either evolution or common descent, even though the evidence for them appears to be more "visible" to the layman.

It's debatable whether the roundness of the Earth is more certain. This requires trusting the expert testimony of others: I have personally witnessed more evidence for common descent and natural selection (but not mutation) than for the round-Earth theory, but I choose to believe astronauts and navigators who claim to have more evidence at their disposal. If we apply the same "trust the experts" attitude in biology, we must conclude that both evolution and common descent are true.

So, unless very obvious claims such as "the Sun emits light" are cosidered, it's rather hard to see what is more certain in physics than evolution or common descent in biology or paleontology.

[markfiend]

Originally posted by Charles Darwin
OK, I give. You have ignored the key points of my post and responded with non sequiters
Evolutionists accept that heirarchies can be made of designed objects, true. But I went on to explain (again) that these heirarchies are arbitrary, whereas heirarchies of living organisms are not. That is why I asked if you were being deliberately obtuse; one gets tired of explaining (and being ignored) why it is that heirarchies of designed systems are [i]different to heirarchies of living systems.
question-begging ["Yes. Inorganic machines are designed. Biological organisms are not."]
:D I plead guilty. I claim exasperation as my defense.
and irrelevant examples ["But just to take two traits ..."].
Irrelevant? I was trying to explain (again) how it is that when we create heirarchies of designed systems, they are arbitrary, many and interchangable, compared to the one heirarchy we observe in nature.
There's not much more that I can say by way of explanation, so I'll agree to disagree and let you have the final word on this sub thread.
Are you sure? ;)

[MrDarwin]

Originally posted by Charles Darwin
One minor problem though, everything we know and understand about science gives strong support to a naturalistic origin of the pebbles; but everything we know and understand about science tells us that it is terribly unlikely that things like echolocation just arose. No, I'm afraid it is not I who has the non scientific motives.

I'm afraid I don't quite follow this line of reasoning. Everything we can observe about the world around us demonstrates that things happen for naturalistic reasons. We do not observe supernatural events happening in the present, nor do we have any evidence of them happening in the past; thus to propose a supernatural origin of anything is not only unnecessary, it is completely at odds with what we know about the universe and how it operates.

[Muad'Dib]

Originally posted by Charles Darwin
Thanks for the resend. I'm trying to go along with what I understand to be the evolutionists operating definition of "scientific fact," so (c) is my position. I realize that some philosophers might cringe prefering (b) or even (a).

Hi Charles,

Thanks for your response. As I've said before, I'm not interested in what other people define as "scientific fact"; I'm interested in what you, in particular, not anyone else, view as scientific facts.

I claim that since you have a doctorate in physics (what is your area of study, by the way?), you must have an opinion on what properly constitutes a scientific fact, and also on which claims are and are not properly called scientific facts. As such, permit me to rephrase my question; the initial statement is different, and any changes to the options are in brackets.

Question. Which of the following is closest to your definition of scientific fact, where "scientific fact" is defined according to your preference (which surely exists), rather than the definitions of others?

(a) There is no claim made about the world or the universe made by any branch of science that is supported enough to be called a scientific fact.

(b) There are claims made about the world or the universe that concern the present time that are supported enough to be called scientific facts (perhaps in, say, physics), but no statement about the past can possibly [or does at this time] fulfill this criterion.

(c) There are claims made about the world or the universe that are supported enough to be scientific facts, and some of these concern the past (perhaps in, say, astronomy). However, common descent is not one of these.

(d) There are claims made about the world or the universe that are supported enough to be scientific facts, and if you squint common descent is another one, but the religious and social ramifications of common descent are such that we should be careful not to teach it even if it turns out to be correct.

<end of question>

As you can imagine, I still would like either an example of some claim about the world or universe made by some branch of science whose supporting evidence is such that you have no qualms about calling it a "scientific fact", or confirmation that there is no such claim made by any science. If it hasn't been clear, that is my motivation for asking this question.

Looking forward to your reply,
Muad'Dib

[DMB]

Charles Darwin:
but everything we know and understand about science tells us that it is terribly unlikely that things like echolocation just arose
People on this thread keep on telling you that there is no reason to suppose it "just arose". In view of the development of other complex features such as eyes, even if the development of echolocation has not yet been fully researched, it probably followed a similar course of very small improvements over a long time. The last thing that is claimed about evolution is that any feature "just arose". That is the creationist position: God said "Let there be echolocation", and there was echolocation -- poof!

[Muad'Dib]

Hi Charles,

Now that I think about it, I would accept any or all of the following in lieu of an example of a scientific fact:


An example of a statement about the world or the universe made by a branch of contemporary science whose evidence is significantly more convincing to you than that of common descent (whether or not you personally would call that statement a "scientific fact").

An example of a statement about the world or the universe made by a branch of contemporary science that you do not think requires a religious commitment, and whose evidence is persuasive to you (whether or not you personally would call it a "scientific fact").

An example of a statement about the world or the universe made by a branch of contemporary science that has supporting evidence strong enough that you have no objections to it being taught in classrooms (whether or not you personally would call it a "scientific fact").


Since this conversation is purely about scientific matters, I anticipate no difficulty in generating such examples.

I hope this is useful,
Muad'Dib

[Charles Darwin]

Originally posted by Muad'Dib
Hi Charles,

An example of a statement about the world or the universe made by a branch of contemporary science whose evidence is significantly more convincing to you than that of common descent (whether or not you personally would call that statement a "scientific fact").

Muad'Dib

You may be unaware that historians consider their work to be a sort of science. They don't just conjure up their ideas and results according to their whims. They have methods and practices, etc. And because evolution is making claims about history (natural history in this case), I find it convenient to compare it to other examples of the theories of history.

Evolution claims to be a fact. There is no question, to me, that historians can rightly speak of "facts" where a philosopher might cringe. Such as "The Norman invasion occurred." Note that this is not just trivial, as actually there is quite a bit not well known of the Norman invasion. This is not at all like saying "WWII happened." Nonetheless, despite gaps in our knowledge, I think it is fair to say the Norman invasion is a fact.

Evolution is nowhere close to this level of certainty. If you really want me to stick to the more traditional sciences, then I could fall back on one of the evolutionist's favorites; namely, that the earth is round. To me that is not such a good example, because the roundness of the earth is so obvious. Now evolution is really really nowhere close to this level of certainty. Yet, nonetheless, evolutionists do use this example, saying just as it is a fact that the earth is round, so too evolution is a fact.

[RufusAtticus]

Originally posted by Charles Darwin
Evolution is nowhere close to this level of certainty.

And I imagine that you came this conclusion after decades of studying the scientific literature of population biology, molecular biology, paleontology, and other related fields. Oh wait. . . .

Evolution happened. It not only has been observed during human lifetimes, but it can also be seen in the morphological, paleontological, and molecular evidence representing the diversity of life.

In fact, populations of biological organisms are guarenteed to evolve because of the nature of their replication. Replication is not 100% accurate. That is a fact. Reproduction does not sample the existing genetic variation completely. That is too a fact. With just drift and mutation, we can guarentee that no gene pool will be the same from generation to generation. I don't know how one can be more certain. If you need the mathematical proofs just ask for them.

[Darwin's Beagle]

Originally posted by Charles Darwin
You may be unaware that historians consider their work to be a sort of science. They don't just conjure up their ideas and results according to their whims. They have methods and practices, etc. And because evolution is making claims about history (natural history in this case), I find it convenient to compare it to other examples of the theories of history.

Evolution claims to be a fact. There is no question, to me, that historians can rightly speak of "facts" where a philosopher might cringe. Such as "The Norman invasion occurred." Note that this is not just trivial, as actually there is quite a bit not well known of the Norman invasion. This is not at all like saying "WWII happened." Nonetheless, despite gaps in our knowledge, I think it is fair to say the Norman invasion is a fact.

Evolution is nowhere close to this level of certainty. If you really want me to stick to the more traditional sciences, then I could fall back on one of the evolutionist's favorites; namely, that the earth is round. To me that is not such a good example, because the roundness of the earth is so obvious. Now evolution is really really nowhere close to this level of certainty. Yet, nonetheless, evolutionists do use this example, saying just as it is a fact that the earth is round, so too evolution is a fact.

You are still sitting on the pot, Charles. It is way past time to take a shit. What is your alternative theory to descent with modification? You have several times implied it is Special Creation, but whenever anyone tries to contrast descent with modification with it, you start calling it religion.

Here is a simple question for you (with an answer at the end if you can't figure it out):

What do you call a scientific theory that has no reasonable alternatives?

Answer: A scientific fact.

Regards,

Darwin's Beagle

[Charles Darwin]

Originally posted by Darwin's Beagle
...
Regards,

Darwin’s Beagle


I'd like to make a longer reply, but this will unfortunately have to be brief.

1) Chromosomal fusion

You say: Chromosomal fusion is NOT the ALTERNATIVE explanation to that of evolutionary theory. It is THE EVOLUTIONARY EXPLANATION for it.

But Chromosomal fusion does not entail evolution.

You say: The reason that Human Chromosome 2 has the same G-banding patterns as do Chimp Chromosomes 12 and 13, and has telomeres and an extra centromeric segment in the middle is because the Human Chromosome 2 fused from chromosomes derived from a common ancestor as that of the Chimp.

Confusion here. You are conflating two concepts. When you say "is because the Human Chromosome 2 fused from chromosomes," OK, fine. But then you append: "derived from a common ancestor as that of the Chimp."

The existence of a fused chromosome does not call for evolution as an explanation. It calls for a fusion event. Your claim that prior to the fusion event the two chromosomes were derived from the chimp, is irrelevant to the fusion event and the subsequent fused chromosome.

You say: The thing that needs an alternative explanation to is the similarities between the chimps and humans in their chromosomal structure.

But this would be true even if no fusion event occurred.



2) HERVs

You say: Your assertions that there is an endogenous retrovirus (ERV) that occurs in chimps and gorillas but not in humans is wrong.

No, you are wrong. See:

A HERV-K provirus in chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, but not humans. M. Barbulescu. Current Biology, Volume