Quotes critical of evolution

Rodney said:
No, I saw it, but it doesn't answer the question. Milton is not arguing that the life we see today is the only possibility, but rather that random mutations are just as likely be deleterious or produce lesser complexity as they are to be beneficial or to produce greater complexity. So, it's a tautology to say: "Well, we're here, so the cumulative effect of random mutations and natural selection must have led to the mind-boggling complexity of man, not to mention the complexity of other animals." Yes, we and they are here, but there are two other possibilities: (1) Evolution guided by some process, and (2) A special creation.
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You realize that this agruement is the same as saying that becuase a random dealing of an entire deck of 52 seperate cards is 1 in 8.067x10^67, that it can not happen randomly? There must be something guiding the dealing out of the cards.
 
Rodney said:
I can if you can cite one example in the history of mankind wherein a new species has been created that is physiologically incapable of interbreeding with the prior species.
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With the prior? Did you read about ring species at all? In that case, the new variants (won't call them species yet) are always able to interbreed with the prior species--they do not diverge from their parents nearly so much as from their cousins. "Prior" is a strawman; it is not what evolution predicts. You need to read Dr. Adequate's "Strange News from the Monkey House".
 
ponderingturtle said:
You realize that this agruement is the same as saying that becuase a random dealing of an entire deck of 52 seperate cards is 1 in 8.067x10^67, that it can not happen randomly? There must be something guiding the dealing out of the cards.
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No, it's more like the dealing of an entire deck coming out the exact same way 1000 times in a row.
 
Mercutio said:
With the prior? Did you read about ring species at all? In that case, the new variants (won't call them species yet) are always able to interbreed with the prior species--they do not diverge from their parents nearly so much as from their cousins. "Prior" is a strawman; it is not what evolution predicts. You need to read Dr. Adequate's "Strange News from the Monkey House".
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Yes, I read about ring species and I'm still looking for an example of a new species coming into existence in the history of mankind. For example, a dog-like creature evolving from dogs so that it can no longer interbreed with dogs.
 
Rodney said:
No, it's more like the dealing of an entire deck coming out the exact same way 1000 times in a row.
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Might I suggest that you not only consider attending biology classes in the future, but also theory of probabilities lessons.
 
Rodney said:
Yes, I read about ring species and I'm still looking for an example of a new species coming into existence in the history of mankind. For example, a dog-like creature evolving from dogs so that it can no longer interbreed with dogs.
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You asked for it:

From Wikipedia
Artificial speciation
New species have been created by domesticated animal husbandry, but the initial dates and methods of the initiation of such species are not clear. For example, domestic sheep were created by hybridisation, and no longer produce viable offspring with Ovis orientalis, one species from which they are descended. Domestic cattle on the other hand, can be considered the same species as several varieties of wild ox, gaur, yak, etc., as they willingly and readily reproduce, producing fertile offspring, with several related "other" species.

The best-documented creations of new species in the laboratory were performed in the late 1980s. Rice and Salt bred fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, using a maze with three different choices such as light/dark and wet/dry. Each generation was placed into the maze, and the groups of flies which came out of two of the eight exits were set apart to breed with each other in their respective groups. After thirty-five generations, the two groups and their offspring would not breed with each other even when doing so was their only opportunity to reproduce.

Diane Dodd was also able to show allopatric speciation by reproductive isolation in Drosophila pseudoobscura fruit flies after only eight generations using different food types, starch and maltose. Dodd's experiment has been easy for many others to replicate, including with other kinds of fruit flies and foods.
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link

Shall we all stand back as the goalpost is moved again?
 
Rodney said:
Yes, I read about ring species and I'm still looking for an example of a new species coming into existence in the history of mankind. For example, a dog-like creature evolving from dogs so that it can no longer interbreed with dogs.
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Perhaps you did not understand ring species, then.

In "the salamander's tale", the idea of time as the environmental barrier is explored. If you went back 10 generations, you could still interbreed with your ancestors' pals (I don't want to suggest incest). If you picked up a special friend, and brought her back in the time machine with you another 10 generations back, you would both likely be able to interbreed with the folks back then. Certainly, the babe you picked up in the middle time would be able to. At each 10th generation, you pick up someone (or a group of someones, I don't know what you are into). At each next stop, 10 generations is not nearly enough to prevent interbreeding...but at some point, you will reach a generation that you can no longer produce fertile offspring with. Each step along the way, you have a generation that can interbreed with those on either side, but eventually you get to a distance across which those gene-dogs won't hunt.

Your criterion of "a dog-like creature evolving from dogs so that it can no longer interbreed with dogs" may have already been met. I am not cold-hearted enough to try it, but if you inseminate a Chihuahua with Irish Wolfhound sperm, would the resultant pregnancy kill the poor tiny mother? (I am assuming artificial insemination, else insemination would possibly kill her to begin with. No, don't try to imagine this.) If this happens, which one is the dog, and which is no longer dog? (The answer is in Unrepentant Sinner's post--they are both dog, but one might be canis lupus major and the other canis lupus minor.)

In other words...you are still asking the wrong question.
 
Rodney said:
The probabilities required for a single-celled organism to evolve into man are incalculable, which may explain why there is no model showing how that happened.
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No it isn't. You are betraying your utter lack of comprehension of both evolutionary theory and probability/statistics. As has been explained already, even if abiogenesis turns out to be extremal improbable it only needed to happen once for us to be here talking about it. The universe is incomprehensibly immense and old. That's a lot of room for improbable things to happen. Once self reproducing molecules are formed there is very little improbability involved in evolution. The improbability involved in each successive generation from the first self reproducing molecules to human beings is small. The first step of improbability may have been quite huge, but each successive step since then has been very, very tiny.
 
Rodney said:
So show me your maths.
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We already did.
I think I thought of a better way to present it to you, though:

You argue that if all the small changes made in a species add up to one big number, and that big number is very improbable, that means the small changes are all very improbable, and for all intents and purposes, impossible.

The flaw in that thinking is that you fail to see how selection pressures shaped each step along the way. Flip a coin a thousand times: the pattern you get is unlikely to be gotten again, but each flip had a 50-50 chance of getting heads or tails. The analogy almost works with biology, but you have to substitute random chance with environmental selection pressures, which are not random, but a function of how that part of the world happens to be, at that point in time.

Another flaw in that thinking is that it implies a life form could have only evolved in one particular way. But, as I tried to argue, if the environment at any time was different, the life form would have come out very differently. If, during some of your coin flips, the wind was a big stronger in one direction, it would have influenced the pattern of heads and tails you got. But, again, you must remember that natural selection is not random. The adaptations of life forms is driven by their environment.

ETA: My coin analogy is also flawed, in way, because in life forms, the adaptations for the current member are based on previous adaptations, where as the coin flips are not dependant on each other. But, at least it helps get the mathematical concepts across.

Remember the safe analogy, where the cracker gets a small cache of money as he gets closer to the right combination.

ETA: Of course, the safe-cracker analogy is also less than perfect, because it assumes there is a right combination defined in advance. This is not so with life, because nature does not plan its adaptations in advance. But, at least it helps get the point across that adaptations are not random, and could happen within a reasonable amount of time, given clues in the enviornment for survival.
 
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Rodney said:
I can if you can cite one example in the history of mankind wherein a new species has been created that is physiologically incapable of interbreeding with the prior species.
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You're kidding me right?

First off you do realize that spcies aren't "created." They occur due to mutations. They can't be directed, only observed. Second there are myriad examples of species that are physiologically incapable of interbreeding that have been observed over the years, some in decades, some over centuries. Third, could you reply in a way that demonstrats some understanding of how taxonomy works so we're sure you understand the way classification determinations are made?
 
Rodney said:
So show me your maths.
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It's not my maths that's the problem, it's your maths.

You don't seem to be able to comprehend the difference between the probabilities of a series of discrete events, and the probability of a series of conditional events. A series of discrete events cannot be calculated as a single probability, since each event in the series is independent of every other event.

In evolutionary theory every mutation is a discrete event, which means that the probabilities should not be propogated to each subsequent event (mutation). You could, in theory, calculate the a priori probability of getting all the way to a human from abiogenesis, but that calculation would be meaningless, since the events that lead to humans evolving are not conditional, and were not set a priori. This is precisely the problem I pointed out to you in Milton's statement a few days ago. Saying that the probability of humans evolving is so incredibly small that it couldn't have happened by chance is a meaningless statement, because the probability calculation (however hand-waving) that it is based on in meaningless.

To give an example;
Toss a coin. What's the probability of you getting heads? 1/2, right?
Toss it again. What's the probability of you getting tails? 1/2 again.
Toss it again. What's the probability of you getting tails? 1/2 again.
Toss it again. What's the probability of you getting heads? 1/2 again.
Toss it again. What's the probability of you getting tails? 1/2 again.
Toss it again. What's the probability of you getting heads? 1/2 again.
Toss it again. What's the probability of you getting heads? 1/2 again.
Toss it again. What's the probability of you getting tails? 1/2 again.
Toss it again. What's the probability of you getting heads? 1/2 again.
Toss it again. What's the probability of you getting heads? 1/2 again.

So, at each stage the probability of your getting a particular outcome was 1/2, and you ended up with the sequence HTTHTHHTHH. Now, if I had asked you, before you started, what's the probability that you will get the sequence HTTHTHHTHH, you might have rightly say that it was 1 in 210, or 1/1024. But no sequence was specified, and any sequence would have had the same probability. This is because there are 1024 possible sequences. You got just one of them, but because we didn't specify before we started which sequence we expected, that probability calculation is utterly meaningless in the context of the coin tosses. We ended up with a unique sequence of events, the a priori probability of which is pretty small, but we did so by going through a series of events, each with a 50/50 probability, and no expectation of the outcome.

And that's your problem with the maths. You see the 1/1024 chance of getting the sequence HTTHTHHTHH, and say, "Wow, that wasn't very likely!" when you should be seeing at a series of independent 50/50 events and saying, "Meh, so what?"
 
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