Skepticism and Evolution

paximperium said:
Oh Plumjam still haven't done this:
Define the limits of these variations and the mechanism that prevents these variations from becoming larger over time.
Using vague, " I don't know but the geneticist must know." is unsupportive of your argument. Try again.
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Expect the "Gish gallop" any time now. Clop-clop... clop-clop... clop-clop...
 
"If I can't see it, or touch it, or experience it, then it must not be true!"


I suppose for these people, ignorance is... hmm... what? Maybe they like being ignorant so they can feel superior.
 
Third Eye Open said:
Good god, how many times does it have to be said? Humans don't live for hundreds of thousands of years. If we did, then we could breed such things.
Can you even tell that you are spouting the same rubbish over and over in every thread you participate in? I'm new and I'm bored of you.

If your poem made millions of copies of its self, and you burned all the ones that ended up with a gibberish word and did not copy off them... aw I'm not even going to bother, this is a ridiculous analogy and you know it. What makes a sonnet good at surviving? Does it just have to have words? To rhyme? You might as well say that 'sex theory' is bollocks because you can't cut in half a male and female and stick the halves together to get a new person.
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Don't get frustrated. Just think of it as an opportunity to practice against a very amateurish and dishonest Creationist. You'll figure out how to tear bad arguments apart and pick up very bad logical fallacies.

I don't bother with him anymore. He is so bad that only in his delusional world does he believe that anyone believes his Creationist garbage.

I suggest you hold him and don't let him get away with none-answers. His "answer" didn't address a single thing. His "variation" has no basis in biology and he presented no mechanism but some vague "the geneticists must know it but they don't know it yet."

Keep it up. He's very easy to tear apart.
 
Third Eye Open said:
Good god, how many times does it have to be said? Humans don't live for hundreds of thousands of years. If we did, then we could breed such things.
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This is the evolutionist's main get-out. Retreat into time-irrefutability.. which makes most aspects of the theory untestable, and therefore non-scientific (as the word 'scientific' is commonly used).
Faith fueled by imagination.


Can you even tell that you are spouting the same rubbish over and over in every thread you participate in? I'm new and I'm bored of you.
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You are so bored of me that you keep reading my posts and responding to them.


If your poem made millions of copies of its self, and you burned all the ones that ended up with a gibberish word and did not copy off them... aw I'm not even going to bother, this is a ridiculous analogy and you know it. What makes a sonnet good at surviving? Does it just have to have words? To rhyme? You might as well say that 'sex theory' is bollocks because you can't cut in half a male and female and stick the halves together to get a new person.
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Bizarre.
 
plumjam said:
This is the evolutionist's main get-out. Retreat into time-irrefutability.. which makes most aspects of the theory untestable, and therefore non-scientific (as the word 'scientific' is commonly used).
Faith fueled by imagination.
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This is plumjams main get-out. Retreat into time-irrefutability-irrefutability. Since evolution takes a long time to happen, all he has to do is mention this fact and ::::: POOF ::::: he has won the argument.

Imagine if we were talking about plate tectonics.

Me: The continents have moved away from each other over millions of years.
PJ: That has not been observed happening (Jerome: Pure supposition!!)
Me: The continents have been observed to move inches per year. (Jerome: Have you measured this movement?)
PJ: That is within the limits of continent movement. Give an example of observed continent movement!
Me: Continents take millions of years to move that far.
PJ: Ah, the time-irrefutability argument.
ME: /facepalm
 
I have little doubt that a couple of centuries of gene sequencing and mapping chromosomes to characteristics will enable scientists to step the whale genome back to its LCA with bananas, and forward again to the fruit. Creationism will eventually die a natural death. Serious attempts at debate with creationists in the meantime is probably not the most productive use of time.
 
plumjam said:
This is the evolutionist's main get-out. Retreat into time-irrefutability.. which makes most aspects of the theory untestable, and therefore non-scientific (as the word 'scientific' is commonly used).
Faith fueled by imagination.
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What about the critters with lifespans several orders of magnitude shorter than ours that we have observed to speciate? Why do you dismiss that evidence?
 
plumjam said:
This is the evolutionist's main get-out. Retreat into time-irrefutability.. which makes most aspects of the theory untestable, and therefore non-scientific (as the word 'scientific' is commonly used).
Faith fueled by imagination.

You are so bored of me that you keep reading my posts and responding to them.

Bizarre.
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So Third Eye,
advise when dealing with these kinds of Creationists is to never give them anything to work with because they will always derail an argument and throw in red herring and never answer the original question. Notice how he never answered the original question and is now attempting to make you answer an unrelated topic?

You should also never use analogies of any sort when dealing with Creationists like this because they will purposefully mis-understand it or pretend to be stupid and not get it at all.

Hey Plumjam:
Define the limits of these variations and the mechanism that prevents these variations from becoming larger over time.
You did not define those limits at all but threw in a red herring and using vague, " I don't know but the geneticist must know." is unsupportive of your argument. Try again.
 
joobz said:
I can't help but think he's attempting to illict a response to "prove" a point in his religion thread.

In any case, without any further information, Saying "i'm skeptical of evolution." is like saying "I'm skeptical of dave."

really? dave who?
What did dave do?
Is Dave here?
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Dave's not here.
 
plumjam said:
This is the evolutionist's main get-out. Retreat into time-irrefutability..
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It's also the same "get-out" that geologists use when describing plate tectonics. However, we can test it based upon features we can measure in our time scale.

The same is true for evolution.
I've given you an opportunity to prove your arguments and test the improbability of macroevolution.

So far, the two definitions of macroevolution (speciation, de novo gene formation) have both been demontrated to occur. Speciation has also been demonstrated using various definitions of speciation.


And time makes a difference.
The idea that we could ever reach the nearest star (alpha centari) is unphathomable with modern technology. However, If we had charted Voyager to head in that direction and if it kept the speed it has now (17 km/sec), it could reach alpha centari(proxima centari) 74,380 years. That means that voyager could have traveled there and back during the time it took for the first recorded evidence of homo sapien sapiens and today.
It could have made 11 round trip journeys during the time it took from the first evidence of Homo Erectus and today.
It would have done 81 round trips from the time chimps and humans evolved.
 
plumjam said:
If you don't believe there are limits perhaps you should go and breed a completely new and viable life-form from a "previous" life-form. Maybe start with a kind of plant, and end up with a worm or a stick insect of your own creation.
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It is possible that science could achieve this, eventually. But, right now, it will take a loooong time, and many, many generations, before a plant will evolve into a worm. According to theory, it took hundreds of millions of years for a common ancestor to branch off into plants and worms.

In the meantime, we will continue using the theory to make predictions: If we were to claim a certain worm and a certain plant shared a common ancestor, what evidence of transitions can we expect to dig up, and where? Stuff like that.

Similar questioning lead to the discovery of Tiktaalik, a transitional fossil between fish and land animals. It was discovered exactly where they predicted it would be, based on evolutionary study.
 
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D'rok said:
What about the critters with lifespans several orders of magnitude shorter than ours that we have observed to speciate? Why do you dismiss that evidence?
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Speciation is not macro-evolution. All you get from fruit flies is more fruit flies.
 
plumjam said:
...snip...
Say I have a Shakespeare sonnet. No random changing of its letters is going to turn that sonnet into a 3 hour long play, or a 400 page novel, or a telephone directory, or a haiku poem. Also, the likelihood of random changes to the letters over an extended period improving the effectiveness of the Shakespeare sonnet, as meaningful and beautiful poetry, would be so vanishingly improbable that a man would need to be irrational to believe that such a process is essentially what lies at the heart of the enormous diversity and complexity of life.
...snip...
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I know that you have probably been told this many times before but:
You have ignored the many other types of mutation, e.g. gene duplication.
So if we start duplicating verses in a Shakespeare sonnet then it can turn into 3 hour long play, or a 400 page novel, or a telephone directory, or a haiku poem.
 
plumjam said:
Speciation is not macro-evolution. All you get from fruit flies is more fruit flies.
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You get slightly different fruit flies, yes. And after a while you'll get slightly different slightly-different-fruit-flies, and so on.

Now, if you are saying that there is some sort of barrier there that stops this differentiation at some specific point and prevents the slightly different slightly-different-slightly-different-slightly-different...slightly-different-fruit-fly from being significantly different from the original subject then please provide us with some explanation of what that barrier is. In particular, how would it "know" the traits of the original and by what natural mechanism would it exterminate a population that deviated from it slightly too far.
 
plumjam said:
Speciation is not macro-evolution. All you get from fruit flies is more fruit flies.
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Macro/micro-evolution is a false distinction. If you admit that speciation happens, you are admitting that macro-evolution happens. I'm guessing you know this, but wish to cling to your talking point.
 
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