Evolution answers

[Dinwar]

Someone offered an analogy

You should really avoid those until you learn to properly evaluate them.

And even if we assume that this one case makes sense, you're left with innumerable design flaws in organisms, not to mention demonstrable instances of non-optimum design. Evolution explains this--organisms reach local fitness highs, not global. Intelligent design does not--there's no reason for something so powerful and knowledgeable that it can create matter out of nothing to make sub-optimal designs.

And even if we ignore the flaws in design, you've got the entire fossil record and biological literature--ALL OF IT--standing against you.

 

[justintime]

Originally Posted by justintime View Post
Foophil, here is a link to a site that also argues against evolution being a science. It goes beyond your friends 10 point creationists views by producing actual Evolution frauds, fossil gaps and list of unconvinced scientists. Maybe your friend is not aware of this site.

No thanks. I'll stick to what the (overwhelming) majority in the scientific community agrees upon regarding evolution. Until that changes, I see no reason to go off reading about other theories as I am not qualified to judge those. I'll accept the fact that if there is something inherently so wrong with the current Theory of Evolution, scientific testing will discover it and help evolve the theory further. Until then, I'll let the experts make that decision.

And frankly, I don't see you getting very far with your theory if you can't answer some of the basic (to me... a non-biologist) questions that have been asked of you so far.

But your creationist friend has already debunked most of the evolutionary theories propounded by experts. In fact they are the only ones in a position to challenge evolution because they too have qualified scientists rejecting outdated implausible theories. Your best bet would be to find what has not yet been debunked by them and that is why it is important for you to know what they have already debunked.

Unfortunately you won't get that from the experts because they are not in the business of debunking their own cherished theories and would rather you remained uninformed or even misinformed.

 

[godless dave]

But your creationist friend has already debunked most of the evolutionary theories propounded by experts.

Another false statement.

 

[Slowvehicle]

Someone offered an analogy of a car engine and car exhaust. Why does the exhaust run all the way from the front of the car to the rear? Was the engine badly designed to have it in front when it could have been put at the back making for a shorter exhaust?

Actually the existing design and relationship between engine and exhaust makes a lot of sense and once understood also makes it very acceptable. And for that very reason most cars are made that way.

...in other words, you don't know why, right?

Go ahead; explain it, since you understand it.

 

[Dinwar]

But your creationist friend has already debunked most of the evolutionary theories propounded by experts.

Not even close to true. They haven't even STARTED debunking evolutionary biology arguments. They still haven't debunked the first one: the principles of stratigraphy. It's been about 200 years, and they still can't do it. Rather telling, I'd say.

In fact they are the only ones in a position to challenge evolution because they too have qualified scientists rejecting outdated implausible theories.

Actually, the only ones in a position to challange evolutionary theory are those of us who study it. We don't do so, because it's true.

Your best bet would be to find what has not yet been debunked by them and that is why it is important for you to know what they have already debunked.

Everyone's best bet is to look at the Creationist literature. I encourage it. Once you do, you realize just how fraudulant and farcical that entire field of "research" is. If I try to explain it people accuse me of lying--they can't believe anyone would be that irrational.

Unfortunately you won't get that from the experts because they are not in the business of debunking their own cherished theories and would rather you remained uninformed or even misinformed.

To any lurkers reading this: justintime is a demonstration of the results of his methods of becoming informed. Those of us oposing him are the results of actually studying the relevant material. I leave it to you to decide which of us is actually informed on these topics.

 

[justintime]

Not even close to true. They haven't even STARTED debunking evolutionary biology arguments. They still haven't debunked the first one: the principles of stratigraphy. It's been about 200 years, and they still can't do it. Rather telling, I'd say.

Actually, the only ones in a position to challange evolutionary theory are those of us who study it. We don't do so, because it's true.

Everyone's best bet is to look at the Creationist literature. I encourage it. Once you do, you realize just how fraudulant and farcical that entire field of "research" is. If I try to explain it people accuse me of lying--they can't believe anyone would be that irrational.

To any lurkers reading this: justintime is a demonstration of the results of his methods of becoming informed. Those of us oposing him are the results of actually studying the relevant material. I leave it to you to decide which of us is actually informed on these topics.

We have more scientists unconvinced of Darwin's theory than all the members defending it on this forum or OP.

"List of unconvinced scientists.
“We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

http://evolutionisntscience.wordpress.com/list-of-unconvinced-scientists/

 

[Dinwar]

We have more scientists unconvinced of Darwin's theory than all the members defending it on this forum or OP.

Most scientists aren't members of this forum. Only a handful of us are. And there are more scientists named Steve who support the theory of evolution than there are scientists opposing it.

 

[John Jones]

We have more scientists unconvinced of Darwin's theory than all the members defending it on this forum or OP.



http://evolutionisntscience.wordpress.com/list-of-unconvinced-scientists/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Steve

Project Steve is a list of scientists with the given name Steven or a variation thereof (e.g., Stephanie, Stefan, Esteban, etc.) who "support evolution"

 

[Dissolution]

We have more scientists unconvinced of Darwin's theory than all the members defending it on this forum or OP.



http://evolutionisntscience.wordpress.com/list-of-unconvinced-scientists/

I've already pointed out that this list is completely false. Not sure how you missed it.
It includes a variety of non-scientists, park rangers being the prime example, various people that have asked to be taken off the list and some that explicitly rubbish creationism and agree with the current scientific consensus.

The things got it's own Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scientific_Dissent_From_Darwinism

Note the guy that's still on it that calls it's claims laughable pseudo-science and the 10 times larger counter-petition that was put together in four days featuring only scientists called Steve.

 

[Slowvehicle]

Someone offered an analogy of a car engine and car exhaust. Why does the exhaust run all the way from the front of the car to the rear? Was the engine badly designed to have it in front when it could have been put at the back making for a shorter exhaust?

Actually the existing design and relationship between engine and exhaust makes a lot of sense and once understood also makes it very acceptable. And for that very reason most cars are made that way.

Why do so many automobiles, in your opinion, have the engine at the front of the chassis?

What counterexamples are there? Why do those counterexamples put the engine in different places?

Why does the exhaust of most front-engined automobiles "run all the way from the front of the car[sic] to the rear"?

What counterexamples are there? Why do those counterexamples run the exhaust in a different way?

.

 

[Corsair 115]

Cannot offer you a link to Adam. But there is plenty of evidence of Eve. Click on link.
Are we all descended from a common female ancestor?
http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/female-ancestor.htm

Great. Now where's the evidence she was created from Adam's rib? (And how would that work anyway?)

 

[aggle-rithm]

Someone offered an analogy of a car engine and car exhaust. Why does the exhaust run all the way from the front of the car to the rear? Was the engine badly designed to have it in front when it could have been put at the back making for a shorter exhaust?

Actually the existing design and relationship between engine and exhaust makes a lot of sense and once understood also makes it very acceptable. And for that very reason most cars are made that way.

This would be a better analogy if the car exhaust doubled back on itself and traversed the same distance more than once.

 

[aggle-rithm]

But your creationist friend has already debunked most of the evolutionary theories propounded by experts.

No...I don't believe that he has.

 

[fishbob]

UnrepentantSinner all the missing links have been rejected with equal vigor.

Have we found the missing link?



Piltdown Man, Neanderthal Man, Nebraska Man and Lucy (Australopithecus was an tree swing ape) have all been rejected as possible missing links candidates.

http://www.allaboutscience.org/missing-link-faq.htm

Shakeups Continue among Human Evolutionary Candidates
http://www.icr.org/article/5473/372/

Vigor does not mean reasonable, accurate, possible, or likely.
Vigor can mean enthusiastic or fervent or foaming at the mouth rabid.

Your sources suck vigorously.
Where suck means chocky jam packed full of inaccuracy.

 

[Retrograde]

I'm imagining God sitting in some cubicle somewhere with a mouse and keyboard, sipping Red Bull and arguing with the dev team. "Dude, seriously, EXTERNAL GENITALIA? You know how many humans I've lost that way?! And whos' bright idea was it to add psychotropic drugs? Ever try to build a space-fairing civilization when all the people are getting high all the time?!" We are Dwarf Fortress for the divine!

But the developers are a bunch of kids just out of school who of course know everything (and who came from an environment where the program has to work just until the prof grades it) and won't listen to advice from more experience programmers, who all got canned anyway because they were too expensive, and besides marketing has a big splashy intro scheduled for the 1st and that can't slip and .... yeah, I've been on a lot of those release teams. All makes sense to me

.

That's a pretty well-phrased question; I may use that, even though I have my doubts as to whether they really understand the word "metric," much less the need for it that they themselves have unnecessarily introduced.

It's the fundamental fallacy that evolution has a purpose and that every change is striving towards, well, some pinnacle of perfection, which is usually taken to be H. sapiens. I see it more of a 'just doing what you can to get by with the least amount of effort, and it it works, keep doing it' sort of thing.

I also see creationists largely ignoring the role outside forces play is favoring certain adaptions. Do they also believe in a constant, unchanging Earth? No global climate changes? No volcanoes or earthquakes disrupting the landscape? No changes in atmospheric makeup?

 

[fishbob]

People don't take any of this fossil stuff seriously or what paleontologist have to say because it is irrelevant to their survival or has any practical value.

The fossil pictured to the left is one of many that were used to help understand and develop the Permian Basin oil fields of west Texas.
How can you say that billions of dollars are irrelevant when the major goal of ICR, the Discovery Institute, and similar organizations (collectively - the cdesign proponentsists) is to separate billions of dollars from their current owners and transfer them to the leadership of these organizations?

 

[jimbob]

I have put literally minutes of thought into it, and I am now ready to present my alternative theory to evolution, one which explains all the sub-optimal anomalies we see in nature.

The theory posits that God created the Universe, but put most of his efforts into some planet other than Earth, say, Rigel VII. The life on that planet is AWESOME. Efficient, highly homeostatic, and with sleek, eye-popping design. God put a lot of thought into that planet's biosphere, and it shows. (Not to us, though. We'll never see it.)

Meanwhile, God delegated the work of creating life on backwater worlds such as Earth to a team of elves, or something. These elves were definitely not the "A" team of bio-designers. One of them screwed up and created an eye that inverted the image. Rather than fix this problem (it was nearly five o'clock), they threw together a quick kludge whereby extra processing power from the brain turns the image right-side up. It works OK, and as long as no one looks at their work too closely, no one will be the wiser.

Another elf routed the esophagus of the giant squid through its freaking BRAIN. "What were you thinking here!?" the head elf asked him. "If he takes too big a bite, it will kill him!"

"Relax," said the underling. "It's a SQUID. Who gives a crap?"

It was nearly time for happy hour, so they came to a compromise whereby the squid would live so far underwater that it would take thousands of years for anyone to detect the mistake. By then, both elves would have moved on to other jobs.

I'm a software developer, and believe me...I have seen this sort of thing many, MANY times. People throw stuff together without thinking it through. When bugs are found (which they always are), they throw together a fix that works around the problem. Eventually, the code becomes a tangled mess of counter-productive instructions as well as huge sections of completely inert stuff that represents many thousands of man-hours of wasted time. But, it works, and it's too much trouble to fix it.

This type of organically designed code is strangely similar to DNA.

Sir, you seem to have lost your mind.


(And nominated for the beautiful picture it presents)

 

[turingtest]

...
It's the fundamental fallacy that evolution has a purpose and that every change is striving towards, well, some pinnacle of perfection, which is usually taken to be H. sapiens. I see it more of a 'just doing what you can to get by with the least amount of effort, and it it works, keep doing it' sort of thing.
...

Exactly. I've said this many times, but I don't think it can be said too many times- the evolutionary process is not a normative one; it has no goals, only outcomes*; and folks who don't understand this most fundamental principle of evolution don't know the first thing they need to in order to be in a position to criticize it on scientific grounds.

Even "survival of the fittest" can be misleading if it's used to frame the survival as a goal- it's not, it's just an outcome that allows the process to continue.

 

[dlorde]

.. God delegated the work of creating life on backwater worlds such as Earth to a team of elves, or something.
...
I'm a software developer, and believe me...I have seen this sort of thing many, MANY times. People throw stuff together without thinking it through. When bugs are found (which they always are), they throw together a fix that works around the problem. Eventually, the code becomes a tangled mess of counter-productive instructions as well as huge sections of completely inert stuff that represents many thousands of man-hours of wasted time. But, it works, and it's too much trouble to fix it.

It's all true - I wrote some of that code...

 

[Wudang]

I'm a software developer, and believe me...I have seen this sort of thing many, MANY times. People throw stuff together without thinking it through. When bugs are found (which they always are), they throw together a fix that works around the problem. Eventually, the code becomes a tangled mess of counter-productive instructions as well as huge sections of completely inert stuff that represents many thousands of man-hours of wasted time. But, it works, and it's too much trouble to fix it.

This type of organically designed code is strangely similar to DNA.

"Broken gets fixed. Shoddy lasts forever"