Evolution a hoax?

[dafydd]

any indication of the existence of Adam and Eve?

Er...... no.

 

[catsmate]

That's a whole different kettle of fish calling the pot black.

Here try this:

I'm getting a lot of use out of it.

 

[bikerdruid]

I took you off ignore but it's getting tedious. None of what you wrote is relevant.
..........................
What's more interesting is what sort of bottleneck (or was it Adam and Eve... would have created this scenario, but it's still entirely within human lineage.

the irony within your post is staggering.....and humourous as heck.

 

[Almo]

the irony within your post is staggering.....and humourous as heck.

Unfortunately, another anti-science thread has opened up, and Randman is over there instead of here. I wonder why creationists are drawn like flies to Science. They're desperate to give their opinions legitimacy with a tool that is anathema to their goal.

I think I'll start calling this "Science Envy". Science works because of its requirement that accepted results are reproducible. If the psychics, dowsers, creationists, or whatever could co-opt that power, they could make so much progress in spreading their ideas.

So you get quantum-mechanical babble in sales pitches for useless bracelets. "Clinical trials prove..." in ads for useless medicinal products. They want desperately to have that power Science confers: "This works, and we know it works because it has been verified by Science!"

But ultimately, they fail because of Science's built-in self-correction mechanism - the requirement that claims (even long-accepted claims) must stand up to continued subsequent testing. This means it cannot be used to promulgate just anything; only things that work on a long-term basis.

By "ultimately fail," I mean over the course of decades or centuries. The charlatans and deluded may get temporary traction in the course of a lifetime, but over time, repeated failures to duplicate a claim relegates that claim to history.

But what about the early Greeks who thought maybe the earth went around the Sun? It was centuries before that correct result came back. The point is, it did come back, because Science continually questions itself. When experimental results started to make the Geocentric theory look too complex compared to the Heliocentric model, people started looking at the Heliocentric one again. Earier, we just didn't have the data to support the Heliocentric model.

This does raise the issue of how we tell which theories today are correct but unverifiable, and which are just wrong. The point is, it doesn't matter. Keep testing those theories, and it will all get sorted out. The sieve of reproducibility of results is what separates us from hundreds of thousands of crackpot ideas. Sure, we filter out some correct results that we will have to rediscover. But this is a small price to pay for avoiding all of the garbage, like homeopathy, dowsing, and faith healing.

So go ahead and envy our Science. Just don't be surprised when the very thing you are trying to use turns against your theories. Science is beholden to nobody.

 

[Reality Check]

Depends on what you mean by shared. They are not all in the same spot, just a small fraction of them are. You left that out and yet call creationists liars?

I meant "shared" whan I said shared, i.e. in both humans and chimps. That is what shared means. Try reading Three Layers of Endogenous Retroviral Evidence for the Evolutionary Model for a fuller explanation about why ERV's show common ancestry:

The three layers of ERV evidence for common ancestry

• The presence of ERVs in orthologous loci among species of various degrees of taxonomic separation, and of the nested hierarchies they fall into
• The comparative degrees of LTR-LTR discontinuity among orthologous full-length ERVs
• Shared mutations among orthologous ERVs and the corroboratory nested hierarchies they fall into

The creationist lie is the absurdly low number they state for the ERV's in orthoglous loci.

The science shows that most of that shared ERVs are actually in the same location

In 2005, the available sequence of the Chimpanzee genome was aligned with that of the human genome, and an extensive comparison analysis was performed. As part of this analysis, the researchers looked at every available solo LTR and full-length ERV in the chimpanzee genome, and checked to see if there was also one at each corresponding locus. Just as with the examination of indels, the results were that less than 100 ERVs are human-specific and less than 300 ERVs are chimpanzee-specific (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7055/full/nature04072.htmlChimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, 2005; R. Waterston, personal communication, April 22, 2010).

In case you cannot do the math: That is 400 out of ~200,000 human ERV's do not have a corresponding ERV in chimpanzee and vice versa. That means that there are ~199,600 shared, same location ERVs.

 

[Reality Check]

Sounds like the author of that link doesn't know what he's talking about. Can you guys show where evolutionists have published and stated that nearly 100% of ERVs occur in the same loci for chimps and human beings because I have never read that and quite the opposite.

Sounds like you are displaying an abysmal inability to read. See my last post. If you want the details then have read the actual paper:
Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome
which has in its abstract:

Endogenous retroviruses. Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) have become all but extinct in the human lineage, with only a single retrovirus (human endogenous retrovirus K (HERV-K)) still active24. HERV-K was found to be active in both lineages, with at least 73 human-specific insertions (7 full length and 66 solo long terminal repeats (LTRs)) and at least 45 chimpanzee-specific insertions (1 full length and 44 solo LTRs). A few other ERV classes persisted in the human genome beyond the human–chimpanzee split, leaving ~9 human-specific insertions (all solo LTRs, including five HERV9 elements) before dying out.

 

[RussDill]

How do you know the strong anthropomorphic principle applies to us?

What if it was all meant for the Perfect Life forms, and we are merely taking advantage of it?

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2302

 

[Perpetual Student]

For anyone interested, the July issue of Scientific American has an interesting article about he evolution of the eye.
Evolution of the Eye

 

[Dinwar]

Interesting article.

The results indicate that our kind of eye—the type common across vertebrates—took shape in less than 100 million years,

To put this bit into perspective, 100 million years ago was the transition from the Albian to the Cenomanian, or from the Early to hte Late Cretaceous. The author makes it sound like, well, the blink of an eye, but in truth this represents a long, slow process. Which, by my reading, starts nicely at the beginning of the Cambrian Explosion and continues on through most of the Cambrian itself.

They also explain why the eye, far from being a perfectly engineered piece of machinery, exhibits a number of major flaws—these flaws are the scars of evolution. Natural selection does not, as some might think, result in perfection. It tinkers with the material available to it, sometimes to odd effect.

As someone who deals with eye problems on a constant basis, I can appreciate this.

Frankly, though, I doubt this will sway anyone. We have ample evidence of the evolution of the eye in terms of modern examples of everything from a few photosensitive cells (Cteniphora) to eyes more comlex than our own (eagle eyes--we are a transitional form in terms of eyes, a less-fit holdover from a population which didn't evolve such sophisticated equipment). The fact that any biologist can literally point to an eye that's missing a number of structures our own eye has hasn't swayed creationists, ID advocates, or randman to date. I don't think this will do anything to help the situation.

 

[Perpetual Student]

Interesting article.

To put this bit into perspective, 100 million years ago was the transition from the Albian to the Cenomanian, or from the Early to hte Late Cretaceous. The author makes it sound like, well, the blink of an eye, but in truth this represents a long, slow process. Which, by my reading, starts nicely at the beginning of the Cambrian Explosion and continues on through most of the Cambrian itself.

As someone who deals with eye problems on a constant basis, I can appreciate this.

Frankly, though, I doubt this will sway anyone. We have ample evidence of the evolution of the eye in terms of modern examples of everything from a few photosensitive cells (Cteniphora) to eyes more comlex than our own (eagle eyes--we are a transitional form in terms of eyes, a less-fit holdover from a population which didn't evolve such sophisticated equipment). The fact that any biologist can literally point to an eye that's missing a number of structures our own eye has hasn't swayed creationists, ID advocates, or randman to date. I don't think this will do anything to help the situation.

It is an interesting article for those who have an understanding of genuine science and a knowledge of evolution -- and for those who know evolution is not "a hoax." It was not my purpose to propose it as any king of proof or persuasion for the hopelessly ignorant.

 

[Dinwar]

Fair enough. Sometimes I get too caught up in a debate.

 

[Acleron]

Fair enough. Sometimes I get too caught up in a debate.

I am not aware of anyone with 'beliefs' being swayed by the facts. The value of these debates is:-
1) rebutting the false logic and information presented by such a believer so that anyone who actually wants the facts can see for themselves.
and
2) a very good series of mini lecture for people such as myself who are not aware of the latest thinking and discoveries in such a wide field. So thank you to all who contributed.

 

[tsig]

So you guys disagree with conventional geologists on the formation of this part of the Grand Canyon?



http://www.bobspixels.com/kaibab.org/geology/gc_geol.htm

This is a bigger deal than some of you may realize. There's been other research, even by an evolutionist as well as creationists, indicating the long-held belief the sandstone was formed in a desert environment is incorrect and it was formed in water and the many animal tracks were formed under water. It's not a direct challenge to evolution but creationists have largely led the way because it was an issue for them, and they have done some good work, sometimes mentioned in mainstream journals, to advance a different hypothesis and appear to be correct in this small area.

Must have been long legged animals.

 

[Bram Kaandorp]

Must have been long legged animals.

I'm still waiting for the "humans and dinosaurs lived together because we found both dinosaur and human footsteps in the same rock" line of talking.

But maybe the creationists here are more enlightened than I give them credit for.

 

[Dinwar]

But maybe the creationists here are more enlightened than I give them credit for.

Not by much. randman has already given us "Dinosaurs aren't really old because one person found soft parts!"

 

[Reality Check]

So you guys disagree with conventional geologists on the formation of this part of the Grand Canyon?

http://www.bobspixels.com/kaibab.org/geology/gc_geol.htm

I do agree with the geologists on the formation of all of the Grand Canyon.

This is a bigger deal than some of you may realize. There's been other research, even by an evolutionist as well as creationists, indicating the long-held belief the sandstone was formed in a desert environment is incorrect and it was formed in water and the many animal tracks were formed under water.

Try reading what you link to

Coconino Sandstone - This layer averages about 260 million years old and is composed of pure quartz sand, which are basically petrified sand dunes. Wedge-shaped cross bedding can be seen where traverse-type dunes have been petrified. The color of this layer ranges from white to cream colored. No skeletal fossils have yet to be found but numerous invertebrate tracks and fossilized burrows do exist.

1. pure quartz sand, i.e. not the muddy sand seen in sandstone fornmed underwater.
2. petrified sand dunes.
3. tracks of (and probably burrows) of land dwelling animals.

It's not a direct challenge to evolution but creationists have largely led the way because it was an issue for them, and they have done some good work, sometimes mentioned in mainstream journals, to advance a different hypothesis and appear to be correct in this small area.

It is no challenge at all to evolution because the creationists theory of formation under the sea would only affect the geology.

Unless you are talking about the really dumb idea that the Grand Canyon was created by some mythical flood. A child can see that is wrong - floods create straight branching channels. The Grand Canyon meanders (almost loops back on itself at one point) - a typical sign of slow erosion.