Evolution answers

[Dinwar]

http://ncse.com/cej/2/4/misquoted-scientists-respond

Speaking of Niles Eldredge, here's an article I wanted to link to all week. It's a response by evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, etc. to the Creationist use of their statements. Eldredge didn't refute the precise misstatement made by the authors of JiT's absurd website, but he touches on the subject.

By reductio ad absurdum, all extant creatures are horribly deformed versions of their common ancestor, and those deformities are heritable and precisely match the taxonomic tree of life...

You've watched the video of Mrs. Garison explaining evolution, I hope. In grad school it made the rounds among us paleo-types. After spending three hours grading freshman labs, we needed the laugh!

 

[Aridas]

Peer review is a flawed process full of bias, inconsistencies, abuse, blindly trusted thus making it an ideal candidate for fraud. We have seen a 10 fold increase in science fraud and every survey/study indicates the trend will continue. Why the best scientific minds created such a flawed mediocre system with all its shortcomings suggests scientists are overrated and science is drowning in mediocrity because it is practiced by mediocre people requiring a mediocre process that allows them to function without undue attention.
Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/

You mean, a ten fold increase in retractions, from an incredibly miniscule number to a slightly less incredibly miniscule, but still incredibly miniscule number.

Either way, humans are deeply flawed in the first place. There's likely no system that includes substantial human involvement that will not have unavoidable inherent flaws. Feel free to try to propose either a better system than the peer review process (and the real scrutiny that comes after when scientists at large get to review it), though. Given the nature and goals of scientists, if what you propose actually is better, it will likely be implemented.

 

[Dinwar]

You mean, a ten fold increase in retractions, from an incredibly miniscule number to a slightly less incredibly miniscule, but still incredibly miniscule number.

Exactly this. justintime has been quite thoroughly trounced in the thread on fraud in science. Fraud rates are around 0.005% in the studied fields, and increases in fraud rates are nothing more than background noise. Plus, every one of those frauds was discovered by scientists, rather disproving JiT's idea that science is ineffectual.

 

[justintime]

But many creationists believe that speciation can occur. They believe it can occur within their vague but fairly wide definitions of Biblical kinds, which span species.

How do you define a species? If you do so using common biological definitions it should be trivially easy to see how speciation can occur.

Creationist believe in the variations within species. God made all sorts of wild animals, livestock, and small animals, each able to produce offspring of the same kind. In short dogs give rise to dogs and birds to birds and fish give rise to fish. There is plenty of evidence that is what is observed in nature today.

Because of the variations within species evolutionists have speculated species changing from one species to another and tried to provide evidence using fossil remains. But the world as it exist and the evidence we see do not support such changes from species to species. Dogs are still dogs and so on and so on. We don't see a half fish half man even though somewhere it is believed by evolutionist a common ancestor existed. We don't see a common ancestor for birds and man even though that is also a possibility. And we don't see a common ancestor for apes and man even though many fossils of apes have been mistaken for a common ancestor.

Claiming the change in species from fish to reptiles to dinosaurs to birds and finally to apes and humans which began some 390 mya. One can even go further back to trace human ancestors to an amoeba. We got to stop this nonsense and start behaving like rational adults. Scientists are protected from public ridicule, they belong to fraternities that protect them by limiting their speculation, conjectures and misrepresentation of data to peer review. But as some point they have to deal with reality and the general public. This is one such occasion.

 

[Dissolution]

Please stop listening to Ray Comfort, Jit.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The only wolves alive today in the wild are those who are descended from wolves who avoided humans instinctually.

 

[dlorde]

You've watched the video of Mrs. Garison explaining evolution, I hope.

Oh yeah; Mrs. Garrison does slightly over-simplify, but the idea is there

 

[Sideroxylon]

Creationist believe in the variations within species. God made all sorts of wild animals, livestock, and small animals, each able to produce offspring of the same kind. In short dogs give rise to dogs and birds to birds and fish give rise to fish. There is plenty of evidence that is what is observed in nature today.

Because of the variations within species evolutionists have speculated species changing from one species to another and tried to provide evidence using fossil remains. But the world as it exist and the evidence we see do not support such changes from species to species. Dogs are still dogs and so on and so on. We don't see a half fish half man even though somewhere it is believed by evolutionist a common ancestor existed. We don't see a common ancestor for birds and man even though that is also a possibility. And we don't see a common ancestor for apes and man even though many fossils of apes have been mistaken for a common ancestor.

Claiming the change in species from fish to reptiles to dinosaurs to birds and finally to apes and humans which began some 390 mya. One can even go further back to trace human ancestors to an amoeba. We got to stop this nonsense and start behaving like rational adults. Scientists are protected from public ridicule, they belong to fraternities that protect them by limiting their speculation, conjectures and misrepresentation of data to peer review. But as some point they have to deal with reality and the general public. This is one such occasion.

I can hear Kemt Hovind when you talk about dogs only turning into dogs. But what do you consider species to mean? Are domestic dogs one species? Are wolves another separate species? Could they have common ancestry? How about coyotes?

 

[dlorde]

... We don't see a half fish half man even though somewhere it is believed by evolutionist a common ancestor existed...

Lol! a half fish half man would be quite a blow to evolution...

Having a common ancestor doesn't mean a creature that had some offspring that were fish and some offspring that were human. But I suspect you knew that.

 

[Sideroxylon]

That statement about half man and half fish demonstrates some serious deficiency in your understanding of evolution, which is not surprising if you have been listening to Doctor Dino Hovind. If you are prepared to learn that can be rectified.

 

[Aridas]

Because of the variations within species evolutionists have speculated species changing from one species to another and tried to provide evidence using fossil remains. But the world as it exist and the evidence we see do not support such changes from species to species. Dogs are still dogs and so on and so on.

...Dogs are still dogs in evolutionary theory, too, amazingly enough.

We don't see a half fish half man even though somewhere it is believed by evolutionist a common ancestor existed.

And what would you think one would look like? The paths diverged a long, long time ago, either way, by the evidence, and have developed in various different ways since then.

We don't see a common ancestor for birds and man even though that is also a possibility.

That's strange. I'm fairly sure that we actually do. It's just not quite as immediate as you seem to be implying.

And we don't see a common ancestor for apes and man even though many fossils of apes have been mistaken for a common ancestor.

I suspect that you're actually referring to the transitional ones that are considered to have occurred after the lines split, but yes, we seem to have common ancestors, too, despite creationist propaganda.

Claiming the change in species from fish to reptiles to dinosaurs to birds and finally to apes and humans

No. I don't know where you got this, but I suspect Creationists that really didn't understand what they were talking about make it up, either through ignorance or dishonesty. The reptiles to mammals pathways are apparently considered quite separate from reptiles to birds pathways.

which began some 390 mya. One can even go further back to trace human ancestors to an amoeba.

Not really. The ameobas that you're referring to have just as many years of evolutionary history behind them as humans do, and likely a lot more generations.

We got to stop this nonsense and start behaving like rational adults.

Yes, you should stop spouting nonsense. I agree.

Scientists are protected from public ridicule, they belong to fraternities that protect them by limiting their speculation, conjectures and misrepresentation of data to peer review. But as some point they have to deal with reality and the general public. This is one such occasion.

"Protected." To be clear, that characterization alone shows that you have no idea what you're talking about. They're held to much, much, much higher standards than the creationists that you like to cite and would have their arguments ripped to shreds if they tried to put forth arguments of similar quality to what the creationists do. If anything, it's the Creationists that are protected from deserved public ridicule, via ignorance and false beliefs.

 

[John Jones]

Crocoduck!

 

[Dinwar]

Claiming the change in species from fish to reptiles to dinosaurs to birds and finally to apes and humans which began some 390 mya.

Great gods in Hell, justintime--Mrs. Garrison was a PARODY!

"Fish" isn't a taxonomic term; the "fish" that evolved into amphibians were not very similar to most modern fish.

You missed several tens of millions of years between "reptile" and "dinosaur". The reptiles that dinosaurs evolved from were not like modern reptiles.

Birds did not evolve into apes. Mammals evolved from a branch of Archaeosaur, and are about as old as the dinosaurs are.

Humans evolved from ancient apes, yes--but not, as this statement implies, modern apes. Modern apes and humans shar a common ancestor.

Scientists are protected from public ridicule

Nonsense. Every citizen in the state of California routinely gets a chance to ridicule and critique my work. When was the last time something YOU produced was subject to as much scruteny? (My publications do go through a word processing phase to eliminate spelling errors, I should add....)

they belong to fraternities that protect them by limiting their speculation

The only fraternaty I belong to is Sigma Gamma Epsilon, and they certainly don't protect me. My boss doesn't either--he's the first to come down on me if I screw up. Scientists are rather harsh with their colleagues.

We don't see a half fish half man even though somewhere it is believed by evolutionist a common ancestor existed

No student of evolutionary biology has EVER suggested there be a half-fish, half-man. Such chymaric monstrosities are only ever proposed by Creationists. What researchers into evolutionary theory argue is that we share a common ancestor, which had primative traits shared by both but lacked the derived traits unique to each group. The statement you presented is nothing more than yet another lie.

 

[Mojo]

Creationist believe in the variations within species.

What about variations within kinds?

 

[tsig]

Why don't I give you a history of the fossil myth and its evolution.

Transitional Fossil Sequences and the Evolution of Life
http://evolutiondismantled.com/transitional-fossils

There these old fossils sitting around and the more they considered how special they were the more special they figured the Designer was.

 

[Aridas]

Nonsense. Every citizen in the state of California routinely gets a chance to ridicule and critique my work. When was the last time something YOU produced was subject to as much scruteny? (My publications do go through a word processing phase to eliminate spelling errors, I should add....)

I feel like asking... was your misspelling of scrutiny intentionally there to make a point, then? And fraternity, three words after the little note? I could list more, but... such is unnecessary for the question.

 

[Slowvehicle]

Most of the fossil variations have been eventually proven to be variations within the same species either a result of deformities, dwarfism, diseases or wrongly identified bone fragments belonging to other species.

You probably do not even realize that the highlighted bit is not true.

When do you intend to address this?

 

[tsig]

By reductio ad absurdum, all extant creatures are horribly deformed versions of their common ancestor, and those deformities are heritable and precisely match the taxonomic tree of life...

That's one creationist theory. Adam and Eve were perfect humans and we have degenerated since.

It's called genetic entropy.



Is man presently degenerating genetically? It would seem so, according the papers by Muller, Neal, Kondrashov, Nachman/Crowell, Walker/Keightley, Crow, Lynch et al., Howell, Loewe and also myself (in press). Scott suggests this is foolishness and dismisses the Crow paper (1–2% fitness decline per generation). But Kondrashov, an evolutionist who is an expert on this subject, has advised me that virtually all the human geneticists he knows agree that man is degenerating genetically. The most definitive findings were published in 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by Lynch.4 That paper indicates human fitness is declining at 3–5% per generation. I personally feel the average mutational effect on fitness is much more subtle than Lynch does—so I think the rate of human degeneration is much slower than he suggests—but we at least agree that fitness is going down, not up. Can Scott find any qualified geneticist who asserts man is NOT now degenerating genetically? There is really no debate on current human genetic degeneration—Scott is 100% wrong here, and is simply not well informed.

 

[Sideroxylon]

Crocoduck!

Justintime's fishman and Bananman's crocoduck are both chimeras and both things, as pointed out above, are exactly the kinds of things evolution does not predict. Neither fall within observed nested hierarchies that inform taxonomy. To say such a thing demonstrates deep misunderstandings about evolution.

 

[Dinwar]

I feel like asking... was your misspelling of scrutiny intentionally there to make a point, then?

No, I just couldn't remember the proper spelling (and IE doesn't yell at me the way Firefox does when I screw it up). It's a foible of mine, one that eight years under the gentle instruction of nuns couldn't cure; I don't know why, but English spelling just doesn't click for me. I think it has played a major role in my life--my spelling and handwriting aren't going to get me good grades, so my content had to be good enough to compensate.

To be clear, the doc processing my reports go through isn't specifically due to my spelling. It's company SOP--ALL documents leaving the company go through it, as part of our quality control process.