Stupid Christian Article on Evolution

[catsmate]

You assume your own perfect and complete knowledge from where you judge.

No. Science is a about gathering data, collating and integrating the data and working from that data through theorising, experimentation and observation. Real scientists know that they'll provavly never has complete knowledge.

I have no problem in believing in an infinite superior to your very finite inferior.

I like that.

Well this says a lot about you but very little about reality. Your need for the crutch of belief in a god has no correspondence with reality.

One of the reasons that I am a theist is how most plausible it seems to me that there is an infinite superior omnipotent Creator to brush aside the arrogant inanity and finite inferiority of impotent and impudent atheists that happen to be other mere men, despite their self-exalted self-opinion.

And again, more self revelation.

 

[sphenisc]

...Nobody anywhere ever said "evolution is a change in the frequency of alleles, period".
...

They've come preeeettttty close.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6975140&postcount=714

 

[PixyMisa]

That is pretty close, yeah. Stupid search function wouldn't work for me to find exactly what was being taken out of context.

 

[devnull]

Yes. Someone misspoke on a forum..... therefore god.

 

[A'isha]

Haeckel and the whole over reliance on dubious embryonic analysis played a huge role in Darwin's argument and later evos in initially gaining acceptance for evolution.

No, Haeckel's drawings had nothing whatsoever to do with the development of Darwin's theory nor the arguments for that theory that he presented in "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection". Mainly because Darwin's book was published almost a decade before Haeckel drew any of his infamous embryological diagrams.

Unless you think that Darwin invented time travel in addition to evolutionary theory.

It became sort of a mythic concept, recapitulation and the Biogenetic law, so much that it's been very hard to stamp out despite the claims often being wrong, and not really logically supporting evo theory any more, nor being that critical to it.

Haeckel's drawings were used in most textbooks to introduce people to evolutionism until around 1998.

What's sad is the evolutionist community cannot seem to divorce themselves from Haeckel and finally accept recapitulation just isn't so.

You have no idea what the modern recapitulation theory is, nor how it differs from what Haeckel's ideas were. Because if you did, you wouldn't say nonsense like the above.

Especially since Richardson's 2002 paper lays out exactly what Haeckel got wrong, what he got right, how his ideas differ from modern ideas (honed with more than a century's worth of additional knowledge gained since Haeckel's drawings first appeared), and even how his ideas are compared and contrasted with those of von Baer (EDIT: and those of one of Haeckel's harshest contemporary critics, Wilhelm His).

 

[devnull]

Yup. A guy drew some pictures once. Therefore, god

I can keep this up all night

 

[dlorde]

In my BSc Human Gen degree I have never once seen or even heard of Haeckel. Neither have I heard of him as part of my ongoing medical degree and I finished embryology in the first year.

That surprises me - we were told all about Haeckel in my BSc Human Biology degree (this was back in the mid '70s).

 

[PixyMisa]

Yes. Someone misspoke on a forum..... therefore god.

It's not even misspeaking, it's that randman altered the quote and took it out of context.

 

[Avicenna]

That surprises me - we were told all about Haeckel in my BSc Human Biology degree (this was back in the mid '70s).

May have been mentioned during a lecture I missed or I may not have been paying attention. But as far as I can recollect I only came across the name through my own reading and possibly arguments with creationists.

 

[Bad vibe]

I just wondered does anyone think that ID isn't creationism and is something different?

 

[randman]

That is pretty close, yeah. Stupid search function wouldn't work for me to find exactly what was being taken out of context.

I didn't take it out of context.

Evolution is the change in allele frequency through time. That's it. Period.

Why would you pretend "no one ever said that"?

 

[randman]

Haeckel and the whole over reliance on dubious embryonic analysis played a huge role in Darwin's argument and later evos in initially gaining acceptance for evolution.

No, Haeckel's drawings had nothing whatsoever to do with the development of Darwin's theory nor the arguments for that theory that he presented in "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection". Mainly because Darwin's book was published almost a decade before Haeckel drew any of his infamous embryological diagrams.

Unless you think that Darwin invented time travel in addition to evolutionary theory.

It became sort of a mythic concept, recapitulation and the Biogenetic law, so much that it's been very hard to stamp out despite the claims often being wrong, and not really logically supporting evo theory any more, nor being that critical to it.

Haeckel's drawings were used in most textbooks to introduce people to evolutionism until around 1998.

What's sad is the evolutionist community cannot seem to divorce themselves from Haeckel and finally accept recapitulation just isn't so.

You have no idea what the modern recapitulation theory is, nor how it differs from what Haeckel's ideas were. Because if you did, you wouldn't say nonsense like the above.

Especially since Richardson's 2002 paper lays out exactly what Haeckel got wrong, what he got right, how his ideas differ from modern ideas (honed with more than a century's worth of additional knowledge gained since Haeckel's drawings first appeared), and even how his ideas are compared and contrasted with those of von Baer (EDIT: and those of one of Haeckel's harshest contemporary critics, Wilhelm His).

You are dense, aren't you? When are you going to figure out I just might have my facts right. I stated embryonic evidence was a large part of Darwin's thinking. Darwin used Von Baer, who opposed Darwinism all his life I might add, and who thought Darwin and evos in general misused his data. Haeckel came along and developed and expressed his biogenetic law. Evos at the very beginning jumped on Haeckel's concepts and as Richardson states, they relied on his data all the way until 1997.

Now you can try to say I don't know what Richardson says or the history of recapitulation, but that's hogwash. You cannot make a specific claim on how I've not gotten the picture right so you make a general one.

Richardson called Haeckel's depictions factually wrong and a fake in 1997. Then, by 2002, he says those same fakes are "evidence for evolution" and all of this in peer-reviewed literature.

What more can be said? How can you defend that?

You can't. You probably cannot explain the history of recapitulation theory either and how it keeps getting knocked down and coming back again. The process has been repeating itself well over 100 years. Just modern myth-making on the part of evos.

 

[randman]

May have been mentioned during a lecture I missed or I may not have been paying attention. But as far as I can recollect I only came across the name through my own reading and possibly arguments with creationists.

Did you never take an introductory biology course?

 

[A'isha]

I didn't take it out of context.

Yes you did. You, in fact, excised the main point Dinwar was making:

You don't understand what evolution is. Evolution is the change in allele frequency through time. That's it. Period. Full stop. The exact pathway evolution followed isn't critical to the theory of evolution--whether genes are added or lost, their frequency is still changing and it's still evolution.

You seem to think that the theory of evolution is the pathway it took, but it's not--the theory woulud hold true had evolution taken any other path. This is obvious: every kingdom and phyla started at a specific point, and evolved from there. Which means evolution can work on complex organisms as well as simple ones.

The problem is that there is no evidence for front-loading, nor is there any mechanism by which the organisms could have the genes you suggest prior to their evolution, other than goddidit (with a nod to panspermia). Paleontology shows the path evolution took. It seems to be from simple (unicellular) to complex (multicellular), though the simple still dominate. Which, by the way, is another nail in the argument's coffin: The world is still dominated by bacteria, by a HUGE margin.

This was in reply to you saying that a different mechanism for macroevolution than the one suggested would "torpedo evolution".

Dinwar was merely pointing out to you that it would do no such thing, since evolution studies how the mechanisms of gene change lead to developments of the genomes of living organisms, by selecting for or against the genes that get changed and then passing them on.

The specific theories of the way this change is done is not synonymous with the specific theories of what happens after this change is done. They're interrelated in the overall theory, of course, but they aren't the same thing.

That's why any given mechanism for gene change is not as important as the fact that this gene change leads to novel genes arising and thus to the genome evolving. That's why he said that the restoration (re-evolution) of lost genes would not affect the theory of evolution at all, because it's still gene change, and the fact that such re-evolution happens at all basically sinks front-loading dead.

By focusing on one small part of Dinwar's post, you're just trying to deflect that entirely, without actually addressing it.

 

[randman]

Just more confusion and faith statements from you, ANT. He stated:

The problem is that there is no evidence for front-loading, nor is there any mechanism by which the organisms could have the genes you suggest prior to their evolution,

Ok, then why does the coral have genetic sequences for vertebrate nerve function? Why is the LCA now considered to be incredibly complex genetically? Why is it now the opiion that the creatures that gave rise to plants and animals had more types of genes available to them than plants and animals today?

Did God do it?

The thing is neither he, nor you, seems to grasp the facts or the significance of these facts.

Looking at other data, when was the last time a kingdom is thought to have evolved? How about new phyla? How about new orders? How about new families?

When was the last time a new genus evolved? And when was the last time a new species evolved?

Are you beginning to get the picture?

 

[randman]

Pixy, you are not up on quantum physics but yes, both causality and locality appear to be violated as well as realism unless you want to invent a new infinite number of parallel universes, basically the argument that the multiverse did it, and even then it's questionable.

Our realization of Wheeler’s delayed- choice GedankenExperiment demon- strates beyond any doubt that the behavior of the photon in the interferometer depends on the choice of the observable which is measured, even when that choice is made at a position and a time such that it is separated from the entrance of the photon in the interferometer by a space-like interval. In Wheeler’s words, since no signal traveling at a velocity less than that of light can connect these two events, “we have a strange inversion of the normal order of time. We, now, by moving the mirror in or out have an un- avoidable effect on what we have a right to say about the already past history of that photon” (7).

http://fr.arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0610/0610241v1.pdf

 

[Mister Agenda]

Well, yes. ID brings biology essentially into the same realm as archeology -- trying to predict the behavior of intelligent entities in order to figure out why they did what they did, and what else they might have done. And just like no amount of Achaean excavation will ever allow us to understand their culture perfectly, no amount of information about known designs will ever give perfect predictions as to what other designs may be found.
It's generally going to be easier to predict unintelligent actors than intelligent actors, but that doesn't mean that a theory that an intelligent actor is involved is therefore either completely useless or unscientific.

I cheerfully acknowledge that ID as a hypothesis isn't inherently unscientific. It could be entirely scientific if it could drop the idea that the designer was a conscious being rather than an unconscious process of sorting out less adaptive variations. IDers have made the words 'intelligent' and 'design' almost taboo in serious biology circles, but the process of evolution does design life and is intelligent, in the way a computer might be described as intelligent...not in comparison to humans, but in comparison to artifacts and processes that don't have any computational power at all.

In a sense, Intelligent Design is corret. There is an intelligent designer. It is the automatic process of natural selection acting on natural variation, like a computer crunching numbers, which in effect, designs organisms to be more adapted to their environment.

 

[Mister Agenda]

Let me see what you can create with the 2%.

You assume your own perfect and complete knowledge from where you judge.

I have no problem in believing in an infinite superior to your very finite inferior.

I like that.

One of the reasons that I am a theist is how most plausible it seems to me that there is an infinite superior omnipotent Creator to brush aside the arrogant inanity and finite inferiority of impotent and impudent atheists that happen to be other mere men, despite their self-exalted self-opinion.

One of the reasons you're a theist is because it helps you think you're superior to atheists and you like that? Thanks for your honesty.

And the post you're referring to about 98% of the human genome being junk was mistaken. We know that because of the work of biologists.

 

[Mister Agenda]

Really?

How often do you atheists think you might be wrong and that there might be a God?

Point me to such threads please.

Maybe you do individually and personally, in fact I'm sure many do, but none of you "skeptical" and "critical-thinking" atheists will openly admit and allow for this among yourselves in your posturing.


The most any of you can show me in this regard is a belligerant "Yeah, well show me the evidence and then I'll believe, but there is no evidence you can show me, is there? Is there? But you can't comprehend that in your little fear-based mentality, so there." or something really similar.

Do your own research. Most of the atheists here at JREF are agnostic atheists and will say so if asked. We don't pretend to have knowledge of the nonexistence of any possible version of God. We just don't see how belief in such a being is justified when none of the people who claim to have knowledge of this being can present more than hearsay evidence and they contradict each other.

Our argument isn't with God, it's with the people who claim to speak for God. You haven't made a convincing case that what you're claiming is real. We don't believe you're right. If there is a God, it isn't speaking for itself, all we have to go on is what you and others with similar claims have to say.

Instead of whining that we're too hard to convince, maybe you should be working on finding better arguments. You could start by only using ones that don't contain a logical fallacy or arbitrary assumptions. You might want to ask yourself before you try it on us if the exact same argument could be made for Ganesh, Ishtar, Brahma, or Grandmother Spider.

And it wouldn't hurt if you asked us what we think instead of telling us.

 

[randman]

Well, yes. ID brings biology essentially into the same realm as archeology -- trying to predict the behavior of intelligent entities in order to figure out why they did what they did, and what else they might have done. And just like no amount of Achaean excavation will ever allow us to understand their culture perfectly, no amount of information about known designs will ever give perfect predictions as to what other designs may be found.
It's generally going to be easier to predict unintelligent actors than intelligent actors, but that doesn't mean that a theory that an intelligent actor is involved is therefore either completely useless or unscientific.

I cheerfully acknowledge that ID as a hypothesis isn't inherently unscientific. It could be entirely scientific if it could drop the idea that the designer was a conscious being rather than an unconscious process of sorting out less adaptive variations. IDers have made the words 'intelligent' and 'design' almost taboo in serious biology circles, but the process of evolution does design life and is intelligent, in the way a computer might be described as intelligent...not in comparison to humans, but in comparison to artifacts and processes that don't have any computational power at all.

In a sense, Intelligent Design is corret. There is an intelligent designer. It is the automatic process of natural selection acting on natural variation, like a computer crunching numbers, which in effect, designs organisms to be more adapted to their environment.

So this the heart of the objection. You guys insist the concept itself a priori cannot be given a fair shake based on your idea that we cannot include a conscious being as part of the process?

Of course, animals and people are conscious and genetics and the environment play a role in behavior but that's Ok.

You don't see an inconsistency in your logic here?