151. Comment #35845 by Luis_Cayetano on April 29, 2007 at 3:39 am

Sorry, the booklet is called "The View From Mount Improbable".

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152. Comment #35858 by BillySands on April 29, 2007 at 4:46 am

I must be a glutton for punishment!(that or the fact I'm trying to put off doing some work on the sabbath)

devolved

There's excellent scientific evidence that a fossil can form within the span of a human lifetime.

No there isn't. Are you going to tell us about cowboys and hats that are encrusted with calcite (not fossils) now?

Use catatastrophic beliefs and it gets near instant burial and preservation.

I mentioned previously different habitats fossilised in sucession. This is not possible in a catastrophic event! A catastrophic event would also bury animals randomly.

Well here's a scientists response, "In fact human chromosome 2 does not match the two small ape chromosomes it is claimed to have fused from. There are significant differences, and what similarities there are have been highly exaggerated by those making the claim.

I dont see any evidence refuting this scientists respone!

Incidentally, it is not the case that a correct prediction proves a theory. Even if human chromosome 2 did look just how one would expect if it were to have came about via joining of two smaller chimp chromosomes, to suggest that this proves that it came about this way is to commit a logical fallacy, the fallacy of verified prediction. In fact similarities between different kinds of creatures is evidence of a common Designer, not common ancestry—see the attached notes on homology.

Really???? My point here hovever is that it survives the test if it did not, then the idea would be rejected The more tests it survives, the more likely it is - now provide some testable evidence for creation!
By the way, do you then concede -based on your presupposition of a creator- that analogus structures must therefore argue for the existence of more than one creator ?

Why did you ignore my comment on Alx-4? That is a mutation that causes an extra claw on dogs." For the simple reason that more claws is no evidence of new information. If I bought two copies of 'The God Delusion' instead of one I'd have the same stuff twice over. If you used a photocopier to make a copy of a document and it malfunctioned and printed two copies, you would not conclude that you had created new information by this accident. It is like this with the extra organs that sometimes appear on animals (and plants). There is no new information created, so it has nothing to do with evolution!

Now, you should know fine well that my point was that you dont need new genes to change body plan, so your idea that you do is false. How is the altered protein that is produced not "new information"? It doesnt exist in other dogs. You conveniently ignored other sources of new DNA too.
Also, I think you will find that Photocopiers are more reliable than recombining, copying and repairing DNA systems.

Do you accept that mutations occur (If not, then we could only ever have no more than 4 allelles of any given gene - ond one for y chromosome genes). Can natural selection then favour good ones?

In a recent paper, evolutionist Dr George Gabor Miklos summed it up nicely when he said: 'We can go on examining natural variation at all levels ... as well as hypothesising about speciation events in bed bugs, bears and brachiopods until the planet reaches oblivion, but we still only end up with bed bugs, brachiopods and bears. None of these body plans will transform into rotifers, roundworms or rhynchocoels.'
[George L. Gabor Miklos, 'Emergence of organisational complexities during metazoan evolution: perspectives from molecular biology, palaeontology and neo-Darwinism', Mem. Assoc. Australas. Palaeontols15, 1993, p. 25]

Sorry? Recent paper? In terms of molecular biologys progress, 1993 was the stone age. Take a look at the graph of known sequences on this page http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/index.html
One fundamental flaw with this quote mining business is that you are giving no reasons why this guy made this statement - incidetally an evolutionist that does not believe in evolution - come on! Think! it is creationist propaganda. You need to provide evidence of your own, not expect us to bow to the "authority" of others - that's religions philosophy! Its like me saying that you are wrong because the dalai lama says so. Wereas if I said you were wrong because there is no prophecy saying the messiah will be born to a virgin (and there isn't isaiah 7:14 is about someone else 700+ BCE concerning a threat to israel) them my position is much stronger.

Be honest, someone who comes here willing to donate £1000 to charity if they can be proved wron has already closed his mind to other possibilities. Show me a T rex with a human (articulated and insitu) and I will conclude I am wrong - that's all it needs is some evidence- not arguements concerning gaps or points of personal incredulity. You however will not entertain the possibility you are wrong. Your wager told us that from the start

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153. Comment #35868 by Tim Marsh on April 29, 2007 at 6:43 am

Billy Sands, can I just say, you're doing a great job here supplying information on genetics. You are a credit to atheism!

Other Comments by Tim Marsh

154. Comment #35871 by BillySands on April 29, 2007 at 6:51 am

Thanks Tim
Here is some more evidence concerning chromosome 2 fusion:
1) The analogous chromosomes (2a and 2b) in the non-human great apes can be shown, when laid end to end, to create an identical banding structure to the human chromosome 2.
2) The remains of the sequence that the chromosome has on its ends (the telomere) is found in the middle of human chromosome 2 where the ancestral chromosomes fused.
3) the detail of this region (pre-telomeric sequence, telomeric sequence, reversed telomeric sequence, pre-telomeric sequence) is exactly what we would expect from a fusion.
4) this telomeric region is exactly where one would expect to find it if a fusion had occurred in the middle of human chromosome 2.
5) the centromere of human chromosome 2 lines up with the chimp chromosome 2p chromosomal centromere.
6) At the place where we would expect it on the human chromosome we find the remnants of the chimp 2q centromere

Not only is this strong evidence for a fusion event, but it is also strong evidence for common ancestry; in fact, it is hard to explain by any other mechanism.
(taken from http://www.evolutionpages.com/chromosome_2.htm )

Here is a little prediction I made of my own: The genes above the join and below the join should be in roughly the same order as they are in the analagous chimp chromosomes(remember, duplications and evolution occurring post common ancestor etc can occur and disrupt things). I chose one gene at random above the join on Human chromosome 2 (RasGRP2) and one below (HOXD8). Lets compare orders:

Human chromosome 2 CARD12 TTC27 LTB1 RasGRP3 CRIM1
Chimp chromosome 2a CARD12 TTC27 LTB1 RasGRP3 CRIM1
Human chromosome 2 PDK1 CCA7 CHN1 HOXD8 HOXD4
Chimp chromosome 2b PDK1 CCA7 CHN1 HOXD8 HOXD4

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155. Comment #35887 by Robert Maynard on April 29, 2007 at 7:39 am

devolved, if you believe this is to be the end of our discussion, I am sad. I'll make a last attempt to point out the mistakes you've made, and hope you might recognise them. Let's go through your latest reply. I can already tell it will be a long one.

First, the Anthropic Principle is a superb example of presuppositional logic at work .. if you presuppose that the universe could only have come into existence by entirely naturalistic means you have to defend by faith a principle incapable of any disproof. Armed with such faith it becomes possible to dismiss a Nobel Prize winning astronomer as 'wrong'! How do you know he was wrong? What was the logical flaw in his reasoning?

Mind boggling rhetorical hopscotch. Let's go through this paragraph.
"If you presuppose that the universe could only have come into existence by entirely naturalistic means you have to defend by faith a principle incapable of any disproof."
As Tim has pointed out, the naturalistic and non-naturalistic paradigms of interpreting the universe are not equally valid or effective. We fully accept that science is based on an impossible to justify presumption that there are only naturalistic explanations. However, this 'presupposition' has yielded tremendous insight into the world, and can take the credit for essentially every technological advance ever made. The other paradigm is ancient, has no criteria for falsifiability, and explains nothing. Faith in science (if that's what you want to call it) is demonstrably more useful than faith in non-science (here defined as any and all non-natural explanations).
Will you acknowledge or discuss the unequal nature of these presuppositions?
The scientific worldview is not a view which is incapable of disproof. I'm sorry, that statement could not be more wrong. The scientific process as conducted by the entire community is a permanent, multidimensional process of falsification. If non-natural things do exist, either inside or outside the Universe (whatever that even means), we should be able to find them, or find evidence of any interaction with the natural universe.

"Armed with such faith it becomes possible to dismiss a Nobel Prize winning astronomer as 'wrong'! How do you know he was wrong? What was the logical flaw in his reasoning?"
I assume you were referring to my remarks about Sir Fred Hoyle's calculations on protein formation. Hoyle was an astronomer, not a researcher of abiogenesis, and he certainly did not win a Nobel Prize for his analogies of protein formation. He didn't win a Nobel prize at all, actually - but I don't want to make a point out of that. He was, after all, an atheist for most of his life - he questioned abiogenesis in his autumn years, because it was a rival of his preferred model, panspermia (essentially, pre-developed lifeforms are 'delivered' to Earth by comet or other collision, and thrive in the conditions). Panspermia is an act of explanatory regression, and solves nothing - Hoyle's cosmological work and his old age seems to have compelled him to backpedal into senile agnosticism or outright deism - but, again, I won't make any arguments out of that..
What are the "logical flaws" in his reasoning? His analogies for protein formation are not logical arguments, they are a mathematical calculation, and I provided you with a link to a piece discussing why it is dishonest to attempt calculating the probability of abiogenesis, and why Sir Fred Hoyle's calculation - and all similar calculations - are inaccurate and worthy of hearty derision. Seeing you're asking me to "point out the flaws" in his "argument", despite the fact that I did exactly that in my previous post, I will assume you did not read the piece, (just as I have assumed you've never investigated Hoyle's actual calculations, but merely parroted his resulting analogies) and speed through the main points of the piece here, so that you might hopefully chuckle with me.

- The calculations base their figures on the formation of modern proteins, ie. proteins composed of a string of 300-400 amino acids. There is no justification for this, and this is not part of abiogenesis theory. The calculations assume that a fixed, minimum number of proteins are required for life to evolve, again an unqualified assumption based on modern examples of bacteria. These flaws on their own demolish the entire calculation.
- They postulate an almost single step procedure from chemicals straight to bacteria, ratcheting up the improability - again, this is not the case in abiogenesis theories.
- Conclusions like "it would take more time than the age of the Universe" are basing their calculation on "sequential" trials, rather than the likely reality of "simultaneous" trials. What this means is that the calculation presents the odds as though all the chemicals in a pre-biotic soup are somehow directed toward the assembly of a single string of amino acids, and when this failed, it started from scratch, one after the other, until one combination happened to hold. In this way, the time "needed" is basically equal to the huge odds, which, again, are completely wrong.
The hypothesised reality of course, is that this assembly was occuring non-stop, day in, day out, with an unknown quantity (very likely many millions - we are talking about events on a molecular scale) of independent strings combined every second.
I'll try and put this in a way that makes the conclusion quite obvious - suppose the odds of an event were 1/1,000,000. Now suppose that there were 1,000,000 'attempts' every second.. (I put attempt in quotes because in the case of abiogenesis the chemicals obviously have no intentionality or goal).
In terms of probability, you would expect this one in a million event to happen once every second (1000000:1000000, or 1:1).
Of course, that's not how the real world works. Just because I roll six dice, or roll one dice six times, doesn't guarantee that one of them will land on six every time, even though the odds are 6/6 (1), that it will. In the same way, even if abiogenesis WAS based on sequential trials (which it isn't), and the odds WERE insurmountably high (which they aren't) - it doesn't follow that you need to fail a number of times equal to the odds before probability will allow you to succeed once. Even if the odds for any event were 1:1x10^{10000000000000} (which they are not), there is nothing that prevents it from happening on the first try.
The more attempts there are being made simultaneously, the more likely an improbable event becomes, even in a single iteration.

This is all pretty basic math - I didn't do an advanced math course in high school - yet here I am, having to explain to you why Fred Hoyle's calculations are flawed. You moan about being personally attacked for "asking questions" and "using logic", but this is not personal - if you cannot see for yourself what was wrong with the particulars of these calculations (Hoyle's and others) - either you did not look at the actual calculations, and accepted the validity of the descriptive analogies at face value (in which case you're being quite dishonest about your quest for knowledge), OR, you are desperately ignorant of math, not to mention the basic concepts of abiogenesis (in which case you are, again, being dishonest about your quest for knowledge)

"If there are logical flaws in the paragraph above point out the flaws using logic. "I reject what you say because it doesn't conform with my beliefs" is not a logical argument."
Again, you are confusing notions of logic with empirical data. I hope that I have outlined the flaws with Hoyle's calculation and your first paragraph to your satisfaction, and I encourage you to read the TalkOrigins piece I provided in my previous post.

"The Anthropic Principle also leads inexorably to science fiction tales of multi-verses where Dr Dawkins has a green moustache. Perhaps in one universe he's the Archbishop of Canterbury instead of the Archbishop of Atheism."
The anthropic principle does not make any predictions regarding the hypothesised multiverse. All attempts at explaining the anthropic principle to you have not sunk in so far, because you're still saying nonsense stuff about it, so I shouldn't bother.. but I will!! Here we go, one last time!

*deep breath*

OKAY, so, we find ourselves on a planet whose conditions are not only highly unique in the contrast space of all other planetary environments we have observed to date (except for, potentially, the latest object found orbiting Gliese 581), but are also entirely necessary for the development of life as we know it.
SO, the (apparent) problem here is that it seems like a desperately fortunate coincidence for us that we find ourselves in a necessary but statistically improbable environment, rather than one of the far more common, inhospitable environments.
The Anthropic Principle is neither a logical 'trick' nor is it based on premises of any kind - it is the simple recognition that since these infrequently occuring conditions are a NECESSITY for the development of life, it would have been PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for us to find ourselves in any of the far more inhospitable, far more common environments, as we simply never would have developed to make the observation!
The probability of observing a "fine-tuned" environment is "rigged" in a sense, because environments which are not configured in a particular way do not produce observers.

Second, is the presupposition that scientists who do not accept your presuppositions are pseudo-scientists. You can only claim that the evidence overwhelmingly supports the evolutionary hypothesis if you rigorously exclude the scientific work of those who don't agree with your paradigm. In this realm 'peer review' means only accepting papers that conform to the evolutionary hypothesis and systematically rejecting those that don't on philosophical grounds.

There is a far simpler reason why anti-evolutionary intelligent design papers never meet peer-review. It is because the speculation of an unmeasurable and unspecified supernatural designer in a hypothesis makes that hypothesis non-disprovable, as no set of predictions can be made that rely on the properties of the designer, and as such any structure (however haphazardous, wasteful or 'evolved' it looks) can be said to fit the design hypothesis. It is non-disprovable, and hence does not qualify as a scientific theory. It is also because when intelligent design proponents do make falsifiable predictions, such as the claim of 'irreducible complexity', they have been falsified.
If your method is not scientific, it will not be published in a scientific journal, because they only deal with science. You squawk about the conceit of naturalistic presuppositions, and then question why research which invokes non-naturalistic explanations is not recognised as scientific. I will tell you - it's because it isn't.

I have to leave this comment here for now. This is already quite long, but the rest of what you have to say deserves a response (besides what Billy Sands has already curtly responded to.

Other Comments by Robert Maynard

156. Comment #35903 by BillySands on April 29, 2007 at 8:42 am

It just occurred to me that biblical literalists like to claim that life is only possible because of the values of physical constants in the universe. They make the a priori assumption that no other values will do however, if Gen 9:8-17 is to be believed, water droplets did not refract light and make rainbows before the flood. Looks like the bible argues against the biblicists view of the anthropic principle, since it says other values must have been attributed to the universal constants.
I think more compelling evidence for the theists case would be a young universe with a single planet in it. Not the 12 billion+ year old one with a possible billion billiion planets that we inhabit. Given the vastness of the universe, we have already found another potential life friendly planet. The theists mis representation of the anthropic principle is nothing more than a misrepresentation and an arguement from incredulity

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157. Comment #36009 by Tim Marsh on April 29, 2007 at 9:29 pm

And let's not forget the biblical literalists who suggest that all animals, including strict carnivores and carnivorous dinosaurs, used to be 'plant eaters', despite their various morphologies adapted specifically for the catching of prey and the eating of meat.
This is, of course, based entirely on a section of Genesis where God gives all the animals 'green herbs' to eat (its ambiguous), and also the fact that carnivorous dinosaurs would've wiped out mankind if they coexisted.
They are different accounts of when they started eating meat (after original sin, or after the ark-incident), needless to say.. none of it is true.

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158. Comment #36014 by Robert Maynard on April 29, 2007 at 10:30 pm

Hey, presto! Part 2!

Once the unscientific presupposition of naturalism is excluded the claim that the evidence overwhelmingly supports the evolutionary hypothesis is highly questionable.

Naturalism is the basis of scientific method. We observe, speculate, test, then falsify or tentatively accept. Naturalism is the definition of scientific, not the opposite of it.
If the presupposition of naturalism was excluded from science, we could not use our observations of the natural world to conclude anything, and all arguments would be equally valid.
We find ourselves in a similar situation when we hold supernaturalism to be equally as valid as naturalism. Any amount of supernatural speculation can be invoked at any point and no explaining would ever get done, nor would any disproving. It is one thing to say "We do not know," but it's entirely another to say "We do not know, therefore we know that God did it."

"I wonder if any of you has ever critiqued a scientific paper written by a non-evolutionist and faulted it on scientific grounds? I'd love to see such a critique. Again "It's rubbish" or "I've read it and it's very poor" hardly qualifies.

..I wonder indeed, if a design undergraduate (me) has ever critiqued a scientific paper and faulted it. No, I haven't. Billy Sands or Tim may have, but not me!
In any case, I might ask if you have you ever done the same for a paper researching an evolutionary topic? While we're setting arbitrary rules for participating in a discussion, I am asking if you've done so based on original research, without quoting large portions of sentimental incredulity from other scientists, whose arguments are so paper-thin they have been shredded by posters reading an article about Catholic limbo.
Here's a primer to get you started, if your bite is worth your bark - THE ORIGIN OF NEW GENES: GLIMPSES FROM THE YOUNG AND OLD [PDF format]
I did not receive the memo that one must now be a scientist to discuss science, or conclude that hypotheses which are summarily rejected by the vast majority of scientists are more than likely bunk, and be able to explain why this is so.

I find it telling that you are willing to parrot the analogies and testimony of Hoyle and creationists without understanding or knowing the numbers, yet demand that we may not argue using statements which amount to "I've read it and it's very poor". Then you turn around and quote a scientist saying this -
"In fact human chromosome 2 does not match the two small ape chromosomes it is claimed to have fused from. There are significant differences, and what similarities there are have been highly exaggerated by those making the claim." without providing any link to the paper (so we have no way of investigating the "extensive" research you assure us is conducted), or even including any of the research in the paper in your post. This statement, on its own - is meaningless. This scientist is literally saying "I've read the papers claiming this, and they're very poor" and you're leaving it at that. What a breathtaking double standard.

I wonder if evolutionist Richard Lewontin of Harvard speaks for you when he said, "Even if all the data points to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic." (Todd, S.C., correspondence to Nature 401(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999.)

Philosophically, he is correct, but it's not necessary to take that as revealing some kind of inherent fundamentalism, because the data we currently possess does not point to an intelligent designer, so it is already impossible for "all" of it to do so. So I guess the quote is meaningless.

There's excellent scientific evidence that a fossil can form within the span of a human lifetime.

I can't think of a better response than Billy has already responded with. No, there isn't. You have given us nothing supporting this claim except an empty assurance.

Needless to say the scientist offered and provided much, much more including the notes mentioned above.

No, not needless to say. As noted above, you haven't provided any reference to the paper, and failing that you have also haven't directly referred to any research within the paper, quantifying his incredulous semantics of "significant" and "exaggerrated" differences.

If I bought two copies of 'The God Delusion' instead of one I'd have the same stuff twice over. If you used a photocopier to make a copy of a document and it malfunctioned and printed two copies, you would not conclude that you had created new information by this accident.

I have to stress this - DNA contains quantities of information which dwarf encycloaedias. This however, does not make them remotely comparable to books. There is a point where the descriptive power of analogies must necessarily break down, and the book/photocopier analogy is a write-off - it's a heap of twisted metal in a 9 analogy pile-up (wedged in between Hoyle's Boeing and Paley's Watch)
For starters, the information in the first half of any book is not connected in any forced or consistent way to the information in the second half. We do not copy or combine books by tearing them in half, and then reconstructing the other half by running them through a photocopier. Secondly, you only ever speak of changes not occuring in a single iteration, or 'generation' of photocopying. This is not an intimidating assertion, when the reality you are describing covers billions of years, with the clear majority of generations involved lasting less than a day.

Finally, you still haven't defined information in a useful way, so we are left with the thankless task of deducing what you might mean by information in relation to genetics. So, what is information, and what constitutes an increase? Accidentally duplicating existing genes does not count, so needless to say more genes does not represent more information. You don't consider any alteration in phenotypic outcome as an increase, so even small mutations which result in favourable adaptations do not count as information increase, by your statements. What you have said you do consider an information increase is genes which do something new, like, as you've said, code for a lung in a creature with no lungs (I've already explained why this is nonsense, but let's roll with it). This is a step in the right direction, evolution is all about increasing complexity, so new things are definitely a part of that! However, because you have denied the possibility of cumulative improvement - that is, the evolutionary prediction that new structures begin simply and develop over many generations (sort of exactly like everything else in evolution) - and because you demand contemporary research, and because you speak in terms of single step increases resulting in something new, what you must be demanding is nothing less than a fully integrated, functioning, new physiological structure which did not exist in the prior generation.
Fortunately for us, evolutionary theory does not predict anything like this occuring in one step without being completely fatal. We fully encourage you to seek out anyone who supports a theory like this, and criticise their ideas in the interest of science. We are in agreement that such a scenario is absurd.

Evolution predicts slow, incremental changes, which genetics shows to be necessary exactly because the replication fidelity of DNA is so stable. Evolutionary theory does not predict major structural changes to a lifeform in a few generations, so it is difficult to observe. It is particularly difficult to observe when the dynamics of selection models are still a hotly debated topic - which makes it very difficult to design selective pressures in a laboratory environment in an attempt to contrive and observe rapid evolutionary change. In the meantime, what scientists have observed in laboratories is that even minor genotypic mutations can have interesting and often amazing phenotypic effects. If your definition of information increase has requirements which aren't a part of evolution, then it's a useless definition.

So how do I decide? I dare to use logic and ask questions and am rewarded with abuse, character assassination, lies and snide comments but no evidence, just assertions of it. So who is doing bad science and covering it up with bad manners and bad language?

You "dare to use logic" and "ask questions", but either didn't know or didn't care to know the details of Hoyle's calculation. While you're on the internet, you are less than five clicks away from a page discussing either side of abiogenesis or evolution.
If you asked questions and "dared" to use logic, you would not have stumbled on only one side of the argument, consistently, and you wouldn't have needed me to explain why the abiogenesis calculations were flawed. It is simply indefensible.
If you are not receptive to patiently repeated answers to your questions, and explanations of your mistakes, you are being dishonest about your pretension of honest inquiry, and you deserve ridicule every step of the way.

Thus far, you have not portrayed the demeanour of an honestly curious person. You are a photocopy of every creationist I've encountered on the internet - the same tired arguments, the same evasive goalpost shifting, the same vacant quote mining - and no new "information".

Other Comments by Robert Maynard

159. Comment #36018 by devolved on April 29, 2007 at 11:22 pm

My last response to Robert and Billy

Robert claims: "As Tim has pointed out, the naturalistic and non-naturalistic paradigms of interpreting the universe are not equally valid or effective.
We fully accept that science is based on an impossible to justify presumption that there are only naturalistic explanations. However, this 'presupposition' has yielded tremendous insight into the world, and can take the credit for essentially every technological advance ever made."

1 I respect Tim's belief but disagree with his inference. If God created everything in the beginning evolutionary scientists will have wasted huge amounts of time, money and energy on pursuing the wrong explanation.
2 You are correct in saying that the paradigms are not equally effective. It's rather as if two men are standing on Plymouth Hoe looking out to sea, each looking at the Spanish Armada through a telescope. One says "Those ships are a long way off" and the other say, "They're very close to shore".
3 There is not one single technological advance that owes anything at all to a belief in evolution. I'd go further and suggest that if operational science ignored the evolutionary paradigm it would not hinder its activities.

Robert claims: "The scientific worldview is not a view which is incapable of disproof."

I don't quite know what you want to include in your 'scientific worldview'. The following link will ably demonstrate where science is and is not incapable of disproof.
http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3830/

Robert again: "There is a far simpler reason why anti-evolutionary intelligent design papers never meet peer-review. It is because the speculation of an unmeasurable and unspecified supernatural designer in a hypothesis makes that hypothesis non-disprovable, as no set of predictions can be made that rely on the properties of the designer, and as such any structure (however hap hazardous, wasteful or 'evolved' it looks) can be said to fit the design hypothesis."

The link above will answer this.

I appreciate your frustration at debating with someone who constantly refuses to play by your rules but I see no point in 'playing' when the dice are loaded against me before I start the game. I've spent most of my life as an atheist or agnostic.

And yes I was wrong Hoyle didn't get the Nobel prize.
So he got his math wrong. The article you pasted in makes claims about how abiogenesis worked. The Talk Origins website says: "abiogenesis Not to be confused with "spontaneous generation," it is the theory that life originally arose from non-living matter, given the proper conditions during the early earth." So we're back where we started, making claims about what happened in the past. We can all believe what we like about what happened in the past but none of use can do science there.

I'm not sure that we can make any more progress on the Anthropic Principle. Again there's a short article by Andrew Lamb you might wish to look at:
http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3841

Billy doesn't like evidence for fossils that forms quickly so he makes sure his definition excludes the evidence. Neat footwork there.

Billy doesn't respond to my challenge to do some real science. Let's pursue the challenge a little further. Let's get 20,000 dead frogs and we'll leave half of them out in the open and bury the rest rapidly to simulate a catastrophic burial. We'll need to spread them around the planet. Every year we'll go and look for one of the frogs we left out in the open and one we buried and see how they're doing. Neither of us will live to see the end of the experiment but I'm sure we'll have some fairly substantial evidence after 10, 30 or 60 years.

Billy seems to know the impact of a unique global catastrophe that may have happened in the past and started with a deluge that covered the entire earth for more than a year and continued to affect the entire Earth for hundreds of years thereafter.

No doubt we'll meet again elsewhere on RichardDawkins.net. I'll carry on testing my beliefs, presuppositions and interpretations of data. I hope you'll do the same.

Other Comments by devolved

160. Comment #36031 by BillySands on April 30, 2007 at 2:38 am

Devolved

Again you present no evidence!

Billy doesn't like evidence for fossils that forms quickly so he makes sure his definition excludes the evidence. Neat footwork there.

It's not me changing the definition of fossil. I presume you are refefing to the cowbow boot then. Find out for yourself what a fossil actually is before you accuse me of lying like an agenda promoting creationist. I find your comment amusingly absurd in light of the fact I have told you what it would take for me to drop evolution.

Billy doesn't respond to my challenge to do some real science

Sorry, what challenge was that?

Feel free to bury frogs if you want. We can find plenty of non fossilised frogs that are a few hundred to a thousand years old. Perhaps you could actually find out what fossilisation actually is first

Billy seems to know the impact of a unique global catastrophe that may have happened in the past and started with a deluge that covered the entire earth for more than a year and continued to affect the entire Earth for hundreds of years thereafter

Well, yes I do have a good idea what went on: we have other localised catastrophic events to compare it with - duh!
I suspect you are in a strop because you cant answer the challenge of reason. I'm sure you wont read this - you haven't read anything else we posted! Anyway, here are some good reasons why the flood is just plain stupid! http://www.google.com/custom?q=flood&sitesearch=www.talkorigins.org

I think you should drop your presupposition about presuppositions.

I'll keep a weather eye open for you

Other Comments by BillySands

161. Comment #36034 by BaronOchs on April 30, 2007 at 2:46 am

I wonder the creator isn't a little embarassed that the false evolutionary account is both far more plausible and greatly more interesting than the actual true version involving himself?

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162. Comment #36037 by Shuggy on April 30, 2007 at 2:52 am

In 1984, when Benedict headed the Vatican's doctrinal enforcement body as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he said he was "personally" in favour of scrapping the 13th-century notion, which he termed a mere "hypothesis."

Looks like when you get to be Pope, you can make up whatever rules you like (must be a great time to get back at your enemies), and as if Ratzo takes literally the line about "what you bind on earth is bound in heaven."

Other Comments by Shuggy

163. Comment #36038 by BillySands on April 30, 2007 at 2:56 am

Tim
I wonder why he did not respond to you? Lets also not forget that the fossil record shows that meat eating, disease and deformity occurred long before man came on the scene either.

That's the problem for creationists, evolution disproves their account of special creation (actually even genesis 1 and 2 disagree with each other on the order of things). It also means that we are not special, and that if we evolved, then sin is not an issue, because selection favours selfish traits. The whole of christianity rests on the idea of sin. Actually there is good evidence now that genes predispose to certain behavioural choices. You may find the nature/nurture lecture here particularly interesting: http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/ I like the prairie voles!

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164. Comment #36043 by Shuggy on April 30, 2007 at 3:33 am

if we evolved, then sin is not an issue, because selection favours selfish traits.

Whoa! At the gene level, not the individual or species level. Why do you think RD's book is not called "The Selfish Individual"? The concept of "Sin" is much better dealt with at a memetic level than a genetic one.

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165. Comment #36045 by Robert Maynard on April 30, 2007 at 3:37 am

Some final, pained thoughts. :|

I appreciate your frustration at debating with someone who constantly refuses to play by your rules but I see no point in 'playing' when the dice are loaded against me before I start the game.

This is similarly why most evolutionists don't bother continuing when "information increases" are invoked. Creationists define and redefine what the term means in whatever way will let them pirouette out of having to face the facts, and it's tiring. For example, while evolution predicts that all major changes begin as minor changes, and develop over many generations, creationists say "A mere gene duplication does not represent information increase, and it never will. We want NEW information, NOW."
All evolutionists can wonder is "Well, by our models, if you let the differences between this gene and its copy grow over time, they may eventually carry out entirely different functions, and this would definitely constitute new information - it's just that it can't happen overnight. But if you preclude our demonstrated sources of eventual information (initially innocuous genetic mutations) from qualifying as new information (or even admitting their "potential" for introducing new information), then where else can they possibly come from? If new genes can't come from old genes according to you - then of course your only other option is to conclude non-natural intervention. That's an unfair semantic trick, because the terms you're using are not descriptive of the facts."
This misleadingly loads the dice in the creationists favour, by their admitted inability to conceive of the scales of time involved in evolution.

The article you pasted in makes claims about how abiogenesis worked .. so we're back where we started, making claims about what happened in the past. We can all believe what we like about what happened in the past but none of use can do science there.

I really must protest - I provided a link, which you didn't address, so I provided the link again, and added my own paraphrased description of what the piece discusses in case you didn't read it the second time. There was no 'pasting' - not that you're one to talk.
Now, there's an important distinction here - the article is not some kind of revealed truth about "how abiogenesis worked". It is a defence of abiogenesis theory, against misconceptions like Hoyle's calculations. It is all theoretical work, I understand that of course - but it is important, it is exciting, it is constantly progressing, and it gives us our best chance to understand the origin of life by naturalistic means. The main thrust of the article is that abiogenesis is a more developed theory than creationists want to believe, and while the science has continued to advance, the improbability calculations have literally not changed in twenty years. I simply can't wait for the day when the theoretical work becomes well grounded enough to begin churning out popular exposition explaining this exceedingly convoluted science.

I'm not sure that we can make any more progress on the Anthropic Principle. Again there's a short article by Andrew Lamb you might wish to look at: http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3841

I thought I'd make a remark on this part of that article - "However, as Craig pointed out, it does not follow that we should not be surprised that we do observe features compatible with our existence; we still need an explanation."

We definitely do need an explanation. However, it is important that any questions we ask are phrased "how", rather than "why". How questions deal in mechanisms, why questions presupposes purpose.

The tentative explanation is that somewhere, about 4.5 billion years ago, towards the edge of a large-ish, nondescript spiral galaxy careening through space amongst a cluster of other galaxies, one of millions of clusters and billions of galaxies, a small star was born, shedding massive amounts of matter - some of which coalesced into heavy atoms and formed a series of rocky globes orbiting close to the star. Of these four globes, one happened to stabilise in an orbit around the Sun which put it in an exquisitely improbable position. It's cobbling together and position left it with a series of actively shifting sedimentary plates, an atmosphere, and enormous oceans. It flourished with life through processes not now completely understood, which gradually diversified in an expanding economy of competing replicators. Then, approximately 5 million years ago, selective pressures initiated runaway cognitive expansion in a particular species of ape. These apes developed disciplines of knowing their environment in ways unavailable to all preceding animals. Eventually they looked around, comparing their planet to all the others in their vicinity, and exclaimed "Criminy, this planet is a pretty sweet deal! We are surely blessed! Someone up there likes us!" Then one of them was all like "Well, that's not a very useful way of explaining our situation. I mean, okay, these are extremely unlikely circumstances, given what we can see around us, but a) even if we were created, could we really be put anywhere else? No! and b) if we weren't created, would we be able to find ourselves in a harsher environment? Again, no. So, I guess you COULD look at it that way, that we were created, but it doesn't really increase our understanding of the situation.. for that, I recommend investigation!" and the other guy was like "But you're assuming we can find the answers by looking at the natural world."
"..Well, yeah?"
"But we don't know what forces may be beyond our comprehension."
"There's enough we don't know which may be within our comprehension. I think you're just afraid of learning proper explanations."
"...Man, I wish you weren't writing my parts to make me look foolish"

Billy doesn't respond to my challenge to do some real science. Let's pursue the challenge a little further. Let's get 20,000 dead frogs and we'll leave half of them out in the open and bury the rest rapidly to simulate a catastrophic burial. We'll need to spread them around the planet. Every year we'll go and look for one of the frogs we left out in the open and one we buried and see how they're doing. Neither of us will live to see the end of the experiment but I'm sure we'll have some fairly substantial evidence after 10, 30 or 60 years.

Um, the burial isn't the issue. Rapid submersion in sediment has always been an important part of fossilisation. It is required to preserve the carcass from natural predation and decomposition, but fossilisation and compaction does not occur rapidly. This is why paleontologists often find fossils in strata which geologists find were swamp-like areas when they were exposed. Paleontologists also commonly find fossils in strata which show signs of landslides. It is also why there are so few fossils found in forests, because the leaf litter and rich ecosystem composts corpses exceedingly quickly (this has especially impeded our search for fossil evidence of human/chimp ancestry.
Again, leaving 10,000 frogs in the open is not representative of theories of how fossilisation occurs. It is, as they say, a straw man..

I agree that a violent flood would almost certainly be capable of shifting sediment so as to provide fossilisation conditions.
The difference is, the hypothesis that all or many fossils we find are the result of a catastrophic flood must explain several things which standard models of geology already explain.
In order to explain how some fossils get so deep and others so shallow, flood literalists claim the sediments of all the Earth were ruthlessly churned to shuffle the corpes of the unfathomably bizarre pre-Noachian ecology all throughout the strata we find today. However, despite this apocalyptic rock smoothie, there is an ordered progression of corpse distribution, so that, for example -
- no human remains exist in strata older than 4-5 million years.
- no dinosaur remains exist in strata younger than 65 million years old, or older than 230 million years old.
- no land dwelling animals exist in strata older than 417 million years old.
- human remains are not found in strata also occupied by dinosaur remains.
- to quote the old Haldane line, there are no rabbit fossils in strata classed as pre-Cambrian (strata more than 550 million years old)

Of course, I am using figures related to evolutionary epochs, not compatible with a young-earth model - but that also raises the issue of how the exacting amounts of decay product which accompany the specific radioisotopes which allow us to date these fossils and strata in the first place.. got where they are in a flood explanation.
Somehow creationists must swallow that all the radioisotopes in the Earth (buried in the sediment of young earth) were shuffled by the flood and arranged to be surrounded by exacting amounts of their corresponding decay product, making them appear to be in different states of decay, in an order that exactly reflected a linearly ordered strata, increasing in age with depth. Of course, then you're forced to postulate an openly deceitful Creator.

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166. Comment #36048 by devolved on April 30, 2007 at 4:13 am

"Somehow creationists must swallow that all the radioisotopes in the Earth (buried in the sediment of young earth) were shuffled by the flood and arranged to be surrounded by exacting amounts of their corresponding decay product, making them appear to be in different states of decay, in an order that exactly reflected a linearly ordered strata, increasing in age with depth."

The answer is that these methods are far from infallible and are based on three arbitrary assumptions (first, a constant rate of decay, second, an isolated system in which no parent or daughter element can be added or lost, and third, a known amount of the daughter element present initially."

Robert as ever the data don't support your arguments. You interpret data to fit your world view and then claim that as proof.

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167. Comment #36049 by Rachie on April 30, 2007 at 4:15 am

I think the problem with a lot of these posts is that they are missing the point that limbo wasn't actually ever the doctrine of the Catholic Church, but a commonly held practice.

My problem comes with the fact that it took the Church about 3 years and millions of pounds in deciding whether to make this fact commonly known. Bureaucracy gone mad.

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168. Comment #36050 by Rachie on April 30, 2007 at 4:15 am

I think the problem with a lot of these posts is that they are missing the point that limbo wasn't actually ever the doctrine of the Catholic Church, but a commonly held practice.

My problem comes with the fact that it took the Church about 3 years and millions of pounds in deciding whether to make this fact commonly known. Bureaucracy gone mad.

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169. Comment #36055 by Robert Maynard on April 30, 2007 at 4:27 am

These methods are far from infallible and are based on three arbitrary assumptions (first, a constant rate of decay, second, an isolated system in which no parent or daughter element can be added or lost, and third, a known amount of the daughter element present initially.

All three assumptions are far from arbitrary, very well founded, and very carefully controlled for - particularly when tempered by cross-referencing multiple instances of radioisotopes, and multiple types of radioisotopes, in the same strata; the results are approximations, I have no illusions about that. But the very word "approximation" in this case does a disservice to our predictive power using these methods.

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170. Comment #36058 by BillySands on April 30, 2007 at 4:33 am

"Robert as ever the data don't support your arguments. You interpret data to fit your world view and then claim that as proof.."

Well, why dont you read about it for yourself, then you can reason and not swallow. To help you, this one is written by a christian. Although, I dont care who wrote it, I let the evidence and arguements speak for themselves.
http://www.asa3.org/aSA/resources/Wiens.html

Are you really saying that a book who cant get its genalogies correct is a better way to date the earth? Read the genealogies of Jesus in matt one and Luke three. They are mutually exclusive - and there are many other serious problems with them too - such as "illegal" moabite ancestors,"illegal" bastards, people whose line was cursed, and the wrong son of David in luke. Hmmmm!

By the way, what about ice cores and tree ring records going back over 30 000 years.

All you do is just make unsubstantiated claims, appeals to authority, arguements from incredulity and ignore facts - you are in denial! You are providing a good lesson for others on the difference between reason anf foundationless faith.



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171. Comment #36065 by devolved on April 30, 2007 at 5:12 am

So Robert follow this link and tell me what's wrong with it.

http://www.parentcompany.com/handy_dandy/hder12.htm

Neither limbo nor purgatory are found in the Bible and the Catholic Church should have never associated itself with either idea.

Billy thanks for the web link. I'm happy to read it. Please do me the courtesy of doing the same. I read every word you write and take everything you say seriously. When it comes to Bible errors you might like to read commentaries that are not inherently hostile to the the Bible. A good starting point would be the New Bible Commentary 21st Century Edition published by IVP. I hope we've established the problem caused by only reading books and articles that support what you already believe.

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172. Comment #36080 by BillySands on April 30, 2007 at 6:25 am

devolved
I do read your stuff. Also, I am very familiar with pro- bible apologetics. I case you dont know, I used to be a Christian and had the same presuppositions as you - that the bible must be true and everything must be done to interpret the world in biblical terms. However, you can not reason your way out of biblical difficulties. So, when I criticise the bible, rest assured that a lot of thought has gone into my specific attacks.

I'll ask you again. By your reasoning, do analagous structures argue for more than one creator?

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173. Comment #36153 by Robert Maynard on April 30, 2007 at 10:21 am

devolved said:

So Robert follow this link and tell me what's wrong with it.

You got it, little buddy! :D

The article reiterates, repeatedly, three central principles which are required for radiometric dating to work. In a manner that is almost customary for creationists, the writer describes these complex natural phenomena as if they were a clock.

1. The clock must run at a known constant rate. Nothing must happen to speed it up or slow it down. (the rate of radioisotope decay in the tested sample must be constant)

2. The clock must be set correctly at the beginning of the time period being measured (the original quantities of the sample isotope's decay product must be predictable)

3. The clock must not be disturbed by resetting the hands during the time period being measured. (the sample must not be interfered with in a way which would alter either the amounts of the isotope or its decay product)

I have changed the language somewhat to reflect honest scientific terminology. For example, it is not necessary to "know" the original contents of the sample, via the use of, say, video cameras, and a time machine, to realistically predict the quantities in an isolated sedimentary sample.

Now the next step they take is to attempt to seed doubt into each of these points (and I should point out, in isolation, and in abstraction from the methodologies of actual radiometric dating). Let's see what the "Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter" has to say about each!

On the first principle, the piece admits that decay rates are generally accepted to be constant, and can be reliably tested and measured in most conditions. Then-
"However, some research suggests that special conditions may, perhaps, appreciably alter some radioactive decay rates." [emphasis mine, in case you missed all those quantifiers]
How deliciously cautious! Good news for creationists, right? He even cites a proper journal (Journal of Physical Chemistry, ...1966!) to back up the claim! You'll notice however, that he does not mention what these conditions, specified by Anderson and Spangler, are. This is because doing so would throw a monkey wrench right into the works of his vague claim - as Spangler and Anderson are speaking (to the extent that I've been able to determine from a paper too old to exist in full on the internet) about the effect of ionisation, including ionisation to complete plasma, on isotope decay rates. What's the problem you ask? Deposits of radioisotopes in layers of ancient and undisturbed sediment... can not ionise under natural conditions. Ever. Even if they could (which they can't), the disruption that hot plasma (or even near-plasmatic ions) would do to a sedimentary layer would be very hard to overlook, as there would almost certainly be no sedimentary layer left! Furthermore, in such a condition, we can hardly expect to even find the isotope's decay products in its vicinity, as not only would they be emitted in an ionic state (due to the reduced electrons of the original isotope), but they would be emitted as explosively hot from a source that is even more explosively hot. This is not what geologists find when they look at strata.

"It is also possible that exposure to neutrino, neutron, or cosmic radiation could have greatly changed isotopic ratios or the rates at some time in the past."
Yes, that is possible. What is not possible, is the specific access of radioisotopes embedded in sediment to external sources of cosmic radiation, neutrinos and errant neutrons, in such a manner that would not be catastrophically visible everywhere else in the strata (once again, to the point where one would expect there to be no strata) - there would be the molecular equivalent (at least) of 'scorch marks', if such high energy sources were somehow bombarding already underground radioisotope deposits.

"In addition, according to a recently developed theory, the speed of light has varied since the Creation, and this would have affected radioactive decay rates drastically."
Yeah, except it hasn't! :D
Although it's presented almost as an assertion here, Barry Setterfield's theory of "c-decay" (the exponential decrease of the speed of light since a "creation" event) has been thoroughly ridiculed, is not "recently developed" (first proposed in 1981) and was summarily rejected by the creation science movement. At least the writer admits this by the time he deals with the issue in more detail (question 7c). To get more gritty, Setterfield's theory of c-decay was supported using inaccurate early measurements of the speed of light, dating back to the 1600's - and then he literally just drew a line of best fit that suited his 'presuppositions'. Read more about c-decay - it's garbage!
Strangely enough, ever since measuring equipment reached impressive heights of accuracy in the 1960s, the speed of light hasn't changed in the past 40 years, despite having noticably decreased relatively steadily for the past 400 years.
So I guess out of the two competing explanations of
a) the speed of light was decreasing, but stopped when we had better equipment to measure it, or
b) measurements of something as precise as the speed of light become increasingly inaccurate with increasingly primitive technology,
The "Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter" considered the former worth mentioning. Teach the controversy?

Radiometric decay rates do not vary in the conditions in which they are used to date sedimentary rock layers.

Principle the second!

The "Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter", (hereafter referred to as "Futey", or "El Futerino" if you're not into the whole brevity thing) cautions us that if we were to regard a radioisotope sample and its proximal decay products, with no reasonable assurance that the 'decay products' present were originally part of the radioisotope in question, then we could end up with wildly inaccurate estimates of the samples geological age. This is true!
Fortunately for us however, all those geologists and nuclear physicists WHO DO THIS FOR A LIVING also considered this possibility ...at least once. While feeding your paranoias about how a radiometric dating process could go wrong, El Futerino has neglected to make any mention of the specific methodologies of conducting radiometric dating designed to account for this.
For example, for a radiometric estimate to be given on a sediment layer, the radioisotope sample needs to not only be in an isolated pocket (which is to say, neither dispersed nor visibly shifted), but the sediment layer also needs to be acceptably (which is to say, usually entirely) free of naturally occuring traces of the decay product. Sometimes this is not possible, and small allowances of the decay product are permitted - but in such situations it is also protocol to give as liberal an estimated range as possible, as well as attempting to corroborate the finding with an additional source (if at all possible).
It is hardly the matter of zealous, inconsiderate guesswork that Futey attempts to depict it as. It's almost like he's pushing an agenda or something..

Last point!

As I've already mentioned, geologists are not in the practice of using clearly compromised samples when mounting an honest scientific inquiry. They have methodological protocols in place specifically to assure that anything they find is the result of the passage of time, and not various improbable and obvious contaminations. If you want to see an example of methods being abused to produce intentionally misleading findings, you need look no further than the examples mentioned later in Futey's piece.


Several examples are given, citing apparent inaccuracies in various radiometric dating methods when applied to settled lava flow. Hot molten lava, of course, does not conform to the necessary qualities of sedimentary dating, particularly in their capacity to trap foreign materials from the atmosphere and nearby sources into the rock with their heat and pressure, and also the contamination problems associated with reducing the rocks and the isotopes within to a fast moving fluid state. This is why igneous rocks are almost never used as indications of solid geological time - there is too much room for intervening factors.

Futey also mentions how "the shells of living mollusks have been dated at up to 2,300 years". Carbon-14 dating is based on the statistically predictable presence of trace percentages of the radioactive carbon isotope, carbon-14, in living things. This is because exposure to high energy sources in the biosphere (such as intense solar radiation) forms said isotopes out of ordinary carbon atoms, and they are carried through the biosphere as the radioactivity of carbon-14 only seldom disrupts the cellular functionality of an organism. Dating with carbon-14 is done on fossils because after the creature has died and become isolated from the biosphere (usually underground), the amount of carbon-14 present in its body is fixed (as opposed to when it is alive, and it is constantly trading molecules with the outside world), and hence decays in a predictable way.
Carbon-14 dating is never done on living organisms by real geologists, simply because it would tell us nothing and would yield results that are inappropriate for the mathematical standards that fossil dating is based on. Are we supposed to be surprised when methods yield inaccurate results when you don't follow the conditions necessary for their application? ..Apparently!
This is like saying that Newtonian equations of motion are fundamentally inaccurate because they don't predict what happens when you throw a helium balloon. (in an atmosphere, that is - it would still work in a vacuum)

The page also mentions carbon dating of coal samples which is (as with almost all coal) in reality, understood to be some 600 million years old, returned carbon-14 results of less than 50,000 years.
Now, suffice to say that 50,000 years is already damningly old for a young-earth creation model, but that doesn't make it true.
One of the other properties of carbon-14 that El Futerino has neglected to mention is that unlike most larger radioisotopes, carbon-14 forms commonly out of regular carbon(-12) under exposure to other sources of radiation. Therefore the quantities of other radioisotopes in the coal samples have it well within their power to convert amounts of carbon that they are exposed to, into carbon-14. And in case you didn't realise, coal has a hell of a lot of carbon in it. See this TalkOrigins piece for more!

In conclusion.. radiometric dating is as reliable a process as its widespread, ubiquitous use in the natural sciences would suggest. In light of your earlier charge, I'm tempted to claim this as my first real critique of a scientific paper - except that it was neither peer reviewed, nor scientific.

For future reference, if you want to be exposed to arguments that are not one-sided and intentionally misleading, I'd recommend reading the title first. Something called "The Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter", from Parent Company, a home-schooling resource group for creationists .. probably should have set some alarms off as to what "presuppositions" they may be working to advance.

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174. Comment #36158 by devolved on April 30, 2007 at 10:37 am

Billy you ask me, "I'll ask you again. By your reasoning, do analagous structures argue for more than one creator?"

The PBS website definition:
analogous structures: Structures in different species that look alike or perform similar functions (e.g., the wings of butterflies and the wings of birds) that have evolved but do not develop from similar groups of tissues, and that have not evolved from similar structures known to be shared by common ancestors.

The Bible is clear that there is only one God who created different kinds of living creatures separately. There's no reason why the one God should not use common design principles in differently created kinds. So by my reasoning the answer is no.

You obviously wouldn't expect me to buy into any of the presppositional biases in the PBS definition.

I can't see this exchange going much further although I'd like to know more about your Christian experience and why you no longer believe.

Just about the best CMI link I can leave you with, hopefully addressing just about everything you've raised is below.

http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/2610/

If that doesn't satisfy you who don't you enter the lion's den and pit your considerable intellect against the creation scientists directly.

I genuinely wish you well.

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175. Comment #36180 by BillySands on April 30, 2007 at 12:30 pm

devolved

analogous structures: Structures in different species that look alike or perform similar functions (e.g., the wings of butterflies and the wings of birds) that have evolved but do not develop from similar groups of tissues, and that have not evolved from similar structures known to be shared by common ancestors.

Now, you said homologus structures were evience of a single designer. To clarify the point you were trying to make, homologus structures are based on a common plan- Forexample the vertebrate wing, flipper or foot are variations of the pentadactyl limb. Because there are undeniable similarities, you claim there is one creator. However, insects have wings, "flippers" and feet, but they are structurally very different. Surely then, by your logic, there must be more than one designer. Afterall, are you telling me that you would look at a bike and a car and conclude there was only one designer?
The trouble is you then undermine your attempts to reason and reveal your true position here:

The Bible is clear that there is only one God who created different kinds of living creatures separately. There's no reason why the one God should not use common design principles in differently created kinds. So by my reasoning the answer is no.

So If it disagrees with the bible, it must be wrong then? It appears that you only sparingly use reason. Can you see why we dont buy this?

You obviously wouldn't expect me to buy into any of the presppositional biases in the PBS definition.

That's correct! what is the most likely possibility? one where the theory of evolution works perfectly well without a god or one that requires one?
Hint: god only complicates any theory by needing to explain him too. Without evidence, I have no more reason to believe in god as I do in fairies. At least you admit your presupposition, but that is NOT evidence or logic. We need EVIDENCE!

If that doesn't satisfy you who don't you enter the lion's den and pit your considerable intellect against the creation scientists directly.

I already have! I got one reply that I trashed and have heard nothing since. I also challenged http://christiananswers.net/ , http://clarifyingchristianity.com/ and http://www.lookinguntojesus.net/ . None of them replied. I have also been on David Robertsons site - fortunately not every one there is as innane as he is!

I genuinely wish you well.

You too

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176. Comment #36195 by BillySands on April 30, 2007 at 1:08 pm

Robert
Great post. All I would add to that is that a lot of the carbon that molluscs use to make their shells comes from dissolved carbonaceous minerals - like calcite and aragonite found in rocks. this is already ancient and 14C levels are negligible, this gives the artificially old dates for mollusc shells

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177. Comment #36302 by Robert Maynard on April 30, 2007 at 9:25 pm

a lot of the carbon that molluscs use to make their shells comes from dissolved carbonaceous minerals - like calcite and aragonite found in rocks. this is already ancient and ¹⁴C levels are negligible, this gives the artificially old dates for mollusc shells

*smacks forehead* That makes even MORE sense! Boo-yah!

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178. Comment #36304 by Tim Marsh on April 30, 2007 at 9:44 pm

And the regression of devolved's position continues. Let's see how he's responded to small, selective parts of what I've said:

I respect Tim's belief but disagree with his inference.

This from a man (I'm assuming) who has said "Again "It's rubbish" or "I've read it and it's very poor" hardly qualifies." and continually demands open reasoning and evidence. I've spelled out the logic of my claims quite clearly, and yet you feel you don't need to address this and attempt to point out where a supposed error has occured, you're content to say "I disagree"? It's like you're declaring the rules but don't feel you have to follow them!

If God created everything in the beginning evolutionary scientists will have wasted huge amounts of time, money and energy on pursuing the wrong explanation.

That may be one of the biggest 'If's I've ever seen. Not only is 'evolutionary biology might be a big waste of time' a very different statement from 'evolutionary biology is a big waste of time', but it is just good scientific process that the forming of an alternate hypothesis is no reason to reject the original, working, theory, particularly when the alternate hypothesis has no empirical data to support it (and also makes no testable predictions).
Regardless, evolutionary theory is in many ways the centre-stone of modern biology, and it is not a gross exaggeration to claim that 'nothing else in biology makes sense' in it's absence anymore. Even if evolution by natural selection turns out to be only instrumentally useful (my money's on useful and true), one cannot deny (though you try) how exceedingly useful it has been to our understanding of everything in biology.

You are correct in saying that the paradigms are not equally effective. It's rather as if two men are standing on Plymouth Hoe looking out to sea, each looking at the Spanish Armada through a telescope. One says "Those ships are a long way off" and the other say, "They're very close to shore".

Actually, it's not like that. You're implying that scientific inquiry is a kind of conservative approach to a problem, that even if not correct, allows us to get more done. This is a gross underestimate of the rift of utility between the paradigms.
A better analogy would be:
Two students are given a solvable math problem, in which you are required to show your working, and receive marks of every step of correct calculation you do. At this point in time, neither student possesses the knowledge to correctly calculate the final steps of the problem, but they have been taught enough to get most of the way through.
Student A enters with the paradigm "This problem is unsolvable, so why bother?" Student B enters with the paradigm "This problem is solvable, and I could potentially get it if I tried".
Needless to say, not only is Student B going to get more marks, but Student B is also ultimately correct. Even when regarding what are (apparently, according to creationists) uncertainties and unknowns in scientific inquiry, history shows us that you will always be more correct to assume "Even if we don't know it now, we will eventually be able to, and will endevour to get as close as possible", rather than "Not knowing this proves our ignorance, and we should embrace a position of ignorance".

There is not one single technological advance that owes anything at all to a belief in evolution. I'd go further and suggest that if operational science ignored the evolutionary paradigm it would not hinder its activities.

Wow! Talk about making an assertion with no evidence! :o
It looks like this assertion was made without any checking either!
I have already mentioned that evolutionary theory essentially 'ties biology together' in that it allows biologists to remove all pointless speculations of 'purposes' behind adaptations, and view things in survival and transmission paradigms. How about this?
Essentially all the methods in the science of phylogeny are based on the theory of evolution, and phylogenetic findings have formed the basis of most of greatest advances to date in population genetics, relating to gene-transfer (even wikipedia will back this up, and it's free for everyone to check).
Immunology, and many of the treatments devised through it, owes much of its success to the evolutionary understanding of the formation, development, and limitations of the immune system, as well as helping us understand how infections will transmit between species. Not to mention that the actual process of evolution is visible on the level of small pathogens, and the understanding of how viruses and various microbes evolve in bodily environments is vital to understanding, pre-empting, and treating them.
And as you may not have realised, without an evolutionary paradigm, we wouldn't have the understanding of horizontal genetic transmission we have today, which is paving the way for all of the most promising gene-therapy treatments in current research (See Medstrand P, van de Lagemaat L, Dunn C, Landry J, Svenback D, Mager D (2005). "Impact of transposable elements on the evolution of mammalian gene regulation". Cytogenet Genome Res 110 (1-4): 342-52. for more information, it should be on Google Scholar).
Your last claim, about biology getting on just fine without evolutionary theory, is so baseless it's difficult to address. But I'll just reiterate, the evolutionary paradigm allows us to view all biological structures in terms of functionality, survival adaptation, and generational transmission. No other paradigm (least of all some predictionless 'design' paradigm) yields as much success in understanding why biology is the way it is.
So to be frank, evolution has already made too much of a contribution to science to be 'scrapped from the record', ever. Anything shocking we're likely to find in the future will be more information about how evolution works, since we've already settled whether it works.

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179. Comment #36307 by kkant on April 30, 2007 at 9:56 pm

Once again, nice responses to devolved folks. Talk about an ass-kicking. :)

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180. Comment #39513 by Fade on May 11, 2007 at 3:34 am

Question : How do you get all the dead babies out of Limbo?
Answer : With a pitch fork.

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