Is Darwin's Theory of Evolution True? Part 4.0

  • Thread starter Thread starter Techno2000
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Glark said:
40.png
Richca:
We find in each of the six days of creation that it is either prefaced by (days 2-6) or said ‘And God said’ let there be this or let there be that.
Click to expand...
The “heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1) were created before the first “And God said …” (v.3). The earth was initially in “darkness” (v.1) and then God created “light” (v.3).

So it seems there was more to creation than just the “six days”.
Click to expand...
Yes, I would agree. I would also agree that God’s initial creative act are the ‘heavens and the earth’ of Genesis 1:1 which includes the waters and darkness of verse 2 and possibly even ‘air’ or what we would call earth’s atmosphere depending on how one translates the hebrew of the last part of verse 2 ‘and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters’. The hebrew word (ruah) for ‘spirit’ here can also mean breath or wind so it depends on the context of the text. If one translates the hebrew as ‘and the wind of God was moving over the face of the waters’ than I’m not to sure how you have wind moving over the face of the waters without the ‘air’ or earth’s atmosphere. The ancient Israelites obviously did not have a modern scientific understanding of what we call air or the earth’s atmosphere. However, they were certainly aware of the natural phenomena taking place in the immediate heaven above the earth such as wind, clouds and storms from which falls rain, hail, snow and associated phenomena of lightening and thunder.

Where we might find the english word ‘air’ as translated from the hebrew Old Testament in english bibles is actually from the same hebrew word (shamayim) which is usually translated ‘heavens or heaven.’ So, for example, in Gen. 1:26 in the RSV-CE, we have ‘…and over the birds of the air…’ The hebrew word (shamayim) translated here ‘air’ is the same hebrew word for ‘heavens’ in verse 1. If God’s work on the second day concerning the making of the firmament or expanse dividing the waters from the waters is understood to be the immediate heaven above the earth where the clouds are formed and rain falls to the earth, than what we call the earth’s atmosphere the Israelites simply called heaven or rather what God called the firmament. In this case, ‘ruah’ would be better translated ‘spirit’ which is the translation I personally prefer.
 
Last edited:
(continued)

If one translates the hebrew ‘ruah’ as wind than whatever the ’ natural science’ involved with this phenomenon such as the concepts of air or the earth’s atmosphere, for the sacred writer and the Israelites its a part of God’s creation. The sacred writer of Genesis 1 does not get involved with all the specifics of creation (which is sort of what I’ve been doing concerning the ‘air’) and all the natural phenomena of it. Genesis 1 is like a condensed summary of the ‘major’ parts or natural phenomena of the world which could be readily understood to the simple and uneducated folk of his immediate audience. The sacred writer obviously doesn’t list all the natural phenomena of creation in Genesis 1 such as rain, snow, fire, mountains and hills, rivers, etc., such like phenomena of God’s works can be found in other texts of the Bible such as in Daniel 3:28-68 or in the psalms. Whatever the sacred writer doesn’t specifically mention in Genesis 1 is all contained under the phrase ‘the heavens and the earth’ from verse 1. The ancient Israelites and other sacred writers of the Old Testament understood this as can be found in numerous texts of the Old Testament as well as the New Testament.

I kind of got side-tracked here. In conclusion, I believe Gen. 1:2 is a description of the ‘state’ of the heavens and the earth after God’s initial creative act of creating the heavens and the earth of verse 1.
 
Last edited:
curious_cath said:
No, you are not missing anything
Click to expand...
So the theory that all life on earth evolved from microbes is an irrelevance? If so, why is the scientific community obsessed with it and why does it preach it as scientific dogma?
 
curious_cath said:
Analysing the style of the narrative is a good starting point. Then you probably recognize the 4 distinctive literary styles and sources of the Pentateuch: J, E, D, P (Jahvist, Elohvist, Deutoronomic, Priestly). Etc.
Click to expand...
No, that’s news to me. Do you consider Noah’s Flood to be myth?
 
curious_cath said:
Oh really? Then how is it that people talk to God and God talks to people? How do people know it is God? God cannot be restricted to time or space. Jesus also says “nobody has seen the Father, only the Son”. Where do you see any piece of real, literal history?
Click to expand...
Sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
 
So the bottom line is it can no longer be claimed a two person bottleneck is impossible. Diversity was built in.

It is all coming together folks. Another one falls.
 
Last edited:
It is an irrelevance for you if you choose so. But it is very important for scientists.
 
You talked about “real, literary history” in the Old Testament. What is the distinction, in your views, between real, literal and mystical history? God talking from the clouds or from a bush is real and literal?
 
What do scientists use it for? For example, drug discovery is still trial and error.
 
buffalo said:
So the bottom line is it can no longer be claimed a two person bottleneck is impossible. Diversity was built in.

It is all coming together folks. Another one falls.
Click to expand...
The Discovery Institute is lying again. Unless you are prepared to show much higher mutation rates in humans than have ever been measured before.

Two people have a maximum of four alleles between them. If they were the entire population then you will need to show how hundreds of alleles for some loci can evolve in the time since the population of two.

A population of two has noticeable effects today, as can be seen in modern cheetah populations, which had a bottleneck down to a single family about 10,000 years ago.

rossum
 
Hugh_Farey said:
Haldane’s dilemma was not an unresolvable obstacle to evolution even when JBS Haldane proposed it in 1957, particularly as it only applies in quite specific circumstances. However, he concluded his paper with the words: “I am quite aware that my conclusions will need drastic revision”, and indeed, they have been drastically revised, particularly as regards some of the basic assumptions he had to make in order to carry out his calculations.

I can’t help being slightly amused by your “waiting for proper studies to refute Haldane’s original work”. Were you expecting them just to drop through the letter box? Anyway, try: Nunney, Leonard, ‘The Cost of Natural Selection Revisited’, Annales Zoologici Fennici 40, April 2003, for just what you were waiting for. Sadly, the death of Darwinism is not due any time soon.
Click to expand...
I have read that article long ago. I can only sigh when defenders could only quote Haldane’s caution on his work. As with all scientific new assertions, caution to others to verify their work is almost second nature. Peer review etc. All Nunney did was a simulation modeling exercise. MODELING. Probabilistic simulation. Tweak a variable here and there. All done in the office probably.

That doesn’t disprove Haldane’s Dilemma. There was no attempt to prove Haldane’s Dilemma was factually wrong. Yes, I am waiting for studies that actually prove Haldane wrong. Is that all you got? Where were the confirmatory studies? Or is Haldane’s calculations in the ball park that it is futile to rebut?

In George C. Williams’ Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges acknowledged that Haldane’s Dilemma was “never solved”. In his Chapter 10 Other Challenges and Anomalies, he listed Haldane’s Dilemma as the first issue. He went on to described work done by other researchers such as Bruce Wallace and others that touched on this issue but his end conclusion was “not solved”.

Who is George Williams? Wikipedia says :

George Christopher Williams (May 12, 1926 – September 8, 2010) was an American evolutionary biologist.

Williams was a professor of biology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who was best known for his vigorous critique of group selection…

In 1992 Williams was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.[11] He won the Crafoord Prize for Bioscience jointly with Ernst Mayr and John Maynard Smith in 1999. Richard Dawkins describes Williams as “one of the most respected of American evolutionary biologists”.

There are those who are honest enough to admit a problem. And there are others who think they could just gloss over a significant stumbling block to their pet theory.
 
ericc said:
All Nunney did was a simulation modeling exercise. MODELING. Probabilistic simulation. Tweak a variable here and there. All done in the office probably.
Click to expand...
I’m a bit lost as to your problem here. Haldane’s Dilemma is not experimentally based. It is a mathematical calculation based on certain assumptions. It was less than a model, because he couldn’t observe it in the field or test it in any way - lacking modern data manipulating software. Had he been able to, as Nunney could, he would have seen that it wasn’t a true dilemma, and that there was no obstacle to evolution.

Until modelling was possible, it was impossible to deny Haldane his assumptions, and, as George C Williams said, his Dilemma couldn’t be resolved. Now it can. Furthermore, we know so much more about genetic inheritance than we did sixty years ago that even his basic premises are largely irrelevant. Neither Haldane nor Williams, incidentally, thought that the dilemma would not be either resolvable or superseded, and they were right. It rarely does creationists any good to grab evolutionist quotations out of context to try to support creationism.
 
Hugh_Farey said:
I’m a bit lost as to your problem here. Haldane’s Dilemma is not experimentally based. It is a mathematical calculation based on certain assumptions. It was less than a model, because he couldn’t observe it in the field or test it in any way - lacking modern data manipulating software. Had he been able to, as Nunney could, he would have seen that it wasn’t a true dilemma, and that there was no obstacle to evolution.

Until modelling was possible, it was impossible to deny Haldane his assumptions, and, as George C Williams said, his Dilemma couldn’t be resolved. Now it can. Furthermore, we know so much more about genetic inheritance than we did sixty years ago that even his basic premises are largely irrelevant. Neither Haldane nor Williams, incidentally, thought that the dilemma would not be either resolvable or superseded, and they were right. It rarely does creationists any good to grab evolutionist quotations out of context to try to support creationism.
Click to expand...
  1. Haldane’s Dilemma theory remains intact. I haven’t seen any papers refuting his logic. Modeling has always been possible. Either by pen/paper or by computers.
  2. If his assumptions on the values of the parameters he used is not realistic, then we should be able to plug in the corrected values and look at the results of the new calculations. Didn’t see any either. Nunney’s computation is really a sensitivity study. Not a realistic computation of actual data.
That’s why I stand by my earlier statement that I am waiting to see a real study either validating Haldane or invalidating him. It should be as simple as plugging real data into his model and either confirming or not confirming his calculations. Einstein got his maths verified through various experiments done by others. I am waiting for Haldane’s.

Please , I am not trumpeting any creationist stuff. You are only throwing smoke bombs.
 
Well, fair enough; you’ll just have to stand waiting by the mail box while science passes you by. Good luck.
 
Last edited:
So you did not read the article and your claim they are lying in itself a lie. But how can you even know what is true or not?

Yep, they went through all of this. Buggs and Venema are not intelligent design advocates.

This is important:

“A population geneticist named Dr. Steve Schaffner of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, ran a simulation to determine whether a bottleneck of two individuals was possible. He found that, at dates older than 500,000 years ago, a bottleneck could not be ruled out. His analysis of allele frequencies could not distinguish between allele frequencies obtained after a bottleneck of two and those from current genetic data. Dr. Joshua Swamidass, assistant professor in the Department of Pathology and Immunology at Washington University in St. Louis, estimated the time to the most recent four alleles in the genome.”
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top