Is Darwin's Theory Of Evolution True? Part Two

[rossum]

Jesus said, “But from the beginning of creation, God created them male and female” - Mark 10:6. Adam and Eve being created 14 billions years after the beginning of creation hardly sounds like they were created at “the beginning of creation”.

No, they were created about 120 hours or more after the beginning. Days 1 to 5 had already finished by the time A & E appeared. Jesus was not speaking literally here.

Remember that to God billions of years is 0% of His lifetime, just like 120 hours is also 0%. God does not see time as we do: “A thousand years is like a day and a day a thousand years.”

rossum

 

[Rau]

Jesus said, “But from the beginning of creation, God created them male and female” - Mark 10:6. Adam and Eve being created 14 billions years after the beginning of creation hardly sounds like they were created at “the beginning of creation”.

Hmmmm…so is it now your position that Adam and Eve lived 14 billion years ago? Or that everything we understand about astronomy and cosmology is bogus, or something else?

 

[LeafByNiggle]

LeafByNiggle:

Here we go again, giving distinct labels to two aspects of the same phenomenon.

Microevolution can be demonstrated as observable fact; macroevolution cannot (for example, no one can demonstrate the evolutionary tale that a piece of a reptile’s jawbone evolved into the bones of the inner ear of a mammal). In other words, it’s a matter of fact verses possible fiction. They may be two aspects of the same phenomenon, but in terms of reality, they couldn’t be further apart.

The ease or difficulty in demonstrating something does not change its essential nature.

anon65111186:

Then again, Humani Generis is nearly 70 years old and our knowledge has increased since, so maybe the Pope would

You’re right - the corruption in the Church is much worst and more ingrained today than it was 70 years ago. It could be the fulfillment of prophesy, in which case it is all leading to something - the Antichrist.

You know your view is off the rails when you have to hypothesize massive corruption in the Church to explain it.

 

[Techno2000]

Techno2000:

goout:

The billions and billions of various viruses and bacteria living in the hospital are “selected” as disinfectants clean out the susceptible ones and leave behind those with ever increasing resistance.

Here we go again…extrapolating microevolution and macroevolution.

Please explain what you mean

A Roach becoming resistant to bug spray…doesn’t necessarily mean it can become a Whale one day.

 

[rossum]

A Roach becoming resistant to bug spray…doesn’t necessarily mean it can become a Whale one day.

But it does mean that it may become a different species of roach.

You also need to be aware that the evolution of a protostome (insects and others) into a deuterostome (tetrapods and others) is not seriously considered by any biologist. The differences start in the development of the embryo.

Again your lack of relevant knowledge is showing. Why do you not learn more about the subject before asking questions with such obvious answers?

rossum

 

[Aloysium]

So far you have done an excellent job describing random variation as it relates to living things. Keep up the good work!

Also correct, if somewhat confusing

To me, and most biologists, adaptation though genetics and evolution are two ways of describing exactly the same thing. Indeed the only different is that evolution is big and adaptation is little. That is like saying the water in Lake Michigan is of a totally different nature than the water in the Walden Pond.

Thank you, I want there to be no doubt that I know what I’m talking about, especially when asserting that random mutation is not a cause of macroevolution, nor even any sort of primary influence in microevolution. A simple experiment that we should not do would be to expose oneself to X-rays, tobacco smoke, Hepatitis C, any sort of mutagen and observe the less that wonderful consequences. The foundations of evolutionary theory - random mutation and natural selection are poorly thought out to say the least.

I take it you agree with what you understood of those particular remarks.

The claim that evolution is merely adaptation to the extreme is understood. I would say that adaptation does occur but not randomly and not merely through natural selection. And, the tree of life is a myth, sort of like the earth being on the back of a turtle. It provides an analogy representing the vastness and complexity of living forms but falls apart if one tries to make causal connections.

From my perspective, the reality of a microbe, a plant, the variety of sea creatures, animals and we ourselves, extends beyond the confines of the physical, that which the raw senses detect. Speciation (the creation of a class of living beings, not necessarily synonymous with its somewhat disputed biological meaning) involves the emergence of new forms of being, not directly the result of genetic mutation, although genomic differences would exist. New types of being arise as living physical forms which exist as part of an environment, which they individually incorporate to grow, mature and procreate. The analogy might be more one of arguing that the water in Walden Pond is just like that in the Alcyonian Lake, when creation would involve a discussion of the earth.

 

[Aloysium]

Glark:

Jesus said, “But from the beginning of creation, God created them male and female” - Mark 10:6. Adam and Eve being created 14 billions years after the beginning of creation hardly sounds like they were created at “the beginning of creation”.

Hmmmm…so is it now your position that Adam and Eve lived 14 billion years ago? Or that everything we understand about astronomy and cosmology is bogus, or something else?

Possibly they were created outside what we consider time. Maybe this entire universe came about as a result of our rejecting God, and His trying to get us back Home. The Garden scene, the crucifixion and final judgement all one event - a religious big bang. At the Centre of all being - the Heart. Who can know the mind of God?

 

[RandomAlias]

RandomAlias:

It would have been for feeling or sensing the movement of prey in the dark.

This is a fine example of the innumerable baseless assumptions that are made in every day in evolution “science”. You have zero evidence that such a stub was super-sensitive to anything. You merely assume the stub conferred some kind of survival advantage because that is what your theory requires.

How shall I respond to anti-science? Patient instruction seems to have failed. Let me try another approach.

Congratulations. You are the new owner of this thread. Throw yourself a party.

If you want to engage in dialogue – which I doubt, based on your record in this thread – you may find me in threads where faith, charity, and humility are in evidence. I hope to see you there.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

Thank you, I want there to be no doubt that I know what I’m talking about, especially when asserting that random mutation is not a cause of macroevolution, nor even any sort of primary influence in microevolution. A simple experiment that we should not do would be to expose oneself to X-rays, tobacco smoke, Hepatitis C, any sort of mutagen and observe the less that wonderful consequences.

The theory of evolution of species readily admits that the vast majority of visible mutations are harmful. So this experiment you describe does not prove anything beyond what is already assumed in the theory. It certainly does not disprove the theory, since all you need are a few beneficial mutations for evolution to work. In the experiment you described above, if you waited long enough and exposed enough people to those mutagens, eventually you would see an occasional small beneficial mutation.

The claim that evolution is merely adaptation to the extreme is understood. I would say that adaptation does occur but not randomly and not merely through natural selection.

I don’t see any scientific mechanism for this happening in every single case. Especially in the case of adaptation to an arbitrary and artificially environment. I am thinking about the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Since the resistance is highly specific to an antibiotic, one is lead to believe that the bacteria had the plans already programmed in some way telling it how to develop to resist that particular antibiotic. But the antibiotic was the result of arbitrary human choice. For the bacteria to be pre-equiped to handle that antibiotic implies that the bacteria has within its physical structure, information about which free-will choices the humans were going to make. If that really were true then we could in theory decode that information and perhaps predict the future development of antibiotics. Wow! Fortune-telling bugs! But if we could do that, why couldn’t we change the future and develop some antibiotic that is not already provided for within the bacteria? The concept of free-will vs God’s omniscience yields a contradiction like this whenever one posits a deterministic means of tapping into God’s omniscience. And being able to decode the potential for antibiotic resistance before it emerges would do just that. I’m not saying that God doesn’t know what course scientists will take. I’m just saying that He is not telling us. So when formulating scientific theory, we do not speculate on what God knows. We restrict science to what we can directly observe.

Speciation (the creation of a class of living beings, not necessarily synonymous with its somewhat disputed biological meaning) involves the emergence of new forms of being…

To turn this philosophical statement into a scientific statement you would have to, at the very least, specify exactly how your idea of speciation differs from the current biological meaning. If you can’t frame the claim in the language of science, it isn’t science. It is philosophy.

 

[Aloysium]

Since the resistance is highly specific to an antibiotic, one is lead to believe that the bacteria had the plans already programmed in some way telling it how to develop to resist that particular antibiotic. But the antibiotic was the result of arbitrary human choice. For the bacteria to be pre-equiped to handle that antibiotic implies that the bacteria has within its physical structure, information about which free-will choices the humans were going to make. If that really were true then we could in theory decode that information and perhaps predict the future development of antibiotics. Wow! Fortune-telling bugs! But if we could do that, why couldn’t we change the future and develop some antibiotic that is not already provided for within the bacteria? The concept of free-will vs God’s omniscience yields a contradiction like this whenever one posits a deterministic means of tapping into God’s omniscience. And being able to decode the potential for antibiotic resistance before it emerges would do just that. I’m not saying that God doesn’t know what course scientists will take. I’m just saying that He is not telling us. So when formulating scientific theory, we do not speculate on what God knows. We restrict science to what we can directly observe.

To turn this philosophical statement into a scientific statement you would have to, at the very least, specify exactly how your idea of speciation differs from the current biological meaning. If you can’t frame the claim in the language of science, it isn’t science. It is philosophy.

Antibiotics work in different ways. The short of it is that antibiotics fall into classes. Penicillins interfere with the building of the cell wall. Others affect protein-building or DNA-copying machinery that is specific to bacteria. Macrolides block ribosome production of proteins. Quinolones cause DNA strands to break and prevent their repair. There’s no fortune-telling involved. The bug has to utilize its resources to find a solution within its armamentarium. They can create proteins which counteract or over-ride the action of the toxic agent. The sort of information that codes for such proteins can be passed among bacteria in the form of plasmids, spreading resistance. This is a really complex area. The chance of a genetic glitch producing a functional protein capable of circumventing or neutralizing an antibiotic is astronomical.

Evolution is not observed. It is speculation, a way to frame raw data. It is as valid as any other nonverifiable hypothesis, and inferior to revealed truth.

There is a meaning that is good enough for general consumption, but concept of species is a hotly disputed area in biology. Of course all science is grounded in philosophy. That the philosophy of science is not essential knowledge in many programs speaks to their neglect of true educational objectives and may in large part be responsible for a lot of bad science today.

 

[Aloysium]

How shall I respond to anti-science?

What made the comment “antiScience”? It sounds more like anti-bad-science, speculation being passed off as fact. A story is created to fit the facts, and whether it has any validity cannot be known.

 

[vz71]

Yes it is. That defence mechanism evolved.

How do we know this?
What evidence do you actually have that tells us the evolution of the defense mechanisms of the creature?

 

[LeafByNiggle]

The chance of a genetic glitch producing a functional protein capable of circumventing or neutralizing an antibiotic is astronomical.

This is a pseudo-scientific claim, since it alludes to a quantitative result (“the chances are very low”) without any mathematical justification of said quantitative result.

Evolution is not observed. It is speculation,…

No more so than the fact that the half-life of radium is 1600 years. That has also not been observed, only speculated from what radium does over a few years.

 

[rossum]

The chance of a genetic glitch producing a functional protein capable of circumventing or neutralizing an antibiotic is astronomical.

Show us your calculations please. You are making a claim about a number here, so you need to show your working.

rossum

 

[rossum]

What evidence do you actually have that tells us the evolution of the defense mechanisms of the creature?

1. We have evidence of evolution.
2. There is nothing in the defence mechanism that could not have evolved, it uses standard biological processes.
3. There is zero evidence of any other process that would produce the same result.

I agree that is not absolute logical proof, but it is good enough for science. As always new evidence will change the way science explains the effect. Absent new evidence, the existing evidence supports evolution.

rossum

 

[OKi]

“The chance of a genetic glitch producing a functional protein capable of circumventing or neutralizing an antibiotic is astronomical.”

YES. This is explained nicely in the video “Information Enigma” featuring Dr. Stephen Meyer.

 

[rossum]

As I am sure your mathematics teacher told you, “Show your working.” If you want an example of the sort of thing that I mean, here is an example of the type of calculation I am talking about:

How complex is God relative to Dembski’s Universal Probability Bound (UPB)? This question is dependent on how much information God contains. God is omniscient, knowing everything; a very large amount of information indeed. However we can put a lower limit on the information contained in God. Given that God inspired the Bible, the minimum amount of information is the amount contained in the Bible. God knows more than is in the Bible; knowing less is not possible.

Looking at one of my Bibles, I find that it has about 30 characters per line, 56 lines in a column and two columns per page. The Old Testament contains 840 pages and the New Testament 240 pages. A total of 1080 pages. This is 30 x 56 x 2 x 1080 = 3628800 characters. For simplicity let us take the number of possible characters as 30, 26 letters plus space and some punctuation. Therefore by the standard probability argument the likelihood of the Bible having arisen by chance is 1 in 30 ^ 3628800. Remember that this is an upper bound, God is less probable than this because He contains more information than is in the Bible.

Working out the numbers, 1 in 30 ^ 3628800 is a probability of 1.8 x 10 ^ -3628942. This is less than the UPB of 10 ^ -150 with a good margin for error.

Now please show us your calculation.

rossum

 

[Techno2000]

“The chance of a genetic glitch producing a functional protein capable of circumventing or neutralizing an antibiotic is astronomical.”

YES. This is explained nicely in the video “Information Enigma” featuring Dr. Stephen Meyer.

Yes excellent video

 

[vz71]

We have evidence of evolution.

There is nothing in the defence mechanism that could not have evolved, it uses standard biological processes.

There is zero evidence of any other process that would produce the same result.

On point 1, you have evidence in other living things of genetic changes.
Not necessarily evidence of this one.
Point 2, just because something is possible does not mean it happened.
Point 3, there is zero evidence of evolution here as well.

I am not going to claim to know how this creature was built.
You seem convinced that evolution did it, but given the evidence it seems a leap of faith.

I remain unconvinced.

 

[Aloysium]

This is a pseudo-scientific claim, since it alludes to a quantitative result (“the chances are very low”) without any mathematical justification of said quantitative result.

No more so than the fact that the half-life of radium is 1600 years. That has also not been observed, only speculated from what radium does over a few years.

Show us your calculations please. You are making a claim about a number here, so you need to show your working.

I say evolutionary theory is pseudoscience.
You say my use of the term “astronomical” is pseudoscience.
Touche sir, you have balanced the metaphysical scales of fairness.

Someone is making the unsubstantiated claims that random electrochemical noise in the genome, under the knife of natural selection is the cause of all the diverse organisms we find on earth. What is supposed to happen in science is to provide evidence supporting that claim. I’ll provide you with an example of what one might to do to convince me, for what it’s worth, of that sort of belief belief:

Either do some meta-analysis on known studies or conduct one’s own to find

• rates of spontaneous or induced genetic mutation
• those that impact on say the bacterial cell membrane in the case of penecillin resistant bacteria
• how those proteins that are viable compare to those that are not

The odds are that the ratio of functional to faulty proteins arising from naturally occurring DNA mutations will be minuscule, for all intents and purposes infinitely small. That’s what reason tells me and what I believe. Others believe differently, but have a dogma to fall back on to justify themselves, but that is all they have - the Emperor has no clothes.