Population Bottleneck

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If you were correct, don’t you think scientists would’ve thought of that already?
 
edwest said:
That’s nonsense and highly biased.
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Aren’t most people on either side biased? And that’s what I’ve been trying to avoid, as best as I can, by getting scientific answers to my questions. Not atheist scientists but just from scientists who have no dog in this fight.
 
Science is evaluated for it’s integrity, not for the belief of the practitioner.

A person’s beliefs will help guide the scientist in many ways and possibly influence conclusions, but in hard science it’s difficult to mix religion and science because you are usually doing hard observations and data, and making conclusions. One’s belief system, whether atheist or theist, is somewhat irrelevant.
 
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goout said:
Science is evaluated for it’s integrity, not for the belief of the practitioner.

A person’s beliefs will help guide the scientist in many ways and possibly influence conclusions, but in hard science it’s difficult to mix religion and science because you are usually doing hard observations and data, and making conclusions. One’s belief system, whether atheist or theist, is somewhat irrelevant.
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That’s how I always thought of it but there are those who like to insult scientists, calling them biased and atheists.
 
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Even insulting scientists will not stop ongoing research. If scientists aren’t biased, according to some posters here, promoting evolution like a product to Catholics is the only goal. So, carry on…
 
You should go over to the 5K+ thread and ask yourself: What is really going on here? Is this actually about science?
 
A quick opinion on the matter. Most if not all scientists believe in the evolutionary theory. This theory posits a general “climb” from the simple to the complex via a mixture of time, mutation, and natural selection for superiority…with a smattering of exceptions and seemingly sporadic “leaps” in evolutionary complexity. So it seems to me that one might ask what constitutes a human which is being included in this bottleneck. I would posit that a minimum of 10000 closely similar species of “human” didnt pop into evolutionary existence all at once so we might rightly claim that whatever it is we take to be a qualifying member of those under consideration were probably numbered quite a bit less than 10,000 in their recognizable beginnings. We must then consider that the 10000 benchmark must include those individuals who though not exactly similar were similar enough that they fall within the grey areas of progenitors who contributed to the survivability of those evolutionary ancestors who number among the 10000 as well. The other possibility as I see it is that the bottleneck number is considering only those solidly enough in the species to be recognized neither as slightly less evolved nor slightly more evolved but for all intents and purposes having the same identifiable genome. The members of this solidly defined species then underwent some natural catastrophe which reduced their numbers to the benchmark bottleneck number of individuals. How scientists have come to the conclusion that a recognizable population of a particular species never went below 10,000 and then rebounded I have no idea if your sources are accurate. There are many examples of what were at one time deemed critically endangered species rebounding in numbers enough to be taken off the list in our recent history that show that going below 10,000 individuals would not ensure extinction if that was the point.
So**…1.** How do we define what members we are including in our count.
2. If the number includes progenitors as well as their evolved progeny then any number becomes meaningless.
3. If the count includes only those members with the same genome then at the point their genome becomes recognizably different from their progenitors their numbers statistically would have to have been much, much, much smaller than 10,000 unless one believes all 10,000 evolved at the same time within the same generation or two. The odds of this I think every scientist would scoff at.
 
My apologies if I’m being somewhat behind the curve here, I’m giving opinions as I read the thread from first to last…
concerning your first post here, Why is it that your willing to believe that God became fully human on earth in Jesus (while retaining the fullness of his divinity somehow) then performed miracles like water/wine, raising the dead, etc. and yet you would strictly apply the known natural physical laws to Noah and his cargo as if God wouldn’t, or couldn’t have suspended the natural processes of the necessity of food and waist production among the animals within the Ark? And those that Noah wouldn’t have known about? Life finds a way, we see demonstrations of that in our own time even without the evocation of an interfering deity. Frogs have been found alive after decades in a hibernating state, extremophiles have been found in every inhospitable environment yet explored on earth. All manner of living creature has been found alive in the middle of the ocean after who knows how long adrift on the meagrest of flotsam.
Would you think if deemed necessary God would not have ensured their survival?
Where did all that water come from? Um…the tears of Angels? Scienceing.com says water vapor in the atmosphere can be as high as 4%. The earths surface if 70% or so water and grab this…www.pbs.org has an article which says underground reservoirs of water may hold as much as 3x as much water in earths visible oceans. Don’t know if that’s true but the point is if God wanted to manipulate water he seems to have created enough to ready at hand to do whatever was needed. I’m sure many fish were killed. I’m also sure many fish probably survived. Heck perhaps God even created safe zones for saltwater fish. Nobody knows but is it out of the realm of his ability? I think you know its not. I don’t have one single problem with believing the Noah epic and the flood as happening similar to the way its described in the bible…if you include a divinity in the equation. Erase God from the situation and sure, there would be many natural hurdles to overcome. As it is though, its what we have from scripture and that’s all we have as to its possibility.
 
goout said:
One’s belief system, whether atheist or theist, is somewhat irrelevant.
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In the pursuit of truth, one’s belief system is also relevant. For example, when one is investigating the cause or causes of a phenomenon, such as the origin of the first living cell, and he/she noticed that natural processes alone are inadequate to explain it, a theist would welcome a hidden or unobservable cause, God, to explain the phenomenon, while an atheist would persist, against all odds , in saying that the first living cell was produced entirely by chance. Of course, you may say, that God is irrelevant in a scientific inquiry. Yes, but it is not irrelevant in the pursuit of truth! There are times when scientific inquiry reaches an impasse or is inadequate, and one must have recourse to philosophy to find the cause of the phenomenon. Here is where your belief system becomes important. A theist would welcome God as an unobservable Cause who guides natural forces to produce the first living cell, while an atheist, who pretends to remain a scientist only and not also a philosopher, would persist, against all odds , that the first living cell was produced entirely by blind natural forces. Since, from a human standpoint, the production of the first living cell was a most improbable event , the atheist who insists that it happened solely by chance, is giving a less satisfactory explanation than the theist who recognizes a hidden Cause for the phenomenon. Note that in both cases an act of faith is being made. The theist is making an act of faith in the power of God to direct natural forces in the production of life, while the atheist is making an act of faith in the power of blind natural forces to explain a most improbable event. You see, your belief system spells the difference between being able to give an adequate explanation or not.

By the way, I am a very busy man and am actually stealing time only from my busy day to come to the CAF, so I may not be able to respond to your posts right away. But please do not hesitate to post your reactions and perspective anyway, and I will respond as soon as I can.
 

A brief history of human evolution: challenging Darwin’s claim​

The fossil records today show few intermediate forms; on the other hand, we see fully-formed living species seem to emerge suddenly without any evolutionary transitional form between them. This lack of factual evidence is enough to back their claim that all living species are created separately, and that life appeared on earth all of a sudden and fully-formed. Derek V. Ager, a famous British evolutionist admits this fact by saying;
“The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of Orders or of Species, we find – over and over again – not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another.”(Ager [1976]
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The fact that all living species were created separately, suddenly and fully-formed without any evolutionary ancestor is yet again backed by evolutionist biologist Douglas Futuyma, who claimed,
“Creation and evolution, between them, exhaust the possible explanations for the origin of living things. Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from pre-existing species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must indeed have been created by some omnipotent intelligence.”(Futuyma [1983]
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Fossil records today back this claim that all living species emerged fully developed and in a perfect state on earth.

(https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41257-018-0014-2#CR1))
 
cont’d
“We then move right off the register of objective truth into those fields of presumed biological science, like extrasensory perception or the interpretation of man’s fossil history, where to the faithful [evolutionist] anything is possible – and where the ardent believer [in evolution] is sometimes able to believe several contradictory things at the same time.”(Zuckerman 1970a, b)
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Keeping all the arguments and counter arguments in mind with respect to the theory of man’s evolution, I shall conclude by quoting a few sentences from Harun Yahya’s book, ‘Fascism: The Bloody Ideology of Darwinism’ ,
“…the theory of evolution is a claim evidently at variance with scientific findings. The theory’s claim on the origin of life is inconsistent with science, the evolutionary mechanisms it proposes have no evolutionary power, and fossils demonstrate that the intermediate forms required by the theory never existed. So, it certainly follows that the theory of evolution should be pushed aside as an unscientific idea.”(Yahya 2002a, b, c)
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Richard C. Lewontin who is a well-known geneticist and an evolutionist from Harvard University claims that he is first and foremost a materialist and then a scientist. He confesses;
“It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, so we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”(Lewontin 1997)
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So, in short, the evolutionists who give materialist answers to the hundreds of questions that arise in the conscious thinking mind of the modern man today, are not only further creating confusions but have in a way failed to satisfy the logical and rational human mind.
 
Not familiar with it. Does it have anything to do with your topic, Population bottleneck?
 
I just googled it. It looks like this would be a good introductory article about it: What is the Gap Theory

Honestly, I think that this would only deflect your thread, but if you are really interested about it, then you can just open another thread for it.
 
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