Teaching evolution at a catholic school

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Despite all the solid evidence to the contrary? No, I don’t think I will. Y’know, it should really tell you something when only poorly-constructed papers from crackpot fake-science organizations provide evidence against something.
 

Sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution​

More evidence for IDvolution.

Sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution

It is textbook biology, for example, that species with large, far-flung populations—think ants, rats, humans—will become more genetically diverse over time.
But is that true?
“The answer is no,” said Stoeckle, lead author of the study, published in the journal Human Evolution .
For the planet’s 7.6 billion people, 500 million house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity “is about the same,” he told AFP.
The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
“This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could,” Thaler told AFP.
“another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there’s nothing much in between."

“If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies,” said Thaler. “They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.”

The absence of “in-between” species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said."
 
annem said:
Claiming there is no 'ultimate" truth is merely restating: there is no truth, period.
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There is truth, but it is contingent.

Is 1 + 1 = 2 true? Yes it is. Is it ultimately true? No it is not, because 1 + 1 = 10 in base 2; the first statement is only true in base 3 or greater.

All statements of truth come with assumptions, stated or unstated. Those assumptions come with further assumptions etc. There are assumptions about the language being used, the symbology etc. 1 + 1 = 1 in the symbology for logic (true OR true → true).

And of course: 1 + 1 = 0 (modulo 2)

All truths are contingent; they are true, but they are not independent of the surrounding assumptions, stated or unstated.
 

The death of NeoDarwinism, No Selfish Gene​

“The genome… is best described as a database used by organisms to generate the functions that you and I and others study as physiology.”

“We inherit much more than DNA”

“The number of possible interactions , the number of possible circuits you could form 25,000 genes is 10^70,000. There wouldn’t be enough time over the whole billions of years of the evolution of life on earth for nature to have explored but more than a tiny fraction of those.”

On Dawkins and the selfish gene - “He is totally confused.” “He has misused a metaphor” “He [Dawkins] is philosophically naive and I am afraid he has misled many people for a very considerable period of time.” 40 minutes in

“There are no good or bad genes”

“There are reasons those genes are there”

"The great majority of people we are talking to were educated in biology 30 or 40 years ago and they really have no idea of the sea change that has occurred."

“the house of cards, the citadel if you like is empty, but many people still do not know that.” 54 min

 
Before I respond, I must ask: Are you citing yourself here?

Anyways, a couple things I’d like to point out: First of all, 100k years is a pretty large time window. It’s wide enough for a whole range of global events to occur which cause selective pressure on pretty much every species on Earth. Heck, we’ve done it in less than 100.

Second, a lack of genetic “links” is to be expected. A species that diverts, such as the ancestor of Homo Sapiens and the Chimpanzee, is likely to not exist at all because its daughter species can out-compete it. Don’t really see evidence against anything in this paper, just clarification of evolutionary mechanics and outcomes.
 
annem said:
Again, an answer you may want to rethink. Why bring up slavery ,given the utter lack of a movement in Buddhism to end slavery,
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You are correct. Buddhism has not moved on slavery since the time of the Buddha.

The fourth of the Four Noble truths of Buddhism is the Eightfold Path. The fifth step of the Eightfold Path is Right Livelihood:
[The Buddha said:] “A lay follower should not engage in five types of business. Which five? Business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in intoxicants, and business in poison.” (emphasis added)

– Anguttara Nikaya 5.177
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Slavery has been wrong in Buddhism since the beginning; that has not changed.

As I am sure you have noticed, not all adherents of a religion follow all the rules of that religion, Buddhism and Christianity included.

My point about interpretations of Revelation changing over time remains. Your irrelevant point does not impact my argument.
 
buffalo said:
BTW, the fruitflies have useless additional wings and other features and die out.
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False. For a start, research the many many fruit fly species in Hawaii. There are more fruit fly species there than in the rest of the world put together. A few early arrivals spread out and speciated in an environment with little or no competition.
 

Essential reading…a trillion trillion years or more​

Uh OH! Essential reading for evo supporters.
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When Theory and Experiment Collide

…As other scientists have found with other enzymes, it turned out not to be a snap. The technical details are reported in a paper just published in BIO-Complexity . [2] Here we’ll keep it simple.
Based on our experimental observations and on calculations we made using a published population model [3], we estimated that Darwin’s mechanism would need a truly staggering amount of time—a trillion trillion years or more—to accomplish the seemingly subtle change in enzyme function that we studied.
Now, if I were a Darwinist a result like this would bother me. I’m sure some of my fellow Darwinists would try to dismiss it as irrelevant… but that would bother me all the more.
The excuse for shrugging it off would, I expect, be that the transition we examined isn’t actually one that anyone thinks occurred in the history of life. That’s true, but it badly misses the point. As Ann and I made clear in the paper, our aim wasn’t to replicate a historical transition, but rather to identify what ought to be a relatively easy transition and find out how hard or easy it really is. We put it this way in the paper [2]:
Whether or not a particular conversion ever occurred as a paralogous innovation (or the direction in which it occurred if it did) is not the point of interest here. Rather, the point is to identify the kind of functional innovation that ought to be among the most feasible […] and then to assess how feasible this innovation is.
So, if I had a Darwinist alter ego, here’s the problem he’d be facing right now. To dismiss our study as irrelevant, he’d have to say (in effect) that he sees no inconsistency between these two assessments of the power of Darwin’s mechanism:
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buffalo said:
Uh, the odds go astronomical with more…
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No, the odds reset after a few generations. Evolution is a continuous process. Environments are changing so evolution is always adapting species to those changing environments.
 
rossum said:
No, the odds reset after a few generations. Evolution is a continuous process. Environments are changing so evolution is always adapting species to those changing environments.
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They get worse over time.
 
rossum said:
They are different species of fruitfly. That is macroevolution by definition: the appearance of a new species.

Your denial of macroevolution is incorrect.
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OOOOOkkkkkkk… macro-evolution as we all know does not mean lineage splitting with loss of function. The claim of macro-evolution is that a fruitfly will ultimately mutate into a bat or something much greater.
 
buffalo said:
The claim of macro-evolution is that a fruitfly will ultimately mutate into a bat or something much greater.
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I didn’t know it was possible to be this far from reality.

Evolution is the idea that species respond to selective pressures in a way which results in more competitive individuals surviving and passing on their genes, and these adaptations compound until individuals cannot breed with other descendants of their common ancestors.
 
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Capta(name removed by moderator)rudeman said:
I didn’t know it was possible to be this far from reality.

Evolution is the idea that species respond to selective pressures in a way which results in more competitive individuals surviving and passing on their genes, and these adaptations compound until individuals cannot breed with other descendants of their common ancestors.
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Let’s examine your claim … All living things are descended from a single living cell that random mutations and natural selection acted on over billions of years? Are you an adherent to this view?
 
Well, there were a couple. First off, flies cannot and will not evolve into bats. They serve drastically different purposes in their respective environments, and so there’s no pressure to do so. They also diverged evolutionarily very long ago, and so their common features are just coincidental (like fish and dolphins).

Second, the true claim of evolution is that, like I said, changes accumulate over time to create new species as descendants of common ancestors no longer interbreed. It’s not that flies evolve to bats, but flies evolve to specialized flies that can’t create a lineage of offspring.
 
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