Transitional Fossils and the Theory of Evolution in relation to Genesis Accounts

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Techno2000 said:
How many “ slight modifications ” that
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Phrases similar to “a boatload” come to mind. If I tell you how to get from Washington DC to Atlanta GA, do you need to know where every crack or pothole in the pavement and slight curve in the road is? How about where and at what angle the sun will hit the windshield?
 
whatistrue said:
With a large enough sample size, even minuscule probabilities can become common. And given the sheer number of individual life forms that have ever existed and the amount of time that has passed, the sample size is extremely large. So probability (aka the odds) also supports evolution.
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One has to look at search space and for many of the odds they are well beyond the UPB.
 
whatistrue said:
And whether you can “see” something has no bearing on its existence or likelihood.
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At last. That kind of a non-scientific mindset is, as we have been posting throughout this thread, exactly what is required to believe in macroevo. Thanks.
 
Eric_Hyom said:
Nothing can happen without God; whether it was evolution or Genesis. Because God is needed, I will stick with Genesis.
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That is an incredibly flimsy argument. I don’t see how sentence 2 follows from sentence 1 at all.
 
Truth is derived by argument. It is how we come to see which ideas are true and which aren’t.

How else do we find truth?
 
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whatistrue said:
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Techno2000:
How many “ slight modifications ” that
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Phrases similar to “a boatload” come to mind. If I tell you how to get from Washington DC to Atlanta GA, do you need to know where every crack or pothole in the pavement and slight curve in the road is? How about where and at what angle the sun will hit the windshield?
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Well, the slight modifications of the marbled crayfish is proclaimed throughout the evolutionary world.
 
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Was that supposed to be relevant to my post, or was it just a gratuitous statement with no point or meaning?
 
Eric_Hyom said:
The creation of the universe is history, and you can’;t change history. Either at least 'One God created the universe and life, or there is no god.
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Again, phrase two does not follow from phrase one. At all. Genesis is not proven true by the existence of God.

Genesis’ creation account is, however, proven false by the multitude of observations that prove it does not match up with observation.
 
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whatistrue said:
Was that supposed to be relevant to my post, or was it just a gratuitous statement with no point or meaning?
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Scientists who are studying the marbled crayfish want to know every crack or pothole in the pavement and slight curve in the road.
 
Techno2000 said:
How many “ slight modifications ” that Darwin spoke about, do you estimate it took, for evolution to go from the first Cell, to the millions of different plant and animal species we have on Earth ?
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Let’s start by estimating the number of generations between the first life and ourselves.
Code: 
                           From      To  Elapsed Generation Num. Generations  Modern Examples
                           -----    ---  ------- ---------- ----------------  ---------------
Single celled prokaryote   3.5Ba     2Ba  1.5By   6 hours     2191500000000   E. coli    30 mins
Single celled eukaryote      2Ba   500Ma  1.5By   1 day        547875000000   Paramecium  6 hours
Simple Chordate            500Ma   400Ma  100My   6 months        200000000   Amphioxus   1 month
Vertebrate fish            400Ma   350Ma   50My   1 year           50000000   Zebra Fish  4 months
Amphibian                  350Ma   275Ma   75My   2 years          37500000   Frog        1 year
Reptile                    275Ma   200Ma   75My   3 years          25000000   Gekko       2 years
Mammal                     200Ma    70Ma  130My   5 years          26000000   Rat         6 weeks
Primate                     70Ma     2Ma   68My  10 years           6800000   Macaque     4 years
Homo/Human                   2Ma   Today    2My  20 years            100000   Human      20 years
                                                              -------------
                                         Total Generations:   2739720400000
That is approximately 2.7e12 generations. The human genome has 3e9 base pairs, which gives about 2.7e12 / 3e9 = 900 generations per single base pair on average. At 20 years per generation, 900 generations is 18,000 years per base pair, though obviously the elapsed time was shorter earlier when generation times were less.

As I said above, if you are going to be talking about numbers then you need to do the calculations. One mutation the generational equivalent of every 18,000 years does not seem to be excessive.
 
Eric_Hyom said:
Single cell life can survive and reproduce. Now set up a computer to predict how a skeletal system could form. You can’t do it unless you first program thousands of goals. Evolution is not goal driven.
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If you’re expecting to arrive at a skeletal system that actually exists, then obviously the goal would have to be pre-programmed.

But we can easily simulate evolution (which might go in any direction, not just the one it took on Earth) without any pre-set goals.
 
buffalo said:
Look for revealed information outside our own frame of reference.
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Like the Bhagavad Gita? That is revealed information outside most Christians’ frame of reference.

Or are you trying to tell us that what the Discovery Institute published is “revealed information”?
 
rossum said:
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Techno2000:
How many “ slight modifications ” that Darwin spoke about, do you estimate it took, for evolution to go from the first Cell, to the millions of different plant and animal species we have on Earth ?
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Let’s start by estimating the number of generations between the first life and ourselves.
Code: 
                           From      To  Elapsed Generation Num. Generations  Modern Examples
                           -----    ---  ------- ---------- ----------------  ---------------
Single celled prokaryote   3.5Ba     2Ba  1.5By   6 hours     2191500000000   E. coli    30 mins
Single celled eukaryote      2Ba   500Ma  1.5By   1 day        547875000000   Paramecium  6 hours
Simple Chordate            500Ma   400Ma  100My   6 months        200000000   Amphioxus   1 month
Vertebrate fish            400Ma   350Ma   50My   1 year           50000000   Zebra Fish  4 months
Amphibian                  350Ma   275Ma   75My   2 years          37500000   Frog        1 year
Reptile                    275Ma   200Ma   75My   3 years          25000000   Gekko       2 years
Mammal                     200Ma    70Ma  130My   5 years          26000000   Rat         6 weeks
Primate                     70Ma     2Ma   68My  10 years           6800000   Macaque     4 years
Homo/Human                   2Ma   Today    2My  20 years            100000   Human      20 years
                                                              -------------
                                         Total Generations:   2739720400000
That is approximately 2.7e12 generations. The human genome has 3e9 base pairs, which gives about 2.7e12 / 3e9 = 900 generations per single base pair on average. At 20 years per generation, 900 generations is 18,000 years per base pair, though obviously the elapsed time was shorter earlier when generation times were less.

As I said above, if you are going to be talking about numbers then you need to do the calculations. One mutation the generational equivalent of every 18,000 years does not seem to be excessive.
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No, I’m talking about all the fit and unfit modifications it took to become a species. Example if it took 10 modification steps for an artichoke to become an artichoke that has to be added into the equation. And if it took 10 modification steps to become a Cauliflower that would be 20 modification steps total, so on and so on.
 
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rossum said:
You missed the words “local area” in that piece. The first humans in the Americas did indeed appear suddenly. One day there were no humans in the Americas and the very next day a canoe load of humans had landed from the Asian mainland. Species evolve in one place and then spread to other places. All those other places see sudden appearance. You missed a very obvious point with that “local area” specification.
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I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. When Gould says “it appears all at once and ‘fully formed’”, it has nothing to do with migration. Nice try, but no cigar.

In the paragraph previous to that quote, Gould says,
“Niles Eldredge … and I have been advocating a resolution to this uncomfortable paradox … The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change … It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism” ( The Panda’s Thumb, p.182).
The “uncomfortable paradox” he refers to is alluded to earlier in the chapter - ie, “the embarrassment of a [fossil] record that seems to show so little of evolution directly … I wish only to point out that it [the gradualism predicted by Darwin] was never ‘seen’ in the rocks. We [paleontologists] fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study .” (pp. 181-182. Emphasis added ).

Here are some more Gould quotes in the same vein:
“Three billion years of unicellularity, followed by five millions years of intense creativity [the Cambrian explosion] and then capped by more than 500 million years of variation on set anatomical themes can scarcely read as a predictable, inexorable or continuous trend towards progress or increasing complexity [as predicted by Darwinian theory]” (S.J. Gould, The Evolution of Life on the Earth, Scientific America, Vol. 271, No.4, October 1994, p.67)

“… we must understand that [in the fossil record] nothing happens most of the time – and we don’t because our stories don’t admit this theme … The Burgess Shale teaches us that, for the history of basic anatomical designs, almost everything happened in the geological moment [ie, the Cambrian explosion] just before, and almost nothing in more than 500 million years since.” (S.J. Gould, A Web of Tales , Natural History, Oct 1988, pp.16-23)

“Every paleontologist knows that most species don’t change. That’s bothersome … brings great distress … They may get a little bigger or bumpier, but they remain the same species, and that’s not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don’t change, it’s not evolution, so you don’t talk about it.” (S.J. Gould, Lecture at Hobart and William College, 14/2/1980)
 
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