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HansTrappist
Guest
He said. She said. Meh.
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cornbread_r2
Guest
The ToE contends that the best adapted survive. If environmental conditions favored antelopes without legs, for some weird reason, antelope populations without legs would survive because they were best adapted to the environment.
From wiki:
Devolution, de-evolution, or backward evolution is the notion that a species can change into a more “primitive” form over time. Devolution presumes that there is a preferred hierarchy of structure and function, and that evolution must mean “progress” to “more advanced” organisms. This may include the idea that some modern species that have lost functions or complexity accordingly must be degenerate forms of their ancestors. It should be noted though, that according to the definition of evolution, what is described as devolution is itself evolution.
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Voltaren
Guest
This is a common tactic by a dishonest creationist. He will say there are two-sides to the argument without pointing out that one side has has all the evidence and the other side has distortions and lies.
Why don’t you stop supporting fraudulent pseudoscience and become an honest person?
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Voltaren
Guest
Yes, really. If your religion disagrees with evolution, your religion is wrong. Just like if your religion disagreed with the atomic theory, your religion would be wrong.Really now…
The world is how it is, not how different religions want it to be. Believing your religion against indisputable evidence is worse than blind faith.
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smndtupidisaftr
Guest
How do you call the acquisition of genes that actively pump out drugs that kill them devolution? How do you call the development of systems that routinely change their antigens so that they escape the host immune system devolution?
I work in a lab that studies E. coli and these bugs will be put in the same test tube for months and still survive. All of the nutrients deplete, yet they evolve in order to survive the nasty environment. And when you plate them after a long incubation, they look completely different than E. coli. That’s not “devolution”, that’s speciation at the bacterial level.
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theistgal
Guest
I’m not nuts about the theory of gravity, either, but what can you do?
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InJesusItrust
Guest
So wait, God can turn bread into flesh, smite all the first born of Egypt, tear down the walls of Jericho, part a sea (supernatural events) and yet naturalist philosophy is unquestionable and anyone who questions it is a kook?
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Rich_Olszewski
Guest
In a commentary on Genesis authored as Cardinal Ratzinger titled “In the Beginning…” Benedict XVI spoke of “the inner unity of creation and evolution and of faith and reason” and that these two realms of knowledge are complementary, not contradictory
:
“We cannot say: creation or evolution, in as much as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, which we just heard, does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the ‘project’ of human persons comes from, or their inner origin, or their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary – rather than mutually exclusive – realities.”
– Cardinal Ratzinger, In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall [Eerdmans, 1986, 1995], see especially pages 41-58)
God is ultimately the Creator of all things however He chose to do the creating.
Pope Benedict XVI warned against fundamentalists’ literal interpretations of the Bible:.
The pontiff told a gathering of intellectuals and academics in Paris that the structure of the Bible “excludes by its nature everything that today is known as fundamentalism. In effect, the word of God can never simply be equated with the letter of the text,” Benedict said.
Benedict praised scientific progress, but cautioned that evolution raises philosophical questions that science alone cannot answer. In the book, he stopped short of endorsing what is known as “intelligent design.”
:
“We cannot say: creation or evolution, in as much as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, which we just heard, does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the ‘project’ of human persons comes from, or their inner origin, or their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary – rather than mutually exclusive – realities.”
– Cardinal Ratzinger, In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall [Eerdmans, 1986, 1995], see especially pages 41-58)
God is ultimately the Creator of all things however He chose to do the creating.
Pope Benedict XVI warned against fundamentalists’ literal interpretations of the Bible:.
The pontiff told a gathering of intellectuals and academics in Paris that the structure of the Bible “excludes by its nature everything that today is known as fundamentalism. In effect, the word of God can never simply be equated with the letter of the text,” Benedict said.
Benedict praised scientific progress, but cautioned that evolution raises philosophical questions that science alone cannot answer. In the book, he stopped short of endorsing what is known as “intelligent design.”
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smndtupidisaftr
Guest
Pope Benedict hits the nail on the head. The theory of evolution has no bearing on philosophy.
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Faith1960
Guest
In a commentary on Genesis authored as Cardinal Ratzinger titled “In the Beginning…” Benedict XVI spoke of “the inner unity of creation and evolution and of faith and reason” and that these two realms of knowledge are complementary, not contradictory
:
“We cannot say: creation or evolution, in as much as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, which we just heard, does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the ‘project’ of human persons comes from, or their inner origin, or their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary – rather than mutually exclusive – realities.”
– Cardinal Ratzinger, In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall [Eerdmans, 1986, 1995], see especially pages 41-58)
God is ultimately the Creator of all things however He chose to do the creating.
Pope Benedict XVI warned against fundamentalists’ literal interpretations of the Bible:.
The pontiff told a gathering of intellectuals and academics in Paris that the structure of the Bible “excludes by its nature everything that today is known as fundamentalism. In effect, the word of God can never simply be equated with the letter of the text,” Benedict said.
Benedict praised scientific progress, but cautioned that evolution raises philosophical questions that science alone cannot answer. In the book, he stopped short of endorsing what is known as “intelligent design.”
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KP3243
Guest
Geosphere is when the earth was just rocks then it evolved into the biosphere is where life could exist then God created man.
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HansTrappist
Guest
The answer to your point is that there are some things that random mutation can do and it is certainly capable of explaining some simple features of life. But random mutation has to work with pre-existing cellular machinery, so there is a very limited number of things it can do. Sure, random mutation might blow up a bridge or build a dam with genetic debris. If such an event happened to do the organism some good, then it would be favored by natural selection. In a sense, that is what happened with the Antartic fish that have evolved what amounts to an antifreeze protein in their blood, but this type of example likely marks the far boundary of what random evolution can do.
As to E. coli, Michael Behe notes that:
Over the past decade E. coli has been the subject of the most extensive laboratory evolution study ever conducted…Over the course of the whole experiment, perhaps ten trillion, 10^13, E. coli have been produced. Although that sounds like a lot, it’s virtually nothing compared to the number of malarial cells that have infested the earth. In the past fifty years there have been about a billion times as many of those as E. coli in the Michigan lab, which makes the study less valuable than our data on malaria.
Nonetheless, the E. coli work has pointed in the same general direction. The lab bacteria performed much like the wild pathogens: A host of incoherent changes have slightly altered pre-existing systems. Nothing fundamentally new has been produced. No new protein-protein interactions, no new molecular machines. As with thalassemia in humans, some large evolutionary advantages have been conferred by breaking things. Several populations of bacteria lost their ability to repair DNA. One of the most beneficial mutations, seen repeatedly in separate cultures, was the bacterium’s loss of the ability to make a sugar called ribose, which is a component of RNA. Another was a change in a regulatory gene called spoT, which affected en masse how fifty-nine other genes work, either increasing or decreasing their activity. One likely explanation for the net good effect of this very blunt mutation is that it turned off the energetically costly genes that make the bacterial flagellum, saving the cell some energy. Breaking some genes and turning others off, however, won’t make much of anything. After a while, beneficial changes from the experiment petered out. The fact that malaria, with a billion fold more chances, gave a pattern very similar to the more modest studies on E. coli strongly suggests that that’s all Darwinism can do.
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HansTrappist
Guest
(cont.)
Also, You should ask yourself, How is it that malaria so easily gained a resistance to chloroquine but is unable to defeat the sickle mutation? Are there problems that are even harder for evolution than dealing with sickle hemoglobin? Problems that are for all intents and purposes beyond the reach of RANDOM mutation? The answer is that Darwinian (random) mutation can deal quickly and easily with some problems, but slowly if at all with others. There is a mathematical limit to what random mutation is able to achieve in nature.
In the Edge of Evolution, Michael Behe helps clarify this point:
Let’s compare the two numbers for the odds of achieving resistance to atovaquone, where just one mutation is needed, versus chloroquine, where (presumably – since if a single mutation could help, chloroquine resistance would originate much more frequently) two are needed. The odds are, respectively, one in a trillion (10^12) and one in a hundred billion billion (10^20). The ratio of the two numbers shows that the malarial parasite is a hundred million times (10^8) less likely to develop resistance to chloroquine than to atovaquone. This is reasonable since the genome size of the malarial parasite is in the neighborhood of a hundred million nucleotides. The implication is that if two amino acids in a protein have to be changed instead of just one, that decreases the likelihood of resistance by a factor of about a hundred million.
Even though the odds are tremendously stacked against it, P. falciparum (malaria) was able to develop chloroquine resistance because there are an enormous number of parasitic cells (about a trillion) in an infected patient’s body, and about a billion infected people in the world in a year. So the parasite has the population numbers to get around the terrible odds. Spontaneous resistance to atovaquone can be found in roughly every third sick person. Spontaneous resistance to chloroquine can be found perhaps in every billionth sick person, and since there are usually close to a billion sick people on the planet every year or so, that means chloroquine resistance is usually waiting to be found in at least one person, somewhere in the world, at any given time.
Suppose that P. falciparum were not quite as prodigious as it actually is. What if, instead of a trillion malarial cells in the typical sick person, there were only a million? How long would it then take for chloroquine resistance to pop up? If all other things were equal, it would take about a million years. The reason is that if there were fewer parasites per person, and therefore fewer in the world’s population, then the parasite would have to wait a proportionately longer amount of time for the right combination of mutations to come along. The number of players in the lottery would be decreased a millionfold, so the length of time needed to get a winner would be increased a millionfold.
This straightforward example carries an obvious implication. Species in which there are fewer living organisms than malaria (again, other things being equal) will take proportionately longer to develop a cluster of mutations of the complexity of malaria’s resistance to chloroquine. Let’s dub mutation clusters of that complexity – 1 in 10^20 – “chloroquine-complexity clusters,” or CCCs. Obviously, since malaria is a microbe, its population is far more vast than any species of animal or plant we can see with the unaided eye. Virtually any nonmicroscopic species would take longer – perhaps much, much longer – to develop a CCC than the few years in which malaria managed it
Behe goes on to conclude that:
No mutation that is of the same complexity as chloroquine resistance in malaria arose by Darwinian (random) evolution in the line leading to humans in the past ten million years. Instead of concentrating on us humans, we can look at the odds another way. There are about five thousand species of modern mammals. If each species had an average of a million members, and if a new generation appeared each year, and if this went on for two hundred million years, the likelihood of a single CCC appearing in the whole bunch over that entire time would be only about one in a hundred. Let that sink in for a minute. Mammals are thought to have arisen from reptiles and then diversified into a spectacular array of creatures, including bats, whales, kangaroos, and elephants. Yet that entire process would – if it occurred through Darwinian mechanisms – be expected to occur without the benefit of a single mutation of the complexity of a CCC. Strict Darwinism requires a person to believe that mammalian evolution could occur without any mutation of the complexity of this one.
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HansTrappist
Guest
(cont.)
Behe goes on to note that:
The development of chloroquine resistance isn’t the toughest problem that evolution faces. We know that for certain, because the malarial parasite solved that problem but hasn’t solved others, such as sickle hemoglobin. How much more difficult than a CCC would a challenge have to get before Darwinian (random) evolution would essentially be ineffective, even for simple single-celled creatures such as malaria?
Recall the odds against getting two necessary, independent mutations are the multiplied odds for getting each mutation individually. What if a problem arose during the course of life on earth that required a cluster of mutations that was twice as complex as a CCC? (Let’s call it a double CCC.) For example, what if instead of the several amino acid changes needed for chloroquine resistance in malaria, twice that number were needed? In that case the odds would be that for a CCC times itself. Instead of 10^20 cells to solve the evolutionary problem, we would need 10^40 cells.
Workers at the University of George have estimated that about 10^30 bacterial cells are formed on earth each and every year. If that number has been the same over the entire several-billion-year history of the world, then throughout the course of history there would have been slightly fewer than 10^40 cells, a bit less than we’d expect to need to get a double CCC. The conclusion, then, is that the odds are slightly against even one double CCC showing up by Darwinian processes in the entire history of life on earth.
Put more pointedly, a double CCC is a reasonable first place to draw a tentative line marking the edge of evolution for all of life on earth. We would not expect such an event to happen in all of the organisms that have ever lived over the entire history of life on this planet. So, if we do find features of life that would have required a double CCC or more, then we can infer that they likely did not arise by a Darwinian (random) process.
As we’ll see, life is bursting with such features…
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