Irreducible complication

DDHv wrote:There are also details spoken of as stupid which on closer examination were determined to be not at all stupid. Example: The "backward" positioning of the photo-receptor cells in mammalian eyes. I leave the discovery of why to the student.

Aand... a big-assed cop-out. Why am I not at all surprised.

aairfccha wrote:

The E wrote:Any given organism is the most optimal organism for its niche, with a small chance that a descendant of that organism will be even more optimal,

Yikes! Logically it is impossible to improve on the most optimal organism unless circumstances change. Besides, evolution is a "good enough" process which can lead to extreme optimisation and specialisation...

True, that was a terrible turn of phrase by me

The E wrote:
True, that was a terrible turn of phrase by me

Less than optimal?

The E wrote:

DDHv wrote:If evolution is any change, in what way can the theory be tested? It has been written that any theory which cannot be falsified is not scientific.

It can be falsified. You just have to prove that the postulated mechanisms for it (i.e. mutation, recombination) cannot produce the postulated results.

Which you are, admittedly, trying very hard to do. But so far, all your arguments have been statistical rather than empirical;
snip

Probability arguments based on evidence are proof for humans. Certainty is an impossibility for anyone but God.

"Dr. Carl Werner,
snip
It is interesting to find a number of fossils, not easily distinguishable from currently living organisms, which don't even have the same genera name. This should mean that they are different.

/"

And? Evolution predicts that change can happen, not that it must. The mechanism at play here is called "stabilizing selection", which occurs when an organism's niche is effectively unchanging over time.

Living fossils aren't a problem for evolution. They are explained perfectly by the theory and are even expected; the term itself goes back to Darwin, and he also managed to find a logically consistent explanation for them.

Putting a fossil into a different genera than the equivalent living organism is a human caused problem.
Also, from: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... isted.html
"
Instead, like birds and some other living animals, the juveniles went through dramatic physical changes during adulthood.

This means many fossils of young dinosaurs, including T. rex relatives, have been misidentified as unique species, the researchers argue. /"

"snip
The only place I know where these columns are being gathered into one data base and work on correlating them is being done is the column project of the Institute for Creation Research.
snip
/"

And? Are you trying to make a point here? If so, what is it?

Did the main stream geologists do this obvious research? The advantage of freedom of theory is that errors are more likely to be noticed by those who disagree with the accepted theory. Improved methods of testing theories are more important than the theories themselves.
Also, I liked UnToSc, and wish there was some way to read faster. Yes, I do practice speed reading, but am still limited to aprox. 3,000 WPM, slower when thinking pauses are needed.

snip
If your theory devolves to "$DEITY did it", it's invalid in the absence of proof for the existence of said deity.

IMO, we can't speak of certainties. The organization of the eighteen currently accepted sub nuclear particles does not speak of random beginnings. They act in a probable manner within the known conservation laws.
There are also details spoken of as stupid which on closer examination were determined to be not at all stupid. Example: The "backward" positioning of the photo-receptor cells in mammalian eyes. I leave the discovery of why to the student.

You are aware that the only people who would think this to be stupid are kids in first or second grade, right.

The Vitamin A aldehyde <> rhodopsin chemistry which detects photons (the only sub nuclear particle we can directly experience) is high energy. The positioning of mammalian rod and cones allows heat produced to be easily removed, so high density of the rhodopsin is possible. The trade off is nerves at the front of the retina, thus the blind spot - the result is high ability to detect light in low light conditions. Note that a form of light guide is part of the design, to get the photons past the nerves.

"snip However, the land bridges can go a long way to explain how the animals could spread from the mountains of Ararat./"

That's not a justification though, not in terms of the theoretical framework you've said you believe in. It works perfectly well within the framework of the accepted theory of Evolution, which states that isolated populations drift apart until they become separate species, but this is something you have specifically called out to be impossible (under the heading of macroevolution).

My turn to say "You don't understand." There is no question on adaption, even to the point of speciation. The question is whether this is an adequate source for novel elements. ID proponents say it is not. Creationists put the baramin (kind) mostly at the family and genera level. Solid genomic sequencing should eventually provide answers on this by determining the boundaries for kind specific genes.
Better adaption just refines what is already there. The English sparrow, after introduction to North America, divided into multiple species quickly, but are all sparrows.
OTOH, the pacific golden plover migrates to Hawaii with about a 6% energy reserve, and there is no reason to believe those islands were ever closer to the mainland. Could they have produced this behavior by gradual adaption? If so, how did they survive the failures?

"BTW, a creationist has suggested that the reason God was insistent on humans spreading from Babel in spite of their determination not to do so just might have been because the ending of the ice age also meant the ending of the land bridges, and He wanted humans across the major land masses./"

Has said creationist also provided proof of the Tower of Babel being real?

Do you insist on certainty? On the probability level, compare the number of primary language families with the number of peoples mentioned in the table of nations. (Genesis 11).
Mitochondrial DNA sequencing and mapping of the mutations found, which is a higher confidence evidence, shows three female sources. The mutation patterns follow the Shem, Ham, Japheth division of nations, with an unknown primary female source about a dozen generations earlier. The Ham group shows a larger number of generations, which may correlate with the African historical custom of earlier marriages.

Tenshinai wrote:

The E wrote:
True, that was a terrible turn of phrase by me

Less than optimal?

Indeed. Good thing that there are selection pressures at play

DDHv wrote:

snip
If your theory devolves to "$DEITY did it", it's invalid in the absence of proof for the existence of said deity.

IMO, we can't speak of certainties. The organization of the eighteen currently accepted sub nuclear particles does not speak of random beginnings. They act in a probable manner within the known conservation laws.

It's adorable how you refuse to actually engage with the arguments.

Here, let me make it simple for you. Disprove the following statement:

"Creationism postulates that currently existing organisms cannot have come into existence through the combination of mutation and selection pressures commonly referred to as Evolution. It instead postulates the existence of a creator entity, which through undefined means has caused currently existing organisms to exist."

It's the reliance on the creator entity, the axiomatic assumption that it has to exist, that makes all forms of creationism invalid. If we construct a logical system, our axioms need to be simple and fundamental. "|x| + |y| >= |x| for all x" is a perfectly valid axiom to use. "God exists and he has created all living beings" is not. Learn the difference.

My turn to say "You don't understand." There is no question on adaption, even to the point of speciation.

No, wrong. If you allow speciation to exist, then your whole argument falls apart.

The question is whether this is an adequate source for novel elements.

But what is a "novel" element? You see, if you say that evolution can't produce novel elements, you have to define what a novel element is in this context, and define a mechanism by which adaptations and mutations are barred from going beyond a certain amount of change. Which you and other creationists have so far failed to do.

ID proponents say it is not. Creationists put the baramin (kind) mostly at the family and genera level. Solid genomic sequencing should eventually provide answers on this by determining the boundaries for kind specific genes.
Better adaption just refines what is already there. The English sparrow, after introduction to North America, divided into multiple species quickly, but are all sparrows.
OTOH, the pacific golden plover migrates to Hawaii with about a 6% energy reserve, and there is no reason to believe those islands were ever closer to the mainland. Could they have produced this behavior by gradual adaption? If so, how did they survive the failures?

To turn this around, what is the purpose of this behaviour if a creator entity exists? Evolution, as we have pointed out, occasionally produces stupefying inefficiencies. When you postulate that there is purpose behind creation, some sort of guiding intelligence, you also have to speculate about the reasoning behind it. So. Here's the deal: Evolutionary theory can explain this. Creationism either can't or refuses to. Guess which theory is more valid, more acceptable? (Hint: It's the one without a sky fairy at its center)

Has said creationist also provided proof of the Tower of Babel being real?

Do you insist on certainty? On the probability level, compare the number of primary language families with the number of peoples mentioned in the table of nations. (Genesis 11).

Yes, actually. There is no evidence that the development of languages started at a given point in time, or that there was a time where there was a universal language spoken all over the world. Also, you should know better than to treat the bible as a primary source, given that there is no generally accepted guide to what parts are factual and which are allegorical.

You see, we know how languages develop, a process not unlike evolution in organisms. Isolated communities develop their own dialects, which eventually develop into full-blown languages that are not "compatible" with each other (like, for example, german and dutch). In order for a theory that bases itself on the Babel story to be valid, it needs to provide proof that that story is true, and that in turn means that it has to prove that that process did not exist prior to the construction of the tower of Babel.

Mitochondrial DNA sequencing and mapping of the mutations found, which is a higher confidence evidence, shows three female sources. The mutation patterns follow the Shem, Ham, Japheth division of nations, with an unknown primary female source about a dozen generations earlier. The Ham group shows a larger number of generations, which may correlate with the African historical custom of earlier marriages.

It's funny how easy it is to predict the points you bring up. Like, you do know that "mitochondrial Eve" is a hypothetical woman or group of women that lived anywhere between 150-230000 years ago, far outside the timeframe suggested by the bible for the age of the universe (!). You claiming that there are "three female sources" is technically accurate in that you can take a given population and go back long enough until you have only three sources for mtDNA, but it doesn't fit into any of the timelines the bible establishes.

How have I not noticed an ongoing evolution vs creationism thread?

DDHv wrote:

The E wrote:snip

Here's the correct definition: Evolution is the process of change in living organisms over time. Devolution does not exist. End of story.

snip

If evolution is any change, in what way can the theory be tested?

Pretty damn easily. Watch multiple generations of a population and monitor their genomes. Do they shift over successive generations as a result of the processes the theory postulates?

It's a pretty clear yes or no test.

It has been written that any theory which cannot be falsified is not scientific.

Fortunately there are constant opportunities to test for the falsification of evolution. It just passes all of those tests.

If you're looking for a theory that cannot be falsified look to absolutely any theory that tries to invoke magic powers or divine intervention as a mechanism in it. THAT is an unfalsifiable proposition. No matter what test result comes back you can always respond with "well it's that way because magic". Or "well it's that way because God". Making it *impossible* to generate a failing test result.

So glad you brought that up. Usually I have to spend interminable amounts of time explaining to creationists that falsification is a concept that matters while they refuse to listen because they can't possibly provide any means to falsify their claims.


<snip lengthy story about "living fossils".... all living fossils are are modern day species which are morphologically highly similar to species they descended from long long ago. Since this is in no way whatsoever an issue for evolutionary theory this is just a pointless distraction intended to impress the uninformed>

In geology, we have many exposed oil well bores, outcrops, cores, cross sections, and seismic data for stratigraphic columns. The only place I know where these columns are being gathered into one data base and work on correlating them is being done is the column project of the Institute for Creation Research.

If you want a look at the entire column, just go look at data from the Williston Basin in North Dakota. They drilled the *entire* column from present day to the Precambrian strata. It's right there, all in one place. No reconstruction and piecing together in a computer program from bits and pieces from all over the world necessary.


https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/documents/P ... /MS-66.pdf


(Or if you prefer, I believe there are something like a couple dozen other places on earth the entire column exists and has had cores drilled.)

gcomeau wrote:Usually I have to spend interminable amounts of time explaining to creationists that falsification is a concept that matters while they refuse to listen because they can't possibly provide any means to falsify their claims.

This, pretty much. DDHv, for any of the nonsense creationists are peddling, ask yourself how said nonsense can be proven.

This requires you to examine the core axioms underlying the theory. If the core axiom is "there is a guiding intelligence behind creation", then you have to provide evidence for its existence, hard, concrete evidence. Not just the sort of statistical arguments you have been posting, since there is a significant difference between "highly improbable" and "impossible" (A difference that you seem unable to fully grasp).

Conversely, the core axioms behind the theory of evolution are:
1. Organisms inherit traits from their ancestors.
2. The mechanisms of inheritance allow for a certain amount of randomness to be injected into the process, producing new variants of those traits.
3. An organisms' fitness is determined by the interplay between its inherited or acquired traits and the environment it's living in.
4. Only organisms with sufficient fitness to reproduce can pass on their traits.

Every single one of these axioms can be proven to be true empirically.

Now, what you have been doing in this thread, DDHv, is doubting the veracity of axiom 2. Your core argument is that the process described in 2 is incapable of producing certain variations, without providing any hint as to what the mechanism for this looks like. You've even gone so far as to declare experimental evidence that directly supports axiom 2 invalid due to microorganisms being a special case, without providing any evidence that the mechanisms observed there are actually invalid for more complex organisms beyond some statistical handwaving.

I'm going to tell you one of the tricks I've used in this thread. Every time you make a post in it, I'm hopping over to http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html and see if whatever new claim you have copied from whatever you were reading that day or week was mentioned there. You see, the entire line of argumentation you're using is so played out and unoriginal that there's an entire FAQ dealing with it.

Conversely, the core axioms behind the theory of evolution are:
1. Organisms inherit traits from their ancestors.
2. The mechanisms of inheritance allow for a certain amount of randomness to be injected into the process, producing new variants of those traits.
3. An organisms' fitness is determined by the interplay between its inherited or acquired traits and the environment it's living in.
4. Only organisms with sufficient fitness to reproduce can pass on their traits.

Every single one of these axioms can be proven to be true empirically.

#1. Proven.
#2. Proven.
#3. Not proven but likely, or very likely if you don´t try to be overly hyperstrict with definitions. Still works perfectly fine as part of the whole though.
#4. Disproven, sort of(depending on definitions). But it doesn´t matter even the slightest to the theory, as the theory is about macro success, and greater fitness tend to be highly advantageous there no matter how many exceptions to the rule that exists.

Tenshinai wrote:#1. Proven.
#2. Proven.
#3. Not proven but likely, or very likely if you don´t try to be overly hyperstrict with definitions. Still works perfectly fine as part of the whole though.
#4. Disproven, sort of(depending on definitions). But it doesn´t matter even the slightest to the theory, as the theory is about macro success, and greater fitness tend to be highly advantageous there no matter how many exceptions to the rule that exists.

Well... it can be nitpicked. Technically since the evolutionary definition of "fit" is that reproduction was successful #4 is tautologically true, but not terribly meaningful.

The E wrote:

Tenshinai wrote:snip

snip
If your theory devolves to "$DEITY did it", it's invalid in the absence of proof for the existence of said deity.

"Creationism postulates that currently existing organisms cannot have come into existence through the combination of mutation and selection pressures commonly referred to as Evolution. It instead postulates the existence of a creator entity, which through undefined means has caused currently existing organisms to exist."

Change "cannot have com" to "is wildly improbable to have come" and I can agree with you

It's the reliance on the creator entity, the axiomatic assumption that it has to exist, that makes all forms of creationism invalid. If we construct a logical system, our axioms need to be simple and fundamental. "|x| + |y| >= |x| for all x" is a perfectly valid axiom to use. "God exists and he has created all living beings" is not. Learn the difference.

Worshiping one who claims to be the truth brings up an interesting question. If highly probable evidence for doubting Him appears, do you choose to doubt? If you don't, it is just as hypocritical and insulting as doubting Him without such evidence would be. This is the major reason why I have decided that the quality of the methods for testing theories are far more important that any theory.
"=gcmeau"Pretty damn easily. Watch multiple generations of a population and monitor their genomes. Do they shift over successive generations as a result of the processes the theory postulates?" IMO is a good one. Examining genomes inherited from the past allows using probability math for evaluation and also sounds like a good one.

The intricate and interdependent patterns of subatomic particles and many other such things (as far as we know them at present) point to a high probability of an intelligent Designer, not a chaotic beginning.
BTW, refusing the use of axioms would not only eliminate the three currently known geometric systems, but would not allow using "The universe is real" and "The universe is understandable, at least in part" axioms, thus preventing science
IMO, it is not possible to directly test any axiom. What can be done is to deduce the results from that axiom, then do a very careful comparison to reality.
IMO, all axioms are faith propositions. This includes any axioms about how the universe began. Have you noticed that the chaos and time biases are leading some people to the theory that our physical laws are a chance result from a chaotic beginning?

"My turn to say "You don't understand." There is no question on adaption, even to the point of speciation./"

No, wrong. If you allow speciation to exist, then your whole argument falls apart.

Speciation is even more important for a Biblical creationist than for an evolutionist. If we need to have every species on Noah's ark, even if all were babies, there would not be room. OTOH, if only a pair of feline, a pair of canine, etc. are needed for all kinds, the primary problem becomes one of having room for enough food. This can be helped some by having immature specimens, of course. Especially with dinosaurs and elephants

"snip Creationists put the baramin (kind) mostly at the family and genera level. Solid genomic sequencing should eventually provide answers on this by determining the boundaries for kind specific genes.
snip the pacific golden plover migrates to Hawaii with about a 6% energy reserve, and there is no reason to believe those islands were ever closer to the mainland. Could they have produced this behavior by gradual adaption? If so, how did they survive the failures?/"

To turn this around, what is the purpose of this behaviour if a creator entity exists?

Do you mean the migration behavior that allows the plover to survive? IMO one purpose is to provide high confidence evidence against chaos. Note that all non-Biblical IKA beginning theories start with the universe already existing, then try to explain its current state. Even the Babylonian ones started with chaos which by chance produced their gods.

You see, we know how languages develop, a process not unlike evolution in organisms. Isolated communities develop their own dialects, which eventually develop into full-blown languages that are not "compatible" with each other (like, for example, german and dutch).

The assumption in evolution is that species level changes can build up to kind level differences. This bias requires ignoring evidence of irreducible complexities, no matter how probable. The assumption of language formation from dialect formation is similar, although we AFAIK do not have any means (such as genomic sequencing is becoming for evolution) of testing the language theory.
BTW, recent developments allow sequencing in groups of thousands of DNA base pairs, instead of small groups. One result has been finding that genetic variation among homo sapiens is over 4%, rather than the earlier estimate of under 1%. 4% of the current minimum estimated difference between Homo and chimps would be over 200,000 base pairs. That is a lot of mutations. Could any probable selection pressure be large enough to sort out that number of difference in the stated time

"Mitochondrial DNA sequencing and mapping of the mutations found, which is a higher confidence evidence, shows three female sources. The mutation patterns follow the Shem, Ham, Japheth division of nations, with an unknown primary female source about a dozen generations earlier. The Ham group shows a larger number of generations, which may correlate with the African historical custom of earlier marriages./"

It's funny how easy it is to predict the points you bring up. Like, you do know that "mitochondrial Eve" is a hypothetical woman or group of women that lived anywhere between 150-230000 years ago,
snip

[/quote]
From: http://www.icr.org/article/new-dna-study-confirms-noah
" Scientists have been comparing the genetic differences between every major people group around the globe. How did those differences arise?

Assuming that God placed the ideal mtDNA sequence into Eve, all those differences arose by mutations since the Genesis 3 curse, about 6,000 years ago. Other scientists measured the rate at which these copying errors occur. Though very slow—we acquire about one mutation every 6 generations—a few dozen mutations could appear after several millennia.

This sets the stage for researchers to compare competing models' predictions against measured mtDNA differences./"
One method of testing works out predictions based on various ideas, then compares with reality. Since you insist the Noah idea is fiction, lets compare with a "Dahak" version. At 50kyears and an initial population of thousands you wind up with a very large number of mutations, probably in the hundreds of thousands. Since I think evolution is fiction, lets compare the minimum for 200kyears, stated to be 681 from our current knowledge. Note also that the mutational variance between the known three primary nodes is very small which argues for a low number of generations from the "eve." This could be from either a very short time span, or longer generations.

The measured variation from the latest information I have is 123 overall. I do have one question here > the number of Mc per cell varies widely by cell type. Do the egg cells only have one per cell? If there are enough Mcs, it should be possible to tell which is an earlier MtDNA, and which is the latest mutation by comparing the relative frequency of the MtDNA variations in one cell.
If anyone finds any research discussing the number of Mc/egg, please post it!!!

Cancel the last sentence.
From: http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/technical/The- ... quence.pdf

Abstract
We have calculated the consensus sequence for human mitochondrial DNA using over 800
available sequences. Analysis of this consensus reveals an unexpected lack of diversity within human
mtDNA worldwide. Not only is more than 83% of the mitochondrial genome invariant, but in over
99% of the variable positions, the majority allele was found in at least 90% of the individuals. In the
remaining 0.22% of the 16,569 positions, which we conservatively refer to as “ambiguous,” every
one could be reliably assigned to either a purine or pyrimidine ancestral state. There was only one
position where the most common allele had an allele frequency of less than 50%, but this has been
shown to be a mutational hot spot. On average, the individuals in our dataset differed from the Eve
consensus by 21.6 nucleotides. Sequences derived from sub-Saharan Africa were considerably more
divergent than average. Given the high mutation rate within mitochondria and the large geographic
separation among the individuals within our dataset, we did not expect to find the original human
mitochondrial sequence to be so well preserved within modern populations.

It should now be possible to use probability math to calculate the odds on this sequence being Eve's, whether you accept the Biblical Eve or the evolutionary one.