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On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 13:39:10 UTC, "rjbjr" <rjburnsjr.TakeThisOut@comcast.net> wrote:
> Dear Dan,
> No Dan. I wasn't refering to the "watch on the ground" arguement.
> I was referring to more scientific study of DNA. Work I have seen
> calculates the probability that such structures could arise by chance as
> Darwin posits. The chance of such a thing happening is so small that there
> isn't enough time from the Big Bang to organize that many atoms in the
> proper sequence to produce even the simplest single cell life form.
Two problems here.
First these proofs aren't and won't be accepted, because they make the
same assumption as Paley, that it (the DNA) came together by chance. If
you want to *refute* the anti-creationist position (not just offer an
alternative that you think is acceptable), you must show that such a
random assembly was necessary to the beginning of life: that an
evolutionary sort of process leading to the first cells from something not
DNA-based is completely unbelievable. By an evolutionary sort of process,
I mean things like the "RNA world" that currently is getting a lot of
research attention. And peer review.
Relevant fashionable phrase: "God of the Gaps", whose existence is proved
by the fact that there are things on which don't yet have all the answers.
Second, if this refutes anything, it's abiogenesis (theories of how life
originated from non-life) that suffers, not Darwinian evolution by natural
selection.This has already been said in this thread, but apparently it
needs to be mentioned again. Observe carefully, and you'll notice that
people opposing creationism are quite
ready to cast abiogenesis aside in these debates. Not that they really
doubt it at bottom, but they recognize that solid evidence is lacking,
sort of like Big Bang theory 40 years ago; and scientists _try_ not to be
dogmatic about things they don't really know.
>
> The evolutionists have the further problem with the cambrian explosion
where
> all phyla that exists today just popped into existence all at one time.
> They did not evolve slowly as Darwin's theory would predict.
I'm going to take a little nap before answering this. Wake me up when 10
or 20 million years have popped by, there's a good fellow. --Sorry, snark
does not belong in a serious discussion, as T. H. Huxley said to Bishop
Wilberforce.
So let us seriously understand what this means, first. As someone noted in
blog comments the other day, it's a little misleading, since apart from a
few obscure marine invertebrates, no animals that lived at the end of the
Explosion would be recognizable to a modern who didn't know paleontology.
List a couple of dozen animals (if you haven't been warned by reading the
end of this sentence) and you'll name mostly vertebrates, a rather major
group that did not exist then. (There was one extremely primitive
chordate, member of the same phylum as vertebrates, which I assure you
youwouldn't recognize as a relative if you're not hip to the latest data.)
The point is that phyla are rather an abstraction. They're not God-given
categories (oops, I mean that biologists don't treat them that way), but
they represent radically different body plans in the opinion of the
experts. Learn that arthropods and molluscs and echinoderms existed, and
you might make the mistake of looking for crabs and squid and starfish;
no, those took a very long time to develop.
Actually, evolutionary theory is pretty clear on "adaptive radiation",
which is the name given to the _fast_ proliferation of new forms into a
space that's not already occupied. As you doubtless know, there are fine
examples at the start of the Triassic and the Tertiary after major
extinctions.
So, as to the various arrangements that we now recognize in their remote
descendants to be different body plans: how long _should_ they take to
develop in a world without competitors already established? Not easy to
say. Scientists had the wrong guess about that, and it has been corrected;
but as a refutation of evolution that fails about as badly as does the
surprising survival of coelacanths.
"Darwin's" is of course a red herring, since no one takes his work as
literally true or even inerrant. It's true, though, that he expected a
more gradual process than many moderns think is the norm; it's a matter of
controversy, as you know.
> The fossil
> evidence seems to support the Genesis account much better than it
supports
> Darwin.
Umm, have you read Genesis lately? Its sequence of the creation of life
forms (and of the rest of the universe) is so far from the plain evidence
of fossils as to be on pretty much a flat-earth level.
> That's why evolutionists are now saying that DNA was planted on
> earth from somewhere else in the universe. They say that maybe all this
> happened because of DNA was riding on an asteroid that struck earth.
Don't
> remember Darwin's theory predicting that.
Again, the confusion with abiogenesis. You are entitled to believe in God
or asteroids as the ultimate source for life on Earth, but it has no
effect on the
line of science that started with Darwin and Wallace. Asteroids, of
course get you into a regress: where did the stuff originate, anyway? The
problem has just been pushed off to a some hypothetical other planet. I
almost prefer God as an explanation; but my conscience decrees that I
should take asteroids if need be, because that could at least in principle
be subject to a test on the basis of evidence. But neither a God of Gaps
nor an Asteroid of the Gaps is really required by the evidence we have.
> ... Perhaps you could
> answer a question I've wondered about concerning the evolutionists view
of
> things.
>
> As I understand it, evolutionist believe new species are created over time
> by small mutations in DNA.
> Doen't that theory apply to humans as well as other species?
Certainly, in principle. To be sure, we have no example of another species
that controlled its environment as we do, or applied medical science, so
we have a situation that isn't readily predictable. Regrettably, this
could get us into the whole nasty subject of Eugenics, so I'll move on.
> If the theory
> applies to humans, then why haven't I seen any evidence in the current
> population on earth? We have 7 billion humans alive now. But, I've never
> met anyone with any really unusual features that might be an example of
> evolution at work to produce a better version of a human.
Again we have a question here of the tempo of evolution. Current ideas,
which I think unlikely to change much now that there's evidence, have us
separated from the ancestors of chimpanzees by a mere 6 million years or
so; this came as a surprise to paleontologists, who thought it was more.
Hey, how does that work with the fast pace of evolution I was talking
about? It's a lot slower,\. There is no law that adaptation has to go at a
constant rate; consider the adaptive radiation I was talking about, in
which new species (and larger groups) eveolve quickly into niches that
nothing else is occupying.
But 6 million years is a long time. Even the million-plus that separate us
from the origin of H. erectus (formerly Pithecanthropus) is too long to
expect a lot of visible results in a few human lifetimes.
>
> Seems like a human that could fly and walk would be a good improvement
for
> man. But, I've never seen anyone starting to develop feathers or wings.
> With all of the oceans, wouldn't it be nice if humans developed gills or a
> blow hole like a dolphin. But, I've never met anyone with any sign that
> such features might develop. As for our brains, I don't see any sign that
> people are any smarter today than Aristotle, or Plato, or Leonardo.
Here is the big thing, and your question about "evolutionists' view of
things" is very much to the point.The very first thing to understand is
that evolution has no purpose and no end point and no goal of improving
the species. Things that we see as improvements to happen, and so do
things that are hard to see that way, like the progress from a normal
ordinary barnacle to a parasite with almost no internal organs. (Does
"parasitic barnacles" sound funny? I agree.) Adaptation is to what's
happening here and now, not a seeking for some good end. And it can only
work with the raw materials on hand, so you can't evolve just anything
that would be nice.
As for brains, there's no really good reason to think that we are smarter,
on a genetic basis, than ancient Egyptians, or the people who colonized
Australia 50,000 years ago or thereabouts, or the people who drew the
amazing cave paintings that were discovered a few years ago. But there's
no very good reason to expect that to have changed so quickly.
>
> Does Darwin predict how fast evolution should happen?
(As noted, Darwin had ideas on the subject, and they were largely but not
entirely right. Darwin is not the ultimate authority, but in fact no one
can make good quantitative predictions about the pace of evolution. Before
anyone drags out the ghost of Karl Popper and cries "Unscientific!" let
him talk to the astronomers, who can't predict when a star will blow up;
or the nuclear physicists, who can't predict when an _atom_ will blow up.)
> With 7 billion
people
> on earth, the chances are far greater now than at any time in the past for
> mutations to occur. Yet, not only have I not met anyone evolving, but I've
> never read of any account of it. Not only that, I've seen paintings from
> thousands of years ago. The people drawn on the walls of the Egyption
tombs
> look just like my neighbors look. So, nothing seems to have evolved for at
> least 4000 years of recorded history.
Right you are. I hope I've begun to explain why bilogists aren't bothered
by this. By the way, note that they've knwon all you say for 150 years and
longer -- except that they didn't know, even when they had to fight Lord
Kelvin about it, how really long the Earth's history is. To say that they
are too stupid to think of it, or too enmeshed in a conspiracy, would be
-- well, conspiracy theory in its nasty sense.
>
> Not only science, but my own observations make me doubt the Darwin
theory.
> I assume it would take many incremental changes in a human to produce a
> person that could fly. But, my math says that's not going to happen. No
> change in 4000 years. So, maybe we'll see an example of human evolution
in
> a million years. But, the fossil evidence doesn't indicate that's happening
> either. Hasn't science discovered human forms a million years old? Don't
> those skeletons look just like our skeletons?
No, they don't. Presented with skeletons of H. erectus and modern human,
even a person with no real biological training would have no trouble
seeing large differences. I assure you, you could tell in a moment.
>
> How many changes would be required to produce a winged human? Does
Darwin
> evolution theory offer a guess? So, how many millions of years would you
> expect it to take to produce a new species from today's humans from
random
> chance?
The second thing to understand, is that it is NOT random chance. I really
can't give a complete dissertation on evolutionary theory here, but random
variation *and* natural selection together are not random chance. That has
to ber understood before one can begin to catch up with Darwin, let alone
the people extending the work 150 years later.
I hope this is useful, or has begun to be useful. It's outrageously long,
but after all, Darwin's book was even longer -- and it was the short,
simple version of the book he had planned to write!
--
Dan Drake
dd.TakeThisOut@dandrake.com
http://www.dandrake.com/
porlockjr.blogspot.com
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