|
Register | Sign In |
|
QuickSearch
Thread ▼ Details |
Junior Member (Idle past 2660 days) Posts: 7 From: South Africa Joined: |
|
Thread Info
|
|
|
Author | Topic: Extent of Mutational Capability | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
|
Greg, what is your background with this "creationism-vs-evolution debate"?
The first thing you should know is that "creation science" itself is a deliberately crafted legalistic deception. For most of the 20th century (circa 1920 to 1968, during which the "monkey laws" were in effect), anti-evolutionists could be open about having purely religious reasons for opposing the teaching of evolution in the schools. But then Epperson v. Arkansas (1968) led to the striking down of the "monkey laws" and after a few failed attempts the anti-evolutionists learned that the courts no longer allowed them to ban evolution for religious reasons. In response, they superficially scrubbed their published materials of all explicit references to the Bible and to God (who suddenly became an "unnamed generic Creator") and dishonestly claimed (ie, lied) to the courts that their objection to evolution was for "purely scientific reasons." That is traditionally known as their playing the game of "Hide the Bible." That deception was exposed in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), whereupon the anti-evolutionists switched to playing the game of "Hide the Creationism" by calling it "intelligent design" instead of "creation science." "Creation science" is based on their "Two Model Approach", in which they "define" two "mutually exclusive models", the "creation model" and the "evolution model", and then set about attacking their "evolution model" and proclaiming that that proves their "creation model" without ever having to present, support, or defend that "model" -- in fact, repeatedly in creationist-run debates the creationists steadfastly refuse any discussion of their "creation model". Here is how Dr. Henry Morris, one of the Founding Fathers of "Creation Science", described the "Two Model Approach" to me (my emphasis added):
quote:In reality, the "creation model" is very highly restricted to young-earth creationism, which results in the vast majority of theistic creationist ideas (including most Christian ideas about Creation) being lumped into the "only alternative", their "atheistic" "evolution model." So of course they never dare to present or discuss their "creation model", since that would expose their game of "Hide the Bible." The other consequence of the "Two Model Approach" is that their "evolution model" has virtually nothing at all to do with evolution. At best, it is a caricature misrepresentation of evolution, a strawman for creationists to attack and crow about having defeated while steering clear of actual evolution itself. You yourself presented one such misrepresentation of evolution, also echoed by CRR: the idea that evolution would require animals "evolving from one kind to another", such as a cat "evolving" into a dog (even though from the cat's perspective that would be devolving). As I and others here have described, not only does evolution not say or require that but such an event would be completely contrary to evolution. So when a creationist "disproves" evolution by pointing out that we never see a cat evolving into a dog, he is actually lying to you. The approach you're taking in your year-old investigation appears to be one of collecting what both sides have to say. You are apparently treating what you collect as being different interpretations of the evidence (a commonly expressed creationist position and argument). But that cannot work when one side (the creationists) bases its "interpretations" on a misrepresentation of the other side. It would be like someone "disproving" Christianity by misrepresenting Communion as being nothing but cannabalism. Or "true Christians" redefining what Christianity is in order to claim that Catholics are not Christians -- a friend listens regularly to The Jesus Christ Show and it really gets Jesus angry whenever he hears that nonsense about Catholics not being Christians. So part of your investigation also needs to pay attention to whether both sides are being honest and truthful in what they say about the other side. In particular, are creationists being honest and truthful about how they represent evolution? Or are they misrepresenting it in order to turn it into a strawman thus deceiving you and themselves?
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
It makes you wonder whether all/most species whilst they're in the process of speciation meet up breed, move away, meet again etc etc and either finally separate for good like lions and tigers but can in principal interbreed or one outcompetes the others That interbreeding happens a lot. A number of examples of canine hybrids and feline hybrids happen in the wild -- see my Message 9 for links. And a local creationist seems to love his "chicken or the egg" argument in which his answer is "two chickens", but they need to completely re-evolve their reproductive systems simultaneously, or so he claims (it makes absolutely no sense to me either). In reality, chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) are still able to interbreed with their ancestral species, the red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus), such that it's now very difficult to find a red jungle fowl that is not a chicken hybrid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_junglefowl#Hybridisation). Yes, life can be very messy. Edited by dwise1, : "to find" and added a Wikipedia link
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
|
Sorry, PaulK. I'm using your board as a springboard to address Greg.
Greg, I hope that you have not wandered off and that your intentions are still honest. That you are honestly seeking the truth about creation/evolution.
Oh look, a Creationist is quote-mining. Let's look at the context: Quote-mining is a major creationist cottage industry. It involves digging through all kinds of scientific sources, including science popularizations (eg, the primary sources for the creationist leap-second claim (my own page on that claim), that less than a million years ago the earth would have been spinning impossibly fast, were quite literally Popular Science and Reader's Digest), in order to find passages to misquote in order to make it appear that scientists actually agree with creationist claims. Of course, any writings by a well-known scientist are prime targets for this treatment. Even without changing a single word in the fragment they quote. So, you may ask how, if they do not change the actual wording, that would constitute misquoting. Here is an example that you should understand; the following quote is a hypothetical argument I'm just now making up against the existence of God:
quote:And if you open up your KJV Bible to Psalm 14:1, you will indeed see those exact same words. Yet I misquoted that verse. Can you see how and why it is a misquote? A deliberately deceptive misquote? It is because I had lifted it out of context. Here it is within its context: quote:The author was not saying what he himself thought or believed, but rather presenting what he imagines the opposing side would say. Ironically, a number of creationist misquotes involve quoting what their author thought the opposing side would say. Lying through quote-mining is achieved by several techniques. Lifting out of context is one. Sometimes they will hide the context in ellipses (...). I tracked down one misquote which hide several pages in that ellipsis, such that that "one sentence" was spliced together from sentence halves pages apart and talking about different things. Another technique is to quote the source using scientific terminology and then applying everyday meanings to that quote. Their "scientific quotes" "refuting" the existence of transitional forms make heavy use of that one. Another technique is to misrepresent what evolution is or entails or says and then quote scientists explicitly disproving that misrepresentation. For example, both you and CRR brought up the mistaken idea about evolution that evolution would require a cat to evolve into a dog (even though a cat would consider that to be a case of de-evolving), so you could then misrepresent any actual biologist stating honestly and truthfully that that is impossible as that biologist speaking against evolution. The bottom line for approaching any creationist quotation is to go to original source and see what it actually says. For example, one very effective debate strategy against Dr. Duane Gish was to present two transparencies side-by-side on the overhead projector (this was circa 1980). On one side was Gish quoting sources in his books. On the other side was what those sources had actually written. The audience, consisting mostly of creationists, was appalled at Gish's dishonesty. talkorigins is a newsgroup, an early Internet precursor to Web forums. They created a website to act as an archive site for the newsgroup postings and it grew from there with many articles having been added. The TalkOrigins Archive is a very excellent source of information when investigating creationist claims and the "creation/evolution controversy". On that site is the Quote Mine Project. I've not read it yet, but it looks like it has a lot of information.{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy. ("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984) Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world. (from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML) Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles) Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32) It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias.Steven Colbert on NPR
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
|
This is a two-step feedback response system that is repeated in each generation, like walking on first one foot and then the next. It repeats every generation.
Good enough start, but I'm afraid it slipped away from you. Based on evidence observed this occurs in virtually every breeding population in every generation, and we can thus say with high confidence that at least one new mutation survives in at least one individual from one generation to the next. For the purpose of maths we can say that this has a probability of >0.99, so we can use 0.99 and be conservative. The probability of another new mutation surviving in the following population is also, conservatively speaking, 0.99 The probability of both occurring is not 0.98, because they are separate instances and one does not depend on the other. This is like flipping a coin, each flip has an 0.5 probability of being heads (or tails) and every subsequent flip has the same probability because it does not rely on the results of the first flip. Close to three decades ago, I was so skeptical of Dawkins' WEASEL program in his "The Blind Watchmaker" that I wrote my own implementation of it. When it outperformed even his program (mine was in compiled Pascal, whereas his was in interpreted BASIC), I still could not believe it so I analyzed the actual probabilities. Both my program and my analysis of it are at http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/monkey.html. In all that time, the only criticism of my analysis was that my count of iterations was off by one -- ie, an insignificant minor error which does not affect the outcome. Basically, the probability of approaching the target was very small, but the probability of every single iteration failing was vanishingly small, so arriving at the target in extremely short time became inevitable. Most probability exercises involve a particular series of independent events all happening in a particular sequence. For example, to get a particular sequence of 100 fair coin tosses (ie, P=0.5, not weighted for tails since the heads side is heavier) the probability is p100 or 7.89-31, AKA very improbable. To express it algebraically:P = P0 P0 P1 ... Pn = pn But that's not what we are talking about. We are talking about a population and about the probability of at least one of them succeeding. What we want to know is the probability of at least one member of the population succeeding. We do not want:P = PA AND PB AND ... AND Pn What we do want is: P = PA OR PB OR ... OR Pn For that, I borrowed from Boolean Algrebra's de Morgan's Theorem: C = A AND B is equivalent to NOT(C) = NOT(A) OR NOT(B) Hence, given Q = 1-P -- i.e., the probability of P being false: P = PA OR PB OR ... OR Pn becomes Q = QA AND QB AND ... AND Qn So to calculate the probability of failure if all failure probabilities are the same, we get: Q = = qn From which we can calculate P = 1 - Q So, let's assume the probability of a beneficial mutation occurring in an individual as being 1/1000 or 0.001. Let's furthermore assume a population size of 1000. So, q = 1-0.001 = 0.999Q = q1000 = 0.367695 P = 1-Q = 0.6323 Pretty good odds, don't you think? Now let's assume a larger population size, like 10,000, which in the wild shouldn't be too unreasonable:Q = q10 000 = 4.517-5 P = 1-Q = 0.99995483 Approaching dead certainty, wouldn't you agree? And that's ignoring the fact that you could skip several generations without success. We're actually calculating the probability for success in successive generations, which is much less likely. Of course, my MONKEY, like Dawkins' WEASEL, does not simulate evolution, but rather it compares two different kinds of selection: single-step selection and cumulative selection. The target is the alphabet in alphabetical order. Single-step selection involves trying to put the alphabet together randomly in one attempt and, when that fails, start all over from scratch. I calculated that in order to have one in a million chance of success, you have to run the program on a supercomputer (performing 1,000,000 attempts per second, hence running 1000 or 10000 times faster than the fastest PC) for many several times the 14-billion-year ago of the universe. Yet both MONKEY and WEASEL succeed within seconds (or within a half-hour in the case of the original WEASEL), every time without fail. By using cumulative selection, which is based on evolution. Single-step selection is based on creation out of nothing, creation ex nihilo. Even though single-step selection has absolutely nothing to do with how evolution works, creationists continually try to saddle us with that loser of theirs.{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy. ("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984) Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world. (from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML) Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles) Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32) It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias.Steven Colbert on NPR
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
Closing the topic should be left up to the administrators. When the originator arbitrarily closes a topic it is seen as being very rude, though you could request that an administrator close it before its time. The process involves an administrator first placing the topic into summation mode, wherein anyone who had participated can submit one and only one final message which sums up their thoughts about the topic and how it went. After all the summation messages have been posted, the admin will then close the topic. However, one can later request that the topic be reopened. Of course, if the topic is spinning out of control, an admin can close it much more abruptly. In such cases, it is also not uncommon for an admin to close a topic temporarily in order to encourage the participants to cool down before continuing.
the ID and Creationist response here is to say that the limb is not vestigial, but has a natural function, serving as an attachment point for muscles that both male and female cetaceans need to reproduce.
That is an example of creationists lying by shifting the meanings of words. Such "semantic shifting" is very widely used in creationist quote-mining (see Message 158 above). It's an attempt at "word magick", making something go away by redefining its name. Such "word magick" is a dishonest and deceptive practice best left to lawyers {1}. In this case, there is a very strict definition for "vestigial" to mean that that feature serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever, and the practical definition used by scientists to mean that it no longer serves its original purpose and hardly any other purpose. It's the difference between being of very little use and absolutely no use whatsoever. Hence the cetacean vestigial pelvis is indeed vestigial because it no longer serves to support the hind legs, which no longer exist (though can occasionally still be expressed {2}). The fact that some muscles still attach to what's left of that atrophied feature does nothing to eliminate the fact that the pelvis is vestigial and tells us something of the whales' evolutionary past, just like the vestigial pelvis in some snakes.
The best way to test this is, I would say, to examine the limb itself: looking at bone structure, basic design, etc., what are the evidences as to its background: are there clear indications, parallels, of limbs of a land-mammal; alternatively, is there clear evidence that it has, and has only ever had, the sole function of an attachment point for reproductive organs. As Dr Adequate points out in Message 165 and AZPaul3 in Message 164, look at the fossil record which experts have studied extensively. In the much earlier cetacean ancestors you will find better defined pelvises and hind legs which had started to atrophy away. You will clearly see that those earlier pelvises served the function of articulating those hind legs. Clearly, being an attachment point for reproductive organs was never the sole function of the pelvis. You can research this in the paleontology journals in the periodicals section your local university library, just as Merle Hertzler had done. He was a young-earth creationist I met on CompuServe in 1993-1994. He was the first honest creationist I had encountered since I had started trying to discuss this issue circa 1984. Not only did he do his best to discuss creationist claims (an extremely rare quality in creationists) but he would also research not only his claims but also the responses he got. As happens all too often to honest creationists, he learned that his claims were false and in a year's time he ended up on the other side arguing against creationism. He tells that story on his page, Did We Evolve?. Basically what happened was that an "evolutionist" had referred him to a book in which there was a citation in a paleontology journal, so he went to look that up. And he found more and more evidence that the creationists had always told him did not exist. I seem to recall that the citation had to do with cetacean fossils.
A further angle would be to compare other sea creatures to see if they have a comparable external mechanism. Do you mean fish? Their reproductive systems are nothing those of mammals -- remember, whales are not fish, but rather mammals and as such have reproductive organs like other mammals and not at all like those of fish who basically do all their egg fertilizing in the open water. Though I'm not familiar with shark reproduction, especially considering that some are viviparous (ie, give live birth). But still, since fish have no limbs in their evolutionary history, there would be no reason to expect them to have vestigial pelvises. Remember that evolution works by modifying what's already there. Unlike in designing a car, you cannot just completely redesign and replace an entire component in an animal; rather you are stuck with modifying what it already has (eg, in cars we completely changed how the engine is mounted and had to completely redesign how the radiator fan is powered, in cars we replaced the old pneumatically powered intermittant windshield wipers with a completely new electronic design). So as you compare the limbs of amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds, both modern and fossil, you will see the same bones in the same relative positions over and over again. Their sizes and shapes will vary, but they are the same bones and you can trace them back to certain fossil fish. Footnote 1:An excellent example of lawyers redining words is found in the story of the Lintillas in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: quote: From Fit the Eleventh:
quote: Footnote 2:It would be interesting to look at the development of whale embryos. For example, baleen whales have no teeth, but they still have genes for teeth and during embryonic development they start to form teeth which are then reabsorbed. Similarly, chickens have genes for teeth which we can cause to be expressed; in experiments fetal mouse gum tissue was placed on the jaws of chick embryos which caused teeth to start to form. So my question is whether we see hind legs and the associated pelvis start to form in a whale embryo. I think that we should see that, since some individual whales have been found with vestigial hind legs (ie, not fully formed nor functional).
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
Regarding the definition of "vestigial", refer to the Wikipedia article, Vestigiality. In the introductory first section:
quote: And the first paragraph of the Overview section:
quote: So the definition of "vestigial" does not require that trait to be absolutely useless, whereas the creationist redefinition does require that. In that way, creationists try to redefine vestigiality out of existence in order to create "evidence" against evolution. They are creating a false claim and a deceptive argument. Again, the lesson learned is that you need to learn about the science in question so that you can evaluate what both sides say about it. It is not enough to simply collect arguments, but you must also determine the worthiness of those arguments.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
|
From Musgrave's post cited in your quote, Weasels, ReMine, and Haldane's dilemma:
quote: I am that David Wise and MONKEY is my program (http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/monkey.html). Not only do I describe what MONKEY does, but I also analyzed the probabilities involved. I even provide the source code (then written in Pascal, but now also converted to C). What the program does is so easy to understand and information is so freely available, it boggles the mind how creationists like Remine and Royal Truman can get it so wrong. They have to be trying very hard to misunderstand it. They certainly have strong motivation to misunderstand everything: protecting their faulty theology from reality. Verily it was written: "Everybody's got something to hide, except for me and my MONKEY!"
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
|
Please remember that CRR is quoting ReMine on this issue; so if this is false then CRR is not lying, he is being lied to.
True enough. However, even though he is "merely" repeating a lie, it still does remain a lie. And the consequences of that lie being told is exactly the same whether or not CRR knows that it is a lie.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
Douglas Axe has estimated the chance of a chain of amino acids forming a functional protein is ~1 in 10^77. Denton estimates that no more than 10^40 proteins have ever existed on Earth. So even with those vast probabilistic resources the odds are fantastically small that a protein could have formed by chance. (obviously there are lots of assumptions and boundary conditions in any estimates of this kind). Pro-evolution researchers have done estimates and come up with the chance forming a functional protein as ~1 in 10^50. However that still leaves the chance at ~1/10^10 so it remains fantastically improbable. Note this avoids the sharpshooter fallacy because any functional protein would be success. You can read more on this in Axe's "Undeniable". I have seen this claim made for decades, so, no, I will not buy that book just in order to read the same false claim yet again. Just making bare assertions and bare links instead of presenting the argument is frowned upon here. That is basically what you have done, minus any links (just naming an ID book is less than a bare link). Here is a reply I posted on CompuServe two decades ago. Please let us know whether Axe's claim is different than Charles Wagner's was and describe how they are different:
quote: Bottom line:
PSI mention and contrast single-step selection and cumulative selection. If you are not familiar with those concepts and how they differ, then read the first half of Chapter 3, "Accumulating Small Change", of Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker. Or you could go to my page, MONKEY, in which I discuss my own implementation of Dawkins' WEASEL program and link to my MPROBS.DOC file which analyzes and discusses the probabilities involved in cumulative selection. Basically, creationists keep using single-step selection whose probability of success are abysmally small, whereas evolution uses cumulative selection which succeeds with extreme rapidity and certainty. So far, the creationist attempts I've seen to "disprove" both WEASEL and MONKEY rely on lying about how they work (which I discuss on that page). Edited by dwise1, : PS
|
|
|
Do Nothing Button
Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved
Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024