How do you define the word Evolution?

Lots of people say that, as you could have found out by, y'know, looking at what people in the medical profession say instead of making stuff up. Then what you suspect is driveling demented lunacy from beginning to end. This is gibberish. You are indeed. If you mean a causal connection, there isn't one.

No causal connection? Well, well, well; now doesn't that come as a surprise! Is there any empirical evidence that the alleged post-toxin mutations occur, or is their existence a matter of conjecture?

To you it may, but not to people who've studied evolution: we find this deeply obvious. Of course there is evidence; one of the many differences between science and creationism is that in science making stuff up is frowned on.

Yes, in some cases. More to the point the mutations are occurring all the time but are only retained when they are beneficial rather than detrimental. In the case of chloroquinine resistance by malaria parasites it requires two mutations to confer resistance. Either one will probably not be retained until the second one occurs. This is why it has taken quite a long time for resistance to develop.So it is not that the presence caused the mutation pair but it caused it to be retained when it happened.OTOH I believe in some cases an environmental stressor can trigger an increase in mutations in certain parts of the genome to help the organism to adapt. This appears to be controlled as an adaptive mechanism. I can't give you a reference off the top of my head.

As I have shown previously some evolutionists do include abiogenesis in their definition of evolution; e.g. Coyne, Kerkut.In the 2009 "Darwin Collection" by The American Association for the Advancement of Science the first article was "On the Origin of Life on Earth" by Carl Zimmer.Including it in evolution theory is only an issue when a Creationist does it.

Here's one.

See my reply to Dredge, Message 424 by CRR, posted 23-04-2017 5:17 PM

And ... what is the relevance of this essay to the definition of evolution? Does Zimmer define evolution in some unconventional way in the course of the essay? Please supply a quotation.

Bacterial populations are always producing mutations. An antibiotic does not change this. Adding an antibiotic to a bacterial population does not change the way it produces mutations, except perhaps the stress caused by the antibiotic might cause more copying errors (mutations) during reproduction.Billions of reproducing bacteria produce billions of different mutations. If one of those mutations confers a defense against the antibiotic then since the descendant bacteria will be more likely to survive and produce offspring they will eventually dominate the bacterial population.--Percy

Name 'em.

Depends on context. In the case of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" it's clear he means how different species originate from other pre-existing species.Bet you don't know what he meant by "reaces" either.

I may have not understood that Hovind claim completely. I heard it mainly through a criticism of it.The big problem with trying to research Hovind is that he avoided writing anything down, so most of his claims can only be found on his videos. Sitting through hours of his slanderous nonsense (ie, constantly misrepresenting science and scientists) requires a strong stomach. The only thing I can think of that would be worse would be listening to Trump "speeches"; at least Hovind knows how to speak and to form sentences.Fortunately, somebody had created transcripts of some of his videos and posted them online. That is how I was able to find and quote his particularly colorful presentation of the leap second claim inflated the rate of the slowing down of the earth's rotation by a factor of over 30,000 because the originator (apparently Walter Brown) didn't understand leap seconds. I also found it on Answers in Genesis' website circa 2002 through Dr. Sarfati's response to feedback from Kent Hovind attacking their list of claims they wish creationists wouldn't use. That's all been rotated off their site since then, but a lot of that list is still there as a collection of short articles. Also, I saved Sarfati's reply to Hovind and quote it here followed immediately by a similar quote from Dr. Don Batten concerning Carl Baugh. They both say exactly what I've been saying for decades, that using false claims can only do harm to creationists' cause -- for which I have received a series of vicious hate emails from "good Christians".Where I part company with Sarfati and Batten is that I have yet to find any good arguments for "creation science." More specifically, despite repeated claims that they have mountains of scientific evidence for creation, since I started studying creationism in 1981 I have yet to see them present any scientific evidence for creation. Instead, all they do is attack their misrepresentations of evolution and any science that conflicts with YEC, as per their Two Model Approach, which is a false dichotomy.

I have heard such claims repeatedly, not only for geologists. In the cases that I've been able to research (eg, biologist Gary Parker), the reason for going YEC was not because of the evidence, but because they had converted to a form of Christianity that requires belief in YEC. And the reasons for their converting were for personal reasons having nothing to do with scientific evidence.Also, I have found that such converts tend to exaggerate and rewrite personal history. For example, a YEC activist I've had the distinct displeasure of knowing claims that he used to be an atheist. That is a lie, because he described to me his life as an "atheist" in which he definitely continued to believe in God and would pray to God every night. What had happened was that as a teenager his church had taught him (perhaps not intentionally) that he could indulge his bubbling hormones and do whatever he wanted to without guilt if he were an atheist. So he pretended to become an atheist, apparently fooling himself in the process.Similarly, we encounter so many creationists and fundamentalists who claim to have been atheists and to have believed in evolution almost all their lives until they converted. Yet they display profound ignorance of evolution and of atheism. So whom do they think they are fooling, besides themselves and fellow believers whom they wow with their testimonials?IOW, I have found that such stories do not warrant being accepted on face value. Au contraire! Quite the opposite. Those biology majors in Scott's class had spent years of their academic life memorizing isolated facts without understanding them. It was only by learning about evolution that those years of study started making any sense to them.Since I started out as a language major (German), perhaps that can serve as an analogy. A linguistics major in my Russian class (linguistics and foreign languages were separate departments) described the Berlitz method of language instruction as memorizing a million and one sentences and hope that one of them eventually comes up in conversation. IOW, you know a lot of facts (sentences and names of things), but you don't understand how to use them. For that, you need the theoretical framework known as grammar. By learning the grammar, you learn the structure of that language, how it functions, and hence how to use it.Consider the case of my ex-wife who was a French major. She became quite proficient with French, having a natural ear for language, whereas I would always work through the grammar. A couple decades after school and she had been away from French all that time. She forgot a lot of it, whereas I, by knowing the grammar, would be able to reconstruct how something was said. Her approach was purely memorization while mine was understanding how the language worked. You can see the difference that makes.Memorizing a large set of facts does not lead to understanding. Finding the underlying structure of those facts does.

This reply is to two of yours: Message 408 and Message 414. I have chosen to link through the former. The question that I'm addressing here is whether understanding is required to do your job. Of course, that depends on what your job is.If your job is just to gather samples or data and/or to process those samples or data and generate reports, then all you need to know is how to perform those tasks; understanding what you are doing is not important.If you are a technician, then all you really need to know in order to be competent is how to operate your equipment, how to use your tools, how to perform diagnostics, how to troubleshoot failures, and how to effect repairs. You don't really need to understand how any of it works, though that could help.Isaac Asimov described it well in the first Foundation novel. When the Foundation was first expanding, it exported its only resource, technology, in the guise of a religion. The barbarians would send their people to the Foundation who trained them to be priest-technicians. What those priest-techs learned to operate a device was to say the proper prayers and perform the proper rituals, then push that red button. No understanding of the miniaturized fusion reactor technology they just deployed was required. That caught my attention, because the QC NCO in my shop, chosen for his knowledge of electronics, didn't understand electronics saying it was all just FM, "f**king magic". You don't need to understand the technology in order to be a competent technician, but it does help.And here's a case where it helps. You have test and troubleshooting procedures provided to you by somebody who did understand the technology. But what happens when you encounter a situation not covered by those procedures, where you would have to actually stop and figure out just what's going on? Without understanding the technology, you couldn't do it. Our troubleshooting procedures for logic circuits included two simple rules: if an input is shorted, it's a logic zero and if it's opened then it's a logic one -- NOTE: logic circuits operate at two distinct voltages (eg, 5V and 0V) to which the logic values of one and zero are assigned. A few advancement exams in a row, I got a series of questions based on a logic circuit. Given that certain inputs were shorted or opened, I was to choose what the outputs would be. First time around, I couldn't understand why the answers I was coming up with didn't seem right, but it was a timed test so I had to move on. Then I figured it out. Normally, 0V is the logic zero, but in this example 0V was the logic one. That completely changed those two simple rules. The only way for me to have solved that problem was for me to understand the basis for those two simple rules and be able to create new rules for this new situation.Of course, not everybody can be a fat, dumb, and happy technician. Some people have to conduct research or plan research. For that, they need to have an understanding of that field of science. Keeping them ignorant of the theoretical underpinnings of their field would make it virtually impossible to do their job effectively.

Piling up facts is not science--science is facts-and-theories. Facts alone have limited use and lack meaning: a valid theory organizes them into far greater usefulness.

​

Robert A. Heinlein