The Word Evolutionists

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The Word evolutionist is often bandied about by creationists to describe those who study/accept evolution as a valid scientific theory to explain how life originated on Earth. It is the same as the use of the word abortionist. Neither word is real. Just as there are doctors who perform abortions(ob/gyns) there are scientists, evolutionary biologists for example, who study evolution. I believe this stems from the creationist attemp to make evolution seem like a rival religion to their own. Or am I missing something?

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So now evolutionists are taking offence to the word evolutionist?. I cant remember a time where i insulted someone by calling one an evolutionist. All an evolutionists is to me is a scientist that believes in evolution. I dont call them all scientist because thats a generalization, not all scientist believe in evolution.

What would i define a scientist?. Not sure probably someone that studies science. Evolution is definately the majority of scientist. Many people think its because of the evidence but other people believe its because creation cannot even be considered an option.This message has been edited by almeyda, 06-19-2004 01:18 AM

But evolution is a theory of how life came to be through natural processes. Without the need of a creator. Humanism is derived from this biological evolutionary way of thinking. Just natural processes. Just the universe, no designer. Evolution is not about finding out how God made the world. It is about finding out how the world came to be with natural processes.

NosyNed are you an athiest or a believer...?

Im a huge fan of Dawkins. Because he is so consistent in his beliefs. Evolution means athiesm. No designer only natural processes. Then if his asked something about morals and where do they come from etc He'd say something like oh well we must face the facts. Much respect for the men that take the ToE consistently.

I dont know about your God, but it does say something about the God of the Bible. Which is it puts death, bloodshed and disease before the fall of man. Survival of the fittest is the ToE, over billions of yrs. The God of the Bible however made a perfect world that was ruined by sin. This was the whole point of Jesus, and why he was called the last adam. So really evolution undermines the foundation of the Bible and renders it useless so yes in a way evolution does say no God. Moreover it means we cant trust nothing on Genesis, If the first man Adam was a literal man how can we believe that if Genesis is merely a fairy tale. Evolution and Genesis contradict each other way too many times to be compatible. And the fact that evolution is natural processes without a designer or supernatural intervention necessary shows that no God is really necessary. Unless you want to believe in God on your own behalf.

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But that only applies to your particular mythology; other gods might not have this purpose. So, evolution is not inherebntly opposed to god, even if it does falsify some/many of the claims of christianity

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Spot on. You can add Allah or any God you want to evolution. But ive only got a problem when its included with the God of the holy Bible.

Good luck trying to fit a natural processes scientific theory with the supernatural. And you think life coming from non-life is provable?.

Are you talking about materialistic theory?. If you are then yes since evolutionists say the universe is all that theres been etc. If i was an evolutinist yes i would agree.

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The question isn't if life came after and from non-life but how it happened. Isn't it?

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Yes thats true. But the 2 views are between an infinite intelligence. Or life coming from non-life by itself.

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Evolution - Genetic changes in populations of organisms through time that lead to differences among them.

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Please stop and read it, and consider it for a moment. I'm not asking you to believe it - just read what it says.

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What you need to understand is natural selection works fine in already living things and kinds. But when we go back to that premeval pond. And that single cell. There is no information in its genes to bring about more complex things. Theres nowhere it can get more information from. Living things today are complete, and have brains, blood, eyes. Therefore can reproduce and using natural selection can change over time. Not into different kinds but mutations. If evolution is just mutations and natural selection then it is not evolution. As we need single celled organism that can then add to itself blood, lungs etc. This is not possible. If your child was taller than you, that would just be a change in genes. It wouldnt be that it evolved into a different kind.

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I think you have suggested elsewhere that this "information" that you are talking about can decrease. Describe a genetic change that would count as a decrease in "information". Since the information that is passed from generation to generation is in the genes tell us what a loss of information would be.

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Once you've made it clear what this "information" thing you are talking about it then we'll see about it increaseing or not.

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If you can say how new information came into being, then you would have the key to answer the question about the origin of life. All living things have a 'code' containing information to reproduce life. Non-living things in nature have no such code, therefore information to produce life is not available to them. Evolution is a theory about living things coming into being by natural selection. Natural selection can change living things, it can adapt to environments, it can lead to beneficial mutations, and is observed in the present all around us. Creationists love and agree 100% with natural selection. The problem is evolutionists have used natural selection to account for all living things. However, a mutation does not necessarily reduce specified complexity, just that it is so likely to do so that it cannot be the mechanism for generating the huge amount of specified complexity that we see in supermliving things. Mutations are known primarily by the defects they cause, it testifies to the overwhelming tendency for them to reduce the information in living things (just like a mistake on my computers keyboard will decrease the information content of what I am typing). If you buy two copies of the newspaper, do you buy twice as much information? no. Duplication of anything does not constitute an increase of information. Random mutations to change the duplicated gene would not add information unless the mutated sequence coded for some new, useful protein (no one has demonstrated such a thing happening, theres only been evolutionary imagination). If "superman" were the duplicated 'gene', and mutations in the letters changed it to "sxyxvawtu ", you have clearly lost information though you have a new sequence. This is the difference between complexity and specified complexity.There has been a lost of information, although one specie may have adapted elsewhere alot better. This cannot be used to explain change such as fish-to-people. We still only observe horses dublicating with equine kinds. Therefore producing the variety of equine kind we have today through natural selection. This fits with a biblical framework because God made living things to reproduce after their kind. But this means natural selection is not a valid answer to evolutions claims. Evolution claims structures ‘evolved’ into other structures. For example scales into feathers, gills into lungs, fins into legs etc. Birds for example have the information built into the genetic code for feathers. Reptiles have information built into the genetic code for scales. The information in the reproduction and mutation does not include the information required to make the transformation from A to B. In the same way, the genetic program in living things does not change the genetic data.Observation on natural selection and kinds has taught us that it is very faithful to reproduce the original pattern exactly. Random mutations only confuse and corrupt the genetic data. They never create new forms. No matter how healthy or beneficial a mutations in a fruitfly or mosquito may seem. Natural selection does not change the genetic data. It merely causes different emphases, or rearrangements, of the same data. Thats why we see so much change in living things. So many types of dogs through the canine kind etc. We do not see the change that evolution speaks of. The single cell in the premeval pond does not have the information and using natural selection could not get past the next step. The information problem gets to the very heart of the evolution issue. You can argue all you like about the similarity of species, transitional forms, or natural selection. There is still one basic element missing which is the mechanism for change which requires the addition of new information for evolutionary change.

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As requested please define "information". Why is "sxyxvawtu" less information than "superman". It is not at all clear to me that information has been lost. It just looks like different information to me.

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In living things, information is stored in patterns of DNA, which encode the instructions to make proteins, the building blocks for all the machinery of life. Natural selection works only on information in the genes and with mutations. But this means it cannot account for the complexity and diversity of all living things we see in the present today because natural selection according to evolutionary theory has life evolving and changing throguh natural selection. But there are flaws in natural selection as an explaination for evolution. There is complex biological machinery of which Darwin was simply ignorant. Real motors, transport systems, the blood clotting cascade, the complex visual machinery. These require many parts or they would not function at all so they could not have been built in small steps by natural selection.Mutations never add information only reduces it, this includes even the rare helpful mutations. The reason why the change in Superman and the sxyxvawtu is less information is because it has been a mutation of the latter. Mutations of course simply corrupting and confusing the genetic data. This speciation through natural selection involves sorting of the genetic information present. Not the adding of information that evolution needs for fish-to-people. Natural selection and variation no matter how profound a change may be over time is due to populations changing there genetic data within the constraints of the present information. Evolution requires massive amounts of genetic information over and over again. But natural selection does not work like that. This mechanism evolution uses has nothing to do with the evolution of more complex life forms. Over and over again until we arrive at people. Again it does not matter how beneficial a fly may be with larger wings there is a constraint. A block between the interchanging of genetic information between these so called "kinds".

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In the definition used in information theory you do have more information (but not twice as much). What is your definition? In what way is it different from that used in information theory? How do I calculate the information content of your newspapers or more pertently, your genome?

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You mention you dont have twice as much. And i agree with you. So naturally the change in natural selection would be restricted to just the letters in those newspapers. So if the paper reproduced without the first few pages of information. It would naturally be a loss of information. Using the information present and it cannot add new information for it is not in its genes. So this paper may go on and live happily in cold weather somewhere. It is not evolution but natural selection. So natural selection cannot be used to explain the diversity we see today and how eventually using this mechanism we can easily arrive to people and everything else. There must have been already created kinds to reproduce and diverse with natural selection like the biblical framework states. You asked how do you measure the content, well i dont know exactly but creationists have mention many such as

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The information content of the genome is difficult to evaluate with any precision. Fortunately, for my purposes, I need only consider the change in the information in an enzyme caused by a mutation. The information content of an enzyme is the sum of many parts, among which are:
* Level of catalytic activity
* Specificity with respect to the substrate
* Strength of binding to cell structure
* Specificity of binding to cell structure
* Specificity of the amino-acid sequence devoted to specifying the enzyme for degradation

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Could you give some examples of where you've been given "evolutionary imagination" instead of real examples?

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Evolution is full of them. Fish to amphibians, amphibians to reptiles, reptiles to mammals, dinasaurs to birds. We dont see such astonishing transitions in the present because they dont occur. Certainly not by using natural selection.

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If you are given examples of useful proteins appearing would you admit to being in error about evolution not being able to add "information"?

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The problem is that evolution can point to something that has won the battle over a poison. Or fruitflys with a beneficial mutations. But do you realise what evolution needs to explain todays living things?. It needs massive amounts of information being added and we should observe it everyday clear as day. But frankly, we know what natural selection is and we observe it. And its not what the evolutionists require to explain there theory. Mutations, random accidental changes in copying hereditary information are overwhelmingly a downhill process.

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When you say "overwhelmingly", you you mean that mutations never go uphill, even slightly, or do you mean that mutations seldom but occasionally do go slightly uphill?

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They never go uphill. Because using only the information present it cannot go uphill. What i mean when i say overwhelming and not never is because there is the rare beneficial mutation which is a loss of information however an insect may live happily in his new environment. Theres nothing wrong with a loss of information with natural selection because it uses adaptation. But when evolutionists talk about natural selection, they put it in a catergory which natural selection has not been observed doing.

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If you agree that the latter is true, what if we had a kind of process that could "pick" or "select" only those "uphill" mutations? Would you agree, then, that in that situation, mutations could provide "uphill" movement?

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These uphill movements you speak of arent what evolutionists require. The very name selection implies that your choosing between two or more variants. So that means that the end result is extinction of one in favour of the other. Natural selection never increases the number of variants, only decreases them. Leaving mutations as the answer is not a valid explaination, leaving chance mutations as the only source of new information. You have to have all these new genes coding for new features all interacting precisely with one another, continually arising as animals get more complex. As evolutionary philosophy suggests. To believe in this requires faith, again going back to the religios nature of evolution. Also we go back to the facts being interpreted as i kept mentioning but noone agreed or understood. Natural selection is the fact, evolution interpret the fact to fit there framework in which this mechanism has given rise after rise of new species. Its certainly not something we see in natural selection. Since no new information is added, this has nothing to do with ‘fish to people’ evolution, for which one needs processes capable of such change.

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In the case of the newspapers two copies has a small increase in information content.

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Keep in mind Nosyned that we are talking about identical newspapers. With the same letters of information. Natural selection could only cause change with a reshuffling of those letters. It cannot add new letters causing new information.