Critique of Ann Coulter's The Church of Liberalism: Godless

We know that that's false, however. There is no variation among haploid organisms that isn't the result of genetic differences. And there is no genetic difference in asexual organisms that is not the result of mutation.Because some of the bacteria were different from the rest, we know that they mutated to do so. And because they survived in an environment where their brethren did not due to those differences, we know that natural selection occured.So, in this case, what you say is absolutely false. Mutation did occur, new genetic sequences did arise - it's the only explanation - and therefore, evolution did occur.

I hope every one has their thinking caps on

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Scientific Realism How Science Tracks Truth by Stathis Psillos

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becuase what had happened philosophically was that Mendel's name was being slipped in under the determination of Darwin's. The realists were placing the secular world on notice that they could argue to an "underdetermination" that was vocally ONLY "overdtermined." That is how the false reality of Mendel in place of Darwin came about and thus why a politcal resolution is no soulution but the breach that no digital divide seals and thus Ann had (use vs time) to discuss.Edited by Brad McFall, : referenceEdited by Brad McFall, : reference try two

That's n-a-i-v-e-t-e (plus diacritical), Ray. The dictionary is the only way to cure that brand of ignorance. Oh, I'm sorry--wrong Book.I'm surprised you believe the ACLU would never support Christians.They do it all the time: what could be more Christian than the KKK? Yes.You.By the way, that's a comma splice. Get a grammar. How can I respect you as a red-meat Christian conservative when you can't speak the language?Since you are on a sexual metaphor kick (thereby demonstrating the enlightened Christian philosopy of gender), how do you feel about Coulter's expressed preference for Arab boyfriends?Were you under the impression that she is a "good Christian girl?"

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God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ”Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’
--Ann Coulter, Fox-TV: Hannity & Colmes, 20 Jun 01 Save lives! Click here!
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC!
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OK, you've gone off the deep end, ray.Rant someplace else, or I'll get the admins to box your ears.Edited by schrafinator, : had to put my shiny new signatures in this message to ray!

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"Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends! Well I say there are some things we don't want to know! Important things!"
- Ned Flanders"Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

Christianity was the fuel for quite a bit of philosophies that spiralled into some horrific atrocities. Constantine, the Crusades, pogroms against Jews,Cathar wars, the Inquisition, the Reformation, witch-hunts, slavery, ethnic cleansing like Serbia, just to name a few, all their crackpot ideologies are directly linked to Jesus` theory. I don`t blame Christ for all of this. I don`t think He could ever have imagined what his proclivities would give rise to. Or maybe not.

There's always going to be a genetic difference in every single organism. There are no carbon copies on the genetic level. This is attributed to shuffling, not the advent of completely new lines of information. Evolution requires the formation of new genetic material within the organism's DNA. How we arrive at the emergence of new strains of bacteria is not evolution because there is no new information at all, just a new order of that already extant info. The changes are attributed to natural selection and mutations, which are losses of genetic information to the overall population, not the gradual perfection. When an antibiotic destorys bacteria and a contingent of that population survive and multiply, thus leading to a new strain of bacteria. This is the normal lifecycle of all bacterium, not an evolutionary process. No, you are using misnomers about what the theory of evolution truly entails in order for speciation to occur. If evolution simply meant, "change," nobody would care. But evolution doesn't stop there. If evolution simply meant "natural selection," nobody would care. If evolution simply meant, "mutation," nobody would care. But these aspects are not what defines macroevolution. What defines evolution is the fact that completely new information must appear in order to slowly or quickly to achieve speciation. Since this event has only been seen within the proponents wild vagaries and has not been actualy witnessed, either on the molecular level or in any given population, there is no compelling reason to assume that something of this magnitude could ever occur. I mean, if bacteria are truly evolving all the time, then how is it that bacterium are still alive in the form we find them in today? How is it that one bacterium branched off to be the ultimate progenitor of mammals, while its far distant cousin could withstand time and natural selection without any significant change? It doesn't add up. Naturalistic evolution of life from simple eukaryotes to prokaryotes all the way up to human leaves me wanting without some sort of corroboration. The whole theory stands on an a pro tem, theoretical basis, not hard fact.

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“It is in vain, O' man, that you seek within yourselves the cure for all your miseries. All your insight has led you to the knowledge that it is not in yourselves that you will discover the true and the good.” -Blaise Pascal

I'm not sure what you are arriving at here. Are you suggesting that Mendellian contributions aren't nearly as important as Darwin's contribution to heredity?

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“It is in vain, O' man, that you seek within yourselves the cure for all your miseries. All your insight has led you to the knowledge that it is not in yourselves that you will discover the true and the good.” -Blaise Pascal

The sort of shuffling you're referring to doesn't occur in haploid organisms. It's a feature only of sexually-reproducing diploid organisms. The bacteria we're talking about are asexual haploids.The only source of genetic variation in these organisms is mutation. The only source. Obviously not all of the bacteriums, because so few of them survived. The source of this resistance is natural selection promoting organisms with a certain mutation and eliminating those without. That change in the population is evolution. I'm absolutely not doing that. That's an old creationist canard, and it's 100% false. There's no confusion about what evolution means on my side - it's all on your side. You simply don't know what we're talking about when we use the word "evolution." We're talking about the change in allele frequencies over time that leads to new morphologies within species, and new species from old populations. The source of both of those kinds of changes are selective forces operating on genetically diverse individuals within a population. Not really. Speciation happens when populations are seperated, by one of a few different mechanisms, into genetically seperate reproductive communities. Typically we recognize these events long after the fact because of the genetic divergence that occurs between the two populations, but it is a significant mistake on your part to assert that the genetic divergence caused the speciation. The reverse is the truth - speciation causes genetic divergence. Mutation is the source of completely new genetic information. This has been consistently observed in the lab and in the wild. 100% wrong. Speciation has been observed thousands of times, within the lab and out in the wild. It's a well-understood process that we've seen happen over and over again. How does that question even make sense? Bacteria are in the form we find them today because today, that's the form they're in. The form we find them today, however, is very different, in many ways, from the forms we find them in as fossils from the past. Do you find it weird that both you and your father could be alive at the same time? No? Then what's weird about two different populations taking two different directions? Your problem is that you need to stop thinking of evolution as a telological process. Evolution is not driven by the future; it's driven by the present. The reason that one group of organisms gave rise to mammals is because that group, unlike others, found itself in environments that promoted those kinds of changes. Other organisms that did not give rise to mammals obviously found themselves in different environments. Like, perhaps, a well-organized fossil record that shows exactly that kind of change over time, as captured in static "snapshots" for every epoch of the Earth's history?Like, perhaps, a nested hierarchy of decendancy, as inferred from the same genetic tools that are used in courts of law to establish paternity?How much more proof of your origin as a prokaryote do you need than the simple fact that the only reason you can even breath oxygen is because simplified prokaryotes indwell within your very cells?

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of information.If I reorder the letters "dog" to derive "god," I have new information, yes?If I reorder genetic code to produce a new protein, I have new information. If not, why not? I'm not sure what that sentence fragment means. But are you under the impression that antibiotics destroy all targeted bacteria and only resistant bacteria survive? That is not so. Antibiotics merely reduce the bacterial load to a level which the immune system can handle. Both strains--original and resistant--survive. Only the ratio has changed. Really? Why aren't we represented in the fossil record with the dinosaurs? Why are thousands of extant species not represented in the fossil record? If Jews became Christians, why do we still have Jews?NJ, this is weak stuff. Try again.

Then you actually undermine the evolution of sex and undermine the purpose of natural selection. For instance, what purpose does it serve nature which chooses the stronger over the weaker, chooses the optimal over the suboptimal, to choose the less efficient method of sexual reproduction over the more efficient method of asexual proliferation? Secondly, if shuffling didn't occur in haploids, then how could it ever become a diploid? Where would meiosis and mitosis come in? Aside from which, there are 46 chromosomes per cell, so I'm not sure why you think shuffling cannot occur in haploids. All that is required is for a specific loci where mutations can effects a phenotype. When that happens you get different alleles, not new information, but a new order. Genes with the same or fairly similar traits still differ because their code is not exactly the same. Just like CAT, TAC, ACT, CTA, are similar in some ways, but shuffled enough to make it different. That isn't evolution and it does nothing to explain the gulf between eukaryotes from prokaryotes. Just when and how did the evolution occur? That isn't true at all. Yes, mutations occur and yes, they can affect a phenotype, but you are undermining shuffling. Aside from which, most mutations are neutral, a very large percentage are deleterious, sometimes very harmful, and in the rarest of circumstances, they can produce a temporal benefit. "Temporal" being the operative word. But its like someone once said, "A good mutation is like riot police handcuffing people within a population. Someone mutates to not have any arms so that the good news is, they can't be handcuffed. This temporarily works out to benefit the armless man. On the flipside, he has no arms. How beneficial is that?" This is the same premise I find with Sickle Cell Anemia being used by evo's to explain beneficial mutations. Evolution needs more than just genetic drift, mutations, natural selection, and luck. That is a small adaptation which is a far cry from a parapatric speciation, which must be neccesary for Darwinian theory. And that still has never been observed. You are taking well-known effects of nature and begin to apply it to theoretical biology. All of a sudden, a little bit of truth and a little bit of falsehood become a chimera. Probably because the meaning of the word 'evolution' has itself evolved into something that was never intended. I wish that someone could come up with a solid definition concerning the theory. But everytime it runs into a conundrum someone just changes the meaning to keep the theory alive. I would agree that subspecies arise, producing dwarfism and recessive qualities in a group that has migrated and is now isolated from the main population, but true speciation is a specious plea because its still never been witnessed, but sounds plausible. We are talking about one specie giving rise to a totally new taxon. That's never been witnessed. If you are referring to subspecies or hybrids, of course, just like a breed of dogs or horses or fruitflys or whatever. What speciation means is a new species arising from another. That still has never been witnessed or manipulated in a lab. If bacteria was able to evolve into a completely new taxonomic unit, which ultimately led to higher and higher forms, then what impels its ability to do so while the rest of the population is in a stasis for billions of years? If the raw material on which natural selection acts is random copying errors, then we should be able to quantify its probability, right? So how many chance mutations must have concievably occured in order for bacterium to be the progenitor of the human race? How many steps are we talking about here? Too many zero's for me to type out, that's for sure. You know the genome is without any biological function unless it is able to be translated. That means, unless it leads to the synthesis of the proteins whose structure is sequenced, its utterly worthless. So, even the very beginning stages of primordial life, we would need enzymes, proteins, molecules, the peptides to bond the chain, all to be self-replicating. That's inconcievable. The word 'improbable' just doesn;t aggrandize the enormity of its implausibility. And it isn;t my looking at it teleologically so much as it is me looking at feasibly. If we can't reproduce these functions under controlled experiments, then what makes you think these anamolous occurances could happen by chance millions of times, especially when the chance of one occurance is so nil to begin with? I don't think you can really appreciate what it must have taken for bacteria to reach that level of complexity. There are so many links we are talking about here, all unaccounted for. And you can call that an argument of incredulity, but I call it an argument from sensibility. That would be nice, yes. Too bad that isn't what we see. And if we did see that, every eminent evolutionist would have no need for punctuated equilibrium instead of gradualism. Its been a persistent problem for evolutionists ever since its inception. Fervently asserting that there are hundreds of transitional forms doesn't have the same explanatory power as actually presenting some. All that nested heirarchies provide is a basis for how we know so much about DNA and so little about an actual lineage. Case in point: To the extent that a nested hierarchy of living things exists, evo's presume to know what a Creator would do in asserting that God would not create life according to a nested hierarchy. In other words, they try and rationalize that God wouldn't be so blase. Aside from this, it fails to contemplate that when morphological similarities are juxtaposed by disimilarities, it becomes difficut to establish any rhyme or reason and to decide which feature is the result of a percieved lineage and what is an actual lineage. Its all a matter of interpretation. There are numerous traits that don't follow any discernable path of gradation, but this is seldom considered. And when ever there are huge links missing, evo's simply state that 'not all organisms were fossilized.' Then what makes you think there was a lineage at all? Isn't a guesstimate on a good day? Obviously. How is that proof that I evolved from a primordial prokaryote? That's like saying I evolved from a rock because we both are composed of atoms.

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“It is in vain, O' man, that you seek within yourselves the cure for all your miseries. All your insight has led you to the knowledge that it is not in yourselves that you will discover the true and the good.” -Blaise Pascal

No, you don't have new information, you have a new order. If 'dog' derived 'eog,' then you would have new information. The only reason you don't look exactly like your parents is because of shuffling. You don't have new information that they don't have, you just have a mixture of both their DNA sequenced in a different order.

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When an antibiotic destorys bacteria and a contingent of that population survive and multiply, thus leading to a new strain of bacteria. This is the normal lifecycle of all bacterium, not an evolutionary process.

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Sorry, I placed an extra preposition in there. Yes, the target or aim or goal of the manufacturer is to kill all of the bacteria. Are they realistic about it? Yes. They know they aren't going to be able to kill all of the bacteria. Ever heard of the Love Bone fossil beds of Florida. Its abounding with fossils of creatures that should not in any sense be contemporaneous with one another in a massive graveyard. Its almost like all those creatures were washed into a basin that would become their grave... almost like a flood. Aside from which, perhaps you can tell me why trilobite are sometimes found higher than Coelacanth in the strata layer. That's some impressive subduction and erosion. Because atheists need two groups to pick on. I'll do better next time Omnivorous.

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“It is in vain, O' man, that you seek within yourselves the cure for all your miseries. All your insight has led you to the knowledge that it is not in yourselves that you will discover the true and the good.” -Blaise Pascal

This is incorrect. We all carry mutations that did not come from our parents.

Sexual reproduction is common, sure, but it's hardly the mode of reproduction for the majority of living things - which are asexual bacteria. In organisms with a long generation time, you can't rely on mutation to provide enough phenotypic variation. Chromosome shuffling provides a way to generate phenotypic variation without suffering the downsides of increasing the mutation rate.In bacteria, which can reproduce a new generation every 40 minutes, they can rely on mutations for all the new phenotypes they need. Mostly. Almost all bacteria have some means of exchanging portions of their genome with other individuals, but that's not sexual recombination of chromosomes, like in you or me. Lol! Boy, you've just got no idea what you're talking about, do you?Human cells have 46 chromosomes and are diploid for 23 homologous chromosomes. Other organisms have different numbers.Bacteria don't have chromosomes at all. They have one main nucleic molecule, organized in a ring (instead of in a chain like in eukaryotes), and potentially several smaller genetic rings called "plasmids." And because they only have one copy of every gene in their genome - half as many as you or I have - they're called "haploid." This doesn't make any sense. A change in a nucleotide - from A to C, let's say - is not shuffling, it's a mutation. Rearrangement of single base pairs doesn't really happen, it's not a common mutation."Shuffling" refers to the fact that sexually reproducing organisms donate one of each pair of homologus chromosomes to their offspring. The result is that individual chromosomes in the population get shuffled together and paired off.That doesn't happen in haploid, asexual organisms, because each offspring is a clone of the parent. There's no shuffling, there's just mutation. Which can't happen in bacteria! Seriously, this is not a difficult point to grasp. Bacteria don't have the chromosomes to shuffle. They have one closed ring of DNA that is duplicated in its entirety for each offspring. The only source of variation in bacteria is the changes that might occur to that ring during the duplication process - those changes are called mutations. The definition has never changes. The Theory of Evolution is "the scientific model that explains the history and diversity of life on Earth as changes in allele frequencies due to random mutations and natural selection." That definition covers all changes, from "macro" to "micro", because all those changes are essentially changes in allele frequency. I'm not referring to hybrids or "subspecies." I'm referring to new species from old ones, which has been observed thousands of times.Here's a few instances where it has happened: Observed Instances of SpeciationThe idea that speciation has never been observed is nonsense. No major creationist organization puts forth that position. I don't know who told you that we've never observed new species from old ones, but whoever did misinformed you. New species are observed all the time. Whatever was unique to its environment, over that time, that caused those traits to be selected for. Different environments, different selection. Selection is environmentally determined. Well, bacteria can generate a new "step" every 40 minutes. How many periods of 40 minutes have existed in 4 billion years? You do the math, you want to know so bad. I don't see it as an important question. That is exactly what we do see, which is how evolution is proved. If God created life to look as though it evolved, to act like it had evolved, to expect to be treated like it had evolved, isn't that a pretty big hint that we should damn well do what God clearly wants us to do, and explain life as though it had evolved?If the best you have is "God is trying to fool us", I'm not very impressed. If God created living things to be treated as though they evolved, who are we to argue? If you didn't come from prokayotes, why would God build you out of prokaryotes?I understand that we're dealing with concepts in genetics that you know absolutely nothing about, and I apologize if my post isn't much clearer. But there's really no simple way to describe these concepts, and your ignorant antagonism certainly doesn't give me much opportunity to correct your misunderstandings. Maybe if you were asking questions in order to learn, instead of making ignorant statements thinking you can win a debate, you'd have an opportunity to learn. Why is that something you're determined to throw back in people's faces?

There's only four genetic "letters." New orders are all that there are ever going to be.The order is the only difference between the genetic codes of, say, you, and, say, octopuses; between donkeys and daffodils; between any organism and any other organism.Every living thing, all the same four letters. Just in different order. If changing the order isn't new information, then new information is not required to go from daffodils to donkeys. No, you don't. The DNA doesn't "mix." It stays in discreet chromosome units. There are 23 pairs of homologous chromosomes in every human cell. For each pair, you got one from mom and one from dad. And when you have children, you'll donate one (at random) from each pair to your child in your sperm.That's shuffling - the fact that, as sexual diploid organisms, we get half of our chromosomes from each parent, and we give half of our chromosomes to each child. Lol! Yes, floods have happened in the past. I can point to one that happened recently in the US.

why does shuffling only happen in diploid cells? Here's why. Or two possibilities of why (I wish I could remember more of my biology classes)Diploid (two of every chromosome )cells undergo meiosis. Meiosis is the basic cause of shuffling. why?In order to get from 46 to 23 in gametes, you have to split twice--two meiosis events. I and II, they're called.Now then, either the shuffling occurs during one of these two meiosis events, or it happens when the sperm chromosomes meet the egg chromosomses.haploid cells do not undergo meiosis. They undergo mitosis only (diploid somatic cells undergo mitosis--it's how we grow, basically).
these cells will not combine under normal conditions. A bacteria with 20 chromosomes will produce two copies with 20 each, and only divide once. And since they don't have any cells that normally combine to get back to the functional number of chromosomes (for their species), there ain't gonna be shuffling.yeah, I made that a touch confusing. methinks you don't know what shuffling is. shuffling is where you have the ends of chromosomes crossing over each other, and bits of one will change places with bits of another. I wish I had my bio book to show what I mean--it had some cool graphics to explain this.
(I wrote this after the bit above, even though this should have been first, but I do this i the order I caught what you say)mutation isn't harmful, beneficial, or neutral by itself. It all depends on the environment. which is why sickle cell is an advantage in places with high rates of malaria, but over here in the west, you're screwed as far as athletic ability is concerned. It's why cystic fibrosis is (or was) beneficial in europe--greater resistance to (pnuemonia, I think?). Go where there isn't a high rate of pneumonia, it's bad for you.i'm not sure where yuo get the idea that we keep on changing the definition of ToE. It's really simple: change in the genetic compostion of a population during succesive generations, as a result of natural selection acting on the genetic variation among individuals, and resulting in the development of new species (american heritage dictionary). It's one that every biologist agrees on (unless they think it's too wordy, or not wordy enough). It's the most basic foundation of the theory. so you mean that this didn't happen:
Several speciation events in plants have been observed that did not involve hybridization or polyploidization (such as maize and S. malheurensis).Many Drosophila speciation events have been extensively documented since the seventies. Speciation in Drosophila has occurred by spatial separation, by habitat specialization in the same location, by change in courtship behavior, by disruptive natural selection, and by bottlenecking populations (founder-flush experiments), among other mechanisms.and here's a link with a lot more, including the hybridization and polyploidy events :Observed Instances of Speciationsexual production isn't suboptimal to asexual production. At least, not in a neutral environment. You want to know why we think sexual production developed--better able to adapt to resist changes.In terms of novel alleles and mutations, yuo've a greater chance of those happening in sexual reproduction than you do asexual reproduction.asexual kicks but when there are no new challenges--it far outstrips sexual reproduction in capabilities. but introduce a disease it isn't prepared for, and sexual reproduction will kick but.to the puncuated equilibrium--it explains why we don't find al the individual species between, say, a fish to a reptile. we have the changes in the larger orders, like genus, family, order, but not ever species. punk eq explain why we don't find every single damn species of the transtition--the taxon group under-represented in the fossil evidence.as to your nested heirarchy criticism. Linneus came up with it, unwitingly. His classification of animals, with a few important changes (like making dolphins mammals, not fish (which was how he originally had them) and putting chimps into their own genus), follows the same classification we get if we use just DNA for classification. And he didn't have DNA. There are very, very few organisms which are difficult to classify. And that's at the genus/species level. Not enouh to discount the heirarchy.

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All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences