Patterns and Tautologies (The Circular Logic of Homologies)

Natural selection is 'survival of the fittest'. Which ones survive?The fittest ones. How do we know that they are the fittest? Because they survive.
Actually natural selection is death of the unfit. Homology shows morphological similarities in various kinds of biological organisms due apparently to common ancestors. But it could also be a pattern based on a common designer, common programmer of the genetic code you know. There are lots of reasons to be wary of the homologies story of the evolutionist. What vestigial features are you talking about? In the human for example, name me one. No we believe in evolution therefore we believe that the oldest thing are at the bottom and the younger things are higher up.
We have index fossils to tell us approximately how old the rocks are and the index fossils are dated originally according to how old the rocks are believed to be based on the theory of evolution and the principle of uniformatarianism which is an original assumption of little value.
SO... we date the fossils according to the rocks and we date the rocks according to the fossils ..... and round and round we go. Things that look similar morphologically should be similar genetically -it's like having a similar recipe for chocolate icecream and vanilla ice cream and a less similar recipe for ministrone soup. So whether evolution from a common ancestor is the cause or whether there is a common designer causing the similarities, one would expect a similar genetic code for similar morphologies. It only looks fantastic when one doesn't consider any alternatives. I wish I could be so excited about it.

The only people that believe the coccyx to be vestigial are those that believe that we once had tails.As a modern embryology textbook notes, ”Rarely a caudal appendage is found at birth. Such structures are of varied origin (some are teratomata); they practically never contain skeletal elements and are in no sense tails.’Most of us have four coccygeal vertebrae; a small percent of people have five and a few have three.
Unnecessary removal of part of the coccyx can have potentially tragic consequences.
In the past, bolstered by the idea that this organ was vestigial and unneeded, surgeons would sometimes remove a person’s coccyx peremptorily (as was once done routinely with tonsils). But this results in severe problems for the patient, because the coccyx serves as a crucial anchor point for various important muscle groups. Victims of coccygectomy (tailbone removal) in the past have had as a consequence difficulty sitting down and standing up, difficulty giving birth, and difficulty getting to the toilet in time.
Take it away and patients complain; indeed the operation for its removal has time and again fallen into disrepute, only to be revived by some naive surgeon who really believes what the biologists have told him about this useless ”rudiment'.In a high percentage of cases, people with a caudal appendage will also have another medical condition,such as spina bifida, in which a vertebra is incompletely closed.Edited by Beretta, : grammar

Hello Bluejay, You’re right NS is common sense but it tells us nothing of note. Neither do we know as an evidential matter that there is no designer that might be responsible for creation. So both possibilities should remain on the table until one or the other can be evidentially proven rather than just assumed. And there clearly is a pattern, undeniably so but just what the cause of the pattern is has not been proven by either side of the debate. If the ToE advocates could gather a bit of positive information-building mutational evidence rather than assuming its occurrence despite the lack of evidence, it would be a great start. The only things that have been demonstrated are mutations that cause pathology, neutral mutations that have no effect and then there are the few beneficial mutations that only ever involve a loss of information.
What you need to demonstrate is mutational changes that are beneficial and involve an increase in information. There are none of those but we need plenty to prove that evolution is even remotely possible. All beneficial mutations that add information and code for something new and useful exist only in the minds of evolutionary believers.“I’ve never found a mutation that added information. All point mutations studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce genetic information and not increase it.” (Lee Spetner -1997 -Information and Communications Expert.)Ernst Chaim -biochemist and Nobel prize winner said ”there is no evidence for chance mutations creating living systems.’
So the point is why assume -you need proof which doesn’t exist, therefore assumptions and philosophy take the place of evidence -is that science? Again, these are examples of loss of information, not information gain which one requires for evolution. Creationists and ID proponents both understand and accept loss of information as factual, it’s the gain that is the problem. Similarities exist but the cause of these similarities is the big question. Radiometric dating dates rocks not fossils and radiometric dating is based on assumptions and is contradictory -different radiometric techniques often giving vastly different ages for the same rocks and all based on unprovable assumptions. As for the fossils themselves, the pattern is of sudden appearance of fully formed kinds of organisms and it certainly doesn’t show a slow steady build up of change with clear relations along the way. Most fossils show sudden appearance, stasis with minor variation and then often extinction. The organisms that don’t go extinct look pretty much the same as those living today. Science should be evidence based and technological advance is based on that sort of evidential science not the sort of ”science’ that imagines change without proof and presumes to give us an alternative creation story based on material processes alone. No actually the creationist model is based on what is actually shown, the evolutionary model presumes too much and then tries to collect the evidence to support the assumptions and ignores the bulk of the fossil data that shows stasis, not gradualism; extinction not evolution. Anomalies just show that there are huge problems with the materialist assumptions. Are we really sure that those parts of the genome don’t do much at all? Like organs that were once assumed to be vestigial and turned out to have a purpose. From what I hear a lot of ”junk’ DNA is turning out not to be junk after all -which would support a creationist model rather than an evolutionary one.

Hello Wounded King and thanks so much for tracking that quote down and reminding me to state my sources. I usually do but perhaps I was rushing, my apologies for putting you to all that trouble.The point of the matter is that many organs were given vestigial status in the past (thanks to evolutionary premises) and only later was their function determined at which point they were one by one dropped from the 'vestigial' list.
Evolutionists like 'vestigial' because it seems to point to transformation. Unfortunately it really doesn't, since the loss of something that had a function does not show us how new and extremely complex organs arise by purely material processes. Blind cave bats had eyes which lost their function but how did their eyes arise in the first place? That is the point to address. They are easy to lose through mutation but there is no evidence that they can come into being in the first place through mutation and natural selection.
A little bit of scientific evidence would help.

Hello again, Bluejay, Superstition meaning ”an irrational belief’ would be either that some intelligence created us or that nothing but chance and natural law created us. Moving towards a ”natural’ understanding of the world may not be as rational as some think. That may be the modern superstition. Well I suppose we were addressing the question of vestigial organs and I wanted to clarify that more are believed to be vestigial than actually are because evolutionists are rather keen on believing things of unknown function to be vestigial, mistakenly believing that that would be good evidence in favour of the ToE. So many supposedly vestigial organs have later been found to have a purpose after all which is what we would expect -everything was originally made with a purpose. Mutation and loss is support for the general rundown that we would expect in a creationist model. We believe that everything was originally made with a purpose rather than left over from an evolutionary process and that does appear to be the case. I had no intention of being rude. The problem is that these dates were determined somewhat before any radiometric dating was available to do the job and lo and behold, they ended up apparently confirming what had already been decided based on the theory. Date the fossils with radiocarbon and then date the rocks they are found in with radiometric dating and what you have is a total contradiction. Of course the evolutionist doesn’t do radiocarbon dating on the fossils because they don’t expect to find any. Yet, right through the geologic column radiocarbon is found, which is impossible if the rocks are as old as radiometric dating would tend to show. Of course they call this radiocarbon ”contamination’ and the ”contamination’ can’t be got rid of no matter how carefully the tests are done. So there is a problem. That’s where the rate group came from with their testing. The ages given by radiometric dating are certainly old but then one has to assume that radioactive decay has always gone on at the same rate which may well be a completely incorrect assumption considering the concentration of helium found in zircon crystals and the known and tested rate of helium diffusion out of the rocks. Why is so much helium still there if the rocks are as old as the radiometric testing seems to suggest? Why is there still radiocarbon when it is not supposed to be there? Why are these factors ignored?
Because they don’t support the evolutionary long age paradigm. Anything that doesn’t support the evolutionary paradigm is routinely left out or explained away. If you’re a rate project researcher, you have a different model from that of the evolutionist. You note the dating problems, the anomalies and the complete contradictions to what should be found and then you do some research to find out if there are other factors that can be investigated to support your framework. Evolutionists look for ways to prove that the earth is old (it must be if evolution is true) and creationists look at the bulk of the dating techniques and note that they support a relatively young earth and then investigate the radiometric dating techniques to see why they produce a contradiction -and they do, but why? It’s all in the assumptions behind the radiometric dating -the unprovable assumptions. Because the reason for the pattern is assumed not proven -begging the question .
Why does the fossil record not generally support evolution? Where are the billions of missing links? Why are there so few that can even be suggested to be intermediate when there should be so many? The entire picture begs for a new interpretation. And some people believe that the only people that will even consider finding intermediates between apes and humans are the ones that desperately cling to the belief that men were once monkeys that evolved over supposed millennia from unicellular organisms. How about: australopithicines are extinct apes and Neanderthals were human, an isolated population. It’s all in the worldview and what you are looking for - what you believe to be true and what you believe to be false. Or maybe even the fuzzy blurry is how humans confuse things due to a belief in human constructs like evolution. No I guess I just wonder why they believe that evolution even happened. Big scientific debates like that make me shake my head in horror and disbelief. Have they ever heard of isolated populations of people having different characteristics? They won’t even consider the obvious alternative so they bog themselves down in wild imaginings -for them there is no alternative to naturalistic philosophy. Even the evolutionists see stasis, not gradualism. The gradualism is imaginary based on the assumption of evolution having occurred. Fossils are dead -you can’t prove any relationships amongst dead things -you can only assume they are related by an evolutionary process and ”find’ the details or believe that intelligence not random change is required and then you don’t even need to do all the imagining about lines of relationship.
Like I”ve said before, the genetic code shows a relationship but not that evolution is the relationship. Carrying on as if evolution must have happened begs the question. Change occurs within a range. We do not know that there are no limitations. Evolutionists assume none and extrapolate accordingly. Creationists assume limits based on the evidence of what we actually know to be happening in the world around us and don’t presume to extrapolate. It is imagination until such time as proof is produced. We need some beneficial information producing mutations! Things like gravity and electricity are nowhere near the same as evolution. We can test and repeat with gravity and electricity. The same cannot be said for evolution. They are not even in the same ball park. Like I said, mutation producing a loss of information. Train’s going in the wrong direction. Based on your preconceptions. Based on mine, I think you’re wrong. I think it’s going to turn out much like the vestigial organs that only remain vestigial until somebody finds their function.

For a start, vestigial organs do not provide strong evidence for evolution since the loss of some function only means that something had a function and that perhaps mutation has rendered the organ no longer functional or no longer present. That is not what evolutionists require for their argument. They require nascent developing organs to show that evolution is happening. Creationists have no problem with vestigiality per se since we know that a once perfect creation is running down due to a mutational load that becomes worse with each generation - exactly as the creation model proposes.
Our only problem with the vestigial argument is that many organs have been called 'vestigial' when in actual fact their function is not yet known or fully understood.The impaction of wisdom teeth represents a modern tendency to eat highly processed foods in which case the mandibular muscles are less utilized so that, as with all muscles that are under utilized, bone growth is affected. Less bone growth in the mandible means less room for what used to fit but no longer does in a considerable portion of the population.Loss does not equal evolution. Again, loss does not support evolution and does not work against creation -we expect mutation and loss. If a proportion of the population lack the muscle in question, clearly life is possible in it's absence. Just because somebody cannot see but lives, this does not mean that eyes have no function.Obviously it's better to have them.The same goes for muscles that may not be present in a proportion of the population. It doesn't mean to say that they have no function in the proportion that do possess the muscle.
The plantaris muscle may be small but according to anatomists there is growing evidence that some of the smaller muscles in our body that were once considered vestigial, on the basis of their small size and weak contractile strength,are in fact sensory organs rather than motor organs. The plantaris appears to be a highly specialized sensory muscle.Despite its function, clearly we can operate successfully without it. Which is why we don't need it as urgently and can survive without it.
Perhaps a leg, no matter whether human or animal require certain muscles at different levels of necessity. This all quite non-problematically allows for a common creator with a common basic building plan rather than a vestigial ape in the family tree. And I'm sure in time, those that we do not know the function of with absolute certainty will come to light with further investigation as has been the case so often in the past.

Hello Bluejay, And apart from the philisophical mindset that says it actually happens, we don't have evidence that it does in fact happen -all we have is extrapolation of genetic variation which says that it is theoretically possible....or we could have a common intelligent creator which would account for the lack of gradualism in the fossil record, the sudden appearances of everything and the general stasis once they appear. Of course your theory is possible but so is mine.Experimentally mutation has not been demonstrated to cause the increase in genetic information that would be required for one kind of organism to develop into another so in the absence of that sort of concrete experimental evidence, we have assumption that it has in fact happened.
ID on the other hand looks at the wealth of evidence for mutation causing pathological change and the evidence showing that mutation may be neutral as well. In the absence for some sort of confirmation that positive mutations cause an increase in information which could theoretically account for the vast range of complexity of living biological systems, we prefer to stick with the science in the meantime. But archeopteryx had wings with feathers, no half scales-half wings, no half legs-half wings so how can anyone be sure it's not just a bird?. Apart from that, other modern birds were found in the same geological strata as archeopteryx so were obviously around at the same time as the supposed intermediate. Just because it had teeth and claws does not make it partly a reptile; the ostrich has claws and nobody calls it a reptile. Turtles do not have teeth but they are reptiles.Only people that believe in these intermediates and need them for their theory call archeopteryx 'intermediate' or 'transitional'. Well my point precisely -how would we know that a raptor ever developed wings? Only those that believe such things are possible imagine that it did in fact happen.In the absence of some reasonable confirming evidence, that goes beyond the philisophy of materialism, we say it didn't happen or that it is not scientifically verifiable. No, I say it looks good on a superficial level but in the absence of proof for genetic mutation causing positive morphological changes, it is not well supported by the evidence. That all animals are related in terms of their genetic code is true, but the reason for their relatedness is not necessarily that the one developed into the other via mutation and natural selection. Actually the same time as some modern birds appear and again, why not just call it a bird unless you have some philisophical commitment to naturalism?
"At the morphological level, feathers are traditionally considered homologous with reptilian scales. However, in development, morphogenesis, gene structure, protein shape and sequence, and filiment formation and structure, feathers are different." (A.H. Brush, 'On the Origin of Feathers' Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 9:131-142,1996)