An accurate analogy of Evolution by Natural selection

There's no exact analogy --- obviously the only thing that's completely like evolution is more evolution.Your videotape analogy, besides using artificial selection, has the disadvantage that there is no room in it for the sort of beneficial mutations that we observe in nature. I can't see how the process you propose could lead to anything other than degradation of the image.

OK. It's a bad analogy, and we have no need of an analogy.It's bad because:* It allows no significant or interesting changes, if you're only selecting for video quality. The process you're suggesting isn't going to give us a result where the bride says "I don't" and then the groom starts making out with the bridesmaids. Or if you were using a video of a fish, there would be no way that your process would turn it into a video of a frog.* It presupposes an end goal to be reached, namely high video quality.* It involves artificial selection, whereas most evolution is by natural selection.* It allows no adaptive radiation --- your "species" of tape will never split into two species. Not only are you taking the environment to be static, but there is only one niche in it to be filled.* There is only one optimal solution, and there are no local maxima.* There is no meaningful distinction, in your analogy, between genotype and phenotype.* It seems intuitively unlikely that the process that you describe would produce any improvement, or even change, whereas scientists can see beneficial mutations and natural selection happening all the time.We have no need for it because:* We don't need any analogy. The ideas in evolution are not so abstruse that we need it put into baby-talk for us.* The purpose of an analogy is to explain the unfamiliar by means of the familiar, as with Einstein's famous metaphor of space-time as a rubber sheet. But no-one has ever seen the process you describe, whereas anyone can see evolution if they have some bacteria, a petri dish, and some antibiotics.* No analogy is perfect. This is why creationists keep producing supposed analogies of evolution --- because then they can attack the analogy instead of undertaking the hopeless impossible task of arguing against the theory of evolution. I have lost count of the number of times that I've said to a creationist words to the following effect: "No, the theory of evolution is not like saying [some idiotic analogy that the creationist has made up]. It's actually more like saying that the action of natural selection and genetic drift on variations produced by mutation, recombination, and lateral gene transfer, and propagated by reproduction, can produce evolution. Would you care to argue against that?"Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I said that the concepts weren't abstruse. Unless I study tensor calculus, then maybe Einstein's "rubber sheet" metaphor is the closest I'll get to understanding what he was talking about.Evolution, on the other hand, can just be explained to people.And, as you point out, there are many people with a vested interest in not being able to understand evolution. Experience tells me that when you try to explain anything to a creationist by means of an analogy, he'll seize on some implied detail of the analogy which you didn't even mention and which has no correspondence to the thing that you were trying to explain and start whining about that, rather than using the analogy as a tool for understanding.The theory of evolution, as it actually is, has to be repeatedly shoved in their faces for them to turn to their last resort and try to find something wrong with the actual theory. If you offer them any excuse not to confront it, they won't.

Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Everything that we can observe happening is just microevolution of languages. Atheist linguists pretend that this proves macroevolution of languages, but we Bible-believers aren't fooled. No-one has ever seen a Latin-speaking community turn into a French-speaking community! Besides, wouldn't that be the very opposite of linguistic evolution, since French is less grammatically complex than Latin? Evolution means an increase of complexity!Besides, the first French-speaker would find that no-one could understand him, since he'd be living among a community of Latin-speakers! Linguistic evolution is impossible!No-one can show me a language that is half-French and half-Latin! Where are all the intermediate forms?Atheists claim that "intermediate forms" can be found in the so-called "documentary record", but this is just their atheistic interpretation. None of these so-called "intermediate forms" consists of 50% modern French words and 50% Classical Latin words, and this is what "intermediate forms" really means.Furthermore, the documentary record is incomplete! We do not have copies of every single document written between the classical period and the modern period. This means that I can ignore every single document that we do have.The Second Law of Thermodynamics proves that linguistic evolution is impossible, although I'm not going to present the working showing this because there isn't any. More and more linguists are admitting that linguistic evolution is impossible, although I'm not going to name them. Linguistics is on its last legs, and will soon be recognized as a laughing-stock. Really, any day now.Linguists don't agree on every tiny little detail of linguistic evolution, which proves that they're wrong about everything and God magicked all languages into existence at the tower of Babel. No-one can explain the origin of the word "okay", so God must have made it by magic!Sir William Jones was a racist whose thinking inspired Hitler!Your atheist philosophy leads you to deny God's truth as revealed in his Bible, which must be God's truth because it says it is.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

There isn't one, short of killing all the stupid people in the world and dancing on their graves. You can take a horse to water ...The best we can do is make sure that the water is clear and not brackish.

No. No. No. Which makes it a lousy analogy, because this is not what we observe when we observe the evolution of bacteria.Since reasoning from your analogy leads to a conclusion which is the exact opposite of what we observe when we observe the actual behavior of the supposed analog, your analogy is rubbish.This perfectly illustrates my point --- talking about some inaccurate analogy that you've made up is not the same as talking about reality. In your case, reasoning about the analogy that you've invented leads to the exact opposite conclusion to what we observe when we observe reality.The moral of this is that you should think in metaphors less and observe reality more often. No.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Except that this is not the answer that you will hear from biologists, who will instead point out that the coelacanths that we see today are not the species that we find in the fossil record. Nor are they found in the same environment as those coelacanths that we find in the fossil record.

That would explain a lot ...

Sure, but this just doesn't apply to comparisons between modern coelacanths and fossil coelacanths.You might as well be accurate. What do you have to lose by being right about this issue? YES.Coelacanths aren't one species, they're a collection of species. The species we know today are not the same as the ones we find in the fossil record.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.