TOE and the Reasons for Doubt

quite, but the difference is between those who do the research and produce supporting evidence and theories, and those who don't.Respected, the university researcher may have been, but from what I can tell he wrote a book where he mentioned it rather than a paper about it. Big difference. No, you creationists are very hard to please. You see 3000 generations and opine that your fruitfly hasn't turned into the housefly.Not only is that not the way it works, but the timescale for that sort of natural mutation way off and the methods you're using (forced mutation) will very likely not give you anything of the sort you falsely expect. No, I'm suggesting that a random mutation knocked out the gene turning the antennae into antenna, at which point they grew instead into the legs that they evolved from.cause, effect. effect, cause.legs evolved over time into antenna through the actions of other regulating genes.regulating genes get turned off, older regulating genes are still on, antenna become legs.The fact that they're in the wrong place to be useful as legs is besides the point.Get the picture?Edited by greyseal, : No reason given.

But it does --- when you actually observe reality, as in Lenski's experiments, instead of making stuff up, as in creationist fantasy land. The evolved forms are demonstrably fitter than the ancestral populations, as can be shown by placing them in direct competition. The mythical "genetic entropy" of creationists does not occur. Adaptive evolution does.All the fudging of figures and misunderstanding of basic genetics in the world won't make that reality go away. Deal. Well, of course. This is because any truthful person, such as an evolutionist, is bound to say that mutations which confer benefits are beneficial mutations.Incidentally, did you just use the phrase "deleterious mutations causing an increase in fitness"? Only I advise you to learn the meanings of the words you're using.Also some basic genetics, something that you might indeed have done before you decided to discuss genetics.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

You make a lot of stuff up, don't you?I take it that, unlike me, you have not read Kimura. If you have read his work, then I have severely underestimated your level of dishonesty.

...the problem [of Haldane's dilemma] was never solved, by Wallace [soft selection] or anyone else. It merely faded away, because people got interested in other things. They must have assumed that the true resolution lay somewhere in the welter of suggestions made by one or more of the distinguished population geneticists who had participated in the discussion."George C. Williams, respected evolutionist.

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin

You're combining Haldane, Kumura and Ohta (not Ohno) to reach a conclusion of your own devising that none would endorse. Natural selection doesn't just "come along" when the accumulation of deleterious mutations reaches some imagined threshold. Natural selection operates all the time, 24x7. If populations actually experienced diminishing fitness over time due to "genetic entropy" then the most rapidly reproducing life (like bacteria) would have evolved their way to extinction long ago.I agree that if evolution could not select beneficial mutations as fast as it could discard deleterious mutations that it would be a serious problem, but this isn't consistent with observation. Theory interprets what we actually observe about reality, which is why scientists like Kumura and Ohta did not theorize that neutral and nearly neutral mutations diminish adaptation over time.--Percy

Ooh, look, an out-of-date quotation, taken out of context, with no source and with some words added. I'd ask if that's the best you've got, except that long experience with creationists makes the question somewhat superfluous.I notice that you haven't even bothered to provide us with a misinterpretation of the quote. Too lazy? Things don't just misinterpret themselves, you know, and as a creationist this is your sole function.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I'm torn between thinking you've never gone here:http://www.gate.net/~rwms/haldane1.htmland thinking that you read it but failed to understand and/or finish it, or just skipped straight through the wikipedia entry that links to it to the pro-creationist rebuttal innocently posted as "external links". At least now I know where you got the cute quote from.One part of this whole sordid affair I can tell you I do understand fully is the simple, toy computer program used by creationist and evolutionist alike - and ReMine doesn't understand what it is, what it does, how it does it or why it gets the result it does.

Actually, the book is pretty much all about genetic entropy, except the parts that are all about creationist apologetics and YEC PRATTs. It's published by the Feed my Sheep foundation, and it's the only book they publish; take that as whatever you want. There's a fairly long thread in which a poster named VoxRat dissects it chapter by chapter (amidst a lot of chaff) at Another look at "Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome" by Dr. J.C. Sanford.He's also developed a computer program called Mendel's Accountant, which simulates evolution and has been hailed by many creationists as final proof that evolution doesn't work. It appears that the basic story is that it's set up so that it's impossible for its simulations to show beneficial effects and, surprise surprise, the output never shows beneficial effects. There will probably be a FAQ somewhere Real Soon Now that discusses this in detail, but the seeds of this FAQ are in the Evolutionary Computation thread.

so not a big difference from what I wrote, really ye-es...as you say, when the first six whole pages in google are devoted to how wonderfully accurate it is...by apologetics and anti-evolutionists alone...then I'm skeptical enough to think there may just be something very wrong with it.You know what I like about Dawkin's weasel program?It's simple. It's a toy. You know exactly what it's doing and how, and the result is obviously not fixed.

John Sanford's qualifications place him in the former category. (!)Edited by Kaichos Man, : No reason given.

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin

when he forgoes peer review, and his book is referring to that topic which has therefore not gone through peer review, previous qualifications don't count for much. yes, precisely - a very surprising and intriguing result, but nontheless true.perhaps you would like to further another hypothesis how mutation could "evolve" a leg from an antenna in almost a single jump...without it being evolution? without it being a result of what evolutionists suspect may occur (namely, that antenna are modified from legs, and that messing with the regulating genes will cause atavism)?

I'm amazed you like anything about it. After all, it commits the cardinal sin of having a target: METHINKS IT IS A WEASEL. You pointed out to me very forcefully that evolution cannot have a target. Remember? When I was silly enough to suggest the target of my theoretical model was the creation of a gene related to the antenna of a fruitfly?Evolution has no target! Absolutely. And at least Dawkins was honest enough to admit that it didn't model biological evolution. As you said, a toy.

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin

The target you're thinking of that you've been told evolution does not have is the one creationists ask about, for example, "How does evolution know that a fish needs legs to crawl about on land?" Naturally evolution has no knowledge of or plan for the future. It just keeps what works and discards what doesn't.Evolution does have a target, just not the kind that creationists always imagine. Evolution's target is whatever causes the most successful reproduction. For evolution operating in the wild it's a very general target, but the principle of successive selection is best illustrated with a single specific target, and that's what Dawkins did with his program. A little bit of work could modify the program to select any sequence of English words, and a lot more work could select for any grammatically correct English sentence (detecting correct grammar is a tough software problem), and an absolutely huge amount of work could select for any factually accurate statement about EvC Forum (comprehending semantics is a largely unsolved software problem). This would yield a program more closely analogous to evolution in that it would have many, many "correct" targets. Dawkins explained in his book The Blind Watchmaker that his program was an illustration of the power of successive selection using the "monkeys banging away on typewriters to produce Shakespeare" example as a basis. It was neither intended or presented as a model of biological evolution, but as an illustration of how evolution works successively over many generations rather than all once in a single generation, and of the power of successive selection to home in on a desired result.--Percy

Well done for managing to misunderstand Dawkins' point. It was a very, very simple point, a point so simple that children could understand it, but you are a creationist, so you can misunderstand what he meant.Well done.

And he is outnumbered by the following people: That's a lot of scientists. So maybe you could stop arguing that your idol Sanford is right on the grounds of his qualifications, and try to base your arguments on facts.Oh, right, but you know damn-all about the subject that he's talking about. All you know is that someone with a PhD said something that you wish was true, so all hail to the mighty John Sanford. Let us bow before him.