The Truth About Evolution and Religion

Hi dkroemer welcome to EvC, Where are you obtaining you information from for what a soul is?What is your definition of soul?God Bless,

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

I am basing my views on the following quote from mainstream biologists from Harvard and Berkeley:"Facilitated variation is not like orthogenesis, a theory championed by the eccentric American paleontologist Henry Osborn (1857—1935), which imbues the organism with an internal preset course of evolution, a program of variations unfolding over time. Natural selection remains a major part of the explanation of how organisms have evolved characters so well adapted to the environment." (The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma, page 247)Gerhart and Kirschner are saying facilitated variation and natural selection explain only adaptation. They are not saying it explains the increase in the complexity of life. This is another quote from their award winning book:"By comparison, if we question how long it would take a high-speed computer to write randomly a specific Shakespearean sonnet, we are asking that all the letters of the words of the sonnet will come up simultaneously in the correct order. It is an impossible task, even if all the computers in the world today had been working from the time of the big bang to the present. Even to compose the phrase, To be or not to be, letter by letter, would take a typical computer millions of years." ( page 32)They modified their statement that a computer would take "millions of years." With facilitated variation and natural selection a computer could reproduce "to be or not to be" in a short time. However, they did not give the calculation for a full sonnet. I am suggesting that the reason they do not is that natural selection plus facilitated variation plus mutations obviously cannot explain the complexity of life.

The book on metaphysics I have is titled The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics by W. Norris Clarke, S.J. It was published in 2001 by the University of Notre Dame Press. Fr. Clarke was my metaphysics teacher in 1963.

Hi again dkroemer,Personally I think you need to slow down and take in some of the comments that have already been made. In order for you to teach anyone about biology in general and evolution in particular, you will need to establish your credentials, you need to show that you understand the basic concepts of biology (in general) and evolution (in particular).Can you define what the biological process of evolution is (as opposed to the theory of evolution)? Once we have established that you know what evolution is, as a process, then we can move on to other topics. None of the above. I would ask the student (a) how he defined "free will" and (b) how does this apply to biology and evolution?This is what is called a "teaching moment" - a time when the questioner can be prompted to think outside their current thinking and see if they can develop an answer. It seems you rely heavily on quotes from people, and there are several problems with this: if the quotes are taken out of context then they do not mean what they are purported to mean, the person being quoted can be wrong, the person may not be an authority on the subject. This is known as the logical fallacy of the appeal to authority. Here is an example of the problems with quotes: the "he" in the phrase "And yet, he explained, it did evolve, ..." appears to refer to Darwin, and yet this is not possible because "random genetic mutation" was unknown in Darwin's time. Do you or do you not understand that natural selection and random genetic mutation are two completely distinct and separate processes?Comments like this do not bode well for your ability to teach anyone something about biology in general and evolution in particular.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : clrty

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What is your definition of free will?

Hi dkroemer, sorry, I asked you first:What is evolution?After you have answered that, then you can ask me a question.Enjoy.

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I'm not sure there are any natural selection pressures for random strings to resemble Shakespearean sonnets. So it would have to be done through artifice. There are any number of ways of doing that, some will produce sonnets quicker than others so it is a bit daft to calculate it. One could create a "Methinks it is like a weasel" type program, which would probably do it very quickly. Or you could create some kind of method of comparing a string to any Shakespeare sonnet and evaluate it on some kind of measure of 'similarity' and then make copies of the ones that score highest etc. That might take a little longer. What an individual person thinks is 'obvious' doesn't mean a great deal though, does it? Some people thought it was obvious that improving sanitation in a hospital would have little to no impact on mortality figures. Fortunately Florence Nightingale begged to differ and she gathered evidence and used her mathematical training to generate reports that clearly demonstrated the efficacy of doing so.So, can you compete with a 19th Century nurse and show us that which is 'obvious'?Complexity is an almost certain result of evolutionary processes. Indeed - we'd be surprised if it didn't emerge!If you don't believe me, read this paper. They used evolutionary algorithms to design an oscillator that did not use capacitors. A number of interesting things resulted, but I think this quote sums it up:

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It has proved difficult to clarify exactly how these circuits work. Probing a typical one with an oscilloscope has shown that it does not use beat frequencies to achieve the target frequency. If the transistors are swapped for nominally identical ones, then the output frequency changes by as much as 30%. A simulation was created that incorporated all the
parasitic capacitance expected to exist within the physical circuit, but the simulated circuits failed to oscillate. The programmable switches almost certainly play an important role in the behaviour of the circuit and it is only possible to probe their input and output connections and not the circuitry in which they are embedded.

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In short: within a short period of time, an extremely complex piece of equipment was designed that could not be understood completely by the researchers performing the work!

The probability of getting a sonnet by random chance is 600 to the 27th power. The probability of getting an average protein by random chance is about the same since there are 20 amino acids as compared to 26 letters and one space. In the The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma by a professor of biology at Harvard Medical School (Marc Kirschner) and a professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley (John Gerhart), these experts on evolution do not do any probability calculations for a sonnet. They only do a probability calculation for a short epigram and express that calculation in terms of how long it would take a single computer to produce an epigram. The answer is a short time.My assumption is that they do not do this calculation for a sonnet, which would represent the primary structure of a protein, because it is obvious that natural selection does not explain the complexity of life. I'm saying, in other words, that Gerhart and Kirschner are saying there is no explanation for the complexity of life. I challenge you to produce a single quote from a peer reviewed paper or biology textbook that says natural selection explains common descent. I can give you a number of quotes which says it does not.I realize how shocking what I am saying may be to you. My guess is that you have been deceived by the Darwinists and the advocates of intelligent design. Advocates of ID say there is a controversy about natural selection and Darwinists go along with the deception.

We agree. I know, you said this before. I responded to it. That's correct. That is indeed what you were saying earlier. And I asked you some questions about that and responded in general to it. Would you care to address anything I said about this?

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it would have to be done through artifice. There are any number of ways of doing that, some will produce sonnets quicker than others so it is a bit daft to calculate it. One could create a "Methinks it is like a weasel" type program, which would probably do it very quickly. Or you could create some kind of method of comparing a string to any Shakespeare sonnet and evaluate it on some kind of measure of 'similarity' and then make copies of the ones that score highest etc. That might take a little longer.

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Yes, and you are basing that on what you think is 'obvious'. If you want to inform us about their opinions about the explanations for the complexity of life, you'll have to provide a quote that actually gives it. Not assume that because they didn't perform a calculation at a certain point in a book that therefore means they have certain beliefs about complexity and explanation.Nevertheless, their opinion isn't the main contention here since they are not debating. It's your opinion that counts. What has that got to do with complexity? So can I. But since it was nothing to do with anything that I said I fail to see what would be achieved in so doing. Only in that you repeated a bunch of points, didn't address my original responses to those points and then started talking about something else entirely. Perhaps one of us is deceived, maybe both. I addressed this point in my previous part. It was the bit about Florence Nightingale and how she demonstrated without question who was being deceived.

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What an individual person thinks is 'obvious' doesn't mean a great deal though, does it? Some people thought it was obvious that improving sanitation in a hospital would have little to no impact on mortality figures. Fortunately Florence Nightingale begged to differ and she gathered evidence and used her mathematical training to generate reports that clearly demonstrated the efficacy of doing so.

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So, can you compete with a 19th Century nurse and show us that which is 'obvious'?

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Complexity is an almost certain result of evolutionary processes. Indeed - we'd be surprised if it didn't emerge!

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If you don't believe me, read this paper.

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Maybe, after you've addressed the points I raised originally we could return to this hypothesis and test it.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.Edited by Modulous, : quoted some of things I said in the previous post - just in case that helps

There are two different ways of approaching this. You have chosen the mathematical one, uninformed by the way biology actually works.Here is an example of the two methods:Goal: throw 25 dice and get all sixes.Method 1: Throw all 25 until you finally get 25 sixes all at once. (That's the mathematical approach.) You'll be there close to forever.Method 2: Throw all 25, then throw a second time using those dice that were not sixes. Repeat. (That's the biological approach.) You'll be done in minutes.Perhaps the mathematicians should keep their noses out of things they don't understand, eh?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Hi, dkroemer, am I right in assuming that you cannot define evolution? Nope, amused is more like it. Are you ready to learn the difference between natural selection and evolution?Enjoy.

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I did not understand your response, so I just repeated my original point. I am beginning now to understand you. I admit that I am making assumptions about what Gerhart and Kirschner are saying based on my ideas about what is obvious. I take it all back. I don't know what Gerhat and Kirschner mean. Now, it is up to you to explain to me what Gerhart and Kirschner are saying.

They are both mathematical approaches. The second one more accurately simulates natural selection.Biologist don't bother with these calculations except to express how complex life is. These calculations only explain how complex is the primary structure of proteins. This complexity does not even begin to describe the complexity of life. There is molecular machinery made up of dozens of proteins. There is also the timing of biological processes. The following is a quote from The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins:"Evolution skeptic: Professor Haldane, even given the billions of years that you say were available for evolution, I simply cannot believe it is possible to go from a single cell to a complicated human body, with its trillions of cells organized into bones and muscles and nerves, a heart that pumps without ceasing for decades, miles and miles of blood vessels and kidney tubules, and a brain capable of thinking and talking and feeling.JBS: But madam, you did it yourself. And it only took you nine months. (p. 211)J. B. S. Haldane spoke simple truth to his skeptical questioner, but he would not have denied that there is mystery, verging on the miraculous (but never quite getting there) in the very fact that a single cell gives rise to a human body in all its complexity."(p. 217)In other words, not only did proteins have to evolve, but the development of a mammal from a single fertilized egg had to evolve. Human babies, for example, have small heads so humans adults can have small pelvises. According to the theory of natural selection, babies with big heads were less likely to survive because their mothers died in childbirth. No?

You should add Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker to your reading list. At the very least, the first half of Chapter 3, in which he describes the difference between single-step selection (SSS, to make my typing go faster) and cumulative selection (CS). In SSS, you try to get everything to fall randomly in place all at once, then you try again from scratch, and again from scratch, etc. OTOH, CS uses each attempt as the starting point for the next attempt. SSS selection is what creationists and IDists claim that evolution uses, whereas CS is what evolution does use.The effectiveness of SSS can be calculated directly and, as you stated, it results in an extremely low probability, so low as to be deemed virtually impossible. But that's not what evolution uses. To illustrate and test a CS model, he wrote his WEASEL program in BASIC that used CS to generate a single line of Shakespeare, "Methinks it is like a weasel". They started the program and left for lunch and and it was finished by the time they returned. In the book, he does not provide a code listing, but he does describe what the program does. Armed with that information, many skeptics have written their own versions of WEASEL in their own choice of language (BASIC, being an interpreted language, is rather slow and so is not a very good choice unless you're not a very experienced programmer). The Wikipedia article that Modulus pointed you to (please read it) points to a long-established page that presents a number of those programs: Almost Like a Whale.My own program, MONKEY, was written a couple decades ago in Turbo Pascal (I am David Wise). You can download my program along with the source code from his site (my own is down until I can find a new provider). Unfortunately, a timing loop in the start-up code of TP started failing when PCs started running faster, as described by Musgrave on his page. I found and incorporated a fix for that, but I don't know whether Musgrave ever got it.I wrote MONKEY because I couldn't believe Dawkins' claim. I calculated the SSS probability and assumed a computer much faster than my PC/XT (Norton Factor 2) that could perform a million tests per second and came to the conclusion that in order to have one chance in a million that computer would need to run for a couple hundred billion years, many times longer that the universe has been in existence. But with CS, MONKEY succeeded within a few minutes (most often within 30 seconds, depending on population size) consistently, repeatedly, without fail.I then analyzed the probabilities involved, though for CS I had to employ Markovian chains. What I found was that the only way for MONKEY to fail using CS would be for almost every single attempt to fail, the probability for which is much lower that the probability for SSS to succeed.I just checked and Musgrave included my calculations and write-up on his page.

Hi dkroemer, I haven't read the book so I can't say for certain ... ... but I can make an educated guess:

• That natural selection is not the only mechanism in evolution.
• That mutation provides variation for selection to act on.
• That neutral drift also is part of the picture, where neutral mutations will persist in populations as long as they are not disadvantageous.
• That deleterious mutations will cause reduced success in reproduction and survival in organisms with such mutations, and
• that beneficial mutations will cause increased success in reproduction and survival in organisms with such mutations.
• That in different ecologies different mutations can be deleterious or beneficial.

... just for starters.Evolution is the change in frequency of hereditary traits in breeding populations from generation to generation in response to ecological opportunities.This is observed today in all living species, and thus it is a fact of reality.Traits that are beneficial become more frequent in the population, while traits that are deleterious become less frequent in the population.When evolution occurs in populations isolated from other populations of the same species, the evolution that occurs will be different because (a) the mutations that occur only occur in one population or the other, and (b) the selection of variations will be different because the ecologies are different.Over time this can result in reproductive isolation and the formation of new species.This too has been observed and is a fact.The process of evolution and the process of speciation are observed facts.The theory of evolution is that these two processes are sufficient to explain the diversity of life as we know it, from the world around us, from history, from prehistory, from archaeology, from paleontology, from geography, from physics, from genetics and from chemistry.This includes the development of more complex species, but complexity is not a required end result of evolution, rather it is an observed result that happens to be explained by evolution.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : clrty

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