Ready When Made

Hello there Brian.I think we have deteriorated since sin (first). I think we are more vulnerable to diseases and such. However I am ofcourse referring to the supposed 'millions of years' spoken of on your side. But I think mainly we are designed , or READY WHEN MADE.Later guys.[This message has been edited by mike the wiz, 10-16-2003]

Hi Mike,I, like yourself, am not a scientist (no offence meant), so maybe we can discuss this at a basic level! lolOk, I know for a fact that humans are living far longer than we did even a hundred years ago. We can also run faster, we are stronger, we are clearly much healthier than people who lived a hundred years ago, so how can this be a deterioration?If your theory is correct, doesnt it suggest a steady decline from the perfect Adam and Eve down to the low life that we are right now? If this is the case, why isn't this what the evidence points to.If we were 'ready when made' why have we drastically improved physcially?Brian.

Mike, you're skipping the issues.1) Address the issue of the number of extinctions relative to the number of total species
2) Address the issue that we're in a recent bust period due to *humans* - otherwise, evidence the fact that large numbers of extinctions are coming from something other than humans.
3) If your claim is that you feel we're not witnessing new species, then state so, so that I can cite articles on speciation events.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

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Millions of years may indeed have been too long. That is my main point. I don't think a human would be the result of an extinction/takeover/degeneration, as they too would have the same problem when 'needs' arose.Millions of years wont solve an urgent problem.

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I think you are looking at this from a teleological perspective. It's not like a 5 million years ago a species began evolving into a human. The species simply adapted to a new environment, then another, and then another, etc. Now we are here. Its pretty clear that if you look at change in environments on a broader scale, the environment changes quite frequently. So this isn't a stretch to say that a species just adapted to new environmental circumstances.Also, the environment doesn't have to change necessarily. All you need is new variation caused my mutations that can have more reproductive success then other variations.

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Any evolutionary way it is looked at cannot change the fact that we observe extinction but not evolution. Degeneration rather than improvement, can be indicated by this.

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You make it seem like evolution and extinction are competing theories, and if extinction is proved, then evolution is false. That doesn't make any sense, IMO. No evolutionist denies that species go extinct when drastic environmental changes occurr.Extinction isn't necessarily a fast process either, it can take thousands of years when a species numbers begin to dwindle before they are extinct. The only reason we see extinction at such a rapid rate is because we (humans) are causing them to go extinct. We would observe extinctions at a vanishingly smaller degree if we didn't cause them.Let's say I go into a Sequoia forest and cut down a 250 foot tree. Do I then conclude that Sequoia's don't grow because I've only seen them get cut down? The answer is no, because growing and getting cut down are not exclusive concepts.JustinC

How about 450 species of ciclids in 2 MY, is that fast enough? Oh yeah, that's just in one lake, Lake Malawi in Africa. In all of East Africa, 1500 species from 1 common ancestor in 10 MY. This is just cichlids, little inconspicous fish. What rate of speciation are you requiring Mr. Wiz? Faster or slower than the cichlids?

Personal incredulity is not evidence, nor does the Universe "care" what you think or do not think.The evidence, as cited by others already, demonstrates that you are wrong.

Sorry for interrupting this forum especially since this comment may not be on topic. On the "deteriorating world" theories: My theory is that life was better, people better health etc in the beginning and it was that way for awhile, then health started to decrease again, and today it's starting to increase again. Well this not including intelligence level of course.------------------
-chris[This message has been edited by messenjaH, 10-16-2003][This message has been edited by messenjaH, 10-16-2003]

Brian,
I think this SERIES to the least is what Matchette meant by "As Dr. C. B. Davenport said in the course of a discussion: "The researches of Stanley are of peculiar interest to those biologists who have a more or less speculative trend. They suggest that we must about-face in looking at the problems of evolution. Hitherto we have sought to go downward in the series"and not by next"to find the simplest organism which might represent, perhaps, the beginning of the organic series. Now, I think we begin our conception of evolution with a consideration of the increase in molecular complexity and degree of organization of molecules."which is something I have completely not expected to look for in the evolutionary literature but my guess would be that this series will be discoverable in the 40s literature which if found my guess again would be able to explain longer lives , faster runners and deterioratin as one.c Just a guess.

And we haven't survived millions of years. Species average a small number of millions of years before going extinct. So in that sense you are right, "we" don't survive very long.But I should ask who is "we" in the above?Does it mean all of life? In that case your point has some validity. How close, how many times has life been pushed to the line?Snowball earth and a series of huge die offs; could one of them gone all the way? It maybe just good luck they didn't.To counter that. Our knowledge of the range of conditions that bacteria can live under shows that it would not be easy to extinguish all life.

Where is the evidence that people used to be in better health? Long ages in the bible are at best an allegory, if not total hyperbole. Increased health today is the result of science (using the supposed cursed naturalistic methodology). We took the evil spirits out of medicine and inserted antibiotics. The latter seems to be working better. Intelligence has probably been at a steady state for quite sometime. Recently watched a show on PBS about Archimedes (sp?) who lived around 200 BC I believe. His mathematics were destroyed during the Dark Ages, except for one transcript labelled "The Method." It had been written over with prayers by monks. In "The Method" Archimedes laid down proofs that are quickly looking a lot like the first proofs of calculus, more than a thousand years before Newton came up with it. He had solved how to measure volume by summing infinite slices, the hallmark of calculus. He was also the first to calculate pi, at least to the second decimal. Before this turns into a total diatribe, intelligence by itself has not changed, IMO, but rather knowledge has slowly built. The two shouldn't be confused.Just to get back towards the topic, if everything was healthier, including plants, we should find fossilized trees with amazing ages as measured by growth rings. If this is limited to the animal kingdom, one can measure age by looking at bone growth as has been done to many mummies and the "Iceman" found in the Alps. These don't show increased age or anything suggesting superiour health. Sticking to the YEC timeline and your theory, they should show these attributes.[This message has been edited by Loudmouth, 10-17-2003]

Hi Brad,I think what Mike was getting at in regard to deterioration was that sin caused a perfect world to 'fall away'. I believe that his model suggests that we start with a perfect being and once that being disobeys God then that being and his offspring began to deteriorate.I do not think that any improvement in humans is compatible with Mike's suggestion. Since we are clearly living much longer nowadays than we ever have before, I suggest that the idea of sin causing a deterioration of the world and its inhabitants is yet another aspect of this ancient book that has been proven wrong.Brian.

Ok- fair enough - but I do not think that humanism IN ANY SENSE can "evolve" culture in the biologists sense yet this is a posssible requestioned answer by the new president of Cornell U for 2015- The potential of unregulated by political priveldges to research colleges access to the creation and invention of nanotech products seems to me BROADER and more dangerous than the past regime that founding fathers here had in mind. It would be as easy to understand as the difference between my one brother who believes today in artifical intelligence and is studing in France which for me I rejected the concept of the perceptron instead years ago which appears in converstion with my other brother over a natural lanaguage comptuer interface that without nanoecology keeping up with economics looks pretty scary to my educated arse which really is only worship as far as I can tell. Best of luck and God Bless. Brad.

Loudmouth, thanks for pointing all this out to me, I just don't know much of how to learn how life was like back then, especially since my theory has been slightly thrashed, as I see its flaws, I will continue to ponder all this.------------------
-chris

The few anthropologists I have talked to seem to agree that art, religion, death rituals, and social hierarchy give special insight into daily lives of ancient civilizations. It pretty much comes down to what people did with their extra time outside of gathering food and giving shelter to their families. As an example, recent theories on pyramid building in Egypt state that the builders were not slaves, but rather citizens who gave up their free time between harvests as an offering to the pharoah. For a society to do this you would need societal and agricultural organization in order to support such a large population as well as a unified religion. We can never be absolutely sure exactly what went on in the past, but archaeology is helping us make a very reliable educated guess.

I wish to offer arguments in support of mike the wiz. He does have a very good point here. Let's look at it in a simple manner.Say any species suddenly is faced with a challenge to survival that will require some new trait to keep it alive. Suppose we have some bears on an island. The climate gets colder. Natural selection kicks in, and soon we have only the bears with genetic information for long hair surviving to pass on their chromosomes. So the gene pool has narrowed down to long hair only. But then temperatures reverse to very hot. However, since natural selection has thinned the gene pool down to longhaired bears, there are no shorthaired bears to breed with to regain genetic information for short hair.
Obviously, these bears are going to need some macroevolution by random mutation to gain short hair again in order to remain cool. But before the long time periods required by evolution pass, the bears have all perished in the heat. Natural selection should have tipped the scales back to shorthaired bears again, only there weren't any after they all died out in the preceding ice age.
This illustration shows how species diversify, losing genetic information through natural selection, and may become extinct because they don't have time to develop a survival trait. Life on earth is clearly therefore deteriorating.