Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham

I call it ordinary microevolution, there's nothing "super" about it.

What is to prevent microevolution from becoming macroevolution?

What do you mean by that phrase exactly ?

It was your own words that inspired such nonsense, inconsistent and contradictory as they often are. You said the material of the pre-Flood landscape was scraped off by the flood and then redeposited into the layers we see today. When asked how so much material could have been deposited upon the landscape in just the couple thousand years before the flood you said that the pre-Flood world was much richer and more vital, so there was much more life.I thought it was just you not considering the implications again when you said that the pre-Flood landscape was not organized into layers. You might want to think this through a little bit more before insisting on it. If the pre-Flood era contained deserts and warm shallow seas and swampy lowlands and coastal regions and so forth, then all these environments leave their own distinctive deposits.But let me summarize what I think is your current position. There were no stratigraphic layers prior to the flood, so material comprising the pre-flood landscape must have been a homogenous mix of every kind of deposit (never mind how that might have happened, and never mind how, since it must have been just as deep as the post-Flood layers, it wasn't turned to rock). During the flood all this material was scraped off the landscape, sorted, then redeposited into largely homogenous layers of various types like sandstone, shale, and limestone that we see today. Major geological formations like the Grand Canyon are a result of the receding floodwaters or burst lakes that carved into the strata before they had completely dried into rock.--Percy

Er ... the speed. The speed would be "super" and not "ordinary".Especially if you hold that the evolution was actually saltational. Do you?

Hi Faith,I think your only problem is that I didn't use the exact same words you used. You don't like that I used the word "soft", but I communicated the exact same ideas you did. Your position is that the Grand Canyon was carved before the strata had become too hard to erode quickly, that they were still soft enough to allow huge amounts of material to be removed in a short period of time. I'm sorry you don't like the word soft, but I'm communicating your precise position. The English vocabulary is rich enough to permit the same ideas to be expressed in different ways.And after the flood you believe the rocks hardened by drying.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

Curiously I've had no trouble understanding what has been said here ... and the fact that you are having trouble understanding a simple concept presented by several people would indicate that the failure is on your end (cognitive dissonance interference?): comprehension of the issue that the necessary rapid evolution to current species from species that were on the ark, should leave SOME evidence in the dirt\soil\etc that has accumulated in many places since the purported flood. These bones should be intermediate in form from their common ancestor to the current forms.One of the places to look would be archaeological sites where the bone of animals are preserved. Now I am sure that Coyote could give you a list of all the different species found in such sites covering the last 4,500 years.Another place to look would be sites where animals were trapped and died, like the Tar Pits, showing stacks of bones from animals over the pastTar pit - Wikipedia

quote:

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Animals are usually unable to escape from the asphalt when they fall in, making these pits excellent locations to excavate bones of prehistoric animals. The tar pits can trap animals because the asphalt that seeps up from underground forms a bitumen pit so thick that even mammoths find it impossible to free themselves before they die of starvation, exhaustion from trying to escape or from the heat that would come from the sun. Over one million fossils have been found in tar pits around the globe.

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And there would also be fossils left from volcanic eruptions since the purported flood.[abe]: the question comes down to how many "kinds" were on the ark, and how many modern species have evolved from them to fill out the diversity of life as we know it (I tried to find the picture Ken used in the debate, but this is the closest): there are several speciation events shown between the ark landing and the present day -- and it shows many intermediates in between[/abe]So where are these intermediate forms if we have not found any? That is the simple question, Faith.If nothing else there should be some record of some of the 'kind masters' that were on the ark, and there should be evidence of concentrations of their immediate descendants near the ark landing site.Edited by RAZD, : ..Edited by RAZD, : ..Edited by RAZD, : added img

Yeah, none of that is really true.Your stuck in a position where you believe something that science shows to be false. Since your belief cannot change, you're left with trying to find a way to believe that science has *not* shown your belief to be false.And your way to do that is to try to discredit the conclusion by saying they're unfounded.But everyone knows they're founded, and correct, and that this is just your way of dealing with having to believe things that are wrong.

you're looking for an argument where there is none: the only argument was about what's in the sediment, not whether or not it's layered. i do not understand where you are getting lost in this argument. the archaeological and historical records (that is not the fossil record, the stuff above the fossil record, the stuff post-flood in your view) should have evidence of the rampant diversification of species within the "kinds". sure. and then we should see evidence of this "microevolution" (in fact, extremely fast evolution) in the historical and archaeological records. i'll give you a documented example to get the ball rolling.there is extremely strong evidence, in recent history, for variation among dogs due to artificial selection. this is all within the species level. but we can document changes in say, the length of a pug's snout between ancient chinese paintings, victorian photographs, and pugs today.most creationists, and i suspect you as well (correct me if i'm wrong) would count not just dogs (canis familiaris) but {iall[/i] canids as a "kind". ken ham definitely does; i believe he said as much as in his talk. so, where is the "missing link" or last common ancestor between canis lupus (the wolf) and canis familiaris (the dog), or even the pug that looks more like your average dog? these as well should all be changes documented in the last 4,300 years. if not in the historical record, than in archaeological digs: dogs have been domesticated for all of human history. to be fair, creationists have a very muddle definition of "kind". i believe i better understand the way you are using it now. nope, not even close. some of the things that are included together in "kinds" are actually quite different, eg: my wolf/pug example. are you proposing that one day a wolf just gave birth to a pug? or do you expect there to be some variation between the two?

no, look at it again. some go extinct earlier, and some come about later. like i said, neither representation is accurate.

i like how AronRa puts it in his phylogeny challenge. not to be confused with my paleontology professor's phylogeny challenge, which awarded points for the widest diversity on the cladistic tree of life you could eat in a single sitting.

The speed only seems "super" because of the weird expectations promoted by evolutionism that it has to take a long time. All it takes is the reproductive isolation of a smallish number of individuals over enough generations to combine all the alleles in the population. Because of the change in gene frequency caused by the new allele mix in the new smaller population you'll start getting new individual phenotypes within a few generations. Getting a completely new variety or breed that characterizes the whole population should just take however long it takes to mix all the alleles. Certainly no thousands of years. Maybe a couple hundred, maybe less. No. Just the usual change from generation to generation through sexual recombination, nothing extraordinary at all.I'm not arguing anything I haven't argued here a hundred times before.

As I read on in your post, however, I see that you aren't understanding it at all. But at least I think I get a better idea of what the problem may be. Paradigm clash I'd say. You guys think in terms of transitional forms, I don't because I don't share the evolutionist model. Your model expects gradations, mine doesn't. Mine expects variations, not gradations. The bones in the archaeological digs could have all sorts of different forms from those either on the ark or in the fossil record just depending on how the groups dispersed after the Flood. Larger, smaller, heavier, lighter, taller, shorter, any variation is possible depending on what mix of alleles was involved. Well, yes, there should be evidence of varieties of all the animals that were on the ark, but not gradations, not transitionals, but varieties. What you get depends on the combination of the alleles present in any given reproducing population.The alleles for human skin color for instance should produce the whole range of skin colors. You've got six reproducing individuals on the ark, each with four genes. Say one has AABb, another has AaBB, another has AaBb, the fourth has aaBb, the fifth AAbb, the sixth AaBb. I don't have the patience right now to try to calculate all this out and it wouldn't be something you'd find in the archaeological graves anyway. But this may illustrate the principle I have in mind. From the basic genetic variability you could get both very dark skinned and very light skinned individuals as well as everything in between, and depending on how they form groups and disperse from one another you will start getting whole populations with different skin color from the other populations. Not gradations, just different groups with different characteristics. No they shouldn't. As the animals dispersed from the ark and their population grew, you'd start getting different mixes of alleles in the groups that split off. Basic evolution: change in gene/allele frequency brought about by reproductive isolation of a daughter population. You theoretically could get a population of wiry fast dogs in one place and another population of large lazy dogs in another, and yet another population of good hunting dogs and another of small dogs as pets. But the point is the genetic variability of the pair on the ark is going to get distributed among their offspring in unpredictable ways based on how the groups split off from each other and disperse geographically. You are not going to get gradations or transitions, you are going to get a range of varieties.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Because of the non-weird expectations promoted by observation, Faith. Evolution observably doesn't go that fast.

Well, are you talking about saltation or not?A pair of ur-cats come off the Ark, yes? Some time later, we have lions which are descended from them, yes?This would suggest that in between you have things which look less like ur-cats and more like lions. These would be intermediate forms.The alternative is that you have things which aren't more like lions than they are like ur-cats suddenly giving birth to lions. This would be saltation, the production of Panthera leo at a single bound.You have to have one or the other: if you want lions to evolve from non-lions they can either do it gradually or suddenly, there isn't a third option.