How long does it take to evolve?

Yip. From my point of view Lamden is a dishonest creationist. And he tells untruths. The false dichotomy gave him/her away.

I love you too, my dear.I don't think you understood what I meant by creationists "winning" if etc. But who cares.
I can try to explain, but probably won't have time for about two weeks.
Others understood me just fine.

Isn't that a bit like trying to calculate the average mass of every organism on earth? What would that "average" even mean?If you wanted to argue that there hasn't been enough geological time for evolution to occur, you'd need to know the maximum speed of evolution. What's the point of knowing the "average"?

I have a feeling we won't hear from you again. Well, maybe the understanding was not what you think. We have seen similar patterns in your posts before.Care to respond to Message 12?

That's why I switched to the time question. Blue-green (cyano) bacteria around 3.7 - 3.8 billion years ago on a 4.5 billion year old rock, in the oldest known strata of sedimentary rock. 6 million to 2 million years ago, depending on what you call "human being" ... (Homo or Homo sapiens sapiens?)Enjoy

RazD
I appreciate your dialogue.
When the claim that a q like this is usually followed by a gotcha is made against me, I am incriminated for a crime others may have committed.
For crying out loud, this is supposed to be an opportunity to discuss issues, not an interrogation room in KGB headquarters where every blink comes under scrutiny.
Of course I am going to ask every question that pops in to my head, perhaps some can intrinsically not be answered. I am not that smart, thought out, or cunning.
The attacks against me are so asinine , but I guess it's a price I have to pay to access insightful comments from people like RAZD.
I repeat, I have heard many a presentation from both the evolution side and their detractors. I ought to be allowed to think for myself without being bullied into some evolutionary group think, even if it is the unanimous consensus of a respected community. If its true, let me get there myself. If I am dishonest to myself, I will not send any missionaries after anyone. I promise.

Ok, here goes.
But if this makes sense, I deserve an apology.
Dawkins points out, and I believe correctly so, that toe doesn't prove there was no creator, it just makes it possible for us to intelligently accept that life ( don't nitpick my wording)to exist without .
All I meant to say was, if toe could Happen, ev wins. And if it couldn't, we don't prove creation, but we don't have the viable alternative of ev. If you find another alternative, fine, I was not discussing that.
Pardon my Grammer I wrote this from my phone and it is very hard to get things right. Edited by Lamden, : No reason given.

Welcome Lamden. Good to have you on board. Sometimes you need a thick skin on this site. I think though that you are drawing a false dichotomy. It doesn't have to be either creationism or natural evolution. There is also the strong possibility of creationism using the evolutionary process. If, evolution is a result of a pre-existing intelligence then the question of how long it would take becomes a moot point. We would have no way of knowing about the original plan or even if there has been an intervention along the way.

This would be a proper understanding. We do not discuss 'proof' in the absolute sense, simply the preponderance of evidence and reason. Who do you mean by 'you' in this instance?I think you will find that, in this forum, if you are a YEC, it will be extremely hard to appear reasonable. We've seen just about every ploy in the book. Sorry, but we are skeptics, after all. Edited by edge, : No reason given.

Science says absolutely nothing about whether or not there are gods or a Creator. Both of those things are beyond any possible test anyone can or has imagined.But all of the evidence shows that evolution is a fact; that at one time there was no life on the Earth and that overtime there was a succession of changing lifeforms.The next question is whether or not there could be some explanation for what is seen.One possibility is Continuous Successive Creation where some god or gods create lifeforms then kills off those lifeforms and create newer lifeforms. But that really tells us nothing. It does not explain the changes seen or why there was a succession of lifeforms or what causes changes or how things change.Then came the Theory of Evolution and the Descent of Man and for the first time there was a testable explanation. More and more fossils were found and the technology and techniques of gathering data was improved and gradually the Theory was revised based on additional information.One of the biggest milestones was when we began gathering data about the environment that existed when the creatures that later became fossils were still alive instead of just looking at bones on the lab table or in the museum.Later genetics provided the model and methods to explain change. That is all very recent though, even Mendel's work was only 150 years ago and it lay unnoticed for about a half century. The real understanding of genetics though is even more recent with the vast majority of our knowledge only coming in the last quarter century or so.Granted, all of the evidence so far seems to indicate that no divine intervention is needed to explain the life seen here on Earth but that is a far cry from saying there is no god, no creator.

If the Theory of Evolution is ever invalidated, it will be by a breakthrough in science, not be people adhering to certain beliefs, nor will it make those beliefs any more credible.Certainly when we come to the YEC people, we know that their model is false for the simple reason that the earth is old, very very old. The evidence for this old age is abundant, pervasive, and consilient.But we also need to understand just what the theory of evolution says.To start with we have the process of evolution: This is sometimes called microevolution, however this is the process through which all species evolve and all evolution occurs at the breeding population level.If we look at the continued effects of evolution over many generations, the accumulation of changes from generation to generation may become sufficient for individuals to develop combinations of traits that are observably different from the ancestral parent population. This is also sometimes called arbitrary speciation in that the place to draw the line between linearly evolved genealogical populations is subjective, and because the definition of species in general is tentative and sometimes arbitrary.If anagenesis was all that occurred, then all life would be one species, readily sharing DNA via horizontal transfer (asexual) and interbreeding (sexual) and various combinations. This is not the case, however, because there is a second process that results in multiple species and increases the diversity of life. The reduction or loss of interbreeding (gene flow, sharing of mutations) between the sub-populations results in different evolutionary responses within the separated sub-populations, each then responds independently to their different ecological challenges and opportunities, and this leads to divergence of hereditary traits between the subpopulations and the frequency of their distributions within the sub-populations.This is what causes increased diversity of life forms.The process of anagenesis, with the accumulation of changes over many generations, is an observed, known objective fact, and not an untested hypothesis.The process of cladogenesis, with the subsequent formation of a branching nested genealogy of descent from common ancestor populations is an observed, known objective fact, and not an untested hypothesis.This means that the basic processes of "macroevolution" are observed, known objective facts, and not untested hypothesies, even if major groups of species are not observed forming (which would take many many generations). So the question of how long it takes to get from A to B is a little irrelevant: the ToE is there to explained what has already happened, and so far it is doing a bang-up job at it, imho.That is why we can look at the mouse to elephant question, measure the fastest rate of changes, extrapolate what time would be required, and find that about half the actual geological record was spent dilly dallying around before getting to the "finish line" -- that there was almost as much time to spare as there was used in the "race." This is of course due to the fact that the "end point" is not a goal to be reached but just a step on the path taken, the drunken walk path.Do this with any species and you will find a variety of times used but in each case that more time was available.This is particularly true when we look at species that go through punctuated equilibrium, with short periods of change and long periods of stasis.Enjoy

Mocking like a typical creationist. If you don't want to be taken for a dishonest creationist, then that is definitely not the way to do it.Now, I am willing to try to take your self-representation as a reasonable neutral person at face value, even though you keep throwing red flags in our faces that clearly reveal you to be a dishonest creationist who has come to us in sheep's clothing. While you do most certainly smell like a creationist, I am willing to play along with the idea that that's just some creationist crap you had stepped in and are tracking on our floor.You see, the problem is that in the past we have seen far too many creationists misrepresent themselves such that they appeared and sounded just like you do now. It is a shame that they have poisoned the well so thoroughly for you, but we will try to work past that. Please be understanding and patient as we scrutinize you and your statements extra closely. And do please endeavor to demonstrate that you are not a dishonest creationist by separating yourself from typical creationist misconduct.Regardless of whether you are or are not a creationist, there is a lot you can learn here from us about "creation science". Not only do we collectively have extensive experience in the relevent sciences, but we also collectively have considerable experience with the claims of "creation science". Indeed, some of us used to be creationists (not me; I smelled hokum from my very first exposure to it circa 1970, especially that claim about a NASA computer having found Joshua's Lost Day).And if you are indeed a creationist as you so strongly indicate, then we can learn some things from you. For example, there are a number of creationist claims that make absolutely no sense whatsoever and yet sound convincing to other creationists. There seem to be a number of unspoken false assumptions about how evolution works that they are making that would allow those claims to make sense, but, since those assumptions are unspoken (and creationists I have asked about them have refused to speak about them), we don't know what they are. As a creationist, you would be in a position to provide that missing information and understanding of the creationist position and mindset.And if you are indeed a creationist, then we could round out your education in ways that your creationist teachers never could. Assuming you are a creationist, how long have you been one? Not for very long, I would guess, since most experienced creationists know that their position is far too weak for them to risk "strolling into the lions' den." But a new and nave creationist is born every minute, like P.T. Barnum's suckers. Those new creationists feed from the creationist literature and armed with those "new scientific discoveries" venture forward to the slaughter, not knowing that those "new discoveries" are very old false claims that were soundly refuted decades ago. On this forum, we call them PRATTs, "points refuted a thousand times". The problem is that the creationist literature almost never gives you the history of those claims and most definitely never tells you about how they were refuted. Even in the rare instances when a creationist admits that a claim is wrong and officially drops it, his writings continue to carry it and new creationists will read that and never know the truth.Here are a few cases to illustrate that point, plus an illustrative quote from a former creationist, Scott Rauch:

• The "leap second" claim that at the rate the earth's rotation is slowing down then billions or even just millions of years ago the earth would have been spinning impossibly fast, flattening it like a pancake or pizza. It originated circa 1979 and was soundly refuted in 1982 -- the originator didn't understand leap seconds and came up with a wrong rate several thousands of times too great. Even though it was refuted over three decades ago, it is still very popular and is used very widely. New creationists are taught it routinely and are never informed of its refutation. See my page on it at http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/earth_rotation.html (incomplete, but I will upload it today within 12 hours from now).
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• The moon dust claim that if the moon were really billions of years old then it should be covered by a layer of meteoric dust more than 200 feet thick. Specifically, Dr. Henry Morris of the ICR cited a "1976" NASA document ("written well into the space age", as every creationist citing it would intone) as the source for that claim during a debate mainly to "refute" the opposition's claim that creationists use out-dated and obsolete sources, plus he cited it in his book, Scientific Creationism. When I pulled that NASA document off the university library shelf, I immediately saw that its contents were presented in 1965 and that the document was printed in 1967. Furthermore, I found that Harold Slusher, Morris' actual source, had misrepresented the document and pulled a couple mathematical tricks in order to inflate his result by a factor of 10,000; correcting for that factor, his equation actually yields a dust layer depth of a third of an inch. That false claim received so much negative attention that the ICR officially dropped using that claim. However, to my knowledge that disclaimer only appears in the foreword of one book, while Morris' Scientific Creationism still contains that false citation of the NASA document 25 years later and most of the ICR's books (published by Master Books) still contain a "uniformitarian age of the earth assumptions" table that repeats this admittedly false claim. See my page, MOON DUST for the complete story.
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• Circa 1990, a local creationist fossil shop hosted a short series of informal public debates in which any member of the audience could get up and present his case. I got the word out to local groups so that the audience ended up roughly half creationist and half not, instead of almost totally creationist as the organizer had wanted. One young creationist got up and announced he had some brand new scientific information that was going to blow evolutionists away: the speed of light has been slowing down. Immediately, half the audience both burst into uncontrollable laughter and explaining to him what was wrong with that claim. At the time, Setterfield's claim was more than a decade old, hardly "brand new", and it had been refuted almost as soon as it had come out. The young creationist was completely blown away and had no idea what had just hit him. He is an example of what I told you above, that new creationists fed only on what creationists teach them and knowing nothing about their claims' histories are in grave danger when they sally forth "into the lions' den". On my quotes page, I quote a leading member of Answers in Genesis about this very problem, Dr Jonathan Sarfati. And on my links page I link to an article by another leading member of Answers in Genesis, Dr. Don Batten (not actually posted on the AiG site for political reasons, but I have verified its authencity with Answers in Genesis) -- in particular read the final section of the article, "Muddying the water?".
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• "I still hold some anger because I believe the evangelical Christian community did not properly prepare me for the creation/evolution debate. They gave me a gun loaded with blanks, and sent me out. I was creamed."
  (Scott Rauch)

So as you can see, if you are a new creationist then you can use this forum to learn the complete story about the claims that you have been taught. That way, you will which ones to not use. Though, of course, if you are a dishonest creationist (which is sadly typical), then the truth would mean nothing to you anyway.So, even if you are a creationist, we both have a lot we can learn from each other. Do stay and allow that to happen.In subsequent messages I will describe some of the red flags you've been waving and describe their problems. Others' replies have mentioned them, but I think they should be explained to you.

As others have indicated, your question itself is a red creationist flag. To give you the benefit of the doubt yet again, this could just be some creationist crap that you are tracking in after having stepped in a steaming pile. In other words, it could be that this was a question that you had heard a creationist raise and which you thought sounded reasonable, so you passed it on to us to answer it. And that could most likely be the case even if you are indeed a creationist in sheep's clothing, since most creationists just simply regurgitate the convincing-sounding claims and arguments that they hear, most often without understanding them themselves (which is one thing that makes it very difficult and frustrating to discuss a creationist's claim with him).So then, here is what we are talking about:Your question sounds very much like a common creationist "unanswerable question". An "unanswerable question" is a dishonest fundamentalist proselytizing trick widely used by creationists. It's a question that is designed to be impossible to answer, at least for most of the creationist's victims. Its primary purpose is to knock your opponent's feet out from under him and, by throwing him off-balance, hopefully to make him doubt his own position, thus softening him up for conversion (like I said, I have read their training materials). Secondarily, though in a very close second, they are useful in deceiving an audience by making the opponent's position appear weak, even to the point of making it appear that you have disproven his position.Part of the delivery of an "unanswerable question" is to insist emphatically that you honestly and truly want to get an answer to that question, that you are extremely interested. In email correspondence with a local creationist, Bill Morgan, he would constantly throw "unanswerable questions" at me, always insisting emphatically that he really wanted an answer, and yet when I would answer it and suggest we discuss it, he would invariably either run away (ie, not respond and refuse to respond to any follow-up emails), change the subject with yet another "unanswerable question" (which he calls "rabbit trailing" and which he condemns as an unacceptably dishonest trick, but which he constantly employs himself thus revealing himself to be a hypocrite), or rarely try to claim that I didn't answer the question while refusing to respond to my request for any reason why he thought that. A key component of nearly all of his reactions to getting an answer was a sudden and total loss of interest in the question. That is understandable, since the whole purpose of an "unanswerable question" is that it cannot be answered. On one occasion, Bill Morgan slipped up and admitted the real reason he asked a particular "unanswerable question": "To make you look stupid."One form of the "unanswerable question" is to require your opponent to have complete knowledge, such as a detailed account of how life began, or of every single stage in human evolution, and to present it right then and there off the top of his head. Despite the fact that we do not yet possess that amount of detailed information yet, since much of it is still to be discovered, and regardless of the fact that your opponent is far from being a foremost expert in that field -- eg, should you expect the bag boy at the local grocery store to be an expert in brain surgery?It should also be noted that most "unanswerable questions" are based on false assumptions and are presented in a manner to force the victim into defending a position that he in fact does not hold. For example, Bill Morgan's more recent "unanswerable question" has been to present complex human organs as the product of supernatural design and to mispresent my position as being that they formed by matter just having happened to have fallen together in that form. No, what he is misrepresenting evolution to be is actually a form of creation ex nihilo, whereas I would instead say that those organs had evolved, which is something quite different than what he's trying to pin on me.Now regard your question in light of all that. You wanted us to calculate how long it would take for single-cell organisms to evolve into humans. In order to do that, we would need to construct a detailed mathematical model of every single stage of that evolution. That would require us to possess complete and highly detailed knowledge of every single stage. Not only does that not yet exist, but the likelihood that we on this forum would be such foremost experts is extremely slim. And even if one of us were an expert, constructing that detailed mathematical model is a non-trivial task, so to expect us to do it immediately off the top of our heads and on the back of an envelope is highly unreasonable. And to then declare defeat for evolution nobody could comply to your unreasonable request goes far beyond unreasonable.Consider this analogy: You decide to disprove the existence of supersonic aircraft by stopping people on the street and challenging them to design and build and fly one. Virtually all the people you ask have no idea how to do that. Even if you were to find an aeronautical engineer who has the knowledge to design a supersonic aircraft, it is not only a non-trivial task you have given him, but one that is impossible for him to perform by himself on the street. Therefore, you conclude, supersonic aircraft cannot exist.This keeps reminding me of that incident told in the Pirke Avoth ("Sayings of the Fathers") about the uppity Gentile who was going from one rabbinic school to the next demanding the head rabbi to recite the whole of the Law (ie, the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament) while standing on one foot. Now, it would not have been unreasonable to ask that they recite portions from memory, since memorizing the Torah was a primary skill that they taught (memorizing entire books was common practice even in Gentile academies, as memorizing the Talmud in yeshivas centuries later), but to have to recite the entire Torah in one session would be a non-trivial task and to have to do that while standing on one foot was just plain unreasonable. The other rabbis treated that Gentile as he deserved and chased him out with a stick. But when he approached the Pharisees with his unreasonable request, Rabbi Hillel answered him with: "Do not to others that which is displeasing to yourself. That is the whole of the Law. The rest is just explanation. Now go and learn it." BTW, that was in 20 BCE, a full half century before Jesus is reported to have presented that Pharisaic teaching, the Golden Rule.BTW, creationists do pull the dishonest trick of misidentifying someone as an expert and then either discredit him publically or use his inability to answer his questions as proof. For example, Bill Morgan told the story of going to a national park and listening the ranger describe the geology of the valley, during which he started hitting the ranger, whom he misidentifed as an "expert in geology", with outlandish creationist claims that the ranger had no idea how to respond to; in that way, Bill Morgan "disproved" geology to the rest of the audience by having publicly disgraced a "geology expert." In another example, Bill Morgan had a series of questions about how chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) can get into the stratosphere to damage the ozone layer if they're heavier than air. So he took his questions to "the experts": air conditioning salesmen at a trade show (CFCs are used in refrigeration). His "experts" couldn't answer his questions, so that meant that CFCs couldn't possibly be in the stratosphere -- never mind that air samples taken by sounding rockets directly and empirically detect CFCs at various altitudes and measure their concentrations. Now, if he instead had gone to the real experts, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), he would have found all his questions answered in their on-line FAQ.Lamden, do you now see how your question and the conclusion you jumped to make you appear exactly like a typical creationist? Especially considering how you invoked the Two Model Approach, which is the false dichotomy (AKA "false dilemma") that others have mentioned -- indeed, in a Wikipedia article that mentions the Two Model approach, that link takes you directly to the false dilemma page. I will discuss the Two Model Approach with you later.Now, your first post would have come off much better if you had stated the general problem ("How long would it have taken?") and asked for ideas of how to set up the mathematical model to arrive at the answer. And to have asked if anyone knew of research that had been done along those lines. And to have refrained from pronouncing defeat for evolution (an extremely typical creationist action).Are you starting to understand everybody's objections?

FWIIW I find this assumption presumptuous when it could be the product of our wonderful emasculated education system, particularly in certain states that feel they need to push the false dichotomy onto the students (and let them decide ...). So it could be just ignorance.Curiously I note that Alabama has turned away from that path (and I'm thinking that is in response to business wanting educated people).Certainly if that is the case then this site is a good place for some remedial education eh?

Well, if we were to view that in context, I believe that you would see that the point I was making was that there is a lot that he can learn about "creation science" from this forum and that that would be regardless of whether he is a creationist or not.So, if he is indeed a creationist, then he should kindly drop the pretense and engage in open discussion with us.And if he is indeed not a creationist, then he should kindly stop looking and acting like one so that we can engage in open discussion.A corollary would be that if he is a creationist, then he should realize that trying to sway us with creationist claims and arguments will not work, so he should drop the standard creationist adversarial role and engage in open discussion.And if he is not a creationist but rather has indeed studied both sides, then he should share what he has learned and engage in open discussion about it.As I believe I had mentioned, I have been encountering absolutely bizaare creationist claims that make no sense whatsoever (eg, when whatever evolved into chickens, then they would have had to have completely re-evolved their reproductive organs from scratch) but which creationists seem to find quite reasonable. The only explanation for that that I can think of is that they are operating under a set of assumptions about evolution and how it works which are completely divorced from reality, but which they believe to be true. It would really help for us to know what those assumptions are, but trying to ask a creationist about them is virtually impossible. I tried to ask Bill Morgan about his underlying assumptions for "but THEY'RE STILL MOTHS!!!!", but he kept dodging and trying to change the subject by throwing one "unanswerable question" after another at me.We need to find a way to get creationists to engage in open and frank discussion. Frankly, I doubt that they are capable of it.