Summations Only

Do you mean the supposed evolution from the reptilian to the mammalian ear? That was discussed on a thread a while back, with illustrations.In fact you don't "see" evolution going on in the fossil record: what you have is a series of different fossils with different ear designs that you IMAGINE OR INTERPRET to be steps in an evolutionary sequence. And the differences between the ear designs are significant enough to make the evolutionary path so convoluted it is not at all plausible: one part has to move to a different position in relation to the other parts; one part has to shrink and another expand; one part has to disappear altogether. It's an entirely different design and since you CAN'T see it evolve, the idea is really pretty outlandish. You keep saying that but not proving that it's really so. Shouldn't we expect morphology to match DNA sequences? Whether evolved OR designed? I mean the DNA is a recipe for the physical organism, so there shouldn't be anything unexpected or special about there being a match. It doesn't prove anything against design, since design is the most reasonable explanation for the whole system in the first place.

So your hypothesis is that a designer created all those different organisms independently and then they got buried in a massive, worldwide flood in a very specific pattern so that the progression of the bones from organisms buried deeper to organisms buried higher up in the column would appear to follow an evolutionary pathway? Isn't that kind of outlandish?The pattern of the evolution of the mammalian ear has very fine detail. It tracks through the geological column extremely well, meaning that you will always find the more derived forms ABOVE the less derived forms in the geological column - in the distinctive pattern outline by the diagrams presented. Why would you expect non-coding sequences to follow this pattern? Why would you expect simple sequence repeats to be informative as to population structure? Why would you expect basic housekeeping genes, such as Ribosomal RNA and cytochrome C, to be highly conserved across unrelated species and yet show patterns of differences that can be grouped into a nested hierarchy - and one that largely matches predictions based on morphology (which both of the genes mentioned have little to no direct effect on morphology). Why would there not be just 1, or at least a very small number, of each of these highly conserved housekeeping genes that is used across all species? Why does each species or group of species get their own unique sequence that is just a little bit different from their closest relatives?While you may be right that this doesn't prove anything against design, it is a very, very weak case FOR design. It is a much stronger argument for common descent (and as far as I am concerned, common descent does not preclude or exclude design or the existence of a designer).Now, if your argument is that the original organism was designed and then "microevolved" after that, the challenge then becomes delineating these original "designed" groups. The problem is that there are genetic, bio-geographical and morphological connections between many disparate groups. The delineation of these groups becomes very subjective and practically impossible to defend. Design may indeed be the best explanation for the "whole system," and I personally believe it is. But that is a completely different argument than the argument about evolution. Besides, it is a philosophical or metaphysical argument, not so much a scientific one unless one can present a method for testing it. The question being posed is "how does design account for the patterns we observe in nature, and in particular the patterns that look evolved?" The arguments thus far amount to nay-saying.HBD

So many other features that are common to things we know are designed simply don't show up in living things we can observe.Some examples:When we look at things we know are designed like architecture, art, pottery, automobiles, airplanes, fountain pens ... we find that innovations tend to spread across versions made by different makers. Automakers adopted many new features (some good some bad) across product lines. Vent widows disappeared regardless of which species of car we are discussing. Generators were replaced by alternators regardless of which species of car we are discussing. Radial tires replaced bias ply tires regardless of which species of car we are discussing. Radios and air conditioning, turn signals, heaters, all appeared almost simultaneously regardless of which species of car we are discussing. Electric systems replaced vacuum systems for door locks and wipers and headlight covers regardless of which species of car we are discussing.Even non-function things similar to sexual display features we see in living things appeared across all makes; all cars had fins, all cars lost the fins, all cars lost running boards, all cars gained LED lights, all cars gained pearlescent paints and it happened across all models and rapidly and just as rapidly changed.Looking at the history of living things shows a long succession of failure, with only a very few ideas that are successful and even those ideas that are not complete failures do not get implemented in the improved form across product lines.We do not see the eyes evolving across species like we saw the changes in sound systems in cars, AM radios adding FM capability and then tape decks and CD players and RCA ports and USB ports and connections to the drivers cell phone and ...It simply doesn't work like that when we come to living things. Humans do not get upgraded to include the wolf's hearing and smell, the added telescopic vision of the eagle, the improved design of the octopus eye...What we see in living things is "Just barely good enough to get by" and only for a little while.Hardly good design and certainly not intelligent design.

Saying 'I don't believe you unless you provide evidence' is not a presumption. It's sanity. You yourself have argued thusly. Wrong. It's conclusion is that there are natural processes that explain much of what we see.
There are obviously infinite number of of supernatural processes that can explain aspects of what we see. Nobody has provisioned any evidence to differentiate these and since they are typically unfalsifiable, they don't warrant serious consideration. Deduction is the worst way to develop empirical knowledge as it provides us with nothing new. You must have put the conclusion into the premise thusly:Major premise 1: harmonious relationships towards forming a useful purpose means the entities were designed
Major premise 2: All designed things where the designer isn't known have a supernatural creator
Minor premise 1: Life has 'harmonious relationships' etc.
Minor premise 2: We don't know the designer of life
Conclusion: Life was designed by a supernatural creator.Both Major and Minor premise 2 are disputed. Especially the Major premise. Again, the only explanations that have been tested are natural ones. Only tested explanations make it into theory.Test a supernatural explanation, show that it explains something and you might have something that can be added to the theory. I could point out that nobody has put forward and tested a supernatural explanation. That's really all I need to do with negative claims. You can disprove this by counterexample. Only if science is determined by your understandings of 'indirect evidential manners'.Show me the supernatural explanation, explain the tests it has gone through - and we can compare that to what scientists are doing to see if they are similar enough that we can infer they are both scientific approaches.Most creationists and IDists simply say 'It looks designed, therefore a God created / designed it. Maybe an alien, but that was probably created by a God through the same reasoning process. God.'They may not be being direct about the evidence, but that doesn't make it science. There was a paraplegic man who was accused by the police of breaking into a house, climbing through the first floor (not the ground floor, so second floor for you?) of a house.His DNA was recovered from broken glass. This increases the probability that he did it. Therefore it is evidence.The fact that he couldn't move his legs, and his arms were seriously restricted, he lived 200 miles from the crime scene and a nurse testifies to watching him sleep throughout the time of the burglary is also evidence.Science tries to take all of this evidence and come up with a neat explanation for the whole thing.This is what ID fails to do. It ad hocs its way through objections, they're never derivable from theoretical base and they employ entities and processes that are undefined, vague, or simply evidentially unsupported in their ad hoccery.We could suppose the disabled man astrally travelled into another person, mutating their DNA temporarily through harmonious reflection...but its just an ad hoc way to preserve the original theory 'disabled man did it'. Just like 'designer did it'. It would be wrong. The scientific answer is simply more probable.

Yeah, if evolution happened, things would have to change!Why has no-one noticed this fatal flaw in the theory before!

You so often waste your cleverness on silliness.Evolution has to depend on mutations, right? Mutations are most often not beneficial, right? The mutations would have to occur in the genes for the ear, in the sex cells, right? They'd have to make useful changes in the sex cells in the genes for the ears. The number of mutations needed to make the changes between the two different kinds of ears must be enormous, especially since most of them won't make the useful changes.What you don't say, but that you must believe, is that evolution isn't just a random process of mistakes in replication. You must believe that somehow or other it "chooses" useful changes even in the mutation stage, without waiting for selection to choose them, because the odds of getting such changes through mutation are just impossible. You must believe that you're going to get mutations that move one part of the ear toward its final destination increment by increment, while simultaneously doing away with another part increment by increment, while at the same time making all the other changes necessary to changing a reptile into a mammal, all by random mistakes in replication, and all making beneficial designs at every stage of the process, or you'd have lots of deaf reptiles. Mutations don't occur that often, certainly not in the sex cells, they don't do anything beneficial very often, you need changes in many genes, beneficial changes. No such processes have ever been witnessed. The poor cheetah has been waiting around forever for one mutation to help it out, but you think you are going to get millions of mutations to make a reptile ear into a mammalian ear and you ridicule anyone who thinks otherwise.And this isn't even to mention my favorite argument, that whenever you are getting changes it's not by mutation, it's by built-in alleles, and as changes are made you are losing alleles so that when you have a new design you have fewer alleles left for making changes until it's possible to completely deplete a population of alleles for a given trait. This is what happens in microevolution, and it's easy to understand in terms of domestic breeds. You can get useful changes because it's useful changes that are built in, mutations don't make useful changes most of the time but the designed-in alleles do. So you can get a whole new breed in a very short period of time merely by reproductively isolating a small number of them so that they can only breed with each other. And then you don't have enough genetic material for more changes, so this in fact gives a functional definition to the Kind by bringing evolution to a halt. Mutations will never accomplish anything beneficial even if you give them a few billion years.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This is how the process would have to work to go from a single mating pair to the diversity we have today in only 4,000 years. But not when there are hundreds or thousands of generations between fossil examples. But these "hidden" alleles have not been demonstrated. Neither is there any support to the genetic depletion hypothesis. Instead what we find is alleles within a given population that can be connected to a particular phenotype that do not exist in other populations - they are not hiding somewhere. We have also talked about this in previous discussions that there are some traits that for which there are too many different alleles that exist in a population and they could not have all existed in a single ancestral mating pair. So new alleles ARE being formed by mutation and those new alleles contribute to novel phenotypes. Part of the problem is you don't really understand how a phenotype is constructed from the DNA coding and when we have tried to have the discussion you complain that it is too complicated and I/we are being condescending and overly confusing the issue. But... it doesn't take millions of gene mutations to change a bone like that. It takes changes to the regulatory controls of those genes. Bones undergo ossification and the shape and position of the bone depend on where ossification starts and how long it is switched on for. Change one or both of those regulatory elements and you get a different bone shape - it is not always necessary to mutate coding regions.Also note that as the jaw transitioned from the reptile-type to the mammalian-type there was a point where both jaw joints were present. That is a weird thing to suggest indicates design. Would you consider fungicide resistance to be beneficial to a fungal pathogen? We have several examples of point mutations conferring fungicide resistance to several classes of fungicide. These mutations did not exist in the population 10 years ago. Now they are so prevalent that some fungicides are no longer useful for controlling disease.I think you mean to say something like: mutations cannot turn a reptile into a mammal even in a billion years. But that is not what the theory says happens - that is an over-simplification.HBD

Excellent argument.I would point out though that this argument is against a designer with "human-like" qualities or that would design things like humans do, not against any designer. I don't even think it disqualifies the potential designer as incompetent. Sure we can look at a lot of "design flaws" in living things, but it may be that we just don't see the purpose for a particular design - that is, it doesn't fit our human qualifications as a "good" design.What your argument does really well is it shows that using human designed objects and recognizing that they are actually designed does nothing to address design in nature. They do not have the same qualities at all.HBDEdited by herebedragons, : No reason given.

Who ever said any alleles are "hidden?"And there's nothing strange about "alleles within a given population that can be connected to a particular phenotype that do not exist in other populations" -- it's exactly what I'm talking about. I don't get your problem with this.And yes something has to account for the great number of alleles for a single gene within a population. I've already conceded that some sort of mutation must be involved, but the usual mistake in replication doesn't seem sufficient for the job. Of course, reality is totally oversimplified when it comes to evo theory, which is capable of imagining anything whatever. The subject WAS the making of a mammalian ear from a reptilian ear. That WOULD involve the making of a mammal from a reptile. So yes I'm saying billions of years wouldn't do it given the numbers of mutations needed, in the light of the actual rate of mutations, the rate of mutations in sex cells, the rate of mutations in the appropriate gene, the rate of BENEFICIAL mutations in the appropriate gene in the sex cell, not to mention all the rest that has to happen to turn a reptile into a mammal.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Correct. What we see in living (and actually most non-living natural examples) is entirely different than what we see in any examples that are known to be designed. Correct, but falling back on the "we don't know the goals of a designer" argument makes it totally vacuous. If the designer can have any damn goal in mind at any time in history then there is no reason to expect any consistency at all.Yet we do find consistency.We can divide living things into distinct groups, those with an internal skeleton and those with an external skeleton, those with clearly defined limb and those without, those that are mammals and those that aren't.There is a consistency but it happens to be exactly the consistency that would result from evolution instead of design.We can also see that one constant factor has been designs failing and disappearing. Far more critters die before being born than are born and many critters born die even before they reproduce and almost all species that have ever existed have gone extinct.If there is a designer we can say many things about that character; that it is fickle, cruel, not very competent, inept, ignorant, incompetent, capricious, impossible to understand and most important, inconsistant. If that is the case then the designer is of no real importance and so irrelevant to the continued evolving set of knowledge.

Imaginary is what all the evidence shows.

I'm not sure I find this a compelling argument against a teleological view of biotic reality. Regarding, for instance, your automobile example: while it is true that, say, radial tires replaced bias ply tires -- if one looked at all cars during this transition from bias ply tires --> radial tires, one would find that some cars retained the older tires while newer cars had radial tires. In other words, there'd be a nested hierarchy of cars, wherein some had the new tires and others retained the older tires. It was only after this novel "trait" was fixed in the entire car "population" that (obviously) all cars had this newer innovation. In many ways, then, the human design process mimics the evolutionary "descent with modification" process; after all, the preferences of the marketplace often act as a selective force. Edited by Genomicus, : No reason given.

Thanks for clearing that up for us, Professor.I fail to see how your rant about mutations and evolution has anything to do with the "science in creationism."

Yes, it was fixed but at a pace far beyond anything found in nature, and it was across all of the species; not because of novelty but rather because it was a better solution. The same hold true for all the examples in that paragraph.The second group mentioned, the example of fins and running boards and lighting could be called fad but again, the change was at a scale and a completeness far beyond anything see in nature.There is simply almost no resemblance between design as found in nature and those things we know ere designed.AbE:Let me carry this a little further since I think it is really important.What we see in those things we know to be designed is something we simply never see in living things and that really is Planned Need Driven Change.The change from bias ply tires was not simply chance, it was need driven. There had to be a way to keep the tire tread flat on the surface while the wall of the tire flexed.Further more, it was not a matter of descent with change. It was toss everything and build better. About the only things that remained constant was the general material make up. And it was designed and built outside the species where it functioned. And was built not by one source but many sources. And was applicable not just to descendants of one species but other Orders and even other Kingdoms.Edited by jar, : See AbE:

You did the maths? On the back of an envelope:A generation size of 50,000 with a generation time of 5 years, over 50 million years is 10 million generations. More children are born than make it to adulthood. So let's say 50,000 population represents 250,000 births. Each birth has say 30 genetic mutations.250,000 x 10,000,000 = 2.5 trillion births or 70 trillion mutations...per species. And we're examining changes accruing between classes. How many species and of what sizes and lengths of time could there be? Let's say there are a mere 1,000 reptillian + mammalian species to consider in that time period - we'd get to potentially add 3 more zeroes to the number of mutations in consideration. When the numbers we are using makes the number of stars in our galaxy look like a small number, I think we're allowed to use the term 'astronomical'.We have huge numbers of mutations, we have a method of selecting the ones that inhibit survival and those that maximise reproductive success. Everybodies bones are slightly different shapes and sizes. The ratio of the dimensions of my bones will be slightly different than other people. I might have nobblier bones, but slightly thinner. Someone else might have shorter bones of lower density. Somebody might have a bone that becomes brittle in the presence of a rare environmental contaminant. They're all unique.Changes that result in deafness may make mating difficult. Mating calls are common, for example - as well avoiding predators and finding prey. So these changes get passed on less regularly. Recombination through sex could result in two types of changes being expressed simultaneously, and if multiple children are born, some will probably not have both traits. They are likely very similar in all regards, so it's a reasonable test - does having both traits work better to getting mates? Over and over these tests are run. Dozens per fertilization is a reasonable estimate I believe. Built in?Alleles are mutated copies of a gene. We have observed this happening. There's no way you can make this argument coherently. No, this is something you invented through a misunderstanding. In allopatric speciation the absolute number of alleles goes down in each subgroup, but that's because the absolute size of each population is smaller. The frequencies don't necessarily change, though they might so alleles are not necessarily lost as there are often many copies. At this point the two populations start growing to their new local maximum generating new mutations and thus new alleles, but not sharing them with one another.An allele that is 'lost' from one population, is found in the other, but many significant alleles are generally distributed such that they are likely to be represented in both.There is no inexorable tendency to zero alleles. This would more or less require a population size of 0 (as an approximation each individual carries one allele from each parent). Yes, but that's an exercise in deliberately limiting alleles for our benefit. It is very dissimilar from allopatric speciation. Or any other mode of microevolution apart from catastrophe induced evolution. The question of the thread, with respect to this notion is, what evidence do you have that the 'designed in' alleles are the useful ones as opposed to the alleles created through mutation?The evolutionary explanation goes thusly:Over time mutations accrue, generating alleles. Much of this is neutral with respect to reproductive success. Then something happens and selection pressures change significantly. The differences between individuals is exaggerated as they struggle to survive. Once neutral or slightly beneficial mutations now represent a noticeable 'edge' and their frequency increases. The effect may be small, but with sufficient selection pressure dramatic phenotypic changes can occur within a few generations or a few thousand - such changes as we see with domestic breeding. This is known as 'punctuated equilibrium'.Your argument seems to be that some (all?) alleles are pre-designed (even the new/observed ones?). You have no mechanism, no evidence some intelligent designer exists, no way to differentiate designed and non-designed alleles other than begging the question. It doesn't look good, it certainly isn't science.