Evolution......?

Hi quicksink,You're going about this the wrong way. First you have to establish whether evolution occurred or not. Now, geology seems to be an interest of yours, & I'll probably have no trouble convincing you of an old earth, the principle of superposition etc. This then begs the question, what are all those fossils doing there in that precise order? Can you explain this without resorting to evolution? The precise mechanism need not concern us, we are just attempting to establish whether evolution happened or not. Another excellent evidence of evolution is phylogenetic analysis. That is, deriving evolutionary/family trees from genetic/morphological information. The colossal amount of concordant results (with exceptions) overwhelmingly point to evolution, that's macro-evolution, having occurred.The rest of your points are God of the gaps arguments. None of the concerns (though pertinent) falsify evolution. Given we can say with a high degree of certainty that evolution DID occur, it therefore follows that bats MUST have evolved echolocation, even if we don't yet understand how. Put it another way, there is no positive evidence of IC, no positive evidence that bats DIDN'T evolve echo location, but PLENTY of evidence that evolution occurred, even if evidence of every step of every trait doesn't exist. In short, criticisms of evolution never give positive evidence, it is always an unsubstantiated claim that xyz COULDN'T occur.What will you go with, positive evidence, or incredulity? Knowing you from these forums, I'm willing to put money on the former.Mark ------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

Hope that cleared it up for you, quicksink ------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

Cobra,

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

"You're going about this the wrong way. First you have to establish whether evolution occurred or not."
How can one know that evolution occurred without a mechanism?

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A hundred years ago it wasn’t known what caused the suns fires, did that mean there were no fires before the mechanism was known?
No, of course not, ergo, evidence of evolution is evidence of evolution, the mechanism is irrelevant to the observations.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:
"This then begs the question, what are all those fossils doing there in that precise order? Can you explain this without resorting to evolution?"
One does not need a replacement theory in order to question a paradigm.

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Quicksink accepts old earth geology, therefore the fossil record is evidence of evolution. Unless you can re-explain the fossil record in the context of an old earth, remember, I was talking to quicksink.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

"The precise mechanism need not concern us, we are just attempting to establish whether evolution happened or not."
I don't think the geological column is enough to convince the skeptic that evolution has occurred. What about proggressive creation? What about guided evolution? A known mechanism is of extreme importance if somebody wants to convince someone else that all of the life we see around us is the result of a blind naturalistic process.

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A blind naturalistic process?? Present evidence of anything else. If you can’t, then it is not admissible as a SCIENTIFIC alternative, but only a theological one. You may as well say pink fairies did evolution. I, nor any scientist, will accept the unobservable, that leaves no trace to even infer it, as a valid framework for scientific enquiry.
I repeat, you do not need a mechanism for an occurrence, to accept an occurrence. See above.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

"Another excellent evidence of evolution is phylogenetic analysis. That is, deriving evolutionary/family trees from genetic/morphological information. The colossal amount of concordant results (with exceptions) overwhelmingly point to evolution, that's macro-evolution, having occurred."
The phylogenetic analysis fits in fine with either progressive creation or guided evolution.

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Again, evidence for the supernatural pls. We are trying to do science. You cannot hypothesise something in science that is a/ unobserved, & b/ leaves no indirect trace with which to infer the supernatural.
Also, progressive creation wouldn’t show common descent, as there would be no relationship between organisms. And, if guided evolution were true, why are there so many neutral substitutions that can have phylogenies derived from them?
But first things first, evidence of that supernatural please, or you may as well argue the sky may have had yellow, red, & green stripes from horizon to horizon, because you have as much/little evidence of that than special creation/progressive creation/ guided evolution, or would that be ridiculous?

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

"The rest of your points are God of the gaps arguments. None of the concerns (though pertinent) falsify evolution."
Nothing falsifies evolution once you are convinced that evolution has occurred based only on the geological column and phylogenetic analysis.

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Rubbish, finding fossils out of order, or no genetic similarities between organisms would have been falsification. It’s not my fault the falsifications have never been realised.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

"Put it another way, there is no positive evidence of IC, no positive evidence that bats DIDN'T evolve echo location"
How is one going to find evidence that bats didn't evolve echo location? Your argument is blind-naturalistic-processes-of-the-gaps.

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No, it isn’t. I have turned the argument around from, show bats evolved echolocation, to show they didn’t. The original point was that being unable to explain any particular trait, did not represent a falsification, in the same way I don’t expect your inability to NOT prove bats evolved echolocation, proves evolution.
Just show me the supernatural, & you have an argument.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

"but PLENTY of evidence that evolution occurred, even if evidence of every step of every trait doesn't exist."
But the only evidence you gave can be interpreted very easily under two different models (progressive creation and guided evolution).

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No, it can’t. See above.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

"In short, criticisms of evolution never give positive evidence, it is always an unsubstantiated claim that xyz COULDN'T occur."
I'd say an unsubstantiated claim that xyz CAN'T occur is no worse than an unsubstantiated claim that xyz CAN occur.
"What will you go with, positive evidence, or incredulity? Knowing you from these forums, I'm willing to put money on the former."

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There is evidence of evolution, it isn’t unsubstantiated, even you yourself mention guided evolution, do you agree that there is evidence of this? If so, it’s not unsubstantiated, then, is it? I‘m not presenting a mechanism, I’m saying you don’t need to understand mechanisms to accept an occurrence. When I was a boy, I always wondered what made cars go, I accepted that something DID make them work, without knowing anything about the internal combustion engine, exothermic reactions, & the behaviour of gases under pressure & at temperature.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

I personally rather go with positive evidence, namely, the evidence for a Designer. It's unfortunate that your argument is based on incredulity of a Supreme Designer.

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Produce positive evidence of a designer, then. If I have any incredulity for a designer (when did ID become SUPREME ID?), it’s precisely that there is a lack of evidence. If there WAS good evidence of a creator, I’d accept the scientific theory of a creator.Mark------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

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Originally posted by quicksink:
How many positive mutations can be found in one individual organism?

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How many positive mutations could be indentified in 10 generations?

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http://hrst.mit.edu/hrs/evolution/public/papers/kimura1968/kimura1968.pdfThis is talking about Drosophila, but you get the idea."We return to the problem of total mutation rate
From a consideration of the average energy of hydrogen
bonds and also from the information on mutation of
rIIA gene in phage T,, Watson22 obtained IO-*- lo-9 as
the average probability of error in the insertion of a new
nucleotide during DNA replication. Because in man the
number of cell divisions along the germ line from the
fertilized egg to a gamete is roughly 80, the rate of muta-
tion resulting from base replacement according to these
figures may be BO x 10-8- SOX 10-0 per nucleotide pair
per generation. Thus, with 4 x IO9 nucleotide pairs, the
total number of mutations resulting from base replace-
ment may amount t o 200- 2,000. This is 100-1,000 times
larger than the estimate of 2 per generation and suggests
that the mutation rate per nucleotide pair is reduced
during evolution by natural selectionl8~19."In actual fact, from fertilised egg to human germ line cell requires many more mitosis' to get to the point where sperm & egg are being produced. Nevertheless, 200-2000 mutations in every sperm & egg gives plenty of material to work with.You may be confused, as I was, when Geneticists often talk of mutation/substitution rate as the rate of FIXED mutations in genomes, rather than mutations per replication in germ line cells.I know it only partially answers your question, but I'm running out of time to post Mark------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

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[This message has been edited by mark24, 04-08-2002]

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:
"A hundred years ago it wasn’t known what caused the suns fires, did that mean there were no fires before the mechanism was known?
No, of course not, ergo, evidence of evolution is evidence of evolution, the mechanism is irrelevant to the observations."

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I understand where you are coming from, but I believe that your analogy is flawed. The reason that it is flawed is that you are taking an observation (fossils) and giving them an interpretation (evolution). In the case with the sun fires, all you are doing is observing the fact that sun fires occur, thus there must be a mechanism. However, just because we can observe change in the geological column, does not mean that species evolved from a common ancestor. The change could be due to instant creations or even successeive visits by aliens. In other words, sun fires means sun fires, but fossils do not mean evolution.

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That’s not the point, you don’t need to understand nuclear fission to observe the sun is bright. You don’t need to understand a mechanism for evolution to see it in the fossil record. There are many examples of slight changes as you go higher in the fossil record. Foraminifera, trilobites, sticklebacks, radiolarians. Understanding the biological processes (or otherwise, as you point out) behind these changes in no way detracts from the FACT of small changes accumulating in higher strata.As regards progressive creation, phylogenetic evidence points away from this. Unless God deliberately deceived, to make it look like there was common descent back to prokaryotes.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

"A blind naturalistic process?? Present evidence of anything else."

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If a blind mechanistic process fails to explain life, that is evidence that a non-blind mechanistic process is evidence for life. And what would you suggest as evidence of another process, such as Creation?

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When you know all there is to know, then you can say that natural mechanistic processes don’t (or do) explain life. This is a premature statement. Nor does it have anything to do with positive evidence of God/Supernatural. The absence of evidence, isn’t positive evidence of anything.I wouldn’t suggest anything as evidence of creation, the evidence by itself should be able to be interpreted as such, & support a testable hypothesis, with falsifications. So please present 1/positive evidence of creation, & 2/ God/Supernatural, that supports such a hypothesis.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

"I, nor any scientist, will accept the unobservable, that leaves no trace to even infer it, as a valid framework for scientific enquiry."

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The "Supreme Creator" has left evidence, namely the design in nature and the complexity of living things.

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Supposition. I could just as easily say, with just as much basis, that evidence of a Supreme Creator is a falsification of him, using you own criteria. He can’t be the supreme creator because He’s amazing, & complex, & therefore designed, is therefore evidence of a designer, so isn’t supreme. ad infinitum.Secondly, present POSITIVE evidence that there is design in nature. Cue Dembski, hee hee.Thirdly, a hypothesis that is testable, with falsifications, please.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

"Again, evidence for the supernatural pls."

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The amazing complexity of living things, design in nature, cause and effect principle, Jesus Christ rising from the dead seems to be a fairly well established historic event.

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1/ Produce this well established historic event from independent, non-religious sources please.2/ Written historical documents aren't admissable as evidence anyway.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

"Rubbish, finding fossils out of order, or no genetic similarities between organisms would have been falsification. It’s not my fault the falsifications have never been realised."

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First of all, under a progressive creation/guided evolution scenario we would expect fossils to be in order. But what do you consider "out of order?" Obviously a fish in the Cambrian didn't do it. Would a shark? I doubt it. Also, there is no reason to think that under a Creation/Progressive/Guided model there would not be genetic similarities among all living things.

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Your going to have to present evidence of the supernatural, mate, if you want to have progressive creation/guided evolution.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

"Produce positive evidence of a designer, then. If I have any incredulity for a designer (when did ID become SUPREME ID?), it’s precisely that there is a lack of evidence."

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Although I'm sure that the SUPREME DESIGNER would be unhappy with your mortal questions, I will attempt to answer.

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The evidence for design in nature is abound. Even Richard Dawkins agrees with me here. In absence of a plausible mechanism to explain said design, one may conclude that design is not "designoid", but rather, it is real.

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I’m as worried about the Supreme Designers opinion as you are of the Bogeymans I really must see that Dawkins quote. Cite please, page numbers if possible.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

Also, the cause and effect principle gives evidence for a Designer.

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Please elaborate.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

"If there WAS good evidence of a creator, I’d accept the scientific theory of a creator."

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Nobody's asking you to accept the "scientific theory of a creator". It's the scientific theory of CreaTION. It is of course impossible to know for sure what a SUPREME Creator is like, as well as it is impossible to know what mechanism the Designer used for Creating. However, it is very possible for us to look upon His Creation and recognize the design He put into it.

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How? Without first assuming the supernatural to be indicative of reality without a scrap of positive evidence for it?Mark------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

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[This message has been edited by mark24, 04-09-2002]

Hi Cobra,I’ll pick up on stuff that never got covered.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:
Hello Mark,

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"2/ Written historical documents aren't admissable as evidence anyway."

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Yeah, I can't believe my teacher looked at me funny when I told him that the existence of Abraham Lincoln was obviously a conspiracy set up by Republicans to portray a great president.

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I should have worded it better. Written historical documents are not admissible as evidence in the physical & natural sciences.

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

"Your going to have to present evidence of the supernatural, mate, if you want to have progressive creation/guided evolution."

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I don't see why. SETI claims that it can identify desingned radio signals and interpret them as being sent from a designer with which they have no other evidence for.

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The program is looking for signals that have no known natural (in the astronomical sense) cause. That is to say, they must not conform to patterns of rotational systems etc. In essence, SETI has a frame of reference. To compare that with ID, ID would look at the entire universe & try to infer design without that referential frame. That is, it looks at ALL life & makes the inference without a frame of reference. Even if SETI DO get that elusive signal, we cannot rule out that it was from an as yet unknown natural source. As such, SETI & ID is a false analogy.Also, I asked for evidence of the supernatural, not a reason why you don’t have to produce the evidence .

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Originally posted by Cobra_snake:

Once again, what constitutes "positive evidence". Unless I recieve some guidelines, I'm afraid that your not going to be convinced (If the human brain with 120 trillion connections doesn't constitute "positive evidence" of design, I need some guidelines here.)

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Fair question. There's two ways I can think of showing design in nature. However I throw it around, it comes back to these two.1/ Prove IC.2/ Show the existence of God/Supernatural entity, & His/their previous work in complex supernatural design. At least you have a referential frame, a la SETI. In the same way that I could potentially identify an Egyptian artifact, by looking at the similarities/differences of that artifact, & comparing to other artefacts that came from Egypt, & elsewhere. To be fair, this is a tough act to follow as it assumes an aspect of nature has already been identified as being designed, but how can there be a supernatural reference frame without this?Mark------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

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[This message has been edited by mark24, 04-17-2002]

There are plenty of phenomena that doesn't have a mechanism to explain it yet.Now, you've dodged this over on the Dinosaurs/Man thhread, so whilst Ive got youu here, I'll ask again. What would you accept as a transitional? The question would be better asked as, what criteria would you apply to all fossils to determine whether they are transitional or not?FYI, the ceolocanths aren't thought to have given rise to amphibians anyway. It is the rhipidistans. Another straw man bites the dust.Mark------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

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[This message has been edited by mark24, 04-21-2002]

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[This message has been edited by mark24, 04-21-2002]