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Author Topic:   Any practical use for Universal Common Ancestor?
JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 88 of 1385 (849384)
03-07-2019 11:25 AM
Reply to: Message 77 by Dredge
03-07-2019 12:14 AM


Re: Name one.
Furthermore, a story about life on earth evolving from UCA doesn't qualify as knowledge. Only demonstrable facts qualify as knowledge - this precludes theories, opinions, conclusions, beliefs and atheist folklore.
That bans all of science from the discussion.

This message is a reply to:
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JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 115 of 1385 (849525)
03-13-2019 9:31 AM
Reply to: Message 111 by Dredge
03-13-2019 12:29 AM


Common descent is useful in theoretical science, yes, but it is also useful in explaining why the Tooth Fairy has blonde hair and why ETs look a little like us humans.
Common descent has nothing to do with imaginary beings or alleged aliens. The fact that you think you know what aliens look like says a lot about your mental stability and capability.
Edited by JonF, : No reason given.
Edited by JonF, : No reason given.
Edited by JonF, : No reason given.
Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

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Replies to this message:
 Message 125 by Dredge, posted 03-15-2019 12:18 AM JonF has replied

  
JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 116 of 1385 (849526)
03-13-2019 9:48 AM
Reply to: Message 113 by Dredge
03-13-2019 12:52 AM


Re: Don't creationists have a universal common ancestor too?
. Please be advised that "research" and even "better research" is not a practical use. Research can and often does lead to a practical use, but until it does, research is practically useless.
It's nice that you acknowledge that the practicality can't be known when the research is done.
You seem to be conflating useful facts (which can lead to useful applications) with an irrelevant and useless theory (which never leads to useful applications).
Prove that. I thought you realized that you generally cannot prove a no.

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JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 133 of 1385 (849582)
03-15-2019 9:33 AM
Reply to: Message 125 by Dredge
03-15-2019 12:18 AM


The point is, common descent (as in the concept of UCA) is as practically useless as fairy tales and science-fiction.
I know.
Analogies aren't evidence.

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JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


(1)
Message 239 of 1385 (849862)
03-23-2019 2:24 PM
Reply to: Message 237 by ringo
03-23-2019 12:15 PM


Re: Don't creationists have a universal common ancestor too?
That's a well-known but mangled quote mine of Professor Bounoure (not Bouroune). At least he didn't overstate Bounoure's credentials as is usually done. Cretinism or Evilution? No. 3, E.T. Babinski, More Out of Context Quotations of French Scientists:
quote:
Concerning the quotation with which this section began, let's repeat it here:
quote:
"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."
- Prof. Louis Bounoure (Former President of the Biological Society of Strasbourg and Director of the Strasbourg Zoological Museum, later Director of Research at the French National Centre of Scientific Research), as quoted in The Advocate, Thursday 8 March 1984, p. 17. (p. 5 of The Revised Quote Book)
Since the Revised Quote Book stated that "Prof. Bounoure" had served as the "Director of Research" at the "French National Centre of Scientific Research" I wrote the Center [The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique = The National Center for Scientific Research]. I asked them about the exact origin of the quotation and received the following reply, dated March 3, 1995 (translated by professional French translator, Jacques Benbassat, with some minor editing and paragraphs re-arranged in an easier to follow order)...
quote:
The beginning of the quotation, "Evolution is a fairy tale for adults" is not from Bounoure but from Jean Rostand, a much more famous French biologist (he was a member of the Academy of Sciences of the French Academy). The precise quotation is as follows: "Transformism is a fairy tale for adults." (Age Nouveau, [a French periodical] February 1959, p. 12). But Rostand has also written that "Transformism may be considered as accepted, and no scientist, no philosopher, no longer discusses [questions - ED.] the fact of evolution." (L'Evolution des Especes [i.e., The Evolution of the Species], Hachette, p. 190). Jean Rostand was ... an atheist.
The [end] of the quotation of Professor Bounoure to which you allude is taken from his book, Determinism and Finality, edited by Flammarion, 1957, p. 79. The precise quotation is the following: "That, by this, evolutionism would appear as a theory without value, is confirmed also pragmatically. A theory must not be required to be true, said Mr. H. Poincare, more or less, it must be required to be useable. Indeed, none of the progress made in biology depends even slightly on a theory, the principles of which [i.e., of how evolution occurs -- ED.] are nevertheless filling every year volumes of books, periodicals, and congresses with their discussions and their disagreements."
[Obviously, Bounoure was expressing his distaste at those in his day who argued over the "principles" of evolution, "how" it took place, whether via Lamarckian or Darwinian "evolutionism." Bounoure probably thought that such "principles" were not worth all the "discussions and disagreements" since they were not well understood, were yet to be discovered, and perhaps might not be discovered, i.e., if supernatural intervention into the evolutionary process was accepted. Bounoure was a theist. He also probably thought that more practical scientific investigations needed to be pursued and less "discussions and disagreements." - ED.]

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JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 253 of 1385 (849886)
03-24-2019 10:16 AM
Reply to: Message 243 by Dredge
03-24-2019 3:01 AM


None of those support the contention that the ToE cannot explain the fossil record. They are about the details of the explanation.

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JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 255 of 1385 (849889)
03-24-2019 12:40 PM
Reply to: Message 254 by edge
03-24-2019 11:34 AM


The Panda's Thumb is a strongly pro-evolution site. But that quote does not appear on that site. It appears to be fr Gould. My phone is almost dead so I can't chase it further now.

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JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 276 of 1385 (849930)
03-26-2019 8:57 AM
Reply to: Message 264 by Dredge
03-26-2019 12:54 AM


Re: Pills
Why is any evolutionary theory needed to explain the facts pertaining to the action of antibiotics? One ingests a toxin (antibiotic) that kills certain bacteria in one's body - what's that got to do with the theory of evolution?
What happens if you stop taking the antibiotic when the symptoms disappear but you've got plenty of antibiotic left? Hint: the answer begins with "e".

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


(1)
Message 281 of 1385 (849938)
03-26-2019 12:28 PM
Reply to: Message 271 by Dredge
03-26-2019 1:36 AM


Re: Another useful application of evolutionary theory
the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It's as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history" - Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1987, p.229
"Since Darwin's time, the fossil history of life on Earth has been pushed back to 3.5 billion years before the present. Most of these fossils are microscopic bacteria and algae. However, in the latest Proterozoic ” a time period now called the Ediacaran, or the Vendian, and lasting from about 635 to 542 million years ago* ” macroscopic fossils of soft-bodied organisms can be found in a few localities around the world, confirming Darwin's expectations." The Ediacaran Period.
The first Ediacaran fossils were discovered in 1946. I don't know offhand what was known in 1987, but it seems Dawkins was oversimplifying. There's certainly been a lot more learned since 1987.
The mainstream explanation is that Ediacaran organisms were soft-bodied and extremely unlikely to fossilize. Many Cambrian organisms developed hard body parts in a geologically short time frame, and were much more likely to fossilize.

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JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


(2)
Message 282 of 1385 (849939)
03-26-2019 12:31 PM
Reply to: Message 278 by edge
03-26-2019 10:53 AM


Re: Another useful application of evolutionary theory
Excerpt: Richard Dawkins's New Book on Evolution:
quote:
The biggest gap, and the one the creationists like best of all, is the one that preceded the so-called Cambrian Explosion. A little more than half a billion years ago, in the Cambrian era, most of the great animal phyla "suddenly" appear in the fossil record. Suddenly, that is, in the sense that no fossils of these animal groups are known in rocks older than the Cambrian, not suddenly in the sense of instantaneously; the period we are talking about covers about 20 million years. Anyway, it is still quite sudden, and, as I wrote in a previous book, the Cambrian shows us a substantial number of major animal phyla "already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists."
The last sentence shows that I was savvy enough to realize that creationists would like the Cambrian Explosion. I was not (back in 1986) savvy enough to realize that they'd gleefully quote my lines back at me in their own favor, carefully omitting my careful words of explanation. On a whim, I just searched the World Wide Web for "It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history" and obtained no fewer than 1,250 hits. As a crude control test of the hypothesis that the majority of these hits represent creationist quote”minings, I tried searching, as a comparison, the clause that immediately follows the above quotation: "Evolutionists of all stripes believe, however, that this really does represent a very large gap in the fossil record." I obtained a grand total of 63 hits, compared to the 1,250 hits for the previous sentence.
I have dealt with the Cambrian Explosion at length before. Here I'll add just one new point, illustrated by the flatworms, Platyhelminthes. This great phylum of worms includes the parasitic flukes and tapeworms, which are of great medical importance. My favorites, however, are the free-living turbellarian worms, of which there are more than 4,000 species: that's about as numerous as all the mammal species put together. They are common, both in water and on land, and presumably have been common for a very long time. You'd expect, therefore, to see a rich fossil history. Unfortunately, there is almost nothing. Apart from a handful of ambiguous trace fossils, not a single fossil flatworm has ever been found. The Platyhelminthes, to a worm, are "already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history." But in this case, "the very first time they appear" is not the Cambrian but today. Do you see what this means, or at least ought to mean for creationists? Creationists believe that flatworms were created in the same week as all other creatures. They have therefore had exactly the same time in which to fossilize as all other animals. During all the centuries when all those bony or shelly animals were depositing their fossils by the millions, the flatworms must have been living happily alongside them, but without leaving the slightest trace of their presence in the rocks. What, then, is so special about gaps in the record of those animals that do fossilize, given that the past history of the flatworms is one big gap: even though the flatworms, by the creationists' own account, have been living for the same length of time? If the gap before the Cambrian Explosion is used as evidence that most animals suddenly sprang into existence in the Cambrian, exactly the same "logic" should be used to prove that the flatworms sprang into existence yesterday. Yet this contradicts the creationist's belief that flatworms were created during the same creative week as everything else. You cannot have it both ways. This argument, at a stroke, completely and finally destroys the creationist case that the Precambrian gap in the fossil record can be taken as evidence against evolution.
Why, on the evolutionary view, are there so few fossils before the Cambrian era? Well, presumably, whatever factors applied to the flatworms throughout geological time to this day, those same factors applied to the rest of the animal kingdom before the Cambrian. Probably, most animals before the Cambrian were soft-bodied like modern flatworms, probably rather small like modern turbellarians”just not good fossil material. Then something happened half a billion years ago to allow animals to fossilize freely”the arising of hard, mineralized skeletons, for example.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 278 by edge, posted 03-26-2019 10:53 AM edge has replied

Replies to this message:
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JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 305 of 1385 (850013)
03-28-2019 12:29 PM
Reply to: Message 304 by Porkncheese
03-28-2019 12:05 PM


Re: Any practical use for Universal Common Ancestor?
The past 16 months iv been on an atheist forum. So now im really woke on their views and motives.
Too bad you didn't learn anything about science and scientists. E.g.:
However Newton and Einsteins maths doesn't work in space.... Hehehehe
Hee hee hee indeed. That's false.

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JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 310 of 1385 (850018)
03-28-2019 1:26 PM
Reply to: Message 308 by ringo
03-28-2019 12:56 PM


Re: Any practical use for Universal Common Ancestor?
Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud by the very science that you scoff at.
And it was suspect from the beginning, and was never a significant basis for the ToE.
Not that Porkie cares.

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JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


(1)
Message 322 of 1385 (850096)
03-31-2019 9:49 AM
Reply to: Message 311 by Dredge
03-31-2019 1:39 AM


Re: Pills
I can't see what evolution has to do with the action of antibiotics
It has nothing to do with the actions of antibiotics. That's why it's so strange you brought it up.
but antibiotic resistance is "evolution".
And "make sure you finish the course" is a practical application of the Theory of Evolution.

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 323 of 1385 (850097)
03-31-2019 9:51 AM
Reply to: Message 313 by Dredge
03-31-2019 1:45 AM


Re: Pills
What is the theory of evolution?
If you don't know you shouldn't be here.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 313 by Dredge, posted 03-31-2019 1:45 AM Dredge has replied

Replies to this message:
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JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 324 of 1385 (850098)
03-31-2019 9:54 AM
Reply to: Message 314 by Dredge
03-31-2019 1:52 AM


Re: Another useful application of evolutionary theory
Magic is consistent with everything and explains nothing.
But your designer must be a pathological liar to make all the evidence point to evolution. Are you comfortable with that?

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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