Always talking about micro-evolution?

It's pretty obvious, reading this post, that you've never really studied the theory of evolution. I suggest you aquaint yourself with abasic college text on the subject. In particular you might pay attention to such keywords as "population genetics", "sexual selection", "evo-devo", "Hox genes", and "neoteny", for starters.It's off-topic here to specifically address your points, but the questions you pose are kiddie stuff. Seriously. Do some homework and stop embarrasing yourself.

quote:

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But I say unto you... whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. - Matthew 5:22

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It's pretty clear that I have a better understanding with the Bible than you have of the modern theory of evolution, and that's not saying much.

Another wild claim that I challenge you to support with evidence. A blatant falsehood transparent to anybody actually aquainted with the Piltdown story. We're getting a lot of ludicrous claims out of you, but very little - nothing, in fact - to substantiate them. Time to put up or shut up, Skeptick. You'd have to prove some kind of familiarity with the subject first. If you know as little about dating as you seem to know about evolution, we're not very keen to wade hip-deep through your ignorance.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 02-10-2004]

There's no evidence you'd be able to recognize one. What an imagination you must have. I never admitted any such thing. Is this what you resort to when you're on the ropes? Fabricating straw men? Hey, you were the one who brought it up. It's hardly my fault if you're going to try to debunk evolution using hisotry you've failed to do your homework on. It's one long argument from personal incredulity.Did you have evidence for some of the wild claims you've made but have yet to support with evidence? Do I need to remind you what you've abandoned/conceded in this thread again? Or can we assume that any sort of evidence is not forthcoming with you? Why should we debate with somebody who feels so unconstrained by the truth that they're free to make up whatever they please?

"Evidence" would be primary sources, not popular press science-history books.

Straw man argument. I never said that my knowledge of the Bible was better than your knowledge of Darwin's Origin of Species.But the fact that you conflated the modern theory of evolution with a book Darwin wrote nearly 150 years ago is more evidence that you don't understand the theory of evolution. Did you look up those terms I gave you? I'm claiming victory by default, because you've failed to show up for the debate. Remember, in debates, evidence is presented and claims are supported. You're failing to do either, once again.You've got one more chance. One more straw man argument or unsupported claim and we're done talking. Period. I'm not going to bother debating with somebody who's not going to put a little work into it.

Does "10-10" mean "1 in 10^10"?

How does that question even make sense?Let me put it to you this way. Let's say that you're at a track meet, and you're attracted to fast runners. In fact you want fast children so you've agreed to mate with the fastest runner.The question you're asking is akin to "how fast do they have to run before I'll mate with one of them?" It doesn't matter. "Fastest" is relative - most handsome is relative. So long as the ducks actually have feathers, one of them will have more handsome feathers than the others.The females have to mate. They're driven to do this. They'll choose the best mate they can find, but you're not going to find many ducks that are going to hold out forever. (That line of ducks doesn't last very long, you see.)It's not a question of "how handsome do you have to be to mate?" Evolution doesn't optimize. I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you. (I don't have to be the handsomest possible duck to mate. I just have to be more handsome than you.) The fact that the duck doesn't have to have perfect plumage to mate. It just has to not have the ugliest plumage around.

Cute. Not sure what your point is, though. The fight doesn't always go to the strongest, though it is a good way to bet. Yes. Selection isn't a process where only the victor gets the spoils. It's a process where the loser definately doesn't get any spoils. Who cares? Why do you presume the ugly ducks are physically superior? I don't see that "good lookin' ducks" getting "beat up" is in any way an inevitable outcome. Which one is the rock pidgeon? The drab one?Clearly female rock pidgeons have no plumage preference. Sexual selection is always based on the preference of the limiting reproductive resource, which is almost always the female (because the female is able to parent so many less offspring than the male, usually.) It doesn't show. When we point out how your questions are based on misapprehensions, you turn around and ask them again. That doesn't look like learning to me.You still haven't looked up the terms I told you about, I see.

Well, the plumage coloration and pattern is probably governed by the interactions of maybe 3-4 genes. I can't give you the "odds" of this arrangement: because I don't see what about wood duck plumage you find particularly intelligent. As you correctly pointed out, it's mal-adaptive, and only persists because the females, for whatever reason, prefer to mate with the colorful males. Why would an intelligent designer saddle wood ducks with a mal-adaptive coloration? I guess I don't see why you're so hung up on the odds. I can't calculate them because I don't know which genes control the pigmentation and arrangement of feathers. I don't know how many alleles there are for each gene. I don't know how the genes interact. And I especially don't know what plumage patterns resulting from these interactions you're likely to find more significant than others.It would be much more useful to ask "what are the odds that female wood ducks would come to prefer bright plumage?" but I can't even answer that, because I don't know the sample space - the enumeration of all possible wood duck brain states that would be relevant to their behavior in regards to plumage.You're asking for odds without being able to define the sample space. Answering your question isn't going to be possible, which you would know if you were really thinking about this stuff. If you want odds, then figure out these numbers:k: How many possible plumage configurations could be represented in the wood duck genome?
n: Out of those, which ones do you consider significant?The "odds", then, should be somewhere around n out of k.

Why...what?Why we're talking about the genetic basis of wood duck plumage? Because Skeptick brought it up, presumably hoping to catch us evilutionists in a contradiction.Why we're talking about evolution in general? Because that's what the forum is for.

I think what that means is that it never expresses proteins. The "junk" DNA may very well have function, but that function wouldn't be related to its nucleotide sequences. No, because we're using the same "de-coder ring" that the cell uses.

What's throwing us off here is that you've gone from a tone of honest questioning (your first 3 or 4 posts), to one of arrogant superiority (the bulk of your exchanges with me), to one of supercillious deference (your recent posts), all in about 3 days.It's difficult to believe that these represent an honest change of heart, because that usually takes a lot longer. Plus when honest people really want to rectify their ignorance, they usually conclude that an internet forum is not a good substitute for a science education, and ask for reccommended texts for their edification. What they usually don't do is continue to ask the sort of questions creationists ask to try to entrap us, like "what did the male wood ducks do while they waited for their plumage to evolve to the females' high standards?" or some such.Is there any reason we shouldn't view your new tone of "I'm so ignorant, please don't hurt me" as simply one more disingenuous tactic?

Why don't you evolve into a stage where you support assertions with evidence when asked? That's all we've ever wanted.If you've got questions, ask 'em. Nobody's worried that you're going to outsmart us, trust me. But be prepared to be corrected if your questions are based on premises that just aren't true.Fire away.

Yes, but that hardly implies we'll be able to calculate the probabilities of any concievable event, right?Probability is a part of bookmaking, too, but I doubt you'd demand that a bookie tell you the precise odds of Superbowl MVP Tom Brady getting injured in next year's season.Reasonable people don't ask for odds that can't possibly be determined.

You have to be dodging on purpose to be missing points the way you are.What I said was not that frogs to princes was inevitable. What's inevitable is that a population of frogs will evolve into something. There's a considerable difference.What are the odds that life as we know it should exist? Very low indeed. What are the odds that life of any kind should exist? Mathematically inevitable. Don't confuse what is with what can only be. As a matter of fact, I do hope creationists don't bring up probabilities - it's a pain in the ass to explain it to somebody who can't be bothered to actually learn something about probabilities. Yes. Of course, the evolutionary model doesn't predict humans evolving from frogs, or frogs from humans. Kind of a disingenuous tactic to oppose an argument we're not making, isn't it? I say that it's chaotic and haphazard. Prove me wrong. (These are the assertions without evidence that we've been warning you about.) Precisely the same as the leaves being in any other single, discreet arrangement. No, and I don't have to. It's your argument from personal incredulity - you do your own homework. Don't you find it just a little ill-advised for you to be making arguments from probability with no actual understanding of probabilities?It's hilarious how you vacillate between arrogant ignorance and feigned supercilliousness. I threatened to stop taking with you after your next unsupported assertion - which you committed above - but it's honestly too much fun to read your attempts at trolling.