A question for Evolutionists

First, robertleva will just shout out as he had been taught to: "That is not evolution because THEY ARE STILL MOTHS!"Second and more importantly, robertleva excluded from his question any mechanism that would increase genetic variability: In the original: You have to remember that, as a creationist, robertleva does not understand evolution but rather misunderstands it as he has been trained to do. Creationism claims to attack evolution, but in reality it attacks their misrepresentations of evolution while keeping well away from actual evolution.Your reply uses actual evolution, which he will not understand since he's misrepresenting evolution.To illustrate his fundamental error, here is a description of a generic single-objective genetic algorithm (which is based on how evolution works):

quote:

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Step One: Generate the initial population of individuals randomly. (First generation)

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Step Two: Repeat the following regenerational steps until termination:

1. Evaluate the fitness of each individual in the population (time limit, sufficient fitness achieved, etc.)
2. Select the fittest individuals for reproduction. (Parents)
3. Breed new individuals through crossover and mutation operations to give birth to offspring.
4. Replace the least-fit individuals of the population with new individuals.

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Instead, robertleva removes sources of increases in genetic variability, " ... through crossover and mutation operations ... ", reducing sub-step 3 to:

quote:

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3. Breed new individuals to give birth to offspring.

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Evolution works because of both increases in genetic variability and natural selection. Remove either one and it's no longer evolution but something entirely different. What he is trying to "disprove" is not evolution and really has next to nothing to do with evolution.A possible analogy to make that more clear might be efforts to "prove" that heavier-than-air flight is impossible. A 737 is supposed to be able to fly great distances. So your test builds a 737 airframe minus the engines and you try to fly it. Gee look! It can't even take off, leave the ground. Doesn't work!When they point out to you that it needs engines to work, you set up an engine separate from the airframe and start it up. At best it careens off out of control. Well! That's certainly not flight! It still doesn't work!Even when they mount the engines properly onto the airframe and have you watch as they take off in controlled flight, you still don't believe them since you "already proved it couldn't possibly work." 
BTW, even though robertleva has posted a lie, I have no doubt that he doesn't realize that it's a lie. That's just what he's been taught and he has made the mistake of believing and trusting them (as I'm sure that his immediate handlers have also done).

Looking at the record (click on his name as a link), this OP was the first thing he had posted (25 Apr 2021) , but it didn't get promoted until 03 May 2021, a week later. While he did participate a bit in four other topics, his last message listed was on 28 Apr 2021, about 5 days before this topic was belatedly promoted. That might suggest that he had not intended this to be a post-and-run, but rather he had already decided to brush the dust off his sandals and forget about us (New Testament reference for writing off a community you fail to convert).This OP was the only time I recall seeing him even mention evolution. As I recall, in all his other messages he affirmed his belief in demons, tried to convert us while pulling the typical proselytizing BS (including denying the Cheeto dust of proselytizing all over his face and hands), and generally engaged in typical fundamentalist nonsense.I suspected he was yet another case of what we'd seen before. In a number of fundamentalist schools students will be given an assignment in which they find an "atheist" forum ("evolutionist" means the same thing to them) and troll it with "challenges to evolutionists", reporting back to the class for credit.There was even a "grassroots" campaign a decade ago (04 May 2011) organized by one ministry (so much for "grassroots") with its own webpage: Just a moment... . The idea was to arm creationist students with a set of questions to raise in class. The purpose was to put the teacher on the spot with "unanswerable questions" that would show that what the teacher was saying wasn't true and so to cast doubt on evolution -- BTW, slamming your victim with "unanswerable questions" is a common proselytizing tactic. That page lists their list of 15 questions which of course are nothing but PRATTs ("Points Refuted A Thousand Times"). A few other sites added to that list with even worse questions. My personal was "Looky at all these compounds! What did they all come from?" to which the obvious answer was, "Start paying attention in chemistry class and you'll learn where they come from, and so much more!"It used to be very common to get some of those students doing that homework assignment here, but it's been a while now. The pattern would be for them to post an OP with one or some (or even all) of those questions, maybe offer a few weak responses, and then abruptly disappear to go collect their class credits.This OP certainly smelled like one of those, however his email suggests that he is at least a young adult who is either a service member or a veteran (MacDill AFB is near him and it does have a Navy Reserve presence). At one point he mentioned not being very well received in the gaming community, which I assume to be on-line gaming, so I assume him to be rather young still (old gamers tend to do more table-top gaming). Maybe his adult RE class handed out those same assignments. My senior English teacher taught us that words have both denotations and connotations. The denotation is the factual definition, basically what's in the dictionary. But the connotation is the set of emotions and prejudices that are associated with that word."Evolutionist" has both denotations and connotations. Every time you ask someone, especially a creationist (also loaded with connotations), what "evolutionist" means and he'll always give you a somewhat neutral denotation: someone who "believes in", ie accepts, evolution.But that creationist never ever offers any of the connotations they have for that word, virtually all of them negative. To them, an "evolutionist" is not only an atheist, but also outright anti-God and wanting to destroy religion. Furthermore, they deem by definition "evolutionism" and creationism to be mutually exclusive, therefore an evolutionist cannot be a creationist nor can a creationist be an evolutionist (not by their narrow definitions; see below).This works as a trap for their opponents, especially in any kind of discussion or debate format before an audience of believers. Especially in the earlier debates (ie, before we figured out this trick) the creationist was introduced as a creationist and his opponent was introduced as an "evolutionist". The opponent would usually accept that label ("OK, this is creation/evolution, so since I'm on the opposite side I guess that label makes sense.") without knowing about the very negative connotations that he was signing on for. So as a "self-admitted" "evolutionist", the audience immediately saw him as the most vile form of enemy and he lost the audience and the debate before either of them even spoke the first word.That is why I keep asking creationists what an "evolutionist" is supposed to be, just as I keep asking them what they think that evolution is (clearly that's not what we normals know it to be), and they never ever give me a straight answer, if they even bother to answer (which is very rare).Edited by dwise1, : he referred to the gaming community

That's assuming that we are dealing with an actual person and not some seriously defective AI being foisted upon us by some script kiddie. So far all "he" has done here as been to repost nonsense lifted from elsewhere. Has anyone located where this latest deposit came from?But for sake of argument, let's allow that "he" is an actual person. In that case, his primary problem is that he is not even wrong. What he is babbling about has nothing to do with evolution, nor with anything in biology. It's just the usual creationist stupid nonsense.This latest seems to be a continuation of his Message 81 where he "tries" to "disprove" Dawkins' cumulative selection, except his attempt consists of mentioning it and then attacking the other option, single-step selection, thus proving what Dawkins was also demonstrating, that single-step selection doesn't work.His rehash here of that tired old false creationist nonsensical claim of "evolution requires all complex modern proteins to have magically fallen together by pure chance" makes all the same tired old mistakes such as (list far from comprehensive, since I'm in a rush to prepare for duty tonight):

1. All modern proteins had to have self-assembled into existence instantaneously out of nothing, like Hoyle's tired old "tornado in a junkyard randomly assembling a 747" nonsense. And as such, the probability model would have to be through single-step selection.
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   Instead, modern proteins would have evolved through cumulative selection.
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2. He assumes that every modern protein must be specified exactly, for which other creationists describe having even one single "wrong" amino acid anywhere in that protein would make it useless.
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   In reality, many amino acids in a protein can be replaced with a different one. Roughly speaking, generally nearly half of a protein's loci are purely structural and could be filled with any amino acid; it's primarily the protein's active sites that need to be highly specified. Indeed, when we compare the same protein across species, we find differences in the amino acid sequence which we are able to use to map out how the different species are related to each other through common descent; ie, that is a powerful tool for constructing phylogenetic trees. And ironically, false claims about how closely related species are to each other based on protein comparisons used to be a hot creationist topic (refer to my The Bullfrog Affair).

Running out of time. Gotta run.But one last. "He" calls "evolution" (whatever "he" means by that) a tautology and calls it false on that basis. The thing is that a tautology is always true; it's just trivially true (ie, offers no actual explanation) and hence not useful. But it's still true.So "he" led in by stating that evolution is true. Nice start.