Who Owns the Standard Definition of Evolution

I get the impression that K.Rose is a bit less strident on that topic. There seems to be a willingness to take the dates at face value and see if it works as evidence.

He just hasn't started on it yet.It's kind of pointless discussing evolution with him if his starting point is a 7,000 year old earth, he's not arguing in good faith. I think he's just practicing.

K.Rose:

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I don't have the exact number, but somewhere between 6000-7000 years.

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I think that whether species can interbreed or not is important to them for their "basic created kinds" nonsense as well as their false "micro- versus macro-evolution dichotomy." I have even seen a self-appointed expert creationist use the ability to interbreed as virtually the sole criterion for determining whether two critters are "of the same kind." Even the creationists who use this criterion more loosely will make much of interfertility and hybrids as "proof of microevolution just being variation within a basic created kind."Hybrids is actually a problem for that entire argument, since they cannot account for the wide range of hybridization which actually describes increasing degrees of mutual infertility. Eventually, species become too different from each other to produce any offspring, but creationists' definition of "kind" as depending on interfertility cannot account for that whereas evolution very easily does, along with all other aspects of hybridization.Quickly, an example is when Faith had accidentally proven macroevolution (and then immediately started backpedaling frantically). Got things to do, so here's a repost from my decidedly one-sided discussion of "kinds" with candle2 (Message 3022 -- that message also contains another repost which itself contains a few embedded YouTube videos on the subject; Share and enjoy!): Ah, if only creationists would bother to learn some biology, even some basic biology. It could save them from saying so many stupid things.  ABE:

From 4000 years ago, no. In corollary, the only members of my family tree that I don't doubt to some degree are those Members with which I have had direct contact, or other members with which the former Members have had direct contact.But I don't want to convolute the discussion with these thoughts because this brings an interesting question:Do we use our present-day biological observations to understand ancient events/processes, or do we use ancient events/processes to understand present-day observations?

Absolutely not my intention to mock science or those who toil away in advancement of it. I am acutely aware of the need to proceed with what you know, or, in the absence of that, what you think is your best guess.Many a brainiac science/engineering effort comes to constipation on the insistence of irrefutable evidence. If we did everything this way we'd never get anywhere. They key is to keep track of the assumptions in your endeavor; these are the "open items".

The point of course was that we don’t need to know what happened in the distant past to know what happened more recently.

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Do we use our present-day biological observations to understand ancient events/processes, or do we use ancient events/processes to understand present-day observations?

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With all science we start with observed processes and apply the knowledge we gain from those to cases where we cannot observe them. That might be making predictions (since we cannot observe the future) or reconstructing past events from the evidence that they have left.

I think I am safely withing Category #2, and maybe even Category #3, and if those were the responses to my question "what is evolution" I would be disheartened and would probably just walk away. If I had asked that question then I would have been looking for an answer that I could comprehend in that conversation.The 4th-grade response is more palatable to me - and to ~99% of adults out there - because it forms a comprehendible concept. And for ~99% of that ~99%, including educated persons, that is the concept they harbor for the rest of their lives.

More importantly, we need theories that explain what we do know. That's an issue that creationists often get tripped up on. They often confuse assumptions with conclusions. For example, we don't assume common ancestry. We conclude that species share a common ancestor because of the evidence. We don't assume that the differences between species is due to evolutionary mechanisms. We conclude that those differences are due to evolution because of the evidence (e.g. transitions outnumber transversions). More to the point, we don't assume a fossil is transitional. We conclude that a fossil is transitional because it has a mixture of features from two different groups (e.g. a mixture of ape and human features).

Of course, my response will be about actual evolution, not your stupid strawman "evolution". Two reasons for that:

1. Nobody knows what your idea of "evolution" could possibly be, since you refuse to define it or describe it; IOW, we have no way of knowing what the hell you're talking about. Referring us to "standard creationist definitions" would not help at all, since no creationist will ever reveal that secret.
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   Almost as if you all had something to hide and were very highly motivated, desperate even, to keep it hidden.
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2. Since your "evolution" has nothing at all to do with reality (unlike actual evolution) -- and even contradicts reality -- , then it has already been invalidated simply through the manner in which you creationists had cobbled it together to serve as a strawman.
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3. Since your "evolution" played no role in the accumulation of any part of our knowledge, it can be dismissed out of hand. Kind of like if you were to ask about the effect on our knowledge were we to discover that Eleanor Roosevelt had wings; it's just too stupid to give any thought to.

Therefore, since your "molecules-to-man evolution" is nothing other than yet another of your stupid creationist strawmen and hence would not have played any role in our accumulation of knowledge, we can simply ignore it as just more stupid bullshit that you tried to inject into what should be a sincere question.BTW, Tanypteryx already provided a thoughtful answer in Message 433 and I cannot help but notice that your "reply" to him just completely ignored his answer. That tells me that you will just ignore my answer as well, just as you have ignored almost every one of our answers.Like the too-often cited story of the frog and the scorpion, you are a creationist so you cannot do anything other than ignore the truth; cleaving to bullshit lies is in your nature. Now to cast more pearls before a creationist swine.Another aspect of the answer is that you way of viewing it (a typical religionist view) is completely different from how I view it (a scientific view). The way that you would think about the question is very different from how I would. This came out your posts here and your inability to understand our answers.An analogy would be the difference between a polyfilament line and a monofilament line. Sever some, even many, of the threads in a polyfilament line and the line can still hold, but sever just one single thread of a monofilament line (which by definition consists of only one single thread) and the entire line is gone. Hence, a system with a polyfilament structure is robust, whereas one with a monofilament structure is very brittle.Neglecting your overall inability to understand what a theory is, you seemed to view it as consisting of one single idea, ie having a monofilament structure. Sever that one single idea and you destroy the entire theory.But in reality, a theory as well as all fields of study consist of bundles of ideas; ie they have a polyfilament structure. A theory has correct ideas and wrong ideas, but since they form a bundle then the theory as a whole can still hold together and remain intact despite containing a number of wrong ideas. Hence, through testing and new discoveries we can determine whether a given idea is wrong in which case it can be replaced with a correct idea.My view of theories is based in part on my experience in software, simulations, and wargaming, all of which depend on models. Basically, a theory would be a model describing how a system works. All models are imperfect and hence contain wrong ideas about parts of that model. And while some ideas are more important than others, again finding some ideas to be wrong does not necessarily destroy the entire theory.And even if a theory is massively wrong, some of its threads are not ideas, but rather actual observations made in the real world. Indeed, the theory was constructed in the first place to explain observations and those observations were part of the theory from the beginning. While the possible explanations for those observations could all be wrong, the observations themselves still stand. Hence, your single discovery that "invalidates everything" doesn't apply to those observations, nor should a single discovery be able to have such an enormous impact.But that does not work for a religious system which is typically a monofilament structure consisting of a single chain of conclusions -- it doesn't even have any real-world observations to support it, but rather every part has been made up by believers. That word, "chain", seems appropriate in that every idea of that system forms a link in that chain and, as the saying goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, unlike the bundling of a polyfilament structure. In your religionist system, one single discovery could destroy the entire system, but the same is extremely rarely true in a scientific system.I would also point out that your religionist approach involves starting out with perfect and complete "knowledge", usually sold as some god having provided us with a "Revelation" that is "perfect". From that point on, all that could happen would be for that "perfection" to be lost, to degrade through inaccurate transmission and misinterpretation. In such a system, the goal would be to get back to the "perfect" original. At no point would the religionist be motivated to test any of those assumptions (except against that "perfect" original). As such, discovering that part of that original teaching was wrong or not as it was sold as being could cause the entire Jenga tower of cards to collapse.But in science, we start with observations and some ideas of how to explain them. The first ideas will normally be the worst and the most subject to error, but as they get tested and either corrected or replaced with better ideas, the entire theory being constructed keeps getting better and better (think of the common wisdom of waiting until at least Version 2 of software before you buy it; eg, I bought Windows 1 and later found Windows 3 to be far, far better and more useful). Replacing whole sections that turn out to be wrong only serves to improve the theory, not destroy it.Of course, as already noted, science has observations to base its work on, whereas religion has no observations but rather made-up stuff.In summary, you are trying to project your own monofilament religionist view onto science, which does not work. The deficiency is in yourself. So how does the discovery that something we thought was right turns out to not be? How does that affect, well, everything?For most things, not that much impact. That would just be the normal situation of improving the theory. Even if the discovery leads to the replacement of an entire theory, it still has the same purpose of explaining the observations which do not change.Let me reiterate that point: even if our entire explanation for observations is found to be completely wrong, the observations themselves are still the same as before.What the hell are you talking about?I cannot think of any such that would need to be changed just because one of our explanations has had to be replaced. Do we have examples of complete replacement of ideas? Yes. Does anyone ever hear of them? Yes, of course, in almost every science class in all gradesNow a couple examples:

• The best known example would be the replacement of geocentrism (eg, the Ptolemaic System) with heliocentrism (eg, the Copernican/Keplerian systems).
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  For centuries, the Ptolemaic system worked extremely well with its circular orbits and epicycles (smaller orbits around points on the larger orbits). As errors would be found, they simply added more epicycles or tweaked the ones they already had. As a result the Ptolemaic system was extremely accurate with unassailable predictive power. But it was very complicated, cumbersome, and it didn't make any sense in how it worked (best I heard was that each epicycle was a crystal sphere).
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  Conceptually, the heliocentric Copernican system was more satisfying, but it was inaccurate because of features retained from the Ptolemaic system, including uniform speeds and circular orbits. It made sense, but it didn't work as well.
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  Johannes Kepler who used Tycho Brahe's observations of the motion of Mars to solve those problems through his Three Laws of Planetary Motion:
  1. The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci. Ie, replace the circular orbits with elliptical ones.
  2. A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time. Ie, a planet's orbital speed varies with respect to its distance from the Sun; faster when it's closer and slower when it's farther away.
  3. The square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of the length of the semi-major axis of its orbit. Ie, a planet's orbital period (AKA its year) is longer the larger its orbit is.
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  So here we see one system replaced with a less accurate one, though the new system became more accurate through refinement that involved the replacement of wrong ideas (eg, circular orbits, uniform orbital speeds).
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• In electricity, almost every textbook defines current as the flow of electrons through a conductor. But in which direction does it flow, from negative to positive or from positive to negative? Well, that depends on whether you are an electrical engineer (EE) or not.
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  I have been taught that we can thank Benjamin Franklin for early electrical theory. Starting with his famous kite experiment where he quite literally caught lightning in a bottle (well, in a Leyden jar actually, but close enough to a bottle), he proved that lightning was the same thing as the static electricity that people had been experimenting with and changed ideas about static electricity.
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  Now, people had been playing with static electricity for while already and they found that there were two different kinds of static electricity depending on what you rubbed with what; ie, silk on glass or fur on amber. But what Franklin (as per what I was told) figured out that those two "different kinds" of electrical charge were actually the same kind and that the observed difference was due to having too much or too little of the charge carrier (the flow of which was then defined as current as mentioned above). But which was which; which had more of that charge carrier and which had less? It was pretty much a coin toss so Franklin decided that the charge from silk-on-glass had a surplus of the charge carriers so he called that "positive" and fur-on-amber had a deficit so called that "negative". For the next century an entire science of electrical theory developed around those definitions with all the supporting math.
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  But then at the end of the 19th Century they developed the cathode-ray tube (CRT) and discovered that the "cathode rays", which were the charge carriers of electricity, were actually negative. Scientists had gotten it wrong for the past century! What to do, what to do? Well, you cannot just throw away a century of productive work that still worked perfectly well, nor could you throw away all hardware just in order to relabel it -- consider the estimated prohibitive cost of redoing every single traffic and mile-marker sign in the USA just in order to replace miles with kilometers.
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  So electrical engineers took a compromise position: keep the labeling and math conventions already established and just make a mental note that electrons actually flow in the opposite direction. And with the advent of solid state electronics which includes the idea of the flow of "holes" (where doping has left out electrons that would have been in the undoped semiconductor lattice, such that the flow of electrons in one direction involves the "flow of holes" in the opposite direction) leading to EEs talking about current being "hole flow".
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  At the same time, technicians think in terms of electron flow. Everything works out the same, except EEs describe conventional current which flows from positive to negative while technicians describe electron current which flows form negative to positive. The math in circuit analysis is the same except technicians have to take an extra step in determining the polarity of a given voltage drop (AKA "IR drop") across a given component whereas for the EE the math takes care of that directly.
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  I was trained as an electronics technician and while I was working on my computer science degree on active duty I also took EE courses "for fun" (and to augment my technician training), so I was well aware of conventional versus electron current. However, the EE students had not yet learned about it, since their beginning books defined current in terms of electron flow while defining the direction as positive to negative. I had great fun confusing (and then educating) them by getting them to think it through.

I have things to do, so I'll stop there.Now that I have answered your question, I have the same kind of questions for you which I will present in the next message, but I'll let you prepare.Basically, what effect will it have when you, a young-earther, discover that the young-earth claims are completely false and that the earth is actually ancient as science has found it to be? And what effect will it have when you discover that evolution is true? And when we discover the natural processes that led to the origin of life?But much more important that the effect is the question of why those discoveries would have those effects.

PaulK gave a great answer. Here is my spin.We start with processes we can observe. We then ask what we should and shouldn't see in present if those processes were active in the past. That's it. If our hypothesis is supported by observations, then we understand a bit more about what we are seeing in the present and its history.It's really no different than a forensic scientist trying to reconstruct a crime that happened in the past. Given what creationists have said in this thread, it would seem that no creationist would accept any evidence found at a crime scene because the supernatural could have been at play. The past is wholly untestable, or at least it would seem that way from their arguments.

withing??? I have no idea what you are trying to say here. Yep, that's what I figured. You claim to want to know about evolution, but you are too lazy to study to learn it. That's another characteristic of all creationists who post here. Well, so far as I can tell, you have no comprehension of anything you have been told in this whole thread. We're still searching for your level of comprehension.

Indeed to the too many topics!Please pardon my use of the "just" ; "simply", even better "the theory We have all agreed to run with" would have been more appropriate."Accepted" can be misconstrued as "we're done, this is our conclusion", which we know is not the case; and to the great scientific unwashed it implies scientific fact.

I was looking for your own personal wording, but thank you for your explanation nonetheless.

Now here's something I can understand, and a better indication of my perception level!But isn't this straight natural selection, something we can see every day and not really an evc point of contention?

Why? My personal wording is irrelevant. It's a policy, it's factual, not a matter of personal opinion. So why did you ask? You have an answer, what are you going to do with it?