Hi Arphy. I see you chose to ignore most of my direct questions to you.
A doctor has tested evidence that his methods of helping solve an illness will work. That's why i would believe the doctor.
How do you know? Do you demand to see that evidence every time you are ill? Or do you just accept that the doctor's expertise is sufficient?
When a biologist tells me that natural selection works and then shows me a study where it shows that this mechanism is occuring, I will believe the biologist.
There are countless studies showing natural selection in action. Here is a page on one teams work on natural selection in Galapagos finches.
There is plenty of this kind of evidence, yet you still won't believe it. You seem to feel that you are qualified enough to dismiss it without even having examined it.
However when that biologists makes up imaginative stories about how this process can over millions of years completly change the descendents of the creature studied into something that no longer even remotely looks like the original creature. say somethng that disagrees with my narrow interpretation of the Bible. Then no there is no need for me to accept his speculations.
Fixed that for you.
Half the time they are wrong, at least the ones on NZ TV, but anyway. This is because they make speculations. Sure they have kept records (human records) and can see via satellite the movement of clouds (information from the present) and can also measure atmospheric pressure (information from the present)and know of various mechanisms that scientists have studied in the present. This allows them to make an informed speculation. However according to evolutionists there are no eye witnesses to most of earth history who can verify our speculations of the past. Therefore they remain speculations.
So you believe the forecasters (to whatever extent) because they show sucuess in making predictions? that's good, because the ToE is superb at making predictions.
Perhaps the best example is the discovery of
Tiktaalik, the famous transitional fish/tetrapod. Scientists knew what they were looking for. They knew roughly when the ToE said that it should have lived. They knew what environment the ToE said it should have lived in. They knew what rocks, of what age and what origin where the most likely candidates. So they went to those rocks, in Greenland, and looked.
They found exactly what the ToE predicted; an animal with both fish and tetrapod traits. Its anatomy matched their predictions. The predictive power of the ToE was confirmed yet again.
That is just one example of the evidence that you deny exists. There are many more.
Before I move on, I would just like to try again to get you to answer a few direct questions.
Do you not think that the wider store of knowledge increases the possibility of an expert being right? Yes or no?
Do you think that experts have more or less chance of being correct about their own field of study than laymen? More or less?
Do you think that expertise has absolutely no value in forming conclusions? Yes or no?
Then why did he say the things he did? He knew that creationists would pounce on them
a) You misunderstod what he said; I have already demonstrated this. The contradiction exists only in your head.
b) Perhaps he felt as though he should be able to speak his mind at a professional conference without dishonest slimeballs hijacking his words.
c) What you are saying here is equivalent to "Hey, why do these shopkeepers leave stuff lying around on shelves anyway? Don't they know I'm just going to steal it?" Dishonest quote mining is not justified by the victim's failure to protect himself from it.
His two quotes just don't make sense when put next to each other. first he says "Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it's not. It is a bird, a perching bird." and then he says "Archaeopteryx is half reptile and half bird any way you cut the deck". What the...??
There is no contradiction. Birds are a subset of reptiles. If it's contradictions you're looking for, I recommend the Bible.
Note that however much you think there is a contradiction, Feduccia makes clear that he thinks your view is ridiculous. That makes any attempt on your part to use his views as ammunition inherently dishonest. He doesn't agree with you Arphy. How many times do you have to be told this before you stop trying to use him as an authority to back up your views?
To cap it all off, he says "These creationists are confusing an argument about minor details of evolution with the indisputable fact of evolution: Animals and plants have been changing." Great, so evolution from goo-to-you-via-the-zoo is proven because "animals and plants have been changing". This is just a ridiculous defense.
It's also not what he said... "Plants and animals are changing" is a conclusion, delivered in sound-bite form. It is not the evidence for the conclusion, nor was Feduccia claiming it was evidence, nor would anyone. You are now deliberately taking his words out of context yourself, instead of simply repeating what you were told on creation.com. You have moved from repeating lies to making up new ones. Classy.
Bird-like features
Arphy, please, stop humiliating yourself, it's just too painful to watch.
There are no derived traits of birds present in platypuses. There are basal traits, shared by marsupials, reptiles, amphibians and fish. Birds may also display these basal traits, since they are also descended from reptiles, amphibians and fish.
What you will not find is a
derived bird trait in a platypus. You understand what that means right?
vitellogenin egg-yolk protein (also found in fish)
It's also found in
fish. How does that make it bird-like? It sounds more fish-like to me, which is what we'd expect, since fish are distantly anscestral to marsupials.
two ZPAX genes (also found in amphibians and fish)
Amphibians and fish are both ancestral to birds and marsupials. These are basal traits.
X chromosome similar to avian sex chromosome Z, but another chromosome is similar to the mouse X, and still another is similar to the human X
Hey, you were the one who was so keen on evidence; how about you provide some? Do you have a source for this? Is it creation.com?
some bird-like microRNAs
Back that up please. How about you show me a credible source demonstrating that platypuses have derived avian traits...
You have demonstrated here that you don't understand what you're talking about. The shared traits you describe are basal features. They are evidence in favour of common ancestry and evolution, not evidence against. That fact that you are unable to tell the difference underlines just how poorly placed you are to criticise the experts you overrule out of hand. It is all very well to insist that you have evidence, but it won't do you any good if you don't
understand the evidence.
The point was to show that while it seems very incredibly Darwin still thought that naturalistic processes could still explain it. in other words, he had a belief that he would stick with dispite the initial absurdity this belief brings.
Arphy, that is not a flaw. That is a positive quality, namely, the determination to look beyond superficiality. Superficial appearances are not reality. Superficially, the sun looks as though it is going round the Earth, but it's not. Let's just compare the messages of the two sources;
Darwin - "Superficially, evolution looks absurd, but it's not."
CMI - "Superficially, evolution looks ridiculous and it is!"
These two views are diametrically opposed. There is no way of parsing Darwin's statement into anything other than a rebuttal of the CMI position. CMI are still quite happy to use it though. I guess dishonesty and superficiality are fine with them.
Please take the use of the quote in context! The author was saying that the eye is incredible, which even darwin agreed with.
That's bloody rich, considering that there is no attempt in the ICR article to place the quote into its proper context. They could very easily have included the full quote, but they chose to clip it, leaving a distorted version.
Also, Darwin
did not believe that the eye was incredible! You are falling hook. line and sinker for this lie, when the evidence against it is right in front of your eyes! It's like losing at three-card-monte with the cards face up!
Charles Darwin writes:
the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.
Okay? Do you get that? He didn't think the difficulties were real. He didn't think that the evolution of the eye was in any way incredible. Please stop lying about it. The truth is right in front of your eyes in black and white (well, blue and white...). You are fooling no-one except yourself.
You do the same with Patterson. Let me remind you what he said;
Colin Patterson writes:
the creationists' {interpretation} is false
How much more simple do I need to make this for you? He said your guys got it wrong. They misunderstood. None of what they are saying represents Patterson's true opinion, so their appeal to his authority, fallacious from the start, is false. He disagrees with you Arphy. How exactly do you manage to transform this, in your mind, from "the creationists are wrong" into "the creationists are right"?
So what, when we find out that evolutionists see faults in the evolution as well, we should pretend that we haven't heard, and not use this to support our position on the weakness of evolution as an explanatory philosophy? Tough luck. we will use the ammo created by evolutionists against them, and I think this is legitimate.
No, when you discover that you were so wrong about the interpretation of a comment (which you do not have the expertise to understand in the first place) that the author needs to specifically go on record to state that you are wrong, you should admit that you are wrong, rather than insist that you know what he meant to say better than he did himself.
Mutate and Survive
"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod
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