TOE and the Reasons for Doubt

As more and more data is found, our picture of the distant past is becoming clearer.That is the strength of science; it can discard old falsehoods. Would that religious belief was as concerned about accuracy. Track down the creationist who perpetrated the fraud. (He'll be the one selling tickets and books and making a fortune from the gullible.)

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Hi Calypsis4,If you click on your name it will take you to a page that lists all the threads in which you're participating. Under the New Replies column it says "Yes" if there are replies to your messages that you haven't answered yet. The up arrow takes you to the first unreplied-to message, the down arrow to the last.When reading one of these unreplied-to messages you'll see a notation that says "Calypsis4 has not yet responded." This notation is actually a link, and if you click on it it will change to say, "Calpysis4 has taken note of this reply." If you reply to the message it will change to say, "Calypsis4 has responded."When you've replied to or marked as noted all the messages in a thread, then the indication under the New Replies column on your thread list page will change to "No" or "Noted". Using these features will make it easier for you to keep up with all the responses you're getting.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Change subtitle.

Yes, every new intermediate form that turns up is another nail in the coffin of evolution. No, wait, I mean creationism. Oops. I nearly said that proof of how tyrannosaurids evolved was evidence against evolution. But that would have been retarded. As you yourself appear to admit: "The Raptorex fossil proves that these features evolved".Yes, once more an indisputable intermediate form has been discovered, and once more creationists have egg all over their stupid faces. Your fantasies are evidence of nothing but your own peculiar mental state.And since this is not going to happen, you'll have to make do with basing your absurd faith on fraudulent cartoons scratched on rocks.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Percy,How do you post a picture?

Please see the dBCodes help page. This link is also available to the left of all message creation and message editing windows.Within the above cited is the section specific to pictures.With the exception of the avatar pictures, all pictures must be stored elsewhere on the internet. You can not upload such to evcforum.net directly from your computer. Store the pictures on a personal website or on one of the storage services such as photobucket.Please do your practicing at one of the Practice Makes Perfect topics. Any one will do - You don't need to start a new topic.PLEASE, NO REPLIES TO THIS MESSAGE. SUCH THINGS ARE OFF-TOPIC CLUTTER.Adminnemooseus

G'day Calypsis. That day may be closer than we think. This is a shot of some of the organic material retrieved from a T-rex skeleton in the States by Mary Schweitzer:Red blood cells, blood vessels...not in bad nick for a 65 million year old, is she?Edited by Kaichos Man, : make it pretty

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin

What evolutionists can discover is indeed pretty darn awesome. But I don't see how this observation will hasten the day on which Calypsis's absurd fantasies will come true.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

G'day Percy. Been bending my brian on Haldane's original paper to try and gain an understanding of this. It all comes down to the "negative logarithm of the frequency".As I understand it, Haldane established a substitution rate that the population could withstand without being threatened with extinction. It is this rate that determines the number of deaths and, to a large extent the speed of the substitution. The number of mutations and their relationship to each other don't come into it.You can't double the negative logarithm for two mutations, otherwise your organism will become extinct. But you can halve it to accommodate each of two mutations. So what happens if you do?Pretty much what I suggested with my example of mutants A and B, but with an important difference. You would have a two-phase process (Mutants A and B replacing non-mutants, and then Mutant AB replacing Mutants A and B), But Haldane did concede that while the cost in lives remained the same, "It might happen faster".The reason for this, I believe (Haldane wasn't specific) is that the substitution of Mutant AB doesn't have to wait until all the non-mutants have been substituted for A or B; as soon as there is an organism with both mutations the process can get underway.I have to concede therefore, that there is probably a time saving associated with multiple mutations. However, the fact that beneficial mutations are so rare, and the fact that in order for this to work the mutations would all have to be relevant to the same form of selection means that multiple mutations could play at best only a minor role in alleviating Haldane's Dilemma.

Dr Adequate,Have you ever wondered why every far-flung culture on earth, many of which have been separated by unbridgable time and distance with no opportunity to communicate with each other, all have "the dragon" as part of their folklore?And why were these dragons always large, dangerous reptilian creatures, do you think?Hmm. Large, dangerous reptiles...that sounds familiar...

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin

Yes! And flying, fire-breathing... Oh wait...

Pterodactyl. Condensation.

Except that pterodactyls aren't dinosaurs and look nothing like dragons.Condensation? Yes, I fear having condensation breathed on me like nothing else.

No. For the same reason that I've never wondered why I'm being attacked by vast flocks of flying pigs. * sighs deeply *Whenever we find a culture with a mythical reptile, we translate its name into our word "dragon". The reason why all the stories we classify as dragon legends have things in common is that the things that these stories have in common are the reason why we classify them as dragon legends. Yeah. From boa constrictors to crocodiles to Komodo dragons, the world is indeed full of large dangerous reptiles. The concept of large dangerous reptiles should sound familiar, because they actually exist.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

You cracked it so quickly? My word - how many Ph.D's was it again? He didn't "establish" anything. He posited a problem which he was pretty clear in saying might not be a problem as not only did he not fully understand the problem or the mechanics of the problem, but was not sure if there wasn't a perfectly natural explanation that could deal with the issue should it turn out to be substantiated.I fear you're the same as the creationists who can't decipher the toy weasel program written over twenty years ago for a now-defunct computer.I re-re-re-repeat:Haldane himself wasn't sure there was a dilemma
Haldane himself was sure there were problems with his workand many others have since come forwards in the intervening 20-30 years or so to point out he's wrong. Seriously, it's a non-issue. Get over it. It's as false a dilemma as the Darwin quote in your sig and the Feduccia quotes other creationists have slung around.You're going to have to do a lot better than the "internet tough guy" spiel - like actually show some working.and (to weigh in on later messages) - dinosaurs are dragons? REALLY?and, like, you don't think it impossible that dinosaur bones could have been dug up before to display fantastically huge creatures, from whence legends of ancient magical creatures could have sprung?Take, for example, the massive underground mole monsters in China/Siberia/Russia - huge great beasties they were, could bore through solid rock! They only had one weakness, and that was sunlight.Every so often, one of these huge beasts would accidentally bore out into the cold hard light of day, and instantly die, to be turned to stone.From this, they gave them the name "mamont"You might know them as "mammoths".

Beneficial mutations may be rare when compared to deleterious mutations, but they occur at a more than sufficient rate. Try this hypothetical example for the ancestor humans 10 million years ago. Assume a constant population size of one million, 10 random mutations per generation, and a generation time of 20 years. Further assume that only one out of a million mutations are beneficial. Plugging in the numbers you'll find that during that period of 10 million years there would have occurred 5 million beneficial mutations.--Percy