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Author Topic:   The Electric Eel - more evidence against evolution
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
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Message 6 of 101 (665596)
06-15-2012 1:58 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by fred2353
06-14-2012 10:37 PM


fred, I've been following this so-called "creation/evolution controversy" (the only semblance of a controversy is purely of creationist manufacture) for a little more than thirty (30) years now. From your very first message posted here, I would assume that you have arrived much more recently, with it very likely that this is your first time to post to a forum with "evolutionists" on board. In my time, I've seen a lot of creationist claims and have tried to discuss them with the creationists presenting those claims. I very quickly learned that the surest way to anger a creationist was to take him seriously and try to discuss his own claim with him. The best reason I've been able to piece together (since they were not forthcoming with that information) is that they themselves had no idea what they were talking about; they were unable to discuss the claim because they were just repeating some "convincing-sounding" claim they had heard with no understanding of the science involved. I very much suspect that that is your own situation here.
Rest assured that on this forum you will be expected to be able to discuss and to support any claim you make.
As another part of your orientation here, there's an acronym used here that you need to learn: PRATT (Point Refuted A Thousand Times). If you continue to spend any time here, you will see it often. It describes mostly all creationist claims, since we've seen them for decades and they were all been soundly refuted decades ago, so thanks to the P.T.Barnum Principle ("a sucker born every minute") as each new generation of misinformed creationist comes bravely forward with the same old nonsense from decades ago, we find ourselves yet again, for the thousandth time (and more), having to repeat the same refutation that destroyed that claim decades ago. Some of us get sick and tired of having to repeat ourselves all the time. Please be understanding when we become impatient with you posting PRATTs.
Many PRATTs are based on creationists' really screwed-up ideas of how evolution is supposed to work. All creationists know are the nonsensical gross misrepresentations of evolution and other science that the creationist propagandists churn out and feed you like fois-gras ducks. What they have told you is wrong. Proceeding from those false misrepresentations of evolution, all that their claims and arguments against "evolution" actually demonstrate is that their false misrepresentations of evolution are wrong. Since they never ever actually address evolution itself, none of their claims and arguments have anything to say about evolution itself.
That is the fundamental problem with your electric eel claim: it is based on a mistaken idea of how evolution is supposed to work. You are expecting evolution to produce a fully functional complex system in pretty much a single step. A key underlying assumption in that expectation is that until that system is fully formed it is completely useless. Of course that couldn't happen, but then you aren't actually talking about how it would have actually evolved. While I haven't seen this particular claim before, it clearly belongs to a class of PRATTs that includes the bombadier beetle and the human eye. In the case of the eye, the mistaken idea is that until it is fully formed it can serve no function -- "What good is half an eye?" -- , whereas in reality we find every stage of the development of the eye in nature where each stage, each "fraction of an eye", is functional and beneficial to the animal possessing it. In the case of the bombadier beetle, two chemicals and a catalyst combine in a chamber in the beetle's abdomin which then are expelled in what's described as an explosion as a noxious and caustic ball of gas in a predator's face. The creationist argument is both that until it could have gotten every part of that mechanism right each generation of beetle would have blown itself up and that those chemicals serve no other purpose. In reality, both chemicals do occur in other insects and are used for different purposes, plus there are several other insects that also use them as a defense against predators and who develop cavities in which to accumulate those chemicals, such that the additional step to what the bombadier beetle has is a relatively small one. For a more complete discussion of the bombadier beetle, refer to the article, The Bombardier Beetle Myth Exploded by Christopher Gregory Weber, Creation Evolution Journal Vol.2 No.1, Winter 1981, pp 1-5.
You see, the way that evolution works is incrementally taking something that already exists and modifying it to either perform the same function more efficiently or effectively, or to perform a different function. A complex system does not just suddenly appear, but rather it started out as a minor modification that continued to change from generation to generation, always performing some function even if not the same function that it ends up performing.
In the case of the electric eel, do those electric organs also exist in other animals and what purpose do they serve in those other animals? What kind of protection do those other animals have? As it turns out, there are many "electric fish" capable of generating electric fields; 348 species are listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_fish. While strongly electric fish (eg, electric eels, electric rays, and electric catfish) are able to stun prey, weakly electric fish cannot, but instead have a variety of uses for electricity such as navigation, object detection (electrolocation) and communication with other electric fish (electrocommunication). Of interest is that all gymnotiformes (AKA "South American knifefish", which includes the electric eel) are electric fish though only the electric eel is strongly electric. Except for adult apteronotids, the nature of their electric organs are the same with the electric eel's organs being much larger, taking up 80% of the eel's body with thousands of stacked electroplaques that act like battery cells -- the electric eel is also the largest gymnotiforme. So it's not that the electric eel is qualitatively different from the other gymnotiformes, but rather that it's quantitatively different (ie, it and its electric organs are larger, which gives it many more electrocytes, enough to generate higher voltages and greater amperage.
if it "evolved" to electrocute things ...
It did not. Rather, it started out as yet another gynmotiforme with their inherent electrical characteristics, which it used for the same purposes as other gynmotiformes and electric eels also still do. It was only as it and its organs grew large enough to crank out enough juice that it could then use electricity for defense, which it still does. As that use led to even larger electric organs, it could then take advantage of its defense mechanism in hunting and disabling its prey. That's how evolution works and electric eels do not present any mystery in that regard. As for how it protects itself from its own electricity, we'll have to see what the ichthyologists who've studied it have to say. Whatever mechanism that turns out to be, it obviously could have evolved at the same time as the increasing size and output of the electric organs. For that matter, you should be able to describe that mechanism to us.
fred, obviously you feel motivated to fight evolution. I would encourage you to do so correctly. Instead of fighting against strawman caricatures of evolution, you need to fight against evolution itself. I once used a boxing analogy where you, the creationist, don't go anywhere near your real opponent, evolution, in the ring but instead you just shadow-box off to the side and keep bragging about how you keep knocking evolution out when in reality you've never gone anywhere near your opponent; you need to stop shadow-boxing and you need to actually get into the ring! {end of analogy} You need to stop using PRATTs and to actually address evolution itself. That means that you need to learn what evolution really is. That is the only way you can ever even begin to hope to win against your chosen foe, evolution. The way you're going now, all you'll ever accomplish is to more thoroughly discredit yourself, creationism, and Christianity, as well as to endanger your own faith and the faith of others.
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Hide and note.
Edited by dwise1, : reworked and un-hidden

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by fred2353, posted 06-14-2012 10:37 PM fred2353 has not replied

  
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