Randman's analysis of scholarly papers

Oh really? Then please do show me some positive scientific evidence of creation or ID, rather than spending your time picking around the corners of the ToE for scraps you can manipulate.Show me some positive evidence that does not require some "failure" in the ToE.And when you've done that why not read the paper posted at the head of this thread and pick it apart as you promised.Edited by RickJB, : No reason given.

This is a funny thing with science. It asks questions in the following format:If A is true, then we should see B
We see B
I can think of no other reason we would see B other than A being true.Therefore: I tentatively conclude A is true, pending further investigation.It looks like we are assuming A is true to forward our argument, and in a way we are - but that' science. If we 'assume' that the theory of evolution is accurate - and our hypothesis based on that produces succesful predictions - then we can be confident that our 'assumptions' are well placed. I had an interesting debate with Ray about assuming conclusions are true in science, check it out if you are interested in my thinking in more detail.

Rand, do you say things just to get under people’s skin or do you not see how redundant your debate style is? You are presented with a really good paper and the first thing you do is go online looking for critiques before reading it. (just for your information, your “I couldn’t cut parts of the pdf so I went online and just happened to find a critique of the document” isn’t really being believed) Can you just read the paper?! Read it, reread parts, look up the big words, do whatever it takes to get through the paper and gain a basic understanding of what it means. Trust me, whether you believe in the end or not you will be a better person for the effort.Tell us about progenotes. Tell us why if the concept is false (Woese is wrong and progenotes do not exist) that the ToE is somehow falsified and somehow undermined. Hell, define progenotes to start with, and go from there. What problems does Woese identify in the ToE? You state that he identifies a major flaw in the ToE. What is that? From the critique you cite they find a flaw based upon gene homologies. What does that mean? What does a refutation of the progenote concept based upon gene homologies tell us about the origin of the major urkingdoms?IMO this is it Randman. I am asking that you change your style of debate. I understand your faith and belief. I even respect it. But you need to start actually looking at the things you debate against. You need to stop repeating the same arguments over and over despite being shown they are ridiculous. I am not anti-creationist necessarily, I am against anti-intellectualism.This may be an aside, but I want to illustrate my point. I have a student, who will be a senior this year. She is 100% through and through a YEC. She argues with me every chance she gets out of class. But she is also one of my best students. She reads every evo paper I give the class, she answers every question on every exam. On some she prefaces “Evolutionists believe . ..” but she demonstrates a complete knowledge of the material and I have no academic qualms about giving her an A. I met her parents this summer (same beliefs) and they told me she said I was her favorite professor. So she is the standard by which I judge creationists. Do you see my point Rand?

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Doctor Bashir: "Of all the stories you told me, which were true and which weren't?"
Elim Garak: "My dear Doctor, they're all true"
Doctor Bashir: "Even the lies?"
Elim Garak: "Especially the lies"

Well, it's the truth so if you don't believe it, that's your problem. Tell you what. Can you read several books I think you ought to read?I read the beginning, looked at some other parts and read the conclusion. I probably will read more of it since it seems such good evidence against the Theory of Evolution that knowing more details can help refute the lunacy of evolutionism, but your question is really asinine.I wonder if the guy that linked the paper has read it. Have you read it? If you have, then can you explain how natural selection works with a progenote?Or, tell us why you think a progenote is a false concept? Frankly, I am not saying the concept of progenote is false per se. What I am saying is that the paper raises serious problems about evolutionary theory in regard to the idea that the universal common ancestor was not a progenote.Why don't you explain what those problems are? Suffice for this thread is the fact does not actually verify or substantiate the ToE. I already stated it. He states that the differences in the 3 primary kingdoms are so significant that a common ancestor to all 3 would have to be more complex than is reasonable to assume (watered-down version), and so posits the only plausible alternative is a progenote.For the rest of your post, no, I think your comments are frankly absurd. None of my points are refuted, which is why I keep bringing them up, and frankly I cannot see how you guys can keep bringing up the exact same logical and factual fallacies again and again and think they refute anything. In fact, I openly speculate the propaganda of evolutionism has caused some sort of diminished mental capacity in it's proponents akin to brainwashing.For example and I don't want to get too off-topic, but no matter how often someone shows evos that defining evolution as both heritable change and universal common descent at the same time, and jumbling up those definitions and meanings within arguments is unscientific and a logical fallacy, evos still think their fallacy refutes criticism. They will argue, for instance, that some heritable change is observed, and so "evolution is a fact" and go on discussing "evolution" as universal common descent and not bat an eye. In fact, at this point I wonder if the koolaid is so strong that evos really cannot see the error and illogic in their argument on that.Edited by randman, : No reason given.Edited by randman, : No reason given.

The problem is evolutionists won't admit that if A is true, we should see B and we do not. In this paper, they assume that A is true, and so expect to see B but do not see it and cannot envision B as they expected, and so they posit there must be a B, but it's a different sort of B, a progenote.

Your comments are absurd for 2 reasons:1. If you review my posts and threads, you will see I have already presented positive evidence for ID. To say otherwise is a lie, hopefully based on mere ignorance.2. One of the signs of a losing argument is an attempt to shift the topic, which you are trying to do. Having no substantive response to the topic on this thread, you demand evidence and comments not allowed on this thread (different topics) and so your comment is also absurd on that point.

Show me the papers that seek to prove the Theory of Evolution. I don't mind discussing this paper, but it does not seek to do that, does it?And so I am not backing out of anything. Unreasonable and untenable and illogical axioms do render the science based on it as likely to be wrong, and insisting such science is accurate or whatever is unscientific. You trying to weasel out of this, modulous?Take any definition of the Theory of Evolution and show where are the peer-reviewed papers that seek to prove it, please. The truth is the theory was accepted without peer-reviewed papers substantiating it.

No papers seek to prove a theory. You know this by now. Other papers regarding evolution in some way confirm the theory's accuracy due them working (whereas they would probably fail if the theory (or some part of it) was incorrect). Perhaps - the grand majority of those that study do not find the axioms surrounding evolution to be unreasonable/untenable or illogical...so you'll have to excuse if we ask you to mention a few axioms you find problematic. No - trying to make sure you don't The biological theory of evolution is the theory that explains the hows surrounding the allele frequency variation that can occur to populations of biological entities. It includes mutations, a selection method, gene transfer and other things including epigenetics.Rather than cite a specific paper, I'll refer to a common experiment - taking a asexually reproducing organism with a speedy reproduction rate (eg bacteria). Take one entity of this description and clone it - test one clone for anti-bacterial resistance. It dies. The other clone (or original) is non resistant. Let this bacterium reproduce over many generations. Apply anti-biotic. Some die, some don't. Test DNA of original bacterium with the bacteria that survive. Note mutations have taken place, note those mutations have changed the way the cell wall is built.Calculate the allele's frequency before and after the experiment. In this case it has changed from 0% to some percentage greater than 0. Therefore allele frequency in a population of biological entities has changed. Therefore evolution has happened. The only factors that can account for this change are mutation and selection. The theory of evolution is strengthened, further experiments required to increase the strength of our conclusion.Excuse me for being cynical but 1,500 posts here might do that to the most charitable poster. However, I have a feeling that you might say 'that isn't the theory of evolution', or 'that isn't evolution' or something else that might weasel out of this, hence why I'm not going looking for a specific paper and hence why I asked after your definitions since I thought you might be using different definitions for evolution and the theory of evolution.I suspect you might be talking about common descent or the entirety of natural history.

Wow I almost died laughing. Who here believes that Rand read the article then started searching for refs online? Anybody? Sure, what are their titles? Better yet, I can access online reveiws then claim to have read them.. Then I would be in a good standing to discuss such works with you, right? If you were one of my students I would fail you. You think that is critical review? What is your education level? Very very sad. Despite your high opinion of yourself you are very much misinformed. I read it Rand. I read it and actually understood it. I am not going to tell you why I think Woese is wrong about progenotes. Not because I don't know but because I know you have no idea and it makes me laugh to think about it. ROTFL

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Doctor Bashir: "Of all the stories you told me, which were true and which weren't?"
Elim Garak: "My dear Doctor, they're all true"
Doctor Bashir: "Even the lies?"
Elim Garak: "Especially the lies"

You can copy and paste from PDF's with the latest versions of Adobe Acrobat using the text copy tool.This is such a copy from "Bacterial Evolution" by CARL R. WOESE, Department of Microbiology, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801: MICROBIOLOGICAL REVIEWS, June 1987, p. 221-271 Vol. 51, No. 2
0146-0749/87/020221-51$02.00/0
Copyright C) 1987, American Society for MicrobiologyAnother copy of the paper in pdf is here where I copied this: MICROBIOLOGICAL REVIEWS, June 1987, p. 221-271 Vol. 51, No. 2
0146-0749/87/020221-51$02.00/0
Copyright C) 1987, American Society for MicrobiologyThat's why I don't believe your (lame) excuse.Enjoy.

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In all fairness, with the link originally provided it isn't entirely obvious how to copy/paste. There is a link to the pdf version of the file, but I missed it the first time I went to the site, so its perfectly possible randman missed it.Of course, its quite odd that, upon wanting to copy/paste he wasn't able to hunt for a different version of it - but it doesn't mean he wasn't honestly stating he couldn't copy/paste

Read This MessageIf this thread is to avoid being closed then the participants are going to have to work out among themselves how to stay focused on the topic and move the discussion forward.I will be issuing short suspensions for off-topic posts that appear after this one. If you've been reading the thread sequentially and posted off-topic before seeing this message, then fix it immediately before I see it.PS - The PubMed paper was a collection of TIF images which cannot be cut-n-pasted from. The PDF version is for some inexplicable reason 10 MB, a ridiculous size, and it's in two-column mode, which makes cut-n-pasting extremely time consuming, since both columns get pasted, and the extra column has to be edited out one line at a time.Edited by Admin, : Add PDF info.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Here is what you said in Message #27, thread Does Evolution Require Spreading The Word?(bold added by me)

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You hit on something. Evolutionism has a messianic and religious aspect to it. it's not just science, and imo, it's not good science. What it is though is a powerful propaganda tool, imo.

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I then went on to ask you the following in Message #35: Then, you tried to wiggle out of supporting your claim that Evolution is "not good science", by asking me the following in message #40, which sidesteps the point of your original claim that Evolution is "not good science":

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First, why don't you bring some papers that seek to prove evolutionary theory is true rather than assume it is true.

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Can you do that please?

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I then replied in message #53: To which you replied, in message #58:

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Show me the papers then, and I will look at them and critique them.

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Where are they?

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...which brings us to this thread.The only reason I provided the links to the studies in the OP is because you seemed to want me to.If you don't want to use those papers to show how the science is shoddy, then pick a couple of your own choosing.Remember, the whole point of this thread is for you, randman, to support your claim that the evolutionary science contained in scientific papers is "not good science".

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if you guys can produce the peer-reviewed papers that established the veracity of ToE, I will be glad to review them.

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Great.Both of the papers I provided links for in the OP show positive supporting evidence for the veracity of the ToE.One does it through the molecular evidence of the origin of birds, and the other one concerns the "molecular clock" which is one of the methods used to determine evolutionary trees of descent.

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On the specific subject of the assumptions required to accept ToE, I stand by my stance that they are unproven.

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That's exactly what those papers do, though. They test the "assumptions" that the ToE describes things accurately. That's what every Evolutionary-related study does. Each paper is a test of the theory.So, either you have to show that the papers' authors got their methodology or their statistical analysis so wrong that they got terribly false results which uphold Evolutionary theory, or you need to stop making the claim that it is poor science.

There are probably no peer reviewed papers that prove relativity.Do you perhaps misunderstand the nature of scientific theory?

Hi Schraf,I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to give randman the "win" on this topic. That's right: he wins. There are simply NO peer-reviewed papers in existence (AFAIK) which seek to "prove" the ToE. No scientist writes those. The foundational works in the ToE and the neo-Darwinian synthesis - from Darwin to MacArthur - are/were books, and hence inadmissable. Moreover, although numerous articles have been published providing evidence for aspects of the ToE, most of those take the existence of evolution as a given, and discuss particulars of mechanism, mode and tempo. Even the most profound changes that have occurred in the ToE as a result of peer-reviewed publication in the scientific literature (e.g., Gould/Eldredge's "Spandrels" paper), are still based on the premise that evolution is a fact - no matter how much they've changed our perspective on the subject. Those papers and articles written back in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries that could arguably be considered "foundational", were before the age of peer-review, and hence also inadmissable.Sorry, but the way the challenge has been set up, there's simply no way to provide the applicable papers for randman to critique. Just my two centavos.