#10 A Stunning New Illustration of Intelligent Design in the Cell
#9 The Ham-Nye Creation Debate: A Huge Missed Opportunity
#8 State-Run Museum Covered Up Collaboration with Atheist Groups
#7 Ciliate Organism Undergoes "Scrambled Genome" and "Massive...Rearrangement"
#6 Phys.org Says the Argument for Suboptimal Design of the Eye "Is Folly"
#5 Whale Hips, Another Icon of Darwinian Evolution, Takes a Hit
#4 A Key Inference of The Edge of Evolution Has Now Been Experimentally Confirmed
I bet you can't wait for the top three to be announced over the next three days? Maybe one of them will be about scientific evidence for intelligent design and god(s).
66 comments :
Some of my favorites are the posts following the generic template Scientists discover something they didn't expect -- predictions of Darwinism fail again!
From #4: A recent paper in PNAS confirms a key inference I made in 2007 in The Edge of Evolution. Summers et al. conclude that "the minimum requirement for (low) [chloroquine] transport activity ... is two mutations."
I'll see you your two mutations and raise you how rapidly this actually occurs in practice:
The region around the Mekong River delta is infamous for its malaria parasites. Twice already—in the 1950s and the 1960s—they have developed resistance to key drugs, and the underlying mutations spread inexorably around the world, forcing public health officials to find new ways to fight the disease. Now it is happening again. Over the last decade, artemisinin, the most powerful drug available to cure malaria, has failed in more and more people in Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, and border regions of Thailand.
That's from Science Magazine, at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6215/1276.summary .
So development of drug resistance by the malaria parasite is right out there at the edge of what evolution can do, except it has happened three times in the past 60 years. Once every couple of decades is pretty far from nearly impossible or even unlikely, I'd say.
This handy little guide will help you how to become a superb ID proponent by educating you on how to interpret what you read about evolution from non-ID/creationist sources.
It will also help you understand how creationists think when they read evolution-related material.
Normal word - Cdesign proponentsist interpretation:
Rare = never ever.
Ulikely/improbable = impossible.
Likely = rare/baseless guess.
Theory = guess/baseless faith.
Guess = biased wish/atheo-materialistic faith.
We don't know = and you never will, therefore god!
Not fully understood = not at all understood, impossible to understand, magic/miracles required.
Unexpected result = all naturalistic explanations ever have been falsified.
Neutral mutation = not beneficial, therefore impossiblee/doesn't exist, cannot be fixed.
Natural selection = Orthodox neo-Darwinistic "party line".
It has a chance of one in 10^16 = It has a chance of one in 10^77
Maybe = biased guess (see: Guess).
Could have = couldn't and didn't (see: Guess).
Beneficial mutation = loss of function/tradeoff and/or loss of information.
New function = loss of information/information was already there.
New information = no new function.
New information and function = still belongs to the same class of enzymes (ex. hydrolases), so not really new.
Improved function = no new information, ability was already there.
Mutation = destroys information, always degrades. Guided by god, not random.
Millions of years = ad hoc excuse invented to explain why we don't see 20 million year macroevolutionary change in a few months of experimental evolution.
Took billions of years = same excuse as above, just worse.
Ancestral Sequence Reconstruction = *crickets*
Molecular phylogeny = phyloschmylo, it's more Darwinist math-tricks.
Observation/experiment = hoax and/or only creationists properly understand the result.
Demonstration = hoax.
Statistics = Wat?
Statistically significant = Nyah nyah! Darwinist math-tricks.
Complex = impossible to evolve, must be designed.
Complicated = Impossible to understand.
Complexity = praise the lord!
Information = immaterial soul-stuff that refutes materialism and all naturalistic expanations ever.
Quantum = immaterial soul-stuff that refutes materialism and all naturalistic expanations ever. Cannot possibly evolve.
Experiment shows how mutations can... = It's still just a bacterium/fruitfly/dog-kind.
Ape = monkey
monkey = ape
evolutionist = ape-monkey
homosexuality = bestiality and rape by ape-monkeys.
evolution = materialism/naturalism/scientism/darwinism/chance/fair coin/abortion/euthanasia/racism and genocide.
darwinism = materialist religious faith.
That's not Behe's argument. He's actually trying to say that this is the best evolution can do. Two mutations is the best evolution can do with huge parasite populations, anything more than that will probably never evolve and especially not in a much smaller population. That's what he's trying to insinuate.
Of course, the issue is that he's extrapolating this particular case to the entire history of life. That because chloroquine resistance requires at least two particular mutations, anything else that ever evolved requiring two mutations or more, in small populations, is so improbable as to be practically impossible, so the mutations had to have been designed in by his god.
The issue is, Behe has no good reason to imagine that what evolved was the only possible solution in all other lineages. In fact we have good evidence that organisms are highly mutable and adaptable to different circumstances, so he cannot extrapolate this bottleneck to where he wants. Sure, bottlenecks exist, that doesn't mean everything else that evolved had to pass through such bottlenecks. There is no basis of his extrapolation.
I especially liked the one where ciliates shuffling there genes prior to reproduction was a death knell to evolution. I did my masters over thirty years ago on autogamy in ciliates, effectively a reshuffling of genes prior to reproduction in some ciliates.
For some reason, evolution survived and thrived decades after this was first observed (which was decades before I did research on it over three decades ago).
Also:
Having a Ph.D. and criticizing ID = being a "tenured bore", a "Darwin lobbyist", a "tenurebot", a "Darwin fraud"
Having a Ph.D. and supporting ID = being a brilliant scientist
This YEC doesn't welcome the debunking of the whales hips as a sign of them were being land lovers. Marine mammals were only post flood adaptations to the seas after the flood killed off the monsters there before.
Evolutionists skrew it up by saying the whale hips etc are used for reproduction. Thus allowing for the option that is all they ever were for.
Especially if the PhD is in physics, as we all know that physicists are far better qualified to pontificate about biology than any biologist could be.
Mikkel: This handy little guide...
Happening only 50 thousand times per one million years = the edge of evolution
That's not Behe's argument. He's actually trying to say that this is the best evolution can do. Two mutations is the best evolution can do with huge parasite populations, anything more than that will probably never evolve and especially not in a much smaller population. That's what he's trying to insinuate.
I think you may have responded to what you thought I was saying, not what I actually said (though if I'm incorrect about that, please let me know). I was indeed saying Behe's argument is that this is the best evolution can do, right out there on the edge of possibility before that vanishes into impossibility.
Except it seems to've happened on average every 20 years or so recently. Not bad for something that is supposed to be right out there on the edge of possibility. Brings to mind the old US Army Corps of Engineers motto, "The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer."
Except it seems to've happened on average every 20 years or so recently. Not bad for something that is supposed to be right out there on the edge of possibility
Behe's response would be that that is a result of the large population size and short reproduction cycle of the malaria parasite. For any organism in which this is not the case, eg. most multicellular organisms, even this wold be beyond the "edge" of evolution.
As Mikkel says, a chief problem with this argument is Behe's generalization of this particular trait to any and all traits that could potentially be created thru evolution. Behe could just as well argue that the malaria parasite has never evolved to have jet propelled engines on its back, so any other trait would also be impossible to arise thru evolution.
If I may be so bold, here is a summary of what I see as the flaws in Behe's argument that I posted on another forum. (As you'll see, it's heavily indebted to Larry's posts on the subject here):
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/post2143005.html?#p2141673
Behe's response would be that that is a result of the large population size and short reproduction cycle of the malaria parasite. For any organism in which this is not the case, eg. most multicellular organisms, even this wold be beyond the "edge" of evolution.
Yes, but: Beyond the linguistic handwaving, getting down to the numbers, weren't his odds on the development of immunity something like 10^23 against? Even with large population sizes (and I wonder what the effective population size is for malaria parasites in the Mekong), that's just a huge level of unlikelihood. My guess is that Behe's numbers don't work out to anything like once every 20 years.
@Piotr
Heh. I read his paper on the "survey" on experimental evolution, where he concluded that only once in 20 years of experimental evolution, did something "novel" occur.
Extrapolating this to the entire history of life, that's 175 million "novel functions". That's quite a lot. Then throw on top that instead of an experimental population in the billions (let's just be courteus to Behe and say one trillion), the planet has about 10^30 total cells on it, we get 1.75x10^26 new functions.
To borrow a phrase from astronomy, that's more novel functions "than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on the Earth". Of course this is a silly oversimplification, the point is merely to see what fun can be had with overgeneralizations made by Behe under geological time.
Re falciparum population size: Nice thing about science - people publish in journals. A 2001 paper provides effective population size estimates between ~300k and ~800k. So let's go way on the high side and say a million. Does the math work (three 10^-23 events occurring in 60 years)?
@judmarc
I disagree with the way Behe calculates his probabilities and I disagree with his claim that the two mutations have to arise within a short time of each other.
However, the probability of a single mutation is about 10^-10 and the probability of two specific mutations is 10^-20. This is well within the edge of evolution for Plasmodium populations. Chloroquine resistance (and artemisinin resistance) arise more frequently than expected because there are several different combinations of mutations than can cause resistance and because some of the required mutations are neutral and present at substantial frequencies in local populations. That's why artemisinin resistance arose in Cambodia but not in other locations (yet).
There's nothing mysterious going one here. Behe is basically correct when he claims that if a specific event requires two specific mutations then it's not going to ever occur in most populations of multicellular organisms.
BTW, this explains why no organism is ever at the top of an adaptive peak. Sometimes you just can't get there no matter how hard you try.
One of the articles I read mentioned something about a much higher probability of duplication events than of point mutations; I wondered whether that (if correct) enters into this at all.
RE my last comment: In other words, providing additional opportunities for neutral or near-neutral mutation events.
Robert: " Marine mammals were only post flood adaptations to the seas after the flood killed off the monsters there before."
So, were the whales on the arch? That might add significantly to the weight that the arch had to carry. Or did they evolve modern whale characteristics in the 17 months and 17 days that the flood lasted? A fraction of the generation length of even the smallest whales. And before they evolved these traits (within a generation), were they treading water? That would be a great achievement; I can only do it for about 20 minutes.
Or did they evolve into whales during the last 6000 years? Not even the most optimistic evolutionary biologist would suggest this speed for the evolution of whales.
Or did they evolve into whales during the last 6000 years?
Much more speedily than that. Leading "flood scientists" date Noah's flood at 2348 BC (1656 years after the creation of the world), and we have reliable historical records of encounters with whales going back more than two millennia (Aristotle and Pliny the Elder, for example, describe several cetacean species each). One may just as well assume that a couple of perissodactyls jumped off the deck of Noah's ark and morphed into whales before they hit the water.
Yes, they are decades late to the scrambling story, which was reported from the David Prescott lab in the 1990s.
One wonders what form of "intelligence" would have "designed" ciliate genome architecture. Does The Designer have a bizarre sense of humor? Too much spare time?
One may just as well assume that a couple of perissodactyls jumped off the deck of Noah's ark and morphed into whales before they hit the water.
Mighty is the Creator, bless his rudimentary pelvic girdle!
And how do you get around the detrimental effects of massive inbreeding of all of those animal pairs. Not to mention the kissing cousins of Noah's family.
They entire earth after Noah beached his boat must have resembled Deliverance.
I'm betting that you and I are the only ones who know about Deliverance. It was 1972. Most Sandwalk readers weren't born then. (Hi Joe!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFutge4xn3w
There's nothing mysterious going one here. Behe is basically correct when he claims that if a specific event requires two specific mutations then it's not going to ever occur in most populations of multicellular organisms.
If I understand correctly, here is another way of looking at it: If you were to place a bet on a specific pair of mutations arising and becoming fixed in a population at some particular point in the future, you'd almost certainly lose that bet. The number of possible combinations to choose from is just too large compared to the mutation rate.
Somehow, Behe thinks this proves the existence of God. Go figure.
.....and on the flip side Mikkel has a promissory note for all the endless biological changes that have happened but evolutionary biology cant get beyond speculation.
so yeah, intelligently designed evolution is looking pretty F%$^n' good in comparison.
How many round tuits will you need, Mikkel? FYI, I hear Joe Felsenstein has a hoard. Im sure the prof will be amenable to divvying up his stash.
I am pretty sure that most of your readers have seen Deliverance, although you I and Joe may be the only ones who saw it in first release.
But I think that Joey G. was the inspiration for one of the characters in this clip.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lWqkVhlY-5A
a pretty damn smart one!!!
one claim of lame design after another gets debunked. theyALWAYS get debunked.
so stand in line Arlin, stand in line!!!!
you'll get your turn.
Steve, is the designer an extremely good designer, or just a "passable" designer?
From a purely design perspective, the squid eye is better designed than ours. We have a spine and abdominal wall that are not that well designed for an upright posture.
And I have a bone to pick (no pun intended) with the designer who thought that it was s great idea to place the testicles, an internal organ, on the outside of the body where it is free game for any baseball, squashball, bicycle crossbar, and angry person with a foot or a knee.
But if the designer is so great, why does ID keep claiming that the nature of the designer and the mechanism it uses are off topic? It's a good thing that Newton didn't didn't see an apple fall from a tree and say, "well, I have now detected gravity, no point in investigating any further.
The designer also gave squids a pretty good brain, but screwed up their reproductive strategy, reducing their life-span to a miserable year or two. Was it malice or incompetence?
The DI's #5 is that whales hips are not truly vestigial, they are still used to anchor the penis. This has been known for a long time even by creationists, check out Gish's Evolution? The fossils STILL say No!
But whale hips are still good evidence that whales once walked on land. I got Thewissen's The Walking Whales for Xmas (good book,both readable and informative) and on p. 30 it says:
"Bowhead whales have more parts to their hind limbs than most other modern cetaceans, although they vary in size among individuals. In bowheads there is always a pelvis and a femur, a cartilaginous or bony tibia, and sometimes even a bony metatarsal. Sometimes there is even a real synovial joint (a joint with real lubricating fluid like all the other highly mobile joints in the body.)”
Such complex leg-like structures are completely unnecessary for anchoring a muscle, and the fact that former hip/leg bones are still useful confirms rather than undermines the evolutionary explanation since otherwise natural selection would have eliminate the bones completely. Of course Klinghoffer says nothing about that.
But he does manage a quote mine and a clumsy smear. He writes:
"In the catalogue of purported vestigial parts, whale hips are "the marquee example," writes Stephanie Keep at the absurdly named "Science League of America" blog populated by our Darwin-lobbying friends at the National Center for Science Education. Unfortunately whale hips have now gone the way of appendix."
Klinghoffer then references a paper about the penis anchoring role, implying that Ms. Keep doesn't know what she is talking about. What Klinghoffer doesn't say is that Keep references and discusses the same journal article! And while Keep does use the phrase "marquee example" the full quote is:
"Quite often, these bones are held up as the marquee example of vestigial structures. I have no problem with that, but there's a problem when vestigial structures are defined as evolutionary remnants that have no function." (Emphasis added.)
Klinghoffer implies that the "absurdly named" Science League of America is either ignorant or deceptive, but it he who is concealing information and making false implications. And this is number 5 on the top 10 list!
And a hairless body, with a large surface area, and very little body fat (at least until fast food) is definitely not the best design for anywhere but the tropics. Damn, we can die of exposure at temperatures above freezing.
Yes, that designer did s great job.
For a period of time in 1972, "Squeal like a pig!" (followed by maniacal laughter) was a phrase heard far too often around my college dorm.
WS
Yes the KIND was on the ark that whales etc came from. Yes after landing adaptation was instant and great. People are the example. I see innate mechanisms in biology's genetic memory that can be triggered and change things greatly. Just like in peoples looks.
Everybody has to explain marine mammals origins. Its very unlikely, against probability as some ID writers stress , that enough mutations could be selected on to make a whale out of whatever it first was.
iD folks have a knockout case in shoeing the impossibility of a land creature EVOLVING DARWIN style, in the timeframe.
yet they make a mistake. YEC does too. Marine mammals were land lovers originally and obviously.
Its welcome to find bits and pieces left over .
In fact vestigial concepts are another unwelcome evolutionary thing. If evolution was true then all biology should be crawling with bits left over. This on this and something on that.
In fact biology looks like, in its anatomy etc, like it never evolved by fits and starts.
Anyways.
whales would use some leftovers once they lost their legs.
To have these bits by evolved lines of change and only left over what is still used seems another impossibility at just a first blush.
Hey I saw Deliverance and it was a great movie but the sex scene did not and should not of been made or allowed. Gross and evil. Thats a place for gov't censorship.
Larry
There's nothing mysterious going one here. Behe is basically correct when he claims that if a specific event requires two specific mutations then it's not going to ever occur in most populations of multicellular organisms.
Not by serial point mutation, perhaps. But it's far more likely in recombining populations (which most multicellular populations, and Plasmodium, are).
a pretty damn smart one!!!
So, Steve, the Designer was smart enough to design malaria-causing Plasmodium (a ciliate) and the 500 or so other species in the parasitic order Haemosporidia? Way to go. Nope, that design's not lame at all. It is fiendishly elaborate and successful. You win.
Its very unlikely [...] that enough mutations could be selected on to make a whale out of whatever it first was.
And yet, post-Ark, whatever-it-first-was could change genetically and diversify into whales and dolphins in a matter of generations? I'm getting a bald spot from all this head scratching.
For Behe, can it be serial, or must it be effectively simultaneous? (I.e., are his particular posited point mutations independently selectively advantageous, or do they only confer selective advantage together? I'm momentarily ignoring anything neutral or selectively disadvantageous, since it's my impression this is what Behe requires.)
Behe appears to ignore recombination entirely, as do many of his critics. I think Behe is prepared to concede that A can reach a certain level through neutral evolution, and the B mutation then must take place in whatever fraction of the population has A.
The full probability depends upon the fitnesses of A and B alone, and their distance apart (which affects the likelihood of A+B arising by recombination rather than serially). You can readily get subpopulations of A alone and B alone through drift, unless they are significantly deleterious. There is p(A then B), p(B then A), but there is also p(A + B arising by crossover). I think the latter will be significantly greater than the 1st 2 combined, increasing, to a limit, with increasing map distance. The advantage of the combination only has to be sufficient to overcome the recombination load of severance of A+B.
Of course, adding more reality - segment duplication, etc, which can protect against any deleteriousness by dosage effects, and greatly increases the dimensionality of the 'search space' - changes the probabilities again, for this hypothetical two-shot system.
Behe's argument is based on the probability of chloroquine resistance arising in a single infected individual. Sex doesn't count in that case. Besides, we're talking about recombination between alleles that are only a few hundred bp apart. That's a low probability event, especially if the genes are near the centromere or at the tips of their chromosome.
I hear that Robert Byers plays a pretty mean banjo.
Hey Robert, since you present as a (nominally) human male, I assume you claim ownership to a pelvis and penis. Does this mean you have lost the ability to walk ?
Hey Robert, what sex scene ?
If you are referring to the male rape scene, I must say that that is a typically christian interpretation on what sex actually is.
Gross and evil? I believe that was the point if the scene. It was taking something that women experience far to frequently (one is too frequent), and that the male dominated society has a poor record of dealing with, and turned it around on itself.
The fact that you still remember this scene after 40 years means that it was very effective.
Steve: ".....and on the flip side Mikkel has a promissory note for all the endless biological changes that have happened but evolutionary biology cant get beyond speculation."
Yes, re-constructing the details about how the different lineages will always be speculation. But it is speculation based on mountains of evidence, testing and predictions. What does ID have? No evidence, no testing and no predictions. And we ask about the nature of the designer and the mechanism that it uses, we are told that this is not part of ID.
we're talking about recombination between alleles that are only a few hundred bp apart. That's a low probability event, especially if the genes are near the centromere or at the tips of their chromosome.
Well yes, IF the alleles are very close neighbours or in low-recombination areas, the probability goes down. However, most genes cannot lie near centromeres or telomeres, and epistasis (which is what this amounts to) is not restricted to close neighbours, so maybe that's the wrong place to look for the 'Edge of Evolution'.
The probabilities attaching to recombinational events confound intuition. If you have two subpopulations each harbouring the A and B forms, and nonzero crossover or gene conversion between the two sites, you get an exponential increase in the likelihood of A+B for any increase in the two subpopulation proportions, while the chance of the second mutation occurring in either increases only linearly. It doesn't take much for the first probability to exceed the second, depending of course on map distance.
Allan Miller says,
... IF the alleles are very close neighbours ...
In this discussion we are only dealing with different alleles within a gene so all of them will be within a few hundred base pairs.
Nevertheless, I take your point. Even if the frequency of a crossover is about one in a thousand and even if the frequency of either allele in a population is only about one percent, you are still going to get an appreciable benefit from recombination.
Dear Robert Byers
If you can't write something coherent, don't write anything at all.
Byers is saying that the time is too short for land animals like Ambulocetus to evolve into whales, 20 million years is too short a time, therefore the change took no time but was instantaneous. The land animals turned into whales "instantly", and this is proven by his hypothesis that 20 million years is too short.
So the solution to "not enough time" is not merely far less time, but no time.
In the same way, Byers' argument would appear to have not enough logic or evidence or sanity. Therefore its logic is genius.
Klinghitler's lies and ignorance about the fossil record and the current anatomy of whales are quite odious. Kudos to Ted for drawing attention to this smear by Klinghoffer.
While Klinghitler's writing as usual has a ratio of about one lie per sentence, this one stood out to me:
Under selection pressure from reality, Darwinists have already had to back away from Darwin's own understanding of what it means for a structure to be vestigial.
Of course in reality, Darwin's definition of vestigial (he said "rudimentary") never changed, and is still spot on today, but creationist @$$π07£$ like Klinghitler couldn't refute that evidence even 156 years later, so they just lied about how Darwin defined vestigial/rudimentary. This outright lie has been directly copied by Klinghitler from other creationist ignoramuses; almost certainly from Jonathan Sarfati of Creation Ministries International, who has been caught repeatedly lying about the whale fossil record. Sarfati dug around through a pile of science books looking for inaccurate definitions of "vestigial" until he found a children's book that defined "vestigial" as "no function." Then Sarfati claimed that showed it was Darwin's original definition, and WE had changed the definition!
Rather than serving no purpose, writes Jerry Coyne in Why Evolution Is True, now being vestigial can mean serving a different purpose than in one's distant ancestors.
NOW can mean? NOW can mean!? $%*@ you Klinghitler, you lying scoundrel.
Klinghitler, like all creationists, learned 100% of his "science" by moronically aping other creationists' ignorant drivel. Neither Klinghitler nor Sarfati nor other creationist authorities ever read The Origin of Species but just copy their lies and misrepresentations fifth or sixth hand. If they ever read it, they could not understand it because it is scientific, and no creationist can understand and honestly paraphrase any scientific argument, as we see from their comments on this blog. Although they can emit sentences in English, we should not be deceived into believing they can understand sentences in English or in any human language.
Increasingly fascistic, intolerant, extremist in its fanatical hatred of science and in its slavish obsequy to child-molesting money-scamming religious authorities, the anti-evolution movement has been defeated scientifically at every turn, its abusive lawsuits are dismissed by the courts with accelerating speed, and there is nothing left for them to look forward to in 2015 but an endless money-grubbing search for fascist theocratic billionaires for whom the IDiots, in exchange for money, swear unquestioning devotion to their agenda of envionmental rape, theocracy, media control, expanding economic inequality, suppression and slander of gays, and destruction of education, critical thinking and science research wherever they raise their impertinent, disobedient head.
Happy New Year IDiots.
Diogenes
Judge not lest yoy be judged is a bible verse from Jesus.
Anyways.
Its absolutely a fact that evolutiondom has used vestigial bits to PROVE creatures evolved. Sure they do and sure they so think.
Only later did evolutionists scramble to explain why there was so little buts left over from all that evolving.
Somehow evolution gets rid of unneeded things without needing to turn them into something else thats useful. Whalesy's offer a case where a leftover was reused yet in reality it begs the question why biology is not crawling with resuse of leftovers.
Evolutionism suffers a hard hit on the concept of vestigial bits.
There are far too few for where there should be so many and so much of the many reused .
Creationism demands SHOW US where or why not whence vestigial leftovers in a biological universe claiming to have come from molecues or some fis thing.
Its the new year and already evolutioniists posting here are making a trap for themselves.
I always mention my favorite mnemonic of the 4 H's
Hiccups – an ancestral reflex harking back to when our ancestral larval forms had gills in water
Hernias – harking back to our horizontal ancestry
Hemorrhoids – ditto (not to mention "non-H" sinusitis given our sinuses cannot drain correctly in the vertical position)
Heart disease – we are definitely not at our adaptive peak – ergo the success of ”Darwinian Medicine”
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/119/3/459.full
Clearly any "designer" most certainly had to be either malicious or most unintelligent!
That's the part I don't get. How can IDers persist with such blatant ignorachio elenchi ? They cannot all be stupid, (I mean neurosurgeons require an IQ above average; so how can we understand such obstinate obtuseness? Can this be some grown up version of desperately wishing Santa Claus were true.
Robert - out of curiosity, have you ever heard of "Whale Leg Atavism"? Do you even understand the term "atavism"?
I suggest you google that expression and search under images
http://tinyurl.com/kw6oklb
case clearly closed!
http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/lessons/wh.evo.ppt
Robert, Sometimes it is fascinating to see how your mind works.
Byers, here are examples of how Darwin defined vestigial/rudimentary structures. Note that Darwin emphasized that vestigial structures may not be useless, but can be reused for another purpose. These passages prove that Klinghitler and Sarfati were lying when they said Darwin defined "vestigial" as having no function:
"Useful organs, however little they may be developed, unless we have reason to suppose that they were formerly more highly developed, ought not to be considered as rudimentary." (Darwin 1859, emphasis added)
"An organ, serving for two purposes, may become rudimentary or utterly aborted for one, even the more important purpose, and remain perfectly efficient for the other. Thus, in plants, the office of the pistil is to allow the pollen-tubes to reach the ovules protected in the ovarium at its base. The pistil consists of a stigma supported on the style; but in some Compositae, the male florets, which of course cannot be fecundated, have a pistil, which is in a rudimentary state, for it is not crowned with a stigma; but the style remains well developed, and is clothed with hairs as in other compositae, for the purpose of brushing the pollen out of the surrounding anthers. Again, an organ may become rudimentary for its proper purpose, and be used for a distinct object: in certain fish the swim-bladder seems to be rudimentary for its proper function of giving buoyancy, but has become converted into a nascent breathing organ or lung. Other similar instances could be given." (Darwin 1859 [see text]; also Darwin 1872, p. 602, emphasis added)
"Rudimentary organs, on the other hand, are either quite useless, such as teeth which never cut through the gums, or almost useless, such as the wings of an ostrich, which serve merely as sails." (Darwin 1872, p. 603)
"... an organ rendered, during changed habits of life, useless or injurious for one purpose, might easily be modified and used for another purpose." (Darwin 1872, p. 603)
Quotes copied from TalkOrigins, "29+ Evidences for Macroevolution."
The operative word is MAY. It may not. So why is it there? It is there because its leftover bits from evolutions action.
So Darwin sees it as a option for uselessness.
What of it? details.
The greater issue is WHY is biology not crawling with leftovers whether useless or reused?
I mean on every tip of a thing in bodies should be showing a former body type.
in fact vestigial bits are so few a student being asked for examples would have the same ones as the other students.
Very unlikely if evolution had done its deeds.
Evolutionism must say they evolved away for good reasons. a perfect evacuation of historic biology.
In fact thats why they need to invoke reproduction tactics in order to justify, in the males, why some bits remain.
It begs another question unless I'm missing a point here.
Barbara. Thanks. however as a Christian and a thinking person I don't agree the mind is where we think. The bible says man thinks with the heart/soul. the mind, therefore, is only a tool for thinking. That is its just a giant memory machine.
like a computer and like a computer it doesn't think. Just organizes data for us to use in thinking.
i'm confident my mind is not thinking when I'm thinking about origin issues.
i know what you mean though. I really do.
Ask people with a heart transplant if they have become someone else.
Robert: "i'm confident my mind is not thinking when I'm thinking about origin issues."
Finally, something that everyone here can agree with.
Robert, just looking at humans we have: gill arches repurposed as mandible; appendix; ear muscles; body hair, hammer, anvil and stirrup repurposed from other structures, tail bone; and many many more.
We don't have gill arches repurposed as mandible. We have gill arches repurposed as mandible repurposed as middle ear.
"We don't have gill arches repurposed as mandible. We have gill arches repurposed as mandible repurposed as middle ear."
I stand corrected. Vestigial, once (or is it twice) removed.
Robert: i did two mail courses in french successfully without learning ANY french.
An IDiot E. E. Cummings (or is that e.e. cummings ?).
Yeah, the one lower jaw bone we've got left is dermal bone not homologous to gill arches.
But your point is still correct and Byers is hilariously wrong. Byers says that if evolution is true, biology should be "crawling with leftovers whether useless or reused." And that's just what biology is, the study of reused leftovers. That's what makes biological complexity different from intelligently designed artifacts: biology, unlike the study of actual intelligent design, is the study of reused leftovers. This, of course, supports evolution, so Byers' premise has shot him in the foot.
Byers: "i'm confident my mind is not thinking when I'm thinking about origin issues."
I'm also confident your mind is not thinking when you're thinking about anything.
Really, this kind of hilarity is just so perfectly dumb, so indistinguishable from an atheist satire of Christian stupidity, that I really must wonder if Byers is just a Poe trying to troll us with a brilliant satire of fake creationism and clulessness.
If so, well done, "Byers." That last quip about not thinking was genius.
WS
Looking at humans we don't. Chump change even if some were right.
Remember how much our bodies changed by stages that lasted a long time before changing. (As you folks say not me).
Body hair is not from a past stage surely. its our body trying to keep things dry and so warm.
Example is our hair growth at puberty.
We have no need for hair under our armpits, it does no good or ever did, and no reason to see selection keeping it there while clearing the rest of our body relative to hair length.
Instead the boy was just triggered to dry up a wet area. It did a little but was no more triggered. Its useless. Yet not vestigial.
The other things are not evidence of previous stages either.
The equation accusation remains. if evolution was true we/biology should be full of leftovers.
iN fact you make my case by your attempt to invoke a few.
why just a few? where are the leftovers??
Tharts what is fishy and not our "gill arches"!
Diogenes.
Biology is not the study of leftovers from evolution. I say they don't it at all but certainly its very off broadway.
Naw. there are so few leftovers, even claimed, that it makes another reason evolution was unlikely.
It should be crawling in a single species. Instead its marine mammals. A obvious thing.
This YEC creationist loves vestigial leftovers because it focus attention on the lack of leftovers. They have to scramble to explain.
If they try to PROVE evolution by leftovers then it proves the opposite.
A line of reasoning.
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