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Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Apparently it really is impossible to teach Intelligent Design Creationists about evolutionary theory

Last week I asked an important question, "Is it impossible to educate Intelligent Design Creationists on evolutionary theory?.

The reason I asked is because in spite of our best efforts over several decades, the Intelligent Design Creationists still don't understand modern evolutionary theory. We see this all the time whenever they start criticizing evolution. It gets them into all sorts of trouble, especially when we debate junk DNA.

Many of their objections to evolution would be easily answered if they only understood that there's more to evolution than natural selection and the appearance of design. They would understand why Michael Behe is wrong about the edge of evolution, for example, and why their pseudoscientific probability calculations are nonsense. They can't possibly understand molecular evolution and phylogenetic trees based on sequences unless they understand that it has almost nothing to do with "Darwinism" and the appearance of design.

They can't understand the evolution of chlorquine resistance in malaria parasites unless they understand modern evolutionary theory but that hasn't stopped them from making false claims. They can't understand Lenski's long-term evolution experiment because they don't understand evolution. Does that stop them from criticizing Lenski?

The immediate stimulus for last week's post was the Dissent from Darwinism claim.
We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.
The reason this is so upsetting is that the IDiots know full well that the complexity of life is due to far more than just mutation + selection. They also know that evolutionary biologists have been "examining" Darwinian theory for a century and have decided that it is not sufficient to account for evolution.

The obvious question is: are IDiots stupid or liars, or both?

Jonathan Bartlett, a computer programmer from Oklahoma, tries to answer the question on Uncommon Descent: ID and Evolutionary Biology. As you read his comments, keep in mind that Bartlett is a Young Earth Creationist (February, 2015).
  1. Dr. Moran fails to understand that ID is not inherently at war with every possible theory of evolution, or evolutionary biology as a whole. The fact that the ID movement doesn’t address your favorite part of evolution probably means that this part of evolutionary biology does not confuse mechanism and design.
  2. Dr. Moran fails to understand that the shift of evolutionary biology away from Darwinian mechanisms shows that ID and its proponents were correct. ID was the one to predict this move, while everyone else was hailing Darwinism as the highest point of evolutionary biology. Darwinism is no longer the pivotal feature of evolutionary biology, thus ID was correct.
  3. Dr. Moran fails to understand the different roles that different theories of evolution play, and why they are important. Genetic drift and neutral theory are not theories of the origin of complex adaptation, thus, they do not function as design substitutes like Darwinism does. They are theories of what happens to the organism after the design. These fail, too, when stretched beyond their bounds to become design substitutes, but that happens much more rarely. Many design opponents tend to agree with ID’ers assessments of this possibility.
Hmmmm ... this is a tough one to evaluate. I think I'm going to go with "stupid" but I could be convinced that "both" is the correct answer to my question.

This response was posted on one of the main Intelligent Design Creationist blogs. It's safe to assume that this represents the best they have to offer in this discussion.


176 comments :

Anonymous said...

Larry, "The reason this is so upsetting is that the IDiots know full well that the complexity of life is due to far more than just mutation + selection. They also know that evolutionary biologists have been "examining" Darwinian theory for a century and have decided that it is not sufficient to account for evolution. "

Coyne and Dawkins insist that mutations + selection are enough to account for the complexity of life. So, who do you have in mind whey you say "evolutionary biologist have been "examining" Darwinian theory for a century and have decided that it is not sufficient to account for evolution"?

colnago80 said...

Re Johnny

Both Coyne and Dawkins acknowledge that random genetic drift plays a role in evolution. The debate between them and Prof. Moran is over the question of the relative importance of genetic drift and natural selection.

Athel Cornish-Bowden said...

I have been enthusiastic about the neutral theory since I first heard about it, but something we have to recognize is that many biologists are still confused about it and use selectionist language to describe things that can only be understood in neutralist terms. Back in about 1975 I participated with two colleagues in a course to introduce undergraduates to protein sequence evolution. One of them, who was in principle more of an expert on the subject than I was, tried to explain it all in terms of natural selection. I think he was so used to natural selection as the whole explanation of evolution that he couldn't see that it didn't work as an explanation of protein phylogenies. He wasn't stupid, but I wasn't able to convince him to go beyond natural selection. Even today, 40 years later, I still hear people using natural selection to explain things that natural selection cannot explain. Unfortunately it's not just the IDiots who need to be educated.

Even though Richard Dawkins speaks well of Kimura in A Devil's Chaplain I get the impression that he's still a natural selection man at heart, and that there are many others.

Anonymous said...

"Both Coyne and Dawkins acknowledge that random genetic drift plays a role in evolution. The debate between them and Prof. Moran is over the question of the relative importance of genetic drift and natural selection."

Coyne and Dawkins acknowledge the drift but its significance in evolution is minimal according to them.

peer said...

Could it be that evolutionism-preachers are lousy teachers?

A few weeks ago, I asked Moran for a definition of evolution,because as a scientist I would like to know what he is referring to. He gave me a textbook obscuranto (Fuytema), which could be summarized as "change over time".

Nobody debates change over time, Moran. By avoiding to define properly, and using sloppy definiations, you have excluded yourself from science.

With random genetic drift you do not make novel genes.Drift is nothing but assuming the preexistence of genes.

Anonymous said...

Peer,
"With random genetic drift you do not make novel genes.Drift is nothing but assuming the preexistence of genes"

What are you talking about? So, how do you make novel genes? With what mechanism?

peer said...

That is what the evologists should explain. Not me, I am a preformationist.

So how does nature make genes?

Petrushka said...

I have read about drift for years, and I understood its importance in the Lensky experiment, but I didn't really appreciate it until I read Wagner's book.

judmarc said...

Drift is nothing but assuming the preexistence of genes.

Wikipedia: "Genetic drift (or allelic drift) is the change in the frequency of a gene variant (allele) in a population due to random sampling of organisms."

So closer to Dr. Moran's definition than yours, since it incorporates the idea of one mechanism of change. Another is mutation, which changes the gene variants that are sampled.

peer said...

As a preformationist I know that all genes ever to be expressed are all preformed and preexisting in the DNA of organisms preformed.

All that is required is the acquisition of regulatory elements to express the information in the right context. That is easy and only requires transpostion of TEs. The major part of the genome is made of this stuff, so iot is hard to deny.

peer said...

It is nothing but fooling around with preexisting genes (with or without pointmutations).

Drift does not help the evologist to evolve. Hopeless obscuranto for preteinding the exceeds its 19th century character.

No, guys, evoplutionism is just Darwinism/selectionism plus a lot of obscuranto to pretend it is more.

peer said...

And to preserve the info, you simply make sure that more than one frame is transcribed. Little wonder every nucleotide in the genome is used in an average pf 6 different transcripts (ENCODE). Do you guys have any knowldegde on 21st century biology? Do you ever read a bioscience journal?

judmarc said...

Drift is nothing but assuming the preexistence of genes.

Wikipedia: "Genetic drift (or allelic drift) is the change in the frequency of a gene variant (allele) in a population due to random sampling of organisms."

So closer to Dr. Moran's definition than yours, since it incorporates the idea of one mechanism of change. Another is mutation, which changes the gene variants that are sampled.

peer said...

Petruska,

Wagner does not address genes, he only adressed genotypes and how novel metabolisms arise by recombining preexisting ones.

His book is a gift to the preformationists.

peer said...

It is nothing but fooling around with preexisting genes (with or without pointmutations).

Drift does not help the evologist to evolve. Hopeless obscuranto for preteinding the exceeds its 19th century character.

No, guys, evoplutionism is just Darwinism/selectionism plus a lot of obscuranto to pretend it is more.

judmarc said...

Everyone knows that natural processes can't make anything complex. The weather, for example, is obviously dead simple. How many mm of precipitation will there be in Austin next winter, Peer?

DGA said...

Peer Terborg, do you ever reread your submissions for spelling and grammar?

Petrushka said...

I see you have read and understood Wagner's book

Not

Anonymous said...

It's an evolution of language lol

Anonymous said...

Peer, As a creationists you probably wondered how to explain the variety of life on Earth after the Deluge. There had to have been some kind of evolution after that or there wouldn't be as many species of animals around now. How do you explain that?

Anonymous said...

I've read this one:

The Random Genetic Drift Fallacy

http://www.amazon.ca/The-Random-Genetic-Drift-Fallacy/dp/1500924121

Have you read it?

Petrushka said...

"Wagner does not address genes,"

That's simply bizarre. I find a hundred references to genes.
Wagner discusses in some detail the origin of new genes. Both protein coding and regulatory.

Anonymous said...

Definition of evolution according to Moran:

Short:
"Evolution is a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations."

Long:

"One of the most respected evolutionary biologists has recently defined biological evolution as follows:
Biological (or organic) evolution is change in the properties of populations of organisms or groups of such populations, over the course of generations. The development, or ontogeny, of an individual organism is not considered evolution: individual organisms do not evolve. The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are ‘heritable' via the genetic material from one generation to the next. Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportions of different forms of a gene within a population, such as the alleles that determine the different human blood types, to the alterations that led from the earliest organisms to dinosaurs, bees, snapdragons, and humans.
Douglas J. Futuyma (1998) Evolutionary Biology 3rd ed., Sinauer Associates Inc. Sunderland MA p.4"

http://sandwalk.blogspot.ca/2007/01/what-is-evolution.html


There is nothing about building complex structures that are often ascribed to evolution.

Petrushka said...

"Have you read it?" (The Random Genetic Drift Fallacy}

No I haven't. And I see no evidence that anyone else has. It's on eBay with no copies sold. On Amazon with no reviews. I will refrain from speculating why.

But my comment was about Wagner, and he doesn't really get into the debate about drift vs selection. His point is that functional space is deeply connected, and it is possible by successive point changes, to replace all or nearly all of a coding sequence, so that the great .... great grandchild has little similarity to the ancestor.

This is not a particularly new assertion, but Wagner has a lovely metaphor to help understand how it is possible.

AllanMiller said...

"There are lots of TEs in genomes, the ones we see haven't done too much damage, so ... they are regulatory. All of 'em."

Petrushka said...

Johnny: What is the argument in "Fallacy"?

I see no review or blurbs about the content. Perhaps that's why it isn't selling.

Anonymous said...

It's a new book. You are not afraid to read it aren't you?

bFast said...

Larry Moron, I challenge you to take what you dish out.
I am sick of your moronic ridicule of ID"iots". You are a little child who can't have a civil conversation, a conversation that does not resort to name calling. You don't know your own theory. You seem moronically oblivious to the fact that your pets, genetic drift and neutral theory are a subset of neo-Darwinism -- the theory that random (non-foresighted) variation + natural selection accounts for all of the complexity of life.

Larry Moron, If you are going to continue to be a bully in your playground and call people idiotic names, then expect to be name-called back!

Petrushka said...

I just bought the Kindle version. It's not exactly a new book. I found a review of the first edition from 2005.

Petrushka said...

The review was not negative. But there was nothing in the review or in the excerpts from the book to suggest it was anti-evolution or anti-neutral evolution. The argument appears to be rather technical.

Petrushka said...

bFast:
As someone with an MA in special education, I'd point out that while the scale is probably shifted, the relative positions are apt.

bFast said...

Petrushka, are you saying that I am also acting childishly?

Petrushka said...

Try reading for comprehension.

bFast said...

Petrushka, are you saying that I am also acting childishly?

Petrushka said...

Hint: try looking up the (now disused) technical definitions of the words. My point is the relative placement of Larry and you seems apt, given the names you assigned.

bFast said...

Petrushka. I am not following what you are saying. It seems to me that you are suggesting that I am acting just like Larry, but that he has the right to be a playground bully because it is his playground. Is that what you are saying?

bFast said...

Then what are you saying? Please use terminology that even the special ed students will understand.

Petrushka said...

You are the one slinging the terminology. Try using an online dictionary.

For the record, the words moron and idiot are as offensive to parents of retarded kids as racial slurs. But a century ago they had technical definitions.

bFast said...

Are you saying that I am the only one on this site using offensive terms like moron and idiot?

Petrushka said...

No. I was agreeing with where you placed yourself relative to Larry.

bFast said...

Petrushka, are you saying that both Larry and I am are acting childishly?

bFast said...

Petrushka, I am puzzled that this conversation has stopped. It could be that you had an interruption that needed to be attended to. But it may be that you are reticent to admit that Larry Moran has been behaving childishly.

I suspect that you hold him in such high respect that you cannot admit that his incessant use of the term IDiot is inappropriate -- a conversation stopper.

He uses this term because he may. He uses this term because people like you, those who hold to his scientific position, accept this bad behavior. Is that not correct?

Jonathan Badger said...

I don't think Dawkins really understands molecular evolution, period. He's basically an old-school naturalist who thinks of genes only in terms of classical population genetics, not as actual molecular sequences. Selectionism is more attractive when all you have to worry about is phenotypes, not the actual molecular biology behind the scenes.

Petrushka said...

No. The word idiot derives from words that mean ignorant or lacking knowledge. Larry's use of IDiot is apt. Although I find it insensitive.

Moron generally means stupid or foolish. That is not apt in this situation..

But a hundred years ago, moron referred to someone with an IQ of 50 to 70, whereas idiot referred to someone with an IQ of under 25.

I thought a 50 point spread seemed about right, with you being the IDiot.

Having belabored something that is severely off topic, I would appreciate having this discussion deleted.

bFast said...

So you are saying that the fact that the term "idiot" holds less historical negative connotation than the term "moron" makes "moron" bad but "idiot" ok?

If one of your special needs students gets to calling another an idiot, you would be ok with that? Really? No.

Larry Moran, please feel free to delete this thread if you are willing to commit to never calling people "idiot" or "IDiot" again.

John Harshman said...

Petrushka, Have some pity on poor bFast and give him the technical definitions, then explain what you were trying to tell him. And remember that you might have to type slow.

Faizal Ali said...

I thought bFast would have got it by now, Petrushka. But he's still struggling. So I guess we know he's not an imbecile.

Jmac said...

Dawkins has been recognized as the world's most influential propagator of evolution theory in the world. How could he not understand molecular biology and evolution? If Dawkins doesn't, who does?

Anonymous said...

This one?
Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation

Jmac said...

Johnny,

It's not a new book just like Petrushka said. It's worth reading only if you believe in the random genetic drift and what it can possibly accomplish. After reading the book you will know that RGD is just an option without any experimental support.

Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen said...

They're neither stupid nor liars. They're insane, clinically insane. Their religion has made them insane. Their delusion takes the form of a particular psychosis that prevents their logical and rational minds from objectively evaluate anything that has to do with the truth of their religion.

Everything that comes into their heads is filtered through the "god-concluder" before they become consciously aware of it. In so far as incoming information has negative consequences for the god-belief, the god-concluder takes over and scrambles the incoming information before it reaches the rational mind.

It's almost like a kind of severe dyslexia, but only focused on particular subjects. When they read things about evolution, it's just a scrambled nonsensical mess to them. All their reasoning fails on the subject because the input is almost pure noise, the god-concluder has made sure of it.

Glenn Morton eventually became aware of this curious effect and thought of it as a demon. Morton's Demon. That sits at the gate of perception and filters out information. Of course, it doesn't literally filter it out (as in makes it nonexistant to them), it just scrambles it so they can't make sense of it. They are literally incapable of making sense of evolutionary biology, not because they're stupid, but because they're sick. They have been afflicted with a disease of the mind: Strong religious belief.

They don't need education, they need a cure. Education can't cure the disease, the disease works to stop education from happening in the first place, so it takes something else to get rid of it. It has to come from the inside of themselves. Somehow a desire to actually understand has to awaken in them.

Anonymous said...

Allan,

No, no, no, no. The ones doing damage were also preformed to do just that. Don't you see? It's all part of the Intelligent Designer's plan. That TEs seem to jump randomly is but an illusion. They were programmed to jump exactly to the positions where scientists find them. The ones that cause cancers and mental problems were planned for that. Others produced humans from a chimp-like ancestor, and etc. All within a few thousand years, of course, because those billions of years are mere fantasies by people who just want to justify their atheism.

What? Identical TEs have jumped many times to non-identical positions and that makes you think that they jump randomly? You fool! It's ID! Identical TEs can be preprogrammed to jump precisely to different, only apparently random, locations because it's Intelligent Design! What part of "Intelligent" are you not understanding? It means m-a-g-i-c! Do you get it now? M-a-g-i-c!!!

Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen said...

Could you please explain how transcription preserves information down through the generations?

Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen said...

Hey bFast, you ran away from the other thread where you were going to show you totally understand evolutionary theory. I asked you a question over there, care to take a stab at it now?

Jonathan Badger said...

People who actually do current research in the subject, for starters. Skim an issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution or the Journal of Molecular Evolution to get an idea of what current research in the field is like.

Dawkins hasn't been an active researcher in decades and what research he did when he was back in the 1960s and 1970s had no connection to molecular evolution whatsoever. He is known as a good popularizer of evolution, but if anything, science writers like Carl Zimmer have a better grasp on modern evolutionary developments.

bFast said...

Actually, Petrushka, the more accurate analogy would be of a coworker calling one of your special needs students an idiot. While I know that special needs is a broad term, some of those special needs students surely meet the technical definition of an "idiot". Would it be ok with you if a coworker called that student an idiot?

Let me just answer for you, to get to the end of the conversation without doublespeak -- no.

So unless you treat Larry Moran like you would the co-worker, you are being internally inconsistent.

John Harshman said...

bFast: All Petrushka was trying to say is that you are much dumber than Larry is, which you have just demonstrated by persistently failing to get the point even when nearly beaten over the head with it. But go on with your tone-trolling. Don't mind me.

bFast said...

John Harshman, "bFast: All Petrushka was trying to say is ..."

John Harshman, you seem to be saying that Larry has greater mental capacity than I do, so he has the right to be a playground bully. Interesting logic.

Unknown said...

bFast, do you even understand the definition of "bully"? I haven't seen Larry delete comments, edit them, make comments within other people's comments or ban people simply because they make a better argument than he does.

But let me think. Do I know another blog that is guilty of all of this? Do I know other moderators who are guilty of all of this? Do the names Barry Arrington and Gordon (Kairosfocus) Mullings come to mind?

Robert Byers said...

What percentage of evolutionary processes IS selection on random mutation??
if its 91% then defining evolution by S on M + T is correct to most audiences.
Other ideas in evolutionaru processes are easily not included in general discussion.
Its accurate to attack evolution on what is presented as its vore mechanism. They do applaud Darwin for this core.
Any thinking ID/YEC critic is aware of these other concepts in modern evolutionary teaching.
Yes we see corrections to old man Darwin as a result of better invesygation showing more mechanism is needed.
In fact I myself never bring up anything but selection on mutations. Thats the gist of it.
Am i wrong or stupid?? 9This is not a free vote for the blog guests!)

Anonymous said...

bFast,

It would be much better for you if you just stopped commenting. You're idiocy is painful to observe.

Anonymous said...

"There is nothing about building complex structures that are often ascribed to evolution."

So you want a definition that contains and describes all of the phenomena that have happened under such a complex process as life evolving from its very beginnings?

I would suggest that you stopped asking for a definition when what you really want is something close to a huge encyclopedia.

Faizal Ali said...

Actually, Petrushka, the more accurate analogy would be of a coworker calling one of your special needs students an idiot. While I know that special needs is a broad term, some of those special needs students surely meet the technical definition of an "idiot". Would it be ok with you if a coworker called that student an idiot?

It seems, in your analogy, you are likening proponents of ID creationism (AKA "IDiots") to a special needs child with a very low IQ.

Don't you think that's rather mean of you?

(Though whether its meaner to the IDiots, or to the special needs child, I haven't quite made up my mind.)

Unknown said...

Of course "it's impossible to teach ... Creationists evolutionary theory," because evolutionary theory is impossible.

Unknown said...

There are so many nails being driven into the coffin of evolutionary ‘theory’ that I long ago lost count. Here is one of the latest nails being fashioned for that coffin.

University of Washington researchers have concluded that the complex process of Nitrogen Fixation appears in earth’s early metabolic life with little time to ‘evolve.’ This finding supports an early appearance of life (Creationism) vs. a later (Evolutionary) appearance of life, and it pushes the appearance of life on earth closer and closer to a time when earth was hostile to all/any life, allowing virtually no time for evolution (theory).

1.Eva E. Stüeken et al., “Isotopic Evidence for Biological Nitrogen Fixation by Molybdenum-Nitrogenase from 3.2 Gyr,” Nature, published online February 16, 2015, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14180.html
2.“Ancient Rocks Show Life Could Have Flourished on Earth 3.2 Billion Years Ago,” ScienceDaily, published online February 16, 2015, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150216131121.htm

Anonymous said...

Robert Byers,

Drift and selection both happen to random mutations. It looks like most changes in DNA sequences are due to drift -- drift is much more common than selection. Interestingly genetic drift occasionally allows organisms to change in some strange ways -- to enter new ways of life. So drift is really important.

Selection is important, too. It leads to adaptation much more directly and consistently than drift can.

Fully understanding evolution's quirkiness, its amazing diversity, requires understanding both selection and drift.

SRM said...

so could it have been a nitrogen-fixing bacterium that told Eve to eat the apple, or were there also snakes around as well.

judmarc said...

Yes, virtually no time - only a few hundred million years.(!)

Arithmetic not a strong suit?

G.D. said...

For some reason bFast's post reminded me of the sorry demise of Oliver St. John-Mollusc.

Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen said...

There's 600 million years between the late heavy bombardment and the 3.2 billion years mentioned in that reference. "little time to evolve" he said.

I know everything is relative but to call 600 million years "little time" is stretching it. This is why we call them IDiots.

peer said...

"Evolution is a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations."

This is assuming a population upfront...

Even worse than I thought. I asked for a definition of evolution and you give me one of population genetics.

peer said...

I would suggest that you stopped asking for a definition when what you really want is something close to a huge encyclopedia.

Apparently you. evolution guys, are unable to define what you mean. How can you do science woithout defining what you mean?

peer said...

It is clear that your knowledge on TEs is zip, Photoncatcher. Just the usual atheistic blabla, which is misleading scientists and non-scientists.

To summarize a few mechanisms for non-random controlled integration:

- targeting gene-rich regions (RNA pol II transcribed
- but avoids the disruption of exons
- targets are environment-inducable genes (“stress-genes”) to induce adapted phenotypes
- endonuclease-mediated (in planst: helicase, replicase)
- targeting protein-mediated (e.g. TATA-box BP; RNA pol II mediated, RNA pol III mediated, TF-mediated, etc)
- siRNA and piwiRNA pathways are both to control TE activity and involves >100 genes.

Read up, mate. There is a lot of bio you don't know.

peer said...

Only one of the transcripts requires to be essential for reproduction. The rest ios than automatically preserved.

Biology is about reproduction. If you understand stand, you understand all biology, including the genome.

Rule One, the quintessence of biology:

"Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of reproduction (not evolution)"

peer said...

No. I never reread the spelling.

It shows that radnom mistakes do nothing to improve my message.

RAndom mistakes as a driving force for evolutzion....please give me a break


peer said...

Of course...there has been a very rapid increase of the number of species from uncommitted, pluripotent baranomes...like specilaized cells from uncommitted stemcells.

peer said...

If we look atb the 1000 genomes project (did you evoguys ever hear about it, probalbly not...), the most scientific and reasonable explanation for atheism is congenital.

Atheists lost the genes to appreciate and/or recognize intelligent design in nature. They are to pity and I think G.O.D. (great omnipotente designer) will take this into account at judgement day...

peer said...

How foreseeable...unable to address in a scientific way now the ridicule starts.

You are really missing genes, Darwimps are loss of function / indel mutants.

judmarc said...

unable to address in a scientific way now the ridicule starts.

You are really missing genes, Darwimps are loss of function / indel mutants.


Google "projection" (as related to psychology).

Anonymous said...

Peer,

I was agreeing with you. What part of "intelligent" in the "intelligent design" wording did you not understand? Or was "design" the problem?

I said that random jumps are only apparently random. Your answer only complements what I said. You have it all figured out. Not only it appears random to these uneducated atheists, it is obviously non-random given your amazing knowledge about TEs. I so admire you!

You missed the part where you devastatingly explain those that jump and cause cancers, embryological malformations, and so many other problems. All part of the Designer's plan, right? Non-random. Stress response to atheism I guess. They jump and cause cancer only on atheists, but those who have cancer and declare being Christians are atheists in disguise, right? Do I get a lollipop?

Anonymous said...

"Apparently you. evolution guys, are unable to define what you mean. How can you do science woithout defining what you mean?"

It's defined Peer. It's up to you to figure out all of the consequences of such processes. Either that or ask. New genes, new functions, chromosomal translocations, recombinations, etc, are all part of this thing. It's all in investigating what words mean in the proper context. That's why research disciplines have so much jargon, because otherwise we would have to be describing each little thing each time we are trying to define something in a few sentences.

For someone with your amazing education I'm surprised that you would not understand something this simple. Oh! I get it! Maybe that's why. You need a complex and encrypted message. Then you would get it, right? Sorry, our little minds don't operate at that level. We are simple humans, not the angel Gabriel in disguise, like yourself.

Anonymous said...

Now ridicule starts? You've been ridiculing yourself from your first message on.

Anonymous said...

"Atheists lost the genes to appreciate and/or recognize intelligent design in nature."

Sure. Since there's no evidence for designers, and no actual proof for design, it's all left to subjective "appreciation." In other words, you have to have faith. You're so much of an idiot Peer.

"They are to pity and I think G.O.D. (great omnipotente designer) will take this into account at judgement day..."

The "great omnipotent designer" will take into account the flaws in "His" own design? Good to know. I was so worried.

Anonymous said...

"This is assuming a population upfront..."

And we all know that self-replicators wouldn't produce a population!!!

Those atheists! Damn it!

Anonymous said...

"This is assuming a population upfront..."

And we all know that life forms don't reproduce!!

Those atheists!! Will they ever learn!!

Ed said...

"It shows that radnom mistakes do nothing to improve my message. "

Correct. Although, removing the mistakes doesn't improve things either.

Anyway, can you actually present some data in favor of your pet hypothesis? Because up 'til now it's the same rehash of standard creationist rhetoric, blah blah blah isn't possible, thus evolution isn't possible.
Michael Behe actually makes decent attempts with IC, but IC has failed every single time it's been tried.
Front loading died a silent death at the end of the19th century, but it seems you've got evidence it's alive and kicking. Do present this evidence.

peer said...

Photon, you neither understand the evolutionist's paradigm nor the creationist's. I think, your genetic make up (deletion of genes) made you allergic to any reference to G.O.D. and ID? It may also be the cause of your not undersatnding the two paradigms. That makes you less responasble for your atheism, would be my guess..

judmarc said...

unable to address in a scientific way

You're right, not scientific, math: 600 million years. Of course that is 100,000 times longer than you think the Earth has existed, and is only one of the numerous ways in which you and Denny contradict each other. But of course you cannot argue with him, because he's on your "team."

TheOtherJim said...

Peer,

The problem with this summary is that you are explaining your desired view, in light of the data. There are alternative viewpoints to explain the same data in a random/ deleterious light as well.

- targeting gene-rich regions (RNA pol II transcribed
- but avoids the disruption of exons


Alternate explanation - gene-rich area targeting due to accessibility of transcriptional active areas. Missing exon hits are due to dead embryos resulting from exon hits except in the case of "mild" disease or cancer causing exon hits.

- targets are environment-inducable genes (“stress-genes”) to induce adapted phenotypes

Or suppression systems are compromised in stress scenarios - a lot like polyGlu-tract diseases that lead to other protein quality control problems, due to the overwhelmed quality control system.


- endonuclease-mediated (in planst: helicase, replicase)
- targeting protein-mediated (e.g. TATA-box BP; RNA pol II mediated, RNA pol III mediated, TF-mediated, etc)


How would they transcribe without using the cell's systems? Would you apply the same logic to horizontally transferred viruses or phages?

- siRNA and piwiRNA pathways are both to control TE activity and involves >100 genes.

Our immune system is there to control external parasites. Not regulate them.. And it also has an impressive number of genes to to run the system.

Anonymous said...

I'm just pointing to your own nonsense Peer. Therefore, what you see is just the reflexion of your own incompetence.

As I told you before, idiocy and arrogance don't mix well. You should renounce at least one of them.

Ed said...

Wow... "your genetic make up (deletion of genes) made you allergic to any reference to G.O.D. and ID?"

Do show which genes are responsible? Or is this another one of your pet hypothesis?

peer said...

Fully understanding evolution's quirkiness, its amazing diversity, requires understanding both selection and drift.

See, nothing changed ....evolutionism is nothing but selectionism = Darwinism.

peer said...

Photon, your problem is that you do not understand the creationists' fallen-earth paradigm. You want to discuss stuff you don't have knowledge on. I advise you to brush up for the sake of your understanding.

Any designed organized system is subject to degradation due to random mutations in control and regulation networks. That explains it all. That is what we see happen in the world. That is what the Darwindians call evolution.

peer said...

Alternative Jim,

"The problem with this summary is that you are explaining your desired view, in light of the data. There are alternative viewpoints to explain the same data in a random/ deleterious light as well."

The real problem are the premeses of evolutionary hypotheses. That is why it took so long to discover that TE transposition is not only a random phenomenon.
Of course, any designed organized system is subject to degradation due to random mutations in control and regulation networks. That explains why we also see TE damage and TE-induced genetic disordersl.

"How would they transcribe without using the cell's systems?"

The cannot. They can also not leave and enter the cells, unless they pcik up some genes from the genome. HIV, for instance, is a deraled ERV that picked up part of the CCR5 ligand in order to reenter immune cells.
Infleunza viruses picked up neuramidase, and Rous Sarcoma Virus picked up a the on-switch of the proto-onco gene src.

RNA viuses originated in the genomes. All viruses originated in the genome from VIGEs. That solves the riddle of vector-borne diseases.

peer said...

This view will of course never be accepted by the atheist-Darwinian community, for obvious reasons (because if the higher genomes are made of designed VIGEs instead of intgerated (remnants of) viruses their worldview disintegrates). That's why Darwinian evolutionry is a science stopper and the reason why it must be expelled from science.

Anonymous said...

Peer,

"Photon, your problem is that you do not understand the creationists' fallen-earth paradigm."

I sure do. It's a nonsensical fantasy about this "Perfect Omnipotent Designer" who was an incompetent creator. Could not do something that would not break at the first sin. Poor Incompetent Idiot.

"You want to discuss stuff you don't have knowledge on. I advise you to brush up for the sake of your understanding."

Says the idiot who can't be bothered to understand the meaning of such words as "definition," and wants an all comprehensive explanation, describing everything from the beginning of life, within a blog post.

Look in the mirror Peer. You're making yourself into a clown. An arrogant clown like yourself is not a pretty view, in case you were wondering. Kids would be very afraid of you, rather than entertained.

peer said...

Its a hypothesis. The GOD genes have been described in the literature rather extensively. Since the GOD genes or genetic network is redundant (i.e. it is not essential for reproduction) it will be easily lost through deletion mediated by TEs or epigenetically repressed.

Do you guys know anything about biology, genes, regulatory networks, mutations, etc?

Ed said...

Well, I've asked you quite a few times for proof of your pet hypothesis and the only thing I've heard up 'til now, are crickets chirping. Are you going to backup your extraordinary claims with evidence? Or are you indeed as photo says "An arrogant clown "?

"(because if the higher genomes are made of designed VIGEs instead of intgerated (remnants of) viruses their worldview disintegrates)"

Well, please do explain class II TE's then.

"RNA viuses originated in the genomes. All viruses originated in the genome from VIGEs. That solves the riddle of vector-borne diseases. "

Does it? How? And (once again) you need to provide evidence.

This is an interesting bit of background about TE's, especially the Alu sequence.

In particular:
"The study of Alu elements has also been important in elucidating human population genetics and the evolution of primates, including the evolution of humans."

and

"Alu elements in primates form a fossil record that is relatively easy to decipher because Alu elements insertion events have a characteristic signature that is both easy to read and faithfully recorded in the genome from generation to generation. The study of Alu elements thus reveals details of ancestry because individuals will only share a particular Alu element insertion if they have a common ancestor.

Most human Alu element insertions can be found in the corresponding positions in the genomes of other primates, but about 7,000 Alu insertions are unique to humans.[10]"

These are obvious reasons why Peer hates anything except his own pet theories. Because TE's van be used to determine common ancestors of humans...

Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen said...

That makes absolutely no sense. RNA transcripts don't affect the mutation rate. Why would it matter that a particular portion of the chromosome is transcribed during the cell cycle, when it comes around to replication there is still a chance mutations will be introduced to the genome. And they will eventually. If the location is not under purifying selection (and mere trancription isn't evidence that a genomic location is under purifying selection), then there is no reason to think it will be preserved over evolutionary time.

Trancription has nothing to do with it. Your totally ad-hoc frontloading rationalization cannot explain how the "front loaded" genes are preserved over generations when they're just sitting around waiting to be put to use millions of generations in the future. They would have degraded beyond reckognition long before the species for which they are supposedly intended, have managed to evolve.

Once again you're talking absolute and delusional bollocks. Take your fevered religious hallucinations elsewhere, your attempts at explaining biology are laughably inept.

Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen said...

"It shows that radnom mistakes do nothing to improve my message."

Try introducing natural selection to that equation.

Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen said...

Yeah.

Funny thing, there was that study conducted where they put people in an MRI and did brain activity images. Then they asked people questions like "What does Bill Clinton/Michael Jackson/Famous Person A/B/C think of X?" and people would answer the question, and the researchers could see that when people answered the question, a brain area associated with "trying to guess what other people's desires are" would light up.

Then they asked them questions like "What do you then think of X?", and a brain region associated with their own desires would light up instead.

All perfectly reasonable and as expected. There's a brain region that tries to ascertain other people's desires, and there's a brain region that generates your own desires.

Then they asked them "What does God think about X?" and guess what brain region would light up? Yep, the brain region associated with their own desires.
People make up god, what god wants and what god thinks. God is a delusion and it isn't a coincidence that god happens to hate all the same people you do. It's because your brain is inventing your god, a subconscious alter-ego with all the same opinions as yourself.

God-belief is a disease of the mind. A psychological disorder and it should be classified as such, just like any other imaginary, invisible, magical friend.

Ed said...

"Its a hypothesis. The GOD genes have been described in the literature rather extensively. "

Are they? Dare/ care to provide Evidence?

Do explain how this mechanism works with born again christians? When they renounce a god, the genes are deleted? But, once they return to christianity the genes magically appear again? And how does it work if the ex-christian turns muslim, or hindu? Do they get a different set of GOD genes?
What about convicted murderers/ rapists? While they committed their crimes they lacked these genes? But if they confess to a priest seconds before they're put to death, the genes *poof* into existence again? And how does it work if they committed the murder for their god?

You explain nothing with your GOD genes, exactly the same MO you've used in all your posts here, you explain/ proof zilch, nothing. You don't backup up your claims with evidence.
In your case I'd tend to call GOD genes DOG, delusions of grandeur genes. You think you're a real hot shot, but your posts and your demeanor on this blog show you're projecting your inability to prove anything on to others.

Anonymous said...

How will natural selection "know:" which ones are the spelling errors and which are correct spellings? My question really is how natural selection emerged and how it became intelligently selective?

TheOtherJim said...

Does your lack of reply to my points mean you concede an alternative interpretation is possible? Besides you disbelief in a naturalistic process, you are saying nothing to refute the alternate explanation.

Your reply even has effectively an FAQ in another blog....
http://endogenousretrovirus.blogspot.de/2007/07/index-to-common-creationist-claims.html

Petrushka said...

I have read through the book. Much of it reads like a memoir rather than a discussion of science. To the best of my ability to comprehend, it seems to argue that chromosome loss due to inbreeding swamps any evolution due to genetic drift.

It's a technical argument that might be of great interest to population geneticists, but I fail to see why it would be of interest to creationists or to IDists.I have seen it touted by creationists. Probably because of its provocative title.

It could use a good editor.

Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen said...

Dear Peer is making an analogy. He's saying spelling errors degrade sentences instead of improving them, by which he means mutations degrade functional genetic polymers instead of improving their function.

But we know from simple experiments that selection can significantly improve the functionality of RNA and protein polymers of various sorts, so I'm merely asking Peer to try and explain how he would draw an analogy to this with his spelling and grammar example.

Anonymous said...

"How will natural selection "know:" which ones are the spelling errors and which are correct spellings? My question really is how natural selection emerged and how it became intelligently selective?"

Your incompetence is abysmal Johnny. Think carefully. Natural selection does not "know" anything. Natural selection is a concept we use to describe a phenomenon whereby sensical "sentences" might out-survive nonsensical and mis-sensical ones. For obvious reasons. You should easily understand now that there's no need for intelligence to be involved. Thing 1 can eat the only sugar present, well, it might survive. Thing 2 can't eat the same sugar, well, it won't survive. Thing 3 can eat the sugar much faster? It might survive better than Thing 1.

Your question is like asking how does gravity know to pull things mostly towards the heaviest objects. How did gravitation "emerge" and "become intelligent" about it? Think. Think!! Thiiiiiiiiink!!!

Anonymous said...

Peer, that is an unusually quick and direct illustration of the title of this blog post.

Anonymous said...

I think, like you told me to and I think again that the "how" was "answered" with another "how", where the "how" is actually my question. If there is not intelligence involved in natural selection how is this phenomenon able to recognize the benefits of selecting something?

Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen said...

"If there is not intelligence involved in natural selection how is this phenomenon able to recognize the benefits of selecting something?"

There's this huge population of some ancestor of Antelopes right, and most of them are average speed, a few of them are slow, and a few of them are fast. Okay?

So here comes this ancestor of the Leopard and it wants to eat an antelope. So it runs after them, the whole herd. The herd starts running away. The Leopard starts catching up, but to which one? Probably one of the slow ones. This repeats itself for several generations. The slow ones are caught, because they're slow.
Soon the average speed of the population of Antelopes has moved up, because there's no more slow ones. Every time a "slow" mutant arises in the population it gets eaten soon afterwards. There's only the "average" and the fast ones left. That means the new slow ones are the slowest of the average. These are in turn eaten by Leopards too eventually.
And so on and so forth. Eventually, only the really fast Antelopes are left. The Antelope population has changed, all Antelopes are now faster, because all the slow ones were eventually weeded out of the population by chasing Leopards.

Not because the Leopards were intelligently and deliberately trying to artificially select the Antelope population for speed. They had no idea how this would affect the future genetic makeup of the Antelope population. They just wanted food, and catching a slow Antelope was easier than catching a fast one. Easier meal.

That's natural selection, no "recognition of benefits" ever happened in this process. It was automatic, unintelligent, blind. There was just a predator and it's prey. The hungry and the scared.

Anonymous said...

I don't think you answered the "how" question yet.

Anonymous said...

Further on the thread: in evolutionary theory the variations are random but the selection is not random. Right? So what is selection if it is not random?

steve oberski said...

And Oliver has run himself over

Although I think bFast is more a contender for the Shooting Themselves event ...

Anonymous said...

Johnny,

If you can't understand those answers there's no point in continuing. You are not competent enough to understand something that's too simple. I can't educate you out of your incompetence. That requires too much work, and I'm not being paid for it. Go get a proper education.

Diogenes said...

"Baranomes"? We have us a YEC. By "baranome" Peer means Noah had a couple of super-proboscideans who walked off his Ark and then dropped a litter that consisted of an Asian elephant, an African elephant, a mammoth, a mastodon, all kinds of gomphotheres and shovel tuskers, Eritherium, Moeritherium, etc. etc. Then they all ran to their respective continents and the vast majority of brand new proboscidean species instantly dropped dead and insta-fossilized. For some reason humans only made cave paintings of the mammoths. The mammoths ran to Siberia and instantly accelerated their gestation rate to 1/100 of an elephant's current 20 month gestation period; thus the mammoths could increase in numbers enough to constitute the hundreds of thousands found today in mammoth graveyards, a scenario requiring a 100,000 fold increase in mammoth population during the ~250 years that YECs hypothesize as separating Noah's Flood and the start of the Ice Age-- or, as YECs should call it, the Ice Century.

Why is it that just 4,000 years ago, speciation was happening dozens of times a day, but it's thousands of times slower now? Well, note that Peer said uncommitted, pluripotent baranomes which is YEC jargon for "speciation happened very fast then, but it's slow now." Why?? Well, because "baranomes" (made up word) in those days were "uncommitted" (made up word) but today they are "committed." Yeah, so should Peer be.

This blog is frequented by real scientists, and here comes Peer, know-nothing creationist IDiot, to brag about how he knows more genetics and molecular biology than REAL geneticists and molecular biologists. And what's he defending? Dinosaurs on the Ark. Flintstones! Meet the Flintstones!

Anonymous said...

Mikkel,

I suspect that Johnny can't differentiate between selection and variation, or something like that. But it's very hard to pin point the problem because Johnny is quite the incompetent to make his questions clear. He is also incompetent at reading, since he has given little to no effort to understanding our answers. With that incompetence and attitude, I think we can do little, if anything, for him.

Diogenes said...

Denny just redefined creationism as "early appearance of life." For many decades, creationism was defined to include recent appearance of life.

But no matter. Denny needs to shift goalposts, and silently substitute a new hypothesis in place of his old one, to make his belief that life appeared by magic appear to be supported by evidence.

Anonymous said...

PHOTO,
"I suspect that Johnny can't differentiate between selection and variation, or something like that"
It is the third option, "something like that". lol

Anonymous said...

Some animalos like mammoths died in the the flood

Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen said...

"I don't think you answered the "how" question yet."

I did. It really is that simple. I explained with an example how natural selection can bring an allele to fixation in a population, without any "intelligence" or "foresight".

Notice how there is no intelligent, conscious act or plan to select anything and yet the end result is still that an initially rare allele goes to fixation.

Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen said...

"So what is selection if it is not random?"

A biased stochastic process. Selection is still described by a probability distribution (so technically it still qualifies as "random" in the mathematical sense of the word), it's just that it constitutes a bias to an otherwise equiprobable distribution. In so far as there is selection, the distribution of outcomes stops being equiprobable. Yet it is still described in terms of probabilities.

A "fair coin" is a coin that lands heads or tails 50% of the time. The distribution is 50:50. This is random.

A biased coin is one that lands a distribution other than 50:50. It could be 30:70, 60:40, 10:90, it doesn't matter. That is a biased coin. It could even be extremely heavily biased and land 99.9999:0.0001. This is still technically a "random" coin, since the distribution is expressed in terms of probabilities. We simply say it is biased.

So selection is a bias in a probability distribution. Selection is random, but biased. By definition.

So in my Antelope example, we could say the odds for any given Antelope to be caught and eaten in a chase, if they all had the same speed allele, would be equiprobable. But since some Antelopes are faster or slower than the populations average, the slower ones will have a higher probability than average of being caught and eaten, and the faster ones will have a lower probability than average. So selection is a biased stochastic process.

Diogenes said...

But the Bible says that God kept alive on the Ark all land animals that had breath in their nostrils. So no, no land animals went extinct in the Flood, except arguably insects because they breathe through spiracles, not nostrils.

Anonymous said...

Diogenes, why don't you provide the quote without quote mining you so often accuse creationists of. Make sure you don't bluff this time because I keep finding you to be a manipulator and a lair.

Anonymous said...

Get a life guys! You are embarrassing yourselves and your "science".

SRM said...

Denny just redefined creationism as "early appearance of life." For many decades, creationism was defined to include recent appearance of life.

I'm still wondering if humans made their appearance during those harsh early years on earth, or have the acts of creation been successive and spaced throughout time? Maybe the great designer isnt done, and we can expect contemporary acts of creation as well. At last, an explanation for emergent viruses like Ebola and HIV !

SRM said...

Oops, just after posting that last sentence, it occurred to me that this is in fact an oft-made claim of many an evangelical: HIV is a god-sent punishment for immoral behaviour. Man, try to crack a joke and you realize it is actually no joke, when there are religious people around.

John Harshman said...

Johnny,

You aren't doing yourself any good with that little bit of petulance. Michael has answered your question clearly and completely, and you respond with insults?

SRM said...

Ah, nature abhores a vacuum. And with the disappearance of Quest (at least by name), look what fills the void.

Robert Byers said...

bwilson295
well your saying drift is more important then selection. Hmm.
So what is the percentage breakdown.?
How much is evolutionary progress based on selection on mutations and how much o random mutations/drift etc.

Diogenes said...

Oh Johnny, what quote must I provide now? Didn't you notice what happens to people who say I can't produce what I talk about? Punkknown said I could never produce a quote from Behe saying evolution of binding sites was impossible; I buried him in Behe quotes. Punkknown said ID proponents never said there were no beneficial mutations; Rumraket recopied my list of IDiots saying just that.

How has it worked out for you so far when you IDiots yell, "Diogenes is a liar, he can't produce the quotes he referred to!" How's that working out for you guys?

Piotr Gąsiorowski said...

I believe mammoth hunting was one of the reasons why Yahweh had to send the flood. Mammoths, like elephants, were doubly unclean: they were hindgut fermenters, i.e. non-ruminants, and their hooves were not cloven. Palaeolithic hunters killed and ate lots of them. They also ate wild horses, woolly rhinos, ground sloths, and many other unclean animals, which was abomination in the eyes of God. I forget why he let the horses survive but got rid of so many other unclean species.

At any rate it was the flood did it, not us, officer. The mammoths were already dead when we found them.

Larry Moran said...

There are several different ways to answer your question. It depends a little bit on the species and how much of their genome is junk.

If we just look at alleles that have become fixed in a population then it's reasonable to conclude that about 99% have been fixed by random genetic drift. Some scientists will quibble with that conclusion but there's an overwhelming consensus among scientists that natural selection is directly responsible for only a small percentage of fixation of alleles in a population.

The challenge comes when you refer to "evolutionary progress." If we interpret that to mean adaptation then natural selection dominates and most scientists would say that natural selection is the ONLY mechanism that leads to adaptation.

But that's not the end of the story. Not every visible change is an adaptation and a lot of what we see in living species does not look particularly well designed to a scientist. Creationists don't understand this. They think that all scientists buy into the Dawkins argument that everything has the appearance of design and must, therefore be an adaptation.

That view is strict Darwinism and it's not universal by any stretch. It hasn't been the dominant view of evolutionary biologists for 40 years. Isn't it about time for creationists to recognize that reality when they attack evolution?

Diogenes said...

Is this Johnny the same as Johnnyb who writes top level posts at UD?

It seems all he is doing here is sticking his fingers in his ears and saying LA LA I can't hear you. A tedious form of trolling. It seems to me that more and more ID proponents are deliberately trolling us, as if they sadistically delight in wasting the time of scientists, trying to prevent us from doing research with questions repeated endlessly after they have been answered, demands for quotes and open letters, etc. If we don't answer, the ID troll declares that no scientist in the world knows the answer, which surely proves that the answer can only be the god of his personal scriptures who created galaxies and just happens to agree with his personal sexual morality and political party. If we DO answer, they have succeeded in preventing us from doing research. Win-win for the ID troll.

Diogenes said...

SRM: e.g. Pastor Steven Anderson's recent videos like "The Judgment of God" saying HIV is that judgment, and that the Bible had the cure for AIDS: kill all gay people like the Bible demands, then voila, no more AIDS.

And they say creationists don't do science!

Ed said...

"kill all gay people like the Bible demands, then voila, no more AIDS."

Ahh, they actually mean kill all gay MEN, because as we all know only gay men have AIDS. Except, 'the male clerics abusing little kids' gays. Because little kids rarely have AIDS.

Joe Felsenstein said...

Or one can note that if something really is an adaptation, it most likely is present due to natural selection. Sure, a few adaptations could happen by accident. But the adaptations that allow birds to fly and fish to swim are there because of natural selection.

And "fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly", as Oscar Hammerstein said. Real organisms are far more fit than they would be if there was no natural selection, and we can infer that this is overwhelmingly due to natural selection.

Larry can be as skeptical as he wants about any particular feature of a living organism. He can argue that it might be a spandrel, and he would be right about that. It might. But the fitness of real organisms is vastly greater than it would be if there (somehow) were no natural selection, For example, organisms whose DNA sequences were produced by monkeys typing on four-letter typewriters.

nmanning said...

Barlett, as some of you may know, has endorsed the 'carvings on Cambodian temples prove man and dinosaurs lived together' YEC claim on one (or more) of his several blogs. In my opinion, that diminishes the validity of any other claim on the general subject of creation, since it demonstrates 1. his ignorance 2. his gullibility 3, his desire to be deceived to prop up his religion. What is it with computer programmers thinking they know anything more than how to program computers?

nmanning said...

"ID was the one to predict this move,"

I'm guessing that no evidence for this assertion was presented?

nmanning said...

Peer the 'scientist' writes:

""Evolution is a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations."

This is assuming a population upfront...

Even worse than I thought. I asked for a definition of evolution and you give me one of population genetics."


I guess this latest YEC moron claiming to be a scientist thinks that evolution is abiogenesis.

Ed said...

Software is designed to do something perfect, the human aye does something perfect, thus it's designed.

As software tester I would be out of a job if software was perfect, because it isn't. Far from it.

Also if software was built to resemble the human genome because of it's perfect design, we'd be looking at extremely bloated software with 90% of the code broken (which no compiler would ever compile anyway) or producing wrong output.
That's why the percentage of non-coding DNA is important, it needs to be as low as possible. Or it should give the impression that the percentage is dropping all the time. Them evilutionists say it was 95%, it's down to 90% says encode and this gives creationists the opportunity to say: see it's practically 0%.
See: perfect design, thus (insert favorite supernatural being here) did it.

Claudiu Bandea said...

Joe Felsenstein: ”But the fitness of real organisms is vastly greater than it would be if there (somehow) were no natural selection.”

Here you go again underestimating the works of Natural Selection,:). Without natural selection there would be no organisms to begin with, and if Natural Selection will cease to exist then all organisms will go extinct sooner or later given a changing environment.

Anonymous said...

Liar and manipulator Diogenes wrote:

"But the Bible says that God kept alive on the Ark all land animals that had breath in their nostrils. So no, no land animals went extinct in the Flood, except arguably insects because they breathe through spiracles, not nostrils."

When asked by me: "Diogenes, why don't you provide the quote without quote mining you so often accuse creationists of. Make sure you don't bluff this time because I keep finding you to be a manipulator and a lair."

He changed the subject to Behe. Why?

Because he is just a liar and manipulator and that is what people like him do when they are caught lying.

Here is proof:
Genesis 7:22

"Of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, died."

Quite a different picture than what bigmouth, liar and manipulator Diogenes portrayed isn't it? Well, I guess it is understandable because he is doing it it in a good cause-lying for Darwin.

BTW: Did anybody notice that the moment Diogenes realized he was caught on a lie, immediately I was accused of being Quest of Johnnyb? That must be liar's old tactic I guess.

Claudiu Bandea said...

That being said, it has not escaped my notice that without the introduction of new genetic variation, Natural Selection will also lead to extinction sooner or later given a changing environment.

steve oberski said...

Hey Johnny,

I betcha that Diogenes isn't intimately acquainted with all the different types of kryptonite and the affect that each one has on superman either.

And he hasn't weighed in on the issue of who would win in a contest between superman and batman.

But so what, just like the bible, they are all works of fiction.

So calm down, it's all just literary criticism.

But I have to say, I'd rather see you babbling about the bible than pretending to be a scientist.

John Harshman said...

Johnny,

I'm curious. What exactly did Diogenes say that was untrue or quote-mined? It's true that Noah was claimed by the bible to have gathered representatives of every "kind", so no land animals, or at least none that had lungs, could have become extinct in the flood. What's wrong with that?

John Harshman said...

By the way, green kryptonite kills him, red kryptonite has unpredictable mutating effects, gold kryptonite permanently removes his powers. And Superman would win easily.

Who would win in a fight: Superman or Mighty Mouse? (Answer: the question is silly; Mighty Mouse is a cartoon character.)

Unknown said...

Diogenes. Humans appeared on earth somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. About the same time the genetically unconnected line of hominids finally died out with Neanderthals.

Ed. As far as I am able to discern from my Bible, there is no "demand" (expressed or otherwise) to kill gay people. In fact, the Bible does express that God desires that no one should perish.

Anonymous said...

John Harshman,

If you can't read with understanding my repeating it won't help, will it?

Ed said...

Well you know Danny, Levictus says this about gays:
"If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them."

Diogenes said...

Johnny, what exactly are you saying I got wrong? Should I have said Noah kept alive representatives of all kinds of land animals on the Ark, rather than all land animals? Is it the nostril/ spiracle thing that you think I got wrong? What's up yr butt Johnny? What do you think Noah did, that's different from what I wrote?

The quote you pasted does not contradict what I wrote.

Anyway, here's the quote as demanded, from Genesis 7, NIV version:


"They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, everything with wings. 15 Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Noah and entered the ark. 16 The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah. Then the Lord shut him in."


The distinction I mentioned about nostrils vs. spiracles comes ftom YEC authorities, who make this point to deny that Noah collected 350,000 species of beetle. That's what YECs say. You got a problem with YECs? Will you call them liars to their faces?

So Johnny, since you're the expert, why don't you tell us: did Noah collect 350,000 species of beetles for his Ark or not? I could be wrong. Why don't you tell us: exactly how many species of insects did Noah take on the Ark, and how do you know?

John Harshman said...

Denny,

First, define "human". Your date range seems too small at any rate, and in fact almost everything you say is wrong. Neanderthals have a considerable overlap in time with modern humans. There is no "genetically unconnected line of hominids", just a rather bushy clade of hominid species, of which only one currently survives. How you make any of that fit Genesis is a mystery.

Diogenes said...

Harshman: "Who would win in a fight: Superman or Mighty Mouse? (Answer: the question is silly; Mighty Mouse is a cartoon character.)"

From the movie "Stand by Me", this logic is also the logic behind St. Anselm's Ontological Proof of God:

1. Define God as the greatest being you can imagine.

2. Consider the greatest being you can imagine. Imagine he does not exist.

3. Consider a being like that from Step 2, exactly the same, except imagine he DOES exist.

4. 2 and 3 get in a fistfight. Who will win?

5. 3 will beat 2 in a fistfight because 3 is real and 2 is make-believe. And in fistfights, real heroes always beat make-believe heroes.

6. Therefore, 2 cannot be the greatest being you can imagine because you just imagined him losing a fight with 3. This is a contradiction.

7. Since you arrived at a contradiction, your mistake must have been in step 2, when you imagined that the greatest imaginable was not real.

8. Therefore God IS real.

Sophistimicated theologians like William Lane Craig love this argument and invoke it often, to prove the moral perfection and perfect love of a genocidal baby-mudering queer-hating Middle Eastern war deity.

John Harshman said...

Johnny, Now you're just being an asshole. The quote says that everything with nostrils that wasn't on the ark died, but also that representatives of everything with nostrils were on the ark. Anything on the ark wasn't made extinct by the (imaginary) flood. Again, what are you trying to claim? How could the flood have made mammoths extinct if they were on the ark, and how could they not have been on the ark if Noah collected pairs of every animal?

John Harshman said...

Diogenes, No, it isn't from Stand by Me. It's from Diner. And anyway, the God I imagine wins the fist fight even though he doesn't exist, because he's just that good.

Diogenes said...

Denny, how do your new strange assertions rebut my point-- that you redefined creationism to mean "early appearance of life"?

And 9+ billion years after the Big Bang and hundreds of millions of years after the formation of Earth is not "early" and is not evidence for creationism.

Denny says: "Diogenes. Humans appeared on earth somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. About the same time the genetically unconnected line of hominids finally died out with Neanderthals."

No. Genus Homo is close to 3 million years old as we know from the recent jawbone find, and is descended from Australopithecus.

As for Neanderthals, they are not genetically unconnected, as Europeans have a few percent Neanderthal DNA. Melanesians have a few percent Denisovans DNA. The Floresian line ("hobbits") outlived Neanderthals.

If Neanderthals are just dumb nonhuman animals, then modern Europeans are a product of humans doing it and making offspring with dumb animals. That is exactly what Old Earth creationist Hugh Ross teaches. Do you follow Hugh Ross, and was your great grandpa a big dumb ape?

Diogenes said...

John: "it isn't from Stand by Me. It's from Diner."

Once again I am caught in a scurrilous lie. Diogenes, liar and hypocrite, caught lying about 80's movie quotes.

John, you god is greater because he wins the fistfight in spite of his handicap of not existing, which made him the plucky underdog. That is a greater god than Craig's.

Jon Fleming said...

John, you've been posting in t.o almost as long as the Hershey collective and you still have to ask that question?

John Harshman said...

The triumph of hope over experience.

Robert Byers said...

Thank you for reply and percentages.
99% in a fixed pop and only Natural selection in bringing physical changes
So in addressing adaptation/body changes a creationist is right in seeing Darwins natural selection idea as dominate ,and the story mostly, and so what one attacks.
The 99% within a population being fixed by random genetic drift , you say evolutionists say this, is probably something even top creationists might misunderstand.
One simply focuses on population changes in looks.
EVEN with random drift creating the origin of mutation why is wrong to say its just selection on mutation?
The origin of the mutation does not matter to a attacking creationist.
Possibly this is about the way creationists use the unlikely probability of a useful mutation appearing to explain the glory of biology. So the random idea thus making it less of a probability problem.


Robert Byers said...

JF
Well then what percentages do you say selection on mutations is it for the progression of evolution and what percentages for random genetic drift?
Is there disagreement and what is written in the textbooks?

Unknown said...

Ed, your quoting of Levictus does not take into account the whole context of the Bible. Which is kind of like reading a book, but not all the chapters. When that is done, one is left with an incomplete and incorrect understanding.

Anonymous said...

No Denny, Ed did not take that out of context. If you read Leviticus complete, there's even more like the mandate to kill gays. Quite the bloody laws. Nowhere does it say in the Bible "you should really not care about what Leviticus says, it's all a joke." Even if it did, it would still be quite stupid from some omniscient god to put such laws there up for "misunderstanding." No, those were laws and they were taken seriously. Taken seriously by people in the very church, which must have read most if not all the bible. It's still a big part of what inspires today extremist Muslims and extremist Christians. I suspect that it's you who reads and takes pieces of the bible to your convenience, rather than read it as it is.

Unknown said...

Diogenes, The issues of primate genetics and morphology are very hard to summarize. But, I believe it is accurate to say that it is now accepted that Homo heidelbergensis (a presumed transitional intermediate) never existed. Regarding Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens, some of the most recent studies question whether interbreeding ever occurred. Neanderthal remains from Iberia and the Russian Mezmaiskaya Cave site have been re-dated, showing that Neanderthals went extinct earlier than previously thought, to the point that it is unlikely that humans and Neanderthals ever encountered one another at all.
1. J. L. Arsuaga et al., "Neandertal Roots: Cranial and Chronological Evidence from Sima de los Huesos," Science 344 (June 20, 2014): 1358–63.
2. Michael Balter, "RIP for a Key Homo Species?," Science 345 (July 11, 2014): 129.

Also, published evolutionary graphic illustrations often show a vertical or horizontal line with the dates for hominid evidence and existence, thus presumably showing an ‘evolutionary’ progression. What is often missing from those illustrations is that hominid remains are geographically dispersed to the point where many would likely not have overlapped. My first point here is that there are many known and irreconcilable genetic and morphological gaps between every one of the known hominid populations going back several million years, and second, that the continuing trend and inference of raw scientific data in all areas of scientific discovery actually undermine evolution theory, and rather support ‘design’ (creationism), and the proposition that God placed specific creatures (including humans) on earth at specific times in the past (sudden appearance), and that paleoanthropological discoveries (ironically - made by atheistic scientists).

• Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, “For the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years ago, are the oldest ones in which we find most of the invertebrate groups. And, we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.” (from “The Blind Watchmaker”)
• Kevin Peterson, evolution / paleontology / molecular paleobiology, “Elucidating the materialistic basis of the Cambrian explosion has become more elusive, not less, the more we know about the event itself.” (from “BioEssays 31”)

As it relates to your comments about millions of years, I think that the probabilities of any aspect of evolution accruing continue to diminish with all the discoveries of all those atheistic scientists. Early or late, the dates for the appearance of humans on earth seem to move around with increasingly better evidence. By whatever standard one wants to use, science is showing us when Homo sapiens sapiens suddenly appeared and how they differed distinctly from hominids, and the rest of God’s creatures. Evolutionists would likely see these distinctions as undirected chance with no meaning or purpose. Go ahead, if you want to. I, as a Christian, see natural science and the Bible as harmonious, which means that what we see in science, little by little, confirms God's purposes narrated in the Bible.

Unknown said...

Ed and Photosynthesis, 2 Peter 3:9 indicates that God wishes that ‘no one perish,’ and God does not contradict Himself. Just as in science, context and objectivity are important.

steve oberski said...

"Himself"?

Anonymous said...

As I said. You cherry pick, and you somehow try and manage to withstand the contradictions by just asserting that "God does not contradict Himself." That's somewhat understandable, you think that your fantasy is a real being. But the bible indicates that your fantasy is a fantasy regardless of your preferences about it. Leviticus alone contradicts your assertions. But we could start visiting other parts of your bible to see how well "God" cares about us 'not perishing.' Also see the notable way in which you take these words, given that the part you cite talks about repentance, which makes this "no perishing" conditional. Not only that, nothing there says anything against Leviticus, since even repentants die, with only the promise of living again later. What's there, again, to say that Leviticus is not to be taken seriously? Nothing. Suspected witches were kill thinking that if they were innocent "God" would take them to heaven. What's there to stop anybody thinking that killing gays would not lead to their salvation?

Even more, many sects in Christianity have concluded that of course this God couldn't care less, about most of us. That "He" has chosen who will "repent" and "be saved" by "His grace" alone. They cite passages with as much conviction as you do. This means that different sects cherry-pick different parts. Many of them doing their different cherry-picking to try and to figure out a way to justify their belief that this "God" doesn't contradict "Himself."

Context and objectivity are far from what you are presenting. It's more like out-of-context, cherry-picked, and obviously subjective.

It would be much easier if you admitted that it's all fantasy.

steve oberski said...

Oh I think it's a lot simpler than that,

Denny has actually never read the Bible.

I'm reminded of a story Christopher Hitchens used tell,

When talking to a Catholic he would tell them that they did not actually believe in the immaculate conception which of course they would vehemently deny but when asked to describe it they would invariably describe the virgin birth.

Like Denny, they did not actually care what their particular dogmas asserted, it was only important that they were asserted and hence must be believed,

Understanding them was in fact an impediment to faith.

Joe Felsenstein said...

Claudiu, we are saying the same thing.

John Harshman said...

Denny,

What you're doing here is known in the trade as "quote-mining". Are you familiar with the term? I assure you that everyone else here is, and you aren't fooling anyone.

Creationists can't even agree among themselves on which fossils are "just apes" and which fossils are humans or human relatives. You and a few others think neanderthals aren't human, but most creationists think they are. And that's good evidence for the idea that hominids form a continuum that can be separated in two only arbitrarily.

You seem either not to be acquainted with the genetic evidence or are ignoring it on purpose. Which?

SRM said...

I often wonder what it must be like to be like Denny, to actually and completely believe that an invisible kind-of-all-powerful-but-not-really-all-powerful man-like entity created and controls this world. And you can pray your heart out, or not, to this god and still both bad and good things happen just as they would if this god did not exist. And this man-god, it is written, demands to be worshipped. But rather than viewing this as something of an unseemly character flaw, and the whole narrative rather ridiculous, it is celebrated fully and completely. Very strange.

I would ask Denny for some insights into this phenomenon, but I suspect he would be the last to have any. It would be a little like asking someone in the throws of a psychotic episode what it is like to be psychotic.

Claudiu Bandea said...

Joe,

Apparently, you didn’t see the smile sign at the end of my remark; it was intended to be a ‘witty’ take on you position on the significance of Natural Selection.

However, I think you are too soft in emphasizing the significance of Natural Selection. For example, you wrote that “the fitness of real organisms is *vastly greater* than it would be if there (somehow) were no natural election", which is indeed an understatement: without Natural Selection there would be *not fitness at all* in a changing environment, period.

Don’t let the peer pressure of some of your colleagues on this blog get to you :).

peer said...

One sharing property of Darwindians is that they do never define their terms and concepts.

peer said...

"If we just look at alleles that have become fixed in a population then it's reasonable to conclude that about 99% have been fixed by random genetic drift. Some scientists will quibble with that conclusion but there's an overwhelming consensus among scientists that natural selection is directly responsible for only a small percentage of fixation of alleles in a population."


If this is true, and most likely it is, you cannot escape the conclusion of frontloading.

judmarc said...

From a stochastic ("random") process to "you cannot escape the conclusion of [intentional, planned] frontloading," without the need for any logic along the way! Truly wonderful, Peer. ("Wonderful" in the old sense of the word, i.e., something to make one wonder.)

Larry Moran said...

@Peer Terborg

Please define "Darwindians" or "Darwinians" or whatever you meant to write.

Ed said...

@Judmarc:
"without the need for any logic along the way"

Why does Peer need logic? Or evidence? I mean he's mr. frontloading himself, all bow down to his wisdom.
There's no need for Him to provide something as trivial as evidence to support his claims. He hasn't provided a shred of evidence for his extraordinary claims in all his posts up 'til now, so why start all of a sudden?