Coffee House Musings on Creationist Topic Proposals

I would say something a little different. I would say that with no thought or analysis you'll use disparaging labels to dismiss any scientific hypotheses that conflict with your philosophy or religion.For example, consider the hypothesis that the early eukaryotes came about over millions of years by one prokaryote gradually increasingly the degree of absorption of another prokaryote with which it had established a symbiotic relationship. I think that rather than providing us your detailed analysis of the hypothesis while weighing the evidence from all sides, you'd instead call it a fantastic and meaningless explanation produced by vivid imaginations. Why bother exerting any intellectual effort when you can just call something names and be done with it.
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I expect you'd also impose impossible and arbitrary criteria, e.g.: Generalizing this criteria, you'll reject all hypotheses where even though researchers can't duplicate the events they do have substantial evidence of what happened. This means you'll have to reject all hypotheses about things that take thousands of years to happen, because people just don't live long enough to recreate those events (erosion of caverns in limestone rock, movements of closer stars, growth of glaciers across the northern hemisphere). The same is even more true for things that take millions of years (fossilization, sedimentation, lithification, erosion of thousands of feet of rock, formation of fossil fuels, speciation above the unicellular level, migration of the poles, movements of more distant stars, significant changes in the sun, significant climate change, atmospheric compositional changes, movements of continents, formation of planets, stars and galaxies).And by this criteria you'll be forced to reject as impossible any process that is beyond our means to duplicate, at least at present, or that we have't done yet (sustainable fusion, travel by light sail, manned travel to another planet, volcanos, earthquakes, swarms of locust, rainstorms, tsunamis, black holes).Recreating the events behind a hypothesis before accepting it is absurd and not the way anyone actually thinks, not even you. It's just the cockamamie idea you're stuck on because you don't have any actual reasons for rejecting what the evidence clearly shows. There are plenty of things we can figure out from the evidence that we can't actually do ourselves or see firsthand, and the general outline of the origin of eukaryotes is one of the things about which we've figured out a substantial amount and have a number of viable hypotheses. Actually, they have far better than the foggiest. They have clearly constructed hypotheses. What they don't have is enough time to actually duplicate such processes because the hypotheses say that these things took millions of years. They can only examine the available evidence and hypothesize from that how events transpired.Perhaps you or some of your friends have requested a genealogical analysis that provides a rough outline of your racial history. Can you reproduce that history? No? Then how can you believe it ever happened?Or consider your own family history. You can't duplicate what is in the written records documenting that history, so how do you be sure it ever happened?In sum, your criteria are absurd. Imagine if prosecutors were required to recreate the alleged events before a jury could accept that they happened. That's ridiculous. No reasonable person thinks it's necessary to duplicate what the evidence says happened in order to accept it. What everyone does, including you, is present the evidence supporting what you think happened. And if you approach the gathering, analysis and presentation of that evidence scientifically, then you should have a pretty strong case. And the people hearing your evidence should give it sincere and careful consideration, not just make derogatory comments.--Percy

So I guess until someone produces a hurricane from a low pressure system over the Atlantic, no one can claim to know hurricanes happened. Or until someone erodes a canyon a mile deep, no one can claim to know the Grand Canyon happened. Or until someone pushes up a mountain range miles high, no one can claim to know maintains happened. Or until someone places a planet in orbit around the sun, no one can claim to know planets in orbits happened. Or until someone produces a bird naturally no one can claim to know birds happened.Repeating your stupid premise over and over and over again (I get to call it stupid because instead of addressing all the reasoned explanations for why your premise is wrong, you just keep repeating it again and again) just forces people to address you with ridicule and derision. You're ignoring reason, and so there's no alternative. Well there's a non sequitur. First, abiogenesis and evolution are two separate topics, which you've been told multiple times. Second, no one in science claims to know how abiogenesis occurred. There are a number of hypotheses, but no one actually knows or claims to know. The only thing science asserts with certainty about abiogenesis is that it occurred through natural processes. As you've already been told, science doesn't know eukaryotes evolved, and science does not assert that they could only have evolved from prokaryotes. There are a number of hypotheses, one being that they were the result of a symbiotic relationship between prokaryotes.Again, this has been explained before. Ignoring the explanations and forcing people to repeat themselves just invites ridicule. You're behaving like a real ignoramus. Please engage with what people are telling you.--Percy

You're actually admitting to believing that understanding evolution is equivalent to claiming to know how to produce a eukaryote from a prokaryote? How many other dunderheaded things must you have already believed in order to arrive at that incredibly insipid conclusion? You haven't demonstrated much talent for logical reasoning so far, so I fear what comes next: I think you need to explain why this makes sense to you, because it makes no sense to anyone else. I bet you know a lot about how driving works but don't know any of the details of all the trips from New York to LA.I can't believe your failure in logic hasn't become obvious to you yet. Or maybe you're just so invested in it that you'd rather look a fool than admit you've been wrong all this time.--Percy

For the first time you're actually saying something true that people can agree with. We cannot know things that happened long ago for which almost no evidence survives.But the other thing you've been arguing, that false equivalence, is still false. Knowing how evolution works is one thing, and we understand that pretty well. Knowing how something specifically evolved billions of years ago for which almost no evidence survives is a different thing and is unlikely to happen. As you've been told, there are hypotheses, and while we can continue our research and hope for breakthroughs in the form of new evidence or reasoning, working out how, for example, eukaryotes evolved hasn't happened yet.--Percy

Yeah, well I don't believe you. When someone is determinedly irrational, illogical and ignorant, it's always because of philosophy, religion or politics. That contradicts your assertion that no one knows how evolution works. Why do you think that? Everything evolved according to the theory of evolution.I think what you meant to say, since it would be consistent with what you just said previously, is that we don't know the details of how it evolved. We don't the know the specific mutations or the specific evolutionary selection pressures. We often don't possess a fine timeline of fossil changes. There's a lot that happened in the past that we cant know because it either left no evidence behind or the evidence did not survive. Why do you think this? It obviously isn't true. Successfully producing a eukaryote in the lab would not mean that nature did it the same way billions of years ago. We agree. Actually uncovering enough evidence to *know* how something happened billions of years ago is pretty unlikely. But there are hypotheses based on the scant evidence we do have. One hypothesis is that eukaryotes evolved directory from prokaryote ancestors. In this scenario the nucleus must have somehow gradually evolved.In another hypothesis eukaryotes evolved from prokaryotes through a symbiotic relationship where one prokaryote eventually became the nucleus of the eukaryote.Those are just the simplified versions of a couple hypotheses. I'm sure there are other hypotheses. We could get into more detail about those hypotheses if you can ever get past just repeatedly asserting either the obvious or the absurd. You're making the same mistake as candle2, confusing not knowing something with not knowing anything. I don't think anyone here has any trouble conceding that there is plenty we don't know of life's billions of years of history on Earth. You shouldn't have any trouble at all indicating things we don't know.--Percy

You believe life on earth evolved because you know what evolution looks like in the fossil record, and you know what evolution looks like because you know how it works. Evolution works by selection and mutation resulting in descent with modification. Do we know the details of how the whale's blowhole migrated to the top of its head in terms of mutations, matings and morphological changes? No, of course not. But we still know how evolution works. Science doesn't work by proving things. Haven't you already been told this a number of times?What science does do is gather or produce evidence in support of various hypotheses, and if one hypothesis reaches the point where it is widely accepted within the relevant scientific community then it becomes a theory. But when you ask about the evolution of the whale's blowhole you're asking a question of a different nature. Sticking with your atom analogy, it would be as if you asked if we knew how some atom in the past was split, and then when we couldn't answer because we have no data about the splitting of that atom you went on to claim we didn't know how to split an atom. And you'd be wrong, because we very much do know how to split an atom, in a variety of ways.You're wrong in the identical way about evolution. You're claiming that our ignorance of the details of past evolutionary events means that we don't understand the process by which the changes happened.You understand how houses are built, right? Men measuring and sawing boards, pounding nails, installing windows, adding insulation and shingles, and so forth? But can you provide the exact details of how any particular house was built? Could even an experienced builder reconstruct the precise construction details of any house, even one he built himself a number of years ago? No. Does that mean we don't understand how houses are built?--Percy

The only real question is how long you'll persist in pretending an inability to think rationally. Nobody's this dumb.As has been explained, macroevolution is just a lot of microevolution. Yes, we can describe the process. For sexual species, matings combine the DNA (with mutations) from two individuals. The DNA combining and the mutations guarantee that offspring are never identical to parents. Selection pressures do not remain unchanged forever, and even if they did there's still genetic drift, and so species change is inevitable.The particular detailed course that evolution took for any species, the question you keep asking, is not usually something we can know. That kind of evidence doesn't usually survive. To illustrate, think how hard it would be to analyze your parents' DNA along with your DNA and figure out what the haploid DNA contributions (one from a sperm, one from an egg) from each parent must have been. Now think how much harder it would be to go back one more generation and repeat the exercise for your grandparents. And now imagine how infinitely harder it would be to do this for an organism that went extinct millions of years ago and for which no tissue survives, only what was once bone now replaced with minerals to become stone. All we have is a shape preserved in stone.We can learn a great deal today through genetic analysis that tells us some events of our evolutionary past. For example, chips have 24 chromosome pairs and humans 23. There are two of the chimp chromosomes that if combined would be pretty much the same as one of the human chromosomes. Therefore we know that at some time in our evolutionary past after the chimp/human common ancestor diverged into a line that led to chimps and another that led to humans, that that chromosome in the chimp line spilt, or those chromosomes in the human line combined.But which of these two possibilities is what really happened? We don't know. When did it happen? We don't know. Was the change gradual or sudden? We don't know. What caused the chromosomes to combine or to split? We don't know. Maybe the fact that you're using the word process in two different contexts is confusing you. When it comes to how evolution works, we understand that process very well. But when it comes to evolutionary history, there's a great deal we don't know about what happened. You're referring to both evolution and evolutionary history as the "evolutionary process," and they're not the same thing at all.--Percy

You keep asking the same question, and we keep providing you the answer. The answer is not going to change, yet you keep asking your question without giving any indication that you understand the answer.Unlike most here, I don't believe you're really this dumb. I think it's more that you don't mind making dumb arguments and arguing ignorantly as long as, in your mind, you're advocating for your religious beliefs.Yes, we know how evolution works. Evolution happens with every reproductive event, i.e., every division for single-celled organisms, every birth for sexual species, every production of a spore for fungi and the like. You can watch videos of haploid sex cells (sperm and egg in sexual species) forming, or of the chromosomes of sperm and egg coming together, or of bacteria (which are mostly haploid) dividing. This is where many mutations originate, the foundation of evolutionary change.What we don't know is long ago events for which no evidence survives. But if some evidence survives from a long ago event then we can figure things out to a degree dependent upon the nature and amount of that evidence.But please stop posting messages that in essence say, "If you can be this dumb then you too can be Catholic."--Percy

Either your comprehension skills are sorely lacking or you're a troll. You don't seem to realize how severely you just contradicted yourself. Here you are in Message 142 agreeing with AnswersInGenitals's point that not knowing the details of how a specific thing was done doesn't mean you don't understand the process: And here you are in Message 143, the very next message, again making the type of argument that you just agreed was invalid: Please get a clue.--Percy

Please respond to the answers that have been provided many times now, instead of ignoring them and just repeating your question over and over again.The process of evolution has been explained, that changes occur during reproduction (descent with modification), and that the contributors to each new generation are filtered by natural selection.Working out the specific evolutionary steps in the evolutionary development of any new feature or organism is dependent upon the amount and nature of the available evidence. Of course it is possible to ask unanswerable questions. One need only ask a question about something at a level of detail for which there is no available evidence, which is all you're doing.You say the inability to answer this question renders questionable whether there was a continuity of evolutionary change, but that's absurd. We know that life is just one successive generation after another. Generations of life for which there is no detailed evidence doesn't mean life happened differently, doesn't mean it was a series of special creations by God, just as not having any evidence of how a house was built doesn't cast doubt about whether they used lumber and nails.What would you conclude from the absence of evidence of your own life? What are the details of how you spent some randomly selected day back in 2015? Does your inability to answer that question mean that your life wasn't continuous, that you ceased to exist or existed in some other way for those days for which you have no recollection?In the same way, life didn't stop doing what life does, namely compete and reproduce, during periods for which no evidence survives. And there are many, many such periods. Probably most of evolutionary history has been wiped out or remains forever inaccessible. The same is true of geologic history.Anyway, please respond to the provided answers instead of mindlessly repeating your question.--Percy

There were already a couple replies to this post, but the corrections to what you said deserve emphasis. The degree to which one judges something true should be dependent upon the facts, evidence, data, information, reasoning and analysis. If you make a claim but can't offer much in the way of these things to support it then the rational conclusion is that it's likely not true. You're misremembering. The claim isn't that the ToE is both a theory and a fact. The claim is that evolution is both a fact and a theory. The evidence shows that it's a fact that evolution occurs and has occurred. The theory of evolution makes sense of those facts by placing them in an interpretative framework. Why this reasoning is wrong has been explained to you many times, but you just ignore it and repeat this claim again. Repeating the explanation yet again would be pointless. Perhaps there will come a time when you're ready to discuss this, but you're clearly not there yet. Tanypteryx said nothing like this. He spoke of evidence - you quoted him saying it.We gather evidence to build knowledge. About some of the things we know, like evolution, you're saying it's impossible to know them, despite that we have evidence. One would hope that your faith in Jesus Christ would make you the kind of person who doesn't make up untrue and derogatory things about other people.Science doesn't really deal in truth. It deals in answering questions about the real world by gathering evidence and building hypotheses and theories around it. The more evidence the greater our confidence becomes in what we think we know, but science would never call it truth.--Percy

This is your third of three replies to my Message 127. Let me first address something you said in your first reply, Message 157: To be an accurate analog to what I said about evolution, what you should have said was: Here's another analog to what I said: "I can describe how cells divide, but I can't know the specific way in which any particular cell divided."So to restate what I originally said about evolution: "I can describe the process of evolution, but I can't know any of the specific events of evolutionary history."The reason we can't know any of these things is a lack of evidence. Paraphrasing Wittgenstein, "Whereof one knows not, thereof one must be silent."Moving on to your second reply, Message 217: That wasn't an argument. You said that you "can accept that life on earth evolved without knowing (or anyone knowing) the first thing about how evolution works," and I responded by explaining why you accept that life on earth evolved, that it's because you do know how evolution works. You know that it's natural selection whittling away on descent with modification. You mean Pierre-Paul Grassé, but anyway, are you endorsing Lamarckism as a possibility now? He believed that mutations play no role in evolution. Lysenko in Russia was a supporter of Lamarkism, too. Lysenkoism was a disaster for Russia. Millions died. Why would the fact that the details of most evolutionary change are lost to history prevent us from understanding how evolution works, since we understand it by studying it actually happening? We know that evolutionary change is due to mutations and selection because that's what we see taking place. Do you somehow imagine that if we could observe all the steps in the evolution of the blowhole that we'd find something other than mutations and selection? If so then why would you think that, since it would mean that past life was fundamentally different from life today? Science isn't just that. Before we construct theories we uncover, understand and explain facts. And here are the facts: DNA is the blueprint of life; changes in DNA cause changes in life; changes in DNA over time are responsible for changes in life over time; differential reproductive success governs which DNA changes continue on into future generations. And the theory of evolution places these facts in an interpretive framework for understanding the history of life. I think you should be asking yourself questions about the relationship between evidence and theory. A couple problems here. First, science doesn't prove things. It gathers and interprets evidence to increase our confidence in what we know about the nature of the world. Proofs are the reserve of mathematics. And you're using the word "know" as a synonym for "prove."So second, that means you've expressed a meaningless tautology: If you can't prove it then you can't prove it.It would help if you better understood the nature of science. There's no certainty in science, just confidence proportional to the strength of the evidence and reasoning. Continually repeating that (paraphrasing) "if you can't prove it then you can't know it" just shows how poorly you understand the nature of science. No one here has ever said that the theory of evolution has become a fact. It's that evolution happened and continues to happen that is a fact. We can observe natural selection operating on modified descendants and producing change today, and we can see the record of past change in the fossil record.This answer has been provided to you many times now. It's not going to change because that *is* the answer. If you disagree then argue it, but please don't just keep repeating your same mistaken notions over and over. You put quotes around "know," so I'm not certain what you're trying to say. If you're using "know" as a synonym for "proven" again then that would be incorrect. Nothing is proven within science. But the evidence strongly suggests that evolution explains the history of life we find in the fossil record. It's actually a very good analogy, for the very reasons you give. House construction is "readily observable and repeatable," to use your words, and so is evolution. And just as nothing prevents a house from being added to indefinitely, nothing prevents evolution from continuing indefinitely, i.e., macroevolution.And finally moving on to your third reply: You're overstating the case. We actually observe or detect lots of actual evolutionary change. We've followed the evolution of the SARS-Cov-2 virus from it's original form all the way to BA.4 and BA.5 and other variations, and we can count on mutations producing more variations upon which selection will operate. The reason the original SARS-Cov-2 virus doesn't appear anymore is because the later variations out-competed it, i.e., were selected for. It was an example of differential reproductive success in real time. For another example of observing evolution in action, students of microbiology detect mutations in the lab all the time during coursework. For another example, look at the wall lizards of Pod Mrcaru.We know how evolutionary change happens: it happens via natural selection of modified descendants. What we don't know are the specific details of past evolutionary change, because mutations and selection do not leave evidence behind.Getting back to the chromosome difference between chimps and humans, we have no information about the specific sequence of mutations and reproductive acts and environmental pressures that led to the chromosomes combining head-to-head on the line of descent that led to humans. We know that natural selection working on descent with modification produces this sort of change, but what specific mutations and which specific individuals bred with each other and precisely what the specific environmental pressures were, we don't know. Given that we can literally watch evolution in action, why do you think not having specific evidence of past evolutionary events is a problem to understanding how evolution works?--Percy

Oh, yes, those atheist Darwinists are just the worst, aren't they? Now you're just playing games with the word "know." No one here has used the word "know" in anything other than a scientific sense. Scientific theories are tentative, always open to change.But it is true that science believes that the theory of evolution is the best explanation we have for the diversity of life on earth, including the history of that life as recorded in the fossil record. Please describe the workings in your mind behind repeating what is basically the same question over and over again while never addressing any of the many times it's been addressed.--Percy

Good point. Unable to string together chains of evidence and argument to reach valid conclusions he's forced to play games with words, and undoubtedly he'll do it with "believes", too. Of course everything we've been saying is meant scientifically, but restating it in a manner less vulnerable to purposeful misinterpretation, it is the consensus of the relevant scientific community that the theory of evolution best explains the diversity of life.--Percy

This will likely throw a monkey wrench into any chances there were of Dredge comprehending what we're saying, but have to say it: not even facts are immutable. Even our observations, measurements and experimental results are subject to reinterpretation and/or change.It's important to be clear that what many people call facts are not actually facts. It was not a fact that there were nine planets until 2006 when we lost Pluto, leaving only eight. Of course Pluto continues in its orbit around the sun just as it always has. What was a fact was that there were nine planets under the criteria for planets that existed up until 2006 when they changed the criteria and Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet.It's not possible to bring the number back up to nine by including dwarf planets in the count because Pluto isn't the only one. There's no agreement on an exact count, but the IAU currently counts five dwarf planets: Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.But a fact that I think we did consider an actual fact was that electrons orbit the atomic nucleus in discrete shells. Many websites still describe the Bohr atom where electrons travel "in circular orbits around the nucleus" at discrete energy levels (atom - Orbits and energy levels). This is pretty much what I was taught in 8th grade over half a century ago, and according to Wikipedia it is grossly out of date.Our understanding today is that electrons exist in an electron cloud within which there are atomic orbitals where mathematical functions express the probability of an electron existing at any particular point. Opinion might vary, but in my view how electrons reside in an atom is a fact that has changed.Another fact that has changed is the expanding universe. We knew it was expanding, and we thought it a fact that the expansion was slowing due to gravity because nothing else seemed possible. Then a couple decades ago while trying to measure how fast the expansion was slowing we learned that the expansion was actgually accelerating, giving birth to the term dark energy. I call it a term rather than a phenomenon or a concept because we have no idea what it is. We know what it does, but we don't know what it is.My view, and I know not everyone shares it, is that tentativity extends not only to theory but also to the supposed facts that underlie theory.--Percy

Edited by Percy, : Clear up an ambiguous sentence about the electron.

Edited by Percy, : Typo.