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Author | Topic: Coffee House Musings on Creationist Topic Proposals | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Tanypteryx writes: All we ever get from them is "evolution is bad and it's a religion, just like us." Strange how you never hear scientists saying, "Creationism is just another scientific theory that uses evidence!". It seems creationists start out already believing that their beliefs are inferior to science because they are both religious and based on faith.
Does anyone think he will realize he's wrong when we tell him, if this pathetic thread proposal is promoted? I predict he will ignore us and spout other total BS mischaracterizations of evolution. That's my guess as well. When someone fails to understand that the majority of species on Earth are asexual, where can you really go from there? Will such a closed mind even let in the additional facts of hermaphroditic species?
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Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Jzyehoshua writes: If by asexual you mean rare cases of virgin births which could be viewed as vindicating the Bible rather than disproving it. We mean asexual, not parthenogenesis. The vast majority of organisms on Earth reproduce by making clones of themselves. No sex involved. Have you heard of bacteria? There are also hermaphroditic species. These are species where each individual has both sperm and eggs. A classic example is the common earthworm. When earthworms mate they both exchange sperm, and they use that sperm to fertilize their eggs. Earthworms | National Wildlife Federation In fact, some of the most basal living vertebrates are also hermaphrodites. Find out What the Characteristics of a Sea Squirt Are.
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Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
dwise1 writes: Jessica H. Christ! What is wrong with these people? A combination of a lack of curiosity, entrenched ignorance, and tribalism.
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Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
dwise1 writes: Says he on the title page: I don't know if I should laugh or cry. I'm going for laughter. It's as if he took his used toilet paper over to the Louvre and expected them to hang it on the wall next to the Rembrandts. Hilarious. I wonder if he has ever read a peer reviewed article before. What would he put in his Methods section?
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Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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MrID actually came close, but didn't quite get there. He could have gone with the classic example of Mercury's orbit falsifying Newton's model of gravity, or even bent starlight. He could have then pointed to a similar experimental test that falsifies evolution. But . . . no. Instead, we just get the insistent "Evolution is falsified" over and over without any actual falsification. Perhaps falsifications are invoked like Candyman and Beetlejuice?
Edited by Taq, : No reason given.
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Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Dredge writes:
In fact, I don't accept any scientific explanation for the fossil record, because it's impossible to know what process was responsible ... hence my contention that anyone who claims to know how evolution works is talking nonsense.
Your refusal to address evidence does not make the evidence go away. I think most rational people would agree that we can determine what happened in the past by looking at evidence in the present. As to evolution, we have that evidence. If evolution did produce those fossils and the biodiversity we see today then we should see a twin nested hierarchy. These would be correlated trees of life for morphology and DNA sequence. That's exactly what we see. We see a nested hierarchy. This is smoking gun evidence for evolution. We can even test for specific mechanisms. For example, we observe that there are specific biases in substitution mutations where similar bases tend to get replaced for one another. This means A's tend to be replaced by G's and C's tend to be replaced by T's (and vice versa). These are called transition mutations. Switching out dissimilar bases is called a transversion mutation. We can measure the percentage of transition and transversion mutations happening in modern genomes, in real time. We can then compare genomes between species. Guess what? We see the exact same pattern. The ratios of transition and transversion mutations between species matches the same pattern we observe in mutations happening in the present day.
Human Genetics Confirms Mutations as the Drivers of Diversity and Evolution But of course, you just ignore this evidence because you have deemed it impossible to learn about the past by looking at evidence in the present. The only reason I can find for doing so is to hold on to your YEC beliefs because I think you know where the evidence is pointing.
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Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Dredge writes:
"Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented".
That's because Christians keep saying that if evolution is true then the Bible is false. When faced with the overwhelming evidence for evolution, what are people supposed to think of the Bible?
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Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Dredge writes:
Please be advised that a theory is not knowledge.
That would be intellectual nihilism. You would rather destroy all knowledge then accept the knowledge you don't like.
For your psychological well-being, you and your fellow atheists need to delude yourselves that ToE is a fact and is therefore "knowledge" ... which is actually oxymoronic ... if it were a fact it wouldn't be a theory.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered."--Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory"
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Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Percy writes:
We can't know how evolution happened in the past because selection and mutation do not leave evidence behind. Actually, that's not strictly true since mutations in modern descendants can often provide decipherable evidence about the relatedness and evolutionary descent of lifeforms, both extant and extinct.
We know that mutation is responsible for the DNA sequence differences between species because of how the differences are biased, as I discussed in post 234. Mutation does leave evidence that we can see today. We also have evidence of selection acting on genomes in the form of sequence conservation. There are regions of the genome that change more slowly over time, and this is due to selection of deleterious mutations in functional DNA.
But the important point is the distinction between how evolution works and how it happened. They're two different things. One we know, the other we usually don't, except perhaps at a very undetailed level. For instance, while we don't know the details of the evolution of the whale's blowhole, we do have fossils that indicate a progression (in different ways in different lines of descent), and we do have fetal development, which often provides clues about evolutionary history.
Mutation and selection in combination with vertical inheritance will produce a nested hierarchy. Whales fit into the nested hierarchy of mammals, and more broadly the nested hierarchy of vertebrates. This is evidence that their genomes were the product of evolutionary mechanisms and vertical inheritance. We could also add patterns of sequence conservation and mutation bias to that list.
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Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Dredge writes: No contradiction. According to taxonomy and physiology, humans are obviously more closely "related" to other mammals than they are tonon-mammals like mollusks and fish ... regardless of being "related" according to the theory of UCD. ID/creationists still can't seem to wrap their heads around the completely non-necessity of phylogenies for functional organisms. If ID/creationism is true, why couldn't chickens and humans have nearly identical insulin and insulin receptor genes while humans and pigs have very different insulin genes? Or why couldn't pigs have an entirely different way of regulating blood sugar other than insulin since they were created separately from humans? There is absolutely no biological reason why we should see more similar insulin genes between humans and pigs than between humans and chickens OTHER THAN SHARED ANCESTRY AND EVOLUTION. The only explanation that will necessarily produce the nested hierarchy that we observe is shared ancestry and evolution. There is no reason why we would expect this pattern from ID/creationism.
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Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Dredge writes:
But if by "relatedness of life", you mean the theory of UCD ... no, that theory is irrelevant and useless to medicine.
Wrong.
quote: quote: quote: quote: Edited by Taq, .
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Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Dredge writes:
Nonsense. Humans are mammals, so anyone with half a brain would figure that insulin from other mammals would likely work better than insulin from non-mammals like mollusks or fish ... nothing to do with UCD.
The only reason we would expect life to fall into a nested hierarchy is if common ancestry is true. The evidence for common ancestry is that there is a real group called mammals, and that humans belong to that group. No such grouping is expected from special creation.
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Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Dredge writes: You could cut through all your stupid Darwinist bullshit by simply providing an example of how UCD has provided a practical use in biology or medicine ... but you can't, bcoz no such use for the theory of UCD exists. The common ancestry of mammals and vertebrates certainly matters to medicine since everything from zebrafish to rodents to primates are used as models for how medicines will behave in humans. This includes changes in gene expression and embryonic development. The reason other species are used in biomedical research is because of common ancestry and evolution.
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Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Dredge writes:
Do certain non-human species serve as models for how medicines will behave in humans because someone believes that all life on earth descended from a common ancestor? As I said earlier, these models are used because the animals used are thought to share common ancestry with humans. If you accept common ancestry amongst vertebrates (including humans) but are challenging common ancestry between much larger groups then now would be the time to say so.
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Taq Member Posts: 10085 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Dredge writes: Certain non-human species share genetic similarities with humans, which is why those species are used as models for how medicines will behave in humans. False. It is because those genetic similarities are due to shared ancestry and evolution that the non-human species are used. Those processes will conserve functions, something that is not guaranteed in creationism.
Tell me, how many scientists had to believe in Universal Common Descent in order for those genetic similarities to exist? The genetic similarities exist. Period. It is because of the pattern of genetic similarities that scientists concluded life shares a common ancestor. That's what creationists just can't seem to understand. It isn't the genetic similarities. It is the PATTERN of similarities that points to shared ancestry and evolution. That pattern is a nested hierarchy.
10? 20? 100? 1000? How many? Was there a critical mass? It was the critical mass of evidence that turned the tide. This is also something creationists like yourself just can't seem to understand.
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