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Author | Topic: Coffee House Musings on Creationist Topic Proposals | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dredge Member Posts: 2850 From: Australia Joined: |
xongsmith writes:
So your best scientific explanation for how a venomous snake came to have hollow fangs is ... wait for it (drum roll) ... "billions of years done it"?
this means that when you wonder how a tooth could ever get hollow, you are showing that you are not really understanding BILLIONS of years.
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8
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nwr writes:
That's the viewpoint known as panadaptationism. Many (perhaps most) evolutionists disagree.
for example, my learning how to play the 5-string banjo probably has NO SURVIVAL ADVANTAGE."I'm the Grim Reaper now, Mitch. Step aside." Death to #TzarVladimirtheCondemned! Enjoy every sandwich! - xongsmith, 5.7dawkins scale
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8 |
Dredge:
So your best scientific explanation for how a venomous snake came to have hollow fangs is ... wait for it (drum roll) ... "billions of years done it"? You made me think of the FBI Agent in the movie "Some Like It Hot" when he comes into the birthday cake sceneand is asked by the head gangster "Do you wanna make a Federal Case out of it?" He grabs the microphone to the earphones off the guy, cranks up the volume up to 11, and drawls out a long loud "YEEAAH!!!" so that's my non-herpetologist answer."I'm the Grim Reaper now, Mitch. Step aside." Death to #TzarVladimirtheCondemned! Enjoy every sandwich! - xongsmith, 5.7dawkins scale
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8 |
Dredge:
Why then didn't the snake simply choose prey with softer skin? likely there were fewer and fewer of fewer of them around, due to predation. the snake probably enjoyed the softies he did find. but there were not enough to live by. ya takes what ya kin get."I'm the Grim Reaper now, Mitch. Step aside." Death to #TzarVladimirtheCondemned! Enjoy every sandwich! - xongsmith, 5.7dawkins scale
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
I've been studying "creation science" since about 1981. My first conversations with a creationist was in person with a co-worker circa 1985 (when we met again six years later, he had remained a Christian but was thoroughly disgusted by creationists and never wanted to have anything to do with them ever again. That was especially after we went to a debate to see his heroes, the master debaters (play with that word pair however you want) Gish and H. Morris, in an actual debate with Thwaites and Awbrey. As we were departing he kept muttering in shock: "But we have mountains of evidence. Why didn't they present any of it? But we have mountains of evidence ... ". After that, I pursued discussion online starting around 1987 with the creationists on CompuServe.
I have learned a few things about the total BS that creationists engage in. Part of their schtick is to try to bog us down with their "impossible questions", basically like that uppity Gentile who c. 20 BCE challenged Pharisee Rabbi Hillel to recite from memory the whole of the Torah (first five books of the Old Testament, as they were trained to be able to do -- far worse, for millennia at Yeshiva the students memorized the entire Talmud which is the size of an entire encyclopedia without any indexing or even a table of contents to be able to look anything up anyway. The proselytizing training materials of the Jesus Freaks circa 1970 were filled with "witnessing dialogues", often in cartoon form (we've seen a number of them in Chick Pubs tracts) in which you, the SAVED ONE, are to bombard your intended victim with huge "unanswerable questions" that will leave him confused and vulnerable for your soul-saving coup-de-grace. Half a century later, that is still their pathetic model. So in typical dishonest creationist fashion, Sludge wants to keep us on the defense trying to explain evolution to him in response to his highly specious "challenges". Well, shouldn't we be asking him what he thinks the actual problem is that he is "presenting" to us? For example, his latest foil in re the Trinity, candle2, challenged us to explain how a dog could give birth to kittens (or something equally stupid). The real answer to that one is that that is not how it works -- it's not how any of it works. So instead we need to ask them why they think that there's any problem. For example, a creationist recently asked me to explain how sexual reproduction evolved, something that I had already gone over with him back in 1998 (to which he had no response at the time except to run away), so I countered with asking him what kind of problem he thinks that that poses for evolution. I think that is a very reasonable question -- unless I know what part of that he seems to be having a problem with then how can I respond in a constructive manner?Predictably, no response from him. For example, consider the old joke (usually cast as racial) of a dumb person pondering the thermos bottle. "It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold, but ... how does it know which to do?" You could explain the heat transference aspects of the thermos bottles over and over again, but as long as that guy has fixed in his mind that the thermos bottle must be making a conscious decision of which to do, he will resist all your efforts in the most stubborn manner possible ... and beyond! That is what we are faced with. Therefore, we cannot afford to take any creationist's questions at face value. There are always some kind of assumptions that creationists are making about evolution or anything else which are misguiding them. If we make the mistake of assuming that that their basic assumptions and understandings are normal, then that just sent us off on a fool's errand. Also trust all creationists to never tell you what their assumptions are nor what they are actually talking about. Confusion is their only friend whom they would never abandon. A local YEC activist (who in all of 20 years worth of email correspondence always refused to ever discuss any young-earth claims -- my evidence that even he knows them to be crap (similar experiences with other YECs)) would repeatedly hurl one "unanswerable question" after another at me and I would respond to each and every one of them. But there was one question that he not only could never respond to, but he would also run away from terrified (one time he was so terrified that he immediately cancelled his email account and did not publish his new one for two years thereafter). That question? "What are you talking about?" In more than four decades, I have yet to meet even one creationist who is able, let alone even willing, to even attempt to approach that question. Think maybe it's time to hit Sludge with it?
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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Sorry, don't know banjo so the number of strings mean little to me. Though I studied a bit about the guitar notes, so I assume something similar. Hands getting too arthritic now so I'll just stick to keyboard.
Back in the late 1960's, folk singer Pete Seeger was on a variety show with a banjo. He described playing it as picking out one melody at the bottom and another melody at the top, all at the same time; (from memory):
quote: Just thought you might enjoy that one.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
Found any whales with a fused sacrum yet? LOL! I already gave that info to you, you fucking idiot. You claim to have found something different? So what? Battling links? Really? Let's face it: you are a creationist. That immediately makes you evil (by your own admission!) and everybody even remotely familiar with this kind of discussion knows that creationists lie all the time! -- how could creationists not lie all the time since their entire thing is to deny reality? Do please make some kind of attempt at some kind of actual argument. Your persistent idiocy is so tiresome.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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but i was saying that none of us humans can comprehend or grok what BILLIONS actually means. we use math, but we have no feel for these gigous numbers. this means that when you wonder how a tooth could ever get hollow, you are showing that you are not really understanding BILLIONS of years. I take you to be a mathematical kind of guy. Darwin wrote regarding the evolution of the eye that our ability to imagine how that could happen fails us, but when we apply reason we can work it out. The same is true whenever we try to work with higher diimensions: while we cannot visualize 11 dimensions, we can still work with them rigorously through mathematics. Back shortly before 1990 I read Richard Dawkins' "The Blind Watchmaker", including the first half of his Chapter Three, "Accumulating Small Changes" (as I recall). He described a simple program, WEASEL, which randomly generated an arbitrary string from Shakespeare, "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL". Rather than a model for evolution (which he never claimed it to be) it still did illustrate the difference between single-step selection (a series of generating a random string that, should it fail to any degree, sent you back to starting entirely from scratch -- ie, the typical "probability model of creationists") and cumulative selection in which you'd produce a population of possible solutions and then select the closest one from which to "spawn" the next population of possible solutions (with each new contestant differing from the selected parent by only one letter). He never provided example code (as I recall, he had written it in BASIC on a Mac, so an interpretive program (always slower than compiled code) that he left running over lunch -- the single-step selection solution would take a far greater time to succeed than the age of the universe). So I took his description of the program as a specification and developed my own code which I called MONKEY (for Eddington's infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters banging out Shakespeare completely at random). Years later, my code was added to the collection at a web site devoted to these programs where it was deemed to be the one most faithful to Dawkins' (of course, since I used his description as my spec). I could not believe Dawkins' claim, so I wrote my own version of his program in Pascal, my working language at the time. When I ran it and it worked incredibly well (produced the alphabet in alphabetical order in about 20 seconds on a Norton Factor 2 IBM XT clone), I still couldn't believe it nor trust it (completely opposite of a creationist's reaction, BTW). What was the trick? As an engineer, I had to know, so I analyzed the probability math involved, which involved Markov chains (something that "Little Man" (AKA "Kleinman") was harping on elsewhere to make himself look more important -- basically, you construct a finite state machine -- I did it all the time at work, especially for working out the serial protocol for a new GPS receiver, such that I basically became the specialist for that (*) -- and you would progress from step to step in accordance with the probability of taking either step. Basically for every step in the MONKEY Markov chain, there was a probability that you would progress to the next state, a probability that you would stay at the current state, and a probability that you would regress to the prior state. BTW, each state involved choosing a single position in the string at random and replace it with a random letter. Here's the thing, though. The closer you approached the target string, the greater the probability of choosing a location with a correct letter and replacing it with a wrong letter (BTW, this completely negates typical ID discussion of this experiment, which falsely assumes "locking rings" that lock in any correct letter -- sorry, not in the original spec and nowhere to be found in my own MONKEY (I have posted my source code in both Pascal and in C, so show me those "locking rings!" They do not exist!)). Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith FRSE (he was an organic chemist and molecular biologist at the University of Glasgow) wrote in Seven Clues to the Origin of Life (1985):
quote: Well, why does MONKEY and WEASEL work so incredibly well? Even in the Markov-chain probability figures, the probability of any individual progressing towards that target string is still very low But the secret is that MONKEY, WEASEL, and evolution itself working through cumulative selection are progressing along many parallel paths. Also, cumulative selection uses small steps starting from a previous point as opposed to single-step selection which attempts it all in one swell foop (like Dredge's stupid typical creationist belief in individuals acquiring a new complex characteristic in a single instant, AKA saltationism). It would take single-step selection, creation ex nihilo's method, trillions of years to generate my alphabet target string (assuming an impossibly fast super-computer running continuously), yet it only took my XT no more than 30 seconds (depending on population size) using cumulative selection, which is evolution's method. What is the probability of any single path succeeding? Small and it gets smaller as you approach the target string (ie, the probability of replacing a correct letter with a wrong one increases). But what is the probability of every single individual attempt failing every single time for generation after generation after generation? Vanishingly small, which makes an eventual success inevitable. Ever play Lotto or SuperLotto or even Powerball? Ever worked out the probability that you individually might win? Very low. But with so many millions playing that same game, what is the probability that somebody, anybody in the entire US population might win? Very likely! Parallel paths within a population. Sounds like something custom-made for evolution! Basically, the "evolution lottery" boils down to a matter of the probabilities of the needed changes not happening becoming vanishingly small as to become impossible. So the probability of them happening becoming inevitable.
That is why evolution works! And why it works so well. * FOOTNOTE:
Engineering sea story (we used to call them "war stories" when I was in the Air Force). One of the GPS receivers used in its serial communications protocol a very different floating-point format, ones from DEC computers instead of the now ubiquitous IEEE 754. Binary floating-point format involves a string of bits divided into three fields: a sign bit, a binary exponent field in two's complement, and a binary mantissa. This also usually comes in single-precision (C's float datatype) and double-precision (C's double). The problem was that the exponent and mantissa fields in the DEC formats were a different size than in IEEE 754. My task was to write conversion functions to convert incoming DEC numbers to IEEE 754 for internal use and then from IEEE 754 to DEC for commands to the receiver. Not only did that involve a lot of bit fiddling with no room for error, but on top of that the DEC numbers were big-endian while our device was little-endian, so I had to switch those bytes around as well. This was a non-trivial task that required a lot of concentration and rigorous attention to detail. At the time, I assisted a West Coast Swing teacher, including in her ladies styling class. I quickly realized that having a guy sit there watching women learning styling would seem rather creepy to them, so I developed the habit of bringing something to read or to work on so that I wouldn't be watching. So I brought in my notes and scratch paper and within one 45-minute class I not only worked out all the bit fiddling, field resizing, byte reversal, etc and even started writing the code. Next Monday all I had to do was type in and complete the code, test it (worked perfectly), and schedule the code review. Going into the code review, I told everybody the circumstances under which I had written it, which perked everybody up. I have never seen a room full of programmers work harder than they did to find a fault, any fault, in my code. Not only could they not find any fault, but it had come very close to the Holy Grail of Programming: a program that not only compiles clean the first time, but also works perfectly the first time.
Edited by dwise1, : added footnote, Cairns-Smith quote, and a little minor cleanup
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Dredge Member Posts: 2850 From: Australia Joined: |
792/53
Stile writes:
No one needs the theory of UCD to understand how viruses evolve and how they affect humans and other species.
Understanding how viruses evolve and how they affect humans and other species (due to UCD) leads to knowledge that guides us into efficiently creating vaccines and medicines.Dredge writes:
A change in allele frequency within a population is explained by mechanisms such as natural, artificial and sexual selection, mutations, genetic drift, recombination.Stile writes:
What crap. No scientific publication would describe the mechanisms of evolution as UCD, or vise-versa. And the theory of UCD can be defined without even mentioning the mechanisms of evolution. Exactly: UCD. The mechanisms of evolution are indepedent from the theory of UCD ... the former exist regardless of the latter. You don't need the theory of UCD to understand and utilize the mechanisms of evolution. Medicine utilizes facts such the mechanisms of evolution, but medicine has no use for the theory of UCA.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
OK, I'm calling "bullshit" on your nonsense.
When an electrical engineer designs a circuit, how much does he directly depend on quantum mechanics? Answer: none. Does what he does do ultimately depend on quantum mechanics? Yes, of course! Basically, why would you ever require generation after generation of electrical engineers constantly reinvent the wheel? Does that electrical engineer ever have to think ALL THE TIME about the foundations of everything that he does and think? Of course not!, you fucking idiot! He already know what works! I forget the actual quote or its source, but: We can see so far because we stand upon the shoulders of giants. Every medical researcher and medical tech knows the theoretical basis of their work. Do they have to think of that basis all the time and base everything they ever do on those fundamental principles? Of course not! Those fundamental principles are basic knowledge, basically a given for them. No need to question any of it. IOW, your "weak questions and vague bullshit" are nothing but meaningless bullshit meant only to try to distract them from their far more important work. If you cannot lead or follow, then do please get the fuck out of the way! You fucking stupid idiot! Edited by dwise1, : minor cleanup
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Dredge Member Posts: 2850 From: Australia Joined: |
Ol' misery guts.
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Dredge Member Posts: 2850 From: Australia Joined: |
I have considered your comments with an open and unprejudiced mind. My conclusion is that I have deemed them devoid of merit.
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ringo Member (Idle past 411 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Dredge writes:
I laughed when I read that. You seem to be saying that one mutation starts with one LEGO and other mutations each add a LEGO until the structure is complete. in fact, a single mutation would produce only a tiny fraction of the gland What actually happens is that a mutation makes a change in an existing structure and subsequent mutations make further changes. The originally function of the structure will continue as long as the accumulated changes allow it - and a new function may arise at some point in the series of changes."Oh no, They've gone and named my home St. Petersburg. What's going on? Where are all the friends I had? It's all wrong, I'm feeling lost like I just don't belong. Give me back, give me back my Leningrad." -- Leningrad Cowboys
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ringo Member (Idle past 411 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined:
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Dredge writes:
The prey animals with thicker skin had a better chance of survival, so thicker skin became prevalent. The thin-skinned prey may well have become extinct because of snake predation. the snake had to evolve tougher fangs coz its prey was evolving tougher skin? I love it! Why then didn't the snake simply choose prey with softer skin? Similarly, the snakes with stronger fangs had a larger food supply (thin-skinned AND thick-skinned), which increased their chances of survival. You really shouldn't be laughing at ideas that are easy to explain."Oh no, They've gone and named my home St. Petersburg. What's going on? Where are all the friends I had? It's all wrong, I'm feeling lost like I just don't belong. Give me back, give me back my Leningrad." -- Leningrad Cowboys
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Tangle Member Posts: 9489 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.9
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For god's sake. What's wrong with using google?
Snakes evolved venom fangs multiple times from wrinkles in their teeth | New ScientistJe suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London. Olen Suomi Soy Barcelona. I am Ukraine. "Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
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