Rebuttal To Creationists - "Since We Can't Directly Observe Evolution..."

Of course that's what he did. He's a creationist! Applying valid tests in an abusive manner (eg, applying the wrong test) is baked into his DNA.The same way that he constantly abuses mathematics by choosing the wrong math models.Show me an honest creationist and I'll show you the personification of an oxymoron. In popular parlance, he would be called a "unicorn", something that shouldn't exist.

Nor is any living organism that inhabits the earth.In trying to explain evolution to creationists, I've taken to using a simple operational definition: Evolution and how it works is tied inexorably to Life and how life works.Therefore, for evolution to violate the laws of thermodynamics, it must be true that life itself also violates the laws of thermodynamics and hence, according to the creationists, life itself could not possibly exist. "Epur si muove." ("And yet it does move." -- Galileo).Life clearly does not violate the laws of thermodynamics, therefore evolution also does not. Every single one of us reduces entropy every second of our lives, until we die at which point entropy catches up again very rapidly.How is that possible? Because none of us is a closed system. Rather, we are all open systems constantly taking in energy to work against entropy.

My introduction to retroviruses and their significance was about 35 years ago in Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics (by Edward E. Max, Creation/Evolution, Issue XIX, WInter 1986-1987 -- link is to the online copy at NCSE). That article also introduced me to a directory publisher's trick to protect their copyright:

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A Possible Way to Resolve the Deadlock

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One way to distinguish between copying and independent creation is suggested by analogy to the following true cases from the legal literature. In 1941, the author of a chemistry textbook was the plaintiff in a suit charging that portions of his textbook had been plagiarized by the author of a competing textbook. In 1946, the publisher of a trade directory for the construction industry made similar charges against a competing directory publisher. In both cases, mere similarity between the contents of the alleged copies and the originals was not considered compelling evidence of copying. After all, both chemistry textbooks were describing the same body of chemical knowledge and both directories listed members of the same industry, so substantial similarity would be expected even if no copying had occurred. However, in both cases errors present in the "originals" appeared in the alleged copies. The courts judged that it was inconceivable that the same errors could have been made independently by each plaintiff and defendant and ruled in both cases that copying had occurred. The principle that duplicated errors imply copying is well established in copyright law. (In recognition of this fact, directory publishers now routinely include false entries in their directories to trap potential plagiarizers.)

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Can "errors" in modern species be used as evidence of "copying" from ancient ancestors? In fact, the answer to this question appears to be "yes," since recent molecular genetics investigations have uncovered some examples of the same "errors" present in the genetic material of humans and apes.

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The point was that for the exact-same errors due to ERVs to show up in the exact-same place in the genome is highly improbable. And applying the multiplication rule to all those independent errors is far more improbable. The only reasonable explanation is that those embedded ERVs show up because they were copied from ancestors to descendents, which is evidence for different species to be on a common tree of descent. In the election deniers' complaints of election rigging in the 2020 election, they loudly proclaimed having hard evidence of massive voter fraud in Edison County. The problem was that Edison County does not exist. That was almost as good as their claims of election fraud in Wisconsin using videos from election offices in Detroit ... which I had always thought was in Michigan.So to double-check I turned to Wikipedia to verify what said about Edison County not existing (I'm ever the skeptic). At the time, Wikipedia redirected me to this article, Fictitious entry:

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Fictitious or fake entries are deliberately incorrect entries in reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopedias (including Wikipedia), maps, and directories. There are more specific terms for particular kinds of fictitious entry, such as Mountweazel, trap street, paper town, phantom settlement, and nihilartikel.

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Fictitious entries are added by the editors as a copyright trap to reveal subsequent plagiarism or copyright infringement.

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Mountweazel refers to fountain designer turned photographer, Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, who died in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine. She never existed but rather was a fake biographical article.It's a fun Wikipedia article to read because of its many examples.

What the hell is that supposed to mean? "do an example of biological evolution"? If English is a foreign language for you, would you prefer using a different one? Man kann „do“ nicht genau benutzen, als man „machen“ kann, stimmt's? Wakirimasen ka?I do however understand a lot of biological evolution and how it works. And you repeatedly demonstrate that you do not understand evolution.How much biology did you take pre-med? Sadly, according to Dr. Eugenie Scott (PhD Biological Anthropology), it turns out that many universities leave out evolution in their undergraduate biology classes, creating a huge gap in their students' education.From when she taught physical anthropology, she tells the story of biology majors, mostly seniors, needing one more science class to meet their general-ed requirements, so they took her class "for an easy A" (the poor fools!). Their own biology classes hadn't covered evolution, but she most definitely did cover it in her class. During the semester, she would watch the light suddenly going on in each of those bio majors' heads: "So that's why ... !" Suddenly, that massive body of isolated and completely unrelated facts all fit together and finally made sense!The key role that evolution plays in understanding biology is expressed in this well-known quote from Theodosius Dobzhansky's article, Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution (American Biology Teacher 35:125-129 (March 1973), p. 129):

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"Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light, it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious, but making no meaningful picture as a whole. . . . Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness."

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Evolution's role as the cornerstone of biology played a part in the creation of the revived creationist movement in the wake of Epperson v. Arkansa (1968). In the post-Sputnik knee-jerk reaction to advance US science and math education, the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) formed in 1958 and developed a biology curriculum in which, being actual biologists and not mere professional textbook writers, they applied what they knew, that evolution is the cornerstone of biology. Susan Epperson was a biology teacher in Little Rock, Arkansas. Arkansas had passed a "monkey law" in the 1920's which would destroy her teaching career just by ever mentioning the "e-word" in class. Her school adopted the BSCS textbook which she was required to use. If she used it then she'd lose her teaching license, but if she refused she'd be fired. So she sued, the case went up to the US Supreme Court, and the "monkey laws" were struck down. That woke up the anti-evolution movement that had lain dormant after its victories in the 20's and which led to the current creationist movement.From the Wikipedia article on the BSCS:

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Evolution controversy

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During the Cold War, in 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched the first Earth orbiting artificial satellite, Sputnik I. The event triggered alarm in United States by heightening fears there that the Soviet Union were achieving technological and strategic superiority. One response to what the Americans termed the Sputnik crisis was to invest money and expertise towards a re-invigoration of the country's science and technological educational system. It was during this period that the BSCS was engaged to develop updated high school biology textbooks. The biology texts they developed covered evolutionary theory, which was by this time overwhelmingly accepted as biology's central organizing principle.

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These books became widely used in the nation's high schools, and as a consequence, the public controversy about the teaching of evolution in public schools re-ignited. After a 1968 Supreme Court decision nullified decades-old laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution in many places of the country, some evolution opponents turned their efforts against the public funding of evolutionary teaching, including publicly funded textbooks. The BSCS textbooks were featured in the 1973 case Willoughby v. Stever, a suit filed by an evangelical opponent of evolution who attempted, and failed, to have the evolution instruction in the textbook legally recognized as an unconstitutional establishment of religious secularism. The case was dismissed as meritless, and was cited as legal precedent in other groundbreaking decisions in the American cultural battle over evolution in the schools.

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So then it is sadly obvious that your own pre-med biology education was impoverished by having leaving out evolution, thus leaving you abjectly ignorant of it. Your religious dedication to the false theology of creationism only makes your affliction even worse.Please learn something about that which you would wish to oppose.

Especially since he obviously doesn't know his sh*t?

And yet again Littleman goes full-blown bozo creationist.So sadly typical. We could set our watches to him. PSEven he doesn't know what he was asking for, so he has to bluff. Again, such a sadly typical creationist.

Neither does studying engineering.You can't just put on a lab coat and suddenly you're a "scientist". Of course, that has never stopped creationists from posing as "scientists" in that manner.

Typical stupid creationist! Are you now going to make the typical stupid creationist claim that evolution violates the laws of thermodynamics?[voice=Talosian_zoo_keeper]Next the subject will yet again grab his script and hurl it against the transparency.[/voice]

Says the creationist who is rubbish without his script. OK, actually you're also rubbish even with your script.

You stupid creationists are so perdictable! Especially you trolls.Well, at least I was able to set my watch off of you. Oh, there's lots that I can do. Including being able to learn and to think. Things that you have demonstrated you are incapable of.That includes understanding what evolution is and how it works, whereas you have repeatedly demonstrated that you do not.I also know what math models are, how to construct one, and why using the right math model for a problem is so important -- all the arithmetic in the world is useless unless you are applying it to the right math model. Sadly, though so typical of a creationist, you still have no clue as you continue to use the wrong math model.HINT: sexual reproduction is not the same as asexual reproduction. Whereas I realize that they are different, you still don't. Were you raised in a fundamentalist Christian home? Did your parents go out of their way to avoid having The Talk with you? Is that what your problem with sexual reproduction is? I mean, you keep bragging about what a high-level genius you are, but you don't even know how to use quote boxes! Even your circle-jerk buddy, Dredge, the self-identified low-grade idiot (IQ of 9), know how to use quote boxes.All you're able to do is to create an unreadable mess!

But you cannot do the math for biological evolution nor for sexual reproduction nor for most anything else. Au contraire! I can also point out that which is so clearly evident to everybody else: that the Emperor (ie, you) has no clothes.

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Verily, you have no clue what you are talking about!Please pull your head out from your auto-proctological exam and learn something (despite it being against your religion): Endogenous retrovirus (ERV)So in your medical school you never learned the difference between viruses and bacteria? Was that because your medical school was of such poor quality? Or because even back then you were so self-absorbed in auto-proctology?

You're talking about 200,000 retroviral infections over millions of years, whereas Kleinman is talking about 200,000 infections hitting a single germ cell all at once. OK, he has thankfully corrected himself slightly by saying that it's the entire germ line that's being hit by 200,000 infections, albeit still simultaneously.First, he's talking about something entirely different than you are. And, knowing lying creationists as I do, I have no doubt that he's doing it deliberately in order to create confusion, the creationist's best friend.But also: Dammit, Jim! I'm an engineer, not a mendacious dissembling creationist! How does that work?Google'ing on how many sperm in ejaculation yielded figures from 100 million to 250 million; the quote at the top of the search page reads:

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A fertile male human ejaculates between 2 and 5 milliliters(ml) of semen (on average about a teaspoon). In each ml there are normally about 100 million sperm. If the concentration falls below 20 million sperm per milliliter there is usually some trouble with fertility.

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So what we're looking at is:

1. 200,000 infections in a single batch of 250 million germ cells means that at most only one germ cell in 1250 (1:500 in a population of 100 million germ cells) got infected.
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2. Only one of those 100-250 million sperm can actually engage in conception, so what are the odds of an infected v. uninfected sperm lucking out? Please note that the only way an ERV insertion can be passed on is through conception (had to include that for Kleinman's benefit, given he doesn't know about sexual reproduction).
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3. On the Q side (ie, probability against), how many ejaculations occur before a conception occurs? Obviously, that would dilute the effects of the infection rate.
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4. Even when a conception occurs, how likely is that to result in a birth? Common wisdom is that about 50% of all human conceptions end up spontaneously aborting (most without the mother even knowing it had happened). From there, how many will be able to make to full-term and how many of those births will be without defects?
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   If an ERV insertion destroys viability in a zygote, then that one will be eliminated. Only the ERV insertions that do not affect viability will be conserved.
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   Gee, if only we had somebody here who could construct a math model and then be able to do the math in order to calculate the probability of that.

So we see that incredibly huge numbers of lethal infections (and mutations) can have occurred and undoubtedly did occur. But the thing is that those failures will all be eliminated and have no further effect. What is left and endures are those few instances that did not reduce viability.So, since Kleinman's "objections" are nothing but BS, I would think that discussion should shift to the question of how ERV insertions happen.Obviously, an ERV insertion in a gene should destroy that gene's ability to produce its protein, but since multiple alleles (multiple gene pairs for a protein that had been produced by duplication mutations) exist then the loss of a single allele should not be felt. And since a substantial percentage of the genome does not encode for proteins (a lot of which are just copies of sequences from elsewhere), an ERV insertion there should have little effect ... and where it does have a substantial effect then it should be filtered out in less than a single generation.So the question that's left to be discussed is how a retroviral infection inserts its RNA/DNA without killing that individual cell. That's my inner engineer talking: how does this actually work?

Last time I flew cross-country, I think we passed over Lake Mead where I saw its bathtub-ring.Back in college (1970-1976), my group of friends included a girl from Yugoslavia (don't even know whether she was Serbian or Croatian -- that distinction became fighting words later -- though one of her decorations was of Belgrade ("White City") so I guess she was Serbian.One day, someone hit her with a joke: "Why don't they let Yugoslavs swim in the Adriatic? Because they'd leave a ring."Oh, and thank you for revealing yourself to be a MAGAt idiot troll.

No, it is not!Please do remind me to never have any kind of medical emergency anywhere in the vicinity of Merced, Calif.