Who Owns the Standard Definition of Evolution

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The thing is the evidence could also point to any number of other manufactured theories tailored to fall in line with the limited evidence.

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That’s true of any scientific theory (the word for it is “underdetermination”). The question is how well do those alternative theories justify the additional assumptions that they make? Can they do as well as predicting what we will find?

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And, of course, if the evidence is genuine, it all falls right in line with Creation.

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How? Creationism would naturally predict that we can find clear limits to common ancestry - the fact that we don’t is a major problem for creationism. Maybe you assume that God would create large amounts of misleading evidence for common ancestry, but it doesn’t seem to be a standard creationist view.

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The conclusion-premise consideration is precisely the point. Between the Evolution Theory and the Fossil Ancestry, which is the premise and which is the conclusion? It could be either-or for both; they both have the same demonstrable proof deficit

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Obviously both would be conclusions, not premises. The anatomical features revealed by the fossils don’t depend on either idea, as should be obvious.And there isn’t a serious deficit of evidence. Creationism has a serious deficit of evidence and Young Earth views are even worse.

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You are correct in saying that I want to see the process demonstrated. The fact that we don't know how to do that does not mean we default to accepting the certainty of the process - quite the opposite, in reality.

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But we do see the processes we just don’t witness them over a period of millions of years. This is just a manifestation of your anti-scientific views.

By not understanding what evolution is you are going to keep making mistakes like this indefinitely. Evolution is not what you choose to think it is, it's what scientists have shown it to be.You can't attack your personal version of the ToE, if you want to challenge it, you need to take the evidence that the ToE is built on and show it to be wrong in some fundamental way. It's no use playing pseudo-philosophical word games that you can't get right (I'll show you why in a minute) science doesn't care about your fallacies - only you do.The ToE like all theories makes predictions. Some of them so precise and critical to it that if the predictions were proven wrong, the theory would collapse. A famous one is a fossil found out of order in the fossil record. Another is a trait found in one 'kind' of animal that can not be there if common ancestry is true - teeth in a bird, feathers on a mammal, a pig giving birth to a dog etc etc. These things would doom the ToE. But they're not found - despite hundreds of years of trying by people like you.As for your conclusion/premise confusion. The observation that fossils existed led to the requirement to explain them. The explanation (conclusion) finally became the ToE. In that order. This is not philosophy, there is no armchair premise, there is observation (data collection) hypothesis building, testing, analysis and conclusions. In multiple lines of research and scientific disciplines all leading to a conclusion which is the ToE. You simply can't hand wave that away - well not unless your medaeval beliefs won't allow you to address properly it that is.

So you admit to being willfully ignorant and still want us to take your pleadings seriously? If you were to actually study evolution you would find your positions as ridiculous as we all do. Please for your own sake, actually learn about evolution before declaring it as invalid.

Circular reasoning is:

1. Because A is true we know that B is true.
2. Because B is true we know that A is true.

When Darwin began there was no A, no evolution, no "natural selection of modified descent." He began with bird and tortoise populations on islands of the Galapagos and compared them to bird and tortoise populations on the mainland. He began with fossils that differed from modern species and from other similar fossils of different ages, both older or younger. He began with studying breeding and how breeders exerted selection pressures to affect the form and function of species. He began with the different appearance of similar species across geographic regions with differing environments. He factored in competition, variation, embryology, instincts and hybrids.From all this evidence Darwin inferred that species experienced selection pressures from their environment, and that each generation was minutely different from the one before. He of course knew nothing of the mechanisms of descent, genetics.Once scientists began considering the theory they found that all existing evidence and each new discovery, each new species uncovered, each new fossil discovered, each breeding experiment conducted, was consistent with the theory of evolution, and each was further confirmation of the theory. And when the science of genetics was born it produced even greater confidence in the theory by confirming most of the relatedness conclusions from morphology of extant species. There is no circular reasoning. Direct fossil species ancestry is indeterminate. There's no DNA. Likely degree of relatedness can be determined through morphological comparisons, but which are sibling species, which are cousin species, which are parent species, which are child species, we can never know with any certainty. We can create "likely" trees because we can exclude certain relationships. For example, we know that the younger species cannot be the parent species in most cases.Validation/certification of fossil species ancestry is not possible. No one is saying it is. We're saying the exact opposite, over and over again, that it is not possible, yet you keep raising this point.But very useful and exact trees can still be derived, just not at the species level. For instance, here's the tree of the major life groups in which we have very good confidence (not certainty and not validated): But we can't do actual trees at for extinct species. There isn't enough information. Charts like this are the best we can do showing fossil span of time and indicating relatedness by vertical proximity, this one of the hominid family: And the above arrangement isn't the only one consistent with the data. Many would place Homo heidelbergensis between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens instead of closer to Homo erectus. Various forms of the word "tentative" have appeared in 19 messages, including Message 365 from you that says, "I realize that all science is tentative." Yet you raise this argument again anyway. When you formed your beliefs, did you hold them to the same rigid standard of doubt? Or were you raised within a community that held these beliefs and grew up accepting them? If the former, please explain.--Percy

What? You've never seen Horse Feathers? I must have seen it at least 10 times by the time I was 20. I assumed everyone would just look at the image or maybe watch a few seconds and say, "Oh, yeah, the I'm Against It song."Anyway, while it was high comedy in 1932 it's a bit dated now. Sorry you watched the whole thing.But the point stands. it's beginning to feel like you're just irrationally against many things for which there is a great deal of evidence. Paraphrasing, "It's conflicts with my beliefs, therefore I'm against it. Evidence? Who cares about evidence? I know what I believe and it's not that. Therefore there must be something wrong with that. I'll just keep reintroducing some really poor arguments while I figure it out."--Percy

The requirement for criminal trials is "beyond a reasonable doubt." Theories in science can definitely be considered "beyond a reasonable doubt," but definitely not "beyond all doubt." Hence tentativity. The "show me" standard was met long ago, before any of us were even born. You've just decided to endlessly repeat "you haven't shown me yet" in response to any evidence. What is profoundly missing in this discussion is, well, discussion, by you of the evidence that has been presented. Never anywhere in this discussion have you said anything like, "I've examined the evidence and have identified these issues." You've only been able to muster things like (paraphrasing), "Exons and introns are intriguing words, but I'm not looking for a lengthy argument."I think everyone here, including yourself, believes that we shouldn't reach conclusions before understanding the facts, yet that's exactly what you're doing. Declarations of belief are perfectly legitimately, but declarations that you'll reject any evidence that conflicts with your beliefs has no legitimacy whatsoever. Please describe just one of these alternative manufactured theories that explains the evidence as well as the theory of evolution. Do you feel obligated out of faith to make insupportable claims like this? For instance, please describe how creation could result in a nested hierarchy in a way that goes beyond, "God just decided to do it that way." Please provide an explanation for why fossils increasingly differ from modern forms with increasing geologic age that goes beyond, "God made the fossils fall into that order when he created Noah's flood." Please explain how all the radiometric elements and their daughter elements reside in geologic layers in exactly the amounts necessary to agree on the age of those layers in a way that goes beyond, "God made it happen that way."In other words, if you've got other answers then they have to be better than, "God can do anything he likes and just decided to do things the way he did." When you don't require evidence for your beliefs then you can convince yourself of anything.--Percy

Both are the conclusion, and neither are the premise.Premise: In the past, there should have been species with a mixture of ape and human features.That's it. Nothing about fossil ancestry or ancestry of any kind. Perhaps you can address our actual premises instead of inventing them. You've shown that to be false. You've been shown demonstrations of the process, and you ignore it.We even see fossils that become less and less ape-like and more and more human-like over a 3.5 million year period.How is that not a demonstration?

You've been shown. The "show me standard of doubt" has been met.And we haven't been urgent. We've reached such strong assurance in the accuracy of the theory of evolution over a 170 year period. Why isn't 170 years good enough for you? Show me. Or are you just making it up? That's just something you say to yourself when faced with mountains of contradictory evidence. I strongly suspect that you have no intention of showing how any of this evidence is consistent with Creation, nor how Creation makes anything that approaches a scientific prediction.In this very post you said you really don't understand what the evidence is, but then you turn around and say that it evidences Creation? That doesn't add up.

Why don't you address the proofs already given?

This is from a while back. This is what you were requesting.I have shown you 5 such tests:1. A nested hierarchy
2. A specific pattern of transition and transversion mutations.
3. A specific pattern of sequence conservation in introns and exons.
4. Transitional fossils.
5. 200,000 shared Endogenous Retroviruses.If you disagree, then show me how these 5 data sets are not a test of the theory of evolution.

Quotable scene (though forgive me if it's from a different movie):

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Groucho is a professor giving a lecture when he notices a student, Harpo, asleep because he had spent all night partying:

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Groucho: "Young man, don't know that you can't burn the candle at both ends?"
Harpo reaches into his coat and pulls out a candle that's lit on both ends.
Groucho does a double-take: "Somebody get his diet!"

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One of the problems with doing a comedy movie is that they lack an audience to tell them what isn't funny. The Marx Brothers solved that problem by including the next movie's material in their vaudeville act and so were able to eliminate or change what didn't work and fine-tune the timing and delivery of what did, resulting in classic hilarity.The centerfold of a Summer 1973 issue of the West German satirical magazine, Pardon, was of the Marx Brothers (Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Karl) saying (translated): "Why Marxism is so popular".All I have left of Pardon is that centerfold (printed black on red, hence not copiable) and a "best of" collection book which includes a cartoon:

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Man with a huge nose cries up to the heavens asking God why he had given him such a huge nose.
God appears from behind a cloud sporting a huge schnoz himself, the same huge schnoz as the man's: "Because I created you in my own image."

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Another cartoon shows Christian missionaries laughing at those stupid natives bowing and worshipping their idol while on the other side of the frame their fellow missionaries are doing the exact same thing with their own idol, Jesus on a cross.

Apologies for such a late reply, considering how far the discussion has grown. But I think some of the topics have been finding a similar thread in some of the posts. I'm replaying to Message 414You are still assuming evolution. If you are looking at diverse species and comparing sequences, you could comment on a ‘sequence similarity’ and build from there. But instead you are then commenting on “sequence conservation” which is assuming the process of evolution between species.Earlier you referred to exons being conserved and introns not being conserved, that “This is EXACTLY what we should see if evolution and common ancestry are true.“ Why would evolution expect that? Why would it expect to retain one part of the genome and not another. It wasn’t meant to explain the differences with evolutionary distance, because I am not assuming evolutionary relationships.But common design can explain those items. I explained it before, but perhaps I need to make it simpler.Exons (mostly) code for proteins. Their nucleic sequences via at least two coding schemes translate into amino acids that form proteins. Proteins are the building blocks of cells. In a common design scenario, the same basic building blocks (proteins) would be used to form the primary matter of different designs. That is why exons would appear to be basically the same across different forms of life, to the extent where the same building blocks are required for the same or similar purposes.Introns, from what we currently know, do not code for proteins. With no need for representing the same building blocks across different life forms, there is no need for them to be necessarily homologous. But introns do have uses, some of them elucidated in the video I embedded in my prior post. A common design explanation might have a necessary or advantageous purpose for them per differing life forms, but the expression of that purpose would not be the same between differing life forms. For example, introns might do purpose-’A’ for one particular lifeform’s building blocks, but for a different life form it would need to do purpose-’B’ for the same building blocks. Thus they would not need to be the same (conserved) between different life forms.Another analogy might be Legos. Exons are the individual pieces. Introns relate to instructions pages using the individual pieces. You would find the same pieces being used among different Lego builds, but the instruction pages would likely be unique to each differing build. You didn’t show anything above to dissuade Common design. You merely declared that it doesnt explain.The problem with your quote on parsimony is that 1) I am not necessarily claiming a supernatural explanation, and 2) your “observed natural mechanisms” have not been “found sufficient to explain the observed effects”. So that is a wash. It wasn’t meant to be. It merely is showing that introns have a number of purposeful uses.But your question does lead to an interesting situation. If in an evolutionary scenario, intron sequences are not being conserved, why would there be a general increase of intron usage as evolutionary time progresses. I wouldn’t think with evolution that something that is not conserved (or as you later say in on example is being removed by evolution) would find an increased and diverse usage in younger life forms. Nor would one expect to see an increase of intron usage to use what is apparently de novo sequences for them. - https://www.sciencedaily.com/...ses/2009/12/091210111148.htm The length of introns in yeast is probably irrelevant. But I would expect yeast to have fewer and/or shorter introns comparable to humans, considering yeast is single-celled and humans are multi-celled organisms. This (again) is under the idea the introns are not coding for proteins, but do have other information (purpose) tied to those proteins which may be differing between organisms.Why they are not the same in yeast as in humans, from a common design explanation, is easy to say. Because introns have different purposes in yeast genes vs human genes. If differing purposes are designed, then of course they would not be the same.

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You are still assuming evolution. If you are looking at diverse species and comparing sequences, you could comment on a ‘sequence similarity’ and build from there. But instead you are then commenting on “sequence conservation” which is assuming the process of evolution between species.

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That’s really a pointless quibble - it doesn’t affect the answer in the slightest.

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Earlier you referred to exons being conserved and introns not being conserved, that “This is EXACTLY what we should see if evolution and common ancestry are true.“ Why would evolution expect that? Why would it expect to retain one part of the genome and not another.

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Why are you asking when you basically give the answer further down? Introns have more freedom to change therefore they will accumulate mutations more rapidly.

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It wasn’t meant to explain the differences with evolutionary distance, because I am not assuming evolutionary relationships.

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That’s an obvious cop-out. If the data is strongly consistent with proposed evolutionary relationships that is evidence for evolutionary relationships. If you have no alternative explanation for that pattern, then that’s too bad for you.

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But common design can explain those items. I explained it before, but perhaps I need to make it simpler.

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Unless it explains the pattern then it is a worse explanation than evolution.I would point out also:The designer by the vast majority of ID supporters is not limited to iterating on existing design. Yet the pattern of exon similarities points directly at such a scenario. Unless you can explain why the designer would do this your explanation is inferior to evolution even there.It is even worse with introns. If there is more freedom for the designer to choose, why is the pattern so consistent with proposed evolutionary relationships ? Even if the designer was iterating on existing designs why are they not as similar as exons - or even more similar? If the designer was producing more original designs why are the introns not even more different?Your speculation that introns somehow controls the assembly of proteins doesn’t help because it’s lacking any quantification that would let you make predictions. I’ll also note that the daphnia research you refer to contradicts your idea of intron function - the added introns don’t have noticeable effect. Science Daily

Einstein once said, “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” We see an example today where some see the authority of the Bible as sufficient for rejecting the truth of evolution.Another great scientist fell victim to this same respect for Biblical authority. Galileo ran afoul of the Inquisition because it was known from Biblical authority that the Earth did not move. Whether you believe the Bible wrong about the Earth or the men interpreting it, at heart the fault lay in misplaced respect for authority.We face the same situation today where sincere Christian’s misplaced respect for the authority of the Bible leads them into errors of the same type as the Inquisition.—Percy