Patterns and Tautologies (The Circular Logic of Homologies)

Hello Bluejay, You’re right NS is common sense but it tells us nothing of note. Neither do we know as an evidential matter that there is no designer that might be responsible for creation. So both possibilities should remain on the table until one or the other can be evidentially proven rather than just assumed. And there clearly is a pattern, undeniably so but just what the cause of the pattern is has not been proven by either side of the debate. If the ToE advocates could gather a bit of positive information-building mutational evidence rather than assuming its occurrence despite the lack of evidence, it would be a great start. The only things that have been demonstrated are mutations that cause pathology, neutral mutations that have no effect and then there are the few beneficial mutations that only ever involve a loss of information.
What you need to demonstrate is mutational changes that are beneficial and involve an increase in information. There are none of those but we need plenty to prove that evolution is even remotely possible. All beneficial mutations that add information and code for something new and useful exist only in the minds of evolutionary believers.“I’ve never found a mutation that added information. All point mutations studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce genetic information and not increase it.” (Lee Spetner -1997 -Information and Communications Expert.)Ernst Chaim -biochemist and Nobel prize winner said ”there is no evidence for chance mutations creating living systems.’
So the point is why assume -you need proof which doesn’t exist, therefore assumptions and philosophy take the place of evidence -is that science? Again, these are examples of loss of information, not information gain which one requires for evolution. Creationists and ID proponents both understand and accept loss of information as factual, it’s the gain that is the problem. Similarities exist but the cause of these similarities is the big question. Radiometric dating dates rocks not fossils and radiometric dating is based on assumptions and is contradictory -different radiometric techniques often giving vastly different ages for the same rocks and all based on unprovable assumptions. As for the fossils themselves, the pattern is of sudden appearance of fully formed kinds of organisms and it certainly doesn’t show a slow steady build up of change with clear relations along the way. Most fossils show sudden appearance, stasis with minor variation and then often extinction. The organisms that don’t go extinct look pretty much the same as those living today. Science should be evidence based and technological advance is based on that sort of evidential science not the sort of ”science’ that imagines change without proof and presumes to give us an alternative creation story based on material processes alone. No actually the creationist model is based on what is actually shown, the evolutionary model presumes too much and then tries to collect the evidence to support the assumptions and ignores the bulk of the fossil data that shows stasis, not gradualism; extinction not evolution. Anomalies just show that there are huge problems with the materialist assumptions. Are we really sure that those parts of the genome don’t do much at all? Like organs that were once assumed to be vestigial and turned out to have a purpose. From what I hear a lot of ”junk’ DNA is turning out not to be junk after all -which would support a creationist model rather than an evolutionary one.

Hello Wounded King and thanks so much for tracking that quote down and reminding me to state my sources. I usually do but perhaps I was rushing, my apologies for putting you to all that trouble.The point of the matter is that many organs were given vestigial status in the past (thanks to evolutionary premises) and only later was their function determined at which point they were one by one dropped from the 'vestigial' list.
Evolutionists like 'vestigial' because it seems to point to transformation. Unfortunately it really doesn't, since the loss of something that had a function does not show us how new and extremely complex organs arise by purely material processes. Blind cave bats had eyes which lost their function but how did their eyes arise in the first place? That is the point to address. They are easy to lose through mutation but there is no evidence that they can come into being in the first place through mutation and natural selection.
A little bit of scientific evidence would help.

Hi, Beretta.Thanks again for your response. I’m not quite sure I understand what this sentence is getting at. At the time NS was first proposed, it was huge: no one had come up with it before, even though, to us today, it seems completely obvious. It told a whole lot of note back in Darwin’s day. The fact that nobody sees it saying anything of note today says a lot for our progress as a civilization away from superstition and towards a natural, scientific understanding of the world. So, what you’re saying is that the nested hierarchical patterns do exist, but that there is no evidence linking this pattern to mutations? I thought that was what I addressed very clearly at the end of the post you just responded to. Here’s the concluding paragraph: There is a pattern of genetics that conforms to the hierarchical pattern of morphology, even in parts of the genome that are not involved in morphology. In fact, cladograms that use genetics rarely (if ever) use morphological genes. They use proteins that are involved in cellular functions. This clearly divides morphology and genetics into separate patterns.And, the pattern that we see is that closely-related animals have vast overlaps in the base-pair sequence of their genes. There are a few differences in random places. We have shown, in stacks of laboratory experiments that would fill an apartment waist-high, that these changes that we see can and routinely are caused by normal, everyday environmental phenomena, such as solar radiation. Indeed, we even see that some apparently have no particular cause that we can determine, at all (check out arabidopsis.org and flybase.org for hordes of such information). The different genes you will see include insertions, deletions, point mutations, fissions/fusions and any other kind of mutation. And, most of these will only be morphological mutations, simply because the easiest way to screen large populations of Arabidopsis and Drosophila for mutations is to find individuals that look different.Your point about beneficial mutations is extremely trivial. If you could show me the difference between a non-beneficial allele and a beneficial allele, I could take you to a biochemist who could systematically show you how each base-pair difference could easily be the result of UV radiation, a free radical, a random replication error, an awkward crossing-over, an inversion or whatever. It fits seamlessly into the pattern. Creationists keep pointing this out, but you don’t seem to realize that this fits the pattern we see in cladistics very well. The vast amount of gene sequence differences between, for example, a human and a chimpanzee, have no major effect at all, and only a few are beneficial. Many harmful sequences also persist, but these generally appear at lower frequencies for obvious reasons. The pattern is extremely consistent with a mechanism of random mutation, but it is not consistent with a pattern of purposeful, specific creation. Why did you ask for vestigial traits, in the first place, if you were just going to dismiss them as irrelevant when we provided them for you? I find that rude and totally unacceptable in intellectual debate. (Please note the color-coding) But, the fossils are in the rocks, and radiometric dating dates the rocks from the time they solidified, which means the fossils could really only be older than the radiometric dating says.Only if you're a RATE project researcher who thinks a hundred years of improvements upon dating techniques are invalid simply because they give consistent dates.What assumptions?You’re still attacking each individual pattern as if it were in total isolation from the others. Despite your claims here, the patterns are largely in agreement, and you can keep arguing that each individual method is imperfect, but I can always turn it around and bolster my argument with any of the other half-dozen patterns I can think of right now (geological layers, fossil succession, morphological nested hierarchies that continue seamlessly into the present, along with genetics data, plus biogeography, which is the patterns of distribution of organisms, and probably others that other people can come up with). That’s the beauty of having lots of data that agree with each other. Any snapshot of the past is going to look like stasis, Beretta, and all we’re ever going to get are snapshots. You can’t see gradualism in a single fossil: you can only see it over significant amounts of time. You should spend some time studying in detail the fossil remains of hominids in Africa. I think you’ll find that everything is not clear-cut and easy to classify, as you seem to think it is. Most fossil specimina that you may find could easily have as many different identifications as scientists who have tried to identify it. It’s not clear-cut. It isn’t easy to tell the difference between a Homo habilis and a Homo ergaster. Some people believe many H. ergaster should be called a different species, H. rudolfensis, and some people see Australopithecus as more than a single genus.Do you wonder why there’s such a big debate in recent years as to whether H. floresiensis (the “hobbit”) is an erectine or a dwarf H. sapiens? It’s because the ways to tell the two lines of our genus apart are not all that straightforward and clear-cut. There isn’t a distinct dividing line between the various species of Homo; there is kind of fuzzy, blurry line that we have decided to assume is sharp just to make things easier to understand.But, even our snapshots show us a nice progression in several dozen locations: flatfish, frogamanders, fishapods, equines, whales, sauravians, therapsids, etc. How can you argue with these? These are just high-resolution microcosms of the entire big picture: we see a gradual accumulation of whale traits in a series of fossils beginning with hoofed land mammals and ending with a streamlined, giant marine animal, and the period of change is verified, not only by morphology, but by non-morphological genetics and radiometric dating. None of these is perfect, but they all tell the same story.The same goes for the Tiktaalik series, the horse series, the theropod-bird series, and lots of others. When we see the fossil record as a whole, we see fish early in the record, then we see lines of fish that gradually accumulate features associated with land vertebrates until, eventually, land vertebrates begin to show up. Then, we see land vertebrates that gradually accumulate reptile features, until, eventually, we see reptiles. Then, we see various lines of reptiles gradually accumulate the characters of turtles, squamates, birds and mammals, and, eventually, we see these crown groups appearing.And, you keep saying that every step shows stasis, and not gradualism. Yet, all the steps together show a progression, and we have enough fine resolution to show that the gradualistic details can be found. What do you mean, “imagines change”? Beretta, we have seen the changes occur: we are not imagining it. You have admitted that the changes occur. It isn’t imagination to take our observations and extrapolate them into a pattern that conforms to all the other patterns we see in the physical world. That’s the very essence of science: you expand the horizons of knowledge by extrapolating the data that you do have into a testable hypothesis about something you don’t have.And, that’s how technology is done, too. We started with some basic observations about, for instance, electricity, then we pressed the envelope to see what we could make of what little we knew. Then, we pressed the envelope again, each time making a more and more complex circuit and a more and more powerful application arose. Now, we have powerful and portable computers, all because scientists kept pushing the envelope for new designs.We’re doing the same with biology, but, because it isn’t as concrete or as applicable or as popular, people think we’re just fudging it all. The fact is that we follow the same protocols and the same methodology. I’ll let Wounded King field this for the most part, if he wants to. But, you are still using the incorrect definition of “vestigial = without function.” A limb that is much smaller than its ancestors limb is vestigial, whether or not it has a function.And, yes, I’m pretty sure there is a sizable chunk of the genome that doesn’t have a lot of function.

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-BluejayDarwin loves you.

Hello again, Bluejay, Superstition meaning ”an irrational belief’ would be either that some intelligence created us or that nothing but chance and natural law created us. Moving towards a ”natural’ understanding of the world may not be as rational as some think. That may be the modern superstition. Well I suppose we were addressing the question of vestigial organs and I wanted to clarify that more are believed to be vestigial than actually are because evolutionists are rather keen on believing things of unknown function to be vestigial, mistakenly believing that that would be good evidence in favour of the ToE. So many supposedly vestigial organs have later been found to have a purpose after all which is what we would expect -everything was originally made with a purpose. Mutation and loss is support for the general rundown that we would expect in a creationist model. We believe that everything was originally made with a purpose rather than left over from an evolutionary process and that does appear to be the case. I had no intention of being rude. The problem is that these dates were determined somewhat before any radiometric dating was available to do the job and lo and behold, they ended up apparently confirming what had already been decided based on the theory. Date the fossils with radiocarbon and then date the rocks they are found in with radiometric dating and what you have is a total contradiction. Of course the evolutionist doesn’t do radiocarbon dating on the fossils because they don’t expect to find any. Yet, right through the geologic column radiocarbon is found, which is impossible if the rocks are as old as radiometric dating would tend to show. Of course they call this radiocarbon ”contamination’ and the ”contamination’ can’t be got rid of no matter how carefully the tests are done. So there is a problem. That’s where the rate group came from with their testing. The ages given by radiometric dating are certainly old but then one has to assume that radioactive decay has always gone on at the same rate which may well be a completely incorrect assumption considering the concentration of helium found in zircon crystals and the known and tested rate of helium diffusion out of the rocks. Why is so much helium still there if the rocks are as old as the radiometric testing seems to suggest? Why is there still radiocarbon when it is not supposed to be there? Why are these factors ignored?
Because they don’t support the evolutionary long age paradigm. Anything that doesn’t support the evolutionary paradigm is routinely left out or explained away. If you’re a rate project researcher, you have a different model from that of the evolutionist. You note the dating problems, the anomalies and the complete contradictions to what should be found and then you do some research to find out if there are other factors that can be investigated to support your framework. Evolutionists look for ways to prove that the earth is old (it must be if evolution is true) and creationists look at the bulk of the dating techniques and note that they support a relatively young earth and then investigate the radiometric dating techniques to see why they produce a contradiction -and they do, but why? It’s all in the assumptions behind the radiometric dating -the unprovable assumptions. Because the reason for the pattern is assumed not proven -begging the question .
Why does the fossil record not generally support evolution? Where are the billions of missing links? Why are there so few that can even be suggested to be intermediate when there should be so many? The entire picture begs for a new interpretation. And some people believe that the only people that will even consider finding intermediates between apes and humans are the ones that desperately cling to the belief that men were once monkeys that evolved over supposed millennia from unicellular organisms. How about: australopithicines are extinct apes and Neanderthals were human, an isolated population. It’s all in the worldview and what you are looking for - what you believe to be true and what you believe to be false. Or maybe even the fuzzy blurry is how humans confuse things due to a belief in human constructs like evolution. No I guess I just wonder why they believe that evolution even happened. Big scientific debates like that make me shake my head in horror and disbelief. Have they ever heard of isolated populations of people having different characteristics? They won’t even consider the obvious alternative so they bog themselves down in wild imaginings -for them there is no alternative to naturalistic philosophy. Even the evolutionists see stasis, not gradualism. The gradualism is imaginary based on the assumption of evolution having occurred. Fossils are dead -you can’t prove any relationships amongst dead things -you can only assume they are related by an evolutionary process and ”find’ the details or believe that intelligence not random change is required and then you don’t even need to do all the imagining about lines of relationship.
Like I”ve said before, the genetic code shows a relationship but not that evolution is the relationship. Carrying on as if evolution must have happened begs the question. Change occurs within a range. We do not know that there are no limitations. Evolutionists assume none and extrapolate accordingly. Creationists assume limits based on the evidence of what we actually know to be happening in the world around us and don’t presume to extrapolate. It is imagination until such time as proof is produced. We need some beneficial information producing mutations! Things like gravity and electricity are nowhere near the same as evolution. We can test and repeat with gravity and electricity. The same cannot be said for evolution. They are not even in the same ball park. Like I said, mutation producing a loss of information. Train’s going in the wrong direction. Based on your preconceptions. Based on mine, I think you’re wrong. I think it’s going to turn out much like the vestigial organs that only remain vestigial until somebody finds their function.

Hi, Beretta.Thanks again for your response. Yes, they have. They even have a name for it: “evolution.” To be more precise, they call it, “genetic drift.” Well, we don't know where the "missing" ones are, but I could tell you where the "found" ones are. You can go right ahead and believe that if you want. “It’s all a matter of perspective” is about the best defense that can be mustered for any religious belief.You have been flinging the word "assumption" around pretty liberally. My intention in this thread is to show you that the basis of our theory is not an "assumption" or "worldview," as you insist, but the many converging patterns of evidence that can be found in the physical world.Given you arguments, you do not believe that such patterns exist. Which of the patterns I have listed do you agree with?

1. Do you agree there is a nested hierarchical pattern in morphology?
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2. If so, do you agree that the morphological pattern of living organisms meshes with the morphological pattern of fossil organisms?
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3. Do you agree there is a nested hierarchical pattern in genetics?
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4. Do you agree there is a clustered/nested hierarchical pattern in biogeography (the distributions of organisms)?
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5. You clearly do not agree there is a sequential pattern in radiometric dating.
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6. You clearly do not agree there is a sequential pattern in the geological record.

-----Clearly, you do agree with the first two: Once we have established which patterns you agree with, we can continue to discuss the plausibility of the others.

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-BluejayDarwin loves you.

They would still be vestiges. They are vestigial, not because they lack function, but that they no longer have the function that the same organ had in an ancestral organism.

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969

Hi Stile. Void of intelligence, what is the source of selective pressure on the species, especially in the early stages of it's existence?As observed in the world, nothing trends towards complexity, design or improvement aside from intelligent pressure. Left to itself, nothing trends towards advancement in design.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Nothing? Science 299, p 380 (2003)

Mmm, Coragyps, would you mind translating this into compatibility to layman's understanding?

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Hi, Buzz. Since Coragyps is otherwise occupied, I'll answer in his place.Roughly translated, it means, "You're wrong, Buzz."The discussion here is about the use of broad patterns of evidence as the basis of the evolutionary worldview. Your post, however, is about something else. Please stay on topic.Edited by Bluejay, : Added to the last paragraph

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-BluejayDarwin loves you.

Stay on topic?? 1. If you have a problem with a message, there's a forum thread to address that problem, so you're the one off topic here.
2. I asked for clarification of Coragyps's message. Are you inferring that Coragyps's message is off topic??

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Hi, Buzsaw.

1. You wrote this off-topic stuff in Message 52:
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   Buzsaw writes:

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   Hi Stile. Void of intelligence, what is the source of selective pressure on the species, especially in the early stages of it's existence?

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   As observed in the world, nothing trends towards complexity, design or improvement aside from intelligent pressure. Left to itself, nothing trends towards advancement in design.
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   Coragyps showed an example where rock crystals form complex structures under natural conditions, and you requested that he expound. However, I do want you to discuss this here, and, since you started it, and since you're the one who's online now, I addressed my response to you.
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2. It's my thread, I chose the topic, and I don't want to talk about Buzzmodynamics anymore.
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3. Message 50 lists six patterns that I see in the evidence, all of which I see as largely agreeing with one another. Here are the relevant questions or statements I put before Beretta (one for each pattern):
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   1. Do you agree there is a nested hierarchical pattern in morphology?
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   2. If so, do you agree that the morphological pattern of living organisms meshes with the morphological pattern of fossil organisms?
      ​
   3. Do you agree there is a nested hierarchical pattern in genetics?
      ​
   4. Do you agree there is a clustered/nested hierarchical pattern in biogeography (the distributions of organisms)?
      ​
   5. You clearly do not agree there is a sequential pattern in radiometric dating.
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   6. You clearly do not agree there is a sequential pattern in the geological record.
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   Feel free to discuss whether or not you feel these patterns exist and/or agree with one another, and whether it is these patterns, or philosophical assumptions, that are the basis of evolutionary thought. But, I don't want you talking about intelligent design or thermodynamics, because those are not the topic I wanted to discuss when I proposed this thread.

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-BluejayDarwin loves you.

No Buzz, you are off topic. If you want to keep posting here then figure out just what the topic is and address it carefully. You've used up lots of leeway so suspension will follow quickly.

{You know, you could have justed edited the message yourself, to remove the content? - Adminnemooseus}Edited by Adminnemooseus, : See above.

Oops! I started a reply to Buzsaw before your warning, but got distracted by a phone call half-way through. Hide it if you want.