That Pesky "Dinsoaurs lived millions of years ago" thing... - Page 4  

DiscoCow,

whale legs, chicken teeth, horses toes, antibiotic resistance, psuedogenes, nipples on men, viable knockouts, orthologous functions, 98% genetic similarity between apes and man, identical codon use, vestigial stomata in underwater plants, panda's thumbs, plate tectonics and fossil divergence, horse fossils, etc... etc... etc...

The evidence is overwhelming, but you are still talking yourself blue in the face until dmz answers this one, simple question...

dmz-

Is there any possible evidence that could convince you of the validity of evolution as a scientific theory? If so what?


Trust me, I've talked myself blue in the face before. This is the third time I've asked the question and I would wager I still will not get an answer.

Is anyone else interested in the answer before we continue?

I am convinced that that question will never be answered. It apparently is forbidden in John 50:10.

I realize your point and I agree with it wholeheartedly. I just had some time to kill so I decided to post (didn't take much actually --copy/paste that's basically it).

I posted it for shits and giggles, you know.


I think we all already know what it's going to be judging by DMZ's record....

I have a philosophy exam in two weeks. One of the possible topics is scientific theory, but I don't think I'm gonna do that... Anyway, this discussion is all very interesting. I hope I can exposit theories of knowledge and ethics even half as well as some posters here have set forth the theory of evolution.

shetline: what i was trying to say, and perhaps didn't make obvious enough, is whatever evidence/theory/logic/.. you present to the deeply religious, will not convince the [religious]. they are not swayed by it. creationsits, and similarly religous/"scientific" will engage whatever evidences suit them. that these evidences are not convincing to you doesn't invalidate them into themselves. they look to their own sources, and where they contradict, their faith supercedes. a man of faith will weigh scientific evidence less strongly than his bible. you can't convince dmz. just like he can't convince you. its a futile campaign. this whole thread is an exercise in futility. perhaps in the same as me trying to convince you all that the debate is unendable.\

Who wants to bet me $10 that dmz won't make another post about baleen and whales in this thread? PayPal is your friend. Or Harald can act in escrow.

Anyone?

(Well, obviously he will now, just to see me shell out. I mean, a serious response only.)

If you measure of progress by on-the-spot conversions, yes, all effort is probably futile.

With a case like dmz, expecting progress by any measure is probably futile.

But I have seem some movement in people's positions and some growth come out of conversations like this. In defending my own viewpoints, I've learned a lot, and have gained insights both into my own belief structure and those of other people. I've occasionally learned a particular point I've tried to make wasn't all that good, or have gotten someone else to abandon a particular losing attack.

You don't have to convince a creationist that evolution is right to convince him or her that certain particular attacks on evolution don't stand up well. At least that's something. I've made that much progress before, although that has been in spoken conversations where I could more easily deal with deliberate evasiveness.

I think what invites debate is the odd conflation of religious belief and mangled science.

It would be one thing if a person professed that they believe in the infallibility of the bible and thus simply rejected out of hand the assertions of evolutionary theory, because they can not be made to square with that infallibility.

What draws us in is the attempt to discount evolution by means of pseudo-scientific sound bites and fake "conundrums" which purport to put evolution on the spot but do nothing of the kind.

When you say:


you are describing a category confusion so thorough as to be unintelligible.

"Evidence" and "weighing sources" have no part in this, and it important to remember that. There is no process of investigation here, no discovery, no system at all. There is only the story of the bible, taken as true.

Trying to tart-up a non-scientific, internally contradictory history of the world by tricking it out with bits and pieces of scientific sounding gibberish, as if you were putting eyeglasses on a pig because you thought it made him look smart, is not an act that calls for a discussion of "faith". This has nothing to do with "faith", which does not require justification.

This is about the abuse of language, and critical thought , and I think that always calls for a vigorous defense of both, whether or not there is any chance of persuading anyone of anything.

Main Entry: 1work
Pronunciation: 'w&rk
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English werk, work, from Old English werc, weorc; akin to Old High German werc work, Greek ergon, Avestan var&zem activity
1 : activity in which one exerts strength or faculties to do or perform something: a : sustained physical or mental effort to overcome obstacles and achieve an objective or result b : the labor, task, or duty that is one's accustomed means of livelihood c : a specific task, duty, function, or assignment often being a part or phase of some larger activity


wipe the corners of your mouths....


AND LET ME GET MY FRIGGIN CRAP DONE!!!


....more later

*slams door indignantly an ACTUALLY GETS SOME WORK DONE*

This is such a great point. If one is to accept based on personal faith that the good Lord created all life in six days, why is it necessary to rationalize that belief with "science?" if someone believes that creationism is an absolutely fundamental part of their faith, why find a need to justify it? especially with such horribly weak science versus an exhausting amount to the contrary.

this leads into my second point: creationists tend to believe that science has an agenda to disprove the bible. this is not the case. science tries to explain the world/universe around or within us through exhaustive testing, logical progressions, etc...science does not care what this answer is, so long as it is logically sound. so, on one hand we have creationists with a mile-high agenda to justify their faith AND debunk scientists; on the other hand, we have scientist who do not seek to debunk creationists (the only literature against ID speaks to clarify fundamental scientific flaws in ID logic, not to prove them "wrong") but merely try to explain. from an objective standpoint, who is able to maintain a stronger case?

now i have done a full circle back to the point made in addabox's post: creationism does not hold up under scientific scrutiny, and the believers in it should neither expect it to, be dissapointed when it does, or attempt to debunk it on scientific grounds.

as a final remark, i find my belief in god to be strengthened by science and evolutionary theory, not contested or weakened. but then, i also believe that when jesus said "love your enemies," he probably meant don't kill them

and one final point:

while folks like to call creationism versus evolutionism a debate, there really is no debate in the scientific arena. it isn't as though scientists are split or any growing number find creationism scientifically credible. occassionally someone with a degree or two from bob's bible college will hold a public "debate" with the evolutionist being some guy with a bachelors in biology, but there is no true academic debate in this matter

It's sad so many people forget this.

ah, but u presume all evidence and sources must be met with the rigors of scientific method. you are looking at the such things through science colored glasses. to a man of faith, evidence doesn't require your rigors. that is my point. the faithed won't be convinced because to them really strong evidence is from the bible. bible followers, in my experience though limited and jaded as it may be, seems to follow scientific rigors where it suits them. where it interferes with the almighty word, they follow the bible. perhaps i am wrong in thinking they all the same along these lines. but nontheless, it is most definitely a vain exercise to convince someone of such a fundamentally held belief, particularly over the internet.


to the end of discovering new ways of approaching the issue, i suppose its intellectually stimulating. but i strongly believe you cannot shake the fundamentally faithful from their strong point. i doubt, in person or on the net, you, or anyone, could convince someone that the fundamental beliefs they hold so dear are based on bunk.

I agree with you on most of this, although I'd quibble with your argument that for believers, evidence comes from the bible. That suggests an exegetical tradition going back to the first century (if Elaine Pagels is right about all of this), which is very much a rigorous and scientific approach to the text. That being said, I would actually argue that we cannot ignore the role of divine revelation/inspiration among these folks. How can we know, in the end, whether or not God himself spoke to Preacher Bob and told him that some element of science is wrong? Certainly, such claims of revelation can be used to mask (and make more palatable) political decisions (I would actually argue that it is all politics, but that's just my approach to the world).

What gets me about all of this is something much more fundamental (no pun intended): I don't attack people for holding religious beliefs. I don't look down on them. And to a degree, I can understand how, on an emotional level, they believe what they believe.

But from a purely intellectual standpoint, I simply cannot understand how someone believes these things. Even worse, many times when I am arguing with a believer about all of this, there's a part of me that just can't believe that I'm hearing the arguments I am. There's a part of me that always suspects that the person is simply pulling my leg or trying to see what they can get away with saying in their argument.

This, at least on my end, is the real problem with this discussion. And for me, I have always considered it an intellectual failing on my part, not a weakness of theirs. I suppose I'm like David Hume on this.

Cheers
Scott

Well, the thread is firmly back on "all creationists are complete idiots" footing. Great.

You are all dodging the key issue here with no small skill; 1st class rehtoric---I must admit--to give the devil his due.




There is alot systemically invested in the Baleen, humback lunge feeding, EFFICIANCY [a critical factor] of feeding in that manner, etc. I actually think there one whale that "roots" on the sea floor for shellfish and has baleen. *checks google* its a gray whale "130-180 overlapping rows of baleen the fray into the hairs that trap bottom crud for food."

If you removed this whale's baleen you would disrupt everything associated with it's feeding habits.


I'm assuming you all think that we "started" with a small, prototype whale-like creature(?) that "slowly" developed what?---teeth, and then baleen? baleen and then teeth? no teeth? no mouth? no navigation systems? no sense to locate food? You have to start WITHOUT any and ALL of these interdependent systems and build them into the cretaure, one at a time---one "mutation" at a time. Assuming you have started with a prototype that works---a circular assumption, in and of itself.

This is not a problem? You DO NOT see mutations adding nifty features to animals. You DO see screwed up conflagrations of misapplided DNA, you DO see fantastic uses and adaptablility of existing DNA---and a huge amount of speciation.

All of which is running down, DNA getting torn up through exposure to the elements, with more and more introduced error, generation, by generation, by generation.

You guys want MILLIONS of years of immaculate DNA building itself into pinnacles of design---constantly beeing weeded out for even better designs that "just happen" to elbow their way into both the physical stucture of the creature and the DNA molecule itself.

What BLOWS ME AWAY is that you want TENS OF MILLIONS of species of flora and fauna doing this---not only in concert and harmony with each other, but you want this HYSTERICALLY improbable scheme to happen in only several hundred million years. The amount of faith it takes to stomach something this illogical and improbable is considerable. A couple of buttons short of a keyboard.

You have great faith in the completly improbable---I respect your decsion--I think it's dead wrong---creation is telling you something quite different, but that's your decsion.

"I don't understand the science and I won't be convinced no matter what evidence is presented so it must be god."

The difference between you and me (aside from the fact that I wouldn't be such a bastard to my daughter if I had one) is that my belief system hinges upon "I don't know let's find out" while yours is founded on "LA LA LA LA GOD DID IT GOD DIT IT LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU."

This thread is close to extinction.

very close

Fellowship

And it is not showing any signs of evolving into a worthwhile discussion, either.

I tried. Just above. I really did try to turn it in a profitable direction.

Cheers
Scott

yeah, this thread is a loss. i'm ready for the old masterlock.

I don't think this thread is going all that bad. As a biologist I find it interesting to read how others interpret evolution. I get as upset as anyone here when creationist types force their religion as science, but at the same time am fascinated by people who believe so strongly against overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Anyway, given that the Demilitarized Zone (having grown up during the Vietnam war that is all I think of when seeing the letters DMZ) has finally tried to answer the "baleen problem" I thought I would weigh in.

First, lets clarify what baleen whales eat. Most people think it is just plankton which they envision as being tiny little things they saw under the microscope when looking at pond water in biology class. Actually, plankton can be as large as shrimp size and many, if not most, baleen whales eat fish if they are in high enough concentrations. The lunge feeding that DMZ referred to is in fact used to catch small schooling fishes such as herring and capelin.

The problem in DMZ's logic is that because he can't imagine anything less than modern day baleen as being effective he can't imagine what whales ate as they lost their teeth and evolved baleen. Well, DMZ next time you are eating your breakfast of Cheerios take a big mouthful with lots of milk. Now clench your teeth tight and make some pressure inside your mouth. What happens (besides your mother slapping you silly for making such a mess)? The milk is forced out and the cheerios are still inside your mouth waiting to be swallowed! So you see, even with all your teeth, and no baleen to speak of, you have pretty effectively imitated filter feeding!! Now think of a primitive ocean just swarming with plankton and small schooling fish. You are a big whale and grabbing all those small fish with your teeth is taking a lot of energy for little reward. Some small mutation occurs that changes the shape of your mouth or spacing of your teeth. Now when swallowing large amounts of seawater and then forcing it out with your jaw closed some fish and plankton stay on the inside of your mouth and you can lick them off with your tongue and swallow them. Now you are getting much more food for less work. You are able to have more, stronger babies than your fellow whales and those babies have the same mutation, increasing their survival and ability to pass on their genes. So starts the path to the baleen we see in whales today.

Baleen whales evolved from ancestors with teeth. The statement that "You have to start WITHOUT any and ALL of these interdependent systems and build them into the cretaure, one at a time---one "mutation" at a time." is nonsense. Every living thing on earth has built on the life before it. It is probable that teeth and baleen were present in species of whales for millions of years until the cost of growing teeth outweighed any benefit from having them. Whale fossils are pretty rare so there is not a very good record. They are big animals and since bones on the bottom of the ocean are consumed by other creatures the chance of fossilization is pretty low. Probably need something like an underwater landslide to bury them quickly enough.

DMZ lacks even a rudimentary understanding what evolution is so I will try to change that. Put simply, evolution is any change in gene frequency. There is nothing in evolution that requires that this change be beneficial, but if it is there is an increased chance that it will be passed on to future generations. If some evil dictator comes to power and starts killing everyone with red hair, the frequency of genes for red hair will decrease in the population because there will be less people carrying the gene who are able to pass it on to their kids. This is evolution. What DMZ and most others do is confuse evolution with speciation. They say evolution isn't happening because we don't see new species arising in our short lifetimes, but that just means they don't understand the theory.

Another thing I would like to clarify. People tend to confuse evolution and the theory of evolution. Creationists think that if they can prove the theory of evolution wrong they will have disproved evolution. No. Evolution is something we have observed to have happened, while the theory of evolution is used to try to explain how it happened. If the theory is wrong then we simply have to come up with another one to explain how live on this planet has arrived at the diversity and complexity we see today from simple origins. This always reminds me of the old joke: Why did the chicken cross the road? We scientist, after careful observation and experimentation, have came up with the theory that it did it to cross the road. The creationists are jumping up and down saying it never crossed in the first place.

It really boggles my mind how people can say that evolution is so improbable and then replace it with a theory that depends on something like god being able to magically create the entire universe in 6 days out of nothing. How did he do that? The famous biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky once said: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." This, more than anything other evidence of evolution, convinces me that it is true. Of course every time I have dissected a dolphin or porpoise and have come across those vestigial leg bones that kind of reinforces my thinking too!

dmz. I beg you: please read the post above this one from end to end. Comment on it if you see anything in it you don't understand and tell us what you disagree with.

I suppose that the moderators would be a selective pressure reducing the fitness of threads like these.

And, as a slap in the face to the usual "Evolutionism = Godless Atheism" schtick, Dobzhansky himself was a devout Russian Orthodox Christian.

"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...the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness."

rampancy: forum moderation is an example of "evolution through artificial selection," if you will.

I think the issue I have with craiger77 is that, instead of answering the hard question of the baleen, has moved the rub of all this back to


This pushes the hard questions back behind the curtain, agian, to an unkown "prototype" creature that we don't have to answers any hard questions over, because nothing "close" exists in the fossil record.

I think this is circular, in an useless way.

We have roughly six million species on the planet at this time (this is the most conservative estimate I could find.) But if you throw in the number "missing links" this number would have to go up exponentially.


I think a rough estimate of what we see today "has come about in the last 500 million years" if you subcribe to evolution. There isn't enough time to build even 1 million species---placed "end to end" (yes that's simplistic---you would be popping out species at a rate of one every 500 years.

I think the above is a bit simplistic, but if vertabrates are only showing up in the last 200-300m years, create a chain of species, roughly add up the number of genes that need to be created, in series, throw in whatever failure factor/missing link factor you want---2X, 5X, 100X, 1000X?---which gives you a unbelievbably rapid rate of "mutation".

As they say "not in a million years".

frag me, rag me, slag me, I gotta go get my work done.

owned

dmz, buddy, just stop posting. Just do whatever work you are supposedly being kept from and stop posting. I am officially throwing the towel in for you.

OK!

He did answer the baleen question. Directly, comprehensively and technically. He wrote how it was biologically possible to directly answer your question. How it was not necessary to imagine a whale without teeth or baleen, or with both. How whales could eat before they had baleen. How evolution, incidentally, would have made this more economical for some whales.

Did you not see that?

How would you answer this bit:

"next time you are eating your breakfast of Cheerios take a big mouthful with lots of milk. Now clench your teeth tight and make some pressure inside your mouth. What happens (besides your mother slapping you silly for making such a mess)? The milk is forced out and the cheerios are still inside your mouth waiting to be swallowed! So you see, even with all your teeth, and no baleen to speak of, you have pretty effectively imitated filter feeding!! Now think of a primitive ocean just swarming with plankton and small schooling fish. You are a big whale and grabbing all those small fish with your teeth is taking a lot of energy for little reward. Some small mutation occurs that changes the shape of your mouth or spacing of your teeth. Now when swallowing large amounts of seawater and then forcing it out with your jaw closed some fish and plankton stay on the inside of your mouth and you can lick them off with your tongue and swallow them. Now you are getting much more food for less work. You are able to have more, stronger babies than your fellow whales and those babies have the same mutation, increasing their survival and ability to pass on their genes. So starts the path to the baleen we see in whales today.

Baleen whales evolved from ancestors with teeth. The statement that "You have to start WITHOUT any and ALL of these interdependent systems and build them into the cretaure, one at a time---one "mutation" at a time." is nonsense."

Your argument do not stand. The evolution is an exponantial process. If only one specie give ten new species every one million year, you will have an astronomical number of species in one hundred millions of years (10e 100).

4th time asking the essential question-

Dmz-

Is there any possible evidence which could convince you of the validity of evolution as a scientific theory? If so what?

Perhaps we should just give DMZ the nickname The Sheik and call it good.

Craiger77:

Perhaps you can answer this. I was just thinking that the crux of dmz's argument is that he's thinking of all of this teleologically--something that Darwin specifically positions himself against. I'm trying to remember all of those earlier (pre-Darwinian) versions of evolution. Is it LeMarc (sp?) who was the leading proponent of that teleological vision of the evolution of species? That is, that all species are inexorably moving toward some "goal"?

That's what I meant when I said earlier that the terms of teh debate have hardly shifted (on the creationist side) in 150 years--except insofar as Christian conservatives have exerted tremendous energy in the last 30 years to positioning their philosophy and politics as "science."

There's also the notion of punctuated equilibrium in all of this to consider....

Cheers
Scott

Oh, you mean that even more bogus, unworkable version of evolution? Yes, this has been pre-ridiculed for you -- no reasons given, but aparently punctuated equlibrium is even more laughable than the rest of this evolution nonsense.

Just thought I'd warn you ahead of time.

Just for a second there I thought you were serious. The cognitive dissonance was something else, let me tell you.

Evolution....creationism....we're all ignoring another possibility: "Interventionism". Perhaps the Earth is "someone else"'s petri dish and all life here is a "cosmic experiment", or a "species bank". Once it gets going, it requires little maintenance, just some observation or the collection of samples just like some of our scientific experimernts here. Farfetched? Wacky? Perhaps, but no weirder or outlandish than biblical "creationism".

The religious and scientific communities steers well wide of such a notion because......... fill in the blank

btw...did this thread get created, or has it evolved?

Actually, I did bring this up as being in the range of possibilities before, although more in the guise of divine interventionism rather than alien. In another context (not this particular thread) I've spoken before about the possibility of alien involvement.

Of course, the possiblility of alien involvement and the probability are two different things. Also, just like when you bring divine beings into the question, you have to ask what explanatory value aliens would add.

If you've dug up remains of very old, complex technological artifacts from well before the age of man, proposing aliens adds explanatory value. If you haven't, and you're simply proposing aliens because life seems too amazing or complex, so you're looking for a source of intelligence to create or direct that complexity, you're just moving the problem you're trying to answer, not solving it. Now you have to solve where the aliens came from and how the aliens reached their advanced state. More aliens that gave those aliens their start? Turtles all the way down?

I can think of speculative reasons to contemplate alien involvement. For example, let's take the assumption of natural biogenesis -- the chemical precursor to biological evolution -- but suppose that, although it can and has happened, it turns out to be so difficult and unlikely that it only occurs on one out of billions or trillions or more of worlds with suitable environments. If this is true, but life is still found on many worlds, then proposing alien assistance in establishing life on many of those worlds would have useful explanatory value.

But since we have no knowledge yet of the abundance of life or lack thereof outside of our own little planet, since (although I'm sure some Area 51 fans might disagree) we have no solid evidence of ancient or current intelligent alien life, and since we don't have any way to calculate the probability of spontaneous biogenesis -- throwing aliens into the picture, to use the wording of Occam's Razor, is simply a needless multiplication of entities.

Lamarckianism (named after the French naturalist Lamarck) is the idea that animals had an inborn "vital force" that allowed them to adapt to their surroundings.

For example: the Giraffe needed to reach the branches of higher trees to get to the food it needed. So, it stretched its neck, and made it longer. Its offspring would have a higher neck, and it would keep on stretching its neck...as time went by, Giraffes stretched their necks to the length they are now.

That's clearly, and totally FALSE. Lamarck's "Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics" was a leading theory of its day, but the rediscovery of the work of Gregor Mendel with respect to genes and alleles effectively sunk that theory. Natural Selection also won out because not only was it compatible with Mendel's work, but it could be scientifically tested. How do you test a theory that relies on "vital forces"? What are those vital forces?

Gould and Lewontin's groundbreaking theory on Punctuated Equilibrium was just another possible explanation of the apparent lack of "transitional forms" that we know of (that's not to say they don't exist: we have a lot of "transitional forms" that trace the path of human/primate evolution, for example). For more information, look at talk.origin's Punctuated Equilibrium FAQ.

It's worth pointing out that the concept of evolution as going towards more "advanced forms", or towards some "goal" is a gross misunderstanding and distortion of evolutionary biology. Evolution merely says that populations of organisms will experience a change in gene frequencies.