toldailytopic "Evolutionary theory isn't about the origin of life"

[7djengo7]

Well, yes, obviously as as a person you are as old as from your date of actual birth. You do have a birthday, right?

You people keep telling me I originated at least 3.5 billions of years ago, and now you're denying that I originated at least 3.5 billions of years ago.

 

[Arthur Brain]

You people keep telling me I originated at least 3.5 billions of years ago, and now you're denying that I originated at least 3.5 billions of years ago.

Um, not sure who's telling you that exactly but your birthday parties must sure be interesting...Also, what you were on about with teeth slots and self inflicted "shiners" in your re-edited post of earlier exactly? Bemusing as well...

 

[7djengo7]

Um, not sure who's telling you that exactly but your birthday parties must sure be interesting...Also, what you were on about with teeth slots and self inflicted "shiners" in your re-edited post of earlier is bemusing as well...

LOL

 

[Arthur Brain]

LOL

Okayyy then.

 

[7djengo7]

The theory of evolution has nothing to do with changes in individual animals or plants. It deals with populations.

Since you modify the noun, "animals", by the adjective, "individual", should we take it that you hold that some animals are non-individual? Could you describe what (if anything) you would call a "non-individual animal"? Or, instead, was your use of the adjective, "individual", merely superfluous?

If merely superfluous, then--removing the superfluity--here is what you have told us:

The theory of evolution has nothing to do with changes in animals or plants. It deals with populations.

Oh, also.....how about populations of 1? Does "the theory of evolution" deal with populations of 1? Does "the theory of evolution" deal with the last living leopard? And, when there's only one living elephant left walking about in his jungle, what happens to him when he gets poached: does he die, or does he go extinct?

 

[chair]

So the mechanism of mutation plus natural selection... mutations happen to populations? or individuals?

Mutations happen to individuals. Natural selection happens to populations.

 

[chair]

Is a population not individual animals or plants?

Clearly a population is made up of individuals. However, single individual does not evolve. The population, over a period of generations, can evolve, depending on how well the individuals survive and reproduce.

 

[chair]

Ah, I see you're here to "play semantics games", too. How dare you ask him a question against which he will be compelled to stonewall? :jazz:

I don't stonewall. I answered his question.

 

[chair]

Since you modify the noun, "animals", by the adjective, "individual", should we take it that you hold that some animals are non-individual? Could you describe what (if anything) you would call a "non-individual animal"? Or, instead, was your use of the adjective, "individual", merely superfluous?

If merely superfluous, then--removing the superfluity--here is what you have told us:



Oh, also.....how about populations of 1? Does "the theory of evolution" deal with populations of 1? Does "the theory of evolution" deal with the last living leopard? And, when there's only one living elephant left walking about in his jungle, what happens to him when he gets poached: does he die, or does he go extinct?

I used the word "individual" to make myself clear, and the term "animals" does not indicate an individual.
1 animal is not a population.

 

[Right Divider]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating

Debunk it, or don't. Don't make simplistic claims about a process that you clearly haven't read much about and equally, don't make claims as to its being "destroyed".

Your opinion in itself means absolutely nothing and so far you've debunked nothing either.

How many times do I have to explain this simple thing?

Radiometric dating, radioactive dating or radioisotope dating is a technique which is used to date materials such as rocks or carbon, in which trace radioactive impurities were selectively incorporated when they were formed. The method compares the abundance of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope within the material to the abundance of its decay products, which form at a known constant rate of decay.^[1] The use of radiometric dating was first published in 1907 by Bertram Boltwood^[2] and is now the principal source of information about the absolute age of rocks and other geological features, including the age of fossilized life forms or the age of the Earth itself, and can also be used to date a wide range of natural and man-made materials.

ASSUMPTIONS that CANNOT be verified!

The part about "absolute age" is hilarious. When they get an age that does not match expectations... they "work" on it until they get one that they like. And what's funny about that is that one of the reasons that they believe that the age might be wrong is a "bad sample"... but the way that they determine that it was a "bad sample" is .... you guessed it ... that it gave the wrong age.

So much circular "reasoning".

 

[Gary K]

The assumptions I see expressed here are pretty amazing.

Only populations mutate. Huh? Every individual in a population mutates at the very same time in the very same way? The odds against that happening are so extreme I know of no one who would bet against those types of odds. The odds must be in the trillions of quadrillions to one against that happening. The odds are already prohibitive against a positive mutation happening to an individual. The same mutation happening to every member of a population at the same time, as only populations evolve? Way beyond my ability to believe. The amount of faith it takes to swallow that is far greater than the amount of faith it takes to believe in God.

Ages calculated are absolute? Since when? Every method of dating returns variable results. None of them say exactly the same thing on the same piece of rock every time the test is run.. Repeatability is very low.

It brings to mind what Jesus said about His enemies. They will strain and gnats and swallow camels.

 

[Silent Hunter]

ASSUMPTIONS that CANNOT be verified!

The assumption you really disagree with here is that isotopes decay at a known constant rate and can only assert that the decay rate was significantly different in the past. This is something you must show to be true. Your continued shifting of the burden of proof ain't gonna cut it.

The rest of your post was simply you ranting about something you don't understand and feigning an expertise on a subject you do not possess.

 

[Right Divider]

The assumption you really disagree with here is that isotopes decay at a known constant rate and can only assert that the decay rate was significantly different in the past.

That is only ONE of the assumptions.

This is something you must show to be true.

No, I don't. The method is based on that assumption and that assumption CANNOT be VERIFIED.

I don't need to prove that they might have changed at some times in the past. You (if you're trying to support radiometric dating) have to prove that is has been constant for the entire lifetime of the sample. And THAT you cannot do.

Your continued shifting of the burden of proof ain't gonna cut it.

Wrong again as per your usual.

The rest of your post was simply you ranting about something you don't understand and feigning an expertise on a subject you do not possess.

Wrong again as per your usual.

 

[Yorzhik]

Mutations happen to individuals. Natural selection happens to populations.

That's what I thought you'd say. But can you explain how natural selection filters populations without selecting for certain mutated individuals?

And that's not a gotcha question. What I'm trying to show you is that you are having a communication problem, not a problem that YEC are stupid and refuse to understand. The bottom line, and what YEC are genuinely trying to find out, is how do we get from the ultimate common ancestor to all the life we have today. We ask that and get the vague answer that allele frequencies change in a population. But you should see that isn't what is being asked. That is like answering the question of how one sports team could beat another one with "the winning team got more points".

As far as we can tell, the way you say common descent usually works is a population starts getting some kind of pressure that with some kind of phylogenetic change an individual within the population can survive better to more likely create more progeny that will result in the population becoming increasingly filled with the phylogenetic change. Sure, there are more ways to set a phylogenetic change within a population, but this is the most common so for simplicity's sake let's start here.

So you can see the problem. You might say what I've relayed here is generally correct, and reiterate that it is setting the phylogenetic change in the population that matters. That's fine. But you should realize it looks like this:
1. Population exists
2. Individual in population gets phylogenetic improvement
3. ???
4. Population profits!

You scream when we ask about number 3 and tell us it is irrelevant because of number 4. So have a little empathy and realize asking about number 3 is rational.

 

[Gary K]

The assumption you really disagree with here is that isotopes decay at a known constant rate and can only assert that the decay rate was significantly different in the past. This is something you must show to be true. Your continued shifting of the burden of proof ain't gonna cut it.

The rest of your post was simply you ranting about something you don't understand and feigning an expertise on a subject you do not possess.

That's a joke. Do you really believe that is the only assumption made in radiometric dating?

The basic assumptions made in radiometric dating are:

• Every radioactive element will decay at a constant rate. The rate at which each element decays is its half-life (def)
  
• The rate of decay is specific to a particular radioactive element (see list of half lifes of various radioactive elements).
  
• When the substance containing a radioactive parent was first formed, there was not daughter element present. It is assumed that the daughter is derived solely from the decay of the radioactive parent. If daughter atoms were present that were not the result of the decay process the calculated date would be unreliable.
  
• From the time when the substance containing radioactive elements first came into existence until the time that the material was analyzed and dated, the system had been closed; in other words there had been in infusion or removal of either parent or daughter atoms.
  
• All daughter atoms contained within the radioactive substance were created by the radioactive decay of the corresponding parent atom. This is a repeat of the previous assumption that the system is a closed system.

http://faculty.ccbcmd.edu/courses/eas101/unit1/radiometric1.html

Here are a few more problems pointed out by a scientist.

As someone who has studied radioactivity in detail, I have always been a bit amused by the assertion that radioactive dating is a precise way to determine the age of an object. This false notion is often promoted when radioactive dates are listed with utterly unrealistic error bars. In this report, for example, we are told that using one radioactive dating technique, a lunar rock sample is 4,283 million years old, plus or minus 23 million years old. In other words, there is a 95% certainty that the age is somewhere between 4,283 + 23 million years and 4,283 – 23 million years. That’s just over half a percent error in something that is supposedly multiple billions of years old.
Of course, that error estimate is complete nonsense. It refers to one specific source of error – the uncertainty in the measurement of the amounts of various atoms used in the analysis. Most likely, that is the least important source of error. If those rocks really have been sitting around on the moon for billions of years, I suspect that the the wide range of physical and chemical processes which occurred over that time period had a much more profound effect on the uncertainty of the age determination. This is best illustrated by the radioactive age of a sample of diamonds from Zaire. Their age was measured to be 6.0 +/- 0.3 billion years old. Do you see the problem? Those who are committed to an ancient age for the earth currently believe that it is 4.6 billion years old. Obviously, then, the minimum error in that measurement is 1.4 billion years, not 0.3 billion years!
Such uncertainties are usually glossed over, especially when radioactive dates are communicated to the public and, more importantly, to students. Generally, we are told that scientists have ways to analyze the object they are dating so as to eliminate the uncertainties due to unknown processes that occurred in the past. One way this is done in many radioactive dating techniques is to use an isochron. However, a recent paper by Dr. Robert B. Hayes has pointed out a problem with isochrons that has, until now, not been considered.

The rest of this article is found at the following link.
https://blog.drwile.com/scientist-realizes-important-flaw-in-radioactive-dating/

 

[Gary K]

Here is another article by the same scientist I quoted in my last post. I will quote his entire article here as to understand it the graphs he uses must be included.

[h=1]One Reason I Am Skeptical of an Ancient Earth[/h] May.7,2009 I hope to write a lot on this topic, as I find it fascinating. For my first entry, I thought I would outline one of the main reasons I have a hard time believing the earth is billions of years old. Essentially, my scientific training makes it very hard for me to take the idea of a billions-of-years-old earth seriously.
You see, as a scientist, I have been trained to take the data very seriously and to limit my conclusions to what are reasonable within the constraints of the data. One of the ways a scientist does this is to is be very cautious when extrapolating the data. In the end, if you measure data over the course of a given interval, you can assume that the general trend of the data will continue, but only for a small range compared to the range over which the data were measured. Perhaps an example will help.
Suppose I took two hydrogen atoms and separated them by a distance of about 430 picometers (a picometer is a trillionth of a meter). If I could measure the potential energy of this situation, I would find it to be near, but not exactly equal to, zero. Then, suppose I started moving the hydrogen atoms closer and closer to one another, measuring the potential energy as I did so. I would find that for about 150 picometers, the potential energy stayed the same. Thus, I could construct a graph as follows:

Now, if I were not a careful scientist, I could assume that this trend continues all the way to a separation distance of zero, and I could draw the cyan line that you see in the graph. However, if I were to continue bringing the atoms closer together, I would find that eventually, the trend changed:

Okay. Now I have a LOT of data points, so surely the cyan line that I have drawn there is a reasonable assumption. Surely the trend just continues, right? Wrong! If I continue the experiment, here is what I find:

What does all this tell us? It tells us that we must be VERY careful when extrapolating the data beyond where we have measured it. In both extrapolations above, I came to the wrong conclusion because I extrapolated beyond the limit justified by the data.
So what seems to be an obvious trend to you and me is not always the proper trend. Thus, as scientists, we must be very, very, very cautious when extrapolating the data. The principle that all good scientists follow is:
Only extrapolate the data when the range over which the extrapolation occurs is SMALL compared to the range over which the data are measured.
Here, then, is one fundamental reason I am skeptical of an ancient earth. We have been studying science for a few thousand years. In general, the main methods used to tell us that the earth is billions of years old are based on techniques that use radioactive processes. Well, we have been studying radioactivity for about 100 years. In order to use radioactivity to come to the conclusion that the earth is billions of years old, we must assume that FOR BILLIONS OF YEARS, radioactive processes have behaved exactly the way we have observed them for the past 100 years. This is a ridiculous extrapolation! In the end, the extrapolation covers more than 10,000,000 times the range over which the data have been measured!
Is there any way such a ridiculous extrapolation could be made while staying within the realm of responsible science? I am not sure. I would think that if there were overwhelming evidence that radioactive processes are outstandingly stable, perhaps such an extrapolation could be made. However, what we have observed so far does not give such overwhelming evidence. Indeed, not only has Otto Reifenschweiler shown that the half-life of tritium can change significantly depending on the chemical environment and temperature (“Reduced radioactivity of tritium in small titanium particles,” Phys Lett A184:149-153, 1994), but there is now strong evidence that small changes in half-life occur when the distance between the earth and sun changes! (Davide Castelvecchi, Science News 174:20, 2008). Thus, to assume that radioactive processes have behaved over BILLIONS of years the way we have observed them for the past 100 is just not reasonable at this time. As a result, I am very skeptical of the claim that the earth is billions of years old.

 

[Gary K]

One last quote here from Dr. Wile. In this he addresses the issue of how half-lives of radioactive substances has been proven to change. He's a nuclear chemist, btw.

I am a nuclear chemist. I chose to be a nuclear chemist because studying the nucleus fascinates me. It’s amazing enough to study something we can never hope to actually see, but the fact that the nucleus is shrouded by clouds of electrons makes the job all the more fun.
Because I am a nuclear chemist, there are certain things I don’t want to believe. For example, I don’t want to believe quantum mechanics is wrong just because it is incompatible with general relativity. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want general relativity to be wrong, either. Black holes, white holes, and wormholes are just far to fun to ever want to give up! Nevertheless, if I have to choose one of those two theories to be wrong (because they are incompatible), I will to choose general relativity, because quantum mechanics works so incredibly well when it is applied to small things like the nucleus.
For a long time, there was something else I didn’t want to believe. I didn’t want to believe that the half-lives of radioactive isotopes could change. It seemed so clear to me at the time: radioactive half-lives depend on the energetics of the nucleus, and the energy levels in the nucleus are (roughly speaking) about 100,000 times that of the electrons in an atom. Thus, if nature exposes a radioactive atom to stress, the electrons should be the ones that deal with the stress, not the nucleus. The nucleus is under the electron cloud, and it deals in energies that are so much greater than electron energies, that the electrons effectively “shield” the nucleus from being affected by most of the stress that nature can throw at it.
Over the years, however, the data have drug me (kicking and screaming the entire way) to the point where I have to admit that radioactive half-lives can change, and in some cases, they can change quite substantially.

The rest of this article is found at the following link. https://blog.drwile.com/kicking-and-screaming/

 

[chair]

That's what I thought you'd say. But can you explain how natural selection filters populations without selecting for certain mutated individuals?

And that's not a gotcha question. What I'm trying to show you is that you are having a communication problem, not a problem that YEC are stupid and refuse to understand. The bottom line, and what YEC are genuinely trying to find out, is how do we get from the ultimate common ancestor to all the life we have today. We ask that and get the vague answer that allele frequencies change in a population. But you should see that isn't what is being asked. That is like answering the question of how one sports team could beat another one with "the winning team got more points".

As far as we can tell, the way you say common descent usually works is a population starts getting some kind of pressure that with some kind of phylogenetic change an individual within the population can survive better to more likely create more progeny that will result in the population becoming increasingly filled with the phylogenetic change. Sure, there are more ways to set a phylogenetic change within a population, but this is the most common so for simplicity's sake let's start here.

So you can see the problem. You might say what I've relayed here is generally correct, and reiterate that it is setting the phylogenetic change in the population that matters. That's fine. But you should realize it looks like this:
1. Population exists
2. Individual in population gets phylogenetic improvement
3. ???
4. Population profits!

You scream when we ask about number 3 and tell us it is irrelevant because of number 4. So have a little empathy and realize asking about number 3 is rational.

I guess there is a communication problem, because i didn't fully follow what you wrote.
What is #3? Isn't it "an individual within the population can survive better to more likely create more progeny"? If so- what's not rational about it?

 

[Arthur Brain]

How many times do I have to explain this simple thing?



ASSUMPTIONS that CANNOT be verified!

The part about "absolute age" is hilarious. When they get an age that does not match expectations... they "work" on it until they get one that they like. And what's funny about that is that one of the reasons that they believe that the age might be wrong is a "bad sample"... but the way that they determine that it was a "bad sample" is .... you guessed it ... that it gave the wrong age.

So much circular "reasoning".

So, after all of your claims you're just reduced to the same old stuff about it being mere "assumptions", even when the article goes into detail, and not just in regards to radiometric dating either?

You've debunked absolutely nothing.

 

[Yorzhik]

I guess there is a communication problem, because i didn't fully follow what you wrote.
What is #3? Isn't it "an individual within the population can survive better to more likely create more progeny"? If so- what's not rational about it?

It could be, but then common descent working on the population level is mostly irrelevant. The interesting things are happening at the individual level (and their immediate offspring, which is vitally important to overcomes Haldane's dilemma).

So think of something better for the question marks. Something that is more relevant and at the population level. Then you will be able to scream at YEC when they don't respect your less-than-population boundary.