Clearly I do care, if you care to read.
Science has mockery and derision for those who don't put up their evidence.
Stuart
toldailytopic "Evolutionary theory isn't about the origin of life"
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Science has mockery and derision for those who don't put up their evidence.
Stuart
Works v. 3rd person present (of a machine or system) [how it] functions, especially properly or effectively.
Stuart
Nope.
As you learned: Nope.
The only reason you keep repeating your lies is because of your desperate need for approval.
Great. Then the information you seek has been laid out hundreds of times. :up:
Feel free to address it. :thumb:
:AMR:
The criticism is that the "over time" part of "change over time" is redundant, not that change happens over a limited time.
The charge that you don't read what it is you're responding to gains ground.
Once again you talk in riddles.
Adaptation (as you have called it in another thread), the result of changes in allele frequency over time, as Yorzhik correctly put it, is something you don't dispute. And you appear not to have disputed that natural selection has worked on variation arising from natural mutations to that result.
So, to untangle your passive-aggressive riddles, should we take it that you have no problem with evolution by natural selection in principle? But that what you have a problem with is the fact that the earth is billions of years old?
Stuart
No. I will not. Evolution is not a "belief". Nor is it a belief in common ancestry. It is a scientific theory about how living beings change over many generations. The idea of common ancestry is a conclusion one can reach based on the theory, but it is not the theory itself.
Let's look at cats again. The theory of evolution explains how modern cat species evolved from an ancient early cat species. That explanation still holds whether all life developed from an original single cell or a thousand cells, and whether those early cells developed naturally or with the intervention of the god or gods of your choice. Evolution is about change.
Right Divider
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Both creation and evolution are belief systems about the distant past.
Neither uses science in the sense in which we use science to get computers or airplanes, etc.
Neither creation nor evolution are repeatable or directly observable.
P.S. The "theory of evolution" is NOT just about "change". It claims that all live forms presently on earth, and many that are extinct, all share a universal common ancestor. If not, creationists would not argue against it.
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It's pretty simple, and not at all significant to the discussion at large.
Darwinists say "change over time." The "over time" part is redundant. You know what redundant means, right? It means that the sentence is just as understandable without it. Sometimes redundancy is useful. In this case, it isn't. Change has to happen "over time."
So, yeah. Riddles.
Sure. Just don't pretend it is sourced by random mutations and natural selection.
You appear to be paying exactly no attention.
Evolution is defined as change in part due to natural selection. Yeah, I have a problem with evolution.
The age of the Earth is just a theory.
Alright then. Change. But speciation does generally take vast amounts of time.
I'm not pretending anything. It's a fact, beyond any doubt. The mutations don't follow any kind of plan, so they are random, and the selection follows the very exacting principle of fitness for survival and reproduction. By all means let us know if you think a mechanism has been missed from the literature.
I'm sorry to hear that.
Electricity is just a theory, but it's good enough to allow this discussion. Atomic theory is just a theory, but there is no modern chemistry without it. Relativity is just a theory, but there is no Satnav without it. The age of the Earth is just a theory, and the current value, with its uncertainty, is 4.54 billion ± 50 million years.
Isochron dating is just a theory. It's easier to understand than electricity, easier to understand than atoms, and easier than understanding space-time. Are you sure you really understand how modern isochron dating works?
Stuart
way 2 go
Well-known member
it has hit the wall
https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/
Now at last we are ready to take Darwin out for a test drive. Starting with 150 links of gibberish, what are the chances that we can mutate our way to a useful new shape of protein? We can ask basically the same question in a more manageable way: what are the chances that a random 150-link sequence will create such a protein? Nonsense sequences are essentially random. Mutations are random. Make random changes to a random sequence and you get another random sequence. So, close your eyes, make 150 random choices from your 20 bead boxes and string up your beads in the order in which you chose them. What are the odds that you will come up with a useful new protein?
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It’s easy to see that the total number of possible sequences is immense. It’s easy to believe (although non-chemists must take their colleagues’ word for it) that the subset of useful sequences—sequences that create real, usable proteins—is, in comparison, tiny. But we must know how immense and how tiny.
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The total count of possible 150-link chains, where each link is chosen separately from 20 amino acids, is 20150. In other words, many. 20150 roughly equals 10195, and there are only 1080 atoms in the universe.
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What proportion of these many polypeptides are useful proteins? Douglas Axe did a series of experiments to estimate how many 150-long chains are capable of stable folds—of reaching the final step in the protein-creation process (the folding) and of holding their shapes long enough to be useful. (Axe is a distinguished biologist with five-star breeding: he was a graduate student at Caltech, then joined the Centre for Protein Engineering at Cambridge. The biologists whose work Meyer discusses are mainly first-rate Establishment scientists.) He estimated that, of all 150-link amino acid sequences, 1 in 1074 will be capable of folding into a stable protein. To say that your chances are 1 in 1074 is no different, in practice, from saying that they are zero. It’s not surprising that your chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore play a part in evolution, are even smaller. Axe puts them at 1 in 1077.
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In other words: immense is so big, and tiny is so small, that neo-Darwinian evolution is—so far—a dead loss. Try to mutate your way from 150 links of gibberish to a working, useful protein and you are guaranteed to fail. Try it with ten mutations, a thousand, a million—you fail. The odds bury you. It can’t be done.
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Right Divider
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You have tremendous faith.
You believe that random mistakes can be "chosen" to create the most complex interdependent systems known to man.
Nope. Evolution is just a theory.
Why? What possible threat could an opposing idea pose to you or the world?
Nope. Electricity is a fact. There really is energy behind the lights above your head. That is not falsifiable.
Evolution is just a theory. It is falsifiable.
It looks like you need a refresher on what a theory is.
Who are you even talking to any more? :idunno:
Has Saturday's loss affected you emotionally to the point where you can't think straight?
Easy. First, you don't start with gibberish. You start with existing genes. The likelihood is a favorable mutation happening is exactly 1.0. How? Because it's been directly observed to happen. Even many creationists openly admit the fact of useful mutations.
But that's not the only problem with that guy's blathering. The probability of you, given the genomes of your great/great/great/great grandparents is so unlikely that it's essentially zero. And yet here you are.
I assume you consider yourself to be useful.
If this puzzles you, we can talk about the math and the logic involved.
Oh, and yes, evolution is not about the origin of life. If you like, you can do what Darwin did,and just assume that God created the first living things.
Or you can believe that the Earth brought forth living organisms. Doesn't matter to evolutionary theory.
Yes.
But you have to understand how the choosing works.
And it requires no faith at all.
Stuart
Stuu: It's a fact.
That 'only' is a bit redundant, isn't it. Just like change over time.
Stuu: Isochron dating is just a theory. It's easier to understand than electricity, easier to understand than atoms, and easier than understanding space-time. Are you sure you really understand how modern isochron dating works?
...
Have people been sympathetic at your end of things?
Stuart
Essentially, in science, it's the same thing.
None, I embrace opposing ideas when they are supported by evidence that contradicts what I thought I knew.
It is falsifiable. It could be energy-free pixies causing the light above your head. The theory of electricity (plus the theory of how incandescent or LED illumination works) say that it is caused by the movement of electrons, whatever that is. The evidence for it is better than the evidence for the pixies, so the electron theory forms the basis for modern electrical theory. That's how you should be using the word theory: a testable/falsifiable explanation for a phenomenon that is based in unambiguous empirical evidence and contradicted by none, which forms the best explanation we have. You might have thought that the word fact applies to the pieces of evidence, but you can also say that it is a fact that electricity involves moving electrons, even though that is only the theory of electricity.
That 'only' is a bit redundant, isn't it. Just like change over time.
Yes, it is falsifiable. That is why it has value.
Stuu: Isochron dating is just a theory. It's easier to understand than electricity, easier to understand than atoms, and easier than understanding space-time. Are you sure you really understand how modern isochron dating works?
If you know how isochrons work, then I am interested to know why you think they are invalid. Isochron dating is the basis for the 4.54 billion ± 50 million year age claim for the contents of our solar system, and hence the time which biological change may have had to build up.
I was in Pak'n'Save yesterday. People were generally calm. I don't know how close my fellow shoppers were to rioting, but there seemed to be a feeling of philosophical resignation. Or maybe it's just too early
...Have people been sympathetic at your end of things?
Stuart
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Mistakes and errors cannot be "chosen" to create highly complex interdependent systems, like the human body.
Therefore, my astonishment at your great faith remains.
Yes, that would be an entirely fatal head-on collision if it was right. But it's not.
The first problem is that we don't know the definition of 'useful' being used. To be useful, does a protein have to perform exactly the same function as is performed in a living organism alive today, or could it have any function you care to imagine that could be useful?
Secondly, do we know whether his calculations include all the redundant changes that can be made without affecting the functioning of a protein, for example amino acid substitutions that have no deleterious effect? I think he probably hasn't done that.
Thirdly, he calculates astonishingly small probabilities without telling the audience about the astonishingly large number of protein molecules that exist in a sample of, say, egg albumin. If it is up to random generation of sequences, then a small puddle of randomly sequenced proteins will very likely have at least one molecule that actually does have a current biological function. These may seem like small quibbles, but each one will have a massive effect on his conclusions. It looks like the usual Discovery Institute smoke and mirrors to me.
But the biggest problem of all is that his post has nothing to do with Darwin. It gives no mechanism for generating the proteins (is it a self-replicating system?), and it ignores natural selection.
Natural selection represents cumulative change. You might know about the power of compounding interest: you keep the interest you earned last time, and next time you earn interest on that last lot of interest as well as on the original capital amount. Your post is doing the biological equivalent of going back to the original capital each time the interest is calculated. That's not how people accumulate wealth, and it's not how biology accumulates complexity.
Stuart