Darwin's theory

Brian Shanahan wrote: »

I asked him a pretty similar question about six months ago (about whether he takes antibacterial drugs when perscribed). I'm still waiting for an answer (despite repeated reminders).

I'd advise not holding your breath when waiting for yours.

Of course I take antibacterial drugs when and as prescribed.
... and I answered Saganist here

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=92708844&postcount=2028

J C wrote: »

Of course I take antibacterial drugs when and as prescribed.
... and I answered Saganist here

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=92708844&postcount=2028

Do you worry occasionally about MRSA or VRE? If so, why?

In all fairness, JC does not deny evolution itself, just deep time evolution. Note how in his narrative all spiders that are not in the same family as harvestmen evolved deadly venom after the fall - before the fall they used their fangs to suck plant juices, and their venom and venom glands where just huge saliva glands.

So he admits that evolution exists, and that it leads to significant changes.

As far as I understand it his position is that things have just been getting worse since creation, which was perfect (perfect for what?) and only bad evolution happens, and it only effects small changes that do not create serious changes in the overall body-plan. These are called "kinds" in wider ID circles, because that is a word that gets used in the king james bible.

In this narrative we do get what they call "micro-evolution" and ID adherents can explain why their favorite weed-killer stops working if you use it year after year on the same patch of weeds, or why it is so easy to breed fruitflies without wings or with extra legs by simply changing the way they are selected, and why we need to create more and more new anti-bacterial drugs as the pesky little buggers keep evolving new resistances, while at the same time not having to concede any ground in areas they find important.

So when you see a burrowing skink with vestigial legs that has developed membranes to shield it's eyes from the sand, they do not see that as lizards on a convergent evolutionary path with snakes, probably driven by similar selective pressures from their environment: they just see skinks with no legs, possibly degenerating away from their perfect skink-ness, or perhaps just going through a little micro-evolution... though they tend to get uncomfortable around that one as it gets very close to a change in "kinds".

J C wrote: »

Richard does talk to Creationists ... and does respond to them

"Concerned Women for America"!

Someone took that particular brand of self-satisfied WASP concern-trolling and made a career out of it!

If I had seen that in different circumstances, I would really wonder if it was a parody of some sort.

It is like debating with a 7 year old child who believes in Santa Claus ,The child keeps putting forward his evidence why Santa must exist-the presents at Christmas,the signs in the shops,the films on TV about him,his picture is everywhere- A large jolly looking man with a beard and who has magical powers and knows if you are naughty or nice, (He is like God in some ways except he will not put you in hell if you are naughty).

J C wrote: »

I am very much aware of the Multiverse Theory.
However, even if an infinite number of multiverses existed ... the inability of non-intelligently directed systems to locally (in both time and space) assemble systems with components with sequences that each occupy combinatorial spaces in excess of the UPB means that multiverse theory doesn't allow all possible things to happen (as is sometimes claimed).

There are also exponential 'run-away' issues where the more changes that are made to CFSI the worse the non-functionality becomes ... because of the great disparity in the ratio between the damaging non-functional sequences (equivalent to the UPB) and the functional sequences (which can be as little as one sequence, where it is a critical sequence for a particular function).
The putative organism must also survive when all of this is going on ... and because it only takes one critical system (or even part of a system) to be 'wrong' to kill something and literally thousands of systems must be 'right' to continue living ... the spontaneous production of CFSI would continue to be impossible, even if multiverses existed ... even an infinity of them.
This can best be summarised by the truism that an infinity of dead things will remain an infinity of dead things ... without an input of intelligence.

Sorry but you've just regurgitated (again) your inaccurate argument against it emerging in a single universe, nothing in the above addresses what would happen in a multiverse with INFINITE iterations. Each iteration and combination has to happen its not a matter of chance or probability it will happen.
In short what you've said is that because it is improbable in one universe it is the same across an infinite number of multiverse.
This is a complete fallacy and looks more like an attempt at obfuscation that actually trying to answer my question.
Anyone who has ever done basic stats can see that if you have an infinite number of something it drastically changes the probability of a single unique event occurring no matter how complex.
And thats not even taking into account that there is more than one unique sequence of events that can lead to life, and that dembskis formula only deals with the observable universe which is far smaller than the actual universe assuming an inflationary universe.

Also the premise of Dembski's equation is to do with time. Essentially he is saying that the universe is too young to have produced spontaneous evolution. If there are infinite universes then his measurement for time is wrong as you have an infinite number of concurrently existing multiverse.
his equation falls apart


Interestingly Dembski himself has no answer for the equation assuming the multiverse exists and is not a fan of the Multiverse theory, you are actually the first person I can find online anywhere who tries to do this so Kudos! but your answer is underwhelming.

I'm actually done debating with you you have been given example after example and link after link that shows the math Dembski used being ripped apart by people with no creationist or other agenda.
Several different computer programs have beaten UPB easily in simulating evolution.
yet you refuse to even try to address these probably because you cant find any answer to cut and paste in rebuttal from a creatard website.

Also declaring yourself the winner in a debate which the vast majority of posters here disagree with you is petulant and childish.
you can repost bad math and obfuscation as many times as you want it wont make them any more valid or accurate.
I cannot find one serious scientific blog or journal that takes dembski seriously. His idea isnt really seriously debated anymore by scientists as it was ripped apart shortly after publication by several different scientists.
I can only conclude that dembski is a fraud trying to make money from the fundamentalist christian groups, I bet he gets paid a fortune to speak at religious universities.
He even admits himself that he starts at the point that God did it, and works back from there looking for ways to prove it or at least come up with enough smoke and mirrors to confuse or put a doubt in people heads.
The scary thing is to the average person who is not going to read up on this stuff, it could seem plausible and pseudo scientific. Thats exactly what they want, to muddy the waters so much that they manage to get ID into schools and universities.

Interesting thread but I cant continue to debate with someone like you JC, its just not worth my time your only intention is to try to shoehorn your religious beliefs into scientific fact. Even if your "science" is deeply flawed, but at this stage I really don't think you care how accurate the science is as long as you can say God did it!

J C wrote: »

Dr Jimbob ... I expected more from you than a limp statement that amounts to little better than 'oh he is ... and yes it is!!!'

Come on Jimbob ... destiny awaits ... I have given you the concise basis of ID, for you to precisely tell us where it's wrong ... and all you can manage is a handwave ... that the flaws have already been pointed out.

If they have ... I've either missed them ... or invalidated them.

You certainly didn't invalidate them, and you seem to be intentionally missing them.

Myself and others have pointed to some pretty fundamentally assumptions made in Dembski's equation - namely that matter is not randomly distributed across the universe and doesnt randomly interact either.

So any maths resulting from such a gross misunderstanding seems pretty useless to me.

And the intellectual posturing is pretty pathetic if you unwilling to even acknowledge the existence of arguments you seem unable to address.

Gintonious wrote: »

Isn't she in prison or had a restraining order put against her for doing stuff outside abortion clinics?

Why would anyone trying to build up the position of creationism show this video? This woman isn't a scientist or a very nice person for that matter.

Yes, it's kind of funny that one of the arguments for her wanting to promote the idea that we are created is that she wants humans to be treated with respect and dignity. Unless you are gay if in need if abortion, that is.

MrP

Vivisectus wrote: »

That is actually not that complicated. The mistake that Dembski makes is assuming that to get from one sequence to another requires the entire genome to be disassembled and then re-assembled randomly. But this is simply not what happens.

What does happen is that the original sequence is copied and multiplied, with some mistakes in it. Some of these mistakes are bad and cause death. Others cause reduced fitness, and will be selected against. Still others will be neutral and have no effect on fitness. A rare few improve fitness and get favored by selection.

Improvements that take a small amount of steps will happen earlier, and then fix themselves in the population. Bigger steps will often be dependent on neutral intermediate steps: the number of evolutionary avenues possible is not limitless.

If you model a 300 position, 20 option string of acids, and set a mutation rate of 1 in 100 and a spawn rate of 10, and then set some combinations as lethal, some as neutral, and some as beneficial, and apply selective pressure to weed out lethal ones (0 survivial chance), and increase the offspring for beneficial ones, we can see that while it takes thousands of generations and lots of organisms to get to the beneficial ones, but it DOES happen.

Surely an equally large mistake is assuming the first sequence was assembled randomly in the first place?

Are any chemical structures/compounds assembled in a truly random fashion?

Oranage2 wrote: »

Also another thing I don't get from this theory is why isn't there any life on planets close to us since if the big bang happened then surely planets in close proximity should have similar conditions and life forms.

They clearly don't have similar conditions though. And close in this context is am extremely relative term - the distances are huge.

Anything closer to the sun is too hot (and any water would be immediately evaoprayrd).

AMD anything further away would be too cold (no running water and in sure there are lots of gases that would be in a solid or liquid state).

I'm sure stuff like thr composition and mass of the planet also has a huge impact (gravity will have a differing strength, which will have an impact on how various elements interact etc).

Oranage2 wrote: »

Also another thing I don't get from this theory is why isn't there any life on planets close to us since if the big bang happened then surely planets in close proximity should have similar conditions and life forms.

I can understand why you would feel like that, but actually it could not be more wrong. It takes very little to change the conditions on a planet.

A tiny percentage change in position, tilt, size, composition, original parameters, and it has cascade massive effect that permeates through the entire conditions set of the planet.

Mere addition or removal of a moon for example would over night change the entire face of our planet and the experience of life on it.

However you say "This Theory" in your post and it is worth pointing out that your point has absolutely nothing to do with Evolutionary Theory. You are talking about life getting started. Evolutionary Theory is about AFTER life has gotten started.

It is an error similar to, for example, going into a discussion on ballistics and trying to make a point about the chemical processes of gun powder explosion. Chemical composition of gun powder is a presupposition of a ballistics conversation. The existence of life is a presupposition of Evolution.

This is one of the most interesting threads I've seen on here. I'm a science student with the OU, I'm studying evolutionary biology but some of the answers in here are still way beyond anything I could ever hope to come up with.

All I'll say is I'm baffled by the fact that so many people still don't believe in evolution. Some people would rather believe in something which has zero evidence to support it and totally ignore the vast amounts of evidence for evolution.