Evolution versus Creationism

[AngryZealot]

I have no problem with dinosaurs being cold or warm blooded or a cross between the two since I believe creatures are engineered. We find many amazing things in living creatures today.
We know that the platypus is bird-like even though we class it as a mammal so it's possible for a dinosaur to have bird-like characteristics.

The platypus is reptile-like, not bird-like, and they are classified as monotremes, which is generally considered a subset of mammals. They split off from the mammal lineage shortly after mammals diverged from reptiles, which is why they contain reptilian characteristics like laying eggs. This is supported from the fossil record and the recently sequenced platypus genome.

 

[Smidlee]

The platypus is reptile-like, not bird-like, and they are classified as monotremes, which is generally considered a subset of mammals. They split off from the mammal lineage shortly after mammals diverged from reptiles, which is why they contain reptilian characteristics like laying eggs. This is supported from the fossil record and the recently sequenced platypus genome.

There was a article I read a few years that showed their bird-like characteristic was more than superficial.

P.S I found one of the articles : http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6568

The platypus X1 chromosome has 11 genes that are found on all mammalian X chromosomes. The X5 carries a gene called DMRT1, which is also found on the Z chromosome in birds.

 

[AngryZealot]

And that makes perfect sense given the phylogenetic tree proposed.

 

[Flying Pig]

I have no problem with dinosaurs being cold or warm blooded or a cross between the two since I believe creatures are engineered. We find many amazing things in living creatures today.
We know that the platypus is bird-like even though we class it as a mammal so it's possible for a dinosaur to have bird-like characteristics.

Read the rest of this thread... There is no way whatsoever that creatures can be engineered. A way to check, easy - engineering means that there is a purpose, but there is obviously no point to a mouse, is there?

 

[Smidlee]

And that makes perfect sense given the phylogenetic tree proposed.

which one?

 

[El_Machinae]

We have homologies with bird genes too. Fox1p, for example.

 

[Flying Pig]

I assume Fox1P is a gene, but what does it do? By the way, birds are descended from a dinosaur (Archaeopteryx, among others) and so they almost certainly have reptile genes, thus a platypus would have bird genes.

 

[peter grimes]

...I believe creatures are engineered.

Most people hold this view, myself, and I dare to say, every poster in this thread. The difference is whether the word 'Engineered' should be read in an active sense or a passive sense. Consider the results any other natural process, and it is easy to understand: Did someONE or someTHING sculpt the object?

Anyone who doubts that life on earth, in all its crazy diversity, is the result of anything other than a natural product of physics and chemistry would say that life is Engineered - using the Active Voice. In contrast, people who correctly maintain that there is no direction to evolution use the term Engineered in the Passive Voice - the same way one would describe a coastal limestone arch that has been sculpted by the changes in sea level.

So really, what has happened, is that over hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of years the complexity, richness, and NON-perfection of life on earth have been sculpted by "natural selection" [to use a catch-all phrase that includes the panoply of mechanisms including sexual selection, genetic drift, historic contingency, and all the other non-directed means, as opposed to a directed, intentional development].

I frequently hear many doubters of evolution refer to the purported perfection certain biological structures as proof that a higher intelligence "engineered" things - but I haven't yet heard a single rational explanation for why there is so much IMperfection in biology.

To use a famous example: Why are the optical nerves in our eyeball installed backwards??

Spoiler answer :

Our bodies are the result tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of accumulated changes, one after the other, along a single unique path, building on, and changing just a little bit from, parent to child. There is an unbroken chain from you and me, tracing back through unimaginable deep time through millions of creatures that were successful in having offspring. At some point in time the positions of the neurons and surrounding tissue conferred an advantage on our ancestors - even though, millions of years in the future, that arrangement would not be the best choice, engineeringly speaking. We are the result of historical contingency. People who doubt evolution commonly ignore this fact.

 

[GoodGame]

We find many amazing things in living creatures today.

Teh Awesome!!!!

 

[Smidlee]

Most people hold this view, myself, and I dare to say, every poster in this thread. The difference is whether the word 'Engineered' should be read in an active sense or a passive sense. Consider the results any other natural process, and it is easy to understand: Did someONE or someTHING sculpt the object?

Anyone who doubts that life on earth, in all its crazy diversity, is the result of anything other than a natural product of physics and chemistry would say that life is Engineered - using the Active Voice. In contrast, people who correctly maintain that there is no direction to evolution use the term Engineered in the Passive Voice - the same way one would describe a coastal limestone arch that has been sculpted by the changes in sea level.

So really, what has happened, is that over hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of years the complexity, richness, and NON-perfection of life on earth have been sculpted by "natural selection" [to use a catch-all phrase that includes the panoply of mechanisms including sexual selection, genetic drift, historic contingency, and all the other non-directed means, as opposed to a directed, intentional development].

I frequently hear many doubters of evolution refer to the purported perfection certain biological structures as proof that a higher intelligence "engineered" things - but I haven't yet heard a single rational explanation for why there is so much IMperfection in biology.

the link to the video in my post #235 deals with this subject; the more we learn the more we are able to determine what can the laws of physics, natural selection, etc can produced (engineer) by guided vs blind search. Guided requires a "fitness function" or it's just a blind search.

P.S A good book where evolutionist tries to deal with how to get designs without a designers is "The Plausibility of Life". The best they could come up with something called "facilitated variation" .They end up talking in circles when trying to nail down exactly what "facilitated variation" suppose to be or do.

To use a famous example: Why are the optical nerves in our eyeball installed backwards??

Spoiler answer :

Our bodies are the result tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of accumulated changes, one after the other, along a single unique path, building on, and changing just a little bit from, parent to child. There is an unbroken chain from you and me, tracing back through unimaginable deep time through millions of creatures that were successful in having offspring. At some point in time the positions of the neurons and surrounding tissue conferred an advantage on our ancestors - even though, millions of years in the future, that arrangement would not be the best choice, engineeringly speaking. We are the result of historical contingency. People who doubt evolution commonly ignore this fact.

This is an old example since we now know the inverted eye has "living optical fibers" (Muller cells). Some engineers is trying to apply to what we know about our eye to design better digital cameras.
This is one example of an out-dated evolution argument which I believe these will increase with time.

 

[AngryZealot]

the link to the video in my post #235 deals with this subject; the more we learn the more we are able to determine what can the laws of physics, natural selection, etc can produced (engineer) by guided vs blind search. Guided requires a "fitness function" or it's just a blind search.

So, in other words, natural selection using number of viable offspring as the fitness function?

 

[Flying Pig]

The reason that you get design wihtout designers is that stuff that doesn't work dies out and stuff that works better than other stuff mulitplies itself more, so eventually because there are finite resources in a given space only the best-suited organisms can survive there. Easy!

 

[Smidlee]

The reason that you get design wihtout designers is that stuff that doesn't work dies out and stuff that works better than other stuff mulitplies itself more, so eventually because there are finite resources in a given space only the best-suited organisms can survive there. Easy!

Even that book realizes it takes something a little more than natural selection plus mutation to explain away these designs we find in life.

 

[Flying Pig]

Something that is useless but does not take up food does not get edited out; male nipples are a good example. The patterns that we find in nature could have arisen at the same time as something beneficial in a very old ancestor, and not been edited out because they do not provide a disadvantage,

 

[Smidlee]

Something that is useless but does not take up food does not get edited out; male nipples are a good example. The patterns that we find in nature could have arisen at the same time as something beneficial in a very old ancestor, and not been edited out because they do not provide a disadvantage,

Or simply like is design to be redundant. I believe there is good evidence of this.

 

[AngryZealot]

Even that book realizes it takes something a little more than natural selection plus mutation to explain away these designs we find in life.

I haven't read the book, but judging from its description on Amazon,

We all know Darwin's theory of evolution—natural selection favors some adaptations over others. But where do new adaptations come from? This problem baffled Darwin and is the main point of attack for opponents of evolution. Kirschner and Gerhart, professor at Harvard and UC-Berkeley, respectively, present their solution to the problem and take a few timely shots at the advocates of intelligent design. The key to understanding the development of complex structures, they say, is seeing that body parts as seemingly different as eyes and elbows are formed from the same basic molecular mechanisms. Thus, the authors propose, the metabolic building blocks of life functions can be rearranged and linked in novel ways with less chance of fatal variations than random mutation of DNA would allow. One piece of evidence they offer is the frequency of periods of "deep conservation" following evolutionary anatomical changes, where conventional theory would argue for continuous mutation and change. Though this seems like an elegantly simple solution, the underlying molecular biology is quite complicated. As for proponents of intelligent design, the authors say their theory turns some of their arguments on their head, converting "some of their favorite claims"—such as "irreducible complexity"—into arguments for evolution.

I would have to say you are being thoroughly dishonest about what the book really says.

 

[Flying Pig]

Or simply like is design to be redundant. I believe there is good evidence of this.

Is that a typo? At any rate, where is the evidence that something which does not provide either an advantage or a disadvantage gets edited out, provided it propagated originally?

 

[peter grimes]

the link to the video in my post #235 deals with this subject; the more we learn the more we are able to determine what can the laws of physics, natural selection, etc can produced (engineer) by guided vs blind search. Guided requires a "fitness function" or it's just a blind search.

The language you use illustrates that you simply aren't following the counter-arguments we've put forth: There is no guide, no search, no intent, no consciousness: nothing that implies a directionality to evolution, excepting that those individuals that are built from a genetic code that results in more offspring producing more offspring will, with time, dominate the population. The outliers in the population - both geographically and physically, will tend to drift further and further from the 'average middle', and eventually will not be able to interbreed. This is the essence of natural selection and speciation. There is nothing controversial about it.

Novel body plans, physiological features and processes, and ways of living don't appear overnight (in reality, nor in the fossil record) - as far as I know there is no irrefutable evidence of a structure that appeared with no antecedent; nothing that can't be explained by extrapolating backwards in time, through small changes from one successful individual to another.

This is an old example since we now know the inverted eye has "living optical fibers" (Muller cells). Some engineers is trying to apply to what we know about our eye to design better digital cameras.
This is one example of an out-dated evolution argument which I believe these will increase with time.

I intentionally chose an old example because it seems that many of the ID and Creationist folks resort to them. Also, my personal library is heavy on the Steven Jay Gould essays, so it's easy for me to find fairly quickly. But speaking to Muller Cells specifically, I'm not sure why you think they are counter-evidence to the natural origin of the human eye
If anything, it reinforces the idea that evolution builds upon the structure or template that's already there. In this case, individuals that had glial cells that enhanced the propagation with light were better off... There's no evidence of intent, design, engineering, or UFOs.

 

[peter grimes]

Or simply like is design to be redundant. I believe there is good evidence of this.

Perhaps he meant to say 'Or simply [Something that is useless but does not take up food does not get edited out; male nipples are a good example] is designed to be redundant...'

What evidence is there of any biological structure having been actively designed??

Saying you believe it is one thing, claiming evidence for it is quite another. The burden is now on you to provide it

 

[Birdjaguar]

The language you use illustrates that you simply aren't following the counter-arguments we've put forth: There is no guide, no search, no intent, no consciousness: nothing that implies a directionality to evolution, excepting that those individuals that are built from a genetic code that results in more offspring producing more offspring will, with time, dominate the population. The outliers in the population - both geographically and physically, will tend to drift further and further from the 'average middle', and eventually will not be able to interbreed. This is the essence of natural selection and speciation. There is nothing controversial about it.

But even after repeated evolutionary setbacks (masss extinctions) life seems to favor "more complex" rather than "less complex" forms.