The Official Perfection KOs Creationism Thread!

[The Last Conformist]

I guarantee you an astrophysicist can predict with 100% certainty exactly where Jupiter will be in fifteen days. He can predict with 99.999% certainty where it will be in 15,000 years.

Do I need saying "Heisenberg"?

Sarcasm aside, a) that's not astrophysics but mechanics, b) carlosMM is overestimating the uncertainty in such predictions. I'll try and find a source some other day, but the margin of error isn't "huge" by any reasonable standard for 15k years for an object of Jovian size.

(You can't predict a position with 99.999% certainty BTW, without specifying the interval it's refering to; if you look at a point, it will be off with 100% certainty if there's any error at all in the measurement, which there of course will be.)

We're also assuming that the laws of physics aren't gonna change during this timespan; a reasonable assumption, but not provable beyond waiting to see. There's also the freak chance that some extragalactic object with colossal speed comes zooming out of thin air and pushes Jupiter out of orbit.


Back to the original comparison 'tween astronomical predictions and evolutionary ones. First, notice we're dealing with quite different kinds of models - in astronomy and astrophysics, we're normally dealing with deterministic models, and when we're not (quantum tunnelling in nucleosynthesis, say) we're dealing with such enormous numbers of particles that we can treat them like deterministic ensembles*, while in evolutionary model we have stochastic effects one a macro scale - mutations are seen as random**, and a single mutation at the right time and place can have huge effects on entire populations. It should go without saying that this means that the business of making predictions about the future is pretty different in the two cases - if you want an analogy, that between predicting the average roll of 10^23 dice and predicting the roll of a single dice.

The similarity is that they're both chiefly observational sciences - much of what they deal with cannot be tested in the laboratory, because it involves temporal and/or spatial scales you simply cannot fit into a lab. As a result, astronomers and biologists alike chiefly work out the implications of their theories, and look if they see it in nature. Predicting the future is of limited interest, for when the future comes around, you're probably dead since 10^7 years or so. A prediction of what the world will look like in ten million years is, for practical purposes, not testable.

(To which, in the astronomical case, comes that we're often dealing with the distant past in any case. The latest news from the Andromeda galaxy are horribly old. Predicting the present is pointless, since you wont know if you were this side of the year 2,000,000 AD.)

Almost none of our theories of stellar developments have been tested in the sense someone has looked at a system, predicted it's gonna do anything more interesting than look the same for a horribly long time, and then watched it happen***. The same thing's true for galactic development, only doubly so. Nonetheless, we consider the theories pretty much certain, because they beautifully explains what we see today. So does the ToE for biology; hence my remark that if you felt free to dismiss it because it cannot say what life will look like in a million years ago, you should dismiss astronomy too.

* Similar conditions in thermodynamics gave us the saying that nothing is more predictible than total randomness.
** This is particularly appropriate for mutations caused by the decay of radionucleotids, which, as far as we know, is irreducibly stochastic, but works well with chemical mutagens, copy error, and the rest of the lot too.
*** A rare counterexample would be the decay of the orbits of binary pulsars. Well, depends on what you call "interesting", but it's measurable, at least.

 

[FearlessLeader2]

I'm done with this thread

 

[FearlessLeader2]

I'm done with this thread

 

[The Last Conformist]

Evolution, if you ask a typical believer like carlosmm or Perfection, is the mechanism by which life on earth branched out from a single common organism. Er, no wait; it’s a change in frequency of an allele in a population. Um, no, that’s not it, it’s natural selection that causes one sub-type of a kind to out-breed the other sub-types and become dominant. Actually, it’s a lot of different things all at once.

Evolution is change in a system over time. It's an abstraction, which can be applied to plenty of different situations. Here, we're dealing with evolution (change over time) of hereditary traits in biological organisms.

I can't figure out without what is the intended difference 'tween the relative allele frequence change and the outbreeding of one subkind by another is supposed to be. The common origin of life isn't part of Darwinian evolution as such, altho it's, of course, beautifully consistent therewith.

It pretends to be a scientific theory, but it’s neither a theory, nor scientific.

*Sigh*
The Darwinian theory of evolution makes plenty of testable and falsifiable predictions in the Popperian sense, and is therefore a scientific theory in Popper's system. If you want to have another philosophy of science, fine - just don't trouble us with it.

(Which theory of gravity are you speaking of, BTW? The Newtonian and Einsteinian ones are demonstrably incomplete, and no quantum one can claim anything remotely like the experimental verification that the Darwinian theory of evolution can. Your case is weak enough without picking poor examples to illustrate your points.)

I'd say something about the whole "kinds" business too, but first, answer me, do you believe these "kinds" to be more than taxonomical abstractions, to have some sort of objective existence?

 

[FearlessLeader2]

I'm done with this thread

 

[FearlessLeader2]

I'm done with this thread

 

[The Last Conformist]

And here is this again. This subtle assault on the concept of species in itself.

Hey, now you're talking about species again. I thought you had given up on those.

The ToE can't prove a significant morphological change is possible via the ToE

Define "significant".

, so it seeks to tear down the concept of species so that speciation becomes irrelevant. Is this supposed to make descent with modification easier to accept as the cause of branching from common ancestry?

It's rather more fundamental than that. It's about what exists independently of us, and what only exists in our minds.

The burden of proof clearly lies on those who believe that species (or "kinds") are anything more than convenient abstractions to simplify our models. We don't need tear down the concept of species - they (you?) need erect it.

Kinds are taxonomical abstractions (TAs hereafter), yes, but they are neccessary ones, lest we be forced to call every creature on earth 'animal' and every plant 'plant'.

I guess you were just writing quicker than you were thinking here, but this is ironic - if I don't accept the objective existence of species, it follows without saying that I don't accept that of kingdoms.

Does "necessary" here mean necessary from a practical viewpoint, or from a, well, philosophical?

That said, these TAs are also to at least some extent, extant in reality also. While the members of a kind vary greatly in coloration, diet, et al, their base morphology does not change. Felines retain the base characteristics of felines, ferns those of ferns. If these TAs do not exist, then apparently all life on earth shares the same conceit as He who coined the term kind, because they all seem to be staying within their own, even in the fossil record we see that to be true.

Based on past experience, it seems you for every instance of apparent speciation will expand the relevant "kind" to make it "variation within a kind". I'm not in the mood for that particular game right now.

It's still not clear to me what is your position on these "kinds" - you say they are "to at least some extent, extant in reality", which one assumes means independently of a categorizing observer. It is not clear to me how such existence could be "to at least some extent" - it very much seems like a binary issue to me.

 

[FearlessLeader2]

Wow. So, you guys have totally fled the battlefield, to the point where you refuse to even acknowledge that there is an enemy to fight, let alone a place to fight him and weapons to wield.

If there's no objective difference between a cockroach and a banana tree, then there is no point in us having this discussion.

(Oh, and BTW, with you pulling a cop-out on that scale, I utterly win.)

 

[The Last Conformist]

How about this one?

Observation
Hypothesis/Prediction
***Experimentation *** (AKA Falsification)
Conclusion and evaluation
Repetition

No experimentation = no science.

This from the guy would claimed astrophysics was scientific?

As you very well know, there has been experiments confirming predictions by the Darwinian theory of evolution, so this "definition" of science doesn't even achieve its apparent goal of excluding it.

And please don't try and come up with a new one. Trying to gerrymander the terminology to exclude Darwinism form scientificness and theoryhood is, at best, an exercise in dishonest rhetorics. It has no bearing on the truth value of the tenets of Darwinism.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Wow. So, you guys

I'm one guy.

If there's no objective difference between a cockroach and a banana tree, then there is no point in us having this discussion.

Of course there's a difference between any two objects - they'll differ in temporospatial coordinates if nothing else (modulo quantum superpositions, but that's not relevant at the scale of a cockroach or a banana tree).

The issue is whether objects can be objectively sorted into classes such as "cockroach" and "banana tree".

 

[Birdjaguar]

From my standpoint as an interested reader, it seems that natural selection and evolution are being intertwined as if they are one and the same. FL2 , I know you do not believe in evolution (a long slow process by which one species changes into another species with which it cannot breed), but do you allow natural selection as a process in life (a speedier process by which a species changes adapts to cahnges in its environment?

 

[FearlessLeader2]

At numerous points, in many of my posts. Are you being deliberately obtuse, or are you just not reading what I post?

(And BTW- if that's the definition of evolution, then it's a new one on me.)

 

[Birdjaguar]

At numerous points, in many of my posts. Are you being deliberately obtuse, or are you just not reading what I post?

I'm just doing a terms check and in post 143 you seemed to accept natural selection when you said: "what sensible folks call variation within a kind"

(And BTW- if that's the definition of evolution, then it's a new one on me.)

I'm sure no one in OT would accept my simplistic text as a definition, I was meerely trying to differentiate it from natural selection. In fact if both sides in this debate posted their definitions, it might be interesting. You all could be defending and attacking different theories of evolution.

 

[FearlessLeader2]

Allow me to snort a Conan's-wizard-buddy snort. Hah!

Half of my problem with the ToE is that none of its adherents will stick with a given definition of anything long enough to pin anything down. I'll say this much, the theory itself sure as heck evolves...

 

[Birdjaguar]

In the evolution vs creationism debate the two sides are very different. The creationists claim that life was created in some fashion by god. There seems to be several flavors of this, but all rest on the single premise that, one way or another, god is responsible. Traditional scientific proof of this is not currently possible. Creationists often say they're right, because evolutionists can't prove to creationists' satisfaction that evolution is correct (can they ever?). They isolate specific details to attack. Science accepts a clear evolutionary path from eohippus to modern horse; creationists counter claim that the fossil record doesn't show they were actually related. Of course, the fossil record can't show a perfect chain of species development over many millions of years. But it is far better "evidence" for evolution than genesis is "evidence" for a 7 day creation.

Evolutionist theory is a very complex model that has gotten more complex as science has evolved more skills and techniques for studying the nature of things. There is disagreement among scientists about the hows and whys of evolution, just like some creationists believe that the world was created in 7 days and others do not. Unlike creationists who all accept the god as creator principle, science allows disagreement at the most basic levels.

Evolutionist theory changes as more data is examinied, studied, and debated. All data can be challenged and the creationists often attack specific data as a way to say the whole theory is wrong. That's like saying the yankees aren't the best team in baseball because they lost 3 games in a row.

We all would like to show absolute proof for our side, but we can't. Evolutionists must build their model of life from the ground up. They must find the best fit for the ever growing existing data. The current many branched TOE is the current best fit. It will change in the next 50 years as we learn more.

The process is simlar in all branches of science. Stephen Hawking has changed his view on black holes. He is not saying black holes no longer exist, just that he has new data that changes how he describes them. Theory evolves.

Creationists don't need all that pesky research and time consuming study to know how life originated. Their approach is top down: the bible tells us what we need to know. End of story. If you force them to look at the data, it is made to fit the model. They have no choice.

 

[SolarKnight]

You do know FL2 that evolution was not actually started by Darwin there were theories before he wrote the origin of species, his was merely one of the most well known.

 

[Birdjaguar]

The link below is to a creationist site that discusses which arguments should and should not be used in discussions with non creationists. In many cases it explains in semi scientific detail why a creationists arguement is weak or invalid. If nothing else it illustrates that creationism is very splintered. It's worth a few minutes.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/dont_use.asp

Here is a sampling from the definitely do not use list:
'No new species have been produced.’ This is not true—new species have been observed to form. In fact, rapid speciation is an important part of the creation model. But this speciation is within the ‘kind’, and involves no new genetic information. See Q&A: Speciation.

 

[carlosMM]

Applicable to living things only, and useless for fossils. But that’s okay, because there’s a handy-dandy second definition to make them fit too. Of course, it doesn’t work on living things, but this is the song that never ends…

nonsense, and you know it!
obviously, we can't have fossils mate in the lab - but we can go by the best estimate of what changes in bone would result in the inability to mate.
just because our information is incomplete doesn#t mean it is useless.

No, I’m highly skeptical, and since you don’t have to answer to my or any other’s authority, you feel that you are superior to me, and that my skepticism could only be born of ignorance cause you’re just so gosh-darn smart, aren’t you?

You were talking about you 'daring' what 'we' failed to dare for 200 years

I’m pretty well inured to your ad hominems by now, but thanks for playing.

think, then talk. Then there will be no need to address your personal failures.

Okay, it’s a nickname for puma, which is a nickname for panther.

are you so stupid to see that your definition is LANGUAGE dependent? Which is ridiculous, as you know quite well that 'one word' will not work in most languages....

Not the way you do it. You deliberately twist wording to achieve a desired result, a strawman, and then attack that. You’re openly dishonest.

who was talking about ad hominem here?
I didn't take anything out of context, I just showed up the inconsistencies in your hypotheses. You DO HAVE the chance to correct my interporetation - would you mind addressing the mess with the different one word families, subfamilies etc. in birds? And the issue of different languages affecting your definitions?


No?



thought so!

You see? You just did it again! I say one thing, you deliberately read something extra into it that is not true, and then attack with that. Dishonest!

hu?
I was just using your standard method of argumentation on you. IN YOUR FACE!

Correction, under your ever-morphing to fit the facts definition of dog, wolf is not a dog. Wolves are the progenitors and members of the dog kind

ah, there I have you now:
is a dog a wolf? or a wolf a dog?
wolf is a 'one word' - so it must be a kind - how can it then be a part of the 'dog' kind?

Mentally insane or plain ignorant. And those are the only possibilities, right?

or plain stupid! I didn't want to say it this openly, but your mental capacities must be quit limited if you do such logical screwups like the wolf-dog one above.

Because under the naturalistic definition of reality that you and all evolutionists unnecessarily adhere to; God is an extraneous bit of nonsense.

tsk tsk, talking about what you know nothing about.

It’s funny that not a single other branch of science requires such a caveat be installed and accepted for any of its theories to work.

funny that physics and maths and chemistry all require that nobody just stands the laws they are based on oin their heads and does 'wonders'

For you and other intellectualist elitist snobs like yourself, any benighted soul who places his faith in anything but the manifest destiny of man’s mind to apprehend all things is an ignorant slack-jawed peasant, not capable of comprehending the magnificence that is your mind, right?

nope, just someone who uses his mental capacities all the time just to believe in something that is contrary to all reliable evidence - he is in my eyes ignorant and plain stupid. Luckily, there's something akin to natural selection in human society, too - intelligent use of the brain, looking at the facts and structuring your ideas of the world based on them, will win out in the long run.

Just look at the number of times you’ve directly assaulted, not my arguments, but me personally, and especially my intellect and my sanity.

look at the times you have claimed utter idiotic nonsense.

Anything that challenges your cherished pre-conceptions is a dang dirty lie, and anyone who says it is a dang dirty liar, and if they actually believe what they’re saying, then they’re just plain crazy. Does an attitude like that strike you as the attitude of a reasonable man, or of a fanatic worshipper?

there is a cold hard truth out there - things ARE, or AREN'T.
If you insist on believing the one side that has been disproven a billion times, I call you stupid or a liar (may be you are actually dumb enough, may be you are intentionally saying the un-truth (that's the definition of lie)).
Creation has been disproven again and again - oyur arguments for it are inexistent.
Evolution has been shown to happen a billion times - your arguments against it have been shown to he based on lack of information or to be plain wrong.
Natural selection has been shown to happen a billion times - your aguments are so full of holes and misinformation (hehe, you actually try to disprove it and evolution based on semantics!!!!!) that they border the absurd.
I have yet to read one intelligent, logically coherent and informed post on the amtter by you.

what do you expect?

Because I am a fallible man, I yearn to see the look on your face when Armageddon comes, but I hope God will forgive me for such callow selfishness.

there we go - religious fanatism! Explains a lot of why you simply resist the evidence. A bit like a husband who can't believe his wife is a murderer despite having seen her commit the act. I am beginning to suspect you ahve a mental block regarding evolution.

To the last, I scoff: you bring intelligent design into the mix and demand that I do what you refuse to? Puh. Leeze. Fossils perfectly support reproduction within a kind: we have a long period of status quo with minimal in-kind variation, and then a sudden arrival of a new phenotype. DNA analyses… I suppose you refer to genes being present in earlier life forms that are present in modern ones? If that is what you refer to, then I’m not sure what you’re getting at. I have no problem with the concept, and have mentioned it myself several times, of God using the old version of a species to birth the new version, after tweaking a gene or fifty to produce the next generation terraformer. Surrogate motherhood is a common practice in both human and animal fertility medicine. Some of that pesky ‘applied science’ I’m always droning on and on about, doncha know…

hm, again, you admit to being not quite frim on the matters.

for you information - fossils support NOT constant re-creation, but rather the gradual (fast or slow) change from one species into another.
YOU are bringing in intelligent desgin all the time - YOU do something to explain how the facts fit your theory.
Why should a god actually create an endless series of species, each based on the other, if the same changes cna easily be explained by processes repeatedly observed in labs and in the field?

and 'surrogate motherhood' requires your god to have actually operated on the animals - did he sterilize his needles or what?


if you find someone ran into your parked car then drove off - do you hypothesize a mars spaceship hitting it, then god painting the color of your neighbours Ford onto your car to hide tha mars-men?

Nope, you make the straight and most parsimonous assuption: that your neighbour ran his FOrd into your car and drove off.
Why don't you do that with science?

How can I possibly prove something to a person who denies any possibility of it being true?

bring evidence.


oh, you have none?

Further, how can I prove the existence of God, when God requires faith, and faith precludes proof?

I didn't demand you prove the existence of God - jus that little flood theory

You asked the impossible, and I shrugged and walked away.

I asked that you back up your claim on the flood - quite impossible, as it didn#t happen.

I could ask you to prove abiogenesis or give up, but I’m not intellectually dishonest.

This is the best one yet - abiogenesis does not have anything to do with the ToE. Your continually not getting this shows your intellectual dishonesty - you cannot be so stupid not to understand it, so you must intentionally lie here!

So the sky is blue and you make much of it? Well let me join you in a whoopeddy-doo.

hm, interestingly, you do not address the very importent point I made........ or did you not get it?
I'll explain again for thementally ********:

the ToE predicts that intermediate species existed between closely related species. At the same time, no intermediate chimeras will be found between not-closely related species (who'd be easy for create for a god).
Not a single fossil has been found that does not fit the ToE - lots have been found and are being found every day that fit it nicely.

My point exactly! You KNOW (and without anything that looked like evidence at all you’d still KNOW) that there is no God, so evolution MUST be right. Anything that doesn’t fit that paradigm is faulty data and discarded, and anything that remotely supports it is inherently right. You KNOW that the jigsaw puzzle (speciation by evolution) will be completed, because there is NO possible alternative.

eh, preacher, you no read my statement!
I discard nothing.
read your post and mine again, and then pelase answer on topic.

You have yet to make any useful predictions. Your ‘fact’ is not in evidence. And knowledge that has no value is not worth pursuing; else we’d have a Theory of Where Socks Eaten by the Dryer Go.

The ToE has made hundreds of thousand of usefull predictions. Your constant denial does nothing to change that.
Want another one:
I predict that there will be found a fossil witht he following characteristics:
it comes from the base of the Yixian formation.
It has the typical psittacosaur snout, with the sutures of the maxilla and premaxilla and lacrimal and nasal converging to a point on the snout,
has either the typical rostral bone, but smaller than any latter species,
or has a predentary bone
or both, but small
has at most a meager lateral expansion of the jugal

this Psittacosaurid dinosaru will be more ancenstral than any other one known before.


Good enough?

Well, I’ll try, but being an ignorant peasant, I might get it wrong. (I’ll put it in a separate post.)

 

[carlosMM]

Evolution:
1) slow change from one form to another
2) sudden change from one form to another
3) a religion started by Charles Darwin
4) a confidence game played by ‘scientists’ (IE intellectual elitist snobs) to bilk wealthy elitist snobs out of their money

Evolution, if you ask a typical believer like carlosmm or Perfection, is the mechanism by which life on earth branched out from a single common organism. Er, no wait; it’s a change in frequency of an allele in a population. Um, no, that’s not it, it’s natural selection that causes one sub-type of a kind to out-breed the other sub-types and become dominant. Actually, it’s a lot of different things all at once.

It pretends to be a scientific theory, but it’s neither a theory, nor scientific. The Theory of Gravity states that two bodies in space will exert an attraction on each other, and as a result of that attraction, all kinds of momentum-based phenomena can be quantified and predicted. It works very well on a macro-atomic scale, but at the point where you start dealing with electrons and protons, it starts to break down because of the other forces exerting so much more influence that they tend to cancel it out. The ToG makes testable predictions about the behavior of objects in space, and these predictions can be falsified.

The ToE states… well it doesn’t really come out and say anything intelligible. Allelles change in frequency in a population over time. Well, yeah. If a creature dies, then its alleles leave the population. If a creature is born, its alleles enter. Put enough births and deaths together, and you’ve got a cha-cha going. Although they don’t actually say it, I guess you can assume they’re speaking of dynamic equilibrium in a kind’s gene pool, that although individuals are entering and leaving all the time, in the short term, a kind’s gene pool is relatively static. When something happens to upset the kind’s reproduction, like a new predator or disease, the genes that allow for survival of that problem increase in appearance as competitors are eaten or die off from disease. This happens all the time, and it leads to what sensible folks call variation within a kind ; IE the names change, but the game remains the same. The population might have changed color ratios, or the members that didn’t have resistance to a particular drug are gone, but the creatures themselves are not different creatures. Same creatures, different ratios of variants. The frequency of an allele has changed.

Now, for some reason that no one has ever provided evidence to support, it is believed that if these changes within a kind occur long enough, it will eventually spawn a new kind. Gregor Mendel showed that traits can be recessive or dominant, and that generations can pass while recessive genes are passed on and then they resurface, which means that change can definitely be horizontal (within a kind). To date, no one has demonstrated that this change can also be vertical (reverting to a past kind or becoming a new kind). Further, no explanation is given for why evolutionists completely discard out of hand the idea of devolution. I’ve never heard of any claim that a kind reverted to a prior kind, which you’d think would have to happen from time to time if all the genes are there…

yeah, nice rant - you happen to name a few of the important points - but it appears you cannot make them go in any proper order. Hm, is this an indication that you have not understood the logic?
I think so


please try again!

 

[carlosMM]

BJ: thank you!
I had a few good laughs, too