Prince, I can't address all your issues except to say they are very dated. Transitional organisms are alive today. See my reply to Neb and Silas has described some very good examples.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: beskeptical on 2002-06-11 14:46 ]</font>

Evolutionists are unable to explain how the whale, which is a mammal, went back
into the sea without leaving any fossil evidence of intermediate forms.
The National Geographic Magazine has always promoted evolution. In the November 2001 issue they gave a picture of a land animal -
Ambulocetus - said to be a stage in the evolution of the whale - but their artist
falsified webs between its claws to make it look as if it were adapting to living in the
sea. The rear legs were also positioned as though they were developing into fins.
The article said the digits ended in small hooves, but later described it "lying
submerged like a shaggy crocodile then leaping forth to snatch passing prey".
This would be a little difficult with hooves! The drawing seems to show claws. It is obviously a perfectly normal land animal that has been pressed into use as an
intermediary between mammals and whales. Evolutionists are truly desperate
about the absence of this link.

Small point, but whales ARE mammals. I assume you meant to say "land mammals".

There are lots of intermediates. The problem is creationists expect the fossil record to deliver up an unbroken chain of evolutionary change before they'll acknowledge evolution as a mechanism of species diversification. Every intermediate found creates two more gaps - one on either side, onto which the creationists leap with glee.

You need to start with the principle that every living creature on earth, and every one we've found through the fossil record, is an intermediate. Evolution is a smooth transition from less adapted to more adapted species, with probably far more dead ends than successes. Whales, despite your suggestion to the contrary, provide one of the best fossil record of any species, partly because their large bones had a better chance to survive until fossilization, and partly because they lived in an environment where fossils were more likely to be formed. I wouldn't make too much of an artists rendering. Your position sounds a bit like the Apollo HBs argument that an artist showed flame from the LM ascent engine so the film of the ascent (wherein there is no flame) must be fake.
The evolutionary development of the whale's skeleton is dramatically demonstrated. You may question the conclusion that the ambulocetus (walking whale) successors headed back to the sea, but please don't do it based on whether an artist showed webbed or hoofed feet.
The fact remains that whales have vestigial hind leg bones and commonly display atavism where the legs actually protrude from the body. Only an evolutionary origin for modern whales would explain that.

Careful, now. Never say "never," and never say "only" . . . [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

(A deity-created whale could certainly feature those characteristics if said deity so desired)

__________________
SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

What's to explain? Within the last 300 years, the California Sea Otter went from a creature that lived on the shore and in the sea to being a sea-creature only. This is because of massive over-trapping and hunting. Only those otters who could stay at sea lived.

We don't have to "explain" it. We've SEEN it.

Yes. Interesting, isn't it? A group dedicated to truth, exploration, discovery, photography, evidence, and documentation. You could learn a lot from them.

National Geographic has always been very forthright about labelling as "Artist's Conception" such pictures. The use of a painting to complete a picture of an ancient animal is traditional.

Or do you think that every painting that anyone has ever done of a dinosaur is a "falsification?"

(You might want to be careful here; this could open you up to an attack in a completely different area.)

The phrase "pressed into evidence" implies a lack of good faith.

The intermediate form is, in fact, a perfectly normal land animal that had moved into an aquatic habitat. Again, this happened within very recently recorded history to the Sea Otter.

What about the Hippo? Here is a land animal that leads a semi-aquatic life. It might be an "intermediate form."

And this phrase is also insulting. None of us really minds too much if you say that evolution is wrong, but when you start to accuse it (and, by extension, us) of deliberate falsehood, you enter into a rhetorical realm that our host, for one, has shown little patience for.

Any group of third graders can get together and yell, "Liar, liar, pants on fire" at each other. This forum demands more of us.

Silas

N. Rain,

I wanted to make some additional comments to what BeSkeptical and Silas wrote. First, let me recommend a book, Ernest Mayr, "What Evolution Is". This is not a creationism v. evolution book, but rather exactly what the title suggests. The "theory of evolution" actually comprises several different theories, e.g., natural selection and common descent. Mayr explains each of these and why scientists believe it. If you're serious in your desire to understand evolution, then read this book. The questions you ask, he answers. (You seem like you do wish to understand; just very few people who question evolution really have a desire to understand it.)

Also many your questions about complex systems harken back Behe (actually well before him, but he's just the latest person to raise this argument) and was answered in 1939 by Hermann Muller (1946 Nobel Laureate - not to be confused with Paul Hermann Muller, 1948 Nobel Laureate who invented DDT). These questions are answered at Talk Origins Behe Faq

I never understood that either. He was wrong about so many things. But the irony is that he gave us the scientific method so if we followed him, we would prove him wrong.

Lately I've been working with evolutionary computation. In evolutionary computation we use the ideas genetics, natural selection, and random mutation to find the (near) optimum solution to large complex problems. If take a set of solutions, we keep the better solutions (natural selection), we breed them to create a new set of possible solutions (genetics) and then randomly perturb these possible solutions (mutation). We see how good each of these solutions are and repeat the process. It turns out this is most efficient algorithm we know of for solving very large scale optimization problems (assuming the gradient is not available, which is always the case for practical problems).

Richard Dawkins in his book, "The Blind Watchmaker", makes this point with sentence

METHINK IT IS LIKE A WEASEL

If we were to select 22 letters at random, the chance of getting sentence is about 7x10^(-32). Use the following procedure:
1.) generate 10 sentences of 22 randomly chosen letters
2.) select the sentence that has the most correct letters
3.) duplicate this best sentence ten times
4.) for each duplicate, randomly replace a few letters
5.) repeat 2.) to 4.) until the target sentence is reached
It usually takes less than 900 iterations to match the sentence, less than 9000 total sentences. About 28 orders of magnitude less than predicted by random chance. The point is that natural selection and random mutation is a very efficient means of finding optimum solutions.

This leads to your question, in the parlance of the previous paragraph: Who decides on the sentence? The answer is simple, the environment. And the environment changes, what the optimum solution for one era will not be the optimum solution for the next.

Consider a lush savanah in Africa with lots of trees for our partially arboreal Australopithecine ancestors could use for safety. Now the target sentence changes, a long drought and the safety trees die. The Australopithecine allospecies is now defenseless, is no longer the optimum solution for a drier open plains. We either get 1.)faster like the eland, or 2.)develop defense, sharp horns, or 3.)get smarter and learn to use language and tools to defend ourselves. Considering our ancestors 3.) was the only viable option.

Lastly, when the target sentence changes, this is how complex systems develops. To find your new optimal solution, you must start with your old solution; this is how Behe's irreducibly complex systems (sic) evolve. This is what Muller showed back in the 30's.

Hopefully this adds to what BeSkeptical and Silas have already written.

Ta,

<font size=-1>Edited to correct grammer</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Wiley on 2002-06-11 19:25 ]</font>

Oh, great! My last two paragraphs were my way of trying to wiggle out of this debate. I knew if I entered this debate it was going to go this way, but I still managed to stick my big 'ol foot in my mouth and get lost inside. Neither side is going to sway the other. My belief in God comes out of experiences in my personal like, and some scientific argument saying, "God can't be proven," isn't going to change that. Besides is it scientific to disregard something when it cannot be disproven? OH, I want to say more, but I really have a big project to work on for my class.

No, I will say these two things: looking at the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, I can't argue in their favor, for I disagree with a lot they did, including how they handled leading what was supposed to be Christianity. I cringe at a lot of things the Church leaders did in the name of God, including what they did to Galileo.

Second, if, as I was taught in oceanography, whales decended from land mammals who returned to the sea, I wonder if I found a way to live in the water and taught my children to do so as well, how many generations would it take for my decendents to turn into sea creatures?

Sigh. I'm getting myself into trouble again. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_eek.gif[/img]

Hmm...the stars sure are pretty tonight, aren't they? How does that quote go, "I've never really noticed them before...."

__________________
"As I lay beneath the Southern Cross, the stars tell more than I could" . . . David Meece

Here's one that just seems wrong. How can it have taken 70 million years for horse hooves to evolve when horses haven't been around for that long? 70 million years ago was in the late Cretaceous. If there were any equestrians living then, they would have been Tyrannofodder.

According to the talkorigins link, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html, the first horse ancestors were actually dog-like animals living in the Eocence period, about 55 million years ago, and they looked almost nothing like a horse.

The first true one-toed horses arose 15-10 million years ago. So they didn't take 70 million years to evolve, but only (55-10) about 45 million years.

But more to the point, what is this bs about such long lengths of time being too long to be belived? Evolutionary changes happen when the environment says they need changing. Horses hooves didn't evolve until there was a specific benefit given to having hooves. The process took as long as it did because that's how long it took. It's that simple. It sounds to me like you're claiming that they were working on a one-toed goal but kept falling behind schedule.

It's also erroneous to think of it as just a transition of the number of toes. That was only one part of a larger series of changes of body styles, sizes, and other adaptations to the environment. Horse evolution was a mish-mash of trial-and-error that produced a lot of various forms, and the one-toed version we know today was just the one that suceeded at the end. They didn't appear from some linear, as-if-scheduled rate of change (ok, late Pliocene, time to drop the next toe!). 50 million years doesn't seem too long or too short to me to change a dog-like animal into a modern horse.

The same thing can be said of the cetaceans as well. The changes came about when the environment made it necessary. I can see many more such examples even today. Hippos and beavers are obviously land animals but spend most of their lives in water. I could see them evolving into water-only animals someday. Sea otters as mentioned above have adapted to an entirely aquatic life, and I can see them evolving into more of a seal-like animal in the future. And seals and sea-lions are in my mind exactly what a transitional animal would look like. Legs have become fins, they are streamlined for the water and spend the majority of their time in it, and are now clumsy on land. In a few million years, they could be ocean-dwelling animals very similar to dolphins.

Well, enough rambling from me.
Here's the TalkOrigins FAQ on Cenozoic transitional fossils.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-...al/part2a.html

And here's a page on equestrian evolution from a different site.
http://www.equinestudies.org/historical.htm

__________________
...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

A question for evolutionists:


The strange duck billed platypus animal has:

(A) a soft, sensitive "bill" and lays eggs like a duck
(B) fur like an animal,
(C) webbed and clawed feet,
(D) pockets in its jaws to carry food,
(E) a spur on rear legs which is poisonous like a snake's fang.

What were its ancestors?

Galileo was put on trial because he defended the heliocentric theory - that the Sun, not the Earth, is the centre of the universe. This is not the same as the Earth being round.
It was indeed known, since the Greeks, that the Earth was round.

Creationists.

[Sorry, couldn't help taking the cheap shot. It was just too juicy...] [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

Going waaaaaay back, Eozostrodon, Morganucodon, and Haldanodon, which belong to a group of proto-mammals, are thought to be common ancestors to the three groups of living mammals: monotremes (which includes the platypus, Ornithorhynchus anantinus), marsupials, and placental mammals. A later mammal from the early Cretaceous period, Steropodon galmani, is the first known definite monotreme.

__________________
Cheers...Loreto

Wrong.

"Oh really," said Picard, not buying it for a second. "And just where, in all aspects of creation, can your hand be seen?"
Q smiled toothily. "Why Picard ... who do you think came up with the duck-billed platypus?"
Q-Squared, Peter David

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/platypus.html

__________________
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

Of course all this evolutionary confabulations would disappear if the radiometric dating was shown to be wrong.
This method is used to give an age to rocks (and thereby the fossils they bear) but
it rests upon several unprovable assumptions, e.g.
(A) Radioactive conditions are the same today as they were millions of years ago.
(B) The 'half life' of the elements is constant.
(C) No products of the radioactive decay were originally present nor have been
added since the formation of the rock.
These are all very large suppositions that cannot be easily checked in the field for
every sample.
When the same stratum is tested by different methods or even by the same
method, it frequently gives an enormous range of ages. For example, one rock
gave 14, 30, 95 and 750 million years by different methods. In another case, dating
of the same rock for Leakey's 1470 'Man' gave 220 million years and 2.6 million
years using the Potassium-Argon method. It is sometimes said that, despite
discrepancies, radiometric dating shows that rocks are millions of years old, not
thousands. One answer is that the 'daughter' elements found in some rocks are
naturally occurring along with many other elements. To infer vast ages from the
ratios of the elements found in rocks is unwarranted. The only reason why the
results of Radiometric Dating tests are quoted is that they give ages in terms of
millions of years. Other methods giving only thousands are completely ignored.

Why? The theory of evolution doesn't depend on the time-frame in which it is observed to occur. It suffices to obeserve that the age of mammals is later than the age of dinosaurs; this isn't changed a bit if the time between them is 4 million or 40 million or 400 million years.

And that's a pretty broad range: if you think that the rate of radioactive decay of chemical elements has changed that much in the past, you need to show evidence for it.

(It would involve changes to the strong nuclear force, which would involve changes to the kinds of atoms that can exist; since we find roughly the same distribution of elements in very old rocks as in very new ones, the evidence points to the constancy of these basic physical constants.)

Sigh... Another imputation of bad faith.

There are *no* valid methods of dating that give dates of "thousands of years" for rocks containing dinosaur fossils. None. There are certain tests that certain people have misconstrued.

(By the way, to make this relevant to astronomy, the basic mixture of elements is found in the stars and nebulae: if radioactive decay was different at the time the stars emitted the light which we see now, certain elements would be absent. They aren't. Ergo the strong nuclear force has not changed by any significant amount in many millions of years.)

Silas

If being able to live in water became essential to human survival and procreation, either we would become extinct, or we would adapt to water life. Those that could hold their breath the longest, tread water the longest, swim the fastest and liked eating raw fish and seaweed would have the best chance to surive. No-one can say how long it would take for your descendants to become aquatic mammals, but if they had a survival advantage over land-based humans, it is clear that they would indeed evolve that way, IF they could survive long enough to adapt. If the environmental change is too rapid, most species won't adapt, so just moving your family into the water may not be the best strategy.

Not at all. Evolution was well accepted by the time radiocarbon dating was invented. The non-constancy of species and common descent were accepted almost immediately and with little debate (~1870). Other aspects of Darwin's theory of evolution, natural selection, multiplication of species, and gradualism, were all accepted by 1930. This is about twenty years before the invention of radiocarbon dating (1949).

Well, technically, it isn't radiocarbon dating that is used for fossils. It works well for organic materials up to about 50,000 years old, and even at that age the accuracy isn't great. Rocks were first dated by uranium decay. I think that discovery was around the same time though - late 40s, early 50s. There are better methods now available, but there is pretty good correlation among all the methods used when the date ranges to which they apply overlap.

Young earth creationists tend to leap upon the divergent results sometimes obtained for a single rock specimen - the kind of info Dunash provided - as "proof" that the method can't be relied upon. What they don't include is the qualifiers that went with the data explaining how the variations arose (although I haven't seen data as varied as Dunash's). Non homogeneous samples - for example those where the rock wasn't formed from a completely molten, thoroughly mixed matrix - will be expected to show different ages depending on where the sample was taken. This is well understood and not an indicator of a flawed method. The wealth of dating information that shows the age of the earth isn't in any way weakened by the few anomolous results used by YECs after they have conveniently dropped the contextual clarification.

Too many things to address to use 'reply with quote'.

I appreciate not being the only person recognizing evolution is the best scientific explanation for the evidence we as humans have gathered about biology and associated sciences.

Evolution is not a 'belief' as a religion is. It does not require faith. In this case it only requires taking the time to learn how the process works and why the evidence is so clear.

So far, every single point that has been brought up on this BB to refute evolution, has already been discredited by the science that followed the original observation. I have not seen a single post brought up here against evolution that is more recent than 10-20 years old. Some of you may have heard these arguments recently, but they are not new evidence.

These old arguments have all been addressed by new research. Every single last one of them.

Even if the supposed evidence being cited here against evolution had not yet been addressed, single inconsistencies, even if numerous, do not indicate a theory is wrong. It would only mean a few points needed to be addressed. When the overwhelming evidence supports a theory, citing this and that reason to discount the evidence, is getting out of the realm of science.

Without getting into a religious debate, I think we should be able to look scientifically at the alternative explanation, creation.

If all animals, and/or insects, plants, & whatever other life is present today on this planet survived on a boat and grew from those few creatures in a mere few thousand years into the current populations, what would be required in terms of the math of reproduction for such a feat to have occurred. Not to mention the feat of populating all the continents and islands, and for the life that did result to accomplish all the variation that adaptation led to?

I propose to anyone to look at birth rates, death rates, rates of adaptation to account for variation, migration rates and hurdles, of all the organisms that supposedly were on that boat, and explain realistically, how it could have occurred in the time frame described by the Bible.

And, why is the above explanation supported by the evidence more than evolution is?

To date, no one has ever specified a Theory of Creation.

It doesn't exist. It has no model. It has no description. It has no explanatory value.

The "creation" model consists solely of saying, "We don't know."

Where did it happen? "We don't know."
How did it happen? "We don't know."
Was it sudden or gradual? "We don't know."

Now, in the extreme, that position is always valid. There are a lot of things we don't know, and an awful lot of proposed explanations, in the history of science, have been wrong. Evolution might well be wrong.

But "We don't know" is *not* an improvement.

The recent refinement of "Intelligent Design," while slightly better, still fails: it cannot explain those features well-documented in nature, of adaptions that are pretty obviously *not* intelligent.

Parasitism alone is a damning rebuttal to Intelligent Design. What the hell sort of twisted, sick, evil, diseased "intelligence" would have "designed" the tapeworm, the fluke, the scabies, the tick, the ichneumon wasp, or the smallpox virus?

And, of course, Darwin realized early on that no "intelligent designer" could possibly have designed whales with hip-bones, or human beings with toes.

(Sheesh, I really hate my toenails...)

Silas

The C14 level is not constant as the ground
level activity is still risingi.e. the amount of C14 is not yet in equilibrium. This
makes the true age shorter than apparent age. This method is quite unreliable for ages over 3,000 years despite datings up to 40,000 years being quoted.

You repeat yourself a lot but you haven't addressed any responses. Do you want to just speak your mind or are you actually trying to convince anyone? You do not speak of any expertise nor qualifications for your statements. Why should anyone take them seriously?

This is a hypothesis of creationists that is not borne out by observation. C14 dating is quite accurate to 40,000 years and can be stretched to about 50,000 years with accelerator mass spectrometry. Comparison with dendochronology (tree rings), gives clear correlation up to about 12,000 years ago - suggesting that C14 indeed has been in stable equilibrium for at least that long. Where did you get the 3000 year figure? What is the mechanism for C14 creation? Why do you think it isn't at equilibrium? How would any living organism selectively incorporate C12 rather than C14 making it appear older than it actually is? Chemically, there is no distinction between the two isotopes.

And on the broader issue of dating minerals:
How do you explain the correlation of uranium-lead, potassium-argon, rubidium-strontium and fission track methodologies that all deliver up the same ages for minerals between about 50 million and a billion years old?

I've always wondered why Christians who want Intelligent Design as it disproves the kinder, gentler God (post Isaiah). If a baby bird falls out of the nest, he will die. The mother bird will not recongonize him. Babies in the nest are mine, babies outside are not. Also consider the wasps who lay their eggs in the still living body of a tarantula. The larvae will slowly eat all the spider's non-vital organs. It takes about agonizing three months for the wasp larvae to finally kill the tarantula. If there is a "Designer", he's one cruel and twisted SOB.

I heard a quote somewhere and I wish I could remember where so I could properly attribute it.

"Stop telling God what He can't do!"

Feel free to say that you wouldn't have created things this way, but please stop saying that no entity could possibly have done so - seems a tad egotistical to decide that there's absolutely no "intelligent" reason to do something just because you can't think of one, doesn't it?

__________________
SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

I figure mosquitoes are the proof there was no intelligence behind the design. Creationists argue that misery is inflicted on humans because we all fall short of God's expectations, but watching a cow suffer as clouds of biting insects torment it doesn't seem to fit with that explanation. The world is the way it is because that's the only way it could be given a billion years of evolution. There's nothing miraculous, just a natural balance, some of which isn't the way we humans might have done it, given the chance.

""Stop telling God what He can't do!"

I think this was Neils Bohr to Einstein when Einstein made the comment that "God doesn't play dice with the universe". Bohr is reported to have replied, "Albert, stop telling God what to do"

The point being made is that to postulate an intelligent designer, the design must be intelligent. It isn't. The existence of the design is used as "evidence" that a designer exists, but in the absence of any corroborationg evidence, the argument is completely circular.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: DaveC on 2002-06-13 11:54 ]</font>

It isn't that I can't think of one; it is that no one can. The facts are not "intelligent."

You can, if you wish, fall back on the position that the creator is "mysterious." However, acting in a mysterious fashion is not "intelligent." Most importantly, saying, "It's mysterious" is not scientific. It can explain anything...and thus explains nothing.

Imagine if I were to respond to Dunash that way! He says, "Radioisotope dating gives contradictory results." I say, "You're right: it's mysterious!" He says, "The process returns dates that are too large." I say, "Don't tell rocks what they can't do."

In a theology message board, you'd have a point. In a science message board, you're off base (and I tag you "out.")

Silas

That's it! Thanks! [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]
Ah, but you can't authoritatively say that the design is not intelligent, you can only say that it's not recognizably intelligent. Concluding that it therefore can not be intelligent is also circular, no?

I am not backing ID - I am not attempting to provide or defend "proof" that a deity did create the universe. I am simply refuting Silas' alleged "proof" that one didn't.

__________________
SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

Oh, I see. It's not you, personally, who is the repository of all possible intelligence and wisdom in the universe, it's humanity as a whole. If it doesn't make sense to "us," it can not be "intelligent."

Sorry, still not valid.

Wow! You claim proof that God could not have created the universe, and then accuse me of being off-base? In a science message board, this whole conversation is off base! [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Your allegorical conversation with Dunash does not seem to logically compare to ours. I think the intelligence of hypothetical deities is a mildly different concept than specific measurements of actual rocks, isn't it?

Your implication that whale hip-bones prove that God could not have created the universe is fundamentally flawed - it proves no such thing. The question of creation simply can not be scientifically proven - neither for nor against.

PS I hope that I'm not coming off as angry or anything here - I'm just engaging in friendly debate! [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]


_________________
SeanF

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SeanF on 2002-06-13 12:22 ]</font>

It is true that one can't prove the non-existence of something - e.g. creation - but when it is set opposite something that IS proven - e.g. evolution - it needs something better than hand waving as an argument for its being a viable alternative. I could be wrong, but to the best of my knowledge, no-one anywhere has ever produced one piece of evidence for the existence of a creator. It is simply a matter of faith.

But you have to first prove the existence of a designer before you can ascribe the characteristics of nature to a design. You haven't done that. You are using nature as the argument that a designer exists - and further concluding that the designer is an intelligence. I'm not trying to prove a designer doesn't exist, nor do I think that's what Silas is trying to do. The onus of proof is on you to defend the invocation of magic as a mechanism of species diversification.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: DaveC on 2002-06-13 12:56 ]</font>