I posted a SCIENCE article on the rate of Human Mutation that shows the rate is one Letter of DNA every Billion years. This gives you a major math problem, let alone a logic problem. You never countered that. Further it is another logical fallacy as well as dishonest to attack me when you could not rebut my science and logic points.
Nonetheless, the big lie which is being promulgated by evolutionists is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn’t. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.
The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It’s basically ignorant.
Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, or some other member of that crowd.
To these people I say, you’ve still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you’d actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren’t one, and you want to become one. You’ll need a baker’s dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn’t long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it’s even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you’d ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you’d need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins “crew” and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950’s, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge’s “Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek” attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in “peripheral” areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
“Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: ‘OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....’”
You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). In other words, the clowns promoting this BS are claiming that the very lack of intermediate fossils supports the theory. Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn’t BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could as easily claim that the fact that I’d never been seen with Tina Turner was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her. In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it’s great for fantasies...
PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it’s all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these “peripheral” areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the “gambler’s problem”, in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of “peripheral” animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the “peripheral” species. Gould’s basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there’s one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge’s BS: They don’t even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this “punk-eek”
They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a “speciation event(TM)” happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
“ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!”
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
(Above excellent summation borrowed from Redroller)
In fact I responded precisely and in detail to your rate-of-mutation post, but since you didn't like the answer you now pretend I didn't make one.
So how honest is that "logical fallacy"?
Mechanicos: "It’s basically ignorant."
Mechanicos: "Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited..."
Mechanicos: "evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that..."
Mechanicos: "faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator..."
Mechanicos: "a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT"
Mechanicos: "best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is..."
Mechanicos: "nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution..."
Mechanicos: "the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980..."
Mechanicos: "some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said..."
Mechanicos: "...taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT"
Mechanicos: "But it gets even stupider."
Mechanicos: "Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying..."
Mechanicos: "It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence..."
Mechanicos: "clowns promoting this BS are claiming that the very lack of intermediate fossils supports the theory"
Mechanicos: "Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance"
Mechanicos: "if you could SEE them, they wouldn’t BE witches"
Mechanicos: "like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years."
Mechanicos: "should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge’s BS"
Mechanicos: "How could anything be stupider or worse than that?"
Mechanicos: "What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?"
My response begins with the following questions:
First, why is the probability 100% that posters who announce themselves with gaudy discussions of "logical fallacies" invariably end by blasting away with such a load of garbage-talk?
Second, why is it that if I simply delete all that garbage-talk, there are no serious arguments to be found in your post?
You obviously know nothing -- zero, zip, nada -- about science in general and evolution in particular, except some wierd notions you picked up God-knows-where, notions which have no more relation to reality than, oh, say, Mother Goose fairy tails to actual history.
Basic evolution procedes one mutation at a time, as sorted out by natural selection -- and those are confirmed observations.
So if you claim that it's "impossible" to "get here from there", then it is you not evolution theory who is making the "argument from ignorance".
In essence you are saying: "just because I can't figure it out, therefore it can't happen".
But in reality, the world is full of "intermediate forms", both living and fosilized, separating different breeds, sub-species, species, genera, families, orders, classes, etc.
And degrees of similarity or separation -- previously guessed at -- can now be determined through DNA analysis.
Every year new fossil discoveries are made and new "intermediate forms" found -- your example of bird evolution being a prime subject.
The discoveries show that birds did not evolve all at once, but over many millions of years, each new advance improving the creatures' abilities to move faster and higher.
Next, your critique of Stephen Gould's "punctuated equilibrium" idea is way off the mark, in both mischaracterizing Gould and purporting to refute him.
In fact, the basic idea of "punctuated equalibrium" makes perfect sence (no "logical fallacies") once you understand that creatures perfectly adapted to their environments do not change so long as the environment doesn't change.
But once their environment does change -- which can happen slowly over long periods, or sometimes nearly instantaneously -- then creatures must either change or die.
And if some creatures change too slowly then they can be replaced by others quicker, smarter, better adapted to new conditions.
That's "punctuated equilibrium".
Somewhere I read the fossil record shows most distinct species only last a million years or so before being replaced by others, perhaps closely related, but obviously distinct.
That's "punctuated equilibrium".