Creationists say that order cannot come from chaos.... INFORMATION does not arise from chaos. RNA/DNA is an information code. The chance of something like that just sort of happening to arise from raw materials via random events is exactly zero.
However, if you take those conditions and increase the size of the conditions infinitely and the time infinitely, it is mathematically impossible for life not to form...
You do not HAVE infinite time. In fact, you don't even have the tens of millions of years which are commonly supposed. You can do your own google searches on 'tyrannosaur' and 'soft tissue' and read about the blood vessels and collagen found inside the tyrannosaur bone or, in fact, search on 'tyrannosaur', 'soft tissue', and 'chicken' to read about the recent sequencing of proteins from that same tyrannosaur bone and the fact that those proteins were nearly identical to those of a chicken. The tyrannosaur turns out to be a big chicken with sharp teeth which died a few thousand years ago. For those bones not to be totally petrified after even one million years it would have to have never rained in Montana or the Dakotas for that much time.
When you're done reading that, try google searches on 'stegosaur' and 'cambodia'. As in North America where you see stegosaur images (petroglyphs) on canyon walls and around rivers and lakes, they've now turned up a totally accurate image of this creature on one of the column stones at Angkor:
While details of macroevolution are continuously studied by the scientific community, the overall theory behind macroevolution (i.e. common descent) has been overwhelmingly consistent with empirical data....
Not when you cannot replicate it in the lab. That is, the common descent part of it could be the same sort of common descent you see going from a 1920s car to the automobiles of today, i.e. a sequence of small design changes, but macroevolution via mutation and selection has been completely tested in the labs, and the theory failed the test as I noted.
Haldane’s dilemma has never been a barrier to evolution, despite some misrepresentations by creationists.
Sorry, but you cannot hand-wave the Haldane dilemma away like that. The Haldane dilemma is one of the two major motivations for punctuated equilibria, the other being the lack of intermediate fossils, and you can do your own research on that. If the Haldane dilemma were not a problem, Gould, Eldridge, Mayr, and the others would not have gone to the trouble.
In fact when you read through evolutionite literature you will find claims to have "debunked" every argument used against evolution and few of those claims will be more transparant than in the case of the Haldane dilemma. The dilemma is not difficult to comprehend and does not involve higher math. Simplistic versions of it indicate that even if a population of higher animals were to substitute a new genetic change entirely through the population EVERY GENERATION, i.e. at a rate vastly beyond what is possible, they could still never amount to meaningful morphological changes or new kinds of animals in anything like the amounts of time which even standard theories claim are involved.
“The total lack of undisputed intermediate fossils.”
This position is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of what represents a transitional feature.
The lack of intermediate fossils is well known and undisputed; it is the other major motivation for PE. Again, as in the case of the Haldane dilemma, if there were no problem, then Gould and the others would not have gone to the trouble to devise PE. Think about it.
The basic problem which you DON'T read in evolutionite literature is that classical Darwinism demands that THE VAST BULK OF ALL FOSSILS SHOULD BE CLEAR CUT INTERMEDIATES and, after a hundred and fifty years of searching, all they have is a tiny handful of very questionable cases.
It's as if I had a theory which demanded that all of the world's people were blond and all I could show anybody was four or five dishwater blondes living in Kansas. I wouldn't get very far with such a theory, would I?
“The logical failure of the supposed new variant, PE.”
I assume you are talking about punctuated evolution?
Punctuated Equilibria 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 (i.e. gets them past the Haldane dilemma) 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:
1. As Walter Remine notes, you need a fairly sizeable population of animals before you'd ever see a "beneficial mutation" (the thing the whole business hinges on in theory). PE eliminates this possibility.
2. 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 advocates of this theory are climing that the 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...
3. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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 4 and 6 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 writings:
The 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 magically somehow or other.
I mean, I hate to be the party pooper or the person to disillusion everybody, but evolution is basically a dead theory walking as we speak. The problems with it are all major; any one of them would suffice to kill off any normal sort of science theory, i.e. any theory which did not involve ideologies, lifestyles, and yuppie careers.
“You do not HAVE infinite time. In fact, you don’t even have the tens of millions of years which are commonly supposed.”
The age of the universe is 14 billion years, which must be accepted in order for evolution to work. The dating methods used by scientists on fossils have not been debunked by creationists-the age of the earth is 4.5 billion years, this fugure is universally accepted by scientists.
Chaos theory shows how life evolves from a seemingly chaotic situation (which could be gasses and hot matter in the early universe).
A classical example that proves chaos theory is the development of convection currents in water when it is heated in a utensil. Heat provides energy to each water molecule, which darts around at random and in chaotic fashion all over inside the utensil. However, after a certain time a band of convection currents develop in which the heated water molecules rise up and are replaced by cold water molecules. This band is like a tube or a structure through which the water flows. Thus the seemingly chaotic behavior of water molecules is converted into an orderly structure. If the heat is removed, this structure collapses. I explained in my previous post how matter in the early universe, along with electrical energy could form amino acids over a long period of time.
“the recent sequencing of proteins from that same tyrannosaur bone and the fact that those proteins were nearly identical to those of a chicken. The tyrannosaur turns out to be a big chicken with sharp teeth which died a few thousand years ago”
“collegen has been extracted from the remains of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex”, according to two the document you provided. The article does not state that TRex was a few thousand years old. “When conditions for preservation are just right, she said, “degradation rates may differ from predictions. Data from both [new] papers suggest that original protein may be preserved.”-This is no proof of dinosaurs existing a few thousand years ago.
“tegosaur images (petroglyphs) on canyon walls and around rivers and lakes, they’ve now turned up a totally accurate image of this creature on one of the column stones at Angkor:”
I noticed several things about this image. First, the color of the stegosaur is lighter than the surrounding rock, sugesting that it may be just a more recent attempt at a hoax. Secondly, the head is way too big, the “plates” flare out widely at the top and its missing its tail spikes for it to be a tegasaur. It could just as easily be a Rhino on a pretty background. Thirdly, etchings on walls of ancient temples showing dinosaurs does not indicate that humans lived with them recently. It could just as easily have been the artists rendering of fossils discovered by ancient people, or a good imagination.
Creationists are too quick to dismiss evolution when confronted with seemingly conflicting evidence that really just requires explanation.
“Not when you cannot replicate it in the lab. That is, the common descent part of it could be the same sort of common descent you see going from a 1920s car to the automobiles of today, i.e. a sequence of small design changes, but macroevolution via mutation and selection has been completely tested in the labs, and the theory failed the test as I noted.”
You cannot replicate macroevolution in lab unless you invent a time machine and observe an experiment over hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
It is a concept that has very strong evidence supported by several scientific discoveries in many fields, and traced biologically through genetics. The creationist’s various hypotheses distinguishing micro and macroevolution are considered to have no scientific basis by any mainstream scientific organization, acording to the National Academy of Science.
“Sorry, but you cannot hand-wave the Haldane dilemma away like that.”
Haldanes dilemma has been misrepresented. Haldane himself gives examples where the evolutionary rates accord with his calculations (average rate of speciation in the carnivora, and mammalia on page 522, his conclusion: “the agreement with the theory developed here is satisfactory”)
(http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/classictexts/haldane2.pdf)
Haldane also gave examples where evolution could fix substitutions faster than under his assumptions (see page 523, where he discusses radiation of species into environments with few or no competitors, and the introduction, where he discusses intense selection)
Haldane also gave examples where evolution could fix substitutions faster than under his assumptions (ReMine misrepresents Haldane and the significance of his work). Haldane also explicitly acknowledged that these were preliminary approaches to developing a mathematical treatment of selection. In 1961 he produced a paper where he revised his approach, and found at least one more circumstance where evolution could proceed faster than with his original assumptions (eeb.uconn.edu). So, the amount of measured variation in the genome meant that if Haldane’s assumptions were right, all vertebrates would be dead. So we know that Haldane was wrong. Exactly where he was wrong occupied many pages of journal articles in the 60’s and 70’s. Kimura (Kimura, 1968) used the heterozygosity problem to advance the neutral theory (eeb.uconn.edu). In neutral theory, most mutations are neutral with respect to fitness, and neutral alleles are fixed by drift. Since the alleles have no effect on fitness, a very large number of allelic variants can be in the population and not reduce its fitness, thus solving the heterozygosity problem (Kimura, M. 1983 The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution. Cambridge University Press).
I had also explained in my last posting to you that recently, the Human Genome project had not even come close to exceeding Haldanes “speed limit” when they discovered 238 out of 22,000 genes had been fixed since the evolution of man and apes from a common ancestor and most variation is due to neutral mutations.
Neither Darwin nor anyone else in his time knew the answer to the “species problem”: how multiple species could evolve from a single common ancestor. Ernst Mayr approached the problem with a new definition for the concept ‘species’. In his book Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) he wrote that a species is not just a group of morphologically similar individuals, but a group that can breed only among themselves, excluding all others. Gould’s works were sometimes used out of context as a “proof” that scientists no longer understood how organisms evolved. Gould himself corrected some of these misinterpretations and distortions of his writings in his later works.
“The basic problem which you DON’T read in evolutionite literature is that classical Darwinism demands that THE VAST BULK OF ALL FOSSILS SHOULD BE CLEAR CUT INTERMEDIATES and, after a hundred and fifty years of searching, all they have is a tiny handful of very questionable cases”
Although transitional fossils elucidate the evolutionary transition of one life-form to another, they only exemplify snapshots of this process. Due to the special circumstances required for preservation of living beings, only a very small percentage of all life-forms that ever have existed can be expected to be discovered. Thus, the transition itself can only be illustrated and corroborated by transitional fossils, but it will never be known in detail. However, progressing research and discovery managed to fill in several gaps and continues to do so. Transitional forms are found all the time. (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/11/051116173945.htm)
“Punctuated Equilibria 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 (i.e. gets them past the Haldane dilemma) and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).”
(Haldane’s dilemma is a non-issue, as I have shown) The theory of punctuated equilibrium developed by Gould and Eldredge is often misrepresented. This theory, however, pertains only to well-documented transitions within taxa (organism or group of organisms) or between closely related taxa over a geologically short period of time. These transitions, usually traceable in the same geological outcrop, often show small jumps in morphology between periods of morphological stability. To explain these jumps, Gould and Eldredge envisaged comparatively long periods of genetic stability separated by periods of rapid evolution (which I had explained with evidence of the undersea coral in the previous post). (You can read more about punctuated equilibrium at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/punc-eq.html)
“I mean, I hate to be the party pooper or the person to disillusion everybody, but evolution is basically a dead theory walking as we speak.”
With regard to teaching evolution in schools, I would highly recommend that you read the (conservative, Bush appointed) Judge’s opinion in “Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District et al” @ http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf
Evolution, ands its thousands of components, are misrepresented by creationists to make it seem like there are many holes in the theory that prevent it from being taught in science classes. Sure, there are many things we don’t know about evolution, but the field of biology would collapse if evolution wasn’t there to tie everything together. The point that I still don’t understand is that this whole controversy is really just over one thing. The interpretation of what the word “day” in Genesis means. “Day” may also be understood to mean “separate period of time,” and thus the time-scale for God having organized the earth from matter in the early universe could extend over billions of years of “earth time,” (in other words, God’s timescale may be a “fast forwarding” of earths time). Fifty years ago Pope Pius XII said that “ the conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, insofar as it inquiries into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent matter.” Pope John Paul II said: “In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII has already affirmed that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation, provided that we do not lose sight of certain fixed points....Today, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies — which was neither planned nor sought — constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.” (John Paul II, Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Evolution)
My argument is finally this: Christians should focus their energy on reducing the number of abortions, pushing conservative security, fiscal, and immigration policies, and helping heal the sick, etc. Evolution is not a life and death issue in terms of our survival today.