Do you remember Terry Hurlbut? Of course not. He’s another boring creationist whose schtick is to claim that creationists really are scientists — after all, Isaac Newton was a creationist. He also maintains something called the “Creationist Hall of Fame” which lists a lot of legitimate pre-Darwin thinkers and 20th century crackpots. His “Hall of Fame” is just a website, but he dreams big: he wants to put up a real building with…what? I don’t know. Printouts of his articles?
Anyway, the semi-interesting thing he wants to do is build that edifice to idiocy somewhere near the Creation “Museum”. It’s a legitimate business plan, I think; the concentration of deluded fools spikes in the vicinity of Answers in Genesis, and that’s his market. AiG has nothing to do with it, though — I wonder if they’d resent someone tapping into their pool of suckers? Or if they’d see it as an addition to their vortex of stupid? It depends on Hurlbut’s ideological purity, I suppose.
It’s nice that the creation museums will be together…Makes it easier to be dumb all in one place
Yeah, but I’m not so crazy about the location. Maybe they could put it closer to a volcano.
He’s a particularly wacky creationist, being one of Conservapedia’s few contributors and self-appointed head of their Conservative Bible Project.
Maybe they could put it closer to a volcano.
Please don’t! It’d scare away all the virgins, making the sacrifices just that much harder.
Given that Arizona is trying to declare that pregnancy starts 2 weeks before conception, please consider Phoenix as an alternate location for stupidity collection.
Gee, Newton, who died in 1727, didn’t read Origin which wasn’t published until 1859. So, how can they claim he was a creationist when he never saw the theory of evolution since it didn’t exist for another 132 years? Ah, the smell of typical Xian dishonesty in the air.
Arizona is trying to declare that pregnancy starts 2 weeks before conception
What. Teh. Feck? Needs citation…
@5 (julietdefarge): How the fuck does pregnancy occur before conception? What kind of dumbfuckery is that?
Back to topic: Let the jeezoids waste their money. Something tells me all these enterprises will ultimately fail.
Hurlbut can easily assuage any concerns or hurt feelings coming from Answers in Genesis regarding his “Creationist Hall of Fame.” Every time some creationist complains — put them in the exhibit.
A perfect plan.
Is it possible to concentrate the stupidity elsewhere? Like say for example on the Johnson atoll. There are already two species of boobies breeding there, and I don’t think they’ll notice a third. Or if the possibility of disturbing the wildlife is too great, then I’m sure that there is cheap land at the base of Eyjafjallajökull. How about we just build them a 500 foot wooden boat, and let then sail around the world?
Higgs Bosons
Not gonna bother with links, just Google “Arizona conception” and you’ll find everything you need. The specific wording is “the age of the unborn child as calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman.” Mind-blowingly nonsensical.
Nerd:
Come on, Nerd! You know that there’s no such thing as progress! Which kind of negates things like the theory of gravity, but whatevs. God was making us stick to the ground, anyway.
Everyone:
Here you go: For purposes of abortion, conception begins the day after a woman’s last period stopped.
Arizona law ‘pregnancy starts 2 weeks before conception’
Regarding Arizona’s IDIOTIC new conception law, here’s a good link with multiple other links. Clicky to your heart’s content or until you vomit in disgust, whichever comes first.
http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/pregnancy-begins-2-weeks-before-conception-now-the-law-in-arizona/politics/2012/04/13/37993
I hate when they whip out Newton. Aside from the previously mentioned pre-darwin existence, Newton believed in things that in his day were considered stupid. Like Alchemy. He was brilliant, inventing a whole form of math to prove his (mostly) correct theorems on gravity and motion, but having known mathematicians, too many of them are mystics. They get a bit too far into nifty number manipulations and like singularian comp sci people end up absorbed in trying to pattern things without the proper information.
Newton most closely resembles Pythagorus, really. Invented triangles (snark, please) then founded a cult around them setting back science hundreds of years. Damn mathematicians.
I don’t think Hurlbut would have any problem fitting in with AiG. After the Tiktaalik fossil was pointed out to him, he claimed it was an “antediluvian laboratory chimera”, and an “out of place artifact in a society known to be inordinately cruel.”
I don’t think I’ve seen even AiG come up with a response that stupid.
Fine with me, just need to make sure it isn’t too close to Teh Lair™
*scratches head*
*wikipediates*
boobies, tits, shags… what is this?! I want to talk to the head of the DBN immediately!
At Rational Wiki, Hurlbut is commonly referred to as “Launchbooty”, “Chuckarse”, or other synonyms. He’s also a full-on birther.
Trebuchet — I wondered if somewhat had picked up on that name. It’s not nice to make fun of people’s names, but “Hurlbut” is just too good not to take the ethical hit for poking fun at it given his particular form of stupid.
Perhaps Ham-let will sue Hurlbut for infringing on his unintellectual property.
I think it is obvious that we have been wrong all along…there IS a god, and it is a real prick SOB. How else to explain how a storm like Isaac can punish the poorest, most abused people in the hemisphere, then gently sidestep Tampa and that whole collection of knuckle-daggers and then head straight for an area still working to recover from Katrina. Chance? Chance? I think not!
Speaking of Newton, every time he invoked a creationist hypothesis in his scientific work, it was subsequently demonstrated to be false. (“Je ne pas besoin de cette hypothesise” anyone? (pardon the mangled French grammar)
Wherever he did NOT invoke creationist ideas in his scientific work, it has stood the test of time.
And his non-scientific work was ALREADY considered quackery even in his own time.
Easy. By using the same Wayback machine Obama used to go back in time and insert his Kenyan birth certificate into the Hawaiian system. They do work in both temporal directions, you know.
Yes, make the problem worse for sensible people living here. Thanks so much for that suggestion.
Amphiox @ 22 —
That would be “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.” And while Laplace, if he said this at all, seems to have been referring to claims of specific divine interventions in planetary motion rather than to theology entirely (the pffft of all knowledge suggests that he veered between deism and atheism), it does seem to be a pretty apt description of the fate of all claims to divine intervention in natural processes.
Do you remember Terry Hurlbut? Of course not.
I do, actually, but I attribute that to his rather unusual surname, as opposed to any of the rubbish he espouses.
Amphiox
Just for the record…
Je n’ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse.
I’m all for it.
Why should such dolts ever live down their stupidity? Endless shame ought to be their lot.
Glen Davidson
Even better, he didn’t believe in the germ theory of disease.
Yes, be consistent with your creationist hagiography, cretinists and IDiots. With your kids, no, but with yourselves, well, it’s time to repudiate all vaccines and antibiotics.
Glen Davidson
The whole creationist bit about how creationism is totes scientifically respectable – because *insert famous scientist from pre-Darwin era* was a creationist, and therefore all modern day evolution ‘sceptic’ kooks are somehow in the right – really annoys me.
It is just so staggeringly stupid – great thinkers from earlier ages before circumnavigation thought the world was flat. It was the accepted wisdom, and they had no way of knowing otherwise. Does that mean that a modern day proponent of not sailing too far, lest one falls off the edge of the world, should be taken seriously?
The germ theory of disease is relatively recent. Because many generations of revered historical thinkers belived that disease was caused by foul humours in the air, does that mean that a contemporary medical practice of favouoring pomanders over antibiotics/anti-virals (delete as appropriate to infection) in case of pandemic outbreak should be viewed as something other than gross medical negigence?
Should we still be treating fevers by bleeding and the application of leeches? Should scepticism of gravity be accepted as a valid alternate theory? Should we accept, in grave seriousness, the words of those who think that the Earth is at the centre of the universe and is orbited by the Sun, or that the sky is a painted vault? – All widespread beliefs held by the intelligentsia at various points in history before superior explantions came along.
On the other hand, at least having all of teh creationist stoopid concentrated in one place will help with the coordinated pointing and laughing that they most assuredly deserve to receive from all rational people.
mythbri @ 13;
I read your link about the utterly horrifying new law in Arizona, and I can scarcely credit how staggeringly evil that law really is – it exists for the sole purpose of moving the goal posts to further complicate access to abortion services for women, and in particular early stage non-surgical abortion. This law will result directly, not only in unwanted children and a furtherance of the ongoing Republican assault on women’s bodily autonomy, but in preventable deaths. It is inevitable, and yet the smiling monster who passed it into law clearly doesn’t care so long as her religious delusions are serviced by the state.
Remind me again how this is the 21st century, and not the Dark Ages…
Back then, at the beginning of systematic science, scientists pretty much expected to have the Biblical stories confirmed. Well, why not? Why wouldn’t the works of God and the word of God be compatible? When it became obvious that nature was NOT confirming the Bible, they generally opted for believing nature. The principle, adopted by the fundies, that the Bible should be believed over nature, is a fairly modern idea – The Fundamentals were written between 1910 – 1915.
#22 Amphiox
“Newton may have had religious beliefs, but he only made scientific progress when he closed the Bible and opened his mind.”
Creationist Hall of
FameFail.Fixed it for him.
.
He was indeed. Specifically, to Newton’s idea that divine intervention was necessary to keep the planets all orbiting on the same plane (I think), which Napoleon (or so it goes) questioned him about.
Thus I brought it up in reference to Newton’s creationism.
Delurking to make a random observation about this Arizona conception thing. As someone who considers herself reasonably informed regarding reproductive health, I was surprised to learn about 9 months back that the gestational age being calculated from the first day of your last menstrual cycle is actually industry standard for prenatal care, so I am honestly not surprised* they feel they can get away with this idea. Most of the information I have seen uses the gestational age, rather than the fetal age (from point of conception), for dispersing information about pregnancy.
Given that I am pregnant by choice, this distinction is more of an interesting tidbit to me, and less of a stumbling block; I can only imagine how difficult this sort of thing makes it for women seeking access to legal abortions. It seems like the “pro-lifers” are taking advantage of a lack of comprehensive sex education in the US, a situation they had no small part in creating.
Hmm, should have given more thought to the handle, since I’ve only got a couple weeks to go… oh well.
* Definitely not happy, just not surprised.
“how can they claim he was a creationist”
He wrote about it. Perhaps you’d like to critique his rationale:
“Did blind chance know that there was light & what was its refraction & fit the eys of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it?”
http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00007
Gee, no alternative and truly scientific theory available to him to make an informed decision. Sounds like liar and bullshitter territory, like every txpiper post. But then, creationists are full of
shiter religion, without a drop of science to be seen. Right txpiper, you can’t prove your imaginary creator exists, ergo, it doesn’t, and your ideas dies with that fallacious fact.“no alternative and truly scientific theory available”
Yeah, but he revealed his evaluative method in his comment about eyes and light perception. From that, I think if you were to tell him that eyes and sight developed accidentally from a light-sensitive spot under the crushing selection pressure of not being able to see, he’d probably think he had a pinhead imposed on all ten layers of his retinas.
“you can’t prove your imaginary creator exists”
Well, neither could Newton in your box. But he had sense enough to recognize that complexity and organization are not the results of errors.
Which if he didn’t know about Darwin’s evolution is irrelevant. Compared to your lack of evidence for your imaginary creator, which is totally and utterly relevant. And you fail…
This proves nothing, as it isn’t conclusive physical evidence, just speculation, and is now explained by evolution. You keep losing to reality. Why do you wish to show the world your delusions?
Oh look, the texpip thread jumps again, having just been thoroughly destroyed after finally being cornered into describing its own alternate, and useless, “model” to the evolution theory the truth of which its dishonest soul simply cannot abide.
Back again with the old “accident” mischaracterization of what evolution theory actually says.
Same old cycle spins again.
Utterly pathetic.
Wrong, and another mischaracterization. But the evolution of vision has already been discussed in depth with the texpip.
And once more, it arrives on a new thread ignoring everything said to it on previous ones, as if hoping that we would forget its pattern of lies.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Simply pitiful.
The texpip is now suddenly able to read the minds of the dead. (The occult supposedly is forbidden by the texpip’s professed faith, but hey, it’s already broken two commandments, what’s one more?).
I suppose Newton the alchemist (alchemy also being something forbidden by texpip’s supposed religious faith) might think this, and if he did, he’d be as wrong as he was when he declared that god continuously maintained the orbits of the planets on a single plane.
It’s completely irrelevant either way.
But watching the texpip attempt pull a fallacy by authority with someone dead for over three centuries would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetic.
Theoretical bankruptcy all the way down.
“This proves nothing, as it isn’t conclusive physical evidence”
No, it’s only the obvious reality concerning everything in the world we live in, except your theory. If Newton were walking on a beach and found a pair of binoculars, he would have wondered who made them. You would declare “Look what happened!”
Your imaginary deity has nothing to do with reality. It only exists in your delusional mind. You haven’t demonstrated otherwise, and keep fallaciously presupposing it. Until you evidence it, it is a delusion.
Who’s theory? The theory of evolution, with million or so scientific papers backing it up, versus zero for Newton’s and your garbage IDEAS? You are one delusional evidenceless fool, even more than Newton was.
Why are you bringing up this well refuted piece of shit? Evolution. Show otherwise by citing the peer reviewed scientific literature, or shut the fuck up. That is science. Religion is belief without evidence. Like your imaginary creator and the imaginary creation….
Why would he? Would he have expected to know the person, or something?
Yes, oh, unless we could distinguish between life and manufactured objects. Actually, most of us can. Txpiper either can’t, or is so intent on denial that it has to pretend that they’re the same.
Really. So how did he explain the extremely derivative nature of life vs. what we see in design, which typically undergoes revolutionary developments from time to time?
Oh right, he didn’t explain that at all. Difference between him and today’s IDiots etc., is that he didn’t know about how slavishly derivative life is like, say, one would expect of unguided evolution.
Glen Davidson
And HERE, cross-posted from the last thread the texpip fled from, is the texpip’s alternative “model” to evolution, the thing it weaseled around for thread after thread trying to avoid discussing, while dishonesty and ineffectively attacking evolution theory without comparative context context, but which he was finally pinned on:
Evolution explains complexity. The texpip goes on and on dishonestly mischaracterizing this explanation while trying to disupte it, but its alternate “model” doesn’t explain complexity at all, but just presupposes it to start with.
Useless.
Degeneration is a PART of evolution theory, so the texpip’s “model” doesn’t actually say anything different from what evolution theory on this point, while evolution theory says much more and everything else.
Useless again.
The first direct prediction of the texpip “model”. ALL mutations are destructive. Evolution theory ALSO says that MOST mutations are destructive, but also includes a minority of constructive mutations.
So, in the area of destructive mutations, the texpip’s “model” says nothing new, and can also be falsified by any single example of a constructive mutation, no matter how small.
Duplication of human salivary amylase. “Model” falsified. *POOF*
Adult expression of human lactase. *POOF*
Lateral gene transfer of beta lactamase. *POOF*
ALSO part of evolution theory, so again, the texpip “model” adds nothing new. At BEST, on this point, it is just one small part of the greater spectrum of evolution theory.
Useless again.
This TOO, is a part of evolution theory (under the term of phenotypic plasticity). So once again the texpip’s “model” fails to add anything new.
Additionally, evolution theory explains why and how animals have this ability to respond to environmental challenges. The texpip’s “model” just presupposes it from the start, and so explains NOTHING.
Useless again.
Evolution theory explains why and how DNA is reactive. It can also, in a broad sense predict the manner in which DNA WILL react (and if you can produce a theory that can predict the manner in which DNA will react to future circumstances with even greater accuracy, you WILL have a candidate for a theory that will supercede modern evolution theory and replace it). The texpip’s “model” again just PRESUPPOSES IT from the start, thus explaining nothing and predicting nothing.
So we will continue to watch, amused, as the texpip spams out inaccurate and dishonest attack after attack on evolution theory, aiming at all sorts of imaginary misrepresentations of the theory that it makes up, hitting pretty much everything EXCEPT what evolution theory actually says about anything, lie after misdirection after mischaracterization after lie, and all the while, on EVERY SINGLE POINT, its own alternative will itself have no answer whatsoever for any of those questions, and will either be the same as evolution theory and just a tiny subset of it, completely wrong and already falsified by simple observations, or fail to address the question at all.
Utterly pathetic dishonest intellectual dishonesty ALL the way down.
And down.
And down.
And if he wondered the same about a horseshoe crab, he would have been wrong.
More dishonest, irrelevant misdirection from the texpip.
Binoculars do not reproduce with heritable variation, and thus cannot evolve. This is precisely what the theory of evolution predicts about binoculars.
And lo, we look at binoculars, and that is exactly what we see.
Once more, the texpip demonstrates the utility and superiority of evolutionary theory.
Ah look. The hypocrite BEARS FALSE WITNESS AGAINST HIS NEIGHBOUR, yet again.
Ethical degeneracy all the way down.
Utterly pathetic.
“Back again with the old “accident” mischaracterization of what evolution theory actually says.”
You can straighten that out by providing an accurate characterization that doesn’t mention or accomodate any kind of deliberation or purpose. It’s either random and unguided, or it isn’t. What does evolution theory actually say?
After several years, still no conclusive physical evidence for txpips imaginary deity. In fact, no evidence of even non-conclusive nature, that isn’t explained by science. Nothing but presuppositions from txpip, which means lies and bullshit. And he hasn’t refuted any of the million or so scientific papers supporting evolution, because his OPINION isn’t and never will be science. Only more science refutes science Txpips OPINION is nothing but illogical and borderline illiterate religious blather.
Said derivations, in eyes, being arrange EXACTLY in a nested hierarchy EXACTLY as one would expect to see if eyes arose via a pattern of common descent, precisely as evolution theory predicts.
And precisely as NO CONFIRMED TO BE DESIGNED CLASS OF OBJECTS EVER OBSERVED HAS EVER BEEN SEEN TO BE ARRANGED.
Ergo, eyes were NOT designed.
I neglected to mention:
“attack after attack on evolution theory”
This is what science is supposed to do. Pick apart. Challenge. Reject the brown spots. No cuddling with security blankets just because they are what you like.
Already done, many times, by many people, on many prior threads.
A thousand times given, a thousand times IGNORED.
And the texpip actually has the NERVE to ask for it again.
Utterly PATHETIC moral bankrupcty ALL the way down.
Pitiful.
NO. But note the DELIBERATELY DISHONEST use of the teleological word “guided”. The texpip HAS ALREADY BEEN TOLD MANY TIMES that such words when used are ONLY METAPHORS, but it CONTINUES TO TRY TO USE THEM LITERALLY.
This has already been explained to the texpip, MANY TIMES.
And still it continues to ignore those explanations.
Still it continues to LIE.
Pathetic.
A thousand times answered already. A thousand times DELIBERATELY MISCHARACTERIZED.
Intellectual DISHONESTY all the way down.
UTTERLY pathetic.
Yes, but without favoritism.
Pure prejudice is what attacks caricatures of evolution while creationist stupidity is assumed to be the default.
Glen Davidson
Jesus.
Te fucking watchmaker argument? Really?
That’s what you’ve got?
Science attacks what the theory actually says, tests what the theory actually predicts.
And evolution theory has been continually attacked in this manner since its inception.
EVERY SINGLE BIOLOGY EXPERIMENT EVER DONE SINCE THE THEORY WAS PROPOSED HAS BEEN SUCH AN ATTACK.
The theory has survived every single one of them.
Science DOES NOT DO is MAKE UP DELIBERATELY DISTORTED STRAWMEN just to have something “easy” to knock down.
Unlike the pitifully dishonest texpip.
And what Science DOES NOT DO is attack theories in isolation, without comparison to alternatives. Unlike the texpip, whose “attacks” against evolution theory are attacks its own alternative cannot survive even half as well as evolution theory does.
It is rather amusing to see the texpip think that it is qualified to lecture this audience about what science is and what science does.
The same texpip whose only use for science is to find quotemines to mischaracterize in order to fabricate dishonest arguments for positions it already presupposes going in.
Utterly PATHETIC.
Yep and if you had any shred of intellectual honesty you’d seeand admit that science continually supports evolution.
iPad posting increases offerings to tpyos.
And notice, not a single peep from the texpip about attacking creationism in the same manner.
Not. A. Peep.
Two-faced hypocrisy all the way down.
That old Paley watchmaker canard?
My favourite thing here is that it’s actually a self-refuting argument. Binoculars/beach or watch/heath or animal/rock – it all depends on one item being clearly of a different quality to the other. You can say that one of the pair was made, and the other was not made.
OK, I’m totally good with that: beaches and heaths and rocks were *not* made. BAM! So much for the hypothetical creator of the world. (And poor old Slartibartfast, too.)
Re: “Arizona is trying to declare that pregnancy starts 2 weeks before conception…”
Um, I think it’s been standard to calculate the age of a fetus from the day the last menstruation mum experienced for some time now. I think it’s because it’s often impossible to know the exact episode of sex that fertilisation occurred but they can be sure it was not before the date of mums last menses. I believe it’s been in use for centuries.
Meh, beaten again. I really must remember to refresh the page before commenting.
“Already done, many times, by many people, on many prior threads.”
No, it hasn’t. And you can’t do it now, which is why you will invest lots of keystrokes explaining why you won’t, but none to doing it. Just so you don’t lose track, bearing in mind that “accident” is a mischaracterization, what does evolution theory actually say?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=evolution+for+beginners
Oh look, the texpip LYING again.
How many times has the texpip had the fundamentals of evolution theory explained to it?
How many examples of beneficial constructive mutations given to it?
How many descriptions of actual observations of natural selecting working provided for it?
How many ACTUAL LINKS given to it.
All ignored.
And it has the pathetic NERVE to come around now asking “what does evolution theory actually say”?
In turn, what does the texpip’s “model” say?
NOTHING.
Utterly pitiful.
txpiper
He was also an alchemist, but I don’t hold that against him, because in his time chemistry was not very well understood. In fact it wasn’t until 101 years after his death that the first organic chemical was synthesized from inorganic reagents, and the idea that matter from living systems was infused with some kind of mystic vitality was banished to the history books.
Which brings me to my next poing: Why would I care about his rational for creationism when people in his day thought living matter was fundamentally different from everything else in the universe? Of course he was a creationist.
He had the tools and the insight to formulate some pretty impressive theories to describe gravity and motion. Those theories (and his related work on calculus) are the reason he is remembered. Take note of that.
Shit. Looks like I inadvertently made a poing instead of a point.
As Monod put it “Chance AND Necessity”.
The texpip will only every focus on one. It’s either mischaracterization of “chance” as “accidents”, and when that fails, it flips to mischaracterizing “necessity” with deliberately misleading teleological language.
And then when it gets destroyed again, it flips back.
And when it is explained to it that the two act together, simultaneously and in parallel, it IGNORES it, and goes back to asinine nitpicking about which had to come first, UTTERLY ignoring the whole point.
Intellectual dishonesty ALL the way down.
And of course, all the while, it just presupposes its own alternative with NO questioning whatsoever.
Intellectual BANKRUPTCY all the way down.
Also, here is the link again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chemistry
See “vitalism debate and organic chemistry”
“if you had any shred of intellectual honesty you’d seeand admit that science continually supports evolution.”
No, it isn’t science. It is just people of a particular religious faith whose faith includes the notion that chaos is creative. We are talking about really sappy ideas, like amino acids coming from interstellar space, and billions of complex, accidental formations and DNA replication errors later, here we sit. These are fairy tales, not science.
Creationists can never do maths.
Just so you don’t lose track, bearing in mind that “accident” is a mischaracterization, what does evolution theory actually say?
txpiper:
Imperfect replication, environmental constraints, contingency and deep time.
(All empirically verifiable)
Read
You don’t get to redefine what is and is not science to suit your ignorance and personal incredulity.
The scientists, you know the ones who actually do science in the fields that know what the fuck they are doing when it comes to relevant fields to evolution, and not the people who come to blogs and show they don’t have a fucking clue (you namely in this instance), so overwhelmingly support ToE it’s not even an issue. The science is in. The evidence is in.
Your little games of gotcha, that incidentally never play out, do nothing to change this.
You don’t even understand what you are arguing against as is evidenced by virtually every single one of your posts across multiple threads for as long as you have posted here..
You refuse to address specific refutations of your nonsense and continually jump threads when cornered.
You are a dishonest, willfully ignorant, sad example of what religion does to ones ability to both reason and have intellectual integrity.
You should forever be ashamed of your performances here.
[meta]
Of course, the elephant in the room is: what created this purported creator?
(Creationism: futile special pleading)
Oh look at that. TWICE before this an answer was ALREADY given. Once WITH A LINK.
Both ignored.
A thousand AND TWO times ignored now.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way DOWN.
Utterly pathetic.
The texpip lying again. BEARING FALSE WITNESS again.
What a liar like the texpip thinks is and is not science is irrelevant.
The projection is amusing. But this is yet another one of the texpip’s old rhetorical tricks, to equate evolution with “faith”.
But suppose we grant that. If they are both “faiths”, they ought to be treated with the same degree of scrutiny, should they not? So where is the texpip’s skepticism about his own “model”?
Not. A. Peep.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Chaos IS creative. And that’s not just evolution theory. It’s MATH.
What a dishonest hypocrite like the texpip thinks is “sappy” is irrelevant.
Well, not entirely irrelevant. Anything the texpip pretends to doubt automatically gains relative credibility due to the texpip’s proven dishonesty.
Not part of evolution theory. Note the repeat pattern. In the middle of discussion evolution, after getting thoroughly destroyed, yet again, the texpip tries to shift to abiogenesis.
Pitiful dishonesty yet again.
That said, amino acids from interPLANETARY space is infinitely more likely and easier to believe than a super powerful super complex creative entity just popping out of nowhere and deciding on a whim, to create the universe.
Evolution wins again.
E PUR SI EVOLVES.
No, science.
What a proven LIAR like the texpip thinks are fairy tales is irrelevant.
Not that the texpip has ever demonstrated even the slightest ability to recognize EITHER fairy tales OR science.
Utterly pathetic.
A thousand and FOUR and counting.
This is a decent classroom program Evolution 101, UC Berkeley
It’s part of a program intended to help teachers get prepared to teach the basics of evolution tp schoolchildren, so it’s a really simple summary of the theory of evolution, presented in a ratio of about one internet page for a typical textbook section or chapter.
Keep in mind, though, txpiper is known to be a YEC who not only denies evolution but also denies deep time – in spite of the geological evidence which convinced his faithful fellow christians two centuries ago. Newton died a century too soon to be exposed to the geology research of James Hutton or Charles Lyell, but if Newton had known them, he would surely have been convinced by their excavations of evidence that the Earth is old. Unlike txpiper, who cannot be convinced by evidence, only by stories told by whichever authorities he happens to respect.
Getting bored with this particular idiot, but this dishonest stupidity:
reminded me of a court’s put-down of another idiot, Tom Ritter, who sued because evolution is the religion of atheism, or something along similarly moronic lines, here:
(ht John Pieret at his blog)
I suppose that it’s possible that txpiper can analyze the reasoning there, and in the referred-to rulings, and actually provide counter-arguments. But that’s probably less likely than that any of these bozos can explain anything in biology actually using ID/creationism.
Glen Davidson
Who nevertheless is happy to use literature on ancient fauna and flora to argue against another one of its dishonest hobby-horses, AGW denial.
With FULL ACCEPTANCE of the ancient ages of course, since those ages are the keystone of the deceptive argument it was trying to make.
Bring the EXACT SAME literature up in the context of evolution and deep time, and its ignore, ignore, ignore.
One thousand AND FIVE and counting.
Not peep from the texpip.
So active just minutes before, but now?
*crickets*
I suppose even liars have to sleep. Have to spend some time dreaming up new lies.
Hey, txpiper –
You forgot to answer my question about how and why your creator god made the identified single-base change which causes sickle cell trait! How does it work to create a “deleterious” mutation which results in painful, shortened lives when inherited from both parents, but which provides selective protection from deadly malaria if inherited from one parent? What’s your creationist theory for that?
Hey txpiper –
You haven’t even answered the simplest question. Do you deny or do you agree that sickle cell trait is caused by a single-base mutation ? No, or yes? Which is it?
I don’t think you’re too stupid to know the answer to that simple simple question. Don’t be a coward. Answer it.
Does the texpip deny or agree that the duplication of salivary amylase in humans is a beneficial mutation that caused a gain of function?
Does the texpip deny or agree that retention of lactase into adulthood is a beneficial mutation that is a gain of function?
Does the texpip deny or agree that Polar Bears and Brown Bears share a common ancestor from which at least the Polar Bear is substantially different?
Does the texpip deny or agree that a mutation that confers resistance to BOTH HIV and bubonic plague is a beneficial one?
Does the texpip deny or agree that losing eyes can result in a beneficial improvement in protection against infection through the eye socket in the same way that losing a CCR5 receptor can result in beneficial improvement in resistance to HIV and bubonic plague?
How would you really know as you distort science and how it is done. Evidence for evolution (papers testing and challenging the theory and not able to falsify it) a million or so. Papers supporting creationism, zero. Why? Creationism was falsified. SOUNDLY. A big problem, your deity is imaginary, and you can’t prove otherwise with solid and conclusive physical evidence. Until you do, you are nothing but a delusional liar and bullshitter all the way down…as you have been for years.
I didn’t know just how this area would turn into this congregation of stupid. I need a huge sum of money to move me and my kids’ extended family somewhere else. Or a large enough sum of money to make trips down to visit the other side of the family… Anything…
Several versions, like “je n’ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là” (I don’t need that hypothesis) and “je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse” (I didn’t need this hypothesis, for a wide value of “this”).
That last one is what I’ve seen in the e-mail signature of a native speaker; but that doesn’t mean it’s the version Laplace used, if indeed the anecdote is true in the first place and he ever said such a thing.
Actually, no, not in the broadly defined West where the Earth was considered spherical by almost all educated people since Aristotle or so.
Dude, we’ve explained to you so often that evolution is not blind chance – it’s blind chance (mutation) plus some more blind chance (drift) plus determination by the environment (selection) – that I’m forced to conclude you don’t believe what you’re saying. In other words, you are trolling.
That’s a bannable offense. Just trying to warn you.
Come back when a mommy binocular and a daddy binocular love each other so much they end up making a baby binocular.
How difficult can that be to understand?? Evolution = descent with heritable modification. Binoculars don’t descend and don’t inherit, so they can’t evolve.
Say, can you tell a dollar from a sand dollar?
Link, please!!!
Mutations with a phenotype, that is. Most mutations have no effect on the phenotype and are therefore neutral; that’s an empirical fact.
*headdesk*
1) chance
2) necessity
3) evolution – a complex intertwining of chance and necessity
4) intelligent design
Those are the only four ways something can come to be. Deliberation and purpose are only involved in the fourth.
Natural selection isn’t random; it’s caused by the environment – and the environment doesn’t contain any deliberation or purpose.
You seem to believe there’s only 1) chance and 4) intelligent design. That’s why you can’t even explain 2) why the smallest crumbs are always at the bottom of the bag of cornflakes or chips.
…Why do you keep pestering us, if you’re never content with the answers we give? Why don’t you open a textbook or use teh gugel?
Did you believe the theory of evolution is ???
Gain of function? I thought the metaphorical switch that switches lactase production off is broken – a loss-of-function mutation?
But, texpip, read this anyway. It explains gain-of-function mutations; they’re actually common (among mutations that have an effect on the phenotype).
I don’t know if this is the “last thread txpiper ran away from” but he was babbling about gun-nuttery in http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/07/29/is-there-a-way-to-impeach-scalia/
On this thread, he was babbling something about life from the stars—I can’t be arsed right now, so here is a link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/29/young_star_sugars_life_blocks_seen/ to an online article about a science paper that describes sugar molecules in spaaaaace.
Amphiox
That’s fucking mind-blowing. I’m just scraping my jaw up off the pavement…
Any definition given to the piper will will either be ignored or he will zero in on a phrase or word applying his own misunderstanding of its use and will claim victory.
Kind of like everything else he’s done here.
It’s all based on his own misunderstanding, denial, and ignorance of things.
But he’s right because he can’t imagine it being any other way.
Oh I forgot about the scalia thread. Need to take some time and go back there.
“But he’s right because he can’t imagine it being any other way.”
That’s many a nut in a nutshell.
“Does the texpip deny or agree that the duplication of salivary amylase in humans is a beneficial mutation that caused a gain of function?”
No, the texpip doesn’t believe that gene duplication is necessarily accidental, like you do.
“When the researchers ventured beyond university campuses to sample populations in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Arctic, they noticed a trend. Cultures with diets that included high levels of starch tended to have more copies of the amylase gene than cultures that consumed few starches.
Starch-loving cultures such as the Hadza of Tanzania who rely heavily on tubers and other root vegetables, have 6.7 copies of amylase, on average. While people like the Mbuti, pygmy rain forest hunter-gatherers from central Africa who eat little starch, have 5.4 copies on average.
In contrast, chimpanzees, dining on fruit and little else, have just two copies of the salivary amylase gene.”
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070903/full/news070903-21.html
David,
“Natural selection isn’t random; it’s caused by the environment – and the environment doesn’t contain any deliberation or purpose.”
I agree. It doesn’t discriminate. The weak and infirm die. That is the raw core of natural selection. It removes. You can decorate and adore the concept, but it doesn’t make things happen.
Newton’s argument is just as valid now as it was when he penned it. Sensory systems do not accidentally form to:
-perceive and utilize a narrow segment of the EMS
-notice the chemical subtleties that distinguish between things that stink or smell good, taste nasty or pleasant
-discriminte pitch and origin of a broad range of frequencies
-detect pressure/temperature contact
-think
I appreciate your intelligence, but you have sacrificed your intellect on an altar of horse shit. Muggeridge was right. “Western Man has decided to abolish himself…having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction”
Still no evidence for your imaginary creator txpiper. Must be a character defect in your honesty and integrity, as the one thing absolutely required for your fuckwitted idea has absolutely no evidence. And that evidence isn’t found in what you pretend science can’t explain, but must be shown separately in the equivalent of the eternally burning bush. Nada, Zip, Zero, Zilch. You don’t want us to consider your idea. And it won’t be without that evidence for your imaginary creator…
Why aren’t you showing that peer reviewed scientific evidence for it. That’s right, it like your creator, doesn’t exist. Compared to a million or so papers for evolution…Why haven’t you refuted each one. That is required for evolution to be totally refuted….
speaking of concentrating the stupid all in one place, isn’t it way past time to toss TXpipster into the dungeon?
“Western Man has decided to abolish himself…having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction”
what’s really funny is that he was talking about YOU, pipster.
Txpiper
Not on its own, anyway. Natural selection operates on populations with diverse arrays of traits already built in from random mutation. You start with a population of horse-like animals with variable neck lenghts, after some large number of generations where the ones with long necks consistantly managed to reproduce more often, you have a population of Giraffes-like animals. The Giraffe-like animals still have variable neck lengths, but the average length has increased.
You have no grounds for that claim. Certainly you can’t cite Newton; in his time the modern chemical formula didn’t even exist yet.
Arguments from incredulity aren’t worth shit.
How does one sacrifice their intelligence on the alter of actually fucking using it?
Seriously, I’ve cultured smarter things than you on an agar plate.
what does evolution theory actually say?
for the lurkers out there, who likely haven’t seen us post the answers to you a million times already (btw, your refusal to accept that we have done so suggests you are suffering mental illness, also as mentioned before), you could always get the basics from places like this:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/
The weak and infirm die. That is the raw core of natural selection.
wrong again.
why bother though. PZ… please just toss this inane bore.
[meta]
Ichthyic, dunno, but like the gooey, the piper serves a function as the Socratic dimbulb that the sage addresses — IOW, it’s not an entirely useless foil.
The raw core of natural selection is who has the most surviving grandchildren.
“must be shown separately in the equivalent of the eternally burning bush”
This is a recurring theme with you. You will not get this. What you will get is a chosen, distinct, identifiable Israel. Slightly less than 0.2% of the world’s total population, and still pulling down 20% of the Nobel prizes.
You will go dull and ignorant to your grave, waiting for Science or Nature to tell you what you can believe. Enjoy the ride…you won’t like the destination.
IOW, it’s not an entirely useless foil.
bullshit.
there’s a million more out there just like him.
let them have a turn at the wheel.
pipster has become a very worn out chew toy.
You will go dull and ignorant to your grave
there’s the inevitable projection again.
you’re a proven liar and willfully ignorant. by the standards of your own religion, you will roast, pipster.
That is NOT what the texpip was asked. The texpip was asked IS THE GENE DUPLICATION MUTATION A BENEFICIAL ONE OR NOT? Yes or no.
“Accidental” was not in the question.
Evading the question again. As usual, as it has no response that doesn’t immediately destroy its own position utterly.
Once again deliberately mischaracterizing evolution theory through omission. The texpip ALWAYS talks either about natural selection OR mutations, as if each one alone were the entirety of evolutionary theory. And all the multiple times it is corrected and informed that the two always operate together, it just ignores, ignores, ignores.
The manner in which natural selection amplifies the beneficial variants has, of course, been previously explained to the texpip in detail.
All ignored again.
Intellectual dishonesty ALL the way DOWN.
Utterly pathetic.
The narrowness of that band was predetermined by the laws of organic chemistry. Wavelengths much shorter damage and destroy organic molecules. Wavelengths much longer are too long to react with the chemical bonds in organic molecules.
The limits on the extended visible spectrum (that which living things as a whole can detect, including portions the infra-red and ultraviolet that humans can’t) was something that evolution had to adapt around, not something that evolution produced.
Of course, for an intelligent designer, building a device capable of detecting a vastly wider range of the EMS is easy. Humans have been doing it for over a century. It is also exceedingly useful.
And yet, the texpip’s omnibenevolent, omnipowerful intelligent designer somehow failed to do it.
Yet another example of a fact of nature that demonstrates the superiority of evolutionary theory over creationism/design.
And still no acknowledgment from the texpip of all those links to summaries of evolutionary theory given to it (for the fifth or sixth interation) since its last set of transparently dishonest questions.
Hypocritical intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Simply pitiful.
Exactly what the ToE predicts, txpiper.
Ya know, when a tribe’s diet relies heavily on starch, that means people who can assimilate it more easily tend to be more healthy and die less often. That gives them an advantage.
Those people who had few copies of the amylase gene reproduced less and died more often, meaning the population gradually got more copies of the amylase genes, on average.
Their DNA didn’t magically change to allow them to digest more starch.
And flips right back to mischaracterizing evolution theory by only considering mutations and ignoring natural selection.
Simply no shame at all.
Ethical bankruptcy ALL the way down.
As we have readily just seen, once the going gets too hot, the texpip flips to 2) necessity and 4. But never the two together. It KNOWS the moment the two are combined its entire line of argument falls apart. It KNOWS its entire position is made of fabrications, presuppositions, and lies.
It lies anyways.
Clarifying my last sentence at 107:
What I mean is that their DNA didn’t “know” that they were eating more starch and “changed” on itself to respond to it. Some people were born with the ability to digest more starch, some didn’t, and the ones who did were more sucessful on average, passing on such traits to their descendants.
I like it how you can’t even imagine a discipline like science, which isn’t predicated on authority. We don’t uncritically assimilate the contents of journals dimwit, that is what you do with Bible study. All those who call themselves scientists are co-creators of science.
As for your veiled references to Hell, I find that a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, I have no reason to consider the Bible or Yahweh or Jesus any more credible than Principia Discordia, which was allegedly revealed to Malaclypse and Lord Omar by a talking monkey in a business suit. On the other hand, I’ve never encountered a god in any mythology as one dimensionally repulsive as the one that you worship. Neither Yahweh nor Jesus nor Muhammad have any redeeming characteristics in my opinion, so why the hell would I want to grovel to them alongside a bunch of broken people like you? I’ll take company over climate, thank you very much.
That’s the crux of his argument.
“Selection only trims down what already exists!1”
“Mutations change content and add new variations.”
“Mutations are mostly harmful!1”
“They’re mostly neutral, and the harmful ones are trimmed away by selection pressure.”
“Selection only trims down what already exists!1”
“Mutations change content and add new variations.”
“Mutations are mostly harmful!1”
“They’re mostly neutral, and the harmful ones are trimmed away by selection pressure.”
“Selection only trims down what already exists!1”
“Mutations change content and add new variations.”
“Mutations are mostly harmful!1”
“They’re mostly neutral, and the harmful ones are trimmed away by selection pressure.”
etc.
Also, way to co-opt science in the service of your bullshit. How many of those Nobel Prizes went to scientists who were working on creationism? Moreover, why would a god indicate that it “chose” a people, by helping them to create knowledge that shows it to be incompatible with reality?
Your mind is so broken I’m surprised you can figure out your keyboard.
Here it is:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/08/15/i-want-skin-that-can-do-this/
It jumped from this to Missouri Screws Up, and then after being thoroughly toasted there, jumped back, and then, IMMEDIATELY after slipping up in its pattern of dissembling dishonesty and actually getting itself pegged on its “alternative” to evolution theory, it fled from there and showed up here.
Which I’ll post again:
Behold the texpip’s “model” that it favors over evolution theory.
It PRESUPPOSES complexity, phenotypic plasticity, and reactivity of DNA (presumably to environmental change). Evolution is an attempt to explain all of these observations. The texpip’s “alternative” doesn’t even try.
It explains destructive and degenerative change, which evolution ALSO does, but cannot explain constructive change except again by presupposition, which evolution does. So it cannot explain as broad a spectrum of observed phenomenon as evolution theory does, and what it does explain, evolution theory also explains, and explains better.
It makes the prediction that NO beneficial mutation can occur, NO gain of information can occur. Remember its a “state of degeneration” since the moment of creation/fall. NO constructive change since then, and thus is FALSIFIED by human salivary amylase, which IS a constructive change that occurred, by the texpip’s own admission (nice of the texpip to let THAT slip), AFTER the moment of creation/fall, as it is DIFFERENT in different human populations that, in the texpip’s model, separated only AFTER the creation/fall (and deluge too).
Thus, we see that the texpip’s “model”
1) Does not even attempt to try to explain the very things evolution theory was developed to explain, the very explanations that the texpip insists are inadequate (but his “model” doesn’t even TRY to explain).
2) In the few things it does try to explain, evolution theory also explains, just as well or better.
3) Is already falsified by a few simple observations.
The texpip claims it is an “alternative” to evolution theory, but it cannot compare in either breadth, depth, scope, or utility, and is already proven WRONG to boot.
(But interestingly, it acknowledges common descent.)
Remember this quote people. And the next time the texpip shows up on a thread on universal health care, show him this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Israel
And when it shows up on a thread about gun control, show him this:
http://articles.cnn.com/1999-09-17/world/9909_17_israel.gun.control_1_gun-control-gun-homicides-tough-controls?_s=PM:WORLD
And when it shows up on a thread about climate change (or evolution for that matter), show it this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/oct/06/israel-scientist-sacked-evolution-climate
And when it shows up on a thread about abortion, show it this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Israel
And ask it why it flouts the instructions of its own god, as demonstrated by the actions of that god’s chosen people.
And the next time it brings up Newton like it has here, throw this back, and ask why it cherry picks Newton, but not any of all those 20% Israeli Nobel Laureates who fully support evolution theory.
And yet, nowhere, absolutely nowhere, in the holy text that the texpip supposedly believes in, does it ever say, at all, that supporting evolutionary theory is a sin.
However, BEARING FALSE WITNESS against evolutionary scientists, IS a sin. And not just any sin, but one of the big ten.
So if the texpip’s book is actually accurate, I’m pretty certain that we will end up in a much happier destination than it will.
And as for climate, consider:
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.ca/2012/06/heaven-is-hotter-than-hell.html
Piper, you live in Texas. Tell me, then: Is poker a game of chance or of skill?
In evolution, you get dealt cards, and life is what you do with them.
You talk about determination being needed. Well, that determination is in the heart of a tigress needing to feed her cubs, and in the determination of an antelope to outrun the danger.
The variations come out at random—to a certain extent—but survival is the sorting mechanism, and is not random (more than a little).
You want too simple explanations, and you are too simple to understand what you read.
Every animal is different from its parents and its siblings, and not every animal survives to reproduce. Those are facts, and evolution is simply the effects of those facts accumulating.
You can believe whatever you want, but you aren’t making any sense.
That’s natural selection at work. Look:
Producing more amylase than usual can be both an advantage and a disadvantage, depending on the situation: it allows you to digest more starch more quickly, but it’s also more costly (protein synthesis requires quite a bit of energy, so you need to eat more to sustain it).
For a chimp, 7 copies of the salivary amylase gene is simply overkill. Chimps with that many copies tend to have fewer resources available for reproduction.
For a tuber-munching or bread-munching human, 2 copies is just too little; malnutrition means to have fewer resources available for reproduction.
Mutations happen everywhere all the time. Natural selection favors different parts of the resulting variation in different environments.
Simple!
You seem to believe that chimps with more than 2 copies or humans with less than 5 never occur. If so, there’s your error.
I vividly remember three times when I explained to you that that’s only half of it: the weak and infirm – whichever ones those are in a given situation – reproduce less successfully than the rest (in the extreme case, they die), while the unusually strong and firm (again, whichever ones those are in the situation) reproduce more successfully than the rest, even if the rest reproduce just fine and can’t be called “weak” or “infirm”.
I agree, of course, that selection does not cause mutations. What you keep forgetting is that mutations happen all the time anyway. Again: you have 100 to 200 mutations that are completely new, that neither of your parents has; a few of those have an effect on your phenotype.
Again “accidentally”. Again casually “forgetting” that selection even exists.
– A narrow segment of the EMS is much easier to perceive than a broad one. That’s because different segments do different things to different substances.
– Lots of molecules change their shape when light of certain wavelengths shines on them. All you need is a bunch of double bonds in a row. Have you never noticed what a simple molecule retinal is? – Well, when you attach that to a protein, it changes the shape of the protein. And that changes the enzymatic activity of the protein.
– Receptors for smells and tastes work like all other receptors for molecules (like hormone receptors or neurotransmitter receptors or… I could go on for hours): they’re proteins that change shape when something binds to them, and only things of certain shapes can bind to any one. This also explains the mistakes sense organs make, for instance why benzaldehyde (marcipan) and nitrobenzene (“marcipan for mothers-in-law”) smell identical or nearly so, “even though” the former is harmless and the latter heavily toxic.
– Hearing and pressure work the same way: pressure (whether large-scale as in touching, or small-scale as in hearing) moves the lids on ion channels of specialized nerve cells. This is not a metaphor: it literally moves literal lids. When the channeles are opened, certain ions flow in or out, changing the voltage across the membrane…
– Not only do hearing and pressure work the same way, the inner ear and this organ are intimately related. Read the article; the “anatomy” section explains in quite some detail how it works at the mechanical/electrical level.
– Temperature? Wait for the lid to mutate a bit, so that, instead of being attached to the skin, it changes its shape with temperature. Many proteins do that. (…Ultimately, all proteins do that, as any hard-boiled egg goes to show. They just don’t all do it at the same temperature, as any soft-boiled egg goes to show.)
– Sensory systems don’t think. :-)
In short, we know a lot today that Newton didn’t know (because he couldn’t) and that you still don’t know (because you stupidly refuse to spend a few hours in Google or with a few textbooks).
Is that why you completely refuse to educate yourself? :-)
If you use reason to argue against reason, you contradict yourself.
If you argue against reason without using reason, you’re unreasonable.
What, that is your standard for a miracle?
Dude, there are obvious reasons why the More or Less Democratic Republic of the Congo or the Not At All Democratic Very Few People’s Republic of [North] Korea or the former country of Somalia don’t rake in 20 % of the Nobel prizes.
You’re stupid.
I don’t know about the Nerd, but the test says I’ll go to limbo. That’s fine. :-D
Too bad for you there’s no evidence that any of this hogwash exists: you know, heaven, hell, limbo, purgatory, anything.
Thank you! That’s what I meant. :-) I’ll check it out.
:-o Wow. That is Lamarckism.
In other words, the Hadza of Tanzania experience selection pressure favoring more copies of amylase, while the Mbuti experience selection pressure favoring less. Evolution theory predicts that the Hadza should have more copies amylase, and guess what, they do!
Yet one more example of evolutionary theory working better than creationism.
And here’s another quote from that article that the texpip chose to quotemine, but which the texpip rather tellingly, left out:
Support for deep time.
Deliberately ignored.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Whatever afterlife destiny where people like the texpip DON’T go, would be the preferred one.
An eternity in the company of arrogant, stupid, pretentious, two-faced, bigoted, misogynistic, hypocritical liars like the texpip. What better definition of the term “hell” could there be?
I just commented here. txpiper, please read it. Now on to the Missouri thread…
And since the texpip has decided to further the discussion on the human salivary amylase gene, we can take a look at this:
http://genesdev.cshlp.org/content/6/8/1457.short
So, TWO insertion mutations. One of which is a GENE DUPLICATION, which subsequently degenerated into a pseudogene. The other is a decayed endogenous retrovirus infection, which is basically another kind of gene duplication.
So their both degenerated, right, which the texpip’s “model” allows, post fall.
But what about the effect on the amylase gene itself from these two mutations?
Lo and behold, if these insertion mutations are removed, the amylase gene LOSES functionality. There is less gene product and the coordinated tissue-specific expression is lost.
So these two mutations are GAIN OF FUNCTION mutations for the salivary amylase gene. CONSTRUCTIVE mutations.
But in the texpip’s “model”, all change is degenerative, ALL mutations must be destructive.
But these two are not.
Model falsified.
*POOF*
(And notice how a “destructive” change in one gene, which knocked out its function and turned it into a pseudo gene, and a “degenerative” event caused by a retroviral infection, nevertheless produced CONSTRUCTIVE, GAIN OF FUNCTION change in another gene, the salivary amylase gene. We can readily see how the texpip’s obsession with differentiating between “destructive” and “constructive” change is asinine. The exact same gene sequence change, ie mutation, can be either, depending on circumstance. So there is absolutely no rigid difference between so-called “degenerative” changes, and constructive evolutionary change).
It’s not like abb3w’s list hasn’t been quoted at you in the past, but since you’re asking, here it goes again. Not that I expect you to pay attention or anything.
***
Go fuck yourself, thread-jumper.
OK, done.
OT, but what the hell. The stupid is heavily concentrated in this tread, so I might as well have some fun.
So, I went to check out the Scalia thread and our little piper claimed that the ‘government’ (not my scare quotes and I assume that txpiper meant the US government and not the government of Guyana) were the only people with guns during the Jonestown massacre. Nevermind that Jim Jones’ guards fired on a congressional rep and his entourage as soon as they hit the tarmac and according to witnesses, some of the residents were forced to commit suicide (drink the poison) at gun point. Oh, and let’s not forget that Jonestown wasn’t in the US in the first place. Can’t let facts get in the way of anything, can we, pip?
David,
“In short, we know a lot today that Newton didn’t know”
Of course. Your comments on the details of the senses attest to that. But Newton’s objections had nothing to do with the complex mechanics of the systems.
I read not so long ago that they think that signal transduction in hearing might depend on a single protein expressed in the tips of cochlear hairs. It is a challenge to science to learn about how this works. The challenge to evolutionary theory is to explain how in hell DNA replication errors resulted in such critical proteins and the mechanisms that regulate their expression. Natural selection acting on random mutations doesn’t cut it.
===
Nightjar,
”If you have a problem with Evolution, you have a problem with one or more of these fourteen points. Which one is it?”
14. It is just a statement of faith which grabs time (without even mentioning the do-overs necessary on account of mass extinction events). More generally, the outline doesn’t make a strong distinction between variation and development. It doesn’t address the mechanism that you would apply to the formation of any complex system.
”thread-jumper”
Sorry, but I lead a busy life and don’t always have time for this. But to add another complication to your faith complex, I thought this was interesting:
“The microbiome is defined as the collective genomes of the microbes (composed of bacteria, bacteriophage, fungi, protozoa and viruses) that live inside and on the human body. We have about 10 times as many microbial cells as human cells.”
http://www.genome.gov/27549400
I’m thinking that lots of accommodating mutations must have been involved in the development of this mutual arrangement. And probably some kind of really sophisticated selection process based on tolerance and diversity.
===
Audley,
“I assume that txpiper meant the US government and not the government of Guyana”
Neither. Jones and his boys were the government.
You don’t get to tell scientists what does and does not cut it you lying ignoramus. The evidence shows that DNA mutations lead to changes in protein functions whether or not shit-for-brains fundies accept it. If this isn’t the mechanism of evolutionary change, then how do you explain nylonase? Did jesus magically poof new enzymes into existence so that bacteria can digest a material that didn’t exist before the 20th century?
If you want your criticisms to carry any weight go to college and learn about evolution, then propose a theory that accounts for all available evidence better than evolution (hint: you won’t be able to do this). “A magic man made it, and then adam and eve rode dinosaurs to church” doesn’t fucking cut it.
As usual TXpiper has it ass backwards. The challenge for your fuckwitted idea is to show conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary deity/creator, the mechanism it used to create all live forms, and how your imaginary deity/creator was formed in the first place. Your idea is not a scientific alternative until you can explain the above with solid and conclusive physical evidence. And at the moment, YOU EXPLAIN NOTHING, SHOW NOTHING, EVEN AVOID TALKING ABOUT YOUR NOTHING IDEA.
Evolution has nothing it needs to show. The conclusive physical evidence is in the million or so scientific papers that back evolution, both directly and indirectly. COMPARED TO ZERO SCIENTIFIC PAPERS BACKING YOUR IMAGINARY DEITY/CREATOR WITH SCIENTIFIC RIGOR.
You can bullshit and posture all you want. You just show to the world what an abject blowhard you are, as you can’t prove what you postulate, whereas science has it nailed down and then some….
Since in his hyperskepticism of evolution, he did not cite the peer reviewed reviewed scientific literature that didn’t refute him when looked at scientifically, TXPIPER refuted no science or scientific theory. That can only be done by more science. His EVIDENCELESS OPINION is *POOF* dismissed as arrogant and ignorant fuckwittery. Since his “idea” was not introduced with scientific evidence, it too, can *POOF*, be dismissed as arrogant and ignorant fuckwittery. Which leaves txpiper huffing and puffing for all its might, but doing absolutely nothing to the rock solid edifice of the Theory of Evolution, nor does he even have an alternative, as his house of cards was demolished by an ant hitting it. Nothing but mental wanking on his part.
Did you stop to think that maybe, just maybe, the fact that we know more about everything today could explain why Newton was pleading from ignorance? These days, we understand how the eye works (we don’t know everything, but we sure as hell know more!) and we can trace the development, through fossils and genetics, of the two types of crystal eyes used by trilobites, the eyes of insects, bees and ants, and even the eyes of amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds (and all the gradations in between which are preserved in the fossil record). So to claim that Newton’s objections had nothing to do with the knowledge gained since then gets you a well-earned “DUH!” When Newton claimed that the eye was proof of a creator, none of the knowledge provided by palaeontology, genetics, biology, anatomy, and a host of other sciences were available so for him to use his own ignorance to plead for gods is understandable.
You have this information, txpiper. What the fuck is your excuse?
And, while we are at it, can you provide some evidence for the existence of any gods? Keep in mind, you don’t have to provide evidence for the homicidally misogynist Abrahamic gods — any will do.
It’s more of an observation, actually.
But here’s the follow-up question: If that isn’t sufficient, then what else is there to it? The theory is always open to improvement and additions. But they have to build up on what we have, because the facts aren’t going away.
Look, deep time is a reality. A theory of evolution that didn’t “grab time” would be incomplete.
What do-overs and why is this a problem?
What do you mean here?
It does if its formation “has an influence on the number of offspring able to reproduce” and can be broken down into gradual steps that could become fixed due to either selection, genetic drift, or a case of population bottleneck.
You don’t always have time for this, so instead of trolling a thread you troll many at the same time, repeat points that have been shredded multiple times in multiples threads, and pretend that past discussions never existed so they must be had over and over again? That doesn’t make any sense.
Here you basically agreed that natural selection is mostly about “some individuals reproducing more than others” and now you went back to claiming that it’s only about how the ““? No, leading a busy life doesn’t explain that. Dishonesty explains it better.
I’m sorry, didn’t you say you were leading a busy life? Seriously, if you don’t have time to continue the discussions you have already started, why the fuck are you bringing up more material for discussion? What the hell is wrong with you?
You’re evidently not very good at it, though.
From a microbe’s point of view, your gut, mouth, throat, skin, etc are not in any relevant way different from any other environment within their reach that they can adapt to and thrive in. I don’t see why this is “another complication”. It’s just more of the same stuff.
the texpip’s alternative DOESN’T EVEN TRY TO EXPLAIN HOW these proteins and regulatory mechanism arose. It just presupposes their existence.
Once again, the texpip demands of evolutionary theory what it DOES NOT demand of its supposed “alternative”.
Intellectual dishonesty ALL the way down.
Yes it does.
E PUR SI MUTATES.
E PUR SI SELECTS.
E PUR SI EVOLVES.
Yes it does. In fact these so-called “do-overs” ARE A MAJOR PART OF MODERN EVOLUTIONARY THEORY.
Whereas the texpip’s alternative “model” DOESN’T EVEN ALLOW FOR OR INCLUDE MASS EXTINCTIONS AT ALL.
Yes it does. That’s why, you know, THE VERY TERMS “variation” AND “development” ARE IN EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AS SEPARATE THINGS.
Whereas the texpip’s alternative “model” DOESN’T EVEN ACKNOWLEDGE THAT EITHER OF THESE EVEN EXIST, let alone “distinguish” between them.
Yes it does.
Whereas the texpip’s alternative “model” DOESN’T EVEN TRY TO SUGGEST A MECHANISM, AND JUST PRESUPPOSES COMPLEXITY FROM THE START.
Once again the texpip deliberately and dishonestly distorts and flat out LIES about what evolutionary theory actually says, while simultaneously NOT APPLYING THE SAME CRITERIA OF CRITICISM TO ITS OWN alternative “model”.
Pathetic HYPOCRISY all the way down.
Simply pitiful.
“Hyperskepticism”? More like plain old denialism.
Still waiting for txpiper to show ANY, much less conclusive, physical evidence for it’s imaginary deity/creator. That simply isn’t found in txpiper’s hyperskepticism of science and the theory of evolution but rather is found in things like an eternally burning bush. Funny how txpiper can’t lead with the evidence, and must perforce hide behind lies and bullshit. One would think it knows it has has shit, and must think it has to act as the confident con-man pulling a snow-job on the credulous due to the lack of evidence….
A hyperskepticism directed as the texpip’s is only to evolutionary theory but never to its own preferred alternative model isn’t true hyperskepticism at all, but simply a fake hyperskepticism, adopted solely for appearance’s sake while engaging in deliberately dishonest rhetoric.
No, the texpip is not a hyperskeptic. It is simply a liar.
A hypocritical liar.
As well, for a typical microbiome prokaryote, like E. coli, global population size and generation time, along with known mutation rates is such that every single base-pair in the entire genome will undergo a point mutation at least once in a time period of a few years, and this is taking ONLY one kind of mutation, a point mutation, into account.
As every point mutation has three possible alternative changes, this means that, inside a decade, every single possible point mutation or every single point of the entire genome of the microbe will have occurred, somewhere in the population, at least once.
Mutation availability is most certainly NOT a rate-limiting factor in the evolution of microbiome prokaryotes. Selection pressure dominates. For all intents and purposes, every single possible mutation gets a chance to be tried in the current selective environment. Even if chance events cause a potentially favorable mutation not to succeed the first time it appears, it will appear again as a spontaneous mutation within a decade or two, and if the selective environment has remained stable for that same period of time, it will get another chance to spread. And another. And another.
*emphasis mine*
Where is any scientific evidence for you claims txpiper? PUT UP OR SHUT THE FUCK UP, LIKE ANYBODY BUT A LIAR AND BULLSHITTER WOULD DO!
Now as for the mass extinction question, the texpip once again deliberately distorts the truth, and uses the dishonest phrasing of “do-over” to imply that it is a 100% reset, when on the genetic level it is anything but.
If we take the most famous mass-extinction (and second worst of all time) of all and look at the most famously affected group, the dinosaurs, as an example, we see that the dinosaurs are completely decimated except for one branch, the birds. So, how much of the genetic diversity of the dinosaurs was lost?
Since we don’t have a full dinosaur genome, we can’t say for sure, but suppose an analogous thing happened today, and all the dominant mammals, including humans were decimated, and only a few lineages survived. How much genetic diversity is actually lost?
Cats have 90% of homologous genes with humans, 82% with dogs, 80% with cows, 79% with chimpanzees, 69% with rats and 67% with mice.
So, if all mammal species were driven extinct save for a few survivor branches, the total amount of mammal genetic diversity that is retained in these survivors is still somewhere from 65-85%.
So, when we use the colloquial term “re-do” as a simplification of what actually happens after a mass extinction, we are talking about re-establishing phenotype diversity.
From a genotype point of view, it’s not really much of a “re-do” at all.
And does anyone else find it amusing that the texpip, in the same post, should BOTH dispute deep time AND try to bring up mass-extinctions as a roadblock for evolutionary theory, when it is the evidence FOR deep time that demonstrates that mass extinctions actually occurred?
GASP, YOU MEAN THAT TXPIPER WON’T UTTERLY AND TOTALLY LIE TO TRY FUTILITY TO DISPROVE EVOLUTION WITHOUT PRESENTING ONE IOTA OF EVIDENCE? OR THAT THERE IS AN IOTA OF EVIDENCE FOR ITS DERANGED AND IDIOTIC “IDEA”? Gasp!, where’s the heavy duty fainting couch, so I can do a dramatic faux swoon, which is closer to the truth than anything txpiper has claimed over several years…
This “do-over” nonsense is even worse than you point out, Amphiox. Because we already had mammals at the end of the Cretaceous, from txpiper’s point of view it cannot matter if every single gene in the dinosaurs might vanish without descendants. The relevant genes were already in the primitive mammals: not just internal skeleton, circulatory system, nerves, brain, eyes, ears, chemical sense receptors (smell, taste), but also live birth and nursing. Not one thing needed to have a “do-over” following that last major extinction.
And looking forward from that time, there were about 65 million generations [given a conservative one generation per year for mammals] to come which would hone those already-complete critters to add a few refinements – like active sonar, and human language ability. 65 million generations when all the” hard work” had already been accomplished by the previous 300+ million years of evolution. Easy peasy.
It is my understanding that Pharyngula grade(tm) Fainting Couches come in Leather, Plush, and Microsuede variants.
Which one would you prefer?
Amphiox:
No corduroy?
There is now!
(The line is evolving….)
I think if it sees me next to it, it evolves almost instantaneously to a kevlar/canvas mix. ;)
”If this isn’t the mechanism of evolutionary change, then how do you explain nylonase?”
Yeah, that is an impressive adaptation. I guess I can see why you would expect things like this to be the result of a random error process.
I think this would be an even better example:
“Miles underground, microbes survive without oxygen or sunlight by feeding on metals like iron and manganese. One of these microorganisms, Geobacter metallireducens, has an unusual survival tactic for life in the underworld: It uses a sensor to ‘sniff out’ metals. If metal is not nearby, G. metallireducens can spontaneously grow flagella—whip-like cellular propellers—to find new energy sources.”
http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/04_02/geobacter.shtml
I’m sure you know about flagella…25 or 30 specialized proteins expressed into a proton-driven motor assembly? Rotor, stator, bearings, clutch, seals, propeller…all obviously accidental productions.
===
”When Newton claimed that the eye was proof of a creator, none of the knowledge provided by palaeontology, genetics, biology, anatomy, and a host of other sciences were available so for him to use his own ignorance to plead for gods is understandable.”
But that isn’t the direction Newton’s argument came from. His rationale works around the reality that there must be an awareness that there is such a thing as light (or sound, or temperature, etc.) in order to design and construct a system to perceive it. He stated it thus:
“Whence is it that the eyes of all sorts of living creatures are transparent to the very bottom & the only transparent members in the body, having on the outside an hard transparent skin, & within transparent juyces with a crystalline Lens in the middle & a pupil before the Lens all of them so truly shaped & fitted for vision, that no Artist can mend them? Did blind chance know that there was light & what was its refraction & fit the eys of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These & such like considerations always have & ever will prevail with man kind to beleive that there is a being who made all things & has all things in his power & who is therfore to be feared.”
http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00007
In Newton’s view, the complexity that we’ve become aware of since he wrote this would only serve to further illustrate his point.
—
“can you provide some evidence for the existence of any gods?”
Evidence for me is different than for you, so probably not. In my view, complexity stands as its own argument. But in yours, a widely-accepted, well-crafted narrative that claims to account for complexity serves you well enough. The problem I have with that is the same one I have with movies where somebody has to crawl through ductwork to save the day. Having done HVAC design, I know ventilation ducts don’t work like that. To me, your views are not workable; they are only scripted.
For more specific evidence, I would point to prophecies from both Testaments, closed and still open. I’ve heard all the resisting arguments. They are always confused, shallow or ignorant, usually an amalgam of all three. (Newton had an acute interest in the subject. He was vastly educated in history, and recognized that legitimate prophetic forecasts represent a breach of natural law, and therefore they stand as evidence for the supernatural). Prophecy has become very interesting in the last few decades…extremely interesting right now. Lots of us are wondering if Damascus is about to finally be wasted.
===
Nightjar,
”If that isn’t sufficient, then what else is there to it? The theory is always open to improvement and additions.”
In my opinion, you still come up grossly short on the subject of mutations. They are simply taken for granted. DNA replication occurs in the context of enzymes that deliberately serve to maintain fidelity. I accept that we all have perhaps a few hundred mutations that our parents didn’t have, but you can hardly fluff that up into support for common descent from a single ancestor. Imagine a giraffe developing a long neck, and you have to imagine a larger heart and other radical physiological alterations occurring in parallel. You’re putting a lot of faith in an error-driven process.
Another nasty problem is the unpredictable nature of the mutations/selection process. This is a good illustration:
“ “You would think that by going back to the Triassic you’d find a transitional form of gall mite, but no,” Grimaldi said. “Even 230 million years ago, all of the distinguishing features of this family were there — a long, segmented body; only two pairs of legs instead of the usual four found in mites; unique feather claws, and mouthparts.” “
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120827180021.htm
This is not a part of the narrative.
—
”What do-overs and why is this a problem?”
The establishment view is that there were several mass extinction events. That means lots of wasted evolution.
–Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event-About 17% of all families, 50% of all genera and 75% of species became extinct.
–Triassic–Jurassic extinction event-About 23% of all families and 48% of all genera (20% of marine families and 55% of marine genera) went extinct.
[insert the mutation/selection resistant gall mites in the above article here]
–Permian–Triassic extinction event-Earth’s largest extinction killed 57% of all families and 83% of all genera (53% of marine families, 84% of marine genera, about 96% of all marine species and an estimated 70% of land species) including insects.
–Late Devonian extinction-a prolonged series of extinctions eliminated about 19% of all families, 50% of all genera and 70% of all species.
–Ordovician–Silurian extinction event-Two events occurred that killed off 27% of all families and 57% of all genera. Together they are ranked by many scientists as the second largest of the five major extinctions in Earth’s history in terms of percentage of genera that went extinct.
There are other supposed lesser extinctions listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event I love the optimism in this statement:
“Mass extinctions have sometimes accelerated the evolution of life on Earth.”
I bet they have.
—
”From a microbe’s point of view, your gut, mouth, throat, skin, etc are not in any relevant way different from any other environment within their reach that they can adapt to and thrive in. I don’t see why this is “another complication”.”
Take enough antibiotics to kill the bacteria that take care of the region around your butthole and you’ll wish you had them back. If 90% of us is not us, there has to be fantastic amount of symbiosis going on.
===
”Whereas the texpip’s alternative “model” DOESN’T EVEN ALLOW FOR OR INCLUDE MASS EXTINCTIONS AT ALL.”
Just one.
You look great in all caps. Are you wearing a NO FEAR tee shirt?
Still no evidence for his inane and unscientific idea from Txpiper. Almost like he knows he has no evidence, and can’t prove a damn thing, so he must avoid doing so at all costs. Meanwhile, no scientific evidence given, so *POOF*, his OPINION, which isn’t and never will be scientific is dismissed for utter and total fuckwittery, just as his idea without any evidence is *POOF* dismissed for the same reasons. No evidence from outside of his OPINION, no nothing presented, nothing refuted, nothing supported. Nothing but a waste of his time. Meanwhile, he shows nothing but lies and bullshit. That stops when his OPINION stops, and evidence takes over.
Afters years trying with just his fuckwitted and unscientific OPINION, this is what damage txpiper has done to the SCIENCE of the THEORY OF EVOLUTION:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
*Crickets chirring*
Nothing has been damaged or refuted. Your OPINION is meaningless to science and scientists.
Welcome to reality and science txpiper. You are the extreme loser. Your efforts haven’t done a damn thing, except damning your soul to hell for lying and bullshitting.
Nonexistent Noah’s nonexistent global flood.
You willfully blind ingnoramus, you’re a sinful idolator, worshipping the words of a physical book rather than accepting the evidence of the physical world which you (supposedly) believe is the direct handiwork of your god. Faithful christians two centuries ago were less sinful than you. Once they started looking at the geology with open eyes, they realized that god had not ever sent a worldwide flood. And they rightly chose to believe the evidence rather than to bow down to a false text. [No flood is actually good news for believers, because then they don’t have to believe in a heinous god who willfully destroyed every single innocent creature on the entire planet except for the impossibly lucky pairs who happened to make it onto the impossible ark. Good.] But you, in your sins of pride and idolatry, think that your interpretation of the bible should be more important than your god’s whole planetful of evidence.
Good luck getting into heaven with those sins against god weighing down your soul.
Classic example of the lack of evidence for txpips “idea” (delusion). He simply can’t point to a single one-time-all-continent-flood-causing-total-extinction in the geological columns on all continents. All he can demonstrate is the expected local flooding at diverse times. He can’t put up the right information from legitimate sources outside of himself, namely the peer reviewed scientific literature, and can’t shut the fuck up as a person of honesty and integrity would do if they can’t demonstrate the scientific evidence. Which leaves him dead center in the con-man region of lies and bullshit. Typical of egotistical losers who ego and sense of OPINION far outweigh their ability to back up their assertions.
Haha. The flagella. The texpip can’t even think up an original point.
Still deliberately misrepresenting what evolution theory actually says, only talking about the random mutation part and ignoring the non-random nature of natural selection.
Further admission that the texpip’s “alternative” to evolutionary theory presupposes complexity without explanation, while the WHOLE POINT of evolutionary theory, and the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM REQUIREMENT for any alternative, is to explain how complexity arises.
Useless.
Teleological concepts like “waste” are IRRELEVANT to evolution theory.
Yes they have. We have, in fact, MEASURED THE RATES OF EVOLUTION, the rates of species appearance and change, in the fossil record to determine this.
E PUR SI ACCELERATE.
E PUR SI EVOLVES.
The fossil records shows FIVE.
The texpip’s model, FALSIFIED. Again.
*POOF*
AH YES, THE TEXPIP HAS NO ARGUMENT AGAINST THE CONTENT OF THE POST, AND SO RESORTS TO SNARKING PITEOUSLY ABOUT THINGS AS TRIVIAL AS HOW THE POST IS FORMATTED.
Utterly pathetic.
Further irrelevant misdirection. The texpip’s “alternative” to evolution theory DOESN’T EVEN ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THESE BACTERIA EXIST.
Note that while you may well wish you had them back, you’re still alive enough to make that wish, and that is all evolutionary theory requires.
Yes, and ALL OF IT is perfectly consistent with evolutionary theory, and PREDICTED BY evolutionary theory.
While the texpip’s “alternative” DOESN’T EVEN RECOGNIZE THEIR EXISTENCE.
More kudos to the texpip for demonstrated YET AGAIN why and how and precisely HOW MUCH evolutionary theory is superior.
You’re confusing the arguments with yourself.
Txpiper, you have never scientifically refuted this paper on natural selection. You can’t, of course, as your OPINION aren’t scientific. You need at least a peer reviewed scientific that actually refutes it, an preferable cites it, at minimum. Or shut the fuck up about natural selection not working.
Welcome to science and honesty. You lack the latter. Time you learned some.
From the texpip’s own link, which the texpip deliberately does not mention.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_biodiversity_blank_01.png
Notice how the total diversity, in number of genera, of life on earth GOES UP after some of the mass extinctions? Notice how the slope of the trendline for the increasing number of genera gets STEEPER after some of the mass extinctions?
The slope of the trend-line = the RATE AT WHICH THE NUMBER OF GENERA ARE INCREASING = the RATE AT WHICH NEW GENERA ARE EVOLVING = THE RATE OF EVOLUTION ON PLANET EARTH*
An increased steepness of that the slope of that trendline = ACCELERATING EVOLUTION OF LIFE ON PLANET EARTH.
E PUR SI ACCELERATES.
E PUR SI EVOLVES.
*(Yeah, that’s an oversimplification of what’s really happening, but this is the texpip we’re talking about)
And does anyone else find it funny how, in the same post in which the texpip claims its “alternative” to evolution allows for just one mass extinction, it provides a link to the EVIDENCE that there have been at least 5 large (and many more smaller) such events?
How, in the exact same post in which it tries to use the details of mass extinctions as arguments against the validity of evolutionary theory, it, not a few paragraphs later, DENIES THAT THESE MASS EXTINCTIONS EVEN EXIST?
Intellectual dishonesty ALL the way DOWN.
Newton was wrong. Live with it.
His argument is circular. It presupposes the existence of awareness, and it presupposes the need for design, without offering any explanation of how either of them could arise.
Newton was wrong. Live with it.
He was wrong about alchemy.
He was wrong about about light not being composed of waves.
He was wrong about how gravity, mass and energy worked in accelerating and gravitional reference frames.
He was wrong about the need for outside intervention to keep the planets orbiting in a plane.
Newton was wrong. Live with it.
txpiper
I’m going to ignore the red herring you ripped off from Micheal Behe. Flagella evolved as well, but that is neither here nor there. The point also wasn’t that nylonase is impressive; the point was that nylonase is new. So new that it can’t have emerged more than 80 years ago. Under creationism I’m pretty sure this sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen, so in your opinion how did it? Is yahweh running around making little revisions to his creatures as a joke?
Wonder why the creationist who worships Newton for his view on divine intervention in biology does not also prominently quote Newton on the planets:
[emphasis mine]
Now, it’s true that our creationist friend may insist that god created the laws of physics which the planets obey when falling into their orbits. He might even insist that god created the planets de novo in their proper orbits six thousand years ago. But he certainly must not insist that we ourselves cannot conceive mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions because we have indeed proven that is exactly what happens. Purely unguided, purely mechanical causes continue to give birth to the beautiful rings of Saturn. Newton was wrong. Just plain wrong.
Newton may have been the most brilliant human to ever live. But there were things he could not know – partly because our technology had not advanced far enough before his lifetime, and partly because knowledge is a collective enterprise which depends on modules contributed by other humans, most of whom had not yet contributed their building blocks before Newton attempted his theories of “everything”. Too bad for Newton. Too bad for creationists who – ignorantly or idolatrously – take him for an authority on those things he did not know and could not possibly know.
Yet another example of a new, constructive mutation that in the texpip’s “alternative” to evolution, in which all change since creation/fall is only destruction, CANNOT EXIST.
And yet it does.
Model falsified. Again.
*POOF*
“Good luck getting into heaven with those sins against god weighing down your soul.”
ha ha…no problem. It is safe to die.
===
” the point was that nylonase is new….Under creationism I’m pretty sure this sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen”
Where did you get that idea? The evidence for adaptations of all sorts, even rather radical ones, is abundant. The dispute is about what makes them to occur, or not occur.
”so in your opinion how did it?”
Environmental feedback, in my opinion. As I’ve noted previously, your view is about a DNA molecule that develops on a random basis, while mine is about one deliberately prepared for adaptation.
What’s the mechanism by which DNA can be prepared for adaptation?
More weaseling lies from the texpip. Let’s examine again what it said about its “alternative” to evolution theory:
Nylonase isn’t “just” a new adaption. It’s a whole set of NEW GENES. It constitutes an INCREASE IN COMPLEXITY, a mutation that is NOT DEGENERATIVE, which the texpip’s “alternative” to evolution, as seen above doesn’t allow. It is a variation that occurs as a GAIN OF INFORMATION, which the texpip’s “alternative” doesn’t allow.
After having made the mistake of admitting and describing its pale, weak, incomplete, and falsified “alternative” to evolution, it isn’t surprising that the liar texpip is desperately trying to run away from its own words as fast as it can.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Pathetic.
Continuing with the deliberate distortion of what evolutionary theory actually says, still only talking about the random HALF of evolutionary theory, while completely ignoring, deliberately, despite being informed about it many, many times, over and over again, the NON-RANDOM half.
More lies from the liar texpip.
Utterly pathetic.
@ Waffler
There is an argument against evolution in goddist circles that says that adaptations are merely expressions of aspects of god’s creatures that were designed in from the very beginning. Creatures do not as much adapt, as merely display characteristics that god had placed there prior. “Evilution” cannot create new information – everything is complete and programmed by god prior.
What evidence would falsify your explanation?
Also, a simple mechanism of introducing stochastic errors in nucleotide sequences.
Except you don’t have a mechanism of how they came about. Your deity/creator doesn’t exist. You have shown no conclusive physical evidence for one, ergo *POOF*, you have nothing, not even an idea. Just your delusions.
Evolution wins by default if you can’t prove your creator exists.
You also haven’t refuted the Schneider’s natural selection paper. You can’t refute it. The evidence is too strong. You know that, but can’t admit that due to your arrogance.
Of course they did. He didn’t notice, and neither do you, but they still did.
The details simply show there’s no magic involved – even though Newton, because he didn’t know better, thought otherwise.
That’s why the argument from authority is a logical fallacy. You’re in a hole; stop digging.
You seem to imagine that this protein came out of nowhere, was built by insertions of one nucleotide after another.
That’s not how it works!
Even the antifreeze proteins of icefishes, which did arise from mutations in junk DNA, weren’t assembled by individual insertions.
The gene for another protein mutated, possibly after a gene duplication.
What???
Not many. Are you wondering why the immune system isn’t triggered by our gut ecosystem? That’s because whatever makes first contact with the immune system in the gut causes a suppressive reaction. Otherwise we’d quickly become allergic to all our food.
Also, bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria.
Also also, look at what you’re doing: Nightjar asks you important questions, and instead of even trying to answer them, you point at another example of something you must have involved a lot of mutations, and another, and another, and another…
That’s called the Gish gallop. Cut that crap.
Quoted for truth!
Translation:
The texpip really does believe that .
And that even though the specific mutations have been figured out!!! Texpip, follow the links we give you. I took this link from the Wikipedia article that Hurin linked to in comment 128! It’s all there!!!
Isn’t it obvious how this works? Well, it should be obvious to everyone with highschool biology under their belt.
G. metallireducens has the genes for the flagellar proteins; they’re normally switched on, but certain metals bind to the switch, which wraps around them, changing its shape so that the transcription machinery can’t transcribe the gene any longer.
The example in my highschool biology textbook involved lactose and the gene for β-lactamase, where every tiny step in the gene regulation cascade was worked out decades ago.
Behold the type III secretion system.
I burp in your general direction. Have you no shame to bring this PRATT up?
Oh crap, two blockquote failures. Let me try again, starting from the first borkquote.
This entire direction is wrong! It’s simply not true that any awareness or design or construction is necessary. It’s empirically false.
The argument from ignorance is a logical fallacy. Yes, even when Newton made it. I can’t help that!
Luke 9:27: Jesus says to apostles: “But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God.”
What are you going to do? Are you going to twist “taste of death” into knots, or are you going to twist “see the kingdom of God” into knots? Also Matthew 24:64, Mark 9:1, and Luke 21:32.
Damascus? How about Tyre? Ezekiel 26:14 makes unmistakably clear that it doesn’t exist anymore, it has been destroyed and never been rebuilt – indeed, it hasn’t even been found, says Ezekiel 26:21. This is repeated in 27:32–36 and arguably said a third time in 28:12–19.
Read this. Read it in detail.
And then read this.
And then take a glance at this long, possibly complete list that contains just a few duplicates and overinterpretations.
Those aren’t prophecies, dude. They’re wishful thinking from alpha to omega.
Amphiox has given you very good reasons for why they should be, in comment 138.
(For metaphorical values of “deliberately” and “serve”.)
How many more times do we need to repeat it? Those enzymes are good, but not perfect! Their failures are included in the numbers we keep throwing at you!!!
Do the math, or it’s not true.
A larger heart isn’t a radical alteration, you dolt. You can enlarge your heart by working out! The precise size of a heart isn’t determined by genetics!!!
How in the fuck is that a problem???
~:-| Why would Grimaldi expect such a thing? What’s the sister-group of the gall mites, and how old are the oldest fossils of that group? Wikipedia and tolweb.org don’t say anything about the fossil record of mites (which can’t help being very scarce indeed).
I definitely wouldn’t expect a gall mite before the Devonian, because there were hardly any plants then. But the Triassic started 110 million years after the Devonian ended.
I don’t understand what you’re talking about by “narrative”.
o_O
O_o
o_o
O_O
“Wasted”?
“Wasted” implies that there is somebody who watched all of that and found it a pity. But that’s a completely unnecessary assumption!
“Wasted”?
Evolution is a process. It is not a person that has a goal in mind. It has no mind in the first place. What the fuck?
What are you on about???
They’ve definitely accelerated the evolution of the survivors. :-| That’s by changing so many environments that stabilizing selection became much weaker and directional selection took new directions. Hence the observed radiations of modern birds and placental mammals after the Cretaceous was over, the observed radiation of dinosaurs once the Triassic was over, the observed radiation of cynodonts, dicynodonts and archosaurs once the chaos after the Permian was over… and that’s just on the continents; don’t get me started about corals or ammonites or sea lilies, or about phytoplankton (predominantly green up to the Permian, predominantly red since the Triassic).
This quote, incidentally, is what Laplace’s famously godless model was about. Sire, je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse.
So, frontloading?
The problem with this is the fact that adaptations to future conditions are a useless burden in the present. There’s always natural selection for losing useless burden; and even when there’s not, there’s no selection against that burden to mutate all the way to unrecognizability.
Frontloading cannot work for more than a few generations. Unless you posit another series of miracles where the Finger of God magically protects certain stretches of DNA from mutations!
Try it. Take a bunch of Escherichia coli (from your colon – yes, that’s what the name refers to – or from a lab strain), put a gene into them that they don’t need, let them grow, come back a few weeks later, and make them use that gene.
Environmental feedback? What do you mean by that? My view is that that bacteria have genes that code for proteases (proteins that break down peptides – molecules with similar structure to nylon) and that some of those mutated to the point they could handle nylon as a substrate. The nylon digesting proteases (nylonases) conferred an advantage to the bugs who had them, who survived and flourished. Is environmental feedback something like that?
Because if it is, you just accepted evolution.
The ability of DNA to develop and change is a function of its chemical structure, and the host of molecular “librarians” it has in the form of proteins that replicate it, transcribe it into mRNA and translate it into protiens. We know the mechanisms by which DNA changes, because we know chemistry. For example, sunlight changes DNA, because it excites (pi -> pi* transition) pi electrons in some of the bases, which in turn leads to dimerization reactions of adjacent bases on the same strand that cannot happen between bases in the ground state. The cell has proteins to find and repair this kind of damage, but if they insert the wrong base, you’ve just changed the genetic code. If that happens at a certain position in the genome of a skin cell, you might get skin cancer.
No magic is needed and neither is any “deliberate preparation for adaptation”. The DNA molecule lacks any bias for “adapting” (mutating) to favor one kind of phenotype or another. Any such bias would be evident in the chemistry.
doesn’t know, and has no intention of ever finding out. He hasn’t thought his idea through in any detail, and he’s way too lazy to ever do that. He much prefers circular Gish gallops.
of which the texpip has no idea whatsofuckingever – and he’s determined to keep it like that.
Like I said, personal incredulity is a feature not a bug for creationists.
well, but.
You could not ever work out hard enough to achieve the blood pressure required to keep a girafe’s brain alive. Ballpark heart size is absolutely determined by genetics!
Sure, but that’s not what said.
Also, ballpark heart size has a certain correlation to ballpark body size (which is determined by genetics). I’m not all that much bigger than an adult giraffe’s heart. :-)
David Marjanovic’
He could always postulate the existence of a 2000 year old Hebrew guy wandering aimlessly around the west bank…
txpiper, that’s not what I asked. I already know that in your opinion mutations are not sufficient. That is acknowledged in the “if that isn’t sufficient” part. I asked “what else is there to it?” No, not in your opinion. In reality.
No, we observe them happening. Seriously, that’s like chiding geologists for taking tides for granted when discussing coastal erosion. It’s stupid and it looks desperate.
Which are not perfect. Of which we’ve measured the error rates.
Your point?
Indeed, the number of mutations we have that our parents didn’t isn’t usually used as evidence for common descent. It is evidence for descent with modification (and that’s what evolution ultimately boils down to, btw).
Your point?
Hm, wait, you’re just dancing around the “what else is there to it?” question now, aren’t you? Tsk tsk.
*sigh*
What else?
Not in your opinion. In reality.
That’s not a problem.
What “narrative”?
And again, why the fuck are you bringing up more material for discussion if you are leading a busy life and don’t have time to finish the arguments you start? What the hell is wrong with you?
Fixed and I know that. Not what I asked.
…
“wasted evolution”? WTF?
Whatever. Why is “wasted evolution” a problem?
Of course they have, what else would you expect. Mass extinctions change and mess up the environment for a lot of species, so stabilizing selection isn’t at work any more. No stabilizing selection, faster evolution. Isn’t it obvious?
So? Gut microbes were there throughout our evolution, they’re part of the environment humans evolved in. Is it really that surprising that we didn’t evolve to function perfectly well without them? As far as humans are concerned, gut microbes were never “not there”. So we’re not as well adapted to an environment we didn’t evolve in (no gut microbes) as we are to an environment we evolved in (gut microbes)… yeah, that’s precisely what evolution predicts. Still don’t see why that is “another complication”.
***
And how exactly does this work, biochemically? Do you know? Do you even have an opinion? A guess? Anything specific?
… Magic?
But the knowledge you have of ventilation ducts is not on the same level as the knowledge you have of biology and biochemistry. I know more about that stuff than you do (what with my field being biochemistry and all) and I am telling you “your views are not workable”. It’s not the other way around. The problems you have with movies where somebody has to crawl through ductwork to save the day? Those are the problems I have when you start going on about and DNA . You have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, and it shows.
Your smugness is unwarranted. Drop it.
I’m curious. Who deliberately prepared the DNA of those bacteria to allow them to gain the ability to metabolize a relatively recent synthetic material, when, how, and why?
Did God just think “”?
Or what?
No conclusive physical evidence, such as an eternally burning bush, has been presented by txpiper to supstantiate/confirm his delusional thinking. Ergo, there is no imaginary creator until he produces the evidence for one. And it isn’t found in his OPINION, which is always *POOF* dismissed as the unevidenced fuckwittery it is. He must perforce produce third party physical evidence, say from the peer reviewed scientific literature….
And to date dear lurkers, what has been been presented is nothing but crickets chirring. Tune in at eleven for more evasions, lies, and bullshit, but not a whit of conclusive physical evidence from TXpiper, egotist extraordinaire…
txpiper:
Thank you for actually answering my question this time. And thank you for admitting, publicly, that there is no evidence for the existence of your, or anyone’s, gods. That is very brave of you considering what your god has (supposedly) said about those who doubt or are lukewarm. Between that and your blatant bearing of false witness, I expect that (if gods or heaven or hell actually existed) your reception would be more than just lukewarm.
Public evidence that txpiper is wrong, and The Theory of Evolution is right. The only way txpiper can be right is if he can show conclusive physical evidence for his imaginary creator. Since he can’t do that, he concedes logically that the theory of evolution, without an imaginary creator, is absolutely correct….
“make it all look like random mutations did that”
That’s the last thing it looks like. You just have to like a preposterous idea like that to believe it. Do you think metamorphosis looks like an accidental achievement? Really?
More when I have time.
[meta]
I see the txpiper confuses metamorphosis with mutation, rather than realising it’s a developmental process.
(such ignorance!)
Still no evidence for your imaginary creator txpiper. Without that, you are like you claim the ToE is. You can’t get there from here. No creator, no idea, no honesty and integrity. Long past time to put up or shut the fuck up. You have nothing. You know you have nothing. But you continue like liars and bullshitters (con men) do trying to snow your way with falsehoods. No honesty in sight.
No, that’s exactly what it looks like.
(If all you’re going to do is make assertions without bothering to argue them, then so am I.)
At least “my” idea makes sense from a mechanical and biochemical point of view. Yours, on the other hand… I’m waiting.
Do you think the Gish gallop is a good debating tactic? Really?
More Gish gallops? No, thanks.
And remember, the texpip has, many times already, ACCEPTED natural selection eliminating useless burdens. It’s “model” in fact insists that this is what natural selection actually does.
It’s own DEGENERATIVE model does not allow for frontloading to persist after the creation/fall.
What something looks or does not look like to a cherry-picking liar like the texpip, who if presented with a field of a million trees, will only ever bother to look at a single leaf, is irrelevant.
As good a description of creationism as I have seen in a while.
Ah. Recycling the metamorphosis schtick, which was already addressed and thoroughly refuted multiple times on prior threads (yet again).
The texpip does do Gish Gallops. It does Gish Hamster-Wheels.
And does anyone else find it amusing that the texpip would decide to choose insect metamorphosis, of all things, to put into its dishonest god-of-the-gaps argumentation?
When, you know, a metamorphosizing insect just happens to be THE preferred genetic model for studying development?
Give the drosophila people a few decades and they’ll probably have mapped out the entire sequence of metamorphosis from egg to adult, cell by cell, gene by gene, (like we already have done for C. elegans and figured out more or less exactly how it could have evolved.
I mean, if you want to go for gap arguments, you should at least be smart enough to look for BIG gaps, not teeny little slivers that are already in the process of being filled.
The texpip doesn’t do Gish Gallops. It does Gish Hamster-Wheels.
txpiper
Why is it that you persist in conflating the failures of your imagination with the veracity of evolutionary theory?
I could argue about how a device made from wood and fabric could never, ever, ever, be buoyant enough to float on the atmosphere because i don’t believe it, and that still wouldn’t refute the existence of the hot air balloon.
:D :D :D
That is a perfect description of what txpiper does.
”the metamorphosis schtick, which was already addressed and thoroughly refuted multiple times on prior threads”
Well, not really refuted, and not thoroughly at all. I can understand you wanting things like this to go away, but you seem to be a little out in front of the empirical data. Perhaps your more interested in shoring up your theory than you are in science.
This article isn’t even a month old:
“… the evolution of insect metamorphosis remains a genuine biological mystery even today. Some scientists have proposed outlandish origin tales, such as Donald Williamson’s idea that butterfly metamorphosis resulted from an ancient and accidental mating between two different species—one that wriggled along ground and one that flitted through the air.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=insect-metamorphosis-evolution
I don’t really see why scientists would consider Williamson’s idea to be an outlandish tale, when the article goes on to offer this:
”Perhaps 280 million years ago, through a chance mutation, some pro-nymphs failed to absorb all the yolk in their eggs, leaving a precious resource unused. In response to this unfavorable situation, some pro-nymphs gained a new talent: the ability to actively feed, to slurp up the extra yolk, while still inside the egg. If such pro-nymphs emerged from their eggs before they reached the nymphal stage, they would have been able to continue feeding themselves in the outside world. Over the generations, these infant insects may have remained in a protracted pro-nymphal stage for longer and longer periods of time, growing wormier all the while and specializing in diets that differed from those of their adult selves—consuming fruits and leaves, rather than nectar or other smaller insects. Eventually these prepubescent pro-nymphs became full-fledged larvae that resembled modern caterpillars. In this way, the larval stage of complete metamorphosis corresponds to the pro-nymphal stage of incomplete metamorphosis. The pupal stage arose later as a kind of condensed nymphal phase that catapulted the wriggly larvae into their sexually active winged adult forms.”
Growing wormier all the while…just precious.
I wanted to address some of David’s points, but the Dem convention is on, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I hear the First Lady is supposed to speak, and I’m interested in her heroic efforts to combat the epidemic steatopygia that is plaguing our republic.
[meta]
It’s not your buttocks that are at issue, O piper, it’s your steatocephaly.
When the texpip has no valid arguments, and knows it, it degenerates into attempting distractions with butt jokes targeting an African American woman.
Ethical bankruptcy all the way down.
Odious.
*barf*
Utterly pathetic.
Pro tip about science: In the mind-blowingly unlikely event evolution was ever discarded it would be replaced by another scientific theory.
Your infantile “invisible magic dude in the sky” horseshit would not be adopted.
And of course, what the texpip doesn’t mention is that its supposed “alternative” to evolution doesn’t have ANY EXPLANATION AT ALL for metamorphosis, while evolution theory has been merrily churning out testable hypothesis after testable hypothesis to guide us in solving this mystery.
While the texpip’s “alternative” still can’t decide how many legs the insects are supposed to have.
Once again demonstrating how superior evolution theory is to the texpip’s useless alternative, and once more illustrating the texpip’s transparent double standard.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Completely pitiful.
“evolution theory has been merrily churning out testable hypothesis after testable hypothesis to guide us in solving this mystery”
Definitely merrily. Testable? I didn’t see any mention of any tests in the article. But how could it still be a mystery after your earlier crushing victory?
Anyway, glad you liked the piece. I enjoyed it as well, except they only used the word “suggest” one time.
Did anyone else notice that the national debt raced past the 16 trillion mark? Isn’t that exciting? I can’t think of a more fitting way to start the convention. http://www.usdebtclock.org/
You can thank Bush for trying to go to war twice on credit.
Tex, along with all your confusion about evolution, you are messed up about economics as well. President Clinton pretty much removed the need for debt clocks, while George W Bush brought the debt roaring back. President Obama is fixing things as well and as fast as any human can do, but he’s saddled with Republicans and delusionals like you who are obstructing just as much as they can, rather than admit that they were wrong and he is right.
At least you are consistent in your egotism and ignorance.
There’s a man from Texas speaking at the DNC that you really should listen to.
The texpip once again attempts a dishonest gap argument with its metamorphosis schtick. It continues to pretend that just because we don’t yet know everything about how metamorphosis evolved, this fact would somehow be an argument against evolutionary theory. This would only be true IF the texpip’s “alternative” had a better explanation. But of course IT DOESN’T, and the texpip repeatedly weasels out of giving a straight answer all the times it has been asked.
When we are talking about the unknown, the limits of existing knowledge, when neither alternative provides a definitive answer, competing theories are evaluated on UTILITY. Which theory is better able to provide testable ideas about what the answer is, that can then guide experiments and investigations to FIND the answer.
This evolution theory does in spades. And scientists guided by evolutionary theory are well on their way to figuring out the answer and adding to the sum of human knowledge in the process.
The texpip’s “alternative” doesn’t do this at all. It can’t. And its apologists like the texpip don’t even bothering to try. In a word it is USELESS.
Evolution wins again.
This has already been explained to the texpip. But of course the liar ignores this and continues to try to dishonestly present the mystery of metamorphosis as an argument against evolutionary theory when in fact it vividly demonstrates just why evolution WORKS as a useful scientific theory.
Intellectual dishonesty ALL the way down.
Once again we see the texpip, without anything worthwhile to say, reduced to snarking on trivialities like the use of throwaway adjectives.
Simply pathetic.
And isn’t it hilarious to see the texpip try to dispute that evolutionary theory produces testable hypotheses when it’s own article, and the whole focus of its own snarking, was about just one such (fringe) hypothesis that was so generated?
And the texpip doesn’t seem to realize that this theory is considered fringe, and disputed by many other biologists, because there are so many other hypotheses being generated and tested out there that most consider better than this one.
And the texpip still cannot provide even ONE competing hypothesis generated by its useless “alternative” to evolutionary theory.
If the republicans actually cared about debt, they would be fervently embracing the Affordable Care Act, which will reduce the debt by 2-3 billion once it goes into effect.
Instead, they want to repeal it.
If they cared about debt, they wouldn’t be talking about going to war with Iran with absolutely no way to pay for it.
If they cared about debt, they wouldn’t be jingoistically guaranteeing that they will not under any circumstances be cutting military funding.
If they actually cared about debt, they would be seriously considering raising taxes to increase revenue streams.
If they actually cared about debt, they would not have been obstructing every single thing the Obama administration tried to do to help the economy.
But of course they DON’T actually care about debt. It’s just a convenient political tool for them to try to get power. They WANT the debt high, they WANT the economy poor, they WANT unemployment to be high. And they are doing everything they can to keep it that way. All so that they can blame Obama for the debt THEY ACCUMULATED, the economy THEY DESTROYED, they jobs THEY OUTSOURCED, the recovery THEY SLOWED DOWN, so that they can win power and use it to advance their reactionary social agenda and enrich themselves and their rich friends.
Lying hypocrites all of them.
Just like the texpip.
Pathetic.
”just because we don’t yet know everything about how metamorphosis evolved, this fact would somehow be an argument against evolutionary theory. This would only be true IF the texpip’s “alternative” had a better explanation”
You’ve slipped into Nerd’s confused rationale. You don’t have to believe something sub-idiotic just because you can’t come up with a better alternative.
”Which theory is better able to provide testable ideas about what the answer is, that can then guide experiments and investigations to FIND the answer.”
Well, you’ve already declared that you won the debate, and announced lots of merry, testable hypotheses. Now, you’re just another faith-case in line, still looking. If you don’t know, then just find the courage to say you don’t know, but that you are convinced that at some point in time after you’re dead, someone might know.
===
”this theory is considered fringe, and disputed by many other biologists, because there are so many other hypotheses being generated and tested out there that most consider better than this one”
What theory? I didn’t see a theory in the article. I saw dreamy nonsense, and mention of incredibly complex systems, as if noticing them explains how they accidentally formed. But I did appreciate the purpose-driven conclusion last sentence:
”Ultimately, the impetus for many of life’s astounding transformations also explains insect metamorphosis: survival.”
I can see where dying off must be rah-rah selection pressure.
===
”If the republicans actually cared about debt…”
Let me tell you a secret: It doesn’t matter who cares about what.
Just two little issues:
1) By definition it isn’t “sub-idiotic” if it can bring together an immense amount of data about the natural world into a few simple statements. Evolution is very well demonstrated, and you have your own confused rationale. You don’t have to like it, or even understand it, in order for it to be true or approximately so.
2) This from the asshole who believes sub-idiotic stories about a magic man poofing the universe into existance so that he could make talking snakes and little clones of himself, which apart from being obviously fantastic, offer no insight into anything. This from someone unable to see through super-transparent lies about the national debt from the people who created it. I wish you weren’t too sub-sentient to understand the concept of irony, because it practically oozes out of your pores.
Your idea is sub-idiotic since you can’t prove your creator isn’t imaginary. Compare this to the million or so scientific papers that support the theory of evolution. Rock solid evidence you haven’t and can’t refute. And no papers supporting your imaginary creator. You are the idiotic and delusional fool, not the scientists. You have nothing to back up your blather, and your blather makes no sense.
You aren’t looking. You know that. You think you have the answer, but can’t prove your imaginary creator exists. You are the faith based abject loser here. Science is always refining with more evidence. You have no evidence to start with.
1. What a proven idiot and liar like the texpip thinks counts as “sub-idiotic” is irrelevant.
2. The term “sub-idiotic” is relative so, if there is no other alternative to compare it to, one cannot honestly make that judgement, so the texpip’s statement is yet another example of its intellectual dishonesty.
3. It is nice to see the texpip admit that there is no alternative to evolutionary theory. Of course we ready know that the texpip thinks it has an “alternative”, so this too is just another pathetic lie.
Notice how the texpip still deliberately ignores the main point – utility of a theory in enaing further investigations and expanding the boundaries of knowledge.
It has no good answer to this so it just lies and distracts.
Pitiful.
…Apparently the guardian dude with the big scary dog isn’t around. I’d know by know, because I laughed out loud!
Metamorphosis arises by changes in the timing of events during development: events that used to be spaced out occur closer and closer together, with the time before them becoming extended into a larval stage that does little but eat and grow. That’s how it works in amphibians today (metamorphosis is more extreme in salamanders than in caecilians, and more extreme in frogs than in salamanders), and it’s how it worked in temnospondyls (branchiosaurids having a more clearly definable metamorphosis than other amphibamids, and other temnospondyls having gradual development). Likewise, the larvae of insects with a full metamorphosis are the first nymph instar (the pronymph) extended into a feeding stage, while the other instars are compressed into the pupal stage.
There are mysteries, and there are mysteries. They’re not all equally mysterious. Nice try at changing the topic.
What, pray tell, is your issue with “growing wormier all the time”? Is “it sounds funny to me” a scientific argument now???
*facepalm* That doesn’t mean tests can’t be done! Even you can’t really be too stupid to understand that.
…and took it waaaay too literally.
Protip from a scientist: take everything a science journalist writes with an enormous grain of salt.
Now address our points. If that means waiting till the DNC convention is over, fine! We can wait.
Right. So in the texpip’s pathetic, hypocritical, mendacious world, the entirety of metamorphosis research constitutes just one lay press article.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Utterly pathetic.
Not to mention the texpip QUOTING a lay press summary of a theory in order to deride it, and then claiming it didn’t “see” a theory in the article.
Simply pitiful.
All it takes is mutations that alter the timing of developmental events. Not a single new gene is actually necessarily required, only changes to the regulator switches that control when they are active. It’s just one version of a broader phenomenon that happens all the time, in all lineages.
Instead of feeding the developing embryo with a yolk-sac, or through a placenta, or with milk (marsupials), or with other embryos in the same womb (sharks) you just have one stage of the developing embryo go out into the world and feed itself.
Just a simple variant of a universal pattern.
Absolutely nothing special or miraculous, and all completely consistent with existing evolutionary theory.
Evolution theory predicts that metamorphosis is a variant of normal development with some stages lengthened and many other stages compressed together.
From this prediction, scientists can design experiments to look at the timing of regulatory switches in developing insect embryos to figure out how they work in the context of metamorphosis.
Evolution theory predicts that insects that metamorphosize and insects that do not share a common ancestor.
From this prediction, scientists can design experiments where the developmental processes and involved genes of insects that do metamorphosize and their close relatives that do not, are compared, to see which gene switches would have had to change for the metamorphosizing insects to evolve.
Evolution theory predicts that, as metamorphosis is a derived variant of non-metamorphic nymph development patterns, insects that do not metamorphosize should appear in the fossil record before insects that do.
From this prediction, scientists can search rocks dating to the transition period to look for transitional forms that demonstrate the process of metamorphosis evolving.
And on and on.
So what does the texpip’s “alternative” predict?
NOTHING.
What experimental strategies does it suggest that might help us solve the “mystery” that is metamorphosis?
NOTHING, except for maybe dragging a wheelbarrow full of silkworm cocoons to the top of a mountain, making a burnt offering of them, and screaming HOW, OH MIGHTY MAKER, HOW???? into the inattentive winds.
Evolution wins again.
Also alpine salamanders.
You mean great whites, BTW. Most sharks lay eggs.
Spoiler: they do.
Your contention that metamorphosis poses a special and insolvable problem for the theory of evolution was refuted. And is being again. And will be again if you don’t get yourself banned soon. Because you’re a predictable and repetitive moron.
Look at what you’re doing. Jumping from topic to topic, hoping something will stall us so you can claim you’ve found an insolvable problem for evolution. Except you have no idea what you’re talking about so you’re just wandering aimlessly through anything that comes to your head or that you have read in a lay press article recently* and impressed you enough. Metamorphosis, gut bacteria, Geobacter, mass extinctions, gall mites… yeah, you damn well are wandering aimlessly. In circles, too. It’s pathetic.
_____
*Probably discovered through… damn I forgot the name of that creationist website txpiper seems to get most of his random topics from. I’m sure Owlmirror remembers, but he’s not here. Anyone else remember? Last time was when txpiper started talking about Feduccia apparently out of nowhere but then Owlmirror discovered one of the most recent posts on that site was about Feduccia? Gah. *mumble, mumble* I just can’t remember the name and now I really want to know.
And you, , can’t explain why.
*crickets chirping*
Everything is the way it is because it got that way.
– J. B. S. Haldane
For six years.
If not more.
Nevermind, I just remembered:
crev.info
Heh. Heh heh.
So predictable, txpiper. Always so predictable.
Still waiting for evidence for your conclusive physical evidence demonstrating the separate existence (outside of your fuckwitted and vacuous assertions) for your imaginary creator txpiper. No evidence, no creator, no idea, no nothing. At the moment, your idea is less than nothing, as you have no scientific evidence. Especially compared to ToE with a million or so scientific papers supporting it. What a loser if you can’t see the evidence for the presuppositions.
”Right. So in the texpip’s pathetic, hypocritical, mendacious world, the entirety of metamorphosis research constitutes just one lay press article.”
You got lost somewhere. I just noted that I didn’t see a theory in the metamorphosis article, and you responded with this:
”And isn’t it hilarious to see the texpip try to dispute that evolutionary theory produces testable hypotheses when it’s own article, and the whole focus of its own snarking, was about just one such (fringe) hypothesis that was so generated?
And the texpip doesn’t seem to realize that this theory is considered fringe, and disputed by many other biologists, because there are so many other hypotheses being generated and tested out there that most consider better than this one.”
See? You were probably just upset. I could tell you were off balance when you said:
”Which theory is better able to provide testable ideas about what the answer is, that can then guide experiments and investigations to FIND the answer”
I thought Dorothy was home in Kansas, but you made your way back to Oz:
”All it takes is mutations that alter the timing of developmental events. Not a single new gene is actually necessarily required…”
The first thing you have to do is get in touch with the fact that this is a very complex process. Trivializing things only goes so far:
“…much remains to be learned regarding the molecular regulatory processes governing larval molting and metamorphosis…To discover new larval molting genes in a higher throughput manner, we performed two-dimensional electrophoresis and identified 30 new proteins whose expression increased during larval molting. However, many more genes involved in larval molting and metamorphosis in H. armigera remain to be identified.”
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-213X/7/73
But I’m pretty sure you can find somebody saying that gene duplication is involved in metamorphosis, and these of course, would be “new genes”.
===
Nightjar,
”..if you don’t get yourself banned soon. Because you’re a predictable and repetitive moron.”
I’m not sure saying exactly the same thing over and over and over is really an offense, is it? Or do insults not count? Speaking of that, where is Stanton?
===
David,
“That doesn’t mean tests can’t be done!”
”…and took it waaaay too literally….Protip from a scientist: take everything a science journalist writes with an enormous grain of salt”
Well yeah, but you also said that peer-reviewed papers use metaphorical language just to save space. I’m thinking the real problem is that technically correct descriptions just don’t sound very good. It is easy and pleasant to say that something “arose”. But “a complicated series of unlikely replication errors resulted in…” sortof takes the sparkle off of the narrative. You can only do that so many times before the unlikely part starts to add up.
—
Are you guys enjoying the convention? I enjoyed Clinton talking about Obama’s plan to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over ten years. The only problem I see with that is that if you’re running annual deficits of $1.2 trillion, and on average you reduce that by $400 billion per year, at the end of ten years the national debt will have gone from $16 trillion to $24 trillion. I don’t see how that is really making any progress. Do you?
David,
Shoot. I got so excited when Biden walked up to the podium, I forgot to ask you about this:
“That doesn’t mean tests can’t be done!”
What is the holdup?
===
Nightjar,
I was going to post the link you were looking for, but you found it. So what is the problem with the site? Questions that shouldn’t be asked?
Oh, and I was going to mention that I can’t access the article and I’m not willing to buy it, but I thought the abstract sounded interesting:
“All life depends on the biological information encoded in DNA with which to synthesize and regulate various peptide sequences required by an organism’s cells. Hence, an evolutionary model accounting for the diversity of life needs to demonstrate how novel exonic regions that code for distinctly different functions can emerge. Natural selection tends to conserve the basic functionality, sequence, and size of genes and, although beneficial and adaptive changes are possible, these serve only to improve or adjust the existing type. However, gene duplication allows for a respite in selection and so can provide a molecular substrate for the development of biochemical innovation. Reference is made here to several well-known examples of gene duplication, and the major means of resulting evolutionary divergence, to examine the plausibility of this assumption. The totality of the evidence reveals that, although duplication can and does facilitate important adaptations by tinkering with existing compounds, molecular evolution is nonetheless constrained in each and every case. Therefore, although the process of gene duplication and subsequent random mutation has certainly contributed to the size and diversity of the genome, it is alone insufficient in explaining the origination of the highly complex information pertinent to the essential functioning of living organisms.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cplx.20365/abstract
Still not one iota of scientific evidence presented by txpiper, still no evidence for its imaginary deity/creator (and there never will be since it only exists in his delusional mind), still no evidence it is anything other than a liar, bullshitter, and fuckwitted godbot.
Your OPINION isn’t and never will be scientific evidence. Which is found in the peer reviewed scientific literature, like this paper on natural selection by Schneider you can’t refute scientifically. In fact, you can’t refute anything from the ToE scientifically. And you OPINION of the paper/ToE is meaningless. Only more science, from the peer reviewed scientific literature, can refute both. So, put up or shut the fuck up. See lurkers, it knows it has nothing, but must pretend it knows something. But we refuted its sorry ass every time due to lack of evidence by txpiper.
Nerd,
“like this paper on natural selection by Schneider you can’t refute scientifically.”
This must be at least the 6th time you’ve linked to this same piece.
“Here this method is used to observe information gain in the binding sites for an artificial ‘protein’ in a computer simulation of evolution.”
The problem is that “information” in a computer simulation does not equate with genetically coded information in functional, non-artificial proteins.
Because you haven’t refuted it, and it will be in your face until scientifically refuted.
Your OPINION isn’t, and will never be science. Hence you did nothing to refute the paper. That require you to link to the peer reviewed scientific literature, as science is only refuted by more science. YOUR OPINION ISN’T SCIENCE. It is fuckwittery, lies and bullshit. Prove otherwise with the peer reviewed scientific literature….OR SHUT THE FUCK UP…..
Notice lurkers, txpiper keeps trying to pretend it is an authority. And authority without credentials, an authority without scientific knowledge or citations, an authority in its own delusional mind. But nowhere else. Authority in science comes from citing the peer reviewed scientific literature. Authority in logic comes from not making mistakes in every post. Authority in anything requires showing and maintaining credentials. And there is nothing.
The only authority he has in in his delusional mind, where giving testament is highest thing fools can do. The highest thing if they wish to prove they are idiots.
Ah, the texpip harping again on the “complexity” bugaboo.
Evolution theory explains how complexity arises.
The texpip’s “alternative” needs it to be presupposed.
Once more the pathetic hypocrite applies a standard to evolutionary theory it does not even approach for its “alternative”.
Utterly pitiful.
An entity that can design metamorphosis must be even more complex than metamorphosis itself.
Which is more credible?
HOW OH MIGHTY MAKER, HOW????
Of course the texpip was more than happy to accept, cite (and misrepresent) computer simulations that show proteins becoming less stable if mutated in certain ways.
But a simulation showing natural selection increasing information? Oh no, that’s not acceptable.
Because it doesn’t fit with the liar’s preconceived fixed ideas.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Utterly pathetic.
Still waiting for scientific evidence to refute the Schneider paper, and for conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary creator/deity txpiper. You can’t put up and you can’t shut up. Only con-men, liars, and bullshitters lack that honesty and integrity. What’s your excuse, other than the dishonesty we regularly show evidence for.???
When the texpip talks about science, it reveals itself to be a stupid, dishonest, lying fool.
When the texpip talks about anything else, it reveals itself to be an utterly reprehensible excuse for a human being.
The texpip really ought to stick to lying about evolution, and stay away from trying to snark about politics. It’ll preserve a much better reputation that way.
txpip
An MD, PhD who I used to work with had an amusing story about how in first grade his belief in Santa was savaged by some older kids on the school bus. He reportedly spent several weeks dismissing their evidence, arguing from incredulity, and trying to piece together a misguided case to support his own hypothesis that Santa Clause was real.
He reminds me of you. The only difference is that he was 5 and it only took him a couple weeks to discover the futility of his actions.
There’s a reason the liar texpip continues to desperately try to weasel around answering Nerd’s citation.
Once more, the texpip’s alternative “model” to evolution.
Gain of information is impossible in the texpip’s “model”. And it’s whole dishonest argument against evolutionary theory is the utterly unsupported contention that natural selection and mutations cannot ever increase information.
Thus, this
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/14/2794.short%20310949
refutes the texpip’s entire position completely.
Model FALSIFIED.
*POOF*
And those duplicated genes will quite likely also be involved in other embryonic processes that are not part of metamorphosis, and will be used in the embryology of related organisms that do not metamorphosize. Hence metamorphosis is not a unique phenomenon, but merely one flavor of development, and metamorphosis will not REQUIRE “new” genes.
Notice also how the texpip deliberately misrepresents my words. I said “not necessarily required.”
The texpip apparently cannot parse normal english.
Either that, or it is LYING, again.
Utterly pathetic.
From the texpip’s own citation:
Gene duplication INCREASES information and produces CONSTRUCTIVE adaptions.
The texpip’s wholly degenerative “model” FALSIFIED.
*POOF*
Gene duplication is not the whole story. Something evolutionary theory has included FROM THE BEGINNING. This is why certain things DON’T EXIST IN LIVING THINGS, like internal combustion engines, fire-breathing dragons, and freely rotating macroscopic wheels.
Things which are EASY to design.
But don’t exist in nature.
The texpip’s design “model” FALSIFIED.
*POOF*
Yes, there are other mechanisms for adding information to genomes. Like point mutations, lateral gene transfer, switch rearrangements, inversions, splicing alterations.
All part of evolutionary theory.
NONE of which an be explained by the texpip’s alternative “model”.
*POOF*
Once more we see the texpip’s transparent attempt to quotemine, and misinterpret the scientific literature.
Once more we see the texpip BEARING FALSE WITNESS against the authors of that paper.
Utterly pathetic.
From my post @214:
From the texpip’s citation drop: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-213X/7/73
Transcription factors = regulatory switches.
me @214:
From the texpip’s citation drop:
So kudos to the texpip for presented yet another example of a piece of research designed USING hypotheses generated by evolutionary theory, which produce USEFUL information and further our knowledge of a not-fully understood phenomenon.
Once more demonstrating the superior utility of evolutionary theory, and the utter uselessness of the design “alternative”.
Oh, thanks to a tip from a fellow Pharyngulite, look who I done found again!
Incoming Big Block O Spam, so ignore if you see fit.
txpiper:
Since you will read things, but not well, I’m repeating this, so you can try again, this time with more correctness:
See the bolded bits?
Now watch:
See those bolded bits?
That’s where you couldn’t stop talking about evolution. Let’s revisit your central paragraph:
See that bolded bit?
That’s the only time you actually almost got close to describing, in positive terms, your model.
And when you did, what did you actually say? “DNA changes, I’m not talking about why.” That’s what I mean by showing your work. Talking about why. Talking about how. The mechanisms, the influences. Since, according to you, environmental influences acting on spontaneous structural changes in DNA are insufficient, where do the other changes come from? Be as specific as possible, please.
Also, follow-up question:
If A can reproduce with B, and B can reproduce with C, but A cannot reproduce with C, are A and C related? (And if you think I’m conjuring unrealistic hypotheticals, look up Ring Species.)
As a side note, you once again felt the need to pad your answer by talking about models other than your own. I’m not asking you what I think, I’m asking you what you think. If you consistently find that what you think is incapable of answering questions to your own satisfaction, in might be time to revisit it.
I see the stupid is still concentrated in this one place…
is this now the official zombie pen, and we’re being hush-hush about it?
or have I said too much?
IMHO since txpiper is attempting to respond (har!), PZ is not limiting it to Thunderdome. I would limit txpiper to the Thunderdome, but then I don’t run the blog. And I would required txpiper to either put up scientific evidence for his imaginary deity, or shut the fuck up, or be shut the fuck up. He just might find that a bit intimidating, as he would have to face the facts, not his idea of the facts.
texpip brand stupid is rather insipid and thin gruel, so it takes a while for the concentration to build up.
*sigh* Lots of things don’t sound good in a language that is barely good for telling our fellow apes where the next fruit tree is. It’s not intelligently designed.
No, why? It’s at, like, 6 in the morning or something.
Oh, you believe tests haven’t been done? Well, then go find the original PNAS paper about and find the responses. They’re probably under “This article has been cited by:”.
As usual, if you don’t have access and think e-mailing the authors takes too long, find me in Google Scholar, drop me an e-mail, and I’ll send you the papers.
…Yes, and? Hopeful monsters (at least in the usual caricature version) are impossible; that’s not news.
That doesn’t follow.
And I can’t see how it could follow from more information hidden in the paper (I’m not in the office now, so I don’t have access, and the museum probably doesn’t have access to that no-name journal anyway). There are so many known examples of gene duplication leading to “the origination of the highly complex information pertinent to the essential functioning of living organisms” that I seriously wonder what the reviewers were doing.
Exactly!
It won’t go away if you keep ignoring it, . Instead, your reputation will continue to decrease. Already you’re being compared to a desperate believer in Santa Claus!
Just once more, in once again different words:
They go blind all the time all over the world, not just in caves. They go blind just as often as humans do, for just the same reasons.
The difference is that outside of caves blindness is such a disadvantage that they usually die before they’ve reproduced. Outside of caves, in other words, blindness is selected against. Therefore you usually don’t find blind individuals outside of caves.
In caves, this selection doesn’t occur; blindness is not a disadvantage in caves. Indeed, it often is an advantage, for instance when the blindness is a side-effect of having unusually large and sensitive jaws as is the case in the example we discussed in detail a few months ago. Therefore, you do find blind individuals in caves.
Outside of caves, lack of pigmentation leads to UV damage very quickly, and often it also means lack of necessary camouflage. In caves, pigmentation is a complete waste. Do I need to go on?
It’s so simple!
Why do people laugh at creationists?
Only creationists don’t understand why!
At least with evolution it is still possible to use metaphoric language to describe it. The texpip must think quantum mechanics is witchcraft.
Yeah, because it really is witchcraft! You know QM is the work of the Great Deceiver, Satan, not at all decent like the principles of Special Relativity discovered by that nice young god-loving Albert Einstein. Funny that god would have entrusted the secret of relativity to a Jew (but then again, modern Jewish control of their former homeland of Israel is absolutely vital to Jesus’ return, so I’m sure Einstein and the success of the Apocalypse are somehow connected in god’s plan!). Funny also that Heisenberg and Planck were both christians, but since they ended up doing Satan’s work, they must have been very bad christians …
I am but a layman, but I can see two reasons why this is wrong.
1) “Arose” is used instead of a more detailed expression for at least two reasons. The first is that, since it’s a paper about evolution, it goes without saying that a trait arose in a species as a result of mutations, genetic drift and natural selection unless you have something new to say on that subject. If you want to be educated on how new traits arise in a species, you can read a Biology 101 textbook and the scientists who are trying to find out new things do not need to bother with that.
Second is that cluttering the phrase by reciting the whole process that contributed to the appearance of the trait doesn’t actually explain anything. It just raises the questions of how each factor influenced the result, questions which someone shouldn’t try to answer mid-paragraph.
2) The “unlikely” would need to be quantified. How unlikely? You have to do the math before throwing a vague adjective. Unlikely relative to what? A lot of unlikely events happen all the time, and things that seem unlikely in a timeframe are pretty damn likely in another, or even in the same timeframe over different subjects. Supernovas, deaths by lightning strike, five identical twins in one pregnancy, water landings…
Mutations can hardly be described as unlikely, since every new individual has several mutations that their parents didn’t. Natural selection and drift happen all the time.
Gasp, why doesn’t txpiper acknowledge this fact, and that Schneider’paper demonstrates natural selection works. Oh, there are those pesky presuppisitons of his, like his imaginary creator/deity and that his unevidenced (peer reviewed scientific literature) OPINION can refute anything, much less science, which requires more science. Which in the case of proven liars and bullshitters like Txpiper, require third party scientific evidence. Their word is bullshit.
Don’t forget errors. Piper keeps asserting this word.
vaiyt,
“The “unlikely” would need to be quantified.”
I agree.
“Cellular proofreading and error toe-checking mechanisms ensure near perfect fidelity for DNA replication.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discontinuous_DNA_replication
“The six billion nucleotides of the diploid human genome are replicated in only a few hours while generating so few errors that the spontaneous mutation rate may be less than 1 mutation per genome per cell division”
http://dnareplication.cshl.edu/content/free/chapters/07_roberts.pdf
“The accuracy of DNA replication is critical to cell reproduction, and estimates of mutation rates for a variety of genes indicate that the frequency of errors during replication corresponds to only one incorrect base per 109 to 1010 nucleotides incorporated.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9940/
I could do this all day. The results are in, and have been for a long time. The specific numbers don’t matter when you are talking about mistakes. The more important point is that the above statements do not jive with the fantasies and fairytales about mutations.
From there, it only gets statistically much worse for reasons I’m too bored to repeat.
”Mutations can hardly be described as unlikely, since every new individual has several mutations that their parents didn’t. Natural selection and drift happen all the time.”
Natural selection, for the umpteenth time, only removes unfit specimens. It does not make happy things happen. You will see all manner of perverse extensions to the concept, and see them invoked on an as-needed basis. The language is not only deceptive, it is shameful.
If you honestly quantify the core mechanisms of evolution, it is just a feckless idea that relies on countless billions of unlikely events. Every single slightly-advantageous step towards increasing complexity and sophistication has to occur because something went wrong. It is all about ideology…it is what people believe because it is what they like.
Unlike you, of course, txpiper, who with the purity of a saint never believe what you like, but rather only what the lord god tells you to believe.
Oops, not exactly what god tells you! Only what some two-thousand-years-ago superstitious ignorant folks thought they heard their old lord god tell them to believe. Collated from fragments, copied through the intervening millennia, translated via several different languages, and lately filtered through the prejudices of your local con-artist pastors and Thug talk radio show hosts who will gleefully tell you what to believe. (Anything, as long as it can fool you and your kind into donating money to them.)
Yeah, you have such a perfectly sound basis for what you believe. You certainly are entitled to mock others about what they “believe”.
Oops again. Mockery is sooo unchristian. You’d better do something about your sin of pride, txpiper. Your bible doesn’t say anything about “blessed are the proud creationists who mock others”. Umm, unless you’re going to claim that’s one of the things that got lost in translation?
I see txpiper has completely forgotten the discussions of reproductive advantage and population genetics we’ve had on multiple occasions.
Shit, I can feel the smug dripping from the post.
100 mutations per individual IS damn well near perfect, considering the size of the human genome.
How many bases does one molecule of DNA have again? Why are you quoting papers that contradict each other?
Dude, even in elementary school, with my cursory knowledge of biology, I could clearly see that the removal of unfit specimens confers an advantage to the ones that aren’t unfit, who will benefit from decreased competition! From there, it’s easy to catch that the less unfit a specimen is, the less likely it is to be selected away, which IS AN ACTIVE ADVANTAGE!. There’s no need for your natural selection fairy EVEN IF I concede that somehow advantageous traits (which are named that precisely BECAUSE they confer an advantage) don’t give any active advantage in and of themselves.
Simple mathematics. I hated math in school, and I still can school you.
Countless billions of unlikely steps spread over massive scales of time over many, many individuals that will die if they don’t adapt… not so unlikely when you input the correct numbers.
There you go, assigning agency and values to the process.
Mutations can be said to be replication errors (since the point of “replication” is to make a copy), but that doesn’t mean they’re “wrong”. In fact, the term “error” already somewhat implies agency that isn’t there, as if DNA “wants” to make a perfect replication. The errors are just something that happen, and they don’t make DNA worse, just different.
All living organisms today are based on imperfect replication because such “errors” confer an advantage in the long term. The perfect replicators, if they ever existed, died out with the first change in the environment. If we had time to see such changes occur in the 150 years since the ToE was published, just imagine it in the timescale of 6000 years… or 3 billion.
Ah, and the steps don’t need to be towards more complexity OR sophistication. Being less complex can be advantageous in the right circumstances, after all. Just ask Deinococus radiodurans, whose ridiculously simple DNA helps its survival under extreme radiation.
Sorry, you lose. Unevidenced OPINION from a fuckwitted idjit *POOF* dimissed as unscientific nonsense. The PEER REVIEWED SCIENTIFIC LITEATURE SAYS OTHERWISE. Now, either refute those papers with something more than your UNSCIENTIFIC OPINION, or shut the fuck up. Only more science refutes science. txpiper is no authority on this subject, and is not be trusted on this subject. It can’t argue scientifically, only make unsubstantiated and arbitrary proclamations like any tyrant and fuckwit would do.
I see txpiper has completely forgotten the discussions of reproductive advantage and population genetics we’ve had on multiple occasions.
projection and denial are just symptoms of an underlying cognitive condition.
can;t guess in specific what the pipster’s is, but it’s obviously there, like if you see blisters appearing on someone’s skin, you can tell they have some illness… could be measles, could be chicken pox… could be ebola.
I suspect the pipster is dealing with the end result of a life lived with an authoritarian personality that has been challenged by reality and lead to some serious cognitive dissonance.
he comes here to unburden his mind of the weight, but his poor broken brain just won’t let him escape.
I’ve seen it many times before. It doesn’t matter how many times you clarify something to someone in this condition, even if they actually ACKNOWLEDGE what you have said, as soon as they leave, their mind reconstructs the house of cards that maintains the extreme compartmentalization they utilized all of their life.
the pipster grew up with authoritarian peers, who encouraged ignorance in him, and this is the result.
it’s only sad because it’s so common. Religion is just an enabler of it, but it is a very good one.
txpiper, why any scientist won’t believe your lies and bullshit, and keep *POOF* dismissing it as stupidity on your part.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=evolution+and+natural+selection&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C14&as_sdtp=
A google scholar search with “evolution and natural selection”. 2.4 million hits. You must refute each and every one. And you haven’t refuted one of them.
You are wrong.
Natural selection states that less fit individuals have fewer successful offspring, while more fit individuals have more successful offspring.* This is an obvious, central point of natural selection theory.
Either you were ignorant of that point – in which case it’s clear your opinion is worthless – or you’re willing to lie about things you know to be true – in which case it’s clear… but you see where I’m going.
Actually, it relies on billions of events that occur every day, every hour, all over the world. Individually, they are terribly unlikely. Taken together, they are all but inevitable.
If by ‘something went wrong’, you mean a DNA transcription error, you’re right – that’s what we’ve been saying. If by ‘something went wrong’ you mean that mutation only ever results in less fit individuals, you’re simply wrong (and therefore either ignorant or dishonest.)
It is worth pointing you still haven’t actually described your model, the ways and means of it.
In two other threads, I have tried to get you to describe your ideas without mentioning other ideas. So far, you have been either unwilling or unable to do so. This request is not going to go away just because you do not engage with it. Every time it is made, and every time you dodge it, you look a bit less informed, a bit less trustworthy.
Just so you know.
– – –
(*Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s actually the definition of fitness, from an evolutionary perspective, yes?)
Still no evidence for txpiper’s imaginary creator. No gap in the science of evolution at needs such a fuckwitted and stupornatural explanation; the science is solid with million or so scientific papers versus none for txpiper. Ergo, it is nothing but a figment of txpiper’s delusional thinking.
He can’t put up, and can’t shut the fuck up. Trademark of liars, bullshitters, and authoritative con-men. I won’t take his far less than truthful word for anything.
Ah yes, back to the ‘amazing accuracy of DNA proofreading’ schtick again. Gish hamster-wheeling all the way down.
NEAR perfect. The key is in the “near”.
And a good thing too, since constructing a human body takes trillions of cell divisions. If it were any higher we’d all be dead of cancer while still embryos.
But when we’re talking about evolution, the mutation rate that matters is NOT the rate per genome per cell division. It is the rate per individual per generation.
And that is about 100 new mutations in EVERY NEWBORN HUMAN.
The texpip trying to lying by distortion yet again.
And given the number of cell divisions, and thus total number of DNA nucleotides needed to be replicated, to go from single-celled zygote to gametes in an adult individual, this produces roughly 50 mutations per gamete, which after fertilization adds up to 100 NEW MUTATIONS IN EVERY NEWBORN HUMAN.
(It varies with the age of the individual producing the gamete – older males produce sperm with more accumulated mutations than younger ones. In female mammals, where all the ova are produced early in life, the spread is narrower).
Notice how the texpip DELIBERATELY ignores this. The dishonest liar tries to play games with statistics by presenting numerators WITH THE WRONG denominators just to distort and confuse.
Pitiful.
Yes they do. The texpip lying yet again. Particularly brazen, seeing how the pitiful liar was trying to distort specific numbers just prior, in the same pathetic post.
No it does not. The texpip lying yet again.
Yes it does. The texpip lying yet again.
E PUR SI EVOLVES.
You find that they are exactly consistent with observed reality.
Exactly unlikely enough to be consistent with the observed reality of the time-frames involved.
Whereas the texpip’s “alternative” model relies on countless billions of IMPOSSIBLE events.
But you never see the texpip applying the same degree of “skepticism” to that. Pathetic hypocrite that it is.
Once more abusing the use of teleological language, and applying its own special definitions to phrases like “went wrong” tailor made to support its own otherwise unsupportable positions without any other reference to actual observed reality.
No, nothing “went wrong”. Things just “went”. “Wrong” is an arbitrary human concept applied by humans after the fact. From MY arbitrary perspective as a human, things went RIGHT.
Round and round the texpip goes.
Same old lies that everyone knows.
Utterly pathetic.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2012/08/23/older-dads-pass-on-more-mutations-to-their-kids/
For a father aged 40, on average 65 MUTATIONS passed from him to his offspring (the remainder, unnumbered in this study, from the mother).
And the original citation:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7412/full/nature11396.html
Notice the number in the abstract:
1.2 x 10^-8 is, at first glance, a very small number, no? But it only appears that way because we don’t consider the denominator. The haploid human genome as 3 billion nucleotides, or 3 x 10^9.
And thus, about 100 mutations per individual per generation
Lurkers, what txpiper and his whacky-baccy pipe dream show is the failure of unevidenced presuppositions. The two fallacious presuppostitions txpiper uses are that his imaginary deity exists, and that there are other reliable ways of knowing than science. No evidence for either presupposition exists. Which makes them both fallacious.
Txpiper has admitted it cannot evidence the existence of deities. Ergo, there is no rational basis to presume one for any reason. But Txpiper wants to believe in the deity of the babble (another fallacious presupposition, the inerrancy of the babble). Ergo, he presupposes his deity without evidence, like postulating an axiom in mathematics. But in mathematics they do test to see the results of their axiom, whether or not it can create a consistent result. In this case, it can’t. The inerrancy of the babble fails the test. It is a false presupposition/axiom. Fallacious and dishonest all the way down.
The other presupposition goes hand in hand with the first. How do you know a deity exists? Which deity? How do you know? It comes down to revealed knowledge gained by reading a book of mythology/fiction you presuppose to be inerrant versus the evidenced knowledge that science uses. Revealed how? This is where it begins to get murky, as the origins of the babble do not inspire confidence in its alleged inerrancy. Looks like another presupposition, not an evidenced conclusion. Also, there was no quality control on what went into the babble, and there is no correction mechanism in case of mistakes.
So his way of thinking is nothing but fallacious presuppositions and “revealed” knowledge from his imaginary deity. He is expected to give testament, and be believed by those who listen. There is no reality check about his conclusions. It is all in his mind, and he thinks all is perfect. There is absolute blindness to the problems with reality of his belief system, and the arrogance to think it is right without any supporting evidence.
Note that txpiper’s method of argument is actually giving testament, not scientific inquiry or argument. The concept he could be wrong and needs to support his assertions with scientific evidence is totally absent. He is using religious argumentation for a scientific argument, which is a category error. But he has been too arrogant to understand that
Science, on the other hand, is an evidenced based inquiry. It continually questions itself and its conclusions. There are mechanisms in place to correct bad data and theories. There is quality control in the publications called peer review. Science isn’t perfect, nor does it claim to be. But it approaches the truth and reality asymtotically. Scientific arguments are all about evidence, what the evidence represents, and how theories are supported by evidence. There is no revealed knowledge, as it is all tentative, even if 99.9999% certain. Deities are ignored by science as they explain nothing, there is no evidence for them, and it is easiest to just ignore that without evidence.
Science is only refuted by more science. Which means more and newer evidence, experiments, and techniques. Publication of said evidence is required, although communication within the scientific community can spread the word of new findings before new findings are published. See the talk about the Higg’s boson. Also see the level of certainty required, and the patience to achieve that level of assurance. This is the quality control lacking in txpiper and everything he does.
In order to refute the Theory of Evolution, a true scientific theory, the argument must perforce be carried out using scientific evidence and the methods of scientific argumentation. Always and forever looking at what the evidence really says.
Science is not refuted by religious texts, personal opinion, inane questions, and other non-evidenced means of inquiry. Likewise, religion is not refuted by science, but the claims of religion may not stand up to scientific scrutiny. Like the existence of deities, creators, and an intelligent designer. No evidence for any of that.
So all txpiper has is his “authority” (BS). He must project his BS like it is true, even if knows it isn’t. He must pretend it is backed up by evidence, and be able to cite something every now and then to pretend he is sciency. But the problem comes when he hits real scientists who know how science is done, and where he is coming from and why. And they hit his Achilles heels, his pride and his BS, by asking for evidence, and not taking his word for authority. In fact, they bring this pesky evidence and question his authority, honesty, morals, integrity, authority, disprove his ideas, honesty, integrity, authority, and even his ultimate authority of his imaginary deity and inerrant holy book. And this pesky evidence showing he is WRONG…HOW DARE THEY QUESTION HIS AUTHORITY???? Welcome to the present situation lurkers, his BS is being severely questioned, and the poor idjit doesn’t know how to shut the fuck up…
“And thus, about 100 mutations per individual per generation”
Yes, as noted in the link you provided above:
“DNA doesn’t always copy itself perfectly, so over the years, genetic errors pile up. And now a new study has quantified just how many mutations sperm will accumulate—and pass on to any offspring—for fathers of various ages. Scientists think that these mutations may be partly to blame for the fact that children with older fathers tend to have higher rates of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and autism.”
So this is the mechanism you would propose to account for everything from sponges to antelope to broccoli having descended from a single common ancestor?
Sure.
What’s YOUR explanation for the 800,000 species of insects? EXACTLY how many of ’em do you think nonexistent Noah fit on his nonexistent ark? How do YOU explain your god allowing 800,000 species of insects to evolve in the few millennia after Noah from the one or two “kinds” he had on the ark – then explain why your god could not allow sponges and antelopes to evolve in the three billion years after the LUCA ? Just how powerless do you think your god is, after all, that it should be constrained by your pitiful imagination into doing it YOUR way, not ITS way ?
It’s nice to see the texpip ADMIT that everything descending from a single common ancestor is AN OBSERVED FACT THAT REQUIRES ACCOUNTING FOR.
Since the texpip’s “alternative” to evolution theory does not admit a single common ancestor.
And is therefore, by the texpip’s own admission, falsified.
*POOF*
Still nothing but “authoritariansim” from txpiper. His word isn’t scientific, and never will be, and it is incapable of refuting any science. His imaginary creator doesn’t exist, no evidence for it. It is a delusional fool without any intelligence, cogency, or even basic knowledge in how science operates. All it know it that its imaginary deity must exist because it believes it must, and if it does, evolution must be wrong. But the two ideas are really orthogonal to each other. And never mind the million or so scientific papers it can’t even understand, much less refute.
Incidentally, all three of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism can be associated, in certain circumstances, with selective advantage.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2007/09/schizophrenia-may-be-a-side-effect-of-complex-brains/
http://www.healthcentral.com/bipolar/c/15/111673/selective-depression
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7030731/ns/business/t/mild-autismhas-selective-advantages/#.UEwHH41lSvM
txpiper, I know you don’t listen to the “evil atheists”. I dare you to listen to a fellow faithful christian:
Francis Smallwood, The Excitement of Evolution
Footnote
txpiper:
Are you ignorant of natural selection?
Well… yes.
You keep claiming it’s an accident. IT’S NOT.
It pretends papers like this don’t exist, but can only “authoratatively” say it is bullshit, without scientifically refuting it. That, of course, requires a sound knowledge of the peer reviewed scientific literature. Which txpiper couldn’t find even if somebody lead him into one. If they did, he would immediately flee from the godless knowledge contained there.
Dang, #266, forgot the link to this.
Opposed to magic?
seriously why are creationists suddenly so fucking skeptical about extraordinary claims when it comes to evolution but never apply that to the big question of “magical peekaboo playing sky pixie”?
One part of the mechanism.
The other major part is differential survival – some of these genotype alterations manifesting in phenotype and therefore creating (for the time, place and circumstance) fitter creatures.
But I’m willing to listen to the mechanism you suggest as an alternative. As of yet, you haven’t actually described one. How about you get around to doing that, so we can argue their relative merits?
Describe your model. Not your objection to other models, we got that bit already, pressed down and running over. Quit telling us about what you think doesn’t work and tell us about what you think works.
If you can.
“Incidentally, all three of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism can be associated, in certain circumstances, with selective advantage.”
These are no doubt just slightly advantageous steps towards the further enhancement of the species. It probably has to do with the selectively advantaged individuals being better equipped to reproduce more often and more consistently. There is abundant circumstantial evidence that fixation is well underway.
@271: Good to know you admitted the existence of selective advantage and fixation.
I suppose this discussion is over, right?
Right?
Bueller?
Txpiper
hotshoe wrote the following passage about the global flood story @ 260:
Since xe is asking questions about the ark, I have a few of my own to add.
1) How was Noah able to gather grizzly bears from North America, Penguins from Antarctica, and Kangaroo’s from Australia? How was one family able to explore such a massive amount of land, separated by vast oceans and find all the relevant, non-redundant species? What sort of vessel did he use to cross the ocean?
2) How long did this take him?
3) How did Noah know when he had found all the essential species?
4) Males and females of some species (such as peacocks and pheasants) look different from one another. How was Noah able to avoid capturing two males or two females of a species, inadvertently condemning that species to death?
5) If Noah knew about all of the continents (as he would have to have if he really gathered two of every species) why was this knowledge lost in Europe and western Asia? Why didn’t it end up in the Bible? How did Noah know about all of the continents before he visited them?
6) Did plants and fungal species simply survive being submerged for 40 days, or was Noah also responsible for learning how to cultivate every plant and fungal species in a pot?
There isn’t, because you are a liar and bullshitter who doesn’t supply a critical citation. No citation, nothing but lies and bullshit. Your word is unscientific bullshit, and can *POOF* be dismissed as fuckwittery. Which it is. You have no “authority” on this subject, as you can’t supply the evidence, and can’t shut the fuck up like an evidenceless person of honesty and integrity would do.
Txpiper’s whacky-baccy pipe dream, also known as the “theory of the non-existent creator”, isn’t scientific. Ergo, it isn’t a replacement for the Theory of Evolution and is meaningless drivel. In order for it to be scientific he needs to up his game to that of science, and not that of an AUTHORITARIAN PROCLAMATION. That is done by following the rules of science as far as evidence goes, and the communication of the theory to ones scientific peers (although in txpipers case, not saying anything to real scientists is communicating to his peers).
How does he evidence his “theory”? By citing the peer reviewed scientific literature. Every scientist does that with every paper they write; cite the supporting evidence. The peer reviewed scientific literature is found libraries of higher learning world-wide. In his neck of the woods, Texas A&M at the Sterling C. Evans Library and Library Annex, U. of Texas at the Life Science Library, or the M.D. Anderson Library at the University of Houston.
moar to avoid moderation
Then Txpiper must communicate that “theory” to the scientific community. That means attending conferences and giving talks, plus writing scientific papers to convince the other scientists you are right. And a bonus for other throwing the Theory of Evolution scientifically? A Nobel Prize and much publicity and fame awaits, but won’t happen if one doesn’t publish.
Typically such an important idea is published in one of the single name journals which can give rapid publication, and are widely read being general science. Submission information for Science and Nature. While there may be legitimate reasons for not picking either of those journals, not publishing is not an option. No paper published in the peer reviewed scientific literature, no scientific theory, the Theory of Evolution remains intact and unscathed by drivel. Welcome to science.
And here he is on a blog and still can’t make his case. Nothing but AUTHORITARIAN posing, posturing, and fuckwittery at the end of the day. No real science in sight, nor any science refuted by more science. Just OPINION and PRESUPPOSITION on his part.
Much longer than that.
It rained for 40 days & nights. The water stood for longer:
“The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.” Gen 7:24
Just sayin’
Anri
Good point. I forgot the part where Noah gets stuck on a mountain and has to keep sending a dove away to check for dry land.
According to Genesis:
That would be even worse for plants and terrestrial fungi
While I am looking at Genesis, I have another 2 questions for Txpip as well.
Txpip:
If Noah crashed on Mt. Ararat as a lot of modern creationists hold, that would mean that at the end of the flood all the worlds animals were concentrated in modern day Turkey.
Here is how genesis leaves the animals after the flood:
1) If Noah had only two of every species, how did he “take of the clean ones” to make an offering to God without making them extinct? Why would god want Noah to dismember or kill threatened species, and in doing so risk their extinction?
2) How did the land animals from other continents get back to their habitats?
Look, I wasn’t saying you would get banned because you are repetitive and predictable. I was saying that if you don’t get yourself banned (for whatever reason) soon, you will bring up metamorphosis again in another thread after dropping the subject here, and I know you will do that because you’re predictable and repetitive.
Try reading for comprehension.
No, its problem is excessive stupidity and wilful cluelessness and ignorance.
I just checked and I do have access, but it’s twelve pages long and I don’t have time to read it now. May read it later. But what, exactly, do you want me to do with it?
… Hey, wait a second. Joseph Esfandiar Hannon Bozorgmehr? That sounds familiar… *googles* Oh, right. Atheistoclast/Reza, the ID troll and holocaust denier crackpot who managed to publish a couple of papers (that from what I’ve heard don’t really say what he likes to pretend they say when he’s trolling blogs and forums) in relatively unknown journals. That guy. *headdesk* Somehow my willingness to read that essay just vanished completely.
No, for the umpteenth time, no.
On the thread from which you jumped, you said this about differential reproduction: “”
I asked: “What is it you don’t believe in? Genes? Heritability? Variation? Reproduction? Maths? What? It has to be one of those things, for you to say you differential reproduction.”
Answer that.
In other words, natural selection AMPLIFIES the selectively advantaged.
And thus the texpip concedes that natural selection does more than just “only removes unfit specimens.”
And admits to lying, yet again.
Of course, there’s still this:
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/14/2794.short%20310949
Natural selection and random mutation combined increase biological information.
The texpip’s “model” falsified.
*POOF*.
And now the texpip sinks to trying to make a joke about mental illness.*
When the texpip faps about science, it demonstrates itself to be an idiot and a liar.
When the texpip barfs about anything else, it reveals itself to be a reprehensible excuse for a human being.
*Apparently not noticing that the punchline requires constructive evolution by natural selection of random mutations to be TRUE.
Do you think this might have been an attempt at some form of rhetorical trap? As in, to support the basis of evolutionary theory, we would somehow ‘have’ to support his ‘joke’, and therefore out ourselves as horrible people?
Or am I over-thinking this and it was just a cheap shot?
LOL. txpiper doesn’t believe in listening to anyone. If anyone, even fellow christians, disagree with him, he doesn’t give a shit, even if he can’t explain what makes him right and them wrong.
He doesn’t listen to fellow christians on the science-based age of the Earth. He doesn’t even listen to fellow Creationists on the science-based age of the Earth.
It’s YEC or nothing. He’s a religious fanatic, and a rather stupid one, too.
The texpip has attempted rhetorical traps before. They are typically so obvious and poorly constructed that the best way to deal with them is to simply let the dishonest hypocrite spring them in its usual clumsy way, as it invariably reveals yet more of its own character deficiencies in the doing.
txpip
As we’ve heard from creationists, the number of individuals of each species on the ark was two. This means that after being unloaded from the ark, each predator has exactly two individuals of each prey species (ignoring any births on the ark) and every other kill will result in the removal of a species until reproduction has occurred.
Lions hunt mainly large terrestrial mammals. Correlations have been reported between mammalian body size, and litter size, meaning that animals such as wildebeest and impala don’t reproduce very quickly, and these types of animals tend have long gestation periods, and take at least a year to reach reproductive age. Wikipedia states that lions can eat up to 66 lb of food in a sitting. If we assume a lion can get by doing this once every other day, and that there are 15 prey species a lion will eat, and that the average edible body weight of a prey animal is 400 lb, that works out to (15 species)(2 individuals/species)(400 lb/individual)= 12000 lbs of food/(33 lb/day nutrition/lion)(2 lions) = 182. days of food for 2 lions and an extinction rate of 182. days/15 species = 12.1 days/extinction of a prey animal for the lions*(on average). This is not including exacerbating factors from food spoilage and competing predators and scavengers from the similar ecosystems.
These conditions would lead to the extinction of the lions and all of their prey animals before significant reproduction was possible. How can this be reconciled with the fact that lions exist today amid functional ecosystems?
How would this sort of predator/prey dynamic not lead to a cataclysmic failure of large mammal species globally?
*rounded to 3 significant figures for convenience
Yes, two of all living creatures, two of every kind of bird and two of every kind of animal. Two.
But seven (pairs, possibly, so fourteen) of every kind of clean animal and seven (or fourteen) of every kind of bird. But two (pairs, maybe, so four) of every kind of unclean animal.
Or something confused like that.
Well, this was only 1600 years after creation, right? So they could have just gone back to eating fruits and seeds for a bit, like their lion ancestors did.
Uh…
Sorry, I was misremembering Genesis 7:2-3
I think the animals are supposed to have just kind of magically shown up right next to the ark in the appropriate numbers, so Noah only had to let them in.
Of course that leaves the question of how all the land animals from other continents crossed the ocean on their own.
Same thing goes for aquatic organisms. I mean, the water from the flood covered the whole Earth and the flood is supposed to have been rather catastrophic. How did fresh water adapted organisms and salt water adapted organisms both survive in the same environment for so long?
Nightjar
Hm. I don’t know what clean vs. unclean animals are. Or what to make of any of that really. The problem I showed above arises because of the relative sizes of the predator and prey populations though, not the absolute sizes. 14 lions and 14 individuals x15 prey species lead to the same amount food for each lion as 2 lions and 2 individuals x15 prey species. The only way in which this scenario is better is that more animals have to die per extinction event, and lions can die without becoming extinct.
unless unclean = predator?
bah. This is one of the many reasons I hate religious texts.
nms
Presumably when Eve eated the fruit, yaweh had a sad, and made them want gazelleburger.
Hurin,
Ritually clean and unclean animals. Clean animals are the ones that are fit for sacrifices and food.
BTW, I’ve seen some creationists argue that Noah took seven of every clean animal, one to be sacrificed after the flood and six to form three breeding pairs. That explains the odd number of clean animals required by God and how Noah could sacrifice one of each kind of clean animals without driving them extinct.
Heh. First paragraph is what you get away with from reading Genesis 6, second paragraph is what you get away with from reading Genesis 7. Just more evidence that that incoherent amalgam of texts called “Bible” was not written as a whole.
Nightjar
From your link:www
Cool. I guess lions and most (but not all) of their food species would probably be considered unclean then. I’m not sure how many of the prey species chew cud or have the correct hoof morphology, and I definitely don’t want to dive into that.
Also worth mentioning is that the list of clean and unclean animals was only revealed in Leviticus, to Moses. It’s part of the Mosaic Law. That’s many years after the flood, so I’m not sure how Noah was supposed to know.
Gasp, you mean, that the Old Testament, might be nothing but mythology/fiction? And wrong??? *checks to make sure the heavy duty fainting couch is in place before a dramatic Swoon, barely missing the Redhead.
You have grown from a zygote (1 cell) to 10^14 cells. How many cell divisions was that?
Large numbers aren’t magic. You can’t simply wave at them and expect your problems to disappear. You must actually do the math!
STOP
LYING
Asshole!
We keep explaining to you why you’re wrong, and you don’t even try to find mistakes in our explanations – no, you simply ignore them and keep parroting your falsehood! What does that make you? Huh?
Huh?
Yeah. It’s 1 in 3 × 10^7 (thirty million) base pairs through a total of how many cell divisions, txpiper?
And if we take the other end of the range, 200 mutations per individual, we’re at 1 in fifteen million base pairs for a total of how many cell divisions, txpiper? That’s still quite impressive.
A-million-to-one odds happen only eight times a day in New York City!
That, plus selection, plus a bit of drift.
As we’ve been telling you for six years now.
Well, it’s an immense number of accidents thrown against a wall. Occasionally, one of them sticks. That depends on how sticky it is.
Once it sticks to the wall, it thrives and multiplies, throwing an even more immense number of accidents against the wall.
The wall moves, twists, bends. It is shaped by the environment. The temperature jitters up and down, and precipitation with it. The continents zoom across the face of the Earth, bumping into each other like clayey billiard balls. The sea goes, and the sea comes.
(That last sentence is a quote from somewhere; I forgot where.)
Um… that’s true by tautology. Being better equipped to reproduce more often and whatever “more consistently” means is what “selectively advantaged” means.
*lightbulb*
So that’s why “Bozorgmehr” sounded familiar! Someone with the names “Atheistoclast” and “Bozorgmehr” is in the dungeon!
Yeah, and neither did Noah, seeing as the distinction was only revealed to Moses. Right?
Nope, that’s not what Gen. 7:2 says. But Gen. 6:19 and 7:8, 9, 15 contradict it anyway! Celebrity deathmatch!!!
Hey,
*mock*
*mock*
As their name says, the Ruminantia chew the cud. That includes the deer in the widest sense (Cervidae), the giraffes, and the horn-bearers (Bovidae), the latter including antelopes/gazelles, cattle, buffalos and so on.
Ruminantia is part of Artiodactyla, those with large hooves on the 3rd and 4th digits. All ruminants, thus, “divide the hoof”.
So, most of lion prey is kosher.
I swear I saw it somewhere, though.
*googles*
I don’t think it was here I first saw it, but:
Heh. Moving on:
Hm.
NIRV:
If you read “seven” as seven pairs here, you also have to read “two” as two pairs. That may be the origin of my confusion @#288. But what kind of translation is that, anyway?
Are you sure? *lighting Owlmirror signal*
Well…
Means: some picked a translation that makes sense – I wonder if they try to make sense of the combination of the two stories instead of using only the context of one.
By “here” I mean the NIRV translation in specific. “Take seven of every kind”, “take two of every kind”… it’s phrased the same way. In that version. But pretty much everywhere else the phrasing is different for clean and unclean, suggesting seven pairs in the first case and two individuals in the second, so I doubt the NIRV translation of that verse is anywhere near accurate.
But I have no idea. So,
Yeah.
Oh, yes.
David Marjanovic
Time to adjust figures in my question to Txpip.
My original calculation (which is built around all the species being unclean):
Here is how it should look: 15*14*400= 84000lbs of food, 84000/(2*33) = 1272 days of food for the lions (sig figs be damned – this is all assumptions anyway). The maximum time the lions can go with out making something extinct is (12*15*400)/(2*33) days = 1091 days or about 3 years. This becomes a complicated problem if we factor in rates of reproduction, since each species may be able to replace several mature individuals in 3 years time. It seems unlikely that the ecosystem would survive however without a high reproductive rate by the prey species matched by a low reproductive rate by the lions. We have also not included the dietary needs of the two cheetahs, and two leopards, who will also need to kill some of the same animals to continue eating, or the two hyenas who will try to take food from kills, preventing the lions from making their kills last 400/(33*2) days = 6 days on average.
The upshot is that I still don’t see how the post-flood lion ecosystem survives, and the fact that the lion eats mostly clean animals make it one of the luckier predators. Predators who eat mainly slow reproducing unclean animals with a largish body mass (pythons and boas maybe?) have a significantly shittier time of it after the flood, as indicated in my first calculation.
Maybe you can clarify how this was possible, txpip?
Wow, another vacation, txpiper?
And so soon after the first?
I gotta get a job like that.
Wow, you guys have been busy.
“Maybe you can clarify how this was possible, txpip?”
You mean how this was possible naturally? The flood, and destroying “them with the earth” was not a natural event.
I don’t know the answers to a lot of the questions you’ve asked, just like I don’t know all the details about the players in the last days scenario. As to the flood, we only have the results to observe: tens of millions of cubic miles of sediments.
This folks is a prime example of unevidence assertion txpiper expects us to swallow. But, no citation, not happened, no flood.
Still no citation to prove this happened in a one-time-all-continent event that killed all life in the fossil record. All we have is txpiper’s UNEVIDENCE ASSERTION AND HIS BOGUS “AUTHORITY” *snicker, the authority of a clown* that it occured. WHERE IS YOUR SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE TXPIPER?
OH, thats right, the same place as the scientific evidence for your imaginary creator. A delusion between your ears…
Shorter txpip: Your scientific theory can’t be true, because I refuse to believe it, but my logistically and ecologically impossible myth is above criticism, because magic.
The texpip pretends to take issue with evolutionary theory using events of “low” probability, but the “alternative” includes events that are IMPOSSIBLE, and it accepts THAT without question.
Pitiful hypocrisy all the way down.
Sediments that clearly demonstrate the occurrence of many “floods”, of varying extents.
Sediments that of different ages, laid down at different times.
Sediments interspersed with layers of volcanic ash and lava.
Sediments DATED to millions and billions of years of age.
Whereas the liar texpip’s pitiful “model” allows for ONLY ONE, global flood.
Model FALSIFIED.
*POOF*
So magic?
Here’s the problem with txpiper’s “thinking”. His deity/creator is imaginary, he can’t show any evidence for one, and admits he can’t. Without a deity, his babble is book of mythology/fiction. He can’t prove otherwise. So we have is txpiper’s “authority” and unsubstantiated word he is right. *SNICKER* The dishonesty and delusion are very deep with this one.
Why should we believe a proven liar and bullshitter when they can’t demonstrate evidence they are consistently right from the peer reviewed scientific literature? Only a fuckwitted and thoroughly delusional fool would think they have a chance of even being listened to given such a track record. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. We laugh at you txpiper. You are one ridiculous person.
…and I speak too soon.
So, can we summarize your model as “anything I can’t explain: Magic!” Would that be a fair summary?
Because that particular model of the universe explains less and less the more we actually manage to figure things out.
“How did the continents get where they are? Magic!” (later)
“Hmm, no, turns out not to be the case.”
“Why do we get sick? Magic!” “Ok, that’s not true, either.”
“What is thunder? Magic!” “*ahem* Well, that one sure looked like Magic, guys.”
“How does gold form? Magic!” “Turns out that one’s exploding stars, not Magic.”
“What’s the Aurora Borealis? Where do babies come from? How can I make iron? Is there anything above the sky? How do birds fly? …you mean none of those are Magic? Hunh.”
“But why are penguins different from terns? Now, that one’s Magic for sure!”
So, this means txpiper is done, yes? They’ve admitted that the “alternative” they’ve been nattering about for ages isn’t based on science. So therefore they have nothing, and they’ve been wasting everyone’s time.
Took long enough, but it’s nice to see them finally say one honest thing.
Yeah, I guess that if you’re going to have magic! as part of your world view, you might as well use it for all the hard questions.
Which show absolutely no traces of a worldwide flood, and are inconsistent with there having been one. Is that also explained by magic? Did God magically erase all the evidence left by the flood and then faked evidence to make it look like it never happened? Or are you now going to pretend to also know more about geology than geologists, in addition to knowing more about biology than biologists?
Oh dear. doesn’t even seem to know that there are wind-deposited sediments, such as huge sandstone formations that consist of fossil sand dunes!
Also: The defeat of flood geology by flood geology
And don’t believe we’ve forgotten about all the other questions we’ve been asking you and that you keep neglecting to answer.
No, not magic. This would be closer to magic.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24297066/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/gunk-t-rex-fossil-confirms-dino-bird-lineage/#.UE_bAc35WSp
Sorry I’m pressed for time right now. I will respond when I can.
Poor Txpiper. Another victim of Sturgeon’s Law.
Please explain why you chose that example, and what about it you consider magic.
Please explain how your phony “alternative”, which violates what we know about how the universe works and fails to accomplish anything without the repeated intervention of Invisible Sky Dude, is not magic.
Why bother responding txpiper? You have nothing but OPINION, authoritarian posturing that doesn’t effect us, bullshit, lies, and untruths to tell us. You present no scientific evidence for your imaginary deity and your fuckwitted ideas. You can’t show scientifically the babble is anything other than mythology/fiction. You just bloviate nonsense. Any sane person would just shut the fuck up.
But, but but…
(Not like some mysterious supernatural uncreated creator thingie poofing species into existence — that’s truly scientific! ;) )
There is no magick to evolution. All the steps are laid out. Random mutations occur with every generation. Those mutations that help fecundity are selected for with natural selection. Science has it nailed, and Txpiper’s OPINION from his alleged AUTHORITY *snicker, the authority of an unscientific clown* does nothing to change the science. He can’t prove his assertions that science can’t explain the real world. Which is done without any need to invoke his delusions, better known as his creator/deity. Which does’t exist, no evidence for it.
I refuse to discuss this again, colander-for-brains.
My usual offer, however, stands – if you run into a paywall, find me in http://scholar.google.com/ , drop me an e-mail, and I’ll send you the papers you want. (I don’t have access to everything, but likely to everything you’d want or need.)
You are contradicting yourself. Can the flood and creation be rationalized in terms of natural causes, or can’t they? If you say shit like:
You are saying that your version of geology and natural history includes supernatural events. That is the same thing as using magic as a rationalization.
Science doesn’t accept “magic” or “supernatural” as an explanation. Those are evasions, not explanations, and they are inconsistent with our picture of the universe as we can measure it.
The amusing thing being that that thing at your link actually happened. Amazing stuff actually does happen sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that anything amazing that you (or people from iron age Mesopotamia) happen to make up is valid.
Hurin #320
…and yet they find it impossible to give credence to it. How many times have we heard that without religion you can’t have a sense of wonder? But it’s the creobots who REFUSE to have a sense of wonder at what’s ACTUALLY HAPPENING.
*lightbulb moment*
You’re right!
This is what “magic” means in the texpip’s dishonest world:
1. An event, fully allowable by the laws of nature, but only happening with an arbitrarily low frequency and probability, IF and only if, it can be used to denigrate evolutionary theory, THAT is magic.
2. An event, fully allowable by the laws of nature, but only happening with an arbitrarily low frequency and probability, IF it can be used to cast doubt on climate change, or obliquely support some libertarian, misogynistic, or homophobic agenda, that is NOT magic, but good science.
The SAME event can be either 1 OR 2 OR BOTH, depending on the topic of the thread the texpip is currently infesting.
3. An event, completely IMPOSSIBLE by any and all laws of nature, completely unable to occur by natural means, completely inexplicable by natural explanation, IF it can be twisted to support the texpip’s own particular and narrow interpretation of a certain several thousand year old multiply-redacted document, that is NOT magic. If it is instead used to support some other narrow interpretation of the same, or other ancient document, then it IS magic.
If calling it magic supports whatever dishonest argument the texpip wants to make, then it is magic. If not, then it is not.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
(And the Gish Hamster Wheel turns back around another notch)
Utterly pathetic.
*sigh*
Seriously? Again?
Exactly.
“There is no magick to evolution. All the steps are laid out.”
Quite a few of the steps you believe in are not all laid out. Mutations had nothing to do with the meteorites/deep sea vents ideas. These are places where even the bravest selection fairies won’t go. Your stuck with chance and accidents. You have no idea how the system of DNA makes RNA makes protein originated. You have no idea how replication enzymes formed, much less a gene. You don’t know jack about the origins of cell differentiation. And you have no reasonable explanation for how dinosaur collagen could possibly last for 68 million years.
“Amazing stuff actually does happen sometimes”
Sure it does, sometimes.
Yet you only give OPINION from your false Authority, not from the peer reviewed scientific literature. Ergo *POOF*, you failed to refute the science.
You lie, otherwise you would be citing the peer reviewed scientific literture rather than BLOVIATING YOUR UNSCIENTIFIC OPINION AS AUTHORITY. Another expected failure of you to substanatiate your point. Still no evidence for your imaginary creator/deity, or that your babble is inerrant. Just lying and bullshitting.
[meta]
The txpiper finds the conceit that a magical mystical ineffable unevidenced uncreated thing poofed things into existence as a complete and compelling and satisfying explanation for biodiversity, but unfortunately for it, it has nothing other than its ignorance and incredulity with which to dispute science.
(Such a sad specimen!)
“You lie, otherwise you would be citing the peer reviewed scientific literture”
No, that isn’t a lie. Reconfigured, that would be a question. That is the problem with your basket case rationale. See, in your little faith box, you only allow peer-reviewed paper writers to submit inquiries, and the same to provide you with exciting answers. If the questions were asked and answered, you would be citing the papers instead of acting like a common horse’s ass.
Your enchantment with peer-reviewers guarantees that you will only believe ideas, no matter how sappy or improbable, that the establishment peer reviewers are willing to sanction.
The dinosaur collagen thing isn’t that hard. I’m guessing the bone with soft tissue in it was sealed in a stable dry environment with relatively little oxygen. Amide bonds (the chemical functional group that connects amino acid residues) are very stable. They will hydrolyze over time, but if the corpse was dessicated quickly that mode of degradation would be retarded. Hydrolysis requires 1 mol of water per mol of amide bonds hydrolyzed. If the location of the bone was also cold, that would have been helpful as rates of reactions are temperature dependent, and colder temperatures invariably lead to slower reactions.
Supposing I grant that the rest of those don’t currently have proposed explanations, how many of them become better understood by hypothesizing that they are the result of magic?
The answer of course is zero.
No, NOTHING BUT YOUR UNSCIENTIFIC OPINION. IN FACT, YOU PRESENT NO THIRD PARTY EVIDENCE FOR ANY OF YOUR CLAIMS. You have no AUTHORITY. Either back up your claims or shut the fuck up.
What faith box???? ANOTHER UNSUBSTANTIAGTED CLAIM FORM YOUR BOGUS AUTHORITY.
GEE HORSES ASS, WHY AREN’T YOU CITING PAPERS??? Maybe you know you have nothing to back up your statements, you diety, your babble??? You have nothing but your OPINION. Show otherwise….Or shut the fuck up.
Another thing; if dinosaurs were around 4000 years ago, we should have dinosaur remains that are way better preserved than those that we have found. We have human remains (Egyptian mummies for instance) that old that are beautifully preserved, and here is a mammoth corpse found in siberia which has been dated to 10000 years ago. Look at all the soft tissue on it!
Piper what would you accept as falsification of your Bible?
Lurkers, notice how TXpiper avoids like hell presented any third party evidence. This is all part of the AUTHORITARIAN BULLSHIT it tries to present. It is the AUTHORITY, and we must bow to its obvious superiority. Except Txpiper is dealing with scientists, who recognize his bullshit, his posturing and his lack of AUTHORITY. Therefore, we make him show he is right. After several years, his score card is his deity/creator zero, science a few million peer reviewed articles without needing his imaginary deity, his idea of how evolved zero, the Theory of Evolution a million or so peer reviewed papers, his babble being inerrant zero, the babble being a work of fiction a few million peer reviewed papers. Now comes the question, why should anybody believe such an obvious liar and bullshitter. No one should. He lost the battle before he even started.
But you know what amazing thing hasn’t happened?
txpiper describing their model for biodiversity.
The one in which tx doesn’t talk about what they don’t like about other model, but just concentrates on describing what they accept as clearly and concisely as possible.
I strongly suspect txpiper isn’t going to do this.
I strongly suspect txpiper simply can’t.
Yet, I will ask again, in the probably futile hope that txpiper will finally comprehend what it means for their worldview when they can’t even tell other people what it is.
Anri
And if that happened, it would be truely amazing.
“we should have dinosaur remains that are way better preserved than those that we have found”
“This is fossilised bone in the sense that it’s from an extinct animal but it doesn’t have a lot of the characteristics of what people would call a fossil,” she told the BBC’s Science In Action programme.
“It still has places where there are no secondary minerals, and it’s not any more dense than modern bone; it’s bone more than anything.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4379577.stm
—
“We have human remains (Egyptian mummies for instance)”
Deliberately preserved in a dry climate.
—
“here is a mammoth corpse found in siberia”
frozen.
And your point is…?
And the Gish Hamster Wheel now turns in earnest.
Some are not YET. But many, many more are.
As opposed to the texpip’s “alternative”, in which NONE of the steps are laid out at all.
Note how, once again, the texpip dishonestly tries to apply a standard of argument to evolutionary theory which it DOES NOT apply to its own “alternative”.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
And here we have the return to the deliberate attempt to misconflate evolution with abiogenesis theories.
Tired repeated lies all the way down.
Chance and accidents AND selection, which is DIRECTIONAL.
Back again to the deliberate misrepresentation of evolutionary theory, mentioning only half of it while ignoring the other half.
Dishonest anti-intellectualism all the way down.
More hamster wheeling. Discussed and refuted long, long ago.
We have a number of promising partial ideas on this, such as the RNA World hypothesis.
The texpip’s “alternative”, on the other hand, is the one with NO idea. In fact, it DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THAT DNA or RNA existed until evolutionary theory TOLD IT SO.
Repeating lies, all the way down.
More worn out hamster wheels.
And once again, with an area beyond the limits of existing understanding, a theory is judged on its UTILITY, its ability to produce testable hypotheses that will help us, step by step, discover the answers.
Evolution theory does this in spades.
http://www.biology-direct.com/content/1/1/39
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16807003
http://www.els.net/WileyCDA/ElsArticle/refId-a0021988.html
No idea? Evolution theory is happily producing idea after idea after idea for us to investigate and test. With each one we learn more and come closer to the idea.
The texpip “alternative”?
*Crickets*
All it does is PRESUPPOSE those things to already exist.
Useless.
Another pathetic hamster wheel, already discussed at length in prior threads, all ignored by the pathetic hypocritical liar that is the texpip.
Pitiful.
Yawn, the AUTHORITY losing the argument? It changes the channel like any abject loser who can’t shut the fuck up would do. To already refuted bullshit. It lost before it even started. Been there, refuted that, the AUTHORITY is too dumb and short minded to remember. All it can do is go in circles forever. Typical of delusional fools who believe in imaginary things like creators and inerrant holy books. Pitiful.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0020381
The texpip caught lying yet again.
And dear lurkers, still no evidence for his imaginary creator, or evidence to support his idea. No evidence for anything. Poor pitiful txpiper. Couldn’t find a clue even if someone gave him one.
There were dinosaurs living in the area that became Egypt, in the same dry climate. We have the fossils, and they are NOT mummies.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Lost-Dinosaurs-Egypt-Paleontological/dp/0375759794
And we have dinosaurs that lived in Siberian tundra conditions. And we have THEIR fossils too. They are also NOT frozen mummies.
http://alaskareport.com/news1007/do77849_dinosaurs.htm
Once again, the texpip’s useless “model” FALSIFIED.
*POOF*
“txpiper describing their model for biodiversity….”
“I strongly suspect txpiper isn’t going to do this.”
“I strongly suspect txpiper simply can’t.”
Way to go on the strong suspicions there, Anri. Of course I can’t. That, among a few other indications, is the point. Neither can you, account for biodiversity using random accidents. There comes a point when things are so intricate and complex, that anyone who is reasonable will not default to the pathetic notion that accidents and errors result in complicated things. And we are talking complexity that neither you or I will ever begin to comprehend. The deeper the research goes, the worse it gets. If life arose and diversified the way you think, they’d be selling create-your-own-lifeform kits in Walmart.
I post here to register my reasons for not believing what you believe. If you are convinced, and have no more questions, good for you. I am not going to surrender my intellect to your theory. Nor am I going to ignore human history, particularly contemporary history.
===
“More hamster wheeling. Discussed and refuted long, long ago.”
You wish.
txpiper:
Leaving aside that accidents aren’t accidents unless they are random (heh), you carefully but conspicuously ignore what’s been told you at least a thousand times: it’s change and selection, not just change alone.
Fact is, evolutionary algorithms really do work.
I have some advice for you. Shut the fuck up, and take a biology course. Preferably at the high school or college (100) level. Instead of arguing, just try to actually understand what is being talked about, then make your judgement.
Also… I don’t know exactly what you are talking about, but I think we do things that are kind of close to that. (you might have to shop at Invitrogen instead)
All of these came from wolves during recorded history you say? Why, there must have been a massive tornado in that junkyard.
You can’t account for biodiversity using random accidents?
Hello!
If a critter was only producing genetically identical offspring, there would be no biodiversity there. If random accidents started screwing up the genes, there would be diversity. If only the viable survived to reproduce, well, that would be what we see today.
Biodiversity and random accidents go together.
Hmm. Eaten comment. Don’t know if it will be back.
In the mean time enjoy this list of very different looking animals which definitely couldn’t have come from an analogue of evolution carried out by humans during recorded history. Because that would be exactly like a tornado in a junkyard (or something).
Maybe they are selling create your own organism kits somewhere?
testing.
No “create-your-own lifeform kits” being sold, huh?
To do that the texpip would first need to have an intellect.
It doesn’t.
It just has lies.
Yep. When the texpip has no arguments, and knows it, all that its left with is the classic “No You!” toddler comeback.
Pitiful.
I don’t know why my comments keep getting swallowed so I’m going to stop posting for now.
As for “create-your-own-lifeform” kits, simply google “dogs”. We managed to breed shih-tsu, beagle, and irish wolf hounds all from wolves during recorded history. How do you suppose that happened*?
*I’ll give you a hint: no magic was necessary.
Still repeating the tired old lie, the hamster wheel fapfapfap of mischaracterizing evolutionary theory, acknowledging only half of it and ignoring the other.
No, there does not. Evolution theory explains the origin of complexity as a series of individually small steps. And just as 1 + 1 + 1 …. has no end, there is no theoretical limit to how much complexity evolution theory can explain. No conceptual limit except that imposed by observed reality.
Meanwhile, the texpip recycles yet again its dishonest double standard. HERE is its “alternative” to evolution theory:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/08/15/i-want-skin-that-can-do-this/
The model DOESN’T EVEN EXPLAIN COMPLEXITY AT ALL. It just presupposes it from the start.
So the texpip demands that evolution theory explain complexity, and pretends that it is insufficient (which it is not), all the while evading the fact that its own “alternative” DOESN’T EVEN EXPLAIN THE ORIGIN OF COMPLEXITY AT ALL.
Pathetic hypocrisy all the way down.
Give them time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology
Even when snarking the texpip only manages to score own-goals.
Pitiful.
Combine random “accidents” with non-random survival (natural selection), and we can.
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/14/2794.short%20310949
Notice that the texpip STILL hasn’t even attempted to answer this citation, which it has been asked to repeatedly. It tried, rather pathetically, to evade it, but then has just ignored it.
One (of many) places the hamster wheel dares not touch.
Intellectual bankrupcty all the way down.
Pathetic.
If that was all the texpip intended, it would have stopped the Gish hamster wheel fapping after the first revolution and left for good.
But here it is, still fapping.
The texpip caught in yet another blatant, transparent lie.
Pitiful.
Lies.
What reasons? You haven’t present any reasons. You have presented your delusions, you idiocy, your fuckwiterry, your stupidity, your arrogance, and your fuckwitted arrogance. You haven’t presented any evidenced reasons, as they don’t exist. The evidence is found in the peer reviewed scientific literature, not in your babble/mythology/fiction, nor in your imginary deity.
Here’s what you have proven and shown to date, including for your imaginary deity, your inerrant babble, and your inane idea:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
*crickets chirring*
You’ve shown NOTHING! You fail.
Whereas we have proven our case for the Theory of Evolution. Check the peer reviewed scientific literature found in the libraries I post in #275 above. There are a million or so scientific papers supporting evolution, directly and indirectly. Poor txpiper is so arrogant in his Authority he can’t acknowledge what is there. Dishonest all the way down. Typical of liars, bullshitters, godbots, and liberturds.
True.
Fortunately, we aren’t.
If you have read all of the discussion on this (and other) threads and do not yet understand that point, you are, I’m sorry to say, just too dumb to have this conversation.
I will indulge speculation further by saying that I don’t think you’re that dumb, but that you are working very hard to constantly drag things back to language you feel safe with. Sadly, this means that you keep moving away from any actual understanding.
First of all, it’s not the default, it’s a well-tested scientific theory. The default was assuming Magic Man Done It. We got away from that due to the evidence of the world around us.
Secondly, until and unless you can demonstrate what point of complexity is, and why it differs categorically from a point of slightly less complexity, you have not actually demonstrated anything at all. In other words, you have to demonstrate why two types of dogs can be related, but why a cat and a dog can’t be. Not just state it, but demonstrate why.
Thirdly, science and common sense are often in conflict. That’s why we had to invent science, because common sense can only take us so far before it begins to get things terribly, awfully, uncorrectably wrong. Most things throughout history that ‘reasonable people’ believed about the world have proven to be wrong.
Me? True. You? I dunno.
On the other hand, specialists in the field do have substantial understanding of the process and end results. We’ve been presenting you with examples of increased understanding throughout the thread.
Please stop equating biodiversity with bio-genesis. It’s something only ignorant or deeply dishonest people do.
You’re saying, in effect, that you don’t understand what the specialists around you understand, that you have no good alternative, but that you refuse to accept the evidence anyway.
You do understand, I hope, why that’s not a very convincing position.
Well, what you don’t have, you can’t surrender.
Why do you keep confusing the origin of life with evolution? I think it’s deliberate obfuscation.
Dude, learn some basic molecular biology. Asymmetric cell division isn’t all that uncommon in bacteria, and it’s simpler than you seem to .
You will now go and look for the last thread we discussed this in.
If it was in ScienceBorg and isn’t back yet, you’ll simply wait till it’s uploaded again.
I will not help you turn the Gish hamster wheel backwards.
Not all that many peer reviewers are fucking assholes who’ll try to recommend rejection of a manuscript just because they don’t like the conclusions. That would be unscientific of them.
Not all that many editors are fucking morons who’ll read such a recommendation and accept it, not noticing what unscientific crap it is.
Now excuse me, I have two manuscripts to review.
That’s a good question… which the texpip has been refusing to answer for years now. I brought up the prophesied annihilation of Tyre in this very thread; the crickets chirp, and the texpip holds his ears.
As I keep saying, creationism can’t explain a single champsosaur.
That’s neither as uncommon as you seem to believe, nor is it surprising. If your bones lie in groundwater that is a concentrated solution of calcium carbonate, they’ll be filled with calcite crystals after a few hundred or thousand years. If they don’t, they’ll never be filled with calcite crystals.
Either that, or it’s another case of colander-for-brains. I remember discussing that article.
Oh, it wasn’t dry then.
…Which forces the texpip to squeeze all of paleoclimatology into 6018 years.
Sort of. But the area became warmer later.
…Which again forces the texpip to squeeze all of paleoclimatology into 6018 years.
The texpip, of course, has no fucking idea that we have oxygen isotope curves that trace temperature continuously through tens of millions of years… it’s not two or three isolated data points.
Perhaps more importantly, we have Jurassic dinosaurs from Siberia. They’re not frozen, and they don’t preserve soft tissue (at least outside their bones; I guess nobody has looked inside).
There comes a point where you need to question everything you thought you knew. Question with boldness even your claim that this notion is pathetic: what reasons do you have for thinking it’s pathetic?
How do you know this before you’ve ever even tried?!?
Not yet, but they’re working on it. Venter has already gotten pretty far. The link has been provided; follow it.
Fixed that for you. Belief is required when there is no evidence to back up an idea. You must believe, as you have no evidence for your imaginary creator/deity, or your babble being inerrant. We reach a scientific conclusion based on the overwhelming scientific evidence.
Only some who is intellectually bankrupt and dishonest all the way down would confuse the two as the same type of “belief”.
At the end of the Permian, atmospheric oxygen dropped from higher than what it is today to around 10% in what, 5 to 20 million years?
In the texpip’s timeline, that would be 6 to 26 YEARS.
In a single human lifetime, sea level O2 goes from above today to lower than the summit of Everest.
Aha! Evidence for a global flood!*
But wait, the texpip’s model predicted that to be 40 days.
Still FALSIFIED.
*POOF*
*(Noah was a cynodont)**
**(actually, I suppose we CAN say that Noah IS a cynodont, since mammalian nests inside one of the cynodont clades….)
txpiper:
Txpiper, there is a difference between life arising and life diversifying. The conditions that led to life arising are no longer present in out daily world, but Walmart does carry amino acids, which are halfway between non-life and life.
Walmart doesn’t carry create-your-own-universe kits, either. Nor does it carry anything that operates outside scientific principals. There are a few homeopathic remedies, and some prayer plaques and such, but only a few, and no guarantees that they work.
Walmart doesn’t carry reproduce-your-own-lifeform kits, either, although you might meet some there. See, you cannot reproduce yourself by yourself. You need another person to even get a child that is half yours, and a whole lot of machinery to make a clone—and that clone will not be an exact reproduction.
As long as you cannot reproduce lifeforms exactly, you will get diversity. You need to provide a mechanism to keep evolution from happening, or you need to shut the frak up.
Now lurkers, look at this from txpiper:
Now, also keep in mind it claims it isn’t here to change our minds. Put if it just wanted to keep its own OPINION about evolution, it could do so without posting on a blog. There is only one reason for the liar and bullshitter to post his subideas on a blog, namely he wants other people to believe the same delusions he does. In other words, he posts here to convert people. If he wasn’t trying to do that, there is no reason to post period. Just another example of the lengths the creobots will go to so they don’t have to face up to their lies…
Amphiox, thanks for “cynodont”. I looked it up, and learned a lot.
Txpiper, we are all still cynodonts, diversified off into mammals, primates, monkeys and apes. There’s not much new, just new arrangements—and that new arrangement happens every time a new little cynodont is born.
Unless you can show that new arrangements do not happen, you have to admit that evolution is happening.
Txpiper, you have present YOUR REASONS FOR YOU NOT ACCEPTING EVOLUTION. Now, why can’t you shut the fuck up? Or is it really you can’t accept us concluding evolution is occurring, and has occurred? Can you actually be honest?
”there is no theoretical limit to how much complexity evolution theory can explain”
That’s almost a doxology, isn’t it? You should have it put to music.
===
“Check the peer reviewed scientific literature found in the libraries I post in #275 above”
I didn’t have a chance to look at those, but I did peruse some of the articles you linked to in post 253. One http://www.cabdirect.org/abstracts/19720103934.html# I thought was quite interesting, apparently a review of Susumu Ohno’s 1970 classic book. The guy was pretty rough on him:
“The recent flood of information about protein sequences has stimulated the exhumation of evolutionary theories that have long been dead, and ought to have remained decently buried. Recently I heard, to my great surprise, a professor of molecular biology advocating the theory of orthogenesis.
Dr. Ohno’s book continues the trend. He supports a view, prevalent at the beginning of the century, that natural selection acts merely as a filter to remove deleterious variants, and that other factors are responsible for major evolutionary changes. He argues that the most important of these factors is the release of polypeptides from the constraints of natural selection, as a result of gene-duplication. The sequences are then supposedly free to vary at random until by chance they arrive at some configuration advantageous to the organism. Unfortunately, Ohno does not discuss the difficulty that new and advantageous configurations must be extremely rare, nor does he mention the crucial advantages of Darwinian theory in explaining the origin of improbable adaptations. Because most of the amino-acid substitutions during the evolution of proteins have been conservative in nature, he concludes that natural selection cannot change the basic character of a gene.”
.
The reviewer then goes on to laud the real champion:
.
“The logical jump between the observation and the conclusion is as remarkable as it is unnecessary. The prevalence of stabilising selection has long been understood in terms of conventional evolutionary theory.”
.
Then continues the rebuke:
.
“The author of a heterodox argument can sometimes be forgiven for enthusiastic overstatement, but Ohno commits the cardinal sin of persistently failing to make clear the distinction between theory and fact.”
.
Cardinal sin? Hell, this guy just doesn’t know how evolutionary science works.
And I thought Ohno was a cardinal, wasn’t he? At least an archbishop? Didn’t the community breath a sigh of relief when everyone could talk about where so many genes come from without feeling like idiots?
Kidding aside, Dr. Ohno really was a remarkable scientist http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/411472 I wouldn’t be surprised at anyone flirting with orthogenesis.
===
”Asymmetric cell division isn’t all that uncommon in bacteria, and it’s simpler than you seem to believe.”
Let me try again. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Cell_differentiation
—
”I brought up the prophesied annihilation of Tyre in this very thread”
The city spoken of in Ezekiel is underwater, which is what you would expect in view of him having recorded “when I bring the deep upon you, and great waters cover you”.
—
”That’s neither as uncommon as you seem to believe, nor is it surprising. If your bones lie in groundwater that is a concentrated solution…”
Not surprising. What would you suppose the pyramids might look like 68 million years from now?
===
“The conditions that led to life arising are no longer present in out daily world”
Yeah, they haven’t had much luck duplicating those conditions in labs either.
Because we can’t recreate life in a lab yet, abiogenesis didn’t happen?
So, before Newton things fell up?
txpiper must think the world works on make-believe magic. It’s like Insane Clown Posse, except somehow even dumber.
Why bother. You lie and bullshit, present no scientific evidence, and can’t support anything you claim, like your imaginary diety/creator, and your unscientific ideas, and your imaginary refutations of science base on your OPINION and AUTHORITY *snicker, the authority of clown*. So, WHY BOTHER US ANY MORE?
Compare the theory of evolution to the theory of gravity. There is a fact of gravity, which is that mass attracts mass. This isn’t in dispute, and never will be. We observe it, we have always observed it, and unless something very fundamental changes in the way the universe works, we will always observe it.
Newton proposed a theory of gravity, which rationalizes gravity in quantitative terms, and allows for quantitative predictions of gravitational dynamics. Newton’s theory was excellent, however it turned out not to be valid in all cases, and Einstein proposed general relativity as a more complete theory of gravitational phenomena. Gravity is still an active research field 300 something years after Newton’s theory was proposed.
People are still trying to understand for instance how gravity would work if the universe were small enough for quantum mechanics to apply to it (as it would have been in the first few Planck times of its existance). Theories provide insight and predictive power, and are continuously revised and expanded. The underlying facts of the phenomenon that the theory is proposed for do not change very much (although our knowledge of them, and abilities to measure them do).
Evolution is no different. Lamarck and Darwin both had ideas about how biodiversity could be explained in terms of organisms changing over time. Both men also knew that organisms could inherit traits from their parents – one of the facts of evolution. Since Darwin’s time, evolutionary process itself has become a fact. Richard Lenski actually observed it in the lab. The entire fossil record is consistent with it, and genetics allows us to map the history of evolution independent of that. Evolution is a fact.
The theory of evolution is how evolution works and like gravity it is still investigated. Lamarck was fundamentally wrong about the mechanism of evolution even as he understood that it was happening. Darwin brought us the framework for evolution, but he had no idea how heredity worked. And so on. Like gravity we understand very well how evolution works, and that it does work. Like Gravity there are ambiguities and details still to pin down, because reality isn’t simple.
And one thing that we do understand very well about evolution is the fact that there are no obvious singularities. If a gene can change once, it can change an arbitrary number of times. No walls. No “kinds”. Just a mechanism which can continue as long as there is a planet here for it to happen on.
No.
(Except, of course, to pathetic lying dishonest hamster wheeling fapwits attempting but failing miserably to snark a point worth listening to, like the texpip).
What it actually is, is REALITY.
Pathetic.
The only beings in this universe known and confirmed to be capable of intelligent design in this universe try to design lifeforms and fail.
And the texpip takes this as evidence FOR creationism/ID?
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Pitiful.
It would depend on the preservation conditions. If they got buried under sand or mud, protected from wind and water erosion, they might last reasonably well.
One might expect a fragment of a brick or two to survive.
EXACTLY as one might expect a few short amino acid chains of collagen to survive, out of a STARTING AMOUNT OF SEVERAL TONNES.
Yes, do.
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/14/2794.short%20310949
(Spoiler: the texpip won’t. Because it can’t. This citation destroys its entire position, completely. *POOF*)
Notice, as well, from the texpip’s reply, how it reveals that the texpip doesn’t even understand what “cell differentiation” actually means (or, perhaps more likely, is deliberately lying about it, again).
ALL forms of cell differentiation are variants of assymmetric cell division. And, in nature, we observe a gradient of all kinds of these variants, from the simplest, as seen in bacteria, to the most complex.
EXACTLY as the theory of evolution predicts.
It is obvious txpiper really doesn’t understand evolution. It is just a dirty word to him, and it thinks its OPINION and pretending AUTHORITY will refute it. Only more science refutes evolution. And txpiper doesn’t understand science either, so it can’t refute evolution, and just flails around looking idiotic and futile as it waves its arms in attempts at misdirection. So it is up the creek without a canoe, a paddle, a raft, or even a life vest. With rapids and a water for it go over…
Here’s the texpip’s citation:
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Cell_differentiation
Now THIS is assymmetric cell division:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_cell_division
Now, let’s go back to the texpip’s OWN CITATION:
This is assymmetric cell division.
This is assymmetric cell division.
This too is assymmetric cell division.
Assymmetric cell division again.
Assymmetric cell division.
Assymmetric cell division.
Assymmetric cell division.
Again.
Evolution theory produces testable hypothesis after testable hypothesis concerning this, from the broad to the specific. Perhaps the simplest and broadest is that the earliest forms of cell differentiation should involve assymmetric cell divisions where the daughter cells have fates that are only slightly different from one another, and that if any examples of these earliest forms of cell differentiation still exist in the world today, we would expect to see them in prokaryotes like bacteria.
And, lo and behold, we go test this hypothesis in nature, and that is EXACTLY what we find.
As for the texpip’s “alternative”?
It didn’t even know that cell differentiation even existed until scientists, using evolutionary theory, TOLD IT SO.
Useless.
You don’t know jack about the origins of cell differentiation.
You don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground.
And you don’t know jack about your imaginary deity, and why your babble isn’t mythology/fiction. You don’t know much, but you sure have OPINION and PRETEND YOU ARE AN AUTHORITY. An authority on how to be stupid, ignorant, and arrogant.
A nice self-description by the texpip.
And an EXCELLENT description of what the texpip’s “alternative” to evolution theory says about cell differentiation.
ie, NOTHING.
Useless.
A little bit of what evolutionary theory has helped us know about cell differentiation.
Just a sampling.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3226138
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519300910877
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v422/n6929/abs/nature01486.html?lang=en
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v400/n6747/abs/400881a0.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v411/n6833/abs/411094a0.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016622369593934P
http://jcs.biologists.org/content/121/17/2783.short
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19708/
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7127/full/nature05467.html
The texpip apparently doesn’t comprehend the meaning of the word “jack”. Or, more likely, the pathetic hypocritical liar is LYING again.
And here’s some more.
http://www.nature.com/scitable/content/gene-and-pathway-co-option-and-the-14458976
http://genesdev.cshlp.org/content/13/4/377.full
http://www.ias.ac.in/jbiosci/jun2003/523.pdf
All knowledge provided to us thanks to the theory of evolution’s ability to produce testable hypotheses that we can use to design experiments to expand and refine our understanding.
As for the texpip’s “alternative”?
*Crickets*
Useless.
And, as I predicted, the liar texpip continues to run away, tail between its lying legs, from this:
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/14/2794.short%20310949
A complete and total refutation of the foundation of its entire dishonest argument, the axle of its hamster wheel.
*POOF*
Utterly pathetic.
An example of two beings with superior intellect and integrity than the odious liar texpip.
For God so loved the world he gave his only son, who couldn’t be bothered to tell people to boil their water so that they could avoid cholera.
Yup, some alternative.
More knowledge of cell differentiation, produced by the theory of evolution.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8851042
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12007411
http://www.mpi-marburg.mpg.de/thanbichler/research.html
Ok, more or less true, in my case (not other people’s, but I don’t really speak for them).
So…
(ready?)
… tell us.
Seriously.
Tell us all about your understanding of cell differentiation. Not what you don’t like about other people’s concepts, just describe your concepts.
You and I both know you won’t.
You and I both know you can’t.
I strongly suspect both you and I know that’s a serious problem for your worldview – and as sympathetic as I am about the discomfort that facing up to that fact might end up being for you, it’s really the only honest thing to do.
You don’t know jack
I think the pipster should run along and play the game with the same name.
see if he really does know jack.
http://www.youdontknowjack.com/
I’m betting he’ll fail at basic trivia, even, just as he fails spectacularly with any knowledge-based subject.
I note that the nummulites that make up the limestone of the pyramids have been around since the Eocene, and I’m confident that they can last more-or-less intact for another few tens of millions of years. Forams are pretty durable. Also, the King’s chamber is granite.
However, that does not mean that the blocks themselves will last intact. The Nubian African Plate is moving northeast into the Eurasian plate. I suspect that in 68 Mya, the Mediterranean Sea will not only close, but that the area where it is now will be a site of extended orogeny. Geological activity may well create discontinuities and slopes that will tumble the blocks and break them, over time.
The result of plate tectonics, +50 Mya:
http://www.scotese.com/future.htm
/IANAG
raise your hand if you actually taught cell biology at the freshman college level?
I’m betting I’m not the only one here who has.
Hmppf, not only don’t teach, don’t even remember taking cell bio; remember my herpetology classes just fine. Fun field trips!
Then I stupidly followed the “love of my life” out of academia into mind-numbing wage slavery. Now I’m sad and a little jealous of those folks here who succeed in their research/teaching careers. Reading pharyngula is one of the interesting things I can do to keep my brain active. I can’t be an expert in anything but thanks to the wealth of info – especially links in threads like these – I can at least learn what’s important in major fields.
So, thanks, y’all. Thanks even to the hostile witness txpiper, because some of our best commenters would have hardly any reason to share info if not in response to the egregious stupidity displayed by such creationists. Good job, txpiper. If you thought you were doing the lord’s work by speaking out against evolution, think again – you’re just making it clear to any readers that there is more truth in science than ever could be found in your dead-end literal-bible stuff. Please don’t go, please stay and turn more lurkers against your dumb version of christianity.
The rest of you, you know what good folks you are. Thanks again.
”Tell us all about your understanding of cell differentiation. Not what you don’t like about other people’s concepts, just describe your concepts.”
Not cell differentiation. The subject was the origins of cell differentiation. How did a cooperative system evolved that causes stem cells to specialize? Would that be the result of mutations, natural selection, or something else?
OMG. txpiper is still trying? For your sake, I hope you never wake from your delusion. The knowledge that your life has been intellectually wasted would be crushing.
As usual the dishonest liar texpip ignores prior replies in its pitiful attempts at spinning the hamster wheel.
On the off-chance that the texpip wasn’t actually being a liar, and had, in fact, gone temporarily blind, I will repeat some of the pertinent links:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3226138
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519300910877
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19708/
http://www.nature.com/scitable/content/gene-and-pathway-co-option-and-the-14458976
http://genesdev.cshlp.org/content/13/4/377.full
http://www.ias.ac.in/jbiosci/jun2003/523.pdf
Fine, show us conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary creator and you might have a point. FAILIURE TO PROVIDE SAID EVIDENCE IS FAILURE OF YOUR IDEA. END OF STORY. AND YOU HAVE FAILED EACH TIME EVIDENCE FOR SAID CREATOR IS DEMANDED OF YOU. YOU ARE A FAILURE.
And once again the texpip attempts to repeat its standard lie, the mischaracterization of what evolutionary theory actually says.
Note how it is mutations (or) natural selection OR “something else”? All part of the texpip’s tired and transparent attempt to always separate evolutionary theory into incomplete strawmen to falsely criticize, when the WHOLE POINT of the theory is that it is mutations AND natural selection, working TOGETHER in synergy.
Even the hamsters managed to figure out the idea of synergy when wheeling, at least part of the time, unlike the pathetic liar texpip.
And notice, once again, the texpip still avoids this:
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/14/2794.short%20310949
The coward knows it HAS NO ANSWER for this.
Utterly pathetic.
Txpiper can’t refute the science with more science, and can’t provide conclusive physical evidence for its imaginary creator. Each and every post that doesn’t do both is tacitly acknowledging the Theory of Evolution is correct, its deity doesn’t exist, hence its babble is a work of mythology/fiction and therefore meaningless. Thanks for proving us right txpiper. You do a swell job for our cause.
“And once again the texpip attempts to repeat its standard lie, the mischaracterization of what evolutionary theory actually says.”
I was asking for an explanation for the origins of cell differentiation according to primary mechanisms of evolutionary theory.
I think you’ve made the point for me. You don’t know anything at all about the random, unguided, accidental, super-complex origins of a system that coerces stem cells to specialize. Lots of genes would be lighting up or shutting down in a process like that. Any given cell could have been part of a cornea, or just another bowler in a butt hair. Did you see any developmental clues in all the knowledge links you provided?
Perhaps your efforts should be a little more towards actually thinking instead of protecting your security blanket. Don’t forget that science is about trying to trash the current pop idea.
txpiper:
No, you weren’t. You were trolling.
You keep ignoring all the obvious and simple ways that we show you that you are wrong. Then you ask about something complex, demand a precise and exact explanation, ignore all the explanations that you do get, and pretend that you are not getting any answers. You then act as if all of science has fallen apart.
I say again, as simply as possible: You cannot reproduce yourself exactly—therefore, evolution happens.
All else is bullshit, Bub.
So is trolling.
Nice projection.
How pathetic. The texpip basically admits to not bothering to have even looked at those links.
Pitiful.
Here’s the link again:
http://www.ias.ac.in/jbiosci/jun2003/523.pdf
And here’s another one the liar texpip didn’t read:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19708/
And another:
http://www.nature.com/scitable/content/gene-and-pathway-co-option-and-the-14458976
Notwithstanding that the above is a obvious and complete lie, as the texpip NEVER “asks” questions honestly, but only tries to trawl of “gotcha” rhetorical tricks, the above is yet another example of the texpip’s pitiful disingenuousness.
The POINT, as anyone with a brain and a set of morals can plainly see, was the utterly DISHONEST manner in which the question was asked.
Here, since the texpip is such a dense, stupid, and dishonest idiot, I’ll quote it again.
Note, once again, the deliberate use of the word “or”, attempting to rhetorically separate mutations and natural selection, to better play up to the current dishonest strategy of mischaracterizing evolutionary theory that happens to be up on the texpip’s pitiful hamster-wheel, when the proper way to actually ask the question, for anyone who actually is honestly asking it, would be “mutations AND natural selection”.
Utterly pathetic.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Ethical degeneracy all the way down.
Moral hypocrisy all the way down.
And of course, the pathetic liar texpip ONCE AGAIN desperately avoids mentioning the fact that its supposed “alternative” to evolutionary theory, not only does not explain cell differentiation AT ALL, it didn’t even know that lifeforms were made of cells.
Useless.
*POOF*
And to repeat, just because the texpip’s hypocritical dishonesty really should be emphasized:
And one of those links I provided, again:
http://www.ias.ac.in/jbiosci/jun2003/523.pdf
The title: On the origin of differentiation
As is evident from the contentless barf the fapwit fapped out, the texpip didn’t even bother to read the title.
Oh, and still no reply to this:
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/14/2794.short%20310949
No, I am not looking at those links, and neither will anyone else. I don’t feel poisoned if you copy and paste statements that illustrate your point. You do that, and if they don’t seem square, I will pursue the idea.
Just so you don’t lose track, you will be looking for facts concerning how the system that causes cells to assume a particular role arose. I look forward to your quotes.
What a blatant, hypocritical, stupid liar like the texpip dishonestly claims science is “about” is irrelevant.
But it is amusing to watch the texpip flail and fap about, trying to lecture an audience of published and actively practicing scientists about what science is “about”.
Utterly pathetic.
Yep. Intellectual dishonesty all the way down. It knows that those links completely destroys its argument, so it tries to avoid them.
Utterly pathetic.
Here it is again:
http://www.ias.ac.in/jbiosci/jun2003/523.pdf
Has txpiper given any evidence of a deity yet? I may have missed it. Is ignorance of biology, history, etc., supposed to be a kind of evidence?
Another example of how evolutionary theory generates testable hypotheses:
http://dev.biologists.org/content/1994/Supplement/79.short
Prediction: the fapwit texpip, if it bothers to read the link at all, will try to make hay about the hypothetical nature of the abstract, and obsfuscate over words like “could”, “may”, and “probably”, as it has already dishonestly tried to do in the past.
And of course, in the process, completely miss the point.
And until the fapwit texpip demonstrates the bare minimum level of intellectual honesty to actually read links provided to it before attempting to fap about the subjects pertaining to them, including this
http://www.ias.ac.in/jbiosci/jun2003/523.pdf
and this
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/14/2794.short%20310949
absolutely nothing it attempts to fap out need be regarding with anything other than contempt.
For the fapwit texpip, only evolution theory requires evidence to be given. Its useless “alternative” doesn’t need it.
Since there is no evidence of any kind available for its “alternative”, the blatant double standard must be maintained at all costs, for otherwise the texpip would have nothing left to fap about, and would have had to have gone away a long time ago.
Amphiox, bring on the quotes.
txpiper, bring on the evidence of a deity.
It doesn’t matter how fucking clueless you are about evolution. If you want to fix that, get a fucking eduction rather than troll a fucking blog.
Now, where’s your evidence? Bring it.
http://www.ias.ac.in/jbiosci/jun2003/523.pdf
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/14/2794.full
The fapwit texpip, too cowardly and dishonest to even click a link, deserves no response other than contempt.
Pathetic.
It’s telling that the texpip is trying to just demand quotes. It’s another throwback to one of the texpip’s favorite dishonest tactics – taking quotes out of context.
And of course it also allows the intellectual coward to avoid challenging the actual source material itself, but instead to focus on what it thinks is the easier task of hamster wheeling the provider of the quote.
And old, tired, cowardly, dishonest game of which we are all more than familiar.
Utterly pathetic.
Or in otherwords, spoonfeed me your papers so that I can counter by ignoring you, or arguing from incredulity.
Txpiper, we know you a dishonest fuckwitted idiot, but the lurkers will follow the links to the real scientific evidence, so when you say nobody you are committing both false witness, a sin, and Mark Twain’s damned lies. We know, because they report that to us they have looked when they unlurk. It just shows you don’t understand science, how it works, don’t want to know, and want to remain an ignorant deluded fool for the rest of your existence. Which will end with your death. There is as much evidence for an afterlife as there is for your imaginary deity, which is none. Lies and delusion all the way down for you. Pitiful.
Gee, you still think science is done via quotes from “authority”. Which shows why you aren’t an “authority”, as you have no understanding of the process. Full papers supporting the idea are required. Quotes are for mindless creobots who lie and bullshit, and pretend to know something.
What is needed for your hypoidea to be viable is conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary creator. You know, that which exists only in your delusional mind. The one you admit you have no evidence for, and none should be expected? Which, with that acknowledgement earlier this thread, whether or not you believe it, you essentially conceded defeat, that your idea is just so much delusional bullshit, the scientists are correct, and the Theory of Evolution is correct. There is only the possibility if the ToE being wrong if there is a viable scientific alternative to it. And you admitted your idea isn’t and can’t be scientific as there is no evidence for it.
”obsfuscate over words like “could”, “may”, and “probably”, as it has already dishonestly tried to do in the past.”
”And of course, in the process, completely miss the point.”
Those words make the point rather well.
===
”It’s another throwback to one of the texpip’s favorite dishonest tactics – taking quotes out of context.”
Oh, but I was going to let you copy and paste from your hard-hitting knowledge sources. I perused the articles you linked to, and I don’t think you are quite there yet because I noticed statements like this from the Bonner piece:
“Clearly cellular complexity will increase with or without a change in size: mutations involving cell differentiation that produce greater efficiency will be favoured by natural selection.”
“The first step must have been the invention of multicellularity itself.”
“Once multicellularity has occurred, the constant selection pressure for efficiency in the new collective will have its effect.”
Pretty much the standard fluff.
.
Wolpert was a little more direct in explaining what he was doing:
“I will try to present a scenario whereby the eukaryotic cell could have evolved multicellular embryonic development. In doing so a central requirement is that each stage is required to have a selective advantage and that there is continuity between stages (Horder, 1983). Big jumps – hopeful monsters – are not allowed. Even so, I recognize that my scenario is only slightly better, perhaps, than one of Kipling’s Just So Stories, like how the leopard got its spots, or the camel its hump.”
That said, he glides along on the jargon like this:
“We can thus imagine a cell increasing its diameter 2.5-fold and then dividing 4 times to give 16 cells … Let us further assume that the third requirement is satisfied and the cells remain together, and, moreover, the cells [just happen to] form a hollow sphere. The latter may require oriented cell divisions or the maintenance of junctions between cells on the outer surface but that may not be too difficult . [On the other hand, it might be very difficult]
The net result of such changes would be an increased cell size in good medium leading to a multicellular sphere in poor medium. It would be a selective advantage if the cells were ciliated so a sphere might swim faster and so find an environment with good food. [Why, of course it would Dorothy] Now there would be, for the first time, a positive selection for the multicellular state in a poor medium and the multicellular state would be environmentally induced. By the Baldwin effect we can imagine mutations such that no matter what the medium the cells grow large and divide many times. An environmental signal would have been taken over by the genes: the signal has in a sense become constitutive. The selective advantage for multicellularity could now be speed of swimming, sharing of metabolites, protection from predators. Just one more step is required for the evolution of the embryo. The individual cells need to separate and start the programme again. This could occur when the cells grow and became too large to remain in contact. Each individual cell could now go through the same programme.”
I’m surprised that you chose these two articles. Would you like to try again? You will be looking for facts concerning how the system that causes cells to assume a particular role arose. Or you could just say that currently, you don’t know jack about the origins of cell differentiation.
Naughty, naughty, txpiper. Naughty of you to pretend that you care about facts. When you’re the one who pretends to “know” that non-existent Noah built an impossible ark to survive a non-existent global flood, you should be ashamed to posture about wanting facts. IF you actually cared about facts, you would listen to your faithful fellow religionists who verified from the facts – visible even with modest 18th century technology – that there never was a global flood and that all the sedimentary strata we see have been laid down at widely different times and with widely different processes. They set out to confirm the Noachian Flood, but their honesty ended up requiring them to testify that there was no evidence of such a flood and literally a whole world full of evidence against it.
You’re a liar and a sinner to put your belief in a literal bible above the physical evidence of your god’s created planet. And you’re a hypocrite of the first rank to pretend that YOU care about facts while scolding anyone else for bringing insufficient facts to this discussion.
Liar, liar, pants on fire, txpiper.
“neither will anyone else” ? You had to have known that was flat-out wrong even while you typed it.
I open all of amphiox’s links because I, for one, am interested in actually learning something. I am “anyone else” and I am proof that your little comment was a direct lie.
You lose, fool.
Currently, I don’t know jack about the origins of cell differentiation.
So now what, Tex? Do I throw out all of science and start trying to decide which of your delusions to cling to?
Currently, I don’t know jack about the origins of the cigarettes the family teen is smoking, but I do know the girl is smoking, and doing a pitiful job of hiding it. You are going to say that it is illegal for a teen to buy cigarettes, and that she therefore cannot possibly be smoking.
If scientists cannot show every detail of a long-ago event to YOUR satisfaction, it doesn’t mean jack. Nobody has claimed to know everything, except you, and you haven’t shown that it is impossible.
I mention my daughter again to say that she is not my exact clone, therefore, evolution happens.
Argue and explain that, you delusional ostrich, and give the origins of cell differentiation a rest. (Not a pass, you misunderstanding misanthrope, a respite while we talk about the big stuff.)
Quote, not evidence, irrelevant. Cite the full paper or shut the fuck up. Science doesn’t work by quotes, idjit creationists do to muddy the waters.
But txpiper the fuckwitted idjit, YOUR OPINION ISN’T SCIENCE, NEVER WILL BE SCIENCE, AND WILL NEVER REFUTE SCIENCE. THAT REQUIRES MORE SCIENCE, WHICH YOU NEVER PRESENT. Your OPINION is nothing but irrelevant bullshit without evidence. Ergo, your OPINION on anything scientific is bullshit, your OPINION on the existence of your imaginary creator is bullshit, your OPINION on the inerrnacy of the babble is bullshit. And your OPINION of you as an AUTHORITY on anything is bullshit. Nothing but hot air and irrelevancies.
Science doesn’t have to satisfy you. You have to satisfy science if you wish to refute it, or add a scientific theory. And to do that requires science which you avoid. So, keep bloviating nonsense and pretending you have authority. Your smallness, arrogance, and idiocy are shown with every post, along with your nonsense, and lack of authority.
”I open all of amphiox’s links because I, for one, am interested in actually learning something.”
Oh, well then I retract my statement, and apologize for not thinking anyone would actually spend the time it would take to read all that, and so quickly.
Did you see anything compelling about how a really complex phenomena like cell specialization would evolve on the basis of random errors and natural selection?
Also, how did you react to Wolpert’s candid remark? I thought it was weird that his introduction began with that quote, didn’t you? I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to purge their worldview of unscientific, just-so stories.
===
”I do know the girl is smoking, and doing a pitiful job of hiding it.”
I’m sorry to hear that, and I hope you find a way to steer her out of acquiring that addiction. You could perhaps point her to articles that tell her how cigarette smoke is loaded with mutagens, and then to sources that describe all the disastrous effects of mutations.
So you admit that it has been found again, in direct contradiction to Yahweh’s own alleged words:
Thank you.
Huh?
The pyramids aren’t bone, they’re rock (composed mostly of fossils, funnily enough), and they lie around on the surface, they’re not covered by deposits of the Nile or for that matter by sand dunes. (At least so far [Homer Simpson]; see comment 373.)
Do you have any clue what you’re talking about?
Try duplicating a black smoker in a lab.
It’s probably possible, but rather egregiously expensive.
While you organize your fundraiser, please be so kind as to address every single link in comments 381, 382, 383 and 386.
No. What we’ve always observed is stuff falling down. Then a few ancient Greeks found out that “down” actually means “toward the center of the Earth”. Assuming a geocentric universe, Aristotle believed that the center of the Earth was the center of the universe – and concluded that the center of the universe was the for solid and liquid matter to be. His hypothesis that everything to be in its explained his observations quite nicely.
That all masses attract each other wasn’t observed till a lot more recently. That’s because gravity is so weak.
Stem cells? I’m talking about bacteria: Bacillus and Clostridium forming spores by asymmetric cell division – which I was taught in excruciating detail in the development biology course that was compulsory for molecular biologists – and Caulobacter dividing into a swarmer and a cell that remains attached to the stalk.
Or, hey, learn about biofilms. The bacteria in a biofilm don’t all do the same things either.
*headdesk* You can’t even have one without the other (except for mutations without effects on the phenotype, which you’re not talking about)! Mutations always happen, and selection never ceases simply because there’s always an environment!
What’s difficult to understand about this!
No, no, Josh. That knowledge will come, unless txpiper jumps off a bridge first or dies in a car accident. Therefore, I hope for his own sake that he wakes up sooner rather than later; the knowledge of having wasted 50 years is more crushing than the knowledge of having wasted 30 years.
“Would be”?!?!?
FFS.
For an exam, I had to learn by heart every single gene that takes part in the sporulation of Bacillus subtilis, and the products of which genes switch which other genes on or off or interact with their products. We know that shit, txpiper. There is a lot more knowledge than you have ever dreamt of.
(It didn’t take very well, but I passed.)
It’s almost cute how obviously you’re projecting.
Science is about trying to trash every idea. Every single one. I’m not exaggerating.
You have no idea what an incredible asshole you are. Here’s how I know you really have no idea:
Science can’t be done in soundbites (like you tried in comment 368 – I’ll get back to that). It just can’t. Amphiox would need to copy & paste the entire fucking paper, except for the authors’ addresses and the acknowledgments, for everything to really make sense; and it isn’t even possible to paste pictures or tables into a comment here.
Did you seriously believe scientific papers contain fluff? Printing is expensive! Most journals make authors pay after too many pages, and the limit is always low; even the ones that don’t reserve the right to return manuscripts to the author for shortening before they’re accepted for publication; and the most prestigious journals completely refuse to accept manuscripts that are longer than 3, in exceptional cases 4 pages!
(This is so bad, it’s actually a problem for science sometimes. There is research that can’t be published in papers of 5 or 10 pages because it just yields too much useful information. Consequently, such research is hard to publish at all. The Internet will help, but it hasn’t helped much yet.)
Scientific papers are extremely dense. You can’t pick a sentence or a paragraph out and pretend it represents anything on its own. It’s just not possible.
I’m astonished you still haven’t noticed this. You you know what scientific papers are like – and consequently you don’t even look at them! You search them for soundbites, just like you do with the Bible, of which you likewise always quote individual sentences without any context.
You’re the densest blockhead I’ve ever encountered. To be fair, I haven’t interacted much with the legendary , but you’re definitely in his league.
Work on this. Or you’ll fall for a scam, if you haven’t already. Stupidity is expensive these days.
…Oh, back to explaining how what you said is mind-blowingly insulting. Without the context of your profound ignorance, what you said means “I refuse to find out why I’m wrong, just so I can keep annoying you, and every one of you is just as evil as I am: you, too, refuse to find out when you’re wrong.” My first reaction, I have to admit, was that I wanted to get violent. Stupidity isn’t just expensive, it can be literally painful.
Well, sure. Greater efficiency is usually favored by natural selection: it means that more resources remain for reproduction, and “resulting in a greater number of surviving fertile offspring” is what “selected for” and “favored by natural selection” mean. So, trivially, mutations that produce greater efficiency will be favored by natural selection. This includes mutations that do so by way of cell differentiation.
He was just as direct as Bonner: he was proposing a testable hypothesis.
Go ahead, disprove it. That is your job as a reader of a scientific paper.
No, they don’t just happen to do so. Do you know how a morula (solid ball of cells) turns into a blastula (hollow sphere) in the embryogenesis of so many animals?
The cells secrete salt. (Don’t know which ions exactly, but it doesn’t matter.) At least some of that salt ends up between the cells. Water follows and pushes them apart. It can’t separate them, because they’re connected by proteins… so the equal pressure in all directions results in a sphere.
It’s so simple, and yet you had no idea. That’s sad.
Why? Oriented cell divisions are what Caulobacter does; they weren’t a new development. Proteins that connect cells, or at least let cells stick to each other for some time, are likewise older than multicellularity; they’re present in choanoflagellates, which form undifferentiated colonies at most (AFAIK).
So, again, why? Because you don’t know any better. Because you don’t know anything at all about the very topic you’re talking about – you don’t even know that not everyone knows as little as you about it!!!
I still don’t understand why you aren’t ashamed of having ever believed there isn’t any knowledge that you don’t have.
Eukaryotes are ciliated by default. Wolpert didn’t even need to mention cilia.
This refers to the beginning of the paragraph: “The net result of such changes would be an increased cell size in good medium leading to a multicellular sphere in poor medium.” And that refers to the preceding paragraph, which I’m not going to copy again.
Such mutations – a broken “off” switch to growth regulation – are actually known, you know.
No. You don’t know – and that’s the problem you have!
That just repeats the preceding sentence in other words. Do you know what “constitutive” means?
Whoa. This paper really isn’t about the origin of cell differentiation!!!
That’s a testable hypothesis, exactly what Wolpert was trying to give us.
The very quote you pasted points to several facts and tries to connect them. You don’t notice, because you don’t understand the technical terms that refer to the facts.
Work on that. Get yourself into a university library and open a molecular-biology textbook.
Also, comment 423.
Why ask stupid and idiotic leading questions. It happened. Its records are in the genetic material that make up living things. Unlike any record for your imaginary creator. Nothing whatsoever for it. You believe in phantasms. We conclude what is reality. Learn something. Then you won’t sound so dumb, stupid, unintelligent, and just plain fuckwitted.
Also, how did you react to Wolpert’s candid remark? I thought it was weird that his introduction began with that quote, didn’t you? I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to purge their worldview of unscientific, just-so stories.
Ponder that.
Ponder it a little longer.
Why indeed would a biologist put loopy speculations into a scientific paper, and why would the journal publish it?
Perhaps it isn’t actually loopy speculation?
…
Indeed it isn’t. It’s a testable hypothesis, and – in spite of being a well-known expert in the field – Wolpert didn’t know of any evidence that disproved it, so he published it. That’s how it works.
Kipling’s Just-So Stories are also testable. The difference is that Kipling knew of evidence that disproved them. (Want me to elaborate?) That’s why he published them as literature instead of as science.
Now on to your comment 368.
Oops. Blockquote fail. The first paragraph of comment 430 is from comment 427.
So is this:
Mutations don’t automatically have disastrous effects. That’s why any smoker is still alive. Most mutations are repaired, and of the remainder, most have no effects at all.
Those that have an effect, however, are usually harmful; and the effects of any beneficial mutations can only show up in the next generation, and even that only if they happen to occur in the germline. (You know what that is?)
That’s why evolution happens in populations. One single organism can’t evolve – unless we interpret it as a population of cells, in which case it can evolve, but evolution is cancer.
Now on to comment 368.
Looks like my prediction about the texpip came true, yet again.
The dishonest hypocrite decides to make hay about the some hypothetical aspects of the cited work, as if that were somehow a weakness for evolutionary theory, whereas the WHOLE POINT is that the theory of evolution produces testable hypotheses that advance our knowledge, step by step.
Whereas the texpip’s “alternative” produces no such testable hypotheses, cannot help advance understanding of the unknown, and is useless.
The pathetic liar’s tired dishonest game is transparent:
1. ALL scientific citations contain hypothetical parts. It’s practically a REQUIREMENT for getting published – you have to show how your work will stimulate future work, how your results generate new testable hypotheses for others or yourself to try in the future. So naturally the texpip looks for just these and quotemines them to make it seem that scientific knowledge is less certain than it actually is.
2. In making a big deal about the uncertain language that is always used by honest scientists when discussing hypotheses, it tries to criticize evolutionary theory for producing a partial answer (and a pathway for learning more) rather than a complete one, all the while deliberately ignoring the fact that its own “alternative” provides NO ANSWER AT ALL to the same question.
Cowardly hypocritical intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Utterly pathetic.
[meta]
Thanks for the apology.
Really, really, you should learn something from this little episode. Just learn that normal human beings want to learn things about reality (which science describes). Hardly anyone is as stunted in that area as you are. If you honestly thought that no one would “actually spend the time” because YOU wouldn’t – or because you only would if you thought you could use the results as ammunition against foolish evolutionists – then you were wrong. And this little wrongness is something YOU can actually learn a larger lesson from.
I know it’s really really difficult for you to comprehend, since you have chosen to surround yourself in your personal life with the determinedly ignorant, the fools and conmen who believe (or purport to believe) in an impossible young earth. I know this is really really difficult for you, because the only way you can maintain that particular flavor of religious belief is by avoiding real-world knowledge as you would avoid the devil itself. But, most people are not hogtied like you are. Most of your fellow christians – hundreds of millions of ’em – delight in seeing scientific evidence as it accumulates. Some of them even go so far as to read evolutionary biology in order to learn more about the real world, not in order to use it as a weapon against the “godless science”.
You don’t have to give up your religion altogether. Christians accept the reality of an old Earth. Christians accept that the story of Noah was something other than literal historic truth, but also understand that it being a folktale or parable of some kind doesn’t automatically ruin their belief in the main message of Christ. Christians accept evolution. Evolution is a fact – Christians knew that long before Darwin wrote the first theory which reliably explained that fact. Christians reconcile the story of Adam and Eve with the fact of evolution in various ways – possible it’s a metaphor for our species gaining a self-reflective consciousness that allows us to be aware of our own sins/shortcomings; possibly it’s the moment when god took action to insert a soul into the first human being when previous human ancestors had lacked one. Christians accept that the bible was never intended by god to be treated as literally true word-for-word.
You might have to start attending a different church, though, if the one you’re currently attending is keeping you glued to your commitment to ignorance.
Honestly, you don’t have to hide yourself away from the real-world evidence with literal-bible nonsense. Any time, you’re free to join the rest of us normal humans who retain our curiosity and who click through to science-journal links because we want to actually learn something.
You can do it!
(Though I use the texpip’s quote to introduce this, this is NOT a response to the texpip.
This is merely for the interest of people who are honestly curious, not for cowardly liars like the texpip.)
Cell specialization isn’t complex. As the citations show, the simplest forms of it are mediated by the action of a single genetic change.
The earliest forms in single celled prokaryotes are basically separate stages in the life cycle of the cell, like vegetative cell and spore, or actively dividing and programmed cell death, as seen in cyanobacterial blooms. The actual differences in the two phenotypes are also not huge.
In the earliest metazoans, all that happened was instead of single cells going from phenotype A to phenotype B during the course of their regular life cycle, as they had done when they were free living, a mother cell upon dividing into daughter cells had one daughter cell go immediately to phenotype A, and the other go immediately to phenotype B. A change that in a single cell used to be separated by time became instead separated by space. As a result, the colonial metazoan was able to benefit from the activities of BOTH PHENOTYPES simultaneously rather than having to choose when to do A and when to do B, and not being able to do B while it was busy doing A, and vice versa. This provided an immediate selective advantage over single free living cells that were stuck with either A or B, but never both at the same time.
The genetic change necessary to bring this about was simple too – sometimes a single genetic switch, since the ability to change from A to B was already present and already governed by gene switches. And sometimes it wouldn’t even have required ANY new genetic change, but simply as a consequence of being in a group of cells instead of being alone. Consider a simple colony like Volvox, which is a ball of cells. The two phenotypes are A a feeding/growing phenotype that has a flagella for moving towards high concentrations of food and light and other resources, and B, a reproductive phenotype that’s basically a spore. In the free-living ancestor of the colonial form, the genetic switch that governs the change from A to B can be simply the availability of nutrients. When there are plenty of nutrients, be A and grow. When nutrient levels grow scarce, become B to wait for better times.
So what happens when these cells, instead of separating into free living singletons after every cell division, stick together longer, such that the rate of new cell divisions is faster than the rate of cells breaking apart to go off on their own? The cells will form a ball, a colony. Just as a consequence of being in a colony, the cells on the outside are exposed to the environment and will find themselves with lots of nutrients nearby, while the cells in the center will be blocked from nutrients by all the other cells around them, and find themselves in a nutrient starved situation. And boom, you get cell differentiation with the inner cells becoming spores and the outer cells growing flagella to swim towards food.
And that is all it took to get metazoan cell differentiation started.
This hypothesis, produced by the theory of evolution, generates the testable hypotheses that the simplest forms of regulation for cell differentiation – the triggers that activate the genetic switches that govern the decision to become A or B, would likely be positional in nature – dependent on where, relative to other cells in the body, any particular cell finds itself, and that the way, genetically, the cells “know” where they are relative to other cells would be the same way that single cells “know” where they are relative to other things, like food – by sensing chemical gradients. If the cell notices a lot of control substance then it “knows” that it is near a source of C. If a cell notices very little of control substance C, then it “knows” that it is far away from C. And C can be almost anything, from an external substance, like a food molecule, or a protein produced by other cells, which single cells produce during quorum sensing.
Thus we would expect that the genetic switches that control whether a cell differentiates into A or B would depend on whether the cell detects a large or small amount of a control substance C.
So we can go test this hypothesis by looking at how cell differentiation is controlled in various organisms (and, thanks to the theory of evolution’s prediction of common descent, we can compare these different control mechanisms between species that are thought to be closely related against species that are thought to be distantly related and obtain even more useful information).
And guess what, this is exactly what we find. Cell differentiation is controlled almost universally by genetic switches that sense chemical gradients.
Every is an elaboration of this simple beginning. You can get very elaborate (complex!) patterns using overlapping gradients of different substances, going in different directions. You can have linear and radial gradients, and so forth. You can have one of the phenotypes controlled by one gradient be the production of ANOTHER GRADIENT, which can feedback on and regulate the first. A two gradient system with contact feedback, controlled by just two switches, can produce a checkerboard pattern of cell differentiation (and this in fact is observed to be used in a wide variety of embryological processes).
But all the complexity is built by simple step-wise additions to that simple beginning – the turning of a single gene on if a certain substance is present in a high enough concentration, and having that gene be off if the concentration of that substance is not high enough.
It is complex in the way 1 million is complex. 1+1 is simple.
Consider a cell that divides into two daughter cells that remain stuck together. The two daughter cells are automatically in different environmental circumstances.
Daughter cell A is exposed to the outside environment on say its left side, and has another cell touching/stuck to it on its right side, while daughter cell B is exposed to the outside environment on its right side and touching/stuck to another cell on its left side.
That difference is all that it takes to active a single genetic switch that will cause the two cells to differentiate differently. The touch of another cell can be the signal.
Ah, I think I’ve figured out what has really been bothering me about txpiper fuckwitted argument. I’ll put it in terms he can understand. The petrochemical industry makes great us of catalysts to do a number of jobs. But early work on catalysts tended toward beginning and end products, not how the catalyst actually worked. The early catalysts were nothing but trial and error. Try this, try that, see what happens. If good, try to repeat and refine. For example, adding a little rhodium the palladium changed the product distribution. Refine. The exact mechanism by which it exactly happened wasn’t known, but it didn’t stop the development of hydrocarbon cracking, hydrogenation, steam reacting with methane, hydrogenation of nitrogen, etc. We chemists knew what the beginning and end products were, but not the intermediate steps. This doesn’t mean we didn’t make use of the technology. It took a long time to develop the technology to see what is happening at the surface of catalysts for the exact mechanism to be worked out. Now, catalysts can be “engineered” for a given purpose.
But this is also exactly what happens in biology. Try many things via gene duplication, then random mutation happens (trial and error experiments, undirected). The more successful experiments are chosen by natural selection (better reproductive success) for further trial and error experiments. What we see in biology is the end product of the experiments done by nature, and txpiper wants to see how they got there (the mechanism by which it happened). This just requires the proper technology for biology to see how it could come about. But this requires technology that isn’t available at the moment. But it is being worked on and will show the mechanism of how things came about. My guess is good computer models. Meanwhile, we know it works because of the start and end points. More misdirection by the dishonest liar and bullshitter.
Oh, and still no evidence for your imaginary deity, or that your babble is inerrant txpiper. No evidence for your claims…
That’s a very weird site. There’s no citation of where and when this review was published. And Google doesn’t find it anywhere else.
Anyway: reviews don’t appear long after what they review. The fact that the review isn’t anywhere else on the Internet fits my hypothesis that it dates from the early 1970s. So, it’s about 40 years old; Science Marches On. Never take anything that’s 40 years old, or for that matter 20, as representing the current state of science before you’ve searched for something more recent.
It’s also very weird that the reviewer calls Ohno (misspelled “Ohna” once, which is really embarrassing) “Dr.”. Duh! Of course he’s a doctor! And so is the reviewer (by all probability), and almost every single reader! The book reviews I’ve read never do that (and neither do, say, moderators at conferences); but then, I’ve never read a 40-year-old one.
So, on to details:
Whoa! I’m just as surprised to hear there were still advocates of as late as 1970 or thereabouts!
That must be a misunderstanding. I mean, if Ohno really wrote natural selection doesn’t amplify beneficial mutations, he was plain wrong; so either he didn’t, or it’s irrelevant to the rest of the book and therefore ignored by everyone today.
I don’t know what exactly Ohno wrote; however, gene duplication clearly is important – and, as we now know and as nobody knew in 1970, it’s common. We’ve talked about salivary amylase, and that’s just one example.
Exactly, they are. Unless they arrive at a dominant detrimental configuration, which clearly isn’t common.
Ohno didn’t do the math? Surprises me; but people have done it in the 42 years since then.
The reviewer (a Bryan Clarke) keeps claiming neutral mutations aren’t “Darwinian”. Well, in the strictest sense they aren’t, because Darwin, not knowing anything about DNA, didn’t know about them; they’re an addition – not something that overturns everything.
Wait, wait, wait! That’s not the substitutions themselves, it’s those that stabilizing selection hasn’t eliminated!
Whoa. If he really wrote that, he was either quite stupid or meant something rather inscrutable by “basic character”. I think it’s more likely that Clarke mistook “cannot change very quickly” for “cannot change”; but I haven’t read Ohno’s book.
“Basic character” is a really wishy-washy expression.
And Stalin called everyone “Judas Ischariot”, and the head of the Social Democratic Party of Austria once said in parliament “and ere the cock croweth thrice, the [conservative] People’s Party will have”… I forgot what exactly, probably “betrayed the workers & employees”. People take their metaphors from what they’re used to.
Ooh. That depends on such things as the definition of “species”! Ohno and Clarke may have been talking past each other here. If Clarke regarded anagenesis* as speciation and Ohno didn’t, they were both right.
* Look it up. I’m too lazy to do yet more of your homework today… also, “today” is just 27 more minutes.
If that means that it’s not normally done by losing genes, that’s correct. Sea urchins and hagfish lose genes during development (different genes in different cells, obviously, and none at all in the germ line, obviously), but no other cases are known.
That’s actually correct (if you don’t interpret “essentially” in a very narrow way). It’s not common for mammals to have genes that other mammals lack; there are mutations, so the same gene from different species (or indeed different individuals of the same species) won’t necessarily be identical, but they’re still easily recognizable as homologous.
And cells always secrete things like salt. So you don’t need to specifically have a mutation to secrete salt just so a morula-like clump of cells will evolve into blastula-like hollow sphere of cells. You can go straight from clumping to hollow sphere because salt secretion was something the cells were already doing, just as a result of the laws of fluid dynamics.
Or you can have a mutation that alters the timing of salt secretion, that gets selected for due to something completely unrelated to colony shape, such as, say, controlling salt levels inside the cells, and the change from clump to hollow sphere is just a secondary consequence, neutral in character, which becomes new variation available for natural selection to act on later in a different environment.
LOL! Two successive blockquote typos that cancel each other out after the second quote, and both are actually visible!
…by which I mean that dominant deleterious mutations are both empirically uncommon and expected to be so from molecular biology: if you’re diploid, and one copy of a gene is broken, the other still works. That’s why most deleterious mutations are, empirically, recessive.
Consider one of the most common types of environmental signals – that of the availability of food.
One of the most common foods is glucose. So a signal from the environment could be the amount of glucose around.
Well guess what, cells can also make their own glucose. They might have glycogen stores that they liberate into glucose when glucose is absent from the environment, or they might use their own proteins to synthesize glucose for emergency energy when glucose is unavailable.
So let’s say we have single cells, sensitive to glucose, that start living in colonies. Nutrient starved cells in the interior start producing their own glucose. The cells beside them can detect the glucose they produce. BOOM. Environmental signal has become constitutive.
That’s all it takes for the first step.
No need to try again.
As others have pointed out, facts were given and plenty of them. The manner in which evolutionary theory produces testable hypotheses to explain and connect the FACTS was also demonstrated.
The liar texpip (precisely as I predicted it would – I chose those citations knowing what the predictable idiot would likely do with them if it ever summoned the courage to try, and in the process expose once more the complete bankruptcy of its position) as usual just distorts, ignores, and obsfuscates.
Completely useless.
Though amusing, like this:
Here’s another simple scenario:
It is very common in cells to have surface receptors structured as a complex of two proteins, we can call them R:S. R sticks in the cell membrane, and S binds to R on the inside of the cell membrane. When R binds to whatever it binds to outside the cell (let’s call it r), it releases S, which floats away into the inside of the cell. S has a DNA binding domain that recognizes a particular genetic switch. When free from R, S binds to the switch, activating gene X. (Or S could activate other proteins that activate gene X, for the purposes of this example, it doesn’t matter).
Thus we have a response to an environmental signal that causes gene X to be activated.
Now, suppose the gene for S mutates, and as a result of this mutation it loses its ability to bind to R. This is an easy mutation to occur, because it is actually a “destructive” mutation on the protein level – protein S loses one of its functions, and lots of different mutations in the right regions can do this.
So what’s the result of this mutation? Protein S now floats free inside the cell from the moment it is made, where it can bind to the DNA and activate gene X. Gene X is thus active all the time.
Of course the cell loses the ability to respond to r in the environment by activating X. Maybe this will be a disadvantage. But, since the response to r that it loses is the production of X, and it now produces X anyways all the time, that might not affect the cell much at all, depending on its environment.
But we’ve just gone from an environmental activation to a constitutive activation in a single mutation.
Now suppose an additional mutation occurs that changes the genetic switch that controls the mutated S. We’ve just gone to a regulated constitutive activation of X in two steps.
Or, consider gene S getting duplicated. (We’ll call the second copy S’). What happens initially as a result? It could be nothing. S and S’ are identical, both bind R, so there’s no change for the cell. Or perhaps having two copies of S results in extra S floating in the cytoplasm. This will of course mean that the cell will now produce some X all the time, but produce even more X when r is around.
Now then, what happens if S’ mutates and loses the ability to bind to R? Now the cell gains a function. It can now regulate the production of X in TWO ways, instead of one. Either in response to r, via R:S, or constitutively with S’, the regulation of which is free to continue to change with additional mutations.
So, once again, we go from environmental signal to constitutive signal.
And if a future mutation knocks out R, we can go from environmental signal to obligate constitutive signal.
Every individual step a simple, common type of mutation.
What’s the functional result?
…argh. I forgot to explain why dominant deleterious mutations exist at all: when the mutant protein coded by the mutant gene not only doesn’t work but 1a) sticks to the normal protein 2) in such a way that it prevents it, too, from working, or 1b) otherwise produces a poison, then a deleterious mutation is dominant. neither 1a + 2 nor 1b are expected to occur often, and indeed they don’t.
Indeed. Look what I found…
– Charles Darwin in a letter to Henry Fawcett (September 18th, 1861).
Bingo.
What, there are cyanobacteria that do apoptosis?
All I knew were the specialized nitrogen-fixing cells seen in thread-shaped multicellular cyanobacteria. Those cells are easily visible; they’re bloated and brown, because they have a thick wall to keep oxygen away from the enzyme that turns nitrogen molecules into something useful. Of course they also don’t do photosynthesis – they’re fed by their neighbors – and therefore lack chlorophyll and the bluish stuff.
More precisely, Volvox forms exactly the hollow spheres that intrigue so much.
A flagellum. Or two flagella; isn’t Volvox a green alga and thus has two?
Oh yes, everyone should look that up!!!
Gene duplication is one kind of random mutation.
This metaphor is so anthropomorphic that the texpip is going to take it literally. How about:
Those “experiments” in which larger numbers of surviving fertile offspring are produced are more often available for further “experiments”. When there are more X than Y, more X than Y will mutate (in absolute numbers, not in relative ones).
Oh, it is. What usually isn’t available are the populations, through many generations, for sequencing. In Lenski’s experiment, they are. He’s working on which nucleotide changed into which other one in which generation and in the end made it possible for some of his Escherichia coli to live off citrate.
I hope this won’t post twice…
And while most signaling pathways are a lot more convoluted, some actually are that simple. Call R JAK and S STAT, and we have a whole class of real ones.
And now, before I go to bed, a Sagan quote on just-so stories and on science being about trashing every idea:
Apparently, they do.
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080528/full/453583a.html
Well, it might not be the full apoptotic mechanism seen in eukaryotes, but its some form of programmed cell death. (In some species, blooms will spread for a time and then suddenly vanish virtually overnight, the whole population liquidating itself in a programmed, coordinated manner (I suspect mediated by quorum sensing) while a select few cells form spores that will seed the next bloom)
Apparently most of the caspases that mediate apoptosis in eukaryotes originally came from the ancestor of the mitochondria, which still play a role in the initiation of apoptosis, or so I’ve heard.
Though I must admit that my source on the cyanobacterial blooms is tertiary (It’s from the chapter on death in Lane’s “Life Ascending”).
“Mutations always happen, and selection never ceases”
Everything you guys think hangs on this sorry premise. You have to be professionally groomed to believe that you exist in a living world that these two feckless notions produced.
txpiper #447
Nothing sorry about it. That’s the way reality is. Just because you have problems accepting reality doesn’t make it go away.
So…
is that an “I won’t”, or an “I can’t”?
. . .
Cool story, bro.
Now… what was your explanation for the living world? You know, the one where you discuss your hypothesis without mention anyone else’s?
I just can’t seem to recall where you actually did that. Did I miss it?
Or am I right yet again that you either can’t or won’t?
Your sorry premises are your imaginary deity and babble being inerrant. Still no evidence for either, and your failure to provide any evidence is tacit acknowledgement we are right, and you are wrong. No evidence, no existence. Typical problem all godbots have. Nothing but their delusions.
Txpip
Yeah, seriously. If it weren’t for all these professionally groomed eccentrics and their weird “theories”, we would have all the answers. Just like we did in the 14th century!
The “premise” is an OBSERVED FACT.
The rates and magnitudes and frequencies of both mutations and natural selection have been measured in real time.
E PUR SI MUTATES.
E PUR SI SELECTS.
E PUR SI EVOLVES.
Notice how, with essentially nothing left to say, and all its dishonest arguments utterly destroyed, the texpip is basically left with nothing but endlessly repeating this useless phrase over and over again in various permutations?
Utterly pathetic.
And notice as well that while evolutionary theory depends on mutations and natural selection, the existence of both of which are observed facts, the texpip’s useless “alternative” hangs on a premise that has NOT been ever observed, EVER.
Something which the texpip always, desperately, pathetically, ignores.
Pitiful hypocrisy all the way down.
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/14/2794.full
(STILL no response to this from the texpip, since, of course, it HAS NO RESPONSE but won’t admit it. Pathetic.)
Indeed, the texpip even references mutation rates itself, thinking, because it is a liar who doesn’t appear to comprehend math, that the “low” magnitude of the rates makes a point, while failing to realize that the rates are exactly consistent with observed reality as predicted by the theory of evolution.
So the texpip KNOWS that mutations happen all the time. (About 100 per individual per generation in humans).
But now, when all its other arguments have been thoroughly dustbinned (again), it tries to pretend that mutations “don’t happen”.
The hamster wheel of pitiful lies turns again.
Wait a minute!
What’s your problem with these premises ? Look NOT at the implications for anyone’s worldview, NOT at the likely conclusions therefrom, just the premises.
Take it one at a time to be clear. Mutations always happen
I recollect that, earlier, you accepted the observable fact that you have a hundred or more mutations that differ from a non-mutated copy of either of your parent’s DNA.
Have you changed your mind about accepting that you have mutations ? No ?
If you still accept that fact, isn’t it obvious that it must be true that “mutations always happen” ? They happen to you, they happened to your parents before you, they happen to every organism we sequence the DNA of. Isn’t it obvious that the most reasonable statement we can make about mutations is that they “always happen”? Instead, do you want some improbable hypothetical like “mutations usually happen but even though we have never seen an organism which can replicate DNA with completely flawless fidelity, and even though we have both physical and theoretical reasons to conclude that no such organism could ever exist, we won’t state that mutations always happen; we’ll leave some nice wiggle room and just propose they usually happen”
Is that it ? Is it that you want scientists to say “mutations usually happen” ?
Please answer the questions on this premise before we look at the second premise or at what the implications are if the premises are true.
Observed FACTS about this reality:
Mutations happen.
Natural selection occurs.
Mutations and natural selection in combination produce and increase biological information.
Evolution happens.
The texpip lies.
Hotshoe, mutations, the champions of change in your theory, are failures. They are the screwups that you credit with having transformed a single ancestor into countless millions of plant and animal species. They are the supposed source of alteration that produced every gene, every novel bio-feature, every function, and every amazingly complex protein to include a whole suite of replication enzymes that were specifically designed to keep the failures from happening. The pitiful few that get by the check and repair system, in your view, are responsible for rendering prokaryotes into multi-cell organisms, those eventually into fish, those to amphibs, those to reptiles and those to birds and mammals.
You’d really have to work to cook up a more asinine scenario. For rock stupid ideas, the only thing that can compete with it are the notions about everything that preceded the common ancestor, when there were no mutations and raw accidents reigned supreme.
And here you are, with an array of hyper-complex senses, a phenomenally complicated brain, a fantastically complex, low-maintenance body, and a limited amount of time to sort things out before the senescence genes you think mutations gave you will end your life. It is a truly amazing thing to behold.
Super!
So let us have it!
Give us your super-sensible, far-much-more-betteriffic model.
Just your own (utterly sensible, fully logical) ideas, without all that nasty illogical evolution stuff. Best not to mention it at all, really.
Just give us what you think is true – not commentary on what you think is false.
I ask futilely… because you can’t.
You don’t have a theory.
You don’t have a model.
Let alone one simpler, or more sensible, or with more evidence backing it, than evolution.
It’s a ghost, a phantom, it doesn’t exist.
Or – prove me wrong in my statement. I’ll apologize, you’ll see, if you prove me wrong, and you do have a theory, a model to describe.
As I have said before, and will no doubt have to say again, I know – and you know – that you have no such model, no such theory. After this much discussion, if you had a idea, you would have presented it.
Well yes chemistry is not genetic but is pretty much due to natural selection. Strong bonds remain, weak bonds are broken. Molecules do not act with a purpose
I’m actually starting to feel kind of sorry for txp*p*r. They’ve been reduced to curling up in a ball, trying to keep you from noticing that they’re crying, and now and then yelling, “NO, YOU’RE ALL WRONG!”
The champions of your ideas are faulures. Your imaginary creator has no evidence for it, so it is just a delusion in your mind. There is no evidence your babble is inerrant, making it a book of mythology/fiction. And you never, ever, present any conclusive physical evidence for your delusions. And they are delusions until you can evidence them. Poor txpiper, living in a delusion filled world, full of imaginary things that can’t do squat.
…eyes tightly closed to make sure they don’t accidentally read any of the thousands of scientific papers stacked all around them…
“Failures” only from your point of view. Changes are changes, no values attached.
Along with natural selection, drift, etc. etc.
Repeating this got old real fast.
And yet, they do happen.
Ayup. Plants too. It took quite a bit of time, but it happened.
As opposed to “Poof. Magic!”?
Citation needed.
Isn’t it? =D
This is great. Anytime I feel like my grasp on evolutionary theory is growing hazy, that the classes were too long ago, I just find a Pharyngula thread with a creationist troll and bam! It’s better than Cliff’s Notes or rereading my Bio textbook.
Oooh ooh I have one! There was this supernatural being who, despite being incorporeal, had a gender. He created the earth and humans. Even though he’s incorporeal, he created humans in his image. This turned out to mean that he made them as petty and irrational as he is.
Wait, that’s been done already, right?
It does sound rock stupid when you write about it.
The nice people who are responding to you in this thread, IMO, are giving you a lot more credit than you deserve. I am not of the opinion that any degree of lecturing/cajoling/explaining/insulting will overcome your stalwart ignorance of bedrock scientific consensus. They interact with you in vain. You are too stupid to be taught.
Once more, a blast from the past:
Phil Corn/txpiper:
One of the few times that he was honest about being stupid, rather than stupid and dishonest. He’s only gotten worse since 2006, since, obviously, he finds learning — never mind learning to be realistic — to be so painful that he refuses to do it, at all.
It occurred to me, watching him blather on and on about complexity, and probabilities, and so on, that he keeps making the stupid implicit implication:
Complexity exists (C), therefore, reality works by magic (M).
[Where complexity is not only the complexity of life, but everything that he does not know]
Presumably, because complexity is completely impossible without magic.
But this is logically equivalent to saying that if reality didn’t work by magic (~M), there would be nothing that is complex (~C). Or in other words, the entire universe would be so simple that Phil Corn could understand it easily and without any particular effort in learning biology, or statistics, or biostatistics, or chemistry, or physics, or biophysics, or anything at all, really. Science would be obvious. Physics would presumably work like LEGO™, and everyone could see the pieces snapping together.
So, this attitude is consistent with his laziness, stupidity, and dishonesty.
I see that in one month, it will have been exactly six years since his first arrival on Pharyngula. Hooray for a near-continuous streak of utter jackassery for YEC idiocy.
Whoop.
txpiper –
I appreciate that you’re responding, but it appears you couldn’t be bothered to actually pay attention to my post, because you’re not answering the question we’re trying to grapple with at this moment.
It’s an easy Yes or No question. Here, I’ll repeat it, with emphasis:
Your answer should NOT contain any references to the implications of mutations for an evolutionary worldview (or for religious worldview, either). IF we get past this simple little question, maybe we can get into examining worldviews again. Not now.
Right now, we’re just trying to get a baseline of your knowledge/acceptance that mutations do exist physically and that you as well as every other organism we can observe has at least some mutation, not a perfect copy of their parental genome.
Yes, or No ?
If you don’t believe natural selection can compound mutations into changes you shouldn’t be able to believe that chemistry works via the atomic model.
“Your answer should NOT contain any references to the implications of mutations for an evolutionary worldview”
Says who, and why? Because any normal perspective on mutations has to acknowledge that if they have a noticeable effect, it is not something you would want? Do a web search, and post the links where somebody is cheering over the results of mutations.
—
“Right now, we’re just trying to get a baseline of your knowledge/acceptance that mutations do exist physically and that you as well as every other organism we can observe has at least some mutation, not a perfect copy of their parental genome.
Yes, or No ?”
Of course I accept them. There are, on average, 100 trillion cells in the human body. Replication is extremely high-fidelity, but not perfect fidelity. Rare errors do occur, and the results are probably as predictable as nothing at all, or cancer rates.
You are still unable to assess mutations for what they are. They are like a golf shot. Straight down the middle is the designed norm. But if the ball hits a tree, the ground, or anything else and goes unnoticed, it was neutral. If the ball hits a car windshield, a window or another person, something gets broken or someone gets injured, or possibly killed. That is deleterious. If the ball knock’s Claude’s ice cream cone out of his hand when he was about to cross the street and would have been killed by a driver who was going to run a red light, then that was a beneficial.
The problem with your theory, and the problem with you, is happy-faced optimism that beneficial DNA replication screw-ups occur frequently, and in the germ line where they only become more scarce as players. But they haven’t, and they don’t, as evidenced by a long list of plants and animals that have not budged in tens of millions of supposed years. The top dog in your developmental mutations show is always something as pathetic as having sickle cell trait and being resistant to malaria. This is not exactly the kind of thing that even if it happens countless times, will produce a novel bio-feature, much less rendering reptiles into bird or mammals.
Don’t tell me, let me guess. Yet, it evolved.
What the fuck is your problem? Do you just not like the word “mutation” because it just isn’t magical enough? Then make up some other word, if that suits you. No one gives a fuck about your ignorant opinions. Science will keep on going without it.
Let’s go back to square one. I’d rather do that than read your absurd analogies.
What part of it do you think is wrong, and what specifically is wrong about it?
Tex, it’s hard to keep up with your confusion.
First, and my pet peeve, mutations aren’t the only factor in the development of new characteristics. You are totally ignoring the gene mixing that happens in sexual reproduction. Every animal that is born is a new combination of characteristics from both its parents. They aren’t waiting around for your magical misunderstood mutations—they are already different, even if their genome copying goes perfectly.
Second, the mutations that count happen in the germ line—if they happen anywhere else, they are ignored or cancerous or just funny looking. We’ve told you this before …. I’m going to bed.
Still recycling the same old pathetic lies, the same tired old misrepresentations of evolutionary theory, the same dishonest misuse of teleological language.
Mutations are not “failure” or “screw-ups” or “errors” or “mistakes”.
They simply are.
It is WE who label them AFTER THE FACT, based on what we observe to happen. WE choose, AFTER THE FACT, to assign value judgments to them. A mutation that propagates is called “successful” AFTER THE FACT. A mutation that does not propagate may be called “a failure” AFTER THE FACT.
The texpip, liar, CALLS a mutation a “failure” AFTER THE FACT. The “failure” exists only in the texpip’s dishonest mind.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
And again with the fetishization of “complexity”. As has already been explained, evolution theory explains “complexity” by dividing it into simple steps, so whether it is “hyper”, or “phenomenal”, or “fantastically”, or “amazing”, or “mind-boggling”, it doesn’t matter, evolution explains it all equally easily.
Whereas the texpip’s own “alternative” isn’t able to explain complexity at all, but simply presupposes it. Even worse, because it is “degenerative”, the degree of complexity in the past must be even greater than the degree observed in the present, and even more difficult to explain.
And yet the texpip, dishonest liar that it is, continues to try to use “complexity” as an argument against evolution, while not applying the same standard to its own useless “alternative”
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Utterly pathetic.
I’m sorry, are we under the misconception that errors in a routine task never generated something novel?
Here we see the texpip, presupposing design from the start, even in its analogies.
It demands all sorts of intentionally impossible criteria for evolutionary theory to pass, but for its design “alternative” it just accepts it, without questions, from the start.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Another lie by the texpip.
100 new mutations per individual human per generation (these by definition of course are in the germline). How many times have the texpip been already told this, in this very thread?
And yet the liar still repeats this pathetic lie.
Pitiful.
Another lie.
The total number of plants and animals that have “not budged” in tens of millions of years is ZERO.
Zero.
Everything has changed. 10 million years ago, EVERYTHING was different.
Even the so-called “living fossils”.
Sharks? Different millions of years ago.
Coelacanths? Different millions of years ago.
Brachiopods? Different millions of years ago.
Horseshoe crabs? Different millions of years ago.
The “living fossils” are only similar to what they were millions of years ago. They are not the same.
Humans? Different as little as 10 thousand years ago, with different frequencies and distributions of lactose intolerance, salivary amylase and FOXP2.
And then there are the examples of living things that have been observed to change within living memory.
All these the texpip has been told.
And yet it has the nerve to even think of saying such a baldfaced lie.
Ethical bankruptcy all the way down.
Pathetic.
Another lie. The texpip has been given COUNTLESS examples in the past, and it always picks the least impressive of them all to claim as the “top dog” and ignores all the others.
How more intellectually dishonest can one get?
How about a lizard developing an entirely new organ?
A mutation that doubled brain size in hominids when it first duplicated it once, and tripled it when it duplicated it a second time?
A bacteria gaining the ability to metabolize a nutrient that its inability to metabolize was part of the species definition for that bacterium (since bacteria don’t do sexual reproduction and therefore the interfertility definition does not apply to them)?
Whereas the texpip’s “alternative” can’t explain the origin of ANY novel bio-feature. All it does is presuppose them all to have appeared, fully formed, from the start.
So why does the texpip try to apply this criteria as criticism for the theory of evolution, but ignore it when considering its own “alternative”?
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Pathetic.
Remember, the texpip’s “alternative” is DEGENERATIVE. Everything started perfect and complete, and deteriorates from there. New novel biological features ARE NOT ALLOWED in the texpip’s “model”, the have to have existed from the beginning, to be later lost or retained.
But the fossil record shows novel biological features appearing all the time.
Once there were no multicellular organisms. Then there were.
Once there were no teeth. Then there were.
Once “fish” had no fins. Then they had them.
Once there were no eyes. Then there were.
And even worse for the texpip’s “model”, these novel features appear at different times. Forget the actual dating of the strata, and just consider their order.
The texpip’s “model” only allows for ONE creation event. There should be ONLY ONE appearance of novel biological features, at the beginning, and NO OTHERS, anywhere, ever again.
And thus the texpip’s useless “model” is falsified.
*POOF*
Another example of the texpip’s dishonesty.
Evolutionary theory explains complexity by positing an accumulation of simple steps.
We show the texpip an example of such a step and the texpip derides it for being too simple.
And yet that is EXACTLY what evolutionary theory says should be the case.
Which of course has already been explained to the texpip.
But the coward just ignores that and continues with its lies.
Pathetic.
Another lie by the texpip.
It has already been explained to the texpip multiple times that the common ancestor was NOT the first lifeform. (The common ancestor was actually a relatively sophisticated cell, the product of its own long history of evolution, that lived in an ecosystem of many other cells. It’s the common ancestor by dint of the fact that it’s descendents survived to the present day, while the descendents of all its contemporaries did not.
Mutations and natural selection began from the moment the first partially self-replicating molecule appeared (it didn’t even need to be wholly self-replicating).
And before that, the laws of chemistry “reigned supreme”.
Fire is also a “raw accident”.
It can only happen if a molecule of oxygen smashes into a molecule of fuel fast enough to overcome the binding energies of both molecules, causing the two molecules to combine/rearrange themselves, and liberate a small amount of bond-energy in the process.
And all oxygen molecules move entirely at random, in random directions, and at random speeds.
While all fuel molecules more entire at random, in random directions, and at random speeds.
A collision at just the right angle, with just the right energy of two molecules (very, very tiny things, occupying very little volume) must be a vanishingly unlikely event.
And yet, matches burn.
texpip the cowardly liar still avoiding replying to this:
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/14/2794.full
Pathetic.
And this supernatural being was super duper complex. Mind bogglingly complex. Complex beyond comprehension. The complexest thing evah.
But it does not require any explanation. It was just always there. Or poofed into existence all on its own one random moment.
And yet, somehow, things much, much, much less complex than that, like whale echolocation (just lumps of meat bouncing sound waves around in water, sheesh), can ONLY be designed.
Here’s some ancient sharks from many millions of years ago
http://hinchu.blogspot.ca/2009/08/ancient-sharks.html
The texpip apparently thinks these look exactly the same as modern sharks.
Here’s an ancient shark from just 3 (maybe 2) million years ago
http://blog.everythingdinosaur.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Megalodon_web.jpg
Looks more like a modern shark, doesn’t it?
Oh wait. That thing was almost 60 feet long.
And the texpip claims that nothing has changed for millions of years.
And here’s a modern shark whose type first appeared 20 million years ago. It DID NOT EXIST before that.
http://www.fossilguy.com/gallery/vert/fish-shark/sphyrna/hammer_sketch.jpg
And the texpip claims that animals did not evolve.
See how the texpip evades the question? Tries to change the topic?
Anything to avoid having to answer yet another of the many questions that utterly destroy everything it has been trying to argue, with ease.
Pathetic coward.
Another example of evolutionary changed observed in near real time.
http://www.setur.fo/uploads/tx_userpubrep/A_molecular_characterization_of_the_charismatic_Faroe_house_mouse.pdf
All that change occurred in the last 250 years.
A few more examples of directly observed speciations, appearance of new genetic information, beneficial mutations, morphological changes, new organs and so forth.
http://phylointelligence.com/observed.html
Oh, I am so glad to hear that you accept the reality of physical mutations.
You disbelieve so much of observable physical reality as a result of your literal-bible misconceptions, that I figured it was even odds that you would end up denying them after all – when pressed to answer yes or no.
No surprise, it turns out you want to deny their implications, but at least you have the sanity to admit that they actually exist. So now we have a baseline.
Now we have agreement on the first premise Mutations always happen.
Baby steps, baby steps.
Next question:
Do you accept that at least some (small number of) mutations occur which turn out to be beneficial to the organism that has one?
I know you already mocked sickle cell/malaria resistance – so think about some other examples you’ve heard. Are any of them true examples?
Now, we’re not going to argue about whether some (small number of) beneficial mutations could be enough to result in the evolved biosphere we observe. Not now. You can afford to be honest about this without worrying that your entire case for creationism will collapse. God may work through beneficial mutations. How would you know god doesn’t work that way … but that’s not the topic of discussion right now.
Baby steps, baby steps. Think about a beneficial mutation on about the same level as finding a dollar on the sidewalk – a little bit of good luck, not an almost miraculous stroke of good fortune.
Do you accept that can occur and has occurred at least some times in our life history ? Yes or No?
Wwwwwwwwwwwow.
Heh, understatement. Mitochondria are very important in apoptosis.
Dude… those are observed facts. Both of them. I’ve seen them happen with my own eyes, on a petri dish. I’m sure I’ve told you the details at least once.
Both of these facts can be explained very easily:
Mutagens are always present, the replication machinery always makes a small but nonzero amount of mistakes (if nothing else, quantum physics makes it impossible to be perfect), and so does the repair machinery, which furthermore doesn’t even detect every mutation in the first place. The numbers for all of these can be looked up; do it already.
Selection never ceases because there’s always an environment present. No matter what that environment is or how (if at all) it changes, the next generations will trivially always be composed of the descendants of those that had the largest number of surviving fertile offspring.
No, we assess mutations scientifically. You do presuppositions based on your fallacious belief in your imaginary creator and errant babble.
Until you can show conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary creator, and that your babble is not a book of mythology/fiction, you have nothing but your delusions. You are a delusional fool without evidence. Nothing but fallacious unprovable presuppositions and idiocy based on those presuppositions. You can’t show you idea is right. You can’t show anything. You have no authority to say what science is or isn’t. You have nothing but your inane, fallacious, and fuckwitted OPINION
You pretend AUTHORITY because you’re a delusional fool who thinks that is how one argues. Religious fools argue from fallacious authority like you do. Scientists argue from evidence. Which is why every time you fail to show evidence for your imaginary deity, science wins. And it wins with every post you make, as you have acknowledged you can’t prove it exists. Shutting the fuck up is the only way you show the world you aren’t an abject loser.
So, no theory yet, tx?
No model?
Willing to admit can’t or won’t yet?
. . .
Wait a sec… where are you getting your information for claiming some creatures haven’t changed in millions of years?
Not, I presume, from modern biologists, who are all incompetent because they accept evolution.
Presumably, you get all of your biological information from non-peer-reviewed sources, right?
First of all, if you think being resistant to malaria is ‘pathetic’, you’re kinda dumb.
Secondly, could you give an example of a “novel bio-feature”, as you see it? As in, something living creatures do that’s not a modification of something else?
Lastly, can I take it you believe that no animal ever has kids that are smarter, stronger, faster, more colorful, sing louder, digest more efficiently, or ever do anything better than they do due to genetic change?
I ask because that is exactly and precisely what you have to believe to keep insisting that all mutations are deleterious.
Unless, of course, you believe something else is at work here, which apparently you don’t, because if you did, you would have told us about it.
I question that: rather, it doesn’t, in the human case, make enough difference to outweigh the cost of repairing yourself better. There are many species (many birds, for example) that live and remain fertile long enough to have children younger than some of their great-great-great-grandchildren.
Incidentally, the link Amphiox gave has at least one embarrassing error, under “Observed endosymbiosis”, claiming of an example of observed endosymbiosis, that “Effectively these two prokaryotes form a new eukaryotic cell”. In fact, both partners in the endosymbiosis are eukaryotes, and (this isn’t addressed to you, David!) there’s no way a eukaryotic cell could arise from two prokaryotes in a single step: extensive changes must have followed the initial endosymbiosis (see Nick Lane’s Life Ascending, Ch.4 for a popular exposition).
…and just to chime in, that’s only to humans.
It’s a lot more often to rodents.
Or roaches.
Or bacteria.
You’re right! Turtles in particular do that; they get more fertile as they get older.
The studies aren’t finished yet, for obvious reasons, but so far it seems like turtles don’t senesce at all.
Another is that the herring gulls are a much worse example of a ring species than it acknowledges. A good one are the Ensatina salamanders in California.
Including those in the guts of the mice and the roaches.
“There are no senescence genes, o naive txpiper. There’s just no natural selection on humans to repair themselves better: once you’ve raised your grandchildren, staying healthy won’t make you have a larger number of surviving fertile great-grandchildren, so it doesn’t make a difference if you die.
Let that sink in.”
I think I’ll let that sink out. There is more to aging than natural selection doesn’t love you anymore.
http://genomics.senescence.info/genes/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_aging
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_repair-deficiency_disorder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence
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Hotshoe, I will respond when I have time. Thanks for your post.
Seven mistakes txpiper is still making.
1) Thinking its OPINION is scientific. It’s not, and never will be science. It cannot refute science. It is nothing but noise.
2) Thinking that refuting science proves its’ idea. The two are separate, and disproving one does nothing for the other.
3) Thinking that its idea is scientific. It isn’t until it is published in the peer reviewed scientific literature.
4) Thinking it doesn’t have to show conclusive physical evidence that its imaginary creator exists. This is a must for a scientific theory, and the evidence should be independent of biology. Gaps in biology prove nothing for his imaginary creator. Until that evidence is presented, his inane idea is nothing but noise.
5) Thinking its babble is inerrant. Like its imaginary deity, it must stand or fall on the evidence.
6) Thinking science isn’t refuted by only more science. More science is absolutely required in order to refute science. And science is in very short supply from txpiper. Nothing but noise.
7) Thinking questions can refute science. Nothing but more noise, as txpiper has no answers either. Its creator is vaporware and non-existent, and its babble is a book of mythology fiction. No answers from phanstasms and fiction.
From the texpip’s own citation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence
A testable hypothesis about senescence PRODUCED BY EVOLUTIONARY THEORY.
ANOTHER testable hypothesis about senescence PRODUCED BY EVOLUTIONARY THEORY. One that even has been tested.
YET ANOTHER testable hypothesis about senescence PRODUCED BY EVOLUTIONARY THEORY.
On the other hand, the cowardly liar texpip again avoids mentioning the fact that its “alternative” to evolution HAS NO EXPLANATION FOR SENESCENCE AT ALL.
Intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Utterly pathetic.
And a single reading of the texpip’s other link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_aging pretty much demonstrates that progeria very likely has little, if anything at all to do with regular senescence.
So the texpip’s inclusion of it is just another pathetic dishonest stunt in an attempt at misdirection.
Either that or the idiot didn’t even bother to read its own links before posting them.
Notice how the texpip, pathetic and desperate, continues to do absolutely anything, anything, to deflect attention to its continuing failure to respond to this:
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/14/2794.full
Utterly pathetic.
yep, doesn’t have the honesty and integrity to put up the scientific refutation, or the honesty and integrity to shut the fuck up if he can’t scientifically refute the idea. So all he can do is play the con-man. Pretend he speaks from AUTHORITY, but when that pretend AUTHORITY is challenged, can’t back anything up. How does one spell F-R-A-U-D and L-I-A-R.
”Another evolutionary theory of aging was proposed by George C. Williams[13] and involves antagonistic pleiotropy. A single gene may affect multiple traits. Some traits that increase fitness early in life may also have negative effects later in life. But, because many more individuals are alive at young ages than at old ages, even small positive effects early can be strongly selected for, and large negative effects later may be very weakly selected against.”
This is a good example of someone being unhappy because mutations and helpful fairies were left out of the picture, and formulating “another” idea to fit the facts into evolutionary theory. If he is correct, his theory is an expose of the actual nature of mutations.
===
From the Early Aging link, titled in honor of the fact that there is a norm:
“Scientists are particularly interested in progeria because it might reveal clues about the normal process of aging.”
“Progerin may also play a role in normal human aging, since its production is activated in senescent wildtype cells.”
“normal” is a good word to notice, since it elicits the obvious reality that there is such a thing as abnormal human aging. In this case of Progeria, a single point mutation is responsible for a screwed up protein and horrible results, which actual science predicts. This is, of course, antagonistic to your sappy ideas about environment being either receptive or hostile to mutations.
Progeria and George C. Williams theory of a single gene adversely affecting multiple traits well illustrate the real and true nature of DNA replication errors, the supposed thundering engine of evolutionary change. The evolutionary fantasies about mutations are in stark contrast to everything medical researchers contend with.
“normal” bugs you, doesn’t it?
===
“continuing failure to respond to this:
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/14/2794.full “
“Here this method is used to observe information gain in the binding sites for an artificial ‘protein’ in a computer simulation of evolution…demonstrating that information gain can occur by punctuated equilibrium.”
This was in no way scientific research. This was cooked. Schneider went into this believing his premise and came out of it self-reassured. There is no way in hell one person with a computer can approximate genetic information with a computer simulation. You should be embarrassed even bringing something like this up, particularly in view of the fact that PE requires every assumed rule about evolution is off the table so things can happen fast, fast, fast. PE is just a sorry apology for the fossil record not supporting the theory. Would you like me to quote Gould on that point?
===
You keep emphasizing, and I can easily agree, that you have at least 100 new mutations that your parents didn’t have. So freakin what? Are you advantaged? Are you going places and developing new features? Is that where democrats come from?