If you ever want to see the typical course of a creationist’s visit to Pharyngula, we’ve got a good example in medic0506, who showed up to argue and then didn’t. I mostly ignored him, but his announcement that he was disappointed caught my eye.
I was told on DDO that there were actual scientists here who would engage in informal argumentation, so since I’ve had my fun with the whineylibs, I’ll scroll through an see if there is any valid posts by someone who wishes to have a discussion rather than just try to scratch my eyeballs out.
This is standard noise from creationists: get thrown lots of evidence, then claim that there was no evidence and they’re all so very tired of it. So I thought I would take a look at his posting history here to see what kind of substantial, thought-provoking, evidence-based arguments he had made.
Surprise. There weren’t any.
He’s very proud to have coined the term “National Coven for the Solicitation of Evolutionism” for the NCSE. He thinks it fits because Eugenie Scott reminds him of the wicked witch
. Why? Because she lied and said Meyer’s awful paper, The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories, didn’t mention ID (what? It was an ID paper; the whole issue with that is that it was smuggled in by a creationist editor friendly to the idea, making a farce of peer review). As evidence, he provided this video:
I really would not want to cite that as favorable to intelligent design creationism. Meyer was disgraceful, Eugenie was patient and calm, and she didn’t say what medic0506 claimed she said.
Then he declares that he is a young earth creationist. In reply to a comment that he’s flat-out denying the overwhelming scientific consensus, he waves away that little problem of contradicting physics, chemistry, and geology by saying it only takes 1 to be right
.
Next we learn That “old book” [the Bible], on the other hand, paints an accurate picture of what nature should, and does look like, so I see no need to disregard it in favor of what others believe.
He then ignores all the comments that point to verses in the Bible that paint a very inaccurate picture of the world. Sometimes the absence of a reply is as damning as the content of a reply.
When confronted with standard evidence for an ancient universe, like the existence of galaxies farther away than 6000 light years, he simply denies it: your belief in deep time is heavy on theory but light on actual evidence
.
The rest is just repetitive noise, and then he starts talking about retreat because there is a dearth of scientists here. He can’t make a single positive argument for his goofy beliefs, and his entire visit was simply an exercise in evasion.
Unimpressed. Bored. That’s why I didn’t bother to engage with yet another asinine fool stopping by — he had nothing to discuss, and he knew that if he brought up any actual arguments for a young earth or creation by divine poofery, he’d have his head handed to him.
Yay! We have a major eruption of kookery from medic0506!
I’m willing to be proven wrong on this, but I don’t believe that starlight is something that actually physically travels to earth, in order for us to see it. I think that light is emitted from an energy source, and if the amount of energy released as light is enough, the object will be bright enough for our eyes to see it from earth. I don’t buy when someone argues that starlight has been traveling for billions of years to get here. Feel free to prove me wrong by proving the current understanding of light travel, but no one else so far has been able to address this without just throwing more theoretical BS at it.
So light doesn’t actually travel at some limited speed, but if it’s really, really bright, it is instantly transported to our eyes. All that empirical evidence, all those measurements of the speed of light…that’s all just theoretical BS. Why should we throw out all of physics? Because a creationist thinks brightness can substitute for velocity.
AJ Milne,
The Gish Go-slow?
The Gish Gabble?
Page 3?
How long before he gets *here*?
really
page fucking 3
How long before medic gets here?
Reading at an apparent rate of fewer than thirty comments per day?
Ummm… Middle of June?
Thank you for the link Tigger. I didn’t know such sites existed, debate sites. I don’t know how you could solve a problem like “Should Gender Identity Be Predicated on Biological Sex?” by debating. The answer to such a question shouldn’t depend on someone’s debating skills. But I guess a lot of people go on the internet to throw their opinions around rather than to find out what is happening in the world. Strange people.
Tigger/1001:
Both good…
(/Gish goldbrick?)
He’s being facetious. And it’s a comment of causality. Suppose you were in the 4th grade and you were told “angular motion is conserved; imagine a figure skater is spinning– if he spreads out his arms his radius is increased and he must spin slower”. Well, a confused 4th grader might ask “how do the skates know whether the skater has his arms out or not.” It means the 4th grader doesn’t understand why the state of the arms necessitates nor how it causally triggers a change in rotation. She doesn’t mean she actually thinks the arms speak to the skates. In fact she knows the arms don’t speak to the skates but she doesn’t understand how else the state of the arms and the rate of rotation can be irrevocably causally correlated.
I fear I might be responsible for this snark in that I asked about how placing a prism light-years between a two points and will cause the light to instantaneously (in medic’s worldview) to a third point. As light is imediate this is an instaneous change between these two points light years apart by the placing of a prism also light years apart. How, I asked, could a single change in structure be instantaneously transferred to all potential points in the entire universe simultaneously (and it’d have to be to all potential points as I could have placed the prism facing any direction). So I asked “how does the third point know that you put a prism there”.
As a snark, medic0 fails as the brain “knows” the angle because the photon showed up on this point of the retina rather than another. No snark. Direct and obvious correlation only.
AJ Milne, thanks! This could go on for a while…
Bicarbonate is back,
I had no idea either. But, from what little I’ve seen of it (and unlike live debates), that site seems to put a deal of stock in links and evidence. A bit like Pharyngula, methinks!
As far as photons are concerned, I get the impression that medic0506 hasn’t really given it any deep thought, but has the vague idea that there is one photon for each image we see (and the retina is one big receiver, not billions of tiny ones).
That would explain some of his stranger comments, anyway, like the one about how the brain knows the angle of the photon before it hit the retina if it is travelling (if it is stationary, then of course the brain knows what angle it is making with the retina).
In other words, we see the star in real time because of the humungous photon between it and our eye…
Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened, 983
I’m actually getting a bit annoyed medic still has done nothing to respond to my comment in the dome very shortly after his arrival, except to ignore its existence so he can continue spouting his bullshit about ‘vision’ and light not traveling. Not surprising since the tools described rely entirely upon electromagnetic radiation (of which human visible light is only a tiny portion of the entire spectrum) traveling at an accurately measurable constant rate (through vacuum, or through a material transparent to that wavelength of EM) and cannot be hand-waved away as because they are used every single fucking day all across the world in robots (e.g. various forms of lidar), entertainment (e.g. structured lighting of kinectv1, phase-modulated TOF of kinectv2), manufacturing quality assurance (e.g. x-ray examination of BGA solder quality, structured light examination of dimensional tolerances), food safety and quality rating (e.g. x-ray examination for bone contamination or improper can sealing, microwave examination of water content in plant matter, certain flavor/ripeness properties and disease detection using infrared), atmospheric observations (e.g. UV-Vis-IR optical imaging, and TOF of radio bursts otherwise known as radar), air traffic control (e.g. radar, radio broadcast beacons, GPS), etc.
<hops off his hobby-horse>
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge, 986
The response of the creationist that accepts light travels, Iredia, from DDO when plagiarized by biasevolution was essentially ‘we just don’t yet know the limitations that were placed on the creator that required it to made that way, but there is a really good reason that we’ll figure out some day and then it will all make perfect sense without evolution.’
I expanded on my comment above in the other thread.
I was inspired by my three-year-old grandson wanting to open my bathroom door (the door handle is well out of his reach); he usually uses my grabber stick but I’d left it in the band hall last week, so he wanted to use my walking stick (cane). In explaining why he couldn’t, I visualised him standing there, looking upwards, with the stick held out in front of him…
1001:
Argument from “I will get around to it eventually!”
I haven’t been following too closely for the last day or three, but as far as I am aware, the fruitcake still maintains there is no such thing as a photon (and would if they exist and ever entered the eye), light does not involve anything traveling, and, maybe, starlight is not the same thing as, for instance, candlelight (I’m not sure he’s ever been clear on that point?). As such, I’m unconvinced he has the above-quoted vague idea, other than as a vague “model” of why photons don’t exist, etc., etc., etc.
Having said that, such a vague idea does seem to loosely correlate with at least some of his assertions. But so does tiny dragons constantly flying out of your nose, each then memorizing the details of something in the universe (except themselves), and returning to hover in front of your face until you happen to glance, with eyes open, at whatever a particular tiny flying-eye dragon memorized. When you do so glance, it enters your eye and breaths fire on your retina, causing you to “see” what the dragon memorized. It then exits via the nose, to begin the cycle again.
Wait. So you took a system that answered questions clearly and concisely[*] and replaced it with a system that not only doesn’t answer the questions but makes their premises impossible?
and trivial
Then you are a fucking idiot.
===
[*]answers to your trivial questions.
…Why are people near-sighted or far-sighted, if our eyes are just photon receptors that don’t play a primary role in vision?
Convergent rays of light passed through a lens is refracted and brought to a focal point. A able-sighted persons eyeball will be shaped so that her retina is aligned at the focal point. A near-sight or far-sighted person’s retina isn’t.
Um, where on earth did you get the idea that photon receptors don’t play a primary role in vision? They play the most important role in vision.
And near/far-sightednes occurs *because* the eyes are photon receptors. How on earth could near/far-sightedness exist *other* than something faulty with the photon receptors.
Why macular degeneration??
Damage to the retina. The retina reacts to photons. If the retina is damaged in spots, it doesn’t react and vision is impaired.
Why should people see spots before their eyes?? Obviously those spots aren’t being put there by photons of light, so why do people see them??
Congealed vitreous jelly and discarded blood vessels float inside your eyeballs. They deflect and block light and cast shadows and alter the path of light onto the retinas. So, yes, the spots *are* being seen as a result of photons of light.
Why do we see “stars” even though our eyes are closed, after getting hit with a baseball??
A disturbance to the vitreous sac behind the retina stimulates the cells and nerves responsible for sight. As the same nerves and cells are responsible for sight the result is the same. (Nothing to do with light.)
Why blurry vision?? Do some photons appear blurry because they splatter on impact with your eye as a result of their millions-of-miles journey at 671,000,000 mph??
Sight is many millions of photons at once. The light we see comes for a very narrow angular range of rays of light, which for proper focus remain in tight formation. In passing through the eye and its components they are refracted several times. Blurriness occurs if the through the refraction they are spread too far apart or not brought together tightly enough.
If light doesn’t travel, then with no change in speed is possible, and refraction is unexplained. In your model, focus is not alterable.
How do people hallucinate while under the influence of certain drugs??
The parts of the brain responsible for processing vision is stimulated.
How is it that people who suffer from certain psychiatric disorders see things that aren’t really there??
I don’t know. You tell me.
Sorry. You stepped into that one. But again the visual center of the brain is being stimulated.
medico can’t click on links. See, clicking on a link results in a packet of electrons being sent through a wire to a server, and more digital information being sent to other servers, followed by some computer done by a remote CPU, followed by more signals sent back to your computer. Some of the physical links that transmit these packets of digital information are fibre optic cables, through which photons travel, at the speed of light (bouncing around the various surfaces of the cable, so the information actually travels slower than lightspeed).
Since photons don’t travel for medico, he can’t follow links. We will have to copy-paste it for him in its entirety, like so:
190. Snoof:
Ya know, for a person of even average intelligence to put forth a dishonest strawman like this of what’s being said, you really have to want people to see you as a dishonest person with no credibility. Either that, or you aren’t of even average intelligence, and can’t follow 8 lines of text while understanding the meaning and keeping the thoughts expressed within, in their proper context. I doubt you’d be here if the problem was related to lack of intelligence, so I have to believe that the former, is the case.
Those are the only things that predate upon GOATS ON FIRE!!!
191. Kevin:
And how exactly were those lineages “traced”??
Still no evidence of a god. There’s also no evidence that biology, physics, or anything else in science is false. Nothing but a lot of incoherent bullshit. You are losing this “debate,” medic0506.
you don’t even know what a strawman is. Your knowledge of logical fallacies is on a par with your knowledge of biology and physics
did you look up Dunning Kruger syndrome?
you, like all creationists, suffer from it most severely.
I think I get it now.
since photons don’t exist, and light doesn’t travel, then nothing discovered using the EM method can be considered actual evidence.
The structure of DNA was discovered using X-ray crystallography. X-rays are part of the electromagnetic spectrum. therefore, we didn’t discover the structure of DNA, and DNA doesn’t exist, so we can’t compare the relatedness of species using DNA.
Is that about right?
I still want to know how refraction works. :(
Pick up a copy of Miller and Levine’s basic biology text and find out for yourself!
since you have never actually read even a high school level biology text, it would do you worlds of good to find out actually what it is you want to argue against.
It never ceases to amaze me that ignorant dolts feel the most qualified to pontificate about subjects they know nothing about.
but then, I’m certainly not the first to notice that.
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
-Charles Darwin
seriously, here is the level at which you should be reading about biology, Medico:
http://www.millerandlevine.com/Texas/index.html
why, it’s obvious isn’t it?
since your eyeball is curved, you can curve the lightbeams you shoot out of your eyes, thus centripetal force then causes the light to refract.
…and then you get rainbows!
quickly followed by pink fluffy unicorns dancing on them.
medic0506,
You have been rather stingy with your answers to questions about your theory or light…or just about anything else, for that matter. However, let us be charitable. Science is ultimately about predictive power. The Big Bang Theory predicts that the Cosmic Microwave Background should show a blackbody (thermal) spectrum with a temperature of about 2.7 K. It predicts further that since there was an inflationary epoch that there will be inhomogeneities of a given size. Both of these predictions have been confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt with error bars so small they are obscured by the line through the data points.
Do your theories yield any predictions, or are they just so stories, and so, not science.
Ever hear of the genome? Your book of mythology/fiction, and your imaginary deity, know nothing about it, so you know nothing about it. That is called pure ignorance….
Already done, and the answers are quite satisfactory (enough so that we can actually build things that work based on this model).
It doesn’t need to have a “GPS”, nor does your eye need to “know” the numerical value of the angle at which it enters. If it enters at an incorrect angle, the photons don’t land in the right spot in the eye. This causes a blurry, smeared out image. Have you ever looked through a telescope, or even a pair of binoculars? It’s the same fundamental error that happens with out of focus. In a normal eye, incoming photons are focused onto the retina, which produces the image that the brain interprets as the object.
In the case of a near-sighted (myopia) person, the incoming photons focus in front of the retina rather than on it (causing the photons to hit the retina in different places, smearing the image), blurring images that aren’t close to the person. For far-sightedness (hyperopia), the focus is located behind the retina, again causing a blurring of the image, but this time images are blurred if they’re too close to the person.
There are a number of things that can go wrong in the eye to cause the photons to not focus properly (axial length of the eye, size of the eyeball, excessively curved cornea, non-constant ocular media, etc.), but it’s easy, using the principles of optics on which light travel is based, to fix the problem. For myopia, glasses with concave lenses correct the focus by altering the incoming light wave (i.e. stream of photons) so that it properly focuses on the retina. For hyperopia, glasses with convex lenses achieve the same result. Note that this correction has absolutely nothing to do with fixing the problematic parts of your eye; it has only to do with altering incoming light.
Macular degeneration is caused by damage to the retina. It has nothing to do with light itself, and nobody to my knowledge has ever claimed that it does.
By “spots”, I’m guessing you mean floaters or cataracts. Floaters are little bits of material floating (hence the name) in the vitreous humour of the eye. Photons that strike them are refracted; floaters often appear blurry because they have a different index of refraction (causing them to not focus properly) than the vitreous humour they float in. Cataracts are caused by an excess opaqueness in the lenses of your eye (which can be caused, as with most eye issues, by many things), which also causes incoming photons to not be focused properly.
Blurry vision is explained above. The rest are actually an issue of the brain, not the eye itself. When you get hit, it causes a false signal in the occipital lobe of the brain (which interprets the signals normally generated by incoming light through the eyes), and it then interprets this false signal as the “stars” you see when hit in the head. Hallucinations work slightly differently, but they are also caused by problems in the brain, not the eyes. And it’s worth noting that we’re not actually talking about light in these cases, and nobody would claim we are.
Before dismissing the current understanding wholesale, it’d be worthwhile to actually look to see what said understanding says about these issues.
See above. The present understanding answers all of these questions completely (for the ones that actually involve light, rather than brain issues; that part belongs to neurology, not optics).
Define what you mean by this. Do you mean that vision plays a primary role in light? If this is the case, the ability to make photographs of light-emitting things when nobody is around to visualize them is a clear disproof.
If the eyes are “more than just photon receptors”, why is it that we can fix issues with the eyes via pieces of glass designed with the understanding that eyes are exactly that?
blf 1013
I love your little dragons.
medico0506 trolled some tripe about every animal being dedigned with the same general proteins so they can eat each other. Faugh.
First, if a good designer was to set up a digestive system, she’d run it so everything was broken clear down to individual atoms. That would eliminate all poisons and incompatibilities, and let the creature build back up exactly what was needed.
The costs of breaking down and building back up would average out in a good system. Or at least an intelligently-designed system. The fact that this doesn’t happen is support for a kludgey mess cobbled up from worm guts and getting by.
Second, God pretty much designed animals to only eat vegetation, before the Fall, at least according to Ken Ham. So why would us predators have anything designed to digest anything but the plants and herbs designed as food?
Third, the issue came up when we were talking about other homologies such as
I once crossed the Wallace line on an Indonesian ferryboat from Bali to Lombok.
Usually I can understand creationists. Their concepts tend to be simple and as I’m rather fond of following hypotheticals to see where they lead, I don’t really mind entertaining their premises and concepts.
However there is one thing about medic0’s arguments I simply do not understand. I simply do not understand why he brought vision into a discussion of light travel and why he thinks light travel is problem with the concept of vision. What’s more he seems to think this problem is obvious and self-evident as well that instantaneous light transferal solves the problem. I honestly have no idea what he means. He seems to think that be regulating eyes to “just” photon-receptors, that, by definition, makes them incapable of having a “primary role” in vision. Medic, could you please explain why this should be so? Why should traveling light be any hindrance to vision? (Indeed as traveling light allows refraction, traveling light is necessary for vision.)
Perhaps he has a problems with the idea that light is made of photons. I imagine he sees this as a million tiny individual bee-bees. It doesn’t occur to him that photons/light could equally intuitively be viewed as tiny individual drops (or better yet molecules) of water in a river. (Of course analogies are only analogies.)
Whatever the mechanics of light is, that it travels and the nature of optics had been known for centuries before any knowledge of its structure. And the explanation for optics/refraction based on lights speed had been known for over half a century.
So really, although modern (i.e. 130 year old) physics is useful for knowing the “nitty-gritty” it isn’t essential for the study vision and light travel and focus.
So medic0, instead of thinking of light as bee-bees shooting tiny targets in your eye-ball, think of it as a steady stream of water. Blurry (out of focus) is when the stream is too wide a stream and there is too much splash back. Focus is when the stream is fine and precise. Do you still find blurriness a problem?
And don’t claim I changed the model on you. We merely claimed light was made of photons. Water is made of molecules. They are both particles.
Oh, and I love the dragons too.
Damn touch screen.
…. other homologies such as number of arm bones. A chicken has the same arm bone count as I do so I can keep scoffing wings?
May I remind everyone that we have a major clash between Mediocre’s Group A worldview and rational people’s Group H worldview. (I define this nomenclature below.)
By definition, people with a Group A worldview privilege their chosen beliefs over any source of actual information. Their prime moral directive is to protect and defend their chosen beliefs against any and all contradiction.
Also by definition, a person with a group H worldview places his beliefs in a secondary level, strictly dependent on actual evidence. Their moral directive with respect to beliefs is that any and all beliefs must yield to evidence of reality.
Mediocre, being in group A, must ignore evidence, must deny reality, must lie about evidence and about his opponents — failure to so defend his choice of beliefs would violate his morals. Too many A groupies take it further: history, ancient and recent, abounds with examples, from the YHWHists’ genocides to George Till’s single murder to the neoPETAists’ attacks to Boko Haram’s current atrocities. (Yes, there often are other factors, like territorial greed, involved in such defenses of faith. That doesn’t change things unless defending the faith is actually absent.) I don’t see Mediocre as being quite that fervent, but I can only hope that my assessment is correct.
Group A worldviews are found in many different places. Religions, of course, are obvious, but conspiracy theories are prime loci, as are antivaxxers and other reality-denialists.
You seldom see those defenders-of-the-faith behaviors from Group H worldviews; I can’t come up with any examples (that inadequacy is not submitted as proof of absence).
———————————————————-
I need mnemonic devices sometimes, because of the way my mind works. The ‘A’ and ‘H’ nomenclature is one such device: ‘A’ refers to the arrogance of faith; ‘H’, the humility of science.
woozy #1030
He doesn’t, really. Light travel is a problem for his preferred age of the universe. The problems associated with vision are a result of his denial of the universal speed of light.
This all ties back to his allegiance to the idea that the universe if very young. In order to defend that, he must deny any evidence that shows different, part of which is the speed of light.
Well, to play devil’s adv… er, god’s advocate, a creationist doesn’t have to claim God was a good designer (or even a designer at all), just that the critters were spontaneously generated in diverse and complete form. However to be a creationist with scientific inclinations though, one has to ask why one would believe in an inefficient designer who designs only along neighboring functionality[1] but not globally functionality, when a model of evolution would be much simpler[2].
[1] I’m wording it poorly, but by “neighboring functionality” I mean each vertebrate has similar eyes but when it comes to insects they have another and then squids and octopuses have a third (likewise bone structures and… *everything* ….) and never *once* does the structure of one isolated feature get replicated in other organism that does not have an equal similarity in the structure of *all* features regardless of function. If there is a designer, He is a very blind and narrow focused one.
By “global functionality” I mean … if a bat’s wing works it should exist on something else that isn’t a bat. Nothing mammalian has bird-like wings and nothing avian has insect-like wings.
[2] And, yes, evolution *is* simpler. Evolution has one process over a very long time. Creationism has several thousand spontaneous acts of generation withing a single day and work of intense upheaval.
God’s advocate again. Medic0 never indicated he was a Ken Ham follower. In fact he has revealed little about his creator other than that as medic0 is a creationist it follows there is a creator.
Ken Ham really should be a weirdo even among creationists. He has a lot of interpretation of scripture manifest into his model which no yec genesis 1-3 is true literally, need apply. Although Ken Ham and all creationists suffer the same problem as a model of science. It relies on a model of *great* upheaval as within a six day period *everything* is torn asunder and massively spontaneously created and retrofitted in hectic mania, in complete contrast to the nature of the universe for the rest of all eternity.
Third, the issue came up when we were talking about other homologies such as
One thing I’ve noticed over the years, is that godbots tend to be absolutists, and can’t understand science since science is one of the first examples of continuous improvement,, where your ideas and evidence aren’t carved into stone at any point, and you need to re-examine why certain policies and methods were put in place, and if they are still working in this day and age. Since science is continuous improvement, what Charles Darwin said a 150 years ago may not apply today, due to improvements in analytical methods and general knowledge since then. Which is why real scientists laugh when creobots think Darwin is the “authority”about evolution. A hundred and fifty years of continuous improvement have shown Darwin wrong on several technical points, but right on his overall theory. So Darwin is simply another great scientist who had his moments of being wrong. But that doesn’t bother us one little bit.
One of the continuous improvements is cGMP. The “c” stands for current, and that is what drives the continuous improvement (or maybe evolution), of Good Manufacturing Processes. One feature of that is we must review our quality policies every two years to make sure they align with what is expected under ICH guidelines. Which aren’t static. Part of this is that we must also review our analytical systems and process systems every few years. If no new innovations are made in HPLC, our old methods can stand. If new analytical systems like UPLC become available, we need to evaluate our present methods against the new technology. Check for improvement. Same with our processes that form product. What can we do to improve the yield and quality? Sometimes the answer is nothing, but we do have to look.
The problems godbots/creobots/IDiots run into in dealing with scientists, is that there whole philosophy/sophistry is set up upon the Fallacy of Authority. Since science ignores their imaginary deity, they get panicky when their deity is ignored. Never mind they must provide the proper evidence: evidence that would pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained) origin. They just can’t see their authority derived from imaginary things, and mythical/fictional books will be laughed at and ignored. Pity, as it would save them a lot of embarrassment….
Empirically.
No one actually is claiming that eyes are “just” photon receptors. They are also photon collectors, photon refractors, photon concentrators, photon transducers, photon filters, photon imagers, and photon analyzers, among other things.
But it is ALL ultimately about the photons.
How sad that medico has devolved to dishonestly redefining even simple four letter words like “just” in order to make his pitiful arguments.
I would like to take a moment to sincerely thank medico for bringing up the “flash” in the eyes on a blow to the head. This is an EXCELLENT example of an imperfect feature that exists because lifeforms evolved from a common ancestor rather than being intelligently designed.
The number of humans (and other animals) who have died gruesome violent deaths in combat because a blow to the head momentarily disabled their vision with a flash is probably uncountable. It is a serious, serious FLAW, that any intelligent designer with even a half-pittance of competence would work hard to fix.
It exists solely because, instead of being designed properly, from the ground up, with optimally selected materials, for the task of detecting photons, the photoreceptor and other cells in animals eyes were kludged upon from pre-existing cell types inherited from a common ancestor that were previously used in OTHER types of sensory detection and signal transduction. This left them with one peculiar shared property: they transmitted information by changing their charge across their outer membranes. Which on the face of it is a very non-optimal way of doing things. Why have this critical information stored OUTSIDE the cell membrane, vulnerable to all sorts of environmental interferenences? PARTICULARLY when eukaryotic cells already possessed internal membranes and compartments in which the charge differential COULD have been created, and protected from the outside environment?
And a side effect of this suboptimal arrangement is that a sufficient deformation of the soft cell membrane (and there is no reason why a photon receptor cell even NEEDS to have its membrane be soft, rather than rigid, with a cell wall to protect from just this kind of deformation) will short circuit the signal pathway from the photoreceptor molecule and discharge the membrane potential of the cell even if no photon had been detected. (And it can also short circuit the signal pathway of the neurons the photoreceptors communicate with, causing THEM to fire even when the photoreceptor cell does not stimulate them).
This discharge with deformation property of course was useful in the cells that evolved into touch and pressure detectors, but it is absolutely useless in photoreceptor and visual neuron cells, but photoreceptor and visual neuron cells were saddled with this defect because they happened to share a common ancestry with the touch and pressure detector cells.
Thus if the brain/head/eye are subject to a large enough impact, the pressure wave from that impact travels through the organ, deforming the cell membranes and triggering aberrant firing of those cells all over the place which the brain, also kludged up and thus unable to recognize the difference between an aberrant signal and a real one, interprets as a flash of “light”.
So thank you, medico, for providing a wonderful and information example of the real-world consequences of evolution and common descent, and demonstrating yet again how organisms are decidedly NOT designed.
Well now, look at this!
REAL intelligent designers (ie humans) have just managed to create a living organism with a 6 DNA bases instead of 4.
So much for medico’s claim that the shared similarities (in this case 4 DNA bases) are the result of the shared environment of planet earth.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/07/living-organism-artificial-dna_n_5283095.html?ir=Science
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13314.html
The creationists may fap away, but science marches on, leaving them ever further in the dust.
@ opposablethumbs #989
Dang!
@ Menyambal
Ken has a ruse for that. YHWH programmed in a lot of redundancy, in order to make provision for the future expression of such traits. His world view is a whole Heath Robinson contraption of such little patches. He is terrified that any concession, however trivial, will form the thin end of the wedge, that will bring about a cascade of doubt and the collapse of said world view. I think he is quite right in that. My only disagreement with him wrt his thin-end-of-the-wedge concern, is that he sees this as somehow a bad thing.
@ Amphiox
While you are here. I have not noticed anyone bring up the role of mitochondria in our ability to see things. If you (or anyone else knowledgeable) have a few minutes and a fresh cup of coffee, it may be an interesting new avenue in this conversation.
@ medic0506
“Vision”: We have these icky bugs in our eyes that catch the dragons and tell our brains what to see. Its soooo GROSS, I tell you!!!
Well the most obvious role of mitochondria in sight is in generating the energy required to resynthesize photoreceptor proteins as they get continually bleached out in bright light. (Notice how even limited human intelligent designers can successfully manufacture photon receptors that can work multiple times, absorbing multiple photons and be reused, while living things have to make do with suboptimal fragile proteins that stop working after only a few uses, needing to be continuously and expensively replaced…)
And it is interesting that opthalmologic issues seem to be common in mitochondrial disorders….
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2989385/
@ Amphiox
This exemplifies another aspect of what is wrong with medic0506’s view of what an animal is. These mitochondria, once so carefree and happy with their lot, were cruelly press-ganged, and forced to hard labour in other animals’ cells.
It appears, at least to me, that the creationists are blind to such. I am not a human “Kind ™ ” … I am a seething colony of billions of bugs, with a smidgeon of ape thrown in for good measure.
and tapeworms
I had smidgeon of ape, once. They served the wrong wine with it.
Well, hopefully not.
On the other hand, don’t forget the eyelash mites! Or is that eyebrow mites? Considering they’re all (iirc) sub-microscopic, they probably won’t care that I can’t remember.
And the gut flora!
Seriously, whenever I think about how blindingly complex an ecosystem we are, how we have these other amazing systems ensuring homeostasis, how a whole world of electrical and chemical signalling is going on at amazing speeds inside us at every moment, and all that even before we start interacting with each other … and how that is only one infinitesimally tiny fraction of what is going on around us and which humans have actually learned to observe and understand in only a blink of an eye in historical terms … I can’t believe so many people are so desperate to drag the threadbare security blanket of a fictional fairytale creator/designer/skydaddy into the mix and get the screaming heebie-jeebies if you mention that there is no need for this hypothesis.
I sometimes wonder if it was a press-gang, or were they more enticed with the false promise of a warm meal and a comfy bed, only to be tricked into eternal slavery? Or did they barge in, savage pillagers, only to be tamed by their clever hosts?
Or was it a voluntary seduction, sealed with a porin kiss?
Or even a mutual suicide pact? (The apoptosis pathway originally came from mitochondria….)
@ chigau
Having seen through our ruse to add her muti to her food, Zoë has now been press-ganged into going to the vet.
@ Amphiox
To get an idea, we can look at their closest relatives: Cousin Pelagibacter ubique spends its time freely cruising the ocean waves. Second-cousin Wolbachia seems to be at a stage between the two…
This according to the Pfffft article on them.
It appears they might even have been responsible for Jesus of Nazareth (NB: No YHWH needed!):
Perhaps it was the other way around. There the phagocyte was, happily eating its dinner, when suddenly…. the dinner revolted.”No, you shall not have the sustenance needed to continue your own life”, said the dinner. “I shall remain here, never being digested, instead sucking all of my needs directly from you. You wanted to eat me? You will never get rid of me. Never.“
193. Nick G:
‘Nuff said right there to figure out where your problem lies. It lies in that you let evolutionists, who have obviously already made up their mind on how to interpret any data that comes in, get away with “asserting” their presupposition, rather than requiring them to provide real scientific evidence. You allow them to use assumption and extrapolation to “assert” what they want you to believe, without supporting them evidentially, and call it science.
Secondly, you make the mistake of allowing other people who are clearly biased on the issue, to speak for all of science and falsely tell you that “science says” this or that. Science does not say that all organisms have a common ancestor. Some scient-ISTS say that, but science says no such thing. Actual observational and experimental science shows that there is no known mechanism by which an organism turns into something that is different in form and function, than its ancestors. It shows that there are highly bounded variations within groups of organisms, and that there are discontinuities between these groups, with no known mechanism which is shown to bridge those gaps. That’s it, that’s what real science shows, and anyone who claims that science shows more than that is being dishonest with you.
If you know how reproduction works, then it’s not rocket science to figure out what needs to be done. Lack of availability, of the right kind of information, is the problem. Scientists looking for evidence for evolutionism are forced to try and gather data that they interpret, according to their a priori belief, then use that interpretation as their evidence, while ignoring contradictory evidence that falsifies their assumptions. And again, it’s important to note that evolutionists, and their methods do not speak for all of science.
Exactly, just as I said above. The evolutionary interpretation of genetic evidence is based on nothing more than a priori belief. “No functional significance” is an argument from ignorance, just like junk DNA, vestigial organs, homology as an indicator of ancestry, etc., and we all know how those ended up.
BTW, I’ll be addressing your link to talkorigins in another post, when I get time to write it up.
well I was about to say this thread just got better and better, and then medic0 showed up. *rolleyes*
Speaking of which… (eyes and awesomeness)
Colorblindness-correcting sunglasses
From the company’s How It Works page:
The diagram explains it better:
image link
Basically the lenses filter out more of the wavelengths NOT affected by colorblindness, so the remaining colors appear stronger in comparison, which allows them to be distinguished and ‘pop’ out as they do for ordinary color vision – on traffic lights, warning signs, diagrams and so forth.
medic0506, younreally need to catch up. We have covered all of your objections, repeatedly. You keep commenting on stuff from ‘way back, which is going to make any new arrivals think we haven’t been successful in refuting you.
This isn’t a sermon by you, so you don’t get to spout irrelevancies for the gullible. Get up to speed or get out.
Science does NOT have assumptions. Back when the assumption was that God had done it, science was the asking, “Are we sure about that?”
Everything else in your last post was wrong, too. You just assume and assert, and you make an ass of yourself.
@193, paraphrased: “I’ve never seen a monkey give birth to a frog, therefore, evolution is false”.
After a 1000 comments, the most basic explanations of the source of his error and the most polite questions to explain the logical requirements of his “theory” (principally, what stops small changes adding up to big ones), we’re literally no further on than we were at the start. He is fully impenetrable.
1051, Pteryxx
That is fantastic! My twins are colourblind, as is my father and one of my grandsons. It would be wonderful if they could see colour!
Also, thanks knowknot, back at #980. *blush*
I was writing from experience there – I *had* these same arguments, about creation and the relatedness of different wonderful animals, with my fundie christian teachers in first grade. It’s really not that hard to understand!
Notice how the liar medico continues to fail to provide the specifics about “what needs to be done”, and continues to evade the question.
Because he knows that the instant he provides an honest answer he will lose the argument.
The intellectual dishonesty is pathetically transparent.
Medic0506 lying and bullshitting
Sorry science hasn’t made up its mind how interpret the evidence, but you present no alternative with your imaginary deity. Why? It is imaginary, doesn’t exist until you provide evidence for it. And your mere testament is not and never will be that evidence….
199. Azhael:
OOPS
199. Azhael:
And your watered down, evolutionism-friendly definition of “science” is noted and met with, not contempt, but with refusal to accept it until it conforms to a more normal, meaningful definition of the word “science”. As it currently stands, “evolutionary science” is at best, a pseudo-science, junk science, and nothing more. No amount of foot-stomping, toddler-like temper tantrums, using vulgar language and name-calling, or just repeating the same assertions over and over, are going to make it any more valid. In fact, you do a tremendous disservice to real science when people who try and portray themselves as speaking for all of science, engage in the use of those tactics, as so many on this site do.
You do not own science, and while you are entitled to believe whatever you want, you have no right to re-define science for everyone else, or to try and enforce your beliefs onto all scientists. If “evolutionary science” and real science merge because of empirical evidential support, at some point in the future, so be it, but for now they are two totally separate entities and real science will continue with or without the permission of the evolutionary community.
tl;dr version…When it comes to science, you speak for yourself, not the entire scientific community.
MedicNo, can you cite some creationists doing actual scientific research? It seems like you have an entirely bass ackwards view of what science is. It’s up to you to link to credible sources, you know.
But you don’t even understand what science is, or what evolutionary science is. How can you determine if it is a real science or not?
More lies and bullshit by Medic0506
Sorry unscientific idjit, you lose. Your imaginary deity is not scientific, and won’t be until you can provide conclusive physical evidence to show it exists, and did what you claim it did. Until then, you have nothing but pseudo science, as your delusions aren’t accepted by working scientists, nor will they be until you shut the fuck up and point to the evidence.
Menyambal/#1052:
I dunno. I kinda figure anyone reading is more likely to see his effort as what it’s functionally become: a plodding effort to be serially as wrong as possible, about as much as possible, over a course of weeks (if not months or years). And without the blitzkrieg effect of the actual Gish Gallop, they’ll have time to realize, man, you swallow that creo pill, it’s as good as a blow to the head in terms of your ability to follow high school physics.
… speaking of high school physics, I think I’m a little jealous of people learning it now. Got to thinking the other day, after someone asked facetiously about refraction–hey, how would I explain it to someone was new to it? Full disclosure: I’m not much a pedagogue, myself; not really one of my strengths. But I remember working it out myself, the slow way, picturing one wave crest, hitting a shallower bit of water, what happens to propagation at each point…
… and it ain’t fair, really, this being 2014. They have animations, now. I figure it’s worth something like 24,000 words/second, depending on the frame rate. Figure 4, here, for example:
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/teach_res/hsp/u7/t7_emr.htm
… kids these days. In my day, it was uphill both ways, I tells ya.
(/And we liked it. We were tough… Also, never mind your namby pamby ‘tablets’ and ‘touchscreens’… Stone tools, that’s what it was. A chisel and a chunk of rock, and you had to deduce Snell’s Law yourself, and carve out the thetas by hand, and if the rock splintered wrong, they failed you on your penmanship… Or… Umm… Chiselmanship, that’s what it was…)
(… oh, also, icing on the cake: I’m looking at this, and my nine year old comes by, askes what this is…
I explain. Start pointing at stuff, see, the crest hits here, the transmission is slower in shallower, so the propagation slows down, so you get this change in direction of the wave form…
… and he gets it. In like, what, five minutes?
Too easy. I say bring back the chisels.)
FALSE. More bearing false witness against evolutionary scientists by medico.
FALSE. It is a conclusion from empirical evidence.
Yes we do know how those ended up. 50% of human junk DNA, proven old retroviral insertions and parasitic sequences like LINES and SINES, has been empirically demonstrated to have no functional significance. 45% or so of the rest, pseudogenes and so forth, have no demonstrable functional significance to a degree of certainty that would convict in a court of law. 1-2% turned out to have regulatory function, and one or two examples, <0.001% were found to have evolved a new function at a later time.
99% of all vestigial organs, like the vestigial hip bones of whales or the toe splint bones of horses, have been empirically demonstrated to have no functional significance, or even to be detrimental. Some vestigial organs, like the human appendix, were found to have evolved a new function, but that function has been empirically demonstrated by multiple appendectomy surgeries to have no functional significance, and indeed outweighed by detrimental effects.
Homology continues to be an effective demonstration of common descent, and indeed there is no explanation for the fine details of empirically observed homologies other than common descent that is not patently absurd.
Medico's ridiculous assertion that all homologies can be explained by environmental optimization is absurd. (and I am waiting for him to claim that he made it not for "homology" but for "shared characteristics" so we can all laugh at him yet again)
So yet once more we see the hypocrite medico make an argument that only works by deliberately ignoring 99% of what has already been observed about the subject.
It will be amusing to see if the liar medico will try to bring up ENCODE, without realizing that ENCODE analyzed for function WITHOUT assessing significance, and that the definition for "function" ENCODE used was a definition of non-significant function….
Here we see a vivid example of an argument that can only be made by dishonestly changing the meaning of what the word “is” is….
It also further depends on deliberately dishonest redefinition of the words “at”, “best”, “a”, “as”, “it”, “more”, and “and”.
But what can we expect from a mentality that refuses to acknowledge that light moves at a finite speed?
Heh. Ah, me, we’re onto ‘junk science’, are we?
My my, this one is derivative. Could pretty much be a DI pamphlet, that last screed. Sure, he’s thinking for himself.
(still rambling on) Not to mention the indoctrination starts early in grade school, too.
4th grade creationism quiz image via Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy
That last one pisses me off. “If an animal has sharp teeth, it must mean it is a meat eater. True/False” That’s intended to mesh with the claim that all animals ate nothing but plants “in the beginning” and trick kids into distrusting homology and adaptive characteristics before they ever encounter those concepts. But there’s a really simple answer to that – we can observe which animals need to eat meat or mostly meat, and which go around hunting other animals, and observe that they almost always have teeth you wouldn’t risk your fingers on. So saying an unknown animal with big sharp fangs is likely to be a predator, is still a pretty good initial hypothesis – it’s more likely to be right than wrong. Change that question to “means it PROBABLY is a meat-eater” and it’s true.
But I could already knock holes in those lines of indoctrination as a first-grade animal buff (and I did) – what about rats and mice? Their teeth are really sharp? Are they more or less meat-eaters than, say, beavers? Why aren’t there giant 500-pound predatory rats that hunt down deer? Or predatory *deer* that hunt down herds of grass-eating cats and dogs? If the teeth don’t matter *at all* isn’t that what you’d expect?
I got sooo much detention as a little kid. <_<
Medic0506: “As it currently stands, “evolutionary science” is at best, a pseudo-science, junk science, and nothing more.”
Really? Do tell. So, what, pray, is your definition of science. In the real world that I inhabit, doing science every day, one essential aspect of science is that it absolutely must make verifiable predictions. Evolution does this in spades. For example, it predicts how much DNA two critters with a common ancestor might share given that the populations diverged at a given time in the past. It predicts the sorts of traits that a critter might evolve to fulfill an unfilled ecological niche. This allows us to understand the aye-aye–a nocturnal lemur that evolved to fulfill the ecological niche of a woodpecker, of which there are none on the island of Madagascar. What about you Medic0506, got any predictions–or do you presume to psychoanalyze your deity?
amphiox @ 1065
“Empirically demonstrated to have no functional significance”? We still don’t know what much of the non-coding DNA in the human genome is doing. Not knowing is NOT the same as having no functional significance.
I think I have discovered the source of the problem. Medic0506 thinks that Science is an entity, with a body and a brain and consciousness and vocal cords, which can speak on its own behalf.
I wonder if a lot of other creationists think this way. It would certainly go a long way towards explaining their repeated claimed that science is “just another religion.”
medic0506
I can see that no amount of explanation, however articulate or erudite, is likely to help you understand evolution, evolutionary theory, the relationship between theory and reality, or simply how science progresses. I get that. However, you should at least realize that among the people of the world who practice science, your views are only marginally represented. They are “fringey”, for want of a better word. I won’t even go into your views on optics. So when you write:
Scientists largely disagree, as do the tax-supported agencies that fund them.
One explanation might be that the scientists of the world are part of a global cabal founded 150 years ago* to destroy religion for nefarious political gain**. This would require a tremendous amount of financial support and networking, but moreso, secrecy. On the other hand, you might be wrong. One of these explanations is more parsimonious than the other.
*Evolutionary thinking is of course much older than this, but since I’m trying to offer an explanation that might ring true to you, let’s just date the formation of this confederacy as the publication of The Origin of Species. I’m avoiding esoterica associated with preDarwinian evolutionary thinkers like Buffon, Hutton, deSaussure, LaMarck, &cetera for your benefit. So you can probably think of lots of variations on this theme. I invite you to do so now, substitute your variant for the one I’ve provided and analyze the plausibility of that hypothesis using Occam’s razor.
**And they are winning.
>50% of the junk DNA in humans is LINES and SINES. These are endlessly repeating parasitic remnants of jumping genes. One of the most common is the Alu sequence, which is just a short segment that repeats over and over. These sequences vary in length from person to person, and are in fact the basis of DNA fingerprinting. This variation allows us to empirically calculate the mutation rate in these sequences, and it almost exactly matches the background baseline neutral mutation rate. And that means there is no significant effect of selection on the retention and elimination of mutations in these sequences from the genome. And that means these sequences do not possess a function that is significant enough to be visible to natural selection, which is the definition of “significance” in evolutionary theory.
And since the LINES And SINES make up >50% of the non coding part of the genome we know that the “majority” of the so-called junk DNA in humans does not possess any function that is significant enough to be subject to natural selection, up to the present moment. (It is of course always possible that a non-significant sequence can become significant in the future with additional mutations, but the lack of any signature in the sequence of a selective sweep indicates that it has not been significant up to the present moment,)
It is therefore possible to determine whether any sequence in the DNA has significant function by looking for this signature of natural selection working on the sequence, so long as the sequence varies enough within he population to do the analysis.
Word.
chris61/#1070:
There’s a biochemist we may well both know better equipped to give you the excellent reasons for thinking much of it is, indeed, non-functional…
… and, philosophically, arguing that look, technically, even a pile of broken genes and transposons could, somehow, have some discernible function, is a bit of a Russell’s Teapot argument. Absent decent positive reasons for thinking so, you kinda need to bring in a decent picture of the teapot. (And yes, generally, there’s been a lot of criticism of ENCODE’s photography in this area.)
Incidentally, for any creos present, and as Moran also explains, the nuances of how much it even matters to any of this how much of, say, human DNA really does anything but reproduce* are non-trivial, but the broad summary is: it really isn’t much of a deal-breaker for the modern synthesis if it turns out another few percent need to be there for some peculiar reason that’s escaped people until now. But, I figure, if you’re commenting in this area at all, you’ve probably already heard all this.
(*/Kinda like the Royal Family, then.)
SallyStrange:
Not quite… by stretching projection to its fullest, they likely think that Science is *portrayed* as a god with a voice that speaks to genuflecting Science-worshipers, but actually is a scam made up by authoritarian Science-priests that indoctrinate children with lies so the Priests can live fat on the profits and victimizing. And they think Darwin’s Origin of Species is a touchstone for turning followers into a cult, like Hubbard and Scientology; or like certain other Books I could name.
*looks at Antiochus Epiphanies’ 1072*
…I realize you were trying to be ironic there…
(… and re 1073, also word.)
medic0506:
Try reading that to yourself, along with all your previous replies. This quote seems to be directed at yourself. This quote is actually quite true, now take it and make use of it, its good advice, you just directed it at the wrong targets. tsk tsk tsk.
When did you become the ScienceAuthority to declare Evolution as JunkScience, ‘Not Science At All’? If you don’t think Amphiox gave the proper definition, don’t just say it is wrong, tell us the proper definition. Don’t Tell , Show.
There aren’t any scientists doing research on creationism or ID. There are religious folks pretending to do science in those communities, but they aren’t doing work that goes outside of their little delusional communities. It isn’t noticed by the scientific community as whole, since it involves presupposition and imaginary deities.
re myself @1078:
errata: references to Amphiox should be replaced with Azhael. Sorry.
But medic objects to everyone’s definition of “Science”, while never telling us what the “real” definition is, so mistakenly referring to Amphiox is just as valid as the correct reference to Azhael would have been.
medic0506 #1050
So, in other news, medic is being dishonest again.
He quotes Nick Gotts as saying “Because evolutionary biology asserts”, and proceeds to criticize evolution for asserting things, rather than basing conclusions on evidence. However, what Nick actually said was:
Clearly what Nick is referring to here is hypothesis testing. You present and idea about the world, you derive predictions from that idea, you check to see if the predictions are true. That’s science in a nutshell, but medic conveniently left that part out and then criticizes Nick for being unscientific.
I’m beginning to suspect that this is the real reason for medic’s interest in ignoring recent post and instead answering the ones written days ago: People are less likely to remember exactly what was written, so it’s easier to get away with lying about it.
Remind me, medic, what does your god say about lying?
Science flies you to the moon. Faith flies you into buildings.
I challenge Medic0506 to provide ANY link to a solid science website
In this entire discussion, he posted 0 links to anything that I would consider “good solid” science.
His references so far:
1 link to a website selling zorses
3 links to creation.com
2 youtube videos from Rob Carter (author of the creation.com material)
So really 5 links to a single person who apparently is more knowledgeable than the countless scientific authors in the flood of materials posted by everyone else. Medic0506, certainly you can cite some peer reviewed scientific literature for us! If you’re so capable of recognizing whether someone’s science is correct or incorrect, certainly you can link to a diversity of proper scientific locations!
This is why I bowed out of this entire thread with mediczero… in saying this what he is really saying is “I will define what I think ‘science’ is for myself, I’m not going to let the ‘scientific community’ tell me how I should define science”.
I don’t know how you even begin to argue / debate with someone who starts from such an arrogantly ignorant premise.
How does medico know this to be the case, unless he is presuming to speak for the entire scientific community himself?
Hypocrite.
SallyStrange #1071
Fuck, he believes light is transmitted instantly to the eyeball without having to travel. Frankly, this belief is far more sane.
Side note, 1085 (1086 now, I guess) comments? Is this some sort of record breaking attempt?
It may be the longest thread dedicated to a single troll, but it’s not even close to the longest thread ever. Remember the “grenade” thread? 4000+ comments.
I remember a few threads that reached around 1300 or 1400 comments back in the day, but they had a rotation of trolls. Medic0506 the ever prolonging is probably winner of “Longest thread devoted to one troll though”, and the additional second thread that Medic0506 is pointedly ignoring means they have lots and lots of refuting comments they’ll never get to.
This has been a highly entertaining and edifying thread, so thanks everyone from all of us lurkers and semi-lurkers (slurkers?) out here. At times I wonder if medic is trying out for Colbert’s soon to be vacant chair.
Back somewhere on the previous page (and I can’t be arsed to look it up at this point; medic will probably never get this far anyway), medic was asked how he determined the age of the universe, and he said it was from the genealogies in the Bible. Of course I don’t think there’s any biologist (or geologist or physicist, for that matter) who would argue that all the diversity of life on Earth could have evolved over the course of 10,000 years, so he’s got a point about the changes we see from one generation to the next not being able to add up to the difference between a horse and a frog if you accept his premise. But the fact that he draws his premise from the writings of a group of goatherds from 2-3000 years ago, and ignores everything since then that has shown their claims to be false, tells you all you need to know about his “science”.
Personally I find it awe-inspiring to think that every living thing on Earth outside my immediate family is my cousin, even if it does make for some awkward family reunions.
@Amphiox & LykeX
I think the bible is quite unequivocal about this … and I don’t mean to be an alarmist, or anything, … in my opinion, medic0506 is Hellbound for All Eternity.
…
Junk DNA, chromosomes, Kinds ™ … Time we brought up all 155 species of vole. They have the weirdest chromosomal arrangements evah (from 17 to 64!), yet not even fuckin’ YHWH can tell them apart. So much for the “theory” of Kinds ™ .
Tigger/#1011:
Yeah, come to think of it, I wonder if you’re right.
I should probably therefore qualify my #1000, given that. He’s may have some kind of such notion, here, somewhere in the soup of silly, fuzzy as it probably is.
… still suspect for what it’s worth the ongoing blob of objections about cataracts and so on was more just a pick up and throw whatever comes to hand strategy, though. As it’s escaping me how any of that is supposed to follow from having a problem specifically with photons or c; it seems more likely that’s just about making noise, trying to imply to the gullible there’s some kind of problem with the consensus view that’s so bit his precious sixty-centuries-old universe in the butt.
@ omnicron
Another godfapping troll, DH666, was instrumental in getting the Thunderdome launched.
What a Maroon: I figure that’s why the creationistas freak out at *every* episode of Cosmos.
theophontes
Ah, danielhaven.
At least he had a sense of humour.
I wonder how he’s doing.
It is unlikely they were written by goatherds. It is more likely they were first written down by scribes / priests recording then-common verbal mythology, some of which probably originated a considerable time before and were transmitted orally.
chigau
Probably still godfapping, and pretending to be Afrikaans (in order to explain his inability to communicate in English.)
I will grant medic0506 this: their English grammar is fairly coherent. It is the content itself that makes no sense.
200. Kevin:
But you do something that is just as bad. You believe that there is some arbitrary, magical mechanism, that we don’t see in natural processes today, that allowed organisms in the past to morph into different types of organisms. Additionally, that cutoff is not magic nor its existence arbitrary. It is a part of known biological reality, that no knowledgeable person denies, but more on that below.
I do have an answer to your question here, and broadly speaking, that barrier is reproduction. But before I go more in depth on that answer, it’s important to note that from a scientific perspective you are asking the wrong question here. It isn’t enough to just ask if an idea can be possible, or if there is something to stop it from being true. You also have to ask if there is a process or a mechanism that “allows” it, or causes it, to happen. The question should be…Is there a known mechanism which allows organisms that are different in form and function, to share a common ancestor?? In looking for an answer to that question, you will find the answer to the question, as you asked it, if you are indeed open to seeing it. If your mind is not open to seeing a potential falsification of your theory, then no amount of scientific evidence will ever change your mind.
An unbiased look at the observational evidence available shows that there are highly bounded variations within groups of similar organisms, and that these boundaries are conserved, so to speak, within these groups, meaning that they regulate and limit reproductive ability between groups. Reproductive ability is so limited that many groups could not mate physically, even if they tried. At the molecular level, that inability to mate and produce fertile offspring effectively isolates the gene flow between groups of organisms that are different. This creates “discontinuities” or reproductive gaps, between the groups, and there is no known process or mechanism that can bridge those gaps.
Reproductive pathways exist between organisms that interbreed and share ancestry. A reproductive pathway can be traced and shown between a horse, zebra, and donkey, for instance, showing a way for all the organisms within that group to have access to the same ancestral “gene pool”. No such reproductive pathway exists that can link a horse to say, a snake for instance, so there is no known way in which the two could potentially have access to the same ancestral gene pool. It is not enough to say that two organisms have a similar trait, or a similar gene, so they must have inherited it from the same source. Unless you can show a continuous, uninterrupted reproductive pathway to link these organisms together, the claim to common ancestry is completely impotent. This creates insurmountable problems for part of evolutionary theory, macro-evolution or universal common ancestry, and makes absolutely zero sense, from an evolutionary perspective.
With this evidence from observational biology and genetics, followers of evolutionism literally have to believe the unbelievable. That is that evolutionary processes created this highly visible roadblock, to keep itself from happening. Not only that, but they also have to believe that these processes designed and implemented genetic repair mechanisms to make sure that recombined DNA in an offspring stays remarkably similar to that of the parent, while also using some seemingly invisible and hidden mechanism to allow all life forms to morph into different forms so they could all have access to the same ancestral gene pool. Not only did evolution hide the mechanism, it managed to hide the bodies as well. They literally have to believe in biological magic.
Magic as a form of artistry and entertainment, is actually more realistic than the biological magic that evolutionism provides. Although magicians try to hide the mechanisms by which their tricks are performed, we know that those mechanisms exist and humans have knowledge of how they work. No such mechanisms are known that allow biological magic, and evolutionism becomes even more irrational when you realize that it espouses biological magic, but denies the existence of a biological magician.
This short video of an interview with David Berlinski, sums up all the evidence very nicely…
@ blf
I suspect that the process was similar to that employed by Homer. There was a demand for a canonical work, to record religious fairytales. The stories then, would have been extremely ancient, even if adapted over time to reflect more contemporary (ie, for those times) social issues, culture and predjudices.
There were many people in the days of early Islam, who thought it a veritable heresy to record Mohhammad’s fairytales in writing. I do think they were right, and for all the right reasons. Alas though, all these religions chose to fix what had previously been a dynamic religion “in stone”, by recording in writing a simple snapshot of a living religion. They really screwed up big time. Some arbitrary version was fixed in time. Had it been written at a different time, it would have been quite a different kettle of fish.
amphiox @ 1073
Lack of conservation of primary DNA sequence doesn’t address the possibility of conservation of higher order structure nor the certainty that DNA binding proteins bind small 5-6bp stretches of DNA that don’t show up in most searches for sequence conservation and yet have been (at least in some cases) demonstrated to be biologically as well as biochemically functional. Scientists only find what they go looking for. If you dismiss the possibility out of hand that poorly evolutionarily conserved and repetitive sequences have function then it’s pretty certain you’ll never discover whether or not that’s true.
PS: Yes I am saying that, were religions allowed to evolve – rather than being recorded as absolute, immutable Truth ™ – we would have been far better off. I could even entertain the notion that such an adaptive religion would be capable of holding real social value.
theophontes@1098, I mostly agree with the comparison to Homer. My slight quibble is Homer’s work is obviously intended to be transmitted and retold orally (the hexameter verse, et al.). However, overall, the portions of the babble which probably have their basis / origins in old (long-retold) stories seem to lack that characteristic. On the other hand, the babble has (probably) undergone much more editing and selective revision.
And Medic0506 shows, once again, that he completely fails to understand how evolution works.
Quelle surprise.
208. Aaron:
You just explained it.
Did the fruitcake just imply David Berlinski is a reliable source of information on biology or evolution?
(Headdesk…)
*reads the latest carefully crafted trolling from medic*
Um, yeah. Is that the Berlinski who tells terminal cancer patients he can cure them for large sums of money, as long as said patient travels to location where Berlinski will not be charged with a crime when they die? I can’t be arsed to verify any information from medic, because ew, he is a skeevy little manipulative, lying POS.
*returns to researching 500 million year old Cambrian/ Ordovician algae*
Amphiox, 1042
To be fair to the Ultimately Inept and Incompetent, most intelligently designed silicon-based imaging photosensors do have a somewhat analogous ‘degradation’ in that they require a reset of the charge in each photocell at the beginning of each sensing cycle. Of course, it is part of its normal operation – not damage or degradation to the semiconductor structure of the sensor that must be periodically repaired – and flipping a switch is nowhere near the complexity of (re)building proteins.
Remedial Semiconductor Imaging Photosensors
In CCD sensors, the electron storage well is a region of doped semiconductor in contact with a gate (electrically insulated electrode) biased to a set voltage. When photons of sufficient energy strike the doped semiconductor layer, they liberate electrons that get pulled to the nearest well (biased gate) before they can recombine with holes. The more photons to hit the semiconductor, the more electrons in the well at the end of the exposure time. If exposure is too long, or the well is too small, then the electrons start spilling over into adjacent wells to produce ‘bloom’ in the resultant image. Because the electrons collected in the well are shifted out through adjacent wells during the readout process, there does not have to be a global reset (removal of bias voltage from all gates) at the start of each exposure period but some sensors have the option to do it anyway to try to achieve a more uniform exposure time. If the incident light is too intense at a well (a bright lamp, LED, etc.), all other well charges that shift through that bright well will be affected by extra electrons released in that well. This is why some CCD sensors minimize the dwell/shift time by quickly shifting all well charges into light-protected intermediate storage during the slower process of digitizing the charges.
In CMOS sensors, the charge storage component is mostly just parasitic capacitance from the mosfets and photodiode. Light intensity is measured over time by charging the inherent capacitor to a set voltage at the start of each exposure period, then disconnecting the capacitor from the supply and letting the photocurrent through the photodiode discharge the capacitor. The more photons hitting the photodiode, the lower the charge left in the capacitor at the end of the exposure time.
There are some custom ‘logarithmic response’ CMOS image sensors (centeye is the only manufacturer that comes to mind) made primarily for ‘small bird’ to ‘insect’ scale robots utilizing optical flow algorithms. Instead of resetting the charge and disconnecting the capacitor for some extended period of time before reading the remaining charge, they maintain a connection to the power supply during the pixel charge readout. This basically amounts to directly measuring the immediate photocurrent of the photodiode and gives the sensor a larger range of measurable light intensities, but decreases precision and makes it even less useful in measuring differences in low light intensities involved in astronomy and other situations (the photodiode in CMOS sensors has a ‘dark current’ that slowly drains the capacitor even without incoming photons of the target wavelengths).
Liar, we see those same mechanisms in effect today. That you disbelieve what science says is irrelevant. Science doesn’t give a shit about your unscientific testament. I’m still waiting for your third party evidence from the peer reviewed scientific literature,
or any physical evidence for your imaginary deity….
Ah, a paid liar and bullshitter without credentials….That isn’t third party scientific evidence, that is third party propergander and testament.
Here is a simplified tree of life for medic0506.
Here is a more comprehensive one.
The most recent common ancestor of horses and snakes didn’t look like either of them; as the offspring of that ancestor reproduced, their offspring differed slightly – enough that, a trillion generations later, the distant cousins looked nothing like one another.
medic0506, 1104
“Because it is” is not an explanation.
Oops, First link borked.
Simplified tree of life
Tethys@1106, No, the cancer quack is Stanislaw Burzynski. The fruitcake’s referred-to loon is David Burzynski, who is with the DI.
How does light reflect if it doesn’t travel?
@ medic0506
I hate to tell you this, but this person will be joining you in the fiery pits of hell. I do not wish this on either of you, but what can I do? Your little god is very strict, and very specific: Don’t bear false witness!
Just bye the bye. We are not going to pretend that simple Newtonian Ballistics is anything like advanced Einsteinian Quantum Physics. David is a liar for doing such a switch in comparing modern neo-Darwinism with kiddies’ Newtonian Physics. The former is not anywhere as straightforward as the latter. Pretending otherwise is a lie. Knowing it is a lie and yet still presenting it as evidence is a form of bearing false witness. You might fool yourself. You cannot fool us. And YHWH’s punishment for committing such an abominable sin is burning in Hell for eternity. Or longer.
You know what I like most about the tree of life? It shows that the things that medic0506 thinks are important (great big mammals of the kind that appear in babies’ cardboard books) are an infinitesimal proportion of current species; and yet, medic0506 would have them separated into several discrete ‘kinds’, whilst lumping the vast majority of other living things (microbes) into one, ignoring his own bizarre definition of ‘kind’.
Yeah, but those silicon photo sensors were designed by flawed and imperfect designers with a difference of competence relative to medico that would from the perspective of medico’s postulated designer be naught but a rounding error…
I wonder if medic0506 is actually not a human at all, but a NPC that has escaped into the internet from the Pokémon universe.
@medic the intransigent
You are not a knowledgeable person. Every sentence you have posted on here demonstrates that. You ignore evidence, deny logic, and argue both from ignorance, and incredulity.
It’s not magical. You are the only one that appears to believe in magic here, with eyes that see without detecting photons and apparently teleports from one place to another.
I don’t know if it’s that we’re using too big words for you, but no, others have tried to use simpler ones and you just ignore them. Like I suspect you will ignore me. Or cherrypick them and misquote me.
Evolution is going on right now. It has never stopped. Until the life on this planet fries when the sun expands to swallow the earth in about 4 billion years it will never stop. Perhaps not even then. Especially since it may also be happening elsewhere.
Your single biggest misconception seems to be that you think that a species changes into another species. Completely. The entire thing.
It doesn’t. Evolutionary theory doesn’t claim that it does. Except for organisms that effectively clone themselves (such as bananas) nearly every organism on this planet, especially those that reproduce by sexual reproduction have offspring that are different from their parents. Are you a clone of one of your parents? Are you exactly like one of them or are you different? A mix of their DNA?
Add to this that even this process isn’t without shall we say transcription errors. This leads to mutations. I think I read somewhere that on average we’ve got about 17 each. But this is not a hard and fast number. Some may be more. Some may be less. Sometimes the mutations are beneficial, giving the offspring a slightly better chance of surviving to produce offspring of their own. Sometimes they are not so much. They vary in degree. The worst ones usually result in the fetus not surviving to term.
If the environment that the organism grows up in is not particularly dangerous then usually the non critical mutations don’t make much difference and don’t increase their chances of having offspring (unless I suppose it’s something that makes them more attractive to the opposite gender – from a biological procreation view).
If it is dangerous then those with the mutation that lets them cope better with this will have an edge, they will have a better chance of surviving and having offspring. This of course is all massively simplified but since you have trouble with complex ideas we’re keeping to the simple version.
If some members of this organism live elsewhere, where it isn’t dangerous in that particular way, then the mutation won’t be an advantage in that population and that group will become genetically different to the group living in the first dangerous area. Over time, and if the organism is particularly long lived that could be a very long time, the differences between the genetic makeup of the two groups will become different enough that they will no longer be able to interbreed. So now you will have two groups, that share a common ancestor, but are no longer able to be fertile with each other, and both are different from the original ancestor group.
Humans are comparatively long lived compared to such things as fruit flies which is why the rate of our evolution is relatively slow, and things like microbes have such fast rates because their generations are so short, allowing small changes to be accumulated faster.
Because you are dishonest, ignorant, and a walking example of the Dunning Kruger effect I fully expect you to ignore this, or dismiss it with a wave of your hand because it disagrees with what you believe to be true, in spite of the I suspect millions of scientific papers supporting the science behind evolutionary theory. I do hope that someone else brave enough to get to this point of the comment thread will see you for the liar you are.
By the way. I am a physicist. I know about light. I teach about light. And the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum, and how we generate it, and how it can get absorbed, and reflected and refracted and diffracted. I know about Maxwell’s equations which combine magnetic and electric fields and give a value for the speed of light as a consequence of them. Your argument from ignorance and incredulity is noted and dismissed. I’m not going to go through your latest set of misconceptions as others have already done so admirably.
Speaking as a scientist, you have not said anything that can be in any way be thought of as scientific. It is you that is the purveyor of pseudo-science, waving around ‘scientific’ jargon without having the least knowledge about what it is that you are saying.
To other commenters I acknowledge that my evolutionary theory knowledge is not that of an expert in that field, and if I have made any glaring errors feel free to clarify or correct. This is not medic0506 who has no such expertise.
Ah… now he’s vid-quoting Berlinski…
SO, let me get this straight medic… you will allow a man that the vast majority of the scientific community dismisses as an intellectually dishonest crank, to define “science” for you, but you will take a firm stand against actual scientists, independently confirming the work of other scientists, over and over again, world-wide across multiple cultures and even religions, creating an overwhelming consensus regarding the theory of evolution, defining science for you? And you don’t see the problem there?
And it’s just mere coincidence that Berlinski’s views just happen to fit so nicely with your preconceived beliefs? Are you still going to try and convince us that you’re approaching this whole issue objectively? Or that your entire premise is not wholly shaped by beliefs that are, in terms of explaining the natural world, akin to ancient Greek mythology? It’s clear you have no interest in being honest with us, but at least be honest with yourself.
FALSE.
He is not asking the wrong question. But YOU are, medico. Of course you know this, but you are just pretending not to admit it.
The mechanism of natural selection of random mutation allows it.
Natural selection of random mutations plus reproductive separation is the known mechanism.
@blf, 1095,
See, this is why no one likes scientists–y’all insist on, you know, facts. (Seriously, good point.)
@ blf
Homer certainly underwent some editing. The romantic in me is inclined, also, to believe that there were quite spectacular rhyming parts to the fairytales that are forever lost. Undoubtedly there was a lot of rhyme (and repetition)used by the Greeks in order to help memorise tales of truly epic proportions.
As I am not sufficiently competent to make any hard statements, let me just suggest that the reason the babble is so inferior in every way to Homer, is that they had not the storytelling finesse to begin with. In the case of the Koran, it was pointed out -at the time – to Mohammad how inferior his fairytales were to those of contemporary Iranian storytellers.
I’m not going to waste effort wading through the morass of medico’s drivel to identify where or if he specifically pulled out the snakes-horses comparison (hey, it’s a trunk up the cladistic tree from his last one, with the horse-frog!) but of course snakes and horses both possess the same highly specific variant (the vertebrate variant) of the already highly specific chordate body plan, and as such are morphologically more similar to one another than 98+% of all the rest of life on earth.
IIRC, creationists also used to disbelieve extinction, because God would not create perfect animals only to let them go extinct. That led to another scuffle about fossils, somewhere in the hundreds of years ago, because there couldn’t possibly be weird unknown animals that used to exist and don’t anymore. Think there are any problems observing extinction today?
One more comment about SINES, LINES and higher order structure. Higher order structure of any molecule, be it DNA or anything else that is a chain, may not depend on the sequence of the base pairs, but it sure is affected by the length of the sequence, the sheer number of atoms contained in the sequence, seeing as how atomic sizes within molecules are more or less fixed. Even if a particular LINE or SINE sequence is part of a higher order sequence independent structure, said structure cannot be the same in an individual with 2 copies of the LINE/SINE as it is in an individual with 40 copies of it, anymore than you can make the higher order structure of a 2 inch string the same as that of an 80 inch string no matter how you coil or tie or knot or fold it.
And there are lots of SINES and LINES that vary between individuals at that range of copy number. So even IF, say, the 2 copies are part of a higher order structure that is absolutely essential to survival, such that losing those 2 copies in that particular place leads to instant death, in the individuals who have 40 copies at that location who clearly survive just fine, 38 of those copies have no significant function.
@1097 medic0506
Holy fucking shit, doesn’t your head hurt from all that stupidity?
What the flying fuck does that have to do with common ancestry??? You are literally arguing here that two organisms can’t have a common ancestor because currently they are unable to breed together. We have plants that through a process of polyploidy have become reproductively isolated FROM THEIR PARENTS. We know exactly what the ancestor is and yet the new organism can’t reproduce with its inmediate ancestor, but can however reproduce with other polyploids.
There are breeds of dogs that are physically incompatible with each other because there are size differences that are too big. There is a mechanism that can bridge those gaps, it’s called artificial insemination xD
Show us. I want to know exactly what you think this “reproductive pathway” is and how it is any different from the “reproductive pathway” that can be traced between horses and snakes as members of amniota.
Can you show a continuous, uninterrupted reproductive pathway between horses and zebras? Do you have a pedigree from their common ancestor to the present?
Remarkably similar….well yeah, since the offspring is necessarily the same species as the parents. However, while very similar, they are never identical. Also, have you heard about sex? Do you know that recombination means that the offspring doesn’t have any chromosomes that are identical to any of its parents (except special cases like the Y chromosome which largely doesn’t recombine) and that the offspring can have combinations of genes that are completely new from what the parents had precisely because the suffling process is very far from perfect? Add to that the mutations that occur during replication.
We have already discussed this, you little liar….all organisms reproduce with variation. Your completely unsupported claim is that there are magical boundaries that prevent that variation from going on certain directions. A claim that you have repeated over and over and never once even attempted to validate in any way.
The “invisible and hidden mechanism” is evolution, you fuckwit…natural selection, drift, genetic linkage, are all observed mechanisms that result in changes in genetic frequencies in a population over time. Those changes accumulate and some genes disappear, others become fixed, and as time passes, the population changes, you know, like from the common ancestor of zebras and horses to modern zebras and horses? I know, i know, you believe that the universe is 10000 years old tops because some shepherds in the middle east thousands of years ago told you, but those of us who don’t accept preposterous non-sense for no good reason and understand what science actually is, know that the universe is far older and in the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on this planet, there has been plenty of time for changes in genetic frequencies among a population to produce very significant divergence indeed.
It’s so cute when you try to project. We don’t believe in magic, let alone biological magic, we have a fucking mountain of observations to base our conclussions on. You, however, literally believe in magic as in *poof* and something appears out of nowhere.
I find it hilarious that there are people out there who think that horses, donkeys and zebras could have evolved from a common ancestor in 10000 years, but that common ancestry between horses and snakes is impossible because “invisible boundaries”. You actually believe in a form of superevolution, much, much faster than what is generally observed in wild populations. You do this, not because there is any evidence to even begin to support your ludicrous mythology, but because you must negate that the universe is very, very fucking old and that in that time, evolution can lead to progressive changes so dramatic that the ancestry of all life can indeed be traced to simple, unicellular organisms.
Once again, your assumed mythology gets in the way of reality and you choose to dismiss, bend and lie so that you can continue to pretend that your pitiful stories have not been confirmed to be utter made up bullshit.
You may continue to smugly assert that this and that is unscientific and that the same evidence that confirms one observation, somehow is invalid for another equal observation simply because the magnitude is bigger than what you can accomodate in your myth…so long as you continue to be unable to produce a single piece of evidence that falsifies stablished biological science or even begins to validate your claims, we will continue to call you on your completely empty, rhetorical bullshit and laugh at your assertion that the scientific consensus in biology is all unscientific and shit because it doesn’t include your imaginary wizard.
Second point of fact here of course is that for the purposes of photon detection, the silicon compounds used by human designers is a far superior base material than the proteins supposedly chosen by medico’s all knowing all powerful creator. You only have to reset the charge, moving a few electrons a little bit, rather than resynthesize the entire protein from several hundred amino acids.
And seeing as human designers have already succeeded in creating direct communications between their silicon photoreceptors and brain neurons, and have already started making retina implants that can interface directly with brains, even that excuse doesn’t work for medico’s poor, poor designer.
And silicon is a thousand plus times more common on the surface of the earth than carbon, so even the availability argument is not available for medico’s poor designer, either.
So much for medico’s absurd claim that life on earth all using proteins, all with the same limited set of 21 amino acids, can be accounted for by a designer choosing the materials that work best in the given environment.
@ What a Maroon
The general crappyness of babble and Koran might indeed suggest priests. But consider also professional storytellers. Their tales being retold by goatherds who overheard such at the markets.
Old School Storyteller (Storytelling is far older than they suggest here.)
Yet another example of medico’s favored tactic of dishonestly redefining terms to exclude the evidence he does not want to accept.
In this case we see he has dishonestly redefined the words “creates”, “insurmountable”, “problems”, “absolutely”, “zero”, “sense”, “makes”, “for” and “this.”
One should also note the gradual cargo-culting creeping into medico’s rhetorical tactics. It is only after he was rightly accused of intellectual dishonesty that he started weakly and wrongly trying to fling that accusation back. It was after it was pointed out to him that he was making unsupportable assumptions about his deity’s existence that he started using the “assumption” slander against evolutionists. It was only after some of us started shortening his ‘nym to “medico” that he started doing the same.
Poor fool can’t even come up with ways of debating on his own, and can only vainly and poorly copy what he has seen others do.
Medic0506: “You believe that there is some arbitrary, magical mechanism, that we don’t see in natural processes today, that allowed organisms in the past to morph into different types of organisms.”
Ah, but we do see the process in operation today–mutation coupled with natural selection. You have already noted that genetic variation can lead to changes sufficiently large in a “kind” that they cannot have fertile offspring. Why would the changes stop there, particularly if the species are in isolation from each other for millions of years. That’s the problem, ain’t it? If you were to entertain the idea of naturalistic explanation for speciation, you’d have to admit that Earth is very, very old. Then you might start looking at actual evidence, rather than taking literally the poetic musings of pre-literate bronze-age shepherds…and who knows where that would lead.
Remember, Medic0506
“If they can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit attrocities.”–Voltaire
amphiox @ 1115
That is only going to be true if your ‘selective sweep’ is comprehensive enough. Like I said scientists only find what they go looking for. So what is your evidence that the majority of LINES and SINES have no phenotypic consequence to the organism that carries them? How do you know that buried in amongst all that sequence and copy number variation among different humans there aren’t some short key sequences that are maintained?
There is something that evolved much, much faster than horses or snakes – religion (especially Christianity).
http://funki.com.ua/ru/portfolio/lab/world-religions-tree/
I think it quite likely, in the aftermath of the ENCODE data, that someone out there is working on doing the kind of selective sweep you are describing even as we speak, and the result shall be forthcoming eventually.
The sheer range of variation in both sequence and copy number and copy location among humans is evidence enough that there is no phenotypic consequence strong enough for stabilizing selection to constrain the variants, in humans. I do not know the state of research among other organisms, but the Onion Test logic applies here. If you can have two closely related, phenotypically nearly identical organisms and have one with over 10 times as much DNA as the other, then it is by far the most parsimonious explanation for the majority of the DNA in at least one of them to be not significantly functional.
I don’t, but a short key sequence buried amongst all that sequence and copy number variation will by definition constitute only a minority, and a very small minority at that, of the total DNA that makes up the LINES and SINES. And therefore the statement the “majority of the LINES and SINES do not a significant function” will remain true, and the statement that the “majority of the noncoding DNA in humans does not have significant function” will also remain true, because the LINES and SINES make up over half of all the non-coding DNA.
The Homeric epics are indisputably a distillation of a long tradition of heroic oral poetry, stretching back to the Late Bronze Age.
You might consider that this sweeping value-judgment is influenced by the use to which modern culture has put the two traditions. Homer is understood by all educated readers as the epitome of high literature, and translations are typically made with the aim of conveying the elevated poetic tone, and the majesty of the heroic action. The Bible, since the KJV, has not been generally translated with an eye to literary merit, but for literal sense and (supposed) theological import. Furthermore, translations of the Bible nearly universally “flatten” it so that it all sounds generally the same, whereas in its original form it contains multiple genres and registers. The Homeric epics in the Greek are a great deal more uniform in this regard.
It’s important to note also how different the aims were of the original authors. Greek epic poetry was sport and entertainment, recited for public acclaim at regional festivals. The biblical texts were composed by and for a small elite cadre of priests and scribes, and its potential to entertain the masses was not a factor they considered important in and of itself, whereas that goal was primary for the bards of the Aegean world. And where there may have been some Hellenistic influence on biblical texts when we come to later compositions like Chronicles and (parts of) the Deuteronomic History, Herodotus and Thucydides were the models, rhetors, emphatically not poets.
It is like taking a spectrograph of a star and seeing it is made mostly of hydrogen, and seeing no spectral lines for lead. Does that mean that there is for certain NO lead in the star?
Well no. There could be a small amount of lead there, which your spectroscope is not sensitive enough to pick out of the background noise in the data. But it will never mean, short of you having your understanding of how spectroscopy works turn out to be completely wrong, that there is actually MORE lead in the star than there is hydrogen.
And so it is with significantly functional DNA. Our ability to determine functionality, and our measures of significance, with respect o selective sweeps and other methodologies, may not be sensitive enough to pick out all the possible functioning bits within what appears to be non-functional DNA right now, but it sure is sensitive enough for us to say that MOST of that DNA does not have any function that can be reasonably labeled as significant.
amphiox @1135
The range of variation among currently living humans is largely unknown since only a minuscule proportion of individual human DNAs have been sequenced – and even less is known about variation among human ancestors. How long would one expect it to take for stabilizing selection to constrain human variation? Maybe it’s in the process of being constrained. Or maybe modern medicine has affected reproductive viability to the extent that all bets are off.I guess we’re going to disagree about this.
medic0506 #1097
Yes, there are several mechanisms that go together to allow this. Mutation is the most obvious; it ensure that new variations are injected into a population, allowing the offspring to be significantly different from the parents.
If two populations are isolated, they will start to diverge. Over time, this may result in completely different organisms. We can see this happening in real time and we can see the unmistakeable signs of it having happened in the past if we look at present species.
While we’re on the subject, what would falsify your “theory”?
Actually, existing mechanisms would be quite sufficient to bridge such a gap, although it would be outrageously unlikely for such an event to happen, once the populations have been separated.
Regardless, this doesn’t mean that currently reproductively isolated populations couldn’t have descended from the same ancestral population. the inability to fuse two stick into one doesn’t mean you can’t break one stick in two.
So, once again, what’s your point? Are you under the impression that you’ve said anything remarkable or that this causes any problem for evolution?
Good. Show it. Don’t just say it can be show; actually show it. I think it would be most interesting to see what evidence you’ll appeal to in order to demonstrate this connection.
Good thing we’re not saying that, then. We’re saying that the traits and genes share specific similarities that are best explained by common ancestry.
For example, if two organisms require a gene to fulfill a specific function, and if only a narrow range of genes will do this, it’s reasonable to think that two unrelated organisms might end up with the same gene.
However, what we actually see is that organisms end up with genes that are remarkably similar, despite there being no functional reason whatsoever for this similarity. In such a case, it’s not reasonable to think this happened by either accident, natural selection, or design. We’re left with the most parsimonious explanation; common ancestry.
Moreover, this happens not just with one gene, but with a whole suite of them. We can construct family trees on each gene separately and we see convergence between them, as well as a convergence between genetic trees and morphological trees, as well as convergence between the former two and trees based on fossils. They all line up.
If there was no common ancestry, there would be no reason whatsoever why we should see such coherence even with a single gene, much less with all the other data types. Yet, here we are.
Common ancestry is not an assumption, an assertion or a point of dogma. It’s an inescapable conclusion for anyone who honestly looks at the evidence.
Excuse me. That last part is supposed to go:
Meaning what? You want us to present examples of every single individual organism along the line of descent? That’s about as reasonable as saying that if you can’t describe the exact path of the bullet, to millimeter precision, you can’t convict me of murder, even though you’ve got a video of me shooting the victim.
Tell you what, you show me the “continuous, uninterrupted reproductive pathway” between horses and zebras (as you claim exists) and we’ll take our cue from that.
#1104
So what is the moon reflecting, again? you’ve been asked variants of this questions over and over again and you’ve once more refused to give a clear answer. You’re dishonesty is blinding.
Except that was the earlier draft, missing the last part.
I think I’ll just take a break now. It’s not my night.
We know enough about the LINES and SINES to reliably use them for DNA fingerprinting. IE for this particular DNA feature we enough about its variation to know that it varies so widely that each human being, or every billion or so, depending of which sequence and population is tesed, is unique.
We can and have. It is right there, explicit and empirically, in the DNA. To claim otherwise requires deliberately and dishonestly redefining the meaning of the words “continuous”, “uninterrupted”, “reproductive”, “pathway”, “link”, “together”, “to”, and “is”.
I can give you examples of other selective sweeps which we have discovered and their time scales.
A selective sweep of the lactose tolerance genes was found in people of European ancestry taking place over about the 8000 years.
A selective sweep for certain immune proteins was found and dated specifically to the medieval periods the Black Death epidemic, so less than 800 years.
I also vaguely recall hearing is an ongoing selective sweep for certain loci thought to be associated with language over that last several thousand years and still ongoing.
blf
Thank you!
I am on allergy meds and they are having some side effects*.
I can breathe but I can’t brain very well today.
*I know there is a hilarious pun involving Kennedy and Berlin in there somewhere, too bad I cannot come up with it.
amphiox@1142
What proportion of the human genome is used for DNA fingerprinting? Why would variation at the nucleotide level within those very small regions preclude some higher order DNA structure conservation? Also why does the existence of variation preclude functional significance?
“At the molecular level” is another telling indication of medico’s utter ignorance and incompetence. The “inability” he talks about exists at the organismal level, not the molecular one. At the molecular level, we are talking about splicing of individual genes between species, and we already know from direct empiric evidence that this is fully possible, just very very expensive when you get to multiple genes at a time.
Tethys,
I can’t imagine what that pun might be either, but then my meds stop me braining most days; so I’ll just leave this here for the inspiration of others.
In a fun bit of serendipity, Dr. Moran did a thing on a fresh paper on the ‘junk DNA’ thing just now.
Well, I want to love this. I do love religion as a folkloric anthropological concept. Except this shows religions are divergent whereas they actually converge, borrow and usurp all the time.
Why would higher order DNA structure conservation constitute a “significant” function, if sequence is not conserved and therefore the same “function” could be fulfilled by DNA of any random sequence? Taking up space and being a certain shape in solution does not equate to “significant” function.
They tend to do both. Religions often fracture over differences in theology or succession – Protestant vs Catholic for the first kind, Shia vs. Sunni for the second – but they also often borrow from neighboring religions and incorporate local beliefs when they move into a new area – the absorption of Saturnalia feasts or indeed the very origin of Christianity, combining Hellenistic traditions of savior cults with Jewish beliefs.
That would explain the horrible repetition, but at least Pokemon have an internally consistent biology (even if its magically goofy biology) and medic0506 is nothing if not incoherent and internally contradictory. Also the god he’s trying to promote is YHVH and not Arceus so I don’t buy it.
Sorry, omnicrom, god is mew
amphioxis @ 1151
What I’m trying to get at is that while biologists have a pretty good understanding about protein coding sequence and how variation its function, we have anywhere near as good an understanding of non coding sequence and how variation at the nucleotide level affects its function. Especially since it isn’t clear that we even know what all those possible functions are.
re 1148:
The only Kennedy/Berlin punnie I know of is the time Kennedy visited Berlin and said, “I Am A Berliner”, not realizing that residents of Berliner don’t use that word, while the rest of the world calls some particular form of donut, A Berliner. My faulty memory tells me there was something about his pronunciation, not the word itself, but… whatever: the pun was: Kennedy called himself a donut in front of everybody in Berlin, and labelled the residents by a word they considered a mild insult, all while trying to be diplomatic. (and that turned out so good for JFK). uuhhmm, I see how this arose from medic using Berlinsky as his Authority to smack down the arrogant horde here.
twas brillig (stevem)
Good job he wasn’t in Frankfurt, then.
Or Hamburg.
The Pffft… says the doughnut thing was all a misconception
Indeed. I certainly didn’t intend to say or imply otherwise.
Yes. However, it is doubtful the performing bards “memorised” the tales per se, but more the outline (to varying degrees) and then improvised the individual verses. This is where the meter(?) &tc becomes so important — Memorizing that Hero Foo had an epic battle with Antihero Bar, and then making up the details as you recite.
On one day, “The swords drawn, bright in the sunlight, Bar snarled at Foo, who spit at the vile Bar. Enraged at the insult, Bar yelled like a Berserker, Foo laughed like a Jester, and the battle to end all battles, the father of battles, the mother of many wars, commenced and started…”
On another day, “Spears pointed into the sun, shields at the ready, Bar screamed at Foo, and Foo snickered. Enraged at the insult, Bar screamed like a Banshee, Foo broke out laughing, and the war of wars, the great battle of Bar and Foo, began…”
Same story, different “wording”. Obviously, I’m no poet, and the above example does not do a good job of conveying how a Homer epic was possibly “memorised”, but I hope it gets the idea across…
Tigger @1154
Mew is allegedly the template for Pokemon life, but Arceus is credited with creating the universe and the various legendary pokemon that shaped the world.
210. Draganglas:
Correct. Though I won’t pretend to have a precise formula or know what that threshold is, the further away an object is, the more energy it must produce in the form of light, in order for us to see it from earth.
On the contrary, if you think that through, you have it backwards. A telescope makes no sense under your theory of light travel, and can only work if my ideas or something very similar is true.
Under your theory, starlight has to physically travel and c remains a constant, telescopes should not be able to change any part of the equation. Light photons still have to reach all the way to earth and physically enter your eye. Likewise they also have to physically reach the earth in order to enter the telescope lens. Telescopes cannot in any way change the speed or distance in the equation and thus would become a useless middle-man.
Telescopes magnify, and magnification can only work if vision is the primary active mechanism, and works from the ground up.
Yes, but the tree (http://funki.com.ua/ru/portfolio/lab/world-religions-tree/) shows an “evolving” solely divergent tree. (A very impressive divergent tree. Makes a great, albeit inaccurate, graphic.)
Actually it’s interesting that in evolution species mainly diverge. I mean, if evolution is false and we are just making this shit up, wouldn’t it be more fun and aesthetically pleasing to make up a theory where animal kinds can merge as well as diverge?
====
Tigger, you and I are both over 50. If that berliner/donut thing were true we’d have heard about it some time before the 80s. And look at the ovation he got in the video clip. Not a *single* confused look or smirk in the crowd.
They gather more photons than the naked eye you silly person.
Telescopes work just fine with a camera when nobody’s vision is involved at all. That sentence is a complete non sequitur. Magnification occurs precisely because of the nature of light: more photons, see bigger. Go to the children’s section of your local library and get a book about optics for third graders.* Learn all about prisms and rainbows and telescopes. This is rudimentary stuff, and you just look more ridiculous every time you address it.
*Yes, this is aspirational. Reach for the –erm, stars, medic0506!
how do telescopes work. Generalissimo Google™ is your friend.Citation need from an unscientific liar and bullshitter.
Citation needed unscientific liar and bullshitter, as it doesn’t work like you think. Since you think died a natural death of refutation centuries ago.
Again, citation needed unscientific liar and bullshitter. You don’t understand reality, and you have no authority to back up your inane claims. You have nothing but delusions. Asking you for citations means you do a reality check on your claims. If you don’t, your assertions come out of your ass.
medic5060,
But…
No, damnit, I’m going back to the more sensible discussion.
omnicrom,
Arceus was retrofitted to the Pokémon universe, a good dozen or so years after Mew; and, like here on Earth, we can prove that there was a common ancestor – we can’t prove there is a god.
Arceus is a fraud! (And I should have put ‘god’, in quotes, in my other comment.) =^_^=
More obvious dishonesty from medico here. Note the what he surely thinks must be clever (but isn’t) deliberate omission, that c is constant ONLY IN A VACUUM. And we know this is a deliberate omission because multiple comments explicitly told medico the liar this.
Light slowd down wgen it enters different media that are not vacuum. It slows down in the telescope lense and bends. So of course the telescope changes the equation. But medico’s claims about light the telescope has no way of changing the light and thus should not work.
Selective omission of important information to deliberately reverse the meaning of the opposing statement. A tired old ploy by medico. Pitifully obvious. Digustingly hypocritical.
woozy,
I agree – there was absolutely nothing odd mentioned about that speech at the time. We didn’t have a telly then, but my mother was a keen radio listener and JFK fan, so we had the BBC news on every evening; and the news mentioned nothing except how well the speech went.
That — especially the — sounds to me like an almost-explicit confirmation the fruitcake does indeed believe in a form of extramission with instantaneous transmission.
I have no fecking idea why he thinks magnification “only” works with extramission. Or why he thinks telescopes magnify (as others have already pointed out, they increase the amount the light gathered).
On the contrary, magnification cannot work at all if vision is the primary active mechanism here.
To make this argument, medico has to dishonestly change the meanings of the words “only”, “primary”, “active”, “works”, “from”, “up”, and “if.”
blf @1159: Interesting stuff. More on Homer and oral poetry here.
!WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!?!?!?!
Seriously, that is *utterly* incomprehensible.
I’ll try to work it out but … you serious aren’t just wrong. You make no sense at all.
No. Your theory can not explain or allow refraction. Without refraction you can not have magnification. Our theory explains refraction and explains magnification.
c is the speed of light in a vacuum. In other media, such as air or glass, it is slower, but still constant in those media.
The glass lenses in a telescope change the speed of light as it passes through the lenses.
And they do. Why wouldn’t they?
What the fuck!?!?! Do you think we think telescopes make the light come to earth *faster* and that by getting here faster it is bigger?
The telescope has nothing to do with getting the light here or finding the light. Telescopes simply make the image, once here on earth, appear bigger. The *many* parallel beams of light which make an image arrive to earth and hit the curved lens of a telescope. Each beam upon entering the lens, each at a unique angle, refracts[*] to another angle and are no longer parallel so the beams spread apart. The beams leave the lens and refract back to their original angles but now the have been spread apart and thus, the image is larger.
Your theory does not allow for refraction[*] and thus can not explain telescopes.
How?
You keep saying that and I truly have no idea what you mean. What do you mean by “primary active mechanism” and where on earth did you get the idea that we think vision *isn’t* the primary active mechanism? No-one ever said any such thing and it doesn’t follow.
What does that mean? I assume you aren’t being literal (I’d make a joke about looking at the ground instead of the sky, but that’d be cheap.) But seriously what on earth do you mean by that.
[*] refraction: law 1: light travels through media at constant velocities– different media different constant velocities. law 2: energy and momentum is conserved. Ergo: when light passes from one medium to another and its speed changes, it’s entry angle adjusts to conserve momentum and energy. For refraction to make sense light has to travel.
Your method does not explain refraction and thus can not explain magnification.
It’s not fucking brain-science, idiot.
You still miss the distinction about significant function versus simply function. Wat may not know precisely what thise functions are, but if it us significant function we should observe a phenotypic difference between organisms that possess variants. The more significant the function the more obvious the phenotypic effect. And we simply DON’T observe anything that obvious despite HUGE differences in the noncoding DNA. Perhaps there are subtle differences, but by definition if they are that subtle that are most careful studies can’t find them yet, then they must not be that significant.
Take your idea of higher level structure. What determinesthus higher level structure? If it is the sequence then it WILL be vulnerable to mutation and visible to natural selection, and we WILL observe the telltale sign of a selective sweep associated with it. If it is not related to sequence then it must arise from some other property of DNA and its interactions with surrounding molecules. But those would be GENERAL properties, because the parts of DNA not involving the basepair sequence are general properties, and these general properties would not be changeable by mutation and would not be heritable. And if it not heritable then it does not have evolutionary significance. It is equivalently to saying that dissolving in water is a function of DNA.
Rob Grigjanis@1171, Thanks! The linked-to article by Sarah Price, Homer and Oral Poetry, indeed explains what I was trying to explain.
211. Opposablethumbs:
A mammal is simply a grouping of organisms for classification purposes based on similar morphological characteristics. I could group all organisms with brown hair and brown eyes and call them brownies, same thing. Neither set of groupings have any real significance since they have no bearing on ancestral relationships.
Actually they do, as you present an unevidenced assertion, which is immediately dismissed as fuckwittery. You need to cite third party evidence to get into this pointing and laughing at you in any meaningful way. Your failure to cite said third party evidence is prima facie evidence you are lying and bullshitting.
Of course if vision were primary, different people with different eyes should see something different when looking through the same telescope.
How convenient for medico that he deliberately chose description that is completely untestable empirically.
How interesting that he accuses common descent, falsely, of being not empirically testable, but his argument about light DEPENDS utterly on untestability.
Hypocrite would be a redundant descriptor at this point.
Of course if vision was primary (in the HONEST definition of term. Lord knows what medico’s personal dishonest version of the term means) changing the telescope lense to one of a different power would not change the image in a reliable way that two observers with different eyes would be able to agree on. But of course this CAN be done.
And so dies medico’s light lie, dismissed by empirical evidence.
Seriously, what does medic0 mean by “vision is the primary active mechanism”? Even if he means extramission he still thinks light (whether from the eye or from the star) doesn’t travel so refraction is is still impossible.
Does he think vision *makes* light come to us? If so … well, I can play his game… by his model if vision makes light come to us the telescope is a useless middle man as it’s our eyes and our vision that is the primary mechanism.
1118 Tigger_the_Wing, Back home =^_^=
Bullshit. The NPC’s I encountered in Pokémon were more intelligent than Medic0506.
1131 Amphiox
Maybe someone is testing out a new ‘self-learning’ chatbot here? Makes as much sense as anything at this point…
FALSE.
Amphiox
Amphiox, you seem to have a vague idea of what “primary active mechanism” means. Throw a brother a break. Can you explain it to me ’cause it is seriously bugging me.
As I was trying to get across a couple of days ago (good jeebus this is interminable isn’t it), medic appears to believe that vision entails direct, instantaneous apprehension of objects themselves, as objects, not the light they reflect or emit.
The moth currently doing a repeated headscreen on my monitor is more intelligent than this fruitcake.
Except if you compare that group with a grouping based on the similarities of Cytochrome C, you’d find no particular overlap. However, the groups based on morphology overlap quite nicely with those based on Cytochrome C and many other proteins.
How many non-functional similarities will it take before you accept that it’s not a chance occurrence?
Almost 1200 comments and we’re none the wiser.
Draganglas: “This would mean that if a object in the night sky is bright enough – exceeds a specific threshold – we should be able to see it, regardless of its distance.”
Medic0506: “Correct. Though I won’t pretend to have a precise formula or know what that threshold is, the further away an object is, the more energy it must produce in the form of light, in order for us to see it from earth. ”
Bzzzzt! Oh, but thank you for playing. Your “theory” offers no explanation of why a telescope would make objects visible from far away. And I am still waiting on your explanation of the Foucault and/or Foucault-Fizeau experiments. Or for a prediction…or for a coherent presentation of what the hell you believe about the physical Universe. So far, you don’t even rise to the level of wrong.
Personally, I noted his use of the term “rest mass”, only occurring after several other people had mentioned it. I wouldn’t be surprised if people could find more examples.
Correct me I am wrong, as it has been a while since high school optics, but if I recall, telescopes actually don’t magnify images (microscopes do). What it does is concentrate/collect more photons, which increases the detail in the image. You then can magnify the image afterwards either in post production of photographs or with a magnifying lense in the eyepiece and see the increased detail more easily, but the image that is first produced by the telescope is not any larger than a naked eye image of the same object. Bur if you tried to magnify the naked eye image, you wouldn’t see more detail. You’d just see a bigger fuzzy blob because the eye did not collect enough photons to resolve those details.
This is why you can’t just take a microscope, turn it around, point it skyward, and use it as a telescope (which is too bad, just think of all the fruitful collaborations that could have occurred between astronomers and biologists if they had to share instruments all the time!)
Our slow one/#1175:
… it occurs to me that if you used this guy to study for a biology* exam, and simply took the negation of most of his sentences, you’d probably do pretty okay.
… it’d be like ‘What wouldn’t that silly creationist gomer who’s hobby is mostly making silly shit up say? I’ll go for that, then…’
For persons following at home: mammals are, in fact, a monophyletic taxon. Meaning, simply: yes, if you take any two organisms classified as a mammal, they share, somewhere, a common ancestor which anything not classified as a mammal does not (of course, it also goes without saying, assuming you found all three of these organisms on this planet, it’s a pretty safe bet all three also all share an additional common ancestor, somewhere further back/that ancestor is an ancestor of the mammal’s later common ancestor)…
And, incidentally, the volume of evidence for this is pretty crushing, and spread through the genomes. Compare, say, the sequences for proteins shared between them, you’ll generally see a similar nested pattern, with the mammals having more in common in their sequences than organisms whose lineage branched off earlier.
… we should totally have a classification system for what he gets wrong, tho’. That, sure, wouldn’t be about genetic lineage. But it might be useful, just to keep ’em all straight. The dump it in a shoebox filing system is probably a bit outmatched by the sheer volume of silly, now.
(*/As noted, you might also do pretty okay in quite a few other fields. We could almost do a series. Science The What Wouldn’t Medico Say Way.)
I note here how medico has ignored the previous posts I made about the uniform luminosity of Type Ia Supernovae, even though he conceded already that he accepted the existing scientific consensus about Supernovae in general much earlier than that.
And does medico think that my friend in Edmonton can see my flashlight in Saskatoon? After all, I can see it, so it clearly has enough energy to cross that visibility threshold, and distance doesn’t matter….
The Leeuwenhoek Space Microscope would not be able to find fruitcake’s μbrain.
The big astronomical telescopes have reflective main mirrors, to concentrate the light to point where lenses can finish the job. Example, Keck telescope in Hawaii, with its hexagonal reflectors, and laser correction for atmospheric effects, can match or exceed the Hubble space telescope:
For some reason, Medic0506, unintelligent designer backer, doesn’t say anything believable…Reality is not their friend.
Amphiox:
They do magnify. Discussion here. But you’re also very right that they’re more about gathering lots of light, with a large primary mirror or lense.
(They call it aperture fever, among amateurs, when they start getting silly, building them fatter and fatter. Gotta have the fattest scope, presumably, to see the faintest nebulae. Though, in fact, that’s only so useful if you can actually get to a decently dark sky, most of the time.)
For a simple experiment to help you understand how lenses work, take a magnifying glass, and focus a spot of light on a piece of paper or something (if you are doing this with sunlight, you can easily start fires).
If you notice, there is a bright spot in the center/focus. This is because almost all of the light hitting the lense straight-on is condensed into that little spot. You should also notice that around the bright spot, there is a shadow. This is because all of the light that is condensed into the focus is no longer illuminating that section of the paper. The Magnifying lens isn’t creating more light, it’s just taking the same amount, and guiding it into a much smaller area, leaving that tiny focus much brighter, and the surrounding area much dimmer. You can even do this indoors with something as simple as a glass of water, except the focus/shadow won’t be quite as clearly defined.
So, yeah, applied to telescopes, this is letting you take photons from a much wider area that what you can get through your iris, giving you a brighter image then what you would get without the telescope. And then magnified so you can make out detail, instead of just seeing a brighter spot.
Anyways, that was a waste of time, as anyone but medico probably understands that already, and we already know that medico is being willfully ignorant.
He’s dismissed wikipedia as a source because it’s too biased. I’m assuming, that like reality, wikipedia has a demonstrated liberal bias. It might also explain why he is so intent on dismissing reality.
medico is still going, huh? How is this getting so much attention? He is going at a fucking snail’s pace, is offering no new arguments at this point, and every sentence so far has already been refuted at least six different ways each. This probably one of the least interesting creationist trolls I have seen, though I will admit the novelty of his complete misunderstanding of how light works.
AJ Milne
One of the things that made my unplanned and initially unwanted sojourn downunder worth the trip was being able to make visits to observatories in places with a decently dark sky. Heck, just being able to pull over to the side of the road and look up to see more stars and galaxies than I’d ever seen in my life…
Even here, in rural Ireland, the Western horizon is blighted by city lights, although on clear nights the view to the East is spectacular compared to South East England where I spent most of my life.
I doubt it matters. Medic0506 just can’t acknowledge the universe is billions of years old. (I have no idea why it matter so much for a belief in a god, but it apparently does in this case.) All of the incoherent “theories” about light/vision are just a show, and they could be exchanged for something else provided it gives the conclusion he wants. They’re only a side-effect of him burying his head deeper and deeper up his own ass.
How about this, medic0506? Turn on Fox News*, if you don’t already have it on, and watch until they have a reporter sent to cover a story in some place far from Fox’s headquarters. You will be able to notice a delay between when the anchor asks something and when the reporter seems to have gotten the question. There will be a pause in the reporter’s reaction, which wouldn’t be noticeable in a face-to-face conversation. It is not because reporters become more and more stupid as they travel farther from Fox headquarters. It is not because the reporter has to wait for a sound wave to travel that distance (because sound does have a speed too) — that is not physically how they communicate with each other. It is due to the speed of light, because the electromagnetic signals are transmitted across some region of space, and that takes some non-zero length of time. Maybe you should troll their website, to see what they have to say about this phenomenon. I bet they’re in on the conspiracy too. Maybe they’re just acting that way, to prove light has a constant speed and the universe is billions of years old. Because they hate you. But you also have to ask yourself why the stock exchanges work on the same principle: they put their trading computers close to the exchanges, so they can make trades as soon as possible before other people do (and rip them off in the process). Maybe it’s all a big, giant conspiracy; and you’re the only one who knows better. I’d be willing to see some evidence of that, but you do not have any.
*I admit, this is bad advice.
1179, zenlike
Reading medic0’s latest droppings, I shall have to agree with you.
At least the NPC’s scripts made sense.
Oh, you mean like the difference between being here in Chiwaukee with a haze problem, versus Dah YooPee with no haze???? Those northern lights were beautiful, and I miss them.
222. Mykroft:
I appreciate your ability to respond in a civil adult manner even though we obviously disagree. That kind of civility is rare here.
As to the content of your post, I have done my homework over the past couple years, and continue to do so. I have been researching information from both sides. I’d be willing to bet that I’ve read at least as many, if not more, scholarly articles from secular research journals, than many of the people on this site. Most of the information that people here post is old hat to me, and after researching the actual scientific arguments, links like Wikipedia and talkorigins aren’t the least bit helpful in making the case for evolution.
Without having done the amount of research that I have, I could not be as convinced as I am that it is false. It is that research that shows me that this theory should have been deemed falsified, and scrapped long ago. Every basic tenet of the theory has been falsified, or proven not to be sufficient to show what evolutionists claim that it shows. All anti-evolutionists know that to be true, whether they are creationists or not. It’s no longer a matter of trying to falsify the theory, that’s done, it’s a matter of persuading people to accept what the evidence shows. Proof and persuasion are two different things.
Actually medico, instead of researching evolution and what not, you might find a common English dictionary more helpful to your education.
You’re partially correct, in that there is a threshold for us to see something, but this doesn’t prove anything about the nature of light; in order to see something, your eyes need to collect enough light (i.e. photons) in a short enough interval for the emitting objects to be perceived; this is why cameras, which can do long exposures (and thus collect more photons) and see objects and details in the sky that you wouldn’t be able to see with your eyes (or at least, you see much finer structure via cameras than you see in eyes, for objects like nebulae you can see through a telescope eyepiece).
I’ve already shown you, repeatedly, how telescopes work and how their ability to work hinges on the current understanding of light, but let’s see what you’ve got.
They don’t change the speed of light, though they do change the distance the light has to travel to reach your eye (by reflecting/refracting the light before it reaches your eye, though this change in distance is infinitesimally small compared to the distance it had to travel before that).
Magnification is a result of the telescope optics, nothing at all to do with human vision. Telescope magnification (using an eyepiece) is a result of the ratio of the focal length of the objective lens to the focal length of the eyepiece. The focal length of the objective lens/eyepiece is determined by the shape/material of the lenses, not by “vision”.
I notice that you haven’t replied to any of what I’ve told you; I wonder why?
You may have skimmed over a small handful of scholarly papers on evolution (though I really doubt you understood much of any of it; journal articles tend to be very thick in details and math), but it’s obvious to anyone at this point that you’ve never even looked at a Freshman physics textbook, let alone anything specifically on optics.
The Bible is not a secular research journal and you certainly have not read any books or papers on evolution because if you had then your ignorance of basic evolution wouldn’t be as plainly obvious as it is. In short, you’re a fucking liar. But we knew that days ago.
225. Vaiyt:
Kinds has nothing to do with gaps in knowledge. It’s unfortunate that some people are so against using a biblically correct term in science, that they totally and completely miss the fact that they know that it’s true.
You would never argue against the statement that groups of organisms can’t interbreed because they are too different, you know that is a true statement. Well that’s what kinds are, yet you guys try to find an argument against the word, even though you know that the meaning behind the word is absolutely true. And nothing is being discovered that changes that, so your argument is false, this has nothing to do with gaps in knowledge.
Tigger @1197:
The perils of urbanization…during the great blackout of 2003, there were panicked calls to the Toronto police about a mysterious band of light in the sky*. AKA the Milky Way. Didn’t see it myself, as I was sleeping after a long hot walk home followed by therapeutic vodka. But I’m sure the photons were there. If only someone had the foresight to put them in a box…
*Well, that’s what I heard on the radio the next day. Grains of salt distributed as needed.
medic0506
You are lying and your God will send you to Hell.
But you clearly didn’t understand it if you claim that 1) light has a constant speed in all media and 2) light and electromagnetic radiation are different things.
amphioxis @ 1114
I note that all of your examples of the length of time we would expect stabilizing selection to constrain human variation are based on coding sequences where, as I have noted elsewhere, we have a much better idea of the effect of variation on function than we do with non coding sequences.
amphioxis @1173
But we do see obvious phenotypic effects between all human beings. How ‘significant’ it is I suppose depends upon what you are measuring. Perhaps, for example, 90% of non coding sequence in human beings affects brain function. How would we know? Every human brain functions a little differently even given the very crude and imperfect measures we currently have of brain function. Or maybe some of that variation affects response to particular chemotherapeutic agents or drugs used to treat certain mental illnesses. None of these agents have been around long enough to have imposed any selection pressure on human variation but at least from the perspective of an oncologist or psychiatrist they would still be considered biologically significant functions.
erm.
The comparisons show that this belief is reasonable. If they were very different from each other, we would suspect they were not related.
You are being silly here because you assume we need to have an actual organism that is entirely unrelated in order for us to have an idea of what “an example of a genetic comparison of two completely unrelated organisms” would look like. We don’t need any such thing, we can write up a fictional genetic code that belongs to no known organism and run such a comparison. And indeed we can compare the genes of the most distantly related known organisms for some useful information here as well.
But that’s just falsification, you should be paying attention to the confirmation that other people here have provided you with already.
[for instance, these distant related ones I speak of are not established to be related JUST by comparing their dna to each other. Multiple comparisons are used between different organisms to establish BOTH a continuum of similarity, and also verify that there are no chronological impossibilities in the family tree, which is YET ANOTHER area of possible falsifiability! ]
You are the one with the unfalsifiable claim here. You just admitted it by implying that no matter how similar the dna tests are that we can show you, you will not conclude them to be related.
*oops, I wasn’t reading the last page…
@1206
medic0506
Oh, so kinds are just the things that can interbreed. Thanks for debunking the coherence of kinds!
Try ring species. They show for certain that you can split one “kind” into two if you take out the middle. Therefore if you think there are currently more than one “kind”, this does NOT mean they must not have a common ancestor. Your objection to evolution is debunked.
LykeX @ 1187:
Mediczero’s first use of the term “rest mass” was when he was describing the (to him) absurdity of the established science of electromagnetic radiation. On e of the items was: “photons have no ‘rest mass’ (huh?)”
Later on he seems to have incorporated the term into his meaningless bafflegab.
Re: JFK’s speech:
If you’re from Berlin, you say “Ich bin Berliner“. Ein Berliner is a sort of jelly doughnut. This is undeniable. I’ve seen the film of the speech, and there is definitely a momentary hesitation where the audience was somewhat taken aback before they figured out what he meant (it’s not hard), and started cheering.
It’s definitely not as bad as McNamara’s “Viet Nam for a thousand years” = “The duck wants to sit down” speech. I doubt if anybody figured that out on site.
continuing, since you already admit that a bunch of change can occur withing a “kind”, and you must based on the evidence of ring species see that ring species are within the range of changes taht can occur, you must therefore admit that evolution of new species is possible.
This conclusion is inescapable, even if you disagree about the history of the earth, and indeed even if common ancestry of all species was not true. You must conclude that, as time goes forwards, more “kinds” or species can indeed evolve.
medic0506
Hold your open hand about a foot in front of your face with the palm facing you and fingers spread wide as you can. Now stare straight ahead and rapidly wave your hand in front of your face. How many arms, hands, and fingers do you see?
While your at it, perhaps you could use your infallible knowledge of existence to explain why I have such a powerful love of cold pizza. I really don’t get why, but fresh hot pizza tends to make me gag while I can easily scarf down a whole cold pizza in a single sitting.
And why should I believe a proven liar and bullshitter like you, especially if it seems all you have is attitude and fuckwittery? Try citing third party evidence to back your claims, otherwise they are simply dismissed as fuckwittery.
226. Mykroft:
I have several times, and yes it does make sense given what we know today.
Unfortunately, in focusing so hard on finding contradictions, atheists often miss important parts that fully explain what they deem to be inconsistencies. Your insect claim being a good example, and I’ll let Paul Taylor answer to that one…
“Critics commonly attack the Bible by appealing to the ideas of secular scientists. They seek to show how a Bible passage departs from modern scientific thought. For instance, Moses says insects have four legs, whereas we know they have six. Leviticus 11:20–23 says, “All flying insects that creep on all fours shall be an abomination to you. Yet these you may eat of every flying insect that creeps on all fours: those which have jointed legs above their feet with which to leap on the earth. These you may eat: the locust after its kind, the destroying locust after its kind, the cricket after its kind, and the grasshopper after its kind.”
In fact, we use the phrase “on all fours” in a similar manner. It refers to the action of the creature—walking around—rather than the complete inventory of the creature’s feet. In reality, the Bible is very precise in describing locusts and similar insects. Such insects do indeed have four legs with which to “creep” and another two legs with which to “leap.”
In most cases like these, you can point out the absurdity of assuming that the author forgot what a bird looks like or miscounted the legs on a grasshopper. Moses, trained in pharaoh’s court, was one of the most educated men of his day. For that reason alone, an unbiased reader of the Bible would assume that the author had good reasons for his chosen words. As Christians, though, we know without question that the Author spoke the truth and knew what He was talking about.”
http://www.insectman.us/articles/biblical/insects-4-legs.htm
228. John H:
Right, but you need a source that propels the light with enough energy to make the trip. Try that experiment with a flashlight…ain’t happening.
At the rate medic0506 is plodding through the thread, (it has taken him over a week to reply (9 May 2014 at 7:28 pm) to 222 (posted on 2 May 2014 at 9:25 am); nearly a thousand comments behind), he won’t ever catch up to the end of it.
All we have is childish assertions that we do so understand exactly what he means by his completely incoherent and unevidenced versions of light, vision and evolution, and we are only hanging on to our own versions, which have been totally refuted (by whom, one has to wonder) because…
…well, just because. He certainly doesn’t have to tell us why! We know already!
Does medic0506 really think that as long as he puts a sentence down for someone else to read, however incoherent, the other person will somehow (by telepathy, perhaps? Or stationary photons?) gain a full understanding of all the thought processes behind it?
I bet he just hated school, with all those instructions to ‘show your work’. And I bet his teachers got really, really frustrated with one-word, incorrect answers which he would insist were correct and that they couldn’t prove him wrong.
And medic0506 finally acknowledges that light moves!
Oh, I hate to disagree with a guy as smart as you but actually Ich bin Berliner = I am San Franciscan and Ich bin ein Berliner = I am a San Franciscan. The former is far more frequently used and more correct but the story of the confusion and amusement is pretty much a complete fabrication. I challenge you to find any reference to the story before 1981 and to find any initial sources. I couldn’t. (Then again I didn’t try that hard either.)
damn, medico, reading that hurt…
A laser doesn’t necessarily have more energy then a flashlight. The reason you use a laser is because all of the photons emitted are travelling in a nearly parallell path. A flashlight has them radiating out in all directions from the bulb (which the reflector then bounces them in a mostly ‘forwardish’ direction.
A flashlight isn’t useful for this because it’s not a tight beam – it won’t illuminate one mirror, or even just the moon, it’s scattering those photons over a pretty big chunk of the sky.
Also, even if you use a more powerful laser, it’s absolutely useless for lighting a room. All it will illuminate is that little dot where it lands (and any dust/fog/mist/smoke that happen to be in the path of the beam).
Are you just being facetious, or are you really this confused on optics and light?
1217, medic0506,
You do realise that what you have written here, in defence of four-legged insects, is an interpretation?
That means the apologist isn’t taking the words literally?
And if you agree with him, then you agree that the words of the bible don’t have to be taken literally?
Which means that you don’t have to take the long, long list of ‘begats’ literally, either?
Which means that you don’t have to fit the facts of the universe into a 10ky timespan?
*Crickets*
229. Mykroft:
No, not army. I’m a paramedic and Medic-05/Medic-06 are the stations that I work.
Now one for you…Why do you guys spell name, “nym”??
And why is that with proper amplification by mirror ande the like. Your unevidenced testament is dismissed as fuckwittery.
Uh, so what? The issue is whether light takes time to travel; not whether light has to have a powerful source to be seen from far away. Shining (powerful) lasers at moon and watching the light come back to us at a later and measurable time shows light travels at a finite speed.
So again light travels at a finite speed and takes time to traverse distances. In other words starlight is something that actually physically travels to earth, in order for us to see it
We don’t. We use ‘name’ for name. We use ‘nym as a short-form of ‘pseudonym’.
Nice evasion of not providing the conclusive physical evidence, evidence that would pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin, that you must provide even to get into the game. Without that real deity and solidly evidenced deity, all you have is an imaginary deity, commonly called a delusion, which shows with each and every delusional post you make….
medic0506, the problem with lying all the time (apart from the chance that your god, should it exist as described, will send you to hell as punishment) is that you cannot remember what you have said before, so your comments – as well as being individually incoherent – contradict each other.
lochabar:
True but that doesn’t matter. For thousands of posts, medic0 has been claiming that light does not travel through space; that it is instantaneously transferred (or instantaneously propels itself). But reflecting a laser off the moon and measuring the time it takes for the light to return means that it takes time for the light to travel and the light has a speed.
He was simply *wrong* and he seems to have admitted it. Or was tricked into admitting it.
Okay, I guess we can debate his magic threshold theory now. Also his claim light can’t exist without its source (in which case we could just turn the laser off after aiming at the moon and then watch its return).
Tigger/Nerd:
Tigger, yeah, there is nothing quite like getting out under a dark, dark sky, stars you never see in the city, sharp and clear against the black. I tend to get out of the city in the winter, most of the time, now, up in the Laurentians, but there’s lots of nights it’s not so cold you can’t stand and gawk a while without losing extremities.
… and Nerd, I saw the lights once in the mid 90s, under very dark skies, in rural northern Ontario, around 45 degrees north…
… it was unbelievable. Huge curtain of green, that seemed practically to touch the ground. It was so bright, it wasn’t so much beautiful, at first, so much as scary–it was late, I was tired, got out of the car, wondered just the hell was going on, up there.
LOL! I did that just 2 weeks ago. I was really bored and typed in a random string of letters to the BLAST search. I figured I’d find something interesting to distract me. My hits had stunningly low correlation to anything known. Entertained? Yes, but with probability rather than with biology.
@1222
How dare you question the wize Medic0506! He knows that lasers are more powerful (ie have more energy) than flashlights because Star Wars! Everything else is just theoretical!
I’ve seen the aurora once, when it came far enough South to be seen here on the South coast of Ireland 51º); but it was weak, and white. I’d love to see it in all its glory!
AJ Milne, do go to Australia. You won’t get frostbite when it’s 30º at night there, you’ll be able to stargaze in your shorts – because it’ll be Celsius!
So you have no idea what energy is, or what a mind-boggling number of experiments of all sorts have demonstrated the energy of a photon actually is.
Energy = hc/λ
Momentum = h/λ
But whatever. Let’s assume you’re totally right. Put it in a physics journal or something and see how that plays out. Therefore, because we see radiation which originated from sources billions of light-years away from us, it “must” have been “propelled” with a whole lot of what you think is “energy.” The fact remains, if this were true, that this trip took billions of years to happen. Not a few thousand. Billions. Do the fucking math.
“On all fours” refers to being on hands on knees. Or being quadrepedal. It doesn’t just mean walking. However, the word “go”, preceeding “on all fours” DOES also mean “walking”. Meaning that if “on all fours” was just an idiom for walking…it is redundant.
And this is just bullshit because even if certain insects have legs adapted to certain purposes like predation, swimming, or leaping, they still use those legs with the other legs when they are walking.
Locust moving on all six legs.
You fail. Your Bible fails. Your entire religion fails. You believe in a lie and tell lies to defend that lie. You are nothing but a charlatan defending charlatans. Good day, sir.
Well, actually, some of it will make it to the moon. But unlike a laser, the light isn’t highly focused, so only an infinitesimally small fraction of the light will make it to the moon (and by that time, they won’t be a coherent beam anymore, though the photons themselves still exist), and most of that will be scattered away from the moon, rather than being reflected back to the Earth (since, aiming at the retro-reflector, and given the number of photons in a typical flashlight beam, it’s unlikely that any significant amount of unfocused light will strike the reflector rather than the lunar surface).
In fact, the laser itself, when shot out to such a high distance, will also become more and more diffuse with distance. The pulse starts out a few meters wide and contains an extremely large number of photons, but by the time it reaches the moon, it’s a few kilometers wide, and a portion of the pulse (about 1 in a 10 million photons IIRC) strikes the retroreflector and is reflected back toward Earth (the rest being scattered away from the lunar surface). The beam of reflected photons is several kilometers wide when it returns to Earth, and only about 1 in 10 million of the reflected photons is detected after it returns to Earth (we can identify photons as coming from the laser pulse since they’re still extremely monochromatic once they get back; that isn’t a quality we typically find of extraterrestrial light). Getting significant results from retro-reflector measurements takes hours of observations and continuous pulses, since only 1 out of every 10^17 or so photons will actually make it back to the original location where the pulse was sent out.
The energy in the light from a flashlight vs. a lunar rangefinding laser is often about the same per photon; since flashlights generally shine white light, a combination of all visible light, and if memory serves, the lunar rangefinding lasers are normally visible or near-infrared light.
The method by which the light is generated is different, however. With a flashlight, the light is generated by either an incandescent bulb or diode, resulting in random emission of photons at all different wavelengths and amplitudes. Lasers work differently, by a process called “stimulated emission” (the “se” in “laser” actually stands for stimulated emission). For stimulated emission, the emitted photons are of the same wavelength (which is why lasers generally one color). As a result, they stay a coherent beam for much larger distances than typical light does; long enough, it turns out, for the spread to be small enough that some photons strike a retroreflector as far away as the moon, and some of those photons can make it back to their point of origin.
Oh, and since so few of the photons actually make it back, the amount of returning light is well under the threshold for human visibility; the returning light can’t be seen by the human eye. We have to use a CCD camera to detect the returning light.
Any other optics questions?
medic0506 doesn’t do questions, except rhetorical ones. He does incoherent pronouncements from his creationist perch above science and reality itself, which were handed to him personally by Jesus, in the form of the Bibble.
@1219
Tigger_the_Wing, Back home =^_^=
That’s what happens when the unstoppable Pharyngula horde collides with the immovable determined crank.
1238, brianpansky,
Where would you like this sniny internet?
Jebus, but medic0506 is the most blithely confident idiot to come along in a long, long time. I’m closing this thread and opening a NEW THREAD.
It’s lovely to see creationist foolishness exposed so happily.