Seth Andrews did a fine job of dismantling creationist Josh Feuerstein’s claims in a video I posted a while back. Now an apologist for Feuerstein has sent me (and Andrews) an email. This one is from Ed Neeland, a creationist chemistry professor at the University of British Columbia.
Dear Thinking Atheist:
I listened to your vid on Josh Feuerstein and the burden of proof argument. As a scientist, I found myself thinking, doesn’t the burden of proof cut both ways? We have no evidence that lifeless chemicals transformed into life, i.e. chemistry became biology.
Neeland doesn’t have much of a rhetorical strategy other than denial. That “We have no evidence…”? It’s a flat out lie. Of course we have evidence. Cells are made of “lifeless chemicals”. We understand where those chemicals came from. We understand how those chemicals act in the cell. We can find organic precursors to all of the pathways present in the cell, and we have a genetically linked chain of descent. We see vestiges of earlier forms in extant forms, such as the common use of RNA as a catalytic agent in proteins. There’s no magic at any point.
Shouldn’t that missing first piece of the puzzle rankle? Shouldn’t we dismiss the case (as you put it) for chemical evolution?
No. Science deals in provisionally developing natural explanations of phenomena using available evidence. We never have a complete, explicit picture of every single step in an evolutionary process, and this doesn’t perturb us at all. When you eat a french fry, do you have knowledge of every single step of the industrial process that leads to food sitting on the table in front of you? Did you know the original potato as a seed that was planted in a specific farmer’s field? Do you think this means that it is reasonable to postulate that an angel flitted down to deliver a hand cut sliver of starchy goodness to your fry cook?
Further, even if all the components of the cell were in a beaker gratis (phospholipid membranes, enzymes, correct pH level, molecular machines…everything), do we have any evidence that these components cobbled together into a viable cell? No.
Ah, yes, the familiar complaint of the creationist who denies history. If you put DNA, lipids, salts, and amino acids in a beaker, how come it doesn’t spontaneously and instantaneously all coagulate into a perfect functioning cell? For that matter, why doesn’t it just turn into a frog or a potato (oh, that’s where his french fries come from!)?
Of course, there isn’t a single biologist on the entire planet who argues for that scenario of spontaneous generation of complex cells. All of the evidence is for gradual emergence of biochemistry from simple chemical precursors, which leads to self-sustaining chemical reactions, which leads to autonomous chemical factories, which leads to something like a vesicle with inputs and outputs and metabolism of some sort. And all that happened over a hundred million years or more.
The beaker experiment is ludicrous. That alone is sufficient to identify Neeland as an idiot.
Again applying the burden of proof argument, science has neither demonstrated how the cell’s components originated nor once originated, how they might have self-assembled. That’s a big problem because a plethora of scientists are working and have worked on this problem for years with no results.
There he goes again! “No results”, aside from all that stuff published in scientific papers that Neeland never reads, or the work that led to a Nobel prize for ribozymes and RNA chemistry.
In fact, we have lots of experimentation to show that this process demands intelligence, carefully controlled conditions and planning to even manufacture simple parts of the cell.
No, we don’t — we have evidence that we can assemble the components of a contemporary, functioning cell using intelligence and planning. That does not mean that the process demands those things. I can put one rock on top of another using intelligence and planning; that does not imply that natural processes can never put one rock on top of another.
So we can’t purposefully create an entire cell and the closest we can come (simple components) takes everything we’ve got in terms of design and planning. Connecting the dots leads to a Creator. That’s one of the reasons I am a Christian and BTW a practicing scientist. Just food for thought.
Again, this is simply not true, and Neeland must know it. We know that simple components can be formed by natural processes: pressure and heat, for instance, will cause common compounds to spontaneously assemble into pyruvate, or nucleotides, or amino acids. We don’t have a complete explanation, but we do have bits and pieces — the pathway is a dotted line right now, which clearly indicates the direction towards the answers.
When a ‘scientist’ has to resort to blatantly lying about the state of the evidence (and within his own discipline, no less — abiogenesis research is largely about chemistry), it’s good cause to doubt his credibility, and at the very least to completely reject his claims.
*snicker* Not whit of evidence of how his creator was created…..
PZ:
What’s the makeup of your email on an average day? Equal parts creationist nitwits to misogynist dudebros?
Potatoes are usually grown from eyes, not seeds. Your whole argument falls apart.
Those were some frustrating quotes to read through. Why would someone who actually spent years studying these fields do that to themselves?
Why, it’s creators all the down, son.
PZ well sums up the answer.
We have a lot of evidence that nonlife became life. The precursors to life are even found in meteorites, amino acids and nucleotide bases. The Urey-Miller experiment and decades of subsequent experiments, one of the latest being the Scripps evolving self replicator, by some definitions a created form of life.
And moreover, as we all know, the eye couldn’t have evolved. So double whammy, evolutionists.
I can recall a few big results just in the last decade. This one received a lot of attention:
We have no evidence that lifeless chemicals transformed into life, i.e. chemistry became biology.
What am I, chopped liver?? I’m 230lbs of chemistry temporarily being biology.
No!!! We should find that missing first piece of the puzzle. That is what science is and what science does. Goddidit isn’t an explanation, it is a science stopper.
Neeland is a liar and an idiot. This is a classic case of a well known phenomon.
Fundie Xianity Induced Cognitive Impairment.
“I don’t now how it got like that, therefore god.”
Does he actually provide any evidence about a process that requires an intelligence or does he just make claims?
science has neither demonstrated how the cell’s components originated nor once originated, how they might have self-assembled.
Isn’t it pretty clear now that mitochondria are simpler life-forms that got absorbed into cells and given a long-term job? It seems like pretty good evidence that cells are cobbled together out of what worked at the time. When he asks us to build cells out of whole cloth he is ignoring the obvious fact that nature didn’t. A creator doing a tabula rasa design would presumably not have left such kludges in the design.
In a comparison, we’ve never created a star or a planet in the lab, or watched one go from start to finish, but we can observe pieces of the process and build models that we can test in the computer lab. There’s plenty in science that we have to do in pieces because we can’t fit it in a lab or over a single grant-cycle.
It’s like the blind men arguing that the whole elephant can’t exist because they only feel one part.
Marcus @9:
Just the way god made you :)
Yes. As are chloroplasts.
It’s obvious that eukaryotes are products of ancient endosymbiosis.
@raven – thank you, I am working at the edge of my knowledge (but I just put in some course time at google.U so know I know everything). Seriously, though, it seems to me that enosymbiosis <— new word in my vocabulary! Blows the creationist question off the map. You don't need to create complex cells, you just need cyanobacteria and a "mergers and acquisitions" model.
I’m guessing Ed Neeland went into Chemistry because dental school was full up.
Basically, if you are a scientist and you spout creationist nonsense, odds are that you are a lousy scientist. Even if you’re doing competent work within the narrow confines of your largely unrelated field, you still doing it without an overall understanding of the principals.
Moral of the story: just because you know something about A, doesn’t mean you know squat about B.
☞ “Ed Neeland, a creationist chemistry professor at the University of British Columbia.”
Dear Dean of Chemistry, UBC:
Your professor of Chemistry is obviously unfit to teach and/or perform basic research. If he has tenure, please remand him to a small office in basement B and relieve him of his teaching duties, lest he infect generations of students with his ignorance. If he doesn’t have tenure, please show him the door.
‘kthnkxbye.
Personally, I was surprised he wasn’t an engineering professor. But then….
…whose name appears nowhere in the department directory. False witness, how does that work again?
https://www.chem.ubc.ca/people-directory
Oops nevermind, found him. He’s at the UofBC, Okanagan. Figures he’d be on the right (as in direction and politics, not correctness) side of the mountains. My state, WA, is just the same.
http://www.ubc.ca/okanagan/ikbarberschool/people/faculty/chemistry.html
Even among the more truth-tethered among us, the research on abiogenesis is not something that gets tons of attention or is all that widely known. Personally I’d love it if you wrote a post summarizing the state of that field though perhaps that’s too far outside your area of expertise.
Yeah, it’s a pity he’s at UBCO instead of UBC. My brother is a UBC chemist; that trailing “O” ruined a perfectly good opportunity to tease him.
He’s an organic chemist too. He really should know better. REALLY.
{grumbles}
Louis
But rocks are not alive! Checkmate evilutionists!
Implicit in his whole approach is that most common of creationist idiocies: “If I can poke holes in the standard scientific model, that proves that god did it.” Even if we had no evidence at all for abiogenesis (which isn’t the case), even if researchers had investigated for decades without any results (which isn’t the case), even then he would still need to provide positive evidence for his god.
Instead of rambling about the burden of proof cutting both ways, he should go back and look up what the phrase even means. It doesn’t sound like he understands it.
Congratulations. You’ve just pointed out a lack of evidence for magical, instantaneous creation of highly evolved life.
Oh this argument is so old… both sides are hopelessly mired in their own ideological dogma that they can’t even agree where to disagree. Sorry PZ Myers, but there is NO evidence supporting the heart of the atheists’ belief system that genetic evolution can come about at the molecular level via the “natural” mechanisms of random mutations, so get off your high horse. There is no evidence and you have never provided any. And the onus is on YOU, the presenter of said hypothesis (that new genotypes originate via random mutation), to present the evidence, which you cannot do.
You routinely spout off evidence THAT evolution occurs, from a macroscopic perspective, which no sane scientist in his right mind would deny. But you have provided NO evidence supporting your atheist viewpoint THAT evolution is random.
Neeland sneers at what he erroneously considers the scientific weakness of evolutionary theory because it cannot hand every conceiveable answer about abiogenesis to him on a sliver platter, and yet he then turns around and demands that this supposedly explanitarily ‘weak’ theory be replaced with… goddidit. That we should just go along with the idea that an undetectable supernatural sky fairy created life by means of magic because we can’t brew up complex cells in a beaker with no more difficulty than making a sandwich. He doesn’t present any evidence at all for this most extreme of claims, so it is rather cheeky of him to claim that it is a superior explanation to the still incomplete by massively evidentially supported theory of evolution.
Why stop there? Why not argue that, since we can’t yet conclusively demonstrate the functioning of the subatomic particles believed to be responsible for gravitational effects, we should just ditch the whole theory of gravity, and instead replace it with the idea that legions of overworked invisible angels hold all the planets and stars in their orbits, and vast clouds of their tiny co-workers flit about us at all times, pushing down on our bodies and every nonsecured object and atmospheric molecule in order to stop the whole shooting match just floating off into the void. Get too far away from the primary angel cloud, and you become weightless. Terminal velocity is not just caused by friction form air resistance, but is simply the fastest invisible angels can fly in atmosphere (angles actually fly by magic, the wings are mostly for show).
Given the quality of Neeland’s arguments against evolution, he should be fully on board with the invisible angel theory of gravitation.
@Mark
First, you might want to look up “evidence”. Especially not that it’s not synonymous with “proof”. It sounds like you’re running afoul of that misconception. WE do in fact have evidence both for evolution and abiogenesis (which are not synonyms either, btw).
Second, am I hearing you right? Are you denying the existence of random mutations? If so, please explain if you’re denying the existence of mutations as such, or merely think that they’re a result of divine intervention.
I’ll just leave this here.
http://youtu.be/mLGrxGBO364
Yes, try the scientific literature. There are people working in the area.
Try the Lenski experiments. Random mutations allowed for E-coli to metabolize uptake citrate for energy, when the parent population was unable to do that. Links to primary literature and an explanation of the findings found here under the “Evolution of aerobic citrate usage in one population” heading.
Hummm, whereas you supply absolutely no evidence for an imaginary creator/designer. Science, with soupcon of evidence, religion, with nothing but presuppositions.
Mark #29
You’re confusing theology with biology, old chap.
An atheist’s position vis à vis theology is that they lack belief in god(s).
An atheist’s position vis à vis biology is _____________
A biologist’s position vis à vis biology is that evolution happens.
A biologist’s position vis à vis theology is _____________
The Lenski experiment was quite telling. If the mutations weren’t random, then why didn’t all the bacteria develop the same mutations? They were grown under the same conditions, from the same original strain.
Bottom line: If it isn’t random, then how come it looks so damn random?
Somewhere in the internet wilderness, drive by troll Mark, skids off into the distance gloating about how he “told those atheists”.
“Neeland sneers at what he erroneously considers the scientific weakness of evolutionary theory because it cannot hand every conceiveable answer about abiogenesis to him on a sliver platter, and yet he then turns around and demands that this supposedly explanitarily ‘weak’ theory be replaced with… goddidit.”
I agree with this criticism of Neeland’s argument, however when you say that evolutionary theory has not discovered “every conceivable answer about abiogenesis” as a way of shifting the burden of proof off of atheists, well that’s stretching it. Because evolutionary theory can hardly provide ANY answers. I find this rather unusual since organic chemists (working at a size scale BELOW that of genetics) can provide oodles of very accurate explanations for every single electron and molecular wiggle that happens in complex organic reactions. Subatomic physicists can also do this for what they study. Cellular biologists can go to great lengths describing every aspect of various enzymatic reactions. Yet when it comes to evolutionary genetics? Silence. No evolutionary geneticist can come close to proposing a workable mechanism for how genetic evolution occurs, at least a mechanism that is demonstrable with evidence from the real world.
And much like the “Goddidit ” crowd hides behind their blind faith in the supernatural, the atheists hide behind their blind faith that “randommutationdidit”.
Oh and he also founded a creation club on campus. What a thoughtful guy.
http://www.ubcocreation.com/main.html
Mark:
Any minute now you’re going to dazzle us with at least 2 metric fucktons of evidence to show that atheists have “blind faith” in anything…
“NO”
“YOU”
“THAT”
“BELOW”
Someone please take the random word capitalization key away from Mark.
That’s because evolutionary theory only comes into play after abiogenesis has occurred. They are two different disciplines, and fact that you don’t acknowledge that fact is telling on your lack of honesty and integrity.
And what evidence do you supply that random mutation in the genome doesn’t occur? Nada, zip, zilch, zero, nothing, bullshit. Whereas we do know the mutation rate of humans. Evidence, which you, without honesty, integrity, and intellect, ignore, unless you can show with scientific evidence those mutations aren’t random…..
Please explain what kind of evidence you’re looking for. What is it you think is being claimed without evidence? In other words, what the fuck are you talking about?
We know that heredity works through DNA. We know how DNA can be altered between generations. We know how such alterations can cause changes to the pehnotype. We know how phenotypes are subject to natural selection. We know how selection can affect the future generations.
What is it you think is missing?
@37 Mark
Organic chemists, subatomic physicists and cellular biologists deal with events that can be followed from beginning to end because they happen in very short time frames. Evolutionary biologists don’t have that luxury.
I’m actually much more in agreement with you guys than you believe, I’m jut trying to get you to “think outside the box” because you are narrow-minded and you are doing science a disservice.
Yes, I am familiar with the Lenski experiments. They provide evidence that evolution occurs. Can you please provide me with a proposed biochemical mechanism whereby a typical known mutation can result in the emergence of these new traits?
“am I hearing you right? Are you denying the existence of random mutations?”
No, I am in no way denying the existence of random mutations. What I am suggesting is that it takes as big a leap of faith to believe that random mutations that can result in the new genetic material upon which natural selection can act and drive evolution, as it is for the goddidit crowd to believe that a big man in the sky did it with his invisible hand. The numbers are so astronomical it’s beyond the ability of many calculators to even manage.
“Bottom line: If it isn’t random, then how come it looks so damn random?”
Ahh, now your getting to the issue. It does indeed look random from our perspective. but get down to the biomolecular level and it ain’t so random any more. Just like when Newton was alive, everything was all nice and orderly and could be neatly slotted into his Newtonian laws of physics that were so obvious for the eye to see. Until quantum physics and relativity came around, then Newtonian physics was put in its place. It ain’t so clearly logical anymore.
“Somewhere in the internet wilderness, drive by troll Mark”
Ah yes, here we go — demonize someone who is challenging your inconsistent arguments as a “troll”. Very scientific of you!
Mark
This is SHOUTING.
This is emphasis, which is produced by typing: This is <em>emphasis</em>
From the UBC Okanagan site linked earlier.
1. He has no tenure. He’s associate, not assistant.
2. it specifies:
Jeez, this requires research? They hate the Necromongers and they especially hate getting stranded on monster-laden planets. Although generally misanthropic, they have great respect for people who demonstrate bravery while actually accomplishing a goal – as opposed to pointless bravery that ends in losing one’s life without accomplishing much of anything. People who go to extreme lengths to persevere against outside threats – we’re talking **extreme** lengths, things that would be unimaginably torturous for the vast proportion of humanity, like cross dressing – will earn a protective, parental-to-sibling-like love. As for non-emotional reactions, they include a significant range, such as protective violence, retributive violence, and defensive violence.
:'(
The Luria Delbruck fluctuation test – done in 1943 – showed that mutations arise at random; they are NOT generated by selection. So Mark is IGNORANT of about 70+ years of biological and molecular research. No big surprise really – anyone that ‘thinks’ atheism is a prerequisite or component of evolutionary theory has tipped his hand.
Genotypes are changed by random mutations – part of my Masters thesis work was to isolate new mutants of the Star/asteroid gene complex. This was done by RANDOM MUTAGENESIS via P-elements. The FACT that the experiments worked shows that random mutations can alter genotypes (only 1 in about 5800 flies were mutant; P-element mobilization schemes generally run from 1 in 50 mutants for singed weak, to 0 in 10 million for Adh.)
There are many KNOWN mechanisms of HOW mutations arise, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM HAS OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE BEHIND IT – that is HOW researchers determined an alteration of the genome arose in the first place !
As to how genetic evolution occurs ? Quite simply : some random variants are either luckier or grant a reproductive advantage than others. These variants tend to become more common in the population as generations go by. Eventually, they may be the only variant in the population.
But I’m sure Mark with present evidence that 70+ years of research from thousands of people is WRONG !!1!!!! And that his unstated, evidence-free ‘alternative’ explanation is somehow better by some undefined, unknown way …
This bit of hypocrisy from an idjit who has presented no evidence, not even a link to Wiki? You have no honesty and integrity. You are a troll until you produce links to evidence to back up your inane claims….
Mark @44:
I wasn’t aware that I was required to formulate a scientific response to your insipidity. You’ve made several unsupported assertions and if you’ve noticed, I called you out on one of them (see comment 39).
You got the response you did bc you barged into here acting just like trolls so often do.
I will apologize for one thing: it seems you’re not a drive by troll.
Also, if you plan on hanging out here, please use the blockquote function to quote others:
<blockquote> place quoted text here</blockquote> gives you
The only things ScriptureThumpers will count as “evidence” is that which supports their particular scripture.
/stating the obvious
As a 35+ year practicing scientist, you are doing what is called “trolling”. Stop it.
Mark #44
Newtonian physics landed twelve men on the moon and delivered a fuckton of unmanned vehicles to the places they were meant to go. WW2 naval guns could hit a target at a range of best end of twenty miles using Newtonian physics.
(And what’s with the linky-nym on one post and the not-linky-nym on the next?)
@Mark, #44:
Ah. I see you aren’t familiar with the Lenski experiments. And you’re a liar.
Define “typical known mutation”.
If we already have characterized a particular piece of DNA, it can’t have “new” traits. It has the traits it has. It can’t give the organism “new” traits, because it already exists in an organism, and that organism’s traits already exist.
IANAB, but I really think you’re making a horrible hash of things here.
And I think you’re too overconfident to even realize what a horrible hash you’re making.
And boy does that piss me off, because I love me some hash. Good hash. Tofu, potato, onion, garlic, ginger, mushroom, mirasol pepper, some vegan feta…then throw some spinach on top to wilt immediately after it comes out of the pan. If you’re going to create a hash, at least try for something like that.
Mark:
More to the point, you weren’t challenging me. Those “inconsistent arguments”* aren’t even mine you nitwit. I don’t know how life formed. I don’t claim to know. Yes, I’m an atheist, but I’m more than fine saying “I don’t know”. I don’t lie awake at night worrying about how life formed.
*you haven’t proven the arguments-made by PZ -are inconsistent. You’ve asserted that. The claim I called out was:
Either prove it, retract it, or shut up.
“Please explain what kind of evidence you’re looking for. What is it you think is being claimed without evidence? In other words, what the fuck are you talking about?
We know that heredity works through DNA. We know how DNA can be altered between generations. We know how such alterations can cause changes to the pehnotype. We know how phenotypes are subject to natural selection. We know how selection can affect the future generations.
What is it you think is missing?”
We are missing the statistical evidence and biomolecular mechanisms supporting the assertion that this alteration of DNA can come about via random mutation. When you do some rudimentary numerical analysis you quickly see that the rates of mutation that would be required to bring about all these beneficial traits, as opposed to deleterious traits, would quickly turn the rest of our genome into Swiss cheese before they could even see the light of day of natural selection. And populations would need to be in the billions, not thousands as in many cases. There is a lot more going on here that scientists are not aware of. The smug faith that atheists exhibit that they have basically figured it all out, that only a few of the details need to be worked out, is just that — smug . Do I know what that “something else” is? No. But as a scientifically oriented person I don’t have to. I merely need to point out inconsistencies in existing hypotheses. Of course the religious crowd points to God, which I disagree with.
Not this shit again.
Fortunately for everyone concerned, your limited imagination and staggering arrogance are barriers only to your own comprehension and capacity for being taken seriously, not for natural processes.
….you actually have no understanding of relativity or quantum physics at all, do you?
Mark
Bless your heart.
Mark @56:
And there we go again. You’re making claims about atheists that you aren’t backing up. Why are you lumping all atheists together? Why do you think we all believe the same thing about the origin of life? That atheists all don’t believe in god does not therefore mean we all share the same opinion on the origins of life. This is one of the reasons you sound like a creationist troll.
That, and you actually said that atheists have “faith”.
Just for the record, and speaking as one o’ them there atheists. Someone could debunk the entire theory of evolution, and it would not cause me to consider the existence of a god any more likely. So much for the alleged “heart of my belief system.”
Evolution is random mutation, followed by natural selection. Random mutation has been evidenced. Evidence of the power of natural selection.
Mark:
Sooo, bc you’re ignorant, that means scientists in the relevant fields are too? It’s ok for you to say “I don’t know” dude.
Mark @ #56
Mark, you’re either ignorant, a liar or both. That first sentence is simply not true. The second sentence doesn’t even make sense.
Nope, it has been evidenced. You don’t see the evidence due to your trolling.
@Reginald Selkirk #3, Saad #7: The potatoes could have been grown from seeds… Un-check that mate! ;-)
So, it takes “as big a leap of faith” to believe
1. that something known to exist has effects on its environment that have not been documented from end-to-end in the way that its effects on its environment through such means as photon absorption and reemission have been documented
as it does to believe
2. that something that is not known to exist despite the collective efforts of thousands of skilled logicians and investigators over the course of thousands of years, something that is not known to have even the smallest effect on the least little thing in the universe, like absorbing and reemitting photons, actually directly controls all things big and large over scales of time from instantaneous to billions of years.
I don’t know about you, but I find it easier to believe that methane controls the production of rainbows than I do that leprechauns do. methane probably doesn’t. We’ve got lots of evidence that atmospheric water vapor is an adequate refracting medium, and I don’t know of any that says that this behavior is methane dependent.
But sure as fuck, I’d say methane if anyone asked me if I was more willing to believe that ultimately responsibility for rainbow production lies with atmosphere methane or with tiny, invisible, green guys with beards who seem to show up, while remaining undetectable and uncatchable, when matter is clumping disproportionately in groups of nuclei containing 79 protons.
I just limped up to the bar from the shore. I have a touch of gout today. Nothing whiskey won’t solve. I was thirsty. The ocean in front of me was filled with water. Yet I had to depend upon this pathetically week and injury-prone ankle-joint to schlep my sorry ass up to the bar. And boy was I hot. From a primary energy source I can’t even look at, let alone derive my energy needs from, unless you count the ridiculous freakin’ inefficiency of the Food Cycle. My lower back hurts too. Nothing whiskey won’t solve.
All’s I’m sayin’s is that the dude who designed me was a fucking moron. His design sucks, almost as bad as his design for rabbits, who have to eat their own shit to stay alive. I ever meat the motherfucker, I’ll bring it, fuck his ass up, leave him trembling behind the woodshed, back where I left Jesus for every ex-drinker to find.
But the dude who invented whiskey? Now THAT was a clever lad. A very intelligently designed what-have-you, that surely was.
Mark #44
From wikipedia:
Duplication is a well known event.
That’s just stupid. There’s no other way to put it.
DNA replication isn’t a perfect process. That fact alone indicates that changes will accumulate in genes over time. Add to that simple changes, like substitution and deletions, and larger changes, like gene duplications, inversions and translocations to other chromosomes, and we’ve got all the new material we need.
It doesn’t take a leap of faith to believe what has been repeatedly demonstrated.
That’s an explanation of how random events, when combined on a large scale, can seem non-random. It doesn’t explain how a purportedly non-random event can end up looking random. The same explanation simply doesn’t work. Large numbers of random events tend to cancel each other out. However, large numbers of non-random events do not tend to give the impression of randomness. Quite the contrary.
The only way this argument makes the slightest bit of sense is if you’re just making the obviously fallacious “well, we could be wrong” and if that’s your argument, then you clearly have no understanding of science.
Weak. Meet. Sorry.
Please, by all means, show us this rudimentary numerical analysis.
Easy to say. Let’s see your math.
Seriously. You’ve made a positive claim. Back it up.
To be fair, Mark’s presumably only got ten fingers.
What’s really amazing is yhat god went to a huuuuuuuge amount of effort to make evolution work, and then to make it look exactly as if life evolved for billions of years. God’s a mighty epic practical joker — must be Loki.
Why is it that the people who say this are always the ones who have know idea how to say
1. “I was wrong”
or
2. “I don’t know”
????
Oh, look an evolution denier. We haven’t had one of those in a while. *confetti*
Seven of Mine, formerly piegasm, don’t speak too soon. Mark may also be a misogynist or a homophobe or whatever else.
No matter, I’m still running for popcorn.
Excellent, a quantitative argument. Please cite your numbers and calculations. I’ll send you off to read some Fisher or Wright or Felsenstein, if you demand something more contemporary.
“The Luria Delbruck fluctuation test – done in 1943 – showed that mutations arise at random; they are NOT generated by selection.”
And how did they know that at the biomolecular scale these new traits supposedly a response to “mutation” were “random” when the structure of DNA wasn’t even discovered until a decade later? lol Really? Because they applied some mathematical population-level formula to it and said “oh look, these new traits pop up every once in a while”? Kind of like pq squared population analysis? That can provide no specific insight into what’s going on at the level of DNA, all that pq squared analysis does is look at phenotype and provides evidence that new traits emerge in populations.
“There are many KNOWN mechanisms of HOW mutations arise, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM HAS OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE BEHIND IT – that is HOW researchers determined an alteration of the genome arose in the first place !”
Of course. What I am asking for is the next step in that process — how those known mutations can actually create functional new genetic material that can result in beneficial traits upon which natural selection can act — and a mathematical statistical analysis describing every step of the way. For example, demonstrate how any of those known mutations can come close to changing hair colour from brown to blond (as a hypothetical example; there are many many many thousands to choose from) which then would supposedly impart some advantage. That link does not exist, except for some tenuous evidence in the Lenski experiments which requires gazillions of bacteria over 20,000 generations and all they can provide is a simple duplication. Hardly compelling.
“As to how genetic evolution occurs ? Quite simply : some random variants are either luckier or grant a reproductive advantage than others. These variants tend to become more common in the population as generations go by. Eventually, they may be the only variant in the population.”
Yes, we’ve all been spoon fed that story our whole lives. Unfortunately, the math just doesn’t support it.
For someone who claims not to be a creationist, he sure sounds like one; right down to the “you think you know it all” comments in response to an opening post that explicitly says the opposite.
@44 Mark
Like @71 LykeX, I’d like to see your math demonstrating that beneficial mutations can’t arise.
Mark:
Any plan to provide evidence for your belief that atheists have faith? Or that atheists believe that “randommutationdidit”? Or are you just going to troll the blog with your unevidenced assertions?
If you wanted to disprove the notion that you’re a troll, you’re doing a much less than stellar job there.
****
Thomathy:
I hope you bring back enough popcorn to share :)
Doing this is so easy
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
Anyone should be able to manage it.
Can you?
All in the scientific literature. But then, since you haven’t made one link to evidence, all you claims are dismissed as fuckwittery. Back up your claims with citations, or your claims can be dismissed.
HTML can’t produce quoted text; the math just doesn’t work out!
My FSM, I’m with Mark! That would be like asserting that surfaces cause the reflection of light and the geometry of surfaces determines the focus of light even before people discovered discrete photons! How would you prove something like that?
Checkmate, Faitheists!
@84:
Azzy FTW!
chigau @82:
So easy a caveperson can do it, eh?
“Excellent, a quantitative argument. Please cite your numbers and calculations. I’ll send you off to read some Fisher or Wright or Felsenstein, if you demand something more contemporary.”
Actually, I should remind you of the scientific method which imparts an onus on the presenter of the hypothesis to either perform an experiment or to provide evidence supporting it. It’s not my responsibility to have to go out and search down evidence supporting your hypothesis. It’s funny how the atheists are always slamming the creationists for not providing evidence of the existence God, yet at the same time they provide no mathematical, statistical structural evidence supporting their own explanations, at the biomolecular level (at least, nothing that I have been able to find. You’d think it would all be right at their fingertips). And to clarify, I’m not talking about population-scale studies which everyone here seems to be throwing at me, of which there are many. I am talking about structural biochemical pathways.
And to tell you the truth, I did such an analysis a few years ago (after completing my 3rd year pre-med genetics and biochemistry classes) and it was just so utterly ridiculous that I soon made up my mind and moved on. I don’t feel like going through it again, but I will … at a later date. I know this may sound like a cop-out, but I am going on a month-long trip into the Alaskan wilderness in a few days and I really have to pack. I don’t have the time to spend digging it all up again. I’m not making that up; I really do have to go. I’ll come back some time and provide you with it when I have got the time to do it.
But please, direct me to what you suggest are the most relevant works of Fisher, Wright or Felsenstein; I’d love to go through them in more scrutiny!
Nope, I guess the creationist troll isn’t going to address my questions.
Mark:
Stop by anytime. I’d really rather have you creationist idiots than racist or misogynistic dudebros.
“My FSM, I’m with Mark! That would be like asserting that surfaces cause the reflection of light and the geometry of surfaces determines the focus of light even before people discovered discrete photons! How would you prove something like that?”
That is not a valid analogy. A beam of light is a macroscopic entity. The goings-on of individual photons are of no consequence to the behavior of the beam as a whole; only the statistical sum of the goings-on of trillion of photons determines the behavior of the beam, and this can be predicted with basically 100.000000% precision. In contrast, the evolution of a new trait can be brought on by one single “alteration”, “mutation”, or whatever you’d like to call it, in one tiny piece of DNA. That is a microscopic dynamic that is amplified into the macroscopic realm via genetic replication and protein synthesis.
Shorter Mark: *yelling* What?! I can’t hear you, I’m going through a tunnel! There’s no service…*makes static-y noises and turns off the phone*
Tony!, I’ll gladly share! This will be a party, what with the confetti. A creationist, at least and at long last.
_____
I am always amazed that creationists can continue to repeat the same stuff without end.
Mark @ #78
‘Functional new genetic material (sic)’ is an inaccurate was to describe mutation. Also, ‘beneficial traits’ are not necessary outcomes of mutations, even those that are propagated through generations. In fact, a beneficial trait can only be so described within a particular context of environment and time. Evolution does not work toward a goal, like ‘beneficial’, it works only on survival and to that end any given trait at any given time and in any given environment may be ‘beneficial’ at any other time or in any other environment or not. To suggest that a trait must be beneficial is to suggest that there is a purpose where there is none. That kind of thinking is revealing of a particular mindset and evidence of a deep misunderstanding of evolution.
This is a nonsensical statement.
Mark, if you are not a creationist, what is your belief?
Especially considering that he’s a chemistry professor! Granted, I only had to take what my college called “Chemistry 112” (so, freshmen level), and that was 12 years ago, but I don’t think all chemical reactions are reproducible in a beaker. So his premise seems flawed from a chemistry standpoint, let alone a biology standpoint.
I see some comments above that seem to confirm my suspicions.
Is anyone who insists that “atheist” = “evolutionist” a liar or an idiot?
What material the mutations arose in is irrelevant to the fact that they showed that the mutations arose at random.
If the mutations were directed, the number of resistant colonies would show limited variation – something like 100 +/- 5 colonies per plate averaged over many plates.
If the mutations were random, the number of resistant colonies would vary greatly, depending upon which generation it arose in – end up with up to half the colonies resistant, or none, averaged over many plates.
The results showed high variation; thus sane and rational folk deduced that the mutations arose at random rather than being induced.
Later research SHOWED that genomic DNA sequences can change by many different mechanisms. You don’t have to know HOW a mutation arose to know that one did; later research geared specifically to examining DNA figured out what happened.
Where did you get the stupid idea that beneficial mutations always REQUIRE ‘functional new genetic material’ ? Examination of REALITY shows that all known beneficial mutations are alterations of already existing DNA – modified duplicates, insertion of retrotransposons, retrotransposition, alteration of regulatory regions, etc. None of these require anything new to ‘POOF 1!1!!!1!!!!1!’ into the genome as you seem to ‘think’ it does.
In Drosophila, resistance to organophosphate insectides was induced by integration of an Accord transposable element near a phosphatase gene; this cranked expression of that protein up around 100x. Those with the element survive and thrive in the presence of organophosphate poisons; those without the element die.
So where, EXACTLY, is the ‘new functional genetic material’ your deranged ‘model’ requires ? It is only where the Accord element is that is different, not its presence in the genome.
You keep getting it backwards – we observe beneficial traits arising. Examination of the genome shows HOW the trait arose – VIA MUTATION (a change in the DNA relative to those without the beneficial trait). You have something resembling evidence to the contrary ?
Rock pocket mice on dark volcanic outcroppings in a sandy desert. The mice are usually tan (and blend in on a sandy background), but an occassional mutation of a single gene in the pigment synthesis pathway leaves them darker. Those variants do QUITE well on the dark outcroppings.
Initiating standad creationut posturing in 3.. 2.. 1..
Those links were established decades ago; that you are ignorant of them does not mean they don’t exist. No matter how desperately you wish them to.
Actually, the math does support that idea. IT HAS SINCE THE 1920s !
That was when the field of population genetics was devised.
Examination of REALITY supports that idea. It has for over a century and half.
Using half-arsed numerology and misinformation theory will not make thousands of articles magically disappear, or show that mutation is somehow magically guided by an unknown being that somehow does stuff.
Whereas you present nothing to back up your idiocy and fuckwitted IDiot questions. We’ve seen your type before. All presupposition, and have no idea of what evidence is or what it means. Boring troll.
For fuck’s sake.
So, Mark comes here, throws shit on the wall and tells us to clean it up. Mark, you are making a positive argument. You could provide us the numbers that prove your theory and yet you have to pack for a trip. That’s a total cop-out. You started a discussion with every intention that not to participate in it long enough other than to tell us we’re wrong and just as bad a the creationists and then go off on your merry way.
That’s infuriating and it’s also dishonest.
Further, you keep conflating atheism and evolution. These are not the same thing. They are not interchangeable. Stop doing that. Or don’t, since you’re not sticking around anyhow.
Yay! A drive-by tu quo que. Nothing to see here, party’s over, and I’ve thrown the popcorn in a fit of rage. The floor would be clean, but for all the shit Mark threw, so eat it at your own risk.
chigau @ #95, we don’t have to choose. Mark won’t help us, anyhow.
@ Mark;
A few points;
1) Evolution and abiogenesis are not synonyms. Evolution describes the process by which life forms develop over many generations, while abiogenesis is a theory addressing how the biological processes that gave rise to life first came about. An inability to describe the exact method by which life first arose does nothing to invalidate the observations made of how random mutations and environmental selection pressures can infuence a population over many generations. Even a layman like me knows that the process has famously been directly observed in various types of bacteria and in fruit flies.
2) Atheism is not a prerequisite for evolution, nor is it some presuppositionalist position held by evolutionary theorists. The discipline is not politically invested in promoting atheism, though many people who study developmental biology and genetics come to an atheist position because that is what the evidence points to. There are no known fingerprints of intentionality in our genome, either from a putative deity or ‘ancient alien’ designers in the vein of the Engineers from Prometheus. Why assume that which is not by any stretch of the imagination in evidence?
3) A major problem many perople have with grasping evolutionary theory, and I would hazard a guess that it may be a stumbling block for you to, is one of time frame. From our day to day perspective, then numbers involved for random mutation and natural selection to give rise to complex life can seem huge, but you have to rememeber two concepts at all times – deep time and mass iterations. The universe is roughly 14 billion years old, and Earth has existed for approximately four billion. The primordial seas of our planet churned about containing the chemical precursors to amino acids, and thus for proteins, for millions of years. Is it so unreasonable that, in all that time, a self replicating combination of chemical compounds couldn’t have formed by chance? And once you have slef replication, you have the possibility of mutation, changing the chemical makeup and thus offering the opportunity for selection pressures to apply.
Once you get this basic building block of life, then vast spans of time and countless billions of cellular mutation events offer enormous potential for genetic alterations that are deleterious, advantageous and also nuetral to take place, all of which feeds into selection pressures and slowly allows for new forms of life to emerge that are slowly bashed into shape by their surroundings. No consciousness is required for this process when you have enough time and a random event starts the biochemical ball rolling. None of this requires the kind of non-parsimonious assumption that belief in any ‘intelligent designer’ demands.
The notion of god breaks all the known physical laws to such a degree that assuming its existence makes the entire process of rational scientific study moot, and even if we assume alien designers, all that does is shift the question of how life arose back a little. Whether we are talking about an ancient astronought’s science project of a magical puppet master, none of it answers a critical question – even if we were somehow originally created by (a shoddy and clearly incompetent) designer, then who or what created that creator? And who created their creator? And the creator after that, and so on ad infinitum?
If your numbers are so good, why not publish them in the scientific literature instead. Or, are you afraid the peer reviewers will call your calculations just so much bullshit?
Mark #88
Umm, no. You didn’t just question the evolutionary model; you made a positive claim. You asserted that:
You don’t get to weasel out of that now. Can you back up that assertion or not?
You know, you can type in as many buzzwords as you like, but if you show no understanding of them, they actually make you look stupider, not smarter.
The thing is, I’m not convinced you have any clear meaning intended with those words. I get the impression that you’re just putting them in there to sound impressive. If I’m wrong, you can prove it easily; simply explain, in simple, straightforward terms, what you mean.
See, first you’re asking for evidence that changes can occur, then that these changes can lead to phenotypic change; then that this change occurs randomly; then that this randomness doesn’t cause too many deleterious mutations. Frankly, you’re all over the place. I’m not getting the impression of a single, coherent position. Rather, I see this as a result of a half-baked collection pseudo-scientific nonsense.
It’s possible that you’re just not explaining yourself very well, but either way, I’m not getting any clearer. If you’ve really got a point that you think is important, I suggest you take a time-out, really think things over, and post a single, coherent, straightforward explanation of what you think, what you think we think, and why your position is superior to ours.
Yes, it does. After all, you’d never accept that kind of bullshit from us, would you?
Honestly, why did you join this discussion and make these claims if you weren’t ready to back them up? You didn’t really expect us to just take you at your word, did you? In the future, maybe you should just hold off until you’ve got the time to make a proper case. Otherwise, you’re only going to give us the impression that you’re yet another lying creationist.
There are mountains of evidence, whole multi-story libraries. You can’t even walk outside (literally) without seeing the evidence.
Mark’s glassy eyed repeating of xian cult slogans isn’t even assertions without proof or evidence. He is simply lying.
However, he does make one good point. He, Michele Bachmann, and Neeland are all examples of the well known phenomenon of: Fundie Xianity induced Cognitive Impairment.
Believing in weird cults can drop your apparent IQ by at least half.
I should remind you of the scientific method which imparts an onus on the presenter of the hypothesis to either perform an experiment or to provide evidence supporting it.
OK, I think this is a parody.
When you do some rudimentary numerical analysis you quickly see that the rates of mutation that would be required
Since you must have done that analysis, in order to believe that, please share your work.
He hasn’t done that. More lies.
It’s been done and the rate of mutation is far higher than it needs to be to explain evolution.
E=RM + NS. What is rate limiting for evolution is selection pressure. Data. Whenever ecospace becomes available it is quickly filled. By adaptive radiation. The dinosaurs die by Chickxulub, the mammals take over and become stunningly diverse in a very short period of time.
Galapagos finches, African cichlid fish, Hawaiian Drosphila. We see it always. Evolution is capable of operating at far higher rates than it normally does in a steady state ecology.
Alaskan ‘wilderness’ in October….
hmmm
The depth of Mr. Neeland’s argument is made clear in the following text, which is his, meaning he owns it, and it comes from here:
http://www.askjohnmackay.com/questions/answer/how-recognise-design-science
2 years! 2 whole years! (Timeframe blindness much?)
Cells are complicated! And I’m educated!
Cells are DEMANDING littles farts!
I SHOULD KNOW!
Wow. Just wow.
And as for our friend Mark, he shows all the signs of the “med school = keys to the Dharma because hard and stuff” sort of person. Thankfully they seem to be rarer than they were. Nowadays, if you want to find a truly knowledgable person (who will happily tell you how knowledgable they are) without scooting over to engineering, you have to talk to a chirpractor. Because Doctors.
Bloody Dunning-Krueger overdrive. Hard work plus tunnel vision just makes it worse.
And this game Mark seems to be playing, the whole fox in the henhouse thing is a creasionist/Christian/fundamentalist favorite. At least we don’t have to watch him rub the Socratic Method Juice all over himself.
And I’m pretty sure he justifies it be believing he’s not one of “them,” for some arbitrary value of them. Because Doctor. And education.
Dying to see some of that brilliant, self-evident math he did back in the day.
So after taking a couple undergraduate courses, you did some math that you thought was relevant, and concluded “I’m smarter than all these biologists, and, in a brief period of study have overturned one of the fundamental theories of biology”, rather than “Hmm, maybe I don’t actually understand this as well as I should.” Got it.
I’ll happily wait a month when Mark is done shooting wolves from a helicopter to see the results of the “numerical analysis.”
FRm Mark:
“new genetic material”
“beneficial traits”
“a mathematical statistical analysis describing every step of the way”
WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!!! That’s my creationist alarm going off. Mark’s an ignorant loon, a Cordova-lite who’s memorized just enough techno-babble to impress the ignorant, but he clearly doesn’t understand a whit of it.
Consider yourself called out, phony.
If you take twice as long to code for a locust, as for a human, how intelligent is that? Magic shit design perhaps, but not intelligent. Some authors could do with editing. And why does God need DNA? If beings could exist immaterially, there would be no need for any material at all.
I think it’s probably incorrect.
Ahhh, you are making the same mistake that Behe made in the Dover Trial
You are looking at one string of DNA with 160,000 base-pairs to 12,200,200 base-pairs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria
When you figure out the Mutation Rate (per million base-pairs), you can see that it is very low and that’s likely what creationists/intelligent designists are using – Behe did.
Wikipedia has one figure at 0.003 mutations per genome per generation – tiny
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_rate
But you saw where I high-lighted per genome
Evolution – The Modern Synthesis is about the populations – there are 10^19 bacteria per cubic meter
But here was where Behe was hammered – if there was just one bacteria….. tehe…. it might have some validity but given a day’s worth of bacterial growth, there would be so many genomes, it would seem almost inevitable that a mutation would occur.
Eric’s comment deals directly with this – CTRL F and then search for cubic
http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2014/01/24/probability-and-evolution-2/
@Waffler, possibly or possibly not of the Waffler Institute, depending on the time of day, #110:
Well, duh: That happened to his brother Theodore, so why not him?
Mark@37
I find this rather unusual since organic chemists (working at a size scale BELOW that of genetics) can provide oodles of very accurate explanations for every single electron and molecular wiggle that happens in complex organic reactions. Subatomic physicists can also do this for what they study.
Lol. Heisenberg got a whole principle for how physicists and chemists CANNOT do that. Not only can they accurately predict “every single electron and molecular wiggle”, it is Impossible to do so.
Seriously, you don’t know what you are talking about. And my narrow-mindedness has nothing to do with that.
I wonder if Mr. Neeland has researched the not very god-like properties of peanut butter. Apparently it is not very evolution-like also.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FZFG5PKw504
“Peanut Butter, the Atheist’s Nightmare!”
Of course, I’m one to talk, not even being able to make a pretty link.
Oh.. I just noticed the phrasing:
@37 Mark
They can do “this” “for” “what they study.”
I swear, it’s not only an ignorance tell, it’s a construction out of the “Padding Highschool Report Aassignments the Easy Way: Now We Are Sophomores.”
Everything single possible mutation in the genome of E. coli occurs once every couple of days within the gut of a single cow. The reason we haven’t seen E. coli evolve into a sparrow in our lifetimes is not because the mutation rate is prohibited, but because sparrows don’t survive very well in the stomachs of cows.
Somewhere, somehow, life either began, or it always existed.
Which is simpler and more likely to spontaneously occur, a simple cell, or a universe-creating superbeing?
Which is simpler and more likely to have always existed, a simple cell, or a universe-creating superbeing?
If you want to use probabilities to argue against evolution, the first thing you must do, if you are honest, is admit that the probability argument destroys all creationist/theist ideas FIRST.
Most of the time natural selection PREVENTS change. Stabilizing selection is the most common kind of selection.
If selection wasn’t around the put the brakes on things, mutations acting on their own would have filled the entire universe with a diversity of organisms by now.
I think it is obvious that Mark presumes a full new protein appears instantaneously *puff of smoke* without any intermediates *snicker*
Just like the scene in Judgement Day about Kitzmiller v. Dover. Behe is on the stand, saying there are 1) no intermediates for flagellum, and 2) no books on evolution and the immune system.
For 1), scientists showed all the intermediates, and 2) the lawyer dumped a pile of books (about a dozen) with titles like Evolution and the Immune System and Development of the Immune System, with the judge shaking his head at either the deliberate ignorance or perjury.
Still available from PBS Nova’s Judgement Day.
I really don’t see how Mark can be called a creationist. He is much more likely to be a SooperSkeptic, a smug being who has to be led by the hand and force-fed every detail before he will accept anything. Not very promising for a future MD [or is it DC] , fields where inferences based on incomplete knowledge are necessary.
You need to learn political/religious dog whistles. They were everywhere.
For Mark:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McArthur_Wheeler
Really, forget about biology and devote a few hours to the perusal of these syndromes.
naturalcynic
He’s smug alright, but in that creationist kind of way. The fact that he considers atheists to have “blind faith that randommutationdidit” is one tell. Also the fact that he appears to have read about some terms and thinks he’s so knowledgeable about them, despite not really understanding what he’s talking about–that’s very much a creationist tic.
And if Mark is still looking, a primary example of evolutionary theory in work, with a medical twist, is MERS. Predicted by evolutionary theory, not by IDiots.
Dang, got my acronyms wrong. It is MRSA, which is bacterial, versus MERS, which is viral.
The doctors were worried about the Redhead getting MRSA with her leg wound. She seems to have avoided that misery.
This statement demonstrates that Mark has no clue as to what the “random” in random mutations actually means. Either that or he is being deliberately dishonest and referring to a type of randomness that has no relevance to evolution at all.
This statement by Mark demonstrates that he is either lying about being in med school or he cheated on his pre-med microbiology exams to meet requirements for admission. Because if he had honestly taken that course he would have known that the number of bacteria involved in 20 years in a lab flask experiment is duplicated and exceeded in the wild bacterial population in about one month.
*Gasp*, you mean Mark just might be another lying and bullshitting IDiot? I am so non-shocked I tell you….
the answer is in your equation.
liar.
nobody could be that much of an idiot and still be able to type.
creationists are ALL liars. Every single one of them. It does not matter whether the believe what they are saying is truth, they are spewing obvious misinformation that is discreditable in less than 5 seconds. They KNOW this. ergo, every single one of them is a liar, whether they admit it to themselves or not.
he could be.
he could also be lying about what he learned.
example:
Jonathan Wells.
Trebuchet @ # 22: … found him.
Amazing – Neeland’s thumbnail c.v. does not list any credits in biochemistry from Lehigh U.
Funny how, of all the people shown as UBCO Chem Dept faculty, Neeland is not only the only one wearing a tie or equivalent, he is also the only one who looks like he spent his twenties knocking on doors where he had not been invited, with a black-bound book in one hand.
I for one eagerly await his return from his pilgrimage to Palintopia.
Got that wrong too. Lenski’s citrate users had two and sometimes three mutations. One sometimes found was a mutator. A mutation that raises the mutation rate. It turns out that mutation rates like everything are also under…natural selection and evolve. If it is advantageous to have a higher mutation rate, that happens.
I don’t believe for 1 microsecond that Mark is in medical school. He knows far less than a well educated high schooler. And besides he has lied about just about everything else. Not credible.
FWIW, Lenski’s experiments are part of a long line of microbial evolution experiments stretching back to the mid 20th century. We’ve seen this near countless times. The most apparent to everyone is drug resistant bacteria. It’s routine and a serious problem that is getting more serious by the decade.
True. This is an important point.
When a species sits on a sharp adaptive peak and is surrounded by other species on nearby adaptive peaks, stabilizing selection tends to keep them there.
Mark @ #44
Mark @ #56
You know how to tell a bullshitter is bullshitting, even without specific understanding of their field of bullshit? When their bullshit doesn’t even have internal logic.
Mark, before you duck off to the alaskan wilderness, could you please clarify whether the number crunching is “rudimentary numerical analysis” or “beyond the ability of many calculators”? I can’t see how it could possibly be both, unless you’re going to handwave it away by weaseling some bullshit that you were talking about the “many calculators” used by children in primary school that only have 4 basic mathematical operator buttons.
Options available for posting your work:
1. Bookmark this page, post when you get back.
2. Subscribe to this thread, post when you get back.
3. Post your work to the thunderdome thread. It’ll be there when you get back.
4. Email them to PZ. His email will still work when you get back, and it sounds like he’s really interested.
Or maybe you just don’t want to, because you’ve been making shit up. Since it’s so easy to post your work after your trip, I’m sure we can all agree that if you never do, it means you were a bullshitter. Thanks for playing.
@136 raven
Well, yes. Or he’s absorbed all the tells by hanging out, in which case he’s very likely to have the virus anyway.
In any case, it’s the same crap over and over again because it’s beleieved to justified. In fact it’s righteous. The opponents (“anti-religionists,” or term of the day) are othered, and on top of that, it’s war.
In war, it’s a spy’s job to lie. It isn’t even lying, really… it’s subterfuge, intelligence gathering, strategic disinformation, etc. There’s a greater good. If they can only open a crack…
And every action rests on a foundation of hoghly motivated reasoning. Motivated to the point that an intelligent person with access to meaningful information simply accepts Pastor Bob’s statements on physics, genomics, and anything else that isn’t pleasant to actually question at Wednesday group.
So, yes, lies. But lies that aren’t lies even if they were lies which they cannot be known to be.
“…It is a prison that you cannot taste, see or touch. A prison for your mind.”
Creation or Evolution Does it Matter?– Dr. Ed Neeland
http://kcc.sermon.net/main/main/5798357
*
Creation or Evolution? What does the evidence support? — Dr. Ed Neeland
Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkTF7qizsp0
Part 2
@140 Allan Nalla
Um… thanks. That hurt. /s
Dunning-Kreuger Overdrive in the flesh. And it still sounds just as idiotic as any.
I tried to watch the 2nd one, but after about 3 minutes it became a flashback to sitting very uncomfortably, in a church, wondering what I’d gotten into, and all the little interrogations that occur during “fellowship.”
“Even a pen!” Even a pen had a designer. “Even my red tie!” Over and over and over. This is nothing but pure, horrible indocrination. Grinding it in so deep that the roots of incredulity reach everywhere.
What amazes and saddens me is that none of this crap ever really goes beyond the Comfort / Cameron “crocoduck and coke” arguments. All that changes is the quality of presentation, the length of the words, the proud credentials of the presenter. (“And I should know!” says Ed.)
It’s egotism and fear, I think. Egotism that believes that “what I know” is all there is to know. And fear of not being “special.”
And it is sad. Especially when I think about all the kids that are steeped in exactly this kind of thing, day in and day out.
Allan… why did you post that?
For extra fun, here’s a link to a statement by Mr. Neeland’s hero, James Tour.
James Tour is commonly trotted out as one of the “few legitimate scientists” to sign the Discovery Institute’s DARWIN BAD sheet.
It’s called “Layman’s Reflections on Evolution and Creation. An Insider’s View of the Academy,” and it is one huge experience in psychology and doubletalk.
Mark #56
I’m not an expert on genetics or evolution, but I don’t see how you can calculate the probability of “beneficial” or “deleterious” traits arising. Traits aren’t inherently beneficial or deleterious. They’re only so in the context of an environment.
Also:
Suppose there was an extremely rare genetic condition which imparts an indigo pigmentation on a human’s skin and people of indigo skin who mated had indigo skinned children. Now imagine an alien race comes to the planet and starts killing people without indigo skin. A sufficient number of generations later, you could be saying, but that mutation was so rare! How do we have 30% of the population with indigo skin?! It seems like Mark is completely ignoring the power of selective pressures over long periods of time.
Obviously, “Mark” is an acolyte of Doug Axe…the Discotute hack who proudly proclaims that proteins are impossible because numbers.
This is bog-standard Discotute stuff. Surprises me that “Mark” doesn’t just cut-and-paste Axe’s completely discredited writings on the subject.
I just skipped to a place in the middle of that Neeland video and immediately regretted it:
Not true. Fallacy of Argument by Lying.
1. Craig Ventor made a bacterial cell.
2. We have also made the next step down, viruses. Many times. To the point where we have resurrected extinct ones, the 1918 flu virus and the human defective endogenous retrovirus Phoenix. Phoenix had been extinct for 5 million years.
3. It’s also a rather stupid argument. No human has made a planet or star either. Yet. So what? We know how they are made and it doesn’t take an Invisible Sky Fairy.
Not only do you get email, PZed, you get an creaIDproponentist!! He’s totally not a creationist. *wink wink nudge nudge*
He’s more on our side than we think. He says so right there….. But then he argues pretty much against everything that science has shown to be our best idea of how things came about. Does Mark’s IP trace to somewhere in Seattle, by chance?
@147…In addition, “according to evolution, it happened by itself” is a moronic assertion.
a. “Evolution” doesn’t speak. Never has. You can search and search and search, but you will never find a paper on the subject by “evolution”.
b. The biologic theory of evolution does not speak to the initial organization of the first cell. Just doesn’t. It’s about the diversity of life on this planet and is mainly in recognition of the fact that the copy-editing mechanism for RNA and DNA is not 100% accurate, resulting in minor differences between nearly-but-not-completely identical organisms, and how those differences are sifted by environmental and other pressures. The theory of evolution can be neatly encapsulated by the statement “we are not clones”.
@147 raven
Actually this isn’t true. What Ventor did was replace the genome of a bacterial cell with a synthetic genome. Same thing for viruses. The DNA still has to pass through a pre-existing cell in order to make a virus.
The following is making the rounds on e-mail lists.
Since PZ hasn’t published it….
*
Dr. Myers:
I read your article (http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/09/10/i-get-email-37/) on my comments to the thinking atheist. Very entertaining writing. But I’ve always enjoyed science fiction. My responses in blue.
1) “Cells are made of lifeless chemicals. We know where they came from.” No we don’t. We can’t generate all amino acids “naturally” nor control their enantiospecific generation “naturally” nor condense the specific enantiomers into functioning proteins (enzymes) “naturally”. Similar case for sugars, membranes, molecular machines etc. I wish it were that easy. It would make my job so much easier. Now, add some intelligence/planning and we can make rudimentary beginnings. This is the first of many examples of elephant hurling in your arguments. Basically, that’s bad arguing.
2) “There’s no magic at any point.” Nonsense. If it’s all so simple and so well understood then make a cell. Having a spot of trouble on that one? No surprise as you need to add intelligence and planning greater than our own (given our total failure to duplicate a cell). Trying to bluster through my criticisms isn’t working.
2) “Science deals in provisionally developing natural explanations of phenomena using available evidence. We never have a complete, explicit picture of every single step in an evolutionary process, and this doesn’t perturb us at all.” Well it should bother you because you could drive transport trucks through the holes in your arguments.
3) “All of the evidence is for gradual emergence of biochemistry from simple chemical precursors, which leads to self-sustaining chemical reactions, which leads to autonomous chemical factories, which leads to something like a vesicle with inputs and outputs and metabolism of some sort. And all that happened over a hundred million years or more.” What evidence leads us to believe gradual emergence of life from non-life? Again, if this scenario is so cut and dried; then make a cell. It’s just something you have faith in with NO experimental evidence to support it. That’s called blind faith and more elephant hurling. At conferences, I enjoy listening to talks from OOL (origin of life) scientists who freely admit that they have no real idea how life originated. How refreshing to see that “all of the evidence” supports your view. I really must correct them at my next conference. May I quote you?
4) “The beaker experiment is ludicrous. That alone is sufficient to identify Neeland as an idiot.” Ad hominem attack. Another fallacy. And BTW, calling me an idiot bothers me not at all. Your arguments simply have no basis from our science peers. You can believe what you want but call it what it is…faith.
5) “There he goes again! “No results”, aside from all that stuff published in scientific papers that Neeland never reads, or the work that led to a Nobel prize for ribozymes and RNA chemistry.” More elephant hurling and ad hominem attacks. Dr. Myers, focussing on the fact that a hammer falling from a roof might drive a nail into a piece of wood doesn’t mean that an automobile manufacturing plant could self-assemble. That is the basis of your argument. I would never deny the possibility of the hammer argument but I am correctly pointing out the sheer improbability of the manufacturing plant. No doubt, like David Suzuki, you believe that jamming a screwdriver into a fine Swiss watch might improve its function. You have more faith than I.
6) “We know that simple components can be formed by natural processes: pressure and heat, for instance, will cause common compounds to spontaneously assemble into pyruvate, or nucleotides, or amino acids.” Nucleotides? I can’t even think of a paper describing spontaneous NUCLEOSIDE synthesis from simple chemicals let alone nucleotides! Please give me a reference that describes the spontaneous self assembly of simple chemicals into cell nucleotides. My colleagues tell me that their labs use expensive machinery, intelligence, planning and carefully controlled conditions to synthesize nucleotide fragments. I am going to tell them to abandon their equipment and labs. In their next grant proposal, perhaps we could describe your method instead? It would surely be less expensive to let natural laws and unguided chemicals make cell biomolecules. As for natural amino acid synthesis, the results are pitiable and reading the literature shows it. Pyruvate? Big deal. Surely some chemistry is going to happen by mixing chemicals together (just as a falling hammer could drive in a nail) but attributing that to the creation of a cell is pure wishful thinking. See automobile manufacturing plant analogy again.
There is much more that could be said in response to your statements but calling me a blatant liar only makes me smile. Many of the biologists I meet at conferences are very honest about these issues and frankly much more polite. Your reputation precedes you sir. Maybe that should bother you.
Sincerely,
E. Neeland
Dear Allan Nalla
You have convinced me.
I accept Brahma.
Bless your heart.
Ha! If evolution is true, and it takes a bajillion years to turn a monkey into a man, it’s still false because the Earth is only 6,000 years old! CHECQUEMAIT ATHEISTS.
…
I’ll see myself out.
Seconding Ichthyic @142: Allan Nalla why *did* you post your comment @140?
A question like this:
Is blatant bullshit bc there is *no* evidence in support of creation.
It also implies there’s only one form of creationism; ignoring that there are thousands of religions worshiped by humanity. Which creation is being discussed and why? Yeah, I know it’s the ridiculous and completely fictional creation myth of christianity, but what makes that more valid than the creation myth of Norse mythology? Why wasn’t the question “Norse creation myth vs evolution: What does the evidence support?”
Also, Neeland is dishonest. Evolution is the explanation for the diversification of life on the planet, not the origin of life (if he wanted to ask a slightly better question, he’d have pitted creation vs abiogenesis, although even there, there is absolutely NO evidence to support any creation myth, and that includes the bullshit in christianity).
And this, @151:
Who’s email lists?
So really, what was your point?
Ed Neeland’s poor sky daddy must be awfully uncomfortable being crammed into such small and ever-shrinking gaps. It must be worse than the Coach section on Frontier Airlines.
At the very best, Neeland’s argument is “not A, therefore B.”
Why does this idiot think that PZ Myers being able to create a cell is a test of the theory of evolution?
So this Dr Neeland loon has managed to replicate the process by which his god* used, and thus overturn all of biology and step forward and claim his Nobel prize!!?!
What?? No?
Quelle surprise.
* I assume the assertion is made eventually that this Neeland loon thinks it was all done by his imaginary sky god. Or is he being coy?
Oogedy Boogedy fundie primitive superstition email lists, of course. Part of their reinforcing mechanism for the childhood brainwashing procedure, the echo chamber effect.
Allan Nalla is unable to think but at least he knows it.
So he is cutting and pasting and linkfarming other peoples lies and fallacies. We’ve seen them all hundreds of times already. It’s boring godbotting.
Actually we can. It is simple. Neeland is already moving the goal posts here. Standard creationist dishonesty. He is adding the undefined word “naturally”.
What he means by “naturally” is nothing really. It’s meaningless science babble.
It’s also irrelevant, a red herring. It doesn’t matter what we humans can do. It matters what a 13.7 billion year old vast universe can do with a 4.8 billion year old pimordial planet earth, a fusion reactor 93 million miles away, and a billiion years of planetary scale chemistry.
Tone trolling. It’s bad arguing, Neeland.
Speaking of bad arguing all Neeland has done is the Gish Gallop. He is stringing lies, logical fallacies, and assertions without proof or data together and hoping no one notices. He also bringing up irrelevancies and red herrings while moving the goal posts, which are on wheels. Also attacking science, not proving creationism and the existence of an Invisible sky fairy, which he can’t do anyway. His mindless followers don’t care but real scientists do.
I’m not going to bother with the rest. It’s boring and my time is worth far more than that.
PS And oh yeah, if you have to lie to defend your primitive superstitions, your religion probably isn’t true.
That is close enough. Ultimately the entire cell is encoded by its genome. You should look up what DNA is and what it does before babbling away.
Wrong again. That is what viruses do. They are parasites. We’ve made them from scratch and resurrected ones dead for 5 million years.
It’s no trick to coat viruses with their protein coat. Or to synthesize proteins. It’s so routine and was done so long ago that it would be pointless to repeat it.
Ultimately life is just organized organic chemistry. We don’t need magic or gods to do it.
In some ways, this debate is revealing. The fact that humans have not yet succeeded in creating a cell from inanimate chemicals does not imply that goddidit. At the same time, even if humans were to succeed in creating a cell, it would not necessarily imply that goddidn’tdoit. So why do creationists fixate on this particular gap in knowledge?
I think it implies that deep down there is a realization that positing an almighty sky daddy is a truly an extraordinary claim, and so requires extraordinary evidence. Their position is defensible only if the sky daddy does things that could not be explained in any other way. Miracles are essential to the validity of their worldview. What is more, it is clear from the emphasis on miracles in the Bibble, that even the bronze-age, preliterate shepherds who developed the mythology at some level realized this.
It really does emphasize how improbable even they realize their worldview is.
These are all red herrings, irrelevancies.
We haven’t made comets, asteroids, planets, or stars either. This doesn’t mean they require gods to make them. We can’t move continents around or even make a mountain range. And it still doesn’t prove the gods exist.
We know how they are made. We can even see it happening with modern powerful telescopes and other instruments.
Neeland is saying that what humans can’t do means that it must be done by the gods. There isn’t any logic there at all. It’s just wrong.
Your criticisms are not criticisms. They are lies, logical fallacies, irrelevancies, and gibberish.
One more for the road.
What Neeland is doing isn’t attacking evolution. He has changed the subject.
He is attacking abiogenesis, life from nonlife.
Evolution isn’t the same. Evolution the fact is that life has and does change through time. Evolution the theory is how and why life changes through time.
It’s all typical, boring creationist dishonesy. A religion of lies.
Allan Nalla @ 151;
By this… err… let’s be really generous and call it ‘logic’, then, since we are currently unable to create sustainable fusion reactions that produce more power than they consume, stars must be impossible. They simply can’t be natural phenomena, and instead must be giant burning balls ‘O space magic.
As raven says @ 159, what our technology currently allows us to do is irrelevant. What the universe is capable of over time frames measured in billions of years is what matters. Creationists always fail to grasp that distinction mostly because they don’t want to consider it, and thereby can avoid dealing with its implications for their fantasy of how very special they like to think they are.
Neeland, per Allan Nalla (nice palindrome!) @151:
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA! That’s the part you find nonsensical? A simple statement “There is no magic” is nonsense? Hah! Ok then. At least now I know how much to trust the rest of your analysis.
@163
It’s true that abiogenesis is separate from evolution using the standard definition of evolution as change in allele frequencies (or trait frequencies, depending on who you ask) in populations over time. But they’re clearly closely related topics, and both central to our understanding of the history of life on Earth. Most general evolution texts include a discussion of our current understanding of the origins of life (Miller-Urey and follow-on experiments, RNA World, etc.), and – for my money at least – any decent general evolution course at the university level should also include at least some brief discussion of it*. When someone like Neeland writes some crap like #151, a better approach (again, just IMO) is not to say that abiogenesis and evolution are totally separate topics but instead to acknowledge how they’re related and focus on how much we actually do know about plausible scenarios for abiogenesis – knowledge he seems to be largely ignorant of.
*I teach a university-level general evolution course, which I like to think at least qualifies as decent, and I certainly cover it.
Every time someone says evolution doesn’t happen, I look to my own cornsnakes and the color/pattern mutations that spontaneously appeared, and the fact that I can actually succeed at breeding for temperament and size and I laugh and laugh and laugh.
Then I drink some cocoa and laugh some more.
“Make a cell”…
Sure. Give me an Earth-like planet with pre-biotic conditions and about 100 million years for the chemistry to cook.
Just because YOU can’t figure out how it was done does not mean it’s impossible. Obviously not, since…guess what? We’re here and therefore are the evidence that the event actually did take place.
No, they aren’t that closely related. Different theories, different ways to go about it.
It is also important to show how much the creatbots lie about things. Even something as simple as mislabeling a process. Lies upon lies upon lies.
Still no solid and conclusive physical evidence for their imaginary creator, or how it was created…..
@166: I’m curious. Do you cover the definition of “life” in that as well? Such as:
Prions — no.
Viruses — maybe but not really?
Replicating cells — yes.
All self-replicating biochemical systems, yes?
Their is one other difference between abiogenesis and evolution.
1. We know more and more about abiogenesis but not everything. Since it happened around 3.8 billion years ago, we may never know the actual details.
It was long ago, under very different terrestrial conditions, so no wonder we don’t know much.
Even if we do succeed in repeating abiogenesis in the lab with self replicating RNA molecules and so on, that doesn’t mean that this is what happened on earth 3.8 billion years ago.
2. By way of contrast, we know huge amounts about evolution. We can do it in the lab or someone’s house or yard i.e. cornsnakes. I breed new flowers myself.
It happens even if we don’t want it to as with emerging diseases or drug resistance.
It is in fact, the basis of the agricultural systems which feed 7 billion people.
3. So what does Neeland attack when he attacks evolution? He attacks abiogenesis and pretends it is evolution.
It’s very dishonest. Just like his kooky religion.
I’m not Lee1 but the best definition of life is probaby the one NASA exobiology uses.
Life is an independent, replicating, evolving lineage. Note that ability to evolve is part of the definition.
This includes viruses. It excludes mitochondria and chloroplasts. They replicate and evolve but they aren’t independent
Neeland is actually objecting to magic being rejected as a possible explanation. The guy wants to be considered a scientist, but he thinks magic is a valid model.
Just goes to show that having a clue is not a prerequisite for getting a degree.
@Rowan, #167:
@170
I don’t talk about a formal definition of life – I just talk about how (we think) the transition occurred through a grey area (as far as how life might be defined) from biomolecules and their precursors to self-replicating biomolecules (presumably RNA), to RNA/protein complexes, to very simple lipid-enclosed proto-cells to what we would recognize as something akin to very simple prokaryotes.
@171
I’d definitely agree that we’re almost certainly not going to understand in full detail how life originated ~4 billion years ago, unless it turns out that Doctor Who is a documentary. But there’s a lot about the evolution of life on this planet following abiogenesis we’re probably never going to know either, because many taxa don’t make good fossils, older fossils have been destroyed by various geological processes, etc.
More generally, I have no doubt of Neeland’s ignorance about the distinctions between abiogenesis and evolution, and I have no trouble believing there’s intellectual dishonesty going on too. But I personally find it useful to think of them as separate but closely related topics, both of which are interesting and important for most evolutionary biologists (and anyone else interested in the history of life on Earth, which includes both its origin and its subsequent diversification, etc).
LykeX,
See what I wrote @161–they have to posit magic. It’s the only evidence that is extraordinary enough to justify the positing of an omnipotent sky daddy.
@172. Interesting that NASA’s definition includes viruses. Most virologists I’ve interacted with are quite on the other side of that fence. They claim they’re not alive since viruses are obligate intracellular parasites — like mitochondria and chloroplasts.
Which is why the topic is fascinating. Bookbookbook..what was that book I read….aw crap, I don’t remember. And the google is letting me down.
Make a Creator, Dr. Neeland.
Whichever is easier is the one that the evidence you cite ACTUALLY supports more.
It is one thing to simply critique one theory, (also a useless thing, in fact), but it is something else to talk about TWO theories and claim support for one over the other. You have to apply the SAME critiques to BOTH theories if you want to do that honestly.
Though of course, it is obvious you aren’t interested in doing anything honestly here.
actually, it is. pretty much the only thing used from the original cell was the cell wall. It was an entirely synthetic genome, and was functional.
much closer to “created a cell” than not.
bait and switch.
but hey, if these idiots could argue honestly… There wouldn’t BE an argument.
Neeland, provide evidence for your imaginary creator, evidence that would pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin. You have nothing, and you know that. Ergo, your argument is false from your imaginary creator forward.
At bottom, which isn’t very far, all Neeland and his hero James Tour are presented is a fancied up version of Ken Ham. Stated directly, by Ham, the core of the argument is this:
It’s more disturbing in Tour’s written statement, because the concentrated bulk of words lays open the hollow core. It’s more pathetic in Neeland because, well… “Even a pen!”
But in the end, that’s ALL you’re paying for. Same as in the tent, on television, in the rented mall space, on the corner. It’s just a question of flavor and presumption of status.
Wouldn’t that happening actually be some evidence against evolution?
James Tours is another defective personality, a mind warped by toxic religion.
I’ve read what he claims other scientists have said in private about evolution.
Some of these happen to be people I know. James Tours is flat out lying here!!!
He might be a competent chemist but he is a tenth rate human being. It’s Hitchen’s Rule: Religion poisons everything.
Another red herring, another irrelevancy. Another poor strawperson murdered by a deranged mass murderer.
Neither abiogenesis nor evolution says anything like this ever existed or ever happens. Subcellular soup in a beaker has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with evolution.
What Neeland is doing here is murdering strawpeople en masse. It has nothing to do with science at all. He is lucky that the gods don’t actually exist. If they did, he would be repetitively set on fire in Hades by all the poor strawpeople he torched in real life.
@160 raven
I said “Actually this isn’t true. What Ventor did was replace the genome of a bacterial cell with a synthetic genome.”
You said “That is close enough. Ultimately the entire cell is encoded by its genome. You should look up what DNA is and what it does before babbling away.”
To which I reply – LOL! Look who’s being dishonest now. That is CLOSE ENOUGH? Craig Ventor did NOT make a bacterial cell. He modified a pre-existing cell. Not only did he need a preexisting cell to insert his synthetic genome into in order for it to replicate, he needed other preexisting cells (i.e. yeast) in which to assemble his synthetic genome. Read the paper.
I also said “Same thing for viruses. The DNA still has to pass through a pre-existing cell in order to make a virus.”
And you said “Wrong again. That is what viruses do. They are parasites. We’ve made them from scratch and resurrected ones dead for 5 million years.
It’s no trick to coat viruses with their protein coat. Or to synthesize proteins. It’s so routine and was done so long ago that it would be pointless to repeat it.
Ultimately life is just organized organic chemistry. We don’t need magic or gods to do it.”
I agree that we don’t need magic or gods to do it. But we do need pre-existing cells. We may synthesize proteins in test tubes but everyone I know who’s ever done it uses cell extracts as a source of ribosomes etc. If you have a reference to someone really doing it from scratch, I’d be very interested.
Evidence for a creator/designer?
1. What does your prior experience tell you about how information comes to be? All complex information (no exceptions) has come from a mind. So looking at a car, a computer, even a pencil…no natural laws using natural mechanisms have ever created complex information. So it’s a very simple conclusion when looking at a cell.
2. Evidence that the creator/designer is the Triune God of the Bible: We live in a tri-universe.
Henry Morris wrote: “Consider: The created universe is actually a tri-universe of Space, Matter, and Time, each permeating and representing the whole. However, the universe is not partly composed of space, partly of matter, and partly of time (like, for example, the three sides of a triangle). A trinity is not a trio or a triad, but a tri-unity, with each part comprising the whole, yet all three required to make the whole. Thus, the universe is all Space, all Time, and all Matter (including energy as a form of matter); in fact, many scientists speak of it as a Space-Matter-Time continuum.”
Tee-hee, Henry Morris is a young earth creationist, christian apologist, and founder of the creation institute. All of his biased opinions on evolution and theoretical physics can be safely discounted as rubbish. Please go get an real education Allan Nalla, you will only embarass yourself here among actual scientists.
PRESUPPOSING THE QUESTION!
Cells, crystals, solar systems, banded sediments, mountains and so forth are all examples of complex information for which no evidence exists that it ever came from a mind. So the assertion that “all” complex information must come from a mind is a PRESUPPOSITION WITHOUT EVIDENCE.
Indeed, we have vastly MORE examples of complex information arising without ANY EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER of being created by a mind, than of complex information for which we actually have evidence of it being made by a mind. There are orders of magnitude more cells in the universe than there are pencils.
Thus, to even say that “all complex information (no exceptions) has come from a mind” is in fact grossly dishonest. The actually evidence clearly demonstrates that complex information arising from a mind is the RARE EXCEPTION, and the VAST MAJORITY of complex information actually does not arise from a mind at all.
BZZT!
Space and time are the SAME THING. So it isn’t a tri-universe at all, it’s a BI-universe.
And if you insist on splitting space and time apart, then you have to be consistent and to the same with matter, in which case it is Space-Time, Matter-ENERGY, and you have a TETRA-universe.
Of course splitting space and time is a wholly arbitrary division of 3 dimensions on one side, and one on the other. In order to be consistent you need to split space into THREE separate dimensions. Which gives us Length-Width-Depth-Time, Matter-Energy, and that’s a HEXA-universe.
But wait! There are more dimensions that that! String theory gives us at least ELEVEN dimensions…
And then just confining ourselves to Space, Time, Matter, and Energy actually misses at least one other critical category essential to the makeup of the universe, which is FORCE. So Space-Time, Matter-Energy, Force gives us a PENTA-universe.
But of course there is more than one Force, so if you’re going to divide Space and Time, you’re going to have to divide force into Strong Nuclear, Weak Nuclear, Electromagnetic, and Gravity, and that gives us an OCTA-universe. (ALL HAIL THE SACRED OCTOPUS, for he is LORD AND MASTER!)
It takes some pretty dishonest special pleading to pigeon-hole a triune God out of that.
Tethys: Do we live in a tri-universe? Yes or No.
no
all he did was use the shell of a cell and a couple of ribosomes.
the artificial genome produced ALL of the rest of the needed components to not only make the cell fully functional, but to replicate itself for many generations.
your position is like saying someone wasn’t responsible for the production of a car because they didn’t do the doors, the windows, and the paint job, even though they did everything else.
yeah… but, whaddya want from a creationist? you people willfully ignore knowledge to maintain your delusion? Should the rest of the world be shocked that you continue to do so?
nope.
willful ignorance is hardly original.
as to the other moron…
why is it creationists think they understand information theory any better than they do evolutionary theory?
it’s laughably pathetic.
Of course Allan Nalla also commits the classic creationist fallacy/lie (with these types you never know if it is deliberate lying) regarding “complex” information.
A pile of metal, rubber, leather, cloth, wood, etc, contains more (much more, orders of magnitude more) complex information than a car. Likewise a pile of graphite, wood, gum rubber, tin, and paint than a pencil.
Design does not, and indeed cannot, create complex information. Design SORTS information that is already present, created by natural mechanisms, discarding the excess. Design REDUCES complexity and REDUCES information.
Natural selection, of course, does the same thing.
@192 Ichthyic
You should read the paper as well. What Venter did was insert a synthetic bacterial chromosome that had been assembled in a yeast cell into a pre-existing bacterial cell, included a few genetic tricks so that the endogenous chromosome would be degraded and consequently over several generations eventually the only components of the resultant cells were derived from the synthetic genome. It was an impressive accomplishment to be sure but the point is that when Neeland says that human scientists have never created a cell de novo, he’s right. I would disagree with him that it implies what he think it implies (because I’m not a creationist) but it’s dishonest to call him a liar for saying it.
What drives the religious, the fear that there is no-one behind the curtain holding the strings.
Allan Nalla #187
Define “information”.
I ask you for this because I’ve never heard two creationists define it the same way and most never get around to defining it at all. Until we have a working definition, your statements are devoid of meaning.
Ah, the old IDiot argument about alleged information needing a “designer”. The trouble is that the “designer” is presupposed, and needs to be evidenced directly. Show us conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary designer, evidence that will pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers, as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin. Something equivalent to the eternally burning bush. It will not be found in the present arguments from incredulity being presented by IDjits.
Otherwise, you have the problem of what designed the designer. Logical fallacies no matter where one looks. Nothing but an empty set of evidence.
::peeks in, sees “tri-universe” from creationist nitwit
Proceeds to join in the mocking laughter::
Allan Nalla @187:
None of that is evidence to demonstrate the existence of your abominable, genocidal deity nor any other god invented by humanity.
ALL information is the product of a mind, because information is how we make sense of the universe, but not a property of the universe itself.
It’s the same mistake that leads to arguments like DNA being created by conscious effort because we looked at how it interacts with RNA and amino acids, noticed the analogies and called this process “coding”. We assigned letters to the bases and called their arrangement “a language”, Then some of us turn around and say said “language” had to be made by an agent’s hand. Of course it was – but the agent was us, not God.
The positions of the stars as seen from the nightly Earth sky encode complex specified information, as any astrologer will show you.
The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost
Sat down to eat his breakfast toast.
He used all the butter;
He used all the jam;
So he sent him to earth, had him nailed to a post.
Read: “Without Excuse” by information scientist Dr. Werner Gitt (2011) . With his co-authors Bob Compton and Jorge Fernandez, Gitt provides the most rigorous and useful definition of information thus far. He distinguishes this Universal Information (real information) from things often mistakenly called information, and shows how ultimately all biological information comes from God.
In the Beginning was Information: Dr. Werner Gitt
From Werner Gitt’s article: “Scientific laws of information and their implications—part 1”
The five levels of universal information
1. Statistics. ….. The statistics level can be seen as the bridge between the material and the non-material world. (This is the level on which Claude E. Shannon developed his well-known mathematical concept of information.
2. Syntax. If we look at a text in any particular language, we see that only certain combinations of letters form permissible words of that particular language. This is determined by a pre-existing, wilful, convention. All other conceivable combinations do not belong to that language’s vocabulary. Syntax encompasses all of the structural characteristics of the way information is represented. This second level involves only the symbol system itself (the code) and the rules by which symbols and chains of symbols are combined (grammar, vocabulary). This is independent of any particular interpretation of the code.
3. Semantics. Sequences of symbols and syntactic rules form the necessary pre-conditions for the representation of information. But the critical issue concerning information transmission is not the particular code chosen, nor the size, number or form of the letters—nor even the method of transmission. It is, rather, the semantics (Greek: semantikós = significant meaning), i.e. the message it contains—the proposition, the sense, the meaning.
4. Information itself is never the actual object or act, neither is it a relationship (event or idea), but encoded symbols merely represent that which is discussed. Symbols of extremely different nature play a substitutionary role with regard to the reality or a system of thought. Information is always an abstract representation of something quite different. …..
5. Pragmatics. Information invites action. In this context it is irrelevant whether the receiver of information acts in the manner desired by the sender of the information, or reacts in the opposite way, or doesn’t do anything at all. Every transmission of information is nevertheless associated with the expectation, from the side of the sender, of generating a particular result or effect on the receiver. Even the shortest advertising slogan for a washing powder is intended to result in the receiver carrying out the action of purchasing this particular brand in preference to others. We have thus reached a completely new level at which information operates, which we call pragmatics (Greek pragma = action, doing). The sender is also involved in action to further his desired outcome (more sales/profit), e.g. designing the best message (semantics) and transmitting it as widely as possible in newspapers, TV, etc.
6. Apobetics. We have already recognized that for any given information the sender is pursuing a goal. We have now reached the last and highest level at which information operates: namely, apobetics (the aspect of information concerned with the goal, the result itself). In linguistic analogy to the previous descriptions the author has here introduced the term “apobetics” (from the Greek apobeinon = result, consequence). The outcome on the receiver’s side is predicated upon the goal demanded/desired by the sender—that is, the plan or conception. The apobetics aspect of information is the most important of the five levels because it concerns the question of the outcome intended by the sender.
In his outstanding articles “Inheritance of biological information”5, Alex Williams has explained this five-level concept by applying it to biological information. Using the last four of the five levels, we developed an unambiguous definition of information: namely an encoded, symbolically represented message conveying expected action and intended purpose. We term any entity meeting the requirements of this definition as “universal information” (UI).
[snip]
Allan Nalla! Please stop spamming as of now. If you think you have a case to make, then make it. No more walls of copypasta. If people want to follow your link, they will.
Why do you keep dumping creationist twaddle all over the thread Alan? We are not fooled by their attempts to shoehorn god into science. Evolution is fact., intelligent design and bariminology are transparent and deliberate lies from the oh so honest christians. Why are you proud to be a liar for jebus?
LykeX wanted to see a definition of information. I provided one (the five levels of universal information).
Go for it. Critique Werner Gitt’s definition if it makes you feel better.
not really what was asked for.
what people are looking for is to see if you actually understand any of them.
it’s pretty clear you don’t.
what you’re saying here is that it’s a bullshit argument, to which we appear to be in violent agreement.
fuck the technicality, as I said, it’s like saying the important thing was the doors and the paint job.
here, Alan, here’s a question for you:
given the definition of information you chose to copy paste…
Can a mutation increase information in a genome?
simple yes or no will do.
extra credit:
if no, why not?
if yes, how does that work?
Still no solid and conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary designer Alan, and no method on how the designer was designed….
In other words, all you have is smoke, mirrors, and handwaving. Not one iota of solid evidence. You what you delusional think science doesn’t explain isn’t that evidence. Too much science says otherwise….
Can a mutation increase information in a genome?
What was Richard Dawkins’ answer when asked: “Can you give an example of a genetic mutation or evolutionary process that can be seen to increase the information in the genome?”
Dr. John Sanford, pioneer of plant genetic engineering and inventor of the gene gun writes in “Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome”: “While it is almost universally accepted that beneficial (information creating) mutations must occur, this belief seems to be based upon uncritical acceptance of RM/NS, rather than upon any actual evidence. I do not doubt there are beneficial mutations as evidenced by rapid adaptation yet I contest the fact that they build meaningful information in the genome instead of degrade preexisting information in the genome.” (pp. 26-27)
Regarding Jonathan Sarfati’s book “The Greatest Hoax on Earth? Refuting Dawkins on Evolution” (2010) Sanford commented: “In my opinion Sarfati’s book beats Dawkins’ book (“The Greatest Show on Earth”, 2009) point by point, on all issues.”
so… you are entirely unable to give your own answer.
thanks for playing, bye.
Still no conclusive physical evidence for Allan’s imaginary designer. Sigh, when will we ever see that evidenced, which has been MIA for 2500 years??????
@207 Ichthyic
It’s a bullshit argument to say Venter created a bacterial cell. Like I said, if you’re going to accuse someone of lying for saying something, they should be lying. Neeland wasn’t. And it’s not like saying the important thing was the doors and the paint job. The ‘shell’ of a cell in this case consisted of everything but the chromosome. That would include the cell membrane, replication and transcription complexes, ATP, nucleosides, nucleotides, ribonucleotides, ribonucleosides, RNA, amino acids, tRNAs, ribosomes (oh wait – you mentioned the ribosomes), enzymes required for metabolism etc. etc. Hardly the equivalent of the doors and the paint job because a car can run without either while Venter’s synthetic genome would have done squat without the rest of the cell.
This is a claim that requires a scientific paper, not the mere opinion of a presuppositonal and wrong IDjit. Citation to the peer reviewed scientific literature required, or the claim is dismissed without evidence….
You make a persuasive argument that it isn’t correct to claim Neeland is lying.
I don’t agree that venter didn’t do the vast bulk of the groundwork necessary to create a new organism, but I do agree with you that it isn’t correct to call Neeland a liar.
I’m just curious if Allen Nella worships tricycles too.
Also, Amphiox,… you rock.
@189 of course. And I misspelled Allan’s name. Tpyos and all…
I was kinda hoping for something half-way useful.
What you’ve posted is sufficiently (and I suspect deliberately) obscure that I can’t be certain of the meaning, but it sounds to me like there’s a lot of question-begging going on. For example, I do not accept that the genetic code is a language that transmits an intended message. That is in fact part of the central point under discussion, so you can’t just assume that.
Regardless, I’m not clear on what this definition means. Please explain further, preferably in your own words. It’s you I’m talking to, after all, not Gitt.
Can a mutation increase information in a genome?
No, because there’s no evidence for it despite scientists’ best efforts of trying to make new complex information from mutations. Over 100 years of mutating fruit flies in supermutagenesis experiments have concluded fruit flies reproduce fruit flies (albeit with horrible mutations). Scientists have NEVER observed one simple organism producing offspring with new complex information ( eg. new body part) or significantly different properties.
According to the website Creation-Evolution Headlines, Dr. John Sanford (Cornell University) was asked what has been the reaction to his book (“Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome”) by Darwinists. His answer: “Complete silence.”
@219 Allan Nalla
The sort of changes you’re looking for occur over time scales well outside the range of a human life span or even the lifespan of human civilization. Why would you expect a mere 100 years of mutating fruit flies to produce something that wasn’t a fruit fly? The majority of offspring of any organism are going to look mostly like their parents because that’s the way genetics (and evolution for that matter) work. Changes are gradual and scientists do understand and can reproduce some of them in the lab.
@215 Ichthyic
Thank you for acknowledging that Neeland didn’t lie. It was a BS argument for all the reasons PZ stated in his original post, I think we can agree that it didn’t require exaggeration to refute.
@Alan Nalla
You’re boring. No evidence of something we didn’t expect to find anyway, therefore evilution is a sham! Wow, such a killer argument. Not.
Evolution, like tectonism, is something that happens way too slowly to be reproduced in an experiment – but it can be measured, and evidence of its past workings are everywhere. That’s especially true of the bigger processes, like the transition from fish to land animals, or from reptiles to birds. You expect people to repeat in a lab something that took 300 million fucking years to happen naturally?
Wrong, but then you claim is dismissed since you don’t provide any evidence for your claim.
Still no evidence for you imaginary designer. It’s almost like it doesn’t exist except as a delusion in your mind.
You can’t apply this definition of information to DNA, because you have no evidence of “intended purpose”. It’s what you’re supposed to demonstrate exists.
1) Information has purpose.
2) The content of DNA is information <- unproven premise that assumes the conclusion
3) Therefore DNA was made with purpose.
The most you can prove with that definition is that our symbolic interpretations of what DNA does reflects intended purpose, which it certainly does. Our purpose.
Allan Nalla is obviously a YEC so incapable of comprehending that there’s plenty of past time for evolution to function in.
Since, as far as I can tell, your definition of information relies on an intentional message, then obviously no. A random process cannot produce an intentional message because randomness doesn’t have intent. Of course, that’s just a result of you stacking the deck ahead of time.
If you instead ask whether random mutations can produce functionally useful changes in a genome, then the answer is a big yes. We have plenty of examples of this, such as the Lenski experiment mentioned earlier in the thread.
So, in other words, your conclusion is entirely an artifact of your biased definition. You’ve written your conclusion into the definition, which amounts to begging the question. That’s part of why I wanted to get a clear definition to begin with. These discussions are really quite pointless if you insist on using vague, deliberately obscure or cherry-picked definitions.
Explain your definition of information in your own words and we’ll take it from there. Don’t bother posting anything else until you’ve done that.