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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
You flee like a frightened child every time the evidence for evolution is presented. And where do you flee too? The irrelevant red herring of abiogenesis.
One more time with feeling. It does not matter where the first living thing came from. All living things since have evolved from it through Darwinian natural selection.
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Like I said ... repetition is the truth of small minds. If the first life form was intelligently designed and thereby "created", everything you base your brand of dogma on becomes irrelevant, which makes the question quite relevant.
Now, if you did not choose to use evolution as an argument against creation or intelligent design, and simply stuck to evolution of successive species, then you'd be under no obligation to address the origin of that first life form. YOU CHOOSE to make it "matter".
And this is the question you flee from like a frightened child, claiming it doesn't matter, which you may believe is clever, but it's not. You fool no one, and your tactic is all very transparent.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
No. It's not. It is a very simple, very irrelevant argument.
Of course you can. It's like ignoring (simply because it is irrelevant) how our ancestors first came to North America. Did they fly here? Come by steamship? Cross the Bering Land Bridge by foot? It doesn't matter. Once they got here, everything that followed would have been the same regardless.
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Your analogy is silly and of no value. If the question were the origin of Europeans on the North American continent, the question of how they got here would be very relevant, particularly if someone like you claimed they got here on board a Boeing 747.
By the same token, if one chooses to declare the "Origin of Species" as being facilitated by Darwinian evolution, with everything evolving from a single ancestor, one needs to define the origin of the original ancestor from whence those others came. If that original came to exist in some manner other than the claimed method of "Darwinian Evolution", that might prove highly relevant in assessing the claimed mechanisms responsible for the others, particularly since Darwinian Evolution is such a poor explanation, like the existence of a 747 in 1492.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
Evolution neatly cuts that silly Gordian knot. The first chicken hatched from an egg that was laid by something that was not a chicken.
QED: The egg came first.
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REALLY? The egg came first? So if a chicken is a descendant from something that is not a chicken ... let's just say for argument's sake, a "dinosaur" ... then that dinosaur would have then had to lay a chicken egg? That's what you are saying? Yep, I think that's what you said here.
By GEORGE .... MAN ... you broke the code!!! You've just explained why there are no transitional fossils at the same time you denounce your own claims that there are so many examples of them!!!
We now have the abrupt appearance of a Chicken which sprang from an egg laid by something that was not a chicken. Brilliant stuff here!! Now, I suppose that another non-chicken thing quickly came along and laid an egg that was a rooster, to facilitate the chicken eggs coming from a chicken, finally. And this makes perfect sense to you? How, I ask, rhetorically, as I really don't want to know the answer. Some things are better left a mystery.
HAHAHAHAHAHA .... you crack me up!!!
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
It wouldn't matter one way or the other. Evolution is still true.
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Are you a master debater, or what!! How convenient and clever ... I must remember this debating tactic ... when faced with a difficult or inconvenient question ... just say "it doesn't matter". Brilliant!
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
Nonsense. It is never "the most logical conclusion" to appeal to magic in order to fill in gaps in our knowledge. It is never "the most logical conclusion" to invent an ad hoc hypothesis that is in complete variance withe everything else we know. Every single previous time we have asserted "God" to make up for gaps in our knowledge, we have been wrong.
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I have made no such appeal to magic explanations at all .... that would be you! You're the one promoting all of this Darwinian magic claiming that a single bacteria of unknown and irrelevant origin magically became every life form on the planet ... through magic mutations. The birds and the bees and the monkeys and the trees in spite of their drastic differences! And everything came via this path of magic too ... the ape evolved into a human ... but just to make matters even more magic ... some apes decided against the idea, and remained apes. Some bananas decided to become plantains and others decided to be eggplants, avocados, and asparagus. Some were just satisfied being a plain old banana. From petunias to pot bellied pigs, all of the Billions of species of life ... plants that have a totally unique physiology to everything else .. mammal that breathe air, fish that don't, whales that do, on and on. It's the greatest magic show on earth!!
And you sit there with a straight face and tell me I APPEAL TO MAGIC?
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
Is it a cerebral lesion of some sort that prevents it from sinking in for you that no scientist believes complexity is the result of random chance?
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Wrong. A mutation is a random event. It is an error ... by whatever mechanism caused it, of which there are multiple factors to include environmental cause to just plain malfunction in copying genes for no apparent reason. Therefore, the vary nature of mutation and natural selection begins as a random event.
Why you keep missing this relatively straight forward concept in the very theory you embrace is more than what a mere cerebral lesion could account for.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
Your transcendent ability to completely miss the point is again on full display here. Linnaean taxonomy did not merely classify life, it classified it into a nested hierarchy in which species were grouped into genera, genera into families, families into orders, orders into classes, classes into phyla and phyla into kingdoms.
Now here's the important part. Linnaeus was a creationist. There could be no evolutionary agenda at play for him to understand that this pattern was inherent to the natural world. It was driven by the evidence! It was real and it was a true reflection of nature. And from a creationist or Intelligent Design perspective, it has no explanation.
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That's such a radical departure from logic, I'm not sure where to begin. But I guess all I can really say is that if nature can produce this outcome by genetic mutation, I can't see how you could say that an intentional action couldn't produce a similar result? Why would you make such a silly statement? Particularly given the efforts science is now pursuing in that very area of genetic manipulation and modification? What they are doing isn't Darwinism ... they are literally manipulating species intentionally, for a desired outcome, and creating new species of living things AS WE SPEAK. Me thinks you are very confused ... probably due to the repetitive "broken record" mindset of repeating the same nonsense over and over again. You should stop that. It's bad for your mind.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
It is on the other hand a direct prediction of descent with modification via Darwinian evolution.
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How can one "PREDICT" a random mutation? Let alone the countless mutations necessary to create a new species occurring over MILLIONS of YEARS ? You can't. What this is really about is taking known evidence and finding a way to fit that evidence to a predetermined story, which explains much of the Darwinian magic you claim to be natural evolution.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
No inherent evidence of its own you say? Only a cretin could honestly make such a statement.
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No, only a cretin would claim that this is evidence of anything other than similarity among different species as well as a predictable similarity among a class of animals that were sexually compatible.
A modern example of this would be to chart all of the various dog breeds that exist today and claim that this is evidence of Darwinian evolution, with a pekapoo being the transitional form bridging the evolutionary gap between the poodle to the pekingese. The reality is not so complex ... someone let the dog out and a gate was opened for a rather enterprising fellow who had his way with the neighbor's dog.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
Oh good. Lakes take a moment to revisit the place in this thread where we have directly experienced the "twisting and changing of definitions and terms."
I presented the extensive fossil record of the transition from land mammal to whale. This is a transitional sequence of several different intermediate forms... all coincidentally at exactly the right geologic level...which document every step between a full fledged, four legged land carnivore, though several intermediate amphibious steps, to fully dedicated ocean going giants.
What was your response?
First, you ignored most of the evidence and most of the other fossils and attempted to challenge a single one; Pakicetus. But sadly, you challenged it with a stock creationist complaint that has not been defensible for a decade. You claimed it was only known from "a few skull fragments."
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Stop ... it was NAMED "Pakistani Whale" based on those skull fragments, meaning (for the denser folks who aren't real good at reading between lines) that it was predetermined to be a whale ancestor long before the other skeletal components were found over the course of YEARS of search and collection. THAT WAS THE POINT! These frauds needed a transition, and they dug one up, literally, after already thoroughly consulting the baby name book before hand
But continue ...
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
When it was pointed out that, no, we actually have most of the skeleton by now and have had it for more than ten years... did you bother to go look at the newer research? I mean... if you were honestly going to claim a rational reason for your opinions, wouldn't a look at the actual research findings be reasonable? Instead what did you do?
You googled a creationist web page and cut and pasted their excuses. Yeah, that was top notch scholarship there, Guy. Grade A.
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No ... I just made a rational deduction based on many other blatant frauds committed by the "evolution scientists" over the years which are well documented. I considered that, along with the naming of the skull fragments "Pakistani Whale" as a clear sign of fraud .... but moreover ... the creative license taken by these alleged scientists that extrapolated out of those few skull fragments a full artist rendition of what appeared to be a large whale-like creature swimming and catching fish on the cover of Science Magazine. Later .... after the other parts were found, the beast looked like a rodent ... the size of a medium dog ... having no resemblance at all to the picture first misrepresented by the frauds that found the skull fragments. Not to be deterred by the fact that this creature was a land based runner, and not at all a sea based swimmer ... it started off as a whale and by George it was going to be a whale come hell or high water. That is a fraud
Just to correct your gross misrepresentation of the previous exchange and a few details you conveniently left out.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
A lie that even the Institute for Creation Research and Discover Institute no longer attempt. All the major creationist organizations fully admit that speciation is real, and has been observed to occur in the laboratory and the field.
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Now that is just pure bull. Not even all evolutionists believe in speciation, let alone creationists. The fact is, speciation is the most absurd part of Darwinian evolution with not one piece of credible evidence to prove speciation has ever occurred. Furthermore, I've cited a couple of the top evolutionists who readily admit this missing evidence. So here you are, AGAIN grossly misrepresenting the facts, or totally misunderstanding the BS being fed you.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
That's another complete red herring, but it does in fact have an interesting aspect to it. Yes... stars and monkeys absolutely do share common ancestors. Those would be the original stars that formed after the Big Bang. At the atomic (let alone subatomic) level, all atoms larger than helium were formed in those original stars.
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And you are prepared to provide the evidence of the "Big Bang" too, I suppose?
Good ... science will surely grant you great praise for doing so, since no one else has thus far. Just another one of those fairytales that you believe is a proven fact. Big bang? What blew up? Where did the energy come from .... where did the thing that blew up come from? Wait .. let me guess .... IT DOES NOT MATTER .... am I close?
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
Well, not exactly. It is the pattern of that variation that nails down the genealogical relationship. That humans and chimpanzees share 98.4% of their DNA shows not just that we are genetically related, but that we are more closely related than humans are to gorilla, about 97.7%. And using genetic distances we can assemble a "tree" that conforms perfectly with that obtained using comparative anatomy, biochemistry or the fossil record.
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Nailed down, aye? Well guess what .... there is new information showing that humans have about 15% of their DNA more closely related to Gorillas than previously thought, and Chimps having 15% of their DNA more closely related to Gorillas than humans. And, that the greater evolution of hearing in humans which was previously attributed to human speech has been found to coincide with a similar advance in the hearing of Gorillas.
Some of your genes are more similar to gorillas than to chimps
Why is this important? Well, it is when people start making claims that something is "nailed down", when the reality is ... nothing is nailed down regarding evolution ... especially the theory itself which is ever changing to match any contradictory new information.
But evolution requires only two things ... the willingness to abandon common sense and the ability to avoid rational thinking. And the whole Human-Chimp-Gorilla relationship is a good example. We are told that according to our DNA, we are more closely related on the evolutionary tree to a chimp than a chimp is to a gorilla. Now, without this scientific guidance, one might make the mistake of thinking that these apes ... chimps and gorillas are more closely related to each other than either one would be to us humans ... strictly from an observational, common sense assessment. So we must then ignore that urge for such common sense analysis, and defer to the evolution science instead.
Then, we have the Neanderthal-Human connection, though this is getting a little buggered up with new findings too. In fact, it's a moving target, as described in rather circular fashion here:
Complete Neanderthal genome sequenced: DNA signatures found in present-day Europeans and Asians, but not in Africans
Excerpt:
"Anthropologists have used the fossil record to construct tree-shaped diagrams that show how the different branches of hominins, which includes humans and human ancestors, split off from one another. These diagrams tend to proceed in a straight line, from the tree-trunk base of a common ancestor through progressively smaller branches until the species of interest is reached. The Neanderthal data suggests evolution did not proceed in a straight line. Rather, evolution appears to be a messier process, with emerging species merging back into the lines from which they diverged."
Reading over the entire article will leave your head swimming with nonsense, diverging populations and merging back .... isolated populations not evolving ... interbreeding between Neanderthals and Modern Humans, etc. If only one thing can be said, it would be that things are not at all "nailed down".
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
And if creationism were true, there is no explanation for why all those independent sources of evidence should agree.
Why would it not occur to me when it is so patently obvious as to be tautologous? Insert massive "duh" here.
The problem for creationists though remains the pattern. The only actual intelligent designers of which we know do not design like that. The creations of even the same individual designer do not created the nested patterns of genealogy.
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You have ZERO basis for making such a ridiculous claim, which first assumes these unique "nested patterns" exist outside of the imaginations of evolutionists. Secondly, you're applying a form of negative logic by saying that the only designers "we" know of "do not design like that" as if the argument revolved around the intellect of humans designing nature, as opposed to a much more advanced intelligence that you immediately dismiss as seeing no evidence of.
You also have ZERO foundation for claiming that there is such a thing as truly independent research in this or any other area of science, let alone that anything in science enjoys universal consensus. And, since all evolution research proceeds based on a baseline set of assumptions, certain levels of agreement are preordained. It all proceeds based on the acceptance of Darwinian evolution as fact, and then explains the evidence found based on those assumptions.
That's not true science, that's story telling.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
There is only one explanation for that rigorous and persistent pattern that we find in so many completely independent sources of evidence: Common descent.
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Baloney .. as was previously defined by your "Pakistani Whale" which was predetermined to be a Whale transitional based only on a few skull fragments, science has nothing to do with such blatant demonstrations of bias. Again, that's making the evidence fit the story ... not letting the evidence tell the story.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
You could not have provided a better demonstration of how the nested pattern of the natural world is completely absent from human technology. You describe here how in actually created things, technology can spontaneously leap from one platform to another and does not require genetic descent.
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More nonsense ... the first computers were entirely mechanical, using electromagnetic relays. Then the development of the vacuum tube revolutionized the machine, which in turn was further revolutionized by the invention of the transistor, and then, the microchip that populated a multitude of miniaturized transistors on a silicon wafer. Then entire computers were miniaturized and placed on that single silicon wafer ... then multilayer chips packed more and more on smaller and smaller spaces.
Technology, totally driven by man's purposeful intention, followed a very clear, very measurable generational evolution from simple to more complex, but all still based on the fundamentals that were established in previous generations. And every bit of it was based on machine language code of ones and zeros. And no matter how complex and miniaturized the technology has become ... those fundamentals are still present. Hard drives are still hard drives, based on the same storage principles of magnetism, with just more complex algorithms. Memory is still memory, based on the same principles too.
All of it, aside from miniaturization, and a few innovations such as optical technology isn't much different at the foundation level. Just smaller and more powerful due to advancements in design and manufacturing. Digital technology has always been and remains OFF and ON ... square wave technology, with frequency increasing speed at which that OFF and ON occurs.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
There is no discernible pattern whatsoever to the distribution of hardware components or software algorithms. An innovation invented for one "lineage" (think the Apple Mouse) can later be found in otherwise identical form on MS/DOS machines.
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No pattern? What planet to you live on? Here's a pattern ... large mainframe computers were the structure of computing early on, serving data to input output terminals with no processing capability of their own. That evolved into PC terminals that did do some of the processing with most still done at the mainframe. Then mini computers served as alternatives to mainframes ... then distributed PC networks emerged, and the mainframes and minis went away. Now, the internet, creating a worldwide network of terminals. That has progressed to hand held devices accessing the worldwide network. A very clear pattern of technological evolution has been ongoing, adding greater power and capability to more and more people. The internet has been likened to a vast neural network creating an artificial brain. And we now have actual computers operating as artificial intelligence, and computers using biological matter as components. We have computers that can read thoughts. So I have no idea what you're talking about with this "no pattern" nonsense.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
The equivalent in the natural world would be to find feathered bats, or gill breathing whales. But we do not find them.
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I have no idea what point you're trying to make here ... are you making a point? I can't find one.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
Considering DNA... the molecule is just the storage device for information, not the information itself.
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STOP ... DNA is BOTH the storage device and the information too. So you get a big fat F here in DNA.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
The DNA code is the functional equivalent to the machine languages you mention above. The molecule itself is equivalent to the storage medium. Sometimes it's a hard drive. At others it's ROM memory, or flash memory, or CDs... years ago it could have been 80 column punch cards. As humans intelligently design, they have a vast suite of tools available to them, and what is or is not used depends on the specific design. They are never constrained by genealogical history. Each "creation" begins with a blank sheet of paper.
And yet every living thing uses the same "storage mechanism" for their genetic code. They are constrained by what they inherited. There is no cosmic Dell engineer that can swap out a CD drive with a DVD drive and then later a Rewritable DVD drive.
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Given that DNA is the most complex molecule that exists, it can hardly be considered a constraint. Given that DNA is the most efficient and compact molecule which serves as both the storage device and the information simultaneously, I don't think it's just a default choice for lack of a better option. If you were to actually show a better option, your line of reasoning might make an iota of sense, but you can't and therefore you don't. That nothing that man has ever created comes remotely close to the complexity of the DNA structure, seems to suggest that a designer was involved, which was exceedingly more advanced than the science which has you believing that you evolved from a bacteria.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
But worse... there is also only one operating system for every living thing. It is not merely that we all share the same storage medium, we all share the same code.
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No ... if we all shared the SAME code, we'd be identical, and the code differences between you and I, no matter how small, are differences I celebrate more than you can imagine.
That the same programming language can create the diversity we see, with only small percentage changes in the code producing dramatically different life forms is the unheralded miracle that you seem to conclude as some form of constraint, proving no inherent intelligence in design, when the opposite conclusion should be your first rational thought.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
There is no resemblance whatsoever between the "design" of the natural world and the product of the only intelligent designer we actually have experience with; people.
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Actually, scientists are using DNA to construct DNA based computers ... as of 12 years ago. Probably not a cost cutting measure, or viewed as some sort of constraint. But in general, the natural world is far more complex, exceeding our best capability to mimic. We are however, finding that even though we cannot duplicate life, we can modify existing life and create new species by combining genes of different species. This suggests that whoever designed living matter, was far more advanced, since he/they did something that we are incapable of doing, even with the that living matter available to serve as a prototype. We just aren't advanced enough to back engineer it.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
Again, you argue against yourself. Mac OS and MS/DOS actually are different codes. Even the binary codes used on different computers are different. They may use zeroes and ones, but the same patterns of zeroes and ones means different things in ASCII than they do in BCD.
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Actually, no, not different codes, as the code is still ones and zeros. Also, Microsoft, Apple, Linux all use a variant of C .... and now, both Apple and Microsoft utilize Intel machine language code for processor compatibility, and it would be easy to have a machine that could run either OS on the same hardware platform, interchangeably. The proprietary differences are intentional, and not a technology limitation. Humans design things with an intentional proprietary nature lacking universal functionality for profits sake, not because we can't do it. We copyright everything so that eliminates the possibility right from the start.
By contrast, the designer of the Universe is probably not motivated by profits, and therefore found DNA to be the most efficient structure and language, given that a careful look around suggests no hint of limitation to it's use, as every living thing uses the same code, with alterations in the instructions providing the vast diversity we see. And, still, we don't really know all of the secrets of DNA.
In similar manner, long ago, the human discovered that the best form for a wheel was round. I'm sure that didn't stop a few from trying different shapes, but ultimately, we concluded that round is best ... and sometimes things just work out that way. And since that very first round one, we've not found a more efficient design, so we stick with what works.
Could not this basic logic apply to DNA? It works ... there is no better or more efficient design, so that's the standard.
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Originally Posted by HistorianDude
Again... the product of intelligent design looks nothing like what we find in the natural world.
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You do like repeating yourself, don't you? Do you think credibility is created through repetition? It isn't.
The fact is, DNA demonstrates every element indicative of design. It has a complex structure. It contains a complex code that provides every instruction for building complex life forms at the cellular level. And it repairs itself. Not only does it exhibit intelligent design features, it demonstrates intelligence itself.
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