HELEN
To Pat, Radiochemist, and Scott –
Pat: Please explain to Scott how to find positive mutations, OK. He
doesn’t know.
You wrote:
we accept the evidence for an ancient age for humanity. No
assumptions necessary. When we find humans hundreds of thousands of
years ago, it's not hard to realize that humans have been around for a
long time.
You don’t find humans around hundreds of thousands of years ago. You
have found some bones that you are dating at that age and then declaring
them human. Big difference.
Nor was intelligence lower 20 years ago than it is today. Tests have
been re-written in an effort to correct racial and cultural bias, but
the human race has not gotten any smarter! As far as ancient ages go,
we cannot figure how they built the pyramids, aligned them the way they
did astronomically, or knew about trepanning craniums.
In fact they did much better then than later in history:
<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR> It is hard to believe, but judging from the number of skulls
which showed healing and bone regeneration
at the borders, the proportion of
"patients' who survived the ordeal of a trepanning was quite high, from
65 to 70 %. Out of 400 skulls examined by
one researcher, 250 indicated recovery. In modern times
(14th to 18th centuries) this proportion
was much lower, sometimes approaching zero. Birner (1996)
cites that a professional "trepanator"
named Mery, lost all his patients in 60 years of activity. The most
common cause of death was infection of the
meninges or of the brain, or hemorrhage.
http://www.epub.org.br/cm/n02/historia/trepan.htm <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
The Indus River Civilization people were smart enough to build cities
above the flood plain. People in America today are not that smart. I
live near Sacramento. Areas flood on a regular basis…Parts of Denver
and the Midwest are the same. No, we are not any smarter!
You said young creation was my assumption and contradicted by the
evidence. That is exactly my opinion of your old universe/earth/life
ideas.
For instance, coral reefs may not be the evidence you think they are.
http://www.grisda.org/origins/06088.htm
http://www.grisda.org/origins/22086.htm
But, that, actually, can be another thread if you like.
And I had to chuckle when I saw your assertion that we are becoming
physically better. That doesn’t work for either creation or evolution!
Evolutionarily, the precursor of the apes and humans was probably MUCH
more physically capable than we puny homo sapiens are today; there has
been a pretty big tradeoff there evolutionarily and it is claimed that
we replaced brawn with brains. And if you want to go with creation, we
have also degenerated from ‘very good’ to ‘maybe they’re still
passable!’ That last judgment is mine and a bit tongue in cheek if you
missed it.
============
To Radiochemist:
You stated
No, my comments did not depend on an ancient age for
humanity and
your view does not depend on a young age for
humanity. Whether or not
humanity is acquiring a lethal burden of
mutations is not dependent
on the age of humanity it depends on how many
mutations are being
acquired.
Actually it is both. The longer the age for humanity, the longer a time
the mutational heritage has had to build, regardless of rate.
You think that humanity is acquiring a lethal burden of mutations.
But your case suffers from the fact that
mankind is flourishing in
terms of numbers.
That is because of medicine, not because of a lack of nasty mutations!
We have decreased maternal and infant mortality incredibly, cleaned up
so that the various plagues are not the threat they were, increased care
and understanding of the elderly, etc. We have more people because they
are not dying off in the numbers that they would were there no
medicine. This has nothing to do with evolution, but with technology
and care.
A couple of years ago I picked up Arno Karlen’s
Man and Microbes;
Disease and Plagues in History and Modern Times. If he is right,
then we will not see the numbers increase the way predictions would have
it. However the point is that we are not increasing in numbers due to
actual fitness, but due to medical care and basic cleanliness. And, I
think if you look at the rising number of care homes for the elderly,
the retarded, and the unwanted; if you look at the evidently climbing
rates of cancer and various diseases and realize a lot of these people
are being KEPT alive (which I believe is morally right, but that is not
part of this argument at the present), you will see, I think the reason
for our population climb, but I think you will also see that it has
nothing to do with the idea of ‘flourishing.’
=============
And finally, to Scott:
FORGET the theoretical stuff. What I was trying to do was agree with
you in the first place with the
slight proviso that, being a
mathematical theory, error catastrophe was somewhat more substantial
than it might be if it were purely philosophical. You missed that point
in your desire to deny everything I ever say, I think. So forget it.
You wrote:
It is creationists, such as Dembksi and ReMine, that
prefer their favorite mathematical scenarios to actual empirical
evidence. There is a huge difference between mathematical models based
on theoretical constructs and those based on data.
Dembski is proposing a testing mechanism. If the mathematics of a
testing mechanism bother you there is nothing he or anyone can do about
that. ReMine does the same thing Wells does in one sense – he shows
simply that the evolution models are untenable even in their own
admissions, bit by bit. So using these two men to try to say something
about people you disagree with using mathematical scenarios rather than
physical evidence is a wrong argument. You chose the wrong people with
that one.
However, have you ever even bothered to notice, let alone count, the
number of evolution scenarios which are based purely on the mathematics
of computer models?
And I guess you missed the relevance of the paper I quoted. The fact
is that if a seeming beneficial mutation (and they are certainly rare
enough) can turn out to be damaging in the long run, then how on earth
are you going to get one mutation to build on another to turn a fin into
a leg or a scale into a feather, or a unicellular organism into a
butterfly? In fact, the University of Calif. At San Diego just came out
with great excitement over finding a gene that caused shrimp to lose a
pair of legs. You know what they claim this shows? How shrimp later
became insects! You know what it really shows? Deformed shrimp which
have NO advantage over their fully legged relatives!
You asked how we find good mutations? Pat seems to know. Check with
him. But nothing he mentioned indicates anything that can even begin
to change one sort of thing into another sort of thing, no matter how
slowly.
In addition, how do you find ANY mutations? Aside from presuming them,
you have to look at the genetic structure. I know you know how to do
genetic comparisons. You ridiculed me about it before when I said I
wanted to learn more about it. You told me it was quite simple and how
much time did I need? So I’m sure you can look at genetic comparison
charts and spot mutations and, by your admission, it is just a matter of
technology and time before you find out where the good ones have been!
Then you told me here that is was arguing against a straw man for me to
mention that sexual reproduction was not doing a very good job ridding
the human race of deleterious mutations. But that was exactly the point
of my argument, Scott! You had stated, “Sexual recombination
accelerates the rate at which harmful mutations are removed and the rate
at which beneficial ones are accumulated.” I didn’t claim, nor did you,
that all had to be eliminated. I simply said that, given the number of
problems we associate with these harmful mutations, as evidenced by the
NG list, that sexual reproduction was not doing what it should in this
area! We have quite a build-up of nasty stuff there. And if the
positive mutations are only those Pat can list, then we are in serious
trouble as a human race.
Did you miss what I was trying to say? It was in response to the
statement you had made, so there was no ‘strawman’ about it.
And although some claim the human race is in a condition of error
catastrophe, I did not say that. It may or may not be true. I don’t
know. What I did say was that there is a mathematical theory regarding
error catastrophe and the rate of heritable damaging mutations in a
population, and that the human race does seem to have a bit of a buildup
of genetic load. Whether these two things are on a collision course I
don’t know.
And finally, when I asked,
But again, where are the positive
mutations?, you responded:
They are the ones that DON’T make us ill. Again, tell us all what –
exactly – we should look for.
-- I am hoping dreadfully that you really did not mean that healthy
people are that way because of mutations! If health were not our
somewhat natural condition, we could not have survived even as long as
YEC viewpoints say, let alone as long as evolution says we have!
