God and natural selection

[RayMarshall19]

Originally posted by UTEOTW:

"THIS STATEMENT IS JUST PLAIN STUPID. EVOLUTION REQUIRES THAT SOMETHING NEW BE CREATED AND PASSED ON TO THE NEXT GENERATION. YOU CAN SAVE ALL THE "CENTS" YOU WANT FOR AS LONG AS YOU WANT. IN THE END THEY WILL STILL BE JUST A BUNCH OF CENTS."

It is not a stupid statement. He is pointing out that if you accept small changes as fact, there is no reason to draw a line which limits how much accumulated small changes are possible. It is an arbitrary and capricious distinction to separate the two.

So your analogy of "THEY WILL STILL BE JUST A BUNCH OF CENTS" is flawed.

1) For those who aren't familiar with the expression, I found a legal definition of "arbitrary and capricious" that fits this discussion: ABSENCE OF A RATIONAL CONNECTION BETWEEN THE FACTS FOUND AND THE CHOICE MADE.

The ASSUMPTION that "small changes" (whatever that means) will eventually produce a new species from an existing one clearly meets this definition of "arbitrary and capricious". There is no connection betwen the facts and this assumption (choice). I am not the one guilty of this mistake.

2) "there is no reason to draw a line"? Yes, there is a good reason to draw a line where the facts end and supposition based upon assumption begins.

3) The "CENTS" example was his, not mine, and I stand by my original evaluation. Science does not supply a "species store" in which to spend your "small changes" to "buy" a species.

 

[Paul of Eugene]

Originally posted by Scott J:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Paul of Eugene:
[qb] Whenever you read any anti-evolutionist argument based on the odds against life starting, bear in mind two things:

1) The odds are always calculated as if evolution itself did not exist.

So statistics are only meaningful if they build in a bias toward the desired outcome... nope but it does sound like something an evolutionist would like to be true.

Evolution theory describes how an imperfect replicator can become better given mutation and natural selection, which defeats the odds calculation involved.

Not really since it the explanation doesn't even address the subject of the math and also because the explanation "assumes" that evolution is 100% true... making any statistical analysis of it meaningless.
</font>[/QUOTE]If you admit that "any statistical analysis of it [is] meaningless", then why do you support a statistical analysis of it that favors your side?

Let me explain this calculation "as if evolution did not exist".

One notes the exact arrangement in a cell. One then notes the great complexity of the arrangement, the way the proteins work together, the way the cell functions to harmoniously gather energy from the environment and manage to procreate in a very sophisticated manner.

Once then calculates the odds against a series of atoms coming to this arrangement by chance. An incredibly large number, of course, results.

But this calculation, the odds against the currently living cell coming to being from raw atoms, is in fact working from a description of creation by a designer. In effect, it is showing how hard it would be for a designer to come up with a living cell as we know it.

If you are trying to show that creation of life is impossible because it is so complex, then the calculations presented might be meaningful.

But as scientists attempt to reconstruct the history of the beginning of life, they postulate no such spontaneous perfect assembly a single cell from raw materials.

They look for organic molecules to find a way to be formed before their is life.

They look for a way for some of them to start copying themselves, in an environment where an energy flow encourages the spontaneous formation of dissipative structures.

They look for that kind of self copying dissipative structure to gradually improve over time as a result of the competition between reproducers.

This leads stepwise up the chain to living cells and multicellular organisms and finally us.

The calculations based on random assembly to the completed living cell simply do not take this differential population enhancement effect into account and are therefore not relevant to the emergence of life.

 

[Paul of Eugene]

Originally posted by Scott J:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by buckster75:
For someone to say the eye, for example, could have been formed by natural selection, seems to me to be very absurd.

It did to Darwin as well... but he required it since he had precluded the notion that God did it. </font>[/QUOTE]At first glance, the evolution of the eye might seem absurd. But actually the evolution of the eye is one of the more easily explained examples of gradual development!

The living cell seems to be affected by light in any case, just because of the complex chemicals that are in it.

A creature such as a worm often has a single spot that is used to respond to light. It helps the worm to orient itself away from the daylight and get back down into the dirt.


If that spot is dipped into a cup, that helps pinpoint the direction of the light even more.

If that cup can be covered by a transparent but tough material, that can protect the sensitive light responding cells.

If that cup can deepen, the directional detection for the light improves.

If that transparent covering can curve, it can start to focus the light a bit, giving even more precise direction, and begin to allow the detection of fuzzy images.

And bit by bit, increment by increment, the whole eye as we know it can evolve.

Examples of the intermediate stages of the eye are available in living creatures today - all stages!

 

[Paul of Eugene]

Originally posted by buckster75:
My response when the years required was stated. Did I miss a response to this?

"As I stated I don't know much about this but:
I am not seeing this number of years in our recorded history (Bible). Am I reading the wrong Book?"

No, you are not reading the wrong book. You are simply not reading enough of what God has given us. He did not just write in the Bible. He also wrote in the stars and in the rocks. Reading both together helps one to interpret the other. It is not surprising that when we only had a part of God's revelation that we got parts of the interpretation wrong. We all know many sincere people who have wrong theology and keep at it anyway. What is so surprising about that?

But reading God's direct revelation in the rocks and stars helps us understand better what He was telling us in His book.

My own way of reconciling the science with the great creation hymns of Genesis 1 and 2 is to accept the key God gave us Himself when He reminded us that a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day.

The days, then, are poetic and parabolic references to epochs of creation. They are not epochs of creation arranged as our literalistic science oriented minds would arrange them, but they are arranged topically and in accordance with the structures as they appeared in the eyes of the viewers of the era in which the narratives were created.

In much the same fashion as the description of the sun rising and setting, having a chamber, and standing still for Joshua, was also from the point of view of those who recorded at these things in that time.

So it is possible to accept the Bible and our new knowledge of the world and the universe also, but it does require us to somewhat adjust our interpretation of the Bible.

 

[RayMarshall19]

Dear Paul of Eugene:

I hope everybody will carefully read and study your post immediately above. You do a great job of explaining your motives and your beliefs and exactly what is wrong with both. There is no need for me to add anything further.

 

[Phillip]

Originally posted by Paul of Eugene:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Scott J:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by buckster75:
For someone to say the eye, for example, could have been formed by natural selection, seems to me to be very absurd.

It did to Darwin as well... but he required it since he had precluded the notion that God did it. </font>[/QUOTE]At first glance, the evolution of the eye might seem absurd. But actually the evolution of the eye is one of the more easily explained examples of gradual development!

The living cell seems to be affected by light in any case, just because of the complex chemicals that are in it.

A creature such as a worm often has a single spot that is used to respond to light. It helps the worm to orient itself away from the daylight and get back down into the dirt.


If that spot is dipped into a cup, that helps pinpoint the direction of the light even more.

If that cup can be covered by a transparent but tough material, that can protect the sensitive light responding cells.

If that cup can deepen, the directional detection for the light improves.

If that transparent covering can curve, it can start to focus the light a bit, giving even more precise direction, and begin to allow the detection of fuzzy images.

And bit by bit, increment by increment, the whole eye as we know it can evolve.

Examples of the intermediate stages of the eye are available in living creatures today - all stages! </font>[/QUOTE]Yes, and you might as well watch a tornado build a 747 when it flies through a junk-yard full of old airplane parts.

 

[Phillip]

Originally posted by Paul of Eugene:
So how far away is it to the next life bearing planet anyway? My faith is that God has arranged one way or another for life to be common throughut the universe, but its only a hypothesis, unsupported so far by any evidence.

Okay, so did the Son of God die on all of these planets to cover sin with His blood, or were we just the lucky planet out of billions and billions where Satan landed?

 

[buckster75]

Phillip.

If I understand what some have said here (as I stated I know little about this) the airplane parts would not have to be modern and yet you can get a modern plane because the parts can change like the "cent" did.

 

[Helen]

Uncharted Spirit, with all due respect to your father, it is not spinning which begets gravity. Recent studies are indicating it has to do with localized increases in something called the Zero Point Energy. But all that is for another time, another place.

I want to point out to the folks reading here that the use of the word 'species' is loaded and we need to be careful. Species and the biblical 'kind' or 'baramin' are definitely NOT the same thing.

Yes, new species CAN be formed. This is especially true in birds where mating cues are visual. If a small population is isolated and they have no one to breed with but themselves, within a couple of generations that population will begin to show their own marks of identification due to the expression of recessive genes which could not show up in the larger population with any regularity.

Maybe it is as simple as a spot by the eye or beak. As they start to recognize each other by that spot, all the chicks will end up having that spot and within just a few generations, if you take these birds and reintroduce them to the population at large from which they came, there is a very good chance they will refuse to breed back with them, because they look different. Voila, a new species! What is interesting is that the genetics may be exactly the same! We see this sort of thing with something called a 'ring species', which we have observed in frogs as well as birds.

But in every case the bird is no less the kind of bird it was, or the frog the kind of frog it was. So yes, under today's definition(s) of species, new ones can and do form.

HOWEVER the biblical kind is a whole 'nother story. There is no possibility (let alone probability) of one kind, especially by virtue of the sorts of changes which can lead to new species, changing into another kind. Felines remain felines. Canines remain canines (notice, please that the domestic dog is all one species regardless of size, hair color or length, or any other characteristics -- that's because a dog's mating cues are olfactory. If it smells right and it's within reach, it's fine!), equines remain equines, bovines remain bovines, etc. etc. etc.

Even the lowly E.coli can't be induced to change into anything else after over a hundred years of us trying. And they have a generation time of only 20 minutes, meaning we have dealt with, literally, millions upon millions of E.coli in our efforts to show evolution is even possible.

It hasn't happened with a bacteria. It can't happen anywhere else, either.

HOWEVER, natural selection CAN and does weed out less fit individuals or unlucky ones (in the case of a catastrophe), leaving truncated populations which may be better able to deal with limited resources or an environmental change, but which never are able to reproduce the full amount of genetic diversity their population had before the 'weeding out' and thus are impoverished to that extent.

 

[Mark Osgatharp]

Does anyone other than me find it interesting that the Lord, in His perfect treasury of heavenly wisdom - the Bible, didn't see fit to address any of these fine spun "scientific" theories about His creation.

The Bible simply states that the creation clearly demonstrates His eternal power and Godhead and declares all who fail to ascertain this to be fools.

No where in the Scriptures do we read that late in the history of man God would add the "A Bomb" of "creation science" to the Christian's arsenal. Our only weapon is "the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God."

Mark Osgatharp

 

[Helen]

Mark, ignorance is not a good way to exert dominion over the world the Lord has given us.

 

[Scott J]

Originally posted by Paul of Eugene:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Scott J:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Paul of Eugene:
[qb] Whenever you read any anti-evolutionist argument based on the odds against life starting, bear in mind two things:

1) The odds are always calculated as if evolution itself did not exist.

So statistics are only meaningful if they build in a bias toward the desired outcome... nope but it does sound like something an evolutionist would like to be true.

Evolution theory describes how an imperfect replicator can become better given mutation and natural selection, which defeats the odds calculation involved.

Not really since it the explanation doesn't even address the subject of the math and also because the explanation "assumes" that evolution is 100% true... making any statistical analysis of it meaningless.
</font>[/QUOTE]If you admit that "any statistical analysis of it [is] meaningless", then why do you support a statistical analysis of it that favors your side?</font>[/QUOTE] Because I don't admit that at all. The statistics in my opinion can be and have been approached objectively by people like Hoyle... who if I am not mistaken still put his faith in evolution. That is especially true of things like coding, purely left-handed populations, and many of the freak environmental conditions evolutionists must imagine to even make their speculations remotely possible.

Let me explain this calculation "as if evolution did not exist".

One notes the exact arrangement in a cell. One then notes the great complexity of the arrangement, the way the proteins work together, the way the cell functions to harmoniously gather energy from the environment and manage to procreate in a very sophisticated manner.

Once then calculates the odds against a series of atoms coming to this arrangement by chance. An incredibly large number, of course, results.

But this calculation, the odds against the currently living cell coming to being from raw atoms, is in fact working from a description of creation by a designer. In effect, it is showing how hard it would be for a designer to come up with a living cell as we know it.

No it doesn't and that logic is so perversely twisted that I am really surprised you would attempt it. Human beings even now can put raw elements together in an environment... to say that chance is a better answer than intent is beyond ridiculous and reveals more about your blind allegiance to evolution than anything else.

If you are trying to show that creation of life is impossible because it is so complex, then the calculations presented might be meaningful.

Nope. If you are proving that design provides a more parsimonious answer than random events within undirected natural processes...

But as scientists attempt to reconstruct the history of the beginning of life, they postulate no such spontaneous perfect assembly a single cell from raw materials.

No but not because the evidence points them away from a complex, "perfect" starting point... recent discoveries have affirmed that "ancient" forms were often more complex than current forms. No, the reason they don't postulate such is because it contradicts their naturalistic presuppositions.

This is just one more case where science is disserved by evolution and naturalism as an overarching presupposition.

Scientists cannot follow the evidence wherever it leads... you can only accept answers that support evolution whether they are likely or not. Philosophical proponents of naturalism and evolution won the propaganda war and have effected a change in the understood meaning of science. It is no longer just the pursuit of explanations of nature... it is now that pursuit but limited to only naturalistic explanations with regard to natural history.

This is in spite of the fact that operational science very often does not presume naturalism and can very well account for intelligence and design.

They look for a way for some of them to start copying themselves, in an environment where an energy flow encourages the spontaneous formation of dissipative structures.

Right. They engage in purely unfounded speculation that dismisses design and supernaturalism without consideration... not because the evidence doesn't agree with those premises or agree with them more than evolution and naturalism... but because the latter must be preserved as "truth", the "fact" of evolution must not be brought into question or critical review.

They look for that kind of self copying dissipative structure to gradually improve over time as a result of the competition between reproducers.

As a Christian, this should offend your sensibilities. Scripture doesn't say that things will gradually improve. It teaches that the universe is in decay.

Of course here, you have made the metaphysical assumption that even though no workable means of attaining the first life has been proposed it must have occurred and led to a process of undirected continuous improvement by a macro-process that has likewise not been proven. IOW's, you have couched speculation in scientific language and made the fairy tale sellable form of propaganda.

The calculations based on random assembly to the completed living cell simply do not take this differential population enhancement effect into account and are therefore not relevant to the emergence of life.

No. They simply take the founding, concrete, assumed events of that process and demonstrate that the foundation is so weak that it hardly merits the word "fact".

 

[Paul of Eugene]

Originally posted by Phillip:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Paul of Eugene:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Scott J:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by buckster75:
For someone to say the eye, for example, could have been formed by natural selection, seems to me to be very absurd.

It did to Darwin as well... but he required it since he had precluded the notion that God did it. </font>[/QUOTE]At first glance, the evolution of the eye might seem absurd. But actually the evolution of the eye is one of the more easily explained examples of gradual development!

The living cell seems to be affected by light in any case, just because of the complex chemicals that are in it.

A creature such as a worm often has a single spot that is used to respond to light. It helps the worm to orient itself away from the daylight and get back down into the dirt.


If that spot is dipped into a cup, that helps pinpoint the direction of the light even more.

If that cup can be covered by a transparent but tough material, that can protect the sensitive light responding cells.

If that cup can deepen, the directional detection for the light improves.

If that transparent covering can curve, it can start to focus the light a bit, giving even more precise direction, and begin to allow the detection of fuzzy images.

And bit by bit, increment by increment, the whole eye as we know it can evolve.

Examples of the intermediate stages of the eye are available in living creatures today - all stages! </font>[/QUOTE]Yes, and you might as well watch a tornado build a 747 when it flies through a junk-yard full of old airplane parts. </font>[/QUOTE]Why do you post such completely irrelevant broadsides?

The actual evolution of a competant flier begins with a competant leaper whose leaping really helps him live . . . perhaps to escape predators or catch something to eat.

Then bit by bit the better leapers survive and the worse leapers drop out of the gene pool. You go from guided leaping to flap assisted leaping to awkward flight to full fledged strong flight.

Over thousands and thousands of generations.

See, you completely ignore the actual theory and observation of evolution in your critique. Indeed, you have again done exactly what I said all those odds makers always do when criticizing eovlution - you haven't described evolution at all, instead you've described creation from junk.

And you claim its very hard.

Are you trying to say creation can't happen?

 

[Phillip]

To an evolutionist, it may be completely irrelevant--to a statistical analyist it is COMPLETELY relevant.

Funny, I've sat by my father's pond for hours watching frogs leap from one lilly-pad to another, waiting to see one zoom into the sky and fly south for the winter. ....hasn't happened yet.

In all seriousness, Helen hit the nail on the head when she mentioned bacteria with a generational life-span of approximately 20 minutes and the best thing they have been able to do is obtain some immunity to certain antibiotics.

Now, many microbiologists are believing that this is simply because certain bacteria have enzymes that prevent being killed by certain antibiotics and if you kill off all of the bacteria without the enzymes, guess, what? You get nothing left but immune bacteria. But, this is the basis of evolution, is it not? The strong survive? But, in all of the BILLIONS of generations of bacteria we have seen, I doubt a single scientist has seen one sprout legs (let along wings) to jump itself away from antiseptic products. Even, as you said, in thousands and thousands of generations.

Keep watching those little critters, it might happen some day.

 

[Helen]

Just one note here, Phillip: the bacteria were already antibiotic resistant, or they wouldn't have been able to resist the antibacterial agent and thus would have died. It's nothing we did; it's a natural variation which appears in various individuals of a colony by virtue of 'hot spot' mutations -- a sort of back and forth mutation which never goes forward and forward and forward, but only back and forth. Some of these hot spot mutations, or combinations, yield natural antibiotic resistance. When there is an antibiotic present, these individuals are, of course, favored to survive. In a wild population, however, they are the minority and actually the weaker of the bacteria and do not gain dominence.

What the biologists HAVE gotten out of the E.coli are a few fat E.coli, a few with a new metabolic pathway (when the biologists themselves interfered with the old one), and an awful lot of dead E.coli.

That's it...

 

[RayMarshall19]

Originally posted by Paul of Eugene:

Examples of the intermediate stages of the eye are available in living creatures today - all stages! [/QB][/QUOTE]

Dear Paul,

Could you please share with us some examples and explain how each "stage" evolved from the previous one?

 

[Paul of Eugene]

Originally posted by Phillip:
To an evolutionist, it may be completely irrelevant--to a statistical analyist it is COMPLETELY relevant.

Funny, I've sat by my father's pond for hours watching frogs leap from one lilly-pad to another, waiting to see one zoom into the sky and fly south for the winter. ....hasn't happened yet.

In all seriousness, Helen hit the nail on the head when she mentioned bacteria with a generational life-span of approximately 20 minutes and the best thing they have been able to do is obtain some immunity to certain antibiotics.

Now, many microbiologists are believing that this is simply because certain bacteria have enzymes that prevent being killed by certain antibiotics and if you kill off all of the bacteria without the enzymes, guess, what? You get nothing left but immune bacteria. But, this is the basis of evolution, is it not? The strong survive? But, in all of the BILLIONS of generations of bacteria we have seen, I doubt a single scientist has seen one sprout legs (let along wings) to jump itself away from antiseptic products. Even, as you said, in thousands and thousands of generations.

Keep watching those little critters, it might happen some day.

Well, if it were just your eyes alone in that one little spot, one would obviously have nothing to report. But there are other eyes looking out at other frogs . . .

http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/204/16/2817

 

[Johnv]

Originally posted by Scott J:
Scripture doesn't say that things will gradually improve. It teaches that the universe is in decay.

I don't wish to get into the whole C/E debate (because such discussion are generally unedifying and produce no fruit).

However, if this were true to the extent you're stating, then we've got a problem, because there is no shortage of astronomical examples that follow the pattern of new stars being formed. Further, in biology, speciation has been observed numerous times.

The past YEC view held that stars do not form, and that speciation is impossible. Although some YEC extremists today still hold to those positions, the common YEC view today is that star formation and speciation are completely plausible, but that more stars die that are born, and more species die out than arise.

Again, not taking sides here, or arguing the various views, just making an observation.

 

[Scott J]

Originally posted by Johnv:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Scott J:
Scripture doesn't say that things will gradually improve. It teaches that the universe is in decay.

However, if this were true to the extent you're stating, then we've got a problem, because there is no shortage of astronomical examples that follow the pattern of new stars being formed. </font>[/QUOTE] Your body is right now producing new protein. Yet you are also dying. Decay means that it is headed inexorably toward equillibrium.

Further, in biology, speciation has been observed numerous times.

And as noted by Helen, speciation occurs within the genetic variability of the parent species and actually results in a less adaptable animal often so determinately tied to a particular niche that minor environmental shifts result in extinction.

The past YEC view held that stars do not form, and that speciation is impossible.

Darwin and his supporting cast thought that the "Black Box" of genetics would be simple...

Though I am not sure who these anonomous YECer's are.

Although some YEC extremists today still hold to those positions, the common YEC view today is that star formation and speciation are completely plausible, but that more stars die that are born, and more species die out than arise.

I don't necessarily ascribe to either view. I would say that the energy to create stars is being diminished over time and that genomes are decaying such that variability is being lost. But the creation of both stars and species is not just dependent on these factors.

Again, not taking sides here, or arguing the various views, just making an observation.

OK. Thanks.

 

[Paul of Eugene]

Originally posted by RayMarshall19:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Paul of Eugene:

Examples of the intermediate stages of the eye are available in living creatures today - all stages! </font>[/QUOTE]Dear Paul,

Could you please share with us some examples and explain how each "stage" evolved from the previous one? [/QB][/QUOTE]


PBS made this video on that subject:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_011_01.html