If random mutations were all that actually produced changes in genomes and things from the field of evo devo weren’t important, then I’d say you have a point.
My latest post (Nr. 106, on 29 Jan) received a number of comments, which I did not answer yet.
Lava from a working volcano is not dangerous radioactive stuff, produced by a gigantic nuclear powerplant that is keeping the rocks underneath the thin crust of the earth fluid for 4,532 billion of years yet. Such a nuclear powerplant would make the existence of living organisms impossible, and only exists in fairy tales.
Please tell me why the cooling down of a sphere of red hot glass with a diameter of 10 cm, is not a valid model for the cooling down of a sphere of red hot liquid rocks with a diameter of 6.370 km (our earth), using a scaling factor of 6,37E+07
Dear George, please do not behave as an enemy of science and accept the clear mathematical difference between change of a system in its parameters and the change of it in its dimensions. Only in Darwinism there is just one type of change (‘evolution’), that can be extrapolated endlessly. The beaks of finches adapt to changing circumstances by the mechanism of recombination of gene variants and selection and by gene regulation. But that mechanism does not produce new genes (‘dimensions’) and thus cannot change a land animal into a whale. The mechanism that is supposed to do such a thing is the mechanism of accumulation of non-repairable, heritable, instantly advantageous, code-expanding mutations. But non-repairable mutations are the cause of cancer and hereditary diseases and severe selective disadvantage and cannot produce the opposite. As a consequence, the supposed mechanism for second-order change/macro evolution does not work in reality.
CONCLUSION 5
The problem of explaining second order change/ macro-evolution by natural processes is not a problem of numbers and chances, but a problem of mechanisms.
See further conclusion 1 in my post nr. 99 on 28 Jan.
@WilliamDJ Of course, no one has ever said it should be. You ignore the difference in a nuclear reactor where the radioactive elements are highly concentrated and the earth where they are very diffuse. You also ignore the fact that we can measure the radioactivity from the surface.
Let me count the ways.
You make a major assumption that the cooling rate is a simple linear function of the diameter with nothing to back that up.
You assume the physical properties of glass and rocks are identical.
You assume the thermal conductivity of rock doesn’t change with temperature or pressure.
You assume there is no convection in the mantle.
You assume the incoming radiant heat from the sun has no impact on the cooling rate.
You never stated how the cooling rate of the glass sphere was measured. Are the conditions the same as those around the earth?
You ignore Lord Kelvin’s much more detailed calculations that show your model is incorrect even though he still got the wrong answer.
And I will remind you that I am not a physicist so there are probably many more.
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You have brought up all the arguments you mention yet in the Biologos thread: Can the age of the earth be a litmus test for what counts as science?
Please read my answers there.
Dear George,
Empirical science and mathematics belong the most precious accomplishments of our civilization. [content removed by moderator.]
See further my conclusions from mathematics and empirical science in my post nr. 53, 58 and 122. For the convenience of the followers of this thread, I reprint them below (re-ordered).
CONCLUSIONS
1. ‘ Evolution ’ (= slow change) is not a robust scientific concept. After more than one hundred and fifty years, the concept of evolution urgently needs to be defined more accurately by distinguishing ‘ first order change/variation ’ (= the change of a system in its parameters) + the motor of first order change + the empirical evidence for it, from ‘ second order change/innovation ’ (= the change of a system in its dimensions) + the motor of second order change + the empirical evidence for it. The consequence of this distinction will be that the empirical evidence for variation of the DNA (for instance, the change in the form of the beaks of Darwin finches, produced by the mechanism of recombination of gene variants and selection and by gene regulation), can no longer be used as evidence for innovation of the DNA (for instance the transformation of a land animal into a whale, by the supposed mechanism of accumulation of non-repairable, heritable, instantly advantageous, code-expanding mutations).
2. The problem of explaining second order change/ macro-evolution by natural processes is not a problem of numbers and chances, but a problem of mechanisms. The mechanism for variation of the DNA does not produce new genes (‘dimensions’) and cannot be claimed to produce second-order change/ innovation of the DNA. The supposed mechanism that produces second-order change ( accumulation of non-repairable, heritable, instantly advantageous, code-expanding mutations) is invalid because irreparable mutations are the cause of cancer and hereditary diseases and severe selective disadvantage.
3. From conclusion 1 and 2 follows that ‘ macro evolution ’ (= the transformation of a bacterium into a human, by natural processes) can only happen in a fantasy world, not in our physical reality.
4. The claim that natural processes can transform simple molecules into an ever growing amount of complex molecules and structures of molecules, is pre-Victorian Alchemist faith. If natural processes could form an ever growing amount of more complex molecules, energy could be harvested for free, and chemical industry would close down. This is absurd. Therefore it is proven that natural processes cannot form an ever growing amount of more complex molecules and structures of molecules.
5. The claim that the family tree of fossils can be seen as a billions of years lasting ’film’ of second order change of bacteria into humans, is contradicted by a multitude of scientific facts and must be rejected according the rules of empirical science
@WilliamDJ There are no answers to the questions that I raised here. Why don’t you just answer the questions directly? You apparently don’t have a problem with typing out your claims over and over.
Repeating a lie often enough doesn’t make it the truth.
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You are wrong.
Besides, we are discussing 'Is there hard evidence for macro evolution’; not the topic of the age of the earth.
You posted a link to one of my responses to you on that thread. In that specific post there are no answers.
You are the one who brought it up. And if you have no answers, just as you had no answers in the other thread, then we can let it drop.
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Read the entire thread ‘Can the age of the earth be a litmus test for what counts as science’ and you will find all the answers you asked for.
I read and participated in that thread as you well know. And to make sure my memory was correct I just went back and checked. No where in that thread did you address your “sphere of red hot glass with a diameter of 10 cm” example so again there are no answers to my questions there. So all the points I made about why your example is incorrect still stand.
I used a sphere with a diameter of 1 meter.
You keep changing the goal posts and refusing to answer the legitimate questions raised by your claims. In the other thread you referenced your guess as to how long a 1 meter sphere of rock would take to cool down based on how fast a thin sheet of lava cools on the surface. Now you want to talk about a 10 cm sphere of glass.
To be clear: in the thread 'Can the age of the earth be a litmus test for what count as science?’ I used a sphere of red hot rock with a diameter of 1 meter, as a model of our earth ( a sphere of red hot rock with a thin crust). In this thread I used a sphere of red hot glass with a radius of 10 cm. as a model for our earth, because the cooling down of such a sphere can be observed and measured in the workshop of any glass blower. Glass is made of Silicium, and rocks (largely) too.
I haven’t really been following along, but of course glass spheres aren’t being heated by radiogenic heating, don’t have an atmosphere, nor are being heated on the surface by the sun. Radiogenic heating for example would have heated the earth more in the past but in total looks something like this:
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And also to a non-physicist like me, the earth is floating around in a vacuum, sort of like being in the world’s largest thermos bottle. 
The earth is floating around in an extremely cold environment (temperature = 2K). Its cooling down can be simulated by a red hot sphere of glass with a radius of 10 cm, using a scaling factor of 6,37E+07
The fluid rocks underneath the thin crust of our earth (1% of its radius) cannot have been kept fluid for 4,543 billion years by a gigantic nuclear plant inside the earth, because the radiation produced by that plant would have made life impossible for at least the first 3,0 billion years (see the graphic provided by moderator pvaquark).
No it can’t. The earth is floating around in a vacuum. The only way heat escapes is by radiation. Your glass ball loses heat by radiation, convection (ever blow on something to cool it down?), and conduction. You ignore 2 out of 3 so your model is useless. In addition to all of the other problems that I have pointed out.
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And in addition to Williams easily recognizable surface problems here, there may be an even deeper fundamental problem that was probably not accounted for. I have an engineering degree (but not mechanical engineering - so if one of those is around to help me out here…) but you can’t just do some kind of linear (or even cubic - for volume) scale and expect your model to give accurate scaled results can you? I.e. Even if I have a ball that is, say 10^-6 radius of the earth (meaning 10^-18 earth’s volume), it does not follow that it will lose its heat 10^18 (or 10^6) times faster than the earth’s rate of heat loss does it? As I recall there had to be more complicated math involved than simple linear scaling.
Lord Kelvin, who would understand this way better than me, actually did the calculations to figure out how long it would take for a molten earth to cool and he came up with 20 to 400 million years. He was still wrong but I would trust his numbers over those of the other William.