immunologists use Evolutionary theory to design vaccines… vaccines that work! …and save lives. So your first premise is flat dead incorrect.
You would make a terrible police detective if you kept telling your boss blood analysis is USELESS … we just cant know for certain. In fact, we can sometimes know to a virtually certain degree.
Finally, speciation works (almost inevitably given enough years) when 2 sub-populations virtually stop exchanging genetic information during reproduction of the next generation. Once such isolation is established, God can send one sub-population in one evolutionary direction… and send the other in a different trajectory.
Isolation can be triggered by a new physical barrier, or in song birds it can be triggered by a new song with limited appeal. Or in many animals by the appearance of some new color or ornamental enlargement of some feature!
Hi George.you are engaging in circular reasoning. Forget God, not even all human beings (including a small percentage of scientists) agree with you that the fossil evidence supports common descent.
Your argument is like atheists blaming God for creating a world without any evidence of God’s existence! They don’t realise the problem is their perception tainted by sin.
Our Perception of things, or the scientific perception of things is not Gods Problem. Its ours!
Like i have said before. I expect scientific explanations to stand on their own two feet. if physicicts claim rain is caused by purely natural causes, i expect an explanation for it that does no include God. And i will evaluate their explanation according to their claims.
Same with Biologists.
It is not necessary that “all” agree. It is only necessary that an efficient elite are able to perform molecular interventions, based on evolutionary evidence, that works.
As for fossils, no matter how you slice it, Australia’s genetic legacy and fossil legacy, fits no known Creationist scenario other than: God intentionally made serial special creations in such a way as to convince scientists that God did NOT use special creation.
That term ‘efficient elite’ came to mind when I was pondering the genetic work of immunologists… or CSI scientists who can produce virtually certain evidence that a particular man is “the perp”… or certain evidence that another is not the perp!
The usual “Australia premise” explored on this list is the one that presumes all life on Australia was wiped out by a year of global flooding.
But do you even think there was a global flood? When did it happen in your scenario?
We didn’t, initially. But as the evidence converged over the many decades since Darwin, it became clearer that the most comprehensive and successful explanation for everything we have found in both macro- and microscopic worlds is the common ancestry narrative. You are right that many of its details have been (and no doubt will continue to be) revised. That is because it is compelled to “follow the data”. And that is its strength; not its weakness.
Can you put anything forward that follows the data even better?
It seems to me that this has been sufficiently beaten to death, and that you have received the answer – many times – even if you refuse to accept it. There simply is no such thing as “the perfect continuum”. Even a movie played at 30 frames per second has discreet frames that must jump from one to the other. So the stubborn purist can always find gaps in anything to complain about, but it gets silly after a while. The vast majority of us are quite willing to accept that reality must have carried on between the “frames”, even if we can’t have the infinite numbers of photographs to show us every infinitesimal moment.
That still doesn’t work. For example, Toyota has hybrid SUVs and hybrid cars. You would have a hybrid RAV4 and a hybrid Camry in the same group, but have a standard Camry with just an internal combusion engine in a separate group from the hybrid Camry. That doesn’t work.
Automobiles don’t form a nested hierarchy, as shown by numerous examples.
Then all other vehicles in that clade should also have that feature, and they don’t. Therefore, they don’t form a nested hierarchy.
As far as i can see, nothing of the sort happened. People just assumed common ancestry and tried to explain things by that paradigm. When they couldnt fit certain details, they made escape hatchets, such as convergent evolution.
So we have the appendix evolving 30 times in mamals.
Eyes evolving 60+ times…
Animals crossing oceans on rafts… again and again…
This so called explanatory framework is a collection of a huge no: of implausible miracles.
If the only reason scientist are sticking to it is that they dont have a better explanation that does not involve God. Its he biologists problem, not mine. All i can point out is that evolutionary science often sounds like fantasy.
Let me leave you with this wonderful just so story.
If you can accept this kind of similarity as a product of chance and natural selection… you will believe any thing…
I would prefer to dig a little deeper before comming to a conclusion.
Actually they cannot claim evolution is designed because that would be an oxymoron. The point of evolution is that its a random (i.e unpredictable process). A designed process would be predictable. this is a fundamental difference.
If you are describing a process designed by an intelligence with specific end points , then its not evolution.
If you dont believe me, you can ask @T_aquaticus or @T.j_Runyon
The question i asked should be easier than the analog you suggested. There is a clear Quantum to count in the question i posed - species… I am not asking to count the no: of changes, but give an aproximate no: of intermediate species that would be required.
With languages, there is no such quantum to differentiate. So if i define every variation in word and grammar as a new variety, it would be easy to calculate the approximate no: of different varieties required. (Just count the points of divergence).
Why not? In nature the flying squirrel is in one group… while the sugar glider is in a totally different groupc(marsupials) though they look the same, They have significant differences in reproductive organs.
Similarly a camry with an ICE is more different from a camry with hybrid engines… while it is more similar to a hybrid SUV. Similar engines (motors), transmission systems. Similar batteries, wiring etc.
The similarity in external appearance is caused by reasons of operating in the same niche.
Apply the same scale to nature and cars… their heirarchies are similar.
Source : Test your understanding - Understanding Evolution
Go through the article. Then replace the sugar glider with a camry with ICE and the flying squirrel with a Hybrid Engine… the explanation would be along the same lines.
It’s one thing to say that you have to give God-driven evolution a name different from evolution. But now you have really gone past the limit of not just scientific terminology, but have stuck your face in complete opposition to what God can or won’t do.
Forget for the moment whether you are happy with the term Evolution… and your somewhat brittle (nay unfathomable?) attitude that you know how best to employ the word Evolution … but you are on the verge of saying God would never use common descent and speciation to accomplish his goals.
What makes you think that, @Ashwin_s? If God can use evaporation and condensation to make rain, why wouldn’t he use common descent to fill the world with interrelated kinship groups of all sorts of creatures?
Earlier in your post, you rather officiously declare that we would believe anything if we believe that “chance and natural selection” could accomplish such similarities.
This would be like me saying to you, if you believe Jesus and Satan can work together to make a beautiful starry night, you’d believe anything! Wouldn’t you feel grievously offended that I lumped the Savior in with Satan? Wouldn’t you feel that I clearly had no grasp of what is involved in Christian belief, if I could so cavalierly associate the Prince of Darkness with the Prince of Life?
Well, it’s the same kind of almost inexplicable ignorance on your part when you talk about randomness and natural selection, as though God would never use the latter to help avoid the former! What makes it so inexplicable is that you have had 3 or 4 instructors on these boards… giving you intimate snapshots of the logic involved when God is in charge of mutations, and in charge of climate-driven evolutionary patterns.
Bit none of it really matters to you … you refuse to actually connect the dots we describe. You are absolutely right … while thousands of other intelligent and professional experts in the fields of evolutionary science are engaged in some kind of quackery and fake processes - - and yet, mysteriously, they still produce medicines and treatments that save lives, and effectively predict how and where to find genetic traces of valuable biological resources all around the world. You must think they do it with some kind of dowsing rods to accomplish these things.
So you don’t think God is at work in producing the Flying Squirrel (a placental mammal) and the very similar Sugar Glider (a marsupial mammal) ? I don’t think these congruent evolutionary developments were random or accidental… nor do many of my friends. So why do you come here with your insulting attitude, impugning the intelligence of quite intelligent people, ridiculing them – all the while you can’t even explain speciation?
When you went to this site, and you saw the test question, did you try to give the correct answer?
You obviously haven’t spent much time thinking this one through:
How would we know what the “average number of intermediate species” it would take to get from a terrestrial mammal to become a whale. Ponder for a moment: how long does it take just to create a species? More than a lifetime, usually, based on even the most aggressive estimates? So how many times has the Earth made whales? Is the process comparable to making walruses? Or Seals? When we had our video cameras rolling… how many species did it seem to require in your view?
What? You weren’t there? You didn’t see the video imagery? Oh … because there wasn’t any…
And yet you have the presumption to ask questions based on information you know cannot be adequately answered by anyone on this planet. Why do you seem so unpleasant in your efforts to discover the truth - - as long as “the truth” fits all your rules?
I use the scientific meaning of the term evolution. It is always used to describe a random (i.e unpredictable), natural (i.e the only agency involved are natural laws and processes) process.
A design implies an agency that transcends natural explanations. A designed process is ultimately not random. The end results are anticipated/predicted.
Evolution cannot be conflated with Design.
What exactly do you mean by common descent? Suppose God worked on the embryo inside the womb of a regular bat, and caused mutations that made the off spring a new species with the ability to echolocate… would you call it common descent? I would call it special creation.
There is a place for randomness in a designed processes. However, the randomness is controlled.For example, if i made a search algorithm to find a solution to a problem, one way to do it would be to keep some parameters constant and allow random choices to be made from a controlled set of options.Then the process would be optimised by checking which “random” choice gives the best result for the parameter being optimised. The effectiveness of this strategy depends on two sets of decisions.
Which parameters need to be kept constant.
What are the sets/paths of variation allowed.
I am not saying God cannot use natural selection. I am saying natural selection + Random mutations cannot make the above two decisions and hence it cannot lead to the kind of optimisations of form/function we see in nature.
And if God made those decisions and programmed genomes accordingly, the process cannot be called natural selection.
They do this through empirical experimentation/ testing which has little to with evolution.Irrespective of whether they assume CA or not, such studies will give us information.Though assuming CA can cause people to neglect useful areas of research.
Take the ENCODE programme as an example. They defined function in genes in a way totally different from what evolutionary biologists do… And that is one of the reasons they found a lot of avenues of medical interest.
However they got a lot of criticism from evolutionary biologists for taking this approach to function in the genome.
Well then you should be happy i agree with you.
Do you think these congruent evolutionary developments are explained by natural selection?
If not… what is left?
I didn’t answer the question because both options were wrong. I had to choose between similarity caused by common descent (homologous) and Similarity caused by natural selection (analogous)…
I think its similarity caused by design.
Let me allow Darwin to postulate the question better
Blockquote
Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record. Charles Darwin (1859), The Origin of Species
I am also saying the same thing…There is no finely graduated organic chain from teh Pakicetus to the whale.
Either Darwin is right and the fossil record just doesnt show the vast majority of the intermediate organisms… (which is another way of saying there is little support for the process of evolution in the fossil record)
or there isnt a finely graduated organic chain to begin with.
claiming that expectations of a finely graduated organic chain based on evolutions is unreasonable is ridiculous.
For perhaps nearly most of the last four centuries, people have been assuming anything but. And still today, great numbers of people including yourself are determined to assume anything but. And yet for all that effort, they still haven’t come up with a compelling narrative for how God physically accomplished his creation. It’s like one set of folks wanting to talk about a carpenter’s tools and methods of the trade, while the other set of folks just insists: “No – the carpenter just said he made this table for us – so he must have just spoken it into existence. Because he barely mentioned using wood for his material and said very little about his tools and all this exacting craft that you’re all going on about.”
From what I can see, if you found 60 photographs of me, you would proclaim in amazement: “Look! Someone just like Merv was created 60 separate times!” And it doesn’t seem to occur to you that perhaps the same person developed and had a life in between those snapshots even though you don’t have a visual record of all of it. You point out that I don’t look exactly the same in every picture, so it can’t all be the same person. And you may be right in a couple cases (some photos of a twin brother or a ‘look alike’ thrown in); they would indeed be separate creations (“convergences” as it were.) But by and large, the best explanation for the string of photographs is that I grew and changed slightly between the photos, solidly and continuously existing throughout.
But you persist: No – it can’t be. Where are all the missing transition photos? You’ve got 60 gaps to account for. More photos are produced. But you declare – Now you have 120 gaps!
While we’re speaking of needing a multitude of miracles, this is a problem that the flood geologists have to explain, not the E.C. folks. But you’ve indicated that you are okay with an ancient earth, if I’m not mistaken. Sorry if you’ve explained this before and I’ve just forgotten; but what do you think happened in the billions of years of earth’s history before humans were on the scene?
More like people trying to explain how the tools made the table without any carpenter.
I am just pointing out, look the table was designed and made by a carpenter…
Do you think the guys who proposed the appendix convergently evolving 30+ times didn’t know that one continuous development would be most probable ? They are forced into such conclusions because of assumptions of common descent applied to real data.
Give the scientists some credit. If there was any way for the appendix to have emerged in one shot in mammals without convergence, they would have gone for it.
When it comes to things like the appendix, my main problem is not the lack of transitions… its the claim that someone identical to Mervin (as per you analogy) was born and grew up several times in history by chance (no input from lineage)…
Actually its a problem faced by evolutionists…
Many related species are separated by oceans… and they had to cross oceans to reach where they did. This miracle had to happen many many times…
As to flood geology, haven’t looked too deeply into it so i cant make any comments. i have explicitly said before that i dont have any problems with the estimates of the age of the Earth.
For the large part, if fossil evidence is to believed, the earth consisted only of single celled organisms…No animal perse has been alive and kicking for billions of years…
