The Barbarian

Since there's a mathematical definition of "information", it's easy to test. According to Claude Shannon's theorem, information is: Where: H= information and p(x) equals the frequency of allele x in the population. So, consider if we have a gene with 2 alleles (different versions of the same gene), each with a frequency of 0.5, we can find the information for that gene to be the negative sum of the products of the frequencies and the log of the frequencies. So then -2(0.5 X log(0.5)), which is about 0.301. Now, suppose a new allele happens by mutation and eventually each allele has a frequency of about one-third. Then it would be -3(0.333..X log(.0333..)) or about o.477. Hence, any new mutation in a population increases the information in the population genome. However, evolution can work just as well by decreasing information. Evolution is a change in the allele frequencies of a population over time, so if for some reason, one of the alleles go extinct, and only two remain, the information will then be about 0.301 again, In fact, because speciation often happens in small, isolated populations, it is frequently the case that the new species will at first have less information than the species from which it evolved. Since all organisms have dozens of mutations (almost all of them neutral) that weren't in either parent, this usually changes over time.

Democritus of Abdera showed, by experiment, that matter must be made up of extremely tiny particles. He called them "atoms"("you can't cut them into smaller bits") about 500 years before Paul wrote that verse. Every educated person in the Greco-Roman world knew about it. But I don't think that's what Paul was writing about. Certainly, there's nothing therein about "atomic structure." The theory of Democritus held that everything is composed of "atoms", which are physically, but not geometrically, indivisible; that between atoms, there lies empty space; that atoms are indestructible, and have always been and always will be in motion; that there is an infinite number of atoms and of kinds of atoms, which differ in shape and size. Of the mass of atoms, Democritus said, "The more any indivisible exceeds, the heavier it is". However, his exact position on atomic weight is disputed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus

Barbarian observes: Actually, the discovery of the mechanism of inheritance cleared up a difficult problem for Darwin's theory. You see, if heredity was like mixing paint (as scientists in his time thought) then it's difficult to see how a new trait would not be obscured like a drop of red paint in a barrel of white paint. But when it became clear that heredity is more like sorting beads than mixing paint, his theory was again confirmed. That's what I just told you. It's like sorting beads, not like mixing paint. Because it's like sorting beads, it explains why Darwin's theory accurately describes what evolution does. Until scientists realized the way genetics works, Darwin's theory had a big problem. Then it became clear why it does. I highlighted the part you missed.

Actually, the discovery of the mechanism of inheritance cleared up a difficult problem for Darwin's theory. You see, if heredity was like mixing paint (as scientists in his time thought) then it's difficult to see how a new trait would not be obscured like a drop of red paint in a barrel of white paint. But when it became clear that heredity is more like sorting beads than mixing paint, his theory was again confirmed.

Those are two rather different things. I notice scientists like Francis Collins (director of the Human Genome Project) openly express their faith in God, while showing why evolution is a fact.

I'm a biologist. And almost all biologists accept evolutionary theory. Since evolution is directly observed in nature, there's no point in denying it. Often creationist mistake thing like natural selection (an agency of evolution) or common descent (a consequence of evolution) for the phenomenon itself. Evolution is defined in science, as a change in allele frequency in a population over time. Which is directly observed. So is natural selection, which even creationist organizations like Answers in Genesis accept. And they also accept a limited amount of common descent, although they draw the line at common descent of all organisms on Earth.

Which is a foolish idea; science can't say anything at all about the supernatural. And yes, there are ignorant "evolutionists" who don't know science any more then some ignorant creationists. Not that all creationists are ignorant; many are not.

Perhaps you don't know what "evolution" means. What do you think it means? If you think so, you don't know much about scientists. Most of us are theists or deists of some sort, mostly Christian. And of course scientists accept scientific ideas only on evidence.

With about 55% of Americans believing that humans evolved from other living things. Down from a high of about 47%. So even laymen see the evidence as conclusive. Most scientists before Darwin believed in special creation, too. The Morley/Michaelson experiment showed that there was no luminiferous aether, just as Darwin showed that organisms evolved into new species over time. And so, those ideas, being shown false, scientists no longer accepted them.

Seems unlikely. Darwin attributed the origin of life to God. Since evolutionary theory isn't about the origin of life, and would not be affected by any particular way life began, it's a moot point. If you like, you can, as Darwin did, assume God did it. This is the difference between human artifacts and natural things. We design artifacts; God creates natural things.

Since we observe it happening constantly, there's really no hope of killing it. The reason almost all scientists accept evolutionary theory is because of the numerous verified predictions of the theory. Last time I checked, using numbers from the IDers and Project Steve, about 0.3 percent of all scientists with a doctorate in biology or a related field don't accept evolutionary theory as it is today. That's not 3 percent; it's three-tenths of a percent. With even many YE creationists now admitting to speciation and a limited amount of common descent, it's clear that YE creation is not doing well. And it's not just scientists; most Americans accept some form of evolution: https://news.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx

Same thing, really. What matters, is genes. Until Darwin and Mendel, many scientists thought so, too. Even Darwin was originally open to the idea. But not after we learned how heredity works.

Darwin didn't accept spontaneous generation leading to evolution, either. Pasteur, like Darwin, rejected spontaneous generation, and accepted the fact of evolution, as you see in the quote from Pasteur.

Mutation is a cause of descent with modification. However, it would have to be passed on to new generations to actually amount to evolutionary change.

A physician thinks that evolution is about spontaneous generation? This shows why you should never ask a physician for his opinion on anything but medicine. If you were wondering, nothing in evolutionary theory is about how life began; nor does any particular way that it began, matter to evolutionary theory. Darwin, for example, just thought that God created the first living things. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. Charles Darwin, last sentence of On the Origin of Species, 1872

Pasteur acknowledged evolution: Virulence appears in a new light which cannot but be alarming to humanity; unless nature, in her evolution down the ages (an evolution which, as we now know, has been going on for millions, nay, hundreds of millions of years), has finally exhausted all the possibilities of producing virulent or contagious diseases -- which does not seem very likely. Cuny, Hilaire. 1965. Louis Pasteur: The man and his theories. Translated by P. Evans. London: The Scientific Book Club. Clearly, a lot of scientists who were not biologists and who lived before Darwin's discoveries, did not think of evolution. Today, almost all scientists, even non-biologists, accept evolution. There's an important thing to consider in those facts. Prior to J.J. Thompson, the existence of atoms was controversial. For the same reason.

Breeding is merely sexual reproduction. Which (in sexually reproducing populations) can be part of evolution, called recombination. But it's not the only thing that causes evolution. Mutation is also a major source of evolutionary change. Whatever causes the population genome to change, is a process of evolution. Immigration of individuals of the same species from other populations would also qualify, which is why that must be controlled for in doing population genetics with Hardy-Weinberg analyses.

No. Mutation is a change in genes. Descent with modification is a change in population genome. Mutation can do that. So can recombination of alleles. Descent with modification is the way scientists described things before they knew about genetics. Today, it is referred to as "a change in allele frequency in a population over time."

Perhaps it would be less confusing, if you used Darwin's term. "Descent with modification."

It's like saying that where you're sitting is the center of the Earth's surface, because each way you look, it's the same distance to the horizon. Space is like the Earth's surface; finite, but unbounded. For the same reason.

Perhaps you don't know what "theory" means. Part of the problem is that the word "theory" means something very different in lay language than it does in science: A scientific theory is an explanation of some aspect of the natural world that has been substantiated through repeated experiments or testing. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/just-a-theory-7-misused-science-words/ And evolution isn't a theory. It's a natural phenomenon, which we directly observe happening. There is a theory of evolution that explains it. There are agents of evolution like natural selection, and there are consequences of evolution, like increased fitness in a population, and common descent. So many people get these all confused.

It would have to be really, really far back. The Greeks knew about it before they were writing; at the very beginning of Greek history, they cite a number of ways to know the Earth is spherical. Hundred of years before Christ, one of them very accurately calculated it's circumference.

The evidence shows no dinosaurs at all, above the worldwide layer of iridium, which came from a large object hitting the Earth. However, dinosaurs were in a decline long before that event. It seems that the object applied the final blow to dinosaurs.

It was billions of years ago, but how many, I personally don't know. Iso-propyl cyanide has been detected in a star-forming cloud 27,000 light-years from Earth. Its branched carbon structure is closer to the complex organic molecules of life than any previous finding from interstellar space. The discovery suggests the building blocks of life may be widespread throughout our galaxy. Various organic molecules have previously been discovered in interstellar space, but i-propyl cyanide is the first with a branched carbon backbone. The branched structure is important as it shows that interstellar space could be the origin of more complex branched molecules, such as amino acids, that are necessary for life on Earth. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29368984 And the Murchison Meteorite, about 4 billion years old, had numerous amino acids within it, including some not found on Earth. In the study, set to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analytical chemist Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin of the Helmholtz German Research Center for Environmental Health in Munich and his colleagues used high-resolution mass spectrometry to look at the organic (carbon-based) content of three Murchison samples. The group found more than 14,000 unique molecular compositions, or collections of atoms, in the samples; there may be 50,000 or more such compositions, if the limited scope of the mass spectrometry analysis is taken into account. And because each collection of atoms can be arranged in numerous ways, the authors estimate that there may be millions of distinct organic compounds in the meteorite. Many researchers have analyzed the chondritic meteorite for amino acids and other possible precursors to life, because some theories hold that life on Earth began with the delivery of prebiotic organic compounds from space via asteroids or comets. Schmitt-Kopplin says that he and his colleagues took a less targeted approach to try to unlock the meteorite's full chemical complexity and, by extension, the chemical complexity of the early solar system. "What we've seen out of this is that we had such a multitude of signals as we never saw in any other sample before," he says. "Even in petroleum, you have really complex materials, but not necessarily as complex as this." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/murchison-meteorite/

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