Mutations do not produce real change

[Valoran]

So Valoran, you just skipped right over the part where I said, "For anyone other than Valoran..."?

Ah, I see you've stumbled across the obvious, well done. Thanks for pointing it out as well, some of us here might not have your keen analytical mind and Holmes-esque powers of observation needed to notice that.

Valoran, that doesn't even make sense. It makes you look crazy.

It means that, for some reason, you are asking whether I skipped over irrelevant parts in your post, when the very obvious fact is that I did.

Sarcasm is wasted on the stupid. I need to keep that in mind.

First you pretend that you're too stupid to understand the point I made by having you affirm for me that sedimentary layers can be laid down rapidly, and now you're pretending... whatever it is that you're going for here. I don't get it - how is it that you figure that pretending that you're stupid and crazy make you feel like you're appearing to be correct?

OES, I'm perfectly happy to admit that you won a meaningless game of semantics, and I've already said so. You're not going to get any argument out of me when you try to argue that ash and soil can be deposited rapidly. I trusted a YEC to engage in honest debate, and I've been shown the folly of my ways. So yes, you did get me to affirm that sedimentary layers can be laid down rapidly. But any time you're going to present actual evidence that sedimentary rock layers can be laid down rapidly, which is the geological evidence that blows YEC-ism out of the water, or actual historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection, I'll be willing to listen, though I can't say I'll be holding my breath waiting for it.

I'm a Christian who believes in eternal salvation based on doctrine and evolution has an impact on doctrine, so I'm participating on a Christian forum about shared beliefs with other Christians.

That's so obvious that it demonstrates that the question used as a diversion from actually answering the question I asked is another pretence of being stupid. Again, why pretend you don't understand very simple things to try to look smart?

And I'm an engineer by degree and science teacher by profession who is here to learn how to debunk creationist nonsense. I'm quite sure you're more than aware of that, given how you turned out multiple posts' worth of ad hominems about it before, so I'm not sure what's the point of your pretending to be ignorant and stupid in an attempt to look smart.

You're a creationist, and you're here to talk creationism. I'm an evolutionist, and I'm here to talk evolution. I'm glad you're finding it so obvious and simple now, but it'd be great if you tried to engage your brain and arrive at the obvious and simple answer before I had to ask you a rhetorical question to guide you towards it because I wasn't sure what you were trying to accomplish by playing dumb.

So... no answer to my question?

Interesting.

OK. You want to parade around pretending to be stupid and craze that's fine by me.

I'm interested in whether or not you're getting a good return for our effort, so I'd appreciate it if you keep me updated on how many converts you get from among us.

So if you "knew" - and I use that term loosely - that I'm here to "convert" you, what were you hoping to accomplish by pretending to be stupid and crazy and asking me what I'm here for?

That's a rhetorical question, by the way. The obvious answer is that you're trying to turn this discussion towards ad hominem, as usual, because your bag of tricks is running dangerously low by now. Your attempt of bringing up Behe's work has backfired so badly that you don't even dare to link us to it. You're unable to discuss the evidence for creationism and against evolution other than copying and pasting links and snippets you apparently have no understanding of, much less refute arguments against. And you've tried to score a personal one-up by claiming to not care what I have to say, except that it's turning out that you care so much you apparently can't stop yourself from replying to me.

What's next? When do the desperate ad hominems, meaningless word games, and your pattern of running away pretending to not care but unable to stay away because you care so badly going to commence once more, OES? What's your and MorningGlory's best shot at trying to get this thread locked again because you cannot answer the evidence against your position? Or dare I hope for an actual evidence-based refutation of my arguments I have made in response to your link?

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

What's your and MorningGlory's best shot at trying to get this thread locked again because you cannot answer the evidence against your position?

If you want the thread to stay open, why don'tcha call me 'stupid' a few more times?

[~candice~]

All right folks.... I think enough is enough.

This thread has been peppered with unnecessary insults and it is time to stop.

EVERYONE, atheist and Christian alike, needs to remember that you can make a point without being insulting. Insulting others doesn't make your argument stronger, it detracts from your argument and makes it look weaker. We may not agree with each other here but that is no reason to be so disrespectful. It is never necessary to take pot shots at another person's intellect.

If you can't play nice I'll shut the thread down. In the meantime, have a 24 hour breather.

[~candice~]

I will re-open the thread as promised, but please keep the discussion respectful.

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

Thanks Candice,

OK, so again, if anyone other than Valoran wants to discuss this issue, I think this video clip summarizes the findings from the naturalist perspective very well:

*** edit by Candice, the youtube links won't work in this forum, so I put it here for you

***

Something the viewer will notice right away is how the speaker acknowledges that yeasts are supposed to have branched off of multicellular ancestors, just as I mentioned the other day - hence, the research is really more illustrative of possibility than anything and must be validated by conducting further research on other single celled organisms.

Something else I noticed was that there's no indication I noticed of what mutation has supposedly occured. As it seems unlikely that unguided chance just happened to faciliate such a beneficial mutation, I'd sure be interested to know if they discovered that every time they subjected the yeasts similar conditions if it would come out with the same result, which would indicated it was not as a result of a mutation, or at least if it was a mutation it would trigged by the conditions and demonstrate that the cell was conducive to such multicellular clustering in the first place.

Also, I've noticed the evolutionist seems to be helping themselves to the extrapolation of the development of a multicellular 'organism' from what seems only to be the strict definition of multicellularity, and I think the extrapolation is at best premature. The interpretation of cooperativeness among the cells seems like a bit of a stretch to me at this point, but what I'd like to know is if one of these single yeast cells eats, does the nutrients pass to all of the cells, and the same thing with resperation, waste disposal, etc.? If not, could this really be considered an organism and not simply a cluster of cells working symbiotically?

Once again, I find it interesting how those who conducted the research seem to be attributing far less to the research than the sensationalists are, which shows a tact and reservation on their part that I think would be appropriate for the popularizers to share until further testing reveals more information.

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

I really don't know enough to make statements regarding this research but criticizing it by using a video of some wild haired dude on youtube doesn't really get us anywhere. I'm not trying to slam you OES, but I'm just saying that I don't think this video was meant to be an all inclusive technical breakdown of what was happening during their research. Unfortunately we don't have any of the UofMinn scientists here to answer questions, I wish we did I'd love to learn more about what they did.

I agree entirely. I'm hardly basing my case off what that guys says... after all he is promoting evolution and that's not my interpretation. I just thought he provided a good summary and since he and I are on the opposite side of the interpretations of this I wanted to show that it's not just the creationists making stuff up here.

I'm eager to know more, myself. I just bottled a carboy of red ale and on the instructions it warns not to agitate the wart. I thought it was so that it didn't oxidize, but now I see that it was to prevent it from evolving... I might need David Duchovny and Orlando Jones to help me out, stat.

Seriously though, it certainly is interesting.

[~candice~]

I'm eager to know more, myself. I just bottled a carboy of red ale and on the instructions it warns not to agitate the wart. I thought it was so that it didn't oxidize, but now I see that it was to prevent it from evolving... I might need David Duchovny and Orlando Jones to help me out, stat.

[Valoran]

Something the viewer will notice right away is how the speaker acknowledges that yeasts are supposed to have branched off of multicellular ancestors, just as I mentioned the other day - hence, the research is really more illustrative of possibility than anything and must be validated by conducting further research on other single celled organisms.

You mean organisms like C. vulgaris (Boraas et al, 1998)? It's already been done more than a decade ago, where unicellular eukaryotes evolved into multicellularity in order to increase their size and avoid being eaten by small-mouthed protozoan predators.

Whether yeast evolved from multicellular ancestors is irrelevant. The question is whether the yeast genome contains any genes for multicellularity today before the experiment was performed on the samples. Yeast has gone for hundreds of millions of years, replicating at a rate of several thousand generations per day in its unicellular state. You also continue to ignore the fact that the yeast genome has been entirely sequenced since 15 years ago and is publicly available. If you want to argue that multicellularity is part of the yeast genome, can you please tell us which sequences are you talking about, exactly?

Oh wait, that's right, I'm talking to a YEC who cannot possibly accept the fact that yeast has been around in its unicellular state for hundreds of millions of years. D'oh!

Something else I noticed was that there's no indication I noticed of what mutation has supposedly occured. As it seems unlikely that unguided chance just happened to faciliate such a beneficial mutation, I'd sure be interested to know if they discovered that every time they subjected the yeasts similar conditions if it would come out with the same result, which would indicated it was not as a result of a mutation, or at least if it was a mutation it would trigged by the conditions and demonstrate that the cell was conducive to such multicellular clustering in the first place.

It's always easy to tell who didn't even read the experiment report at all before trying to discredit it. They're the ones who come up with defenses saying that the researchers should have done this and that when the "this and that" has already been laid out in detail in the report. The experiment was performed on 10 separate yeast populations. All evolved into multicellularity at the end of the experiment.

Besides, are we really still hedging our bets on the "it wasn't caused by mutation!" theory? The yeast specimens all demonstrated the same phenotype of their parent generations and continued to iterate on those phenotypes with each generation. If the phenotype changes were not caused by mutation, it means they weren't genetic, and hence cannot be passed to subsequent generations. That would mean that each generation spontaneously developed the exact same snowflake phenotype as their predecessors all by themselves and improved upon it, and their children all spontaneously develop the same improvements as well and also iterate on further improvements. Can you please explain to us how this is supposed to make any sense? Can you also please explain, after you initially argue how incredible and difficult and impossible it is for organisms to change from unicellularity to multicellularity, you're now trying to claim that such a change can take place without mutation, and hence - by extension - without any change in the yeast genome?

Also, I've noticed the evolutionist seems to be helping themselves to the extrapolation of the development of a multicellular 'organism' from what seems only to be the strict definition of multicellularity, and I think the extrapolation is at best premature. The interpretation of cooperativeness among the cells seems like a bit of a stretch to me at this point, but what I'd like to know is if one of these single yeast cells eats, does the nutrients pass to all of the cells, and the same thing with resperation, waste disposal, etc.? If not, could this really be considered an organism and not simply a cluster of cells working symbiotically?

Can you give us an example of a cluster of symbiotic cells who do not form using any aggregation mechanism but rely on successive division of component cells attached to each other instead, react to selection forces as a whole instead of as individual cells, and exhibit controlled cellular suicide in correlation with cluster fitness and optimal propagule size?

Edited February 10, 2012 by Valoran

[Valoran]

Oh wait, that's right, I'm talking to a YEC who cannot possibly accept the fact that yeast has been around in its unicellular state for hundreds of millions of years. D'oh!

Do you understand what the word "respectful" means?

If you can't discuss the subject without taking pot shots, stay out of the discussion.

To be honest I find it strange that you would interpret a straightforward description of the YEC belief as a "disrespectful pot shot". Are creationists usually offended when their own beliefs are described back to them?

[MorningGlory]

I'm going to second Cobalt here; Valoran, everyone is trying to be civil in this thread now but you....you just can't control your hatefulness, can you? I'm going to pray for a change in your demeanor, especially toward OES.