"Evolution is a chance process"

[artsylady]

"A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence,"

David Hume

[Bread_of_Life]

So what is the actual evidence that the fish saw the food on the land?

Then why did you say it can see the food on the land, or even know that there WAS food on the land?????

We're talking about fish living in the water and seeing food on land,

The answer is, I didn't say it saw food on land. I said that there was food on land. That's true, there was, and with noone to eat it. That meant that fish who could get further and further ashore and back again before becoming oxygen starved had an advantage, not only because they could escape from predators, but because they would have access to food that none of their competitors had.

But the fish didn't see the food, and think "well now I have to grow legs". Rather, the fish simply hunted for food, and some of those fish, the ones with legs or protolegs, had a larger and more fruitful potential hunting area than the others.

So there's no fish with stumps. No evidence!

Correct, we havn't yet found the intermediate form of fish with stumps. However, we have found fish with legs in the fossil record, fish which we do not find today, because they evolved into amphibians.

What is your explanation of why we no longer find these fish with legs? They certainly existed, we have found fossils of them, as you saw on that page I linked you into. Did they die out in the Noachian Deluge (and if so, why, surely for them the more water the better, they're fish!)

it seems there's no evidence for either, yet you beleive one of those lil' stories!

No, I don't really believe either hypothesis, or any other hypothesis. These are just possibilities of how fish evolved into amphibians - they are good ideas of how it might have happened, but we may never know exactly how it did - but there's no reason for me to come down heavily on one side or other.

What I do believe in though is that fish did evolve into amphibians, not only because we have intermediates, but because of the fossil record, and because of the other evidences for common ancestry. How they did this is incidental to the story - although interesting to know I suppose.

So no evidence again. Thank you.

Apart from the fact that we know that it must have happened at some point, no evidence.

Yeah, we're related because we were all created by the same designer.

Many evolutionists believe this also. But it's definetely not the only relation we have, we are cousins with other creatures also, in a literal sense.

Well thank you for starting to use the much more appropriate word 'inference' rather than evidence

What do you think inferences are made from? The answer is "evidence".

How do you feel about the platypus? Personally, I'm sure God created creatures like these specifically to make evolution look stupid.

What about the platypus? In many ways, it should really make creationists look stupid. It shares analogous similarities with some reptiles, but groups of homologous similarities with mammals, and therefore is classed as a mammal.

In many ways, this should make creationists wonder why a creature with such a completely different type of life than other mammals should share groups of functionally unrelated characteristics with them. It should also make them wonder why DNA evidence proves that platypus is far more similar to mammals than reptiles.

With no evidence for any of it. Very sad that it's taught as fact, don't you think???

It is a fact. Our ancestors did escape the sea. Life started in the oceans, and fish evolved first - there is incontravertible fossil evidence to that effect. That means that, somehow, life came onto land, that's factual.

Then why is God created the world and all the species in it so ridiculous.

It isn't, and many evolutionists believe this to be true. But they also believe in evolution. Is this so hard to fathom?

I totally disagree. The earth speaks of balance in every way - none of this survival of the fittest crap. Everything is balanced so that all creatures have a fair shake. Small animals that don't live long produce far more offspring. Large animals that live long produce far fewer offspring.

Actually, firstly, not all small animals produce a lot of offspring, but that's a different argument.

However, you say that you think survival of the fittest is "crap". Well, then, explain to me, one of these small animals that have a lot of offspring, what happens to all those offspring? Given that most animal populations of stable on average, what happens to the hundreds and thousands of offspring they have? If they all survived to adulthood to have children of their own, the oceans would be completely filled with fish in only a few generations?

So exactly what happens to the vast vast majority of all this offspring? How is the population balance maintained?

Clue: The answer starts with "D" and rhymes with "seth"

Yup, you've got it, the vast majority of them die, through predation and lack of resources. And, on average, it's the best adapted that survive. But stop, I thought you don't believe in natural selection (aka survival of the fittest) - so you can't believe in the struggle for survival in nature! So what does happen to all these offspring? Are they raptured before maturity?

And why NOT common designer?

Again i say it, many evolutionists also believe we have a common designer - but they also believe in evolution. Common design does not explain the grouping of functionally unrelated characteristics in the animal kingdom, nor the heirarchically nested configuration in which they are grouped, nor the DNA/embryological and other evidence to support this, nor the fossil record.

We may well have been designed, but we are also related through common ancestry. The two arn't mutually exclusive.

I actually think it's not the predators who camoflage for the most part - it's the prey who usually have this ability.

On the other hand, you thought that stuff about ape and human and goat milk, but you couldn't come up with any substance for it. So have you investigated predation? Have you found out how many predators are camoflaged, and how many are not? Have you researched the lifestyles of each group, and their method of hunting?

Well why didn't they all change into humans?

Because, as we know from the 2 million creatures we've already classified, and the many more we're probably still to find, there's more than one way of making a living on earth.

Take a fish and put him in a small pond where there's food visible on land and see if he'll grow some legs or stumps.

It won't, because this isn't how evolution works. I wonder if you've been reading my posts carefully enough. I'll say it again, just in case - adaptions are not dependent on the creatures will to adapt, they are driven by random mutations.

Sure, snakes with wild red and black markings or black and yellow stripes etc.

Are they only predators, or are they also predated, or in danger of larger creatures? Are they at the top of the food chain? How do they hunt? Do they lie in wait, or do they outrun their prey? What sorts of creatures do they eat? Have you investigated this at all?

Well, what about the ones who AREN'T predators - the ones on the bottom of the food chain. They are still here!

Yes they are, because they have been fortunate enough to evolve a sufficient ability to escape their predators more times than not, or at least enough for a few to survive and breed.

Cool. Now that you put it that way, I really understand how evolution could have happened.

Sarcasm will not help you learn, but rather hinder your efforts.

So.... then, as you stated before, there was food on the land that the fish wanted to get to because they didn't have enough in the water, right? I guess you can throw that hypothesis right out, right? It's all about a bunch of lucky accidents that are dependant on NOTHING.

Well, there are lots of accidents going on. Every one of us has a few genetic accidents in our genome that make us slghtly different from our parents. In London, in one generation, there are tens of millions of genetic accidents in the population. Worldwide, there are billions upon billions in the human gene pool alone.

Some of these accidents are unlucky. Some of them are unnoticeable, they have no immediate effect. And some are lucky. After hundreds of generations, only the lucky ones will remain - accumulating through natural selection in the gene pool, as the unlucky ones are weeded out.

I can't beleive we are continuing in this ridiculous conversation... but since we are

is there any evidence that the fish held it's breath?

Yes artsylady, I have a video here of a fish 400 million years ago holding its breath on a raid for food on a shore of an island somewhere.

No, of course there is no direct evidence for this. That's why it's a hypothesis - not a theory. It's a way it could have happened, not a way it definetely did happen. But happen it did, in whatever way.

You asked for experiments? This should be an easy one. Put a guppy in a tank with a fish and see if he can jump out for a second to hold his breath.

Do you have an aquarium? If so, pull a fish out for a 20 seconds, and put it back. It'll survive. It'll survive for longer than that actually, if it's well oxygenated to start off with.

How often do bad mutations happen as opposed to 'good' ones?

Good question. It actually depends on several things:

1. What is "good" and "bad" will often be dictated by the environment and ecosystem that the animal lives in. As this changes, then so do "good" and "bad" as defined evolutionarily.

2. It depends on what part of the genome you're talking about. For example, in the alpha-haemoglobin protein, all mutations will either be bad or neutral - because the alpha-haemoglobin is already maximally adapted to binding to oxygen (it's used up all the "good" mutations already in the course of evolution, and now binds to oxygen the best it possibly can, and so any change will either be neutral or bad)

On the other hand, in an ecosytem with biting insects that spread disease, a mutation on the 6th protein of the beta haemoglobin subunit is "good", because it prevents you from being affected by diseases spread by biting insects. In other ecosystems, without biting insects, this mutation would be disadvantageous, bad.

Unfortunately, mutations are hard things to spot. We don't have a machine that goes off every time there's a mutation going on. Also once we've found one, testing whether a mutation is good or bad is also very hard - because it's affect can be very subtle, or it can be difficult to tell if the effect is advantageous to the animal being studied.

So there are actually very few "famous" mutations that we know about. One is an example I've given before, which is the sickle-cell mutation. Depending on the environment, this can be good or bad. It's good in Africa, but bad in the USA.

[Guest Genxpastor]

SA,

I never can tell when I'll be back on the boards, but I do have a question for you.

I read a lot about evolutionary proponents stating that their belief is a scientific fact. Personally, it sounds as bad a some Christian mantras I've heard in the past.

The question: Would you agree that your interpretation of the facts of nature is based on assumptions?

Fact: Grand Canyon exists

Interpretation: The Colorado river carved it out (Evolutionary thinking)

My point being is that Christians who believe in a young earth have a totally different starting point than a non-christian. We make assumptions like The Fear of God is the beginning of all Wisdom(God is assumed the be the author of knowledge and wisdom therefore I don't entertain the thought of God not existing. His explanations in the Bible are assumed immutable truths). A fool in his heart says there is no God, etc. (These are scripture verses paraphrased by the way). We start with the Bible and interpret the facts of nature. The Flood for instance, if there was a global flood what would you find? To quote Ken Ham "Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water over all the earth."...And so we find these sorts of things in nature, but evolutionists do the same thing. They cannot entertain the supernatural...why it's not science!

So, can you agree that both sides take with them a set of assumptions before examining the raw data?

Well, that's it...just looking for a yes or no.

Blessings~

P.S. For you old earthers that are Christians please know that I am aware of your theories so you don't need to waste type trying to explain that to me. I respectfully disagree with you and leave it at that if you don't mind. Thanks.

Edited July 16, 2004 by Genxpastor

[Bread_of_Life]

GenxPastor

The yes/no answer is no, but I think your post deserves more than that right? Before I go into the answer on the scientific method, lets make a few things clear:

Are assumptions always bad?

Firstly, it's not always bad to base your conclusions on assumptions. We all base our conclusions in everyday life on what we already know to be true. For example, when I find something missing from my fridge, I know it's likely my fiancee's eaten it. That conclusion is not logical unless I assume that my fiancee lives with me or has a good access to my home, that my fiancee gets hungry, that my fiancee knows what a fridge is for and how to open it, that noone else has ready access to my fridge because my fiancee and I live alone etc etc.

All of these are assumptions - but they are things that I know to be true through evidence and experiment. They led me in this case to a probabilistic conclusion, that it was likely that my fiancee ate it, because noone else has ready access to my fridge, and I know she does, and she has eaten things out of there before.

So assumptions are great as long as you have ready evidence to back them up - however, assumptions start going wrong when you start to deny evidence against those assumptions - when you start to get dogmatic about those assumptions, in other words. You see, even those assumptions were based on evidence (or they should have been to hold water) - and therefore they should be subject to evidence for disproof.

Scientists use assumptions all the time in their work - they're called "assumed knowledge". For example, physicists will use the working assumption that the earth is about 5 billion years old when creating cosmological models - not because they really want it to be that old, but because there's a lot of evidence to say it's that old. What would really be dangerous is if physicists started using the assumption that the earth was 5 billion years old in order to dismiss evidence that the earth wasn't really 5 billion years old, that'd be disastrously stupid. The point is, assumptions must themselves be based on evidence, they cannot just be dogmatic assumptions based on what we want to believe, and they must themselves be subject to evidential disproof.

Many Scientists do believe in God

Secondly, scientists do not assume, as you seem to imply, that God doesn't exist, or that God had no hand in the creation of the earth. Many scientists believe in God, many in a Christian God (that Christ was the messiah, that he was born, lived sinlessly, died for our sins and conquered death through resurrection). However, that doesn't blind them to the evidence that is all around them, that the earth is very old indeed, that the great flood didn't really happen, that life is older than 6,000 years old etc. etc. etc.

Now, these scientific beliefs may require a slightly different interpretation of the bible from the one you have - but that is as may be - the evidence isn't going away just because it appears at face value to contradict the bible, so they have to make their interpretation of the bible fit the evidence.

Inference can lead to fact

Lastly, you seem to imply that inferential knowledge cannot be fact, in other words that knowledge inferred about the past from evidence in the present cannot be factual. If we define a fact as "a proposition to which it would be irrational to withhold the tentative consent of the mind", then I see no reason why past events that leave effects in the present cannot be inferred as fact in the present.

For example, if I find a body with 30 stab wounds in its back, with paralysis drugs in its veins, tied up and heavily beaten, I would infer that a murder took place. I would also hold that this was a factual inference - no other likely theory explains the evidence we have. In other words, the past affects the present in ways that we can predict and create theories to explain.

How does science work?

Okay, now onto the meat of your question. Let me go through how science works with you:

The Primacy of Evidence in Science

Firstly, in science evidence is King. You mustn't get stuck on one theory or another in science, because we've not got all the evidence, and as more arises, it could make the old theory look redundant, and demand a new theory. Science moves from evidence to theory - in other words, we try to find the best theory to fit the evidence, we don't try to fit the evidence to the theory (or else, we shouldn't, it's unscientific)

The Importance of Prediction in Science

So, we go out and gather evidence, and come up with a hypothesis to explain it. But hang on! What if there's more than one hypothesis that can possibly explain the evidence. That does happen, quite a lot - now what do we do? The answer is simple. We make a rule that every single hypothesis and theory must make testable predictions - that is, to be a scientific theory you've got to make predictions about new evidence before we find it, or results of new experiments before we do them. So, we've got a few competing hypotheses, they all make their predictions, then we go out looking for evidence to test those predictions. Only one hypothesis is likely to get predictions consistantly right - the true one. False hypotheses will likely get most predictions wrong. By the way, it's worth noting now that in order to move from being a hypothesis to a theory, you have to have made at least one prediction that's been tested and is right.

Continual Testing and Falsification

Right, so we've got our evidence, we've made predictions, we've got more evidence to test those predictions, and we're left with one theory that clearly has a lot of truth in it. Is that where science stops? Nope! We continue to look for more and more detailed evidence to test the theory. Eventually, we will find a mismatch, and have to modify the theory, or in extreme cases, scrap it and start over. However, once a lot of predictions have come true, it's unlikely it'll have to be scrapped altogether, because it's likely to contain at least some truth! For example, Newton's theory's of motion and gravitation are wrong - but we still teach them in school, because they're such good approximations to the truth, and they only require slight modification to be corrected for relativity.

Summary of Scientific Method

So, in summary, we:

1. Gather evidence

2. Create hypotheses that:

i. Explain the available evidence

ii. Make testable predictions to that they can be tested and falsified

iii. Are internally logically consistant

3. We gather more evidence to test the predictions of these hypotheses, and choose the one whose predictions come true. This then becomes a theory, rather than a hypothesis.

4. We then gather more and more and more evidence until we find fault with a theory, in which case it can either be modified (any modification is considered a hypothesis, and has to go through this loop again) or wholly rejected and replaced (and we start over again).

Comparing Creationism with Science

Hypothesis is Primary, not Evidence

Firstly, many professional creationists do not believe in the primacy of evidence, but rather the primacy of hypothesis. They start with a hypothesis, the literal interpretation of Genesis in this case, and refuse to budge from it no matter what evidence develops. In fact, in Mclean vs Arkansas Board of Education, it came out that ICR members had to sign a pledge that they believed that the bible was the literal word of God to the last autograph - as the judge put it:

"While anybody is free to approach a scientific inquiry in any fashion they choose, they cannot properly describe the methodology as scientific, if they start with the conclusion and refuse to change it regardless of the evidence developed during the course of the investigation."

Now, we talked about assumptions before, how they were not always bad. But they turn sour when we refuse to countenance any evidence against the assumptions - and they've turned very sour in the case of creationism. Rather than objectively looking at the evidence and coming up with a hypothesis, creationists have a hypothesis and try to mould the evidence to fit. This isn't scientific, and it's unlikely to come up with the truth (unlike the scientific method, that is likely to move closer and closer to the truth).

Making Testable Predictions?

Secondly, creationists seem to do anything to avoid making testable predictions. Every scientific theory, when expounded, has to make predictions explicitely that are testable and do in fact follow logically from the theory. Check out the origin of species, or any other original scientific work, they all make predictions. Creationists try to avoid it. They also try to avoid explaining the available evidence in any sort of exact way - rather they focus on criticising the way evolution explains the evidence, hoping that by discrediting evolution they are by default supporting creationism.

Testing Creationism's Implicit Predictions

However, literal biblical creationism does make implicit predictions, even if creationists try not to make them obvious or explicit. For example, you brought up the issue of what sort of a fossil record we'd expect if creationism were true. Ken Ham oversimplified it when he said we'd expect billions of fossils - he's right, we may expect this in both scenarios - but we would expect the fossils to be in the same order worldwide if evolution is true, and no particular order, or very disordered, if creationism is true. Secondly, we would not expect layeringand zoning of different types of rock if flood geology were true, or surface features on those rocks, or the geomagentic properties of the rocks to be aligned and flipping every so often. We would not expect mass extinctions in the fossil record, or coexistant iridium anomolies if flood geology were true. We would not expect unconformities (such are common in the Grand Canyon), and especially angular unconformities, were flood geology true. The fossil record is a whole lot more than billions of fossils dumped in places.

There are many more features of the fossil record I could name - and that's just one single type of evidence, there are many types of evidence used in evolutionary theory - none of them fit with the creationist model. But this post isn't about that level of detail, it's about comparing the two methodologies. When you think about the implicit predictions in creationism, it becomes clear why creationists don't talk about them much, because they've almost all been proven false. Once a prediction is proven false, a theory is rejected, and creationists can't have that, because they put the theory before the evidence, and before everything else, and no matter what contrary evidence develops, they have to stick with their theory.

I hope this helps,

NIkolai

[Guest shadow2b]

--I jest caint seem ta git it thru yo thick skull--BIG--

[truseek]

--I jest caint seem ta git it thru yo thick skull--BIG--

aaaw, don't be so hard on him now. SA seems to be to be a pretty good guy. Many athiests/evolutionists who come to boards such as this come with nothing but inflammatory speech, while SA here is willing to consider our opinion, tohugh perhaps withthin certain limitations (but I think that works both ways). I think that we can learn from him, just as he can learn from us.

In Christ

Truseek

[Faith]

truseek I think that we can learn from him, just as he can learn from us.

Learn what from him? You either believe that God created all or you believe in evolution, there is know middle road. Pure and simple if I believe in evolution and not Jesus Christ as My Lord and Savior, and I die, then I'm doomed. God Bless, Faith :prayer :dove

[truseek]

truseek I think that we can learn from him, just as he can learn from us.

Learn what from him? You either believe that God created all or you believe in evolution, there is know middle road. Pure and simple if I believe in evolution and not Jesus Christ as My Lord and Savior, and I die, then I'm doomed. God Bless, Faith :prayer :dove

I would like to point out that God is all powerful, and though I do not believe in evolution myself, it is not a logical impossibility that He could have used evolution as a means of creation.

In Christ

Truseek

Edited July 16, 2004 by truseek

[Faith]

Dear truseek, read Genesis chapter one and chapter two. God Bless, Faith :prayer :dove

[truseek]

Dear truseek, read Genesis chapter one and chapter two. God Bless, Faith :prayer :dove

How do the first to chapters of Genesis discount evolution? Firstly, evolution does not neccessarily mean man coming from apes. Secondly, the word yom, meaning day is used in other parts of scipture to mean periods longer/shorter than 24 hours.

Some woud say that Genesis 1:20-22 actually supports the idea of all life coming from the sea:

And God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens." 21 So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth."

In Christ

Truseek