Flaws in Evolution

Discussion about scientific issues as they relate to God and Christianity including archaeology, origins of life, the universe, intelligent design, evolution, etc.
Mystical
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Post by Mystical »

It is not random.
If it isn't random, then it had to be guided.
...removed the forest gradually.
Environmental changes are random. So, you are saying life developed randomly. It is improbable for life to have developed randomly.
Would the deer not adapt?
How would they adapt?
...they would surely perish.
Most likely.
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BGoodForGoodSake
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Post by BGoodForGoodSake »

Mystical wrote:
It is not random.
If it isn't random, then it had to be guided.
The environment and other pressures would cause most of them to perish.
Mystical wrote:
...removed the forest gradually.
Environmental changes are random. So, you are saying life developed randomly. It is improbable for life to have developed randomly.
The effect that this change has on a population is not.
Mystical wrote:
Would the deer not adapt?
How would they adapt?
Perhaps some of the larger deer would be able to outrun predators.

Something must occur to account for the white fur of a snow leopard.
(Snow leopards can cross breed with jaguars.)
Mystical wrote:
...they would surely perish.
Most likely.
I agree.
It is not length of life, but depth of life. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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AttentionKMartShoppers
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Post by AttentionKMartShoppers »

BGoodForGoodSake wrote:Let's take it one quote at a time then.

"The odds against life developing randomly are 1 in 10 to the 280th power, this is beyond the entire universe's capacity to match. To make a complete horse is 1 in 10 to the 3,000,000th power! "

It is not random. If I took a population of deer, and removed the forest gradually until it was completely gone, what do you think would happen to the deer? Would the deer not adapt? And if they did not they would surely perish.
How would they adapt? Environment is not going to make a mutation, it'll just cause a beneficial (if there is such a thing) mutation to be chosen...or just a common trait and make it more dominant.
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BGoodForGoodSake
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Post by BGoodForGoodSake »

AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:
BGoodForGoodSake wrote:Let's take it one quote at a time then.

"The odds against life developing randomly are 1 in 10 to the 280th power, this is beyond the entire universe's capacity to match. To make a complete horse is 1 in 10 to the 3,000,000th power! "

It is not random. If I took a population of deer, and removed the forest gradually until it was completely gone, what do you think would happen to the deer? Would the deer not adapt? And if they did not they would surely perish.
How would they adapt? Environment is not going to make a mutation, it'll just cause a beneficial (if there is such a thing) mutation to be chosen...or just a common trait and make it more dominant.
Exactly, it will only effect current traits.
The makeup of the population will change as many of the old features will no longer be adaptive.
Additional new features will be subjected to different pressures than the original population.
It is not length of life, but depth of life. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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AttentionKMartShoppers
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Post by AttentionKMartShoppers »

Additional new features will be subjected to different pressures than the original population.
Where do they come from?
"My actions prove that God takes care of idiots."

He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
- On Stanley Baldwin

-Winston Churchill

An atheist can't find God for the same reason a criminal can't find a police officer.

You need to start asking out girls so that you can get used to the rejections.
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BGoodForGoodSake
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Post by BGoodForGoodSake »

AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:
Additional new features will be subjected to different pressures than the original population.
Where do they come from?
Where did the poodles curls come from?
It is not length of life, but depth of life. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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AttentionKMartShoppers
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Post by AttentionKMartShoppers »

How much wood could a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood! ANSWER THE QUESTIONS SHEESH
"My actions prove that God takes care of idiots."

He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
- On Stanley Baldwin

-Winston Churchill

An atheist can't find God for the same reason a criminal can't find a police officer.

You need to start asking out girls so that you can get used to the rejections.
-Anonymous
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BGoodForGoodSake
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Post by BGoodForGoodSake »

AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:How much wood could a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood! ANSWER THE QUESTIONS SHEESH
The same place the poodles curls came from, mutations, or combinations of existing features.
It is not length of life, but depth of life. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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AttentionKMartShoppers
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Post by AttentionKMartShoppers »

Handwaiving? You don't like reading do you?
"My actions prove that God takes care of idiots."

He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
- On Stanley Baldwin

-Winston Churchill

An atheist can't find God for the same reason a criminal can't find a police officer.

You need to start asking out girls so that you can get used to the rejections.
-Anonymous
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BGoodForGoodSake
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Post by BGoodForGoodSake »

AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:Handwaiving? You don't like reading do you?
You asked me where additional new features after the initial selection would come from?


They would come from mutations.
It is not length of life, but depth of life. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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AttentionKMartShoppers
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Post by AttentionKMartShoppers »

BGoodForGoodSake wrote:
AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:Handwaiving? You don't like reading do you?
You asked me where additional new features after the initial selection would come from?


They would come from mutations.
In theory.
"My actions prove that God takes care of idiots."

He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
- On Stanley Baldwin

-Winston Churchill

An atheist can't find God for the same reason a criminal can't find a police officer.

You need to start asking out girls so that you can get used to the rejections.
-Anonymous
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BGoodForGoodSake
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Post by BGoodForGoodSake »

AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:
BGoodForGoodSake wrote:
AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:Handwaiving? You don't like reading do you?
You asked me where additional new features after the initial selection would come from?
They would come from mutations.
In theory.
That is what I'm saying, in theory.
However, observations have supported this theory.
It is not length of life, but depth of life. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Yehren
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Post by Yehren »

Yehren suggests:
Maybe you should define "transitional." There seem to be a great many number of them...
Really?
Yep. Tell me what you think "transitional" means, and I'll see what I can do.
Is that why you seem to be having problems naming even one?


Well, that's what we're about to test, if you can just tell me what you think one would be. If you don't know, tell me that, and we'll talk about that, first. It's always good to get terms defined first so that there are no misunderstandings.

Yehren corrects an "adjusted" quote:
I think a Christian evolutionist is (a) more reliable one than a Muslim one. But I suppose it depends on which one is more important to you.
No disrespect, but why do you believe your opinions and thoughts are of any consequence?
We'll just have to disagree on that, I guess. I'll still take a Christian over a Muslim when it comes to religious questions, but I'm not saying you're dumb for disagreeing.
Again, and for the last time, I don't care who wrote the articles,
Well, we can see that. I think it's a mistake.
the question and issue is whether others here believe the information presented is accurate and why or why not?
As I said, there's hardly a paragraph without a fundamental error. Pick one, and I'll show you.

Yehren asks, incredulously about the recommended site, which says:
""The following are a sample of the religions which are structured around an evolutionary philosophy. Buddhism, Hinduism, Confuscianism, Taoism, Shintoism, Sikhism, Jainism, Animism, Spiritism, Occultism, Satanism, Theosophy, Bahaism, Mysticism, Liberal-Judiasm, Isalm (sic) and Christianity, Unitarianism, Religious Science, Unity and Humanism. All these share the philosophy (belief structure) that the Universe is Eternal, and reject a self-existent personal God. "

You can't really believe that, do you?
I will repeat myself only one more time: the issue is not the authors view on Christianity,
If they really think Christianity is built around science, and rejects a self-existent personal God, I'm afraid that their credibility isn't very good on anything.

Yehren on the huge number of errors in the cited material:
Pick a paragraph,...I'll see what I can do.
No. You pick a paragraph.
OK. Let's see... here's a rather interesting misconception:
"Time and chance are the creators of evolutionists. The idea is that given enough time, anything possible will happen."

That's completely fantasy. Darwin's great discovery was that it wasn't by chance. If evolutionary theory was really like that, I wouldn't like it, either. Don't blame you; you've just been really, really misled.

Here's another good one:
"The evolutionist says that favorable mutations, the kind that do not harm or instantly kill (which almost all of them do), ..."

Again, very wrong. Most mutations don't do anything noticable at all. Most of us have a few of them. This misconception was probably the result of very early genetics experiments, when only drastic, debilitating mutations were easily observed.

And some more...

"The odds against just 3 favorable mutations developing in an organism are 1 in 10 to the 21st power."

And yet Barry Hall observed an entire series of them forming an irreducibly complex enzyme system, in E. Coli. We have seen this also happen with antibiotic resistance in S. aureus, and many other bacteria. Reality wins.
This thread was started so others could pick out what they felt were flaws in the information presented; the articles are available--the information has been presented.
Those are just a few of the jewels. These guys don't know any more than you do. Probably less.

Yehren on the touted source saying that Christianity does not believe in a self-existent, personal God:
Far as I'm concerned, if they don't get that right, there's a good chance they're wrong about everything else.
You might be right, you might be wrong. But, you haven't really proved anything, yet, have you?
All I know is that they are stupendously wrong about something very obvious.
p.s. Why do you refer to yourself in the third person.
Humor him. He's like that.
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Post by Zenith »

I think we need to define terms here before we use them in a non-common way.

Transitional - All organisms are different and that is because their DNA is all different. This is due to the recombination of genes right before reproduction. New gene 'information' is theorized (I'm not sure if its proven) to be added by mutation. The idea of transitional species is really made obsolete by the theory of evolution because every organisms is different than the last. Every organism that survives to reproduce is transitional.

I have read a lot of people in this thread saying that evolution is random. I believe that nothing is random (until, perhaps, the level of quantum mechanics). If you learn a lot about natural processes, and observe how the world works, you see that randomness seems to lose meaning. Every effect has a cause. Its like a domino effect, one thing leads to another. This is not random. Random is not being able to predict the outcome whatsoever. Science is a perpetual study of how to accurately predict an effect.

The first thought that occurs to people observing something they don't understand is to label it as random.
Mystical wrote:If it isn't random, then it had to be guided.
if you want to call natural processes guided, go ahead, its the same thing.
Mystical wrote:Environmental changes are random. So, you are saying life developed randomly. It is improbable for life to have developed randomly.
no, environmental changes are as random as the sun coming up tomorrow. just because you don't know how it works, doesn't mean its random.
Mystical wrote:How would they adapt?
gene recombination. i learned it in high school.
AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:How would they adapt? Environment is not going to make a mutation, it'll just cause a beneficial (if there is such a thing) mutation to be chosen...or just a common trait and make it more dominant.
envronment affects everything. in fact, the environment is everything. mutations in the genes can be caused by a number of chemicals (and other forces) affecting the order of nucleotides in the dna. Something in the environment causes the order to be changed, a T instead of a C perhaps, and you get (possibly, there are many variables in genetics) a new characteristic on the organism.
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Post by Zenith »

The opposite of chance is design. If you were walking along a desert plateau and stumbled upon a wristwatch what would you assume to be the origin of that watch? Would you guess that after billions and billions of years the sand was melted into a perfectly formed face, stray minerals then gathered to form metal parts and a dead animal's skin dried up and formed a band around it? Or, would you say someone designed and created it?

But what happens when we see DNA strands a thousand times more intricate than that watch?
God's ways of creation are much more complicated and efficient than we can imagine. That our science is trying to decifer the language of God and how his creation continues constantly. God has not created, God creates.

And I am not mocking, by the way.
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