But it was Ben Franklin who said: "Beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy." o_O

How many times to I need to tell you that Religion and God are NOT FUCKING RELATED.

Religion is a bunch of self-important stuffed shirts claiming to be acting on the behalf of a God that none of them has ever personally communicated with.

You want proof of the existence of God? Look around you. Do you really accept, with no evidence whatsoever, that everything around us sprang up from nothingness in the ridiculously short span of a few hundred million years?

How many times to I need to tell you that Religion and God are NOT FUCKING RELATED.

Relax, Brian. Have a beer. o_O

brian, that proves that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists (haloed be his name).

Do you really accept, with no evidence whatsoever, that God sprang up from nothingness?

Excellent, Pirate Jo, fabulous and insightful.

I love the anti-abortion nonsense. Let's all breed like rabbits! Who cares if the overcrowded planet suffers and dies as a result? Jesus is coming to give us a fresh new one any day now.
True nonsense from the pointy-hat crowd.

Amy - all the evidence for evolution that we have covers how a given species adapts. They've found no mechanism that explains trans-speciation (how did we get birds from lizards, for instance). Nor is abiogenesis covered.

I'll repeat that last part. There is no scientific conjecture or testable hypothesis that explains where life came from.

Chrissy - It's just as good a name. But at some level that we are incapable of comprehending at this time, there was a creator that planted life on this planet. Where they came from is anyone's guess.

Pirate Jo - You've got a better answer? Look around at you. Every biological system you see is highly ordered. And they stay that way. Everything else in the universe is decaying at a rapid rate. Yet little bundles of intelligent meat sit on Earth and invent new machinery to try to figure out where they came from. For beings made of meat, we're way to perfectly matched to the physical realities of our home for it to be chance. The lack of evidence of proto-hominids isn't terribly promising either. At some point, someone(s) had to come along and give it a push to get from lower mammals to primates.

Gog - There's no evidence that the planet is overcrowded, or even approaching carrying capacity as yet. There's even less evidence that Jesus is coming back. In case you missed the memo, he's dead.

>>Do you really accept, with no evidence whatsoever, that everything around us sprang up from nothingness in the ridiculously short span of a few hundred million years?

Yes.

Now Gog, seriously, what's with your name?

Brian with all due respect your an idiot. The reason people and animals fit so well in to the environment is beacuse those species that couldnt adapt to the enviornment are dead.

Also have you read any article on genetics latley? I was watching a program just the other day, some geneticist was working with chicken eggs, at a very eary stage in their deveolpment a chicken embroy develops enough vertebre for a full sized tail, about a week later those vertebre have disovled back into the body mass leaving only the few vertebre that make up a chickens stumpy rump.

*Now Gog, seriously, what's with your name?*

I stole it. Honest.

Evolutionary theory has weaknesses, but pointing them out does nothing to strengthen YOUR argument. You want all kinds of proof to believe in evolution, but you don't put the god hypothesis to the same stringent critique. It's enough for you, obviously, just to let the god idea fill in the gaps.

The earth is wondrous, so you find it hard to believe that it simply came to be. Well then God would have to be a trillion times more wondrous than what he created, yet you have NO trouble believing God simply came to be.

Silliness:

> Every biological system you see is
> highly ordered. And they stay that
> way.

"Ordered?" Compared to what? Ever see a friend die of cancer? The one thing "biological systems" don't do is "stay that way." It's all about adaptation. And that vast majority of new designs are failures, particularly those from mutation. They're called "lethals". I'm reminded of this passage from Kinsley's column in the current New Yorker on stem cells:

The lost years are maddening, especially since the opposition to stem-cell research, if it isn't purely cynical, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. The embryos used in stem-cell research come from fertility clinics, where it is standard procedure to create more embryos than are needed and to dispose of the extras. (For that matter, this is standard procedure in the method of human reproduction devised by God as well.)

> Everything else in the
> universe is decaying at
> a rapid rate.

"Rapid?" Compared to what?

What exactly is the "order" in the universe that's being lost? What do you think the point of this project is, anyway?

I actually called Prager's radio show once and gave him Hell about this. He hung up on me, which was cute. You, and he, find the present condition of things somewhat admirable, particularly as regards your own resplendent presence on the landscape. You therefore see the hand of the Almighty at work in this excellence. I think you're both full of shit.

Pop quiz: Brian, look at your little dog Muffins, lying there beside the fireplace. Then look at your own face in the mirror. Why are your ears on the sides of your head, while Muffins wears his on top, like the vast majority of our mammal cousins?

I was serious though. Let's see what he says.

Also, what's that little symbol by your name?

*You, and he, find the present condition of things somewhat admirable, particularly as regards your own resplendent presence on the landscape.*

My god, Pangloss is still alive?! I thought syphilis had offed that poor beggar centuries ago.

PS-

> There is no scientific conjecture
> or testable hypothesis that
> explains where life came from.

That's a bullshit lie.

That's a bullshit lie.

What Crid said.

What's not testable is God.

Crid - I did not deny evolution. I said that it is not sufficient to explain the origin of life. My secondary beef is the use of evolution to say "Well, that about wraps it up for God". The primary beef is the argument that since no two religions agree on what God said, he therefore does not exist. See also: "Who is this God person, anyway?"

As far as decay, that's our good friend Entropy. Thermodynamics. Nothing can escape its icy grasp. You want to reduce entropy, you need to perform work. The idea that life simply sprung up out of nothingness kinda goes against the grain there, don't you think?

Can you explain to me one sane theory that describes how we went from ball of rock to biodiversity in just under a billion years? One that doesn't require faith? Until someone comes up with an explanation for how we managed to go from puddle of goo to 20 amino acids to self-replicating DNA, then there's no explanation that is "evidence-based".

And the dog's name is Crimson. Look closely at the ears. The canals are quire clearly on the side of the head.

Look at this bit on Methionine synthesis and tell me again how this all happened by successive random mutations.

I'm sorry, but that's like believing that computers evolved from sand with no intervention from humans.

You want a primer on REAL intelligent design (and not biblical creationism with a new hula skirt) contemplate what's going on inside that little box next to (or on top of) your desk some time. A couple billion transistors acting like switches, turning on and off at a rate of over two billion times per second. 2^2,000,000,000 possible combinations for all of those switches to be in at any given instant -- almost all of which are wrong.

Contemplate the fact that if any one transistor ends up in the wrong state for just a few nanoseconds your screen turns blue.

And marvel at the fact that it works at all.

So Columbus is pitching his idea for a sailing excursion to the King of Spain.

"Your Highness, I will prove with this voyage that the world is round."

'Nonsense, Columbus. The world is as flat as a table. You'll sail off the edge into the void, and my ships will be lost, the sailors lives wasted.'

Columbus invites the King to a balcony overlooking the harbor and out to sea.

"Highness, when a ship is returning to port, what is the first thing you see, off in the distance?"

'The tip of the mast with the pennant, of course.'

"Yes, and then after an hour?"

'The entire mast, complete with sails.'

"Then the entire ship, yes?"

'Yes, of course.'

"Ah, Highness, that is because of the curvature of the round Earth! You see the tallest part of the ship as it rises up over the horizon first!"

Suddenly the King understands. In shock, he picks up an orange. 'Imagine', he whispers, 'the Earth, round, like this orange'.

Columbus smacks himself in the face with his own hand. "No, no, no! Not round like an orange. Round, like a PLATE!".

Evidence. We get a little at a time and interpret it as best we can. Ultimately we get all the data and marvel at the stupidity of our earlier beliefs.

Well, Brian, I am curious. You don't seem like a big fan of religion, based on your first post, and I agree with what you said about it. I have come to think lately that if God did exist and had an enemy (the Devil, as the religious would call it), religion would have to be an invention of the Devil - a clever device designed to separate people from God.

But you think the earth had a creator, and leaving that whole argument aside for a minute, I am wondering what that means to you. As in, what difference it makes in your life, what you do differently as a result of that belief. Are you a Deist, in other words? Maybe a better question than 'Is there a Creator?' is 'Does it matter?'

And marvel at the fact that it works at all.

Fortunately, our brains are massively parallel and store things in distributed representations, which makes them much more fault resistant. Knock out a few nodes in our networks and you see virtually no degradation at all.

Pirate Jo - I believe in God. I do not believe in Religion. God created the universe and turned his back on it. He has no more effect on my daily life than does the Hadron collider. Doesn't stop me blaming him for everything, but I digress. So basically, it makes no difference in my life whatsoever.

Justin - and you think that fault-tolerance happened on its own? That somewhere along the line, one meat-being was born with a mutation that allowed his meat brain to recover from trauma, and met another meat-being of the opposite sex and they mated and made more meat-beings with the same mutation, and they all lived longer than the meat-beings that didn't?

Sure, it's a nice story. Even makes sense. But from what we know of point mutations in humans, almost all of them are fatal, and the ones that aren't fatal tend to lead to defective offspring. What we've seen aren't new traits springing up out of nowhere, we're seeing the selective promotion of extant traits that were locally beneficial.

Just like the computer, a point mutation from an expected value is almost always catastrophic.

That somewhere along the line, one meat-being was born with a mutation that allowed his meat brain to recover from trauma, and met another meat-being of the opposite sex and they mated and made more meat-beings with the same mutation, and they all lived longer than the meat-beings that didn't?

Yep. I think that evolution almost certainly would have dictated parallel processing in the central nervous system, because it's much easier to build a system from a bunch of simple processing units that way. What is problematic for evolution, in my opinion, is modularity, especially regarding the language system, which really has no real precursors in lower animals.

But this is OK. Evolution doesn't have to explain everything right now to be the best thing we have going from a scientific perspective. As a theory, it's extremely useful - it's the most coherent explanation for the data we have, and it spurs all sorts of helpful research. That's all a theory needs to do. Like every other theory, it's certainly wrong in some respects, but that does not diminish its usefulness.

People can believe what they want, but until they demonstrate that p(divine intercession)

Whoops, guess I can't write the way I normally would (using a less than symbol) without MT thinking I'm opening a tag.

What I meant to write is:

People can believe what they want, but until they demonstrate that p(divine intercession) is less than .05 in a controlled experiment, saying God did it doesn't help us understand things better.

That somewhere along the line, one meat-being was born with a mutation that allowed his meat brain to recover from trauma, and met another meat-being of the opposite sex and they mated and made more meat-beings with the same mutation, and they all lived longer than the meat-beings that didn't?

Wait a minute! We're nothing but sentient meat! No race in the galaxy is going to want to make contact with us. Who would want to talk to sentient meat?

justin -

I'm arguing the same thing in reverse. You can't use something that isn't proven to prove the non-existence of something else.

For me, it stands to reason that if God was going to create life, he'd have made it adaptive. That's what any good engineer would do given the technology. God's tech simply surpasses anything we can comprehend, which is why we haven't created any meat-beings in a lab yet.

tech note: to make an < symbol appear, use the embed code. That's an ampersand "&" followed by the code (lt, gt, trade, etc.) and a semicolon ";"

Conan - Thanks for finally getting the reference.

"Meat! They're made of meat."

Brian, first of all, you should capitalize your name, unless you're a 3rd-tier pop singer from the 90's like kd lang. The New York Times doesn't put up with that shit, there's no reason we should either.

Secondly, you didn't take that bait, which hurt my feelings. Your dog has ears on top of his head, and I think you don't know why. Even though...

...Thirdly...

> I did not deny evolution.

Nobody said you did.

The problem was, you said--

> There is no scientific conjecture
> or testable hypothesis that
> explains where life came from.

Which is bogus. As my old boss used to say, "That's strictly from hunger!"

Fourthly, links to high-toned articles that you yourself understand don't convey insight. You are not a chemist. I'd be very surprised if you could discuss the meaning of any three sentences from that piece in useful detail.

Fifth, religion and God are obviously related for any human being bright enough to string together a sentence, whether or not you're happy about it.

Sixth,

> Do you really accept, with no
> evidence whatsoever

Who said there's no evidence?

Seventh,

> everything around us sprang up
> from nothingness

Says who?

Eighth,

> in the ridiculously short span
> of a few hundred million years?

Says who? Most agree the Universe is 13+ billion years old, and Earth is about 4.5 billion.

Ninth,

> For me, it stands to reason
> that if God was going to
> create life, he'd have made
> it adaptive

For me, it stands to reason that a being both omniscient and omnipotent would not create a universe in which pain were possible.

Tenth, You haven't actually been to college, right?

Eleventh, go buy some health insurance, and keep your hands to yourself.

I really don't understand why religious people have a problem with evolution. In what way is evolution anti-religious? Evolution, archeology, astronomy, physics, et al, are not anti-religion when they encompass views that contradict the bible, the torah, or the koran. They are outside religion. Nothing to do with religion whatsoever.

If your belief system can't cope with the world of fact as we can best determine it, than either change your beliefs, or accept that you have a belief system not based on fact, but...faith. Which I think is the whole point of religion, isn't it? If you were looking for science to confirm everything in your holy books, you wouldn't really have any faith. You'd just have textbooks.

If religion has any value (and I'm not saying it does or doesn't) it surely exists outside the mundane world of facts. If you can reconcile: a faith that stresses personal responsibility for sin, possibly even those committed before you were born; the enormous spectrum of human misery and soft-jazz saxophonists; and an all-powerful, all-knowing creator then surely you can adapt to the idea of evolution being part of God's Great Plan.

Along with all those dinosaur fossils He hid in the ground to test your faith.

But Crid, there IS no evidence or sound theory for where life itself came from. Sure, there's more than mere conjecture that humans and apes share a common ancestor. But on the subject of how we got from hot ball of molten rock to bacteria to trees to sentient hominids arguing on the internet hasn't been shown to any degree of certainty.

I may not understand the intricacies of protein folding or amino acid synthesis, but I understand the concepts well enough to know that they are decidedly non-trivial. One does not need to compose a symphony to appreciate the complexity of Beethoven's Ninth.

As far as "springing up from nothingness", well, doesn't the lack of belief in a creator require one to believe that life was spontaneously created where there was nothing before it? I mean, really.

The Earth may be 4.5 billion years old, but as far as mammals go, it's only a few hundred million, at best. If you wanna believe that we went from rodents to humans in that short a period of time, go for it. Given that the number of changes observed in human remains over the past 10,000 years show very few changes, I'm guessing that either humanity is the endpoint of evolution (unlikely) or evolution is very slow. And if it's very slow, then there's no way to get to hominids in a scant hundred million years. At least not without some kind of outside interference.

What makes you believe that an omniscient being isn't a sadist? Given the scope of human history, I'd say that it's a virtual lock that God is a sadist.

Finally, College educated? Yep. BS in Computer Engineering (Magna) with a minor in mathematics.

franko - the highly religious have a problem with anything that contradicts the narrative that they have built around them.

So, just like liberals, anything that doesn't fit the narrative must be destroyed.

And evolution isn't in their little book. So therefore it doesn't exist. I don't know how they justify their automobiles and their televisions, given they aren't in the book either, but I suspect if you brought it up to one of them their little marginal-thinker heads would explode.

> hasn't been shown to
> any degree of certainty.

"Any" covers more degrees than you meant to describe. The fact that the precise event is deep in the mist doesn't mean the hand of God had anything to do with it.

> doesn't the lack of belief
> in a creator require one
> to believe that life was
> spontaneously created
> I mean, really.

"Spontaneously created" works OK if you mean 'developed within existing conditions and then evolved'.

> If you wanna believe that we
> went from rodents to humans
> in that short a period of time

It's more reasonable than are supernatural explanations.

> I'm guessing that either...

Why guess? You can look it up.

> What makes you believe that an
> omniscient being isn't a sadist?

I don't believe in bad ones any more than good.

> BS in Computer Engineering (Magna)
> with a minor in mathematics.

I hate you for being good at something I suck at. I'll have you know that I was flunking Fortran when you were still in diapers, y'punk.

> Every biological system you see is
> highly ordered. And they stay that
> way.

Entropy is minor. Remember the Gibbs free energy equation? DeltaG = DeltaH - TDeltaS?

The reason why organic complexity can exist is because of the sun. The big ball of enthalpy. The sun feeds plants which feed animals. Don't get hung up on entropy, it is the enthalpy that counts.

We can't test evolution. Given its insistence on slow adaptation, how could one rationally test it? We can follow deductive logic to conclude species adapt according to the changing environment...except that we ought to remember that Darwin came up with the idea of natural selection as an evolutionary force around the same time the Enfield ruled the civil war battlefield.

The complexity of genetics and DNA were not even imagined at that time, yet this theory, which lacked so much vital data at its inception, is still treated as unquestioned canon today...how amusing.

The problem with the idea of adaptation as an evolutionary force is that it presumes:

A. That the environment is static, at least for a long enough period that evolution has hundreds of thousands to millions of years for a species to change. Darwinism fit well with this until the 50s, when we began to discover that environmental "disaster" and rapid change happened quite regularly over large parts of the world. Darwinist adherents answer to this....Well I suppose silence is an answer.

B. Darwinism assumes that similar traits mean an inherent relation between species, when in fact it could just as easily mean a similar need. If two men in two different parts of the world must dig a hole, chances are they will both invent similar shovels...it does not mean they had contact, only similar needs.

C. Darwinism is assumed to be unlimited...but the last 500 years of breeding experiments...to say nothing of the many MANY thousands of years of selective dog breeding, have failed to develope anything like a new species. To the contrary, when it comes to breeding we consistently find that a species ability to change within its species mold is very limited.

D. Darwin himself may have had doubts about the unlimited potential of his theory. In his first edition of his book, he wrote that he saw no problem with a species of bears taking to water...and with enough time and natural selection, evolving into a species similar to whales. That is the fundamental premise of evolution...but in later editions of his book, he removed this statement. Wonder why?

E. Darwinism & evolutionary theory have yet to explain the great eruptions of apparent new life that have occured in the world's history...such as the Cambrian explosion...if life takes millions of years to evolve in complexity, and must adapt to an unchanging environment...how does it appear suddenly with great complexity in an ever changing world?

Freak luck, and thanks for asking.

liz - sure, you need energy to perform work to reverse entropy.

The problem with having a giant ball of enthalpy (which is nothing more than heat energy) is that you don't get worked so much as you get cooked.

Something needs to convert that heat and light to usable energy in other forms.

What amazes me, and this is the part that convinces me that it was all planned, is that we have a planet here where the process of photosynthesis developed, which takes what we exhale and converts it to what we breathe, takes water and nutrients from the soil and converts it to starches and sugars that meat-beings of many species eat, and those species poop on the plants to put the nutrients back into the soil.

Symbiosis is no accident. It's the chicken and egg writ large. Really, what we have here is a planet that started growing plants at a ridiculous rate, and then all of a sudden critters that eat the plants just show up?

I've never been one to believe in randomness.

To twist an on Christian chestnut: It believes in you, which is more important

Besides, saying "I've never belived in randomness" restates my critique above, that you find the universe agreeable and therefore chose to credit God for it.

You sure I can't get anyone a beer? Brian? Crid, a Black and Tan? Liz, I know you want one, right? How 'bout a nice Sam Adams Cherry Wheat? Conan? Sgt. Butler? C'mon, Ben Franklin had it right. Let's just be happy and have a beer. o_O

Brian, thanks for the tech note. Amazing that I make my living via the web and have such limited html skills.

Sorry, dry country here. *L* I'll be having MY beer in a few weeks...although my first choice is a shot of decent whiskey to go with a good cigar.

Re dogs. We've been selectively breeding them for at most a few tens of thousands of years, not millions. Two things are notable about this. One, the enormous variety of dog forms that now exist - apparently all from the same root stock. Two, the fact that they can still all interbreed, allowing for physical difficulties. So it would seem that they have not moved very far in evolutionary terms, despite appearances to the contrary.

When there is a mass extinction catastrophe, there are huge numbers of extinctions. A few species survive, and with reduced competition, they breed like rabbits (or whatever comes after rabbits) until the competition begins to have an effect. Then, just like dogs, there is an explosion of different forms because there is selective pressure once again.

Re testing evolution: genetic programming goes some way towards doing this. Suppose you want a program that will compute, say, aerodynamic shapes for different types of atmosphere. In GP, you set up a virtual world where the denizens are computer programs. Initially they are all generated randomly, and are all useless at solving the problem. But they are not equally useless, and some have slightly better performance than others. This can be pretty minor: perhaps most of them always compute zero as a result, but some occasionally compute a non-zero result. That's enough of a difference to work with. You select the best programs and generate new ones from them, using some method that will result in inherited characteristics and some random variation. You bin the worst performers, and breed from the best. After lots of generations you end up with programs that solve the problem. And all this without needing to know how to solve that problem yourself.

There's been lots of work done on GP and the practical difficulties it encounters, such as getting stuck on local maxima, or bloat. It's not natural selection, because we impose selection on the basis of the problem we want a solution to. But it's a practical application of Darwinian evolution nonetheless.

Regarding dogs, granted regarding the timeline of their breeding...but I don't think I suggested that its been millions of years.

But on that same note, in the event of a global or regional catastrophe...such as volcanic eruption or the breaking of an ice dam (such as in the scablands), great enough to cause localized, regionalized, or global extinction of significant numbers of species, well you are right, those which survive will see a population explosion. However a population explosion will necessarily limit or even halt evolution, as an "ideal" environment for said species can, even with overpopulation, only serve to promote a limited variety of specialized resource gathering or breeding traits. For evolution to be effective, we would have to see either great stability of the environment so that species can adapt...OR...we would have to see a change serious enough and specific enough to allow only certain trait bearers to have an advantage. The oft given example of the peppered moth in England, in which the dark colored moths began to push out light colored moths as pollution darkened the trees during the industrial revolution, giving dark moths an advantage...well it is a fine example of natural selection. But the reality is that all we see is one species pushing out another species over a localized change, this is hardly a vehicle to promote the change of one species to another.

Using computer programs is an excellent example, save for one problem, it is guided by a knowing intellect capable of sculpting desired behavior out of code. In short, the answer you've posited is much closer to suggesting an intelligent source for the architecture of life...than the random selection of creatures in nonstatic environments.

One of the best questions to put to evolution is this:

If we presume that environmental change not only can happen, but does happen periodically, even on a scale of thousands of years (being generous, let us say hundreds of thousands)...how can a force requiring millions of years to work noticable change, actually be considered a viable way to create new forms of life?

My answer: It seems to me to be an impossibility, the time required is simply not present almost anywhere, and it fails completely to explain the rapid appearance of many diverse life forms within only short (relatively) spans of time.

Evolution doesn't require stability. Evolution is a change in the distribution of alleles in a population over time. The change does not have to be adaptive; but when the environment is stable, species can adapt to it.

Your criticism of genetic programming is wrong in one respect, but it is the key respect. Yes, designers built the computers and set up the virtual world. That is equivalent to setting up the universe with atoms and forces. But neither the engineers nor the universe guided the subsequent evolution in any meaningful sense. This is the whole point of GP: you can get a solution to a problem without knowing how to solve it yourself. All you need to know is how to recognise a good solution when you see it. For natural selection, a good solution is one that replicates well.

As neither of us is an evolutionary biologist, I think it is daft for us to argue about this. Personally, I have been convinced by what I have read (including Darwin's Origin of Species) and I am willing to take on trust the bits I have not read about. The basis of your argument seems to be personal incredulity, backed by ignorance. That's not a very good basis. I'd suggest that if you want to criticize evolution, you need to read up so you don't rely on lines like "It seems to me to be an impossibility." Obviously it's not a trivial undertaking - but it would be educational. And you might become famous!

Evolution = Throw a whole bunch of stuff against a wall and see what sticks.

Here's an article about evolution in practice - "an automated device that evolves a biological molecule on a chip filled with hundreds of miniature chambers."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13611-darwin-chip-brings-evolution-into-the-classroom.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=specrt11_head

I'm aware of the details regarding the distribution of alleles, part of my criticism is that darwin himself was NOT. Darwin's theory was based on LAMARK's work. If you're not familiar with Lamark, he suggested that the extensive use of a feature might exaggerate it, and this exaggeration was then passed on to offspring, whose further use exaggerated the feature further, and passed THAT on. i.e. the ancient giraffe had a short neck originally, but by constantly stretching his neck to reach higher foliage, he passed on that slight growth to his offspring and so on. Today we know this to be bunk, but Darwin treated it seriously, another example from the first edition was of a person who had lost his hand, in battle if memory serves, some time later he made his wife pregnant and she bore him a son, who (not surprisingly according to darwin & lamark) was born without a hand.

Today we know, as I've said, that this is bunk, what I do to my body will not be passed on to my children unless it occurs at the reproductive level. (Despite what the movies about mutants suggest)

That is one of the biggest problems with evolution, is that the requirements to pass on traits is so specific. I accept micro evolution for advantagous traits...the human big toe is an excellent example. Its size and strength gives an advantage to the bearer in pushing off at the start of the run. I could easily see how cave man A with a slightly larger toe, would be able to outrun cave man B, who would sadly be eaten by a sabre tooth tiger. Allowing caveman A to knock up his AND caveman B's women and pass that on.

It is true in your example, that the engineers in question did not guide the results of their programming efforts, they let them reach that on their own...but there remain problems, first and foremost in discussing evolution and comparing it to programing, well there is still the question of origin. I realize of course how pleasant it would be to dismiss such a thing, but the analogy you propose simply does not eliminate it. Further, the program, while not guided step by step, did operate within the limits that were set into it. If it was programmed in say...C++ under no circumstances could it morph into a new program all its own, it would remain within the limits set for it. And therein lies the trouble with evolution.

Certainly it would appear that life is infinitely dynamic...however we can recount many instances of proven extinction, but not once have we found a provable instance of developmental adaptation.

Back to genetics a moment though...one of the key propositions of evolution is that beneficial features can develop over time yes? But what of the negative consequences that would beset such a developing species? For example...let me propose a hypothetical mutation in a random human being. Suppose a mutation occured at the reproductive level, that caused him to be born with hollow bones. Hollow bones are one of the features of birds...hypothetically if he is successful at breeding, future generations many hence may develope the ability to fly or glide. However beneficial this mutation might eventually be...in HIS lifetime, he is weaker, able to bear less muscle, will suffer broken bones more easily, and as a result, he is not likely to be able to draw a mate, or may even die much younger before that chance occurs at all.

So we not only require selection to provide beneficial traits, we also require it to provide traits that will be appealing in the subject's present...not just many generations hence.

Moreover, speaking on the matter of genetics, science has found in recent years, that individual genes are responsible for multiple features...so even if we presume that a beneficial mutation might occur...it would almost certainly cause a problem, perhaps a very serious sort, in another part of the organism in question.

Last but not least...as I run out of time today, let me say first that it is true I am not an evolutionary biologist...however that does nae mean that I remain clueless on the subject. In fact I might point out that my criticism of evolutions problems in Biology class at U of M (University of Maryland) earned quite high praise from my professor at the time.

As to whom to trust in...lets see...Charles Darwin...theorist in the mid 1800s...think about that...1800s, a theory based on incomplete data, untestable by the scientific method...and without a viable proven example other than the dogmatic insistence that survival of the fittest will create new species. Survival of the fittest can be shown to do much, but creating new species has not been shown to be one of those things just yet. We ought to keep that in mind.

I don't think rubbishing Darwin because he didn't know about genetics is particularly relevant. The main idea is natural selection. Since Darwin's time we've filled in lots of gaps and found new data, all of which is consistent with that.

Darwinism is one of these simple ideas that is surprisingly difficult to get your head around. Your point about the hollow boned man for example - you are right, he would not survive just because his mutation might prove beneficial at some future point. No-one who knows anything about evolution suggests otherwise.

The thing is, we are all of us in the grip of evolution. We all know people who have no children, or children who die young, or animals that are never mated. These are extinctions. In each case, a particular combination of genes is not going to be passed on: it is lost forever. The rest of us have different patterns and these are passed on. The allele distribution changes. I think the idea is hard to understand because it is like one of Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Each living creature is fixed and unmoving in evolutionary terms, and yet the population as a whole is moving. Trying to explain it to a child is not easy - but it is worth trying.

Why do you accept so-called micro evolution but not macro-evolution? What is the difference? Hint: equating macro with species is just a change of word, not an explanation. I want an explanation of what you mean in terms of genetics.

Norman -

Explain how humans could be derived from the great apes.

How did we lose two chromosomes and not fail? Or, if we have a common ancestor, how did they end up with one more pair, and not fail?

Transspeciation (sp?) is the great puzzle in all of this. There's no workable explanation for how it could work, since every minor anomaly (think Down syndrome) seems to result in (pardon the lack of tact) defective beings.

Brian-

I can't answer all your questions - I don't know if anyone can. It could be that chromosomes can duplicate or split or rearrange themselves within limits. After all, the totality of the genotype is probably more important than how it is divided into chromosomes. And I still don't know what you mean by trans-speciation.

But evidence such as endogenous retroviruses (ERV)

http://vwxynot.blogspot.com/2007/06/endogenous-retroviruses-and-evidence.html

is very convincing. For anyone who's not familiar with this, an ERV is a virus that splices its DNA into the DNA in one of your cells. If it happens to be a germ cell, the viral DNA gets passed on to all your descendants. However, the viral is relatively inert and used to be considered "junk DNA" (which is similar to the "bloat" I mentioned earlier wrt GP). So if you find two creatures with the same ERV in the same place in their DNA, it's a clear sign that they have a common ancestor. It's hard to explain it in any other way; the probability of two identical ERVs in exactly the same locus is too small.

Apparently, the pattern of ERV occurrence is what we would expect if humans had a common ancestor with the other great apes: we have the same ERVs in the same places. We also have ERVs in common with more distant ancestors, but the ape-ancestor ERVs are only common to the great apes.

This is where your argument from ignorance falls down. Just because you cannot imagine how we could evolve different numbers of chromosomes from the other apes, you don't think it could have happened. Before radioactivity and then fusion were discovered we had no idea how the sun could keep burning and pouring out energy. But the evidence that it did was hard to ignore. So the real mystery is not how evolution happened: it is how you manage to ignore the evidence.

Right. I'm arguing from ignorance because something that physics says can't be possible "obviously" happened because there's no evidence of an intelligent creator.

Regarding ERVs, given my limited knowledge of RNA/DNA coding, wouldn't a given pattern have a tendency to land in the same place in a given sequence regardless of species? If you found the same ERV in, say oak tree DNA, would you say that we had a common ancestor with the tree? Do you get some idea of how terribly unlikely it is that meat evolved from wood in a mere 4 billion years?

It's not the evidence I'm ignoring, it's the lack of evidence that you are conveniently forgetting to notice.

We find fossils of dinosaurs. We find fossils of lower mammals. We've found nothing that ties humans and apes. It's very likely that the evidence simply hasn't been found yet. It is, after all, a big planet. But we've found bupkes.

And it is the same kind of bupkes that you and Amy and every other atheist uses as conclusive proof that God does not exist.

I don't know how I missed this. You accuse ME of arguing from ignorance, and you don't know one of the most basic terms of the entire debate?

Transspeciation would be the mechanism by which a species undergoes sufficient genetic alteration as to become an entirely new species.

And in order for evolution to explain the variety of life on earth, it would have to cover that. How do we have some critters with as few as 4 chromosomes, humans with 46, apes with 48, and some with as many as 1600?

Let's just look at hominids. Let's say that at some point in time t that we have a proto-chimp. The progenitor of both man and ape. How much time would it take for two divergent species to, by successive mutation and reproductive reinforcement, become what we now see as human and chimpanzee?

My argument is that either something triggered a whole shitload of changes simultaneously in an entire generation of offspring, or some intelligent being made those kinds of changes. There just isn't enough time (unless fossil dating is short by an order of magnitude or two) to get from the proto-chimp we haven't found yet to what we have now.

The evolution of the eye alone raises significant questions. What came first - the tri-chromic retina, or the larger optic nerve to carry the data, or the enhanced vision center of the brain to process it? It's more than just one gene asserting itself to do that, isn't it?

Which is why I still consider evolution beyond what's already been shown in observation to be as much an article of faith as divine creation.

I accept micro evolution in the sense that a species may change within certain limits, specific features may be exaggerated or reduced. Size for example, species isolated on a small island over the course of many generations reduce in size. The human big toe, if I didn't give that example before, lends a ready advantage to running, providing a better push off than if all of our toes were say...the size of the pinky toe.

Insofar as genetics goes, with respect to micro vs macro...I refer to the literal point at which species A becomes species B, and is no longer able to produce reproductively capable offspring with members of species A, as an example of MACRO evolution. There we have never found definitive proof. If anything, what we've found has made things more complicated, not less, as we discover how complex life really is.

I must disagree with you regarding Darwin, while I don't think I'm particularly "rubbishing" him, to the contrary I will be one of the first to say the man had a powerful intellect, and the idea of species development is a very good one in many respects...at least within certain boundaries. It is the unlimited application of a theory that cannot be tested, and is anything but conclusive. If anything it ought be called a hypothesis.

A very good comparison I should say, in saying that the population moves while individuals remain stable, I take your meaning, well done. For my part however, I must argue that there is a limit to that population movement imposed by several barriers. The first I pointed out, is the nonstatic environment. Because the world changes with such regularity, hot to cold, wet to dry, etc, the traits that would be considered naturally advantageous at one point, would prove detrimental in the next, so that one would find that development would swing wildly back and forth, and never, even assuming possibility, create a whole new species.

Second, previously mentioned also, was the problem of breeding limitations, centuries of human governed breeding experiments have shown that traits can be willfully exaggerated, human breeding is why strawberries in the store are huge, compared to strawberries in the wild, it is why cattle and crops are much larger and grant higher yields than before. It is why we have dogs with specific characteristics and traits that we consider valuable enough to promote...but none of that has shown the ability to do more than simply push for specific genetic propensity, none of it has been able to produce anything like a new species.

Third we have complexity principles, or more specifically, the principle of Irreducible complexity, which is in short the idea that without all its working parts, an organ simply will not function, the eye alone is a remarkably complex feature, without all its parts, it wouldn't work at all, so how do parts which would otherwise have no purpose, develope? How does the brain change in such a way that even if those parts all sprang into existence through some random mutation or series of mutations, that it can now see the world at large. Mind you all of these mutations must occur at the reproductive level to pass these traits on, and all these changes must occur in genes which also control other facets of a body, tinker with one, and unexpected and perhaps detrimental changes may occur elsewhere.

Fourth, we have the problem of attraction for that new development. In theory, a third arm might be a very good idea, if someone however, were to start its slow development, the useless bulge in the interim is likely to be an awkward turnoff and lead to that mutation's extinction simply for the lack of willing breeding partners. Present day evolutionary theory has no answers for these questions.

I'll admit that evolution does follow a measure of deductive logic, however I do not believe that we can accept it as "fact", let alone well establish fact, without having answered the substantial problems with the how.

Right. I'm arguing from ignorance because something that physics says can't be possible "obviously" happened because there's no evidence of an intelligent creator. No, you're arguing from ignorance when your argument comes down to "I can't see how this could have happened" or "It seems impossible." Strictly, that's arguing from personal incredulity.

If you found the same ERV in, say oak tree DNA, would you say that we had a common ancestor with the tree? Yes. It would have to be present in a lot of other species as well, because you'd have to go back a long way to find a common ancestor. If you found one common to us and oaks but nothing else, I would take that as evidence that weakens the ERV argument of common ancestry in all the other cases, because some other mechanism is at work. What would your conclusion be, in these hypothetical examples? From your previous postings, I guess it would be "I just can't accept that we have a common ancestor with oak trees."

Do you get some idea of how terribly unlikely it is that meat evolved from wood in a mere 4 billion years? This is nonsense. No-one suggests that we evolved from wood, and if that is what you think is meant by evolution, then I don't wonder you refuse to believe it. But both we and oaks do have a common ancestor. I don't know how similar our DNA is but it's greater than 0% and less than 100%. I like the idea of "a mere 4 billion years." If we take one inch for a year, 4 billion years is over 63 thousand miles - almost three times round the planet Earth. The last 10 thousand years, during which time we've been breeding animals and plants, is less than 300 yards. Only in the last few hundred years (10 years = 8 feet) did we have any idea of genetics and artificial selection for specific traits. Two thousand years (60 yards) ago, as recorded by the story of Jacob's sheep in the Bible, no-one had a clue.

We've found nothing that ties humans and apes. Except evidence; already you've chosen to ignore ERVs which I gave as one example. Comparative anatomy and physiology are others. Why is it that monkeys, apes and humans (unlike most mammals) cannot synthesize vitamin C? Human fossil remains are another. But, yes, apart from all the evidence, what proof is there? (What did the Romans ever do for us?)

I don't know how I missed this. You accuse ME of arguing from ignorance, and you don't know one of the most basic terms of the entire debate? Transspeciation would be the mechanism by which a species undergoes sufficient genetic alteration as to become an entirely new species. No, I asked you to explain what you mean by it, because the idea of a species is not as simple as the Bible says. Given two individuals, A and B, how do you decide if they are the same species or not?

There just isn't enough time (unless fossil dating is short by an order of magnitude or two) to get from the proto-chimp we haven't found yet to what we have now. You mean, evolution couldn't happen because it's too slow? How do you know there isn't enough time? Is it just personal incredulity again, or do you have some evidence? According to Wikipedia the early ancestors of the hominids (the family of great apes and humans) migrated to Eurasia from Africa about 17 million years ago. As for not finding this proto-chimp, try searching for Dryopithecus. It took me about 2 minutes to discover, so you can't have been looking very hard.

The evolution of the eye alone raises significant questions. Only if you choose to wallow in self-imposed ignorance. The eye has been fairly well studied: why not do some reading, instead of arguing that you can't understand it, so it couldn't have happened? For one thing, there is a range of sight organs in animals alive today that show how the evolution of a fully formed eye could be advantageous at every step.

Because the world changes with such regularity, hot to cold, wet to dry, etc, the traits that would be considered naturally advantageous at one point, would prove detrimental in the next, so that one would find that development would swing wildly back and forth, and never, even assuming possibility, create a whole new species.
You mean, evolution couldn't happen because it's too quick?

[...] centuries of human governed breeding experiments have shown that traits can be willfully exaggerated [...] but none of that has shown the ability to do more than simply push for specific genetic propensity, none of it has been able to produce anything like a new species. We've produced dogs that are indeed like new species - no-one seeing, say, a wolf, a collie and Amy's little treasure, without any prior knowledge, would imagine them to be anything other than three different species. But we haven't been trying to produce new species. A century and a half ago, you could have said "centuries of human governed flying experiments have so far failed to produce heavier-than-air flight. It is physically impossible." And that's just what many people did say. It's argument from ignorance: we don't know how to build a flying machine, therefore it must be impossible.

[...] the principle of Irreducible complexity [...] the eye alone is a remarkably complex feature, without all its parts, it wouldn't work at all [...] Frankly I'm surprised that anyone is still touting IR. You see a man on a roof with no visible means of having arrived there. Evolution says that he climbed up a ladder which has since been taken away. IR says he was lowered from a helicopter. Please, do some reading on this topic. You don't have the answers, but other people do.

If you think that the eye would not work at all without all its parts, you are very wrong, as countless people with injured eyes, or congenitally malformed eyes, will tell you. Even an eye that simply tells the difference between daylight and night time is better than no eye. An eye that lets you see vague outlines of furniture or large moving objects is better still. Of course, all of these examples rely on a good brain to process the information, but even a worm that can detect a sudden shadow and pull back into its burrow is going to have an advantage over one that can't. Pit vipers can see infra-red using no more than pits lined with cells that are sensitive to infra-red. That's a whole lot better than nothing. Heck, you can see infra-red yourself when you feel the heat off something. But having the cells in a pit gives better directionality.

a third arm might be a very good idea [...] the lack of willing breeding partners (On the contrary! Judging by porn sites, I don't think there would be any shortage of breeding partners. :-) But you are right to say, as you said before, that it has to work at every stage. Nature can't set off to evolve for something a million years for now. So I can't see a third arm coming about. However, cats in my part of the world, which is almost cut off by large natural barriers, have developed an extra claw. I'm not sure which foot it's on, or if it's all four feet. This obviously did not prevent breeding, and was not so disastrous a mutation as to ensure extinction. Who knows where it will lead? It certainly shows that "all mutations are bad" is wrong.

[...] I do not believe that we can accept [evolution] as "fact" [...] without having answered the substantial problems with the how. The problems you have would disappear with a little reading. Try "The Blind Watchmaker" and "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. He's a good writer, so he is able to explain complex topics in a way that an educated layman should have no difficulty understanding.

Norman - I fail to see what the bible has to do with any of this. But I understand your need to insinuate that anyone that does not hew to your worldview must be either ignorant or addled by religious indoctrination.

And Dryopithecus? While I'd never heard of it, it doesn't fit the bill in any way. It doesn't link Ape to Man, it links lesser ape to greater ape. The only one that did was piltdown man, and he was a fraud.

You fail to see quite a lot.

I have to admit this has been great fun, I wish that I could have been more active in this discussion, but time has not been on my side.

My primary point regarding evolution, is that it is what I like to call a mutually contradictory hypothesis.

First it assumes that life is unlimited in its developmental flexibility, that in and of itself is a leap of faith arguably doubted even by Darwin himself.

Second, it assumes that within that purportedly unlimited ability to change, the environmental factors that support specialized beneficial mutation, allowing certain members of a species to outbreed their fellows until the mutation becomes the norm, will remain consistent. If we know anything of the environment today, we know it is inconsistent in the extreme. If evolution is supposed to take millions of years, then under geologically "rapid" changes, it simply would not be probable as a vehicle for the genesis of new species. (Couldn't resist the biblical pun *s*)

If we compress evolutionary change to fit with what environmental conditions allow, then we have now compressed it to the point that we should have found verifiable evidence of species change. Whichever way we take it, we come up empty.

Of course there is also the problem of adaptation itself, in Darwin's day it was just "natural selection" they had no idea about mutation or the complexity of life. Today we know about mutation, but we also have a hard time pointing out a positive one in existence today. An example I read in my bio book in college was sickle cell anemia in those of African heritage. One the one hand this mutation did provide inhabitants of the region with protection from Maleria, a deadly killer even today. That protection allowed people who might have died, reach breeding age and reproduce, passing on that tendency, but it also killed the carriers fairly young, around their 30s most of the time if memory serves. Thus meaning noncarriers who either did not contract the disease or at least did not die of it, would be able to pass on their genes for years after the carrier had passed away.

In short, a "beneficial mutation" is also a killer. We come up short on environmental causes for mutation, as mutation that does not happen at the reproductive level does not pass on. So much to say...and so little time.

I'll close with simply this.

If there is a God, not believing in him is meaningless.

If there is not a God, well what of it? The function of the idea of God, has served mankind far better as both a unifying force for culture as well as a moral compass than any opposing ideas ever have. So even if it is a fairy tale, devoid of truth, it can still embody the best in man, and provide both morals & community unity, serve as the impetus to be the best in ourselves as often as we imperfect creatures can be.

Atheism, provides nothing of this. As we see from countries founded on it.

Hi Robert. You're right, it is fun, and informative too.

I think you mean "self contradictory" rather than "mutually contradictory" as mutuality would require more than one entity. For something to be self-contradictory we need a contradiction inside the theory, without reference to anything outside. The examples you give (if we accept them for the sake of your argument) are evidential counter-examples, which don't count for self-contradiction. They would still count against the theory, of course.

Actually, a commonly-made argument against darwinism is not that it is self-contradictory, but that it is tautological, ie not open to contradiction even by evidence, and so is not even scientific. See http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA211_1.html for more. The basis of this argument is that natural selection is defined in terms like "survival of the fittest" and "fitness" is defined by "survival" which is closed and circular and goes nowhere.

I am not sure what you mean by "life is unlimited in its developmental flexibility." We certainly see lots of different forms around us today and in fossils, so life can take a huge range of different forms. All life here is based on the chemistry of DNA and the proteins, enzymes, etc that it can encode. Are there limits to what can be encoded in DNA? Or is it capable of encoding absolutely any protein? It's quite easy to see that it must be limited, because a genotype must be finite in size, and there can therefore only be a finite number of different possible genotypes. The number may be large, but it is finite. (I don't think there is anything infinite in the natural world.) But perhaps there is only a finite number of possible proteins. I don't know.

If you mean "anything can develop into anything else" then I'm also not so sure, if it is a requirement that all intermediate forms are viable. I suppose humans could evolve into oak trees by first evolving all the way back to the common ancestor and then evolving forwards to oak trees. All intermediates are therefore viable. But for this to happen naturally would require a chain of events that would be hyper-improbable, because natural selection is not directed in that way.

I've not answered all your points, but this post is long enough.