BILL NYE VS KEN HAM: TONIGHT AT 7 PM

[pocaracas]

Hey everyone!
Stat's back and he's necroposting.... well... almost!

I think my response was relevant to the topic, so no necroposting here. I was just busy and had a lot of material to respond to (imagine if you had four of me to respond to every time, scary huh?).

I did say "almost"... you only get to necro when 30 days have elapsed...
Also... 4 of you to reply to?... not in the same thread, but there are a few threads where I participate and do try to teach something to some other christians or muslims...

Thank you!
You are too, as long as you refrain from preaching and praying before you eat anything! :p

Several of my best friends are atheists and we have no problems getting together and having a good time.

Well, then, that settles it!
If you ever come by Lisbon, let me know and we'll get together!

It's evolution in action and within a human's lifetime!
Praise Darwin!!

It’s a form of adaptation (that interestingly enough was first pointed out by a creationist, not Darwin) that nobody disagrees with so I am not sure how it’s relevant to Common Descent.

One piece of the puzzle...

Reduction?
As australopithecus climbed down from the trees to stand on two feet, it lost the nimbleness to move swiftly between tree branches, yes... but gained the ability to walk up-right... which led to other traits, one of the most interesting being speech.

Now you’ve entered the realm of story telling my friend. Why did Australopithecus climb down out of the trees (no this is not a chicken crossing the road joke lol)?
We see this all the time though, as we breed dogs and create new breeds we lose genetic information and can never breed them back to their parent breed.

"never" is a bit of a strong word...

Also, Australopithecus probably climbed down, because the trees became scarce, or some population migrated to a location of tree scarcity.... so it had to spend more time on the ground than other apes.
I'm sure there's some environmental evidence of a warming in the area, at the time of australopithecus... I just don't have the time to go look for it now.

Where you seem to see only reduction and "bad" stuff, I see redirection of resources. Some traits fall in favor of others which show more promise of survival and reproducibility.

I am not saying that the new traits are never beneficial, I am merely saying that they are due to a net loss in genetic information. In other words, the mechanism is traveling in the wrong direction; you need something that adds genetic information (and tons of it).

And why do you think that doesn't happen naturally?

We are here... clearly, there's something wrong with that reasoning.

We are here only because Humans have not existed for nearly as long as you claim that they have; that is the whole point.

No, we are here because humans (and life) has been here for far longer than you claim they have. That is the whole point!

But it's not a reduction in functionality.

In genetic functionality it is. There are only one or two heavily debatable empirical instances where natural selection may have actually increased genetic information; the rest are all a net reduction.

Ever heard of people whose parents both had brown eyes, but the kid is born with blue eyes?
Where did the blue eye gene come from?
Was it removed from the parents?

you just had to take that bait!
Just because some of it is sort of right, doesn't mean it's all correct.

It was yummy bait. Well with the way some of the people talk on here I thought there was absolutely no evidence that supported scripture….

There is no evidence supporting the magical events reported on that text.

But there is some supporting some other tales.
Pontius Pilate seems to have been a real person, as that name is recorded by the Romans.

I think you're compounding two effects... mixing them up and throwing the result out there...
On the one side, we have the genetic material. It is subject to errors, even during the life of an individual.
Much of the genetic material for a given species is actually not representative of any physical trait... it's just some left over, some comes from viruses... I remember something ludicrous like some 90% of our genetic code is useless and so, any mutation on that part would yield zero results.

This reminds me of the old vestigial organs argument. I am afraid your information is a little outdated here. They are actually finding that there really is no such thing as “junk DNA” and that the entire genome is crucial to the organism’s survival. Pseudogenes actually produce proteins and are now known to switch off genes when they are not needed, or to increase their use, when more proteins are required. Another example is that “Junk DNA” originally thought to be the left-overs of viral infections has now been found to be crucial in the control of genes involved in blood cell production and producing proteins which enable the placenta to fuse to the uterus in pregnant mammals.

Maybe it is you who is outdated...

This is from 2013... the article that said there wasn't junk DNA was from 2012 and this one clarifies what was going on in there:
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/scienc...k-dna-back

A controversy at last: most of our DNA is junk, no it isn’t, yes it is. Actually, I think it is – up to 90% really is junk.

Of course this is an accurate prediction that creationists made many years before.

Of course... creationists cannot make predictions.

This brings us to the phenotype, the physical implementation of the genetic code, resulting in arms, legs, wings, mouth, eyes, etc, etc, etc.
Here is where you may find the result of deleterious and non-deleterious mutations.
So, to sum up, the human species (and many others, if not all) can accumulate infinite mutations on some parts of the genes and zero mutations on others.... and remain human.

Can you give me an example of where natural selection has actually created a new multi-part and fully functioning structure (not removed one or duplicated one)? I am not aware of any myself.

The human brain.

If you accumulate sufficient mutations and the population manages to survive with them in place, you may get a new species... that's what happened to humans, all those years ago.

So the story goes, but the empirical evidence does not seem to support that being the case.

What empirical evidence?
The 3% "genetic entropy" per generation?
Or the mechanism by which populations weed out deleterious mutations after, at most 80 generations, and, on average, after 20 generations.

How does weeding out such mutations give with your timetable?

Present day humans are... what... 100 thousand years old, or so... before that, the population had a different name, perhaps we nowadays could breed with them... perhaps not... we can't know, they became integrated into the current population.

This timeline is not possible given the observed rates of genetic entropy; that’s the entire point of Sanford’s work. We’re actually degrading.

Don't you remember the paper you showed me where it says that populations manage to avoid propagating such deleterious mutations, thus resulting in healthy populations?

Don't know...
It seems it would take only 3% to turn a human into a chimp... but, as I said earlier, these 3% would have to be very accurately placed... which doesn't seem to happen very often...

Or 50% to turn a Human into a banana?

If I remember correctly that Chimp/Human similarity percentage has dropped in the recent years.

So... are you saying that there's a chance that an individual gets a 3% genetic mutation and is born a chimp?

Doesn't the fact that this doesn't ever happen hint that Sanford got something wrong? Or that your interpretation is wrong?

Faulty analogy, man...
If the population survives, then whatever mutations it has accumulated have served it right.
If a new mutation arises in an individual which is manifestly deleterious, then that individual doesn't survive to breed... the population remains without that particular mutation.

I liked my analogy. Now you seem to be acting as if Humans do not actually have “junk DNA” and that all of the mutations must actually serve a purpose or they get filtered out. Which is it?

Junk dna serves no purpose and is not deleterious, except as it requires energy to duplicate, but we have enough for that and plenty more... so it's at most near-neutral deleterious.

Try not to mix the concepts with each other, ok?

And yet, here we are...

Indeed, meaning we have not been here for very long.

Meaning we have evolved to be here.

Maybe that measurement of entropy gain was somehow erroneous. I'd be more comfortable if the term entropy was used to refer to what it actually means... "genetic entropy" is probably a misnomer... what does it actually refer to? the degree of disorder of the genetic material? Do genes just shuffle around at random?

It’s a real form of entropy; it’s the rate at which properly coded genes degrade due to copying errors and outside factors. Anytime a certain code is being copied a person could measure a rate of information entropy. It’s very interesting, Sanford is a very well respected geneticist, and yet nobody has really presented any sort of refutation of his work on this subject. The silence is deafening.

I still don't like the word entropy in there.
His work may be right, but it doesn't have the repercussions you wish to imbue on it.

What?!
I.... it...what?!!
That conclusion doesn't follow from the conditional statement... if it does, there's some twisted path to get there... care to elaborate?

I do not mind at all. As I have already stated, in order for any knowledge to be possible we must live in a Biblical universe. Therefore, in order for us to know that Jerusalem exists we must live in a Biblical universe. Think of all of the assumptions that must be true in order for a person to know that Jerusalem exists. Not a single one of these assumptions makes sense if we live in a purely material and natural universe. In fact, the only justification for any of these assumptions is that Yahweh exists. Jerusalem exists ergo Yahweh exists.

Bah!!! That old thing again?!
No, there's no evidence whatsoever that we need any christian god "in order for any knowledge to be possible".

Again, it doesn't follow...
Bear in mind that perfect logic can yield wrong results.

I disagree, it absolutely does follow. If all of your reasoning is logically valid it would be impossible to arrive at any truth without also having true premises. The only way you can accidentally stumble upon truth in logic is if you’re forms are invalid somewhere. If the Christian conceptual scheme is logically consistent and hits upon any truth at all then the entire thing must be true.

oh, no it doesn't follow.
Bear in mind that your conclusion is not necessarily in accordance with reality.

Internal consistency is no guarantee of truthfulness.

Agreed, but only if the entire thing is false. If it is truly internally consistent you could not have parts of it that are true and parts of it that are false.

Haha, no...
The parts that are true in your story are not the ones that have any bearing on the whole truthfulness. Like Pilate actually having existed and having been a roman prefect of Judaea.

Would it help, if I throw in the Silmarillion?

Haha, no.

Oh, I'm sure that a few centuries of apologetics could get there!

You’d just end up with Yahweh; it’s unavoidable.

At best, you'd end up with the deist god.
Which seems to be the one you're always arguing for with your "god is necessary for anything to exist and be consistent and whatnot....