Disproving the Bible

[Dystopia]

Typical theist strategy, quoting arguments from other websites instead of formulating your own based on factual knowledge and rationality. I could prove all your arguments wrong without quoting any atheist website. And logically using arguments from a creationist or theist website means going against evolution

[The Grand Nudger]

If you would like to pick up our conversation, where we left off Steve, then you probably wouldn't be tilting at windmills on this one when we're done. We were so close to understanding the fact of common descent together and then you clammed up.

[FatAndFaithless]

If you would like to pick up our conversation, where we left of Steve, then you probably wouldn't be tilting at windmills on this one when we're done. We were so close to understanding the fact of common descent together and then you clammed up.

He's still got creationist 'science' sites opened in his browser. You might be a little optimistic on that one.

[Dystopia]

If you would like to pick up our conversation, where we left of Steve, then you probably wouldn't be tilting at windmills on this one when we're done. We were so close to understanding the fact of common descent together and then you clammed up.

I've left the conversation with SteveII a day after this thread was posted. I returned now for curiosity, so I don't know how it developed

[Minimalist]

About the way they all do....

Creatard says evolution is poo and god* did everything.

These clowns are nothing if not consistent.


* - The 'god' he believes in, of course....not some other schlepper.

[Jenny A]

biological case a
Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, Ann K. Gauger, Robert J. Marks II, "Time and Information in Evolution," BIO-Complexity, Volume 2012 (4).

The "peer reviewed" journal cited is Bio-complexity.org. It isn't really a peer reviewed journal in the ordinary sense of the word. It's dedicated to a particular point of view: Intelligent Design. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/BIO-Complexity Although it claims to be neutral, all of it's editors are pro Intellegent Design. http://www.jackscanlan.com/2010/12/bio-c...t-complex/
And it's had trouble getting enough articles to stay afloat. Consequently, it's had to frequently publish articles by it's own board of editors. The journal itself does not list the editors credentials--always a bad sign.

If there were a controversy, you'd think there would be scientists flocking to publish there. You'd also think that finding a editorial board with credentials to be proud of would be easy too.

[The Grand Nudger]

I've met more than a few christians that didn't realize that ID was politics, not science. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes when the spell wore off. Honestly, if I were a believer, to imagine that something like ID was valid, that science had my faith's back - that would be a wonderful feeling. It would be a goddamned awful feeling the moment that I realized I'd been had. Look at the lengths these assholes go to to manipulate people, and in the worst way, with their religious beliefs. That's downright shakespearian betrayal...lol.

[SteveII]

Regarding probability and enough time for common decent, I have read some articles.

"There's plenty of time for evolution," by Herbert S. Wilf and Warren J. Ewens, a biologist and a mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania was written as a rebuttal to those that say there was not enough time. "Our purpose here is to analyze this process, and our conclusion is that when one takes account of the role of natural selection in a reasonable way, there has been ample time for the evolution that we observe to have taken place." http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/1...7.abstract

However, it seems that the Wilf and Ewens model is too simplistic. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/12/pee...67421.html is an article about the paper addressing the above study. The article quotes the source paper in several places (citation below)

"Wilf and Ewens argue in a recent paper that there is plenty of time for evolution to occur. They base this claim on a mathematical model in which beneficial mutations accumulate simultaneously and independently, thus allowing changes that require a large number of mutations to evolve over comparatively short time periods. Because changes evolve independently and in parallel rather than sequentially, their model scales logarithmically rather than exponentially. This approach does not accurately reflect biological evolution, however, for two main reasons. First, within their model are implicit information sources, including the equivalent of a highly informed oracle that prophesies when a mutation is "correct," thus accelerating the search by the evolutionary process. Natural selection, in contrast, does not have access to information about future benefits of a particular mutation, or where in the global fitness landscape a particular mutation is relative to a particular target. It can only assess mutations based on their current effect on fitness in the local fitness landscape. Thus the presence of this oracle makes their model radically different from a real biological search through fitness space. Wilf and Ewens also make unrealistic biological assumptions that, in effect, simplify the search. They assume no epistasis between beneficial mutations, no linkage between loci, and an unrealistic population size and base mutation rate, thus increasing the pool of beneficial mutations to be searched. They neglect the effects of genetic drift on the probability of fixation and the negative effects of simultaneously accumulating deleterious mutations. Finally, in their model they represent each genetic locus as a single letter. By doing so, they ignore the enormous sequence complexity of actual genetic loci (typically hundreds or thousands of nucleotides long), and vastly oversimplify the search for functional variants. In similar fashion, they assume that each evolutionary "advance" requires a change to just one locus, despite the clear evidence that most biological functions are the product of multiple gene products working together. Ignoring these biological realities infuses considerable active information into their model and eases the model's evolutionary process.

Further down...
"In addition to the overwhelming problems mentioned above, the search algorithm they have chosen is unrealistic. Wilf and Ewens assume that the fitness landscape is smooth, with each beneficial mutation trending upward additively. This is not the case in biology. ...Indeed, there is much evidence to suggest that real fitness landscapes have many local fitness optima surrounded by fitness deserts. If it takes more than several mutations to move from one peak to another, adaptation can become stalled on a local peak, with no way to move from one small fitness peak to a higher one. Because natural selection is blind and without foresight, it cannot tell which particular mutations are leading to an unrealized goal of maximal fitness (in this case a target phrase) some distance away in the adaptive landscape. It can only assess the relative local fitness of variants in the population."

Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, Ann K. Gauger, Robert J. Marks II, "Time and Information in Evolution," BIO-Complexity, Volume 2012 (4).

@Esquilax - you are right, poking holes in a theory is not proof of the competing theory. I am merely addressing the universal opinion here that common decent is a fact.

Steve, you still seem to not understand why you need to stop quoting articles from creationist websites if you want any sort of scientific discussion. As we've made painstakingly clear, those kinds of sites are anything but scientific. You can see the differences in just the way their websites are set up.

So the person that had the thoughts that were written down for all to read must be wrong because he/she believes something you do not. Isn't that a genetic fallacy? What did you think of the arguments that seem to be well reasoned (more so than the original article proclaiming enough time)?

[FatAndFaithless]

Steve, you still seem to not understand why you need to stop quoting articles from creationist websites if you want any sort of scientific discussion. As we've made painstakingly clear, those kinds of sites are anything but scientific. You can see the differences in just the way their websites are set up.

So the person that had the thoughts that were written down for all to read must be wrong because he/she believes something you do not. Isn't that a genetic fallacy? What did you think of the arguments that seem to be well reasoned (more so than the original article proclaiming enough time)?

You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.

No but really, the reason it's wrong is because it's scientifically and factually wrong. They start with the premise that their creationism is true, and they look for bits and pieces of evidence that can maybe be twisted to fit into their viewpoint, while outright ignoring the vast, vast majority of evidence that refutes their conclusion on this topic. That's is not science. It's pseudoscience. It's the same tactic used by woo-doctors psychics and homeopathy. Science draws conclusions based on where the evidence leads, creationists grab and twist evidence to fit their pre-drawn conclusion.

[The Grand Nudger]

No Steve, they are unscientific. To call something that does not posess the qualities that delineate what is or is not scientific "not science" is not a genetic fallacy, and has nothing to do with whether or not the author and the examiner agree over the contents of their beliefs.