BILL NYE VS KEN HAM: TONIGHT AT 7 PM

[pocaracas]

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

Come on, man!!!
Why me?!?!?!?!?!

Haha, I was hoping you’d catch that. You’re always welcome at my parties

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

As I read about it, they just keep the foxes which are more friendly to humans and release the others into the wild.
In time, it shouldn't be difficult to sequence the genome of wild fixes and compare it to the domesticated ones.

True, I’ve heard foxes domesticate very quickly which is interesting.

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

Stat, old boy... maybe that's how new species arise within the same genus.

I am not arguing against speciation; however every time it occurs we are witnessing a reduction in genetic information and functionality which means it is not viable over deep periods of time.

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.

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.

See? It's possible to have a seemingly deleterious mutation which, in fact, isn't deleterious.
It's deleterious in a given context, but not in another context. It may even be beneficial in the case of living your whole life in complete darkness, as no energy is wasted with a visual system and all the complexity it entails.

Yes I agree; however over long periods of time the genome just cannot withstand the huge number of these mutations that it would experience.

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

Aye... still... we are surrounded by such mutations.
Think about it.
Africans have curly hair for a purpose, it creates air pathways which help to prevent overheating of the brain.... in a hot environment.
Also, dark skin prevents melanoma.
Dark irises prevent glare in very bright scenarios.

Yes, I am not sure how this goes against anything I have been saying. Some mutations are beneficial in certain circumstances but it’s the overall reduction in genetic functionality that is not viable over periods of deep time.

But it's not a reduction in functionality.
It's usually an increase, actually, with the subtle appearance of new traits and abilities.

Contrary to what some people would like, these mutated populations still belong to the same species that came out of Africa.

Yes, a single race of people with one single origin just as scripture affirms.

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

My point is... near-neutral deleterious mutations are not really deleterious, even if you compound several of them.

Several of them yes; we’re not talking about merely several mutations here. If the Human species is as old as you claim it is it would have died off tens of thousands of years ago.

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 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.

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.
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.

I did say "compile enough of there mutations", didn't I?
Not just one.
We've seen that, in humans, it is quite common to have at least 3 mutations, but still remain in the same species.

How many mutations would be enough?

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...

That happens when you get the final one which is indeed deleterious.
All others allowed the individual to survive and breed... that last one is the one that fails to provide this mechanism... hence it is not "near neutral" it is downright deleterious.

It’s more just the straw that broke the camel’s back, that one particular straw was no more deleterious than any other straw; they were all equally necessary in order to break the camel’s back.

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.
What works, remains in place... what doesn't, gets filtered out at the individual level, generally...
If we deal with some natural catastrophe, then it's a whole different ballgame.

Indeed, sometimes the evolutionary branch ends... sometimes they just cause the emergence of a new species.

That’s my point though, according to the empirically measured rate of entropy our branch should have ended a long time ago if Humans have really been around for as long as Darwinists claim they have been.

And yet, here we are...
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?

So... if Jerusalem exists, then Jesus and the apostles and the miracles and the ark and Abraham existed, too?
Is that how it works?

Yes. If Christianity were not true it’d be impossible for a person to know that Jerusalem exists.

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?

But I digress... It is possible to contrive a consistent view of reality and have a part of it being true without the entire thing being true: Newtonian physics.

In deduction if something is logically internally consistent then if one conclusion is true then the entire thing must be true.

Again, it doesn't follow...
Bear in mind that perfect logic can yield wrong results.
Internal consistency is no guarantee of truthfulness.

Just because it's consistent?
My dear boy... The Lord of the Rings is internally consistent. At the end, the elves go to valinor, the wizards are no longer required and fade into myth, hobbits mingle with humans, orcs and trolls die out. Humans are the sole remaining intelligent species on (Middle) Earth... I look around me and that looks about right!
Does that make it true?
Why not?

Unlike scripture, The Lord of the Rings does not justify any of our epistemological assumptions about reality. It’s actually a rather poor analogy to draw because even its author said that it takes place in a “stage of imagination” and actually contains dozens upon dozens of logical inconsistencies.

Would it help, if I throw in the Silmarillion?

Because we know it to be a work of fiction? What if we didn't have that information?
What if it had been presented as an accurate account of antiquity?

Unlike scripture, it cannot be used to justify any of the preconditions for intelligibility.

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