How do you know God isn't dead?

[little_monkey]

Explaining evolution to a creationist is like explain calculus to someone who failed high school algebra. What a waste of time. Someone should have the decency to nix this thread.

It’s pretty tough to explain something that is utterly incoherent, but I have no problem with them trying. A lot of creationists are former evolutionists by the way, and I am sure you would not have been personally insulting their intelligence while they believed what you believe, funny how that works.

When someone writes this:

"I find it very hard to believe that a member of one species can mate with the member of another species since species are defined (biological concept definition) as groups of animals that cannot produce fertile offspring. What gave birth to the first Human though and why was that animal not also Human? Thanks for the response!"

He is beyond redemption.

[Statler Waldorf]

He is beyond redemption.

Learn how to define a species please.

[little_monkey]

He is beyond redemption.

Learn how to define a species please.

I would suggest to you, politely, that you enroll into a biology program at a renown university -- Harvard, Columbia, to name a few -- get yourself a BSc, then go for a PhD if you're that smart. And when you have published a dozen articles in peer-review journals, then we'll talk. As it is now, I won't waste my time.

Have a nice life.

[smax]

A liar called me liar, and then lied some more. LOL.

Funny how all the most damning evidence is immediately "false" or "misinterpreted".

You want to stay living a lie, you need only live by one fundamental rule:

Never give the truth any footing.

---

He is beyond redemption.

The trick is just believing whatever you want to and disregarding facts.

[Cyberman]

Explaining evolution to a creationist is like explain calculus to someone who failed high school algebra. What a waste of time.

Paraphrasing The Amazing Atheist: "Explaining evolution to a creationist is like throwing boloney at a tank. Wasted effort! Plus you lost boloney."

[Esquilax]

Learn how to define a species please.

Someone clearly hasn't heard of a hybrid, if he's still sticking to that fucking story...

[Cato]

He is beyond redemption.

Learn how to define a species please.

Oh yes, let us define a species.

Who was the mother of Enos?

[pocaracas]

Didn't I link you something about layers of non-sedimentary rock in between which enable a more accurate dating by imposing both upper and lower bounds? Maybe it's a bit further down....

No you did, and I did read it, but since they have no empirically verifiable control for their radiometric dating system I do not feel any obligation to accept its results.

So you think that a radiometric dating system is faulty at its core?
Or do you just think that the radioactive decay of a given long lived nucleus doesn't follow the same sort of rule as a short lived nucleus? This would lead you to accept carbon dating, but not uranium dating.


An alternative method for dating rock is using plate tectonics and the measurable rate at which continents are drifting apart... of course, assuming they've been drifting at a constant pace (will you claim that they drifted much much faster at the start so to make it seem as if they took millions of years to drift at a constant velocity?).
Plate tectonics also helps to account for the finding of similar fossils in continents now separated by oceans... and they have all been radiometrically dated in such a way that is consistent with constant tectonic drift.

For someone who seems so against storytelling, you sure believe in a tall tale.

Not at all, the common creator inference is very applicable in many branches of science, there’s no rule that it cannot be applied in Biology.

"inference"... yes, you keep changing the name of it to convince yourself that others do assumptions and you don't... -.-'

First off, the moon... where did you hear such ludicrous number?
Here's a more credible source:http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=373
The moon was indeed touching the Earth about 4 billion years ago. In fact, Earth and Moon were formed from a collision of a Mars-size planet (proto-Moon) and a Venus-size planet (proto-Earth).

No, I am sorry that just doesn’t work out.

1. Due to tidal friction slowing the Earth’s rotation, the Moon is receding away from the Earth at a rate of nearly 4 cm a year (according to NASA). Due to angular momentum this rate recession has been decelerating meaning the Moon’s recession would have been far greater in the past. Even if this rate were constant the Moon would have been touching the Earth 1.37 billion years ago, not 4 billion years ago. The laws of physics makes this problem very clear cut.

ok, I admit I kind of doubted my sanity a bit with that one...
But your model does not account for ice ages, where all the water is locked and that mechanism doesn't exist, thus bringing the moon a bit closer.
Now, how many ice ages has the planet seen? How often?

But radiometric methods yield the same age for the moon and Earth. Consistency is good.

2. The Giant Impact hypothesis has some rather fatal flaws, including the fact that the Moon’s iron content is not consistent with being created by an impact, the mass of the impacting object required is far too great (the resulting debris must escape the Earth’s Roche Limit in order to to coalesce and form the Moon), the absence of rings formed by the debris that landed within the Roche Limit, and the absence of any magma lake created by the impact.

The link I gave you provided a collision of a mars sized rock with a venus sized one... That's looks pretty large. And don't forget, at this time, these rocks are still quite hot and malleable... think Earth's core, lava.
The debris must not have gone that far out and was attracted to both resulting bodies.

So you have a dating method suggesting the Moon is three times older than we know it could be.

Methinks your method has some shortcomings that need addressing.

How? Knowing the rate at which the fusion reaction occurs, calculating that, at the start you have the whole sun composed of hydrogen nuclei, use some mass spectroscopy to figure out how much of hydrogen and helium you have in the sun now and bam.... an age of about 5 billion years comes out... Now if only we could repeat this for other stars?... well we can? please do it! Ah, but it's only valid for stars close enough, because other galaxies are moving away, and we get some red shift and we'd also need to account for the time that their light took to reach us... well, astrophysicists haven't been idle, so they gave us those numbers and place the oldest visible stars at some 13~14 billion years old. Rendering our sun a second generation star, which it would have to be, if it was to have rocky planets around it. This means that the star that blew up and provided our sun with it's fuel lasted for less than 8 billion years...

So many assumptions my friend; however, that’s not what I meant by empirically verifiable controls, what I meant was accurately dating rocks of empirically known age. Empirical Science requires direct observation and repeatability. You have none with radiometric dating, it’s all extrapolation based off of assumptions.

Assumptions?
QM tells us the rate of fusion reactions.
Mass spectrometry tells us how much of each element the Sun has.
Plug one into the other and voilá. I don't see assumptions.

For rock datings... yeah.. I already mentioned plate tectonics.
And radioactive decay is quite accurate.... also coming from QM.

There you have a picture of the (old) universe.... and our sun at 5 billion years...

That assumes that the one way speed of light is the same as the round trip speed of light divided by 2, that’s not a testable assumption, although I am not sure I want to open up that can of worms in this thread.

What 2 way!?
Only one way required for spectrometry.... -.-'

3.5 billion for the first life forms to leave fossils.

How did the first life form? Magic?

I don't know.
Are you going to tell me I should accept some storytelling book written in the neolithic?

So yeah... the (old Earth) picture is confirmed by other dating methods. Not just radiometric dating. Now tell me how they're all wrong... -.-'

Well, all of them conveniently sneak in untestable assumptions and are not based upon anything empirically verifiable.

At least they are consistent among themselves.
And (at least) two consistent independent measurements of the same thing, sure hint at an accurate measurement by both.

I think carbon dating is a very competent dating mechanism.
It has it's limits, just like any other mechanism. SO we need to be aware of such limits when analyzing any sample.

What limits are those? When it conflicts with radiometric dating?

Carbon dating IS radiometric dating...
Get your facts straight!

would you?

Most likely, I am very proficient in the woods.

Who said anything about woods? BUHAHAHAHAHAH!

I didn't want to bring this up just yet, but you leave me no choice...

Uh oh….

I can smell the piss...

Dinosaurs. There are fossils of them... some are damn good. All are dated to between 230 and 65 million years ago.

Except the ones that have soft tissue and DNA since those cannot survive for more than 4 million years, right?

oh, soft tissue in dinos? dino DNA?... what is this, jurassic park?
Here, read about those "soft tissues": http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-na...osaur.html

If all species were created at the same time by a single creator, then it stands to reason that dinos and humans walked the earth side by side.... Can you imagine it, T-Rex Vs human settlement?.. oh the horror... I don't think dinos would be extinct, but rather humans...

Not all species were created at the same time, but all of the major kinds of animals were. But yes Humans and Dinosaurs would have coexisted, I see no issue with that, there are numerous animals we coexist with today that are dangerous to Humans (Grizzlies).

Oh, a new insight into creation... not all at the same time... Where did you get this info?

Look at the evolutionary idea: apes evolve in the safety of trees, as it becomes safer to walk the land, they descend and get nimble at walking up straight, because, at that particular geographic location, there are very few, if any, predators.
Story-telling at it's finest.... dinos and humans...

So yes, I think humans came well after dinos. Heck, most mammals wouldn't be able to survive dinos' thick coating, large size, extreme power... just wouldn't be possible.

I think you overestimate how dangerous Dinosaurs would have been, many scientists today question whether T-Rex (who was most likely a scavenger) could have even run because of his body proportions, there’s a reason they went extinct.

It wasn't just the large ones that went extinct, so the reason must have been deeper than that.

How do humans appear with an extra chromosome? I guess a similar mechanism could already be in place on simple organisms, no?... as I've said before, I'm no biologist, so I have no idea how many chromosomes are required for a sexual species.

Well when Humans appear with an extra chromosome it seriously jacks the system all up, I am not aware of any observed cases where it doesn’t make the organism incredibly unfit for survival.

I'm not aware of any cases where it happens in other species, so there... I don't know.

3-5% per generation?
Are you seriously considering this?
10 generations and you could get 50% degeneration..... 20 generations and total chaos... Tell me, do you accept that humans existed 20 generation ago?... That's about (1 generation every 30 years [high estimate, I know]) ~600 years ago!

No that’s not quite how the percentages work; Humans have been around for fewer than 250 generations which is fine given the rates of genetic entropy, it’s doubtful they’d last another 250 generations though.

The 3-5% rate is taken from the following study though…

Crow’s “The high spontaneous mutation rate: Is it a health risk?” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences number 94

Interesting paper...
Didn't read the whole thing, but I did read some particular bits:
- mutations arise primarily from the father zygote, given that the father produces millions of sperm per day, the odds of some error are greater than on the mother's side, who produced all the zygotes before birth... this checks out with something I read recently that stated that there are more autistic kids from older fathers than from younger ones. IF you're over 35, you have a higher tendency to produce an autistic child than if you're 20.
- Deleterious mutations are removed from the population in about 80 generations.
- On the other hand, there's this gem "In [...] people, recessive mutations may persist for thousands of generations. "

Thousands of generations.... and yet you claimed that "Humans have been around for fewer than 250 generations "... Another piece of your story that doesn't add up. Care to produce some evidence for this 250 number?
Or should I just take your word for it?

I know this was for Rythm, but heck... I'll have a go at postulating some crap.

Postulate away…

I like postulating... it's like assuming, but it's a fancier word.
But I'm very bad at making stuff up....

From homo habilis, to homo sapiens, the selective pressures must have been many, but it seems that the ability to make better tools to solve the hunting problem a bit faster, the ability to work in teams to solve the same problem, the ability to feed the family, the ability to simplify the family's life would be desirable traits which required an ever expanding dexterity, and problem solving ability, for as you become an expert hunter, so do prey develop tricks to evade you. Farming and cattle raising ended all that.. some 10~20 thousands of years ago.

Sure, that’s possible, but why are we assuming the cognition needed to do those things is the same that is needed to derive or integrate an equation?

Why would it not be? This was my postulation, I get to make up the rules!

For someone who dismisses storytelling with such ease.... I find it strange that you accept so strongly a story told to you by other people.... the god myth, the yahweh one, in particular, the christian version.... which denomination was it that you followed?

I reject storytelling masquerading as empirical science, that’s why I am so hard on Darwinism. I have logical reasons as to why I believe scripture is infallible; I have no such reasons to believe in Darwinism.

I have logical reasons to assume any scripture is man-made and, as such, fallible.
I have logical reasons to give credence to the theory of evolution, in spite of it being fallible.

Both can be viewed as storytelling, but one is based on actual empirical (since you like that word) findings... the other, on myth.
And myth... well, there are many mythologies... yours is just one more.

I don't enjoy seeing a grown man refusing a story backed by science, but then following some other story backed by.... nothing?wishful thinking?indoctrination?

Stories about dinosaurs turning into birds, Helium into other elements, and life arising from non-life are not science to me, it’s all mythology. I have logical reasons for believing what I believe.

The mechanism which generated life still eludes science, so any such mechanism you do hear about is storytelling, hypothesizing.
Which hypothesis is correct... we'll see when we see. Until then, the best course of action is not assume anything.

Concerning the evolution of dinosaurs int o birds... it took quite a lot of time for that to happen and it is based on feather-like imprints found in some fossils, so there's some reason to that.

Turning helium into other (heavier) elements is something known as Nuclear Fusion, which opposes nuclear fission, whereby the nucleus would be torn apart resulting in lighter elements.
I believe you've heard of nuclear power plants, no?... they operate on the fission principle.
You've heard of Little Boy? That one used fusion, of hydrogen into helium... that's why it was called a hydrogen bomb.
Nuclear fusion and fission are real processes that affect our daily lives, one way or another. They are not myths.
I pity your logic that dismisses reality in favor of a story written some 2 thousand years ago by people who knew no better.

But it seems you missed what I wrote, maybe you thought I was only quoting you in that hide tag...

Yup, I totally missed your response in there, good catch. I was wondering why you appeared to ignore everything I wrote.

hehe, when I decide to ignore what you write, I'll say something like: "That was utter BS which warrants no reply whatsoever. Lay off the kool aid."

Well, you could start laying off it...

[The Grand Nudger]

---

I will try to keep this very simple for you. An organ transplant tissue match requires very similar genetics, so much so that often siblings are not matches for one another. So even though you claim that Aboriginals and Europeans have been separated for thousands upon thousands of years, not enough significant evolutionary change has occurred between the two groups in order to make tissue matches impossible.

Which is why we remain the same species. Thank you for conceding the point. "Not enough significant evolutionary change" is not interchangeable with "no evolutionary change". Had there been enough, it would be a speciation event (even then tissue transplants aren't of the table - ask mice and pigs) - had there be none....we wouldn't find that divergence so well expressed in mutations of those genetic markers related to skin color.

Differing skin colors between groups of people is not Evolution, the genetic information needed to produce those skin colors were present in the parent populations. You’re committing the fallacy of equivocation by changing the definition of the term Evolution in the midst of the discussion.

You clearly don't have any idea what evolution is - so it isn't surprising that you're mistaken yet again. There is a demonstrated change in allele frequencies between populations of human beings, one of which being the mutations and expressions of all of those genes mentioned. You've attempted to sneak in cretinist claptrap with your comment about what was or was not present within parent populations. This is inconsequential - all that is required is change. In the same way that darwins parent population of finches all had beaks- so too did the offspring, nevertheless evolution occurred there, as it has in us.

Why does the explanation have to be Darwinian? Where does this faith commitment to the theory come from? If you do not know the explanation then just admit it and do not try to sell everyone on the idea that it must still be a Darwinian explanation.

Oh it didn't have to be, it just came out in the wash that it was the best explanation. Could've been waffles. That would have tickled me pink, but unfortunately it wasn't. Has the irony of this particular line of argumentation ever dawned on you btw? In addition to being unable to point to anything that requires faith - the very best you could hope to establish here is to suggest that faith is involved - faith as a pejorative.

There are over 20,000 creation articles available for free online and several peer-reviewed creation journals available for subscription; if you cared about the truth you’d educate yourself on the theory.

Pick your favorite, and make a case. I'll be in that thread as well.

Did you not read what I wrote? In order for Common Descent to be valid, you need trillions upon trillions of cases of beneficial mutations that increase the amount of genetic information in the organism to have taken place in our past. Yet, you’d have a difficult time presenting even two observed cases of this actually happening in Nature, it’s all blind faith. The overwhelming majority of expressed mutations are harmful to the organism’s chances of survival.

My rereading your post won't make it any less inaccurate, and clearly my attempts to explain to you where you've went off the rails won't help in that regard either. Laying aside that you've pulled a number out of your ass, and that no beneficial mutations would be required for common descent, and that evolution -by itself- is no indicator of common descent (in the universal sense), and that we can produce beneficial mutations with workaday regularity............

No, no, I guess there's no laying it aside. Your entire response was soup sandwich.

You’re awfully good at making unsupported claims. Who made the prediction? When did they make it? They predicted Humans would have fewer Chromosomes than Chimps? Why?

Reiseberg 2001, Venter et al 2001, Yi et al 2002 - the list is practically endless but any paper dealing with chromosomal speciation hypothesis will reference these three. As they began to hypothesize the vector upon which our divergence from our lca depended their efforts were hampered by our limited access to the genomes of the two organisms involved. The human genome project was a year out of milestone, and the chimp genome project would take two years beyond that. We're currently sequencing other primates, and the results of those projects should give us an even better picture. The overall assumption was that both humans and chimps would have the same number of chromosomes (though there were those that proposed more or less - that would be troubling - we can't really lose chromosomes as primates..they're too important) if we had a common ancestor-but that at least one of these chromosomes would have such a powerful mutation that it produced reproductive isolation - a record of a speciation event.

What we found as both genomes were being sequenced, was at first very troubling - we had 1 fewer pair of chromosomes than chimps. When sequencing had been completed or both species (in 2005) - we found precisely the mutation that had been predicted. Human chromosome #2 is actually 2 primate chromosomes- fused at the telomeres - and containing two centromeres. This is the wonderful thing about genetics (and why it was so important to evolutionary theory), it leaves nothing to the imagination.

So they are primates because someone arbitrarily classifies them as such? That doesn’t prove they are related to other primates at all.

It's a very simple issue of fitting the requirements given for a primate. We could have been wrong about it - we did mis-identify other species relationships. It just so happens that we got this one right. See above.

You have not given me any evidence; you simply made a handful of appeals to homologous traits, which does not necessitate a common ancestor at all; for a theory that you claim is so well supported you sure seem to have a difficult time supporting it.

In leui of any other mechanism for heredity, and in light of the very well demonstrated and very well evidenced mechanism of heredity we discovered, homologous genomes actually do necessitate a common ancestor. Not only is it the best explanation - it's the only explanation. We could play brinksmanship - and state that perhaps only chimps and humans have a common ancestor (for example) - but we'll be at a loss to explain what barriers to this well understood principle justify an act of such idiocy.

Grasping at straws, you were caught being disingenuous. Physics operates completely independently of Evolutionary Biology.

Perhaps you should read back through the thread gigglestick, not that it's going to matter, as pretending that I've been or said something that I did not will still be all you have in the clip.

Science deals with inductive proofs, which I’d accept from you. How do mutations occur and how are they preserved and expressed in a population? You have not established any of this.

Mutations occur when an environmental agent damages dna, or when a mistake occurs in copying prior to division. Mutations are preserved in populations through heredity. I'm not going to waste my time trying to establish every corner of the physical sciences to you - I've already mentioned that. You know exactly what I'll do if you insist upon this.

"Everything we know is wrong, now, without any of the science you don't believe in - tell me what happened"

We've been here before.

Your modern synthesis is nearly 80 years old; it’s not really that modern. What I said was completely accurate according to Neo-Darwinian theory, you asserting otherwise does not change that.

It's stood for 80 years, nary single point of conflicting data. What you said is woefully inaccurate, and I've explained why - in this thread- more than once. I don't see any reason to repeat myself.

No, there’s a fitness cost associated with all classes of mutations, learn your theory.

You're still dancing around beneficial and deleterious mutations. What fitness cost would a selectively neutral mutation have Statler? Think real hard.

Anaerobic respiration serves no purpose? I think the body being able to function without adequate levels of oxygen is a very important trait to have, try to run farther than 600 meters and you’ll find out.

Not an important trait at all to animals with access to oxygen and aerobic respiratory systems. It would be selectively neutral. Good for the creatures in the box eh? Perhaps if you wanted to construct a 600 meter box, fill it with oxygen breathing things, and then turn on the ole kirby - we would see what sort of mutations the residents of that box had been carrying round hitherto unknown - mutations that might help them escape our xenocidal glee - if they have any. Judging by the record of life we have available, the likely answer is that they wouldn't have any. We'd just be staring at a 600 meter box full of dead things.

That does not explain why all of the organisms possessed that trait once it was needed, that implies something weeded out the organisms that did not possess that trait thousands of years before it was needed. Unless you wanted to assert mankind was created with the ability, then that would make sense why everyone seems to have had it.

Who says that they -all- would possess the trait? We'd be at a loss to explain extinction if all organisms in the box possessed the trait. However, once the air is vacuumed out, all remaining organisms must possess the trait. In the case of humans and our ancestors -wed been using our brains for quite some time. So again, you've managed to get it wrong from the floor all the way to the ceiling.

Well you did in fact just say it had to be a neutral mutation, now you’re changing your story; so since it was not selectively neutral, we’re back to what selective pressure selected against it?

This is getting tedious, I don't know if you've realized this, but a very large portion of your responses to me seem to be an issue of your having a conversation with someone else - who resides in your head. Yes, we're back to a question already asked and already answered. Ask a question, receive an answer. Ask a few more questions as filler then re-ask the same question. Common cretinist garbage.

Scientific facts are not established by majority opinion within the Scientific Community, claiming something is the unifying theory of Biology is utterly meaningless. Whether you like it or not you do have to defend your position.

No one said they were. When you're done having a discussion with the man in your head I'll still be here. Modern synthesis is the unifying theory of biology not because I claim it, not because the majority decides that it is so, but because without modern synthesis many sub-fields of biology had no relation to each other - and biology as a whole had weak relations to the other sciences.

Easy, all life on Earth has a common creator, therefore all life is going to possess similarities at the fundamental level; just like all works by Salvador Dali have similar fundamental characteristics. I ask for a prediction that could not have been made unless someone believed in Common Descent and you gave me one that is completely consistent with the modern Creation model.

Laying aside that a "common creator" could have just "created" the first living organism - common descent - and this is all that would be consistent with the data - you've got yourself a hypothesis. Now all you have to do is demonstrate that common creator. Step 1.

So lets see that evidence?

You keep making that baseless assertion. Not a single one of the dozens of Biologists I work with on a daily basis have ever needed to refer to Darwinian Theory in their published work. This is just something Evolutionists like to assert in order to get skeptics to stop asking tough questions.

You seem to be as confused by the term "baseless assertion" as you have been by the term "modern synthesis". You know I'm also skeptical about the biologists you work with - I don't think they exist.

Complete nonsense. Give me a scenario where an organism can evolve without any selective pressures, you keep asserting that is possible and yet you do not support that claim. If you’re answer is going to be mutations then explain what causes the mutation.

Mutation. What is so difficult to understand about this Stat? I'm not asserting that it's -possible- I'm bluntly stating a fact, mutations occur.

They absolutely do support it; you have no idea what you’re talking about.

You could certainly make that case, and as I said, I'll be in that thread. Perhaps what you'd rather not realize (or rather not have mentioned) is that by supporting speciation you will have eroded any biblical nonsense from the outset. To support some observation or theory does not mean "Yeah that happens - except right here, at this line that would threaten my bedtime story, because it threatens my bedtime story". Denied.

“Poorly-informed anti-creationist scoffers occasionally think they will ‘floor’ creation apologists with examples of ‘new species forming’ in nature. They are often surprised at the reaction they get from the better-informed creationists, namely that the creation model depends heavily on speciation.

It seems clear that some of the groupings above species (for example, genera, and sometimes higher up the hierarchy) are almost certainly linked by common ancestry, that is, are the descendants of one created ancestral population (the created kind, or baramin).

There is no such thing as a "created kind". Try harder.

Virtually all creation theorists assume that Noah did not have with him pairs of dingoes, wolves and coyotes, for example, but a pair of creatures which were ancestral to all these species, and probably to a number of other present-day species representative of the ‘dog kind’.

There was no noachian flood. Try harder.

Demonstrating that speciation can happen in nature, especially where it can be shown to have happened rapidly, is thus a positive for creation theorists.” – Dr. Carl Wieland, co-founder of Creation Magazine, Journal of Creation, and Creation.com

There is no creation theory. Try harder.

---

You’re the one who believes that Evolution occurs independently of selective pressures, no Evolutionist worth his salt is going to assert that. It’s obvious that you do not understand Evolution or Creation well enough to engage in any meaningful discourse on the subject.

Mutations occur. If you'd like to take issue with that be my guest. Selective neutrality is well understood, if you'd like to take issue with that be my guest.

I never said that it was, please stop misrepresenting my argument.

Perhaps you didn't realize that the way in which you phrased your question regarding human development left nothing else to be implied. If you don't like the implications of your own argument - then stop pressing it- or own it, your call.

More misrepresentation of my position. The ability to fly would not have been preserved in a population unless there was a selective pressure (predation) present that weeded out those organisms in the population that did not develop that ability (most likely by mutation).

Mutation itself is not a selective pressure unless it is deleterious. A beneficial mutation cannot be classified as such without reference -to- a selective pressure, and a selectively neutral mutation is a non-starter in this particular point of ignorance.

Since there is no selective pressure that could weed out Humans that did not have the ability to do calculus thousands of years before there was a need to do calculus it is ridiculous to believe that the entire Human race developed that ability and passed it on for thousands of years before there was a need for it.

Isn't it amusing, that directly after claiming that I've misrepresented your argument you just so happen to be reforming it precisely along those lines in which you made the mistake in the first place. Unfortunately you can't seem to abandon it - and so you've fucked it up again for the same reason that you fucked it up the first time.

Again. We possess mutations which are not "weeded out" because they are selectively neutral. So any question of "why would we have this before we have a need for it" is a non-starter on these grounds alone. Evolution does not respond to needs, it does not respond to top down directives- it lacks this ability as mechanism.

Again, in the case of our ability to do calc, we see -several- pressures, not just one, several - and they go a bit farther back than HSS. Not only is your question DOA in principle it is DOA in practice.

If you could please explain why I have failed to competently communicate this to you after several attempts, I would appreciate it.

Natural selection is still required in order for these mutations to become fixed in a population.

Tell me, Statler, how natural selection is required - or could even act..on a mutation that is -wait for it- ........selectively neutral?

Take your time, you'll need it.

[Sal]

Learn how to define a species please.

Oh yes, let us define a species.

Who was the mother of Enos?

He's not gonna submit to taxonomies, his use of the word "logic" really means "anything already aligning with my already constructed beliefs".

Besides, he's never ever gonna take into account a non-canonical text (here: Book of Jubilees) unless he wants to introduce the reality of the content of non-canonical books, because that would introduce the possibility of what stood in all those manuscripts, of which only 4 were added to NT.

https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sclient=ps...+Enos&fp=1