The Problem with Christians

[Pat Mustard]

No we don't. We know evolution happens, we* have observed it in nature, we* have induced it in the laboratory (bonus link).

I am fully accepting of the fact that species will adapt to their environment and to threats to their survival.

So you accept evolution as a fact then?

Then why in the next breath do you write such discredited and wrong bullshit as:

Genetic variation and the appearance of random and occasional positive mutations isn't an issue either. But to take isolated cases of such occurrences as proof that simple cell bacteria evolved into fish, dogs, birds crocodiles and humans is a completely different argument. On the one hand you have small changes to the genetic code that don't change the identity of the organism, and on the other you have a complete change of one organism into a completely new species.

There is no difference between the "microevolution" that you promote, and the "macroevolution" you decry. They are one and the same thing, evolution. No difference, no impossibilty and well documented in scientific and general literature. Evolution exists, accept it.

You're arguing apples and oranges here.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then you can accept it as a duck. Your "microevolution" is simply the well established fact of evolutionary speciation filtered through creatard beer goggles. Evolution exists, accept it.

[Angrboda]

AJW, I'm curious what your explanation for ring species is. It seems to defy everything you've been saying.

[Pat Mustard]

I am fully accepting of the fact that species will adapt to their environment and to threats to their survival. Genetic variation and the appearance of random and occasional positive mutations isn't an issue either. But to take isolated cases of such occurrences as proof that simple cell bacteria evolved into fish, dogs, birds crocodiles and humans is a completely different argument. On the one hand you have small changes to the genetic code that don't change the identity of the organism, and on the other you have a complete change of one organism into a completely new species. You're arguing apples and oranges here.

"I am fully accepting that you can walk a step. I just don't accept that taking steps will allow you to walk a mile."  

That's what you're saying here. You're asserting that small changes to organisms are acceptable, but that a collection of small changes, accumulated over many generations, will never result in an organism sufficiently different from its ancestor all those generations ago to qualify as a new species, which is a weird position to take given that we derive species definitions based on the morphological and genetic changes that you've already agreed occur in organisms. If you agree that organism 1 can have offspring and that that offspring (organism 2) will be slightly different from 1, and that slight differences across generations is a consistent pattern such that each organism is slightly different from its parent (and thus progressively more different than organism 1) then why is it that you don't think organism 1,000,000 will be extremely different from organism 1? What mechanism are you proposing to prevent small changes from continuing to accumulate, and how do you intend to demonstrate the existence of that mechanism?

Thanks, Esquilax, you said what I wanted to say much more eloquently than I could.

[Silver]

What most creatards do no not understand in relation to evolution is also contingent on their belief that the world is not as old as science has accurately predicted it is.

Evolution is not a finger snapping event as described in Genesis in the bible performed by a magical sky daddy.

Evolution takes place over a long period of time, and the fact that the earth is billions of years old supports evolution.

[Esquilax]

What most creatards do no not understand in relation to evolution is also contingent on their belief that the world is not as old as science has accurately predicted it is.

Evolution is not a finger snapping event as described in Genesis in the bible performed by a magical sky daddy.

Evolution takes place over a long period of time, and the fact that the earth is billions of years old supports evolution.

Very good point: so much of the language that AJW and others use focuses on species-to-species transitions as though they were instantaneous events, as opposed to lengthy, subtle gradients taking place over many, many generations. I suppose a lack of subtlety and nuance is par for the course for creationist argumentation, but part of me does wonder whether it's at least a little intentional: this "single cells turning into dogs and cats!" thing may not be anywhere near accurate, but it is the most effective way of making a reasonable process that we can easily observe in nature (and do, on a daily basis) seem like crazy witch magic.

But part of the reason that strawman works is a misapprehension of how "species" as a definition works. When a creationist talks about the development of "completely new species," it's this mystic sort of big leap, but "species" is just a word we use to describe sufficiently different organisms, not an inherent biological fact woven into the DNA as this hard line that can never be crossed. It's just a word: a dog is different from a cat in the same way as ice cream is different from a root beer float. They're definitionally different things, but there's nothing preventing ice cream from becoming a root beer float, assuming the correct additional aspects are present. There's no objective entity "ice cream" that cannot change due to the laws of the universe, there's just one object we've assigned a label to, another object we've assigned a label to, and a means by which the one can become the other as a function of those labels.

In terms of life forms, we use species as a category based on physiological and genetic traits specific to each individual species, and when we find a new animal that doesn't fit into the established physiology and genetics of a known species, then it's a new species. This is the way it's worked throughout the history of biology, and it's exactly as trivial as turning ice cream into a float. We already know that genetic traits are both malleable and an influence on physiology, and since species is just a word and not a natural barrier that genetics bumps up against, there is no reason at all why the genes of any one organism might, over time and generations, drift from one human-invented species categorization, into a new human-invented species categorization.

Proper understanding and application of the terminology involved in evolution completely robs the misleadingly instantaneous rhetoric of creationism of all its power.

[AJW333]

"Random/intelligently guided" is a false dichotomy. Something can be non-random while still happening without intelligence. In the case of mutations, each and every mutation happens within the framework of those that came before, which is just an inescapable fact of the mechanism of mutation; those mutations that do arise are transcription errors within an attempt to copy a previous gene sequence. That is a constraint upon mutations that prevents them from being totally random,

If DNA mutations are the result of copying errors, then we should see very few large-scale changes to the DNA. So how would that account for the proposed evolution of thousands of wildly different organisms from the same source of primitive unicellular organisms? How on earth do you get from a simple bacteria with a tiny number of proteins to a human body which makes 100,000 of them, when all you are doing is copying existing DNA? My figures of 1:10^500 to make a single human protein look even more remote given that the DNA is actively fighting against the formation of anything different to what is already extant. Add to this the problem that the majority of uncorrected mutations take information out of the DNA,

"By examining the homologous protein sequences, de Jong and Rydén (1981) observed that deletions of amino acids occurred about four times more frequently than insertions [5]. Deletion events also outnumbered insertions for processed pseudogenes [6-9]. Deletions are about twice as frequent as insertions for nuclear DNA, and in mitochondrial DNA, deletions occur at a slightly higher frequency than insertions [10]. Deletion events are also found more common than insertions in both mouse and rat [11-13]." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2671719/

---

Why is it that in the instance of evolution your requirements for scientific proof are unreasonably high, but in the instance of God, you're happy to take it all on faith without a shred of evidence?  How do you justify demanding evidence for one and not the other?

I'm wondering if I am going to get an answer to this...

My requirements are not unreasonably high. If you want to say something is fact, it has to be proven, otherwise call it hypothetical.

If you look at the complex interdependent systems that occur in nature and especially the human body, it is obvious that it has been designed. DNA is a 3000,000,000 piece code that could not have formed through random processes. Complex codes do not create themselves. So if the evidence indicates design, then there must be a designer. The evidence for God is in the complex design of living things, so the more we know about the complexities of life, the more evidence there is for the existence of God.

Now I realize that you will maintain implacable opposition to the idea that any living thing in this world is designed and that is your choice. I just don't see it as a logical one.

---

What are the odds of one entity being three persons, do you think?  

1+1+1 = 1

xtian math.  Probably taught at schools where the degree comes from sending in cereal box tops.

How can a single entity be made of multiple parts? It isn't hard.

The board of a company is a single entity made up of multiple persons.

---

What if the designer is non-sentient, and is the universe itself?

Not sure how non-sentient creates sentient. That isn't what we see in this world.

---

If we look at entropy from an informational point of view we have;

"in data transmission and information theory, a measure of the loss of information in a transmitted signal or message."

Given that living systems with DNA have shown a progressive and very large increase in information, we can say that evolution requires entropy to be reversed in a step by step fashion over millions of years. If you want to deny that this is the result of design, you can cry "open system,"  but how does the application of heat and cosmic rays,  plus the occasional space rock add to the pool of information within the DNA?

If you stop being wrong, you may become right!

Entropy is entropy. Not information.
The term entropy can be applied to information as you pointed out, but that's not the physical entropy to which you allude when you desire to make "change of entropy" always positive.
Know where the analogy fails and you may come to realize how wrong you've been.

Living beings have become more complex at the expense of energy. Energy that mainly comes from the sun. And the sun is increasing the entropy of the solar system much more than any local dip in entropy on the surface of this planet.
That's it. Stop trotting out your ignorance of what entropy is and how it works.

What I asked was how the application of heat and cosmic rays, plus the occasional space rock add to the pool of information within the DNA. Any answers?

Sounds simple. But is it?

"If the human brain were a computer, it could perform 38 thousand trillion operations per second. The world’s most powerful supercomputer, BlueGene, can manage only .002% of that." https://www.quora.com/If-the-human-brain...mputer-Why

So how does genetic mutation account for the fact that each one of these operations is intelligent and has a specific purpose?

LOL!
Does your brain work like a computer, now?
A good deal of it is dedicated to vision analysis - how many computers out there can see and recognize stuff like our brains can?
And, in parallel, process sound, smell, touch, balance, sense of self, keep track of where all our parts are and what they're doing.... keep track of the requirements of our own bodies.... and think.
Not to mention all the memory. How many neurons are dedicated to memory storage, recall, updating, etc?
Also... redundancy and poor evolutionary design... There are brains out there with more neurons per sq-inch than our own... we could be even better.

The point is that somehow we got from pond slime to a brain that has the the computing power (even if not utilized) of 38 quadrillion applications per second and none of it by design! There's a LOL for you. I'm starting to think this evolution thing is some kind of magic power guiding the forces of nature to go from random lifelessness to ever increasing complexity, all along representing absurdly large reversals in local entropy.

Science depends on precision. If a claim cannot be verified by testing and observation, it should not be declared to be fact, it should be declared to be hypothetical. But this isn't what evolutionists do, they declare all too often, with absolute certainty that a whole train of radical species developments occurred with certainty.

Well.... maybe, if you were to read the actual scientific papers, you'd find that the language employed is much more in line with "we think that", "this could be", "it looks like", "the analysis suggests", etc...

That isn't the kind of language used too often around here.

[pocaracas]

If you stop being wrong, you may become right!

Entropy is entropy. Not information.
The term entropy can be applied to information as you pointed out, but that's not the physical entropy to which you allude when you desire to make "change of entropy" always positive.
Know where the analogy fails and you may come to realize how wrong you've been.

Living beings have become more complex at the expense of energy. Energy that mainly comes from the sun. And the sun is increasing the entropy of the solar system much more than any local dip in entropy on the surface of this planet.
That's it. Stop trotting out your ignorance of what entropy is and how it works.

What I asked was how the application of heat and cosmic rays, plus the occasional space rock add to the pool of information within the DNA. Any answers?

There are many very complex answers.
And Esq has provided you with a bunch of info and links to even more info on how that happens.

Sadly, for you, there's no simple answer.... except the erroneous "god-did-it".

LOL!
Does your brain work like a computer, now?
A good deal of it is dedicated to vision analysis - how many computers out there can see and recognize stuff like our brains can?
And, in parallel, process sound, smell, touch, balance, sense of self, keep track of where all our parts are and what they're doing.... keep track of the requirements of our own bodies.... and think.
Not to mention all the memory. How many neurons are dedicated to memory storage, recall, updating, etc?
Also... redundancy and poor evolutionary design... There are brains out there with more neurons per sq-inch than our own... we could be even better.

The point is that somehow we got from pond slime to a brain that has the the computing power (even if not utilized) of 38 quadrillion applications per second and none of it by design! There's a LOL for you. I'm starting to think this evolution thing is some kind of magic power guiding the forces of nature to go from random lifelessness to ever increasing complexity, all along representing absurdly large reversals in local entropy.

Somehow... and, according to the fossil record, it didn't happen in the blink of an eye, did it?
Why do you assume it did?

Have you ever encountered an endothermic chemical reaction?
[url=]Here are a few examples[/url], to refresh your memory:
"
reaction of barium hydroxide octahydrate crystals with dry ammonium chloride
dissolving ammonium chloride in water
reaction of thionyl chloride (SOCl2) with cobalt(II) sulfate heptahydrate
mixing water and ammonium nitrate
mixing water with potassium chloride
reacting ethanoic acid with sodium carbonate
photosynthesis (chlorophyll is used to react carbon dioxide plus water plus energy to make glucose and oxygen)
"

Being endothermic.... all these reduce the local entropy.
Show us where a god is at work, in them.

Well.... maybe, if you were to read the actual scientific papers, you'd find that the language employed is much more in line with "we think that", "this could be", "it looks like", "the analysis suggests", etc...

That isn't the kind of language used too often around here.

Maybe, because, around here, we use layman's terms?
Maybe because we think that the scientists are right in their analyses and copy the results as if they're proven beyond a doubt?

But.... evolution is a fact. The details may be up for discussion, but the overall notion that species evolved on this planet... that's proven beyond a doubt.

[AJW333]

"information" is not some inherent property or quantity of an object, it's a post hoc meaning applied after a string of potentially unguided characters or processes are interpreted by a mind and scanned for repeating patters and so on.

Information is an inherent property of DNA. In fact the information stored in DNA is enormous. It makes no difference that a third party is aware or unaware of it, that is irrelevant. The ability of the DNA to self diagnose a fault and to then apply a correction is certainly evidence of inherent information.

Given that living systems with DNA have shown a progressive and very large increase in information, we can say that evolution requires entropy to be reversed in a step by step fashion over millions of years.

... Except that now we're talking about a definition of entropy that is not physically impossible, and is hence not an argument against evolution. In fact, I'm beginning to suspect you have no idea what either definition of entropy means, because the fucking Wikipedia article provides an absolutely mundane example of a decrease in informational entropy right there in its introduction.

But we aren't talking about a small reversal in disorder when it comes to DNA. We are talking about going from nothing living to the human genetic code which is 3 billion bits long. This represents a massive reversal of disorder, against all odds.

Entropy in information theory refers to uncertainty in deriving predictions about information, it fully accepts as a foundational principle that information can be naturally occurring, and that the entropy inherent in that information can rise and fall depending on numerous factors influencing the results: the person who coined the usage and came up with its measurements used coin tosses as the primary unit of measurement (are you saying that the outcomes of coin tosses are intelligently designed, because in this context they have information?) and demonstrates how entropy within that set up can both increase and decrease . In the case of a coin toss making entropy decrease is as simple as weighting the coin such that one outcome is more probable than the other, decreasing the level of uncertainty in predicting the outcome of any given toss.

But this requires intelligent input doesn't it? In evolution, there is no intelligent input because that would indicate design, and we can't have that can we?

Decreases in entropy are not precluded in information theory and are, in fact, trivially easy to come across: the lynchpin of your argument falls away, if you're using this definition and, if you switch to thermodynamic entropy then my observations about cosmic rays are perfectly apt.

I've no problem with isolated reversals in entropy, that isn't the problem. It is the scale of the reversals required for life that is the problem.

[Esquilax]

If DNA mutations are the result of copying errors, then we should see very few large-scale changes to the DNA.

... We do, in comparison to the literally countless numbers of small-scale changes that we see in nature, every single time a population reproduces. It's not my fault that you're unfamiliar with this.

And actually, wait: are you now disputing the mechanism behind mutations? I mean, granted, there are other mechanisms, like gene duplication, gene damage and so on, but the majority of mutations come about via transcription errors during reproduction- humans get at least sixty mutations during that time, for example, and given how evolutionary changes mainly occur over generations, it plays a large role there as well. Are you seriously suggesting something else, or just desperately scrabbling for another hole to poke?

So how would that account for the proposed evolution of thousands of wildly different organisms from the same source of primitive unicellular organisms?

Millions of years and a correspondingly large number of generations? You are aware that most organisms reproduce way faster than even humans do, and human reproduction begins occurring after less than two decades for any given human, yes? Millions of years can easily generate trillions of generations for transcription errors to occur in, expanding exponentially as populations grow and diversify. This is another one of those cases where you're unjustifiably incredulous, but an actual understanding of the scale of what we're talking about renders your reaction utterly nonsensical.

How on earth do you get from a simple bacteria with a tiny number of proteins to a human body which makes 100,000 of them, when all you are doing is copying existing DNA?

Didn't we just establish that you aren't just copying DNA, you're also introducing transcription errors caused by an imperfect copying mechanism, sometimes to the point of straight up duplicating genes? I feel like we just got there given that you yourself acknowledged we were talking about "copying errors." The fact that you're questioning this at all, the way you're doing it, hints to me that you've got no real understanding of this mechanism at all.

My figures of 1:10^500 to make a single human protein look even more remote given that the DNA is actively fighting against the formation of anything different to what is already extant. Add to this the problem that the majority of uncorrected mutations take information out of the DNA,

"By examining the homologous protein sequences, de Jong and Rydén (1981) observed that deletions of amino acids occurred about four times more frequently than insertions [5]. Deletion events also outnumbered insertions for processed pseudogenes [6-9]. Deletions are about twice as frequent as insertions for nuclear DNA, and in mitochondrial DNA, deletions occur at a slightly higher frequency than insertions [10]. Deletion events are also found more common than insertions in both mouse and rat [11-13]." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2671719/

Information is irrelevant to this, and the DNA isn't "fighting" against anything. Do your research before you make statements.

And now we're going to play a nice game of "things you conveniently omitted from your citation," which I'm sure will be fun for everyone:

The paper is nine years old. It specifically refers to Mammalian genomes and, obviously, modern Mammals alone, and is thus not something you can extrapolate back into a truism for all of history. The sample size of 18 is not high, and thus further reason not to take this as true for all of biological history, let alone to make the absurdly overreaching claim that you did with it. Actually reading the discussion of the results, instead of cherry picking a single paragraph of the introduction and going no further shows that the report's authors peg insertions and deletions both as sources of genomic divergence in evolution, meaning that they don't take their own results as evidence against evolution, but rather for it, which takes the wind completely out of your sails. And finally, just to show exactly how dishonest/ignorant you're being about this citation, this is the line directly preceding the part you quoted: "Therefore, the study of the patterns of insertion and deletion is necessary to understand the mammalian evolution."

Bolding mine. So, to recap: the people you're quoting for evidence against evolution not only accept that evolution happens, but consider the results of their work to be vital in understanding how it happens. So you need to ask yourself: is there maybe something you've missed in their paper that they understand, but you don't? I mean, you clearly consider these authors to be valid sources of truth, given that you quoted them, so what is there that you've misunderstood, in using their paper to come to the exact opposite conclusion that they did? Are we supposed to take the trained scientists who know their stuff and who you yourself want us to take seriously, seriously? Or are we just supposed to discard their conclusions wherever they disagree with yours?

Are we just supposed to follow your presuppositions, even when you evidently cannot adequately or even knowledgeably defend them?

My requirements are not unreasonably high. If you want to say something is fact, it has to be proven, otherwise call it hypothetical.

If you demand that a thing be directly observed before it can be considered a fact, and yet hold to a belief that you have never observed yourself and call it factual, then you are being unreasonable. I believe the scientific term for what you'd be there is "hypocrite".

If you look at the complex interdependent systems that occur in nature and especially the human body, it is obvious that it has been designed. DNA is a 3000,000,000 piece code that could not have formed through random processes. Complex codes do not create themselves. So if the evidence indicates design, then there must be a designer. The evidence for God is in the complex design of living things, so the more we know about the complexities of life, the more evidence there is for the existence of God.

"If I keep subtracting from zero, I'll definitely reach one eventually!"

How can a single entity be made of multiple parts? It isn't hard.

The board of a company is a single entity made up of multiple persons.

But you're not saying god is a corporation. You're saying he's his own entity, plus also two other entities, one of which is literally also a person. It's not remotely the same thing.

There's less magic in corporations, for one.

What I asked was how the application of heat and cosmic rays, plus the occasional space rock add to the pool of information within the DNA. Any answers?

Yes: information is irrelevant. It is derived from DNA after examination, not during its origins and construction. You're just stringing buzzwords together with no understanding of their usage.

The point is that somehow we got from pond slime to a brain that has the the computing power (even if not utilized) of 38 quadrillion applications per second and none of it by design! There's a LOL for you. I'm starting to think this evolution thing is some kind of magic power guiding the forces of nature to go from random lifelessness to ever increasing complexity, all along representing absurdly large reversals in local entropy.

"I don't understand it, therefore I think it's magic, therefore it's impossible!"

Are you aware of the argument from personal incredulity fallacy, by chance?

That isn't the kind of language used too often around here.

We're talking to a dullard with too high an opinion of his limited knowledge base, not writing scientific papers. I don't know if you noticed, but this isn't a science journal.

[AJW333]

Have you ever encountered an endothermic chemical reaction?
Here are a few examples, to refresh your memory:
"
   reaction of barium hydroxide octahydrate crystals with dry ammonium chloride
   dissolving ammonium chloride in water
   reaction of thionyl chloride (SOCl2) with cobalt(II) sulfate heptahydrate
   mixing water and ammonium nitrate
   mixing water with potassium chloride
   reacting ethanoic acid with sodium carbonate
   photosynthesis (chlorophyll is used to react carbon dioxide plus water plus energy to make glucose and oxygen)

Being endothermic.... all these reduce the local entropy.
Show us where a god is at work, in them.

I don't see the relevance here. Small, localized reductions in entropy are not an issue. Massive reversals are. Pond slime to the human brain is gigantic, no mater how long it takes.