ericmurphy

Dave, one thing I have to ask myself is how long you can go on misinterpreting what Crow is saying when it's been explained to you over, and over, and over again?

Crow's concern is that modern medical technology is reducing the effectiveness of natural selection in eliminating deleterious mutations. What is so complicated about this? I was aware of this problem when I was in junior high school. Any thinking person can see the problem here. How you can pervert this line of reasoning to support the argument that Neanderthals were somehow genetically superior to modern humans is anyone's guess.

We dealt with this months ago on AtBC, for god's sake.

ck1

As Eric points out, this has been explained to you before. Crow's concern is for our evolutionary future, predicting that modern improvements have reduced the ability of natural selection (QTS) to remove or balance bad mutations. Crow clearly indicates that this subversion of selection did not operate in our distant past.

VoxRat

When challenged to support this:Sure enough. Just as I retrodicted. You have misrepresented your source. The fact that 99% of species have gone extinct, and the fact that Homo sapiens is likely to join them, says nothing about "mutational meltdown". Species go extinct from all kinds of causes.

Sven

Dating pyramids is not controversial at all. A few crackpots writing silly books does not create a scientific controversy.

Withered

Thanks PappyJack. Much appreciated.

I see above that my consideration of post flood manpower availibility as regards massive construction projects is easily refuted if you simply presume that the people available were really, really healthy.

Dave Hawkins

Voxrat, CK and Eric ... It appears to me that you are engaging in wishful thinking. It seems that you, like Crow, have a pre-commitment to the evolutionary view of the Origin of Species, thus you cannot allow yourself to accept the clear message of the data presented to you by Crow, Kondrashov and others. Crow is as clear as can be both with his "stone age" statement and his "bomb" statement. He makes it quite clear that if we didn't have modern medicine to keep us alive, we'd be in worse shape than our ancestors. It blows my mind that you cannot see this ... but then it blows my mind that you think the global flood is myth. I (and Dr. Sanford) will continue to spread this message to an ever-widening audience because it is the truth. You've had your opportunity to show me why I'm wrong, and you have not done so. It's high time that people get informed.

BTW ... someone asked how I knew that Sanford rejected his evolutionary views because of data like this ... the answer is right in his book Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome (or via: amazon.co.uk). If you purchase only ONE creationist book in your entire life ... this is the one I would recommend. Sanford is a top notch geneticist and he is now a YEC because of the data in his own specialized field. Sounds a lot like Tipler (though Tipler's not a YEC).

Dave Hawkins

So we disagree on our ancestors being superior genetically ... oh well ...

Returning to the Flood and the Great Pyramid ... Pappy Jack ... Can you explain WHY you reject my points 1, 2, & 4? I might give in on the anomalistic year b/c I haven't seen Davidson's justification for the trapezoid-ness. But his analysis seems very straightforward for the other two year values. What does the discussion in this thread about PI have to do with refuting Smyth's contention that the builders knew a very precise value for it? I fail to see your logic there. And finally, where have you refuted the geodesic inferences? I missed that too.

Amaleq13

Yes, he is and that is why it is so annoying that you continue to misinterpret him. It is really starting to looking willful.

Crow makes it quite clear that we would be in worse shape because we've used technology to negate the natural selection pressures (eg infant mortality) that helped eliminate deleterious mutations from the gene pool of our ancestors.

All Crow is saying is that more of our ancestors died before reproducing deleterious mutations and, as a result, we've got more accumulated than they did. More of them died because they didn't have the benefits of the technology we've enjoyed for the last few centuries.

Amaleq13

Make up your mind, Dave.

What we disagree on is your deeply flawed misinterpretation of Crow.

You are free to continue to disagree with yourself about whether you want to claim our ancestors had superior DNA or not. Just stop misusing Crow. :banghead:

Pappy Jack

Dave, you continue to miss the point.

Any great mass of data derived from measuring (more or less accurately) the dimensions of any great structure, can be manipulated and/or fudged to produce correlations of one sort or another without those correlations being part of a secret message from the architects to later generations about their 'advanced scientific knowledge', cf. Martin Gardner's simple demonstration with the Washington Monument that I referred you to earlier. And this is the point: Smyth (and everyone else who went down the same route) manipulates, fudges or just downright misrepresents the data to produce the results they want.

We can revisit the incorporation of the value of pi in the Great Pyramid if you like, but as you steadfastly refused to acknowledge the reasons that were explained to you at length in the Flood Debate Commentary thread at richarddawkins for its appearance in deconstructions of the Pyramid's dimensions (and Mike's explanation was overwhelmingly convincing, even if you find the implications of using a circular measuring device incomprehensible), this would just seem to be a waste of bandwidth.