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From David H

Many people have responded to your questions and many of them have far more knowledge of the specifics of evolution than I do. However, let me give my layman’s response. There are basically two views of the origins and development of mankind: Theism and evolution. Theism (not just Christianity) postulates that a god created the universe, the earth and all living creatures essentially as they now exist; evolution postulates that man, chimps, dogs, cats etc. all evolved from nature’s previous attempts.

The case for the Christian view comes from a couple of short stories that were written about three thousand years ago. The case for evolution comes about as a result of knowledge acquired by mankind during the past three thousand years.

Three thousand years ago man’s mode of transportation consisted of walking and riding on the backs of oxen and donkeys or in a cart being drawn by them and traveling short distances in boats rowed or driven by the wind. Today we have bicycles, motorcycles, cars, steamships, jet planes to name just a few.

Three thousand years ago man lived in rudimentary mud houses and peed in the streets or in the woods. Today we live in houses with electricity, central heat and air conditioning. We have indoor bathtubs, toilets, sinks and dishwashers. In our living rooms we can enjoy “live” entertainment from the finest athletes and entertainers from around the world.

Three thousand years ago man ate food that was grown or raised in the immediate area. Today we enjoy foods from around the world: Caviar from Russia, Scotch from Scotland, Fruits and vegetables from Central America beef and grains from the American Midwest and can enjoy these at any time of the year.

Three thousand years ago man communicated mostly by oral means and a little writing. Communications from one town to another was slow; communications around the world were impossible. Today I (and you) can sit in front of a computer and communicate instantly with people all around the globe.

Three thousand years ago a person with bad eyesight was destined to fumble around; a person with bad teeth lost them or had them pulled out painfully. Today one can wear eyeglasses or contact lenses or (within the past ten years) get surgery that reshapes the eye to give one 20/20 vision. Today one can go to a dentist and have their teeth straightened and whitened, removed painlessly and replaced if necessary.

I could go on. The point is that much has changed over three thousand years. What has driven these changes is man’s continual thirst for knowledge. Every generation (with some setbacks, specifically the Christian dominated dark ages) knows more than the previous generation.

The general gist of your question was “do I know everything about evolution”. No, I don’t. I also don’t know everything about how a television or a computer works, what really keeps something as big as a 747 in the air, how a laser works, how to breed cattle, how to produce the best grains, how to make fertilizers, etc. However, I do have a basic knowledge of these things. I also have a basic understanding of and belief in things not so tangible: gravity, light and sound, matter to energy conversion, the size and age of the universe, plate tectonics, anesthesia and, yes, evolution. These are things studied by people far more specialized in their fields than I can be. I also realize that in all sciences things are constantly changing as more knowledge is gained. First we thought that the basic building blocks of all matter was the atom, then we learned about the nucleus and the electrons, now we know about quarks and (possibly) strings. First we thought the earth is as it has always been, then we learned about the ice ages, erosion that makes the Grand Canyon possible, and the very shifting of the continents.

The science of evolution is only one of the many sciences that contradict the theistic versions of creation. Others, to name just a few, are astronomy, physics, geography and biology. To believe in the theistic versions of creation, I would have to disbelieve in these sciences also. If one believes in science, and the evidence is all around us, then one must believe in all sciences. To believe in all sciences except evolution is nonsense. A rational person cannot pick and choose which sciences to believe any more than a rational person should pick and choose which parts of the bible to believe. As hard as it is for me to understand the mentality of biblical literalists, I give them more credit than people who believe in some parts of the bible but not all of the bible.

Oolon Colluphid

Really? Fascinating, given your position. May I ask to what level you studied it?

Then you know that the mammalian retina is set in backwards, so that the nerve wiring is in the way of incoming photons, and their exit from the retina leaves a blind spot. Yes it’s still very good... but it could so easily have been better. Why would a creator do that? Any idea why it is so fundamentally flawed, yet it’s the ‘right’ way round in that pinnacle of his purpose, the squid?

Yes thanks.

(Anyone know how fast DNA replicates at a BP rate? I’ll look it up later, I’m sure it’s in Lewin.) Do you know how the cascades of genes regulate embryonic development? Pretty amazing if you ask me! In fact, in amazingness, it pees all over your example from a very high altitude. So? Wanna talk bat sonar? Bacterial flagella? The Krebs cycle? Brains? Fig and wasp symbiosis? Maybe you’d prefer the bombardier beetle? Do you honestly think that the people who spend their lives studying the living world haven’t noticed how amazing it is? That they would give up on the apparent obviousness of a creator without good reason?

In mammals; and rubbish anyway. It is not “crucial for constant vision”, only for constant accurate image-forming. Or are you claiming that without these features the eye would be completely insensitive to light?

... still based on incredulity.

Vertebrates have had at least a thousand million generations’ practice at fine-tuning their eyes. I’m inclined to think that at the present rate of growth, it won’t be even a million years till we can do such things. So?

Yeah? So simply being able to sense light is of no advantage. I suggest you find someone with glasses and tell them that because their vision isn’t perfect, they might as well have their eyes removed. You really haven’t read my posts I linked to have you? Please do so.

Do you think that the tremor-less eyes of limpets, flatworms, insects, molluscs etc etc are of no use to them then? For a simple enough creature, “grey and blotchy” is good enough, an improvement on “more uniformly grey and less blotchy”, and much better than nothing at all. If you think these things have tremors etc, please provide some evidence.

Well it’s not an eye then. But I never said it was, in anything even remotely like mammalian terms. It’s a cell organelle.

And the difference is...? It gets called an eyespot because that’s a handy way to describe a light-sensing piece of equipment. Why heat-sensing? Why not chemical-sensing (what we, for airborne molecules, call smell)? Gravity-direction sensing (works for plant cells)? And why “adapted to light”? Surely you don’t mean it started as one thing and is now used for another? That, my friend, would be evolution.

Read my bloody posts then! It’s not fair for the regulars to have to scroll past long posts they’ve already seen, but I’ll revise and post here if I must (ie if you’re really too lazy to follow a couple of links). They are merely an outline, but they might give you a clue since you don’t currently have one. The first part is about halfway down <a href="http://ii-f.ws/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=001531&p=" target="_blank">here</a>, and it continues about 3/4 the way down <a href="http://ii-f.ws/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=001471&p=3" target="_blank">here</a>.

In a nutshell, the ‘how’ is, step by step, each a slight improvement on what was there previously. Not in one big jump. That is waaay too improbable, and the whole damn point.

A mutation? A mutation? I hope you are only feigning such ignorance and stupidity. It’s not one mutation. It’s millions, all random, some worse, some neutral, some better, and only keeping the ones that work. Repeated algorithmically ad infinitum.

And what, exactly, do you think ‘induces’ the mutations that led to different beak shapes in Galapagos finches -- the weather? And to the desirable traits in dogs -- breeders’ wishes? This biology you say you’ve studied -- come on, be honest, it didn’t include genetics did it?

Well it clearly blew your ability to follow a link on a bulletin board.

You doubt it?! Yet you think you know enough to criticise the single most important theory in biology?
1859 Origin published.
1882 Darwin died.
c.1900 Mendel’s work on particulate inheritance rediscovered.
1940 DNA confirmed as the molecule on which the genetic code resides.
1950 First X-ray photograph of DNA.
1953 Watson and Crick describe the molecular structure of DNA, leading to an understanding of how the genetic code leads to protein synthesis.

Yeah I doubt he knew about it too .

Others have covered the vitamin C thing, I’ll just add that you really ought to read the article <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/molecular-genetics.html" target="_blank">Plagiarised errors and molecular genetics</a>.

Try here:
<a href="http://skepticfriends.org/dawnflatearth.asp" target="_blank">http://skepticfriends.org/dawnflatearth.asp</a>

Try here:
<a href="http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Temple/9917/ffc/insects.html" target="_blank">http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Temple/9917/ffc/insects.html</a>

How so? 1 Kings 7:23 is pretty specific:
“And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about. That whole chapter is quite precise in its descriptions of stuff. Where does it say “approximately”? 7:24 says: “And under the brim of it round about there were knops compassing it, ten in a cubit, compassing the sea round about.” Now, I’m not sure (or particularly interested in) what ‘knops’ are. But if those casting them only made the 300 the bible tells us they should have needed, they’d have been 14 short (or the diameter was around 9½ cubits, not 10).

Don’t undersell your ‘argument’. It’s all animals, plants, protists, fungi, bacteria, viruses... every living thing. But basic probability theory will show you that given enough time (attempts), even really improbable things will very probably happen. Three and a half thousand million years is a very very long time. With evolution, the probability of each individual step need not be very low, because it’s cumulative.

Quite right, it doesn’t. But it’s not supposed to. Evolution is what you get once you have replicators. Getting those, getting life from non-life, is called abiogenesis (or protobiogenesis), and is the province of biochemists and organic chemists. Try a search for ‘RNA world’ or Cairns Smith’s clay crystals as a start.

I note that you missed (or ignored) the most important questions I asked, so I’ll repeat:

Where lies the magic uncrossable boundary between ‘kinds’? How do you know? (You should note that ‘species’ isn’t it, because the Galapagos finches are different species, and that <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html" target="_blank"> speciation has been observed</a>. In previous discussions here, genus and family have been claimed; both have numerous counter-examples and problems. So what do you think?

And on what grounds do you think that accumulated small changes could not lead, over time, to radical differences? Again I link:
<a href="http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/fossil_series.html" target="_blank">http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/fossil_series.html</a>
and again I ask: how is that different from the dog skulls example?

Best of luck in your research.

TTFN, Oolon

[ January 09, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

hezekiah jones

I'm sorry, but that just made me laugh.

<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=%22electromagnetic+spectrum%22" target="_blank">How Roy G. Biv lost a vowel</a>.

DarkBronzePlant

I've been lurking around this thread for awhile, finding it entertaining and educational, from both sides. I rarely post in Evolution/Creation because, frankly, science has always been my worst subject.

Regardless, I'll throw two things out with regards to the eye discussion. First, it seems to me that seeing fleeting images of grey, while not as useful as having "constant vision", would be an advantage over not seeing anything at all; i.e. the pigmented nerve cells, not capable of tremors, would still provide an advantage for an organism to be able to detect movement and respond to it.

Second, and I'm gonna have to search for evidence for this, but isn't this how cats hunt insects and small animals? I had heard awhile ago that cats can actually see in the same manner that some security cameras "see"; that is, they see what amounts to a positive image overlayed with a negative image snapped a split-second later, so all they see is grey (the two images "cancelled out") when there is no movement, but when there is movement, then they see the chape of the moving object. Very similar to the non-tremoring eye descried by davidH.

I know that this mechanism is used in some types of security cameras/motion detectors. Anyone know if this is true with cats as well? Either way, it would seem to indicate an advantage, not only over no vision at all, but also sometimes over constant vision.

bluefugue

I don't normally play post-groupie, but Oolon, I just have to say...

<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

That was one of the most hilarious rebuttals I've ever read.

Arrowman

David, apart from the excellent information which is being given to you above (Will you read it, not skim it? Will you understand it?) I'd just like to remind you that a few posts back you were shown where your creationist source had lied about the Darwin "eye quote".

This is perhaps the best-known lie or misrepresentation perpetrated by the creationist leadership. There are many others, and your posts indicate that you have bee influenced by many of them.

If you study this subject with a genuinely open mind, you will discover that the creationist literature is littered with these lies, misrepresentations, distortions, omissions and half-truths.

Yes, yes, I know about Nebraska Man etc. But that fact is that the number of frauds, hoaxes, lies or major errors in the scientific literature can be counted on the fingers of one hand (well, not quite, but there's not many) - and that these have all been exposed and rebutted by other scientists - never by creationists. Meanwhile, no matter how many times creationist lies are exposed, they continue to be published.

As I said, if you study this subject you will find this out. And once you discover the incredible dishonesty and incompetence of the creationist sources, you may be led to change your thinking about creationism as "science" - whether or not that changes your religious beliefs.

Are you brave enough to take that journey?

davidH

Can't write a lot tonight cause I have to get to bed. I was out but I thought I'll just write this and answer your questions later.

You still haven't explained to me what mutations could have caused even a rod to be formed. I would very much like you to explain this here. No one has yet provided me with a satisfactory answer. Plus if you think about it, the very first mutations couldn't have caused anything useful could they? Maybe the pigment, maybe something else - but I don't see why that should have been carried on in the genetic material as at that early stage those couldn't have had any clear benefit. So what was the point and how could they have been passed on? Plus what's to even say that another mutation should occur that would further bring the separate "parts" of the rod cell together? You see, it's this that I can't understand.
Would someone give me a clear answer to this?

P.S I did follow all your previous web links and read them too. And about Darwin quote, I merely put in what Darwin said about the eye.

Have to go here. Just want some straight answers that's all.

One more thing - if evolution doesn't provide a proven explanation of how the nucleic acids first came about then doesn't that put a question mark over all evolution? If they said that was how it happened but can't give any proof of it or a satisfactory answer then how can you just accept it?

tronvillain

Why would you need a whole rod? You get phototaxis in pigmented prokaryotes today. At the most basic, you need something that responds to light, and a mechanism linking that response to behavior - this could theoretically be done with two molecules. Once you have the light responsive molecule, which could be totally neutral to selection, any mutations which link that response to behavior will be favoured.

How the first nucleic acids came about is irrelevant to evolution. Where the first cell came from is irrelevant to evolution. Evolution would still work even if a god mademade them, or if they came from outer space, or if they were sent from the future.

Dr Rick

</strong>

You've been provided with numerous responses, links, and references that outline very clearly how a complex eye could evolve from simple origins. For instance, on one of the linked threads Peez posted:

Our eye evolved from a primitive eye-like structure, which is easy to see from the nonsensical arrangement of the parts of our eye. Primitive eye-like structures may be found in many extant organisms such as Dugesia. The primitive eye apparently evolved from cells already present in the organism: pigmented cells and photoreceptive cells. Pigmented cells are widespread in organisms and are not necessarily involved in vision. Photoreceptive cells are also found outside of any eye-like structure. Pigmented cells simply require a pigment (a chemical that absorbs light). There are many such chemicals found in organisms, often being produced for functions unrelated to their colour (e.g. haemoglobin). All you need to get a pigmented cell is to have a cell produce lots of one of these chemicals (that the cell was producing for other purposes anyhow) in the cell.

If you had really read the links provided, you would have seen Peez's post and known this question had already been answered. Consider reading the replies and links and posting a rebuttal rather than re-phrasing the same previously answered questions.

</strong>

The Darwin quote was out of context to the point that its original meaning was misrepresented by you; that demonstates either ignorance and/or dishonesty.

Valentine Pontifex

"Rude" is not the word I would use. "Stealing" is one of words I might use for the situation.

And if I am not mistaking that is a violation of the Decalogue that those types just love to post.

"Don't steal; thou'lt never thus complete
Successfully in business. Cheat."
- Devil's Dictionary
:-)