graden1

double post deleted

[ January 10, 2002: Message edited by: graden1 ]</p>

graden1

Thanks for the info, and the link, Coragyps. Very useful stuff. But now I've gotta go look up the conversion for ergs to joules, and also convert "acre-feet" to cubic meters, liters, or something. (I long for the day America goes fully metric.)


Later,

Grady

Howay the Toon

"illogical thought and blind faith" coming out of Northern Ireland should not be a surprise. Have you heard of Ian Paisley for instance. NI is the only part of the UK to have high levels of belief and church attendance. That's probably why its been so pleasant and peaceful all these years.

Oolon Colluphid

LOL! However, "correlation does not automatically indicate causation"

Though I think you could be on to something in this case...

Oolon

Pandora

The first Chick tract I ever saw was the one some co-worker left on my desk when I worked in veterinary research at the government offices in Belfast. I was amazed that such things existed, but even more amazed that whoever put it there was also a scientist!

N. Ireland is horribly reduced to little insular pockets which breed ignorance, intolerance and bigotry (Just check out the Orange Order – a very unpleasant group of people.)

There are many decent people in N.I, but being biased is almost a national sport, so David’s posts were no surprise to me, I doubt he’s had much practice at examining both sides of an argument.

davidH

lol, thanks for the pointers all who answered.I read up more about evolution but still haven't finished yet cause it is a big topic.

But about the eye, I'm interested to see how you would explain it in natural selection terms.
Seriously though do some research on the eye cause it is more complicated than you would think.
And a simple eye - in Darwin's terms - couldn't have been so simple if it was to distinguish light from darkness.
A lot more research has gone on and there are many things about the eye that Darwin wouldn't have known about when he made his theory.
I'd just like someone to explain it in natural selection terms.

And another thing Christianity doesn't disagree with science except on the aspect of macro evolution - evolution as seen by Darwin's finches etc doesn't contradict the Bible, however macro evolution does and that's where the opinions differ. I don't believe that everything came about over millions and millions of years - nor that it came about by blind chance.

hyzer

davidH wrote:

“And another thing Christianity doesn't disagree with science except on the aspect of macro evolution - evolution as seen by Darwin's finches etc doesn't contradict the Bible, however macro evolution does and that's where the opinions differ. I don't believe that everything came about over millions and millions of years - nor that it came about by blind chance.”

First - science does not distinguish big and little “types” of evolution. To use your term, “macro evolution” is just regular evolution over a long period of time. If you don’t understand this you need to read up some more.

Second – why are you judging the correctness of science by referring to the bible?

Third – whether or not you believe that the earth is millions of years old does not matter one bit. The earth is old.

Forth – evolution does not equate to “blind chance.” If that is what you think then you need to read up some more.

Oolon Colluphid

Thanks for coming back David! So many creationists who come here are what we call hit-and-run posters -- one note, which is extensively answered, but they’re never to be heard from again, so it seems our time’s been wasted. Good to see you back .

I wrote extensively about the plausibility of their evolution in my posts in <a href="http://ii-f.ws/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=001531&p=" target="_blank">this thread</a> (and make sure you follow on to the second instalment in <a href="http://ii-f.ws/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=001471&p=3" target="_blank">this thread</a>). (I won’t cut & paste it here to conserve bandwidth, as they’re long posts.) Please read them; they give an outline of “how [we] would explain it in natural selection terms”, just as requested.

Seriously though, do you honestly think we don’t know that? What you’ve got there is what’s known as an Argument from Personal Incredulity – you don’t know how something so amazing could have evolved (because you clearly understand little about how natural selection is supposed to work), therefore it couldn’t have.

Oh really? Here is a picture of the protozoan Euglena acus:



(See also <a href="http://www.jccc.net/~pdecell/protista/euglena.html" target="_blank">here</a>.)

The reddish blob on the right is its ‘eye spot’, which enables it to distinguish light from darkness. It is not an organ in our sense: euglenas are single-celled creatures (neither animal (they are photosynthetic) nor plants (they move under their own power via a flagellum), such things get their own phylum), so the eyespot is not a multicellular thing. It is a structure within a single cell. To be sure, it has its own complexity, but it’s got nothing on a vertebrate rod cell, let alone a vertebrate eye. How simple do you want?

What is involved in ‘distinguishing light from darkness’? Some things have more photons coming from or bouncing off them than others. Photons will hit an organism all the time, more from some directions than from others. Now, many chemicals are coloured -- not by design, it’s just that the molecules reflect some wavelengths of light and absorb others. That’s what colour is. If a photon striking such a molecule causes a change in it, or causes a nerve to fire for instance, then light from that direction has been indicated to the organism. All that’s needed is a pigmented nerve cell. (That’s one hell of a simplification: you really need to get a basic biology textbook and look up, say, rod cell, rhodopsin, opsin, etc etc.) From there on, see my posts linked above.

Very true. And none of it has refuted natural selection. In the 150 years since Origin was published, there has, as you say, been a phenomenal amount of research: all of which supports evolution. You imply that ‘evolutionists’ are still holding to Darwin’s original despite all this research. In fact, it is they who do the research. Darwin also didn’t know about genetics. I imagine you also don’t know that we humans possess a version of a gene which in nearly all other mammals makes vitamin C. Only, our version is broken, so we require vitamin C in our diets or suffer scurvy. Rather an odd thing for a creator to do, isn’t it? And it is broken by exactly the same mutation in chimpanzees and gorillas, which for heaps of other reasons are known to be our nearest relatives. Care to explain?

The vast majority of Christians, including the Pope, don’t disagree with macroevolution. Only biblical literalists do. What version of Christianity do you follow then? With biblical literalism, the disagreement is rather wider, taking in pretty much all of modern science. For the bible tells of a 6000 year old flat earth which was utterly flooded about 4000 years ago, where pi = 3, bats are birds and insects have four legs and where the sun goes round the earth. To name just a few examples. There are more <a href="http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/science.html" target="_blank">here</a>.

Then perhaps you’d care to tell us what the magic uncrossable boundary is between ‘kinds’. You should also read the formal debate between scigirl and Douglas J Bender on the topic <a href="http://ii-f.ws/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=8&t=000008" target="_blank">Is macro-evolution more than micro-evolution + time?</a>.

Well I’m sorry, but it’s true. Try for starters a browse round <a href="http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/" target="_blank">ps418’s site</a> (scroll down to the real ‘meat’ of it).

Nor do I. It came about by blind chance plus natural selection -- keeping those ‘accidents’ that happen to be improvements -- which is THE ABSOLUTE OPPOSITE OF CHANCE. I suggest you write out one hundred times “natural selection is not random”. By definition, it's selection.

I'm also curious: you apparently accept the Galapagos finches and all the other ‘microevolution’ examples, which are caused by the random element (naturally occurring mutations -- DNA copying errors) plus natural selection. So on what grounds do you think such accumulated small changes could not lead, over time, to radical differences? You do know that the plethora of dog varieties are all descended from a single wolf-shaped ancestor don’t you?

(And before you say it, it makes not the tiniest difference to the genetic material (which makes bodies) whether its survival (or not) is due to artificial or natural selection. All that matters is that at each generation, some of these naturally occurring variations reproduce, others do not. That depends on how well these varying bodies fit with the environment -- whether that is an environment including El Nino (finches), antibiotics (pathogenic bacteria), pollution (roadside plants) or human aesthetics (dogs).)

So come on: what is this immutable essence that means one sort of organism can’t change, over time, by jumping through enough generational survival hoops, into another? What is the difference between what happened to the bull terrier skull (<a href="http://nmbe0.unibe.ch/abtwt/ahst.html#Results" target="_blank">from here</a>):

1930


1950


1980


... and what is shown in the fossil record, such as all these examples of <a href="http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/fossil_series.html" target="_blank">Smooth Changes in the Fossil Record</a>?

Happy reading, and please answer these questions.

Cheers, Oolon

[ January 08, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

Quetzal

Also DavidH, if you'd like a little off-line reading on the evolution of the eye, I'd like to suggest Richard Dawkins's "Climbing Mount Improbable". He devotes an entire chapter to the evolution of eyes. One of the interesting tidbits from that chapter is that "sight" (using the term very loosely) has been independently evolved over 40 times. This proves that not only is some kind of vision sense extraordinarily useful for an organism's survival, but it's relatively easy to evolve. Even if you disagree with Dawkins overall, he presents a very readable and very convincing argument in this area.

davidH

Note you quoted this:

You say "all that's needed is a pigmented nerve cell."
I do study Biology and I have studied the eye. I know about the rods etc. But the quote that all is needed is a pigmented nerve cell isn't true. But maybe my research was wrong. I dunno.

I'll try and explain why.
Have you heard about tremors, drifts and saccades?
I'll explain abit just incase you haven't.

There are 3 imperceptibly tiny eye movements. The 3 that are mentioned above are caused by minute contractions in the six muscles attached to the outside of each eye. Every fraction of a second they very slighty shift the position of your eyes automatically without any concious effort on your part.

Tremors - the tiniest and probably the most intriguing of these movements. They cause your eyeball to be rapidly wobbled about its centre in a circular fashion. They cause the cornea and retina of your eyes to move in circles with incredibly minute diameters of approx. 1/1000 of a millimetre (or 0.00004 inch).
That is indeed a miniscule movement!!
Ok, if that wasn't enough, the thing that I find amazing about them is that they wobble your eye 30 to 70 times each second!!
On average that would mean that your eye completes 1,000,000 of these tiny circular movements in 5 1/2 hours. Pretty amazing if you ask me!

ok, now why are there tremors present in our eyes?

Well, what would happen if these tremors stopped?

If tremors and all the other eye movements stopped while you were looking at someone's face, the light sensitive cells in your retina would quickly stabilize. (by that I mean stop transmitting impulses) This is taught and I have studied it in school. If a nerve cell is continually stimulated it becomes adapted and will cease to transmit action potentials.
The light sensitive rods and cones would cease to send updated info to your brain - the image you see would fade into a uniform grey within seconds.
Only if the person moved would you see them again!
Like if they smiled - you would just see this grin appear out of the uniform grey.

(This experiment has been done in a laboratory
- I'll give you all the details this time! lol
David S. Falk, Dieter R. Brill and David G.
Stork, Seeing the Light: Optics in Nature, Photography, Colour vision, and Holography,
Haper + Row Publishers inc.,New York, 1986,
pp. 192 - 193;
Tom N. Cornsweet, Visual Perception, Academic Press, New York, 1970 pp. 399 - 404.

There's another book but I won't bother with it cause it'll just take too long! lol

So you see that a continued change in the light projected on each retina cell in an eye is crucial for constant vision. That is why our eyes supply the retina with a slightly shifting image many times each second.
Without these tremors you would have to be constantly moving the eye or altering the light in order to see anything for longer than a few seconds at a time.

Drift movements - the eye gradually drifts relatively slowly and smoothly off the target where u are looking until it reaches an angle equal to about the size of the tremor. At this point the eye automatically jerks, via a "saccade" back to it's original position.

Saccade - happen up to serval times a second are very quick, jerk type movements that are used to correct for whatever driftes are occuring.

A small way to observe this is to look at one of those spiral things - you know the one with the white and black lines.
You should be able to see a slight "shimmering" effect as if the light on those lines was moving around.
This occurs even if you try to stop it. Even if you shake your head back and forth when viewing one of these things you will see it moving about even more.
It's these tremors, saccades and drifts that are causing these.

Ok, the point I'm trying to make here is this. Think how challenging it would be for a human to create the genetic code needed to produce the fine-tuned nervous system that makes all these precise, co ordinated muscular movements (tremors, drifts and saccades) possible.

But the even bigger point that I'm trying to make is that a simple eye - as Darwin calls it couldn't have been possible. In order to see light and dark - the eye couldn't have been just a single rod or even many rods. If that were so the creature would have only seen a uniform grey - broken periodically when it moved or when the light intensity changed.
You see what I'm getting at here? We have tremors in our eyes and drifts and saccades so that we can see. Without them we wouldn't be able to see.

Imagine an animal looking for food without the tremors etc. It would see it's food on the ground then when moving towards it his vision would go all grey and blotchy - I doubt it would even be able to see a predator - let alone be able to run from it.

The eye in the picture you showed me. I would at a guess say that it would have to contain some kind of tremor method if indeed it is an eye. At a guess I would say it would be more of a heat sensor - but adapted to light.

Then again, I don't see how you believe that an eye could come about by natural selection. Surely a mutation that happened to cause an eye (cause rods containing the pigment with all the enzymes needed to break the pigment down then resynthesise it again. The nerve adaptations that lead to the brain, and an area of the brain also having somehow been affected by the mutation so that it can sense light. even this here being a simple one!) wouldn't have benefited a creature any more than those that hadn't this eye mutation.
You see what I'm getting at?
I honestly can't believe that all this could happen. What could have induced a mutation that would result in an eye? The dark?
I can't understand it. Plus the amount of DNA needed for even a simple eye as you put it would be imense! That would be one seriously huge mutation and I doubt if it would have happened.
Cause if you think about it - even one rod cell is immensly complex. Everything in it has to work together perfectly if the organism is to benefit in anyway from it.

So you see, there is a lot more in just distinguishing light. I find the eye mind blowing.

You see that Darwin had none of this knowledge when he first did the theory. Do you know what he said about the eye?

The quote is taken from:
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, J.M. Dent + Sons Ltd, London, 1971, P. 167.

And at this time he didn't even know about the tremors, drifts and saccades!! Imagine what he would have thought had he known this. It's an interesting thing to ponder.
I doubt he even knew about DNA then as well.

About the Vit C gene, I didn't know that but I do know that it's essential for respiration. But does the fact that we can't produce Vit C not show that mutation didn't just arise in useful mutations? Maybe if you research into it you may find that there is a hidden benefit? I dunno.
But to me that would suggest that we are infact maybe not related to the animals. But maybe it points that there was something that occurred and corrupted creation, it affected animals that are similar to humans eg. a Virus or something. Cause chimps and monkeys can get what humans get. So it is hardly surprising that a mutation that occured to us would also occure to them.
I'll look into it and see cause I never knew that and have to research it myself. Thanks for bringing it up.

About the Bible, I would be interested to see where it implies that the earth is flat,where it says all insects where to have 4 legs, and where it says the sun goes round the earth? Also I know the thing about Pi = 3 - that is a pretty weak one.

Quickly to end - about evolution. I know that rats can become imune to poison as any insect. And that bacteria can become immune to antibiotics. That respect of evolution I believe, I believe that God has made animals with an ability to adapt- they would have to be able to in order to survive.
But for the fact that evolution resulted from 1 organism and from it all animals came - that I can't believe because I see the odds of being far to high to be resonable.
Plus the fact that evolution doesn't give satisfactory evidence of how something came from nothing - like where the nuclei acids came from in the first place. etc.
But as i said, I'm still reading up about it and so have to wait until I have at least a complete general overview of it all.