Denial of Evolution VII (2015)

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by davewhite04, Jan 5, 2015.

  1. Dr_Toad It's green! Valued Senior Member

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    I don't know why, but I will reply to this silliness.

    If 999 mutations are bad and one is good, then the 999 will not be as likely to have viable offspring as the one. Distributed in time, the beneficial mutation will prevail.

    I just can't understand what went so wrong with Homo Sapiens...
     
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  3. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Correct! And the one beneficial mutation is more likely to persist and be passed down, possibly causing morphological change.

    The last point of your post was sheer lunacy. I'm sorry, but I'm tired, and at such times my opinions become more unvarnished. I did predict you'd attempt to implicate water, however.
     
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  5. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    There is a difference between applied science and pure science. Applied science is about making money, such as developing new drugs and high price treatments. Applied science employs methods that are fast and cost effective so one can compete in a fast moving market place. Statistics is useful for this purpose because it does not have the requirement of having to pain scathingly predict first, using logic, before you can try anything. The logically approach is a pure science method, that requires all the ducks have to be in a row, so a magic eight ball is not used to cover blemishes. If the goal is to make money, applied tools are used.

    What tends to happen is because good drugs and good treatments constantly come to market (employ the majority of life scientists) one assumes this is because the methods used reflects pure science. Pure science is too slow if the goal is to make money; tools are used to speed up the process.

    The analogy of applied science is a good chef does not have to have a degree in food chemistry to make a soufflé rise. He can do this with trial and error and empirical observations, while completely ignoring details that occur at the chemical level. This efficiency is what applied science is all about. A pure science approach would start with the food chemistry and predict what is needed to make a soufflé and get it right the first try.

    To make a new food texture, the empirical chef will have hunch for a starting place based on experience and then try a bunch of things. This will be faster that having to define the chemical logic before you can run the proving experiment. When you develop new drugs you don't need to include water, because the applied approach of the chefs lumps this empirically. The assumption is water does not matter and can be substituted like vanilla or chocolate. The assumptions of this simplifying approach, although useful to expedite products to market, is applied to evolution; water can be substituted and therefore ignored. This topic does not allow me to deal with physical chemists who understand the significance of water and organics.

    In terms of chef talk, the idea of one beneficial mutation being passed down and selected will work if there is some unspoken rule of nature that says that is can only be 1 mutation per person, at a time. If there are two or more mutations per person, the odds are the second and third will be bad, not good. If you have a bad mutation and a good mutation in the same person, this is not natural selection but natural attrition. Selection is the best of the best not what is left over. This process of selection is good for drugs.

    The analogy is we have 1000 men standing around with a gun that can shot 1000 bullets. We take one bullet out and require each one put the gun to their head and pull the trigger. The last one standing is selected and gets all the spoils of the other 999. This is not a very good system. It may work to make money but it defies pure and natural logic.
     
    Last edited: Feb 11, 2015
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  7. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

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    Let's leave aside the nonsense about pure vs applied science.
    It's true that organisms are selected, not the traits themselves; therefore it is very difficult to say that individual properties of specific organisms are selected for. However, you seem to be making up the probabilities on good vs. bad mutations, you aren't including any probabilities for neutral mutations, and you seem to be ignoring the degree to which a mutation might be good or bad.
    You might not like the way that nature works, but that's not an argument against a description of nature. Lots of racists like to imagine biological purity, but it doesn't really exist.
     
  8. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    I am not a biologist and therefore I don't know the exact odds. If someone wants to provide that I will use the correct numbers in my arguments. The point is statistics is used to analyze data. We can apply statistics to data that already has a logical explanation. That does not mean it changes into chaos random because we used the method.

    We could run an experiment, where we have a logical correlation but not tell the researcher that it is logical. They will be told to run it as statistical. They will assume the relationship is based on odds because the method will work. If we never tell them they will never assume it was logical, because they will not take the time to reason it out, if the method is so much easier to employ.

    I remember doing a large experiment that had political implications. I knew about the logic of the tests and predicted how it would work. But not everyone was a skilled in this area. They hired a statistician to apply the method parallel to me, so they had margin of error to cover rear ends in case chaos showed up at the party. To the many, this was assumed to be random event subject to chance but to me it was based on cause and effect. In the end, cause and effect won with no need for any butt saving fudge factoring. If I had not been there, as the voice of reason, the brain trust would have assume random with the project same when chaos took a wrong turn.
     
  9. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Simple. Evil requires intelligence.
    Violence, evil and corruption increase viability.

    "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree."
    Psalm 37:35
     
  10. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

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    One can apply statistics to anything. A logical explanation is not required. Nor does the presence of an offered explanation mean that the explanation is correct. Analysis using statistics is one way to test an offered explanation, regardless of how good that explanation sounds.
    If the statistics on a result indicate the same correlation in every case, then one has little choice but to accept a logical relationship. However, the world rarely reveals this.
    It sounds like you come to projects with your preconceived notions and abandon the statistical evidence when it does not reveal the underlying correlations you believe to be there.
     
  11. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    That is what you have just done, by assuming the world rarely reveals logic, but is better explained by random and chaos.

    This was assumed to be true of protein folds, until the tools became available that showed protein will fold into exact folds not subject to randomness. This should have been a wake up, but because the oracle is so easy to use, nothing changed.

    To me, when I suddenly realized that so much of the cells structures fold into exact things with a probability equal to 1.0, that meant that chaos has a lot of no fly zones within the cell. These no fly zones are covered by logic. This does not seem to register to a mind biased by chance. The bias of traditions did not update when this data was shown.

    Life is about order getting the best of chaos and logic winning over random.
     
  12. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,634
    Not a bad analogy, and that is similar to how it works. To make it a bit more accurate you'd take the mutation "gun" with 1000 bullets, take out one bullet, then give it to 10,000 people. 999 die (bad mutations) 1 survives and now he has a neat gun he can hunt with (good mutation) and the remaining 9000 are unaffected. But since they don't have a neat gun, they don't get as much food as the 1, and the 1 has a huge family since he can easily feed them all with his gun.

    It's worth noting that there is no way such a system would be considered moral or intelligent; thus the absurdity of "intelligent design."
     
  13. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Yes. I work in what is much more pure science than applied science: evolutionary biology. By your own definitions, this would be a branch of the sciences more determined to be right than to fudge analysis to make money. So this soi-dissant assault fails also.

    And yet every person carries several mutations, many of which are deleterious in combination. So, naturally, none of such people should be alive.

    Or is it more mathematically reasonable to expect that, averaged across a population, a given positive mutation will express an effect roughly equivalent to that of perfect prediction independent of other factors? Why, moreover, should I think that the existence of deleterious mutations is somehow tied to the existence of positive mutations within a single individual independent of all other factors? Please spare me the simplistic analogies.

    That is yet another absurd analogy. So you don't like the system by which these 999 people will die - but you've already made the claim that most mutations are going to be detrimental. So which is correct, then? You cannot claim that most mutations are detrimental and then say that the very outcome predicted by your objection is illogical. Taking for a moment that the ratio and outcome is correct, that 1 beneficial mutant (the one, apparently, with the don't die in a gun accident allele) would be the sole survivor of the population: your thought experiment is, unwittingly, a fine demonstration of the plausibility of evolution via mutation and fixation.

    I have no idea what you intend to mean by "pure and natural logic" but the system works, in fact, and demonstrably so. It would seem that it is your 'pure and natural logic' - which, again, hints at some intelligent process by which evolution occurs - is not so natural after all.
     
  14. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

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    That's not dogma, that's just what the history of scientific explanation has revealed.
    I think you will find that a fair bit of randomness does apply in the absence of enzymes.

    Nobody argues that there are not physical principles.
     
  15. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Yes.

    I would ask at what the above means, but there is the risk that some kind of response would be provoked.

    Your regard for the statistical sciences is commendable; like the environmental engineer who one day proved to me that an adjacent gas station hadn't contaminated a neighbour's lawn with benzine, because - common sense - "benzine is also produced naturally" and because his single sample on the border between the lawn and the gas station hadn't got a noticeable hit. So much easier than rationality.
     
  16. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    I'm not sure that is true. Based on the contributions of some forum members some people appear to be pure dicks. I suspect you may agree with this.
     
  17. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    The point is statistics is used to analyze data. We can apply statistics to data that already has a logical explanation. That does not mean it changes into chaos random because we used the method.

    Say we took a layman and gave him a complex rational phenomena (explained with cause and effect), within a speciality science, in which the layman lacks knowledge of the needed premises. If he was proficient in statistics he could still apply this tool to black box data. If his tool produced results, he might conclude the phenomena has a connection to statistics and chaos. His tool would apply to some degree.

    Some tools are sort of interchangeable, under certain conditions, and can do the job, even if it is not the proper tool designed for the job. If I was a plumber and had a pipe wrench, and I needed to drive a small nail, I could use my pipe wrench as a hammer. There is no real need to go back to the truck to get a hammer, if the pipe wrench can be improvised and used to drive that one nail. However, this success this does not mean the pipe wrench is the tool that was designed for driving nails. A layman who sees the plumber use his pipe wrench to drive nails, might conclude this is the correct tool for the job, since it worked.

    The value of statistics is the method is easier than reasoning, since one can use a black box and not have to fuss with all the variables inside that sealed box. One adds inputs and gets outputs. The rules of the method, does not mean the box can't be open with reason. The method assumes the box has to remain shut. If you needed all black boxes to remain closed, of course the world will look random. But if you open black boxes to look inside, then cause and effect make more sense. The key to the black box is reason.
     
  18. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    There are only two problems with the above statements: i) the meaning, and ii) the grammar. "Chaos random"?

    As above, so below: what do you mean by "a connection to statistics and chaos"? Statistics is the milieu of the expression of relationships, which can apply to an idea. Also, define "black box data".

    This is fine, so far as it goes.

    Again: clear English, please. You could write it in French or German if that would be easier.

    And you think that the static organisation of water is reasonable? Are you equating the evolutionary sciences and their methods with 'black box statistics'?
     
  19. Jake Arave Ethologist Registered Senior Member

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    I've been sitting here trying to form a coherent argument against evolution for over an hour. I got nothin'.
    If anyone else has statements to spark a debate I would love to hear them.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  20. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Water. Apparently.
     
  21. Jake Arave Ethologist Registered Senior Member

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    Wellwisher's babblings then, I take it?
     
  22. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    It is.

    I'm all for people being happy about water. Water's great! You can dissolve things in it, it fills up the ol' intra- and intercellular spaces, it forms some really nifty transient covalent bonds with things, it puts the "phobia" in hydrophobic interactions (and hydrophobia, come to think of it), but it almost certainly does not store information or confer some kind of magic on biological systems. It is a freaking solvent. It's as though someone started off on how air is an organising element to clouds, which James did above. It's the milieu. It is not a unicorn.

    Edit: solvent. Sorry. Writing about solvents here, and I'm not really a physiologist anyway.
     
  23. Ryndanangnysen Banned Banned

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    38
    When I did see this thread I was a bit surprised!

    Are there still people who believe in evolution?

    By that I mean of course macro evolution,

    Of course that whole thing is one big hoax.

    It was set up by a secret society to keep us away from so called 'occult' things

    and to 'put' us deep in scientific materialism.

    It was a hoax from the start, but a lot of people are blinded by their faith in this crap,

    I understand that.


    Nonetheles, the Emperor has No Clothes.
     

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