What is the case against Evolution?

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by Seattle, Jun 15, 2019.

  1. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    Sorry, I should have elaborated.

    Theistic evolution takes into account the idea of souls, and doesn't cause a person to have to choose between the Bible and science. The third category is someone who is spiritual, perhaps religious, who doesn't believe in creationism, doesn't really follow any particular ancient/holy text, yet believes in ID. Fine line maybe but the difference is that the former category is made up of theists who reconcile their theology with science. In other words, a believer doesn't need to be a theist.

    Yea, I've heard those concepts brought up, as well. Thing is, when you believe in God, you believe that he is the creator, and that humankind is discovering his creation. For example, my belief is that God created gravity but humankind discovered the science behind it, and gave it a name. Same with all other scientific theories. When I identified as an atheist a few years back, I didn't believe any of that - rather, that the universe just ''is,'' and that science is the revealing of the mysteries of the universe.

    The difference between my beliefs as an atheist, and my beliefs as a believer now is that I believe that the mystery is God.
     
    Last edited: Jul 14, 2019
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  3. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Yes it is pointless to argue with truth.
     
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  5. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    No, this was posited by expert witnesses, such as
    And a host of expert witnesses such as Lee Smolin.
    And just a taste of the intellectual honesty of the ID team;
    https://ncse.com/library-resource/design-trial
     
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  7. globali Registered Senior Member

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    tubulin molecules do not fall from the sky. And they are not random chemicals. They need an extremely sophisticated complex machinery to produce them and to regulate their production.
     
  8. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    They self-assemble.
    Microtubule - Wikipedia

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144413/

    Note: All Eukaryotic and some propkaryotic organism have (had) microtubules in common.

    It is a common denominator in all living things. Does that tell you something?
     
    Last edited: Jul 14, 2019
  9. TheFrogger Banned Valued Senior Member

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    Evolution states that a being must survive to reproduction age in order to pass on the genes that helped them to survive to that age...

    Anything that negates this disproves evolution. A donkey? Worker ants? An infertile human being?

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  10. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    I disagree. IMO, you are looking at this from a narrow perspective.

    Not all members of a family need to reproduce. Hive species are usually divided into specific castes, some which are soldiers, workers, gardeners, herders, all sterile but responsible for the hive's health and safety.

    In an ant hive or bee hive, only the queen can lay eggs. Interestingly it is the sterile worker bees which decide what egg is marked for royalty and is fed Royal Jelly which changes an ordinary bee larva into a queen larva. After the mating swarm where the queen mates once and is fertile for the rest of her life, the drones are kicked out of the hive and left to die as their role in procreation has finished.

    A remarkable genetic tour deforce, somewhat similar to the extraordinary life cycle of butterflies. Sterile caterpillar which can only eat, and metamorphosis into a butterfly which cannot eat but can reproduce. This shows the flexibility of evolved reproduction systems and processes in individual and common survival techniques.

    Apparently mathematical evolutionary probability has been exponentially kind to genetic expression and almost any living thing you can imagine does in fact exist. The potential for variety seems almost infinite.


    Hellstrom remarked that insects are the oldest communal and individually very evolved sophisticated species. They were here first and when man fades into extinction, the insect will rise triumphant as the only structured survivor where all other life fails.

    Just think, the insect has survived 5 major extinction events where everything else, including the mightiest animals that ever lived, died and disappeared.

    The enormous variety and variations on reproductive and survival abilities argues against ID, which by definition is a very structured artificial system. Evolution is nature playing jazz, (variations on a theme).

    Did God imagine a wolf-spider and said; "there you go, I gave you eight eyes just for the fun of it". "Now I'll create a few more million IDs for all the other living things so that everybody has a shot at survival which I cannot do anything about, except for the "immortal jellyfish" and "extremophiles" and "tardigrades". "Too bad I can't make them all smart and immortal at the same time, like me".

    Sighs: "So much work to do and so little time" (6 days)........

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    ........5 times now I had to start all over.

    In contrast, natural evolution depends on large spatial surfaces and long time spans, of which there is abundance in the universe.
     
    Last edited: Jul 14, 2019
  11. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Great - competition against evolution

    Since you consider

    you must have some idea how any of the organs claimed to be Irreducible Complex actually came into existence

    Are you able to explain? If not explain yourself any links to suitibly papers?

    Cheers

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  12. Q-reeus Banned Valued Senior Member

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    Miller's basic argument is 'given the commonality of structure between TTSS and flagellum, naturally one came from the other'. I note his expert testimony offered no details as to evolutionary advantage of either arising from scratch via numerous chance mutations. And similarly what evolutionary advantage the numerous intermediates between either could have driven the conversion process on to completion. The devil is in such always missing details. They never admit to be actually proposing mysterious teleology at work.

    Just stop and think it through. For a flagellum to come from a Type III secretory apparatus, at some point the latter must block off from being able to secrete. But it's still nowhere near able to function as a useful motor i.e flagellum. No problem if you subscribe to a mysterious teleological process driving it on I suppose.

    And on top of my issue down in Site Feedback, another mystery. No email alert for this thread since my p3 #56. Interesting.
     
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  13. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Just a minute of your time wegs.
     
  14. globali Registered Senior Member

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    To start with:
    tubulin molecules are complex proteins. They need to be translated, thus for sure they need promoters, enhancers, helicases, RNA polymerases, a DNA template, t-RNA molecules to carry the messages in the triplets, the various specific side groups to bind to the right organelles, the specific amino-acid every time, start and stop anticodons, the existence of ribosomes, post-translational modifications, etc, to name a few)
     
  15. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    I have heard this rebuttal before, but he says it much nicer than you guys do.

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  16. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Agreed. I saw Carl Sagan as probably the greatest educator of our time. If I was a "believer" in the occult, supernatural or paranormal, I would certainly be much more inclined to listen to the dulcet, logical and reasonable tones of Sagan, then perhaps the more abrasive approach of Richard Dawson for example.
     
  17. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    The God of the gaps in other words?

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  18. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    In some bacteria the flagella becomes a poison secreting stinger.
    And why should that be? If there is no survival advantage in having a flagella what is god trying to create? A useless but irreducibly complex appendage? This is becoming completely unhinged.
    Prokaryotic Cell Structure: Flagella
    Can you see how ridiculous this entire exercise is? ID proposes that god created a useless but irreducibly complex appendage to most all single celled organisms, whereas science has clearly shown the adaptive evolution from a surface secretory organella into a functional molecular (chemical) motor?

    So the flagella does have a survival advantage in providing the ability for movement. And if it does have an survival advantage, then evolution and natural selection are very much in the picture. Can't have have it both ways.

    So there is no ID argument against the evolutionary process. Now we should examine the proposal of an Intelligent Designer fashioning an irreducibly complex flagellum including motor from .....?

    What? Any raw materials available or was the flagellum created outside the body and pasted on the skin? Kinda like a copy/paste function for each flagellum on earth.

    Hey, God took one of Adam's ribs and fashioned an entire human from a bone. Neat trick. No irreducible complexity there.......

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    Last edited: Jul 15, 2019
  19. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Aren't you saying they do? God made them in the sky and made them fall on single celled bacteria where they penetrated the cell wall and set up an entire communications network.

    Or did God do all that for every bacteria? I say they form naturally much like every daisy forms a fibonacci petal sequence. It's in the DNA growth instruction. The mathematics of the varied natural (universal) growth patterns, having emerged during 14 billion years of exponential evolutionary mathematical physical interaction and complexity of pattern.

    Science does suggest a little more sane evolutionary progression from available raw materials (bio-chemical molecules) into functional patterns.

    If the idea is to present an abstract motivated architect designer of the universe, I can present an abstract non-motivated but mathematically functional architectural model, with the added knowledge of being accountable without prejudice by purely logical deduction, not love or hate.
     
    Last edited: Jul 15, 2019
  20. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, and the entire system is already in place for the assembly and division of all the other stuff inside a living organism.

    What you seemed to have missed is the ability of microtubules to function as computers and the ability to send and receive information from everything in the cell itself. It is the processor of the mitosis stage in all cells. Which means an exact copy of everything in the cell. Microtubules are fundamental to cell construction and responsible for all the patterns found in biology.
    https://www.khanacademy.org/science...-a-cell/tour-of-organelles/a/the-cytoskeleton

    Do check out the last link. It's good stuff.
     
    Last edited: Jul 15, 2019
  21. Q-reeus Banned Valued Senior Member

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    I'll be brief. Agreed someone is being unhinged. Go back and check the logic of your statements there.

    And - still no email alerts coming through for yours truly. Charming.
     
  22. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    wegs:

    It sounds like you believe in God for other reasons than the mysteries of the universe, and you're just giving God something else to do by saying he created gravity and all those other things.

    What I would ask is along the lines of: how do you know that God created gravity? I mean, you have somehow arrived at this belief that God created gravity, but based on what? Speaking for myself, I would need to see some positive evidence that points towards a god creating gravity before I accepted that God created gravity, and the same applies to any other aspect of God's supposed Creation.

    Merely perceiving a gap in our knowledge does not justify inserting a god to fill it, in my opinion. Suppose we don't know where gravity came from. Okay, fine. So, maybe gravity came about due to some as-yet-undiscovered natural process, or maybe it came about because of a god. Until there's evidence one way or the other, why should we say the god did it, rather than the alternative? Shouldn't we just be content to say that, for now, we don't know where it came from, and we need to wait until more data comes in?

    I understand that if you start from the notion that there's a God, without evidence, then it's easy to extend that belief into all kinds of gaps to "explain" mysteries, but I think that's just giving in to a false sense of confidence about your belief in God. God just becomes a magical place-filler to plug all the uncomfortable gaps in your knowledge.

    I am interested in how you went from being an atheist a few years back to now believing in a god. What changed your mind? Specifically, what evidence convinced you that God exists, after all? Or is it more of a gut feeling, or something?
     
  23. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Well do you have a case against Evolution or not? That's the question isn't it?

    I have a mathematical argument in support of evolution and natural selection. Can you prove me false?
     
    Last edited: Jul 15, 2019

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