Creation vs. Evolution

[Green_Manelishi]

No, it's not. It's still a virus, but it's completely different from SIV. Just as humans, though a little different from apes, are still animals. We are 98% the same as chimps. Is it so strange to you that a 2% deviance in our DNA occurred over the last several million years? Oh wait, we're only 6k years old. Uh huh....

Ignorance is bliss.

It's still an IV, it's not becoming a botulism, or a bird, or a dinosaur, or ...

Some of us are more closely related to monkeys than others. So what the DNA is similar; that proves nothing about evolution.

I don't need to study the lie to recognize the truth. I study the truth and recognize the lie. Allowing yourself to listen to the Lord of this World and his deception is dangerous to your future. But that's assuming you believe you have a future after this life. If you don't then why are you asking me, in the name of "science", to believe that I have no future? Does your fiance believe she has a future or does she believe she is only the end result of "natural selection"?

There you go again, showing your ignorance. If you want to learn about abiogenesis, please start a thread on that topic. It is unrelated to evolutionary theory. Your continued hammering to the contrary doesn't make it so, it just makes you look bad.

As I said, the only reason it's "unrelated" is because it presents a large obstacle. It's much more (cough, cough) "scientific" to say something profound like "Who cares where the blindwatchmaker acquired his parts? They must have been there but we don't know how."

Please cite your source.

Dawkins himself. But then he goes on to wax theoretical as well as insane with discussions of "what could/must have happened" and marble statues waving their hands.

 

[AXL72]

or

3. The person who does not really care and is just making drive-by commentary

OOOPS...well just beat the crap out of me and call me dumb@$$...I just read the J/K. Sorry. However, I just wrote this fine comeback, even though no I know it may not be warranted


Well, i do have strong feelings about my beliefs, but I know how I feel when someone tries to convert me. So I do not try to convert others.

And if I cared:

1. from a christian point of view, it would show weakness in my beliefs that "oh crap, I might look stupid if after all my butt kissing and worshipping to a "GOD" I end up only 6 feet under.

or


2. from an atheist point of view, it would show weakness of "oh crap, I better do some debating (probing) to see if there are any plausible arguments of why I should really start butt kissing a "God" so I don't end up frying in hell"



I will assure you that I am either an atheist or a Christian, bu I have no doubts or weaknesses about my belief / disbelief in a "God". I am not willing to go on record as to what I believe, but rather realize that we cannot win at trying to debate religion.

At the end of the day, the atheists will remain atheists and the christains will remain christains. It just looks like some show weakness in what they believe by probing and debating the issue. Either that, or some are trying to convert the other.

If that is the definition of a drive by comment, then guilty...right here!!:freak:

 

[Bryan]

I do think it is possible to have a discussion about an idea without being "on the make" to convert another person to their point of view.

At the least, we get to hear what others think and others get to hear what we think... at the most, we might even learn some better facts in the process. This happens all the time in coffee shops and college cafeterias worldwide.

My point was that there is no need to make a crack that the thread is useless because nobody is going to convert anyone. I'm pretty sure the people here aren't here to renounce their current system of beliefs.

 

[AXL72]

My point was that there is no need to make a crack that the thread is useless because nobody is going to convert anyone. I'm pretty sure the people here aren't here to renounce their current system of beliefs.

I did not say it was useless. However, I know you did not say that I said it was useless.

My point is, after all this debate and after all the dung slinging, which is obviously a trait we evolved with from monkeys, we are like Chrish stated, "beating a dead horse", and, in the true spirit of a debate, trying to convince/convert others.

The atheists / evolutionists shoot off a volley of debate creativity, and the christians / creationists (or combination creationist / evolutionist group) get fired up and send off their volley. This motivates the atheists further who fire off another round of debate arguments, which in turn stirs the christians. And there is no end in sight as to who can piss the farthest.

And yes, this is just another view/oppinion.

 

[MikeFerrara]

I did not say it was useless. However, I know you did not say that I said it was useless.

My point is, after all this debate and after all the dung slinging, which is obviously a trait we evolved with from monkeys, we are like Chrish stated, "beating a dead horse", and, in the true spirit of a debate, trying to convince/convert others.

The atheists / evolutionists shoot off a volley of debate creativity, and the christians / creationists (or combination creationist / evolutionist group) get fired up and send off their volley. This motivates the atheists further who fire off another round of debate arguments, which in turn stirs the christians. And there is no end in sight as to who can piss the farthest.

And yes, this is just another view/oppinion.

But...these conversations are primarlily for the purposes of entertainment. It's ok to beat a dead horse as long as you have fun doing it.

 

[MikeFerrara]

Because for every cited, documented fact that has contradicted your belief system, you have come back and said, essentially, "that's not good enough." Historically speaking, I have no reason to believe that you will accept any evidence presented to you.

Somewhere back a thousand posts or so, you denied that evolution was even a theory. Have you moved passed that, yet?

I, for one, have learned a ton from this thread, both about evolution specifically and human nature in general.

Yes. Based on the definitions of a scientific theory I found, I did ask questions about how the tof meets that definition. It seems a reasonable enough question.

I have certainly come up with other questions regarding what you call "documented fact". Those documented facts as you call them, as far as I can tell, consist largely of observed small scale evolution (ok that's my term), a fossil record that's missing an awful lot and projections/models based on DNA.

I don't reject the evidence at all. I do, however, question whether or not it's really valid to extrapolate it over such a large scale.

 

[MikeFerrara]

It does not work that way with with Darwinism, per se, because the samples are not randomly selected.

Giraffes, for example. 'Survival of the fittest' would suggest that a long neck is advantageous in times of drought, because when lower shoots and leaves have all been eaten the animals with longer necks can still reach higher forage that animals with short necks cannot. Ergo, over time longer-necked animals will survive longer, hence breed more frequently over time with other longer-necked animals, hence over time neck length will tend to increase for this animal.

Thus evolution would tend to be driven by environmental parameters and breeding for desirable traits, and not random chance.

Well, I get that of course. I also get the idea of natural selection working on mutations after they have occured. My questions though were realted to the probability that the selectable mutations need to go from simple life to complex life would happen and whether or not all of those mutations were even possible.

 

[MikeFerrara]

It doesn't fail. The genetic distance between any two members of the same species which have modified themselves due to adaptation is inherantly less than the genetic distance between two members of completely differing species. The likelihood of speciation is therefore much less and it is less observed -- the areas where we've seen it best are in viruses like HIV1 (which is a totally different species of virus from SIV and which no longer can infect the host organism of SIV) and that is because the mutation rate of viruses (and HIV in particular) is so incredibly high.

It can be logically assumed to lead to different species. You just refuse to admit the possibility, which is just an assertion, not a logical conclusion.

I don't know about anyone else but I don't refuse to admit the indication of a possibility. So far, anyway, I don't accept the idea that based on the observed range and the modeling that it is "proven" that it did, in fact, happen.

If you would like to make a logical conclusion you need to do the work to understand genetics and to show that any two species of animals with a sufficiently large genetic distance between them could not have been evolved from a common ancestor given the mechanism of random mutation and natural selection. I'm aware of no such statistical analysis that has been done, and it is certainly well outside of your talents.

I think the burdon of proof is on the theory to ulimately prove that it not only could but did happen.

I've come accross several such statistical analysis. The problem is that they are on the internet and formulated by those who clearly have an iron in the fire. The antis come up with numbers that show it isn't possible by a HUGE margin and the pros come up with one that shows it to be a piece of cake. IME, when two seperate groups tries to calculate the same thing and come up with such drastically different answers, you need a third analysis because somebody is screwing up. They're clearly not answering the same question.

While I do have some background in statistics it's all been in an engineering context and I don't have the background in biology or genetics to critique the analysis in a meaningful way or to do it myself. Statistics is only useful if the right questions are asked, the right data is used and the right methods given the data and the question are used...which is why it so often yields the "wrong" answer. It's just easy to screw up the question.

 

[MikeFerrara]

No, it's not. It's still a virus, but it's completely different from SIV. Just as humans, though a little different from apes, are still animals. We are 98% the same as chimps. Is it so strange to you that a 2% deviance in our DNA occurred over the last several million years? Oh wait, we're only 6k years old. Uh huh....

I think this is a great topic to discuss for a layperson like me. You say that we are 2% different than a chimp because our DNA is 98% the same. right? In what other ways can we measure the difference between a chimp and a man that might agree with that 2% difference as measured by DNA. Are there any other measureable traits of chimps and men that will yield that same 2% difference or at least a difference that is correlatable with the difference as measured by DNA? I wonder if that measured 2% difference in DNA really does a good job of accounting for the total difference.

 

[Thalassamania]

I think this is a great topic to discuss for a layperson like me. You say that we are 2% different than a chimp because our DNA is 98% the same. right? In what other ways can we measure the difference between a chimp and a man that might agree with that 2% difference as measured by DNA. Are there any other measureable traits of chimps and men that will yield that same 2% difference or at least a difference that is correlatable with the difference as measured by DNA? I wonder if that measured 2% difference in DNA really does a good job of accounting for the total difference.

To explain the DNA work (keep in mind that mapping the entire chimp genome is not yet complete and so similar regions that are representitive are used for comparison):

It is commonly said that humans “share” 98-99 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees, but what does “share” actually mean? The percentage sequence divergence can be derived from alignments of stretches of DNA from human and apes. It varies depending on the region of the genome analyzed.

The sequence divergence has generally the following pattern: Human-Chimp < Human-Gorilla << Human-Orangutan, highlighting the close kinship between humans and the African apes. Alu elements (short stretches of DNA that occur in large numbers in primate genomes and are the most abundant mobile elements in the human genome) diverge quickly due to their high frequency of CpG dinucleotides which mutate roughly 10 times more often than the average nucleotide in the genome. The mutation rate is higher in the male germ line, therefore greater divergence is seen in in the Y chromosome - which is inherited solely from the father - than is observed in autosomes. The X chromosome is inherited twice as often though the female germ line as through the male germ line and therefore shows slightly lower sequence divergence. The sequence divergence of the Xq13.3 region (a 10,154-base pair sequence on the X chromosome) is surprisingly low between humans and chimpanzees.

Mutations altering the amino acid sequence of proteins are the least common. In fact about 29% of all orthologous proteins are identical between human and chimpanzee. The typical protein differs by only two amino acids, While these measures of sequence divergence table only take the substitutional differences, for example from an A (adenine) to a G (guanine), into account. DNA sequences may however also differ by insertions and deletions (indels) of bases. These are usually stripped from the alignments before the calculation of sequence divergence is performed. The overall sequence divergence between humans and chimpanzees for example is close to 5% if indels would be included.