The Creation of Man

[Harte]

Re: The Creation of Man

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Zoomerz\")</div>

LOL, I know you didn't mean it that way. I added that little bit for spice, mostly as an attack on religious fundamentalism....And I agree wholeheartedly that Darwinism could easily be considered a religion of sorts.

Z-[/b]

Darwinism may be a sort of religion but evolution itself has no ties to faith at all. Only years of research and tons of evidence to back it up.

Ever heard of any religion with actual provable hypotheses? Evolution has them (in the genetic code).

Practically every evolutionary biologist alive today will tell you that Darwin was wrong. But that does not mean evolution did not occur. It's more like Darwin overestimated the effects of "survival of the fittest" and underestimated, or flat out never thought of, other more important drivers of evolution.

Anyway, unless you take the Bible literally, there is no conflict between evolution and Genesis.

 

[Zoomerz]

Re: The Creation of Man

Good points Harte; My context wasn't dependent on whether or not Darwinism is or is not a religion. My point is that religious fundamentalism breeds intolerance, and therefore death. Darwinists (or evolutionists if you will) can sometimes be as intolerant and self-righteous.

As far as the bible and evolution being compatible, neither seems to explain the missing component of advanced intelligence adequately (or without a great deal of supposition), so I find them both suspect.

I certainly respect everyone's belief as personal, provable or not. In fact, I envy those that have faith and the capacity to believe. It's not in my nature. So I remain agnostic but open to "more information" heh.....

Z-

 

[Dmitri]

Re: The Creation of Man

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Zoomerz\")</div>

LOL, I know you didn't mean it that way. I added that little bit for spice, mostly as an attack on religious fundamentalism....And I agree wholeheartedly that Darwinism could easily be considered a religion of sorts.

Z-[/b]

I know, Z-, I just thought that I may have sounded like I would like to burn somebody myself, so I added that remark to mean that I did not want to burn anybody.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Harte\")</div>

Darwinism may be a sort of religion but evolution itself has no ties to faith at all. Only years of research and tons of evidence to back it up.

Ever heard of any religion with actual provable hypotheses? Evolution has them (in the genetic code).

Practically every evolutionary biologist alive today will tell you that Darwin was wrong. But that does not mean evolution did not occur. It's more like Darwin overestimated the effects of \"survival of the fittest\" and underestimated, or flat out never thought of, other more important drivers of evolution.

Anyway, unless you take the Bible literally, there is no conflict between evolution and Genesis.[/b]

Michael Ruse (Darwinist), now at the University of Paris, announced at a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that "evolution, akin to religion, involves making certain a priori or metaphysical assumptions, which at some level cannot be proven empirically."

?Intelligent design does not claim that living things came together suddenly in their present form through the efforts of a supernatural creator. Intelligent design is not and never will be a doctrine of creation.? (William Dembski, No Free Lunch, pg. 314)

I have been interested in evolution for about 26 years now, studied Darwinism, new synthesis, etc. For about four years I had worked on phylogenetic trees. Comparing genes is part of my job now. Not that I see tons of evidence, I see none. I guess a lot depends on how you define evolution. If this is the textbook single trunk tree of life, sort of bacterium-primitive metazoan-worm-fish-frog-reptile-rat-chimp-man direct descent evolution, these is zero micrograms of evidence to support it, in genes or elsewhere. If you define evolution as a change in genes, this one sure takes place. An important thing is that this kind of evolution appears to be directed, either by intragenomic factors (initially pre-programmed evolution) or by external factors (?upgrades? by viruses and bacteria). I think the answer which of the two can be found in a couple of years. I hope to contribute a bit here. Another big question is to what extent this evolution progresses. Can it form new species (-probably), new genera (-possibly), new orders (-??), or new phyla (-????)? This still implies direct descent, but too abrupt to leave a paleontological record. Another scenario, hardly testable though, is that new life forms have been itroduces episodically by sort of ready-to-develop spores, no direct descent here. I have not thought about it much.

To be fair to the ID (intelligent design) guys, please check the site at http://www.ideacenter.org/

And there is panspermia site at http://www.panspermia.org/ NASA spends good money now on related lines of research.

With little relevance to science although showing the consequences of natural selection is the book "From Darwin to Hitler, Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany" (Palgrave MacMillan), by Richard Weikart. http://www.darwintohitler.com/

 

[Dmitri]

Re: The Creation of Man

Just thought now, Sir Fred Hoyle?s attitude towards Darwinism was similar to mine. However it took him only a short while to realize that the theory cannot work, while it took me long four years in college. But this is Sir Fred Hoyle, http://www.cf.ac.uk/maths/wickramasinghe/hoyle.html ? one of the brightest minds, founder of the Cambridge Institute of Theoretical Astronomy, prodigious mathematician and theoretical physicist, acknowledged to have been one of the most creative scientists of the 20th century, inquirer into the nature of life since his childhood, and author of the book ?Mathematics of Evolution?, first edition written in his 72. For those of us sticking to Darwinism or the textbook evolutionary theory, following our habits more than logic, let us not compare him to most biology high school or college teachers, the original messengers of this kind or epidemic misconception. His argument leaves no room for a validity of the prevailing dogma. Though it takes some effort/ interest to sort these things out, but not stick to the dogma. Many Universities do not keep the book in their libraries, they are not comfortable with it yet. Sir F. Hoyle was not religion driven; he was scientist as a dictionary defines.

(From his book, p.2, -just for fun, this is from the introduction) ?All that homespun knowledge was wiped clean from my brain by the age of eighteen, because by then I had become convinced that biology was a doubtful subject. The trouble was that in reading widely during my early teens I ran into the Darwinian theory, for a little while with illusions and then with less respect than adults with bated breath were wont to show. The theory seemed to me to run like this:

If among the varieties of a species there is one that survives better in the environment than the others, then the variety that survives best is the one that best survives.

If I had known the word tautology I would have called this a tautology. People with still more bated breath, called it natural selection. I made them angry, just as I do today, by saying that it did nothing at all. You could select potatoes as much as you pleased but you would never make them into a rabbit. Nor by selecting oak trees could you make them into colonies of bats, and those who thought they could in my opinion were bats in the belfry. This made them angry too. Older folk in the know told me that selection did not operate to make complicated things out of complicated things, only to make complex things out of simple ones. I couldn?t understand how anything of the sort could be true, because, unlikely as it was, it would surely be less difficult to make a rabbit out of a potato than to make a rabbit out of sludge, which is what people said happened, people with line after line of letters after their names who should have known what they were talking about, but obviously didn?t.?

 

[Harte]

Re: The Creation of Man

Hoyle may not have been driven by religion, but there is no doubt he was driven by scientific dogma. That is not necessarily a bad thing though.

It was Hoyle that created a new idea in cosmology. I think it was called spontaneous creation or something. It helped him hold on to the idea of a steady state universe until the end of his days. He could not accept the expansion of the universe. But he was in good company I guess. I mean Einstein was tied down by scientific dogma also (cosmological constant, "God does not play dice", etc.)

If I were to by into the intelligent design theory, it wouldn't be because of Fred Hoyle's opinion on evolution. The man was an astrophysicist. In my opinion he was not very open minded in his own field. Not exactly the man to open my mind in an area not of his expertise.

I don't know all the engines driving evolution anymore than anyone else does. I realize that there is not much actual evidence for evolution beyond the species to species change. The problem is there is no physical evidence whatsoever for any other
theory. I feel like I have to stick with what the evidence points to instead of what the lack of evidence may imply. After all, lack of evidence for evolution could mean we all were transported here by Scotty. Or maybe that all other animals descended from humans, or any of an infinite number of possibilities. Many of these might be fun to think about but the point is lack of evidence in itself has no meaning at all.

Steven J. Gould is a good source for info on some more recent thinking about the drivers of evolution.

 

[Dmitri]

Re: The Creation of Man

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Harte\")</div>

Hoyle may not have been driven by religion, but there is no doubt he was driven by scientific dogma. That is not necessarily a bad thing though.

It was Hoyle that created a new idea in cosmology. ?I think it was called spontaneous creation or something. ?It helped him hold on to the idea of a steady state universe until the end of his days. ?He could not accept the expansion of the universe. ?But he was in good company I guess. ?I mean Einstein was tied down by scientific dogma also (cosmological constant, \"God does not play dice\", etc.)

If I were to by into the intelligent design theory, it wouldn't be because of Fred Hoyle's opinion on evolution. ?The man was an astrophysicist. ?In my opinion he was not very open minded in his own field. ?Not exactly the man to open my mind in an area not of his expertise.

I don't know all the engines driving evolution anymore than anyone else does. ?I realize that there is not much actual evidence for evolution beyond the species to species change. The problem is there is no physical evidence whatsoever for any other
theory. I feel like I have to stick with what the evidence points to instead of what the lack of evidence may imply. ?After all, lack of evidence for evolution could mean we all were transported here by Scotty. ?Or maybe that all other animals descended from humans, or any of an infinite number of possibilities. ?Many of these might be fun to think about but the point is lack of evidence in itself has no meaning at all.

Steven J. Gould is a good source for info on some more recent thinking about the drivers of evolution.[/b]

Harte,

His fixed size universe is just a hypothesis, a play on math, if only to keep the diversity of views in cosmology. I guess there is little diversity in the evolutionary theory. He had been interested in evolution since his childhood. And he was very good at probabilistic models, all it takes to see the prevailing theory is misconception. He also knew about genes, proteins and genetics quite a bit. If you like, read his book, it is only 142 pgs. And the personality does not matter anyway, if you follow an argument you either agree or do not agree, not because a person may have been wrong with his cosmological ideas or did not get a phd in biology.

Gould saw problems in the theory, but he was not a good mathematician to pin the source. Mayr said that microevolution does not explain macroevolution, meaning we do not know what is going on at all. But they were strict evolutionists, thinking in terms of randomness + selection.
What turns out to be the reality is that neither randomness nor selection works on a single bit. Thus we do not have a theory. The tree of life with common ancestry is part of the theory; random mutations + selection was the other part to explain the tree. The single trunk tree is just a hypothesis; it may not be true BTW. The explanation in terms of randomness and selection is definitely wrong. Based on this, I think ID and panspermia are good alternatives. If you know of or come up with others, please, let me know. Kauffman?s self-organization looks a stretch to me, and overlapping with ID anyway, unless he says RNA soup was good for first life. Majority can be wrong, and science is not about voting anyway. (Though they thought different and voted in the AAAS for ID being unscientific.) I would not go with such a majority vote blindly, this is not a legislative act that you have to obey. Science should be about questioning and new ideas; not actually the case in the evolutionary theory nowadays. I am glad in the US you still find some reason here; in Europe almost nobody questions the theory at all. I think this is because most people just do not care much what is true and what is not, habits are stronger than reason. I like this forum, thank you,

Dmitri

 

[Dmitri]

Re: The Creation of Man

Let?s get down to the root of the error. What the evolution theory proposes is natural selection on random variation resulting genetic change and thus new forms. The trivial simplicity of the following one gene model is the reason it penetrates minds starting from high school and does not go away easily. If ?A? gene variety has a higher survival probability than variety ?a? of the same gene, and no other variation exists, in a countable number of generations variety ?A? will replace variety ?a?. This is what most of population genetics is about. Where is the flaw? An organism does not have one gene only. And a gene is not just a few nucleotides long it is much longer. What if the individuals with the good gene ?A? carry a bad gene ?b? with the bad effect overweighing the good of ?A?? What about the natural situation that the number of bad mutations significantly exceeds the number of good ones? The species dies very soon, life is impossible, or the theory must die. One may argue: natural selection can eliminate all bad ones, even when they are many, and keep the few good ones. Well, it cannot. You can either check the behavior of the function, or you can intuitively conclude the following. Suppose the genome size is 3 billion base pairs (close to ours), the non-neutral mutation rate is one per a hundred million base pairs, resulting 30 mutations per individual per generation. Most mutations are naturally neutral and do not affect survival. However, for those that are not neutral, we can hardly suggest a rate of more than 1:100 of good ones to bad ones (how many times do we have to drop a Swiss watch on a concrete floor for the watch to go a bit more accurately? ? and a bacterium is far more complex than the whole watch factory). For the selection to work to the advantage of the species there should be some individuals with at least 16 good to 14 bad mutations. The selection will not find this or better one. Even if it did, it would have to wipe the rest of the population in every generation. But it will not find it in a billion years anyway. Some biologists would argue: the mutation rate is lower; it is like one per the whole genome per generation. Well, what genetic change would you get with such a low rate? A new gene in a hundred of billions of years? ? Not even that soon. And natural selection would still have to kill 99 out of 100. Darwin did not know about genes. Muller found the contradiction and termed it genetic load. Neo-Darwinians hid it, they do not want to talk about it, they get angry if you mention it, fun isn?t it? It is not just lack of evidence; it is a lot of evidence to the contrary. I can point a number of other insurmountable problems for the theory, but as Peter the First said to the firework attendant: -Why the cannons did not fire? ?Tsar, there were 7 reasons for that. ?What reasons? ?First, the gunpowder was wet. ?I do not want to here about the other 6.

 

[Dmitri]

Re: The Creation of Man

Back to ET, ID and panspermia. BTW, I try to follow reason, using minimal imagination and maximum parsimony. I will not propose animals are descendants of humans for that reason, Harte. I was sold out to ID last year, because it seems a reasonable option to consider once you are done with Darwinism. There is some difficulty to define intelligent though, especially if you do not want to say who the designer is. You can invoke the Absolute, or you can do without, up to your perception. The general basis for ID is that new information, including genes, cannot come alone by random search and selection, which leads to accepting directing forces that appear intelligent, vs. physical forces that we know of, more intelligent than us, because we can only scratch the surface for now. And I have not had time to talk to ID guys much so far; I will look for a couple to collaborate with soon, I hope.

There is a proposition for ET and bacteria. It can be derived from the minimum mutation rate of 10-9, which would destroy genomes, that species are destined to die unless they acquire new genetic upgrades somehow (without random emergence of new genes made by the Darwinian demon). It is especially deadly for asexual and quickly reproducing organisms like bacteria (we can disregard their conjugation here) and leads to the estimates of the species maximum life span in the order of 100-1000 years. Although some bacteria can survive in the spore forms for many millions of years, still for all of them to have been around for 3.5 billion years ET should be sending either lots of new bacteria to earth or lots of new viruses to upgrade them, or both. Some of the bacteria may be oldish (but not 3 billion years old anyway) yet most may be very recent. It will tick off pretty much any microbiologist, hehe. We are quite young ourselves, just starting to decay a bit, not a great deal so far, and there is help, is not there?

 

[Harte]

Re: The Creation of Man

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Dmitri\")</div>

I was sold out to ID last year, because it seems a reasonable option to consider once you are done with Darwinism. There is some difficulty to define intelligent though, especially if you do not want to say who the designer is. You can invoke the Absolute, or you can do without, up to your perception. The general basis for ID is that new information, including genes, cannot come alone by random search and selection, which leads to accepting directing forces that appear intelligent, vs. physical forces that we know of, more intelligent than us, because we can only scratch the surface for now. [/b]

The ID theory is fun to imagine and could be true. But it doesn't solve the real problem of the diversity of life. It only increases the diversity (by at least one species).

Assuming intelligent design on Earth and other places in the universe explains a lot of the diversity but what explains the designer? Who designed him and who designed the designer's designer? etc. etc.

This kind of feedback is something to be avoided. Possibly we may know one day that we are designed. Possibly we may know how the designer was created. But there must be an end to the logic or it is not logic. All the problems of Darwinism might disappear given enough time for genetic variation to produce enough good mutations. Maybe not, I'm not Hoyle and while I understand a lot of math I'm not interested enough to figure that one out in my spare time. I guess my point is that if we go far enough back into the hall of mirrors we are still going to be stuck with something that looks like evolution to explain the creation of the designers of the designers of the designers...

 

[StarLord]

Re: The Creation of Man

Dimitri, Harte,

Has anyone heard speculation regarding parts of the DNA genome that no one can figure out what it does and or why it's there? As in it seems to be something 'extra' that has no definite reason for being there? I submit that these portions of our DNA are the ones which have been added by ET to facilitate two primary functions. First, would be the acquisition of a higher awareness to speed up the evolutionary process of the human brain thereby leading us to the ability to experience a higher consciousness then our early ancestors had acess to or could fathom / appreciate.

Second, would be the ability to change our own DNA via conscious thought and visualization. We have tests now that can be performed to indicate a body's predisposition to certain diseases. We also have case histories of people that have chosen to fight a illness and disease via a holistic approach rather than have the body ravaged by Kemo-therapy or Radiation therapy and have had spontaneous remission with a 100% kill rate of the specific disease. If the beginning 'code' or original set of that particular part of the DNA provided the fostering cause of the disease and suddenly it was 'turned off' to the point of that message no longer created the reissue of those instructions, thus a total remission and cessation, then is it possible to assume that the original DNA code has been changed or has the body only been alerted to a specific problem and it was dealt with?