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Plant Sciences, Zoology & Evolution / How does "instinct" evolve?
« on: 22/12/2008 12:14:49 »OK
Apart from your gut feeling and your faith, what have you that you can call evidence that someone 'made us'?
This is no 'gut feeling'. Set up any criteria you like that will demonstrate the Intelligent Design of an object,and we'll see if the whale meets them. Or the eye, or the flight of birds as simple examples.
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If you insist that it has to be true because of the small probability of things evolving then you also should say that, when a coin comes down 'heads' then God made that happen too. They are both problems in probability; one is easy to assess and the other involves very big numbers and very small probabilities and is very hard to assess.
I don't think the statisticians would agree with you here. The current scientific biological attitude is 'give it long enough, and anything can happen'.
That, however is not true. Giving a chemical reaction long enough merely produces an equilibrium, not new, more and increasingly complex products.
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Your attitude to the timescales and numbers involved with evolution theory has let you down because you don't want it to be true. I hope that, in your statistics lessons, you insist that your students are made aware of statistical significance and numbers and that they go with their results.
Calculation of compound probabilities is a large part of probability theory, and the probability of a single protein emerging by chance has been calculated by far better statisticians than myself: Fred Hoyle is the prime example. He came up with the figure of 1 in 10 exp 40,000. Now as a biologist, indeed as any reasonable scientist, biologist or not, I know that any probability lower than 1 in 10 exp 100 is an impossibility. Therefore, notwithstanding the whining and special pleading of the abiogeneticists,life itself could not have occurred by chance. So what's the probability of a whale evolving from a land mammal with fur/hair? I'll leave that one with you to chew over.
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When you make statements like "they haven't a clue" about how whales developed echo location you are clearly emotionally involved. "They" aren't obliged to have a clue about something as specific as that. The pathways in evolution are very complex and there will always be unexpected reasons for a particular development.
You in your turn are equally emotionally involved, because you refuse to admit the possibility that things did not evolve. I have put up many things on this board for which evolution cannot provide even a theory of origins. Yet you hold on to it!
So let me ask you directly, is there ANY possibility in your mind that evolution did not, could not have occurred?
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Are you saying that God keeps introducing new strains and species of bacteria just to keep us on our toes? Is it too hard to accept that a strain of bacteria which just manages to survive the onslaught of a new drug will live to reproduce whilst the target strain is killed off? Or is that allowed in your model?
Please don't misunderstand me. I think that variation occurs, even speciation in a very restricted number of cases. But above genus or family level? There's no incontrovertible evidence that it does.
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Where is the essential difference between that and the development of fast enough predators and fast enough prey?
There's no essential difference - until you come to serious differences. Stefan was trying to show that the sinusoidal up and down movement of a running cheetah could somehow produce the vertical movements of a whale's tail, flukes and all. That's a whole new ball game, and extrapolations of that magnitude are never justifiable.
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You can have no proof of your faith until your God comes along and shows us it happening overnight and under a repeatable conditions. Unsurprisingly, your faith doesn't include that sort of evidence - just statements like "It stands to reason" and "evolutionists are all crazy".
I don't remember having made such inflammatory statements.
You, however are struggling with two impossible things:
1 Evolution (in a serious way, I mean, above genus level) has never been shown to happen and
2 You are demanding that we somehow return to the days of creation. I'm sorry, but I can't oblige.
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The qualifications game is a non starter; 2+2 doesn't make 5, whoever says so - BSc, PhD or whatever.
I agree. But you started this particular one:
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Asyncritus
Why do you bother to post on a Science forum if you don't subscribe to the Scientific approach?
Your attitude towards evidence is the ratchet system: use supporting evidence and reasoning to confirm what you believe and ignore the contrary evidence and reasoning. That's a win win for your (as I see it, erroneous) beliefs.
Do you have any appreciation of the concepts and statistics involving large numbers? If you haven't, then I can see how evolution could seem difficult to understand.
Evolution isn't difficult to understand, merely impossible to accept for very good reasons already given.
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SO why not refer to God as 'her' or 'it'? Thatt would demonstrate some degree of open mindedness.
I am a believer in the Bible, which does not leave much room for manoeuvre on that issue.