[Asyncritus (OP)]

Hi everybody, I'm back!

Now, please restrain your applause and general bonhomie.

I'm afraid I've been rather taken up with constructing a website, and haven't had as much time as I would have liked free.

If you'd like to see the results of the endeavour, as it evolved (heh heh!) over the last week or so, go here:

That link is a blatant bit of advertising. How could you, Asyncritus? I thought you were better than that. MOD


I would appreciate anyone linking to the site on their webs.

But I'll be back shortly to reply to Ben's points which are indeed worthy of attention.

Asyncritus

[seeker]

Hey I just signed up to reply to this:

Mendel showed that there can be no halfway house, because red flowers crossed with white flowers don't produce pink flowers. They produce more red and white flowers.

This is not true. Red flowers crossed with white flowers DO produce pink flowers, please revise.
newbielink:http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/mcclean/plsc431/mendel/mendel2.htm [nonactive]

I would also like to comment on the evolution supporters, Asyncritus seems to be the one who's doing the actual work and stretching far by presenting different links and quotes supporting his arguments, giving counter arguments with your own evidence is actually YOUR job, telling him that he's a liar or an idiot will only show weakness on your side, now I know that you don't represent evolutionists but please don't tell him to go away but instead try to keep up with him. I see many of you as merely hand waving to avoid critically examining the arguments.

Now all of his arguments could be common creationist fallacies, but I and many other readers have never seen them or the responses for them. Can you take Asyncritus seriously and respond to the actual points presented, please? Don't even try questioning his faith because that is not our topic!
Or at least point me to some website where I can read, if you can't bother copy and pasting, you know?

By the way I accept evolution but much thanked Asyncritus' is making me revise and research many things.

[Asyncritus (OP)]

Time pressure is now easing, so I'll have a go at answering your questions, Ben rather sooner than later, and I apologise for the delay.

Seeker,

Thank you for this reasonable and reasoned post. We may not agree, but we can at least be rational about our discussions, as you have pointed out the way.

Up till now I hadn't encountered the co-dominance phenomenon (where red x white --> pink). But the very fact that a whole paper has to be devoted to a relatively small number of examples shows how unusual a thing it is.

I accept your correction.

[lyner]

seeker
I appreciate your concern for fair play. However, the evidence for evolution having taken place and descriptions of the various mechanisms are well known and published.
Just go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-dominance#Codominance for loads of discussion about one part of the subject. Wiki is not the Holy Grail of Science but it is a good starting point. (You will note that the article is 'disputed')
If you read the posts from Asyncritus you will find that they present no serious evidence - mainly references to the Bible and other cultural works and to stuff by Agassiz, who is a shameless moneymaker. Would we accept statements from the Taliban?

The details of evolutionary theory are extremely intricate and it is very easy to take a Punnet diagram and think that is all that is involved. Asyncritus picks out Science Bytes and throws them into the discussion with little thought. His statement about 'no half way house' is naive because most, if not all, characteristics are determined by multiple genes plus other factors like mitochondrial DNA. Mendelism is a good working model for breeding horses and sweet peas - that's all.

There is little more to be said in this argument for and against "God made us". There is no scientific evidence  for it; Asyncritus has quoted none. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Evolution has taken place and the steps involved are being steadily explained, one by one. The scientific approach would indicate that Evolution is the most likely alternative to go for.

[Asyncritus (OP)]

The Migration of the Green Turtle
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?

"Green turtles, Chelonia mydas, make lengthy, regular migrations from Brazil to their nesting grounds on Ascension Island, 1400 miles away. The navigational systems used by Chelonia are unknown [heh heh heh!]; but recent measurements of visual acuity in green turtles suggest that they cannot use stars for guidance[heh heh!]. In this paper, we evaluate the possibility that orientation is based, in part, on the detection of some chemical substance originating at Ascension Island."

[What nonsense! Some chemical from Ascension Island, being identified by green turtles, at a distance of 1,400 miles! Must be a pretty powerful pong! And sufficiently powerful to guide a green turtle over a distance of ONE THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED MILES, in water yet! Heh heh heh!]

Evolutionary explanations please?

[Asyncritus (OP)]

Darwin on Instinct
C. Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: Cassell and Co., Ltd., 1909), p. 189.

"This is by far the most serious special difficulty which my theory has encountered. . . . The problem at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to my theory."

"No complex instinct can possibly be produced through natural selection except by the slow and gradual accumulation of numerous, slight, yet profitable variations. . . .We ought at least to be able to show that gradations of some kind are possible, and this we certainly can do."

Heh heh heh!

[Asyncritus (OP)]

Darwin on Instinct
Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd ed. (New York: A. L. Burt Co., 1874), pp.74 ff., 122.

"Those animals which possess the most wonderful instincts are certainly the most intelligent," but "instincts seem to have originated independently of intelligence."

He at least got that right - because the lowliest animals and plants, 'intelligent or not,' all exhibit instinctive behaviour.

[Asyncritus (OP)]

Migration of the Monarch Butterflies
Burton, Illustrated London News, 23 January 1960, p. 142.
M.  Ricard, The Mystery of Animal Migration (London:  Constable, 1969).

Monarch butterflies are famous for their migrations, sometimes as much as two thousand miles, to places like Pacific Grove, California.15 This is so predictable that a city bylaw there protects them. Burton calls it one of the wonders of the world. The migratory hordes extend for miles each fall as they take one of two flyways southward. They semihibernate in California all winter. Then in spring they fly north, never to return. But their untaught progeny do.

Why do these creatures migrate at all? They could hibernate where they were. They pay no attention to the winds, may make wide meanders, but they get to their destination with great accuracy. They surely do not move to find new feeding grounds, nor yet for evolutionary reasons. In South America a similar race of monarchs moves in the reverse direction. Indeed, the monarch has appeared in Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and the East Indies.

Migratory butterflies may travel enormous distances, but they always try to return to their home locality, even to the same bush, to lay their eggs.

Evolutionary explanations please?

[_Stefan_]

More ignorance and more quote-mining. Can't we expect more from you?

Your argument is basically: "I don't know how, or science doesn't know how yet, therefore GOD DID IT!".

There actually is evidence that indicates that sea turtles navigate using magnetoreception, as well as other cues. For example:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/r05570821547q742/
http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/45/3/539


Monarch Butterflies:

http://gomexico.about.com/od/monarchbutterfly/ss/monarch_4.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080108083008.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly#Migration


Even if there was absolutely no evidence on this topic, the alternative is not GOD DID IT. The alternative is more scientific research.

[BenV]

Sorry to go off topic here, but there's one big problem Asyncritus cannot face - god doesn't exist.  He may think he can find ways that evolution doesn't work, but that simple fact totally scuppers his alternative.

Either way, Asycnritus admits that his problem is not with evolution, but with the perceived attack on his beliefs.  He is not willing to discuss or debate the issue, will not listen to anyone else' point of view and is merely crusading.

[Asyncritus (OP)]

Come, come Stefan.

You're mud-slinging again - but this time it's hitting the writers of those accounts. They're all referenced, so if you're going to shout quote-mining, you need to prove it by going back to the original articles and showing that the writers mean the exact opposite of the quote.

Until you do that, I'd shut up if I were you.

[BenV]

You make a very good point about animals not needing to migrate, but isn't this just further evidence against an intelligent creator?  If animals were created, why would a creator bother with all this?

Once again, postulating a creator asks more questions than it answers.

[lyner]

Creationists cannot / will not accept the 'inside out' argument  which evolution uses.
Basically, if  there is an advantage in certain behaviour, then an organism may exhibit it. It is hard to conceive the colossal wastage in an evolutionary system. Most departures from the norm involve loss of reproductive capacity (failure to find a mate or death). Only the rare ones result in success. There must have been a lot of failures whilst a species 'learned' to migrate. Migration must have started as a relatively local behaviour pattern and then stretched to global dimensions, once they 'got the idea'. My anthropomorphic shorthand may be forgiven, here; no actual purpose was implied in my argument!

It is not surprising that they can't accept it because it doesn't include the existence of a God.  It is amazing how 'they' prefer the complete absence of evidence for their God to the, sometimes, rather weak evidence, used to explain certain bits of evolution. Faith has been responsible for an awful lot of bad choices in the past but it is a very 'comforting' notion.

[_Stefan_]

Come, come Stefan.

You're mud-slinging again - but this time it's hitting the writers of those accounts. They're all referenced, so if you're going to shout quote-mining, you need to prove it by going back to the original articles and showing that the writers mean the exact opposite of the quote.

Until you do that, I'd shut up if I were you.

You are taking pieces of someone else's writing, often out of much of it's context, skewing the meaning and ignoring the authors' purpose in order to support an argument that they don't agree with.

Whenever you do have the integrity to preserve the context and meaning, you abuse it all still to fit your agenda.

[Asyncritus (OP)]

Come, come Stefan.

You're mud-slinging again - but this time it's hitting the writers of those accounts. They're all referenced, so if you're going to shout quote-mining, you need to prove it by going back to the original articles and showing that the writers mean the exact opposite of the quote.

Until you do that, I'd shut up if I were you.

You are taking pieces of someone else's writing, often out of much of it's context, skewing the meaning and ignoring the authors' purpose in order to support an argument that they don't agree with.

Whenever you do have the integrity to preserve the context and meaning, you abuse it all still to fit your agenda.

As I said, if you can't prove your allegation, then shut up.

So prove already.

[Asyncritus (OP)]

Creationists cannot / will not accept the 'inside out' argument  which evolution uses.
Basically, if  there is an advantage in certain behaviour, then an organism may exhibit it. It is hard to conceive the colossal wastage in an evolutionary system. Most departures from the norm involve loss of reproductive capacity (failure to find a mate or death). Only the rare ones result in success. There must have been a lot of failures whilst a species 'learned' to migrate. Migration must have started as a relatively local behaviour pattern and then stretched to global dimensions, once they 'got the idea'.

I really cannot believe that an intelligent TNS can say such incredibly daft things!

So they flew 5 miles, and then worked that up to 7,500! Wowie!

C'mon Sophie, not even you can believe such nonsense!

Here are a few more facts which demolish the 'learned how to do it' school of thought:

"There is good evidence that young birds are equipped with endogenous migratory programs, which tell them roughly how many days and/or nights that they must fly, and in what direction."

 In his book La Puissance et la Fragilité, Prof. Pierre Jean Hamburger from René Descartes University describes the extraordinary 24,000-kilometer journey made by the shearwater that lives in the Pacific Ocean:
(and also http://birdchaser.blogspot.com/2006/08/sooty-shearwater-migrationamazing.html)


    It sets out from the coast of Australia. From there it flies straight southward to the Pacific. Then it turns north and flies along the coast of Japan until reaching the Bering Sea where it can rest for a while. Following that break it sets off again, and this time heads south. Crossing the western coast of America, it arrives in California. It then crosses the Pacific to return to its starting point. The route and timing of this 15,000-mile (24,000-kilometer) figure ‘8’ journey it makes every year never change. The journey in question lasts a whole six months, always coming to an end in the third week of September on the island it left six months before, at the nest it left six months before. What comes next is even more astonishing; after their return, the birds clean their nests, mate, and lay a single egg over the last 10 days of October. The chicks hatch out two months later, grow very fast and are cared for over three months until their parents set out on that stupendous journey. Two weeks later; around the middle of April, it is time for the young birds to take wing on their own journey. They follow exactly the same route as that described above, with no guide. The explanation is so obvious: These birds must have all the directions for such a journey within the inherited characteristics passed on within the egg.  Some people may claim that birds navigate by the Sun and stars or follow the winds prevailing along their route on this journey out and back. But it is clear that these factors cannot determine the journey’s geographical and chronological accuracy."
Pierre Jean Hamburger, La Puissance et la Fragilité, Flammarion Pub., Paris, 1972.

"migratory birds have comprehensive, detailed, innate spatio-temporal programs for successful migration. Such programs evidently enable even young, inexperienced birds to migrate alone, with no adult guide, to the species- or population-specific winter quarters that they have never seen before. As will be explained further below, they do this by "vector" navigation: referring to a vector composed of a genetically predetermined migratory direction and to a time-plan, also genetically predetermined, for the course of migration... It follows that the departure time is programmed by genetic factors... "
Peter Berthold, "Bird Migration: Introductory Remarks and Overall Perspective", Torgos, 1998, Vol. 28, pp. 25-30

Not only is it preprogrammed, but it is preprogrammed to do impossible things!

"Some birds migrate at seemingly impossible altitudes. For instance, dunlin, knot and certain other small migrating birds fly at a level of 7,000 m (23,000 feet), the same altitude used by aircraft. Whooper swans have been seen flying at 8,200 m (27,000 feet). Some birds even reach the stratosphere, the layer of thin atmosphere, at an altitude of between 8 and 40 kilometers (5 and 25 miles).11 Bar-headed geese cross the Himalayas at an altitude of 9,000 meters (29,529 feet), close to where the stratosphere begins."

My anthropomorphic shorthand may be forgiven, here; no actual purpose was implied in my argument!

It is not surprising that they can't accept it because it doesn't include the existence of a God.  It is amazing how 'they' prefer the complete absence of evidence for their God to the, sometimes, rather weak evidence, used to explain certain bits of evolution. Faith has been responsible for an awful lot of bad choices in the past but it is a very 'comforting' notion.

The evidence I have been presenting, and which has received no refutation worthy of the name, supports the exceedingly realistic hypothesis that these things were all super-intelligently designed.

Any aeroplane, flying a journey of 1000 miles or so, with fully functioning GPS, at an altitude of 25,000 feet or more at the very edge of the stratosphere, has got to be intelligently designed, or it would simply perish.

Yet, here are these birds, with brains the size of walnuts, performing feats of flight which strain the believability organ.

And they 'evolved' from reptiles, say the evolutionists!

Somebody is kidding you, guys!

[lyner]

As you have been banned, it would be unfair to answer. I only say that you have missed the whole point of what I was saying, async.

[lyner]

This is a Science Forum. If people want Religion or Philosophy, they should post on appropriate Fora. That's reasonable, isn't it?

[achilles_heel]

Being new to this forum, it's not clear why this subject has died.
Surely we can discuss objections to scientific theory without being accused of being religious can't we?

I do have a problem with Asyncritus's conclusions and perhaps someone could talk me through the thinking here, as he appears to have been excluded.  It seems to me that he is saying, 'Here with instinct is a marvellous thing which evolutionary theory cannot accommodate, and THEREFORE there must be a God who did it because no other explanation has been given.'
 
Surely this is a 'God-of-the-gaps' explanation, which is fine unless, and until, someone comes up with a better theory which gives some deeper consideration to these objections and provides an explanation which incorporates the objections that he makes to the current theory.
 
It is a valid argument against Darwinian theory but is not proof of God.
 
My own take on it is that the existence of what I perceive as design in the universe (not only biological , but also at all levels from subatomic to cosmology) begs the question of any existing theory for the origin of the universe and life.
 
One theory that should be taken into account in any reasonable open discussion is that there may be a Creator God.  It is one possibility in a sea of competing theories. We can't dismiss it out of hand just because we don't like it!

[ornate iridescence]

At present, there are no valid arguments and no evidences against modern evolutionary theory. Anyone with a detailed understanding of the theory, and without an agenda of denial, would be able to see that.

The 'God-of-the-gaps' arguments are easily dismissed by evolutionary theory and basic logic.

There is no evidence of  "design" in the universe. All apparent "design" is illusory, and can be shown to be produced by entirely natural causes.

Any reasonable discussion should automatically exclude a creator entity as a possibility. There are no valid reasons that a creator should exist. There is no evidence that it does exist. And even if it did exist, it would explain absolutely nothing, yet raise more questions: Who created the creator? How does the creator create? etc.

Evolutionary theory has withstood the test of time, been supported by millions of pieces of evidence. There are no alternatives to evolution, just as astrology is not an alternative to astronomy, alchemy is not an alternative to chemistry, the stork theory of reproduction is not an alternative to sexual reproduction, and so on. Evolution is the best and only explanation available, and this is unlikely to change.