Fun with Evolutionists

[Roy]

Listen close:

Genes do not determine the complexity of the human body. There is no gene for digestive enzymes or brain cells. Thus, there is no reasoning in saying that genes are the object of selection. If you want to say that the phenotype, based on the genetic makeup, is the object of selection, then fine ----- but that's not what you're saying....

Actually, it was. Go back and read it.

Roy

[Jorge]

[responding to Tiggy] ... answer my question, genius!

"Genius"? TIGGY a "genius"? That'd be like ... ... ...

... like saying that Mother Teresa was actually a serial sadist in her spare time

... like saying that Adolf Hitler was posthumously awarded the Good Jewish Citizen Award by Israel

... like saying that Bill Clinton never had sex outside of marriage

... like saying that Osama bin Laden was the largest financial contributor to Bush's political campaign


... there's more but hopefully you get the gist of it.


[BTW, I know you were being sarcastic with "genius" but I couldn't pass up the opportunity -- - Tiggy is such an easy target, ]

Jorge

[Viktor Scott]

It's amazing how many people in here have fallen for the neo-darwinist, materialistic fairytale that genes define the organism.

Ok, challenge-dodger, why don't we remove the genes for testosterone from your body. What do you think would happen? (HINT - you'd be a lot like Jorge)

[supersport]

It's amazing how many people in here have fallen for the neo-darwinist, materialistic fairytale that genes define the organism. What you people don't seem to understand is that the human body works as a whole and cannot be cut into pieces to decipher. Physical parts of our body do not make us who we are. How could inanimate matter be intelligible? Is your leg intelligible? How about your lung? How about your cells?...(your cells are intelligible not because of their physical structure but because of how they're programmed.)

And it's no different with genes.......genes do not work as individual entities. Not only that, but genes have no well-defined continuity or boundaries...the expression of each gene, in reality, is an expression of the whole. Each gene is ultimately dependent on, and entangled with every other gene....and thus, gene expression -- which was suppressed for decades by you atheists -- is subject to instructions, modifications and adjustments according to internal physiological contexts and external environmental cues.

The other thing you've got screwed up is the concept of heredity: Unlike what you guys have always said, there is no pre-determined genetic program for creating an organism, because an organism's genome can change in the course of development according to external conditions. Thus, it matters not how well adapted one's parents might have been because adaptation happens during development. This goes against the very fiber of your theory, which states that animals happen to emerge adapted because they got lucky enough to come from parents who were selected. But Heredity really has not so much to do with parents' genes, but more to do with the development of the whole organism as it interacts with its environmental contexts.. All of the developing organism's parts are highly responsive and in constant communication with all the other parts, and only change when change is appropriated by the whole. But it's this adaptivity to the environment during development where evolution -- if that's what you want to call it -- really happens. Consequently, lifeforms fates are not written in their inherited genes because each creature is an active participant in life and is able to create his own destiny. This, of course, shatters your whole reductionist, materialist worldview.

Ultimately, Lamarck will be proven right...or at least mostly right. Life is not about being in the right place at the right time. Organisms don't change before the environment changes, only to be selected....Organisms change after the environment changes because each creature is an active, autonomous being which is open to the environment and able to induce a dynamic transformation if needed. And the reality is your silly theory is screwed. You people are hanging on to an outdated mechanism of RMNS when there are perfectly good, proven mechanisms that do the same thing, only better and without so much waste (death.): Non-random mutations, epigenetics, horizontal gene transfer, gene regulation, reverse transcriptions, phenotypic plasticity and more, all of which point to rapid evoltion by way of the actions and behaviors of individual organisms.

Too bad, so sad....Neo-darwinism is dying a slow painful death....all you've got in front of you is more misery and defections from all kinds of scientists.

Anybody else care to comment so you don't look quite so overmatched by the truth????

[lao tzu]

Anybody else care to comment so you don't look quite so overmatched by the truth????

Sure. Tell us, supersport, were you channeling Edgar Cayce when you wrote this?

Too bad, so sad....Neo-darwinism is dying a slow painful death....all you've got in front of you is more misery and defections from all kinds of scientists.

People have been calling for the imminent demise of evolutionary theory for an awfully long time. I don't imagine that's much of a problem for people who can believe that Jesus is coming soon, right after he gets back from the bread store he went seeking out a couple thousand years ago, but for the rest of us, the claims have kind of lost their luster.

Pop quiz, supersport.

How many papers on evolution can you find published in the last year on PubMed?

How many the year before?

Is the number growing or shrinking?

Time to check your answers.

The answers are, respectively, more than 5000, more than 4500, and growing. There are, on average, more than 15 new papers on evolution published every day, and the rate is increasing, not decreasing. Did you get it right? What does this say about your claim that evolution is dying a "slow, painful death"?

• Edited by a Moderator •

The basic facts are not in any kind of dispute. All that's passed on from one organism to another through reproduction is contained in the genome. You grow legs but not wings because your genome contains a recipe for legs but not wings. Depending on how your genome is expressed, you will pass on your genome more or less successfully. We call reproductive success "fitness." Given differential fitness between different organisms, the gene pool itself will change. We call this change evolution.

We describe the causes and mechanisms of this evolution with theory. The evolution itself, though, remains a fact, as verifiable as gravity, and just as describable through theory.

Lamarckian, as versus genetic, heredity has no mechanism. Worse, it is contradicted by experiment and general observation. The child of white parents, conceived and born in Nigeria, is not black. We know how sexual reproduction transfers genetic information from both parents. We have seen it and even videotaped it in the lab. An entire industry has sprung up to do exactly that for humans with fertility problems. The processes of meiosis and mitosis have been carefully examined and recorded.

We know how to wipe out individual genes, and how to insert others. We can create fruitflies with legs that stick out of their heads. We can create tobacco plants that glow like fireflies. We can create strains of wheat that produce their own antifreeze. We do so, not by changing these organisms' environments, but by making changes to their genomes.

The genetic mechanism of evolution works.

Given that mechanism, we can mathematically model the spread of individual genes through a population over generational time. We can measure how well our predictions from theory match up with the observed facts. We have done so. They check out quite nicely, thank you very much.

We can extend our theory into the past and ask what we should expect to find if these mechanisms had been operating over geologic time scales. We have done so. Among the predictions generated by this extension of theory was the idea that tetrapods would have first moved onto land during a particular period of time. The evidence we would expect to find would be organisms with anatomical structures intermediate between fish and the first tetrapods dating to the period shortly before we find the first tetrapod fossils.

Pop quiz:

Did this prediction pan out?

As ever, Jesse

Moderated By: lilangelofterror

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[easyboy201]

Appeal to popular opinion? Argumentum ad populum?
• Edited by a Moderator • and more time trying to realize that figures mean next to nothing when it comes down to it. ;)

It doesn't matter how many people accept an idea... only the idea can come close to validifying itself.

Sure. Tell us, supersport, were you channeling Edgar Cayce when you wrote this?

Too bad, so sad....Neo-darwinism is dying a slow painful death....all you've got in front of you is more misery and defections from all kinds of scientists.

People have been calling for the imminent demise of evolutionary theory for an awfully long time. I don't imagine that's much of a problem for people who can believe that Jesus is coming soon, right after he gets back from the bread store he went seeking out a couple thousand years ago, but for the rest of us, the claims have kind of lost their luster.

Pop quiz, supersport.

How many papers on evolution can you find published in the last year on PubMed?

How many the year before?

Is the number growing or shrinking?

Time to check your answers.

The answers are, respectively, more than 5000, more than 4500, and growing. There are, on average, more than 15 new papers on evolution published every day, and the rate is increasing, not decreasing. Did you get it right? What does this say about your claim that evolution is dying a "slow, painful death"?

• Edited by a Moderator •

The basic facts are not in any kind of dispute. All that's passed on from one organism to another through reproduction is contained in the genome. You grow legs but not wings because your genome contains a recipe for legs but not wings. Depending on how your genome is expressed, you will pass on your genome more or less successfully. We call reproductive success "fitness." Given differential fitness between different organisms, the gene pool itself will change. We call this change evolution.

We describe the causes and mechanisms of this evolution with theory. The evolution itself, though, remains a fact, as verifiable as gravity, and just as describable through theory.

Lamarckian, as versus genetic, heredity has no mechanism. Worse, it is contradicted by experiment and general observation. The child of white parents, conceived and born in Nigeria, is not black. We know how sexual reproduction transfers genetic information from both parents. We have seen it and even videotaped it in the lab. An entire industry has sprung up to do exactly that for humans with fertility problems. The processes of meiosis and mitosis have been carefully examined and recorded.

We know how to wipe out individual genes, and how to insert others. We can create fruitflies with legs that stick out of their heads. We can create tobacco plants that glow like fireflies. We can create strains of wheat that produce their own antifreeze. We do so, not by changing these organisms' environments, but by making changes to their genomes.

The genetic mechanism of evolution works.

Given that mechanism, we can mathematically model the spread of individual genes through a population over generational time. We can measure how well our predictions from theory match up with the observed facts. We have done so. They check out quite nicely, thank you very much.

We can extend our theory into the past and ask what we should expect to find if these mechanisms had been operating over geologic time scales. We have done so. Among the predictions generated by this extension of theory was the idea that tetrapods would have first moved onto land during a particular period of time. The evidence we would expect to find would be organisms with anatomical structures intermediate between fish and the first tetrapods dating to the period shortly before we find the first tetrapod fossils.

Pop quiz:

Did this prediction pan out?

As ever, Jesse

Moderated By: lilangelofterror

We don't allow that kind of talk on t-web. Please see our Campus Decorum for more details.

***If you wish to take issue with this notice DO NOT do so in this thread.***
Contact the forum moderator or an administrator in Private Message or email instead. If you feel you must publically complain or whine, please take it to the Psychotherapy Room unless told otherwise.

[technomage]

Appeal to popular opinion? Argumentum ad populum?

No, not a fallacy. Supersport directly alledged that the ToE was losing support--taoist refuted that specific claim.

[easyboy201]

No, not a fallacy. Supersport directly alledged that the ToE was losing support--taoist refuted that specific claim.

Woo-hoo! I couldn't be bothered reading the posts before this page... I just wanted to come in here and throw pens...
I can do that in this section can't I? ;)

[technomage]

Throw pens? I guess ... but if you get ink on the carpet, you're cleaning it up.

[easyboy201]

Throw pens? I guess ... but if you get ink on the carpet, you're cleaning it up.

Aw man! I don't have to use my tongue do I? ;)

[technomage]

No, that's what they use toothbrushes for.

But it does have to be your own toothbrush.

[easyboy201]

Yeah... I'll be buying a new one. :D

[supersport]

• Edited by a Moderator •

boy that's some real class.

[easyboy201]

• Edited by a Moderator • They say that people usually use examples of something that's directly in front of them first. ;) j/k

[lao tzu]

You know I've got ToE by the gonads, don't you.....

I've got this forum by the gonads.

It can hoodwink gene-obsessed scientists who don't have the gonads to test evolution in a controlled manner on real animals so that they KNOW what caused the physiological change...

Of course all evolutionists hate me because I've got a death grip on their gonads and I'm twisting with a freaking vengeance.

Yup, that's some real class there, supersport.