Thursday, June 9, 2011

Response to Comments: Does Natural Selection Help?

According to the theory of evolution the biological world arose via random biological variation, such as caused by mutations. By “random” evolutionists do not mean completely random. Perhaps mutations occur more often in summer. Or perhaps they occur more often in the daytime, or on Tuesdays. Perhaps mutations occur more often in one part of the genome. Such trends are clearly not random. So what do evolutionists mean by random? They mean that the biological variation is random with respect to need. Mutations are not, for instance, biased in ways that help the organism adapt to environmental challenges.

As an aside, this is yet another evolutionary expectation that has been falsified. We now know, no thanks to evolution, that biological variation very much is not random with respect to need. In fact, we observe rapid, non random, adaptations arising to cope with changing environments. Evolutionists, after resisting the findings, subsumed them within evolution. Such amazing adaptive capabilities, claimed evolutionists, were created by evolution. After all, populations that can rapidly adapt to challenging conditions would be better off, and so preserved by natural selection.

That was not entirely an aside because it raises the question of selection. Given that biological variation is random with respect to need, does natural selection help to explain how those amazing adaptive capabilities, or the other thousands of fantastic biological designs, arose?

According to evolutionists it certainly is. Breeders select for the traits they desire and Darwin argued that nature—by virtue of differential survival rates—effectively selects for the more fit designs.

Evolutionists often refer to selection “pressure” to indicate the powerful and effective role of natural selection in the evolution of biological designs. But in fact there is no such thing as selection pressure. Remember, according to evolution biological variation is random with respect to need. And selection is powerless to change this. It does not coax the needed mutations to occur. Natural selection is merely the consequence of (i) some mutations not working and so disappearing from the population and (ii) others having a neutral or positive effect and so perhaps surviving. We might say that selection kills off the bad designs. It certainly does not induce certain designs to arise.

So if selection pressure is a fiction then what role is there for natural selection? The answer is not much. In fact, starting at that warm little pond almost four billion years ago, evolution must have created humans via a very long sequence of random biological changes. Humans, and everything in between, arose by an astronomically long series of lucky shots. Selection merely eliminated the wrong turns.

Evolutionists are wrong to appeal so strongly to natural selection as the driving force behind evolution’s brilliance. The secret in the soup is evolution’s heroic claim about the nature of chemistry, physics, biology and life itself. Simply put, evolutionists imagine that from a lifeless pond to a human being, there is a long, gradual sequence of tiny, simple changes, each of which confers a slightly positive improvement in the ability to reproduce.

Each of these tiny, simple changes consists of a modest chemical modification, drawn from a small population of possibilities. For example, there are only four letters in the alphabet of DNA. If changing a particular DNA nucleotide to one of the other three letters confers a reproductive enhancement, then is it not likely to occur randomly at some point, and then be selected? Sure, but natural selection is not the key to this story.

The key to the evolution miracle is not natural selection, which itself is relatively uncontroversial, but the unfounded and unspoken assumption that the nature of matter, chemical bonds, chemistry’s periodic table, physic’s universal laws, and all of biology conspire together to form spontaneously a most unlikely thing: life. That is, starting from no life at all, the millions and millions of species and their incredible designs all spontaneously form via gradual, tiny chemical changes that just happen to occur at random. All this because there is an astronomical number of ever improving designs, all linked by those tiny changes. These never-ending lineages of nearly identical species form a myriad of pathways in biology’s immense design space. These pathways lead to each and every species we observe.

This is the heavy lifting behind evolutionary theory, not natural selection. Evolutionists tout selection and selection pressure, but these merely provide cover for the real absurdity. It would be like claiming that jet aircraft could be constructed by a long sequence of intermediates, each of which could fly.

But we need not depend on analogies or intuition. Biology gives us little doubt that there is no such evolutionary magic. Perhaps evolution’s many pathways leading to the many species are real, but there is no scientific evidence for them. Experiments consistently reveal limitations to change, not the sort of biological elasticity evolution requires. Even a mere, single protein molecule cannot be evolved from scratch. And biological designs give us little reason to think they are one in a long line of gradually changing designs, each working a bit better than the previous.

But evolutionists deny the science and insist that with natural selection, evolution becomes feasible. They resist acknowledging the fact that there is no such thing as selection pressure, and that their theory relies on random biological variation coupled with a fanciful notion of life.

For example, an evolutionist recently asked this question:

Let’s have CH clarify: when creationist debaters try to convince people that modern evolutionary theory is a theory of adaptation by pure random mutation, are they misleading their audiences? Is that a problem for CH?

The professor’s concern is that these creationists do not tell their audiences about natural selection and its role in evolutionary theory. Sure, if we want to describe evolution we need to include natural selection. But in that case we need to describe it accurately. We need to explain its limitations. And we need to explain evolution’s unlikely assumptions about the nature of biology and life. If evolutionists are concerned about self-serving, scientifically faulty descriptions of their theory, then perhaps they should look closer to home.

42 comments:

  1. I'm beginning to think that CH's month+ hiatus was a result of him paying too much attention to the comments on his blog. I suspect it was becoming more and more difficult to resolve the cognitive dissonance plaguing him, what with the constant barrage of people pointing out the flaws in his arguments. So he took some time off to get back to his roots.

    He was of course never afraid to make unfounded claims or argue against straw-men that had little to do with the actual claims about evolution, but the most glaringly ignorant and foolish ideas had begun to appear with less frequency and in a more nuanced form because they were so easily and thoroughly torn down in their raw form.

    Now he's had some time away from criticism, and he's been able to convince himself that those arguments were never actually torn down at all. In fact, they're such powerful arguments that he's wondering why he ever started self-censoring in the first place.

    So here we are, back once again to the raw, unadulterated types of arguments with which he started, unblunted by previous criticisms. Sure people made a lot of noise about them before which threw him a bit off balance, and even though he no longer remembers what the specific criticisms were, ultimately they couldn't have been that good because his arguments are every bit as powerful now as they ever were.

    I suspect we're going to be seeing much more blatant inanity for awhile, at least until he re-learns just how foolish they make him look. That might take awhile. It's hard to feel foolish when you have no shame.

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  2. The Darwinian shell game called natural selection is remarkably deceptive. It has fooled a lot of people into thinking that it's a scientific principle, but I see no way to justify calling it science.

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  3. Shubee said...

    The Darwinian shell game called natural selection is remarkably deceptive. It has fooled a lot of people into thinking that it's a scientific principle, but I see no way to justify calling it science.


    Why don't you explain in your own words exactly what natural selection is, how it works. I suspect you're going off another woefully ignorant understanding of the actual meaning just like you screwed up 'Mitochondrial Eve'.

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  4. Venture Free said...

    I'm beginning to think that CH's month+ hiatus was a result of him paying too much attention to the comments on his blog. I suspect it was becoming more and more difficult to resolve the cognitive dissonance plaguing him, what with the constant barrage of people pointing out the flaws in his arguments. So he took some time off to get back to his roots.


    I suspect you've hit the nail square on the head. CH had to recharge his religious batteries so to speak. Now he's back pulling the 'Liar for Jesus' train with his former gusto.

    It's painful to read through the offal like his article above. I stopped counting at five blatant falsehoods. How he faces himself in the mirror every morning I sure don't know.

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  5. More bad news for the evolutionists and their mutation + natural selection assumptions ...

    from ScienceDaily...

    "It was found that the beneficial mutations allowing the bacteria to increase in fitness didn't have a constant effect. The effect of their interactions depended on the presence of other mutations, which turned out to be overwhelmingly negative.

    These results point us toward expecting to see the rate of a population's fitness declining over time even with the continual addition of new beneficial mutations, he said. As we sometimes see in sports, a group of individual stars doesn't necessarily make a great team."

    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110602143202.htm


    Of course, evolution is assumed to be fact by ScienceDaily, but this strikes at a major assumption by evolutionists that happy mutations continue to add up with no end to all their wonderful novelties and benefits.

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  6. Cornelius Hunter: As an aside, this is yet another evolutionary expectation that has been falsified. We now know, no thanks to evolution, that biological variation very much is not random with respect to need. In fact, we observe rapid, non random, adaptations arising to cope with changing environments.

    What are you referring to specifically?

    Cornelius Hunter: Evolutionists often refer to selection “pressure” to indicate the powerful and effective role of natural selection in the evolution of biological designs. But in fact there is no such thing as selection pressure.

    Oh?

    Cornelius Hunter: Remember, according to evolution biological variation is random with respect to need. And selection is powerless to change this. It does not coax the needed mutations to occur.

    No. Selection pressure occurs in response to existing variations in a population, not necessarily mutations.

    You've been talking evolution long enough to know that.

    Cornelius Hunter: All this because there is an astronomical number of ever improving designs, all linked by those tiny changes.

    Not always tiny change, but generally stepwise. And the evidence from common descent shows that such pathways exist across vast numbers of taxa.

    Cornelius Hunter: Even a mere, single protein molecule cannot be evolved from scratch.

    You know that even random protein sequences can be functional.

    Cornelius Hunter: This is the heavy lifting behind evolutionary theory, not natural selection.

    No. They're both essential to adaptation.

    Cornelius Hunter: It would be like claiming that jet aircraft could be constructed by a long sequence of intermediates, each of which could fly.

    Birds descended from theropod dinosaurs. Did you know that many theropods had feathers!?

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  7. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  8. Tedford the Idiot said...

    More bad news for the evolutionists and their mutation + natural selection assumptions ...

    from ScienceDaily...

    "It was found that the beneficial mutations allowing the bacteria to increase in fitness didn't have a constant effect. The effect of their interactions depended on the presence of other mutations, which turned out to be overwhelmingly negative.


    Once again Tedford the Idiot doesn't understand what he reads.

    All the experiments show is that as a population becomes more and more well adapted to a non-changing environment, the chances of it becoming even more fit decrease. This is due to the simple fact that there are less ways to get better when you're already near the top of the fitness peak.

    Of course once the environment changes, the population is no longer near the fitness peak and goes back to having many more possible ways to improve.

    Tedford, you really should stop embarrassing yourself like this.

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  9. Neal Tedford: Of course, evolution is assumed to be fact by ScienceDaily,

    And the scientists who did the research.

    "As we sometimes see in sports, a group of individual stars doesn't necessarily make a great team."

    Nice analogy.

    Neal Tedford: More bad news for the evolutionists and their mutation + natural selection assumptions ...

    According to your thinking, there is never a way to forge a better team.

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  10. Zachriel, right. It's just as evolutionists since Darwin have been predicting for the last 150 years... Population's fitness declining over time.

    A team is forged by working together (like DNA/RNA, etc working with the cellular membrane). This study shows that mutations, quote "depended on the presence of other mutations, which turned out to be overwhelmingly negative."

    Stop and think about those two words: Overwhelmingly negative.

    Not good for your theory.

    Well the study is good because it may help to understand chronic disease as it "evolves". Now there is an area where predicting evolving mutations may actually be accurate!

    The greatest example of teamwork on earth is found in the living cell. Teamwork (positive interaction) in biological systems is not free, neither is it optional.

    How to forge a good team (positive interaction)? A wise coach that can get the players to interact in an overwhelmingly postive manner. Intelligent design wins again!

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  11. Cornelius Hunter:

    "By “random” evolutionists do not mean completely random. Perhaps mutations occur more often in summer. Or perhaps they occur more often in the daytime, or on Tuesdays."
    ===

    Makes sense in a Scottonian type of Maya-way. Since if he were to actually believe and accept belief in a creator, he'd prefer last Thursday.

    Veils of MAYA, don't you just love such make-it-up as you go along belief systems ??? Kinda like the way Scientific Thinking has ended up as evidenced from the present ruination of our planet.

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  12. Neal Tedford said...

    Zachriel, right. It's just as evolutionists since Darwin have been predicting for the last 150 years... Population's fitness declining over time.


    Tedford you blithering idiot, read the damn papers for once in your fat pathetic life.

    The first paper

    Khan, A.I et al. (2011) Negative Epistasis Between Beneficial Mutations in an Evolving Bacterial Population. Science, 332, 1193-1196.

    Abstract: Epistatic interactions between mutations play a prominent role in evolutionary theories. Many studies have found that epistasis is widespread, but they have rarely considered beneficial mutations. We analyzed the effects of epistasis on fitness for the first five mutations to fix in an experimental population of Escherichia coli. Epistasis depended on the effects of the combined mutations—the larger the expected benefit, the more negative the epistatic effect. Epistasis thus tended to produce diminishing returns with genotype fitness, although interactions involving one particular mutation had the opposite effect. These data support models in which negative epistasis contributes to declining rates of adaptation over time. Sign epistasis was rare in this genome-wide study, in contrast to its prevalence in an earlier study of mutations in a single gene.


    The second paper mentioned from the Marx lab

    Chou, H-H. et al (2011) Diminishing Returns Epistasis Among Beneficial Mutations Decelerates Adaptation. Science, 332, 1190-1192.

    Abstract: Epistasis has substantial impacts on evolution, in particular, the rate of adaptation. We generated combinations of beneficial mutations that arose in a lineage during rapid adaptation of a bacterium whose growth depended on a newly introduced metabolic pathway. The proportional selective benefit for three of the four loci consistently decreased when they were introduced onto more fit backgrounds. These three alleles all reduced morphological defects caused by expression of the foreign pathway. A simple theoretical model segregating the apparent contribution of individual alleles to benefits and costs effectively predicted the interactions between them. These results provide the first evidence that patterns of epistasis may differ for within- and between-gene interactions during adaptation and that diminishing returns epistasis contributes to the consistent observation of decelerating fitness gains during adaptation.


    The interactions didn't lower the overall fitness of the population. They lowered the rate of adaption i.e the rate of fitness increase declined. That's why they use the terms diminishing returns and decelerating fitness gains.

    You are amazingly dense, even for a Creationist.

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  13. Tedford:

    This study shows that mutations, quote "depended on the presence of other mutations, which turned out to be overwhelmingly negative."

    Stop and think about those two words: Overwhelmingly negative.


    As if we needed more evidence that pastor Tedford is an utterly dishonest quote miner.

    In this study the word negative simply means less positive than expected if beneficial mutations had strictly additive effects. But still positive! If each beneficial mutation on its own improves survival by an amount s, the study shows that having two of those beneficial mutations improves survival by less than 2 times s, but still more than s. From the paper's abstract:

    Epistasis thus tended to produce diminishing returns with genotype fitness

    In other words: having more than one beneficial mutation still increased fitness compared to having just one beneficial mutation, but the increase in fitness became smaller as more beneficial mutations were added.

    Tedford, do you really think the readers of this blog are too stupid to notice your dishonesty?

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  14. Thorton beat me to it. Great minds think alike, right?

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  15. troy said...

    Tedford, do you really think the readers of this blog are too stupid to notice your dishonesty?


    Sadly for those ICDer readers who eagerly slurp up this swill, the answer is yes.

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  16. troy: "Tedford, do you really think the readers of this blog are too stupid to notice your dishonesty?"

    I bet Neal himself is. He's not being dishonest; he's just that inept.

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  17. troy said...

    Thorton beat me to it. Great minds think alike, right?


    Ninja'ed! :)

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  18. Derick:

    I bet Neal himself is. He's not being dishonest; he's just that inept.

    Well, even if Neal is too stupid and/or ignorant to understand the results of the study - and I agree that it's quite likely that he is - it's still dishonest to jump to his conclusion. Having been corrected numerous times by people with far more expertise, Neal should know by now - even if he is quite stupid - that his initial understanding of a scientific study is quite likely to be incorrect.

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  19. Derick Childress said...

    troy: "Tedford, do you really think the readers of this blog are too stupid to notice your dishonesty?"

    I bet Neal himself is. He's not being dishonest; he's just that inept.


    That is a viable hypothesis. Casey Luskin, the equally inept DI's attack gerbil, had a write up about the papers yesterday at Evolution Snooze and Spews where he made the identical stupid mistake and claimed the papers show overall fitness decreasing.

    Tedford may just be a brain-dead parrot regurgitating mindlessly the DI propaganda he read.

    Is that it Tedford? You're just the idiot messenger?

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  20. UH evolutionary biologist Timothy Cooper having worked five years on this project was quoted in ScienceDaily:

    "These results point us toward expecting to see the rate of a population's fitness declining over time even with the continual addition of new beneficial mutations," he said. "As we sometimes see in sports, a group of individual stars doesn't necessarily make a great team."

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  21. Tedford, it's the rate (the fitness increase) that's declining, not fitness itself. Fitness is still increasing. Are you really that dense?

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  22. LOL! I've seen some dirt-stupid Creationists in my day but Tedford really takes the prize.

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  23. CH:"Sure, if we want to describe evolution we need to include natural selection. But in that case we need to describe it accurately. We need to explain its limitations."

    The ignorance continues. I guess it is easier to attack a caricature than the science itself. The only victims are accuracy and fairness.

    One has to wonder: is Cornelius really unaware of a robust literature spanning at least 40 years on the limitations of natural selection?

    Or the 100 years of literature discussing the interaction between selection and mutation, showing the centrality of mutation as a driver of evolution? How about the increasing evidence for a role of rare, large-effect mutations, rather than selection, as a source of evolutionary novelty? What about constructive neutral evolution?

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  24. If the rate of increase in fitness slows with increasing mutations, won't it eventually stop? That means that increasing fitness, and evolution will stop.

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  25. natschuster: "If the rate of increase in fitness slows with increasing mutations, won't it eventually stop? That means that increasing fitness, and evolution will stop."

    Good. Gosh. Increasing fitness slows when the organism gets near the top of the fitness peak. But the fitness peak moves when the environment changes. Not so in a lab experiment like this one. The environment is intentionally kept constant to be able to study other variables.

    You are intentionally ignorant. You have no excuse for this. I was a young earth creationist 3 years ago. I didn't even know what a fitness peak was. But guess what? Turns out they hide this kind of information in 'books'. You're responding to written words here, so obviously you're literate on some level. Read. Research. Do others the courtesy of at least having a rudimentary understanding of something before you criticize it.

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  26. But it means that it can only go so far up one fitness peak. If an adaptation requires more mutations then that then it won't happen.

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  27. natschuster said, "But it means that it can only go so far up one fitness peak. If an adaptation requires more mutations then that then it won't happen."

    Right, like our side has been saying since the beginning, there are limits to adaption and fitness. As this study has pointed out, it's a process of diminishing returns for those happy mutations. Evolutionists here need to think through the implications rather than engage in empty rhetoric.

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  28. natschuster: "But it means that it can only go so far up one fitness peak. If an adaptation requires more mutations then that then it won't happen."

    Without googling it, define 'fitness peak' in your own words.

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  29. Neal, did you ever find the names of those theologians who had an old-earth interpretation of Genesis prior to 1659?

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  30. Neal: "Right, like our side has been saying since the beginning, there are limits to adaption and fitness."

    Your stupidity is staggering. What scientist has ever said or implied that there aren't limits to adaptation?

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  31. Tedford the Idiot said...

    natschuster said, "But it means that it can only go so far up one fitness peak. If an adaptation requires more mutations then that then it won't happen."

    Right, like our side has been saying since the beginning, there are limits to adaption and fitness. As this study has pointed out, it's a process of diminishing returns for those happy mutations. Evolutionists here need to think through the implications rather than engage in empty rhetoric.


    It's a process of diminishing returns in a constant non-changing environment you brain dead idiot, a situation you don't find in the outside real world. The adaptive feedback loop of evolution drives the population to the 'good enough' level, not the 'perfect' level.

    How many dozens of times do you need that explained to you before it penetrates your fat head?

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  32. Derick: "What scientist has ever said or implied that there aren't limits to adaptation? "

    In the past, while no one would have actually said the phrase 'There are no limitations to adaptation', there were those whose research approach implied that was the case.

    Around the 1950s, there was a trend for many evolutionary biologists to emphasise selection ahead of all else, which meant that they applied the selection as a mechansism which could 'solve' all issues in biology(this was noted by Gould as a 'hardening' of the modern synthesis, which had previously been quite pluralistic).

    But - by the 1970s, however, these ideas were increasingly questioned. Most famously, these ideas were critiqued and ridiculed in equal measure by Gould and Lewontin (1979).

    The 30 years in particular since this landmark paper have seen a substantial shift in the way that biologists approach selection and apparent adaptation.

    But before this, at the genetic level, the limits of selection were already becoming well understood, and had been since the late 1960s. So molecular biologists had a good 10 year+ start - relevant if we are going to talk here about mutation and fitness peaks.

    I find it amusing that these creationist types (Neal, Nat), take a few extracts from a literature they are largely ignorant of, and then propose grave problems for evolutionary theory.

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  33. "Oh yeah? Then why are there still monkeys?"

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  34. Sorry, I was busy grading courses and missed this thread. CH, finally responding to "an evolutionist" (actually to me, who he has anonymized)

    CH:For example, an evolutionist recently asked this question:

    me:Let’s have CH clarify: when creationist debaters try to convince people that modern evolutionary theory is a theory of adaptation by pure random mutation, are they misleading their audiences? Is that a problem for CH?

    CH:The professor’s concern is that these creationists do not tell their audiences about natural selection and its role in evolutionary theory. Sure, if we want to describe evolution we need to include natural selection. But in that case we need to describe it accurately. We need to explain its limitations. And we need to explain evolution’s unlikely assumptions about the nature of biology and life. If evolutionists are concerned about self-serving, scientifically faulty descriptions of their theory, then perhaps they should look closer to home.


    OK, so CH finally, just barely, admits that creationist debaters who describe evolution as a process of random mutation, and fail to inform their audiences of natural selection's role, are "inaccurate". They are more than inaccurate, they are either massively ignorant or deliberately misleading their audiences.

    The rest of CH's post is a lot of verbiage about how unlikely the particular sequence of mutations in evolution is. Yup. True. But I can show you how to -- regularly and repeatably -- get a sequence of events that is extremely improbable. Every time. Just take a coin and toss it 100 times. The resulting sequence of Heads and Tails has a probability of only 1 part in the 100th power of 2. Which is about 1 part in 10-to-the-30th. Wow, that is really improbable. Yet you can do it every time! I guess that shows that people who toss coins are making unreasonable assumptions ...

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  35. I just reread my comment and see I just misattributed to CH the thought that the creationist debaters are "inaccurate". I apologize for this blatant misquotation. CH was describing only evolutionists as lacking accuracy. He did not actually say that the creationist debaters are inaccurate. He said as little as possible about them. Even though they are much, much worse than inaccurate ...

    My original complaint was about CH embracing the analogy of evolution to monkeys with typewriters. Was he wrong? Reading the responses by CH one can see he is admitting he was wrong. Very quietly.

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  36. Interesting. CH never turns up for a discussion in the comments of his own blog anymore.

    Just maybe - a frank discussion with Joe Felsenstein (who was downgraded from an 'evolution' in one post, to a mere 'evolutionist' in another) is an intimidating prospect.

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  37. Paul said...

    Interesting. CH never turns up for a discussion in the comments of his own blog anymore.


    Cornelius has been just mailing it in for almost half a year now. There are only so many ways to type the same BS, and he's done it so much even he doesn't have the stomach for it anymore.

    Just maybe - a frank discussion with Joe Felsenstein (who was downgraded from an 'evolution' in one post, to a mere 'evolutionist' in another) is an intimidating prospect.

    There are any number of technically competent posters here who can expose Cornelius' disingenuous claims and hypocrisy. He knows it too, which is why he refuses to engage any of them. It takes much less effort (and spine) to toss rocks from the sidelines and run than to get in the game.

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  38. So Joe likens life to gambling. Wa, biology is a cinch.

    Er, who are u kidding, Joe? Your years of professional experience is having a negative effect on your logical abilities.

    Finch beaks dont get larger, by um a coin toss. Cecal valves in lizards don't come about by um a coin toss.

    The day you admit design and intelligence in nature is the day you breakout into the real world; the day you affirm your own capabilities as embedded in that same nature finch beaks and cecal valves exist.

    Hope to see you there. Soon.






    Joe: "Just take a coin and toss it 100 times. The resulting sequence of Heads and Tails has a probability of only 1 part in the 100th power of 2. Which is about 1 part in 10-to-the-30th. Wow, that is really improbable. Yet you can do it every time! I guess that shows that people who toss coins are making unreasonable"

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  39. Steve says:"Finch beaks dont get larger, by um a coin toss. Cecal valves in lizards don't come about by um a coin toss.

    The day you admit design and intelligence in nature is the day you breakout into the real world
    "

    I assume this is a poe. Well, I hope it is anyway.

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  40. Neal Tedford said...

    UH evolutionary biologist Timothy Cooper having worked five years on this project was quoted in ScienceDaily:

    "These results point us toward expecting to see the rate of a population's fitness declining over time even with the continual addition of new beneficial mutations," he said. "As we sometimes see in sports, a group of individual stars doesn't necessarily make a great team."


    This is absolutely hilarious! The IDiots over at UncommonlyDense picked up this story and ran with it, with dozens of them making the same stupid claim as Tedford:

    Recent papers confirm that genetic entropy decreases fitness

    The few pro-science folks at UD tried to correct them but were hooted down, called stupid, evidence-deniers, etc. One of them emailed the author of the paper, Tim Cooper, who responded directly at UD

    Tim Cooper, post#189: "I want to respond to the specific point raised in the initial post that our work supports a view that the fitness of the population that we studied will decline over time.

    It doesn’t.

    Our work describes evidence that the rate of fitness *increase* will decline over time. That is, the rate of fitness improvement slows, but does not become negative.

    For anyone interested, a link to the actual article is now live on my lab website: web.mac.com/tim_f_cooper/Cooper_lab/Publications.html"


    Of course not one of the IDiots has offered an apology or retraction. All that has happened is Denise O'Dreary has posted a dozen new topics to push the embarrassment to the back pages.

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  41. Steve said:Finch beaks dont get larger, by um a coin toss. Cecal valves in lizards don't come about by um a coin toss.

    The day you admit design and intelligence in nature is the day you breakout into the real world; the day you affirm your own capabilities as embedded in that same nature finch beaks and cecal valves exist.

    Hope to see you there. Soon.


    What I was discussing was Cornelius Hunter's embrace of the creationist use of the monkeys-on-typewriters analogy. It is a deeply misleading analogy that conveniently leaves out natural selection. Cornelius was trying to impress people with how improbable the sequence of events involved in evolution was. I was pointing out that just tossing coins you can get extremely improbable outcomes -- and do it every time.

    "Steve" seems to have missed the whole point.

    As to whether I should "admit design and intelligence in nature" -- well, I have spent a lot of effort reading William Dembski's arguments that there is evidence for design. They really aren't arguments for design, they are arguments that there is evidence against natural selection being able to explain adaptation. In my article on Dembski's arguments (which Steve can find by using "Dembski Felsenstein" in a search engine) I pointed out a major logical flaw in Dembski's argument -- that he changes the specification in midstream, when one needs to keep it the same.

    Perhaps "Steve" will tell us why I was wrong in that central point, as "Steve" thinks he has a good understanding of all this.

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  42. From the original post: We now know, no thanks to evolution, that biological variation very much is not random with respect to need.

    I thought the creationist line was that Mutations Are Nearly Always Harmful. But you didn't merely say that mutation is sometimes nonrandom but that it basically always is. So which is it?

    Also, "No thanks to evolution" suggests that the relevant observations were made from a non-evolutionary frame of mind, perhaps by creation scientists — not merely that they contradict prior assumptions. Do you have evidence for this?

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