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| Authored by: bprice on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 03:10 PM EDT |
The above religious screed is so fraught with fallacy and signs of the poster
having been seriously misled that it's difficult to know where to start. It does
show familiarity with the Gish Gallop, q. v., as used in writing. The
Gish Gallop is popular among creationists: the galloper rattles off a long
series of quick assertions each requiring a long recitation of facts for
refutation. The Gish Gallop is best used in a time-limited verbal debate
setting: in text, it's been called "argument by tl;dr", but fisking the text
doesn't have the time constraints that Gish used so well. I still have some
time constraints, though, called 'life'. I won't be able to fully straighten
out all the misleading statements. I will provide exactly as much evidence as
the creationist, because of my time constraints — everything I say,
however, can be verified through the scientific or historical
literature.
Evolution, as the term is commonly understood, does not
work, can not work, and has never been seen to work.
This
statement is not just misleading: it's blatantly false. Evolution has been
known, for 2500 years, to be the way the world works; and has been seen to work
in many instances. There is no other explanation that has ever been brought
forth for the the tons of evidence — except for the Omphalos conjecture
that a Deceiver God1 created the universe full of evidence indicating
that such a Deceiver had neither been necessary nor present (it's that universe
full of evidence that comprises the deception, by the Omphalos
Conjecture).
If you do the arithmetic, it turns out to be so
improbable as to be not even worth wasting time on. Think about mutation rates,
the fraction of those which are useful, the probability of a male and female
with useful mutations meeting and breeding, etc, and put even your best
estimates of numbers in and you will find that getting from a single celled
amoeba to even an insect, far less man, will need umpteen times longer that the
currently estimated age of the universe.
The probabilities that are
alluded to, from the creationist literature, are probabilities that applies to a
version of evolution that follows creationist principles, rather than the
evolutionary principles that are observed in reality. In particular, the
probabilities are given for abrupt, single-generation, complete transformations,
rather than the gradual, nearly imperceptible changes from generation to
generation that evolution is based on.
Where evolution seems to
work, sort of, is in single cells such as bacteria which reproduce by division,
and the statistics are very different indeed. Many people such as geneticists
have great difficulty in accepting that it is possible with larger creatures,
except in very limited ways.
Evolution has been observed in
multiple species with sexual reproduction, not just in species (like bacteria)
reproducing asexually. It's been observed in all manner of species that have a
quick enough reproduction rate that personal observation is practical. For
slower-growing species, such as most mammals (including H. sap. sap.),
reproduction on the evolutionary time scale is best understood by historical
observation and analysis. There are observations in some fish in the
Mediterranean, lizards on Mediterranean and Pacific islands, salamanders and
desert plants in California, moths in Great Britain, etc, not to mention
the continuing series of various species (and baramins) in the Galapagos —
many of these observations have enough direct observation of history that there
is no real dispute of their interpretation. Creationists have new observations
to explain away, every couple of months, it seems.
Geneticists are among
those whose observations provide the best, least refutable evidence of the fact
of evolution — except for those few creationists who claim to be
geneticists.
Evolution as a concept was introduced by people so
proud and arrogant that, unlike many highly competent scientists and other
professionals, they refused to acknowledge the existence of a
Creator.
Argumentum ad hominem does not enhance an
argument, especially when it's contrary to fact. Charles Darwin, the villain of
the creationists' (per)version of evolution, started off trying to reconcile
thousands of years of observations and hundreds of years of understanding of
evolution with the creationism that his church had taught him. He delayed
publishing On the Origin of Species for about thirty years, partly
because of his religion.
The fact that the Biblical account is
widely misrepresented by supposedly religious people, who seemingly can't read,
or at least can't read Hebrew, helped even more to confuse the
issue.
It's not clear which of the rewrites of the bible that you
are complaining about. Granted, some of the early rewrites in English were done
largely from surviving Latin and Greek rewrites, but later rewrites (claim to)
have been rewritten from surviving Hebrew texts. The two (mutually
contradictory) creation stories in Genesis seem to be closely aligned from
rewrite to rewrite, whether sourced from Latin, Greek, or
Hebrew.
Even Darwin himself recanted in the end, when he saw the
impossibility.
This story is known to be a fabrication by a
preacher: the person alleged to have made the report contradicted the
preacher's story, immediately upon the preacher's
publication.
1 The Deceiver is often referred to as a
"trickster god": I find 'trickster' to be more frivolous than the deception
deserves. Yes, I'm well aware that many christianities use 'Deceiver' as a
synonym for 'Satan': this makes me wonder who they think their 'creator' is.
---
--Bill. NAL: question the answers, especially mine. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: jesse on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 03:33 PM EDT |
Your statement of probability is rather limited.
Yes, any specific chain of evolution is highly improbable.
But when you have an infinite number of chains, each with a different path...
only the ones that survive will remain.
And the result is the sum of all the survivors.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: symbolset on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 02:17 AM EDT |
Tiger99: you've been a great contributor here. I hate to see you ostracized
for this cornerstone of your beliefs, which I respect.
Evolution is pretty
well proven and most folk are confident in it in matters both large and small.
Disbelief in it has some 'fringe' element that doesn't support your
cause.
Maybe it were better you win this one by fighting at the edges rather
than the well-defended core? Frontally taking on every believer of evolution is
going to take up your whole life, giving nothing in return. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- ? - Authored by: PJ on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 11:45 AM EDT
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| Authored by: Ian Al on Tuesday, April 02 2013 @ 04:55 AM EDT |
You may remember that I don't do math. Probably. However, it seems to me that
the probability of dealing a card from a full deck should be calculable.
If, after dealing the card, you remove the other three suites, then the
likelihood of dealing that card again much improves.
If you remove all the cards lower than the dealt card, the probability improves
again.
I think 'survival of the fittest' works by killing off the probability of the
unfit surviving.
---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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