battery chucka' one wrote:
2. Your example doesn't work since, according to you, the evolutionary process has a beginning and end. I thought it was a matter of ongoing mutations (btw, forgive the rabit trail, but didn't you say once that mutations were different than evolutionary processes?). Therefore, how could MVScal ever get to the end of his cards? It should always have thirteen cards and always need the next card in the process.
First off:
a) I have never stated that the evolutionary process has a beginning and an end. It is an ongoing process. In a way, every species currently in existence (including us) is a transitional form. The activity with playing cards has a beginning and an end...because it is using playing cards.
b) I have never said that mutations were different from evolutionary process. Mutations are a huge component of evolution and could not happen without them. As Dawkins has said, evolution is basically random mutation + NONrandom selection.
c) the point of the activity was to make a simple analogy to show how the process of evolution doesn't require a shitload of necessary components to appear at once, but instead gradually proceeds with each step making succeeding ones easier and more likely.
battery chucka' one wrote:3. With creationism, the whole pulling cards in order doesn't have odds stacked against it due to God's omnipotent nature. The cards wouldn't have to be pulled randomly. God would/could place the cards in order as he made them.
That was my point.
Creationists falsely claim that in order for "evolutionists" to be right, all the millions of necessary molecular, biochemical, structural features for an organism had to appear at once. That's a straw man and they know it. Those of us convinced by the evidence for natural selection have never claimed that the structures had to appear at once. Some of them go to the "of what use is half a wing" argument. The proper reply is "plenty" - it could be a rudder, a flipper, a supporting structure for balance, a display structure for mating, etc.
The group of cards that required the organism to appear Ace through King all at once is the creationist strawman, while the group of cards that took some time to get the Ace and Two in sequence, but then progressed quicker/easier to each succeeding step is the ACTUAL "evolutionist" argument.
battery chucka' one wrote:5. I took a look at a blue whale skeleton and yes, you could make the argument that the fins were once hands.
Not hands, but the basic handlike architecture.
There would be no reason to put fingers and toes in structures like fins that hide them...unless the fins were modified from ancestral land forms.
battery chucka' one wrote:However, I'm not seeing the hips.
They're small, but they're there. Same goes for dolphins and porpoises, all of which had land-based ancestors.
battery chucka' one wrote:7. The math comes in when the whole matter of the 250 proteins being in the exact same spot and then being struck by lightning at that exact time is astronomical.
Except that the "250 proteins" thing is horseshit. No one in evolutionary biology has decided that two-hundred-fifty specific proteins had to be gathered and sparked for life to occur. If Berlinski is saying that biologists ARE making that claim, then he's a flat-out liar. If HE decided, based on his own reading, etc. to have chosen what 250 proteins had to be lined up for "life," then he pulled that number out of his ass.
If you want to play with odds, try to calculate the odds against having myself, Dinsdale, Bri, AND mvscal ALL agreeing on a position. And yet, somehow, in this thread we do.
battery chucka' one wrote:It's a heck of a coincidence that this would happen just on its own. I can't accept that this can just 'happen' on its own.
Just because you can't wrap your head around the concept that biochemical and molecular processes can very nicely occur without any supernatural intervention doesn't mean it hasn't happened (and actually STLL happens). Some folks find it scary and demeaning that they may be "nothing more" than a mere stage in the ongoing organismal process (as opposed to being the pinnacle of some omnipotent deity's loving effort), but fear isn't a rational reason to accept or not accept plain facts. Grow the fuck up.
By the way, the argument that you've just made - that you can't accept that the 250 proteins all happened to be in the right place at the right time (i.e., making the strawman argument about the requirements for the first molecules for life) is PRECISELY what I was addressing in the playing card activity. No evolutionary biologist has MADE the claim that the magical 250 got together and were zapped at a precise moment. Instead, it is much more likely that a known chemical process called "cooperativity" occurred, in which a couple of molecules bonding made it much more likely that subsequent steps would occur. We see it all the time, right now, in the binding of oxygen to the four subunits of hemoglobin in blood and in myriad enzymatic reactions. There's no reason to appeal to supernatural intervention.
battery chucka' one wrote:8. No, I don't think that science is like 'knitting'. I was paraphrasing a statement by PZ Meyers. I think that it's been wonderful in many ways for the world. I also think that it's been awful in many ways. Ultimately, it was created by God and given to man.
Science was NOT created by God.
It is 100% a product of man. It is a wholly HUMAN endeavor.
battery chucka' one wrote:Some used it to glorify Him. Others used it to erode Faith.
But most use it for neither purpose, since science and religion are -or ought to be- nonoverlapping magisteria (to quote Gould). Science and religion each have their appropriate place.
THE BIBLE - Because all the works of all the science cannot equal the wisdom of cattle-sacrificing primitives who thought every animal species in the world lived within walking distance of Noah's house.
