I note many public evolutionists, Prothero and Shermer and many others always stress the cases of vestigial parts in marine mammals as evidence for evolutionary biology.
Yet in reality this is a sampling error that in fact makes the opposite case against evolution.
I agree marine mamnmals once were land lovers and only later gained features to surbvve in the water. Not the impossible steps said by evolutionists, as Berlinski demonstrates, but some other mechanism.
Darwin in a well known challenge in his book defied anyone showing that anything in biology could not be explained as to its origin by small steps from start to finish. Modern evolutionists also insist , however complex, that all biological entities at any point can be seen as coming from small changes in populations and from there in lineages from start to finish for anything.
It always bothered me that this line of reasoning was so important to darwins claim.
It was up to creationists to prove why accumulating small changes could not turn fish could not become fishermen or bugs into buffaloes . WHY NOT ? Darwin asked and ever since. however extreme the claim mat seem to so many.
I say lets turn the argument around on them. The line of reasoning works against them as follows.
I will use two improbable, impossible9did I say impossible) lineages of a finale creatures evolutionary origin.
ONE. to start you have a fish, then a fish breathing on land with crab legs, then it has horse legs, then its got a t-rex head, then its a ground bird with flippers, then a primate monkey, then a rabbit type creature with horns and crab legs, then a bird again, then a mouse. All this happening in about 200 million years of evolution.
TWO. you start with a fish, then a duck like creature, then a fish with flippers, then a land breathing reptile creature with a trunk, then a cat like creature with long giraffe legsm then a primate, then a shrew, then a primate again and finally a bird. 200 million years start to finish.
This is impossible by any common sense, intelligence, of any human being. never mind the intermediates. this sequence of these two creatures evolving this way from start to finish is self evident nonsense.
For evolutionists THEN explain why not BY small steps could these lineages not happen?? Why not, if small populations could be selected on to account for our real biology glory, could not my examples easily, equally, be accounted for bu evolutions mechanism.
if evolution can explain anything we have then why not anything we can imagine??
iF you say no. then the absurdity of bugs becoming buffaloes and fish becoming fishermen makes the creationist point solid and Darwins reply worthless.
As a temporary fix, until Lizzie returns, anyone who is being moderated and can’t comment is invited to leave a comment here and I will approve it, hoping that it will work as a fix for all commenters in all threads. Perhaps other thread authors could also check to see if they can do the same. I note that Lamont has approved my comment in his thread but this has not stopped my comments in other threads (including my own) ending up in moderation, so maybe it won’t, but you never know!
Added in edit:
Seems that author approval releases moderated comments in that thread only. As Lizzie is, I suspect, the only one with administrator permissions, we are stuck with the status quo.
Added in edit:
Seems it is worse than I thought. Author approval is apparently needed for each comment which is really impractical. Mark Frank has already suggested continuing on his blog but perhaps we could open an ad hoc wordpress blog with shared admin among volunteers and open authorship as this seems to operate well here. The level of abusive posting (apart from one notable exception) has been minimal and I think we should err on the side of open-ness. I will try and be alert to checking moderation.
Added in edit:
Just a thought. It could be democratic with shared admin (volunteers, please) and all members having author status by default as that seems to work well here. Keeping a wordpress format should make it easy to transfer active threads if need be.
Added in edit:
The moderation glitch appears to be fixed!
Gpuccio has made a series of comments at Uncommon Descent and I thought they could form the basis of an opening post. The comments following were copied and pasted from Gpuccio’s comments starting here
To onlooker and to all those who have followed thi discussion:
I will try to express again the procedure to evaluate dFSCI and infer design, referring specifically to Lizzies “experiment”. I will try also to clarify, while I do that, some side aspects that are probably not obvious to all.
Moreover, I will do that a step at a time, in as many posts as nevessary.
So, let’s start with Lizzie’s “experiment”:
Creating CSI with NS
Posted on March 14, 2012 by Elizabeth
Imagine a coin-tossing game. On each turn, players toss a fair coin 500 times. As they do so, they record all runs of heads, so that if they toss H T T H H H T H T T H H H H T T T, they will record: 1, 3, 1, 4, representing the number of heads in each run.At the end of each round, each player computes the product of their runs-of-heads. The person with the highest product wins.
In addition, there is a House jackpot. Any person whose product exceeds 1060 wins the House jackpot.
There are 2500 possible runs of coin-tosses. However, I’m not sure exactly how many of that vast number of possible series would give a product exceeding 1060. However, if some bright mathematician can work it out for me, we can work out whether a series whose product exceeds 1060 has CSI. My ballpark estimate says it has.
That means, clearly, that if we randomly generate many series of 500 coin-tosses, it is exceedingly unlikely, in the history of the universe, that we will get a product that exceeds 1060.
However, starting with a randomly generated population of, say 100 series, I propose to subject them to random point mutations and natural selection, whereby I will cull the 50 series with the lowest products, and produce “offspring”, with random point mutations from each of the survivors, and repeat this over many generations.
I’ve already reliably got to products exceeding 1058, but it’s
possible that I may have got stuck in a local maximum.
However, before I go further: would an ID proponent like to tell me whether, if I succeed in hitting the jackpot, I have satisfactorily refuted Dembski’s case? And would a mathematician like to check the jackpot?
I’ve done it in MatLab, and will post the script below. Sorry I don’t speak anything more geek-friendly than MatLab (well, a little Java, but MatLab is way easier for this) Continue reading
gpuccio addressed a comment to me at Uncommon Descent. Onlooker, a commenter now unable to post there,
(Added in edit 27/09/2012 – just to clarify, onlooker was banned from threads hosted by “kairosfocus” and can still post at Uncommon Descent in threads not authored by “kairosfocus”)
has expressed an interest in continuing a dialogue with gpuccio and petrushka comments:
By all means let’s have a gpuccio thread.
There are things I’d like to know about his position.
He claims that a non-material designer could insert changes into coding sequences. I’d like to know how that works. How does an entity having no matter or energy interact with matter and energy? Sounds to me like he is saying that A can sometimes equal not A.
He claims that variation is non stochastic and that adaptive adaptations are the result of algorithmic directed mutations. Is that in addition to intervention by non-material designers? How does that work?
What is the evidence that non-stochastic variation exists or that it is even necessary, given the Lenski experiment? Could he cite some evidence from the Lenski experiment that suggests directed mutations? Could he explain why gpuccio sees this and Lenski doesn’t?
It’s been a long time since gpuccio abandoned the discussion at the Mark Frank blog. I’d like to see that continued.
So I copy gpuccio’s comment here and add a few remarks hoping it may stimulate some interesting dialogue. Continue reading