But not all of them. It’s interesting that even the most hardened creationists who have exposure to some science still cannot quite bring themselves to rule out the possibility of a beneficial mutation. Here’s Sal:
Much (not all) the heterozygosity and alleles were created and thus differences were strategically positioned to not cause functional compromise and most of the mutations thereafter are rare variants and slightly damaging.
So if most are slightly damaging then a few are beneficial. And if a few are beneficial then even fewer will be highly beneficial.
It’s not just Sal, but many IDCreationists seem to allow the possibility that a mutation may occur that is beneficial. Indirectly, of course, usually similarly phrased to the above. I don’t even think most of them know they are doing it.
So, Sal et al. What is it that is stopping the tiny number of beneficial mutations that you unwittingly admit happens spreading in a population? As presumably what you give with one hand you take away with the other. There must be some other mechanism preventing that, otherwise you are basically agreeing with the evilutionists. That is the topic of this thread.
Go team!
Oh, well I guess no explanation is as good as any then.
But since its all about accidents, it had to have been one dam lucky one.
I can’t be bothered teaching basic gene expression, cell differentiation, and developmental biology, all of wich are rather broad but intricately related subjects, to people who are purposefully giving everything they read the most obtuse and uncharitable interpretation they can think of.
It just isn’t worth my time. To anyone who wishes to really understand how organisms develop and evolve, including their tissues, limbs, organs and so on, those links will give an introduction.
To argue about evolution you have to first understand basic biological facts. You don’t, so we can’t argue about it. I’m not here to teach you phoodoo. Go to school.
Just checking in from India. Hi gang!
Christ, this is a painful read. Yes, I can anticipate the feeble rejoinder, save your finger ends. As y’all were; don’t mind me.
Rumraket,
Wow, pupils accidentally form during fertilization.
Cool.
Oh, just to add, I pulled out Orr’s statement on multiple definitions as a guaranteed quote mine, and there Sal is, quote mining it! I must be psychic or something. Damn you, biology; why aren’t you physics? 😁
I did wonder where you went. Sounds wonderful. Have fun over there.
He doesn’t think that’s how it happened, phoodoo says it that way to obfuscate his own understanding, and irritate his opponents. It doesn’t matter if that makes him look like an illiterate fool. All that matters is that it might irritate you, and that it sounds so ridiculous that he can reject evolution altogether on the basis of rhetoric.
By obfuscating this far, phoodoo gets you distracted trying to guess what he’s “thinking.” Trying to explain, only to give him more material to obfuscate. He will throw more and more nonsense and declare victory. It doesn’t matter if he’s representing evolution or not. It doesn’t matter if his comments come across as idiotic for those who actually understand. What matters is the obfuscation and the declaration of victory on the basis of rhetoric.
That’s indicative of a childish mentality. You know, like “Oh yeah? My brother can beat your brother!” Some people never mature, mentally, to the point of understanding that rhetorical maneuvers don’t make their positions right.
Apopos giving stuff an uncharitable and obtuse interpretation, there you go again.
Look phoodoo, I get it, you fear and loathe this subject. Scared, sad, little man. 🙂
Entropy,
Well, we can all agree on one thing, however it did happen, it sure was dam lucky. Again and again and again….
Yes. Exactly. All this. Any substantive answer from me will just serve as further material for him to deliberately caricature into some supreme dumbfuckery. While he consistently refuses to elaborate on anything he says. He constantly avoids defining words, or providing sources. Every call for it is dismissed with just more infantile commentary, or outright ignored. What a complete fool and child he is.
As opposed to the cosmic curtain twitcher shooting things into existence from nothing using his magical creation-beam thought-lasers.
*pew pew pew I’mma shoot ma lazors – POOF* A fully formed Giraffe! Praise the LAWD!
Rumraket,
Nothing beats a fully formed giraffe better than a lucky giraffe.
phoodoo,
Thanks for demonstrating my point. No need, you’ve done it plenty of times, but thanks any way.
Until we get a better explanation, lucky pupils popping up in the middle of eyeballs and being inadvertently useful is all we have to work with.
The pupil is a hole in the iris. Try to think about that for a moment. I can’t guarantee success, but you can try to think about that.
It is very hard to get that one lucky mutation that makes the neck just long enough to reach up to the head.
So which got lucky first, the hole or the iris?
I for one am grateful the hole started in the middle of the eye. Can you imagine how inconvenient it would have been if it started in the middle of your nose?
I was about to say that a normally intelligent person can work these things out, but then I remembered who I’m talking to.
Corneel,
I imagine its something like this: Lucky liquid ball, wait 50,000 years. Lucky hole in the liquid ball, another 50,000 years. Hole-less eyeball owners, finally all dead, thanks to sexual selection. But the hole-in-eyeball owners days are numbered as well-Mavis down the block just gave birth to a double hole-in-the-eyeball baby, and the chicks are already digging him.
50,000 years later, the one-eyed, hole in the eyeball studs are just an ancient memory. Any day now Ivis is going to give birth to little baby Iris, and don’t it make your brown eyes blue. And once Iris’s iris finds a few cones, and starts learning how to wink, we got a perfect spot, right next to a thing that will one day be a nose, to put that little wink. Iris-less, noseless freaks, move out of the way, don’t shed a tear for me, because you ain’t got any!
Now, how long for the lucky vision accident in the brain, that is going to turn these upside down fools, back where they belong? Hopefully before someone walks off the ceiling and kills themselves!
Why do you imagine that?
Noone here has advanced that silly story. No literature suggests such a sequence of events. And no evidence ever found implies that is how it happened.
So, really, why the hell is that what you imagine? It looks like you just flat out proved everything I’ve been saying correct: You are deliberately making stupid stories up, in order to feel safe rejecting them. Thanks for that total confirmation.
Lucky liquid ball forms by invagination of the optic vesicle. It just doesn’t close whole the way; Hey presto, we have a hole.
http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/610049/view
I feel a wee bit insulted about your suggestion that we would seriously consider animals going around for thousands of years with completely closed eye balls.
No, you don’t imagine that.
You are making it sound as ridiculous as you possibly can, because you are into ridicule.
Corneel,
Can anyone actually watch this, and believe, ok, each step was accidental, each step was beneficial, each step predicated a reproductive advantage which wiped out the previous version, each accident was sequential, and there was never a plan of any kind?
Wow, what kind of faith must that require?
It doesn’t remind you a little of Sesame Street?
Oh good. We passed the phase where lucky mutations have to position the pupil exactly in the middle of the eye ball and are going with conventional developmental biology.
Difference was, he was joking, not just trolling.
Glen Davidson
What’s tiresome is people only seeing what they want to see. Let me highlight some words for you:
So we’re not ignoring selection.
And that selection doesn’t create the lucky accidents that it operates on, it merely biases their spread throughout the population in subsequent generations.
Oh, let’s keep this lucky accident and maybe, just maybe, another lucky accident will come across that can be added to this lucky accident. If we’re lucky.
That’s Darwinism in a nutshell.
And selection doesn’t even guarantee that any particular lucky accident will persist, as we can see from gene loss. And the environment can change at any moment, randomly, and what was favorable before can become unfavorable.
No one wants to talk about the random aspects of selection itself. Why not?
right. A lucky accident doesn’t have to place things in their optimal positions. Other lucky accidents can come along later and move them to a more optimal location. If we’re lucky.
The tautological definition of fitness.
We are right to ridicule nonsense. The Darwinian explanation is implausible on its face. There is a limit to the plausibility of coincidence and we all know this intuitively.
You’re asking us to ignore what we know and believe in something we have no good reason to believe. Forgive our skepticism.
Sorry, I was confusing building a Corneel with building a cornea.
They grow by lucky accident and somehow know when to stop growing by lucky accident. And they differentiate by lucky accident. Controlled by GRNs that arose by lucky accident. Some theory.
We don’t have to discuss eyes. We can discuss things that don’t involve development or tissues at all. Just think of all the neat things inside a single cell that arose by lucky accident. A flagellum, for example. Membrane transport proteins. The list of lucky accidents is almost endless.
First comes lucky accident, then comes selection, then comes cornea and corneal infection.
How anyone can believe that all the biological world arose by a series of lucky accidents and pure unadulterated coincidences, boggles my mind. Even if they do have a mechanism to spread those lucky accidents through a population.
There is no argument in your post. It basically just says “I don’t believe this and I find it ridiculous”.
We already knew. What is missing is a connection between “this is what happens”(and you giving a correct description of what happens) and “therefore it is irrational to believe it evolved”. You have never ever connected those two, with any kind of argument or valid reasoning.
You’re basically just declaring your incredulity. It’s a form of social signaling, nothing more. No reason, no arguments, no evidence. You just state how you see things over and over again, you never argue or reason out why that view is correct.
There is no tautology in that post.
Why are you quoting some long dead religious creationist as if his words are authoritative on the matters of the nature of natural selection?
Let us share your skepticism, what you know and how you know it and how is beyond the same skeptical questioning?
Isn’t that what skeptics do?
The Darwinian position is prima facie implausible. Any normal person faced with a plethora of improbable events that converge will rule out coincidence. Darwinian theory doesn’t pass the skunk test.
Take natural selection out of the picture for a moment. So you have these lucky accidents and they spread by random genetic drift to build all these marvelous cellular systems. Why is that any less believable than a theory with natural selection in it? It’s certainly possible isn’t it?
It could just be luck and happenstance all the way ’round and atheists would still manage to believe it.
Try to explain what the problem is. Here you spend a lot of time building a caricature up in order that it may sound ridiculous.
By try to show that it is. Pick an example and then show how it can’t have evolved “by lucky accidents that arose and spread through a population”.
Can you ask a question that makes sense?
So you want me to prove a negative. How utterly Darwinian of you.
Is that a generalization?
Why?
What is “a plethora of improbable events that converge” supposed to represent in evolution here?
Because there are many more ways to destroy functions, than there are of merely changing, or creating them. So if there is no purifying selection to eliminate deleterious mutations, or positive selection to force an increase in frequency of beneficial alleles, all genetic loci eventually degrade into nonfunctionality.
Everything that is a matter of probability, no matter how remote, is technically still possible. But I’m pretty sure we can agree that we are not convinced by mere logical possibility.
And yet here I am, an atheist and a skeptic, and I don’t believe in things on their mere possibility.
Yes, you’re quoting me doing exactly that.
meh
Stochastic selection processes
I want you to back up your caricature with some actual argumentation. So far all you have done is to use the word lucky accident many times in the same post.
Anyone can do this.
Why did the designer decide to create a giraffe instead of a few more rocks and some sand, or a bit more radiation in some far away galaxy? Lucky accident. Or it just happened, that’s all. Why did the designer decide to give the giraffe spots, instead of pink and green stripes? Lucky accident. Or it just happened, that’s all. Why did the designer decide on making the Giraffe’s neck so long, instead of 20 cm shorter on average? Lucky accident. Or it just happened, that’s all. Why did the designer decide to have the Giraffe’s recurrent laryngeal nerve run all the way down into the torso, around a major artery, and then all the way back up through the neck, to innervate a muscle that is less than 20 cm away from it’s point of origin? Lucky accident. Or it just happened, that’s all.
It’s not a caricature. It’s neo-Darwinian theory. Shit happens. Some accidents, by happenstance, spread through the population. Some even spread regardless of whether they are beneficial or not. Enough of these happy accidents take place and you get something like an eye. Or an optic nerve. How miraculous is that?
And even more miraculous that it would happen more than once, independently. Making it even more laughably improbable. Unbelievable.
So why do you believe it? Lack of credulity?
Mung,
Testify, brother! Lucky accidents! Only numbskulls believe in lucky accidents! Bloke in the sky though – that’s the ticket..
No it’s just a caricature. A rhetorical device you work as hard as you can to seems as ridiculous as possible. Which is demonstrated by the fact that you never give the full correct descriptions, but choose instead to make short and vacuous sentences with the most silly-sounding synonyms you can think of. “Accidents”. “happenstance”. “lucky errors”.
It always shines through every post, the intense desire to make it appear ridiculous. To keep it short, simplistic and silly.
One wouldn’t need to do that if it really was silly all on it’s own. So you have to spend a lot of time crafting rhetorical devices and silly phrases.
It happening multiple times should tell you that your intuitions about it being improbable, is wrong.
And here you are tacitly conceding that one should not believe in miracles. That believing in them is a lack of credulity, and that lots of miracles are “unbelievable”.
Isn’t that hilariously ironic given how the alternative that you believe literally constists of saying that the entirety of history, that every event down to the subatomic level that ever happened, was somehow caused and sustained by the miraculous powers of god? How are you not collapsing under the astronomic pressure of irony? I guess that’s another miracle.
Well, given you concession I can only congratulate you on your newfound rationality and say Welcome to skepticism, Mung!
http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1
Lucky accidents. How absurd is that.
Lots of miracles is absurd, says the believer in literal miracles. Tacitly confirming that his beliefs are absurd.
Will you want some butter with that slice of irony?
Mung,
Yeah, rilly complex huh? I had a biochemical pathways chart on my wall at uni. I expect It’s got more complex since. Way beyond the capacity of design.
Is that why you think accumulated lucky accidents is a better explanation?
Your theory is supposed to be a better explanation, not an explanation at the same level of implausibility or absurdity.
However, if you’re willing to admit that you find both “explanations” equally absurd and implausible then I can respect that level of honesty.