Stumpy 284 #101 July 17, 2007 Continually reposting badly done and intentionally misinterpreted science does not make it any more true i'm afraid.Never try to eat more than you can lift Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
billvon 2,990 #102 July 17, 2007 >That mutations are known primarily by the defects they cause testifies > to the overwhelming tendency for them to reduce the information in living >things . . . Incorrect. Look at the common defect trisomy-21 - it INCREASES the amount of genetic information available. This is an example of an undesirable mutation; it causes all sorts of problems, specifically Down Syndrome. But it is a good example of a mutation that increases available genetic information. >(just like a mistake on my computer keyboard will decrease the >information content of what I am typing). If someone makes a mistake and types "inhospitable" as "inn hospitable" they have increased the amount of information they have typed; indeed, they have even changed the meaning of the sentence. A good example of an error that increases available information and may indeed even represent a new bit of information. >Random mutations to change the duplicated gene would not add > information unless the mutated sequence coded for some new, useful >protein (no one has demonstrated such a thing happening; there have >only been imaginative scenarios proposed). See the original post for such an example. >To illustrate: if “superman” were the duplicated “gene”, and mutations in > the letters changed it to “sxyxvawtu ”, you have clearly lost information, >although you have a new sequence. Correct. But if you take the junk sequence "sxyxvawtu" (and we all have a lot of junk DNA; it's one of the consequences of DNA replication) and turn it into "superman" you have indeed added information. The odds of that, of course, are astronomical. But since evolution works a piece at a time, you could see the sequence "sxyxvawtu" mutate to "sxyvva man" - and if "man" was useful it would be retained. It might take ten million replication errors to get "man" (and another ten million to get "supr man" from _that_ result) but evolutionary time scales allow such odds. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
shropshire 0 #103 July 17, 2007 <> Actually, is that true... For example: if I toss a coin the odds are 50/50 that it will land heads or tails (O.K ignore the lands on edge..... for now).... No matter how many times I toss the coin the odds are the same..... even if I could do this for millions of years. So, time does not affect the odds. Now... maybe we can play the edge card here... so the odds are really only CLOSE to 50/50 for heads or tails but really tiny for an edge condition and maybe that's what evolution uses. (.)Y(.) Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
billvon 2,990 #104 July 17, 2007 >even if I could do this for millions of years. So, time does not affect the odds. Not really. What are the odds that you will flip 10 heads in a row if you flip a coin 10 times? How about 20 times? Or 10 billion times? Do the odds of getting a specific pattern increase the longer you flip the coin? The odds of getting a specific pattern (in terms of genetics, one that will give rise to a useful mutation, like a new protein) are pretty astronomical. But we're talking astronomical amounts of time here. Take just one example. Bacteria can reproduce about once every 20 minutes. That's 72 times a day, or 26,000 times a year. Multiply by 2.7 billion years (the time bacteria have been around) and that's 70,000,000,000,000 coin tosses to get a simple protein (which is a run of about ten to twenty codons.) Now add in natural selection - a mechanism that requires you to get each "correct toss" just once, and it's retained - and you have a powerful mechanism that rapidly develops complexity. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
JackC 0 #105 July 17, 2007 QuoteHe just mentioned Natural Selection. You mention mutation but that won't help the cause either. Oh for crying out loud. Wrong wrong wrong. let's do a short course in information theory. Lets take the string of letters: INQORPAAION The information in that string is fixed at 11 letters long. If I randomly mutate one letter I get the string INQORPATION The amount of information has not changed. It's still 11 letters long. If I mutate another letter: INQORMATION It's still 11 letters long. And now another letter: INFORMATION It's still 11 letters long and the information has not changed. The only difference is that now, in the English language, INFORMATION is a word that has meaning. If each of those letters was a code for some other word, all of those srings have meaning. Meaning is not the same is the amount of information there is contained in the string. Any string of letters can have any meaning you assign to them. Any meaning at all. In our case the natural selection would be to choose the word INFORMATION as being useful. But that doesn't stop more random mutaions taking place. If I mutate a few more letters, I get INCONFUSION which is also a word we could naturally select. But the overall amount of information remains constant. Think about it like this. A string of 11 letters takes 77 binary bits to transmit down the phone line to your computer. It doesn't matter which 11 letters I choose, It always takes the same number of bits to transmit it. So 5GE^&563BRH takes the same amount of information to transmit as FORGODSSAKE. Your "Dr" Don Batton is not wrong on a subtle point of biology, He's not wrong on a matter of interpretation. He's wrong on a point of maths. Pure fucking mathematics. It's like he's saying 2+2=597. Is that clear enough for you? Can you please pick on another line of complete bullshit to perpetuate now? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
JackC 0 #106 July 17, 2007 Quote>To illustrate: if "superman" were the duplicated "gene", and mutations in > the letters changed it to "sxyxvawtu", you have clearly lost information, >although you have a new sequence. Correct. But if you take the junk sequence "sxyxvawtu" (and we all have a lot of junk DNA; it's one of the consequences of DNA replication) and turn it into "superman" you have indeed added information. The odds of that, of course, are astronomical. But since evolution works a piece at a time, you could see the sequence "sxyxvawtu" mutate to "sxyvva man" - and if "man" was useful it would be retained. It might take ten million replication errors to get "man" (and another ten million to get "supr man" from _that_ result) but evolutionary time scales allow such odds. Bill, that's wrong. The string "sxyxvawtu" contains more information than the word "superman" because it has more letters in it. The word "superman" takes 56 bits to transmit, but "sxyxvawtu" takes 64 bits to transmit. Just because "superman" means something in English doesn't mean "sxyxvawtu" is meaningless. It could be that "sxyxvawtu" is a word from the ngoto region of burkmenistan referring to a particular type of penile wart. Or it could be an encrypted string meaning "attack at dawn". Meaning is not the same as information. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
philh 0 #107 July 17, 2007 “don't know how testable this really is, because the evolution that we can observe in our lifetimes cannot account for what's explained in these paragraphs on the large scale needed to fit the entire picture.” This is an utterly false representation of science and what it means to test something. To test something and verify it does not necessarily mean to directly observe it. For example Murray Gell Man predicted the existence of quarks and they have been verified by experiment, but they have not been directly observed. That a large celestial body hit the Yucatan 65 million years ago has never been directly observed but it has been verified by the evidence. The same is true for evolution, evolutionary theory makes many predictions which have been verified, and we do not need to literally see an ape like creature turn into a human to verify that this happened in the past. For example the idea that chimps and human evolved from a common ancestor makes a definite prediction which can be tested empirically. That prediction is the fusion of chromosomes in the human genome. We have too few chromosomes compared to chimps, if we had simply lost this chromosone we would not survive. So evolutionary theory predicts we will find a fusion of two chimp chromosomes in the human genome. Sure enough when the human and chimp genomes were sequenced what was found? This published in the Proceedings form the National Academy of Science: “We have identified two allelic genomic cosmids from human chromosome 2, c8.1 and c29B, each containing two inverted arrays of the vertebrate telomeric repeat in a head-to-head arrangement, 5'(TTAGGG)n-(CCCTAA)m3'. Sequences flanking this telomeric repeat are characteristic of present-day human pretelomeres. BAL-31 nuclease experiments with yeast artificial chromosome clones of human telomeres and fluorescence in situ hybridization reveal that sequences flanking these inverted repeats hybridize both to band 2q13 and to different, but overlapping, subsets of human chromosome ends. We conclude that the locus cloned in cosmids c8.1 and c29B is the relic of an ancient telomere-telomere fusion and marks the point at which two ancestral ape chromosomes fused to give rise to human chromosome 2. “ You can read more here: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/88/20/9051 Making predictions and having them verified by evidence is what real science is about, observing things directly is for children’s science at best. “This is just gonna be the difference between us. Until some of you actually see/experience God you will never believe in Him” Why would having a religious experience be so convincing for you? Is it not possible it’s just an interesting mixture of brain chemistry and social surroundings? For example, those that have had temporal lobe epilepsy induced via magnets have felt the presence of some mystic being, those suggestible may interpret it a way consistent with their culture. Another example is those suffering from sleep paralysis do the same: Read about temporal lobe epilepsy here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_lobe_epilepsy And sleep paralysis here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis All of these examples are very convincing experiences but the best explanation for these experiences lies in neurochemistry and not in mythic beings. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
JackC 0 #108 July 17, 2007 QuoteNow... maybe we can play the edge card here... so the odds are really only CLOSE to 50/50 for heads or tails but really tiny for an edge condition and maybe that's what evolution uses. It is my understanding that this is the answer (sort of). If you have a load of monkeys bashing away on typewriters you are going to end up with a load of random junk interspersed with the occasional nugget of gold. This obviously isn't going to get you the entire works of Shakespeare. Natural selection however gives you the edge. Each time a monkey randomly bashes out a recognisable word fragment, you keep it because it is useful. The odds of any monkey getting a word right is tiny but each time they do, you get to keep it. With enough monkeys you're soon going to start collecting useful words. Eventually you might even have enough words to write the entire works of Shakespeare. Or at least cobble together a reasonable sonnet. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
philh 0 #109 July 17, 2007 I think a beeter analogy is the one Dawkins used on the safe lock. Imagine you have to guess the code on a safe and suppose there are 5 numbers. If you have to guess all the numbers concurrently its not going to happen unles you have a very long time. If I havent screwed up any calculations it should be 9*9*9*9*9= 59,049 Suppose it take 30 seconds to put the codes in, it will take you almost 3 weeks of continual trying to get the code right. But what if you didnt have to guess the numbers concurrently but could do it sequentially?then the maths is not 9*9*9*9*9 its 9+9+9+9+9 the odds have shrunk from 59049 to 1 to 45 to 1, it should take you just a few mintues to get the code right not three weeks. this is how evolution workds it doesnt have to get the whole function immediatley it can happen sequentially rathher than concurrently. Primitive eyes can evolve from simple light receptive cells gradualy increasing in funtion all the way to invertebrate eyes.The force of selection is what makes evolution different from random chhance. If you typed text randmly and wanted Shakespeare as the output you are going to have to weighht an infinite amount of time. But if each peice of text has a selective pressure on in and then reporduces another generation very soon you will get Shakespeare like text. Again i would reccomend Richard Dawkins awesome "The Blind Watchmaker " for a better explanation. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
JackC 0 #110 July 17, 2007 QuoteAgain i would reccomend Richard Dawkins awesome "The Blind Watchmaker " for a better explanation Agreed. It's funny but I thought the monkey/typewriter thing was from that very book, I could be wrong though. Still, here is the entire book for those who won't pay actual money for it. Pajarito, are you listening? Edit to fix clicky The Blind Watchmaker (7.7MB) Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
jakee 1,489 #111 July 17, 2007 Absolute rubbish. Why is it that in the Dover trial not one single member of the ID movement could come up with a method of quantifying specified complexity? And you've even spelt Dr Don's name wrong.Do you want to have an ideagasm? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
pirana 0 #112 July 17, 2007 QuoteIs there any other area of science even remotely comparable in scale and unanimous acceptance where you, as a layman, would feel confident in stepping up to the combined works of tens of thousands of professional academics and saying "No, I think you are wrong"? If the answer to the question is no (and I think it must be) what makes evolution so special that you feel you are qualified to judge it? You already answered that for them: Because they do not like the implications. It somewhat removes humans from their pedastal (though I disagree that it does - we still stand tall even if we share pond scum as a common ancestor)." . . . the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
rehmwa 2 #113 July 17, 2007 QuoteIt somewhat removes humans from their pedastal (though I disagree that it does - we still stand tall even if we share pond scum as a common ancestor). nonsense, we get the pedestal. We all started in the same scum. And we WON I think I'll go outside and flash my opposible thumb at some ducks walking by and laugh at them. would someone show me how to spell pedestal, pedastal, pedistle, pedistel..... ... Driving is a one dimensional activity - a monkey can do it - being proud of your driving abilities is like being proud of being able to put on pants Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
pirana 0 #114 July 17, 2007 QuoteQuoteHow does it work so quickly? It doesn't. I'm assuming you read this section of the article. But they had some interesting numbers that pointed to certain stages of evolution would have had to happen relatively rapidly to account for the timeline that scientists have created. Basically even the 4.6 billion years isn't enough to account for the change we claim has happend, unless it happened relatively quickly. Quickly in this context doesn't mean a couple generations. It's still a relatively long time compared to the lifespan of any single involved organism. Whenever that term is used to discuss topics like geology or evolution, it would be good if they gave at least orders of magnitude. Quickly in evolution is not the same as quickly in a 100 yard dash." . . . the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
pirana 0 #115 July 17, 2007 QuoteI doubt you'll see any protests, petitions or political movements going on about the existence of the Higgs boson, for example. I happen to be emotionally entrenched in the potential for detection of the Higgs. In fact, Massive Vector Boson is my word for the day. I was thinking of petitioning my Congreeman to have the day it's detected declared Higgs Day for all eternity. (Which from the Higg's perspective might be 1 X 10 to the -16th seconds). Now that's QUICK!" . . . the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
rehmwa 2 #116 July 17, 2007 QuoteI was thinking of petitioning my Congreeman to have the day it's detected declared Higgs Day for all eternity. He's asked you to stop calling his office and sending pictures to him. He's compromised and is willing to call September 5th "Boss Hogg Day". ... Driving is a one dimensional activity - a monkey can do it - being proud of your driving abilities is like being proud of being able to put on pants Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
pirana 0 #117 July 17, 2007 QuoteQuoteIt somewhat removes humans from their pedastal (though I disagree that it does - we still stand tall even if we share pond scum as a common ancestor). nonsense, we get the pedestal. We all started in the same scum. And we WON I think I'll go outside and flash my opposible thumb at some ducks walking by and laugh at them. would someone show me how to spell pedestal, pedastal, pedistle, pedistel..... Back to the pond with you, where the ducks are laughing at you in their own highly advanced non-verbal language. (That little tail feather wiggle thing means "I fart in your general direction.")" . . . the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
billvon 2,990 #118 July 17, 2007 >I happen to be emotionally entrenched in the potential for detection of the Higgs. The Higgs is just a UN plot to destroy the US economy and take over the world! Why should we be forced by liberal scientists to waste our money searching for a particle that doesn't exist? The Bible doesn't mention it, there's no evidence that I can understand that points to its existence, and it sounds immoral anyway. Perhaps I will find an article by a former economist that PROVES the Higgs particle doesn't exist. Take THAT, godless atheist secular humanist Higgs believer stupid persons! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
pirana 0 #119 July 18, 2007 Actually, I'm hooked on it mostly because boson sounds a lot like bosom. (Well, the spelling is close anyway). The bible does mention bosoms, doesn't it?" . . . the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
dorbie 0 #120 July 18, 2007 Quote>I happen to be emotionally entrenched in the potential for detection of the Higgs. The Higgs is just a UN plot to destroy the US economy and take over the world! No, it's an alien plot to destroy the planet, and I have proof: http://techfreep.com/worlds-largest-supercollider-could-destroy-the-universe.htm Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kallend 2,026 #121 July 18, 2007 QuoteQuote>I happen to be emotionally entrenched in the potential for detection of the Higgs. The Higgs is just a UN plot to destroy the US economy and take over the world! No, it's an alien plot to destroy the planet, and I have proof: http://techfreep.com/worlds-largest-supercollider-could-destroy-the-universe.htm Destroy the planet - peanuts! It's the galaxy they're after.... The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
jakee 1,489 #122 July 18, 2007 QuoteBut again, you realise that evolution as a theory comprises possibly the largest body of knowledge in modern science to be found 'under one roof' yes? Where do you get the idea that it might be wrong? Did you come up with it all by yourself, or have you been influenced by the PR efforts of other organisations? Is there any other area of science even remotely comparable in scale and unanimous acceptance where you, as a layman, would feel confident in stepping up to the combined works of tens of thousands of professional academics and saying "No, I think you are wrong"? If the answer to the question is no (and I think it must be) what makes evolution so special that you feel you are qualified to judge it? And QuoteWhy do you pick out this one theory (one of the strongest in all of modern science) as the one to disagree with? Why with this one theory do you feel qualified to take on the unanimous scientific concensus? Did you come up with your points of disagreement on your own, or did you get them from a religious organisation? Were your biology classes at school run by religious types? Does it have nothing at all to do with religion? Why? For NcClimber. (Barrage of questions? More like variations on a theme I'd say.)Do you want to have an ideagasm? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
NCclimber 0 #123 July 18, 2007 QuoteQuoteBut again, you realise that evolution as a theory comprises possibly the largest body of knowledge in modern science to be found 'under one roof' yes? QuoteWhere do you get the idea that it might be wrong? QuoteDid you come up with it all by yourself, or have you been influenced by the PR efforts of other organisations? QuoteIs there any other area of science even remotely comparable in scale and unanimous acceptance where you, as a layman, would feel confident in stepping up to the combined works of tens of thousands of professional academics and saying "No, I think you are wrong"? QuoteIf the answer to the question is no (and I think it must be) what makes evolution so special that you feel you are qualified to judge it? QuoteWhy do you pick out this one theory (one of the strongest in all of modern science) as the one to disagree with? QuoteWhy with this one theory do you feel qualified to take on the unanimous scientific concensus? QuoteDid you come up with your points of disagreement on your own, or did you get them from a religious organisation? QuoteWere your biology classes at school run by religious types? QuoteDoes it have nothing at all to do with religion? Why? For NcClimber. (Barrage of questions? More like variations on a theme I'd say.) QuoteI would be very grateful if you could see your way to answering my question. It is something I am genuinely very curious about and I would appreciate an answer. Which question was it you wanted me to address? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
jakee 1,489 #124 July 18, 2007 The central theme, if you would be so kind.Do you want to have an ideagasm? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
NCclimber 0 #125 July 18, 2007 Quote The central theme, if you would be so kind. The central theme seems to be "Are you just a mindless sheep of the extremist fundies, regarding the subject of Evolution?"To that, the answer is NO. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
