Denial of evolution IV

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by Hercules Rockefeller, Oct 27, 2009.

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  1. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Darwin's discussion fills a whole book. This was just a summary. Would you agree with these actual words Darwin wrote:

     
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  3. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Have you figured out the ATP/ADP cycle yet? Do you understand why it is ideal for metabolism?
     
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  5. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Interesting though, he picked up on ADP/ATP, and now he's "teaching" it.

    Curious...

    At this rate, he should make it through a freshman course in... 10 years? 20?
     
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  7. Robittybob1 Banned Banned

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    That is true, populations will over populate. But was this the driver for evolution? Strangely enough I tend to look toward the survival at the crisis level as the most important. Whether they are the same I'm not sure (for both situations will cause a crisis).
    But my feeling is that say like now with the human population at record levels, this is not the time that evolution advances, but rather at times of extreme population deficiency, survival then,with populations at low low levels, will advance evolution immensely.
     
  8. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    I cut and pasted just a few lines from On the Origin of Species wondering if you and some others were against what Darwin wrote.


    I've noticed that folks who speak out against Darwin don't seem to ever address what Darwin actually said. So I was bringing that up.

    What he meant was, that the average population for animals in the wild stays about the same - the rivers don't fill up with fish and the forests aren't wall-to-wall deer. So this is part of his theory. More are born than the world could sustain, yet they die off fast enough so that the world sees a constant population. What's killing them? Natural Selection.

    He also mentions that the food supply stays about the same. What he means is, humans aren't feeding them.

    Compare what he actually says to what some of the deniers say about him, renouncing him as an atheist, or someone who conspires against religion - there's all kinds of accusations made, but they make no sense when you read what he actually wrote.
     
  9. Robittybob1 Banned Banned

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    So did you understand what I was getting at? I see Darwin's point, but I also believe in what I was saying too, but I also see the factor involved in selection for mates, and the effects of communities.

    You might even have to take into account premonition as well.
    I know you would say it just didn't happen, but think of the consequences for evolution if there was divine inspiration on top of it all.

    Say the story of Noah as type of example where there are some few who prepare themselves for disaster on the basis of inspiration and survive.
    How would such events upset the general evolution of the human species.

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  10. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Not much I think as "inspiration" more often than not decreases the chance of leaving your genes in the next generation. Most Catholic priest and nuns do not and are usually quite inspired to give up the more common worldly pleasures for life of service and pray, etc.

    Perhaps the most recent large example is Jonestown. (In 1978 at Jonestown over 900 members of Peoples Temple took poisoned fruit punch at the behest of their leader, Jim Jones.) Several times each century, some Christians sell all their goods, gather on a hill top and wait for the return of Christ, their leader has foretold. There is considerable doubt that it actually happened as is usually told, but so the story goes, 960 Jews at Masada killed themselves when the Roman soldiers seemed likely to over run their Masada fortress / temple complex after a long siege.

    If inspirations has any effect on evolution it would be very slight and would seem to be reducing the number of people with more tendency to be gullible / believing without evidence. Perhaps this self selective removal from the gene pool is making mankind a little more rational - more influenced by observables of science and less by dogma of religions. Certainly, God does not need to exist for people to believe he does and become inspired. Poets often get inspired. etc. with nothing to do with "God beliefs." Hell as it is New years Eve, while I type - I'm inspired to not miss my swimming at least twice per week in 2012.
     
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  11. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Yes. That's due to the physical processes that underlie thermodynamics, not because there is any inherent "drive" to increase entropy.

    For example, all rivers flow to the sea. You could claim "there is a consistent direction of water - towards the sea - so any theory about how water flows has to include its attraction to the sea." That would be crooked reasoning, because while rivers usually do flow to the sea, it is not because the sea attracts them - it is because gravity causes water to flow downhill.

    Likewise, there is indeed a consistent direction for entropy, caused not by "the laws of entropy" (or even "the laws of thermo") but because of the underlying physical processes.

    For example, if you have a closed system where part is hot and part is cold, then heat will flow from the hot part to the cold part and thereby increase entropy. This is not because the heat "wants" to increase entropy. This is because elastic collisions occur between molecules and transfer heat energy, and warm things radiate thermal photons that are absorbed by cold things.

    While random processes are behind evolution, the end result is not random; it is highly ordered. This can happen because energy is added to the system by an outside source (the sun.)

    Handedness occurs because life needs only discover something once to make it work. That's why we don't have ten kinds of eyes in our heads; we evolved one kind and it works well enough. That's why there is only one basic formula for chlorophyll with minor variations. It evolved, was good enough and was retained. There is no driving force behind, nor need for, a random expression of every possible chirality, molecule or vision system.
     
  12. Robittybob1 Banned Banned

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    A pretty good observation. But , but , but ... I could tell you of some that worked ... but that is all bad history now. One clue - Armenia Ottoman Empire WW1.
     
  13. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    To Robitybob1: Yes there was a great flood in ancient times. It is in the collective memory of every culture in the mid east. Here is one modern account of what happened:
    http://ncse.com/rncse/29/5/yes-noahs-flood-may-have-happened-not-over-whole-earth
    I favor a different one. Based on fact the in the connection between the med sea and the altlantic ocean there is a quiet well defined erosion channel still. Us & soviet subs use it to slip in and out without detections and once in the Atlantic the Taylor instabilities make desending tube of salt water that they can pass thru without detection but that would take to much time to explain.

    The Med was an inland lake far below sea level with inhabited islands. Then one day the Atlantic rushed in, mad that now submerged channel dround the islanders etc.– Sorry to be so quick /short (not time to tell about the salt deposit evidence etc. – must leave house now for party. The atlantus city story is related too.
     
  14. Robittybob1 Banned Banned

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    I just don't know anything about these things sorry.
     
  15. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Are you wanting to relate this to Darwin's analysis? Because he was arriving at an explanation for creatures in the wild, so most of those 8 principles of his theory don't apply to humans. We humans, by virtue of reason, are able to reshape the world that threatens our extinction. Farming avoids starvation, for example. Our population size grows without the limits Darwin describes, whereas many other species are driven into extinction. The difference is so phenomenal we even witness the extinctions we are causing.

    You mention divine inspiration, its effect on our evolution. That would be analogous to what I said about reason. The only difference is that in science we don't find a divine aspect, we just assign reason to one of the natural aspects of humankind that comes with our newer and better brain. And that is exactly why we stopped evolving (toward a new species).

    You asked about the Noah story in light of evolution. You realize of course there is no evidence of a mass extinction during the existence of humans, or of a flood covering all the earth. The closest disaster of this kind during human existance would be the last ice age. But it took more than 40 days and nights to transpire, so humans and a lot of other species found warmer climes and new ways to adapt. Obviously the ice did not blanket the entire earth and the seas were not glazed over. It was not a mass extinction either.

    Regardless of that, any cataclysm that causes a mass extinction of humans will restart the process of natural selection. The issue of narrowing the available gene pool is small compared to the issue that such a cataclysm would destroy so much of the environment, the survivors would effectively be cast into a new and extremely harsh world that would more likely lead to a final extinction than anything else. It's hard to imagine a scenario in which Natural Selection would ever happen to humans again, in the sense Darwin was talking about.
     
  16. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    The collapse of the Mediterranean wall would have destroyed the immediate region. But the Noah story has a cultural link to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Besides, it's well known that the seasonal flooding in Mesopotamia was much more devastating than the gentle rising and falling of the banks of the Nile, from which the Egyptians derived fertile fields and great longevity as an empire.

    Consequently there are two records of what happened: there is the Middle eastern record, showing vicious gods raining terror on their thralls (no doubt because they deserved it) while in Egyptian myth, the gods are more benign. For example the river just keeps waxing and waning and the sun keeps shining--not nearly the mythical horrors we see just east of them.

    Compare the Mesopotamian story of Tiamat (I posted several pages back) to this bright protrayal of an Egyptian Mother-Creator:

    What a difference a flood makes. Like they say: Location, location, location!

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  17. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    It is not only NOT misleading, it is the well-established science you are continuing to deny because you feel like you understand the law. Clearly you don't.

    A "reaction" is not a "system".

    You are ignoring the teaching materials I have given you. You are continuing with the fallacy that you can draw the boundary as you please. You will never see your error until you study these materials, or similar tutorials, with the ability to solve the sample problems given. Until then, this is pure crankdom.

    Simple math that you have not begun to comprehend. You are resisting my every effort to steer you to your error. By demonstrating willful ignorance of simple math, you are plotting a course to certain failure with the harder ideas.


    Dust off the organic chemistry textbooks and go work some problems of this nature and you will quickly discover your errors. The statement I highlight is bogus. Find out why.

    I'm not the one propounding this BS. I'm the one trying to show you what the dozen or more folks here are telling you. I am trying to help you understand. I have read your posts over and over and all I find are known errors. Whether or not I understand you is irrelevant, because you are propounding errors. You have to correct your mistakes before you can hope to be understood.

    Bull. you have been focusing on yourself, not even once quoting even an elementary text to support your claims. If you want to focus on a cell membrane you must apply the methods from the learning material I gave you. Otherwise, you are lost in yourself, thus you get comments from folks like Dywyddyr and others that "you have your head in the sand", or comments to that effect.

    How do you know? have you established the ADP/ATP cycle yet? No. Until you do so and draw the system boundary you will not have begun to understand the nature of your error. Again, refer to the college materials. You will find some problems at the end of the chapter. Until you can solve them, none of this matters.

    No, you have not begun with a proper formulation.

    No, you first need to establish the system boundary. You need a diagram, the equations from the governing laws (including osmosis and equilibrium of concentrations, the Boltzmann vs Gibbs analysis, a discussion of the logarithmic entropy vs organization, etc.) and the valid reasoning to make inferences so you can calculate properly. You have none of this. This is why no one else is listening to you. Again, I'm just trying to explain, thinking that you have a morsel of common sense that will pull you out of the hole.

    What you are doing is clearly seen as an attempt to prove an antecedent conclusion. Conclusions don't come first. Evidence comes first, including the tools worked out for you in from the prevailing science, given to you in the elementary college tutorial, with sample problems, which you ignore.

    What is "dispersion of potential"? Refer to the following in your answer:

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    No I didn't say that. Go back and read the laws of thermodynamics. Furthermore, be careful placing the word "boundary" near the word "unstable", since your refusal to draw your system still rings the death knell on all of this.

    Where does ATP "input" from? Where is the system boundary? What creates ATP? What are the total energy sources and sinks in this idea of yours?

    Hah! You are looking only at yourself, not at all at the world that already solved this problem that you continue to ignore.

    As soon as you said "DNA" you jumped track, to your foregone conclusions about evolution. You were about to talk about energy transfer at the cell wall, you then almost started to talk about metabolism, and now you jump to replication. Bogus. By the way, the statement "DNA contains 30% adenine" sounds like a label on the snake oil. Why not just derive these claims of yours instead of jumping into them with these bogus concepts? And why are you harping on adenonsine when the ADP in the earlier context is purely associated with metabolism? Who cares (at this point) about codons?

    Woh, pardner, back up! Formation of what? I'm still back at the cell membrane.

    And there you go jumping to the foregone conclusion. FAIL.


    Bull.

    :roflmao:
    That right there is where folks slam down the phone on you. Pure crap.

    So this really was a coded exercise in proving a foregone conclusion of intelligent design.

    Can I get a grant from a Creation Science or Intelligent Design foundation, to polish your prose a little? Because this can be sold. On the bullshit market!

    What a waste of a mind. In the time you have spent foaming at the mouth and having catatonic visions of divine intervention, you could have read the materials I offered, worked the problems, had intelligent discussion, and moved on to the later chapters.

    Here are the cites again, just in case you believe in redemption and the sacred value of human inspiration that delivers us our information, hand fed, so that we may become whole again, even after our fall from grace:

    Cellular Thermodynamics, Joe Wolf, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. An article on the level of a tutorial, with chapter end problems.

    Biological Thermodynamics, lecture notes, Rutgers Unversity. Basic principles, illustrations and formulas, helpful aids, supplements the material in the above tutorial.

    Good luck. You'll need it.

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  18. Robittybob1 Banned Banned

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    All what you have written align with thoughts that have influenced my whole life. OK it hasn't made me rich, for my mind was not focused on business, but I set out to find Truth.
    OK that did not go down as being normal, but what is the use of participating in the Human venture if it was heading to destruction. Are you right Aqueous, are we beyond evolution, in our own Intelligent Design?
    In the process of searching for the answer, I had moments of terror, they called them hallucinations, but I could not see why that would happen.
    I still don't know why it happened, but there was some connection between setting out finding the Truth and going crazy at the same time.
    Were the prophets of old any different? Their actions often appeared to be bordering on crazy too.
    I've got back to work, but I would love to know the truth still, so I am looking into Genesis in the sense of scientific genesis, and obvious evolution is part of that process.
    Can it be done? "Now solve Genesis". That was my divine inspiration; it seems a rather daunting challenge.

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  19. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    “…Although it does sound completely unbelievable that huge water body like Mediterranean Sea can go dry but scientists and many explorers across the world have now concrete evidence that Mediterranean Sea once had evaporated because of various climatic and natural conditions that were created. One of the main theories that provide concrete evidence about this is that in 1968 many geologists were carrying out seismic surveys to understand more about the earth crust and its movements. However, when they started digging the Mediterranean Sea floor, they found samples of arroyo gravel, rock salt, gypsum and anhydrite, which are only found on land and not in water. The layer of rock found under the sea floor was more than three kilometers thick, and it provided clear evidence that somewhere in history Mediterranean Sea floor went dry and was exposed completely. …” From: http://www.thegeekcity.com/was_the_mediterranean_sea_ever_dry/

    The following is the alternative Billy T believes may be the origin of the Noah Flood story so common in the collective memory of many societies that live in the middle east and on the shores of the Mediterranean:

    As the above link tells and very solid evidence supports, the Mediterranean basin was dry a very long time ago and obviously not connected to the Atlantic Ocean. Probably because it was much lower with huge part of the H2O stored as ice. As the climate warmed, more rain fell and the Atlantic Ocean level slowly rose and the inland Mediterranean Lake grew in size and salt content more rapidly. The Mediterranean Lake was much like the Dead Sea is today – lower than current sea level with no way for water to leave but by evaporation, which increases with both Mediterranean Lake surface area and decade long average air temperature, but an approximately constant level for the Mediterranean Lake developed in equilibrium with long term river inflows and evaporation.

    Thus recently enough for mankind’s collective memory myths the Mediterranean Lake may have been ~100 meters below sea level with many inhibited islands, which are now under water. As current climate conditions were approached, there came a day when large storm in the rising Atlantic Ocean level were able to send waves across the ridge separating the Mediterranean Lake from the Atlantic Ocean. Each time this happened, the hight of the separation ridge decreased a little by erosion and the storm driven inflow from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Lake increased during the next bad storm.

    One day in a bad storm, even when the winds died down, Atlantic water still was spilling into the Mediterranean Lake. Initially a flow like that of a small river but this was not a rain feed river. Every week the flow increased as the “river bed” deepened with erosion. Soon more than a Niagara Falls was falling into Mediterranean Lake. Some of the homes on the shores of the now submerged islands began to be claimed by the rising Mediterranean Lake. In something like a year the smaller islands no longer existed. In a decade or so the Mediterranean Lake level was about the same as the Atlantic Ocean level with the current out flow on the surface into the Atlantic Ocean essentially balanced by into flow to the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean thru the old “Noah Flood” erosion channel that subs still use to slip in and out of the Mediterranean without detection.

    The Mediterranean water is both warmer and more salty than the Atlantic Ocean water, however it cools not many kilometer into the Atlantic Ocean and is more dense due to its salt content. Any tiny area of contact with this denser water being lower than average makes more cooling surface in contact with even colder Atlantic Ocean water. Thus “fingers of salt water” are constantly falling down into the Atlantic Ocean off the St. of Gibraltar. This is a natural example of the Taylor instability. Each “finger” grows more dense as it falls – Sonar signals bounce around / scatter so much by these denser fingers that detection of submarines just approaching (or leaving) St. of Gibraltar are still undetectable even though they are no longer shielded by being in the old “Noah Flood” erosion channel.

    Tens of thousands of people living on the Mediterranean Lake islands died in the great “flood” as their islands were submerged in less than a year. Tens of thousands of other people living on the Mediterranean Lake islands survived, some in fishing boats with their cow, etc. and as their children spread throughout the Mid East, the story of Noah, in its many different versions was born.

    To those who lived thru it to tell the tale, the whole world was flooded. The periodic rain driven floods in the Euphrates and Tigris basin of Mesopotamia, IMO, mainly served to make it creditable that the whole world did flood. Most do not know the facts I stated above about subs using the “Noah Flood” erosion channel and salt deposits, buried in erosion silt and rocks discovered only in1986 on the Mediterranean sea floor, etc. so tend to believe the older explanation “Mesopotamia river floods” for the wide spread “Noah Flood” myth in the various versions it different cultures it exists in as described in this link: http://ncse.com/rncse/29/5/yes-noahs-flood-may-have-happened-not-over-whole-earth

    You now have a choice as to which to believe. The one time event of huge flooding or the periodic (expected at least once in each human life span) relative minor flooding of the older theory.
     
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  20. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    Billy, the flooding of the Mediterranean finished 5 million years ago.

    Anatomically modern humans are only about 200,000 years old.
     
  21. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Read the link more carefully. That was when the Med was bone dry in an ice age. (Perhaps the first of many times.) It slowly refilled and the Atlantic rose even more slowly (as are the mountains of the fiords of Norway still rising from their relieved ice burdens). Also look how deep under water the edge of the continental shelf is - I forget typical depth of the edge, but the ocean are atypically high now by some hundreds of meters. For most of history the Mediterranean Lake existed, unconnected to the Atlantic, which was lower and contained in less area than now.

    Note that when, as is the normal case, the ocean is lower than the continental shelf edge, or only up to it, the Atlantic Ocean is far from what we now call the St of Gibraltar. I.e. NO CONNECTION between the Mediterranean Lake and the Atlantic Ocean.

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    As is obvious, the light bluish/green is the continental shelf and it has no break but is continuous near the straight of Gibraltar.

    Also note, as Fraggle likes to point out, that the "out of Africa" people could and did WALK to Australia. That was less than 50,000 YBP so I think the Mediterranean lake only got connected to the Atlantic Ocean (for the most recent time) less than 40,000 years ago - with a huge flood etched into mankind's collective memory as a myth.
     
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  22. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    The link you gave is not authoritative. There was a story that broke a year or so ago about the collapse of the wall below Gibraltar, but I can't find it. Maybe you can.

    Making connections like this (cataclysm and myth) is common, especially among technical folks, but it also can lead to a false positive.

    Here I will take the position of the devil's advocate to help wring the truth out of your idea.

    First, forget all recorded history. Just suppose you have heard a legend about a flood. You are the scribe who is getting ready to record the Epic of Gilgamesh into clay tablets that will be discovered millenia later at Nineveh, the site of the Library of Ashurbanipal. Let's further assume you are employed in the court of Ashurbanipal, so that establishes your geographic perspective of the world, on the banks of the high Tigris, relatively close to the annual snow melt cascading down from the mountains of Turkey:

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    Which story are you about to tell? Something you remember about a paleolithic legend? Or the great flood of the Year of Tiamat (or some designation like that)?

    You see the problem? People remember their own traumas better than the legends of the ancients. More than likely the worst seasonal flooding was downstream of Nineveh. Nevertheless your own water table was not affected by the Mediterranean, and the folks downstream of you, if ever affected by the seas, could only have been influenced by a cataclysm in the Persian Gulf.

    Furthermore, since the Egyptians had become well established for over a millennium before you got your job as village scribe, their own recorded history would have been more likely to capture the mediterranean cataclysm. But it doesn't. This is why I posted the Egyptian hymn, to show you the cultural evidence that these folks have no such trauma in their collective past.

    It is the Mesopotamians who give us the beginnings of all things arising out of horror and nightmare. And they were the perennial victims of river flooding, nothing more.

    It's a point often lost on evolution denialists, who tend to forget that recorded history doesn't begin with the Jews and their borrowed lore from ancient Mesopotamia. (Covering the fundamentalist apologetics, that is.)
     
  23. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    I don't need to:
    They're talking about the Messinian salinity crisis - the same thing I was talking about.
     
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