Another anti-evolution girl.

Discussion in 'Religion' started by evoqe101, Oct 19, 2014.

  1. Landau Roof Registered Senior Member

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    I'm new. I don't know any garbonzo, and I didn't want to say earlier that I smelled troll. However, with your suspicions and the fact that the OP still has only one post to 'her' name makes me wonder what we're doing here. I'm gone.
     
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  3. evoqe101 Registered Member

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    I'm still researching the points mentioned. Why do I need to be on this site 24/7? As regards to the gender, I just rushed through the registration process. Male was probably the default option I presume, or I misclicked. Weird of you guys to take such offense.

    Anyway, thank you guys for the points brought up.
     
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  5. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    No offense was given: we have a recurring problem where trolls come in and post nonsense, and occasionally take up a 'sock puppet' to continue to argue their case via expedient demographics. This occurs not infrequently and so I'm suspicious at times.

    If you're taking the time to research the positions posted, then it's clear that you're not 'garbonzo'. I wish you well of your researches and look forward to seeing your replies.
     
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  7. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Your view is wrong.
     
  8. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    There are two kinds of adaptation. One is based on genetics but is not genetically inherited. An example is muscle mass - the more you use your muscles the bigger they get. That is not inherited (i.e. if you work out a lot your daughter isn't born with bigger muscles.)

    The second sort IS inherited. If you are born with the genes to be slightly taller, and because of that you survive while others who are shorter die, then your children will likely be taller. In the short term this is often called adaptation; in the long run this is evolution.

    Let's take a simple example - whale evolution.

    Pakicetus was a land animal about the size of a wolf. He had canine-like teeth, nostrils in the front, four legs, a long tail and fur. He lived about 50 million years ago and spent most of his time on land. His eyes were high (like a crocodile's) and so he could also wade around in water while keeping his snout and eyes above the water. This let him catch a few fish as well.

    The next step in whale's evolution was simple adaptation. Ambulocetus evolved from Pakicetus. He was very much the same - same body plan, same skeletal structure. However, since Pakicetus had a lot of luck sitting in the water eating fish, Ambulocetus had some adaptations that let him eat fish more effectively. He had flatter feet (better for swimming) and a stronger tail (for swimming.) He had lost his external ears, which is an adaptation that many aquatic animals have since ears don't work well underwater. His nostrils were a little higher to help him sit in water like a crocodile and wait for prey to swim by. However, he could still walk; he still had legs and hips with strong muscles and thick bones to resist gravity.

    That's all just adaptation, right? Modification of existing structures.

    The next step was Kutchicetus. This guy was a little smaller. His nostrils were higher. He could still lumber around on land, but not very well. His tail was getting stronger and thicker, and he was using it almost exclusively for swimming.

    That's all just adaptation, right? Modification of existing structures.

    After Kutchicetus came Rodhocetus, which still had legs but could no longer walk on land. (Think seals, which can wriggle onto the sand but can no longer walk.) He was starting to look like a whale - fat tail, small legs, nostrils moving upwards into what we would now call a blowhole. However he didn't have a lot of blubber yet and still relied on fur to keep himself warm.

    Next came Dorudon, which lived about 40 million years ago. He looked a lot like Rodhocetus, but had very short rear limbs that were useless for swimming so he relied more on his tail. His pelvis had started to disappear since he didn't need it any more. He had started to develop blubber to replace fur since blubber is more effective underwater. This also allowed him to dive deeper. They could likely make clicking noises but if they could their echolocation abilities were pretty limited.

    That's all just adaptation, right? Modification of existing structures.

    Next came the Odonocetes. You probably know one of these pretty well - Tursiops truncatus, the bottle-nosed dolphin. He lost his rear legs completely, although some dolphins are still born with vestigial rear legs. He had a "melon" which was a structure on the top of his snout that focused sound waves. This wasn't new; it's just an adaptation of facial fat that all the above animals had.

    Again, all just adaptation, right?

    But over 50 million years those small adaptations can turn a "wolf" into a whale. (Or a dinosaur into a bird, or a mouse into a human, or a bacteria into a hydra, or a hydra into a flatworm, or a flatworm into a fish.) And that's what evolution is.
     
  9. Enmos Valued Senior Member

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    || evoqe101 is perma banned. Somehow it doesn't show below her name though.
     
    Last edited: Oct 20, 2014
  10. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Why permabanned?
     
  11. Enmos Valued Senior Member

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    Sockpuppet.
     
  12. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Ahhh.
     
  13. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    She got me. Wouldn't have written all that blather if I'd known.
     
  14. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Me neither - my long post 5, but most of it with minor mods was just copy and past from another thread. These "creationists/ Intelligent Designers," all seem to have been thru the same brain wash process so old posts work just fine.

    BTW, one of my posts from a few years ago had nice set of photos of fossils of 4 or so stages you posted about. I think the last was of a modern whale's skeleton. Anyway it showed a short elongated bone perhaps a foot or two long - the residual of the land creature's thy bone - totally useless and not even near any other bone - just "floating" deep inside his body's hind flesh.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Oct 20, 2014
  15. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    consider that though you may have written it for her
    we all shared in those words and insights
     
  16. Landau Roof Registered Senior Member

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    Was the thigh bone connected to the knee bone?
     
  17. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    They probably serve some kind of function - muscle attachment for the purposes of motility/maneuver, or holding during mating - since nature is a co-opter of function. However, the existence of any such sort of 'spandrel' says nothing about a 'designer', particularly as the connection between their vestigial or semi-vestigial existence nature and the more fully functional hindlimbs of terrestrial relatives is inescapable. Clearly, they came from related forms, and that is an end to it.
     
  18. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    23,198
    If they are slowly vanishing, as seems to be the case, I doubt they have any net benefit, and there certainly is a "biological cost" to make them. Lets check again in 50,000 years to see if they have completely or nearly disappeared.

    Learning to wear skins of animals killed for food may be why humans are the only furless /hairless apes. There must be significant biological cost to grow your own for whole body. With something like 95% of their DNA in common, clearly at some point long ago, the line that would lead to modern man had some mutation the made inactive the DNA instructing for body fur and not bearing that biological cost was an advantage selected for, but very rarely the "hair/fur making genes" do get activated - about 50 well documented cases since the Middle Ages.

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  19. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    That's an interesting point - but there's no express need for them to vanish altogether. Nature and behaviour co-opt morphological functionality, or so I suspect.

    I wonder at what point, and for what reason, it became more costly in the human line compared to ape co-ancestors.
     
  20. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Either that, or create a sticky under Biology, for "Denial of Evolution MCMLXXXIV", or whatever number we're up to now. Although I haven't noticed if the religion forum is enumerating the "Noah's Ark was Real" series with a similarly numbered sticky. At least that way the plant and other animal origins opened here would stay current. Oh wait, I forgot: all the plants dropped seeds and spores that survived 40 days of brackish water, and then replanted themselves right where they had been. Well, still, girl or boy, maybe evoge101 can cover this and also how the asexual forms proliferated -- speaking of gender, since it would make no sense to load them aboard "two by two". As to aquatic plants and animals that don't tolerate salt, fresh and/or brackish water -- once the Bible interpreters come forward with a proposed level of salinity after a mere 40 days of rain, even if every spot on Earth was under the pressure of a firehose -- that's a stumper. And they should address the rate of condensation which would support it, assuming it submerged Mt Everest, along with the beginning and ending average water vapor, and how long it would take to recede by evaporation, and where that phenomenal amount of vapor went after the story ended -- where deserts came from that were present before and after the story, and what stopped the evaporation - condensation cycle where this idea begins. All good stuff needed to support the origins of life question from a religious perspective, but delving into the science of weather and at least a little chemistry.

    But if I'm to be limited to botany and zoology I would at least ask Ms. Evoge101 to provide the Creationist explanation of this entry from Darwin's diary of the Beagle:

    The birds are Strangers to Man & think him as innocent as their countrymen the huge Tortoises. Little birds, within 3 or four feet, quietly hopped about the Bushes & were not frightened by stones thrown at them. Mr King killed one with his hat & I pushed off a branch with the end of my gun a large Hawk.
    Also, this kind of remark stirs the pot with a different twist:

    I ascended the highest hill in the Isd, 2000 feet; it was covered in its upper part with coarse grass & shrubs. The remains of an old Crater were very evident; small as the whole island is, I counted 39 conical hills, in the summit of all of which there was a more or less perfect circular depression. It is long since the Lava streams which form the lower parts of the Island flowed from any of these Craters. Hence we have a smoother surface, a more abundant soil, & more fertile vegetation. It is probable that much of the Lava is of subaqueous origin.
    Before any Creationist pronounces judgement on the accuracy of Darwin's work as a de facto zoologist and botanist, they would need to evaluate the accuracy of the bolded statement to first confirm or deny that his preparation in geology was adequate to arrive at the conclusion that the native species of the various islands had to have evolved there. Or, if this is a strictly religious question, to ask whether the Hawk which had never seen any man was ever in that floating zoo, not to mention what it ate if not the huge assortment of mating pairs all rodents collected from around the world. I guess that's all easily explained by magic, but we still need to determine the latest date this hawk first appeared on those islands, and how the date of their appearance relates to the dates in the Creation Myth, based on the known dates of existence of Semitic people, the oldest possible date for the naming of the Tigris and Euphrates (whose headwaters come out of Eden) as well as places like Ur and people like Ashurbanipal. I guess this gets into the history a little too but I think that would be necessary to trace all extant non-aquatic animals to the day the Ark landed.

    Either way it's a can of worms. If God engineered what happened at Galapagos, then Noah could have gotten by with a small vial containing some cyanobacteria (or whatever God's seminal cell was) and within, say, an alleged thousand years or so, all the biota would come back. But then Noah wouldn't need an ark, just a yacht, and the cyanobacteria would take care of itself that way all the other microorganisms allegedly did.
     
  21. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    um a wolf and a dog are the same species. canis lupis
     
  22. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    That is true and not true depending on the specific form of Species Concept one takes up.
     
  23. Landau Roof Registered Senior Member

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    It's a thin and fuzzy line between dog and wolf. Years ago I was walking the main street of my town one night after midnight, and I met a man walking his "dog". I looked and I looked again, and though I am not the gregarious sort, especially at night, especially with strangers, especially when they are tensely gripping the leash of a ferocious looking pet, I had to say to the gentleman,"I've never seen a dog that looks more like a wolf!"

    "That's because it is a wolf." he explained.

    So I walked along with him for the next ten minutes that cold winter, full-mooned night. I saw that the leash was a steel chain and that he had one end wrapped tightly around his forearm. His wolf was straining like hell in a heavy-duty body harness. Wolves don't cotton to collars. He told me not to show fear because the wolf would know, and he couldn't be responsible. (That's why he could only walk it after 12;30 a.m.) But I was cool. I saw that he had a good grip on his pet, and I'm generally not afraid of dogs, which this animal was rather similar to. The man said he fed his pet pounds of raw meat every day with the blood still on it. Had a deal with the butcher. His wolf sneered at the very idea of kibble. They were out just then because of the full moon. The wolf was bouncing off the walls indoors!

    He told me much else, and I even challenged him at one point and opined that he was putting me on. What he had there was a very robust shepard-mastiff hybrid with a bad attitude . But no. He stuck to his story. Then as we were about to part ways and I had a last good look at the animal, the moonlight caught in the back of its eyes. A dog's eyes always reflect green, I learned then that a wolf's eyes reflect red (like a man's). I was convinced. This was never a dog!

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