Facts of evolution cannot be denied.

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by Dinosaur, Jan 31, 2015.

  1. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

    The fossil record provides facts of evolution. An excellent example is Eohippus to the modern horse.

    Darwin provided an excellent explanation for those facts.

    If you desire to dispute Darwin's explantion, you are obligated to provide a better explanation for the obvious facts of evolution.

    I have yet to read any essay which provides a better explanation.
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  3. brucep Valued Senior Member

    An obvious fact is there is no better explanation for the obvious facts associated with the science of evolution. Probably going to be a few who disagree but they're generally ignorant of the obvious facts by choice.
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  5. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

    Totally agree with these sentiments.
    Abiogenesis is just as obviously the default position for the arising of life in general.
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  7. Rav Valued Senior Member

    Easy: Goddidit
  8. wellwisher Banned Banned

    The problem with fossil data is this data is discontinuous due to us only finding things here and there in time and space. What this means is, since science theory has to be consistent with the available data, the theory needed to describe fossil data will also need to be discontinuous in time and space, because discontinuous fossil data does not imply a continuous model, by default.

    This is why theories like random mutations have appeared. This theory is consistent with discontinuous data such as fossil data. Evolution is harder to show in real time, for example with horses, because real time data is far more continuous than fossils and therefore does not jive as well with any discontinuous theory. In other words, with fossils, the theory works every time with 100% reliability. But with real time data one has to hunt harder to find examples that flow naturally from a discontouous theory.

    As an analogy, say we made a design with popcorn that is continuous and symmetrical, on your front lawn. We leave this design to the birds, bugs and animals to feed upon for a month. When we come back, it is all picked over, so it no longer looks like it originally did. What remains is analogous to the fossil data. If I said that the design had been continuous and symmetrical, but I forgot to take a picture for proof, one would not be able to infer this from the remaining popcorn data. The hard data says random and jumbled. This is more consistent with the fossil popcorn data than the truth.

    Relative to Darwin, his theory of natural selection was based on a unique place that was stopped in time; Galapagos. Galapagos was an isolated island, that was closer to a closed system than an open system. He did not try to prove his theory in the country of England, since this was an open and developed environment. Rather he needed a unique closed environment to define the data field he needed.

    As a hypothetical, say Darwin had instead gone to Yellowstone National Park in USA, before the great forest fire and then a second trip 10 years after the million acres forest fire, when new life had returned to the park. He would now see a different environment with total new eco-systems. This data would be as open as Galapagos was closed.

    The forest fire cleaned the space and allowed the fauna and flora to change completely in a very short time. The theory needed to explain this data field would be need to be different since the time scale for change is so short. Wit so much open land, competition is not a big factor; room for everyone. The Galapagos theory would not correlate this data field, as well as it did the close Galapagos data field.

    If we collected charred fossil remains; work in progress fossils not yet totally fossilized, and compare this to the new flora and fauna distribution, the theory of genetic mutations also would not jive as large pines mutate to tiny pines. It was not about genetic mutations.

    One has to be careful about data fields placing restrictions on theories. A better approach to avoid such data field illusions is find logic that is consistent under all data fields. Evolution is factual but how this occurs is still open to data field, if you depend too much on empirical data. It is fun to point out science magic tricks that have fooled the experts for decades; emperors old clothes effect. Politics is the last stand for theory that is about to go the way of fossils.
  9. matthew809 Registered Senior Member

    These "facts of evolution" are also the same facts of intelligent design(the pure, nonreligious version).

    I have never been confronted with even one fact of evolution which wasn't also a fact of intelligent design.

    The theory of evolution comes down to a leap of faith(an extrapolation) based on a preconditioned worldview. The actual facts present in this extrapolated theory only serve to strengthen your personal underlying naturalistic belief system, not the theory itself.

    Given identical supporting facts, understand that your bias worldview is most likely responsible for you choosing one theory over the other.
  10. exchemist Valued Senior Member

    I must admit I dislike the use of the term "fact" in science when it is applied to anything other than the observations themselves, in this case the fossils, the DNA and the degrees of similarity and difference that have been found between different examples. To me, evolution is a (very well-confirmed) theory because it interprets these facts in a way that accounts for them and makes successful predictions of what new fossil andDNA relationships we can expect to find in future observations.

    Intelligent design, by contrast, seems quite incapable of making any testable predictions. For this reason it is commonly regarded as pseudoscience. I also think Judge Jones was right to say it is inescapably religious in conception. All its proponents - except one weird sociologist with a different axe to grind - seem to me to be disingenuously pretending they are not religiously motivated.
    Ophiolite likes this.
  11. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Huh??? Then you haven't been looking very hard. One of the most important forces in evolution is random mutation, caused by such everyday events as cosmic rays and climate shifts. The vast majority are either deleterious or have no impact at all, but on rare occasions one confers a survival advantage. At this point the organism with the advantage is still at the mercy of random events (which I suppose you would romantically rename "fate") and the odds of the mutation being passed down to future generations are often not very great.

    It took a hundred thousand generations during an ice age for a population of grizzly bears to mutate into polar bears, due to the survival advantage of white fur against a snowy background, and of a greater mass of fat for improved buoyancy in an aquatic environment. A simple change in the shape of their teeth, making it incrementally easier to catch aquatic prey, took ten thousand years.

    If this is, indeed, "design," then it is not very "intelligent."

    Intelligent design is what humans do when we breed new varieties of the plants we eat (or use for decoration) and the animals we eat (or use for draft or simply companionship. We have created new varieties of dogs, horses, cattle, sheep, chickens and myriad other animals in just a few generations, often within a single human lifetime. If the gods are trying to do the same thing, with their vastly superior powers, then why do they work so much more slowly than we do???
    What??? The theory of evolution is based on a mountain of evidence from two different, unrelated sciences: paleontology and genetics. It is one of the most solid, irrefutable theories in the entire canon of science!

    Anyone who doubts it has automatically identified himself as antiscience.

    This is quite handy, since we instantly know to be skeptical of anything he may say in the future.
    Yatta yatta. Do you have any idea how foolish your preposterous arguments are??? How badly you are embarrassing yourself??? You know virtually NOTHING about science!
    Last edited: Jan 31, 2015
  12. matthew809 Registered Senior Member

    Fraggle Rocker,

    With all that.... you said absolutely nothing to dispute my point.

    I find that those who rant the most usually are missing the point. Had you actually understood the single point I was making, you would have had a single response.... but you choose to generally rant instead.

    This says a lot.
  13. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

    There could have been aliens that came here to develop us. We are an experiment and it continues till today.

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    If one postuates a "designer" some of the evidence shows he was a real idiot, not "intelligent;" However even these cases are fully explained by ToE.

    It seems likely that the distant ancestor of the giraffe was a four legged creature with probably shorter than average neck (or possibly none) as one of the nerves that told "cheek information" (i.e that bee stung there or he bit his cheek, happen to pass below a bone before going to the brain for processing. Getting it on top of that bone can not be done via a set of many very tiny "analog changes" accumulating over thousands of generations, but gradual elongation of the neck, say by 0.1mm average per generation, can be.

    The relocation of that nerve to the top side of the bone, which later became the "collar bone" is a "binary change" I.e. there are only two "states" ("under" or "on top" of the bone.) So the long necked giraffe of today learns he bit his cheek with considerable neural delay as the bite induced neural signals leave the cheek area, travel all the way down that long neck, go under the bone still and then travel all the way up that long neck and finally reach the brain. - If the giraffe was "designed" the designer must be very stupid.

    A second case showing if man's eye was designed, an idiot did the design:

    The octopus has an eye design almost identical to that of man except much better in one "binary way" (The octopus' retina is in front of the nerve impulse collection network and the "blind spot" where they all join to form the optic nerve carrying the information to the brain. etc.) Man's network of blood vessels is in front of the retina and so makes black random shaped shadows cutting all the 2D images into many dozens if not thousands of separated odd shaped pieces that later processing in the brain must "fill in" with best guesses as to what was blocked by the blood vessel shadows). Moving the retina to the other side of all this support structure (like moving the giraffe's nerve to the other side of a bone) is a "binary change." Evolution can not make such a change, but a really stupid designer can set it up that way.
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 31, 2015
  15. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Here's two:
    The fact that our esophagus and trachea have to cross over in our necks. Not an intelligent design - but an evolved one.
    The fact that our eyes are constructed backwards. Again, not an intelligent design. But evolution doesn't create smart designs, just designs that work.
  16. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

    The fact is that designers only work with existing natural processes - and the natural processes will work (naturally) without the designer's input. The "designer" that anti-evolutionists postulate is not a designer at all but a miracle-worker.
  17. matthew809 Registered Senior Member

    Billy T,

    A bad design infers a bad designer, not no designer at all.

    I do agree that these "bad designs" point to something a lot different than the religious idea of creationism.

    I did not conclude there was no designer from the bad designs. Only that a designer, if he exists, he is very stupid.

    As ToE explains these bad designs, there is no need to postulate any designer.
    I.e. apply Occham's rule and don't do that until there is at least some shred of evidence indicating life was designed.
  19. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

    It says you are not very good at communicating what you mean. One might speculate that this is because your thinking is fuzzy. That would be supported by your decalred inability to understand evolutionary theory.
    Daecon likes this.
  20. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

    Evolution is as near certain as any theory need be.
    Intelligent design/God is not a scientific choice and is a cop out.
  21. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

    WellWisher: From your Post #5
    The above strongly suggests that you neither saw nor analyzed the Eohippus to horse fossils.

    While they do not provide a continuous Movie-like view of a progression of species, they clearly indicate a progression of species ending in the modern horse.

    Are you claiming that those fossils are not related to each other?

    Note that folks with excellent academic credentials consider those fossils to be from a group of related species & that they are supporting evidence for Darwin-like evolution. If you want to refute the Darwinian explanation, you are obligated to provide a better explanation for those fossils which clearly indicate a progression of related species.

    Intelligent Design is a term used to replace creationism. It is an attempt by those with fundamentalist religious views to pretend to be scientists.

    The pure nonreligious version phrase is an intellectually dishonest attempt to make a fundamentalist POV seem like a scientific POV.

    Exchemist: From your Post # 7
    The fossils themselves are facts of evolution. In the context of the previous sentence, the semantics of the word evolution (without Darwinian as a qualifying word) should be viewed as merely indicating a progression of related species.

    Darwinian Evolution provides a very reasonable explanation for that progression.

    If the religious fundamentalists can provide a better explanation, it could very well be called Fundamentalist Evolution.

    BTW: It would be very clumsy to use a phrase like the following to replace the phrase facts of evolution
  22. synthesizer-patel Sweep the leg Johnny! Valued Senior Member

    But when you remove the magical properties from the designer you're forced to accept the possibility that the designer was entirely the product of naturalistic processes.
    And if a designer of greater complexity than the things that it designed can come about through natural processes then guess what .............

    It's how comprehensively facts are explained that is of importance - not the extent to which someone might claim them as a fact.
    Evolutionary theory comprehensively explains things like fossil genes, the layout of our bodies, the position, composition and formation of our organs
    Merely asserting that all of these facts can be answered by design is neither neither explanatory nor comprehensive
    Last edited: Feb 7, 2015
  23. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

    From my Post #1
    Still no explanation from the anti-Darwin Folks.

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