Science-Religion. Which wins?

[MosbyMarion]

<p>

And not good at keeping your science straight. I mean, you’re still using the word incorrectly, and you’re continuing to demonstrate that you have no education in biology whatsoever. If I were to guess, I think you mean to use “phenotype”, and if I were to keep trying my luck, I’d suppose you’re asking how new phenotypes are formed.

</p>

<p>define:allele:</p>

<p>“Form of a gene. For example, alternate forms of the gene called MC1R produce red or black pigment in hair. (Sometimes alleles are referred to, colloquially as genes, as in the gene for red hair versus the gene for black hair. Technically, allele is the correct term.)”</p>

<p>This is the definition of the term as I understand it.</p>

<p>

Once you understand that a phenotype is defined by a certain sequence of nucleotide bases and that the reproduction of said bases is imperfect, it becomes easy to understand how phenotypes can be changed into something totally new from what they where before.

</p>

<p>I consider the lack of observed cases of this happening, and the odds against this process producing the traits we observe even if it does happen, to be sufficient to cast doubt on the theory.</p>

<p>

Correct. Natural selection only accounts for the selection of favorable traits over time. As such, evolution is a two-fold process. The first is spontaneous mutation, which the vast majority of the time produces no new traits. However, in the rare occasion that a favorable trait is produced and capable of proliferation through reproduction, natural selection takes over.

</p>

<p>Ok, great. We agree on this point. With that established, can we cease presenting evidence for natural selection (such as gene drift, nonrandom mating, the founder effect, etc) as if it proves something about evolution?</p>

<p>

New traits can be produced by all types of mutations (these do not neccessarily require ADDITIONAL DNA, but could also involve copying, switching, deleting). That said, there are several ways that additional chromosomes and DNA can be added into the genome. For further clarification of see previous posts.

</p>

<p>In what case have we observed this happening and producing a new, useful trait?</p>

<p>Cases I am aware of:</p>

<p>Genetic diseases such as Down’s Syndrome, which are disasterous.</p>

<p>“Freaks”, such as albinos and wingless flies, where the subject has lost a trait or structure, not gained one.</p>

<p>“Shuffles”, such as HIV and the Flu, in which code which does a task is changed slightly, resulting in slightly different code which does the same task. This can be useful because it prevents the human immune system from recognizing the virus. However, if continued indefinitly these changes would still not produce anything besides a virus.</p>

<p>

Just another misconception you have. Evolution isn’t about survival, it’s about maximum reproduction.

</p>

<p>A mistake on my part. Simply replace “survive when it would have died” with “reproduce when it would not have been able to do so” and my point will be just as valid.</p>

<p>

The consideration (even if you do not fully believe) in 6,000 year old earth is not a neutral situation. The verified peer-reviewed facts are overwhelmingly against it. You have to make a particular effort to reject mainstream science to arrive at the situation you are in. To me it’s the equivalent of saying, and excuse the cliche analogy:</p>

<p>You: The earth could be flat or round. It looks flat when I walk on it and the church says so.
Me: But evidence is overwhelming!
You: <a href=“http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djubl...rthsociety.htm[/url]”>http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djubl...rthsociety.htm&lt;/a&gt;
Me: That website is full of bogus because of X,Y,Z
You: All evidence is bogus.</p>

<p>In this scenario, maintaining neutrality is hardly the rational thing to do.

</p>

<p>I don’t expect you to agree with me. But please do not accuse me of “moving the goalposts”.</p>

<p>At any rate the age of the earth argument is, as I have said, irrelevant except that if you believe in evolution you must accept the old age of the earth, while a belief in creation allows other views if the evidence supports them.</p>

<p>

That’s a subjective, unscientific way to define what a new genetic trait is. So I suppose the virus would have quote “look” the same, but somehow not “do” the same? You’re making little sense.

</p>

<p>To count as a new trait, the virus would have to “do” something new. It does not. The virus operates in the same way. It merely does so with a slightly different code, which means that the immune system, which recognizes viruses by their chemical makeup, is not able to recognize the type of virus as the same that had prviously attacked it.</p>

<p>

Yes. In the sense that viruses develop new abilities through random mutation? </p>

<p>Well sure. The fact that HIV has only existed for the past few decades seems to suggest that mutations are more prevalent than expected. I mean, HIV is completely different from most retroviruses we have seen before.

</p>

<p>First, what is with that snip of my quote? Here is what I actually wrote:</p>

<p>

In the sense that more fit virues survive better? Yes. In the sense that viruses develop new abilities through random mutation? Not as far as we have observed.

</p>

<p>With that settled: HIV has only existed for the past few decades? I believe the theory is that it was originally carried by chimpanzees, and passed to humans sometime in the early 20th century. Reported cases of AIDS go back as far as the 1960s.</p>

<p>

Mutations happen all the time. It’s the beneficial ones that are rare. All rare occurrences WILL occur over long period of time!

</p>

<p>They are so extremely rare, and there are so many of them that have apparently happened, that I do not consider it reasonable to act like it is “overwhelmingly confirmed fact”.</p>

<p>

Of course, you dug a hole in this argument. You reject the old-age earth (because of your beliefs, and not scientific evidence), and then you use that fallacious rejection to reject evolution.

</p>

<p>Whoa whoa whoa! My rejection of evolution has absolutely nothing to do with my views on the age of the earth. If the earth were conclusively proven without a shadow of doubt to be 6 billion years old, I would still reject evolution just as strongly.</p>

[MosbyMarion]

<p>I think mifune has abandoned us…</p>

[MosbyMarion]

<p>Do y’all realize that this is the second most active topic in all of HSL? Only a handful have more posts, and all of them except Post Your Random Thoughts have been around much longer than this has. In two months, this topic has accumulated more than a 1000 posts and 13,000 views.</p>

<p>And the topics that have more posts are mostly game topics where the posts are barely even complete sentences, while many of the posts here are LOOONG debates…</p>

[GaGaManiac]

<p>My faith has allowed to fight demons - literal and metaphorical.</p>

[HarveyLewis]

<p>^Do you mean literally fight metaphorical demons and metaphorically fight literal demons? Because you can’t literally fight literal demons.</p>

[silverturtle]

<p>

I think mifune has abandoned us…

</p>

<p>He is on vacation.</p>

[GaGaManiac]

<p>I meant both literal and metaphorical. By literal I mean spirits that haunted my family and I. I would see objects being thrown around. My dog would be barking for no reason, though she only barks when she sees someone approaching. My sister started hearing voices in her head. Her personality changed drastically. She started to see objects in mirrors… A heaviness was felt in my house. By metaphorical I mean my own personal issues.</p>

[GaGaManiac]

<p>I’m not religious, just spiritual. However, I’ll never abandon my faith in Jesus.</p>

[MosbyMarion]

<p>

He is on vacation.

</p>

<p>Oh, ok. I look forward to his return… :P</p>

[Relevance]

<p>

This is the definition of the term as I understand it.

Stop making yourself look stupid. You’re wrong and he’s right - in the context of your use, the correct term is phenotype, not allelle. </p>

<p>

In what case have we observed this happening and producing a new, useful trait?

[Examples</a> of Beneficial Mutations and Natural Selection](<a href=“http://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoMutations.html]Examples”>http://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoMutations.html)</p>

<p>

To count as a new trait, the virus would have to “do” something new. It does not.

This is not how a genetic trait is defined. Stop making up your own definitions - they are as nonsensical as they are unscientific. </p>

<p>

Reported cases of AIDS go back as far as the 1960s.

That’s an extremely short period of time even by creationist standards, let alone evolutionary ones. </p>

<p>[Origin</a> of AIDS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_AIDS]Origin”>History of HIV/AIDS - Wikipedia)</p>

<p>

They are so extremely rare

Even with a 99.9999% success rate at copying, they would occur with high freqency in each generation. The human genome is made of 3,000,000,000 base pairs (yes that’s three billion, and yes source: [How</a> Many Atoms to Encode the Human Genome? Michael Graham Richard](<a href=“http://michaelgr.com/2008/04/06/how-many-atoms-to-encode-the-human-genome/]How”>Michael G.R.)</p>

<p>To me, it’s more miraculous that we don’t push out mutant one eyed babies everyday. </p>

<p>

Whoa whoa whoa! My rejection of evolution has absolutely nothing to do with my views on the age of the earth.

Yea, it’s just coincidence that the minority who reject evolution also happen to be religious and mostly Young-Earth Creationist.</p>

[nthpower]

<p>“Which one is most important to society?”</p>

<p>While science ‘wins’ for me personally, I believe that, for the average person in an average community, the realities of science (or, if you will, the frightening uncertainty that comes with trying to find realities using science) are less likely than the tenets of mainstream religions to encourage people to behave in a way that does the most good for the most people.
Now, for people who can understand science, aren’t threatened by unpopular ideas like those of individual worthlessness, and are capable of retaining their humanity despite disillusionment, science wins.
For the rest of us, and that is most people, religion is a safer way to ensure decent society. Most want to feel important, influential, and like we have free will but, by virtue of these wants, their execution, interpretation, and acceptance of science is misguided, devaluing the practice significantly.</p>

[MosbyMarion]

<p>

Examples of Beneficial Mutations and Natural Selection

</p>

<p>That is interesting… Without more detail I can’t tell whether these are indeed examples of upward evolution. Even if they are, they aren’t changes that, if continued, would be likely, even over an extrememly long time, to produce the variation we see today.</p>

<p>BTW, did you know that the host site for that page is a site protesting the Polk County, FL, school system’s uniform policy? I used to go to summer camp in Imperial Polk County… :P</p>

<p>

This is not how a genetic trait is defined. Stop making up your own definitions - they are as nonsensical as they are unscientific.

</p>

<p>The kind of changes we see in HIV are not the kind of changes needed to produce birds from dinosaurs, or bats from proto-micelike creatures.</p>

<p>If you want to understand how a reasonable person could reject evolution, consider a particular creature and the stages through which it must have evolved. Take birds:</p>

<p>To get from a dinosaur to a bird would require development of a number of new traits. Taking just one of them, the feather, consider the steps it would take for it to emerge.</p>

<p>Let’s try game theory:</p>

<p>No reasonable person believes that a dinosaur hatched it’s egg and a fully feathered bird emerged. Supposedly the path to feathers began when a mutation caused a dinosaur’s scales to be “bristley”.</p>

<p>What reproductive advantage do little bristles give? Maybe slightly less appealing to predators? Slightly more attactive to mates?</p>

<p>Being generous, maybe a +0.001% chance of reproducing?</p>

<p>Most creatures have a fairly large number of offspring during their lifetime. Most birds raise several young each year, and reptiles often have even larger clutches. Call it 10 eggs laid by a successfull proto-bird mom.</p>

<p>Since populations do not spiral out of control, death rate balances birth rate, and only 1/5 of proto-birds survive to reproduce on average.</p>

<p>So without mutations, the chances of each bird reproducing are 0.2. With the bristles, proto-bird has a 0.201 chance of reproducingl.</p>

<p>So our bristle-lizard mutation would have to occur several times before it would be probable that it perpetuates.</p>

<p>Even if it does survive, there is still about a 1/3 chance that none of its children will survive to reproduce.</p>

<p>If it survives for a few generations, then natural selection will cause it to eventually grow widespread in the population. But this will happen very slowly: a subset with .001 better odds of reproducing will take hundreds of generations to replace the far more numerous unmutated population.</p>

<p>Only when the first mutation has grown to a vast number of organisms and existed for a large number of generations is it likely that the next step, say longer bristles, will occur.</p>

<p>It would take many many such steps to bring the scales to simple feathers, and each step would have to happen multiple times since the majority of times it happened would be false starts killed by random chance.</p>

<p>And this is just one of many structures required to bring one of many creatures on of many steps forward along its evolutionary path.</p>

<p>As if that wasn’t enough, we find that feathers apparantly [Evolved</a> Twice](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longisquama]Evolved”>Longisquama - Wikipedia).</p>

<p>And then there are bats, bees, flying fish, snakes, and squirrels, none of which are related and all of which apparently independently evolved the same aerodynamic abilities.</p>

<p>And then there are the things that don’t have any logical series of steps between A and B, like the cleanerfish.</p>

<p>And all that aside, there is precious little evidence (and plenty of counterevidence) that evolution DID happen, whether it COULD happen of not.</p>

<p>

To me, it’s more miraculous that we don’t push out mutant one eyed babies everyday.

</p>

<p>Yet we don’t.</p>

<p>

Yea, it’s just coincidence that the minority who reject evolution also happen to be religious and mostly Young-Earth Creationist.

</p>

<p>If you aren’t religious, you have no choice but to accept evolution, and there isn’t any other atheistic explanation.</p>

<p>If you accept evolution, you have no choice but to accept an old earth, because there’s no way evolution can happen with a young earth.</p>

<p>Religious people can go either way as they believe most reasonable, but atheists must believe old earth evolution or discard their most basic assumption about the universe.</p>

[Sithis]

<p>

and there isn’t any other atheistic explanation.

</p>

<p>Unless you believe that super-advanced aliens put us here. O.o</p>

[MosbyMarion]

<p>^^ *because there isn’t any atheistic explanation (why doesn’t CC let you edit things?).</p>

<p>^ Yes, lol. No doubt they did it as an experiment to prove to the creationist aliens that given enough time we would evolve.</p>

[Adenine]

<p>I really hope that other people aren’t fooled into MosbyMarions jaw-droppingly ignorant posts on biology. Why do you think you’re so much better than the experts? You don’t even have a HS education. Do you think evolutionary biologists are universally stupid and that the 250,000 peer reviewed publications, and vast amount of evidence from countless fields is all bunk? Evolution is the backbone of biology and billions of hours have been spent confirming its existence only to be brought down by whack jobs who think they know all about evolution. And you just don’t … all over the work of biologists you do it to physicists, geologists, cosmologists and other scientists as well. We’re supposes to respect your pseudoscientific BS just because of what your bible says? To hell with your bible.</p>

<p>How would you like it if you had family killed by genocide (take the holocaust for example) and some ignorant nutcase came up to you and said that it never happened. How would that make you feel?</p>

<p>Creationism is just a pile of archaic BS that was invented to satisfy people until a real explanation came along (like we have now). You prove your idiotic beliefs with solid fact or evidence so quit running your mouth off saying that evolution is wrong. You’re just making yourself look like a brainwashed, moronic fool. You don’t provide any
basis for your case other than making stupid arguments that aren’t supported in the scientific community in any way, shape or form. Why should your garbage be taught in science classes? You think other people are arrogant for saying that the earth is 4.6 billion years old but you come across as plain arrogant for claiming that evolution is wrong despite it being unquestionable fact after passing every testable challenge its been put through.</p>

[Adenine]

<p>^In the third paragraph, “you prove” is
supposed to be “you don’t prove.”</p>

[MosbyMarion]

<p>^^</p>

<p>…</p>

<p>Not a whole lot to say to that.</p>

[ksarmand]

<p>

How would you like it if you had family killed by genocide (take the holocaust for example) and some ignorant nutcase came up to you and said that it never happened.

</p>

<p>Grossly inaccurate analogy.</p>

<p>

How would that make you feel?

</p>

<p>That’s irrelevant to the truth, which is that your analogy is false. I call a logical fallacy.</p>

<p>But that aside, you’re mighty fiery. Leftover adrenaline from the World Cup, I assume? :)</p>

[MosbyMarion]

<p>^ Don’t even waste time answering that kind of stuff ksar.</p>

[Sithis]

<p>@Adenine</p>

<p>I probably shouldn’t address your post since it’s mostly just inflamatory BS, but I can’t resist.</p>

<p>1) How much effort people put into something is irrelevant to whether or not it is true. People in the past (and the present day, to a lesser extent) have spent thier entire lives believing in religion/dedicating their lives to it, too. You think it’s not OK to challenge the scientific community, but it is OK to tell theologians, priests,etc. that they have wasted their lives? Heck, Isaac Newton, who basically founded modern scientific methodology, spent an enormous amount of time on religion and alchemy.</p>

<p>2)“How dare you defy hundreds of years of scientific research? How dare you defy the authority of the scientific community?” Well, how dare YOU defy thousands of years of religious doctrine? How DARE you defy the authority of X Church? You get the picture.</p>

<p>3) I don’t know what the point of that holocaust statement was.</p>

<p>4) The rest of your post is mostly ad hominem and requires no response.</p>