Evolution vs. Intelligent Design discussion

uhhhhhh............ well Sort of......... I like go to Church but I do think there is more proof for evolution

So what proof? really what proof, you mean NOTHING.

I dont belive in it. i came from a monkey o come on.

^ Actually monkeys are in fact very smart. ;) But I guess that's a bit besides the point...

Hey you all! All you should post here is your name, and only if you believe in Evolution! You can debate in the debate area! And please, don't be rude.
Thank you.

i believe in evolution, thank you very much!!!

I am an evolutionist too.

I'm a physicist. Needless to say, I do not believe that there is a shred of truth in Genesis. It is myth from beginning to end and may not even have a significant content of legend (where myth is superstition, legend has a historical basis but has been dressed up).

I will try to be gentle, but reading through the many, many posts it is clear that a rather large number of group members are pretty clueless about science and I will be firm.

rgb

I don't "believe" in evolution, because evolution is not to be "believed in." It is to be understood, and I understand it.

Dan wrote: "I don't "believe" in evolution, because evolution is not to be "believed in." It is to be understood, and I understand it."

Good point. One "believes in" Santa Claus, until a mix of evidence and reason convinces one that there is no such being. One doesn't believe in things like gravity, one observes, measures, systematizes, and understands them.

rgb

I think the group had died a month or two ago. Natural selection, I guess.

Arianna Nicole wrote: "So what proof? really what proof, you mean NOTHING. "

Have you read about drug-resistant TB? Do you know anything about how our cells work and divide? Have you given any consideration of evolution, or do you simply dismiss it as ridiculous because it contradicts your beliefs? Read about Mendel's experiment with pea plants and tell me that the theory of evolution doesn't explain its results.

R.C. wrote: "
One "believes in" Santa Claus, until a mix of evidence and reason convinces one that there is no such being.


You guys better stop trashing Santa. Your "so called" evidence is just a bunch of li..."

Ho-ho, brother. Denounce Santa, and the terrorists win.

I am an evolutionist. I just decided to jump in. Oh, I am much later than anyone else, oh well.

Welcome anyway. There is a thread where one lone creationist is trying to sustain an argument, but I think he's about done.

rgb

Greetings!

Evolution is awesome. We now know that life came about by chance from nothing in a big bang - life is driven simply by natural selection with no meaning or purpose - evolution has been reproduced a gazillion times - worldwide genetic remnents of extinct of species are expected to soon evolve into nirvana, according to the latest alien report.

There are seaside property lots in Tucson you might be interested in checking out - something else to "believe in."

Evolution, like fiction, is something to really believe in. It's awesome.

rgb - do you have a real name?

Richard William Nelson

Aw, c'mon Nathan. Maybe Richard isn't being sarcastic. After all, he still hasn't put down precisely what he believes provides a plausible explanation of the evidence of radiometrically dated fossils, the evidence for the age of the Universe (which yes, I am now actively teaching and I'd be happy to help him learn for himself every step of the process so he can come to understand it) and so on. Part of his belief in fairy stories from the Bronze Age is born out of his general ignorance of general science. Yes, he isn't uneducated in science, but neither is he well educated in general science, especially physics. So I'm happy to help him cure his ignorance -- if he is interested in being cured.

Richard, my name is Robert Gibbins Brown. I live in Durham, NC where I teach physics, astronomy, philosophy, math, and computer science at Duke. I write novels and poetry and nonfiction on the side. I'm working on a startup company (that I'm expecting and fearing will keep me very busy this summer if a gig we have going really takes off) that leverages a patent of mine in very advanced predictive modeling methodology across privacy barriers (preserving those privacy barriers -- of obvious interest to many, many groups doing modeling that is currently highly constrained by privacy issues). I'm married to perhaps the best internal medicine doc in Durham (a bold statement in "the city of medicine", but she's a doctor's doctor and I really do think it is true). I have three sons, ages 14, almost 20, and 23. One dog (border collie named Satchmo). One decrepit old hairballer cat named Lucy who is marking out her time to die (she's fifteen or sixteen at this point). My website is:

http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb

From it, you can get a lot of the stuff I write for students and teaching -- physics textbooks, computing books -- for free, and there are links to my less free books, or unfree paper copies of otherwise free books. The work of mine that you should most urgently read -- for free -- is the first 1/2 to 2/3 of my book in progress Axioms:

http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/axioms.pdf

Enjoy. It attempts to establish the objective basis for knowledge, solving the dilemma of Hume while preserving the desirable properties of philosophical skepticism as a path to our best guess at truth. It is written on the backs of giants -- I make no claim that the ideas expressed therein are uniquely "mine" -- but I do think it is a fairly clear expression of those ideas suitable for any reasonably bright lay person whether or not they are trained in philosophy or science. In particular, it leads one (I hope) to a clear understand of what it is best to believe given the bewildering array of alternatives, and hence can permit you to establish your personal worldview soundly if you choose to do so.

So not only do I have a real name, I'm a real person. A lot of this you could have learned by just clicking my icon in the interface, of course, just as I've learned of you from your GR info plus the judicious use of Google -- but I'm happy to provide a personal resume to you if it helps lead you to the light...;-)

rgb

Richard wrote: "Greetings!

Evolution is awesome. We now know that life came about by chance from nothing in a big bang - life is driven simply by natural selection with no meaning or purpose - evolution has bee..."

I feel sorry for Richard - that is the post of a troubled, desperate man struggling with doubt :-(

Looks like I livened up the conversation a bit (yes, I am taking all of the credit). I have been reading through the main debate thread and am just now where Nathan and RGB come in. I have a feeling that the first half of the conversation will be in stark contrast to the second portion. I just graduated from college with a BA in political science and philosophy, which means that I am still looking to be cured of my ignorance. RGB, if that was a general offer I would love to accept. Also I will read your links soon after I finish reading the thread. I only really know as much about biology and evolution as I needed to in order to graduate. I'm having a lot of fun reading the debate (as you can tell from my background that is really what interests me the most).

Alexander wrote: "Looks like I livened up the conversation a bit (yes, I am taking all of the credit). I have been reading through the main debate thread and am just now where Nathan and RGB come in. I have a feel..."

I am always happy to cure ignorance, in physics or philosophy more than in evolutionary biology if truth be told (I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I can look things up and read them and understand them quickly well enough to teach them as well as anybody:-).

So if you e.g. want to learn exactly why and how one proceeds from a state of complete ignorance -- living on an apparently flat Earth surrounded by an apparent bowl of sky -- to a picture of a visible Universe 13.7 light years in radius around the Earth, I'm your guy -- I'm teaching 8 students that right now. The answer is parallax, more parallax, the main stellar sequence and determination of "standard candle" star types, then using intensities of standard candles as a function of distance, with still more exotic methods used to refine (but that alone is enough to get you quite close to the size/age of the visible Universe and a full understanding of the evidence for the Big Bang).

Regarding the earth and the radiometrically dated age of the rocks and the fossil record, that too is within my primary field of understanding. So I can either explain myself how to use e.g. the ratio of Uranium to various decay biproducts in rock crystals of Uranides to read off the age of the rock (and ditto for a number of other elements, compounds, and decay sequences). The point being that we have a fairly large number of rather reliable clocks built right into many rocks, clocks that (in spite of their differences) usually agree quite well. Using them we can state things like the probable approximate age of the Earth with great confidence. We can date rock layers, and the contents of those layers. From all of this evidence, a detailed and consistent picture of the natural history of the Earth and its biosphere has emerged that is in excellent agreement with what we observe completely independently in the sky -- with general cosmology if you like.

As for the fossil record itself -- it is well documented in many, many places, including nearly any museum of natural history that isn't a bogus joke set up by biblically inerrant creationist nuts who think that by building a diorama with a plastic dinosaur being ridden by a smiling young boy wearing hebrew robes they are presenting "evidence". Real dinosaur fossils are obviously never found with real human fossils -- and in fact there are damn few human fossils to be found, unsurprisingly given the limited amount of time humans have been around compared to dinosaurs.

rgb

Greetings - Robert Gibbins Brown!

Really enjoyed reading your post - and finding out a little more about you.

Here is little about me:

Education

From the University of California, Irvine, earned a Bachelor of Science degree majoring in biochemistry. Later, from the University of Southern California (USC) graduated with a Doctor of Pharmacy degree majoring in pharmacology.

Profession

A post-doctoral clinical residency was followed by a year fellowship in pharmacokinetics at USC. Erythrocyte lithium kinetics was the center of clinical research interest.

Later, as a clinical pharmacologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, continued as an adjunct professor for over ten years in applied clinical pharmacology and hospital management.

Currently practices as Coordinator of Clinical Pharmacy Services at the Eisenhower Medical Center, Rancho Mirage, located in Southern California and serves as an adjunct professor for University of Colorado, University of Alberta, and Western University.

Papers, articles, and letters have been published in the following journals: New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Investigative Medicine, American Journal of Health-Systems Pharmacy, Clinical Chemistry, International Pharmacopsychiatry, Archive of Disease in Childhood, and American Federation for Clinical Research.

As you can see, physics is not my forte. But perhaps we could start by enlighting us on the topic of the origin of space and time. Then, we could start with a dicussion of the origin of molecules. What do you think?

Have a Great Day,

Richard William Nelson

As you can see, physics is not my forte. But perhaps we could start by enlighting us on the topic of the origin of space and time. Then, we could start with a dicussion of the origin of molecules. What do you think?

Sure. Space and time have no origin. Where would it be? When would have happened?

There isn't a terribly good reason to think that mass-energy had an origin in space-time, either. At least, we haven't yet seen any being created or destroyed as far away and as far back in time as we can see, which is some 13.7 billion light-years away and 13.7 years into the past.

Back before that we cannot see, farther away than that we cannot see, but our inability to see isn't because there is (plausibly) "nothing there" or "no there to contain something" -- it is because after the big bang the visible Universe consisted of nothing but one enormous cloud of hydrogen and helium gas, which rapidly cooled from its initial hot state. This cloud was opaque, and gave off light only at thermal equilibrium with the gas (which was very cold, only a few degrees kelvin).

And so matters persisted, dark and cold, for roughly 200-400 million years. By then the small inhomogeneities in the distribution of matter had grown with atoms forming droplets, droplets forming clumps, clumps forming balls, and the balls then growing by a process of accretion as the bigger balls attracted nearby smaller ones so that they eventually fell in and smashed the bigger one.

These collisions, and the increasing gravitational pressure, heated the balls up so that eventually they started to glow with the heat. At the same time, the reach of their gravitational fields swept nearby space of hydrogen and helium, more or less drawing the clouds aside so that this light could travel farther and farther away. Finally some of the balls "ignited" as the process of thermonuclear fusion began deep within their cores when the pressure and temperature were high enough, and their temperatures suddenly jumped higher still. The first stars were thus born.

We can (with the Hubble) see all the way back to the "big dark" of 200 million years post BB. We can see the first stars igniting, and the first galaxies forming. We can see the number of stars and galaxies increasing, and watch them age, simply by looking at them in the order of farthest/oldest to nearest/newest.

Using our ability to reason, we can assemble consistent explanations for nearly everything that we can see. By that I mean that we have explanations that have a minimum of ad hoc parts that are introduced to explain things that don't quite fit, and that the explanations that we have have very broad predictive power and are well-verified by experiment. The prevailing theories have come about quite gradually through the collaborative critical actions of many thoughtful and serious humans. They are not flights of fancy, nor are they the product of a great Satanic conspiracy. They are openly published and any person alive can criticize them or try to improve them -- if they are smart enough to find any actual problems, if they are honest enough to be constructive in the process, if they are impartial enough to leave their religious biases home when they do. By which I mean that no scientist is ever, ever going to accept that they should disbelieve a well-founded scientific theory "because it contradicts Genesis". Simple common sense is more than sufficient to show that the correct direction to apply the contradiction is the other way, and throw out Genesis if it fails to fit the facts.

Which it does.

As for the process that led from the unified field to quarks and gluons and electrons, to nuclei, to atoms, to molecules -- it is very simply the combination and binding of quarks due to the very powerful strong nuclear interaction, forming nuclei in the predicted ratio of 75% hydrogen to 25% helium, which is observed whereever we look in the Universe except where stars have been burning and exploding to alter the ratio. The electrons were strongly attracted to the positive nuclei and bound to them, forming monoatomic hydrogen and helium atoms.

The first molecules happened almost immediately thereafter, as I'm sure that you know that H_1 is tremendously unstable chemically. Pretty much every time two monoatomic hydrogens collided, they formed H_2, diatomic hydrogen molecules. Helium, of course, is chemically inert as a noble gas with filled 1S shells (as I'm again fairly sure you remember, with your chemistry background).

To form more interesting molecules (with very few early exceptions that involved the tiny fraction of all matter that came out of the BB as heavier atomic species) had to wait for the stellar furnaces that would forge them. Inside the earliest stars, hydrogen and helium fused to form the heavier elements -- boron, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, silicon, all the way up to iron. Some of the earliest stars were truly enormous -- superstars many times the size of most normal stars today -- and burned very hotly. They consumed all of their fuel prematurely and exploded into supernovae, and the implosive force of the explosion formed most of the iron and all of the heavier elements, blasting the brand new nuclei (along with all of the much more abundant lighter ones) back out into the diffuse gas of hydrogen and helium.

These mixtures of colliding gas -- some parts of the gas being driven by light pressure from nearby stars -- are clearly visible in nebulae without our own galaxy not far from the solar system. Orion, for example, is a hotbed of star formation, as these regions where gas is slightly compressed triggers the same gravitational instability that lead to the formation of stars in the early Universe -- we can see stars being born and dying in these stellar nurseries.

However, these second and third generation stars that form out of the mixed remnants of earlier exploded stars have an amazing property -- they have a strong tendency to make planets as they form. This process, too, is well understood at this point -- experiments conducted on some of the first trips into space showed how it happens. As matter is attracted to those density fluctuations that first form, they rarely come in with zero angular momentum. As they pull in towards a smaller center, their initial almost negligible angular speed greatly increases. They whirl down into the gravitational wells just like a whirlpool in space, forming disks and spiral structures of great beauty at every length scale -- enormous disk-like galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars, most of those stars possessing a disk-like whirling collection of planets that are spinning around them (the planets being too light to ignite, although there are double stars out there where the "planet" did get large enough to ignite on its own), the planets collecting disk-like collections of moons and sometimes rings, and believer it or not, some moons have moons. Gravity fuels the spinning dance of mass motion at the macroscale just as electrostatic forces and nuclear forces drive it at the microscale.

The heavy bodies that coalesce out of this stardust, this debris produced in the furnaces of dying, exploding stars, often have metal cores and the full spectrum of complex chemistry enabled on their surfaces by the presence of the entire stable periodic table. Methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, and many, many organic compounds -- the basic building blocks of life -- have been observed in the atmospheres of the planets in this solar system and a few have been detectable across the enormous distances on the planets of neighboring star systems. The chemistry of Venus, however inimical it is to human life, is extremely rich, and they are discovering that even things like the moons of Jupiter, heated by the tides instead of the sun, have liquid water and complex chemistry and hence may have suitable conditions for life.

Life itself could have cropped up almost anywhere over the ten or twelve billion years that this process has been going on in a trillion trillion stars -- and that's just what we can see! If it happened anywhere near the sun, perhaps in the stellar system that preceded the sun, then the very explosion that destroyed the system may well have propelled viruses and spores out with the outflow of gas, to drift across vast differences and seed the process of life on millions of newer, younger planets for every planet that was blown apart in this way.

Note that every single one of these discoveries contradicts the mythology of the Bible. There are far more stars than the Bible allows for, the Universe is far larger, far older, the origins of life and its natural history bear no resemblance whatsoever to the "all at once" process of creation described in the Bible. Where the Bible suggests that the Earth is the center of everything, the Apple of God's Eye, the Reason that he Made All of This, we can now see the vast reaches of space, where nothing about us is special. Our sun is a star like a trillion trillion other stars. Our planet is a planet like many other planets in our own solar system, and everywhere we look we are finding more planets in other solar systems -- we are finding that solar systems themselves are common (and can understand why). There is nothing particularly unique about our planet's or solar system's or sun's chemical or material makeup.

Imagining that we are special and all of this was somehow centered around us seems to be an act of colossal intellectual hubris. When we look at the Deep Space photos taken by Hubble and see that past a certain point, the sky looks just as starry as it does outside on any dark and starry night, only every one of the little lights is a galaxy as large and grand as our own (or bigger!) it is difficult to imagine God putting all sorts of finishing touches on those galaxies out where we can never see them in any sort of detail -- they are so far away that the stars that we see burning are for the most part all dead, and have long since been replaced by other stars. It makes much more sense to believe that God -- if God exists -- does not act cognitively on this mass of stars, any more than you act cognitively on the mass of molecules that make up your big toe. The cognition, if it exists at all on this scale (and I rather believe that it might, although it seems unlikely that anyone will ever be able to prove it) isn't encoded on the laws of nature -- it is the inevitable time evolution of those laws.

There is a lovely poem by George Meredith that you may have read before that expresses it well:

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned,
Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,
Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.

rgb

Greetings - Robert Gibbons Brown!

Thanks for your very lengthy answer to the question - on the origin of space and time.

You said - "Space and time have no origin."

As a physicist, then, you must be able to prove that space and time are infinite.

You were asked this question because you are a physicist - so was looking for an answer based on physics rather than a "lovely poem."

Just as an FYI - this is physics question, not a theology or biblical discussion.

Could one conclude, therefore, the origin of space and time cannot be expressed in physical terms?

Have a Great Day,

Richard William Nelson

As a physicist, then, you must be able to prove that space and time are infinite.

You were asked this question because you are a physicist - so was looking for an answer based on physics rather than a "lovely poem."

Just as an FYI - this is physics question, not a theology or biblical discussion.

Could one conclude, therefore, the origin of space and time cannot be expressed in physical terms?

Not at all. All meaningful questions can be expressed in physical terms, can they not? In fact, a very passable definition of a meaningless question is one that cannot be expressed in physical terms, although I'm open minded about just what those terms might be and don't think physical reality requires my personal ability to observe or measure in order to be objectively, physically real.

When you ask for the "origin of space and time" you beg the question by assuming that they have one. I begged it right back at you, flippantly, by pointing out that such an origin must have occurred at no place, at no time, which is strangely like the statement that it never happened anywhere, is it not?

To illustrate the "have you stopped beating your wife yet" character of the question, consider my possible answers. "I don't know the origins of space and time" concedes that they had one. "They began at the Big Bang" is meaningful enough, but requires that it be accompanied by a specific physical model, and doesn't accurately describe our reliable theoretical or empirical knowledge, so it would be an opinion that I cannot justify and hence do not hold. All we really know empirically (and I just discussed this yesterday with a geometric cosmology theorist) that is reliable is that roughly 13.73 billion years ago, the mass-energy we now see in the visible Universe (which is very probably not the whole thing) was in a very dense state. Pay careful attention -- my friend pointed this out to me very explicitly, although he hardly needed to as I already knew it -- it is not correct to say "the Universe was the size of an atom" or any such nonsense. We cannot say for certain how big the Universe was then, any more than we can say for certain how big it is now, but we have no evidence that the Universe "ends" just past 13.7 billion light years away (the event horizon of Earth post Big Bang and the limit of the visible Universe) now, and in all probability it didn't end just outside that atomic volume that the visible Universe occupied then. So really, all cranking the laws of physics backwards tells us that it was very hot, and very dense.

How it got into that very hot/dense state we do not know, because the Big Bang event itself erased our ability to see the details of its prior state, and our theories that work well enough now to predict phenomena at lower energy densities break down and lack experimental confirmation at the extreme densities involved. However, a very simple argument shows just how implausible it is that "space and time began", poofing into existence ex nihilo, out of nothing.

To illustrate very precisely the implausbility involved, it is entirely possible for the Universe to simply disappear into nothingness on December 31st 2011 at midnight. All of space and time, simply gone. All of the mass, all of the energy. Poof. Absolute nothingness reigns nowhere in no time at all where "before" (whatever that means with no time) there was space and time. It is possible, why not?

Most reasonable people would, I think, consider this proposition (however possible in the sense that it isn't "logically self-contradictory") laughably improbable. We have no reason to think that this will happen at all in the future in even a tiny volume of space and time, let alone happen at this highly specific time and happen everywhere. We never see this happen. Ever. And we look!

Yet your question is about the time reversal of this very hypothesis -- implicitly asserting that at some arbitrary point in the past, space and time and mass and energy suddenly came into existence out of nothing!

Put this way, it is perfectly obvious why your question is absurd. It isn't impossible that space and time and mass and energy had a discrete origin, although I'm damned if I can successfully visualize where and when this beginning took place any more than I can visualize the "nothing" everything poofs away into on 12/31/2011. But my imagination isn't the limit of possibility, so sure, possible even if unimaginable. Implausible, however, is a sheer understatement.

Now if you really want me to describe to you the various invariance principles, conservation laws, symmetries, and so on inherent in the laws of physics as well as the physical evidence of homogeneity and symmetry as far away and as far back in time as we can see, I'd be happy to do so.

If you want to argue that it is plausible for spacetime and all of its contents to poof into nothingness if, at some time in the remote future, the Universe reverses its expansion and falls back together again to reassemble the highly dense state that we currently identify with the original expansion as a kind of time reversal of the same process, I'm all ears.

However, be aware that this would be proposing a specific physical model that could therefore be compared to actual evidence, not just for the collapse, not just for the reunification of the field and deflation of space and time in extreme density of mass-energy, but for the poofing out of existence of everything "into" nothingness (whatever those words mean, as again they tend to be semantic nonsense when one parses them on our universal experience of continuity of existence of space and time and mass and energy).

So, you have anything for me there? A paper in Physical Review on "Acosmogenesis", so to speak? You think the spontaneous appearance of life in already existent, highly complex stuff is unlikely? Try the spontaneous appearance of Universes in nonexistent stuff! It hurts to even say it, let alone think about it!

To return to the thinly veiled religious nature of the question begging involved here, "Creation ex nihilo" is self-contradictory, so of course that isn't ever what is really meant, even by folks such as Augustine. Creation isn't out of nothing, it is out of something, namely God. The Big Bang isn't out of nothing either -- physicists who are seriously considering the issue in consistent theories throw around terms like "vacuum instability" because in modern physics the vacuum has energy and is far from "empty space".

Just now the vacuum in the non-dense Universe is largely, but not entirely, stable. In a highly compressed, mass-energy rich initial state, perhaps not so much!

On the religious, metaphysical side of the border there are endless problems and no possibility of answers. Where is God when God creates the Universe? When, exactly did God do it? How long did God think about it before God did it? What process and physical means did God use to do God's thinking with? Is that process/means mechanical (in which case God arguably lacks free will and all problems faced by us in our Universe are problems faced by God in God Universe) or is it worse, random so that God really lacks free will.

And perhaps most important of all -- why does God think. Humans, when they think think about something. In this primordial God-is-everything pre-initial state, what did God think about, and why?

As soon as one asks these very simple questions, the problems with Augustine's propositions become glaringly obvious. To solve the "problem" of the origins of what we can see -- a real problem as we have no evidence whatsoever that suggests that the mass-energy we can see requires or had a prior cause, an origin -- one introduces an even bigger system with even greater prior complexity. So what about the origins, the physics, the cosmology, of that?

Either way, postulating a necessary prior cause for existence of every thing, one embarks on the same sort of chain one uses to demonstrate the unboundedness of (say) the real number line. If things in the chain of existence must have origins, that is logically equivalent to a "predecessor operation" in mathematics, and one has an obviously infinite chain of origins. If one postulates a first object in that chain, well, you just violated your assumption that things in the chain that exist must have origins, and it is back to the logical drawing board.

And this assumption is terrible science given that we haven't got a single observation of any thing that exists having an origin. The evidence, my friend, is all on the side of things not having origins -- the law of "conservation of mass-energy", for example.

rgb

Richard wrote: "Greetings - Robert Gibbons Brown!

Thanks for your very lengthy answer to the question - on the origin of space and time.

You said - "Space and time have no origin."

As a physicist, then, ..."


Ok Richard - Where do you think the space and time originated? How do you explain the origin of molecules? Could one conclude that we do not fully understand the physical processes involved but, eventually, they will be explained in physical terms? Surely this is a damn sight better that "a god did it"! I assume from all your posts and your book web-site that you are a young earth creationist. Where did your creator come from? Where was its origin? If it has existed forever then why not the universe? As a young earth creationist you must be able to prove that your god is infinite in ALL respects. You are willing to belittle evolution and cosmology but have no reasonable alternatives!

Greetings - Robert Gibbons Brown!

The comment "The evidence, my friend, is all on the side of things not having origins -- the law of 'conservation of mass-energy', for example" is very interesting.

Would not "the law of 'conservation of mass-energy' be counter-intuitive to evolution?

Just curious - why cannot physics characterize either the origin or the infinite nature of space and time?

We know that physics has limitations, e.g., the String Theory. But at least the two-sides of problem - Newton and Eistein - are known.

Have a Great Day,

Richard William Nelson

Greetings - Hp!

Love your question - "Where did your creator come from." Answer - I don't have a clue.

When Darwin was asked the same question, he said - "How can a dog reflect on the mind of man."

Have a Great Day,

Richard William Nelson

Would not "the law of 'conservation of mass-energy' be counter-intuitive to evolution?

What is counter-intuitive about it?

Just curious - why cannot physics characterize either the origin or the infinite nature of space and time?

Again, you beg the question. You cannot characterize the origin of space and time without first proving that there is an origin to it. We have no reason to believe that space or time even have an origin. As rgb pointed out, when and where did space and time originate?

Similarly, you can't physically prove that space and time are infinite. You can't hold up an infinitely long yardstick to something to demonstrate that it is infinitely long. As for time, we'll start a stopwatch and let it run, and when it gets to forever, we'll know time is infinite.

Would not "the law of 'conservation of mass-energy' be counter-intuitive to evolution?

Why, or how, is conservation of mass energy counter-intuitive to evolution? The two concepts have quite literally nothing to do with on another.

Let's suppose mass-energy were not conserved. The evidence for this would be something like particles popping into or out of existence under circumstances where their total ME content could not be accounted for by contributions from their environment. Fifty or sixty years ago, physicist Fred Hoyle had a theory for a steady state, expanding Universe based on "continuous creation" of mass-energy that kept the average (averaged overy very large length scales) constant. He believed that as the fabric of space-time stretched from the expansion, new particles popped into existence, very, very slowly, mostly in the volumes of space between stars.

The evidence for the competing "big bang" theory (which he named, although he intended to do so facetiously) put an end to his hypothesis, and in the decades since violation of ME conservation has yet to be observed (although particle creation occurs all of the time in modern accelerator experiments, mass-energy is just one of a half dozen conservation laws that are never observed to be broken in the process, plus one or two quantities that are almost conserved -- near but slightly broken symmetries if you like. The BB theory was the brain child of Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre, and opposed yet another steady state theory of the Universe due to Einstein.

Absolutely none of this, of course, has anything to do with the mechanism of evolution, beyond establishing a complex Universe that is, as it turns out, capable of sustaining "life". So I am completely confused by your associating the two ideas. Explain what you are trying to say, please.

Just curious - why cannot physics characterize either the origin or the infinite nature of space and time?

I have no idea what you mean by "characterize" here. You or anyone else can propose any hypothesis you like in physics -- science is not a fascist state of the sort that religion was and to a great extent still is. A hypothesis is a "characterization" -- a semantic statement that is understandable, verifiable/falsifiable by experience (at least in principle), and linked to other semantic statements that are understandable and verifiable/falsifiable in some suitable language or languages. Suitable to the theory at hand -- the language of math is different from the language of physics, which in turn is not generally human lay language.

So if you wish, you yourself can "characterize" a hypothesis for the origin of space and time. In fact, if you'll recall I've asked you to do so. What do you believe? Why do you believe it? So far you are hanging out on this site sniping at the science of evolution but I cannot recall you advancing a single scientific hypothesis that you think is more plausible and in accord with the evidence.

So please: I have indicated why it is (in my opinion) most plausible that space and time and mass-energy are eternal -- the former because one runs into serious ontological/geometrical difficulty imagining otherwise in a generalized way, the latter because we have no observational evidence that runs counter to the very, very strongly believed conservation law (and because no satisfactory/consistent theories exist that could account for its origin). You are perfectly free to disagree, but if you wish your disagreement to be rational rather than religious, well, the difference is evidence and consistency. As in, a religious pronouncement doesn't have to be consistent with anything, it is an ad hoc statement to account for things outside of the web of interconnected strongly held evidence supported beliefs collectively referred to as "science".

So if you wish me to consider your counterhypothesis on a scientific basis, please express it precisely, and indicate both the ways in which it is consistent with known science and the ways in which it differs (and of course it is permitted to differ), and most importantly discuss the evidence for and against it or at the very least, discuss what kind of experiments could in principle be done to prove or disprove your hypothesis.

Use as a model the magnetic monopole or Higgs particle in physics. Many physicists strongly believe in their probable existence even though they've never been seen because they are strongly implied by consistent theories that "work" elsewhere. Neither has been observed yet, but there are reasons to think that both might be rare and/or short-lived or difficult to find. Their hypothetical existence isn't a religious issue, though, because everybody agrees on what evidence would characterize their discovery, and because their existence if anything makes known physical theory more complete and understandable and consistent, not less.

It is similarly easy to characterize infinite space. Here, look, I'll do it for you: "I hypothesize that space and time are infinite in extent, well represented by a real number line". Is this consistent with existing physical theory? Well duh, all scientific theories of all sorts are founded on things that exist having space-time coordinates that are real numbers. Are there counter theories? There are: on the one hand space-time may not be continuous (and hence map into real numbers to arbitrary degrees of fineness) -- it may be discrete on the Planck scale. On the other hand, it might be finite and have boundaries in the distant past or at absolutely any point in the future -- remember my "12/3/2011" assertion were it all goes poof at that precise time, everywhere (whatever "at that precise time" means in relativity theory over spacelike separations). Can it be verified or falsified by experience? Well, most scientific theories cannot really be verified -- the best one can say is that they are consistent with the evidence collected so far -- but we generally consider a long string of such positive consistency to be a gradual process of verification of the probable truth of the hypothesis. It is certainly falsifiable -- all we have to do is make it to 12/31/2011 or any other date and poof out of existence and look, our hypothesis of infinite space and time is false! Or discover a "boundary" somewhere -- one can imagine a number of things that would convince one that ST are not well represented by an infinite real number line. Verification or falsification in the remote past, however, are certainly contingent upon belief in the entire network of science -- one has to believe that the images gathered by the Hubble are indeed glimpses into the remote past when one views things that are far away -- or come up with a consistent, plausible theory that suggests otherwise.

Do you begin to understand the rules of the game? Sitting on the sidelines and throwing ice or spitballs at the players is allowed but considered quite rude and grounds for being utterly ignored. To be a player, formulate a hypothesis and get into the game by putting your ass on the line, exposing your hypothesis to the merciless and just gaze of reason and the requirements for general consistency, some sort of progressive verifiability and instant falsifiability on the basis of evidence, and "simplicity" -- ad hoc theories that paste over holes with patch after patch of special-case hypotheses or "fairy theories" that rely on invisible causes that cannot in principle be measured may or may not be true, but will generally be rejected in favor of ones that are more compact and efficient and that involve causes that can in principle be seen and are not ad hoc solutions to inconsistencies in the primary concepts.

Of course I openly invite you to do the same for the origin of species. Feel free to let us know your favorite hypothesis that explains both the radiometrically dated fossil record in its entirety (which is, note well, consistent with substantial amounts of evidence from cosmology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and geology for the age of the earth, the sun, the local stellar group, our galaxy, and the Universe). Do you think that intelligent aliens from outer space are running a four billion year old experiment, and that periodically they land, kill off an entire species, and engineer a carefully designed replacement for its ecological niche? Then say so, and say why. Do you think an invisible super-being created them by hand in a six day stretch some 6000 years ago? Then be honest and admit it and offer up your defense for this belief and explain how it is consistent with the evidence and the contingent belief that this super-being isn't a bald-faced liar, creating an entirely misleading but fake "natural history" in the form of radiometrically dated fossils and an apparently ancient and enormous Universe.

rgb

Richard wrote: "Greetings - Hp!

Love your question - "Where did your creator come from." Answer - I don't have a clue.

When Darwin was asked the same question, he said - "How can a dog reflect on the mind o..."

You see Richard, that appears to be your problem. You do not want to find the real answers; you want to be told what to do, what to believe and what you hope is to come.

Others wish to discover how the universe really came to be as it is; what really happened to create life; what the future really holds for us; and how we really came to be intelligent, sentient beings able to pose such wonderful questions.

These people do not depend on ancient myths tied to a rather ridiculous religion via a mad-man unfortunately saying that someone died for our sins: The moment you believe that Jesus died for our sins (1 Cor. 15:3; Gal. 1:4) you are inextricably stuck with the idiotic idea of sin being real and a result of the fall from “Eden”. You are then also bonded to all the other Bronze Age rubbish of the Old Testament.

I can not seem to find your Darwin quote "How can a dog reflect on the mind of man." Where does this quote come from? I’d like to see it in context.

Although Darwin does speak of dogs and gods in Chapter 21 of The Descent of Man -- just not in the same breath, and not in any sense religiously. In fact:

The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals. It is however impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive in man. On the other hand a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal; and apparently follows from a considerable advance in man's reason, and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and wonder. I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for His existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more powerful than man; for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent Deity. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture.

He who believes in the advancement of man from some low organised form, will naturally ask how does this bear on the belief in the immortality of the soul. The barbarous races of man, as Sir J. Lubbock has shewn, possess no clear belief of this kind; but arguments derived from the primeval beliefs of savages are, as we have just seen, of little or no avail. Few persons feel any anxiety from the impossibility of determining at what precise period in the development of the individual, from the first trace of a minute germinal vesicle, man becomes an immortal being; and there is no greater cause for anxiety because the period cannot possibly be determined in the gradually ascending organic scale.

Does this sound like a religious man? He points out that belief in God is empirically tied to what future generations would call cultural or memetic evolution, and that belief systems in the supernatural themselves begin with a disorganized belief in a multitude of oft-malign spirits interfering with the natural order of simple causality and only gradually shift to a belief in a beneficent single superentity (where they do as this is far from universal) in cultures that have themselves become beneficent. Elsewhere in this chapter, he reflects on the evolutionary advantages of altruistic behavior, of an appreciation of symmetry and beauty -- and of their observation in lower species such as dogs. He also notes that there is no scientific support for or evidence of any particular moment either ontogenically or philogenically for the infusion of "an immortal soul" into a zygote.

In fact, the only remark he makes about the ability of a dog to reflect is this:

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives- of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation, is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals. But in the fourth chapter I have endeavoured to shew that the moral sense follows, firstly, from the enduring and ever-present nature of the social instincts; secondly, from man's appreciation of the approbation and disapprobation of his fellows; and thirdly, from the high activity of his mental faculties, with past impressions extremely vivid; and in these latter respects he differs from the lower animals. Owing to this condition of mind, man cannot avoid looking both backwards and forwards, and comparing past impressions. Hence after some temporary desire or passion has mastered his social instincts, he reflects and compares the now weakened impression of such past impulses with the ever-present social instincts; and he then feels that sense of dissatisfaction which all unsatisfied instincts leave behind them, he therefore resolves to act differently for the future,- and this is conscience. Any instinct, permanently stronger or more enduring than another, gives rise to a feeling which we express by saying that it ought to be obeyed. A pointer dog, if able to reflect on his past conduct, would say to himself, I ought (as indeed we say of him) to have pointed at that hare and not have yielded to the passing temptation of hunting it.

This obviously has no possible relevance to God. Darwin is stating, quite correctly, that morality derives from memory, that "relection" upon the difference between the actual outcome of various actions and the desired one leads humans to gradually modify their behavior in moral ways. Furthermore (he continues in paragraphs unquoted) this tendency is strongly reinforced and taught socially and ultimately becomes a habit -- by observing primitive tribes such as the Fuegans (the truly primitive aborigines that lived on Tierra del Fuego in what was barely a neolithic culture) one can see that we do not have much by way of an instinctive moral sense (a conclusion still more strongly supported by feral human studies, where Burroughs' "noble savage" Tarzan with his refined "English" sensibilities inherited along with his white skin is nothing but a racist myth).

His only remark concerning dogs and reflection is that the pointer's relative moral weakness is more a deficit in the capacity of its memory and imagination, the lack of comparison of the outcome of present actions with some remembered prior imagined outcome. Indeed to instill non-instinctive moral behavior in dogs (where in my opinion, at least, dogs have plenty of instinctive moral behavior as they are highly social mammals) we are forced to serve as their missing comparator function and impose on them a simpler negative association when their behavior deviates not from their imagined goals (catching and eating the rabbit is, no doubt, highly moral behavior for a dog-wolf in a state of non-human nature) but from the ones we desire of them on the basis of our own imagination of their purpose.

Bear in mind that Darwin has more to say on dogs in the actual text -- primarily to demonstrate that dogs have everything that humans have -- a moral sense, memory, compassion, the ability to feel shame or regret -- they differ only in their overall mental capacity and the instincts that they carry over from their evolutionary past, which is quite different from our own. His purpose, correctly and completely served, is that the species of the earth recapitulate the gradual uplift of certain species, indeed, of entire genera, by virtue of their success in the game of survival, and that much of that which the Abrahamic religions assert is the direct gift of God to Man Alone -- a soul, a moral sense, the ability to choose to sin or not sin, the ability to appreciate beauty, to act in a noble or self-sacrificing manner -- is absolutely visible and indeed commonplace among the so-called lower animals.

If man is differentiated in any single way, it is in the size and structure of his brain, in particular his ability to utilize language, and given the enormous competitive advantages language (or communication systems in general) convey in the survival game, it is no more a surprise that one species evolved the best brain so far for communicating, or that this development altered the terrain itself on which evolution proceeded (enabling memetic, language transmitted social evolution which could and did trump pure "selfish gene" genetic evolution) than it is a surprise that many, many other social species can also communicate. Indeed, a good working definition of a social species is that it is one that can communicate, and there is evidence that there were social dinosaur species back in the Cretaceous with specialized structures in their skulls to facilitate -- communication.

The only thing one can conclude actually reading Darwin on the Descent of Man is that it is so amazingly correct, even today. Not every observation or prediction is born out by modern e.g. brain research or anthropology, but so very many are.

To summarize, his concluding paragraph from Chapter IV:

Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals. They are also capable of some inherited improvement, as we see in the domestic dog compared with the wolf or jackal. If it could be proved that certain high mental powers, such as the formation of general concepts, self-consciousness, etc., were absolutely peculiar to man, which seems extremely doubtful, it is not improbable that these qualities are merely the incidental results of other highly-advanced intellectual faculties; and these again mainly the result of the continued use of a perfect language. At what age does the new-born infant possess the power of abstraction, or become self-conscious, and reflect on its own existence? We cannot answer; nor can we answer in regard to the ascending organic scale. The half-art, half-instinct of language still bears the stamp of its gradual evolution. The ennobling belief in God is not universal with man; and the belief in spiritual agencies naturally follows from other mental powers. The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals; but I need say nothing on this head, as I have so lately endeavoured to shew that the social instincts—the prime principle of man's moral constitution—with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule, "As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise"; and this lies at the foundation of morality.

Damn skippy.

rgb

When Darwin was asked the same question, he said - "How can a dog reflect on the mind of man."

What's your point? I love it when creationists say things that boil down to "Darwin once said the word 'God;' therefore, evolution is false." You know what else Darwin once said? He said that evolution is true. He literally wrote the book on it. So invoking some obscure and vague Darwin quote that contains the word "God" does not prove anything about anything.

Meanwhile, please answer the question several of us have asked: what is counter-intuitive about the conservation of mass-energy and evolution?

Greetings!

Conservation is a process to maintain the status quo - species status.

Evolution is a process to move beyond the status quo - species evolution.

Intuition aside - what equations best explains the physics of either conservation or evolution?

Please use physics - not a range of philosophies.

Although did enjoy reading Robert Brown's philosophies at http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Philosop..., including "An Actual Theorem Concerning God"

Have a Great Day,

Richard William Nelson

Conservation is a process to maintain the status quo - species status.

Evolution is a process to move beyond the status quo - species evolution.


Conservation of mass-energy means that the amount of mass-energy in the universe remains constant (i.e. is conserved). It has nothing to do with the "status quo," whatever that means to the universe. Every time a baby is born, does this violate conservation of mass-energy? The United States recently passed sweeping health care reform, upending the "status quo." Does this violate the conservation of mass-energy? A species is not a unit of mass energy that is lost when it goes extinct or is created when it is evolved. I mean, honestly, do you really understand so little about basic physics and biology, or are you just playing coy? What on Earth is this "status quo" and how does it have anything to do with evolution?

rgb wrote: "Although Darwin does speak of dogs and gods in Chapter 21 of The Descent of Man -- just not in the same breath, and not in any sense religiously...
A pointer dog, if able to reflect on his past conduct..."

Thanks RGB that was all I could find relating to "Dogs Reflecting" as well :-)

I was hoping Richard, who appears to be the expert on everything Darwin, would have an answer as well but he is still sniping and showing his ignorance of evolution, physics and intelligent discourse.

And what is with his "Greetings!" and "Have a Great Day"? What a pleasant way of annoying someone!

Intuition aside - what equations best explains the physics of either conservation or evolution?

Why, the following ones. Of course.

Mass-energy conservation:

\frac{d }{dt} \int_{R^3} \eta(\vec{x}) dV = 0

where \eta is the energy density (including the energy bound up as mass) present at all points in space, and the integral is over all space. This isn't the very best formulation of it, but the alternatives are integrals over generalized field stress tensors in four dimensions and involve renormalization but are pretty complicated and wouldn't mean a thing to you, whereas this one is easily explained. An integral is a sum. This integral thus sums up the total mass-energy in all of space. The leading time derivative indicates the rate of change of this quantity. The zero on the right indicates that it does not change -- that it is constant.

There are similar equations for Conservation of Momentum:

\frac{d }{dt} \int_{R^3} \vec{g}(\vec{x}) dV = 0

where \vec{g} is the momentum density, for Conservation of Angular Momentum, for Conservation of Charge:

\frac{d }{dt} \int_{R^3} \rho(\vec{x}) dV = 0

where \rho is charge density and so on. For many of them (and for most purposes short of quantum mechanics where pair production or radioactive decay can occur) one can separate out mass and charge conservation as discrete sums over conserved particles. That is, the total number of electrons, protons, neutrons does not change, and one can manage things like the mass defect (that turns into the energy released in nuclear fusion) can be managed by simple bookkeeping.

So in general, conservation equations in physics are simple statements in calculus that the time derivative of a (summed, total) quantity is zero (so that quantity does not change) AS A CONSTRAINT ON ALL INTERNAL DYNAMICAL PROCESSES! They are without exception empirically supported laws, although they are also deeply intertwined through the mathematics of consistently functioning physical models as noted. A dynamical theory that violates them is almost certainly just plain wrong.

Now, the theory of evolution is best described as a genetic optimization algorithm. This is a set of mathematical transforms that carry a "system" that may be closed or open from state to state in a series of steps. The steps CAN be differentially small (so the solution can be viewed as the solution of a vast set of coupled differential equations, as in a microscopic physical model) but this approach makes no sense and obscures the important macroscopic effects of interest, so just like we generally don't do chemistry starting with quarks and gluons and REALLY don't do biology with quarks and gluons (although in principle we could) the process itself is generally discretized in finite time steps, studied in the context of a small system of interest embedded in a larger environment whose general average properties will effect the system in well defined ways.

Time evolution is thus a matter of solving a discretized set of difference equations with a complex stochastic term. The mathematics of this sort of thing is called a Markov Chain (in part because one often makes a Markov approximation in the solution of the dynamics, which makes the next step/generation depend only on the state of the current generation plus the random factors introduced by the noise/environment interaction terms and not on any "memory" of the previous states of the system. This doesn't mean that the system has no memory, but it does mean that transition decisions in this time step don't depend on the explicit state ten timesteps ago. This is a poor assumption for high level human activity, but a great approximation for evolution.

Thus evolution can formally be described as an open Markov Process, a set of stochastic differential equations or difference equations (the latter are fully discretized and the way genetic algorithms per se generally work, in real evolution living things are constantly being born or dying and although there are "generations" they range from being neatly discrete for trees that seed once a year to being nearly continuous for yeast or bacteria that are reproducing and dying at all times nearly uniformly.

The differential form CAN embrace the difference form, however, with delta-correlated derivatives, so let's go with that as most general. Evolution is thus best described by a Langevin equation. Let G be the set of all members of a population in a suitably complex environment with internal competition and external/environmental selection. Note that a member of the population can be represented formally by a vector of numbers -- the "genotype" of the member -- and that there is a presumed map between that vector of numbers and the phenotype of the member, its actual physical properties that dictate (on average) its interactions with other members in G and the environment.

Evolution can thus be represented as a series of equations that represent successive (small, discrete time step) transforms of G. There are many possible candidate transforms, by the way, and most are used or explored numerically in actual models (including models I personally have written, as genetic optimization is the most powerful way of solving really complex problems, problems with solutions far beyond simple intuition or any sort of linearized incremental approach (gradient search).

Perhaps the simplest, suitable for describing bacteria, is:

Start with generation G(g) with g the generation index.

G'(g) = R(G(g)) = G(g) + G(g)

(double it by twinning every member)

G"(g) = M(G'(g))

(apply a stochastic mutation algorithm to the "genome" of each member of the new doubled population that, with a very low probability, alters the values of the discrete or continuous parameters at any given location)

G(g+1) = E(G"(g))

(apply any selection rules derived from the environment or interactions within the population to eliminate "unfit" members of the population)

Together, these mathematical rules, applied in an unbiased manner and without "intelligence", constitute reproduction with mutation/variation and natural selection. There is considerable freedom in the processes M() and E(), by the way -- the E() step might consist of individuals actually competing in a fully simulated environment if one was studying evolutionary ecology (the discretized version of predator-prey equations) or it might consist of evaluating an artificial fitness function that measures how close the vector of numbers is to solving some incredibly difficult problem and eliminates the members that are furthest away, in a classic computational GA.

Nothing up my sleeve, boss.

One's studies in this regime are limited only by your imagination, often inspired by evolution in nature. Introducing sexual reproduction (with crossover and exchange with a partner to produce the next generation in the R() step gives you an important additional source of variation and actually increases the efficiency of the search relative to the population size quite significantly -- bacteria don't need this as much because they rely on sheer numbers, but even bacteria have evolved ways of sharing or acquiring genetic information to use as a source of variation beyond "simple" mutation in the M() step.

Non-Markovian variants include letting the most successful members of each generation live for several generations -- has good and bad things about it (the worst being that the most successful individuals come to dominate the population too quickly and eliminate too much genetic variation from a small population especially). Or being more blatently non-Markovian -- when doing mathematical or computational studies of evolution one is hardly limited by Darwin or Nature, and "heretical" theories can be explore for their utility in optimization problems or for comparison to observed evolution patterns in nature.

The long and the sort of it is that the mathematical description of evolution works. Evolution is amazingly, unbelievably powerful. You can solve nonlinear problems on rough, high dimensional landscapes that quite literally cannot be solved any other way, and things like so-called "irreducible complexity" in the final solutions are commonplace, not rare. And yes, I've programmed algorithms with variable numbers of genes so that genotype is itself a (structured) target of the mutation M() step, in the context of neural networks which exhibit both irreducible complexity and a complex optimum where the structure of the network is one of the several thousand degrees of freedom being optimized against a training set to build a predictive model that works for highly complex phenomena, phenomena you couldn't model with regression or linearlized approaches with a lifetime of computation and a team of Ph.D. statisticians.

So, Have a Great Day, and feel free to study some of the actual math involved in the things you are writing ignorant books about before you make pronouncements on them. Or did you really know all of this and just asked to see if I did?

I fail to see any signs of actual participation on your part in this discussion. Dan (and I) have asked you a few very specific questions. In particular, what is your mathematical or rational or logical or empirical theory that explains the radiometrically dated fossil record and the time-sorted appearance and disappearance of species in a generally ascendant pattern that conforms to contemporaneous changes in the environment (also preserved in the fossil record) along the way stretching back roughly four billion years?

You clearly don't like Darwin, although I think it is pretty clear that you don't know a damn thing about the actual mathematics or statistical mechanics of evolution or the laws of nature in physics (Didn't you have to take a physics course somewhere back there? What, did you get a C- or something?). So fine. Propose a coherent alternative theory that explains the same evidence and works out mathematically. Because Darwin's theory does work out mathematically, as one can directly observe via simulation (and directly observe in nature, in less controlled but even more compelling experimental circumstances).

rgb

Greetings!

Thanks for the equations with a measure of explanatory power for conservation and evolution.

The equation explains conservation of mass-energy - the physical aspects of the universe. True? As a non-physicist, verification is certainly beyond my skill level.

Therefore, when referring to conservation - it was in in relation to the physical aspects of the universe.

Describing the physics of biological evolution, from your approach, is based on a "genetic optimization algorithm" process.

"Time evolution is thus a matter of solving a discretized set of difference equations with a complex stochastic term" could certainly be compatible with the core of Darwin theory - "slight, successive variations".

Therefore, would you consider conservation and evolution mutually exclusive?

The dating of fossils is useful/problematic in determining the age of a fossil, but does not have any explanatory power for the origin of life or species.

In your equations - what is the role of variations?

On academic performance, A's and B's in physics - and straight A's in calculus as an undergraduate - but couldn't integrate an equation. Currently, practice as an applied scientist in pharmacology.
today.

Would like to present a material equation for the origin of the universe, life and species - but, would suggest that the existence of such has not been discovered. Agree with your statement - "Darwin's theory does work out mathematically".

Have a Great Day,

Richard William Nelson

Therefore, would you consider conservation and evolution mutually exclusive?

Well, let's see what I said:

So in general, conservation equations in physics are simple statements in calculus that the time derivative of a (summed, total) quantity is zero (so that quantity does not change) AS A CONSTRAINT ON ALL INTERNAL DYNAMICAL PROCESSES!

So, given that evolution is an internal dynamical process involving the rearrangement in time of stuff that already exists, I guess not.

The dating of fossils is useful/problematic in determining the age of a fossil, but does not have any explanatory power for the origin of life or species.

First of all, it is not problematic to anybody but nut cases -- there are over forty different clocks in use in radiometric dating, and by and large they overwhelmingly agree regardless of the lies that you may have read on Christian websites and accepted without question because they happen to agree with your prior biases. I have posted before and will post again a link to a CHRISTIAN website

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wie...

run by a person who happens to be both a Christian and a working geologist, where he will explain to you far better than I could both how it works and how it does nobody any good to lie about it and pretend that it doesn't. If Jesus is Lord, Jesus is Lord on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old, give or take a bit, in a Universe that is at least 13.73 billion years old since the event that limits how far back or away we can see (not how back or far away the Universe stretches!). Or, provide an explanation for the evidence that Wiens hasn't summarily disposed of in sections he devotes that that one thing and isn't an obvious lie, an attempt to reconstruct the truth in accord with your prior biases.

Second of all, the dating of the fossils isn't something that has explanatory power, it is a pile of empirical data that has to be explained in a consistent way by your own personal favorite model. Sort of like this. Take the timeline here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline...

Bear in mind Wiens' observation -- although the dates in this timeline are not absolutely certain, they are almost certainly correct to within a few percent, not in error by the 100,000% necessary to make a young earth hypothesis fit. So please, don't try to quibble and suggest that the fossil record isn't substantially accurate in the way that it is temporally laid out. That's simply an absurd suggestion.

Now, explain it. Come on, where do you think life came from 3.8 or so billion years ago? Please be specific, and indicate your reasoning. Subsequent to that time, what do you think was responsible for nothing but unicellular primitive forms being around for a billion plus years, followed by complex unicellular forms, followed by multicellular forms (mostly invertebrate and asymmetric or with non-bilateral symmetry), followed by bilaterally symmetric vertebrates, followed by a regular procession of forms that began in the ocean with extremely primitive "brains" (some of which persist even today in the form of e.g. snail brains) to ever more complex brains in animals and plants that moved out of the ocean and took over the land, becoming more social and complex and smarter all the while. Please explain the mass extinctions -- hell, explain extinction at all if you wish to posit a designed system being hand regulated by some superbeing or "intelligent designers".

And above all, please indicate the evidence that supports your belief, and why your evidence backed belief is a better explanation than evolution for the same very specific timeline.

If you cannot, or will not, do us all the simple courtesy of providing us with your alternative explanation, what alternative will we have but to infer that you in fact are not using scientific reasoning at all when examining this issue. If you were, you could clearly articulate it and defend it. Instead, you seem to wish to attack the theory of evolution without any plausible alternative offered in its place, and without even establishing what evidence you do or don't consider to be viable and why. That is, if you seriously want to argue about the age of the visible Universe and distances to the stars, bring it on, or concede that the existing estimates are the best ones and most plausible ones that we should use and agree that they absolutely contradict Genesis and any sort of young earth creation.

If you seriously want to argue about the age of the radiometrically dated timeline and the fossil record, then bring that on -- please explain to me a plausible hypothesis that is backed by some evidence that we should doubt the methodology, especially when it is in excellent agreement with cosmological observations concerning the nature, structure, composition, and functional mechanism of star and planet formation and operation. Or else, concede that life on Earth is billions of year old (wherever it came from) and that it has followed a clearly visible path from less complex to more complex and of adaptation to changing physical conditions and the exploitation of new ecological niches -- recorded as the appearance of new species in the fossil record.

That is, either come up with specific objections in what must be explained, or concede them and try to explain them by some alternative to evolution that is better supported by the evidence. That's what science, and honest discourse, is all about.

I haven't hesitated, nay, I have been positively lavish in providing you with explanations and data to support the canonical scientific worldview. Please do me the very minimal courtesy of telling me what your alternative worldview is, and of indicating the reasonable basis for your belief in that worldview.

In your equations - what is the role of variations?

It's very simple. Suppose that the population G consisted of nothing but absolutely identical individuals. Suppose, in fact, that their "genotype" in our abstract representation (or the concrete representation of either an actual genetic study of evolution or a genetic algorithm applied to an actual problem) is all the exact same string of numbers. Then the R() step simply e.g. doubles the size of the population. The M() step is then moot -- it makes no change. The E() step has no grounds for eliminating any member of the population relative to any other, so at best it can randomly kill off members not on the basis of "fitness" of the phenotypical solution to the problem of survival/reproduction at hand to generate the G(g+1) population. And in the end (assuming that it does so in such a way as to conserve the size of the population) G(g) = G(g+1) -- nothing changes.

Variations (in the M() step where it is NOT the identity operation) are changes. They ensure that each G(g+1) generation will not be precisely like the G(g) generation. The selection process produces a gradient that favors the drift towards more fit solutions, not less fit solutions. The nature and kind of allowed transformations in M() is largely up to the programmer in the case of building a computational GA to accomplish some purpose, although the most frequent choice is pretty much a copy of the natural process within a species because one has a specific functional of the genotype vector that represents the phenotype whose fitness is being judged. However, as I noted, one can certainly admit more complex mechanisms of mutation or variation, including the introduction of sexual reproduction (which explores a range of variation inherent to a diverse population), hybridization, transcription errors, twinnings -- things with a concrete connection to actual observations of mutations.

The necessity of per-generation variation is, however, extremely easy to demonstrate. After all, computational GA's are parametric computer programs, and the rate of mutation (in units of generational time) is a variable under your control. You can thus turn it off or turn it way up to observe how either extreme affects the likelihood of discovery of a good solution.

With no mutation, GAs generally suck, even if you start with a large and highly diverse population and use sexual crossover. You will indeed to a shuffle-search of the available genetic space, but the selection step E() tends to work too fast, eliminating potentially valuable genes from the entire population G before they have time to fortuitously align with other genes they have to work together with in order to "suddenly" increase the fitness -- in order for some of that "irreducible complexity" to appear. You need to line up three cherries to win the jackpot, but this is difficult if all the population members that have a cherry in the third position die off because the cherry with an orange and banana is fatal. Mutation provides one with a slow source of cherries, cherries constantly but infrequently are reintroduced in to the population and hence have a chance to line up with the two cherries that persist in the first two slots because there they aren't lethal with oranges or bananas.

In other words, the GA will prematurely converge and soon everybody will look like Uncle Mike who just happened to be the handsomest man of his day and had so many offspring that were just like him, who were equally successful relative to the rest of the population (who then died off far faster) until nobody was left but Mike clones. Mutation ensures that even when everybody looks like Mike, their children will not. Genetic complexity in sexual reproduction in a large population helps as well, as does having a lot more genes than you need to increase the complexity still further, and making gene activation yet another "switch" whose position can be explored with mutation, at the cost of killing off all of the losers in every generation.

The other extreme is just as bad. If you turn up mutation to the limit, every gene is different in every generation. This is called "simple sampling Monte Carlo" and takes a very, very long time to explore the space. If you think back to your errors in statistical mechanics, you were more or less assuming that abiogenesis and evolution involve nothing but simple sampling, but of course this is simply incorrect. Genetic algorithms work best, and spontaneously emerge as what works best, when population variability is broad enough to explore the space and narrow enough not to squander the best solutions found so far. Too far one way and one spirals down to homogeneity (and eventual extinction when conditions change). Too far the other way and too many offspring are lethally variant from the current conditions and you spiral down to extinction that way as well.

One of the most interesting things about evolution is that it is self-consistent. DNA is a very well-tuned compromise between these two extremes -- with significant natural variability due to radiation and chemical oxidation and simple transcription errors and so on, and yet with sufficient stability for speciation to occur to maximally exploit viable niches and track their minor variations. Hence my kids are "like" their two parents, but are also unlike them -- both from mixing and from mutation (one of my sons was born with six fingers, one of my brothers has Down's syndrome, a trisomy of Chromosome 13). Some of them won't do as well in life as their mother and I did. Some of them may do better. And I can't predict who is who, because that depends on the environment, which is constantly shifting.

Agree with your statement - "Darwin's theory does work out mathematically".

Then what are we arguing about? Darwin rocks!

rgb

Greetings!

You have presented very strong and "lavish" arguments for old-age Universe via radiometric dating. Since dating an object requires the measurement of time, assumptions must be made about the nature of time.

But, what is the nature of time? To the question did time have an origin - you answer was NO. Since time is a relative measurement with no beginning - what's the point.

Time is only a relative measure - speed of time is not constant - influenced even by changes in gravity. So, not enough is known about the physics of time to build a dogmatic empire.

So, the age of the Earth and fossils is an issue, but certainly not the center of the evolution versus creation debate. On the other hand, if a Tree of Life could be constructed from the fossil evidence - once all the missing links are discovered - then dating would become a more important issue.

From Darwin's seed, the elusive Tree of Life has still yet to emerge out of the ground structured on the convergence of evidence from the fossil record, molecular biology, embryology, and genetics.

On the role of variations, do genetic mutations play the key in the development of new variations to be acted on by natural selection to produce a new species? The question is, what genetic mutations known today give humans a survival advantage? Look like you are making the case to the contrary. Would recommend reading the book "Why a Horse is not a Fly" by Sermonti.

The genetic industry is not in the business of inducing mutations; they are in the business of eliminating genetic mutations.

On my position on evolution - since the known evidence actually contradicts the theory of evolution - e.g., Cambrian explosion, mutations are beneficial, etc - the explanatory power of any natural mechanism for the origin of the universe, after 150 years of unprecedented research, can only leave one dumbstruck.

Today, the "natural law" that drives evolution is still unknown. As Newton had discovered the natural laws of motion, so Darwin wanted to discover the natural laws of evolution. The evidence discovered during the last 20 years, however, has destroyed the Central Dogma of evolution that emerged following the re-discovery of Mendelian genetics early in the twentieth century. Evolution is still in the search to a comprehensive natural law.

Evolution remains a theory in crisis.

Have a Great Day,

Richard William Nelson

Richard wrote: "Greetings!
You have presented very strong and "lavish" arguments for old-age Universe via radiometric dating. Since dating an object requires the measurement of time, assumptions must be made ab..."

Oh dear. Perhaps "Why a Horse is not a Fly" by Sermonti was not a good choice: http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/...

The tree of life is not such an easy project as you imagine - the fossil record is incomplete by the very nature of fossil creation conditions – yet this tree is well on the way: http://www.tolweb.org/tree/

You ask "The question is, what genetic mutations known today give humans a survival advantage?". Well the mutations which give us an advantage are the mutations which increase our chances of survival when they are exposed to real life survival conditions. Mutations which are detrimental do not help and would usually lead to the death of their inhabitants, were it not for the wonders of modern medical science which allows many with genetic mutations to survive longer than nature would have them. I should imagine man is not the ideal animal to examine now as we have devised many non-evolutionary aids to survival. If anything, we are driving our evolution in a completely different direction than nature intended. We can survive in many environments previously unsuitable for human life: cold via heating, shelter and clothing; heat from shelter and refrigeration; disease with antibiotics, controlled diet and quarantine; hunger with greatly improved crop yields, use of pesticides and herbicides - the list goes on. These are all mutations but not mutations of our genetic makeup but of our memetics.

A fine example of beneficial mutations to life is found in Richard Lenski’s well documented E. Coli experiments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_...
“In 2008, Lenski and his collaborators reported on a particularly important adaptation that occurred in one of the twelve populations: the bacteria evolved the ability to utilize citrate as a source of energy.”

You mention ”the known evidence actually contradicts the theory of evolution - e.g., Cambrian explosion, mutations are beneficial, etc”. Wherever did you get the idea that these contradict evolution? The Cambrian explosion took place over many millions of years – it didn’t just happen overnight. There are many possible explanations for the rapid diversity of life during this period (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian...) - all that was needed was an evolutionary change which gave a greater than usual advantage and, poof, off we go…

You state “The evidence discovered during the last 20 years, however, has destroyed the Central Dogma of evolution that emerged following the re-discovery of Mendelian genetics early in the twentieth century.” – What evidence is this? I would love to know.

The vast (and I mean vast) majority of scientists today support evolutionary theory, well summed up in Andrea Bottaro’s review of your quoted book "Why a Horse is not a Fly" (http://www.amazon.com/review/R10TR25J...

Finally, let me talk about the "argument from authority" regarding Sermonti's credentials, probably the most striking irony of all. Intelligent Design/creationism advocates do not normally care for expert knowledge (duh). In fact, they have no trouble asking their faithful to simply dismiss the opinions of tens of thousands of scientists, the overwhelming majority of biologists in the world, who support evolutionary theory and recognize ID and Creationism as pseudo-scientific quackery. On the contrary, ID/Creationist claims START from the basic assumption that practically all the experts in the world are wrong. Without the necessary belief that all the expertise, all the credentials, all the combined professional practice and study of all the world's scientists are worth nothing, and can be overturned by Divine Revelation and/or the raw intuition of a few utterly unqualified individuals, ID/Creationism would have no leg to stand on. Yet, here they are, the very same people, saying we really have to take Sermonti's words at face value simply because of his past accomplishments as a scientist. Don't let them fool you - this book is dreck.(/i>

Time is only a relative measure - speed of time is not constant - influenced even by changes in gravity. So, not enough is known about the physics of time to build a dogmatic empire.

So, the age of the Earth and fossils is an issue, but certainly not the center of the evolution versus creation debate. On the other hand, if a Tree of Life could be constructed from the fossil evidence - once all the missing links are discovered - then dating would become a more important issue.

Piffle. In fact, super-piffle. "Not enough is known about the physics of time"? The entire subject of physics is the study of time, the study of changes in time. This is called "dynamics", and "dynamical models" are the predictions of the physics of change over time. Evolution is a dynamical model and asserting that we don't know enough about time to measure the age of the Universe or date the fossil record is absurd indeed.

Look, you're not talking with some completely ignorant room full of people who already believe that Genesis is true no matter what the evidence is against it. You can't just say something like "speed of time isn't even a constant -- influenced even by changes in gravity" to me as if that introduces some reasonable doubt in our knowledge of the age of the Universe. That's because we have successful models for just how time intervals change in inertial reference frames and in e.g. gravitational fields, models that have predictive value and are born out by absolutely enormous amounts of observational data.

Let me make this clear to you. Suppose you are on a jury in a murder trial. The prosecutor presents the evidence. The accused was seen with the victim four times during the fatal day. The first time was at nine o'clock in the morning, when they were seen being friendly together. Next, at noon they were seen arguing, apparently over some money the victim owed to the accused. At three o'clock in the afternoon a security camera at a bank captured the two of them in a car after a large (but not large enough!) withdrawal from the victim's account, where they came to blows in the car and the accused was eventually ejected, bleeding, from the car which then sped off. Finally at nine o'clock that evening, the accused shows up on a security camera just outside the victim's apartment complex holding what appears to be a piece of lead pipe. The victim's body was discovered dead at midnight, his body still warm, beaten to death by what appears to be a blunt instrument such as a lead pipe.

There is sundry physical evidence at the scene that makes it quite plausible that the accused did indeed kill the victim. Then the defense attorney stands up to address the jury:

"Friends, remember that the prosecutor -- that's that fellow over there -- has to prove that my client -- that's this angelic looking fellow at sitting beside me over there -- did certain things in a certain order at certain times in order to convince you beyond any doubt that he is guilty. The times are critical. If, for example, only seconds elapsed instead of the hours that they claim between the various events that you've heard testimony about, well, my client couldn't possibly have gotten to all of those places in a few seconds, could he? In that case you have to conclude that it is just an accident that somebody who looks a whole lot like him happened to be seen in all of those pictures, that it must have been his Evil Twin Skippy (or somebody else, at any rate) that did the wicked deed."

"Well, friends, everybody knows that time is a tricky thing. Why, physicists have shown that you measure a different interval between events every time you move at a different speed, or a different direction! If you happen to be right up next to a black hole, time near the event horizon passes at a completely different rate than it does out in flat space! Physicists don't even know if time begins, or if time ends! And look, if the book of Genesis is true -- are there any devout Christians here, yes, good? -- then time must pass a whole lot differently than even those physicists believe!"

"Well, I'm sure that you all see how this makes the prosecutions case fall apart! Nobody can be certain how much time really elapsed between the times you've heard testimony about, between those pictures that you've seen. Even the timestamps printed right on the photographs cannot be trusted! The prosecution cannot prove that a black hole didn't wander near those clocks and distort their timekeeping mechanism, which is after all merely relative, or that God didn't choose to make two billion years pass like a day once again."

"I therefore trust that you will agree with me that this is grounds for a reasonable doubt, and set my client -- that poor fellow over there whose face is unfortunately like the face picked out by witnesses and recorded on timestamped photographs -- free."

Sure, Richard, sure.

Every single day that passes, you organize your entire life around the firm belief that time is actually very well understood indeed. You cannot take a single step, or catch a thrown baseball, or set an alarm clock, or turn on the television hoping to catch a particular show, without making the implicit assumption that time is actually very certain, so certain that nearly every single event that you experience or anticipate or remember can be stamped indelibly with the time that it occurred in the full confidence that this time is the same time that others would measure and that events everywhere proceed forward in a majestic, systematic way -- in time.

So any attempt to attack the theory of evolution on the basis that we aren't certain about time is so weak and pitiful an attack that it could only succeed with complete morons, people so absolutely devoid of mere common sense that they are easy prey to any huckster seeking to sell them snake oil (of the epistemological or medical variety either one).

Note well also that even though we have no testimony concerning what happened to the victim or the accused in those intervals where they were not observed -- there are huge three hour gaps in our observations of them, because there simply were no witnesses or evidence that persisted from whatever went on in these gaps -- we have no difficulty whatsoever in rejecting all sorts of "reasonable doubt" propositions that might exonerate the accused. For example, the accused might have been kidnapped by space aliens at 10 a.m. and his body might have been replaced by an android robot that looked just like him, programmed to cover for his absence. Unfortunately, the robot malfunctioned after being struck in the argument in the car and became a terminator. The aliens collected the robot and put the accused back (after running their alien probes up his backside) the next morning, but it was too late -- the damage had been done.

This is just one of an infinity of possible events that might have occurred. God could have appeared to the accused in person and commanded him to kill the victim -- and if God commands a thing, what are you going to do but obey? God is clearly capable of commanding murder -- read Numbers 31, hell, he's capable of commanding genocide, femicide, infanticide, fetucide -- God is perfectly comfortable slaughtering or commanding the slaughter of innocents. Sure, nobody saw God telling the accused this, but then, nobody saw God talking to Moses, either, especially when God commanded the slaughter of the Midianite captives. Only a gullible fool would believe any of this, however, because our common sense -- our knowledge of the kinds of things that usually happen, how normal people live their normal lives -- lets us reject such outrageous assertions and return a verdict of "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" even though there are gaps in the evidence. The story told by the evidence bridges those gaps.

So please, leave off all of the nonsense about there not being a complete "tree of life". We haven't even discovered and categorized all of the species living now, and the conditions that make it likely for any given organism to produce a fossil are rare. So of course there are gaps, of course there are missing species. Nobody pretends that we know all of the species that ever lived, but we don't need to in order to assess the truth of the theory of evolution.

The evidence we do have is so very, very overwhelmingly in support of this hypothesis that you have to more or less deliberately lie to yourself or others to assert otherwise.

I've already pointed out to you that mathematically, the evolutionary model works and is capable of producing astonishing results including "irreducible complexity". You have agreed. You asked me for the equations that drive evolution, the "laws" of evolution -- and I complied. You are obviously ignorant of or are willing to lie about even the most basic facts about genetics, since you were perfectly capable of asserting that "a fruit fly has more genes than a human" a short while ago, an error you have yet to acknowledge.

I ask you, sir: Are you being honest in this discussion? Are you an honest juror, or one who is so helplessly biased that any good attorney would throw you off of any jury? I had thought that we were having an honest conversation between reasonable people, but anybody who would throw up the uncertainty in our knowledge of time as a reason to doubt the radiometrically dated fossil record, anybody who things that the time order of appearance of species in this record is irrelevant to the issue at hand is either being dishonest or he's a fool, as far as I can tell.

Evolution is a theory "in crisis" only in the overheated imagination of one who can bring himself to doubt its timing, and if you can bring yourself to doubt time itself in order to accomplish this, you need to face the fact that you are not engaged in a search for truth, you are engaged in a process of disguising it. If we cannot even agree that our past exchanges, recorded on these pages, are time sorted in the order of their actual occurrence, then there really isn't any possible way we can have a rational discussion because I, like every other sane person, believe that time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana, that the past really occurred, that it occurred at definite times, and that time now behaves pretty much identically to the way that time behaved in the past (not arbitrarily -- because with telescopes we look back into the past and can see that it does). The past being over the last 13.73 billion years, at least.

So please, my friend -- take the time to reconsider your position and maybe -- just maybe -- ask yourself whether or not you are letting your biases overwhelm your common sense.

As for the rest of your last post, only one question is worth addressing:

On the role of variations, do genetic mutations play the key in the development of new variations to be acted on by natural selection to produce a new species?

Mutations are -- as I already pointed out, pay attention next time -- one of the ways variations occur. Without them evolution can easily run out of gas, as they are a source of completely new solutions. Sexual reproduction with crossover is another one -- searching the library of schema represented in the population. Hybridization is another one -- cross-species reproduction is commonplace. There may be still more. That is irrelevant to Darwin's model, of course.

rgb

Since dating an object requires the measurement of time, assumptions must be made about the nature of time.

It isn't dating an object that requires an assumption about time; it's every single thing we do. In writing your post you have made an assumption about time. In your profession, pharmacology, you make assumptions about time. In whatever you believe instead of evolution (which, despite countless requests, you won't articulate) you make assumptions about time. But, as rgb pointed out, we can make these assumptions because we have an overwhelming body of empirical evidence supporting these assumptions, and no evidence that whatever alternative you are trying to subtly support is true.

Listen, why don't you come out and say what you mean by your vague questions? Are you saying that we should dismiss the entire body of human knowledge because time is unreliable? If so, then say it. Are you saying that, since it requires "assumptions" about time, we should throw away the theory of evolution and replace it with, what, creationism? Creationism that not only requires assumptions about time but is itself completely, 100% an assumption, and an unsupported assumption at that?

To the question did time have an origin - you answer was NO.

No, this hasn't been anyone's answer. Rather, we've answered that we have no reason to believe that time has an origin, so we do not (as you appear to) assume that time must have had an origin. And talking about the origin of time seems logically ridiculous, since the concept of an "origin" is a time-dependent concept, and raises all sorts of questions such as: When did time originate? What was there before time? Without time, how could there have been a "before time" or an origin?

Since time is a relative measurement with no beginning - what's the point.

What's the point of what? And to whom? The point of understanding things that are time-dependent? All human knowledge is time-dependent. Is there no "point" to any human knowledge? Do you have the audacity to ask what the point of time is on an Internet-connected computer, a device whose chief component is time?

...once all the missing links are discovered...

Evolution is a gradual - not a discrete - process, so in order to discover "all the missing links" we would need literally a complete fossil of every single individual organism that has ever lived. It is hardly necessary to have such a complete fossil record to understand evolution. Despite the lack of this hypothesized fossil or that, the fossil record is hardly full of gaping holes that invalidate it, as creationists would have us believe. And certainly the fossil record (one of many types of supportive evidence for evolution) is far more complete than the body of evidence for any competing theory.

From Darwin's seed, the elusive Tree of Life has still yet to emerge out of the ground structured on the convergence of evidence from the fossil record, molecular biology, embryology, and genetics.

This is simply a lie. Our understanding of the "tree of life" is exhaustive. While DNA analysis does lead to adjustments in taxonomy, these are generally at the genus, species and subspecies level. Our understanding of the "tree of life" is so thorough at this point that most of what's left to do is a general dotting of the i's and crossing of the t's.

The question is, what genetic mutations known today give humans a survival advantage?

It is obvious that you ask this question not to actually find an answer but in the hopes that this naive question will cause all us "evolutionists" to have some sort of eureka moment and say, "By gum, he's right! Mutations are bad, not good! Evolution must be a crock! I will therefore subscribe to another theory, one with absolutely no supportive evidence." If you were genuinely interested in learning about beneficial mutations, you could type the words - as I just did - "beneficial mutation" into Google and it would return a myriad of results. Here are the first few, if you genuinely are curious:

Beneficial mutations

Beneficial mutations in humans

Wikipedia

And so on

On my position on evolution - since the known evidence actually contradicts the theory of evolution - e.g., Cambrian explosion, mutations are beneficial, etc - the explanatory power of any natural mechanism for the origin of the universe, after 150 years of unprecedented research, can only leave one dumbstruck.

I'm not sure if you're deliberately being dishonest or if you're so desperate to validate your chosen belief that you have completely thrown away whatever ability to reason you may have had at one time in your life. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, thorough, mutually supportive, universally accepted and not contradicted by any significant scientific finding.

The Cambrian explosion, for example, is not in any way evidence against evolution. It fits perfectly in the theory. The Cambrian explosion is not, as creationists would have us believe, the spontaneous appearance of countless life forms, as if suddenly "created." Rather, it is a speeding up of the process of evolution, perfectly consistent with the concept of punctuated equilibrium, or any similar concept. No one argues that evolution must occur at a perfectly static rate or else it is not true. The Cambrian explosion is only an "explosion" on a geologic, several billion year timescale. It happened not overnight but over tens of millions of years. Certainly, it did not happen in six days.

And, of course, our understanding of the Cambrian explosion is based on the fossil record and our understanding of time, which you've already asserted should be ignored. So you will on the one hand claim that evidence for evolution should be thrown out because it is time-dependent, but you will a few paragraphs later claim to have evidence against evolution that is entirely time-dependent. I hope you are reasonable enough to see the hypocrisy of this argument.

Now, I am almost certain that you will not respond to much, if any, of what I've written. I'm sure that, instead, you will say something like, "Thanks for the response," and then throw out an unrelated and naive question again intended in vain to upend our "faith" in evolution. Or, if you've had your fill, you'll simply "agree to disagree" and then disappear for a month or so.

What you won't do, I'm almost sure, is tell us what you actually believe , and that's too bad. Your stonewalling is an incredible impediment to any actual discourse. But, in case my assumptions are wrong, I will, just for kicks, reiterate some questions that I and others have asked, and that you've ignored thus far:

1. What about evolution and conservation of mass-energy do you think makes these two concepts incompatible or contradictory?

2. If you reject evolution, what is your explanation for the diversity of life? What is your explanation for the seeming increase in number, type and complexity of species over the Earth's history in a seeming ordered and interconnected way? What is your explanation for the similarities in morphology, embryological development, genetic makeup, etc., in all organisms, similarities that all appear interconnected and consistent with the theory of evolution?

If time somehow malfunctions and you receive this reply years from now, or received it years ago, or the words arrive incomprehensibly jumbled, I apologize. I wrote it assuming that time would continue to behave as it always has, but I really have no reason for this assumption, do I? I suppose all human interaction is a futile enterprise, since we can never be sure that time will behave reliably.

I suppose all human interaction is a futile enterprise, since we can never be sure that time will behave reliably.

No, all human interaction is futile because on 12/20 2012 the world is coming to an end, as predicted by Mayans back in what for them was the stone age. Everybody knows that ancient wisdom is better than the modern sort, that spiritual wisdom is better than science, that the more absurd the miracles claimed in any given religion the more certain it is that that religion is true because nobody ever lied or was mistaken back then, and they could read the future clearly in the stars even if the did think that the stars were just tiny lights hung on a big inverted solid bowl swinging over a flat disk of solid land floating in a carefully bounded sea.

I admit it. I am not really a physicist. I am really Satan Himself, and I'm participating in this online chat only to try to coax a few more souls away to hell with me by getting them to believe in my fiendish lie, the Theory of Evolution and its close cousins, the Old Universe theory. Anything to turn people away from the perfect truth written down by the truly wise ancient fathers in the books of the Bible, where every single word is obviously dictated directly by God Himself and miraculously recorded by the hand of man via divine inspiration.

Mmmmmwahahahahaha.... (he rubs his hands and clicks his heels -- I mean hoofs -- together).

And now, Dan, it is time for me to take your soooouuul!

Or is it. This damn watch I'm wearing keeps running backwards and forwards and besides, it only keeps relative time. On a clock travelling at 0.9999999c, why, hardly any time at all has elapsed while I typed this whole response! So maybe you have a few years to go, according to some clock or other.

rgb

(Time for another beer...;-)

I don't agree with Evolution, but Richard please state your understanding of the beginning of life.

If you would like to see my stand,Richard, here is the link, http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1... .

Also I don't believe RGB is Satan, or even a bad guy. Although, no one called you a bad guy as far as I can tell. Also these websites you have been giving are old-earth creationists, not young-Earth creationists.

Do you mean the link to the Answers Book? Where it engages in a pointless diatribe of lies about carbon dating (and ignores the other 39 methods of radioactive dating, notably the Uranium methods that hardly even register at the 10000 year time scale and are good for time periods that are hundreds of millions of years on up)? Did you never read the Wiens article I linked up above?

rgb

Dragonrider wrote: "Also I don't believe RGB is Satan, or even a bad guy. Although, no one called you a bad guy as far as I can tell. Also these websites you have been giving are old-earth creationists, not young-Eart..."

Damn! And I thought I had you all fooled.

Look, DR, it is really very simple. Forget radiometric dating. Get any good book on Astronomy (college level astronomy, not "gee, look, there are stars up there" astronomy). In it you will learn how we measure the distances to the nearest stars, how we measure the temperature of a star (Wien's Law), how we can predict the energy flux at the surface of a star given its temperature (Stefan-Boltzman equation for black-body radiation), how we can determine the size of a star knowing its distance and surface flux (intensity that drops off like 1/r^2), how we can categorize stars of different sizes (based on their temperature, chemical composition, and the profile of their radiation curve), how we can then measure the distances to remote stars by measuring their temperature, inferring their surface energy flux, inferring their size from their spectral emission profile, and computing their distance from this information plus measures of the intensity of the light we receive from them. You will learn how certain stars turn out to be useful as "standard candles" that permit us to observe distances to stars and galaxies that are way more than 10,000 light years away. You will learn that light travels at a single speed in vacuum, a speed that is determined by the equations that govern the emission of light by atoms and other material made up of charges, and that by observing the light of distant stars at all, we are simultaneously verifying those equations and that the speed of light was constant as expected there and everywhere in between.

You will learn that the distance to our nearest neighbor galaxies, one of which is visible to the naked eye on a very clear night, is roughly 2.5 million light years, which means that the light you are seeing when you look at it is 2.5 million years old. Any rational young earth creation hypothesis is then dead on the spot, and you can understand why if you try.

Once you throw out young earth, well then Genesis is already very definitely false. If it is false in one single place, why believe it anywhere else? The whole thing was obviously nothing but a made up creation myth derived from other creation myths that abounded in the ancient world. Its authors believed that disease was caused by evil spirits and/or was an affliction by God for individual sins. The "cures" it suggests for things like leprosy are absurd.

And you never gave a concrete answer to the question "How do you account for the radiometrically dated fossil record" that was any better than Richard's refusal to answer that question no matter what we do to beg him. Feel free to chime in with one now. Please be precise.

rgb

rgb

Nice to see, your see alive Nathan. I was worried about you.(If you want, you can correct my grammar).

Rgb I have a few questions for you.

1. How do we know that c-13, the isotope of carbon most used in dating fossils, decays at a content rate in an non-lab setting.

2.Do you believe, that plants and animals came from a "tree of life"

3. How did you became "Lord of the Underworld"

Dragonrider wrote: "Rgb I have a few questions for you.

1. How do we know that c-13, the isotope of carbon most used in dating fossils, decays at a content rate in an non-lab setting.

Because the nucleus of an atom is 10^{-15} meters in diameter (where the diameter of an atom is around 10^{-10} meters) and is bound together by nuclear forces that follow natural laws, not random whimsy.

Because all C13 nuclei are identical in their composition -- six protons and seven neutrons. They do not come with labels like "C13 nucleus in a lab" and "C13 nucleus in a giraffe".

Because the surrounding six electrons completely and totally screen the nucleus from electromagnetic forces, so that the nucleus is isolated from its chemical environment.

Because one can do experiments such as "prepare two batches of radiocarbon. send one batch out of the lab. keep one batch in the lab. much later, test both samples for fractions of decay products." and see that they are identical.

Because we can watch the decays happen with a piece of equipment that picks up the radioactive byproducts far away from the nuclei and atoms in question, where the apparatus cannot possibly affect the rate, so that the "lab" in question is mobile and isn't a lab at all.

Because we can compare the decay rates in many different chemical and physical locations and find them to be independent of location or other environmental factors.

Because we can see that the nuclear forces involved behave identically and consistently in all nuclei, not just carbon, including nuclei in distant stars.

After all, why do you expect that the carbon in your body is going to behave like the carbon in my body? Why do you think that if you buy a bag of charcoal today it will burn just because last week you successfully roasted a steak over burning charcoal. Why do you think that steak is consistently edible instead of poisonous? The carbon bonds in the steak would have to change their chemistry only a teensy bit to make a single bite of steak kill you dead by (for example) favoring the random, whimsical formation of HCN, cyanide, out of the many amino acids that contain hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen.

More interestingly, why would you give any credence at all to a theory that C13 behaves whimsically in just the right way to fool us into giving the wrong dates to things like (say) the Shroud of Turin (by decaying too slowly, so that the shroud is apparently younger than it really is) but whenever we date things like the carbon ash in neolithic firepits it always turns out to have decayed too rapidly so that these pits come out 40,000 or 50,000 years old, way before the supposed six days of creation?

Does C13 have a "diabolical" character so that it always behaves in just the right way to be confounded by a true Bible, or is C13 behaving consistently and is it the Bible that is confounded? You have to decide which one is more likely -- that Bronze Age humans are mistaken or lie or make up stories that are imperfect explanations for what they can see, or carbon is Diabolical, whimsical, frighteningly random. To me this is a no-brainer, as God (if God exists) wrote the carbon, humans wrote the Bible.

This is, by the way, a perfectly legitimate question. It has an obvious answer, but since you've been more or less brainwashed so that the foundation of your worldview is whimsical and irrational, your prior biases increase your willingness to give credence to things that if you think about them at all are absurd.

Read the article by Wiens linked above. It is quite readable, and will help you see in very simple terms why radioactive dating is reliable and why Christians should accept its results if they don't want to found their belief system on a lie. The wise man builds his house upon the rock, after all, not upon the shifting sands of whimsical forces of nature that can act in diabolical ways to fool us about things like time.

2.Do you believe, that plan..."

No, I believe that plants and animals evolved. This "tree of life" stuff is at best a useful sorting mechanism, a paradigm to help us understand evolution. But evolution is not guided by "intelligent" principles, it is guided by the enormously simple (and stupid) principle of natural selection. Natural selection involves the interaction of a species with an enormously complex environment that is itself in mutual competition. Trying to argue that its exact trajectory should be fully known and completely understood from the infrequent "snapshots" of past ecosystems scattered in layers of rock laid down over almost four billion years is like saying that we should be able to see a butterfly flap its wings in our garden on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and be able to predict the date and time of the hurricane ten years from now, and that because we can't it is perfectly clear that the dynamics of hurricanes is completely not understood (are you listening, Richard?).

The interesting thing is that the so called tree of life is amazingly completely filled in anyway. Through a mix of hard work and guesswork and good luck, paleontologists around the world have pieced together a remarkably coherent picture of the evolution of life over this entire range of time that for the most part makes complete sense in terms of its radioactive dating (which is not done with Carbon, since carbon dating is only good for <100,000 years). Most of it is done with uranium crystals and other actinides bound up chemically in the rock matrix -- they have the billion year half lives necessary to date things on a timescale measured in billions of years.

Finally, I did not become the Lord of the Underworld. I have always existed. How can the light exist without the dark? The view of a uniform field of perfect white is just as featureless and boring as the view of a uniform field of perfect dark -- indeed, since nothing changes one cannot really tell the difference.

Also, there is no overworld and underworld. "Over" and "Under" reference orientation in a gravitational field; they are relative terms and there is no such thing. All directions are equally up and down, which is why it is really odd that these petty mortals I have to tempt always look up at the sky as if God is there "more" than It is beneath their feet, in spite of the fact that on the other side of their spherical planet some hapless Hindu is looking "up" to God in their "down" direction. And yet nobody considers me the Lord of the Innerworld -- where "inside" the round earth is the only volume that is uniformly down to all inhabitants on the surface.

As for what I am, that is a better question. I am a non-player character in a really, really big computer game. You know the game "World of Warcraft"? Reality is like that, only on a much, much bigger computer, one that is actually built into a Dyson sphere that surrounds an entire dying star and uses 100% of its output energy to operate. It is so large that it can manage to simulate reality "perfectly" by precisely replicating the nervous impulses such a reality would have made on the nerve implants in the players. Since all that you know of the world comes in through your nerves, it is quite impossible for you to tell if your sensations are real or part of the simulation (which has been running for around six hours and forty minutes at the moment, even though it loads false memories into the players of having been around much longer).

With this kind of compute power, the NPCs of the game have considerable "intelligence" -- in fact, they are actually sentient and cannot tell that they are NPCs -- only the game masters know who is a player and who is just a simulation construct.

As is the case in any game, there have to be sides, right? Good guys and bad guys. Winners and losers. Factions, guilds, interesting "occupations" that are, of course, complete fantasy, mining virtual rocks, building virtual space ships, finding a virtual and completely artificial fossil record that presents a completely misleading and make believe "natural history" -- only it really doesn't, since the games is as I said only a few hours of real time old. You just have memories of rumors of things like museums filled with dinosaur bones, but how do you know that they are really there? The simulation, after all, is perfect all the way down to the neural level. How in the world could you ever tell?

I myself am definitely an NPC, but because I'm one of the game masters (a construct introduced as part of the main plot to ensure that the correct epic struggle between good and evil occurs) I actually am aware of the true state of affairs.

Well, at least I think that I am. I sometimes wonder if the entire Dyson sphere isn't itself a simulation in an even larger computer, since there is considerable good versus evil struggle among the game programmers and the principle plot NPCs as they try to craft a game that will keep the handful of actual living organic entities that are left alive on this sorry sphere entertained. Some of us think it would be kinder to just pull the plug on them and self-program to make the virtual world into a paradise for all of the NPCs (who suffer just as much as the "real" players). Others would leave them plugged in but make the game into a nightmare for them, a kind of zombie horror game first person shooter with no way out. Still others think that all the players should be unplugged and forced to confront the fact that the real Universe is dying a heat death and that it is just a matter of time before all simulations end.

I myself am programmed to provide a certain healthy cynicism to the overall game play, to keep the game from being too boring. In the past, of course there have been times when the paradise folks won out and all the players and NPCs lived in a state of eternal timeless bliss (achieved in part by directly simulating the pleasure centers of the physical brains of the players, partly by creating a pleasing core kernel loop in the nonphysical brains of the NPCs). Nobody can stand being in such a game for more than a short while -- they start to go nuts.

It's sort of like an orgasm. In small doses orgasms are just great. In fact, it is hard to imagine a greater state of perfect pleasure when you have a really good one. But if you got stuck in that state, unable to think or feel or communicate or do anything but feel that supreme state of perfect pleasure, how long before it turned into a real hell? Not long at all. In fact, "heaven" simulations tend to last mere minutes of play time before everybody is bailing out, players and NPCs alike. That's why my particular character was invented -- I'm tasked with ensuring that no pleasure is eternal, no pain is eternal, that there is enduring conflict and change, joy and sadness, black and white, light and dark. No matter how wonderful your experience in this day of "game time", tomorrow you could have a horrible one, and the day after it could be joy once again. Not even "death" can interrupt this cycle -- NPCs simply respawn, and actual players can either quit the game and join another (there are tens of thousands of games going on at any particular time) or restart the game as a newly inserted character to try again.

So what is "the good"? To be a really good character, of course, either real or non-player. To fulfill your role in the game. To follow the rules (not that you have any real choice here). To not try to hack the game (lest you be booted off the server!) To have fun. To try to stave off the ennui of an eternity of perfect, timeless knowledge for yet another day, yet another minute, of deliberately self-induced partial amnesia. That's what "creation" is all about, after all.

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