[_ Old Earth _] Assuming Creationism is true (and the flood) what evidence would we expect to find?

[Asyncritus]

Re: Assuming Creationism is true (and the flood) what evidence would we expect to fin

And I answered it. Is it IN the genome? Or is the knowledge of HOW to use our limbs something that we discover. I watched my children discover it. They were quite surprised. Read child development books, you'll see this is quite the norm.

Out of your own mouth you stand condemned.

Recognise the word 'discover'?

What does it mean? You can only discover something THAT IS ALREADY PRESENT, but unknown. Like America, for example. Vespucci didn't KNOW it was there - but it was.

The Law of Mass Action was discovered - but it was always there.

It's the same with your (or whoever's) child. The ABILITY TO DO IT is already present - but the child doesn't know it, and develops it.

If the instinct is NOT present, its expression is impossible.

Surely that is obvious? What sort of scientist did you say you were?

But if the instinct IS present, then the questions stand. How did they arise, and how did they enter the genome?

That they are in the genome is a reasonable supposition - because the instinct is inherited. The Pacific plovers and the godwits LEAVE their offspring behind, and the offspring follow by themselves, having never made the journey before.

Where else could the instinct be?

LK mentions supernatural guidance. That is not a supposition I entirely discount, but for the flat-footed, I use the genome as the repository of the instinct. Somehow.

As you've raised the question, I'll answer it. How do I know it's in the genome? I don't know. Nobody has yet found a bit of brain or DNA which codes for the navigational instinct in the swallows.

Do you have children? Have you never seen this? If you have not, you can read any child development book helping parents understand the development of their kids. It's all spelled out.

I have 4 children, and I know exactly what you're talking about.

But if we leave the voluntary motor movements, and think about the involuntaries, then your problem becomes disastrous.

Does anything tell its heart to beat, lungs to breathe, kidneys to excrete, bowels to function, brain to think, and nervous system to conduct messages?

No - so these behaviours, which are unlearned, are instinctive. How did THEY ever arise and enter the genome?

Human babies are born quite premature. Man other animals go through this in the womb, or, in the case of marsupials, in the pouch. Some other animals have infants as premature as ours which require as much parental oversight until they discover and develop these capabilities.

I asked you about those animals which walk from birth. But butterflies know how to fly from the moment they leave the pupal case. They don't learn - it's instinct. The grubs eat leaves - nobody's taught them. So how did that arise, and enter their genomes?

The whole evolutionary structure is finished with this very question.

No matter how much finagling with the genetics, no matter how many intermediates they find, no matter how much guesswork they invest, the theory is completely annihilated right here.

There is absolutely no answer to the question of how ANY instinct arose, and how it entered the genome. It is my discovery, and I claim priority and primacy for it.

On the contrary. I told you in my lat post that I watched them discover something that was clearly NOT in their instinct at birth. They had limbs that they did not know how to use

See above.

It does not seem impossible to me as it is merely an extension of other obviously possible things that we see all the time.

It;s because you are blinded by this appearance of scientific respectability. You are unable and unwilling to exercise your God-given abilities to examine these things with a critical eye.

I've indicated a major line of thought and research for you to try.

Don't miss the opportunity.

 

[lordkalvan]

Re: Assuming Creationism is true (and the flood) what evidence would we expect to fin

As I'm looking at the Cambrian explosion, I managed to find a collection of quotations dealing with this very subject. The earliest is 1980, and the latest 1999.

They all sing the same song: 'it simply cannot be explained'....

I would be more confident in conclusions you attempt to draw from these quotations if they had not been sourced from a site as unreliable as genesispark.com, especially when the very first one is an obvious and notorious quotemine, the full context of which refers to the fact that no trace of Precambrian life had been discovered when he wrote Origin of Species and that the subsequent discovery of Eozoon canadense (which actually turned out to be inorganic) changed Darwin's grief to delight. However, the point is that Darwin's grief was caused not by the Cambrian radiation/explosion itself, but by the lack of any evidence for pre-existing life, evidence which has since been found in ample amounts. So how much confidence to place in the content of the other (presumably very carefully) selected out-of-context quotations I am sure you can tell us by assuring us that you have actually read the original sources to ensure that the views of the authors are not being misrepresented?

All this, is of course, entirely in harmony with a burst of creative activity - and the observations exactly match what we would expect.

What would we expect, why would we expect it and how does the evidence of the Cambrian fauna support that expectation?

Assuming that these guys are speaking the truth as they knew it, LK, what 'evolutionary' explanation can be offered for this 'explosion' of new biological forms? At known rates of speciation, there simply isn't enough time for all this to have happened.

Well, the emergence of the fauna of the Cambrian radiation/explosion took place over some 80 million years. 80 million years ago there were, for example, no modern mammal species in existence and many mammal species have become extinct during that period; as the Cambrian came some 3+ billion years after Earth's creation and as the fossil record is most certainly incomplete, I am not sure how possible it is for you to be as certain about this as you assert. Perhaps you can back up your claim with some actual evidence? As to the evolutionary explanation, it's the same as it always is: descent with modification through natural selection. before you can determine the likely rate of species radiation at this time, you need access to a great deal of data, not least the environmental pressures and developmental opportunities that may have impacted the organisms in question.

How can one look these facts in the eye, and still talk about 'evolution', 'gradualism', 'uniformitarianism' and the like?

Well, as uniformitarianism is a hypothesis that was formed to consider geologic processes, I don't see how we would talk about it at all in this context. Gradualism has been one particular hypothesis put forward to describe how biological and geologic change are the result of slow but continuous processes, but the beauty of the scientific method is that hypotheses can be tested and modified in the light of evidence and observation. Evolutionary theory remains as sound and valuable an explanatory tool whether we are looking at the Cambrian or the Triassic.

My mind boggles at the thought, but perhaps yours doesn't.

Boggle on, but your boggling will have no impact on evolutionary theory, I'm afraid.

I can't understand why it doesn't.

Because you have offered no evidenced argument that supports any alternative explanation of the phenomena we are discussing. All you have offered is personal incredulity that various phenomena could have naturalistic explanations and on the back of this informed us that God did it is the only possible alternative.

I'll get to the rest of your last post as soon as I can.

That's okay; my time is limited as well.

 

[lordkalvan]

Re: Assuming Creationism is true (and the flood) what evidence would we expect to fin

[FONT=&quot]Genesis is certainly not a 'typical summary'. You really aren't acquainted with the creation myths of other religions, are you?

Not every one, no, but enough to see the similarities, particularly with Mesopotamian creation tales. Many creationists make great play of these alleged common themes to argue that they are all telling basically the same story of a common experience (see, for example w ww.creationism.org/csshs/v06n2p10.htm).

Here's a nice compendium for you to examine and compare with Genesis: Creation Myths - A Large and Diverse Collection of Links to Creation Myths from Around the World - creation myth,creation myths,creation mythology,creation myths from around the world,creation myths from different cultures,creation story,creation sto

Thanks for that reference.

Creation certainly wasn't a mythological event.

I meant rather that the story was mythology. There is certainly no direct evidence that supports the events as described in Genesis.

I mean, if I were to write my own story, and say, "in the beginning there was the god No-thing, and suddenly he exploded, and that explosion produced uncountable zillions of stars and moons, and also lots of life forms like elephants and tapeworms" - would you believe me?

Probably not - and I'd think the language was rather dull and shabby in comparison with Genesis as well. However, what determines whether a tale is mythical or legendary or based on real events and a relatively accurate depiction of those events is a question of evidence.

I very much doubt it - but that account bears more than a passing resemblance to what science is trying to say today.

Well, not 'more than' unless you squint very, very hard.

Now compare that with: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

That's sober, rational sense, isn't it?

Why do you regard it as 'rational sense'? It's poetic, inspiring use of language, certainly, but what reason is there to suppose it is anything more than a pre-scientific culture's attempt to explain things of which it was largely ignorant in terms that made sense to it?

I agree, it's difficult to be precise enough for us moderns 2-3000 years ago. But their systems of classification were certainly based on different criteria to ours, and those are their distinctions: clean and unclean, for whatever reasons.

I thought the 'distinctions' were into 'kinds'? How does this bear on 'kinds' at all and your argument that they relate to genera/families?

I don't know how you could 'isolate' it - maybe a ststistically minded geneticist could help you here - but it is phenotypically perfectly obvious, isn't it?

So you can't isolate and identify this 'built-in' variability, you just 'know' it's 'perfectly obvious'? If it's 'perfectly obvious' why is it so difficult to identify it? This 'built-in' aspect is crucial to your argument, after all.

The reason I have for saying so, is the non-interbreeding phenomenon. It is possible to cross say zebras and donkeys, or horses and donkeys in the genetic labs and domestically. Those are 'related' groups. In the wild, that never occurs.

I don't see that this clarifies anything about 'kinds' and speciation at all. How can there be more than one 'kind' of cattle using your proposed classification methodology (which doesn't seem to have very much rigour or science about it at all)?

But to try that with the higher taxons, would be stupid. There are such limits which cannot be crossed. I recall Luther Burbank, the most famous American plant breeder saying something of the sort.

"I know from my experience that I can develop a plum half an inch long or one two and a half inches long, with every possible length in between, but I am willing to admit that it is hopeless to try to get a plum the size of a small pea or one as big as a grapefruit . . In short, there are limits to the developments possible, and these limits follow a law . .

"In the law [of reversion toward the mean, or average], experiments carried on extensively have given us scientific proof of what we already guessed by observation: namely, that plants and animals all tend to revert, in successive generations, toward a given mean, or average . . In short, there is undoubtedly a pull toward the mean which keeps all living things within more or less fixed limitations."—*Luther Burbank, Partner of Nature (1939), pp. 89-99.

"Some remarkable things have been done by crossbreeding and selection inside the species barrier or within a larger circle of closely related species, such as the wheats. But wheat is still wheat, and not, for instance, grapefruit; and we can no more grow wings on pigs than hens can make cylindrical eggs."—*E. Deevey, "The Reply: Letter from Birman Wood," in Yale Review, (1967), Vol. 61, pp. 631, 636.


"It would appear that careful domestic breeding, whatever it may do to improve the quality of race horses or cabbages, is not actually in itself the road to the endless biological deviation, which is evolution."—*Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey, (1958), p. 223.

What exactly do these rather venerable quotations have to do with speciation and your proposed definition of 'kinds'?

You need a geneticist to answer that one - and the above people, like Eiseley, and Deevey were very famous geneticists in their time.

So this is something else you have no evidence for, it's just something you 'know'? Eiseley was an anthropologist and never a geneticist, by the way; Deevey was a biologist and ecologist. Maybe you shouldn't rely entirely on creationist sources for your references?

It's all very well to talk about 'evolving groups', LK. But whether they exist at all, they simply never existed is sufficiently significant numbers to produce anything like the 6000000 species today.

Well, estimates for the Cambrian phyla range up to 100, so I am not sure on what basis you are so confident in asserting 'never'.

And as shown above, the Cambrian explosion falsifies any such idea. It simply does not happen.

It falsifies what 'any such idea' and how does it falsify it?

I looked at the wikipedia article you mentioned, and I find that although 11 genera sound a pretty fair number, they are really not amphibious in the way a frog, say, is amphibious. All of those mentioned above HAVE TO RETURN TO THE WATER TO SURVIVE.

These MAY SURVIVE OUTSIDE the water for extended periods, but HAVE to return.

So we have to use your definition of amphibious and not biologists'?

Remember, evolution says that they come out of the water forever, and walk, run and eventually fly.

Umm, not all at once. I seem to have to keep repeating this: populations evolve, not individuals.

None of these creatures even remotely meets those requirements.

But they display transitional features which have adapted them for partial existence in habitats that are 'alien' to them. This is the point you don't seem to grasp. You assert X is impossible, then you are shown evidence that X may indeed be possible and so you deny that the evidence you have been shown has anything to do with X.

I repeat, that for a fish of whatever description to emerge from the water AND NEVER RETURN is a complete non-starter, no matter how hard the evolutionists may try to bolster the idea up.

As 'evolutionists' 'bolster' no such idea 'up', this is a strawman argument.

And have you ever considered the differences between a gill and a lung? A gill, in order to function must be kept wet and surrounded by the water from which it extracts the oxygen and into which it passes the carbon dioxide.

A lung is a hollow sac, which, if it fills up with water, results in drowning and death. Those are two insurmountable objections. A lung cannot function underwater, and neither can a gill function in the air.

And yet tadpoles become frogs. How do they do this without 'drowning' in the air?

Structural evolution of the vertebrate lung illustrates the principle that the emergence of seemingly new structures such as the mammalian lung is due to intensification of one of the functions of the original piscine lung.

From the abstract of 'Form and Function of Lungs: The Evolution of Air Breathing Mechanisms' by Karel F. Liem American Zoology 1988, 28/2).

You really do need to familiarize yourself more with research on things that you pronounce about so confidently as being impossible.

So where does our hypothetical intermediate live? It has successfully produced functioning lungs, legs, and kidneys all of which are designed to function OUT OF THE WATER. (By heaven, these mutations are miraculous things, aren't they? Ho boy!)

But it is still a fish, presumably.

So what does it do? It dashes in and out of the water, practising, until it dies. How does it pass these new characteristics to its offspring? AND WHERE DO THE INSTINCTS REQUIRED TO USE THESE NEW ORGANS COME FROM?

This caricature of understanding is worthy of near-derision. It 'lives' where it is adapted to live. How strange that whales, dolphins and turtles all manage to lead such successful lives in marine environments when they are clearly 'designed to function out of the water'?

They are not intermediates, LK. They collectively form a massive group called the Amphibia. There are 6,317 amphibian species, of which 5,576 are anurans (frogs and toads), 566 are caudates (newts and salamanders), and 175 are gymnophiones (caecilians). Poison Dart Frogs | Red Eye Treefrog

Actually, we are all intermediates. The point about the amphibia is that they do things that you have declared to be impossible and that they display transitional features in order to do it. You seem to imagine that 'transitional feature' means that the organism that displays that feature must be directly ancestral to some later organism. This isn't the case and is again something you need to educate yourself about.

They show no sign of 'evolving' into reptiles.

Has anyone said they do and how do you know what they may or may not show signs of evolving into?

There's another major difficulty - reproduction. Most fish, if not all, lay their eggs in the water, and they are fertilised by milt also released into the water. Many bear live offspring.

Some amphibians lay their eggs on land. Some climb trees. Some don't have a tadpole stage, many do - and as you know, there are several tadpole stages. Fish simply don't do this. So how did that evolve, and from what?

It evolved through descent with modification through natural selection. If you want a step-by-step, intermediate stage by intermediate stage, fossil by fossil description, you know that you aren't going to get it so you will just have to be content with trumpeting the lack of evidence persuasive to you that this happens.

Here's a quote from some chap called Asyncritus on his blog 'How does instinct evolve?'

For intermediacy between fish and amphibians and reptiles.

It's a pity that this Asyncritus chap doesn't check the original sources before he so readily uses others' quotemines of them. What is your source, by the way? From the last sentence of Henry Gee's blog that your source has, indeed, quotemined:

Note: the first person to find any part of this post quote-mined in support of creationism will receive the highly prestigious and coveted Order of the Unicyclying Girrafe [sic].

Source: blog s/nature/henrygee/2010

 

[stovebolts]

Re: Assuming Creationism is true (and the flood) what evidence would we expect to fin

Not when you have a larger population to decrease the possibility of deleterious genes being expressed. The new mutation whether good or bad can be latent in a population as a recessive, multiplying in to many many individuals, before less related 4th cousins might finally produce a homozygous offspring which expresses the new mutation.

In the flood story, you have TWO individuals (seven of some kinds). And that is all the genetic diversity you have AT ALL for many generations. Meaning ALL harmful recessives will be in ALL offspring and high chance of 50% of the following generation and thereby highly expressed as soon as the 4th generation because there is no way to dilute it with any examples that don't have it.

Whereas in the non-flood situation, you have a large population and one individual has a mutation and mates spreading that mutation (if itis recessive) among many generations and family branches before it gets doubled ("homozygous" or both alleles matching). Or if it's dominant, all of the offspring will have it no matter which other parent, and all of their offspring will have a 50/50 chance of having it. If it's good, it will have lots of otherwise diverse genes to live among. If it's bad, the rest of the population not having it will be what survives. This external gene source develops diversity for the gene quickly and also spreads non-fatal good stuff quickly.

Not so the flood example. One pair. Any harmful or even just "disadvantageous" recessives will almost certainly be in a large proportion of the mating pool within 2 or 3 generations.

You make some pretty good points here for sure. I'm not very good at this science thing, so I hope that my response will do..

Christianity can get you to believe some pretty unbelievable things. Things that are not of the norm, or things that just don't fit in today's world. But anyway, we believe that Jesus was born of Mary, who was a virgin and we also believe that Jesus, after he died, rose again from the grave.

I don't know that Science can agree with a woman giving birth to a child without ever having sex, and I don't know if Science can duplicate bringing something back to life after 3 days in the grave... But I believe that God, the creator of all things can do these things.

I hope I'm not boring you with non-scientific stuff. But the way I figure it, Scripture states that the animals came to the Ark. I'd have to think that God did some pretty amazing things with these animals so that their offspring.. kinda like he did with Adam and Eve, or I'd have to say your right... The species would have died.

 

[Rhea]

Re: Assuming Creationism is true (and the flood) what evidence would we expect to fin

Never a bore, happy to hear from you.

You make some pretty good points here for sure. I'm not very good at this science thing, so I hope that my response will do..

I don't know that Science can agree with a woman giving birth to a child without ever having sex,

Komodo Dragon demonstrates virgin birth giving rise to questions about how often this can happen.

Single-parent reproduction is hardly ever seen in such complex animals, having been documented in just 0.1 percent of vertebrates, the study team says.

The finding that Komodo dragons are capable of self-fertilization may open the way for many more such discoveries in other animals, says team member Richard Gibson, curator of herpetology at the London Zoo.

Virgin birth, he says, is "considered a very rare phenomenon, but the fact that we've got these two lizards suggests it's not as rare as we thought. We recorded it in two unrelated females within the space of a year in two different collections."

But I personally am, much more inclined to believe that such a birth would have come from sexual activity without penetration. It is very possible for ejaculate near the vagina to travel and cause pregnancy. The woman appears a "virgin" but there was certainly sperm causing the pregnancy. (you can google "I got pregnant without penetration" to see the examples. of modern day women having "virgin births".)

and I don't know if Science can duplicate bringing something back to life after 3 days in the grave...

Just this year a dead man woke up after 24 hours in a morgue refrigerator. Only a couple of months ago people made such a terrible error in diagnosis. (Or was it a miracle and he came back to life?). man wakes up in morgue.

Officials have urged the public to contact doctors or the emergency services so they can they can pronounce someone dead before calling an undertaker.

"You begin to ask yourself how many other people have died like that in a morgue," said Mr Kupelo.

"We need to [get] the message across to all South Africans that it is very wrong for them to conclude on their own that a person has died," he said.

There are scores of these kinds of reports. Thousands over the centuries. 2000 years ago the odds of someone mistakenly calling someone dead when they weren't - higher than this summer in Africa or lower?

There's a Mormon guy who claims to have done this over a native kid in the Philippines. 3 days dead, he "brings him back" and they all believe that firmly.

I'd have to think that God did some pretty amazing things with these animals so that their offspring.. kinda like he did with Adam and Eve, or I'd have to say your right... The species would have died.

And that's an interesting thing to explore. *IF* a god did amazing things to overcome this known biological difficulty, what evidence would his actions have left behind?.

 

[stovebolts]

Re: Assuming Creationism is true (and the flood) what evidence would we expect to fin

Thanks for the links Rhea, good stuff

That' was pretty amazing about the dragons. Again, I know it's not science so I'll try to dampen the theology, but the Jews did expect their Messiah at the time Jesus came on the scene, and there is ample documentation within Scripture to point to Jesus as that Messiah... I know, I know.. Anyone could have claimed a virgin birth.. just like other religions prior to Jesus so I'm sure it's a mute point. Just saying...

Back in the old days, when they burried somebody they would put a bell on top of the grave that had a string that was led down to the coffin and tied to the persons hand... I hear that the bell's gone off a time or two.

And you have to ask the question. Did Jesus really die then? I know that the Romans were pretty good at crucifixion, and the fact that water and blood came out of the side of Jesus when he was pierced should be ample evidence that he was dead. Honestly though, if he wasn't dead, what are the chances of him surviving after being beaten almost to death, and then hung on a cross and having a spear stuck through his side. I think even Science would agree that according to the Scriptures, Jesus was dead.

And that's an interesting thing to explore. *IF* a god did amazing things to overcome this known biological difficulty, what evidence would his actions have left behind?.

And this I would really like to explore. If we're going to talk extensively about anything in this thread, this would be it.

Like I said, this Science stuff really has me at a disadvantage. But I would think anyway that we would see a period in time after the dinosaurs where there would be relatively no disease record found in any of the skeletons found and as the skeletons got younger and younger, whether you're dating through thousands or millions of years old, you would find more and more diseases etc. I believe in a young earth, but I'm not gonna get hung up on that.

What would you expect to see?

Thanks!

 

[Sinthesis]

Re: Assuming Creationism is true (and the flood) what evidence would we expect to fin

Thanks for the links Rhea, good stuff

That' was pretty amazing about the dragons. Again, I know it's not science so I'll try to dampen the theology, but the Jews did expect their Messiah at the time Jesus came on the scene, and there is ample documentation within Scripture to point to Jesus as that Messiah... I know, I know.. Anyone could have claimed a virgin birth.. just like other religions prior to Jesus so I'm sure it's a mute point. Just saying...

Back in the old days, when they burried somebody they would put a bell on top of the grave that had a string that was led down to the coffin and tied to the persons hand... I hear that the bell's gone off a time or two.

And you have to ask the question. Did Jesus really die then? I know that the Romans were pretty good at crucifixion, and the fact that water and blood came out of the side of Jesus when he was pierced should be ample evidence that he was dead. Honestly though, if he wasn't dead, what are the chances of him surviving after being beaten almost to death, and then hung on a cross and having a spear stuck through his side. I think even Science would agree that according to the Scriptures, Jesus was dead.



And this I would really like to explore. If we're going to talk extensively about anything in this thread, this would be it.

Like I said, this Science stuff really has me at a disadvantage. But I would think anyway that we would see a period in time after the dinosaurs where there would be relatively no disease record found in any of the skeletons found and as the skeletons got younger and younger, whether you're dating through thousands or millions of years old, you would find more and more diseases etc. I believe in a young earth, but I'm not gonna get hung up on that.

What would you expect to see?

Thanks!

Dinosaurs did suffer from disease. Not to mention getting eaten.

 

[Ed the Ned]

Re: Assuming Creationism is true (and the flood) what evidence would we expect to fin

I believe in a young earth, but I'm not gonna get hung up on that.