Another Larger Evolution Forum

Where have I been?  I have been debating on the side of design on the EVC forum at www.evcforum.net.  Here are two posts they don't seem to have an answer for other than it is an attack on Darwinism. I see it as more of a different perspective. I also had more points they just seemed to ignore.

So why not start drawing some lines and telling us what you actually believe, otherwise how can we start telling you exactly how wrong you are?

Fair enough, let's start with some information from this forum.
 

 

Wounded King: I hadn't been following this part of the argument but looking at the recent literature I think there is a good chance that both you and Perdition are wrong and that in fact the TTSS and the bacterial flagellum, rather than one being ancestral to the other, merely share a common ancestor (Gophna et al., 2003). The exact relationship still seems to be in doubt though (Macnab, 2004).

Let's look at some Darwinian conjecture from Perdition under another topic.

 

Perdition: All you need is a mutation to occur at a spor that doesn't do any harm to the organism. Then that mutation will be passed down in that family line. At some point, perhpas hundreds of years later, you have another mutation that builds on the previous one. It may help, it may do nothing, but as long as it doesn't hurt the survival of an organism, again, it gets preserved.

So what does this mean? It means according to Wounded King, there is a good chance that Perdition was wrong based on Darwinian conjecture! It is safe to say that Darwinian conjecture doesn't always work. Has anybody actually observed neutral mutations building a novel functional structure?

Let's take this a step further. We all know that DNA builds proteins but, how does DNA build structures based on a hierarchy of proteins? Proteins are assembled to form cells and cells are assembled to form tissues and tissues are assembled to form organs and all of these are assembled to form overall body plans.

Let me answer that. I would say that what was known as "junk DNA" determines this.

I can say that Darwinian conjecture is almost trivial unless the conjecture explain whatever biochemical process exceptionally well. Has it even been taken to the point to where it has been used to create a delusion? I would suspect that those who use it as a religion or an antireligion do this although I don't expect anybody to admit it. Some of them may not even be conciously aware they are doing this.

If Darwinists couldn't explain the hierachial assembly of body plans then, how could they have even competed with intelligent design or even creationism?

Only recently have evolutionary scientists such as Sean Carroll attempted to explain this with the science of Evo Devo. Back in 1997 we saw something that Carroll wrote:

Hox genes, which control much of an animal's basic body plan, were likely first evolving around that time. Development of these genes might have just then allowed the raw materials for body plans to diversify (Carroll 1997).

This quote was referring to the Cambrian explosion and I found it on talkorigins.org. (Use the search terms "hox Cambrian" in that site.) Was this more Darwinian conjecture? It appears so since we later saw this from Carroll:

The surprising message from Evo Devo is that all of the genes for building large, complex animal bodies long predated the appearance of those bodies in the Cambrian Explosion. The genetic potential was in place for at least 50 million years, and probably a fair bit longer, before large, complex forms emerged. (Carroll, 2005)

Intelligent design would predict that the tools and the conditions would have been in place before purposeful and planned steps were made. This being the case, hox genes were in place before the Cambrian explosion.

The most stunning discovery of Evo Devo [that similar genes shape dissimilar animals]... was entirely unanticipated. (Carroll, 2005)

However, this would be a prediction from my hypothesis I call "assemblism". Creationism essentially means using supernatural powers to create something fundamentally new. Assemblism means to build things out of parts without necessarily breaking natural laws. It says that an intelligent designer would use parts from various organisms to build species. It says that common ancestry is quite possible.

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In another post someone quoted 2 of the "10 WORST Evolutionary Designs" and here was my response:

You would have to prove to this advocate of ID that the more improved design would indeed be an improvement or complimentary to the overall design. In other words, are those claims potentially falsifiable?

 

Sea Mammal Blowhole. Any animal that spends appreciable time in the ocean should be able to extract oxygen from the water via gills.Enlarging the lungs and moving a nostril to the back of the head is a poor work-around.

Mammals have faster metabolisms than fish. Gills are apparently insufficient for mammal metabolism. Link provided here:

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/08/why-whales-dont-h...

In fact, I have read a report on biomimicry that reported the following:

Dr Frank Fish, an expert on how animals move, based at the University of West Chesterfield in Pennsylvania, was looking at a sculpture of a humpback whale, when he realised that the artist had put bumps on the whale's flippers. That made no sense: everyone knew that the leading edge of a wing had to be smooth and streamlined.

The gallery owner, however, assured Dr Fish that the bumps were in the right place. Intrigued, the doctor made a thorough investigation. What he discovered was that the mysterious bumps were precisely the right shape, and located in precisely the right places, to make even an animal as cumbersome as a whale extremely agile, as the bumps produce vortices that generate more lift and reduce drag.

 

Can't digest cellulose which makes up an appreciable part of the human diet. Since cellulose makes up a large parts of plants which are eaten by many animal species and the others eat animals which somewhere back in the food chain,

Once again, I would remain skeptical until you could prove that a human would benefit from digesting cellulose. Cellulose apparently serves another purpose. It is a fiber and serves as helping move food through the digestive tract quickly and efficiently.

My quote of the month:

Interestingly enough though, the scientific method does not detect truth directly. The power of the scientific method comes from its ability to detect error, thereby limiting the places where truth may be found.  - Sean Pitman of www.detectingdesign.com

 

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