This is nuance that Lisle did not state here.
There are other aspects of looking at the past which are important. One of them is overall consistency between scientific disciplines eg geology for rock layers, paleontology for fossils and physics for dating methods. Regular science exhibits much consistency and creation science oes not at all.
The citations to the method by which the human mutation rate can be determined are given in hyperlinks in the text. Otherwise, I’m not sure what else you need. The size of the human genome and the degree of similarity between the two species are well known figures and could be found with little effort. Most readers of the blog would be familiar with this. However, this article covers much the same information and includes citations at the end, if that is something you need:
Ah, so you now admit that it could have happened.
That’s what I was trying to demonstrate.
I really don’t know what game you are referring to.
@scd made a claim that there had been an instance of convergent evolution involving two sequences that coded for a 100 amino acid protein. He cited an article saying this was practically impossible to occur by evolutionary mechanisms.
The natural question, then is for him to actually demonstrate this example of convergence has been found. And, if you’ve been paying attention, it turns out that true to form he was confused about what he was reading and cited something else entirely.
Exactly what do you not follow about this?
I looks to me like @thoughtful and you have ended up talking past each other. I think she’s referring to the article you linked where Richard Dawkins tries to give an account for how natural selection could have began somehow around the origin of life?
Ah, I see that now. My apologies @thoughtful.
In any event, the point remains: Natural selection does not require a mind. It only requires that the odds successful reproduction for an organism, or even for a pre-biotic replicating molecule, not be completely random, but affected by specific features of the organism/molecule.
If we evolved, are we able to distinguish between a cat and an hippopotamus? Are we able to measure the height to the counter top?
Is that too easy? Well then, what reality is then too hard to determine by means of our naturally selected faculties? What measurements cannot we make? Where does our reality detector begin to fail us?
I think you’ve misunderstood him. He does not state that his idea, if true, would mean we cannot determine if we are correct regarding a scientific idea like natural selection. He directly addresses this question, in fact, later in the interview:
If it’s conscious agents all the way down, all first-person points of view, what happens to science? Science has always been a third-person description of the world.
The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects. So what’s going on? Here’s how I think about it. I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science.
I must say, I am quite sympathetic to his point of view, and have defended a position quite similar to his on some forums, possibly even this one. I’m speaking specifically of his position that the perception of reality that we experience does not necessarily correspond to anything that exists “out there” apart from our representation of it. I’m not as cracked on the idea that all that exists is consciousness.
The term for that consistency is consilience. It’s the main topic I try to educate Creationists on and by far the one that scares them the most.
Did you watch the genetics section in the film? They dealt with all of this and apparently they’re not “well-known figures” because the article is stating that people don’t agree. Notice it even has a strike-thru on some of its text. 
All of the evidence they describe in the artilce is being interpreted based on a “story” of why people think the chimp and human DNA are different. They’re making up a story that makes sense of the evidence by basing it on the “fact” that we must have evolved from chimps. Just because you CAN find evidence of correlation between your story and evidence does not mean that your story is correct, especially if you can keep changing your story. Again, they dealt with this in the film. They keep changing the timeline of the story, therefore the math will always match.
From the article:
The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition.
Dawkins needs to learn what logical fallacies are.
The account of the origin of life which I shall give is necessarily speculative; by definition, nobody was around to see what happened.
Wow. Honesty.
Chemists have tried to imitate the chemical conditions of the young earth. They have put these simple substances in a flask and supplied a source of energy such as ultraviolet light or electric sparksartificial simulation of primordial lightning. After a few weeks of this, something interesting is usually found inside the flask: a weak brown soup containing a large number of molecules more complex than the ones originally put in.
I’d like to have the citation for this please. What are these “simple substances”? Sounds oh so not scientific, but it’s a good story!
Under the further influence of energy such as ultraviolet light from the sun, they combined into larger molecules.
This is speculation. Again, it’s a story. He doesn’t know that.
So…yeah…I stopped reading.
Never denied that. There may be unicorns.
Ok. I should have kept scrolling to see the most recent post. But I wanted to vent about Dawkins, so I’m keeping what I wrote.
I’m having trouble making sense of this sentence.
I don’t know. Are we able?
Maybe natural selection wants us to think hippopotamus are very large because they’re dangerous when actually it’s the size of a cat. That’s what Hoffman is inferring I think.
I’ve watched his later interviews. He’s done more testing of his theory. He said that the moon does not actually exist.
I think the science will eventually force everyone to swallow his idea whole, or have to dump natural selection. In 50 years, it will be the new idol.
@Ronald_Myers and @Timothy_Horton I agree with you that there’s consistency in those areas of science.
But creationists really shouldn’t be scared. If we’re wrong, who cares? Then God used evolution. I’d be disappointed that God didn’t make the Bible more consistent so I could have known the truth. Are you scared that Jesus existed and rose from the dead?
How do we know the weights and measures are honest?
So you think Jesus rose from the dead too? Glad to see more Christians on the forum.
His simulations just use mathematically true statements to prove that seeing truth doesn’t make you more fit to survive–and actually you’ll die off if you do (this is one of his more recent discoveries)
If you reject his theory, you reject evolution by natural selection or you have to show why it’s bad science.
Watch one of his interviews from this past year or so and look at his papers.
I reject his theory, because I disagree with the assumptions on which it is based.
No, I do not reject evolution. But I do reject “evolution by natural selection” because there is a lot more to evolution than that.
Or the whole argument that natural selection leads to epistemological nihilism is rhetorical sophistry which sounds erudite and sagacious in a creationist presentation, but in the end is hogwash that does not stand up to the slightest degree of examination.
It’s not my science or creationist science. It’s just interesting to watch other people reject science that doesn’t fit their worldview too.
Whether or not it sticks to the rules. Rules that you learn from hands-on experience.
It’s what you learn in a physics degree. My A level physics teacher described physics as “the art of measurement,” and while that’s a bit of an over-simplification, a massive proportion of what you study is what accurate and honest weights and measures look like. It’s all very mathematical and technical, but it does include a lot of time spent in the laboratory or at a computer demonstrating that the rules and principles that you are being taught behave in the way that you’re being told they behave, and that if you don’t follow them, things stop working.
And if that isn’t enough to convince you, then your degree gets followed up with experience in the workplace, where not sticking to the rules has real-world consequences for which you are held responsible.
OK. I think we’re on the same page. You’re talking about verifiable principles rather than untested hypotheses.
But science hasn’t verified abiogenesis, or evolution over deep time so those are only claims as well.
It doesn’t work like that.
They aren’t “only claims”; they are claims that are consistent with the evidence. In order to determine which claims are consistent with the evidence and which ones are not, you have to stick to the rules.
Regardless of what has been “verified,” deep time sticks to the rules. Young-earth claims do not.