The Cambrian Explosion And Evolution

Why?

Please explain why evolutionary processes “can’t even produce eukaryotes.”

As to the Cambrian explosion, why is it “off limits”?

Hey Joe, weren’t you banned from Peaceful Science last August for posting obscenity-filled rants against Dr. Swamidass on you own blog?

Oh Noes! Banned From the Peaceful Shit Science Forum

Joe Gallien: "OK now it is official- I was banned from Joshua Swamidass’s forum Shit Science. Why was I banned? For telling it like it is on my on blog. You see it’s OK for those alleged Christians to attack people but when those people push back, well, that’s a no-no. Hypocrites run Shit Science.

Of course I won’t be returning to your bullshit forum, Josh. I just wanted to see if theistic evos are still as dull as they were when I visited biologos- and you are. So there isn’t anything else for me there anyway. I can get attacked on evoTARD forums- people I expect that from.

Fuck you, asshole. Nobody gives a shit about your forum. All you want is a place where everyone agrees. You aren’t going to learn anything that way. You might as well just start a circle-jerk forum like after the bar closes where everyone just gossips like little old ignorant ladies"

Why are you back now with a sockpuppet “Frankie” when you said you wouldn’t be returning?

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False. There is tons of evidence that separate prokaryotic cells joined together in a symbiotic union. And surely you learned somewhere in your science education that mitochondria are most likely “descendants” of bacteria which were engulfed by a larger cell.

Perhaps a good start would be for you to read:

Of course, for detailed evidence, you would want to read the supporting scientific journal articles, not just a simplified explanation for the layperson.

Actually there is. Have you ever sought out the supporting literature which explains how this idea is tested?

Because your underlying premise is invalid, your opinion doesn’t follow.

Please post your calculations. How much time would be necessary? (How did you determine that the time required was greater than the age of the universe? Did you make careful calculations or simply apply gut-level intuition? Indeed, is your opinion based on calculations or upon feelings based on non-scientific considerations? I’m not denigrating using other considerations, such as religious or philosophical ones. I’d just like to know what they are.)

The fact that you claim that more time is required appears to imply a concession that those “blind and mindless processes” are indeed possible. Also, is oxidation a “blind and mindless” process? Is photosynthesis a “blind and mindless” process? Aren’t most of the processes described in chemistry, physics, and biology textbooks nothing but “blind and mindless” processes?

(Postscript: As a Christ-follower, I have no problem believing that God in his wisdom and omnipotence was entirely capable of creating a universe of “blind and mindless processes” which served his purposes and work together to bring about the “very good” creation God intended. That “very good” creation includes billions of years of evolutionary processes operating in all of the amazing ways we observe around us.)

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“Page Not Found”. :smile: Great calculations there Joe.

Joe, are you going to apologize to Dr. Swamidass for all those obscene things you called him?

Of course they are—just as the solar system is much more than gravity and humans are much more than peptide chains and carbon molecules. What does that have to do with the evidence for the evolution of eukaryotes? Nobody is claiming that just one step or just one process is involved. So your straw-man rhetorical argument doesn’t work.

No they don’t. (1) The authors are actually refuting the arguments of Michael Behe, among others. (2) The idea that Darwinian evolution is an insufficient explanation has been well known for decades (more than a half-century now??) [That’s why no scientists cites Darwin nowadays unless they are making historical points.] It is my understanding that Durrett and Schmidt reiterated this very insufficiency point in their calculations applied to Drosophila. (3) Nowhere in the article do they support your claim that the universe is too young to allow the evolutionary processes which you insist on denying without showing us any evidence.

I am not denying the peer-reviewed science so the burden of proof to come up with calculations is on you, not me. Nevertheless, I provided a link to some introductory material which would have explained these topics to you but you clearly ignored them.

Can you provide any evidence to support your opinion?

Evidence please. How do you know that it is not a reflection of the “blind and mindless” physics and chemistry which God created to produce living things?

The oxidation of hydrogen gas is a “blind and mindless process”— or do you think that, instead, something/someone is guiding it to bond with oxygen under some conditions and not others such that the following entries from a Chemical Element Valence Code Chart is observed:

Oxygen ===> -2
Hydrogen ===> +1

so that:
DiHydrogen oxide ===> (2x1)+ (-2)= 0

Yeah, Joe appended a hyphen that broke the link. Editing out the hyphen causes the article to appear in the browser.

For those who noticed that Joe’s argument sounded familiar, you can find it promoted at the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News & Views page:

Joe clearly cited the Durrett and Schmidt calculations without reading their paper nor grasping the math. (Yeah. Big surprise there. Joe had no idea that Durrett & Schmidt strongly deny his argument.)

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I just now noticed that Durret and Schmidt demolish Frankie’s/Joe’s argument in their rebuttal to Behe’s misapplied math:

http://www.genetics.org/content/181/2/821

I would draw to Joe/Frankie’s attention the last paragraph of the rebuttal:

Finally, Behe notes that for one prespecified pair of mutations in one gene in humans with the first one neutral, we obtain a “prohibitively long waiting time” of 216 million years. However, there are at least 20,000 genes in the human genome and for each gene tens if not hundreds of pairs of mutations that can occur in each one. Our results show that the waiting time for one pair of mutations is well approximated by an exponential distribution. If there are k nonoverlapping possibilities for double mutations, then by an elementary result in probability, the waiting time for the first occurrence is the minimum of k independent exponentials and hence has an exponential distribution with a mean that is divided by k . From this we see that, in the case in which the first mutant is neutral or mildy deleterious, double mutations can easily have caused a large number of changes in the human genome since our divergence from chimpanzees. Of course, if the first mutant already confers an advantage, then such changes are easier.

Wow. That really destroys your “not enough time in the history of universe” argument, Joe.

It all goes to show that if you are going to base your argument on some technical paper, you’d be wise to read and understand it before making such a giant gaffe!

LOL! Typical Joe. Post a science paper he hasn’t read as ID “evidence” when the paper actually directly refutes his claims. Ignore the fact he shot himself in the foot and just regurgitate the same already falsified claim. The same pattern from Joe we’ve seen for 20 years. :slightly_smiling_face:

As to Joe’s claim that all codes require an “intelligent source”:

. . . here’s a fascinating video entitled “Neil DeGrasse Tyson Freaks Out When Physicist James Gates Finds Intelligent Code in Fabric of Space”:

Do any of the physicists here have any reactions to this? I find it mind blowing!

Here’s an excerpt:

Working on a branch of physics called supersymmetry, Dr. James Gates Jr., discovered what he describes as the presence of what appear to resemble a form of computer code, called error correcting codes, embedded within, or resulting from, the equations of supersymmetry that describe fundamental particles.

Gates asks, “How could we discover whether we live inside a Matrix? One answer might be ‘Try to detect the presence of codes in the laws that describe physics.'” And this is precisely what he has done. Specifically, within the equations of supersymmetry he has found, quite unexpectedly, what are called “doubly-even self-dual linear binary error-correcting block codes.” That’s a long-winded label for codes that are commonly used to remove errors in computer transmissions, for example to correct errors in a sequence of bits representing text that has been sent across a wire.

Gates explains, “This unsuspected connection suggests that these codes may be ubiquitous in nature, and could even be embedded in the essence of reality. If this is the case, we might have something in common with the Matrix science-fiction films, which depict a world where everything human being’s experience is the product of a virtual-reality-generating computer network.”

POSTSCRIPT: I will start a new topic thread to get reactions to this short video.

This code sub-thread topic also brings this article to mind:

Many years ago I had a (good-natured) argument with Doug Hofstadter about the traditional claim that the genetic code is “arbitrary”. I am very willing to confess (then and now) that my argument was little more than my having “intuition” (i.e., gut feeling in my case) that just because science hadn’t fully discovered the reasons for the code assignments as they exist in nature didn’t mean that they were thereby “arbitrary” or “accidental”. So I have been fascinated to see articles like this one so many years later.

(I am quite willing to admit that in our friendly discussions that Hofstadter could squash me on virtually every science topics—though on the few occasions we talked about the Bible and exegesis, I was surprised that he didn’t have a basic/traditional liberal arts background on those topics, at least in the Bible as literature sense. Meanwhile, perhaps the latest science will vindicate me on the “arbitrary code” topic.)

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Still wrong Joe. Only codes which use arbitrary symbols as abstractions for other values require an intelligent source. There are plenty of natural processes which encode information. Starlight encodes the chemical composition of the star in its spectral bands. Tree rings encode local weather patterns in the width of the rings. Evolution is a natural process which encodes information about the environment into the genome of living creatures. So no, all coding codes doesn’t require intelligence.

You’ve only had that explained to you a few hundred times over the years.

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It’s nice to se Joke back spewing his irrefutable claims.

Frankie has been Silenced. Film at eleven.

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Yes. And even though his were tired, well-worn arguments, it was kind of fun to observe.

AND you just know what is coming …

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Quite apropos, Dan!

Poor Joke. Banned from every site he posts on. I would be surprised if he hasn’t even been banned from his own blog.

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