Eye evolution - Misunderstood

Originally posted by KellyJay
Okay, pick one of the many things in this universe that allows life to be here and take it
away, do you get life? Testing that is easy, put a pillow over someone's face and stop
them from breathing, they will die. That enough for you, you could cause earth to be to
close to the sun or to far away, how many planets not where we are have life?

Seriously ...[text shortened]... es to support your views, again not bad, you could
be spot on for it, just as you can be wrong.

Is this what you mean by the largest to the smallest being "in sync"? Do you mean that the interdependence of everything is a sign that everything was created?

Originally posted by C Hess
Is this what you mean by the largest to the smallest being "in sync"? Do you mean that the interdependence of everything is a sign that everything was created?

"Do you mean that the interdependence of everything is a sign that everything was created?"

It is a sign in my opinion that it must be that way or we would never see life as we do.
That said, even if we found another life form with DNA programming skills, that alone
would never be enough to make it happen here or elsewhere.

Originally posted by KellyJay
It is a sign in my opinion that it must be that way or we would never see life as we do.

It is not a 'sign' but rather a self evident fact. If the universe were different, and there were different forms of life, they too would have to admit that 'it must be that way or we would never see life as we do'.
Observing that we are as we are, is not evidence for design. To turn it into an argument for design, one must claim that what we are is special. Despite many threads on the subject over the years, nobody on this forum has been able to make the case that what we are is special.

Originally posted by KellyJay
It is a sign in my opinion that it must be that way or we would never see life as we do.

Why not? If "a" is a prerequisite for "b" to form, you would expect "b" to form only if "a" is already there. So it's not really surprising to see "a" if you see "b". If "b" is a prerequisite for "c" and "d" to form, you would expect "a" and "b" to exist before "c" and "d". If it can be demonstrated that "c" and "d" always form under certain conditions, how can you tell the difference between these forms bonding through natural processes only and them all being specifically created?

Originally posted by C Hess
Why not? If "a" is a prerequisite for "b" to form, you would expect "b" to form only if "a" is already there. So it's not really surprising to see "a" if you see "b". If "b" is a prerequisite for "c" and "d" to form, you would expect "a" and "b" to exist before "c" and "d". If it can be demonstrated that "c" and "d" always form under certain conditions, how c ...[text shortened]... ween these forms bonding through natural processes only and them all being specifically created?

The entire universe, you wish to do this for the whole thing from gravity, down to the
subatomic, the distances between suns and planets and on an on?

Originally posted by Proper Knob
Again, details. I'm after details Kelly.

I want you to offer a counter explanation of how the eye came into existence. Much information has been presented in this thread as to how the eye came about by slow incremental changes due to natural selection. What do you have to offer as an alternative?

BUMP FOR MR JAY.

Again, details. I'm after details Kelly.

I want you to offer a counter explanation of how the eye came into existence. Much information has been presented in this thread as to how the eye came about by slow incremental changes due to natural selection. What do you have to offer as an alternative?

Originally posted by KellyJay
The entire universe, you wish to do this for the whole thing from gravity, down to the
subatomic, the distances between suns and planets and on an on?

You have been arguing above that Genesis and the argument from design is a better explanation than evolutionary biology for the characteristics of the diversity of living species. Are we now to take it that it is a better explanation for the distances between planets and suns or the qualities of subatomic particles?

I have faith that space flights have been engineered between Earth and the moon, Mars, an asteroid, and the other planets, sending back information, images, and in the case of the moon, samples of rock. I am not trained in the relevant scientific disciplines. However, I am confident that the scientists who achieved these feats are working to theories and principles and methods that are effective in a way that biblical scholarship could never be of the slightest help.

Scientists can both imagine examining the structure of subatomic particles and actually develop technologies that make this a reality. Biblical scholars failed even to imagine that our planetary system or our material structure could possibly be as they obviously really are, let alone have biblical scholars added in any way whatever to the ignorance on these matters of our uneducated and barely civilised ancestors.

What we have discovered has never come from the bible so the idea that we can make do with that source of misinformation is absurd. Even so called Creation Science is not made possible by the Bible, but made possible by the elements of Science that it borrows. Far from explaining our material world, our planetary system, our diverse forms of life, our genetic inheritance, the truth is that the Bible leaves us pig ignorant on these subjects and indeed, that for over a thousand years, our biblically obsessed ideological masters used the Bible to hide from us the discoveries of the Greeks in these matters. We know less than we would have known - we are made stupid - by religious bigotry.

If you can have faith in the internet and use a computer to access it and to communicate with each other, then you have left the bible and its wisdom far behind you, because nothing in the bible makes this technology even conceivable.

Originally posted by finnegan
You have been arguing above that Genesis and the argument from design is a better explanation than evolutionary biology for the characteristics of the diversity of living species. Are we now to take it that it is a better explanation for the distances between planets and suns or the qualities of subatomic particles?

I have faith that space flights have ...[text shortened]... its wisdom far behind you, because nothing in the bible makes this technology even conceivable.

Just as a note.

The meaning of the word faith as used in your post is a perfectly valid one.

It's not however the same meaning of the word than the one generally used and
discussed on this forum.

I bring this up because I just know that a whole load of theists will jump on that and
commit an equivocation fallacy and imply that because you say you have faith, that
this means your beliefs are equivalent to theirs.

Whereas you are [hopefully] using faith to mean something equivalent to trust.

As opposed to [something like] "belief in the truth of a proposition without/or in spite of evidence"
[blind faith]


Because while you may not have the means to independently verify the claims of NASA and
the other space agencies that they send space probes all over the solar-system... you do have
a good and justifiable reason to trust that those claims are true. With evidence to back that up.
You don't accept these claims based on blind faith, which is what theists must do to accept the
claims of their religions.


I avoid using the word faith to mean anything other than blind faith to avoid this problem.

Originally posted by twhitehead
Observing that we are as we are, is not evidence for design. .

I would go further than that and say that observing exactly what we are (imperfect)
is good evidence that we are not designed.

Originally posted by C Hess
Well, there you go. 🙂

That's what we call evolution.

Well, there's much more to it, but that's pretty much the basic idea.

Originally posted by KellyJay
I believe natural selection will take established life forms, and filter all those best suited for one eco system to become the only ones in that area while those that are greatly hindered in it will die off or leave.

Reply posted by C Hess
That's what we call evolution.

I thought evilutionist's claim is that evolution has the power to change living cells from one kind to another, that is, evolution changes fish to amphibians or reptiles to birds or to mammals or monkeys to men and things like that.

How does the evolution process that allows it to change what we call simple life that it could not create to more complex forms of life?

So how does the evolution process change a simple cell organism into a more complex organism, like a fish; and how does it change a monkey or chimpanzee into a man?

Originally posted by KellyJay
The entire universe, you wish to do this for the whole thing from gravity, down to the
subatomic, the distances between suns and planets and on an on?

I'm asking you first, how can you tell the difference between complex molecular structures forming incrementally, rather than instantenously? It seems to me that if you have all the building blocks in abundance all around you, and only in certain places do they form complex bonds, and we can demonstrate under what conditions those bonds form naturally, and we can point out into the universe around us and see that those conditions did appear naturally in the past (we see distant objects as they appeared in the past), there's a lot of reasons to assume an incremental build-up of complexity, rather than an instantaneous creation.

If you have an incremental build-up of complexity you would obviously see interdependence between all the structures that have formed, or they couldn't have formed. Intelligent design using an incremental building process is indistinguishable from the same complexity coming together through natural processes.

So my second question is, how do you know it's all designed? What evidence can you point to that bears the hallmark of concious design? Complexity or interdependence clearly won't do.

Originally posted by RJHinds
I thought evilutionist's claim is that evolution has the power to change living cells from one kind to another...

There are only two kinds of cells (three if you consider archaea its own kind), variations and combinations of which every living thing is made of: prokaryotes and eukaryotes. These combine to produce the astounding variety of life. With the discovery of lokiarchaeota, we can even begin to understand how archaea evolved into eukaryotes.

Evolution is the most rational understanding of this that we have. It would have been far more surprising if we had observed reproduction with variation in an ever changing environment that appears to be billions of years old and we didn't have this amazing variety by now. That would have given reason for pause.

Originally posted by C Hess
There are only two kinds of cells (three if you consider archaea its own kind), variations and combinations of which every living thing is made of: prokaryotes and eukaryotes. These combine to produce the astounding variety of life. With the discovery of lokiarchaeota, we can even begin to understand how archaea evolved into eukaryotes.

Evolution is the m ...[text shortened]... ears old and we didn't have this amazing variety by now. That would have given reason for pause.

If evolution is the most rational understanding of this that we have then we really don't know if or how animals could change to other kinds of animals. And it has also been determined that mutations would not work for that purpose.

Effects of Mutations on Protein Function: Missense, Nonsense, and Silent Mutations

YouTube

Originally posted by RJHinds
If evolution is the most rational understanding of this that we have then we really don't know if or how animals could change to other kinds of animals. And it has also been determined that mutations would not work for that purpose.

Effects of Mutations on Protein Function: Missense, Nonsense, and Silent Mutations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzbYjpiZbow

That's a good video. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell the whole story. It's true that point mutations can have detrimental effects, but they're also sometimes positive (PCSK9* gene for instance) and sometimes without immediate consequence. Sickle-cell anaemia is one of those cases where the same mutation is beneficial** under certain circumstances, and detrimental otherwise.

All you managed to prove with that video is that mutations happen, and that's what the theory of evolution relies on. Every single allele is a result of mutations. It's the alleles that natural selection can then work on.

* Article in Nature: http://tinyurl.com/d7deoe2

** Article in Cell: http://tinyurl.com/p3cd3ou

Originally posted by C Hess
That's a good video. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell the whole story. It's true that point mutations can have detrimental effects, but they're also sometimes positive (PCSK9* gene for instance) and sometimes without immediate consequence. Sickle-cell anaemia is one of those cases where the same mutation is beneficial** under certain circumstances, and detrimen ...[text shortened]... Article in Nature: http://tinyurl.com/d7deoe2

** Article in Cell: http://tinyurl.com/p3cd3ou

Genetics directly conflicts with Darwin's theory.

The worst diseases doctors treat today are caused by genetic mutations. Nearly 4,000 diseases are caused by mutations in DNA. "The human genome contains a complete set of instructions for the production of a human being…. Genome research has already exposed errors |mutations| in these instructions that lead to heart disease, cancer, and neurological degeneration."5 These diseases are crippling, often fatal, and many of the affected pre-born infants are aborted spontaneously, i.e., they are so badly damaged they can't even survive gestation. However, the biology textbooks, when discussing mutation in evolution, only discuss the very rare "positive" mutation, like sickle cell anemia. The fact of some 4,000 devastating genetic diseases is suppressed from publication.

While instructing students that harmful mutations were more numerous than "beneficial" mutations, this textbook failed to disclose that even equivocally beneficial mutations (which still have a downside) are extremely rare (about one in 10,000), and that unequivocally beneficial mutations are nonexistent in nature.

In the twentieth century many genetic researchers tried to "accelerate evolution" by increasing mutation rates.12 This can be accomplished with ionizing radiation, like x-rays, or chemical mutagens. Researchers gave plants and fruit flies very high doses of radiation or other mutagens in hopes that new life forms, or at least improved organs, would result. Decades of this type of research resulted in repeated failure. Every mutation observed was deleterious to the organisms' survival.

Carl Sagan, in his Cosmos program "One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue," stated that evolution was caused by "the slow accumulations of favorable mutations." While this may be the current popular theory, real science disagrees.

http://www.icr.org/article/mutations-raw-material-for-evolution/