More on the Evolution Requires Reduction in Genetic Diversity thread at EvC

Just a few more thoughts on the criticisms against me that showed up on my thread at EvC toward the end.

Speciation

I don't know why someone thought my whole point was how Speciation comes about, and I'm not up to going back to track down how that idea might have occurred, but I would have thought I'd made it clear that Speciation is just the possible end point of the processes I'm talking about, but that it's the processes themselves and the TREND to reduced genetic diversity that is my focus.  Speciation can be treated too much as a special case and get off on a tangent so I don't emphasize it.  The point I'm trying to make is that wherever a new phenotype is being developed in a new population you are going to get reduced genetic diversity. 

It also occurs to me that some may be confused about the word "phenotype" as I'm using it although again I've tried to be clear about that too.  I'm not talking about single traits in individuals when I use the term, although that is a correct use of the word, but about the development of a COLLECTIVE phenotype that comes to characterize a new population over time due to changed gene frequencies from the mother population, brought about by reproductive isolation from that mother population. 

I do believe Speciation is usually just the extreme end point of these processes but that could take me off my focus so I tend to avoid it, thinking it could be discussed later IF the main part of my argument ever gets fully communicated.

I know I explained the processes a number of times on that thread but when you have five or six people all misunderstanding you in their own peculiar ways, two or three of them so far out there's no way to guess where they're getting their odd notions, while at the same time acting as if they are nevertheless some kind of authority on your argument, it's easy to get scattered and fail to follow up on an important point. 

So I don't know if this makes anything clear or not about where Speciation stands in my argument, but there it is for now.

The American Curl

The other topic I want to try to clarify is the example of the American Curl cat which was apparently brought up as some kind of rebuttal to my argument.  This is a cat that has distinctive curled ears that showed up in an individual some thirty years ago and has been bred to preserve the trait ever since.   It hasn't been subjected to the selection processes that would bring about the reduced genetic diversity I'm talking about although supposedly it has been getting developed as a breed over the last thirty years.

But it hasn't.  It isn't developing as a breed.  All that has happened is that they've taken pains to preserve the trait itself, the curled ear that showed up in a single individual cat many years ago.  By continually breeding cats with that trait with other types of cats they preserve the trait while increasing the genetic diversity.  They need to do this because it would threaten the survival of the cats to allow the genetic diversity to be low, and with one individual as the founder of the breed it would be very low indeed. 

So this is NOT what I'm describing at all.  They are NOT developing a new collective phenotype in this way which is what I have been talking about.  They are merely trying to build up the genetic diversity by blending in a variety of cat breeds.  This way you do not get a new breed although you do preserve the trait.  You get a great number of cats with the curled ears, and a lot of different kinds of cats with that trait, different colors and markings, long hairs, short hairs and so on.  But you are not getting a distinctive American Curl Breed.  Yet.

That WOULD take selection and isolation which is what I'm talking about.  And from what was said I gather that is beginning now.  Perhaps they will get a number of distinctive breeds with the curled ear trait, but they won't get a true breed until it's been inbred over a number of generations, and producing that distinctive breed is what reduces the genetic diversity.

Just another way my argument was NOT getting understood.  Not that I would expect it to, but it's frustrating that people THINK they are getting it when they so clearly are not.

Oh one more point.  It was emphasized over and over that this trait must be a mutation because it is autosomal dominant but it wasn't explained why this has to be the case because the person making the point isn't interested in truth but only in trying to trip me up.  So eventually I'll have to study up on this and see if it's really true that it must be a mutation for this reason.

Later Update: 

Wow, the way they discuss me over there why on earth would I want to come back and subject myself to that level of abuse?  I put up with it far too long as it was.

Now one more thing.  I'm supposed to have misused the Speciation chart because I used it to prove my point when according to them it obviously proves me wrong.  Really can anybody read over there?  What did I use that chart for?  To illustrate the formation of species through the isolation of a small population from a larger population which is my main example,.  The claim about mutations is IRRELEVANT to that point.  Sheesh.

O O O That Evo-ha-looshinist Mizrabul-buh-loozyist Cantwinferlosinist Ra-ag

{3/5 update at bottom}
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Just another ridiculous experience at the evolution forum. Yes I finally left, after the usual series of frustrations. Wasn't intending to post on the "evolution defeats evolution" argument again but it came up on another thread and needed to be moved so that's how that happened. No point in trying to recapitulate the usual nonsense but a couple of things should be mentioned.

Of course I may misuse terms from time to time and contribute to the confusion but I thought I got it said fairly well for the most part.  It's a simple argument so everybody thinks they understand it but as a matter of fact this was the first time anybody ever grasped the basics at all, and only a few at that. It's simple but it's not easy to keep it in mind.

Two things came up toward the end: The first was somebody claiming that the processes of selection I'm describing don't bring about speciation, and I didn't have the presence of mind to refer back to this pretty much classic representation of Speciation from Wikipedia that says otherwise:



What are all these supposed modes of Speciation but illustrations of how small populations form from larger populations, which is what my argument is all about:  genetic diversity is always reduced when this happens, when new gene frequencies are created for the new population by the reduction in number of members. 

And the other ridiculous nonsense that came up toward the end of that thread was the claim that if reduced genetic diversity could bring about all the breeds of dogs then of course it must also be capable of bringing about the entire animal kingdom.  I must admit I hadn't anticipated that anyone could say something so utterly ridiculous, but since evolution is completely an exercise in fantasy anything's possible.

What is it they fail to understand about RUNNING OUT OF GENETIC DIVERSITY?  The fact that you have enough genetic diversity to produce all the dog breeds and all the varieties of other animal kinds in the wild is amazing enough.  There is also the fact that to get all those dog breeds involves the reduction of the alleles FOR THOSE DOG BREEDS.  There are no other alleles in the dog genome BUT alleles for dog characteristics.  To get a dog breed the alleles for other breeds are left behind as only the desired traits for the breed are allowed to be reproduced.  AND it is in breeding programs that in fact the effects of reduced diversity are most often seen, which all by itself demonstrates that the basic genetic diversity for the entire Species runs out while still producing varieties of the same Species.  But that's when they appeal to the god Mutation for aid.

Mutation doesn't improve the situation because even if it did add genetic diversity it too only gets cut down by the selection processes, so you'd get a short reprieve, a new trait, and the reduced diversity in producing a new variety if that trait is selected.  And you'd need a lot more than mere mutation, which only changes the existing alleles anyway, alleles for traits of that particular Species, dog noses in gthe dog Species, rather than anteater noses or elephant noses.  Evolution needs to change the structure of the genome itself to get from one Kind or Species to another. 

Oh well.  It's obvious but they're blind.

I may not be presenting this very well this morning I'm afraid, just wanted to sketch it out.  There's no hope of proving anything to evolutionists BECAUSE evolution is pure fantasy and they can just make it mean whatever they want it to mean.  There's no winning an argument based on pure mental gymnastics.

Bright Spot Nevertheless:

That was frustrating.  But I did enjoy getting to hear an interview with Tom Vail on the radio recently.  He is retiring from hosting creationist river-rafting tours through the Grand Canyon.  It was just nice to hear a sensible point made:  the fact that the layers in the Grand Canyon walls are all "tabletop" flat PROVES that they were never at the surface of the earth as the establishment view insists.  It's a standard creationist argument and I argued it at the evolution forum too, but Old Earth believers are blind, they cannot see it, simple fact though it is. 

Evolution has been proven wrong in so many ways if they weren't blind they'd have been convinced by now.  No point in continuing such a futile effort. 

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Later: Just got a new comment on an earlier post here by a college student who isn't even ashamed to give his name, so comfortable is he with calling a woman who is old enough to be his grandmother an "idiot" in print. I suspect he must be a poster at EvC forums where such rudeness is not only common but even tolerated by administration depending on who is doing it and who and what it is directed against.

He is objecting to my remark that you have only to look at the layers in the Grand Canyon with the naked eye to see that the standard geological explanation is ridiculous, which is what Tom Vail is also saying as mentioned above.  [Correction:  I'd said that the evidence for the Flood is all over the earth and obvious to the naked eye.  But the tabletop flatness of the Grand Canyon layers and the knife-edge close connections between the layers is part of that evidence].  The amazing foolishness of the claims of Geology that such tabletop flatness was once a landscape should be clear to anyone, but false Belief IS powerful.  The student doesn't feel any need to ask what I mean by what can be seen with the naked eye, and he certainly doesn't feel any need to be at all polite to a total stranger. 

If anybody needs evidence that this world is coming apart at the seams morally this sort of thing ought to be sufficient.

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UPDATE 3/5

Got to remind myself never to give in to curiosity enough to go back to EvC and see what idiocies they've been engaged in since I left, but stupidly I did.

The stupid extension of the idea of reduced genetic diversity on out to include all species is now being attributed to ME as part of MY theory though I'd have thought I've been pretty clear that BREEDERS run out of genetic diversity and that being the case there's NO MORE evolution that could possibly occur at all.  That's the first offense.  If any proof is needed that they can't think honestly and reasonably through a simple argument that ought to do it.

The second is the claim that I don't "know" that the various forms of Speciation depicted in the chart I took from Wikipedia "require mutation."  Do they really need me to point out that I'm giving a DIFFERENT explanation for all these things, that I REJECT the usual explanation and that my argument includes the reason mutations can't make a difference to the end result?

And the usual overall craziness that of course expects ME to be there to learn something rather than any of them.  I'm the one who "misunderstands" the situation according to them, when the reverse is true.  That degree of granite-headed bias can't be penetrated.  But one does usually hope that SOMEONE there might be able to grasp the truth.  And maybe that does happen, but slowly.  It takes time.  Meanwhile sticking around for the stupidity and the abuse is not good for one's health.

Well, people who can't see the implications of the knife-edge table-top flatness of the layers in the Grand Canyon can't be expected to understand anything else either. 

I take back anything I've ever said about how scientists aren't really stupid. Or anybody who believes in Evolution with some knowledge of its claims  They really really are really really stupid, blind as bats about the theory, whatever else they may do right.

Answer to a comment about the intrinsic evils of the theory of evolution

Update Feb 9:  Comment in from "Bob" at the post on the K-T Boundary, which I just answered.  http://evofantasy.blogspot.com/2011/05/k-t-boundary-fairy-tale.html

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Hey Michael Jeude:
Thanks for all your comments on my various posts, you seem to be a serious thoughtful guy and you aren't insulting to us creationists as so many with your basic mindset are, so I really appreciate it and have been trying to give you some thoughtful answers in return.  If you didn't keep the URLs to the various posts you may not find them and I don't think I could find them myself at this point either, unfortunately, but they're out there somewhere.

I still have a few to get to, but I thought I'd bring this one up front, just because it gives me an opportunity to say something in what I hope is a clearer way than usual, so if you see it you'll know I answered at least this one, which you posted on my entry titled Evolution, Racism, Conscience-Free Murder etc.

Since I'm bringing it up front I'm going to give a new answer to it here, hopefully a better one. 

Here is M. Jeude's comment:

Christianity: Crusades, witch burnings, corrupted religious figures, and I'm sure a fair about of random killers. All who adopt the name and methods of your religion for evil purposes. It is the same for every religion or philosophical belief, the vast majority abide by social norms. Granted back in Medieval Europe witch burnings where considered acceptable, crusades against any "non-believe" and other "holy" wars are acceptable by the group carrying them out, and some how killers allows rationalize why they kill, even saying "It was gods will"

I find the argument to lack depth, how is atheist less moral than a christian? On an individual bases I've met "Christians" who acted less compassionate, open, and calm than myself. I've also met other Atheist who I wanted to knock the chip on their shoulder off and contemplated worst.

How I personally have focused on this topic is what virtues create a "good" society. A society where everyone feel they can be open, calm, free, respected, and that they are the only limitation to what they can achieve. I'm sure with more thoughts we could end up with a excellent description of a Utopia, but then the question is what virtues should a person have to be "good". Both have the flaw that its from perspective what "good" is, and that varies by cultures, regions, experiences, and belief/philosophy. As a question what do you think are the virtues of a "good" person?

How evolution, a frame work of natural process of biological change, is any more dehumanizing than the bleak, dark nature that humans are capable of I do not comprehend. Neither evolution nor atheism states anything about obliterate, ignore, punish, all who are not like you. Just like your Bible never says go forth and kill in my name.

Everyone is always eager to point out the evils others do, and fain the purity and innocence of those of like mind or other sociological factors. They only focus upon the light they wish to see in themselves that we forget about the fact we are capable of dark and terrible things as well.

You've raised many issues here that I didn't get to in my comment at the blog post, but the main thing I want to say is the same thing I said there:

I'm not talking about individuals here although it's often hard to keep the distinctions clearly in mind.  I agree with you that "the vast majority abide by social norms" and not a strict understanding of the implications of their religion or atheism or evolutionism and so on.  We're not talking about your average atheist or believer in evolution here who don't necessarily base their lives on these philosophies, but about the serious philosophers and world shapers who use them very very seriously indeed to justify conclusions that most people wouldn't even dream of.  

Two Philosophical Systems
The difference between the serious implications of Biblical Christianity and evolutionism is really enormous when you do attempt to follow their precepts strictly.  Biblical Christianity teaches that all human beings are descended from one human pair, all are made in the image of God, morality is built into us by God Himself, and death is not natural to God's creation, which gives human beings a very high status, a sort of noble status.  This is a very different thing from the implications you can draw from a theory that says we're the product of mindless chemical processes which somehow accidentally made us moral creatures and not reliably so at that, of no more intrinsic value than those processes etc etc and so on. 

This makes it easy to dismiss the unborn human being as just a piece of tissue you can throw away at will, and makes eugenics on the level of doing away with "undesirable" genes through euthanasia something to seriously and scientifically consider if you want to "improve" the human "stock," and so on. 

Also although Christians have certainly been guilty of racism you can see there is no justification for it if we're all descended from one pair of parents, while evolution with its heavy emphasis on stages of development from one form to another does invite racist thinking. 

You and others may not take evolution as far as to treat human beings as expendable chemical experiments, but it's certainly implicit in the theory and Hitler and Margaret Sanger among others DID take it to these logical conclusions.  Such implications are inherent in the theory itself.

Again this isn't about individuals, it's about a system of thought that most individuals who supposedly subscribe to it don't pursue to its logical conclusion.  I often have to try to clarify this distinction when I'm talking about Roman Catholicism, which is a topic I am pursuing lately, because there I'm talking about the Vatican itself and its historical actions and its written documents which most Catholics don't have a clue about, who just go on living according to the gospel as they understand it.

The Crusades you mention were a Catholic enterprise for instance.  I used to defend it as Christian but the more I learn about this the more I understand they were strictly a Roman effort to take the "Holy Land" for the Pope, something I want to do a post on soon, and Protestants down the centuries have condemned the Pope as Antichrist himself,.  Which may not mean anything to you, but at least it ought to get across that Romanism was rejected all through history by "Bible believers" or Protestants as not Christian at all.  Not something you'll hear about if your sources have been affected by the Romanist point of view. 

So my point isn't that "an atheist is less moral than a Christian."  Some atheists have a very strong conscience (a remnant of the image of God in all of us) while some Christians who have been saved by the grace of God may have such a history of sin they take a long time to overcome it, and we're all still vulnerable to falling into new sins if we don't daily renew our faith.  

This isn't about individuals at all but about systems of thought, philosophical systems.

So my point is that, while we're all sinners who may do terrible things, only one of these two philosophical systems can be used to JUSTIFY those terrible things.

A note to those who have recently written comments here

Sorry that I've taken so long to get to the comments on this blog.  Thanks to new formatting at Blogger I didn't see them.  I'm just now going through the collection and trying to answer them.

More on UK Creationism

Turns out there are Creationist organizations in the UK, such as the Biblical Creation Society which is described by Wikipedia as ===

... a United Kingdom-based creationist organisation founded in 1977 by Scottish minister Nigel M. de S. Cameron and a group of evangelical students, who were concerned about the popularity of theistic evolution among conservative Christians, but were repelled by the "wholly negative" attitude of the Evolution Protest Movement. Although inspired by the scientific creationism of John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris (authors of The Genesis Flood), it refused to limit its membership to only Young Earth creationists, and in its name rejected American attempts to separate scientific creationism from its Biblical roots (a separation rendered unnecessary by the lack of constitutional barriers to teaching creationism in the United Kingdom).[1] The organisation is based in Rugby, Warwickshire.

I'm not entirely sure what this paragraph is saying (in whose name rejected what?) but I gather at least that their beliefs are disputed by other creationist organizations.

Here's another UK-based organization called Biblical Creation Ministries which the site explains is an offshoot of the organization above. This one is headed up by Paul Garner, whose talk on the Grand Canyon I've embedded in the post below.

British creationist Paul Garner's analysis of the Grand Canyon as Evidence for the Flood

OK, I think I'm going to post some creationist stuff that I like for a change. My main use of my blog is for thinking things through for myself because that's FUN and I think I've come up with some good stuff in spite of my obvious handicaps and amateur status. Most of it ends up being in accord with creationist thinking out there and that's certainly a good sign but I also have the chutzpah to think I have some original ideas of my own. Well, that's a lot of what makes it fun.

I've been watching this film at You Tube of a talk by creationist Paul Garner about the formation of the Grand Canyon. GREAT talk. You'll never find this sort of information at EvC.

The talk is all about the evidence in the Grand Canyon for catastrophic deposition of the layers as opposed to deposition over hundreds of millions of years.

He presents a creationist division of the layers into pre-Flood, which is the Precambrian or basement rocks of the Canyon, Flood-deposited, which is the main body of the strata above that to the rim at the Kaibab Plateau, and post-Flood, which is those strata which can be seen in the Grand Staircase but no longer exist over the Grand Canyon. (I was very happy to see him affirm that the layers that constitute the Grand Staircase to the north are understood to have originally covered the Grand Canyon area as well.) 

This dividing of the layers into time units is the sort of system I've always found hard to accept because I see no difference in the presentation of the layers themselves to the naked eye that would suggest any reason to attribute different mechanisms of deposition to them. But the "PreCambrian" basement rocks do present a different appearance so I can see how they can be thought of as a separate kind of deposition that pre-existed the Flood.  .

He organizes his talk to address five kinds of evidence demonstrated in the canyon for its formation by the Flood of Noah:

1. Fossils of marine organizsms high above sea level
2. Rapid burial of fossil organisms
3. Extraordinary extent of the sedimentary rock layers
4. Rapid or no erosion between the layers
5. Many strata deposited in rapid succession

On the subject of rapid burial of fossil organisms, item No. 2, he spends quite a bit of time on the nautiloid layer in the Redwall Limestone, spelling out the research by Steve Austin on that layer that demonstrates that the nautiloids had to have been rapidly buried. 

On No. 3 He gives the evidence of the enormous horizontal extent of the different layers, the lowest Tapeats sandstone that rests on the basement unconformity, for instance, extending across the entire continent of the US and up through Canada, also being found on other continents although he doesn't give an illustration of that. Same with the Redwall Limestone, which has an enormous range across the North American continent, and he mentions that the same basic formation can be found in England as well. The Coconino sandstone covers the Southwest into Colorado and Texas, as deep as 800 feet in some places. Such a huge extent of the layers is evidence that they were not laid down by any processes known to be occurring today, which is the usual claim.

Addressing No. 4 he points out the knife-edge contact between some layers conventionally explained as unconformities which assumes there to be layers missing between them.  He also discusses the erosion between the Great Unconformity and the lowest horizontal layer that rests on it, the Tapeats sandstone, as having to have been PHYSICAL erosion. He says there is no evidence of the chemical erosion of weathering that would have occurred if the lower layer had been exposed as land surface for millions of years, which is the usual theory, and he shows an embedded boulder that suggests the erosion was caused by a rapid catastrophic debris flow that "simultaneously broke up and transported blocks of the underlying precambrian rocks in a matrix of sandstone."

I've had my own theory about this boundary as the level at which the force of the underground volcano along with the tectonic force which triggered it, met the resisting weight of the more-than-two-mile depth of wet layers that were at that time all laid out above. I see this collision of forces as having formed the basement rock, including the metamorphic rock or schist and of course the granite, and the Great Unconformity itself, all confined beneath the stack above under great heat and pressure, the force being enough to uplift the stack above into its current position, cracking the uppermost layers which permitted the rushing in of the water which scoured out the canyon.

EVIDENCE that the strata were all in place when the uplift occurred is the fact that the strata conform to the curved sides of the uplift instead of butting into them, which is what would have happened if they'd been laid down at any time afterward.  THEREFORE the tectonic-volcanic action that caused the uplift came after all the strata had been deposited, or at or after the end of the Flood.

The abrasion at the boundary between the basement rocks and the Tapeats layer would have been violent in the extreme, easily accounting for the kind of erosion he's talking about.

His analysis is great just as it stands, but I still like my explanation for how the canyon got cut in the first place as a result of the tectonic-volcanic uplift from beneath, which also explains how the uppermost layers got broken up and washed away, their also being the major agent of the scouring of the canyon as they went, and it's also another way of explaining the erosion between the Tapeats and the Precambrian rocks that he explains in terms of a catastrophic debris flow. His explanation has a different cause and different timing but is the same kind of violent physical action I pictured.

He observes that the bend in the whole stack of strata over the East Kaibab Monocline is evidence for their simultaneous deposition, which I've also observed in north-south diagrams of the conformation of the whole stack over the uplift. The conformation of the strata as a whole stack to any such curve is evidence for rapid deposition. So I'm showcasing this as both a great well documented thoroughly scientific presentation of the evidence for the Flood that is so nicely exhibited in the Grand Canyon, and a confirmation of some of my own ponderings on the subject. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aNlb3lFhFM

Evolution theory as God's judgment? Hutton and Darwin as God's judgment?

Why isn't evolution yielding at all to the arguments against it?  I got to pondering this recently.  On the one hand I think Why should it?  The arguments against it aren't really very good when you look at the whole range of creationism out there, especially when you look at the creationist arguments at a site like EvC.  But on the other hand I do think there are some very good arguments that should be compelling, should cause some stopping and thinking even among people committed to evolution, instead of the predictable wall of objections. 

After some thoughts about how the nation is under judgment, that I wrote about last night, the idea that evolutionary science itself is judgment started forming more clearly in my mind.  Our current political situation is God's judgment, and it's judgment first of all on the Church for our compromises, as Chris Pinto was talking about the last couple of days, compromises with the apostate churches, the false churches that teach a distorted gospel, with pseudoChristianity such as Mormonism, with Catholicism, compromises that come down to a failure to separate ourselves from the world and from false teachers, a failure, in a word, to maintain holiness.  So if evolution is judgment it too is judgment on the Church.

And some things I've written here before pretty much say that.  The creationist explanations in geology and biology in Hutton's day and later in Darwin's day were not biblical, explanations for the fossils and the Flood for instance, and later particularly the idea that God went on creating new species long after the Bible says He rested from His creative work.  Such denials of His word would in themselves be enough explanation for why He allowed Hutton to come along with an idea about an old earth that completely eclipsed the Biblical timetable of a young earth, and why He later allowed Darwin to come along and answer the unbiblical notions about species formation with his denial of the Biblical account of God's creation of the separate Kinds, and his supposed evidence that man was made in the image of animals rather than God.

I think we should think of these developments as God's judgment on the Church along with the subsequent developments that have only entrenched these ideas all the more firmly in the scientific and public mind.  And if that's what they are then creationists need not so much to keep producing arguments that challenge the scientific establishment but repentance from our abandonment of God's truth.

The creationism I've seen at EvC is a serious breach of God's revelation.  How many of the people there who argue on the side of creationism are really Christians is a question to begin with but most of them present themselves as Christian even if they believe some awfully distorted ideas of what the Bible teaches.  Their arguments deny the timing that's given in the Bible and some of them get into some really bizarre ideas that have to relation whatever to anything biblical OR scientific.  But I don't keep up with them for that reason, so I can't really characterize them except to say that a departure from a biblical perspective is the norm among creationsts at EvC, and there's where repentance should start.

It should be expressed in identification with the corporate church as a whole, all of us praying as one body no matter who in particular is guilty of what aspect of the problem, but as if we all are guilty as the corporate church.   I think we all need to stop arguing for anything at all, which certainly applies to me, stop saying anything at all, just stop and seek the Lord and pray for His will to be revealed and we all be brought into conformity with it.

Amen.