tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6030110973061875792.post6536550067064594520..comments2024-03-16T21:32:23.088-04:00Comments on A Sure Word: Proof for Evolution? Part 2RKBentleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00566375018731000081noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6030110973061875792.post-31001145919904218552017-12-11T08:42:09.374-05:002017-12-11T08:42:09.374-05:00Steven J,
I'm sorry I've not responded to...Steven J,<br /><br />I'm sorry I've not responded to many visitor's comments lately. I'm going to try to get to several over the next few days starting with your comments to this post.<br /><br />Yes, I'm aware that carts and tricycles don't reproduce. It's precisely because they don't reproduce that I know they have no biological/evolutionary relationship. That's why I use them as an example of how things can be similar without being biologically related. That's the whole point of the analogy. <br /><br />As to when marsupial and placental mammals allegedly split, I relied on NewScientist.com when I said, “65 million years.” Of course, the LiveScience link I provided put it at 70 million years. Your sources say it's 160 million years. The fact of the matter is that they're all wrong. Marsupial and placental mammals do not share a common ancestor and the world is only thousands of years old – not millions. The disagreement among sources is just another example of how imprecise your theory can be yet it's still touted as “settled science.”<br /><br />By definition, wolves do not have heads shaped like a bulldog. If it looked like a bulldog, it would be called a bulldog and not a wolf. At the very least, it would be called a mutt. The variation is found among the entire “kind” of canine, not among individual breeds. Likewise, humans can be very tall or very short or very dark or very like yet are all considered the same species. A tall, dark skinned male can have children with a short, light skinned female. Their children would have various combinations of features from both parents. They might be light, dark, or some shade in between but they wouldn't be blue! Features in a population can be combined in new ways but there are never new features.<br /><br />I could arrange dog skulls in such a way to show how a small chihuahua might have evolved to become a Great Dane. The problem with my progression is that all the various breeds lived simultaneously. There have been some unidentified structures found on dino fossils that some claim are rudimentary feathers. The problem with your theory is that fully-formed, “modern” feathers BELONGING TO BIRDS are found in the same layers as the dinosaurs. Maybe you could find feathers of various complexity and arrange them in a simple to complex progression. That's no more compelling than my small to large dog evolution.<br /><br />You said, “Note that if evolutionists simply wanted to fabricate a family tree, they could simply string together a series of increasingly human-looking hominids and call it a lineage.” They DO that already. Perhaps they don't really think it's the actual history of human evolution but they are constantly presenting arrangements of skulls from ape like to human like to impress lay people that some “clear progression” exists. I'm sure you've seen photos like that. It's rather shameful.<br /><br />I'm running out of room due to Bloggers' character limits so I'm skipping your final point on this post. I'm going to try to circle back to some previous comments.<br /><br />God bless!!<br /><br />RKBentleyRKBentleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00566375018731000081noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6030110973061875792.post-61911349750849276862017-12-09T20:34:02.067-05:002017-12-09T20:34:02.067-05:00The author appears to be talking about vestigial o...<b>The author appears to be talking about vestigial organs. The champion of all vestigial organs ever touted by evolutionists is the appendix.</b><br /><br />I would have thought it was the plantaris tendon in humans, unless you adopt a broad definition of "organ" in which case the authors' example of the GULO pseudogene would qualify. This latter is especially good: if apes and old world monkeys and humans were all created with functional GULO genes (so that we could all originally make our own vitamin C), why did the same mutation disable the gene in all these different "kinds?" We know that there are other possible mutations that can destroy the function of the gene, since guinea pigs convergently reduced the GULO gene to a pseudogene, but via a mutation much different from the one that did it in catarrhine primates.<br /><br />Vestigial organs are an extreme example of a more general phenomenon known as "parahomology," or, as Darwin called it, similar structures for dissimilar functions. Even if the GULO pseudogene has a function, it doesn't help us make vitamin C. Even if the plantaris tendon has a function in the 85% or so of humans who have one, it doesn't enable them to clench their feet into fists as it does for other apes and monkeys. Why should common design result in the use of similar designs to do radically different tasks, when we also see (e.g. in the disparate wing structures of pterosaurs, birds, and bats) dissimilar solutions to similar problems?Steven J.https://www.blogger.com/profile/15638850493907393069noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6030110973061875792.post-46636072973761644102017-12-09T20:24:27.560-05:002017-12-09T20:24:27.560-05:00The problem with evolution is that dogs never come...<b>The problem with evolution is that dogs never come in new shapes, sizes, and colors</b><br /><br />Please post a link to the wolf with a head shaped like a bulldog's. For that matter, while there are black wolves, they are thought to be the result of interbreeding between black dogs and grey wolves -- the solid black color of Newfoundlands or Dobermans is thought to be a mutation that arose among domestic canines. The same point arises more forcefully with domestic hamsters: every one of them is the descendant of a single pregnant female captured early in the 20th century; their array of coat colors is the result of mutations that appeared among captive, domesticated populations.<br /><br />New traits arise all the time from mutations. True, no mutation in any mammal seems to have produced green or blue or bright red fur; I don't know why this is but the mammalian color palate seems pretty constrained, to the range of natural human or canine hair colors. We don't see, in relatively slow-breeding domestic mammals, the sorts of changes to metabolism that arise through mutation all the time in experiments with bacteria, yielding changes from penicillin resistance to the ability to digest nylon or citrate.<br /><br /><b>For a fish to become a frog, you would have to add legs.</b><br /><br />And there are a series of fossils, from <i>Eusthenopteron</i> to <i>Ichthyostega</i>, showing intermediate steps between lobe-fins in fish and legs in tetrapods. I suppose you could push the demand back, and ask for the first appearance of pectoral and pelvic fins, whose modification produced fore- and hind-limbs. Likewise, there are dinosaur fossils showing what seem to be rudimentary feathers as well as other dinosaurs with modern-looking pennaceous feathers.<br /><br /><b>If you look carefully, you'll notice the only direct ancestor shown for Homo sapiens is Homo erectus.</b><br /><br />And even that would be questioned by paleontologists who distinguish <i>H. erectus</i> in Eurasia from <i>H. ergaster</i> in Africa. My point regarding the male-line ancestry of Sally Hemings' children still applies: being unable to decide whether their father was Thomas Jefferson or one of his brother's sons does not negate the evidence that some Jefferson family male was the father.<br /><br />Note that if evolutionists simply wanted to fabricate a family tree, they could simply string together a series of increasingly human-looking hominids and call it a lineage. Respect for the branching nature of evolution -- noting that we expect a complex "bush" of relationships, fragmentarily represented in the fossil record -- explains the hesitation to identify definitely particular populations as direct ancestors. Steven J.https://www.blogger.com/profile/15638850493907393069noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6030110973061875792.post-69980931666468197722017-12-09T20:04:03.413-05:002017-12-09T20:04:03.413-05:00The tricycle and the cart obviously have features ...<b>The tricycle and the cart obviously have features in common but the cart certainly hasn't evolved from the tricycle.</b><br /><br />First, carts and tricycles can't reproduce, don't result from reproduction, and don't have relatives. And their features are not "inherited" from precursors as a package deal, but features of different designs can be borrowed and combined. You could note that every common feature of the cart and the tricycle was indeed "descended" by copying (with modification) from earlier designs in earlier mechanical devices, but obviously you can't hope to explain shared traits by shared biological ancestors when they don't have biological ancestors.<br /><br />But living organisms (or at least eukaryotes -- bacteria can to some extent pass on traits individually and to non-descendants) do breed and pass on features of hearts and eyes and livers in one package. Darwin, in talking to farmers in England, sometimes found them incredulous that their different breeds of dairy and beef cattle shared a common bovine ancestor, but presumably you have no problem with it. Obviously, some similarities among living groups are properly explained by common descent, not common design: a chihuahua and a Great Dane don't owe their similarities to common features installed separately by a Creator.<br /><br />Second, the similarities between a Guernsey cow and an Angus cow are not explained by one of them being descended from the other, but from a common ancestor. This is important: the answer to the question, "how do you evolve a whale from a cow" is that you don't: they are differently modified descendants of an artiodactyl common ancestor different from both. <br /><br /><b>What evolution fails to explain well are similar features in creatures that aren't considered closely related.</b><br /><br />If natural selection can explain how to go from a light-sensitive nerve ending to a box-camera eye in vertebrates, why should it not explain the same thing in, say, molluscs? The human and octopus eyes are notoriously similar in general appearance, though there are important differences in the construction of the retina. If there are only a few ways to modify ancestral structures to serve some function, we should expect evolution to hit on similar solutions over and over -- e.g. modifying the intestines to produce an extra pouch at the end of the intestines, or modifying fingertips to improve gripping surface. <br /><br />By the way, the last common ancestor of marsupials and placental mammals is thought to have lived ca. 160 million years ago, a little before the time of <i>Juramaia</i>, the oldest known fossil mammal that more closely resembles placental mammals than marsupials. I don't know why your sources put the split at the end of the Cretaceous rather than near the middle of the Jurassic.Steven J.https://www.blogger.com/profile/15638850493907393069noreply@blogger.com