Sexual selection and evolution - not so random

[SkepticThinker]

Wow, you're good!
Thanks!
Hopefully Deeje watches.

 

[ppp]

Wow, you're good!
Thanks!
Hopefully Deeje watches.

Deeje has swallowed the Kool-Aid

 

[Bear Wild]

Of course it is random! The female's (and the male's) choices and actions are as individual as their dna is. All 'random'.
Behavioural choices made by a female are unique to her. Everything is random.
Tomorrow she might have changed her mind. Today she didn't.

Here are some definitions of random from the internet.

"Statistics. of or characterizing a process of selection in which each item of a set has an equal probability of being chosen."

"proceeding, made, or occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern:"

"being or relating to a set or to an element of a set each of whose elements has equal probability of occurrence"

"made, done, happening, or chosen without method or conscious decision."

"random relates with a type of event that is described by its probability distribution"

This form of selection does not fit the definitions of random I am aware of or could find on the internet. Maybe if you give your definition and reasoning I can reconsider the title of the thread.

 

[ppp]

Wow, you're good!
Thanks!
Hopefully Deeje watches.

My friend's wife is the rock star. She has a memory for stuff like this.

 

[ppp]

Of course it is random! The female's (and the male's) choices and actions are as individual as their dna is. All 'random'.
Behavioural choices made by a female are unique to her. Everything is random.
Tomorrow she might have changed her mind. Today she didn't.

Behavioral choices are not random. If our behavioral choices were random, then nothing I (or the fox) did would be out of character, because we would have no behavioral characteristics. We do have behavioral characteristics, therefore not random.

 

[oldbadger]

Behavioral choices are not random. If our behavioral choices were random, then nothing I (or the fox) did would be out of character, because we would have no behavioral characteristics. We do have behavioral characteristics, therefore not random.

It seems as if you are trying to force-fit this idea that human beings' behavioural characteristics are certain, or even safe.
They are as random as the weather.

 

[ppp]

It seems as if you are trying to force-fit this idea that human beings' behavioural characteristics are certain, or even safe.

I said nothing even vaguely implying certainty, nor safety.

They are as random as the weather.

Which is not random.

 

[oldbadger]

I said nothing even vaguely implying certainty, nor safety.


Which is not random.

Ha ha!
We should ask the bosses to invite you to become RF's weather-reporter. If you are right it would not be long before you would get a big dollar offer on a TV Station.


A thunder storm is rumbling in the distance. Trouble is, our met office has said their movements are unpredictable at this time.

 

[ppp]

Ha ha!
We should ask the bosses to invite you to become RF's weather-reporter. If you are right it would not be long before you would get a big dollar offer on a TV Station.


A thunder storm is rumbling in the distance. Trouble is, our met office has said their movements are unpredictable at this time.

You are confusing what you know about the weather, with the weather itself. One's inability to predict an outcome is evidence of one's ignorance.

 

[oldbadger]

You are confusing what you know about the weather, with the weather itself. One's inability to predict an outcome is evidence of one's ignorance.

So you could predict the weather?
This is a wonderful thing to read about.

I qualified as a Yacht-Master Offshore about 40 years ago, and I learned that everything you plan for has to include possibilities for the very worst weather. Don't ever be too c-cksure about the weather.

But you obviously are a most learned and capable mind.......

It's just that you are lost in this thread.

 

[ppp]

You are confusing what you know about the weather, with the weather itself. One's inability to predict an outcome is evidence of one's ignorance.

So you could predict the weather?

Why are you misrepresenting what I said? Are you intentionally lying, or were the two sentences too confusing for you?

 

[oldbadger]

Why are you misrepresenting what I said?

You don't seem to understand.
I asked a question.
Questions are not claims, nor representations.

Are you intentionally lying, or were the two sentences too confusing for you?

Again....... questions are not claims, nor lies.

You're falling apart now, in my opinion.

 

[ppp]

You don't seem to understand.
I asked a question.
Questions are not claims, nor representations.

Then your question was a non-sequitur.

You are confusing what you know about the weather, with the weather itself. One's inability to predict an outcome is evidence of one's ignorance. Not randomness.

.

 

[oldbadger]

Then your question was a non-sequitur.

Really!
Is English your first language?

Look, let me help you......... a 'non-sequitur' is a STATEMENT!
Questions are not statements.

You are confusing what you know about the weather, with the weather itself. One's inability to predict an outcome is evidence of one's ignorance. Not randomness.
.

Do you ever think before you write things down?
I'm done.
See ya later..... much later.........

 

[ppp]

Ha ha!
We should ask the bosses to invite you to become RF's weather-reporter. If you are right it would not be long before you would get a big dollar offer on a TV Station.


A thunder storm is rumbling in the distance. Trouble is, our met office has said their movements are unpredictable at this time.

You are confusing what you know about the weather, with the weather itself. One's inability to predict an outcome is evidence of one's ignorance. Not randomness.

 

[Bear Wild]

Really!
Is English your first language?

Look, let me help you......... a 'non-sequitur' is a STATEMENT!
Questions are not statements.


Do you ever think before you write things down?
I'm done.
See ya later..... much later.........

Still waiting on your definition of random to understand what you are trying to say since it does not seem to be the same ones I am using. The outcomes of sexual selection are not 50:50. There is clear selection towards a certain outcome with variation accepted. In any definition I am aware of that is not random.

 

[Bear Wild]

Ha ha!
We should ask the bosses to invite you to become RF's weather-reporter. If you are right it would not be long before you would get a big dollar offer on a TV Station.


A thunder storm is rumbling in the distance. Trouble is, our met office has said their movements are unpredictable at this time.

Joe W was correct, weather is not random. It seems random because of the complex number of factors involved but it is not random. Detailed prediction would require detailed information, but when it becomes possible weather can be better predicted.

 

[gnostic]

Sounds like circular thinking that leads to a dead end but has to push against the wall at the end of the dead end because there is no alternative.

You talk of “circular thinking”, but this is a classic case of circular thinking:

Many scientists realise that the existence of a Designer is not a bad idea however and so believe in a Designer and try to find Him on His terms, just as others believe in the alternative and keep pushing against the wall at the end of the dead end.

That’s exactly what circular thinking looks like.

A person who believe in Designer without evidence for its existence, other than that he or she think it is “good idea” to believe in Designer...that is circular.

And it is also wishful thinking.

Believing in some superior being...call it what you want, eg God, Creator, Almighty, Designer, Yahweh or Jehovah, Logos, Jesus, etc...without a single evidence for it existence, other than you have conviction of such belief (hence, “FAITH”) of what was written 2700 years ago and less, sand written by people who have no understanding of natural science, are nothing more than superstitions and wishful thinking.

Wishes aren’t true, simply because you believe it is a “good idea”.

You wrote a response to @shunyadragon saying this -

Genesis and other parts of the OT have descriptions of things that science seems to have demonstrated to be true. Billions of years is no problem when it comes to the Bible descriptions and science and history seems to have shown that a Noah's flood did happen even if it was not a complete submersion of all the land under water.
Some ancient myths seem similar to parts of the Genesis and I wonder why that would not be true if the Biblical account it true.

...Well...

There are beliefs in Jewish and Christian traditions that Moses was responsible for writing the books of Jewish Torah or the Christian Pentateuch, including that of Genesis.

If I was to accept the historicity of the reigns (numbers of years) of each monarchs of Judah to be true in 1 & 2 Kings, working backward from the Fall of Jerusalem (587/586 BCE), to all the ways to Rehoboam (reign c 931 - c 913 BCE), which reached the points from history become myth, starting with Saul to Solomon in which nothing that narrated their reigns of unified monarch of Israel.

There are no evidence of Solomon’s fable wealth or of his empire, no independent sources from neighboring kingdoms, whom Solomon brooked alliance through marriages.

But that’s not really my points here, Brian2. My points is that we are told from 1 Kings that Solomon’s reign lasted for 40 years, which would put the date, 970 to 931 BCE. We are than further told in 1 Kings 6:1, that Solomon began to start building the Temple in the 4th year of his reign, hence 967 BCE:

6 In the four hundred eightieth year after the Israelites came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the Lord.

That would put the date of Moses leading the Israelites out of Rameses to 1447 BCE (eg 967 BCE + 480 = 1447 BCE):

37 The Israelites journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides children. 38 A mixed crowd also went up with them, and livestock in great numbers, both flocks and herds.

Rameses was one of two cities that the Israelites began building before Moses’ birth Exodus 1:11. So if Israelites left Egypt in 1447 BCE, that would mean Moses was born in 1527 BCE, and he died in 1407 BCE.

So here, is the parts where the Bible don’t match up with history and archaeology.

First. There is a city of such name, but it is actually called Pi-Ramesses, which literally mean the “House of Ramesses”, and it was a city named after the 3rd king of the 19th dynasty, Ramesses II, reign 1279 - 1213 BCE.

Ramesses II and his father Seti I (1290 - 1279 BCE) were the most well-documented pharaoh of the New Kingdom period 1292 - 1187 BCE, because they left many writings documents and inscriptions all over Egypt. And Pi-Ramesses was built around 1250 BCE.

Pi-Ramesses have been located, excavated and dated to the 13th century BCE. Pi-Ramesses or the biblical Rameses never existed in the late 16th century BCE (eg Moses’ alleged birth in 1527 BCE) or the mid-15th century BCE (eg Moses leading his people out of Rameses in 1447 BCE).

1447 BCE would put the exodus in the reign of 18th dynasty pharaoh Thutmose III, 1479 - 1425 BCE, and Pi-Ramesses or Rameses did exist in Thutmose’s time. And no Egyptians records of any Hebrew-speaking living in Egypt, nor mention of the plagues or one night of mass death of first-born males in Egypt. Without contemporary records to verify the Exodus narrative, then Moses is nothing more than a myth.

And that isn’t the only problem with Moses’ timeline. If my calculations of Moses’ birth, exodus and death are accurate, then we have a problem with Joshua 6, where it was said to be the first city captured and destroyed, and left abandoned AFTER Moses’ death in 1407 BCE.

But Jericho, the old city located at Tell el-Sultan, have dated all the successive settlements of ancient Jericho. And the last time Jericho was abandoned in the Bronze Age was dated to around 1570-1560 BCE, not 1407 BCE.

(Note that the areas of Tell el-Sultan, have successive ancient settlements built on top of older settlements, dating from the Iron Age, to the Bronze Age, to the Early Neolithic period. So the deepest excavation revealed that people have been living in Jericho as far back as 9600 BCE. Archaeologists can date each layers using radiocarbon method, pretty much like that of dating tree-rings or dating ice core samples.)

Lastly, we have no evidence that Moses or Joshua existed in the mid-2nd millennium BCE. But even more important is that no biblical writings, like Genesis and Exodus, were ever found in the Late Bronze Age.

Not in Hebrew alphabet, not in Canaanite cuneiform, nor in Egyptian hieroglyphs or hieratic. Nothing written on parchments, papyri scrolls, clay or stone tablets contemporary to the 15th century BCE.

The oldest writing we have from the Torah or Pentateuch, come from a silver amulet/scroll found in the cave called Ketef Hinnom, dated between King Josiah’s reign (640-609 BCE) and before Jerusalem’s Fall (587/586 BCE).

No earlier OT writing exist before Josiah, so the claims that Moses wrote the Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Leviticus, are based nothing more than fabricated faith.

We only get historicity from the OT, when we can collaborate and verify the events from other sources, independent from OT books.

For example, Assyrian annals that recorded and detailed Tiglath-Pileser III (reign 745-727 BCE) intervening a war (734-732 BCE) between Ahaz (2 Kings 16:5-9) and the alliance of Pekah (2 Kings 15:29) and Rezin.

You cannot say history agree with the OT Bible without verification from independent sources or from archaeological evidence, or ideally both.

And there are no verification whatsoever in the timeline of Genesis and Exodus.

 

[Deeje]

I loved the way they celebrate the number of their followers. That to me elicits pictures of Noah’s audience ridiculing him and 'high-fiving' each other.

Yet the difference was made between the true atheists and those not convinced either way. Perhaps that means that there are more 'agnostics' in the world than genuine die-hard 'atheists'?
The die-hards are way more aggressive, like they must prove their case at all costs till not a single creationist survives.

Why they feel the need to do that escapes me....why do they care what we believe? Are they trying to save us from something that will be harmful to us in some way? I know that we are trying to save them, but why are they wanting to strip all faith in a Creator away from us just because they cannot accommodate him? Not believing doesn't make him go away.....and only a face to face encounter will convince them....but do they really want that?

The “speciation” argument is recurring, but it always helps to understand that new “species” are not new “kinds”.....they are simply new varieties belonging to a single taxonomic family. No matter how many new "species" are produced, they will never become a new taxonomy or "kind".

The ability to interbreed is not evidence that new families of creatures ever produce new “kinds” or spill over into creating new and different 'families'. Species are attracted to, and mate with their own kind...and within their own species. It’s what keeps all “kinds” separated....as they have been all through time. Despite what evolutionists 'assume', there is nothing 'linking' one creature to another except 'similarity'....sometimes a minute similarity is all that is needed to 'relate' one creature to another.

Whale evolution is an example of pushing the envelope in this argument. It has been claimed that the first “whales” were small furry land dwellers who sought food in the water and became adept at swimming. As time went by these adapted to aquatic life and their limbs turned into flippers and flukes.....they lost their fur and became monstrous. So over millions of years a small, four legged, dog-like creature about 3ft long and weighing around 40lbs, morphed into a sleek ocean dwelling creature 100ft long and weighing 200 tons.....and what is the “evidence for this?

This is Berkley's explanation....

"The evolution of whales

The first thing to notice on this evogram is that hippos are the closest living relatives of whales, but they are not the ancestors of whales. In fact, none of the individual animals on the evogram is the direct ancestor of any other, as far as we know. That's why each of them gets its own branch on the family tree.

Hippos are large and aquatic, like whales, but the two groups evolved those features separately from each other. We know this because the ancient relatives of hippos called anthracotheres (not shown here) were not large or aquatic. Nor were the ancient relatives of whales that you see pictured on this tree — such as Pakicetus. Hippos likely evolved from a group of anthracotheres about 15 million years ago, the first whales evolved over 50 million years ago, and the ancestor of both these groups was terrestrial.

These first whales, such as Pakicetus, were typical land animals. They had long skulls and large carnivorous teeth. From the outside, they don't look much like whales at all. However, their skulls — particularly in the ear region, which is surrounded by a bony wall — strongly resemble those of living whales and are unlike those of any other mammal. Often, seemingly minor features provide critical evidence to link animals that are highly specialized for their lifestyles (such as whales) with their less extreme-looking relatives."
The evolution of whales

OK...so what do we discern from that information and the "evogram" accompanying it?
That none of the creatures are related in direct ancestry to one another, (though at first glance it strongly suggests that they were) and that the similarity of an ear bone suddenly made four legged terrestrials into the first "whales". Is "strongly resembles" a scientific term? Does a similarity in the ear bone structure "prove" that the "first whales were like a dog? Does the fact that something is "likely", prove that it is?

Evolution is 1 part "evidence" and 9 parts "imagination". The missing links are still missing.
And this is real science to you?

You guys will swallow anything that looks like "science" and the evidence only has to be a suggestion for it to be taken as truth......you appear to be as gullible as you think we are....

 

[Bear Wild]

The die-hards are way more aggressive, like they must prove their case at all costs till not a single creationist survives.

Why they feel the need to do that escapes me....why do they care what we believe? Are they trying to save us from something that will be harmful to us in some way? I know that we are trying to save them, but why are they wanting to strip all faith in a Creator away from us just because they cannot accommodate him? Not believing doesn't make him go away.....and only a face to face encounter will convince them....but do they really want that?

Those that support evolution have undergone aggressive attempts by "evidence lacking" creationists to eliminate the theory of evolution from the world. There attempts have been futile because the theory has truth and real evidence to support it. No one can strip your faith in a creator from you but that does not mean you cannot accept evolution.

Not believing in evolution does not make it go away. It is not too late for you to accept evolution.