The Believabliltiy of Evolution

[tas8831]

There is no word for "belief" attested in any language before 2500 BC.

1. I don't believe a thing you write.
2. WHO CARES about 2500 BC when we are not talking about 2500 BC?

There is no word for belief in animal languages either.

Are you also Dr.Doolittle?

At what point does a coincidence become a fact.

Well, Doolittle, when there is actual evidence for the claimed fact, rather than 2 unrelated and dubious assertions.

 

[tas8831]

That's hilarious!

Not as hilarious as Dr.Doolittle, expert on neuroscience, writing 'an infant decides to grow a broccas area.'

I may be the only individual in the world who might be wrong. Everyone else is dead certain they are right everything and are not in the least disturbed no one agrees with them.

Oh, Doolittle, your feigned martyrdom is sad.

You may be right on any number of things you think - none of the things that I have seen on this forum or the Graham Hancock forum, but maybe somewhere.

You have admitted to only having some education in physics, and not biology or anything else.

Yet, you think that those that have had relevant educations and experience should just accept, at face value, with no supporting documentation of any sort, your trivially incorrect nonsensical claims about the very things these people actually do know about?

Are you crazy?

Why would I entertain your gibberish about metaphysics this and pyramids that and your bizarre claims about language and knowledge when you write things that are demonstrably false about basic brain anatomy and function?

I have never claimed to be an expert in neuroscience, for example, but I DO have much, much more knowledge in it than you do, and it took me just the amount of time it took to read your claims on the subject to know you were wrong. And then, unlike you, I actually provided links and sources showing that I was right and you were Dr. Doolottle.

Same with 'survival of the fittest.' Same with 'sudden speciation.' Same with bottlenecks.

These are ALL fields in which you have admitted ignorance, yet still you seem to think that your mere say-so not only counts as evidence, but trumps all real knowledge!

I think there is a better than 30% chance I am mostly right about what you call "evolution"

On what basis do you make that claim?

Surely, it is not your performance on this forum. On this forum, as far as I can see, you have been 100% wrong on everything you have claimed on evolution. And neuroscience. And genetics.

and you are so certain that you are 100% right that you don't even notice when you disagree with other believers in evolution nor do you notice my evidence.

I am about 99% certain that when I have corrected your claims, I was correct and you were 100% wrong. The ONLY exception was re: so-called 'blind sight', and that was because you totally misnamed and mis-characterized it. AND, unlike you, I "admitted" that there was such a thing (once I had determined, via parsing your naive descriptions of it, the actual name of the phenomenon, the actual part of the brain that it is housed in (not the midbrain, as you had claimed),and actual 'reason' for it).

And you NEVER have provided ANY evidence for the nonsense you write.

A list of three extant taxa is NOT evidence that the speciated suddenly. Your latest demonstrably false claim was re: domestic pigs.

Go ahead and run an experiment - get yourself a European wild boar and make it speciate into a nice pink tuskless domestic pig in one or two generations.

You plod merrily ahead in your absolute convictions.

Do you know what psychological projection is?

Of course you do not.

If there are two different but related fossils in two different beddings then there mustta been a gradual change. It mustta been caused by survival of the fittest.

There you go again, using phrases that you do not understand.

And that is your calling card.

 

[tas8831]

Adam had a child

Fallacy of begging the question.

 

[tas8831]

And this is exactly where experiment free science goes wrong.

Where are your experiments re: how the pyramids were built?

Where are your experiments on sudden speciation?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Ok, I don't think my last reply and the example I have chosen weren't clear enough. That's my fault.

So I will be as clear and blunt as possible.

TRANSLATIONS OF ANCIENT TEXTS ARE NOT SCIENCE!

The studies of languages, modern and ancient, don't belong in science, not even Social Science. It falls under a very broad umbrella term, called HUMANITIES.

Other disciplines falling under the Humanities categories are literature, history, religion, music, art, and so on.

You can criticize a translation, but there no systems like science, which translators or philologists are required to follow...

...Meaning: Humanities don't require to be empirical, therefore philology doesn't require to follow the Scientific Method, nor it require submission before Peer Review.

DO YOU GET IT NOW?

The studies of languages, including translations, are subjected to too many variables, too many changes, that it is not really possible be as systematic as Natural Sciences.

History isn't science, it is another discipline in humanities, but it is related to another disciplines that can involved science, eg archaeology and anthropology.

But archaeology and anthropology fall under the Social Science categories, not Natural Science.

But mind you, history and archaeology can work together, because they are trying to look for answers in the same time, but approach them differently:

• History required looking at written records.
• Archaeology searched for everything else, such as tools, utensils, artworks, buildings, etc, anything that's man-made.

And of course, archaeologists are often historians too, because some people can be qualified to work in both fields.

Look it up, cladking. Look up humanities.

Just some theory of science about science. What is called science and that is named, is cultural and not science in itself.

In Danish depending on how you cut it there are at least 3 kinds of science if not 5.
The first 3 are:
Natural science, that which you call science.
Social science, same as you.
Humanistic science, that which you don't consider science at all.

And the last 2 ones, which are sometimes included, are:
Mathematics
Philosophy.

Any claim of what makes science science and what proper science is as a result of (cultural) bias. Both my position and yours. I just know that you can't use natural science so show that it is the only science, because it is not decided empirically. That natural science is better and a more proper science is not empirical, that is cultural. Indeed it is falsifiable and actually the falsification of that natural science is the only real science, is that you can't observe that. Rather is a cultural process.

Now for these 5, what cladking is doing, it is not natural science.
But what you do, I won't let you get away with. Science is as much a broad term for a group of human behavior and not just natural science.
BTW since I have to give evidence here it is:

Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition. Much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to absolute truth, but the alteration of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly. Facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural. [Stephen Jay Gould, introduction to "The Mismeasure of Man," 1981]

science | Origin and meaning of science by Online Etymology Dictionary

The bold part also accounts for what we call science and not; and how we draw the finer lines. Now what Gould wrote, can be replicated not as natural science but as a combination of soft cultural science and humanistic science. If you know to spot the cultural bias, you can learn to see(understand) it in my position and your own. But if you can see that, you hold my position.
Science as you name it, is not science, it is natural science, because that are other ways to understand science than just empirically.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Oh, that old gambit.

Like the 'evidence' given 'repeatedly' that all change in biology is sudden, like speciation? And the 'evidence' was a list of 3 critters?

'I've explained this already, or I provided evidence' when neither happened, is a big move in pigeon chess.

 

[gnostic]

Humanistic science, that which you don't consider science at all.

Do you consider art and music to be science?

Because they are both grouped in humanities. As are literature.

They don’t have to be empirical, so that itself disqualify it from being science. You would have to do mental contortions to twist art, music and literature into science.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Do you consider art and music to be science?

Because they are both grouped in humanities. As are literature.

They don’t have to be empirical, so that itself disqualify it from being science. You would have to do mental contortions to twist art, music and literature into science.

One step at a time.
Do I consider art and music to be science?
Do you?

What can we learn from this? That you yourself pointed to the problem. What science is, is not empirical, but rather rests on what a given human non-empirically and subjectively think/feel, what science is.

So that to you science is what it is to you, is mental and not a contortion, but what is to me, is a mental contortion. If you don't understand the problem in your position, we don't need to continue.
Within science there are different ways of understanding science and yours is not the only one. Neither is mine. They are both cultural construct.
Of course natural science is a part of science, but science is not just natural (and cultural) science.

 

[tas8831]

'I've explained this already, or I provided evidence' when neither happened, is a big move in pigeon chess.

So I notice a certain someone hasn't been around for a few days. I hypothesize that maybe he's gone to his other haunts for a bit. I google his screen name. I don't see him anywhere of late, but I do come across some folks that have encountered him before.

Like this guy:

Ah [our pal] has shown up

For those who have not met this esteemed gentleman before let me introduce him:

For about 13 years he has dumped about 50,000 posts on various websites that support these 'ideas' and I paraphrase.

I don't link you to his papers, books, website or explanatory blogs - there aren't any all he does is just posts his ideas in long boring forum posts.

He believes:

That he and only he can really read ancient Egyptian - as long as someone else translates it into English first - he has come up with all kinds of ridiculous meanings for the Pyramid texts - he also refuses to provide any research to support his ideas.

He holds that the ancient Egyptians were a different species from HSS.

He holds that the great pyramid was design to can food....

That the ancient Egyptians had no religion

That the ancient Egyptians had a weird language that only he understands

That they used CO2 geysers to build the pyramids

...well I will stop there. I think you get the idea....I won't mention some of the really 'odd' stuff....​

 

[dfnj]

I can understand how an intelligent individual may have problems with the creation account in Genesis. What I don't understand is how that same intelligent individual has no problem whatsoever believing everything we see in the world somehow came from the so-called primordial soup.

The study of abiogenesis is fascinating. From my amateur interest in abiogenesis my theory on how life arose from the primordial soup is based on lottery math. If you buy enough lottery tickets then at some point you are going to win. Trillions and trillions of bubbles over billions of years eventually one bubble will hit the lottery! At some point the first bubble that started acting like a living cell came into existence. It was organized to take in food, process food, expel food, divide in such a way as to create copies of itself with the ability to make self-improvements with new generations which then gave rise to evolution.

It's not that hard to imagine this could happen with one hundred quintillion number of bubbles!

 

[Dan From Smithville]

So I notice a certain someone hasn't been around for a few days. I hypothesize that maybe he's gone to his other haunts for a bit. I google his screen name. I don't see him anywhere of late, but I do come across some folks that have encountered him before.

Like this guy:

Ah [our pal] has shown up

For those who have not met this esteemed gentleman before let me introduce him:

For about 13 years he has dumped about 50,000 posts on various websites that support these 'ideas' and I paraphrase.

I don't link you to his papers, books, website or explanatory blogs - there aren't any all he does is just posts his ideas in long boring forum posts.

He believes:

That he and only he can really read ancient Egyptian - as long as someone else translates it into English first - he has come up with all kinds of ridiculous meanings for the Pyramid texts - he also refuses to provide any research to support his ideas.

He holds that the ancient Egyptians were a different species from HSS.

He holds that the great pyramid was design to can food....

That the ancient Egyptians had no religion

That the ancient Egyptians had a weird language that only he understands

That they used CO2 geysers to build the pyramids

...well I will stop there. I think you get the idea....I won't mention some of the really 'odd' stuff....​

That is interesting. It sounds like a duck. Looks like one too.

I can't imagine what could be more odd than what we have seen already. My favorite is the seltzer geysers. Flavored I hope.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

So I notice a certain someone hasn't been around for a few days. I hypothesize that maybe he's gone to his other haunts for a bit. I google his screen name. I don't see him anywhere of late, but I do come across some folks that have encountered him before.

Like this guy:

Ah [our pal] has shown up

For those who have not met this esteemed gentleman before let me introduce him:

For about 13 years he has dumped about 50,000 posts on various websites that support these 'ideas' and I paraphrase.

I don't link you to his papers, books, website or explanatory blogs - there aren't any all he does is just posts his ideas in long boring forum posts.

He believes:

That he and only he can really read ancient Egyptian - as long as someone else translates it into English first - he has come up with all kinds of ridiculous meanings for the Pyramid texts - he also refuses to provide any research to support his ideas.

He holds that the ancient Egyptians were a different species from HSS.

He holds that the great pyramid was design to can food....

That the ancient Egyptians had no religion

That the ancient Egyptians had a weird language that only he understands

That they used CO2 geysers to build the pyramids

...well I will stop there. I think you get the idea....I won't mention some of the really 'odd' stuff....​

I perused the page you linked. Some people do get around. Darn decent of them to be consistent with the old moniker too.

I ran across a guy on Topix that had created his own version of ID he called SCPID. Systems Cycles and Patterns Intelligent Design. Since cycles and patterns are seen in nature, they are evidence of design. He claimed this was all over the internet, but a search revealed only one other mention of it outside of Topix and the poster there wrote in the same style and wording as the poster on Topix.

What is SCPID theory? - Government and Politics

 

[tas8831]

I perused the page you linked. Some people do get around. Darn decent of them to be consistent with the old moniker too.

I ran across a guy on Topix that had created his own version of ID he called SCPID. Systems Cycles and Patterns Intelligent Design. Since cycles and patterns are seen in nature, they are evidence of design. He claimed this was all over the internet, but a search revealed only one other mention of it outside of Topix and the poster there wrote in the same style and wording as the poster on Topix.

What is SCPID theory? - Government and Politics

Legends in their own minds...

 

[cladking]

So I notice a certain someone hasn't been around for a few days. I hypothesize that maybe he's gone to his other haunts for a bit. I google his screen name. I don't see him anywhere of late, but I do come across some folks that have encountered him before.

Like this guy:

Ah [our pal] has shown up

For those who have not met this esteemed gentleman before let me introduce him:

For about 13 years he has dumped about 50,000 posts on various websites that support these 'ideas' and I paraphrase.

I don't link you to his papers, books, website or explanatory blogs - there aren't any all he does is just posts his ideas in long boring forum posts.

He believes:

That he and only he can really read ancient Egyptian - as long as someone else translates it into English first - he has come up with all kinds of ridiculous meanings for the Pyramid texts - he also refuses to provide any research to support his ideas.

He holds that the ancient Egyptians were a different species from HSS.

He holds that the great pyramid was design to can food....

That the ancient Egyptians had no religion

That the ancient Egyptians had a weird language that only he understands

That they used CO2 geysers to build the pyramids

...well I will stop there. I think you get the idea....I won't mention some of the really 'odd' stuff....​

I never responded to him before but in three days of responding to him I've beaten him down pretty severely. If I were vindictive I'd get him banned too. I might yet.

If you believe anything he says you have already gone wrong. I'd tell you why he gets everything wrong but it's irrelevant to this board. He follows me about the net and trolls me and the boards. He actually announced on one board that he was coming here just to troll. I don't behave this way. despite a lot of provocation everywhere I respond to point or not at all. This post is one of a mere handful I've written off=topic in the thousands of posts I've made everywhere.

I gave up this thread because people refused to respond to my points. After so many months of Saying "Peer Review" and "Look and See Science" are virtually synonyms it was wholly and utterly confused. I suspect nobody even understands the concept that change occurs at bottlenecks due to behavior and there is no such thing as "survival of the fittest". Nobody can see I presented extensive evidence and logic to support it.

This is all secondary to my important points about consciousness and the nature of humanity anyway. If anyone wants to support theior beliefs about "evolution" I'll be back. If anyone wants to discuss the evidence I cite I'll be back.

Otherwise I will not even to counter the fool that PM'ed you. He is a gadfly everywhere he goes.

 

[tas8831]

"In the early years he asked lots of question and was polite, honest, did research and answered questions. Around 2009-2011 he tried to 'prove' his geyser funicular system and was ripped to pieces. At that point he began to attack 'Egyptologists' full time and began to make stuff up, refused to answer questions and made up nonsense and would ignore all evidence against his own beliefs. Knowing he couldn't prove anything he went instead with relentless never ending repetition, repeating hundreds of times the same claims on multiple websites while demanding his opinion be treated like evidence.

In the present world he is a laughing stock and made a decision around 2012-2013 to never provide research as such would then be taken to pieces - thereby making sure Egyptology would never take him seriously. He also started to claim he had made all kinds of predictions and that Egyptology existed only to resist him. He thinks 'sometime' is located in the NE corner of G1 that will change the world and he knows how to open the door to it - but declines to do so....

He now goes around pretending to be a 'scientist' who doesn't follow the scientific method......yeah"​

Thats our boy!

 

[tas8831]

I suspect nobody even understands the concept that change occurs at bottlenecks due to behavior and there is no such thing as "survival of the fittest".

Correct - nobody understands your fantasy drivel about concepts that you continue to botch and misrepresent.

Nobody can see I presented extensive evidence and logic to support it.

You presented zero evidence. That one time you tried, you made a fool of yourself, which is probably why you never present evidence, just lie and claim you did.

Like when you lied about presenting evidence that speciation is sudden - all you did was provide a list of a couple of living animals. That is not evidence.

You are either stupendously ignorant, or a major league troll.

Which do you prefer to be known as?

Otherwise I will not even to counter the fool that PM'ed you.

Your reading comprehension is crap.

Nobody PM'd me, I never mentioned PMs.

I copy-pasted what I found in the comments section of an essay pointing out how ridiculous your hero Graham Hancock is.

Man - do you ever read anything?

 

[cladking]

Wow! Just wow!

You don't even read what you post, its source, nor care about your own claims.

I don't know what's more remarkable, that it took you two days to come up with that nonsense or that you expect people to believe Graham Hancock has posted 50,000 times on the net.


I will not defend my argument in this thread in this post, because I believe each post stands on its own merits.

Might I suggest BEFORE you make stuff up and post it you at least proof read it and give readers the benefit of the doubt about having a couple brain cells to rub together.

Jeesh!

 

[Aman Uensis]

I can understand how an intelligent individual may have problems with the creation account in Genesis. What I don't understand is how that same intelligent individual has no problem whatsoever believing everything we see in the world somehow came from the so-called primordial soup.

I agree. If it can be proposed that a sentient being such as humanity could evolve from chance, there is always the chance that a sentient being could have come before us and created us.

Even intelligent individuals can be of narrow mind.

 

[blü 2]

I can understand how an intelligent individual may have problems with the creation account in Genesis.

Yes, there are insuperable difficulties there.

What I don't understand is how that same intelligent individual has no problem whatsoever believing everything we see in the world somehow came from the so-called primordial soup.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but those don't sound like the words of someone who's gone out of his way to understand what evolution is and what the modern theory of evolution says about it.

Not only must a particular life form spontaneously arise

As you know, the study of how the first self-reproducing cell (or biological unit) came into being is called abiogenesis (sci-Greek for 'birth from non-life'). It's true that at present we have no complete description of how the first such cell/unit could have come into being; but it's also true that steady progress is deepening our understanding of what must have been involved. I find it a fascinating topic.

but the other organisms upon which it depends must have arisen in lock step.

Not quite. First you have a self-reproducing cell (or perhaps a group of them, arising in the same way from the same environment. Then you have a copy of the parent which isn't a perfect copy ─ evolution ─ and three possible outcomes: the difference is detrimental, and the new cell doesn't prosper; the difference is unimportant, and nothing much changes; or the difference is beneficial, and the descendants of that cell will prosper, perhaps at the expense of the others.

And what are the odds of the flora arising in the required sequence as that of the fauna which depends on that flora? That is more believable than Genesis?

Think about it for a moment. It's an entirely pragmatic system. A cell can obtain nutrition by eating another cell only in a particular set of circumstances. And every other step in evolution requires an existing set of circumstances. No creature can eat vegetation before vegetation exists, for example. Once it exists, the possibilities of all kinds of relationship between cells, critters and vegetation arise. That principle remains central all the way down the line. Human evolution goes from the most basic form of life (protobionts, presently undefined)

to the single cell (Prokaryota) 3.5 bya
to nucleated multicelled (Eukaryota) [though some say Eu- was before or simultaneous with Pro-] 1.7 bya
to bilateral symmetry (Bilateria) ›555 mya
to a stomach with two openings [mouth and anus] (Deuterostomia) ›555 mya
to a notochord [‘spinal chord’] (Chordata) ›555 mya
to a backbone (Vertebrata) ›525 mya
to a movable lower jaw (Gnathostomata) ›385 mya
to four legs (Tetrapoda) ›385 mya
to eggs with water retention suitable for dry land (Amniota) ›340 mya
to eye sockets each with a single opening into the skull (Synapsida) ›324 mya
to mammal-like reptiles (Therapsida) ~274 mya
to ‘dog teeth’ (Cynodontia) ~260 mya
to milk glands (Mammalia) ~200 mya
to vivipars and monotremes (Theriiformes) ›160 mya
to modern vivipars (Holotheria)
to proto-placentals and marsupials (Theria)
to placentals and certain extinct non-marsupials (Eutheria) ›160 mya
to placentals (Placentalia) ~110 mya
to all mammals except the Xenarthra [sloth, armadillo, anteater] (Epitheria) ~100 mya
to bats, primates, treeshrews (Archonta) ~100 mya
to tarsiers, monkeys, apes (Haplorrhini) ~63 mya
to New and Old World monkeys and apes (Simiiformes) ~40 mya
to Old World monkeys and gibbons (Catarrhini) ~35 mya
to apes [great apes and gibbons] (Hominoidea) ~29 mya
to hominids / great apes [orangutans, gorillas, chimps, Homo] (Hominidae) ~25 mya
to hominins [gorillas, chimps, Homo, H. floresiensis, H. Denisova] (Homininae) ~4.5 mya
to Homo [H. sapiens, H. Neanderthalis, ] (Homo) ~2.4 mya
to Homo sapiens [Homo sapiens Idaltu, Homo sapiens sapiens] (Homo sapiens) 250 kya
to Homo sapiens sapien​

(and I suspect the next step will be Homo sapiens mechanicus, but we'll see.)

Science is based on observation. Who has ever seen one genus becoming another? Nobody!

Important question: do you have a better theory that fits the facts we know from the evidence of fossils and from DNA? These days it's the DNA evidence that tells us most about the history of species, hence genera, hence families, classes and so on.

It's purely inference which is only slightly better than guessing.

Not quite. The study of evolution is a mix of facts, well-founded hypotheses, and other hypotheses. This is because the evidence is so bitty, so scarce, so hard to find. Nonetheless, it's evidence, and the framework into which we fit it is our picture of evolution derived from fact and theory. For instance, we know that one line of genus Homo was the Denisovans, and we have their DNA, and we can find that DNA in living groups of humans (but more interestingly, not in others).

How do you propose we account for them? Who will answer the question for us, were they Homo Denisova or Homo sapiens Denisova? What's your approach to such issues?

(No, I don't know either, but I know who to ask, and I know why I ask them and not any of my local pastors.)

 

[tas8831]

Wow! Just wow!

You don't even read what you post, its source, nor care about your own claims.

I don't know what's more remarkable, that it took you two days to come up with that nonsense or that you expect people to believe Graham Hancock has posted 50,000 times on the net.


I will not defend my argument in this thread in this post, because I believe each post stands on its own merits.

Might I suggest BEFORE you make stuff up and post it you at least proof read it and give readers the benefit of the doubt about having a couple brain cells to rub together.

Jeesh!

Wow...

Option 1 - MASSIVE troll
Option 2 - MASSIVE fool
Option 3 - Reading comprehension/information processing issues, likely due to a life of alcohol and/or drug abuse

A little of each?

So, I clearly wrote:

"I copy-pasted what I found in the comments section of an essay pointing out how ridiculous your hero Graham Hancock is."

You're not even trying anymore.