This is yet another one of your ridiculous analogies meant to explain away questions that are very reasonable.

The analogy is meant to explain "repeatability" within science, in response to your question "Is the process experimentally repeatable?" The processes we study do not need to be repeatable. The experiments need to be repeatable.

What "questions" are you referring to that you think my analogy explained away? It doesn't "explain away" anything except your misunderstanding of repeatability within science. That is the analogy's entire jurisdiction, its entire intent.

We don't know the exact route from a worms eye, excuse me, "living fossil," to our eyes.
And it's not something we can "TRACE" in the same fashion over and over and over and over again.
We can not confirm it.

I'm skeptical of many claims made that are unjustified interpretations of evidence. Is there a direct path we can trace between our eye and that of a worm some millions of years ago? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The scientists in the article you linked to have a strong hypothesis. It is strong enough to have their findings published so other people can critique and comment. I looked but couldn't find anywhere in the article where it says their hypothesis has been "confirmed".

Toward the end of the article, one scientist is quoted as saying the problem is "solved". I'm skeptical of that statement. It's compelling evidence that the path of our eyeball's progression is shared by Platynereis dumerilii.

What exactly is a "living fossil"? Sounds like a misnomer.

It is not a misnomer. The phrase refers to a very specific thing.

"still resembles" early ancestors implies that it is not a fossilized replica but only resembles something. Over the course of 600 million years, does anything stay the same?
What evidence is there to back such a claim?

It's evidence that's common, easy to obtain. Take the fossil of an organism that exists today and compare it to the fossil of an organism that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. If the fossils resemble each other, then that is evidence that they resemble each other.

geo wrote:
Why don't you just come out with it and tell us what you are arguing. That way we won't have to speculate.

Let me help, ant always has the same points:

1. Science doesn't know everything
2. Science can't prove that God doesn't exist
3. Religion is good, but not necessarily any actual religious claims about the world, just the idea that someone believes something other than science

Reading ant's inability in this thread to understand how his critique of evolution reads as promotion of intelligent design, I was reminded of an article on the neural failure of believers. Ant may wish to read Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins, where this canard about the difficulty of explaining the evolution of eyes is laid to rest.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com.au/2010 ... r-iqs.html
is well worth reading in full. It includes the following comments

The article 'Atheism Rising', by James Allen Cheyne made reference to a compendium of research which has shown an inverse correlation between religious belief and intelligence as measured by IQ. ... Cheyne makes reference to a particular type of thought he calls ACH thinking - or abstract, categorical and hypothetical - which appears to be mostly missing from believers ... the ability to abstract from the conditions of the hypothetical to see the new situation, and assess it... is the very ability that Cheyne shows is missing as one examines results for religious believers.

Why are believers missing this crucial component of thought which also, by the way, is essential for critical thinking? There are a number of reasons. For example, one may be that the honing of such skills was never possible, for example if they came from a home schooling environment. Another, more controversial, is that the very neural pathways that predispose them to belief or faith, are also the ones that inhibit predictive ACH conceptualizing.

An interesting aspect here, as Cheyne notes, is that many people - including believers- display quick wittededness and clear thinking, and also good vocabularies - but remained "uncomfortable with abstract or hypothetical thinking and found such thinking to be alien".

I don't fully agree with Cheyne's argument as I consider that critical thinking and faith can be compatible. But then I have my own definition of faith, such that a conflict with parsimony renders faith invalid. Elegance trumps faith. God is not elegant.

Further more, I still believe that someone like Johnson, from a darwinian lens would rather have the beak than advanced mathematical abilities that do nothing for survival of the species. I think he believes math is just icing on the cake. What evidence he has of that, I do not know.

Really?

Come on Ant. Did i not... wow.


What evidence I have of that? You are the one saying it! I blatantly disagreed with your assesment, and if you read my post, then you must have realized as much.

What does that make the quote above, Ant?

Rememebr this, ant?

http://www.booktalk.org/could-humans-gr ... 15105.html

Come on, guy! It makes you sound ridiculous after reading what i have to say in this post for you to then come back with this:

Further more, I still believe that someone like Johnson, from a darwinian lens would rather have the beak than advanced mathematical abilities that do nothing for survival of the species. I think he believes math is just icing on the cake. What evidence he has of that, I do not know.

johnson1010 wrote:

Further more, I still believe that someone like Johnson, from a darwinian lens would rather have the beak than advanced mathematical abilities that do nothing for survival of the species. I think he believes math is just icing on the cake. What evidence he has of that, I do not know.

Really?

Come on Ant. Did i not... wow.

Sorry, I was busy laughing at Tulip's blind religious bigotry and his inability to read.


Tell me why, from biological survival perspective, you believe having the ability to do the math required for quantum physics would increase your chances of success in your environment than having a beak.
Beaks are incredibly useful in our environment. Have you read up on them?
(remember - I'm not saying we are eventually going to grow beaks)

Tell me why you deliberately misrepresented a position that i clearly outlined just days earlier?

You have lost a lot of good will with me on this Ant.

It isn't ignorance. It's flat out dishonest.

ant wrote:
Tell me why, from biological survival perspective, you believe having the ability to do the math required for quantum physics would increase your chances of success in your environment than having a beak.
Beaks are incredibly useful in our environment. Have you read up on them?
(remember - I'm not saying we are eventually going to grow beaks)

So we're back to math ability again. This has already been answered and ignored.

You continue to insinuate weaknesses in evolutionary theory, but these are based only on your willful ignorance. There must be a God behind all this, right? And He must exist in the shadowy spaces where science doesn't reach or, as demonstrated in this thread, in the shadowy spaces of what you don't understand.

Even an IDer comes right out and says that he believes God is behind it. You can't even do that.

By the way, it's pretty obvious that sheer brain power has helped homo sapien. A beak is good for specific types of food-gathering. That you can't see that only demonstrates how blinkered you are. So insinuate away. You've been rationalizing for so long you can't even formulate a coherent argument.

Beaks are useless to us. We have trillion dollar food industries streamlined to provide food that's optimized for us. Beaks are not incredibly useful for our environment, because our environment has been shaped and optimized for our mandibles. We have changed our environment, it's part of our extended phenotype now. That extension falls short of many issues, of course, but optimizing food for mandibles is not one of them.

We aren't born with the ability to do quantum physics level math. Is that what you're saying is selected for ant? Did tribal man perform quadratic equations? Natural selection favored us due to our ability to learn. What we're able to learn appears to be unlimited, in scope if not in depth(we can do advanced math, but not as well as a calculator).

Evolution gave us the capacity, and informational(cultural) evolution filled that capacity with everything we see today. That initial capacity provided our ancestors with great benefits. Not only could they detect complex patterns in the environment that directly affected survival, but they could communicate this understanding. The spandrels from such a capacity are unlimited. No one will argue that we've evolved past a certain threshold, one that allows us to infinitely permute information.

Your argument now seems to be that evolution alone couldn't have pushed us past that threshold. Which means you have to willfully ignore the survival benefits we've gained in passing that threshold.

johnson1010 wrote:Tell me why you deliberately misrepresented a position that i clearly outlined just days earlier?

You have lost a lot of good will with me on this Ant.

It isn't ignorance. It's flat out dishonest.

I don't know what Geo is talking about. I've already stated my point that from a pure neo darwinian perspective, higher mathematics ("sheer brain power") is not vital to the survival of a species. That was my point. That is not an ID'er stance..
Geo and Dexter love harping on that because they are witch hunters. That is always their aim in these discussions.

Please link me to what you've mentioned above. I may have missed it.
And I actually at times multi-task all of you good atheists here on BT. So give me a break when i say I must have missed you addressing my primary point (bolded above)

I'll now ignore the shouts of "WITCH!! WITCH!!!!" "ID'er WIIIITCCHHHHH!!"