This is actually a little off tangent from the purpose of Volokh's post, but for those who are following this little discussion over at Volokh's, one person posting (a mathmetician) had it where no one else did--looking at the hypothesis of biological macroevolution from a mathematical standpoint of probabilities. Take the chances of winning the lotto, increase by orders of magnitude, then apply that to each instance of macroevolution to find the probablility of constructive mutation being possible. One guy I saw worked out the math and found fewer atoms in the entire universe than the probability of biological macroevolution. By orders of magnitude. Hmmmmmmmmmmm...
Either there's a first cause (God); or there ain't.
And this is taught beyond theory in our schools--it's taught as freakin' scientific law.
What the heck?

First

Darn, second then.. I never get to be first. Maybe I should read the article and give a proper response.

In theory, according to Einstein, if time is affected by gravity, then time at the edge of the universe would be moving much faster than time at the beginning of the universe.

In theory, the edge of the universe could be billions of "years" old, whilst the inside is still only several thousand (or even several dozen) "years" old. Heck, the very center of the universe where gravity is the most intense, may only be a few minutes old, and yet it all formed at the same time... That's a weird thought...

Einstein was right: God does not play dice with the universe. Unfortunately, at present his view would be endorsed mainly by the minority of physicists who accept the many-universes interpretation of quantum theory. But as I explain here, the others are mistaken. They do not take the theory seriously enough as a description of reality.

Citizen Grim,

The concept is interesting, but the edge of the 'observable' universe doesn't necessarily correlate with the 'edge of the universe.' Remember that Einstein also said that no observer was privileged: the universe's edges are equally far from any vantage point within it.

Conceivably, the actual size of the universe could be boundless and infinite, even if our view of it constricts us to a window bounded by the speed of light x the age of the universe. Inflationary bubbles could have accelerated an untold amount of universe outside of our window.

Oh, wait, I'm commenting on IMAO.

Um, NUKE THE MOON!

Wow, David Deutsch commenting on IMAO?!

Time to re-read my dog-eared copy of Fabric of Reality.

Frank J.:

WTF? Were you knocked out by monkey-ninjas, and your PC taken over by that puppy blending instapundit?

Indeed.

David Deutsch,
Haven't read the book, but, if I understand the multiple universe theory, that's like God buying every single lottery ticket instead of playing dice.

LOL @ a4g

I work with physicists all day. This conversation, while interesting, sounds too much like work. NEXT!

What I would like to know is - who made all those lottery tickets for God to buy?

I don't think the theory of evolution is a threat to religion - it is a much bigger threat to science.

When you talk about microevolution (internal evolution, or intraspecies adaptation), you'll find ample evidence to support it. Survival of the fittest, plain and simple. You'll get no argument here - microevolution is scientifically sound and provable. Microevolution is how you get different breeds of dogs. Easy. (Same species, different breed.)

But that's not the issue here. The issue is macroevolution. Like Seth said above, it's mathematically incomprehensible. We did those same calculations in college - it's more likely for a tornado to sweep through a junkyard and build a working 747 than for one entropic violation of biological macroevolution to occur - by many orders of magnitude. And there would need to be a near continuum of such violations for the present world to exist by such a mechanism. By all accounts, this is essentially impossible.

But the theory of macroevolution asks us to just take that with a grain of salt and ignore such daunting obstacles to its veracity. A rather unscientific thing to do. The problem is that science is not invincible. Science is weak in that it can only describe what human beings can measure. How can we measure something that supposedly happened before we ever came into being? Science requires repeatable, provable (and subsequently disprovable) experiments and measurements to validate hypotheses. And macroevolution as a theory has more holes than Swiss cheese.

Thermodynamics is a set of provable scientific laws. Macroevolution violates the heck out of thermodynamics, which states that matter tends from order to disorder. (Time's Arrow, etc.) Macroevolution asks us to believe just the opposite. It must ignore thermodynamics to do so.

Macroevolution asks us to believe that new species are the result of "beneficial mutations." Scientific reality has NO EVIDENCE of mutation that is beneficial. EVERY mutation ever examined is harmful, if not fatal - and almost invariably leaves the mutant sterile.

My friends had a baby last week, named Audrey. Audrey is a mutant. She has a chromosomal anomoly that inhibited her development. Sadly, she will likely not survive the first six months of her life. She will never live long enough to reproduce. Mutations are bad. Very bad. Put down your X-men comics for a while look at what real-life mutation causes.

Another point - there is no interspecies breeding. You cannot cross a dog and a cat - sorry Dr. Moreau. There is NO possibility of viable offspring between different species. Here's the exception that proves the rule: Horses and donkeys are pretty closely related, don't you think? They CAN produce offspring (a mule). Mules are ... anyone? STERILE. SO... we can't get new species that way either.

We hear about the "missing link" between humans and apes. I've got news for you folks, there are millions of missing links (if you believe that there is interspecies decendency in the first place. You'd have to ignore a ton of holes!) If a monkey evolved into a man, there would not be one missing link, or two - but thousands, or perhaps millions. It would be a generational ancestry approximating a continuum. (And how would it happen? Mutations? Um, no.)

If birds descend from lizards as macroevolution claims, there is also a problem. Where is the fossil evidence? Where is the 80% lizard / 20% bird? Where is the 34.5% lizard / 65.5% bird? Such a slow process would take thousands of generations of "beneficial" mutation (with entropic violations at each step), and there is no fossil evidence for this whatsoever. Futhermore, and even more damning - how would such creatures survive? The lizard's front legs would have become "bad legs" LONG before they became "good wings." For such an interval of thousands of generations, these creatures which could neither run nor fly would have been victims of predators and died out. Survival of the fittest, you know. And IF such creatures were able to survive long enough to evolve into birds, why aren't the "in-betweeners" still around today? BIG HOLE IN THE CHEESE.

I could go on and on (and it looks like I have.) Here's my summation (for now):

Asking people to believe such nonsense in the name of science cheapens science and makes it self-contradictory and useless. Here's the simple truth: Macroevolution is NOT science - it is a religion. It asks you to believe things that it can't prove to you and you'll simply have to take them by faith. And it takes a lot more faith to believe in these fairy tales than to believe that God created the universe and the life contained within.

There's my two cents. Don't ask for a dollar - I'd be going on for days...

Sorry Frank, I choked your comments. Wind me up and watch me go... LOL

Well, I for one enjoyed it, Beo.

My favorite "theory" is the one where they said that lizard scales frayed and frayed over time to become bird feathers. Only an idiot who has never actually looked closely at a bird feather could say something as stupid as that.

Plus, if it were true that you could fray the outside of an animal and have that carry down through the ages, my teen-age sons progeny would some day have feathered ankles from their ancestors wearing of strategically shredded jeans.

"You'll get no argument here - microevolution is scientifically sound and provable. Microevolution is how you get different breeds of dogs. Easy"

But where did this functional variation come from? Are you claiming that ancestral wolves had, say, all the genes to make a a poodle, and evolution just let them out? Because otherwise, the reality is that the genes had to have changed in a constructive manner to lead to new breeds, which is exactly what you seem to be denying that evolution can do.

"Macroevolution violates the heck out of thermodynamics, which states that matter tends from order to disorder."

That's not at all what it states, but what's the point of explaining it to someone who doesn't care about the truth anyway?

"You cannot cross a dog and a cat - sorry Dr. Moreau. There is NO possibility of viable offspring between different species."

Ligers aren't sterile. Neither are wolfins. As species get less and less closely related its quite true that interbreeding first becomes rarer and eventually less and less likely to lead to fertile offspring. But that has nothing to do with evolution anyway: new species don't come about because a cow has sex with a kitten. They slowly differentiate from each other over many many generations.

"My favorite "theory" is the one where they said that lizard scales frayed and frayed over time to become bird feathers. Only an idiot who has never actually looked closely at a bird feather could say something as stupid as that."

They must be idiots too for looking at the proteins that form these two different structures and realizing that only very minor mutational changes can cause one to develop into the other. Hence why some mutant chickens form feathers on their legs instead of scales (yes, birds have scales, Virginia). If you think about it, this method of inquiry is actually a lot better than someone who knows nothing about biology squinting at a feather and saying "gee, this doesn't look anything like a scale so that must be crazy talk!"

Would you let a janitor perform brain surgery on you? No, so why would you listen to a completely uninformed person's opinion on biology?

My point was not that there might not be biochemical similarities between feathers and scales, because there certainly are. My point was that it doesn't matter how much you "fray" a scale or a pair of jeans or whatever, you cannot make a mutation that way. You can trim a dogs tail and ears all you want for as many generations as you want, and you will not get dogs with shorter ears or tails. You have to selectively breed them for those traits if you want them to be born that way.

But selective breeding of any animal does not in any way prove natural evolution. It only proves that if a force outside the animal has a specific set of traits that it desires, then it can devise a plan to achieve it through selective breeding.

Oh, and BTW Russian scientists discovered that breeding silver foxes for their fur didn't work. When they tried to farm them they were to wild to co-operate so they decided to breed the most docile ones for their farms. Within three generations, the foxes, all from wild fox stock, developed spotted black and white coats and looked in all respects like domestic dogs. But they were docile.

Haven't read the book, but, if I understand the multiple universe theory, that's like God buying every single lottery ticket instead of playing dice.

Frank,

Yes! It is quite a bit like that :)

Elliot Temple

Plunge, here's the difference between microevolution and macroevolution (since you don't seem to understand it.)

Microevolution regards changes WITHIN a species; macroevolution regards changes EXTERNAL to a species, i.e. the creation of a new species (yep, I used the word "creation!")

Darwin proved microevolution. You can read all about it, I'm sure. He studied birds and how their certain characteristics suited them better for survival than other birds of the same species that did not possess those characteristics. Survival of the fittest, plain and simple.

Humans that are native to equatorial regions of the earth are darker skinned than those in more temperate climates. The pure evolutionist will tell you that their skin adapted over centuries to their environment. That is a big steaming pile of crap. The truth is that the lighter skinned people could not survive as easily in that climate. They migrated to cooler climates or died out. Survival of the fittest. Only a fool (example: Hitler) would ever dare suggest that black people and white people are a different species. The different races of people are the result of many many generations of breeding.

Yes, exactly the same as dogs. All the different varieties of dogs could logically have descended from two dogs. Just as all the different races of mankind could have. Don't you know anything about dominant and recessive traits? Of course with breeding there is also inherant danger. Inbreeding magnifies bad traits as well as the good ones. Great Danes are big, but they die young. Dalmations are deaf. All the result of a stagnation of macroevolution. But yes, all breeds of dog were realized by the selective breeding of subjects with particular traits.

Again, this is INTRA-species breeding - microevolution. Feel free to use the terms "breeding" and "microevolution" interchangably, just as you can use the terms "macroevolution" and "B.S." interchangeably.

There is NO scientific evidence that macroevolution has ever occured. Please, by all means present such evidence. You'd be doing what two centuries of evolutionists have failed to do.

Ligers ARE sterile, despite the fact that lions and tigers belong to the same genus. They are both cats. There is only one recorded instance of a tigon not being sterile. But when there's only one, there's no one for it to mate with, so... it might as well be sterile as far as creating a new species goes. But these are small examples - the exceptions to the rule - and even these cases are damning to the theory of macroevolution. For macroevolution to be viable as a theory, this cross breeding would have to be the rule, not the exception. Breed a lion with a giraffe; THEN I'll be impressed.

In the absence of viable crossbreeding, you'll have to have repeatable and reliably beneficial mutations to drive macroevolution. Again, mutations are rare. And non-harmful mutations are extremely rare within that subset. Beneficial mutations are nonexistant. Provide ONE example. Just one. Once you prove one single beneficial mutation, then you'll need to account for the trillions upon trillions of beneficial mutations it would have taken to produce the world as we know it.

While you're at it, please address my point about how many generations it would take for a lizard's "good leg" to become a bird's "good wing," being sure to explain how the in between iterations would have been able to survive in the wild with lame front apendages.

Please also explain the "step-wise" nature of the animal kingdom, and why there is no approximation of a continuum of intermediaries.

Also, please don't try to lecture me on thermodynamics. If you don't recognize the 2nd law of thermodynamics and it's implications, the you obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Entropy and Time's Arrow are pretty basic stuff. Order naturally tends to disorder. Heat diffuses. Go do some research. Go get an engineering degree from a (reputable) university like I did. Then once you understand it yourself, maybe you can explain it to others. Or to continue your metaphor, put up your dustpan and broom and go enroll in medical school.

So physics are against you (the 2nd law of thermodynamics has yet to be successfully addressed.) Mathematics is against you (the odds of a single entropic violation are infinitesimally small, and you'd have to be violating it around the clock for eons to even create one simple amino acid - not yet a protein, certainly not yet life - talk about a lottery that is rigged against you. Oh by the way, I have a degree in advanced applied mathematics as well.) Common sense is against you. Only your faith sustains you. (And it's misplaced.)

What comfort do you derive from trying so hard to believe in something so flawed?

"My point was that it doesn't matter how much you "fray" a scale or a pair of jeans or whatever, you cannot make a mutation that way."

Well sure, but then, no one other than you said so. The reason feathers and scales are considered similar is because they ARE similar: the biochemistry is remarkably similar.

"But selective breeding of any animal does not in any way prove natural evolution. It only proves that if a force outside the animal has a specific set of traits that it desires, then it can devise a plan to achieve it through selective breeding."

By selecting for particular traits. Which is exactly what happens in the wild when certain traits are non-randomly favored over others.

"Oh, and BTW Russian scientists discovered that breeding silver foxes for their fur didn't work. When they tried to farm them they were to wild to co-operate so they decided to breed the most docile ones for their farms. Within three generations, the foxes, all from wild fox stock, developed spotted black and white coats and looked in all respects like domestic dogs. But they were docile."

Yes, and excellent example of how a breeding pressure can alter a species. Though as usual you got the details of the story wrong (it was far more than three generations).

"What comfort do you derive from trying so hard to believe in something so flawed?"

Why would someone so obviously unfamiliar with what they are talking about think they have any way to judge whether something is flawed or not?

"Microevolution regards changes WITHIN a species; macroevolution regards changes EXTERNAL to a species, i.e. the creation of a new species (yep, I used the word "creation!")"

No biologist would be familiar with such an idea. Species are an arbitrary categorization that we use to organize what we find in the natural world, but in terms of actual biology, there is no meaningful distinction or barrier between one species and another: which is exactly what Darwin realized. This is most easily apparent in bacteria, where the difference between species is merely a degree of accumulation of genetic difference (they reproduce asexually). But it's also easy to see in things like ring species or the several instances of larger animal speciation observed within even a human's lifetime.

"Humans that are native to equatorial regions of the earth are darker skinned than those in more temperate climates. The pure evolutionist will tell you that their skin adapted over centuries to their environment. That is a big steaming pile of crap."

Unfortunately, it's also true.

"The truth is that the lighter skinned people could not survive as easily in that climate. They migrated to cooler climates or died out. Survival of the fittest. Only a fool (example: Hitler) would ever dare suggest that black people and white people are a different species."

They are the same species (even the same sub-species actually). You're the one trying to suggest that they are somehow two distinct types of people. Evolution demonstrates that they are all descended from a common ancestor. Genetics proves that this is so.

"The different races of people are the result of many many generations of breeding."

Yes.

"Yes, exactly the same as dogs. All the different varieties of dogs could logically have descended from two dogs. Just as all the different races of mankind could have. Don't you know anything about dominant and recessive traits?"

I'll bet I know a heck of a lot more than you do, actually. Enough to know that ancestral wolves, from which all modern dogs are descended, did not have, latent within them, any "recessive" genes that somehow concealed, say, a chiuaua within them. This isn't a matter of speculation: we can now sequence genomes directly and see.

"Of course with breeding there is also inherant danger. Inbreeding magnifies bad traits as well as the good ones. Great Danes are big, but they die young. Dalmations are deaf. All the result of a stagnation of macroevolution."

In the wild, breeding populations are rarely so small as to lead to interbreeding on the scale of domestic dogs.

"But yes, all breeds of dog were realized by the selective breeding of subjects with particular traits."

Right. But most of the traits that distinguish them are not present in either each other's genome nor in their ancestors. Where did those traits come from?

"There is NO scientific evidence that macroevolution has ever occured. Please, by all means present such evidence. You'd be doing what two centuries of evolutionists have failed to do."

I assume you've been to talkorigins already? If you are unconvinced by the ample evidence, then you are basically outside the mainstream of actual experts on this subject. What makes the evidence for macroevolution so powerful (though again, biologists rarely use that distinction and find no such great meaning in it) is that there are so many multiple cross-confirming lines of evidence that all coordinate. For instance, when we map out the genetic distance of one species to another in terms of the differences in their genomes, the dating and location information matches up with what the fossil record tells us about the distribution of their ancestors. Lo and behold, what we know about the geographic features of the past earth then matches up with THAT, matching the dates of various ancestral lineage splits with things like the separation of continents. What else could possibly explain all these matchups other than a branching ancestry? And that's just the start of the story. But if you haven't grasped the implications of the above, you should definately start there.

"Ligers ARE sterile, despite the fact that lions and tigers belong to the same genus. They are both cats. There is only one recorded instance of a tigon not being sterile. But when there's only one, there's no one for it to mate with, so..."

LOL, so how would you know whether or not it is sterile then? You're right though: it was tigons. My mistake.

"it might as well be sterile as far as creating a new species goes. But these are small examples - the exceptions to the rule - and even these cases are damning to the theory of macroevolution. For macroevolution to be viable as a theory, this cross breeding would have to be the rule, not the exception."

Nonsense. Species do not diversify via crossbreeding. They most often occur because of the geographic or otherwise separation of two breeding populations who then head in different directions, genetically.

What crossbreeding demonstrates is that some species separated only a short while ago and thus have genomes close enough to be roughly compatible. Some crossbreeds are sterile, some aren't, generally with genetic distance from the split of the two lines.

Again, it's easy to measure this sort of genetic relation directly, not unlike doing a paternity test.

"Breed a lion with a giraffe; THEN I'll be impressed."

If such a thing happened, it would DISPROVE, not prove, evolutionary theory. Giraffes and lions aren't even close: I don't believe they even have the same number of genes.

"In the absence of viable crossbreeding, you'll have to have repeatable and reliably beneficial mutations to drive macroevolution."

Mutations generally don't drive evolution (in the sense that the process waits around for a lucky mutation to come along), they are exploited by it insofar as it contributes to greater variation in a breeding population.

"Again, mutations are rare. And non-harmful mutations are extremely rare within that subset."

Again, you don't seem to know what you are talking about. Most mutations are neutral in regards to fitness, especially because they aren't expressed. But of those that have an affect, benefit/harm is based on circumstance, not some absolute count or scale.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mutations.html#boxhorn

"Beneficial mutations are nonexistant. Provide ONE example. Just one."

Ok, off the top of my head: E.C.C. Lin et al "Evolution of an Escherichia coli Protein with Increased Resistance to Oxidative Stress" in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Sept. 1997, 1453-1462

And note that in terms of evolution, what was observed in this study, the evolution of a new protein shape that made the bacteria resistant to oxygen damage, was so routine and ordinary that the article wasn't even published in an evolutionary theory journal. If beneficial mutation was really some amazingly uncommon impossible odds things like you claim, a study like this would have been front page news. Instead it was a boring, everyday thing in a biochem journal which was more concerned with what the protein did than the fact that it evolved via the natural selection of a new mutation. If you try to claim that the mutation was already there and everything else was just weeded out, I'll laugh. You do know what a bacteria is, right?

Of course, there are countless more examples I could cite just from skimming through any relevant journal in just this year, but you seem to regard your own failure to even LOOK as evidence for non-existence. Have you ever even READ a bio-chem journal? Ever? Please be honest.

"Once you prove one single beneficial mutation, then you'll need to account for the trillions upon trillions of beneficial mutations it would have taken to produce the world as we know it."

Sure, but what is the big deal exactly. This is exactly why natural selection works: it keeps what proves useful and tosses out what fails to prove useful (at least at the time).

"Please also explain the "step-wise" nature of the animal kingdom, and why there is no approximation of a continuum of intermediaries."

If you'd explain what you're talking about, I might be able to explain it. The only thing that separates our current observation of some living group of animals from others is that their ancestors and potential lines of cousins have died out.

"Also, please don't try to lecture me on thermodynamics. If you don't recognize the 2nd law of thermodynamics and it's implications, the you obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Entropy and Time's Arrow are pretty basic stuff. Order naturally tends to disorder."

Again, that's not the second law of thermodynamics. You aren't going to find a reputable scientist who agrees with you that the 2nd law somehow magically makes evolution (a process which has little at all to do with closed systems arranging themselves into order) impossible. Tell me, where exactly does evolution say that any system will use or retain more energy than it loses?

"Heat diffuses."

That's closer, but it's still appalling that you are so misinformed.

"Go do some research. Go get an engineering degree from a (reputable) university like I did. Then once you understand it yourself, maybe you can explain it to others."

Your engineering degree failed you if it taught you that the 2nd law prevents spontaneous order. I suppose this means that ice cubes don't exist?

Also amusing on this front is that you don't seem to realize that the 2nd law _cannot_ be overcome: it is never seen to be violated in practice. It doesn't matter if there is "intelligence" involved or not. If you claim that the 2nd law prevents order coming from disorder, then building a car from spare parts should also be physically impossible. Of course, that's not what the 2nd law says anyway, so there is no problem. All that matters to the second law is that entropy increases SOMEWHERE, not everywhere. If it couldn't decrease locally even as it increases overall, most chemical reactions could never take place!

"Mathematics is against you (the odds of a single entropic violation are infinitesimally small, and you'd have to be violating it around the clock for eons to even create one simple amino acid - not yet a protein, certainly not yet life - talk about a lottery that is rigged against you."

You haven't gotten one thing right since we began this discussion. You are clueless as to what the 2nd law says, have no idea what speciation is, and you seem to think that evolution is all about crossbreeding. You really think I'm going to be impressed because an anonymous person on the internet claims to have two "advanced" degrees?

Please, please try to explain how the formation of an amino acid violates the 2nd law. I can't wait to laugh at you trying to prove that something that happens all the time, everyday, all around, and INSIDE you is physically impossible.

Well, since you've never heard of the concept of macroevolution, I'll refer you to your own source. While I disagree with its conclusions, it does at least describe the differences between micro/macro.

Note also the logical fallacy in their statement:

Antievolutionists argue that there has been no proof of macroevolutionary processes. However, synthesists claim that the same processes that cause within-species changes of the frequencies of alleles can be extrapolated to between species changes, so this argument fails unless some mechanism for preventing microevolution causing macroevolution is discovered.

What a crock! Synthesists "claim" (where is the justification for this claim?) that this can happen and then challenge their opponents to disprove it. It is not possible to prove a negative. The burden of proof is on the systhesists. You must provide evidence for your statement rather than "claiming" no evidence exists to disprove your statement. Therefore I say it again: there has been no evidence to support the theory of macroevolution.

You missed the point about the skin color statement. I say that is a prime example of microevolution at work. Inward diversification. You basically claim I am wrong and then repeat exactly what I am saying.

You also make this claim: "Species do not diversify via crossbreeding. They most often occur because of the geographic or otherwise separation of two breeding populations who then head in different directions, genetically."

I agree completely! Another fine example of microevolution. You still have not made a case for macroevolution. What you have done is show how the differences between African elephants and Indian elephants came about. Again, microevolution. The in-breeding of certain traits.

You say this as well: "If you'd explain what you're talking about, I might be able to explain it. The only thing that separates our current observation of some living group of animals from others is that their ancestors and potential lines of cousins have died out."

What you have NOT done is explain to me how a lizard is the ancient ancestor of all birds. You've had two chances already, and you've blatantly ignored that point. Please address it, or at the very least acknowledge the question. How did the intermediaries survive, and where is the fossil evidence for the existence of such creatures? You say that their "ancestors and potential lines of cousins died out." Okay, where is the fossil evidence for these lines of cousins?

I believe I misspoke about mutation. I can admit when I'm wrong. What I should have said is "provide an example of a beneficial and viable mutation in an organism that reproduces sexually." Obviously a mutated organism that reproduces by mitosis can still reproduce. My mistake.

Regarding amino acids, of COURSE they are produced every day - by living organisms. I'm talking about origins of life here. I'm talking about that keystone of macroevolutionary origins when the very first amino acid supposedly spontaneously formed. And how it magically formed a protein. Which magically came alive and formed a living cell. Et cetera.

What are the odds?

Honestly, have you considered that? What are the odds that this just happened? The odds that any step of this process happened spontaneously in the absense of pre-existing life are mind-boggling. Each step decreases the odds exponentially. You can make amino acids in a lab. No doubt. You can even make proteins in a lab. You still cannot create life.

What is the physiological difference in a living body and one that has been dead for one minute? All the parts are still there. But life is made up of more than its constituent parts.

What are the odds that your eyeball was an accident? Why, in the "evolutionary process" did that happen? How astounding! Suddenly, a creature at some point just happened to develop at organ that allowed it to process the spectrum of light through perfectly shaped lenses (two of them, stereoscopically for depth perception), encode this electrically, and send it to a brain that deciphered this and translated it into useful information. That's amazing. Unbelieveable, really.

What are the odds that all the life on earth descended from those tiny one celled creatures? That all the unique characteristics of life are the result of happenstance? If you step back from the details and look at the whole picture, it is awfully hard to believe, isn't it?

Occam's Razor states that "one should increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything." In other words, Keep It Simple Stupid. The simplest explanation is usually the most likely.

If you ask me how everything came into being, I'll tell you "God did it."

If I ask you, it would take you years to explain it, and you would contradict yourself several times in the course of your explanation.

Do I know all the details? Nope. Neither do you.

Can I prove that God created everything? No. Can you prove that evolution happened and everything is the result of mindless processes? No. Certain things are beyond scientific proof. Even if you are able to prove that macroevolution COULD have happened (and no incontrovertible proof exists), you still can never prove that is what DID happen. Science is not a panacea - it is weakened by the fact that it requires observation of the event. Macroevolution has never been witnessed firsthand by mankind.

That means that we each have to believe what we believe based on faith.

It takes a lot more faith to believe in macroevolution than to believe in God.

Sorry! That should be "one should NOT increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything."

"Well, since you've never heard of the concept of macroevolution, I'll refer you to your own source."

Which agrees with me that the significance you try to give the term just isn't there.

"Note also the logical fallacy in their statement:"

Stating a claim you disagree with, and then ignoring the evidence provided to support it, is not a logical fallacy on my part.

"What a crock! Synthesists "claim" (where is the justification for this claim?)"

This is a good start.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

"that this can happen and then challenge their opponents to disprove it. It is not possible to prove a negative."

Oh yeah? Prove it! (You walked right into that one!)

Of course, that's not the issue. There is plenty of evidence for universal common descent. Your burden is not to prove a negative, but to explain away all that evidence, especially the fact that it all cross confirms with itself in fine detail (something that accident or mistake could not be expected to achieve). How is it that chimps just so happen to share EXACTLY the same cytochrome c sequence with us when there are litterally 2.3 x 10 to the 93rd power possible functional sequences that it could just as easily be? How come the degree of difference in these sequences (found in all life) just so happens to match up with the tree of common descent that fossil evidence paints? And that's just one single gene outof thousands and thousands of ones already studied sequenced and compared across species.

"The burden of proof is on the systhesists. You must provide evidence for your statement rather than "claiming" no evidence exists to disprove your statement."

You've missed the issue. Scientists have plenty of evidence of common descent. They have evidence of how new species arise and how beneficial genetic and morphological change happens. Every piece of evidence confirms that this process is what accounts for common descent. Then you come along and claim that there is some magical unknown barrier that blocks genetic and morphological changes from accumulating too much. This is YOUR claim, for which you must provide some evidence of. You claim that there is a barrier. There isn't any evidence of one. Your only argument seems to be that cats and dogs look slightly different (and the differences, however much importance we place on them psychologically, are actually very slight genetically and morphologically) so they can't possibly be related at any point. Of course, the same baseless argument was made about the different human races once.

"You missed the point about the skin color statement. I say that is a prime example of microevolution at work."

That's not what you implied. You claimed that there were some people who had light skin and some who had dark and they somehow sorted themselves out by climate. But that's contradicted by the fact that all humans share common ancestors.

"Inward diversification. You basically claim I am wrong and then repeat exactly what I am saying."

There was a time when people claimed that African Americans and whites were different, unrelated peoples. The argument was no different than the claim that different species cannot be related: they LOOK sort of different, so how can they be related! But evolution and most importantly, genetic evidence proves that they are related. But the EXACT SAME METHOD of molecular genetics shows the same thing for species: just as we can map out family ancestry within humans, this map continues on into other species of animals as well. Why is the technique valid for inter-human relations but suddenly meaningless once we use it outside of our own species?

"You also make this claim: "Species do not diversify via crossbreeding. They most often occur because of the geographic or otherwise separation of two breeding populations who then head in different directions, genetically."
I agree completely!"

You must be kidding. Before you said that the fact that crossbreeding is rare proves that "macroevolution" is a joke. But as a I said, what the variable reproductive success of crossbreeding of species shows us is that species gradually become incompatible with more and more distantly related species: there isn't some hard and fast "kind" line that strictly divides them up.

"Another fine example of microevolution. You still have not made a case for macroevolution. What you have done is show how the differences between African elephants and Indian elephants came about. Again, microevolution. The in-breeding of certain traits."

That's odd, because African and Indian elephants are different species. I thought that couldn't happen across species?

"What you have NOT done is explain to me how a lizard is the ancient ancestor of all birds."

What do you mean how? By sexual reproduction and evolution. Genetic studies show that they are related, and even show how. Natural selection explains the mechanism. And the fossil record shows how the basic transition worked mophologically.

"How did the intermediaries survive,"

I don't understand the thrust of the question. Why wouldn't they survive? You appear to believe that there are only two ways for an animal to survive: either as four legged lizard or a winged bird. But this is clearly not so. Even living today there are any number of animals that make use of intermediary morphologies that include leaping and gliding and sailing. The fossil record seems to reflect all sorts of different lifestyles in this particular transition.

"and where is the fossil evidence for the existence of such creatures?"

This is trivially easy:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.html#morphological_intermediates_ex1

"I believe I misspoke about mutation. I can admit when I'm wrong. What I should have said is "provide an example of a beneficial and viable mutation in an organism that reproduces sexually." Obviously a mutated organism that reproduces by mitosis can still reproduce. My mistake."

Okay. Again, trivially easy. Even if I limit things to recent human history alone, it's simple to rattle off a whole bunch right off the top of my head. Lactose tolerance is a beneficial mutation that allows people that have it to continue to digest milk proteins into adulthood (if you are a caucasian you might take it for granted, but a majority of people on the planet don't have this ability). Apoprotein A-I is a recent mutation native to a small Italian community that greatly reduces the risk of death from heart attack and stroke. If you want to get into the countless observed examples in animals like mice, rats, fruit flies, and so forth, we can.

"Regarding amino acids, of COURSE they are produced every day - by living organisms."

So? You're the one that claimed that their formation violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. I shouldn't have to inform such a big expert on the subject, but the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to EVERYTHING, living things included. If the 2nd law somehow rules their formation out in nature, then it rules it out everywhere. Period.

"I'm talking about origins of life here. I'm talking about that keystone of macroevolutionary origins when the very first amino acid supposedly spontaneously formed."

First of all, abiogenesis is not the same thing as evolution. Evolution requires reproduction with limited heredity. The two are very different and indepedant subjects.

Second of all, animo acids can be formed by particular chemical reactions. I don't know what you mean by "spontaneously" but all that is required is the right particular conditions. There is every reason to believe that the early earth had many such relevant conditions, but no one claims to know exactly what and what various chemical mechanisms might have been around as well. The question is whether there was a particular mechanism towards self-replicators that eventually became life.

"And how it magically formed a protein. Which magically came alive and formed a living cell. Et cetera."

Again, you're going to have to read up on chemistry and the various hypotheses about how these sorts of reactions work. Suffice to say, they aren't magical. Abiogenesis isn't like evolution: there isn't any single known mechanism and there isn't much evidence to work with to guide our examination. It's still mostly speculative exactly what we'd be looking for. But there's nothing that makes it implausible per se.

"What are the odds?"

Nobody knows, or knows how to know them. But just so you know, you can't calculate them by any simple multiplication of odds.

"Honestly, have you considered that?"

Sure.

"What are the odds that this just happened? The odds that any step of this process happened spontaneously in the absense of pre-existing life are mind-boggling."

It only looks deliberately step by step in hindsight, considering the very _particular_ end result. In process, however, what we are considering are mechanisms that catalyze others.

"Each step decreases the odds exponentially. You can make amino acids in a lab. No doubt. You can even make proteins in a lab. You still cannot create life."

Why not? Again, what barrier is there that you are claiming exists that makes it implausible?

And hey, didn't you say that creating amino acids violated the 2nd law of thermodynamics? How would being "in the lab" suddenly make it possible? Can we violate the 1st law of thermodynamics "in the lab" too?

"What is the physiological difference in a living body and one that has been dead for one minute?"

The second isn't functioning in a way that sustains the life of its constituent cells.

Of course, whether it stays that way depends on what happenes next. We can often very easily repair and revive a body that has been dead for a minute. If we leave it alone, however, it will likely stay dead.

"All the parts are still there. But life is made up of more than its constituent parts."

Are you saying that when a car breaks down, its not because of some damage or failure, but because it's spirit has departed?

"What are the odds that your eyeball was an accident? Why, in the "evolutionary process" did that happen?"

Almost certainly because the chemical processes within a cell are sensitive to light, and that effect was first exploited by some minor mutation, and then refined over time. This particular morphological sequence is not that hard to imagine, and has been done many times, including by Darwin. All the potential intermediaries can even be found in modern animals.

"How astounding! Suddenly, a creature at some point just happened to develop at organ that allowed it to process the spectrum of light through perfectly shaped lenses (two of them, stereoscopically for depth perception), encode this electrically, and send it to a brain that deciphered this and translated it into useful information. That's amazing. Unbelieveable, really."

Well in that telling, yes. But according to how we think mammalian eyes in particular evolved, however, there were many many intermediate forms that were nowhere near as powerful as our modern eyes but were still useful for what they needed to be.

"What are the odds that all the life on earth descended from those tiny one celled creatures?"

Well, given all the evidence for common descent, near 100%. It's possible that there are some as yet unknown creatures which are not related that appeared somewhere else, but we haven't found evidence of any on this planet.

"That all the unique characteristics of life are the result of happenstance? If you step back from the details and look at the whole picture, it is awfully hard to believe, isn't it?"

What does belief have to do with it? This is about the evidence. And happenstance is only one tiny element of the process in question. If you really think that evolution works via mere happenstance, then you don't understand it.

"Occam's Razor states that "one should NOT increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything." In other words, Keep It Simple Stupid. The simplest explanation is usually the most likely."

No, the Razor asks us not to invent extra explanatory entities without need when we can explain things without them. That's an objective measure of parsimony, not the subjective one of what seems "simplest" to you personally. When explaining how the stock market works, "magic elves do it" might seem simpler, but from the perspective of the Razor it is not because it adds an extra entity to the explanation without any need to do so. It's also wrong. That's why "it seems simpler to me" isn't what the Razor advises.

"If you ask me how everything came into being, I'll tell you "God did it.""

That's not an explanation though. It's just putting a name onto the phrase "it was done in an unknown way by something." Nor is it falsifiable (i.e. it doesn't really tell you anything that you could confirm or disconfirm about anything). If you ask me who killed O.J.'s wife, would you really accept "God did it" as a meaningful answer?

"If I ask you, it would take you years to explain it, and you would contradict yourself several times in the course of your explanation."

My explanation is based on examinations of the relevant facts, and that's what the purpose of explanation is all about: to explain the fine detail of evidence. Your "God did it" can't do that in ANY respect whatsoever.

"Do I know all the details? Nope. Neither do you."

Can you explain in evidential detail how it is that most modern mammals have inferior color vision? Can you explain why the fossil record matches the genetic record? Can you predict, using genetic evidence to date the common ancestor, in which layer and part of the world to look for transitional fossils between land mammals and whales, and then find some amazing specimins fitting that description. Nope.

"Can I prove that God created everything? No. Can you prove that evolution happened and everything is the result of mindless processes? No."

I can prove that evolution happened and what mechanism caused it and mediated the process. As to whether "everything" is the result of mindless processes, that's a philosophical question outside of the domain of science. Science deals with specific issues for which there is evidence that can settle specific questions. All science can say is that all known life on earth is related by common descent and that the process that caused this diversity was evolution. As to whether there was a God or not involved, there is no evidence on this question and hence nothing much to say from a scientific perspective.

"Certain things are beyond scientific proof. Even if you are able to prove that macroevolution COULD have happened (and no incontrovertible proof exists), you still can never prove that is what DID happen."

If you believe that, then you must believe that the justice system cannot use forensic evidence to establish guilt. It's exactly the same sort of evidential reasons that undergirds both forms of proof.

"Science is not a panacea - it is weakened by the fact that it requires observation of the event."

Evidence and observation are not the same thing. Indeed, between evidence and single witness observation, physical evidence is far more certain and less biased.

Science is empowered as a tool for knowledge by the fact that it limits itself to evidence. That sets a very high standard.

"Macroevolution has never been witnessed firsthand by mankind."

If you mean speciation, then yes, we have observed it during recorded lifetimes. But more importantly, we have reams of interlocking evidence regarding the common descent of life on this planet. One doesn't need to "witness" an event to prove that it happened (particularly silly when the events in question take centuries to complete), and indeed in many cases extensive natural evidence is far more powerful and more certain than emphemeral historical events. The age of the earth, for instance, can be reliably dated regardless of whether anyone was around to witness all roughly 4.5 billion years of its history. We can do this because the many many different independant methods for dating the earth all agree and cross-correlate.

"That means that we each have to believe what we believe based on faith."

I prefer argument from evidence over faith. Nice try though.

You know I just realized that you seem not to know that birds are related to the two-legged dinosaurs in particular, not just to all lizards. Dinos were up and running around on two legs long before their upper appendages would have become useful for things like stabilization in jumps and gliding.

The amazing and unhoped for find T-rex flesh that was recently discovered happened to contain yet more evidence of this: the bone contained a layer of tissue that is today only found in birds, among all living animals. That's yet mroe confirmation that birds and dinosaurs share the same close lineage compared with other forms of life.

Plunge stated:

There is plenty of evidence for universal common descent. Your burden is not to prove a negative, but to explain away all that evidence, especially the fact that it all cross confirms with itself in fine detail (something that accident or mistake could not be expected to achieve).

Plunge, are you saying that none of what we see could have happened by accident or mistake? Are you suggesting that (*gasp*) it might be the result of intelligent design?

Because intelligent design is a theory that is no less credible than evolution (far more credible, IMHO.)

You say the genetic similarities point to common ancestry. The evidence however in no way rules out that they might have had a common creator and parallel descendency. People can look at the same evidence and draw whatever conclusion they wish. You can't prove universal common descendency - you can only say that the signs point to it. But those same signs can also point to a common creator. And no, I can't prove that either.

This is why I say that we must take such things by faith.

Here's a bit more on intelligent design:

Is the Sears Tower a naturally occuring structure? Of course not. It was obviously designed and constructed by people. You can research the names of the engineers involved, and even get first-hand accounts of its construction as proof that it is manmade. It is too highly ordered to have come into being naturally without the imposition of an intelligent will. Only a fool would argue with that.

Is Stonehenge a naturally occuring formation? No. How do we know? We have no evidence pointing to its origins. We have little if any evidence of its builders. But it is easy to see that it was designed intelligently. Our experience tells us that nature does not produce such things on its own. It is perfectly aligned to the solstice. I'm pretty sure that no credible scientists have ever claimed that Stonehenge was a naturally occuring structure.

The same can be said of the pyramids at Giza. Little record of their construction exists, but there is no doubt that they are manmade and not naturally occuring.

Even though these structures are built out of naturally occuring material, their ordered arrangement is unarguably unnatural.

This concept is not a mystery. Even children understand this. When people look at the Great Wall of China, they know instantly that somebody built it. It didn't just happen.

Outside intelligence CAN and DOES impose order upon a disordered system. That's not a violation of entropy, because entropy presupposes a closed system. An imposed outside intelligence can increase order.

While no evolutionist would claim that Stonehenge is a naturally occuring fluke of nature, they will still ask us to believe that life as we know it IS a fluke of nature. The human body is so much more complicated than Stonehenge or the pyramids (by many many orders of magnitude), but we are supposed to believe that life originated as a single-celled organism and evolved naturally into the diverse spectrum of life we have today. How very ludicrous!

It seems incredibly foolish to consider that there is no intelligent designer involved in life. Evolution therefore makes little sense, and is "trying too hard" to define a paradigm that excludes God.

The complexity and diversity of life is "something that accident or mistake could not be expected to achieve."

"Plunge, are you saying that none of what we see could have happened by accident or mistake?"

You truly are clueless. Yes, it is no mistake that the evidence all points to the same conclusion. It is no mistake because common descent is true, and that truth provides a coordination of evidence that could not exist if our interpretation of the evidence were in error (because then, in addition to wrong answers, we'd get all sorts of DIFFERENT wrong answers to various questions and dates and details and so on).

"The evidence however in no way rules out that they might have had a common creator and parallel descendency."

There is no reason for the cytocrome c protein sequence to be most similar in creatures that happen to be most closely related according to fossil records. If anything, one would think that the sequences would be most similar among animals with similar lifestyles if a creator had intentionally made them so to play particular functions: similar tools for similar lifestyles, whether they are closely related by apparent common descent or not. And yet that is not what we find. Instead, we find a forensic history of the earth that lays out a steady succession of species undergoing morphological change.

"People can look at the same evidence and draw whatever conclusion they wish."

Only if they aren't scientists, and hence aren't really interested in finding actual answers other than the ones they want. Because if particular evidence doesn't fully resolve the issue, what an honest person does is KEEP testing, keep asking questions. They don't just throw up their hands and yell "well, that's it, nothing more to know!"

Your "out" is basically a joke. It's no better than a criminal claiming that, despite all the evidence that he murdered someone in broad daylight, with his fingerprints all over the knife, a timetable of established events, and countless other forsensic evidence, that he's innocent because a magical genie could have faked everything. That's you grand evasion? You have got to be kidding. No one would take that kind of lame excuse in any other venue, so why when it comes to science?

"You can't prove universal common descendency - you can only say that the signs point to it. But those same signs can also point to a common creator."

How do they point to a common creator in any way whatsoever? Why would we find any of these sorts of patterns if a creator had created these species separately? Why would we find a fossil record that clearly establishes morphological transitions with new species coming to be and old ones going extinct? Why would all the relationships fit together in a very particular way, creating a single "true" tree of life?

Or are you saying that the intelligent designer is a grand liar: a faker of evidence?

Genetic tests would reveal that you are your mother's son. But apparently, according to you, this could all be just an illusion: God could have simply happened to create you and the woman you happened to grow up with inexplicably with the right genetic similarities. It's all based on faith!

"Even though these structures are built out of naturally occuring material, their ordered arrangement is unarguably unnatural."

This is an exceedinly weak argument given that stones do not reproduce or chemically react in any way to produce complex interactions, feedback loops, or selection pressures. No to mention that both Stonehenge and Giza and other such creationist examples bear unmistakale signs of human tools and handiwork, as well as arrangements that match human psychology. Where is the analouge in biology? Nowhere.

"While no evolutionist would claim that Stonehenge is a naturally occuring fluke of nature, they will still ask us to believe that life as we know it IS a fluke of nature. The human body is so much more complicated than Stonehenge or the pyramids (by many many orders of magnitude), but we are supposed to believe that life originated as a single-celled organism and evolved naturally into the diverse spectrum of life we have today. How very ludicrous!"

I guess it might be if you are basically ignorant of biology and think that stones are like organic chemicals and can be expected to act the same and have the same origins.

"Evolution therefore makes little sense, and is "trying too hard" to define a paradigm that excludes God."

Evolution neither includes nor excludes God. It includes evidence and explains it using other evidence. The key word, again, is evidence.

Plenty of evolutionary scientists believe in God. Kenneth Miller is a devout Catholic. The idea that he only accepts the evidence of evolution because he is trying to disprove God is absurd.