My thoughts on evolution and Darwinism

[Seymour Flops]

Seymour Flops

Evolution is 100 percent fact
It has been proven by genes to the fossil record etc

Give me the three best proofs of Darwinism in the fossil record and how they prove Darwinism.

 

[Quasar44]

Seymour Flops
I am typing on a tiny phone and can only be brief

The fossil record 100 percent shows a simple easy progression from simpler organism to more complex ones

special fossils have been found to show the transition period from one species to the next .
We have exact fossils that show both fish and amphibian parts in the same organism

Wake up to the last 200 yrs

 

[Seymour Flops]

Seymour Flops
I am typing on a tiny phone and can only be brief

The fossil record 100 percent shows a simple easy progression from simpler organism to more complex ones

special fossils have been found to show the transition period from one species to the next .
We have exact fossils that show both fish and amphibian parts in the same organism

Wake up to the last 200 yrs

I understand about typing on the phone.

When you get to a desktop, or laptop, go ahead and give me in your own words the three best proofs of Darwinism.

Then post the special fossils on the thread entitled "show me the fossils" and explain how they prove Darwinism.

Just repeating, "It's been proved!' is not proof.

 

[Quasar44]

Seymour Flops

Tiktaalik - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

An amazing find of a cross over fish and amphibian species

 

[Seymour Flops]

Seymour Flops

Tiktaalik - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

An amazing find of a cross over fish and amphibian species

Suppose that tiktaalik really is a transitional fossil. How does that prove Darwinism?

 

[Quasar44]

Seymour Flops
It proves evolution that species can change and evolve into completely different ones- if given the right circumstances

 

[Hollie]

Suppose that tiktaalik really is a transitional fossil. How does that prove Darwinism?

One transitional fossil would not prove anything. The abundance of transitional fossils along with the all the other supporting evidence from all the other fields of the physical sciences support the theory.

It’s obvious you are not someone who has even a casual understanding of the fossil record. That’s pretty typical for creationers. Are you aware of the evidence of transitional fossils at all? Or did you just accept what you read from charlatans at the Disco’tute, trying to save souls, wrote on a website?

ID’iot creationism's anti-evolutionary agenda is simply devoid of facts. This is why the creationers present no positive support for special, godly creation. They have none.

There are transitional, or intermediate fossils to be observed in every major museum of natural history, and most minor ones as well. There are more in warehouses than there is floor space to display.

 

[Hollie]

Overall, a nice overview of the retrograde ideology that has morphed over time as the fraudulent attempt to put science under a burqa of religious fundamentalism has imploded.

Intelligent Design Creationism: Fraudulent Science.

Creationism and Intelligent Design are religiously motivated pseudoscientific notions that threaten the inegrity of science.

www.lockhaven.edu

Introduction.​

There are various forms of fake science, bad science, and perverted science. History has seen many come, and decline, but none ever seem to die. The ideas of flat earth, hollow earth, astrology, alchemy and perpetual motion have supporters even today. These are interesting examples of the human ability to hold to an idea even without supportive evidence, and even in the face of contrary evidence. They, however, pose little threat to science, which simply ignores them and goes about its work.

A newer pseudoscience arose, first called "creationism" or "creation science", which tried to impose the literal interpretation of Biblical accounts into science, and into the schools. This movement had considerable public support amongst fundamentalist Christians. Scientists generally ignored it as irrelevant to their work. In recent years a movement called "intelligent design" (ID) has been promoted by a handful of people who write books aimed at non-scientists. These authors claim that intelligent design is not a religious idea, but the public speeches of some of them reveal that their goal is to get "God back into science and into school classrooms". Creationists, having largely failed in their efforts, lend their support to intelligent design, as perhaps the best they can get—for now.

 

[frigidweirdo]

I've been criticised on this forum for arguing with other posters about Darwinism while not taking a stance by stating some replacement for Darwinism. So here are my thoughts:

1) There is evidence of a designer in life on Earth. That evidence is what reknowned Darwinist Richard Dawkins calls "appearance of design."

2) I have no idea what this designer is like. I don't describe the designer as "God" because I don't describe the designer at all.

I sometimes refer to a hypothetical designer as "the flying spaghetti monster" for the sake of debating whether certain facts are proof of Darwism or could also fit a design model.

3) I have no quarrel with those who reject the idea of a designer. I'm fine with other opinions differing from my own.

So long as there is no bullying of non-believers in Darwinism, I don't see why any debate about origins of species need be contentious.

5) evolution and Darwinism are two different ideas. It appears that the designer used evolution as the method to realise the design.

I hope that is sufficient explanation. I'm willing to answer rational questions or challenges to those thoughts.

What "evidence" is there of a "designer"?

 

[Seymour Flops]

Seymour Flops
It proves evolution that species can change and evolve into completely different ones- if given the right circumstances

So nothing about Darwinian "natural selection" being the driver?

Then we do not disagree. I don't know if you read my OP for this thread, in which I lay out my thoughts on evolution and Darwinism, but that's a good place to start.

 

[ding]

What "evidence" is there of a "designer"?

You mean besides an unnatural universe being hardwired to produce life and intelligence popping into existence being created from nothing?

 

[ding]

What "evidence" is there of a "designer"?

These are primary conditions for the existence of life in the universe.

1. The universe being created from unequal amounts of matter and anti-matter.
2. Proton being exactly as plus-charged as electrons are minus-charged. If the proton and electron did not possess exactly the same electric charge, no matter would aggregate and no life would exist.
3. The mass difference between electrons and the nucleus and the distance between the nucleus and electrons. If the proton and neutron did not have enormously greater mass than the electron and the electron were closer to the nucleus, all matter would be fluid and no life would exist.
4. Of the 92 natural elements, ninety-nine percent of the living matter we know is composed of just four: hydrogen (H), oxygen (O), nitrogen (N), and carbon (C). These same elements interact to generate the light of its star.
5. Between four and zero degrees centigrade, where water freezes, water expands, so rapidly that the ice that forms is less dense than liquid water. The complete hydrogen bonding among the water molecules in ice holds them more widely spaced than in liquid water, so ice floats. If water behaved like virtually everything else, and continued to contract on cooling, then the increasingly dense water would constantly be sinking to the bottom, and freezing would begin at the bottom, not as now at the top, and would end by freezing the water solidly. A really large mass of ice takes forever to melt, even at higher temperatures. If ice did not float, it is hard to see how any life could survive a cold spell. On any planet in the universe, if a freeze occured even once in many millions of years, that would probably be enough to block the rise of life, and to kill any life that had arisen.
6. Finally, we have a cosmic principle: To have such a universe as this requires an extraordinary balance between two great cosmic forces: that of dispersion (expansion), powered by the Big Bang, and that of aggregation, powered by gravitation. If the forces of expansion were dominant, that would yield an isotropically dispersed universe lacking local clusters, galaxies or planetary systems; all the matter would be flying apart, and there would be no large solid bodies, hence no place for life. If, on the contrary, gravitation were dominant, the initial expansion produced by the Big Bang would have slowed up and come to an end, followed by a universal collapse, perhaps in preparation for the next Big Bang. There would be no time for life to arise, or it would be quickly destroyed.

We live in a universe in which it has just lately been realized that those two forces are in exact balance, so that the universe as a whole is expanding wherever one looks, everything very distant is going away from us, but locally there are so-called local groups and clusters, where whole clusters of galaxies are held together by gravitation. Our own relatively small cluster contains, in addition to the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy (M31). It is very much like our galaxy, but a little smaller, and there is also a still smaller galaxy, all part of our local group. Most of you have probably heard that we measure the expansion of the universe by the so-called red shift. The further one looks out into space, the redder the light is, compared to the same sources on earth. That is interpeted as an expression of the Doppler Effect, and taken to mean that the more distant an astronomical body, the faster it is receding from us. But the first such color shift ever to be discovered, by the astronomer Slipher back in 1912, was not a red shift by a blue shift. He was looking at our sister galaxy, Andromeda, and observed a blue shift because, far from receding, the Andromeda galaxy is coming toward us at about 125 miles per second. It is just this exact balance between the steady expansion of the universe as a whole and its stability locally that affords both enormous reaches of time and countless sites for the development of life.

I have here only sampled briefly an argument that extends much further. The nub of that argument is that our universe possesses a remarkably detailed constellation of properties, and as it happens, it is just that constellation that breeds life. It takes no great intelligence or imagination to conceive of other universes, indeed any number of them, each of which might be perfectly good, stable universes, but lifeless.

How did it happen that, with what seem to be so many other options, our universe came out just as it did? From our own self‑centered point of view, that is the best way to make a universe: But what I want to know is, how did the universe find that out?

It may be objected that the question would not arise if we were not here to ask it. Yet here we are, and strangely insistent on asking that kind of question. Perhaps that indeed is the answer: That this is a life‑breeding universe precisely in order eventually to bring forth creatures that ask and attempt to answer such questions, so that through them the universe can come not only to be, but to be known; indeed can come to know itself.

George Wald: Life and Mind in the Universe

 

[Seymour Flops]

What "evidence" is there of a "designer"?

The apparent design is the evidence of a designer.

Given that, it is up to doubters of design to prove their case.

Or at least to provide some evidence that their doubts are anything more than wishful thinking.

 

[ding]

The apparent design is the evidence of a designer.

Given that, it is up to doubters of design to prove their case.

Or at least to provide some evidence that their doubts are anything more than wishful thinking.

See post #52.

 

[Hollie]

The apparent design is the evidence of a designer.

Given that, it is up to doubters of design to prove their case.

Or at least to provide some evidence that their doubts are anything more than wishful thinking.

That is the typically ignorant comment from the Flat Earth’ers

For the creationers:

You cannot require doubters of your creationer gods to disprove your nonsense claims. You are establishing a fallacious standard. If you can demand, "my claim cannot be disproven” but not demand that the asserter prove there actually is reason to accept a claim, then anyone can counter your demand using your own standard: Thus, I do have proof disproving your false claim, prove that I do not.

See? You have established that "prove it isn't" is a viable standard, and I am merely accepting your standards and playing it right back at you. I cannot be held to task for this, since if it is okay for you to have such a standard, I can have such a standard as well.


Therefore, it must be the asserter of all positive (i.e., such and such exists) premises to prove their assertion. Why do you believe your nonsense assertion of an alleged supernatural entity is true when you cannot provide any shred of evidence?

Pass that on to your pals at the Flat Earth Society.

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

The apparent design is the evidence of a designer.

Apparent?

Wow, that's some heavy proof.

 

[Seymour Flops]

Apparent?

Wow, that's some heavy proof.

The apparent design means that the burden of proof is on those claiming some other theory not involving design, but random processes.

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

The apparent design means that the burden of proof is on those claiming some other theory not involving design, but random processes.

Apparent design isn't proof.
Prove the design.

 

[Seymour Flops]

Apparent design isn't proof.
Prove the design.

No need.

I'm not trying to convince you to believe that life is designed. Whatever floats your boat is fine with me. I don't insult people who don't believe as I do, and I don't insist that their tax dollars be spent in public schools to dissuade their children from agreeing with them.

If you are sure that life evolved through Darwinian natural selection, you must have proof. Please present it.

If your proof is some version of "everyone says so," why just say so. No shame in that.

If you are honest about it.

 

[Hollie]

Apparent design isn't proof.
Prove the design.

Flat Earthers say “apparent” is proof.

You’re dealing with a youngster who is doing distance learning but not logged in to his class lessons.