Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Time For Class Proving Evolution

You got the name dropping thing down solid. Does not make your arguments any better. But hey!, you are good for a laugh if not for nothing.

Thanks for the correction. I have had trouble spelling at least since the fourth grade.

I read his book and was fasinated by it. I especially liked the part about him saying the accumulation of mutations in humans matches the exponintial decare rate of humans' life spans from about 900 down to about 100 year life expectancy.

The idea that he is no longer respected is just like when I used to come up with ideas in rotory cutter head building. At the time the owner of a nationally known company told me that it was not posible. And then low and behold a few month later he comes out with a news release in the industry with my idea. being right is not always popular at the time.

That there is anachronistically funny. Good work.

It remains to be determined if Sanford is right after all....or not. I am betting it will be a whole lot less likely he is right than you were about your rotary cutter idea.

For those who have no idea what we are posting aobut I decided to look up his book on Amazon.com and get a tiny bit of information about his book. I bolded a couple points.


Dr. John Sanford, a retired Cornell Professor, shows in
Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome that the "Primary Axiom" is false. The Primary Axiom is the foundational evolutionary premise - that life is merely the result of mutations and natural selection. In addition to showing compelling theoretical evidence that whole genomes can not evolve upward, Dr. Sanford presents strong evidence that higher genomes must in fact degenerate over time. This book strongly refutes the Darwinian concept that man is just the result of a random and pointless natural process.

Ring is way too nice to call you the azzhole you are but I'm not.

Azzholes gotta laugh too. And I am not above being one.

If Sanford's phoney "Primary Axiom" is any indication it does not bode well for the rest of his book. Evolution does not start with axioms. It starts with observations of the real world. It seems an epic understatement to call life "merely" anything given the dazzling diversity from extremely humble origins. What can "evolve upward" even mean, and how can it be measured? For that matter what can "evolve downward" mean? What does "higher genome" mean and how can it be distinguished from a "lower" genome? Judging from the abstract Sanford has a lot of explaining to do.

If you see "higher genome" as being more complex, you realize that the complexity of a genome has nothing to do with the complexity of the organism, right?
The genome of the marbled lungfish 130,000,000,000 base pairs.
The Japanese pale-petal plant has 150,000,000,000 base pairs.
Humans have only 3,200,000,000 base pairs.
There are many more examples.

If I repeat this often enough maybe it will soak in.

[biological] Evolution: An explanation of biodiversity through population mechanics, summarily defined as �descent with inherent genetic modification�: Paraphrased for clarity, it is a process of varying genetic frequencies among reproductive populations; leading to (usually subtle) changes in the morphological or physiological composition of descendant subsets, which �when compiled over successive generations- can increase biodiversity when continuing variation between genetically-isolated groups eventually lead to one or more descendant branches increasingly distinct from their ancestors or cousins.
It is not "How life began without God." It�s not "how life began" at all, and it certainly isn't 'anti-god'. Neither does it have anything to do with the origin of the universe. It�s simply how generations of branching lineages change and diversify over time; that's all!

Haeckel did indeed fake some drawings of embryos, not to support evolution over creation, but to support his own, long since discredited, notion of Recapitulation over competing ideas of embryology. The drawings probably did make no never-mind to some educators because they adequately ilustrated some basic concepts of embryology to beginners. They continued to be used in biology textbooks for an embarassingly long time because publishers of textbooks tend to be cheapskates in order to sell books cheaply to schoolboards who are also cheapskates.

Professor TRH, I suspect you are holdinng forth "as prof in this class" based on reading Hugh Ross. While HR is both an intellect, an astrophysicist, and Old Earth Christian, and a deep thinker, and has written many books on this subject debated here, I think he'd be taken back a bit as I am at your dogmatism, at your "this is the way it was" approach. I'm not saying some of your thinking and ideas are not cogent but I'm reminded of a local guy who is known as always being wrong but never in doubt that he is right.

If I'm right about Hugh Ross, he is a very interesting guy. BTW, for the rest of you, he has a website, Reasons to Believe, a Christian apologetics site where he defends Biblical Christianiy from the world of science. There's a twist.

There are gaps, the understanding of which, in the early Genesis scriptural account that neither science nor God (who does reveal through his general revelation--science) has simply not made clear. To this point. That's not to say we shouldn't discuss it but I'm always amazed at those who look to science (our present understanding of God's ordering of the natural world--there is an unnatural world too) as all there is. Just as I am at those who take a rigid Young Earth view of Genesis as "this is the way it is".

For us who believe in Gods revelation, the culmination, again, is Jesus Christ, who comes out of a people, who comes out of a person--Abraham--beginning about Genesis 12. So while G1 to G12 covers the preponderance of time historically and perhaps prehistorically, G12 (Abraham) to now covers the very short time of ~ 4k years. So the emphasis of the majority of the Scriptures is on a holy and just God's redemptive work leading to thecdeath and resurrection of Christ as payment for your
and my sins. Any reader here can be assured of forgiveness and salvation because of this real, personal, and historical act on your behalf. PM me.

As is your norm, you've misunderstood Gould. When a paleontologist or an evolutionary biologist uses the phrase "sudden alteration" or "sudden speciation," they don't mean "sudden" in terms of a historical time frame, but in a geological time frame, i.e., "sudden" compared to what was believed previously by paleontologists and evolutionary biologists.

The early prevailing theories were that change is a gradual and steady state, without significant pauses in the process, but Gould proposed that, per species, there were long periods of relative stability, punctuated by "sudden" changes here and there, in response to the "sudden" appearance of environmental stressors. Again, "sudden" being relative to geological scales of time, not historical scales of time. To you and me, that's still extremely gradual, on the scale of millions of years for a slight alteration to be observable. In other words, even a "sudden" change on this scale would be not measurable by you even if you were born fifty-thousand years ago, and have been watching carefully till today.

Just to keep the name dropping going, it wasn't so much Gould as Niles Eldridge. He was the brains behind the concept. Gould was the salesman

You're describing my next door neighbor to a tee.

As a Christian, I have absolutely no problem believing in "Survival of the Fittest" selection over time. I do not believe that God would have made an ever changing world, then put things in that world that had no chance of survival because they couldn't adapt to those changes. Ie the Darwin Finches and their beak sizes.

What I do not believe is that one species can suddenly become another. Ie. a fish to frog type evolution. The one thing that, in my opinion (since that is really all these type arguments are), is the occurrence of male/female. The evidence in the archeological record of evolution always shows great, significant leaps in morphology when presenting evidence of evolution. ie. much shorter/longer legs, distinct noticeable differences in skull structure, etc. There are never, small gradual steps shown when trying to display real speciation. One explanation is advantageous mutations. This explanation is obviously incorrect simply based on the number of times it would have had to happen to account for the different species on the planet. This is especially true when dealing with the almost 100% infertility rate of mutants and their parent species. The occurrence of a male and female which can produce viable offspring, once again in my opinion, negates any real possibility of true, sudden evolutionary speciation.

Evolution made sense when we were young( learners and gullible, focused on absorbing to pass the class), but not so much as older thinkers.

So eyeball, when are you going to grow up and start thinking?

No, they are much much more than opinion. They are carefully reasoned, well tested hypotheses that are backed up with multiple lines of evidence.



Not at all. It also shows slow, changes as well. But large changes are so much more dramatic and easier to identify. Hence, they make the popular literature so much easier.

If you are speaking about hominids, you really need to review.


You can say anything but EVERYTHING in this series of sentences is simply false. Pick up any text book. Look at any species you wish. Take dogs for instance. One species. Yet so much variation all caused by simple mutations and all capable of breeding with their parent progenitors. So, genetic variation causing HUGE amounts of phenotypic variation are easily made, all by genetic mutations. They are easily sustainable and this happens in a very short time. It comes, then, as no surprise that new species can evolve simply by accumulating more genetic mutation and eventually develop enough change that they cannot backcross to their original mutations.

If you read up - just a little - on the process of speciation in any modern textbook on the topic, you can see there gazillions of ways that this can happen and has happened. This isn't so tough to understand - if you take the time to look into it instead of simply imagining what you think is possible based on essentially no understanding of how the world works.



Da? That's nonsense. I mean, it's not wrong - just as gibberish can't be wrong - it is just nonsense.

Stuff you post cracks me the hell up.

The intellectuals had it all figured out in the days of Jesus.

I am no expert on evolution. Not even close. But I have read an article of two on speciation and how that may occur. Fascinating reading.

One of the things that I gathered is that it is not necessarily the number of chromosomes that is important, it is the sequence of genes upon the chromosomes themselves that matters. Apparently you can have a chromosome split and still have viable offspring if the information sequence is maintained. You would just have lower fertility, but not infertility.

Apparently for complete speciation to happen you would have to eventually have two individuals with the split chromosome have offspring. AND then you would have to have further changes to assure that the new prospective species did in fact become a new species.

Kind of complex and way out of my specialty but interesting stuff. Apparently it is the sequencing of the genes on two of the ape genes that leads scientists to believe we have common ancestors. Anybody willing can google up chromome 2, 2A, and 2B for men and apes and get some fascinating reading.

Will