AronRa vs Bob Enyart on Real Science Friday

[AronRa]

In Thursday, November, 10th 2011, I was interviewed by pastor Bob Enyart on a Christian radio talk show with the ironic name of Real Science Friday. The interview was aired in three parts. We continued that conversation a week later, and that one was aired in four parts. For the purpose of clarity, I will refer to both interviews here as one interview divided into seven parts.

As is often the case in any live discussion of this topic, both sides may cite points in their favor which the other side is unable to examine or verify on the fly, and neither of us should get away with making indefensible assertions just to sound right on radio. Accuracy and accountability matter more. That is why Enyart and I agreed at the end that we would have a written debate in this forum pertaining to the points raised live on the air. We both made several claims relating to scientific research, and we both accused the other of being unread, out-of-date, or of misinterpreting or misrepresenting that data. Now we have time to re-examine each of the specific points made on that show, and show how accurate those arguments really were. We should not introduce any new topics here. Enyart has been doing this a long time; so have I. So I have no desire to refute a perpetual arsenal of assertions from what I see as an endless source of pseudoscience, yet never see any concession of the many errors made. Instead I want to whittle down the points previously raised, and answer the challenges already levied. It is time to find out who was really right about what.

In part1, we were supposed to open with a discussion of my preferred topic, 'honesty in inquiry', but somehow we never got around to that. Instead he dove straight into a series of creationist assertions for me to address unprepared. One of them was a list of mostly pre-darwinian scientists whom he said were creationists. I cited a few evolutionary scientists who were also Christian (like Kenneth Miller) in my argument that simply believing in an intelligent creator god is not enough to qualify as a creationist. I defined creationists as those who reject evolution specifically and methodological naturalism in general, defying the scientific method in favor of a magical creation instead. For example, Genesis sites both a gollum spell and an incantation, 'speaking everything out of nothing'. I reminded Bob that 'Abra-cadabera' is an Aramaic word meaning, "I create as I speak". I explained that few, if any of the scientists Bob listed could be shown to hold that sort of position.

Isaac Newton rejected Descartes' idea that the solar system formed by a condensing gas cloud, a spinning nebula, and he believed that the earth was created -just like Johan Keppler did- about 6,000 years earlier, by God as stated in Genesis. That's what Isaac Newton not only believed, but he wrote extensively to try to persuade people that that was true.

I don't know if Enyart can show that Newton ever denied any natural explanation in favor of an inexplicable miracle. Neither do I think he can show where Newton wrote 'extensively' about this, not that it would be necessarily relevant to either of our positions. I haven't read Newton myself, but Niel deGrasse Tyson says that Newton never evoked God to explain anything until he came to a point when there were no scientific explanations he could yet conceive.

We once believed that epilepsy was the result of demonic possession. The father of Protestant Christianity argued that diseases were some sort of spiritual curse, and that doctors were fools for treating illnesses as they come from some natural cause. Many Asian religions believed in the firmament, which was a giant dome over the earth with windows in it, and water above it, and that's where the rain came from. Comets were an omen, and the stars and planets were anthropomorphized even in the Bible. Lightning was blamed on Zeus or Thor, depending on where you lived, and the part of the Abrahamic god was played by a volcano in the book of Exodus, which was obviously written before anyone knew about plate tectonics. Even if a supernatural belief were actually correct, there is no way to know that because it can't be tested, and it would be of no benefit because it still wouldn't explain anything. Only accurate information has practical application, and supernatural explanations have always been literally useless, if not counterproductive and detrimental too. Every time we have ever tried to evoke the supernatural to explain anything we did not yet understand, all progress stopped until we became dissatisfied with those excuses. And in every case, once we discovered the real explanation, it revealed a whole new field of study with benefits previously unimagined. The natural explanation always turns out to be more complex and fascinating and far more valuable than our earlier notions of gods and magic. So I think it will be if we ever discover the true origin of the universe. That too will cause gods to appear useless, senseless, and silly assertions by comparison.

"Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end to divine things."
-Hippocrates

On this point, I would offer a small challenge to Enyart, regarding his own rejection of necessarily naturalist methodology. Name one time in the history of science when supernatural explanations ever proved to be correct, or actually improved our understanding of anything, rather than impeding or retarding all progress, as I believe has always been the case.

 

[AronRa]

This is our second installment of my interview with one of the world's leading atheists. His name is AronRa. On YouTube, he is just wildly popular.

We argued "natural" versus "designed", but Bob said his intention was not to declare man-made structures as "supernatural". So I now realize the term he was asking for was a word which distinguishes deliberate design from one that is naturally or incidentally designed. That word is 'artificial'. The problem Bob has with this,which he cannot avoid- is that if God created everything, then that would include even natural systems and phenomenon which have their own inate and seemingly undirected design capabilities. Everything would be intelligently designed including those things which 'appear' not to be designed at all. So there is no way he could distinguish what is incidental from what is artificial, or what emerged magically as opposed to naturally.

He then began the typical creationist game of equivocation and projection, an attempt to paint the illusion that science and religion are somehow comparable, when they are not. The game is played by the creationist pretending to be objective -when he and we all know he is not- while projecting all of his own logical fallacies onto the science-minded, who of course do not share any of those flaws. Typically that game has the creationist telling some or all of the following lies:

*Evolution is a religion.
*Science relies on faith just like religion does.
*Science is biased just like religion is.
*There is no evidence for evolution/big bang/abiogenesis, etc.
*There is evidence for creation/the flood/god/etc.
*Religion is reasonable just like science is.
*Religion can be confirmed empiracly and experimentally just like science.
*Creationism is scientific.

"¦and other erroneous allegations to this effect. Bob used them all.

Pastor Bob began his game by accusing me of presupposition and confirmation bias. Specifically he alleged that I presuppose "no designer" and that I would reject even the possibility of a non-evident designer; or worse, that he thinks I would reject,on principle- any evidence that might come to light where a proposed designer is concerned. Those are his tactics, not mine. I reject such philosophy outright, as it is clearly dishonest, and I have always been very clear about that. For one thing, when I came to accept evolution, I still believed in God. When I took my first class on evolution half my life ago, I believed in intelligent design -and even used those very words- even though that phrase had not yet been published, and I no longer believed in deities. What Bob is actually asking me to do is to assume that things which evidently happened didn't really happen and that at some point someone evoked a magic spell instead.

Ignoring for a moment the thousands of creationist arguments which have all been proven wrong a thousand times, yet are still being presented on YEC websites around the world, can you show me one verifiably accurate argument, positively indicative of miraculous creation over biological evolution?

The 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics.

Yes, he actually said that.

I tried to explain why evoking the 1st and 2nd laws of Thermodynamics as an argument against the big bang and evolution respectively was a Point Refuted A Thousand Times, but he wouldn't accept it until much later in our conversation. Eventually he did concede that neither law was positively indicative of a deity or of any supernatural powers that deity might employ, and was not even relevant to either evolution or theology, so neither law counts as the evidence I asked for. There remains no evidence in support of miraculous creation, nor of a god either.

There's not one person in your audience or my audience, or that you can name in the entire world -who knows about Darwin, who doesn't think that Darwin believed in evolution.

Enyart thought I was talking about how Darwin is misquoted as thinking that the evolution of the eye is absurd, or of the death-bed conversion that was often claimed but never happened. I wasn't talking about either of these. I tried to tell Enyart that I had heard this argument many times, and that I even have messages in my inbox from people making this exact claim. But he wanted something available on the world wide web. So I suggest he look to someone who posted hundreds of definitions to UrbanDictionary.com, because he too said, "Darwin himself didn't even believe his own theory, he just said it was an educated guess and that's it". Now I need only determine whether that poster is a member of Bob's audience.

Life is information based.

Since Bob thinks this interpretation of his is relevant, it might be interesting to see him define what he thinks 'information' is, provide a metric to measure it -as that will likely become relevant later- and then see him try to defend this comment.

 

[AronRa]

In Part3, the argument continued with Bob trying to tell me that my saying there is NO [whatever] is a positive argument. Somehow he feels he can simply negate the negation. Conversely he implied that my negative claims require positive evidence, but that his positive claims have no burden of proof. The double-standard is that he accuses me of being biased because I do not assume a god which is neither indicated nor evidently real, but Bob says he is still perfectly safe making the gnostic statement that "there are no leprechauns". Where is his data to make such a bald-faced assertion as that? Where is his proof and evidence that 'no-leprechaunism' is accurate and correct?

You said that there is no center of the universe. There is NO center! You were so emphatic! Now you don't know that. All the cosmologists in the world assert that that is a philosophical belief. There is no data, there are no measurements you could take to assert that, yet you assert things that are beliefs.

I asked AndromedasWake about this, and he said Enyart would almost have been right,if he had said that the cosmological principle was a philosophical belief.

"Philosophical assumption would be a better phrase, because people need not necessarily believe it in order to work from it. However, it is also taken to be the null hypothesis for general cosmology, because it agrees well with the limited degree of measurement we can make from our position. In fact, the agreement grows with each passing year." AndromedasWake also said, "The Isotropic and homogeneus (physicall invariant) nature of the Universe was originally assumed (more or less out of modesty) as an extension of the Copernican principle, and this pair of positive, complementary statements is known as the cosmological principle." Obviously that is not what Bob said in his allegations against me. Bob clarified that he believes that any declaration is philosophical if there is no data on which to base that assertion,even if it is a negative claim. So just to remove the double-standard, I would challenge Bob to show where two different cosmologists have claimed that proposing that there is NO center of the universe is a philosophical belief. Where is his data? Unless he is talking about other creationists, I contend that no cosmologist has ever said that, and that Bob is simply making things up.

I'm asserting that all the cosmologists in the world agree with me in stating that we don't have scientific measurements, we don't have data to conclude that there is no center.

Enyart is wrong to state that there is no measurement or data to weigh in on the subject. There is. We can observe our local sky, and by realizing the Universe around us in three dimensions, we can place ourselves at different points in the data and see how it looks. The isotropy test is good, and there are reasonable arguments from observation to assume homogeniety (for example, all observed galaxies appear to be subject to the same physics.)

The conclusion that there is no centre, or that every point is effectively its own centre, comes from General Relativity, and measurements of the geometry of the Universe. If GR holds, then our observations lead us to believe there is no centre in three dimensional space.

I tried to explain that a mathematic plot point obviously cannot exist or be determined without any of the necessary data required to make that calculation. If there are no perceptible boundaries on either side of any axis, then it is impossible to claim a 'center' between these boundaries, especially when they can't even be confirmed to exist.

Of course there is another point, which is more than just a mathematic coordinate, and that is that our world is orbiting a sun which is itself orbiting a galactic axis, which is also currently colliding with another galaxy in a seemingly seething mass of billions of galaxies -reveals no perceptible center of any sort. But Enyart actually argued that the center of the universe somehow still runs though our world even though that would mean that the center of the universe must necessarily gyrate around the outer edges of a rotating galaxy. He himself argued at another point in this conversation that such a notion is 'absolutely' impossible. But Bob likes to have it both ways. First he said, "There is no data, there are no measurements you could take to assert that"¦" Then he turned around and said this:

I think there's plenty of data to imply a center of the universe. It's the three-dimensional grafting of tens of thousands, -in fact now, hundreds of thousands of galaxies that show that they seem to be quantized, and it's still of course controversial, because if true, it sets the standard model on its head. There appears to be in the red shift a quantized distribution of the galaxies around our general part of the milky way so that they're spherical. And that shouldn't be if the universe is homogenous and isotropic.

First off: quantisation of redshift is not regarded seriously by most cosmologists. It's a highly speculative suggestion, and at least 95% of all the research that creationists will present on the matter is based on a flawed statistical method. Furthermore, as time progresses, reports of such quantisation based on larger datasets become weaker and weaker. Tifft surveyed mere hundreds of galaxies; modern datasets run into thousands of times that. There is also not very good agreement, scientifically speaking, between the 'measured periodicity' from one paper to the next on this subject - if such clear quantisation existed, we'd expect strong, narrow constraints to appear repeatedly with high confidence at near-identical values; they do not.

This is, of course, the way science works, but creationists think in terms of 'magic bullet' one-off papers or arguments.

- We now have catalogues of data that are orders of magnitude larger than those use to initially posit quantisation of redshift.

- We now also have precise selection methods for reducing to useful data, which hasn't been contaminated or skewed by the limitations of astronomy technology. For example, a ground based telescope's sensitivity to spectra will be subject to atmospheric effects, and may result in catalogue errors (where spectra at particular redshift might appear more abundant than others, whilst a space telescope would reveal a smoother distribution.)

*The above is a crude example loosely based on a real-world problem. The specifics are complex, but you get the idea.

These advances in the last ~40 years have resulted in a strong consensus that redshifts are not quantised, and any appearance of a pattern is coincidental. Additionally, there are plentiful analyses of the newer, bigger and better datasets which show that the Universe is isotropic when viewed on scales of about 70-100 Mpc. In other words, wherever the observer sits in the data, if she observes a sufficiently large bubble, it will be statistically indistinguishable from the same-sized bubble in a different location. The conclusion is that the distribution of galaxies in the Universe is lumpy and locally variable, but the lumpiness itself is invariant at a larger scale, so there are no priveleged (special) locations in the Universe.

A centre would necessarily be a special location, and would imply a boundary. An observer near the boundary would observe a different situation on each side of the sky, so isotropy would be violated.

-> Enyart is correct if he means to state that the Cosmological Principle is a philosophical assumption.
-> He is only partially correct about the nature of a cosmological centre, because measurement agrees well with both the Cosmological Principle, and General Relativity in their joint prediction of a Universe with no centre in three-dimensional space. If we go as far as to make this conclusion, we do so on the basis of philosophy and evidence.
-> It has been shown that a the Cosmological Principle might not hold on the basis of our observations of isotropy or homogeniety, but we could produce viable cosmologies anyway [Barrett & Clarkson, 2000]
-> In this case, we still do not necessarily predict a centre, and if we do, would not be at the centre, unless the model is extremely fine-tuned (undesirable for many reasons).
-> If the Universe does indeed have a centre, Enyart has chosen the worst reason to believe in one. His argument based on redshift quantisation is far weaker than the one used to conclude the standard model of cosmology, and weakens all the time.
-> It is more reasonable to assume, based on our observations and the implications of GR, that the Universe does not have a centre, and this is the null hypothesis. The best available model, which has passed the most experimental testing, predicts that the Universe we observe is finite and unbounded. In the crudest sense, this implies that there can be no centre. The data we have is not conclusive, but it is not on Enyart's side.
-> Enyart has chosen an extremely poor foundation for reinforcing his belief that the Universe has a centre, and that we inhabit it. Even if everything he proposed were true, and we were indeed surrounded by near perfect spherical shells of galaxies, it would be no more conclusive that we are at the centre of the Universe, than it would that we are simply at the centre of several shells of galaxies.

For the record, I'm not a cosmologist.

Andromedas defines a cosmologist as someone who studies the large scale structure of the Universe, focusing on general relativity solutions, whereas his work is in astrophysics, observational astronomy, and so on. I would have defined a cosmologist as anyone who studies the cosmos.

Ann Gibbons wrote in an article, 'Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock', in other words, how long ago did Eve live, Mitochondrial Eve, the first woman from whom we could all say that we descended. Now there may have been other women, but one woman from whom we all descended, and she published in Science that if you only look at documented mutation rates, if you use that to calibrate your clock, she wrote, then Mitochondrial Eve lived a mere 6,000 years ago. ....So I want to know if you think I'm taking this out of context.

Definitely! As I said, you have to look at the context of the whole article, which actually opposes every conclusion you drew from this one seperated sentence. For one thing, Gibbons did not say what you said she did. Her article pointed out Russian and Australian studies with similar results, and dozens of Swedish studies which were discordant with them, and could not show such high rates. By pooling all the documented data, they estimate significant, inherited mutations occurring once every 60 generations, as opposed to the 40 generation rate estimated by Parsons and Howell.

"The fact that we see such relatively large differences among studies indicates that we have some unknown variable which is causing this,"
-Ulf Gyllensten, geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden

"Because few studies have been done, the discrepancy in rates could simply be a statistical artifact, in which case it should vanish as sample sizes grow larger."
,Eric Shoubridge, molecular geneticist at the Montreal Neurological Institute.

So Gibbons did NOT give a date of 6,000 years according to 'documented' mutation rates, but only according to the fastest rate ever yet estimated from a thus-far discordant set with no other results that could match that frequency. But more important than that, just to show how out-of-context your quote mine is, look back at what she said prior to that:

"Evolutionists have assumed that the clock is constant, ticking off mutations every 6000 to 12,000 years or so. But if the clock ticks faster or at different rates at different times, some of the spectacular results,such as dating our ancestors' first journeys into Europe at about 40,000 years ago,may be in question. "We've been treating this like a stopwatch, and I'm concerned that it's as precise as a sun dial," says Neil Howell, a geneticist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. "I don't mean to be inflammatory, but I'm concerned that we're pushing this system more than we should."

So Gibbons is criticizing those who count mutations as if they occur at regular rates, when there is no mechanism to provide that. Mutations are random. The Swedish study showed relative sloath compared to the others, and only one of them reached the speed you would need. But each of these is only an estimate based on the variable occurrence of random events in different data sets over short and long-term sequences. Just like I told you on your show, the best you can get are estimates over very long periods with very large data sets. You need additional data for confirmation. On that point, let's look at what Gibbons said immediately after your quote:

"No one thinks that's the case, but at what point should models switch from one mtDNA time zone to the other? "I'm worried that people who are looking at very recent events, such as the peopling of Europe, are ignoring this problem," says Laurent Excoffier, a population geneticist at the University of Geneva. Indeed, the mysterious and sudden expansion of modern humans into Europe and other parts of the globe, which other genetic evidence puts at about 40,000 years ago, may actually have happened 10,000 to 20,000 years ago,around the time of agriculture, says Excoffier. And mtDNA studies now date the peopling of the Americas at 34,000 years ago, even though the oldest noncontroversial archaeological sites are 12,500 years old."

Note that here Gibbons is using the actual documented rates, which are faster than the original estimates, but obviously not the fastest rate,which was the one used to depict Mitochondrial Eve.

That's not allowed to be accepted.

It's not that it's "not allowed"; it's that it obviously can't be right because it doesn't make sense. Is it even possible that the the highest frequency ever recorded should be the average? Or should it be the median of all the available data sets? I know you suffer from extreme confirmation bias, but you cherry-pick the one sentence which you mistakenly assume will support your assumptions, and you reject that very same data even from the same source when all of it always unanimously indicates an African origin for all human demes. You said you rejected that conclusion, but you never answered me as to why. Will you answer that now?

I mean, you seem to be suggesting, (or rather you imply that Gibbons is suggesting) that tribes who are known to have already been in the Americas more than 12,000 years ago, are somehow descended from a woman who wasn't even born until 6,000 years later. We know for certain that can't be true, and we have proven that by multiple means. At this point, I must remind you of a reference I gave you on the air, that of a series of documentaries by anthropologist, Dr. Alice Roberts. These give an easy list showing some of the wealth of data you would have to ignore in this instance in order to draw the sort of conclusions that you do.

Immutability of the species was a false teaching that goes way back to the Greeks.

"Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgement of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained , namely, that each species has been independently created , is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification."
-Charles Darwin

If you accept this much, then you accept evolution. As I said on your show, in the last video of my series on the Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism, I list a series of facts, things we know and can show to be true about evolution.

It is a fact that evolution happens; that biodiversity and complexity do increase, that both occur naturally according to the laws of population genetics amid environmental dynamics. You said you agreed with this.

It is a fact that alleles vary with increasing distinction in reproductive populations, and that these are accelerated in genetically isolated groups. You said you agreed with this.

It is a fact that natural selection, sexual selection, and genetic drift have all been proven to have predictable effect in guiding this variance both in scientific literature and in practical application. You said you agreed with this.

It is a fact that significant beneficial mutations do occur and are inherited by descendant groups, and that several independent sets of biological markers do exist which trace these lineages backwards over myriad generations. You said you agreed with this too.

It is a fact that birds are a subset of dinosaurs, in the same way that ducks are a subset of birds, and that humans are a subset of apes in exactly the same way that lions are a subset of cats. This one you objected to, but as I said, it is easy enough to prove, and I'll be happy to do that to your satisfaction here in this forum.

You didn't let me get to the rest of these, but I'll list them here anyway.

It is a fact that the collective genome of all animals has been traced to its most basal form through reverse-sequencing, and that those forms are also indicated by comparative morphology, physiology, and embryological development, as well as through chronologically correct placement of successive stages revealed in the geologic column.

It is a fact that every animal on earth has obvious relatives either living nearby or evident in the fossil record, and that the fossil record holds hundreds of clearly transitional species even according to the strictest definition of that term.

It is a fact that both microevolution and macroevolution have been directly-observed and documented dozens of times, both in the lab and in naturally-controlled conditions in the field, and that these instances have all withstood critical analysis in peer-review.

It is also a fact that evolution is the only explanation of biodiversity with either evidentiary support or measurable validity, and that no would-be alternate notion has ever met even one of the criteria required of a scientific theory.

Each of these is a verifiably accurate statement of fact which is positively indicative and exclusively supportive of biological evolution, and which creationism cannot account for. When I asked you for evidence in support of creationism, this is the sort of thing you were supposed to provide. The point I was trying to make is simply that all the facts support evolution while nothing at all ever supported creationism instead.

Whenever science hasn't yet figured out the answer, it doesn't mean religion does know it; it means neither side knows it. Science doesn't know everything, but religion doesn't know anything. I assert that there is nothing in your belief system which you can honestly say you know to be true. Knowledge is demonstrable with measurable accuracy. If you can't show it then you don't know it. These facts above are ways in which we can objectively prove -even to your satisfaction- that evolution is an inescapable reality both of population genetics and evident phylogeny. So what can you show me that will distinguish your beliefs from the illusions of delusion? Ignoring for the moment the thousands of creationist arguments which have all been proven wrong a thousand times each, yet are still being presented on YEC websites around the world anyway, can you show me one verifiably accurate argument indicative of miraculous creation over biological evolution?

If there cannot be a natural explanation for the universe, that means there is an actor outside of the physical universe who brought it into existence.

While I would concede that there logically must be a catalyst for the big bang, there is no indication that it should be an 'actor', nothing to imply that it be intelligent, nothing to imply that any imagined intelligence of that sort could have had any special concern for our little world out of the whole chaotic mass of the cosmos. Everything everywhere so far implies that man created god in his own image, and that all these assertions stem not from any logical analysis of data, but rather from mere human vanity.

Dinosaurs?! Where did dinosaurs come from? What did they evolve from? They just appear in the fossil record. ...What did dinosaurs evolve from? And tell me, who in the world agrees with you?

Well obviously Sterling Nesbitt, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences, Christian A. Sidor (Burke Museum and University of Washington), Kenneth D. Angielczyk (The Field Museum, Chicago), Roger M.H. Smith (Iziko South African Museum, South Africa), and Linda A. Tsuji (Museum fà¼r Naturkunde and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany) all agree that Asilisaurus kongwe is a proto-dinosaur which lived approximately 10 million years earlier than the oldest known dinosaur.

In order to vindicate the claim that dinosaurs evolved, and you want to go even further than the crown of Dinosauromorpha, then we should find a potential ancestor from within the next parental clade. In this case, that would be Ornithodira, which encompasses both dinosaurs and pterosaurs. Asilisaurus is the earliest member of that group yet discovered. Of course that's not the only probable ancestor. Asilisaurus has apparent predecessors too. The next level of evolutionary ancestor would have to be an archosaur, but one which shared more affinity with dinosaurs and pterosaurs than with crocodylians or any of the now-extinct archosaurian subsets like phytosaurs, pseudosuchians and so on. One such clade is Avemetatarsalia, and a prime example of a potential ancestor is Euparkeria.

At the base and beyond the crown of Arcosauria, we have Protorosaurus, Prolacerta, and one of the earliest of all pre-arcosaurian Diapsids, Claudiosaurus.

One thing creationists cannot appreciate, -and I don't blame you- is just how expansive the fossil record is. How would you know? But there are many MANY more extinct forms than we still have around today. That's something else creationism can't account for that only evolution can. However, the point is that you were wrong about this too. Dinosaurs do have an evident evolutionary ancestry, and do not simply appear out-of-nowhere the way you said they did.

 

[AronRa]

In part4, I reminded Pastor Bob that an 'assertion' is a statement presented as factual but which is not supported by evidence. Bob responds by 'asserting' that scientists have published an alternative to the Big Bang, one which posits quantized red shifts which he says plots thousands of galaxies implying a perspective center of the universe, and he asserts that this apparent center matches the creationists' model of the universe which he says was published many years ago. AndromedasWake already explained why Pastor Bob is wrong on every point of this, and every interpretation thereof. The only thing I will concede that Bob got right is that the creationists' model of the universe was published many MANY years ago.

I was just watching Lawrence Krauss' A Universe from Nothing', wherein he explains that -9:35 or thereabouts- that from our perspective, you would get this 3-dimensional grafting that you're talking about, and in fact you would get that perspective from everywhere in the universe.

No that is completely not true. You're misunderstanding what he's saying. Yes, wherever you are in the universe, if the standard model is true, when you look out, it's gonna look the same everywhere. Now that is not true if the quantized red shift data holds up. Then it's not true, because if there are spheres of galaxies centered on the earth approximately, our part of the milky way, then if you were somewhere else, you would not be in the center of those concentric spheres.

Actually the quantized red shift is what creates the illusion that the universe has a center.



At about 8:20 into this video, famed physicist, Professor Laurence Krauss Ph.D., (who's primary contribution is in cosmology) explains what AndromedasWake said earlier, albeit with easy-to-understand terms and illustrative graphics. "It doesn't matter which galaxy you're on. Everywhere you see the same thing. Everywhere you think you're the center of the universe. So depending on your mood, either every place is the center of the universe, or no place is the center of the universe."

So I did not misunderstand what Krauss said, but Bob obviously did.

I have a higher view of science than you do, Aron.

He then accused me of using word games, and accused me many times of being "afraid" of truth, and that I am especially afraid of believing in absolute truth. I argued that it is enough to show that something is true or false; it need not be 'absolutely' true or false, because that would not make anything truer than true or wronger than wrong. It only means that there is no longer any possibility to be wrong, because you're claiming infallable knowledge.

When you claim knowledge that is infallable, how do you improve your perspective?

You learn more.

Wrong. If your a-priori pre-conceived notion happens to be wrong, (in whole or in part) but you refuse to accept that, then whatever else you learn will not improve your understanding. The only way to do that is to find the flaws in your current perception and correct them.

There are few times when I am comfortable saying that I am 'absolutely' certain of anything, and I wouldn't say that until the point has already been proven beyond dispute. One example of this -which I didn't mention until later in our conversation- would be when I say that scientists now know -for absolutely certain- that the global flood could not happen and did not happen, and the same goes for the fable of the tower of Babel. We know what really did happen, and how those stories were exaggurated to legendary proportions, but the flood now erroneously associated with Noah's ark -absolutely- did not happen on a global scale.

This part of our conversation did not end the way it sounds. What you do not hear is Bob yelling over me and me telling him that if he cannot converse like a civil adult then I will not waste any more time talking to him. That part was edited out of this recording. His assistant talked me into coming back on the air and the conversation continued.

This segment ended shortly after Bob again brought up the 1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism, where I said that "creationism is a belief that one cannot accept evolution and still believe in God". Bob said himself that he came to that conclusion after being a theistic evolutionist. Kurt Wise came to a similar conclusion when he famously cut his Bible to ribbons to see how much of 'God's word' (the 2nd foundational falsehood of creationism) he would have to reject in order to believe both the fables in the Bible and evident realities of evolutionary science. However Bob misunderstood the point I was making, and somehow thought that I was suggesting that creationists do not believe that it is possible for ANYONE to believe in God and accept evolution at the same time. So he effectively accused me of erecting a strawman, and of being too stupid to understand that.

Let me explain to you your confusion, and let me suggest that you are not as good at thinking as you presume that you are.

When our conversation resumed, he retracted his accusation that the 1st FFoC was a strawman.

I didn't know what error you were pointing out in your first video. I got it totally wrong.

Thank you, Bob. Now will you also admit that leading cosmologists disagree with you on these key points? (1) That there apparently is no center of the universe either indicated by data or supported by the data that we actually do have? (2) That the red shift quantization is an illusion concordant with big bang, and thus is not an alternative cosmological model?

 

[AronRa]

Part5 of our discussion has some real gems from the realm of pseudoscience.

Y-chromosomal Adam is only 4,000 years old.

You never said whence you found this nugget of nonsense. Everything I've been able to find indicates that the Y-chromosome Adam for everyone alive today was first thought to have lived roughly 59,000 years ago, and now 140,000 years ago, and the Y-chromosome Adam for tribal Americans lived 20,000 years ago. Now how is that supposed to work in your world? You certainly haven't examined the archaeological situation around the globe at the time in question. I cover this in what is generally considered to be the most popular video I've ever made.

There was a genetic bottle-neck for all animals and for human beings 4,000 -approximately- years ago.

No there wasn't, but as I told you on your show, there is evidence of a genetic bottleneck 74,000 years ago -concordant with the last eruption of a supervolcano known as Toba.

The Y-Chromosome of chimpanzees is far away from human beings, from men, as the sponge genome is from human beings. Right? In the great barrier reef, they've now sequenced the lowly sponge, and and the headlines in the science journals are that the sponge has 70% similarity with the human genome.

I haven't found any journals which linked the two unrelated studies you've somehow gotten confused here.

First we'll deal with the genome of the sponge.

On your show, you said "sponges were 70% human"; not 'similar to human', not 'sharing the same type genes as humans', you said they were 70% human. That's not right. We can't even say their genes are human. That would imply that 70% of the genes found in sponges are otherwise unique to our species, when really those genes are common to all animals, including us.

"The new study shows that, while the sponge genome contains most of the gene families found in humans, the number of genes in each family has changed significantly over the past 600 million years. By analyzing which gene families were enriched or depleted in different groups of animals, the authors identified groups of gene functions that are associated with morphological complexity."
ScienceDaily

"This incredibly old ancestor possessed the same core building blocks for multicellular form and function that still sits at the heart of all living animals, including humans. It now appears that the evolution of these genes not only allowed the first animals to colonize the ancient oceans, but underpinned the evolution of the full biodiversity of animals we see today."
-Bernie Degnan, a professor of biology at the University of Queensland, Australia

"According to Degnan, essentially all the genomic innovations that we deem necessary for intricate modern animal life have their origins much further back in time that anyone anticipated, predating the Cambrian explosion by tens if not hundreds of millions of years."
-ScienceDaily

As I said on your show, I was fascinated by the 'Shape of Life' project which further confirmed evolution by finding a common orthologue of all animalia within the genome of Porifera, sponges, the oldest animals on earth. Essentially they are the template that all other animals are made from, so of course a substantial number of their genes would be common among all other animals too. As we are uneshewably animals also, we should expect to share at least basic genetics with them. The same goes Trychoplax placozoans, a karyotype of the earliest and most primitive of all animals, possibly even basal to sponges. Not surprisingly, they share 80% of their genes with us too.

"Trichoplax shares over 80 percent of its genes with humans. We are exited to find that Trichoplax contains shared pathways and defined regulatory sequences that link these most primitive ancestors to higher animal species. The Trichoplax genome will serve as a type of "Rosetta Stone" for understanding the origins of animal-specific pathways."
-Stephen Dellaporta, professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale.

"Even though sponges don't have specialized cell types like neurons or muscles, they do have many of the genes that operate in those cell types in humans or fruit flies, though the function of these genes in sponges is still unclear."
-Dr.Mansi Srivastava, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

"Nearly identical copies of these genes are present in humans and are responsible for determining the structure of major body parts."
-HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology

"That was when the surprise hit, "We found a lot of genes to make a nervous system present in the sponge. We found this mysterious unknown structure in the sponge, and it is clear that evolution was able to take this entire structure, and, with small modifications, direct its use toward a new function. Evolution can take these 'off the shelf' components and put them together in new and interesting ways."
-Prof. Kenneth Kosik M.D., co-director of UCSB's Neuroscience Research Institute

"The authors also identified in the sponge many of the same genes that characterize all other animals: genes involved not only in cell division and growth, but also in programmed cell death; the adhesion of cells to other tissue and to one another, signaling pathways during development, recognition of self and non-self; and genes leading to the formation of different cell types.
Significantly, many of the genes that sponges share with humans may play a role in the development of cancer."
NaturalNews

"Once there is a transition from single cell to multicellular organisms, conflict is set up between the different cells of the multicellular organism. It is in an individual cell's best interest to keep replicating, and this actually is what cancer is -- the uncontrolled replication of cells in the body. So in the history of animals, we can see this link with cancer, because the genes that are involved in the transition to multiple cells during evolution are also known to be linked to cancer."
-Todd Oakley, Prof. Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, U.C. Santa Barbara

Humans and other vertebrates have since developed their own genes not found in invertebrates. So of course sponges have a different number of genes, and they won't operate the same way as they've been adapted to do in higher animals.

The chimpanzee genome is 30% different in the Y chromosome, "¦'horrendously different from the human Y-chromosome. "¦We are 30% different from supposedly our closest living relatives."

You should understand that sharing 70% of a gene set does not mean the same thing as having a 70% identical codon sequence, the way our genome matches that of chimpanzees and other higher animals.

"Genes only make up about 3% of our genome. Yes, you read that correctly. The rest of our genome is called non-coding or junk DNA. Despite the fact that there is so much junk, we still share 95-98% of our DNA with a chimp. And 80% with a mouse. This means that we share lots of genes and a ton of junk DNA." "
-geneticist, Carrie Metzinger B.Sc., Bergmann Lab, Stamford University

"Humans and mice (also rats) share several hundred absolutely identical stretches of DNA extending for 200-800 base pairs."
-Dr. John W. Kimball, professor of immunology, Harvard University

"Preliminary sequence comparisons indicate that chimp DNA is 98.7% identical with human DNA. If just the gene sequences encoding proteins are considered, the similarity increases to 99.2%."
-Dr. George B. Johnson, Biology Professor at Washington U. St. Louis, Missouri

So the first mistake you made here was assuming that a 70% similar gene set in sponges equates to a 70% identical codon sequence. Your second mistake was thinking that a 30% difference in the Y-chromosome somehow equates to a 30% difference in the entire genome. You simply deducted your 30% from 100 to conclude that chimpanzees were 70% similar to humans just like you thought sponges were. Wow.

Did you think that men were made entirely of nothing but Y-chromosomes? And that women were made entirely of X-chromosomes? You do understand that men have both of these, right?

Dr. Francis Collins, -director of the human genome project- obviously doesn't know as much about genetics as a creationist talk radio host citing Wikipedia, because Collins said that humans and chimps share 98.4% of their DNA. His international research consortium showed that directly comparable sequence between the two complete genomes is almost 99 percent identical, and that when DNA insertions and deletions are taken into account, humans and chimps still share 96% of their sequence. The first comprehensive comparison of the genetic blueprints of humans and chimpanzees shows our closest living relatives share perfect identity with 96% of our DNA sequence.

Even if we forget all about orthologous genomic sequencing for the moment. Given that there is a wide range of human-chimpanzee nucleotide divergence across the autosomal genome, and very low divergence in the X chromosome, if we say that the X-chromosome matches Collin's estimate, and the Y-chromosome is as you misunderstand it, then given that they count as an inseparable pair, you would not have only a 70% similarity; you would have (98.4 + 70) / 2 = 84.2%.

Of course you're forgetting that the sex-determining chromosomes account for only one pair out of 23, and that your divergent Y-chromosome is now outnumbered 45:1. That already more than accounts for the 'horrendous difference' you want people to think there is, but it gets even worse, because the Y-chromosome is disappearing. It is generally diminished in all mammals, not just humans and chimps. It has been reduced to 1/6 the size of its counterpart and has only 1/12 the number of genes. How much do you think your Y-chromosomal variance matters now?

Did you really not know any of this, -I mean none of it- before you broadcast these embarrassing blunders to thousands of listeners? How often do you do these shows?

This is the advantage of a written discussion with internet access. In moments, I can look up all your awkward assertions and strange interpretations and find out for certain how accurate they aren't. You miss detail like no one I've ever seen! That's why it's important that the next portion of our discussion should be transcripted. This part begins at 15:15.

Here's the way science works, because accuracy matters: When you have two guys like us and we're talking, -and it's always been this way with me- I mean, when people say "you know, they found this or that or the other thing and, it's been since like I was a little kid, I keep hearing the story of like, say for example millions of mammoths flash-frozen with tropical flora in their mouths. And then eventually, when you get to a point where you have access to the internet for example, you can start looking up these things to verify who 'they' are, and how many mammoths they really found, etc. etc. I found that there were fifty-one mammoths, not millions, and that none of them, not one was found with tropical flora in their mouths unless a tulip from Denmark can be considered 'tropical'.
OK I actually have the data. I've got the data. The tonnage of mammoth tusks that were sold on the world-wide market indicate that there were millions of mammoths that were buried in Siberia and at the Arctic circle and north of the Arctic circle, and there were mammoths that had the seeds of tropical plants, the seeds, in thier digestive tract.
Wrong.
Well I could give you the data.
I challenge you.
Hey, you think I'm wrong...?
Yeah I do.
...about over a million mammoths buried?
Yeah, I definitely do, and yes, it's a formal challenge.
How about we have a bet? Five hundred dollar bet to your favorite charity -or mine- that the documentation shows that over a million mammoths have been buried?
With tropical flora?
No, no, there was one of that.
...in their mouths?
There was one of that. There was one of that.
Tropical?!
Yeah, tropical.

We then argued the definition of 'tropical' -just to be clear, and I clarified again:

OK so you're gonna tell me that you found, or that somebody found multiple millions of mammoths in the Arctic circle and that ANY of these mammoths were found with flora in thier mouths that are only found in tropical regions?
Yeah, I just said that one mammoth was found with seeds of tropical vegetation.

You made a couple other comments that I will address below, and then I made the formal challenge which resulted in the posts you're reading now.

Now I was only able to find where fifty-one was the number of frozen mammoths, all of whom had been injured, partially dessicated or eaten prior to thier being frozen, all of them. not one flash-frozen. Not one. And yet the claim was that there were millions of them, and the claim was that had tropical flora in their mouths. No.

At that point, you conceded that I was right about the number of frozen mammoths being 'dozens only', and we both agreed that there were millions more buried mammoths that were not frozen. Yet I still challenged you to show your data. Did you think I wanted you to prove the point we both already agreed on? So what remains a point of contention? Could it be that you missed the point you were supposed to prove?

On your website, you claim to have met my challenge with a reference to Wikipedia and your notice that pseudoscience charlatan, Walt Brown read an article in the Smithsonian. Both citations only mention millions of mammoths buried in bits and bones and tusks all over the Siberian tundra. But at 18:30 in our conversation, we both agreed on that point. Can you review our conversation and maybe figure out what point your data was supposed to prove?

We've all heard the stories of how "millions of frozen mammoths are found preserved in Siberia, frozen so quickly their flesh could still be eaten today, complete with sub-tropical vegetation in their mouths." What is the truth, what is the solution?

I mentioned to you how, -in the days before the web, I would often hear these stories, and I have to give the benefit of the doubt, having no way to investigate any of it. Now that we can Google anything in a moment, the situation has changed. Now we can find out what a lie that is way too fast. That's why AnswersinGenesis lists that as one of many arguments creationists should not use anymore. Amazingly you're still trying to defend it.

Now if you want to argue that there is an area of a few million square miles where vast herds of mammoths have lived and died over a period of several thousand years, and that the bones and tusks of many generations are buried along vast stretches of old rivers and hundreds of miles of arctic coastlines, OK. I have no problem with that. I don't doubt that more than a million mammoths have lived all over the Asian tundra for many mellenia. But if you're talking about a single cache of a million mammoths all together, as if they all lived and died in the same place at the same time, that's another matter, and not the point we were arguing. However the point is that there were never any mammoths that were walking around grazing happily and were suddenly 'flash-frozen' the way they showed on 'the Day After Tomorrow'. That's some of the incredulous part of that story.

You could argue that some mammoths were found in an upright position, and we can see the reasons why, being how they got stuck in bogs or fell through the ice or whatever. You could make some excuse for that, but the next part of the claim is just a flat-out lie with no honest defense whatsoever.

The tonnage of mammoth tusks that were sold on the world-wide market indicate that there were millions of mammoths that were buried in Siberia at the Arctic circle and north of the Arctic circle, and there were mammoths that had the seeds of tropical plants, the seeds, in thier digestic tract.

No sir. None of these mammoths ever had tropical plants anywhere near them.

"....we must first establish the facts, checking the original sources, we find that no more than several dozen mammoths have been found frozen or partially frozen. It is true that tens of thousands of mammoth bones are found, and mammoth ivory has been mined commercially in some places, but those were not quick-frozen. These bones are found in the frozen tundra (or frozen soil below the surface), and are not found in the thick sequences (ten thousand feet thick in places) of sedimentary rock lying stratigraphically below the frozen soil. The frozen parts, are, with few exceptions, found in the frozen banks of modern rivers, usually in small lenses within the larger tundra layer. Some specimens seem to have drowned after breaking through ice covering a river.
Furthermore, the stomach contents and unswallowed food (actually caught between the teeth) are that of a mountain meadow, not unlike that of alpine regions today. The frozen meat itself, while wolves and sled dogs have been known to sample it on occasion, is usually somewhat rancid, not quick frozen and ready to be sold."
-Institute for Creation Research

Mammoths cannot live in the arctic circle. They can't get 200 gallons of liquid water a day. They can't get all the tonage of vegitation they need. They can't live there. That's a mystery that I think I understand that you don't.

One of the many aspects of this which I understand,and you obviously do not- is that there were still mammoths living in the arctic in 1,700 BCE.

"....The woolly mammoth was covered with three types of hair: (1) the outer guard hairs that were coarse and just over 3 feet (90 cm) long, (2) an underfur that was thinner and about 10 to 12 inches (25 to 30 cm) long, and (3) below the underfur a thick layer of wool that was around 1 to 3 inches (2 to 8 cm) long.4 A full-grown mammoth tooth is over a foot long and has a series of parallel enamel ridges. The long hair, small ears, and tiny tail are probably adaptations to a cold climate."
-AnswersInGenesis

So not even AiG agrees with you, and the ICR obviously doesn't either, and neither do the real science sources they both cite:

"Mammuthus (Elephas) primigenius appears to have been a species adapted for extreme cold and tundra conditions, as shown by its smaller size and broad four-toed feet for marshy terrain and by a further decrease in the size of dental plates and the thickness of enamel layers. It seems, furthermore, to represent a dead-end evolutionary development.
The habitalt of the woolly mammoth is indicated clearly by it physical appearance and food habits, as deternmined from the frozen carcasses and associated fossils. Long hair, thick wool, and a heavy layer of fat definitelv indicate a cold climate. Stomach contents (1, 2, 6, 14) reveal an abundance of grasses, sedges, and other boreal meadow and tundra plants, along with a few twigs. cones, and pollen of high-boreal and tundra trees. In general, this floral assemblage is "richer, somewhat warmer and probably also moister" than the present flora of the tundra in which frozen mammoth carcasses are now found (14). Quackenbush (15) found "large trees" associated with fossil mammoth in a now-treeless part of Alaska and also came to the conclusion that the climate was somewhat milder when the mamnmoths lived. The flora of deposits enclosing frozen mammoth carcasses is similar to that of the stotmach contents (Table 1). Furthermore, the healthy and robust condition of the frozen cadavers (2, p. 49) indicaites that the mammoths fared well on such a diet."
Soergel strongly emphasizes the effect of seasonal migrations on the faunal assemblages of central Europe, and he points out (17) that woolly mammoths occur only in glacial or transitional (glacial/interglacial) faunas and not in high-interglacial assemblages. Mammoth are very abundant and have been collected by ivory hunters for centuries. Digby (1, p. 169) describes a single cache of more than 1,000 tusks which he examined in Yakutsk, and Flint (12, p. 470) mentions some 50,000 tusks from Siberia alone. The obvious conclusion is that the frozen mammoths were members of a populous race located in Siberia (and elsewhere) and not occasional strays who happened to migrate beyond their normal range. And, contrary to some popular accounts, the figures cited above do not support the conclusion (3, p. 82) that "absolutely countless numbers" of woolly mammoths were frozen and that "many of these animals were perfectly fresh, whole, and undamaged...."
-Frozen Mammoths and Modern Geology, Farrand, W.

 

[AronRa]

When Pastor Bob Enyart invited me to continue this discussion, he promised that he had an answer to my 'Phylogeny Challenge'. Unfortunately he still doesn't know what the question is. In the preceding portion of this discussion, I asked him to explain it. I expected him to play a clip from the Phylogeny Challenge video,where (from 8:40 on) I explain exactly what the challenge is. Instead, Bob played two separate audio clips from the wrong video, and thought that was it. The clips he played were just statements of fact which contained no challenge. So at the start of part 6, Bob opens on yet another false assumption based on really inattentive research.

Everything we see in nature consistently adheres to everything we would expect of a chain of inherited variations carried down through flowering lines of decent. ...Because the phylogenetic tree of life is plainly evident from the bottom up to any objective observer who dares to compare the anatomy of different sets of collective life-forms. But it can be just as objectively doubly-confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically."

There is overwhelming testimony from evolutionary biologists that everything you just said is completely wrong, and I have in front of me quotes and specifics. You might claim that I'm taking them out of context, but I'll post the references on this show's summary. I am not taking it out of context. The very day that the testimony was taken in Texas, (I mentioned January 21st 2009) that very day, New Scientist published a cover story on the tree of life. And that cover story goes through the proceedings of the N.A.S. and Nature and Science, and everybody, and it quotes an army of evolutionary biologists who say that genetically the tree of life lies in tatters, that it's being cut down.
Yes, I remember that article because they were talking about the horizontal gene transfer that I brought up in the beginning of the 10th foundational falsehood of creationism.
I know, and I watched that very carefully, but your assertion that genetics covers the tree of life is false, and I can establish that.

No sir. Your reference to, and reliance on, trite sensationalism shamelessly promoted by a popular magazine will not change the fact that genetics has already irrevocably confirmed a network of evolutionary ancestry for many different lineages of life. The reason I referred you to my videos on caniforme and feliforme phylogeny is because both of those videos prove the point, by examining and explaining published peer-revewed genetic analyses:

Mitogenomic analyses of caniform relationships, Science Direct
The Evolution of Cats, Scientific American
Molecular Phylogeny of the Carnivora (Mammalia) - Oxford Journal of Systematic Biology

Likewise my Phylogeny Challenge video also cites several juried papers in peer-reviewed journals:

A Molecular Phylogeny of Living Primates
Human and Non-Human Primate Genomes Share Hotspots of Positive Selection
Lineage-Specific Gene Duplication and Loss in Human and Great Ape Evolution
A Human-Specific De Novo Protein-Coding Gene Associated with Human Brain Functions
Human-specific loss of regulatory DNA and the evolution of human-specific traits

If you look up each of the listed citations above, you'll see a series of associated studies, none of which could even exist if your 'understanding' of the New Science article was correct. But they do exist, so my point is already proven, and genomic research continues to confirm evolutionary phylogenies.

"Comparison of whole genome sequences provides a highly detailed view of how organisms are related to each other at the genetic level. How are genomes compared and what can these findings tell us about how the overall structure of genes and genomes have evolved? Comparative genomics also provides a powerful tool for studying evolutionary changes among organisms, helping to identify genes that are conserved or common among species, as well as genes that give each organism its unique characteristics." -Nature (2010)

If these evolutionary biologists are right, then you're wrong, Aron. And genetics tears apart the tree of life, tears it apart. That's why they published a story titled, "Darwin was Wrong on the tree of life".
I remember the story, and I know what it pertains to; it pertained to, -it took the root out of the tree of life.
No! It took the whole branches, the twigs!
No, it took the root!
It slaughtered them!
Just that!
No, you're wrong. You didn't read it. You're wrong. The last time I read it was today. I read the whole article.

Then how did you miss the linked editorial at the very beginning, Uprooting Darwin's tree? In case your subscription isn't up to date, here is an excerpt.

" We now gaze on a biological world of mind-boggling complexity that exposes the shortcomings of familiar, tidy concepts such as species, gene and organism.
A particularly pertinent example is provided in this week's cover story - the uprooting of the tree of life which Darwin used as an organising principle and which has been a central tenet of biology ever since (see "Axing Darwin's tree"). Most biologists now accept that the tree is not a fact of nature - it is something we impose on nature in an attempt to make the task of understanding it more tractable."

How did you miss this part of the article itself?

"Microbes have been living on Earth for at least 3.8 billion years; multicellular organisms didn't appear until about 630 million years ago. Even today bacteria, archaea and unicellular eukaryotes make up at least 90 per cent of all known species, and by sheer weight of numbers almost all of the living things on Earth are microbes. It would be perverse to claim that the evolution of life on Earth resembles a tree just because multicellular life evolved that way.

If there is a tree of life, it's a small anomalous structure growing out of the web of life," says John Dupré, a philosopher of biology at the University of Exeter, UK."

So the article says the phylogenetic tree has no root, just like I said. Obviously I have read this article after all, but it seems you have not. Either that, or you glean for talking points rather than reading for comprehension. You should at least have noticed that the article interviewed two camps; those who say that the tree analogy no longer applies if it can't account for all biota, and the second camp, who say the concept of an 'unrooted' tree still works,at least with regard to animals, if not all other multicellular organisms.

I am sure you're aware that several scientists immediately posted harsh criticism of New Science for their deliberately deceptive title and misleading cover art. The article itself is factually OK, but it is unnecessarily emotive and especially confusing to laymen, obviously. It doesn't explain anything as well as it should have, but it certainly doesn't say what you wish it did either. I know what it's really talking about, and I had already addressed these points months before that article even came out.

Did you see Dennet's reponse?

"Nothing in the article showed that the concept of the tree of life is unsound; only that it is more complicated than was realised before the advent of molecular genetics. It is still true that all of life arose from "a few forms or... one", as Darwin concluded in The Origin of Species. It is still true that it diversified by descent with modification via natural selection and other factors.
Of course there's a tree; it's just more of a banyan than an oak at its single-celled-organism base. The problem of horizontal gene-transfer in most non-bacterial species is not serious enough to obscure the branches we find by sequencing their DNA.
The accompanying editorial makes it clear that you knew perfectly well that your cover was handing the creationists a golden opportunity to mislead school boards, students and the general public about the status of evolutionary biology."

So let me tell you why these evolutionary biologists are saying that Darwin was wrong on the tree of life. Right? Let me give you some of the reasons. This is from the proceedings of the NAS: "European researches examined more than a half a million genes from 181 prokaryotes" (Now I know they don't have a nucleus.) ""¦and found that 80% of them could not be interpreted as forming the branches of a tree of life, 80%. This turns out to be the rule rather than the exception even for eukaryotes, even for organisms that have cells with a nucleus.

At the microbial level, yes it does. However multicellular organisms are better able to protect their genetic core, substantially minimizing occurrence of horizontal gene transfer from 80% closer to 8%.

"Believe it or not, 8% of human DNA is actually old virus DNA. Some viruses, called retroviruses, put their DNA into the DNA of the cells they infect. HIV is a virus like this.
-geneticist, Carrie Metzinger B.Sc., Bergmann Lab, Stamford University

The article also mentions the influence of occasional hybridization and fluke occurrences like a snake bite transferring genes. But these events are so rare and easily identifiable that they do not pose any significant impediment to phylogenetics.

The university of California at Davis has compared 2,000 genes that are common to humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies, and nemotodes. In theory, they should have been able to use the gene sequences like you claim, to construct an evolutionary tree showing the relationships. They failed. The problem was that the different genes told contradictory stories.
I could spare us some time. It is what I told you at the beginning it was going to be,where it relates to viruses and horizontal gene transfer.
No! No! Were NOT viruses!

I guess your copy didn't include illustrations.

"This is a image of the more or less current tree of life showing the 5 kingdoms and how genetic inheritance is now thought to be not exactly vertical but also includes horizontal gene inheritance via at least virus infection and maybe other routes such as the incorporation of mitochondria and plastids as symbiotic partners within Eukaryote cells."

In addition to the description of the illustration, the article also said this: "40 to 50 per cent of the human genome consists of DNA imported horizontally by viruses, some of which has taken on vital biological functions (New Scientist, 27 August 2008, p 38). The same is probably true of the genomes of other big animals."

Beyond that, the article implies that the reason Syvanen could not construct a consistent cladogram inclusive of all six organisms was because of a bizarre case of horizontal gene transfer at the apparent origin of one of them, turning into a genetic chimera. Remove tunicates from the mix and a cladogram is still easily traceable for the five remaining organisms. In fact, we can still even determine phylogenetic clades for most tunicates.

Just for your amusement:
"Thirty new complete 18S rRNA sequences were acquired from previously unsampled tunicate species, with special focus on groups presenting high evolutionary rate. The updated 18S rRNA dataset has been aligned with respect to the constraint on homology imposed by the rRNA secondary structure. A probabilistic framework of phylogenetic reconstruction was adopted to accommodate the particular evolutionary dynamics of this ribosomal marker. Detailed Bayesian analyses were conducted under the non-parametric CAT mixture model accounting for site-specific heterogeneity of the evolutionary process, and under RNA-specific doublet models accommodating the occurrence of compensatory substitutions in stem regions. Our results support the division of tunicates into three major clades: 1) Phlebobranchia + Thaliacea + Aplousobranchia, 2) Appendicularia, and 3) Stolidobranchia, but the position of Appendicularia could not be firmly resolved. Our study additionally reveals that most Aplousobranchia evolve at extremely high rates involving changes in secondary structure of their 18S rRNA, with the exception of the family Clavelinidae, which appears to be slowly evolving. This extreme rate heterogeneity precluded resolving with certainty the exact phylogenetic placement of Aplousobranchia. Finally, the best fitting secondary-structure and CAT-mixture models suggest a sister-group relationship between Salpida and Pyrosomatida within Thaliacea."
-BioMedCentral

Now you see that only Appendicularia could not be firmly resolved. Can you explain why Aplousobranchia evolves so much faster than the rest?

I know the article. I know what it means. I already told you"¦
You completely misrepresented what it means. It's about humans. It's about human DNA. That's what the article is about.

No it isn't. It's about how we should abandon the concept of a single universal common ancestor for all forms of life, or even all eukaryotes. It's about whether phylogenetics has become so complex that it can no longer be adequately represented using the analogy of a tree. In point of fact the analogy fails because there is no root, there is no trunk, and of course there are no leaves. As the article said, life doesn't grow vertically either. Only the branching pattern remains, and that is only applicable to multicellular organisms. Even then, there is still a degree of HGT and hybridization which can,albeit rarely- confuse the tree analogy. However,at least with multicellular organisms, hybridization can only occur between two species of the same genus, so even if it happened frequently, it still wouldn't be significant in any protracted depiction. Personally I prefer to render phylogeny as a tumbleweed of life'. I think it is more accurate, and even more helpful in its illustration of evolutionary relationships at least among animals, which is what paleontologists and other folk are most often concerned with. Envisioning phylogeny as a 'tree' is a traditional convention just like your own 'family tree', except the phylogenetic tree is still a much more accurate analogy than the 'tree' in genealogy.

This is my proof that your claim is wrong, that genetics proves the tree. That claim is wrong, and there are hundreds if not thousands of scientists who agree with me.

No there aren't. None of the scientists involved in this article agreed with you. Just to prove that, here is another excerpt from the editorial:

"As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, we await a third revolution that will see biology changed and strengthened. None of this should give succour to creationists, whose blinkered universe is doubtless already buzzing with the news that "New Scientist has announced Darwin was wrong". Expect to find excerpts ripped out of context and presented as evidence that biologists are deserting the theory of evolution en masse. They are not."

I suspect that "an army" consisting of "thousands of evolutionary scientists" don't really agree with you just like "every cosmologist in the world" didn't really agree with you either.

If we do a superficial analysis, right. If you looked at an animal that has dorsal fins, pectoral fins, and a fin tail, you'd say, "Look how close they are; the look the same", but then I tell you, well one's a dolphin and one's a shark, and you'd say "they're totally on opposite sides of the tree".
In the video for Falsifying Phylogeny, I go to explain the superficial similarities, the surface similarities don't matter. It's what's at the core,where you can tell that an ichthyosaur is a reptile, versus a whale that is a mammal, versus a tuna that is a fish.
The ultimate core is the DNA.

Then how do you explain the example situations I showed in the Phylogeny Challenge video? Where genomic sequencing confirmed the relationships determined by most morphological estimates, but also exposed and corrected errors in classifying bats, aardvarks, and pangolins?

How do you explain the fact that every multicellular organism we've ever found actually does file into a phylogenetic tree? As I explained in Falsifying Phylogeny, every fictional creature we've ever made up for movies or mythology holds traits which would violate taxonomy and effective falsify evolution, but nothing we've ever really found have traits that don't fit, or has presented that sort of challenge.

Furthermore, you continue to deny the fact that humans are formally classified as a subset of apes, and you contine to imagine "enormous differences" between chimp DNA and human DNA,no doubt based on multi-teir misconception of the Y-chromosome- but a codon-to-codon orthologue of greater than 96% is not an enormous difference. Whether you like it or not, humans are classified as apes, and that fact was determined genetically.

You said you saw the 9th foundational falsehood of creationism, yet you didn't remember that there even was a definition. When I repeated it for you, you immediately dismissed it as invalid . It didn't matter to you that it really is the strictest definition of that word according to both evolutionary scientists and even other young earth creationists. In fact, the website that showed that definition is hosted by young earth creationist with an actual Ph.D. in biology. Interestingly the excuse you gave was an example of something that would not qualify as a transition, but which could also falsify evolution. The point is that you don't get to change the definition that is already universally accepted by both sides of this sadly laughable dispute. You're going to have to work with that one.

Now how many examples that I showed in the 9th FFoC actually do fit that definition?

Where did turtles come from? You can't name me the animal that turtles came from, with naming any textbook, or any paleontologist, leading paleontologist who would agree with you, because it's unknown; it's a supposed ancestor.

I have already shown you that in the 9th FFoC,which you said you watched, yet you don't seem to remember anything said or shown therein. This is fairly complicated and difficult to explain to someone who has no understanding of either cladistics or the wealth of fossils involved. You couldn't know anything about either of these without doing much more serious study than you have done or care to do. Honestly even a quick scan of Wikipedia could have answered this for you.

Turtles are a really old order, but they didn't just appear out of nowhere. There are precursers, but they have to meet precise criteria to qualify as potential ancestors or transitional species. All living reptiles (including birds) are classified as diapsids because their skulls have two temporal fenestra or at least vestiges indicating such. Turtles uniquely have none, and are thus classified as the only living anapsids.

The fossil record reveals that at the time when turtles appeared, there were many different species of anapsid reptiles, (another fact creationism cannot account for) and that most of these had apparently died out at the end of the Permian, in the worst extinction event in geologic history.

According to the law of monophyletic heirarchy, the first turtle would not also be the first anapsid, because turtles are highly derived and other anapsids were more generalized. So the ancestor of all turtles must be an earlier anapsid, one which shares special affinity with turtles. It turns out the fossil record reveals two closely-allied stem groups which show these tendencies, pareiasaurs and diadectids.

So if evolution is true, (and ONLY if evolution is true) then this is where we should find quasi-turtles with distinctly transitional characters. Perhaps an apparent pareiasaur that is too turtle-ish to deny, but which still has undifferentiated pre-turtle traits, such as teeth.

'True' turtles don't have teeth,except in movies.

Otherwise, our transitional ancestor should still have looked like a turtle albeit without a shell, or,to confirm its relationship- it shouldn't have enough of a shell to qualify as a 'true' turtle yet. As I said in the 9th FFoC, the anapsid clade once included "turtles on the half-shell or with no shell at all".

Modern turtle shells have two main components, the plastron and carapace. The former is the undercarriage made of conjoined ventral plates like those found on the sternum and pelvis of the Permian Macroleter.

In later turtles, these would be fused in a keritinized matrix. If this was the first testudine adaptation, then the proposed ancestor of all turtles would be Odontochelys semitestacea, the earliest turtle yet discovered, and yes it still has teeth.

Either this animal developed the plastron first, or it begins a separate branch which has lost the top-half of its shell, meaning that an older ancestral link still has it.

The top piece, the carapace is composed of osteoderm scutes overlaid on a framework of broadly-expanded, extra-wide ribs. Both of these traits are dramatic adaptations, and wouldn't likely arise at the same time. Evolution is a matter of incremental, superficial changes slowly compiled atop consecutive tiers of fundamental similarities, and the two traits we're talking about could not have come about simultaneously. So we either need to find an already turtle-like basal species with either abnormally broad-bladed ribs, or one with an appropriate array of osteodermal scutes. Again, the fossil record provides both.

Here is a morphocline recently proposed by Lee (in press), featuring three pareiasaurs: A, Bradysaurus. B, Scutosaurus. C, Anthodon.

Some pareiasaurs (and para-reptilian diadectids) showed a tendency toward the development of both ventral plates and osteodermal armor. If this was the first testudine adaptation, then the proposed potential ancestor of all turtles would be Chinlechelys teneresta.
"More importantly, the reptile's dorsal ribs aren't fully fused to its shell - or carapace - as is the case in later fossils and in modern turtles."

However, embryological development tends to parallel evolutionary development with regard to sequential stages, leading to a field called 'evo devo'. Turtle embryos seem to broaden the ribs as the first of these traits. So if that is the first testudine adaptation, then according to the most recent computer analysis of morphological traits, the closest proposed common ancestor yet known for all turtles is Eunotosaurus.

"We reanalysed a recent dataset that allied turtles with the lizard-tuatara clade and found that the inclusion of the stem turtle Proganochelys quenstedti and the 'parareptile' Eunotosaurus africanus results in a single overriding morphological signal, with turtles outside Diapsida."
-Transitional fossils and the origin of turtles

"Strict consensus cladogram of two trees of 483 steps showing the phylogenetic relationships of 'parareptiles' when turtles are included in the analysis."

None of these are 'supposed'. They are all factual, and it is even possible that all three of these show concordant progression in turtle evolution,if odontochelys represents an off-shoot with a lost trait. Millereta is another 'para-reptilian' anapsid (an immediately allied sister-clade) showing ventral plates, expanded ribs, and a propensity for dermal scutes,all at the same time. The only real contention there is the still unresolved question of whether anapsids lie within Diapsida or prior to it. Hard proof cannot exist without the genome of extinct para-reptiles, but we do have all the essential traits emerging in all associated taxa. So the systematists at Palaeos concur, that according to combined character analyses, anapsida is a eureptilian precurser, not a subsequent subset.

"The position of turtles among amniotes remains one of the oldest and most contentious problems in vertebrate systematics. Three hypotheses are viable (figure 1): turtles are the extant sister to (i) the crocodile-bird clade (Cao et al. 2000; Hugall et al. 2007), (ii) the lizard-tuatara clade (Rieppel & deBragga 1996; deBraga & Rieppel 1997; Rieppel & Reisz 1999; Li et al. 2009), or (iii) Diapsida (Gauthier et al. 1988; Lee 1997, 2001; Lee et al. 2008; Werneburg & Sà¡nchez-Villagra 2009). The first hypothesis is supported by most molecular-based analyses; the others are derived from morphological studies that include the wide range of fossils seldom available to molecular systematists. The seemingly disparate nature of the morphology-based trees has led some to dismiss morphological data in favour of the more consistent molecular signal." (Hedges & Poling 1999; Tsuji & Mà¼ller 2009).
-Transitional fossils and the origin of turtles

So you read a magazine from 2009 and misunderstood it to mean that genetics tears the tree of life apart. But multiple peer-reviewed articles from 2010 reveal that genetics is still considered consistent when confirming that same tree. Is there anything else you would like to be proven wrong about?

I assert that there are no earlier organisms that you can show that flowering plants came from, that turtles came from, that backbones came from, that bats, that fish, that trees"¦ I assert that you can't get textbooks and paleontologists to agree with you.

Actually I have paleontologists, geologists, developmental biologists, (embryologists) and geneticists all agreeing with me in peer-reviewed journals.

--> Flowering plants
"Our research indicates that the descendants of flowering plants may have originated during the Permian period, between 290 and 245 million years ago," says J. Michael Moldowan, research professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences.
..."Our work has shown that oleanane is lacking from a wide range of fossil plants," he notes, "but the chemical is found in Permian sediments containing extinct seed plants called gigantopterids."
That makes gigantopterids the oldest oleanane-producing seed plants on record, an indication that they were among the earliest relatives of flowering plants, concludes biologist David Winship Taylor of Indiana University Southeast, a co-author of the ACS study.
"This discovery is even more significant because we recently found gigantopterid fossils in China with leaves and stems that are quite similar to modern flowering plants," Taylor notes, further evidence that flowering plants and gigantopterids evolved together, roughly 250 million years ago.
-NASA Science News

In a study published in today's issue of the journal Cell, Weigel and his colleagues report that floral patterning takes advantage of the same gene, called WUSCHEL or WUS, which scientists already knew was essential for patterning in shoots that form stems and leaves. "¦The Weigel-led study builds on previous work in his lab that resulted in the identification of the LEAFY gene as a "master switch" for flower development. Salk investigators had shown that LEAFY itself was sufficient to convert shoots to flowers. The finding not only suggested a plethora of potential agricultural applications, including accelerating flower and fruit production in crop plants, it also showed that flowers were modified leaves.
-Daily University Science News

--> Turtles

--> Backbones

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

In the early Cambrian, there were no 'true' fish, nor any other chordate more advanced than only the most primitive jawless, boneless, -sometimes skull-less notochord-types. This is another aspect of the fossil record that creationism cannot account for. Years ago, I included sufficient science links on the evolution of chordates, craniates, vertebrates, gnathostomes, and so on on my web page.

--> Bats
Although bats are one of the most diverse groups of mammals today, they are one of the least common groups in the fossil record. Bats have small, light skeletons that do not preserve well. Also, many live in tropical forests, where conditions are usually unfavorable for the formation of fossils. Thus we know little about the early evolution of bats.
Berkeley Museum of Paleontology

Here we describe a new bat from the Early Eocene Green River Formation of Wyoming, USA, with features that are more primitive than seen in any previously known bat. The evolutionary pathways that led to flapping flight and echolocation in bats have been in dispute, and until now fossils have been of limited use in documenting transitions involved in this marked change in lifestyle. Phylogenetically informed comparisons of the new taxon with other bats and non-flying mammals reveal that critical morphological and functional changes evolved incrementally. Forelimb anatomy indicates that the new bat was capable of powered flight like other Eocene bats, but ear morphology suggests that it lacked their echolocation abilities, supporting a 'flight first' hypothesis for chiropteran evolution. The shape of the wings suggests that an undulating gliding-fluttering flight style may be primitive for bats, and the presence of a long calcar indicates that a broad tail membrane evolved early in Chiroptera, probably functioning as an additional airfoil rather than as a prey-capture device. Limb proportions and retention of claws on all digits indicate that the new bat may have been an agile climber that employed quadrupedal locomotion and under-branch hanging behaviour.
Nature 2008

--> Fish
A popular hypothesis regarding chordate evolution suggests that an ancestral tunicate gave rise to the higher chordate groups through an evolutionary process (paedomorphosis) whereby structural and swimming characteristics of the tunicate tadpole larva were retained into adulthood. Through this process, the tunicate ancestral line was thought to have evolved into the larger swimming chordates. Modern molecular genetics evidence supports a different hypothesis -- that ancestral larvaceans are the ancestors probably to both tunicates and higher chordates.
-BioMedia

In the nomenclature of systematics, 'fish' = 'chordate'.

--> Trees
The first plants to develop this secondary growth, and a woody habit, were apparently the ferns, and as early as the middle Devonian one species, Wattieza, had already reached heights of 8 m and a tree-like habit.
Other clades did not take long to develop a tree-like stature; the late Devonian Archaeopteris, a precursor to gymnosperms which evolved from the trimerophytes, reached 30 m in height. These progymnosperms were the first plants to develop true wood, grown from a bifacial cambium, of which the first appearance is in the mid Devonian Rellimia. True wood is only thought to have evolved once, giving rise to the concept of a "lignophyte" clade.
Seriously, I didn't have to go beyond Wikipedia for this one.

There has been a paleontological boon over the last twenty years or so, conveniently concordant with new revelations in genomics. If you had asked me these questions a decade ago, I might not have been able to answer. Obviously my inability to answer these ten years ago would not have implied that you might have been right on any point, nor that evolutionary science was essentially wrong until proven otherwise. Your position was already disproved many decades ago, and mine continues to be consistently vindicated. The point is that we have known this for more than a century. Any link still missing at this point is like the few jigsaw pieces still out of a mostly completed picture. I have every reason to believe that the last pieces I need are in that pile somewhere, and even if we never find those last few, we already know what the picture is. You're still determined to deny that that there even is a picture to be seen in the mostly completed puzzle.

Fabricated data and forged fossils go far in today's world, especially when they reaffirm the prime axiom that evolution"¦
You do realize that every scientist that looked at that, every one expressed doubts as to its authenticity.
Good for them. That proves my point that the peer review process is in a crisis, because what matters is the politics. The politics is what matters.

No, it disproves both of your points. Forged fossils obviously do not go far,since none of the scientists who looked at archeoraptor would endorse it as authentic. Obviously politics do NOT matter in science. So Czerkas bypassed the scientists and turned not to a peer-reviewed science journal, but to a popular magazine instead,much as you did yourself- in your attempt to deceive laymen because scientists would not be so easily fooled. Nor are they as corrupt as common men or clergy either.

There are volumes being published on fabricated data.

I will not argue that a sometimes deliberate or innocent falsehood will go unnoticed for some time, but science is a self-correcting process bent on critical analysis, the point of which is designed to expose any flaw. Meanwhile creationism is driven entirely by frauds, fallacies, falsehoods, and fakery, where the closest you can get to an honest claim is untestable nonsense pleading for magic in denial of evidence or logic. Just to prove this, can you name any evolutionary scientist who lied in the act of promoting evolution against creationism? Provide the name, the lie, and how we know it was a lie. Then name any professional creationist who did NOT lie when arguing for creationism over actual [natural] science. You just give the name, and I'll show you where and how he lied.

On that note, of all the claims of creationists in all their publications, is there even one you can show that is both supportive of your position and verifiably true?

Do you admit that it is dishonest to assert as fact that which is not evidently true?

Do you admit that it is unwise to assert absolute conviction even when there is evidence?

Do you admit that it is dishonest to pretend to know that which no one even can know?

Do you admit that it is dishonest to automatically and thoughtlessly reject evidence not yet revealed simply because it conflicts with your predetermined conclusions?

In five million years, at the pace it would take for one genetic substitution to replicate itself throughout the entire population such that you have millions of differences from chimps to human beings, to Homo sapiens, for that to happen in eight million years, -you pick your time frame. I don't care. It's mathematically impossible to get millions of changes... The reason it would be impossible to get the human genome from the ape genome, the reason it's impossible in your time frame is because the time it takes to get one substitution, one random mutation to replicate through an entire population takes x number of generations. And we now know the enormous differences between chimp DNA and human DNA. We can begin to quantify the challenge of the millions of changes that have to occur between chimps and humans, and it would take hundreds of millions if not billions of years.

I told you this was already explained by Prof. Kenneth Miller Ph.D. in his famous destruction of Intelligent Design, where he talks about the fusion of our chromosome #2 with chimpanzee chromosome #13. This is yet another point creationism can't even pretend to address.

Secondly, there are not "millions of differences" in this case. Don't forget the fact that humans are a subset of apes definitely and definitively.

Finally you're revealing a double-standard again in that you would need all other species to diversify in orders of magnitude faster than we did. Not eight speciations in eight million years, but a thousand specations in a century or so, just to preserve your flood myth, which we already know is indefensible.

 

[AronRa]

In the 7th and final part of our conversation, Bob continued his berratement of me for showing Pakicetus and Rhodecetus as part of the whale ancestry. Why? Because Phillip Gingrich originally thought he had found the skulls of early whales, but later discovered that they each had four legs. Bob doesn't understand that if one finds the skull of a whale, then you would naturally think that it came with a whale's body. Bob does not understand why these skulls alone were considered transitional even before the bodies were found, nor that these animals weren't recognized as significant transitions until after it was discovered that these whales still had legs. Bob even accused me of not knowing why a cetacean relation was implied,AFTER I explained to him that it was due to similarities in the skull!

So one more time, Bob, Rhodhocetus had undifferentiated conical teeth and an inner ear structure diagnostic of whales. What made the skull alone transitional was that the nostrils were located half-way from the tip of the snout (where they would normally be on terrestrial mammals) and half-way down from the top of the head, where they would be on modern whales.

Now Bob, did Phillip Gingrich 'recant' this? If he had recanted this, would that change these facts? Or would Pakicetus and Rodhocetus still have cetacean traits regardless whether they still had legs or not?

"In most ways, Pakicetus (Greek for "Pakistan whale") was indistinguishable from other small mammals of the early Eocene epoch: about 50 pounds or so, with long, dog-like legs, a long tail, and a narrow snout. Crucially, though, the anatomy of this mammal's inner ears closely matches that of modern whales, the main "diagnostic" feature that places Pakicetus at the root of whale evolution."
-About.com

So do you now admit that THAT's why these animals are linked to the origin of whales, and not any mistake you think Gingrich made?

I could show you a concise summary of all the relevant evidence in one essay, but I predict that you will decide in advance that the source is biased, and that you will refuse to read it for that reason. And that you will not acknowledge your own ironic bias in having made that judgement before-hand.

The journal of geological education, 1983, Phillip Gingrich drew it [Pakicetus] as a fish. He drew it as a fish, and he said it was an ancestor to a whale. The reason you have it in your chart is because Gingrich said it was the ancestor to a whale when he thought it was a fish! So you should,for intellectual honesty, you should say, 'you know what, I'm gonna re-evaluate"¦
So we're gonna confuse a mammalian skull with a fish?
Hey that's his problem; it's not my problem.

No, that's your problem, because Gingrich never did that. Assuming of course that you define 'fish' as a linnaean grade of cold-blooded, scaly, limbless vertebrates with gills, then no, Gingrich never either rendered nor envisioned Pakicetus as a 'fish' at any time. In 1983, Karen Klitz painted an illustration of Pakicetus for Dr. Gingrich, and she rendered it as an otter-like mammal, not anything like a fish.

Gingrich is a paleontologist. He is not stupid enough to believe that whales evolved from fish. No evolutionary scientist is that dumb.

How about the relationship between a bulldog and a chihuahua. You look at those two skulls, you find them as extinct animals, you're gonna think they're on opposite ends of Darwin's tree of life.

Wrong again. We would have identified them as morphologically distinct species, yes, I grant you. Fossils offer no way to determine whether two forms that are obviously closely-related are still chemically interfertile, but they would have been classified as allied species in the same genus. Don't forget how we classified borophagines the same way, and on the same criteria. I explained this in my video on Caniform Carnivore Cladogram Construction, which I advised that you should see before pursuing this debate with me. Yet you said that my claims about anatomy were false. Then you tried to say that octopods had human eyes, and you still held to your assertion even after you admitted that mollusk retina is reversed making it more efficient than simian eyes.

We're arguing over the Nth degree to try to justify something we know can't have happened; the flood for example, the tower of Babel, we KNOW these are false.
Not at all.
We KNOW that they're myths. There's no uncertainty about that.
You think when you say that that means its true? There was a global flood, and languages did get diversified in the recent past, and I've got plenty of evidence from Noam Chomsky, Edward Sapir, and many others.
Languages were already well diversified long before Hammurabi started the Marduk ziggurat. We know that it didn't happen from the Tower of Babel.
These world-renowned linguists disproved Darwin's assertions, first that there is such a thing as primitive language, they utterly exploded that myth. Secondly that human language is a more advanced form of animal grunts, barks, and all, they've utterly exploded THAT myth.

Even if that were true,which it obviously isn't because we've actually seen primitive languages emerging under controlled conditions- it would still be irrelevant, because Hammurabi started the Marduk ziggurat round about the 17th century BCE. There were already different languages being spoken in Egypt, India, all across Europe and the Orient, in tribal America as well as Tawan, Australia, China, Japan, and the cultures that were there then have their descendants still living there now. We KNOW that neither the flood nor the tower of Babel happened the way the Bible describes them. We know they were both adaptations of earlier semitic polytheism and that both were based on real events of much more humble proportions.

Finally you again tried to argue that if science could not find a natural explanation for the origin of the universe, then that must imply a supernatural origin, and of course what you mean by that is magic. You then said that would allow you to assume a supernatural creator, which would allow you to abandon everything we know about biology and pretend that mythology can somehow override that. You kept asserting that it was scientific evidence that changed your mind, but we both know it was not. Just like Kurt Wise, you abandoned scientific evidence in favor of your love of a particular brand of mythology, a mythology that all scientific evidence says cannot be true.

That's why I accused you of being bound to a doctrinal obligation, just like all other professional creationists:

"By definition, no apparent, perceived, or claimedevidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record."
--Answersingenesis.org

"verbal inspiration guarantees that these writings, as originally and miraculously given, are infallible and completely authoritative on all matters with which they deal, free from error of any sort, scientific [sic] and historical as well as moral and theological."
--Institute for Creation Research

"[this school]....stresses the Word of God as the only source of truth in our world."
--Canyon Creek Christian Academy

"...the autographs of the 66 canonical books of the Bible are objectively inspired, infallible and the inerrant Word of God in all of their parts and in all matters of which they speak (history, theology, science, etc.)."
--Mark Cadwallader's 'Creation Moments'

"The Bible is the divinely inspired written Word of God. Because it is inspired throughout, it is completely free from error--scientifically, historically, theologically, and morally. Thus it is the absolute authority in all matters of truth, faith, and conduct. The final guide to the interpretation of the Bible is the Bible itself. God's world must always agree with God's Word, because the Creator of the one is the Author of the other. Thus, where physical evidences from the creation may be used to confirm the Bible, these evidences must never be used to correct or interpret the Bible. The written Word must take priority in the event of any apparent conflict."
--Mark Ramsey's 'Greater Houston Creation Association'

Revealed truth: That which is revealed in Scripture, whether or not man has scientifically proved it. If it is in the Bible, it is already true without requiring additional proof.
...Fallacy: that which contradicts God's revealed truth, no matter how scientific, how commonly believed, or how apparently workable or logical it may seem
--Bob Jones University, Biology Student Text (3rd ed.- 2 vol.)

Each of these is an admission of bias, stating that they will accept only the evidence which seems to reinforce their pre-determined conclusions, but that they will automatically reject -without consideration- any and all evidence which stands against the a-priori assumptions. You will find declarations like this proclaimed proudly by every professional creationist, yourself included. But you will never find anything this dishonest tolerated by any scientific institution. Still you tried to accuse me of holding to this same dishonest fault. In fact, you accused me of holding to a 'dogmatic' defense of evolution. This is not true in the least. I can't help it if evolution is always born out by the evidence while creationism is supported by nothing and refuted by everything. But I can prove that point even to your satisfaction,if you'll properly address my points and queries and don't keep dodging important questions the way creationists always do.

Suspending judgement is wise. Committing to any belief without adequate support is stupid, and refusing to change one's mind despite evidence to the contrary is overtly dishonest, yet that is all the leading creationist organizations do.

The principle difference between me and you is if you present something that shows that I'm wrong, I will concede and I will change it. You however are forbidden to do so"¦
No, that's...
"¦because you adhere to a belief system.
No, you are wrong in that if I saw the evidence that I misunderstood the Bible, that I misunderstood science, and that evolution is true, I would accept evolution. On my home page, I have something you don't have. I have an errata link, an error link, where we list for twenty years, we've listed the biggest errors we made.

I do that too, sometimes with annotations on the videos themselves, or with another video to explain them. Now let's see how many of the errors you've already made in this conversation make it to your errata link.

And are you ready now to take on the phylogeny challenge?

 

[Inferno]

I have yet to read everything - it's one hell of a read after all - but I want to comment on two things before I get back to work. I'll update this if I find any other things I don't agree with. Note that I'm only really nit-picking here, I absolutely agree with every point made so far and I'm really glad you, Aron, wrote this up in such a comprehensible and easy-to-read manner. Let's see what Bob says about all of this.

Dr. Francis Collins, -director of the human genome project- obviously doesn't know as much about genetics as a creationist talk radio host citing Wikipedia, because Collins said that humans and chimps share 98.4% of their DNA. His international research consortium showed that directly comparable sequence between the two complete genomes is almost 99 percent identical, and that when DNA insertions and deletions are taken into account, humans and chimps still share 96% of their sequence. The first comprehensive comparison of the genetic blueprints of humans and chimpanzees shows our closest living relatives share perfect identity with 96% of our DNA sequence, and if deletions are taken into account, humans and chimps still share 96 percent of their sequence.

This last sentence is a partial quote from the first sentence of the article you cited, yet it doesn't really make sense - I think - when you put the second part directly after it. This is merely an issue of comprehension, not correctness. Everything in that quote is absolutely correct, but the underlined part may confuse, and here's why:
In the first part of the sentence it says "perfect identity with 96% of our DNA sequence" and then goes on to say "if deletions are taken into account, [we] still share 96 percent". I think you meant to put something else in the place of this underlined half-sentence but then forgot, correct? Because you've already quoted that part of the sentence in its correct context, just a line above. (green) In my opinion the underlined part can, in this instance, be discarded and a simple full stop will do.

The reason I referred you to my videos on caniforme and feliforme phylogeny is because both of those videos prove the point, by examining and explaining published peer-revewed genetic analyses:

I'm not sure about this, but the "e" is unnecessary, isn't it? "Caniform" and "Feliform" will do. The "e" just makes it spanish. (Katalan to be specific.)

Nothing else to add, excellent job there Aron.

 

[AronRa]

Thanks Inferno. I corrected the double-stated paragraph.

 

[Inferno]

In five million years, at the pace it would take for one genetic substitution to replicate itself throughout the entire population such that you have millions of differences from chimps to human beings, to Homo sapiens, for that to happen in eight million years, -you pick your time frame. I don't care. It's mathematically impossible to get millions of changes... The reason it would be impossible to get the human genome from the ape genome, the reason it's impossible in your time frame is because the time it takes to get one substitution, one random mutation to replicate through an entire population takes x number of generations. And we now know the enormous differences between chimp DNA and human DNA. We can begin to quantify the challenge of the millions of changes that have to occur between chimps and humans, and it would take hundreds of millions if not billions of years.

I told you this was already explained by Prof. Kenneth Miller Ph.D. in his famous destruction of Intelligent Design, where he talks about the fusion of our chromosome #2 with chimpanzee chromosome #13. This is yet another point creationism can't even pretend to address.

Secondly, there are not "millions of differences" in this case. Don't forget the fact that humans are a subset of apes definitely and definitively.

Finally you're revealing a double-standard again in that you would need all other species to diversify in orders of magnitude faster than we did. Not eight speciations in eight million years, but a thousand specations in a century or so, just to preserve your flood myth, which we already know is indefensible.

I would add only one thing here:
Human DNA is about 3,079,843,747 total base pairs. Of those, 96% or roughly 2,956,649,997 are identical in humans and chimpanzees, so we're looking at 123,193,750 different ones in total, so 61,596,875 per lineage. Let us assume the estimate of a split 8 million years ago, assuming (quite conservatively) an average generation of 20 years and Nachman and Crowell's 175 Mutations per human baby. 8,000,000 divided by 20 = 400,000. 400k times 175 mutations gives us 70 million different base pairs or 8.5 million more than we'd need. (This is very much simplified btw.)

Second, Sean B. Carroll gives a thorough calculation in one of his books, either in "The Making of the Fittest" or "Endless Forms Most Beautiful". In it, he calculates how long it would take for a specific mutation to arise in a population of 10,000 mice, (a beneficial mutation to be exact) how long it would take to spread through the population, how likely it is to get deleted by chance and so on. The surprising result is, I seem to remember, a thousand years.

I'll be sure to update the specifics in a few days, I should be home by the 2nd.

Excellent work on the turtles, really learnt a lot there. Also excellent work spotting the double standard!

 

[brettpalmer]

Thanks for this, Aron! I've tuned in to Enyart's show here in Denver a couple time in the past few weeks and I hear him bring up your name every time I've listened. He mocks you, says bad things about your performance, thinks he bested a popular YouTube atheist. It's the very reason why I refuse to do his show. But I'm glad you took the time to write this up. Now, am I incorrect or did you state Enyart is due to come here and respond? Is that the deal?

 

[AronRa]

At the end of our interview, Enyart made an unprecedented concession for a creationist in agreeing to a written debate in this very forum over the merits of the claims made on his show. It will be an amusing thing to see if he does show up, especially if he has been mocking me all this time. How could he? I was already intimately familiar with everything he tried to surprise me with. I demonstrated a more accurate understanding of everything he brought up, and ultimately it turns out I was right about everything I said, while all of his assertions proved to be dead wrong.

Well, creationists typically have neither compunction nor accountability. Enyart showed that he couldn't understand anything he read nor anything I said. I also get the impression that none of his fans have the reading comprehension required to follow this debate, so Enyart can safely say whatever he wants to an audience who will never know or care what the truth really is.

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

At the end of our interview, Enyart made an unprecedented concession for a creationist in agreeing to a written debate in this very forum over the merits of the claims made on his show. It will be an amusing thing to see if he does show up, especially if he has been mocking me all this time. How could he? I was already intimately familiar with everything he tried to surprise me with. I demonstrated a more accurate understanding of everything he brought up, and ultimately it turns out I was right about everything I said, while all of his assertions proved to be dead wrong.

You are 100% right, and that is why I cannot wait to see Enyart try to explain just this one point:

The chimpanzee genome is 30% different in the Y chromosome, "¦'horrendously different from the human Y-chromosome. "¦We are 30% different from supposedly our closest living relatives."

You should understand that sharing 70% of a gene set does not mean the same thing as having a 70% identical codon sequence, the way our genome matches that of chimpanzees and other higher animals.

"Genes only make up about 3% of our genome. Yes, you read that correctly. The rest of our genome is called non-coding or junk DNA. Despite the fact that there is so much junk, we still share 95-98% of our DNA with a chimp. And 80% with a mouse. This means that we share lots of genes and a ton of junk DNA." "
-geneticist, Carrie Metzinger B.Sc., Bergmann Lab, Stamford University

"Humans and mice (also rats) share several hundred absolutely identical stretches of DNA extending for 200-800 base pairs."
-Dr. John W. Kimball, professor of immunology, Harvard University

"Preliminary sequence comparisons indicate that chimp DNA is 98.7% identical with human DNA. If just the gene sequences encoding proteins are considered, the similarity increases to 99.2%."
-Dr. George B. Johnson, Biology Professor at Washington U. St. Louis, Missouri

So the first mistake you made here was assuming that a 70% similar gene set in sponges equates to a 70% identical codon sequence. Your second mistake was thinking that a 30% difference in the Y-chromosome somehow equates to a 30% difference in the entire genome. You simply deducted your 30% from 100 to conclude that chimpanzees were 70% similar to humans just like you thought sponges were. Wow.

Did you think that men were made entirely of nothing but Y-chromosomes? And that women were made entirely of X-chromosomes? You do understand that men have both of these, right?

Dr. Francis Collins, -director of the human genome project- obviously doesn't know as much about genetics as a creationist talk radio host citing Wikipedia, because Collins said that humans and chimps share 98.4% of their DNA. His international research consortium showed that directly comparable sequence between the two complete genomes is almost 99 percent identical, and that when DNA insertions and deletions are taken into account, humans and chimps still share 96% of their sequence. The first comprehensive comparison of the genetic blueprints of humans and chimpanzees shows our closest living relatives share perfect identity with 96% of our DNA sequence.

Even if we forget all about orthologous genomic sequencing for the moment. Given that there is a wide range of human-chimpanzee nucleotide divergence across the autosomal genome, and very low divergence in the X chromosome, if we say that the X-chromosome matches Collin's estimate, and the Y-chromosome is as you misunderstand it, then given that they count as an inseparable pair, you would not have only a 70% similarity; you would have (98.4 + 70) / 2 = 84.2%.

Of course you're forgetting that the sex-determining chromosomes account for only one pair out of 23, and that your divergent Y-chromosome is now outnumbered 45:1. That already more than accounts for the 'horrendous difference' you want people to think there is, but it gets even worse, because the Y-chromosome is disappearing. It is generally diminished in all mammals, not just humans and chimps. It has been reduced to 1/6 the size of its counterpart and has only 1/12 the number of genes. How much do you think your Y-chromosomal variance matters now?

Did you really not know any of this, -I mean none of it- before you broadcast these embarrassing blunders to thousands of listeners? How often do you do these shows?

This is just my favorite example of Enyart's complete lack of understanding about anything scientific. Enyart can only concede that he was grossly in error. Anything short of that will just be more deliberate lying.

Now, who actually thinks Enyart will be honorable enough to concede his mistakes?

 

[brettpalmer]

I had completely forgotten about this thread until last night...Checked in hoping to see if Enyart has decided to show up and found he's more than a bit tardy.

Don't know if you're familiar with it, but Enyart does have a webpage where he uploads all his shows:

http://kgov.com/bel/archive

His "Real Science Friday" material can be found here:

http://kgov.com/real-science-friday

Apparently he hangs out at Theologyweb.com as his forum of choice. He has links under his show topics to discuss his programs there.

 

[AronRa]

A few days ago, I got a proposal from someone acting as Enyart's assistant.

Aron,

Now that Bob has seen your posts on leagueofreason.org.uk, yes, he would like to have a written debate with you as you both agreed to on the air. Bob suggests the following somewhat informal format.

TITLE: Atheist AronRa and Creationist Bob Enyart Debate
TITLE: Evolutionist AronRa and Creationist Bob Enyart Debate
TITLE: AronRa and Bob Enyart Debate Creation
TITLE: _________________________________

TOPICS: as you suggested at LoR the topics will be limited to claims made during the AR/BE shows.

ROUNDS: Three.
Each round consists of ten posts, five for each side, alternating.

POSTS: Ten per round.

LENGTH: informal. But you could suggest a word limit.

DEADLINES: for posting, informal, but no response within a week ends the round in default.

LINKS: okay but actual argumentation must be included in the post.

Bob posts first in first and third rounds. Aron gets the last word in the first and final rounds, and posts first in the second round.

LEAGUE OF REASON: forum limits posting in the three threads to only AronRa and Bob Enyart. No commentary or posts from other readers. A "comments thread" for each round would be available for anyone else who wants to post.

COPYRIGHT: Both sides have the right to reproduce the debate online or in other formats.

Thoughts?

If, -after reviewing our interview on the air- Bob still feels he can defend his position even in this format, then I'm all for it; that will be something to see. But I find his proposed rules confusing.

First of all, he offers new titles, which would require a whole new thread. In fact he wants three different threads. What is wrong with the one thread already created for that purpose? There is no reason for me to copy-and-paste anything I already wrote just so Bob can post first. I already have, and he'll still need to address all those same points either way. Let him have the last word. By then, it won't matter what he says.

In a scientific debate, where accuracy matters more than the pride of either participant, neither one should get away with any error just because his opponent didn't notice it. If that happens, then whatever misinformation gets through the filter would appear to be true, and the chances of that should minimized as much as possible for obvious reasons. Bob doesn't have to reply to anyone but me, and we can have the whole thread moved -intact- to a restricted access forum if he feels that having a 'peanut gallery' of other participants might intimidate him.

The number of rounds or posts isn't important. In fact, we shouldn't have any 'rounds' at all. That might be acceptable in a live debate, but it just won't work here. I usually suggest one dozen mutual exchanges and leave it at that. However I find that my opponents keep ignoring direct questions, so I sometimes tack on a proviso that if I have to repeat my query three or more times, then on the judgment of moderators noting that, the discussion should be over by default. This may be necessary with Bob, since he tends to dismiss relevant questions with "I don't care". Replies like that will not count. This is necessary for me to attempt to reason with him.

As for the length of the posts, since we are limited to the points already raised on the air, then our new submissions logically shouldn't get any longer than they already are, because they will dwindle down as various points are conceded.

Obviously I agree that neither side should be able to censor, restrict, or claim copyright on anything said in this thread. To my experience, it has always only ever been religious adherents who even want that. That's why even our negotiations of these rules should be posted, just so everyone understands the intent of each condition.

Likewise, I obviously agree that links should be provided in support of specific claims. Of course I also agree that neither side even need click those links unless they (or observers) simply want to check the accuracy of the other's citation. Each party must speak for himself, and should understand his own arguments.

My primary contention is with Bob's proposal that failure to post a reply within a single week constitutes a loss by default. It normally takes me longer than that just to catch up on my email! I'm not kidding either. I don't have assistants like yourself. Neither do I have an online ministry peddling books and DVDs and so on. I'm supposed to start my own radio show soon, apart form my podcasts with DPR Jones, but I'll never have sheep to shear like Bob does. So I still have to work for a living, and I more work to do off the clock than on. For example, it Bob posted today, it would take me a whole month to reply to him. I have multiple presentations, promotions, and protests to prepare, and just a few weeks to complete them all. These next few months, I'll be all over the place. I can't put one of these real-world events on-hold, and cannot prioritize Bob above any of them. That and I also have a large and demanding family on top of everything else. At this point, the best I could agree to is no more than a month between posts. I'm sorry, but I'm already sweating just over the amount of time I took me to write this message to you.

 

[Inferno]

First of all, he offers new titles, which would require a whole new thread. In fact he wants three different threads. What is wrong with the one thread already created for that purpose? There is no reason for me to copy-and-paste anything I already wrote just so Bob can post first. I already have, and he'll still need to address all those same points either way. Let him have the last word. By then, it won't matter what he says.

The way I understood it, he's simply proposing different titles for the same thread. I might have misunderstood it though, the message wasn't very clear.

All the best with the family Aron, I still hope you'll get enough time to do this, it should be fun.

 

[nemesiss]

though im not sure if this would be possible...

if any standard for debate/discussion should be used, it should be the one Dawkins used together with Neill deGrasse tyson and also with Lawrence Kraus.

the big benefits are:
- they are more open.
- there are no real limits to what it being discussed, it can grow into a certain direction. this i think is also more pleasing for an interested audience.
- there is no real need for a moderator/chairman, though one is there if the discussion gets too far off topic.
- if gives one side a better chance to refute an argument and also the other side to clarify an argument.


here is the example of how it is held

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

First of all, he offers new titles, which would require a whole new thread. In fact he wants three different threads. What is wrong with the one thread already created for that purpose? There is no reason for me to copy-and-paste anything I already wrote just so Bob can post first. I already have, and he'll still need to address all those same points either way. Let him have the last word. By then, it won't matter what he says.

The way I understood it, he's simply proposing different titles for the same thread. I might have misunderstood it though, the message wasn't very clear.

All the best with the family Aron, I still hope you'll get enough time to do this, it should be fun.

I also understood it as three suggested titles for the debate, not three debate threads. However, it seems you missed this part of the post:

Bob posts first in first and third rounds. Aron gets the last word in the first and final rounds, and posts first in the second round.

I do not understand why Bob cannot just start the debate after AronRa. AronRa has already posted several lengthy opening posts. I understand that he wants it limited to himself and AronRa, thus this thread can be designated as the peanut gallery, and the first posts AronRa made moved to the debate section.

However, AronRa, you might concede letting him post first. If that is what it would take to get him here to debate with you, than so be it. In addition, it seems you could just copy and paste from your earlier posts, because it does not seem that Bob has even a basic understanding of any of the subjects you brought up.

 

[YesYouNeedJesus]

Bob Enyart Live asked me to post this:

AronRa seems to be backing out of his offer to debate Bob Enyart in writing. On the air AronRa agreed to debate Bob here at the League of Reason. Our proposal (see http://kgov.com/AronRa-debate-offer#proposal ) to start the debate was rejected by Aron. Here's the last paragraph of his reply:

"My primary contention is with Bob's proposal that failure to post a reply within a single week constitutes a loss by default. It normally takes me longer than that just to catch up on my email! I'm not kidding either. I don't have assistants like yourself. Neither do I have an online ministry peddling books and DVDs and so on. I'm supposed to start my own radio show soon, apart form my podcasts with DPR Jones, but I'll never have sheep to shear like Bob does. So I still have to work for a living, and I more work to do off the clock than on. For example, it Bob posted today, it would take me a whole month to reply to him. I have multiple presentations, promotions, and protests to prepare, and just a few weeks to complete them all. These next few months, I'll be all over the place. I can't put one of these real-world events on-hold, and cannot prioritize Bob above any of them. That and I also have a large and demanding family on top of everything else. At this point, the best I could agree to is no more than a month between posts. I'm sorry, but I'm already sweating just over the amount of time I took me to write this message to you." -AronRa

We'll wait. By Aron's suggestion that the rules permit a month between written posts (relatively brief posts at that), a 10-round written debate would take more than a year to conduct, and three such debates might take half a decade. While Bob is eager to debate Aron, he doesn't want to marry him. It seems to us that AronRa is merely backing out of his on-air agreement that he would debate Bob Enyart in January of 2012. If Aron ever decides to debate in writing and if Bob is still alive, then Aron can accept the above format, modify it, or suggest something else, and we'll be happy to proceed! Online thankfully there's no need to argue about the shape of the table.

 

[australopithecus]

Though personally I would consider the challenge of debating bob on any subject regarding science as fruitless as debating Hamlet with a yogurt, I'm pretty sure AronRa wouldnt 'back out', despite as we all know, debating creationists is likely to entail nothing more than word games and blatant dishonesty.

Aron is a bigger man than I. And has more impressive facial hair.