** STICKY ** MEMBERS QUOTES

[bluejatheist]

What the hell parallel universe did this happen in? What could possibly give Joe pause from the scorched earth style of dialogue?

http://www.leagueofreason.org.uk//viewtopic.php?f=7&t=9687

 

[WarK]

And well, I use "cornered" because an elevator is... quite cornerfull.

 

[Prolescum]

australopithecus[/url]"]I ate Halal chicken the other day. Next thing you know I'll be blowing myself up on public transport.

Made me laugh.

 

[WarK]

But then again, Noah had magic wood, magic nails, magic tools and magic help. So if anything goes wrong they can just say "Well that proves that Noah's ark was a even greater miracle because we can't make boats like that with current technology therefore the miracle of devine materials must have taken place at the time of Noah. It was simply not put in writing because Noah was none the wiser and couldn't tell regular materials from God's special materials". Oh and "God must have endowed with a blackhole type gismo to expand space on the ark for every species to fit".

Sometimes, the line between adult creationists and 5 year old children is not so clear.

Child 1: "Pew-Pew! Ha! I got you with my canon!"

Child 2: "Nuh-uh! I was wearing armor."

Child 1: "Body armor can't stop a canon!"

Child 2: "Well...um...magic body armor can."

 

[)O( Hytegia )O(]

I guess this sort of explains why religions are so successful:

Even the non-religious people want to band together in a little club to pat each other on the back about their beliefs.

 

[australopithecus]

I'm happy australopithecus to leave our disagreement right here.

This would be like the Japanese, after the battle of Okinawa, saying "All right, I think we can just pause the war right here."

 

[forgotten observer]

On a forum I made about user signatures

Australopithecus: Mine's bigger on the inside

For his 3333th post no less, Made me chuckle.

 

[forgotten observer]

we're all children, with varying levels of pessimism, living in bodies with varying levels of dead

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Inferno[/url]"]Read your list. Can an eight year old understand it? If not, a creationist probably won't.

:lol:

 

[Frenger]

Inferno[/url]"]Read your list. Can an eight year old understand it? If not, a creationist probably won't.

:lol:

Seconded.

 

[WarK]

malicious_bloke[/url]"]Call me old and jaded if you like, but reading this guy's post just makes me think that there is no known mechanism by which new information can be added to the creationist knowledgebase.

All these "points" have been dealt with hundreds of times before...

 

[Dustnite]

From Gilbo's Post:

They also assume that God is infinite, timeless, spaceless and has the capabilites and desire to create a physical Universe. They then assume that a god who created the Universe would fill the expanse with billions of galaxies and stars, (most of which have died), in order to plant life on an insignificant spec of dust in a pointless part of the Universe. Only one of the millions of species would gain self awareness and the abilities to question their origins. They would then fight over the cause of their existance due to the extraordinary amounts of evidence god planted against the "truth" such as fossils, retroviruses and Ray Comfort.

All this, so he can tell us not to jack off or we'll go to hell.

Seems legit.

I nearly died laughing. Fucking brilliant!

 

[Prolescum]

Frenger's ego can handle this:

Violation of Newton's third law with a new space propellant invented by me.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVAglIM5kys


Very affectionately,
Victor Elias Espinoza Guedez
Patent pending: 20 August 2013

Are you sure this doesn't disprove Einstein's theory of relativity, as what you have done isn't relative to anything at all?

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Rumraket[/url]"]A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry
Douglas L Theobald

Universal common ancestry (UCA) is a central pillar of modern evolutionary theory1. As first suggested by Darwin2, the theory of UCA posits that all extant terrestrial organisms share a common genetic heritage, each being the genealogical descendant of a single species from the distant past3, 4, 5, 6. The classic evidence for UCA, although massive, is largely restricted to ‘local’ common ancestry—for example, of specific phyla rather than the entirety of life—and has yet to fully integrate the recent advances from modern phylogenetics and probability theory. Although UCA is widely assumed, it has rarely been subjected to formal quantitative testing7, 8, 9, 10, and this has led to critical commentary emphasizing the intrinsic technical difficulties in empirically evaluating a theory of such broad scope1, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. Furthermore, several researchers have proposed that early life was characterized by rampant horizontal gene transfer, leading some to question the monophyly of life11, 14, 15. Here I provide the first, to my knowledge, formal, fundamental test of UCA, without assuming that sequence similarity implies genetic kinship. I test UCA by applying model selection theory5, 16, 17 to molecular phylogenies, focusing on a set of ubiquitously conserved proteins that are proposed to be orthologous. Among a wide range of biological models involving the independent ancestry of major taxonomic groups, the model selection tests are found to overwhelmingly support UCA irrespective of the presence of horizontal gene transfer and symbiotic fusion events. These results provide powerful statistical evidence corroborating the monophyly of all known life.

Here I report tests of the theory of UCA using model selection theory, without assuming that sequence similarity indicates a genealogical relationship. By accounting for the trade-off between data prediction and simplicity, model selection theory provides methods for identifying the candidate hypothesis that is closest to reality 16,17. When choosing among several competing scientific models, two opposing factors must be taken into account: the goodness of fit and parsimony. The fit of a model to data can be improved arbitrarily by increasing the number of free parameters. On the other hand, simple hypotheses (those with as few ad hoc parameters as possible) are preferred. Model selection methods weigh these two factors statistically to find the hypothesis that is both the most accurate and the most precise. Because model selection tests directly quantify the evidence for and against competing models, these tests overcome many of the well known logical problems with Fisherian null-hypothesis significance tests (such as BLAST-style Evalues) 16,21. To quantify the evidence supporting the various ancestry hypotheses, I applied three of the most widely used model selection criteria from all major statistical schools: the log likelihood ratio (LLR), the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and the log Bayes factor (LBF) 16,17.

...

All of the models examined here are compatible with multiple origins in both the above schemes, and therefore the tests reported here are designed to discriminate specifically between UCA and multiple ancestry, rather than between single and multiple origins of life. Furthermore, UCA does not demand that the last universal common ancestor was a single organism 24,25 ,in accord with the traditional evolutionary view that common ancestors of species are groups, not individuals 26. Rather, the last universal common ancestor may have comprised a population of organisms with different genotypes that lived in different places at different times 25 .
The data set consists of a subset of the protein alignment data from ref. 27, containing 23 universally conserved proteins for 12 taxa from all three domains of life, including nine proteins thought to have been horizontally transferred early in evolution 27. The conserved proteins in this data set were identified based on significant sequence similarity using BLAST searches, and they have consequently been postulated to be orthologues. The first class of models I considered (presented in Table 1 and Fig. 1) constrains all the universally conserved proteins in a given set of taxa to evolve by the same tree, and hence these models do not account for possible horizontal gene transfer (HGT) or symbiotic fusion events during the evolution of the three domains of life. Hereafter I refer to this set of models as ‘class I’. The class I model ABE, representing universal common ancestry of all taxa in the three domains of life and shown in Fig. 1a, can be considered to represent the classic three-domain ‘tree of life’ model of evolution 28.

...

For all model selection criteria, by statistical convention a score difference of 5 or greater is viewed as very strong empirical evidence for the hypothesis with the better score (in this work higher scores are better) 16,17 . All scores shown are also highly statistically significant (the estimated variance for each score is approximately 2–3). According to a standard objective Bayesian interpretation of the model selection criteria, the scores are the log odds of the hypotheses 16,17. Therefore, UCA is at least 10[sup]2,860[/sup] times more probable than the closest competing hypothesis. Notably, UCA is the most accurate and the most parsimonious hypothesis. Compared to the multiple-ancestry hypotheses, UCA provides a much better fit to the data (as seen from its higher likelihood), and it is also the least complex (as judged by the number of parameters).
The extraordinary strength of these results in the face of suspected HGT events suggests that the preference for the UCA model is robust
to the extent of HGT. To test this possibility, the analysis was expanded to include models that allow each protein to have a distinct, independent evolutionary history. I refer to this set of models, which rejects a single tree metaphor for genealogically related taxa, as ‘class II’. Representative class II models are shown in Fig. 2. Within each set of genealogically related taxa, each of the 23 universally conserved proteins is allowed to evolve on its own separate phylogeny, in which both branch lengths and tree topology are free parameters. For example, the multiple-ancestry model [AE1B] II comprises two clusters of protein trees, one cluster (AE) in which Archaea and Eukarya share a common ancestor but are genetically unrelated to another cluster (B) consisting only of Bacteria. Class II models are highly reticulate, phylogenetic networks that can represent very complex evolutionary mechanisms, including unrestricted HGT, symbiotic fusion events and independent ancestry of various taxa. Overall, the model selection tests show that the class II models are greatly preferred to the class I models.

The optimal class II models represent an upper limit to the degree of HGT, as many of the apparent reticulations are probably due to incomplete lineage sorting, hidden paralogy, recombination, or inaccuracies in the evolutionary models. Nonetheless, as with the class I non-HGT hypotheses, all model selection criteria unequivocally support a single common genetic ancestry for all taxa. Also similar to the class I models, the class II UCA model has the greatest explanatory power and is the most parsimonious.

...

The proteins in this data set were postulated to be orthologous on the basis of significant sequence similarity 27 . Because the proteins are universally conserved, all of the taxa have their own specific versions of each of the proteins. It would be of interest to know how the tests respond to the inclusion of proteins that are not universally conserved, as omitting independently evolved proteins could perhaps bias the results towards common ancestry. Nevertheless, the inclusion of bona fide independently evolved genes has no effect on the likelihoods of the winning class II models, except in certain cases to strengthen the conclusion of common ancestry (for a formal proof, see the Supplementary Information).

...

What property of the sequence data supports common ancestry so decisively? When two related taxa are separated into two trees, the
strong correlations that exist between the sequences are no longer modelled, which results in a large decrease in the likelihood. Consequently, when comparing a common-ancestry model to a multipleancestry model, the large test scores are a direct measure of the increase in our ability to accurately predict the sequence of a genealogically related protein relative to an unrelated protein. The sequence correlations between a given clade of taxa and the rest of the tree would be eliminated if the columns in the sequence alignment for that clade were randomly shuffled. In such a case, these model-based selection tests should prefer the multiple-ancestry model. In fact, in actual tests with randomly shuffled data, the optimal estimate of the unified tree (for both maximum likelihood and Bayesian analyses) contains an extremely large internal branch separating the shuffled taxa from the rest. In all cases tried, with a wide variety of evolutionary models (from the simplest to the most parameter rich), the multiple-ancestry models for shuffled data sets are preferred by a large margin over common ancestry models (LLR on the order of a thousand), even with the large internal branches. Hence, the large test scores in favour of UCA models reflect the immense power of a tree structure, coupled with a gradual Markovian mechanism of residue substitution, to accurately and precisely explain the particular patterns of sequence correlations found among genealogically related biological macromolecules.

This is fucking GAME OVER for anything but common descent.

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Dragan Glas[/url]"]Greetings,

It seems to me that eveyone is getting bogged down in details in this debate.

Basically, the argument can be summed up in this way:

Evolution can be thought of as a flow of water - The River Of Life, hailing from its origin in the mountains of its distant past: abiogenesis.

You're standing on the bank of The River watching it flow past you *that way*.

lifepsyop comes along and points out eddies, micro-currents and cross-currents in The River and claims that these prove that The River isn't flowing *that way* - yet won't (or can't) say which way it's flowing.

So, who's right?

Scientists (here and elsewhere), Rumraket (citing scientific papers), Isotelus, HWIN, MGK, Inferno, Dustnite, Darkprophet232, DutchLiam84, herebedragons, Engelbert, Dave B., Idmitruk, scalyblue, me et al who all claim that The River flows *that way* or lifepsyop who claims it doesn't flow *that way* and anyone who claims that it does is part of a vast conspiracy.

Kindest regards,

James

So eloquently stated.

 

[Dragan Glas]

Greetings,

Thank you, HWIN - I finally am granted a place in The Hall Of Fame!

I've just come across this gem...

Nemesiah[/url]"]-Math books that don't have well written complete step by step solutions to their problems (charge me extra, I dont care just dont do the douchebagery of giving a really large statisticall inference problem that would take integral and derivative calculus, a fair amuont of algebra, like 3 variable changes, Eigenvalues, and a couple of trigonometric substitutions to solve and the book only goes answer: b= .8745)

:lol:

Kindest regards,

James

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Isotelus[/url]"]

Fair enough. I'll continue to stick to those that are objective and let him and OFNF have at it. If he continues to bash and insult creationists and creation I think I'm right to at least call him out of those things. He won't reply, of course, but I'm not one to stand by and let someone who doesn't understand what creationism is bash it because they're ignorant to the model.
If you want rational conversation without ad hom's and attacks on things you don't understand I'm all for it but that road needs to go both ways.

Practice what you preach. It is tactless and spiteful to suggest that the type of people who dedicate their lives to this field of research don’t ask questions as deep as yours. Those evolutionists are my mentors, and they are the smartest, most dedicated people I know, and they have a great breadth of knowledge on a wider variety of subjects than in any other disciplines I’ve come across. They are the ones who work tirelessly to write the papers that you agree are great research, and yet you have the audacity to claim they let these brilliant ideas pass them by while somehow the creationists have reached a better conclusion while arguing against an invented type of evolution that is not itself imparted in the scientific literature. Instead of blustering on about what evolutionists do and don’t do, have the decency and the respect for those around you and stick with the points of the discussion, as we would all appreciate it. Please and thank you.

 

[Inferno]

I believe this warrants a mention:

Rumraket[/url]"]

I am not some dumb Christian that ignores evidence

Agree to disagree. :facepalm:

 

[featherwinglove]

Warning ... Unprotected and unsupervised watching of this video may result in frustration, pulling of the hair, desire to punch your monitor, punching your monitor, permanent loss of IQ, irritation, self-mutilation, self-immolation, grinding of the teeth, and death. Remember, you watch it, you can't un-watch it. You have been warned.[sup]1[/sup]

I'm not sure if he's on this forum though.

 

[Inferno]

I'm not sure if he's on this forum though.

Don't think so, no.