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By Stillness:
Ok Thuryl, you got me with the “i.” I was thinking about the letter drawn by a person meant to convey information.

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Originally written by Stillness:

Salmon, I think the evidence points to multiple creation events. Happy? Probably not.

And I’m guessing you didn’t look at the original thread that I’ve linked to a few times, because I am very explicit. I delineate my logic [something which Kelandon and SoT were unwilling, and I suspect, unable to do after many requests], give multiple reasons why common descent is an inferior and unscientific explanation, give quotes from archeologists on what the record actually shows, etc. I’m just halfway defending one of my points (probably not one of the stronger ones) here. I have the feeling that if I do what I did before this thread will be shut down.

Common descent doesn’t predict anything beneficial that knowing that all living things are similar doesn’t. If common descent actually did do something useful that would be a great argument in favor of its superiority. In actual fact life now and in the past gives the appearance of multiple creation events for genetically versatile creatures.

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Originally written by Stillness:

Common descent doesn’t predict anything beneficial that knowing that all living things are similar doesn’t.

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Originally written by Stillness:

Salmon, It’s common descent that’s problematic for me. Evolution is good. We can see it and it actually works. There are certain hurdles I don’t think it can jump though. And indeed when we look at life, past and present, there are distinct divisions in it. It is not a continuum or a blurr.

And we’ve known creatures were similar from time immemorial. We didn’t need common descent to tell us that.

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Originally written by Stillness:

what do people call you?

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Information
1) Mutations are overwhelmingly neutral or harmful. Even when they are beneficial they are generally deleterious (i.e. antibiotic resistant bacteria, wingless beetles). This is not the increase in information needed to go from “simple” proto-life to people.

2) Some single-celled organisms have the ability to generate beneficial mutations without loss of information. It is a special ability of these organisms (possibly analogous to hypermutation) and not the kind of mutation needed for common descent, as it is an exclusive ability.

3) Other claimed examples of Darwinian evolution while appearing to be addition of information fall short upon closer examination. Some may be actual increases but these are at best extraordinarily rare and not seen in multicellular organisms (i.e. the literally millions of mutations of fruit flies last century).

4) An amazing quality of all life is that it contains language – arbitrary quatranomial code written in every cell. (see paramecium for the same code with a different convention) It requires an “agreement” on the code convention before it is ever used. Such programming is best understood as originating with an intelligent programmer.

Patterns/Fossils
5) The testimony of the fossil record is repeatedly the same: types of organisms appear suddenly with no connection to anything that went before them. This is harmonious with the understanding that living things were made by type with the ability to vary within those types. While not necessarily disproving common descent the fossil record certainly is not supportive of it.

6) Life, in the fossil record and now, corresponds to a nested hierarchy. This pattern is consistent with typology, but again not supportive of common descent. It is actually somewhat problematic as common descent requires gradual stepwise change. Lack of distinction and blurring between divisions would be ideal for common descent.

7) Genetic machinery has self-corrective mechanisms to preserve the kind of organism for which it codes. In the case of d. melanogaster mutants normal flies arose from the mutants in a few generations. Cyanobacteria are the same today after supposed tens of trillions of generations over billions of years. There’s no evidence that any organism has the plasticity to account for all the variety in the biosphere. The evidence is in fact the opposite.

8) Discontinuity in distribution of traits in the biosphere (i.e. vivipary, eye designs, hemoglobin) is easily understood from the perspective of a creator that placed these traits wherever it was seen as desirable.

Complexity
9) Life has a quality distinguishing it from other natural phenomena – specified complexity. Living things share this quality with things only know to be made from purposeful action. By analogy we can conclude that living things are also made this way.

10) Living things have irreducibly complex structures. Such structures are only observed to be made by purposeful action. They also place a hurdle before conclusion that stepwise increases in complexity by mutations account for all of the ingenious devices seen nature as such change has never been observed (even in bacteria which can experience hundreds of thousands of generations for every single human generation).

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Originally written by Kelandon:

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Originally written by Stillness:

By the way, what would prevent you from answering me now?

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The same thing as last time. We can't even understand each other's terms yet, so it seems entirely fruitless to attempt to construct arguments with them.

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Originally written by Jumpin' Salmon:

I still don't see what your answer is, despite all the rhetoric.

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Originally written by Stillness:

Salmon, I think the evidence points to multiple creation events.

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Originally written by Stillness:

Whatever, Kel. You wrote in support of common descent but are unwilling or unable to back it up with actual logic.

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Originally written by Kelandon:

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Originally written by Jumpin' Salmon:

I still don't see what your answer is, despite all the rhetoric.

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Originally written by Stillness:

Salmon, I think the evidence points to multiple creation events.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_creationism

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Originally written by Stillness:

Again, your mutation argument is not an issue with me. As far as it being deleterious, well that depends on the specific case you’re talking about. If there is a loss of function it is by definition deleterious, even if the organism becomes more fit for its environment. That is not the kind of change you need to get from bacteria to biologists. A series of deletions does not yield an increase.

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1. All objects for which we know the origin that have the qualities of being both aperiodic and non-random are made by willful agency.
2. Life is both aperiodic and non-random.
3. Life is made by willful agency.

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Okay, basic probability time. No number is inherently random or non-random. Processes can be random or non-random, not numbers. Finding the next digits in pi is a non-random process. Selecting a number, any number, out of all numbers can be done randomly. But the number 2 could be random or non-random, depending on how you come up with it, and so could pi.

This is just what the word "random" in probability means.

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Originally written by Thuryl:

By the way, as a possible counterexample to your premise, what about the large-scale physical structure of the planet Earth? It's not periodic -- you have the inner core, the outer core, the mantle, and the crust, and none of those layers repeat themselves. But while I'm still not sure what you mean by "random", I struggle to see how you could come up with a meaningful definition by which the formation of a planet is random and the formation of life isn't. Are you going to start arguing that our entire planet was physically created by an intelligent agent as well?

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If you randomly select a number from your local telephone directory, it's not a randomly-generated number. Likewise, a circle is not a "random shape" in the sense of being randomly generated, so your argument that pi is a "random number" doesn't hold water.

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Many mathematicians, perhaps most, would disagree with you…keep that in mind before you start making blanket statements about what does and doesn't exist.

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