The End Is Near

@newjaninev2 Well, maybe the science will dramatically change long before then. That certainly is within the realm of possibility. Pretty good evidence for that.

@AkioTsukino Oh, scientific thought changes constantly... that’s the great strength of science. New evidence compels modification of existing explanation. Over time, the explanations provide a better and better fit for the available evidence... constant evidence-based improvement.

@newjaninev2 But strangely enough it's always right instead of always wrong.

@AkioTsukino science is never ‘right’. It’s a coherent, complete, and consistent explanation for the evidence currently available. Further evidence requires incorporation into the explanation... to whatever degree is necessary.

@AkioTsukino religion, on the other hand, has to be right, and it has to be right first time, and it has to stay that way forever... which is why it’s a stagnant swamp, afraid of questions, and even more afraid of the answers

@newjaninev2 You don't see the irony at all, do you? The most astonishing and simultaneously amusing thing to me about militant fundamentalist unbelievers and their transmogrified aberration of science is the degree of ease to which they are so incredibly humble in their arrogance and arrogant in their humility.

@newjaninev2 [quote]Well, the Earth will end in 4 billion years, and much as I’d like to wait around and ‘watch the spectacle’, I feel that may be a little long to wait.[/quote]

The Bible says that the Earth will last forever. It's only the world that will be destroyed.

@AkioTsukino By 4 billion years from now the Sun’s intensity will have increased by 40%, the water will have evaporated into the atmosphere (causing Earth to resemble Venus as it is now). The Sun will expand into its Red Giant phase, blowing away all the water and atmosphere, turning Earth into a blackened crisp. The Sun will then collapse into a White Dwarf over the following half a billion years, eventually becoming a Black Dwarf.

Should be quite a show! Let’s hope someone gets it on video 😂

@AkioTsukino [quote]militant fundamentalist unbelievers and their transmogrified aberration of science[/quote]

That makes no sense whatsoever.

'militant fundamentalist unbelievers’ are, I assume, people who reject your unsupported claims

'transmogrified aberration of science’ is, I assume, the scientific method, rather than whatever bastardised version you try to sell

Further assuming you have something to say, rather than something you’re trying not to say... just say it.

@newjaninev2 [quote]That makes no sense whatsoever.

'militant fundamentalist unbelievers’ are, I assume, people who reject your unsupported claims[/quote]

No. Of the many people I've talked to and debated with on the Bible was a British atheist who went by the name of Rambo123UK on the Skeptic's Annotated Bible and Bible Babble. He had a profound interest and knowledge of the Bible because of it's historical value. He didn't believe the supernatural stuff. The second most knowledgeable person I've encountered was a guy who's name I can't recall. Years ago. He was a Catholic or something and theologically we couldn't be further apart, but we had great discussions and he knew the Bible very well.

It's not about where we agree or disagree, it's about what we know. We knew our stuff. We enjoyed discussing our differing opinions. We respected one another. We rarely agreed.

[quote]'transmogrified aberration of science’ is, I assume, the scientific method, rather than whatever bastardised version you try to sell[/quote]

No. I'm not selling anything, much less science. By that I meant science, like religion, has great potential for abuse, neglect and corruption. Anyone who says otherwise is naive or lying. That is what I think evolutionists do. To me, evolution is bad science. Corrupted.

@AkioTsukino The first part seems unrelated to my comment.

The second part ignores evidence, peer review, and the lack of authorities.

You say that evolution is ‘bad’ science (whatever you mean by that).

Perhaps you’d like to explain why

@newjaninev2 I will tell you what I told the polite one. All you have to do is show me an un-doctored photograph of the transition of one animal into another. A rodent into a horse. An ape into a human. That's all. Cut the bullshit.

@AkioTsukino Are you seriously trying to use the tired old creationist straw-man depiction of evolution as one species ‘turning into’ another species?

Umm... that’s not evolution

All life on Earth (and all life that has ever existed in Earth) is connected by common ancestry... a stunningly complex sphere of interconnectedness. You and I share a genetic history with every other organism on the planet.

The idea of 'links in a chain' is not... never has been... a part of the theory of evolution. it's simply not needed, not to mention just plain wrong. It seems to be something that's found mainly in creationist indoctrination pamphlets. They often contain that ridiculous image of some sort of monkey slowly morphing into another figure which morphs into yet another figure, ending with a human. Of course, that has nothing to do with evolution. It’s a specious straw-man.

In short... that's simply not how evolution works. As you will be aware, different species share common ancestors, so that there is a series of divergences between any two species... and the evidence for that process is overwhelming.

Let’s begin with species, and once we’re clear about what we mean by that word, we can better discuss what evolution is, and how it works.
When talking about the concept of species, the first problem that seems to pop up is Essentialism. This is a hangover from Plato, who thought that every triangle (for example) was but an imperfect shadow of some essential triangle that existed in some or other conceptual space.


Ernst Mayr has pointed out that this same thinking seems to appear when people think about species… as if there’s some quintessential rabbit, against which it can be assessed whether or not any given organism is, or is not, a rabbit.


But a species should never be seen as representing some gigantic and sudden leap from something to something else. There is no magical point in time where biological differences allow separate species classifications. If you don’t understand this, then you’ll be be unable to understand evolution. (This appears to be the source of the creationist error that asks ‘where are the transitional fossils?’ without any awareness that all fossils are transitional fossils).

The closest we can come to the quintessential rabbit would be a specimen that sits in the centre of a vast number of bell-shaped distributions… a vast number because those distributions can address so many features (number of paws, size of paws, number of ears, size of ears, ability to leap, mechanics of leaping, tendency to leap, ability to digest grass, presence of whiskers, number of whiskers, nature of whiskers, muscular control of whiskers, etc… hundreds of thousands of such distributions would only be scratching the surface)


These distributions shift with time. That’s important, so I’ll repeat it...these distributions shift with time.
 Over a large number of generations the distribution of ear lengths may (will) change, with ear lengths gradually becoming longer and longer (as an example… they may well move in the other direction). Eventually, the new distribution may not in any way overlap with the previous distribution… the longest ear length of the previous distribution will still be shorter than the shortest ear length of the current distribution.
 Here’s the question. How many distributions need to change, and to what degree, before the cloud of distributions we thought of as a ‘quintessential’ rabbit now forms a different ‘quintessential’ something else?

@AkioTsukino Genes direct protein synthesis. That’s pretty much all they do (they have quite dull social lives, and don’t seem to have hobbies or outside interests). Those proteins are built up from amino acids.

The genes comprise large numbers of base-pairs, which are simply guanine matched with cytosine and adenine matched with thymine. The human genome contains around 3.2 billion of these base pairs (the largest we’ve found so far is that of the flowering plant Paris japonica, which has 150 billion base pairs. The marbled lungfish has 133 billion base pairs).

As I said, proteins are built up from amino acids. Each amino acid that is used to build the proteins is specified by three base-pairs (those blocks of three base-pairs are called codons).

Let’s look at cytochrome c (we could use any number of such proteins, but I have a fondness for cytochrome c… I like the alliteration)

The cytochrome c protein is built up from around 100 amino acids.
This means that there are 10E135 possible ways that the amino acids could be arranged… but not all of those arrangements would work, of course.
However, because there’s a high level of redundancy in the construction of cytosine c (and all proteins), a stunning 10E93 variants would still be functional.
So that’s 100,000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000 possible ways that DNA could code for functional cytosine c.

Time to make some predictions in accordance with the Theory of Evolution, don’t you think?

1. Because evolution began from a tightly limited range of organisms, only one of those possible functional variants will have been passed down over the last 3.5 billion years.

2. Because of point mutations (among other factors), there should be evidence of extremely slight variation that has crept in over the last 3.5 billion years… after all, even high-fidelity copying systems aren’t perfect (and it would be suspicious if they appeared to be so)

3. That variation should be negligible for species that have comparatively recent common ancestors, and increase between species with more distant common ancestors… while still remaining negligible (The process is remarkably stable, so we wouldn’t expect too many of the 10E93 functional variants to have appeared).

So, what do we find?

How many amino acid differences are there between humans and other species?
To make things interesting, let’s list some species in order of how long it has been since we shared a common ancestor with each species, and then see how many amino acid differences there are between us and that species.
Chimpanzee = 0
Rhesus Monkey = 1
Rabbit = 9
Cow = 10
Pigeon = 12
Bullfrog = 20
Fruit Fly = 24
Wheat Germ = 37
Yeast = 42

Evidence-based simplicity and elegance… the Theory of Evolution

@newjaninev2 Show me the photo of evolution having happened.

@AkioTsukino No problem

@newjaninev2 That's probably the best you can do.

@AkioTsukino It’s a very good illustration... would you like to discuss their shared genes, and how the human is a large colony of formerly bacterial cells?

Even better, would you like me to take you through the genetic [b]evidence[/b] for what I just said?

@newjaninev2 Show me . . . just show me . . .

@AkioTsukino I also note you’re now trying to get as far away as possible from common ancestry... you’re still trying to present evolution as some sort of ‘one species turning into another species’ strawman.

It won’t wash.

@AkioTsukino Very small marine organisms, such as plankton, are ideal for showing gradual evolutionary change. There are many billions of them, many with hard parts, and they conveniently fall directly to the seafloor after death, piling up in a continuous sequence of layers. Sampling the layers in order is easy: you can thrust a long tube into the seafloor, pull up a columnar core sample, and read it from bottom to top (our research institutes here in New Zealand do this routinely).

Come to New Zealand and you can see a two-hundred-meter-long core taken from the ocean floor near New Zealand, presenting an unbroken history of the evolution of the marine foraminiferan [i]Globorotalia conoidea[/i] over an eight-million-year period.

Or you might prefer the eighteen-meter-long core extracted near Antarctica, representing two million years of sediments, showing us, again in an unbroken history, the evolution of the radiolarian [i]Pseudocubus vema[/i]

Or perhaps you’d like to see my personal favourite… a core sample that shows an ancestral plankton species [i]Eucyrtidium calvertense[/i] dividing into two descendants from a [b]common ancestor[/b] over 3.5 million years. The new species is [i]Eucyrtidium matuyamai[/i]

@AkioTsukino Isn’t it time you started to explain the genetic evidence?

Or are you merely doing your goldfish imitation?

Explain the genetic evidence without using the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection

@AkioTsukino Embryology can be very helpful in showing how our evolutionary history appears during foetal development. There are a few quick and easy examples that spring to mind from all those available: gills, blood vessels, and kidneys.

In the early stages of development, fish embryos have a series of pouches (separated by grooves) near where the head will later develop. These are called the brachial arches - they develop into gills, and the grooves between them develop into the gill slits. It‘s very straightforward.

Other vertebrates have the same structures... including humans. In fact, I once had the opportunity to see these brachial arches for myself on a foetus, and it was fascinating. They‘re not ‘sort of like’ a fish‘s brachial arches... they are a fish‘s brachial arches. They‘re morphologically completely [b]identical[/b].

[i]Tiktaalik roseae,[/i] on the cusp between ocean and land, used gills and lungs, but after the move onto land, gills were superfluous (although Olympic swimming competitions would be very different had we retained them). Sometimes (it‘s very rare) the gill slits fail to close, but it‘s easily corrected via minor surgery once the infant is born.

Blood vessel development in fish is, once again, basic and straightforward, producing six major blood vessels. In mammals (including humans, of course), the same six major blood vessels appear in early foetal development, but then three of them disappear at the same time that our circulatory system stops resembling that of fish and instead becomes identical to the circulatory system of embryonic amphibians. Not similar... [b]identical[/b].
In amphibians, this system simply grows into an adult amphibian circulatory system, but in mammals (including humans, of course) it changes into the circulatory system of embryonic reptiles. Not similar to the circulatory system of embryonic reptiles... [b]identical[/b].
In reptiles, this system simply grows into an adult reptilian circulatory system, but in mammals (including humans, of course), it undergoes further changes (the development of carotid, pulmonary, and dorsal arteries) to become the mammalian circulatory system.

During development, human embryos form three distinctly different types kidneys... the pronephros, the mesonephros, and the metanephros. The first two systems are discarded. The pronephros is the kidney system found in fish and amphibians, the mesonephros is the kidney system found in reptiles, and the metanephros is the kidney system that we eventually use.

From fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal.
No matter how many comforting myths we mutter to ourselves, every foetus carries the truth.

@newjaninev2 Thanks for playing.

@AkioTsukino Oh, I was never playing, just providing evidence... but apparently that’s not to your taste