However Dr. Flimmer upon closer examination you can see that I posted the original at roughly 6 pm, and after returning to the BA site (because I do when I can) approximately six hours later I read post #40 . . . which consequently is the catalyst for why I deposited the (as was pointed out: “inferior” version of said joke) joke in the second place. {also I cannot find where Dr. Plait used the incredibly obvious joke . . . not in the original article?}

Also, I am probably not high caliber enough to take out that post @40, so I decided to leaf. . . only to return to read the carnage of #40′s comments torn apart with just a bit of deductive reasoning at the hands of posts #64 and #65.

I shall leaf with this:

Everyday is a good day to leaf somewhere

Valdis Kletnieks@49

I must defer to the expertise of geneticist Lee Spetner who says:

Spetner’s degrees are in mechanical engineering and physics.

You lose. Not only have you employed an argument from authority, but your authority is outside his field.

“The mutations needed for macroevolution have never been observed. No random mutations that could represent the mutations required by NDT [Neo-Darwinian Theory] that have been examined on the molecular level have added any information.

This is a straight lie. I have seen mutations that have created large morphological changes – on a parallel with those required for an organism to be identified as a new species. Any mutation in a hox gene will lead to major changes in the organism’s appearance.

Moreover, hybridisation events have been observed that have led to new species. Mutations don’t get much bigger than mixing two different genomes.

“The question I address is: Are the mutations that have been observed the kind the theory needs for support? The answer turns out to be NO! Many have lost information. To support NDT one would have to show many examples of random mutations that add information.

To talk of “adding” and “losing” information, you must first be able to quantify information. How much information is there in a chimpanzee? What about a different chimpanzee? If two chimpanzees are both chimpanzees, and yet different from one another, they must contain different information. Do they have the same amount of information? If they don’t contain the same amount of information, which one has lost and which one has gained information? If they do contain the same amount of information, how come they are different? If they really have the same amount of information, this must mean that some information has changed from one generation to the next, i.e. a net change of zero, but with some different information, in the which case information has been both lost and gained at the same time, thus proving that Spetner is talking out of his fundament.

Spetner has pulled the wool over your eyes. He really has no idea what he is talking about (well, either that or he deliberately is lying to the creationist audience to suit an agenda of his own).

Unless the aggregate results of the genetic experiments performed until now is a grossly biased sample, we can safely dismiss Neo-Darwinian theory as an explanation of how life developed from a single simple source.”

This is a non-sequitur. Spetner’s waffle about information is a smokescreen for the fact that he has no substantive argument against evolution.

No one denies natural selection as Titan claims – not even the most ardent creationist.

This is almost wrong. It’s so marginal that it is, in fact, disingenuous. Many creationists deny that NS can lead to the formation of a new species, and since NS has only ever had any significance in biology as a mechanism of change (i.e. speciation), you are splitting hairs to the point of irrelevance to assert that creationists do not deny NS.

Many creationists deny unlimited NS, despite none ever coming up with any mechanism to limit it.

(In fact, a creationist named Edward Blyth thought of natural selection decades before Darwin wrote his book On The Origin of Species.)

That Blythe was a creationist is irrelevant, since no-one knew that any option existed at the time. Until Darwin, it was assumed that all life was Created. Once Darwin had realised that NS could lead to the formation of new species, there only needed to have been a single act of creation, at the beginning of life. (In fact, Darwin himself implies this in the final paragraph of OTOOS.)

I look at this creature and see amazing evidence for design.

This is prejudice, not science.

But even if natural selection “created” the katydid, that would in no way prove molecules-to-man evolution

But it proves the validity of the mechanism, i.e. speciation through NS (and other mechanisms where relevant). Your caricature of “molecules-to-man” evolution shows that you do not even know what Darwin claimed – you are making a strawman argument. Evolution is inevitable even if the first life on earth was divinely created. Once you understand the mechanism of NS, to suggest that it does not create new species you must propose a mechanism to limit it. And (AFAICT) no-one has even tried to propose such a mechanism.

or disprove the existence of God.

Who has ever claimed that evolution disproves the existence of god? When and where did they claim this?

What evolution proves is that there is no need for a divine creator-god to produce the diversity and hierarchical interrelations of life that we observe around us. Prior to 1859, the diversity and complexity of life was often cited as “evidence” for the existence of god (Paley’s “watchmaker” argument).

Evolution is false because random genetic mutations – copying errors in the genome – cannot generate new genetic information

What utter nonsense.

Any change in a DNA sequence is different information. Therefore, if that information did not exist previously, it is new information.

You have obviously fallen for Dembski’s lies about information theory and its application to evolution. If you ask any information theorist, they will either have never heard of Dembski or will tell you that he does not unsderstand information theory.

– something evolution demands in spades.

Not really.

All evolution demands in terms of information is change. And change is quite obviously all around us. If you wish to dispute this, find me a mammal that is exactly identical to its parents.

Overall, natural selection preserves, it does not create.

No. NS drives a population to be slightly more adequate than its parent generation at surviving in the conditions that applied to that parent generation. Various mechanisms in nature create variation (genetic recombination and mutation being but two of several). That variation provides the raw material for NS (and possibly genetic drift also) to change the average phenotype of a population. Over time, if a selection pressure is consistent, that change builds up.

If two sub-populations of a species are physically isolated, and experience slightly different selection pressures, those sub-populations will diverge in character over time.

NS only preserves if a population is perfectly adapted and if all conditions in the environment are constant. Even then, in the absence of a strong selection pressure, genetic drift will almost certainly play a larger role in driving change than NS can in preserving a set of traits.

And ultimately, it drives organisms to extinction, not to greater complexity.

This is a misapprehension. Where multiple species compete for the same resources, NS will make the least adequate extinct, unless they are able to adapt to a new niche. It depends on the possible rate of change for that particular organism and the strength of the selection pressure.

Your strawmen are over-simplistic and betray a woeful misunderstanding of evolution.

Maybe you should try to understand the theory before you attempt to criticise it, did you think of that?

@45. TheBlackCat: I shall forgive you for the use of the term “bug” in reference to an orthopteran

Ah yes. Creationists are a paradox really. You can never win, and yet, you can never lose an argument with them.

“I’ve been asking creationists what they mean by “information” for a while, and I’m hardly the first. Every time, they will attempt a definition that they think will prove evolution wrong.”

I’ve also had them argue “I would leave that up to the scientists to say since I don’t know enough about the subject, but since they don’t have a definition evolution is wrong creationism is correct”. When I point out that scientists do have several definitions of information, they claim that it isn’t the sort of information they are talking about, therefore evolution is wrong and creationism is correct.

I’ve been asking creationists what they mean by “information” for a while, and I’m hardly the first. Every time, they will attempt a definition that they think will prove evolution wrong.

Sadly for them, it doesn’t matter how they define it, an example has been found for each of their definitions. Or at least, each of the definitions that would actually apply to biological information.

You see, God created the bacteria with the ability to digest nylon. When people invented nylon the bacteria was able to mutate and use that ability that IT OBVIOUSLY ALREADY had because new information CANNOT BE ADDED BY EVOLUTION. Mutations can only destroy WHAT WAS ALREADY THERE. If nylonase came from bacteria that couldn’t digest nylon, why are there bacteria that STILL digest naturally occuring substances.

Spetner is a physicist, therefore he is not part of the EVILUTION CONSPIRACY that has infected the academic world of biology. HE is therefore free to EXPOSE evilution for it’s FALSE unGodly teachings, as began by Satan in an attempt to bring God’s downfall. And anyway, when confronted with God and scientists, who would you believe? That’s right, God, because he cannot be wrong.

See, I can be a creationist too. It’s easy!

First, Spetner is a physicist, not a geneticist, so trying to invoke him as an expert in the field is misleading.

Second, even if he was an expert it doesn’t change the fact that he is simply wrong. Numerous mutations that have added information have been observed. For example the the evolution of citrate metabolism in E. coli in the laboratory, or nylonase activity in other bacteria in the wild, are clear cases of the addition of new information. In both cases there were new genes coding for new proteins with new functions, if that isn’t a case of added information then what is?

PS. I’m amazed that it took up to post 40 for an actual creationist idiot to show up.

I must defer to the expertise of geneticist Lee Spetner who says:

“The mutations needed for macroevolution have never been observed. No random mutations that could represent the mutations required by NDT [Neo-Darwinian Theory] that have been examined on the molecular level have added any information.

“The question I address is: Are the mutations that have been observed the kind the theory needs for support? The answer turns out to be NO! Many have lost information. To support NDT one would have to show many examples of random mutations that add information. Unless the aggregate results of the genetic experiments performed until now is a grossly biased sample, we can safely dismiss Neo-Darwinian theory as an explanation of how life developed from a single simple source.”

http://www.trueorigin.org/spetner2.asp

So what you’re saying is that transcription errors can result in the genetic equivalent of typographical errors, but these tyops *possibly* create new words? Gotcha.

Read that carefully, and think for a minute. If the result of the mutation wasn’t new and different from the original, it would be identical to the original, and thus no mutation would be detectable. But since mutations *are* detectable, something changed – and thus there was new genetic information.

Surprisingly, Carl Sagan didn’t make it up; according to Wikipedia he got it from Julian Huxley.

I’m skeptical of Carl’s claim because the Japanese aren’t superstitious and the crabs are hardly edible. They’re inch-wide hardshells; it’s just not worth the effort.

1. They can be kind of weird looking
2. They can be HUGE

My mom once sent me a picture of a huge bug *ahem* insect (sorry Sam Heads) that was sitting on her office window and no one could figure out. It was pretty clearly a katydid, but was pretty strange looking. I think the conversation went something like this:

Her: Hi, did you see the image I texted you?
Me: Yes, but it it too blurry, I can’t make it out.
Her: It is a really big insect that is on my office window. Everyone is asking about it and we figured you might know.
Me: Is it really big and fairly thin with long legs?
Her: That’s right.
Me: Then it is probably either a katydid or a grasshopper.
Her: Oh, thanks! We were curious because it is really weird looking.
Me: Then it’s probably a katydid. If it was a grasshopper you would probably recognize it.

Dude, the joke doesn’t get better by repeating it.

And if you try to make the first version better, you should have copied Dr. Plait:

I am going to make like katydid and leaf.
(leaf out the “a”)

And now I take my coat…

White and more common yellow tigers are another example.

That’s the Greater Angle-wing Katydid, Microcentrum rhombifolium