Zerinus - Do you believe there was death before Adam's fall?

[_Maksutov]

Okay, I take back my original claim. You are not as funny as you think you are.

Yes, there's nothing funny about your lying prophets getting busted...oh wait, when it's caught in a photograph for all time it actually is pretty funny. And even more funny that you follow them.

But you won't talk about Hofmann, will you? Because he showed what frauds your doddering old brethren were. It took an antiMormon, Jerald Tanner, to challenge Hofmann. Tanner had more brains, integrity, inspiration from God, than the whole assembled passle of "prophets" above. That's real history, Z-boy, not your Isaiah babblings and your child's cartoon version of evolution.

[_Tator]

I love threads like this because I learn so much. Thanks to all you great contributors and thanks to the clueless Z-boy because without him this great discussion would not go into the detail it has.

[_zerinus]

The references provided to support positive response to these four questions are from government agencies or long term government contractors. Each is based on a great deal of scientific literature and written for the benefit of the general public.

If you are not able to respond to these four questions in the affirmative, then the gap between your beliefs and scientific reality is too wide to offer any hope for you and I will leave you to your irrational and unfounded beliefs.

That is a classic example of obfuscation—overwhelming the readers with a whole bunch of learned documents irrelevant to the argument, and then pretending that you have won. None of this remotely proves evolution.

[_DrW]

That is a classic example of obfuscation—overwhelming the readers with a whole bunch of learned documents irrelevant to the argument, and then pretending that you have won. None of this remotely proves evolution.

What you are trying to describe is known as a Gish Gallop. My post above is not even remotely close to a Gish Gallop.

It is comprised of 4 simple questions. They are questions I am confident that the vast majority of the folks who post here could answer on sight.

The questions are not intended to 'prove' evolution. They are intended to determine your understanding, or lack thereof, regarding a few basic scientific findings on which a rational discussions of natural selection and evolution could be based.

In case you may need a hint on one or two of them, I specifically chose references that contained the answers in the link name (URL). If one can read, they need not even open the link to learn the correct answer. As a further back-up, I indicated the correct answer (a positive response) to each in the post itself.

There is no obfuscation here. There are four, single sentence, yes /no questions. If you knew the answers, or were remotely interested or even a bit curious, you could have answered all 4 correctly in the time it took you to write your post declining to do so.

Care to provide a response related to the issue at hand?

Care to engage the questions in any way whatsoever?

If not - have a great week and please be sure to keep away from the surface of your bubble.

[_zerinus]

The questions are not intended to 'prove' evolution. They are intended to determine your understanding, or lack thereof, regarding a few basic scientific findings on which a rational discussions of natural selection and evolution could be based.

The argument is about evolution, not my understanding of anything. I am not remotely interested in demonstrating to anybody my understanding of anything.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

I think maybe Zerinus' disconnect is between microevolution and macroevolution. He's willing to concede that within species microevolution, a prelude to speciation, occurs because he can observe it? However, he's unwilling to concede macroevolution probably because he doesn't fully believe in the fossil record nor does he accept the extrapolation we're able to make from everything Dr. W posted, the fossil record, and current testable experiments.

Interestingly, what hasn't happened, at all, is the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate matter. There is no fossil record of that occurring. We just have a series of small changes from one organism to another which offers the best proof of macroevolution.

Here's a fact for Zerinus:

If a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species.

- Source is a Harvard guy

If you sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.

- Source are professors from state universities

I recommend Zerinus read this article to address common arguments made against evolution for a quick takeaway as to why he's not on the right side of this one:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... eationist/

- Doc

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

The questions are not intended to 'prove' evolution. They are intended to determine your understanding, or lack thereof, regarding a few basic scientific findings on which a rational discussions of natural selection and evolution could be based.

The argument is about evolution, not my understanding of anything. I am not remotely interested in demonstrating to anybody my understanding of anything.

That's not true. You've linked, twice now, to your blog demonstrating your understanding of evolution. You're more than willing to talk about it. I don't see why you shouldn't continue the conversation since you're clearly interested in the subject. Take the opportunity to convince the lurker that your position is on the right side of the issue.

- Doc

[_Gadianton]

Zarinus,

I read your online paper very carefully. Let's distill your material a bit:

If you spray a population of mosquitoes with a given pesticide, for example, a small percentage of them that have a natural resistance to it will survive, and will then reproduce to create a genre that is resistant to that pesticide. But observable natural selection will always take place within a given species. There are no known instances, as far as I know, that through natural selection one species has “jumped” to become a different species. If anybody knows of such examples, I would be interested to hear it.

interestingly, the scientific definition of species is identical scriptural one! In science, a species is defined as a class of living organisms with identifiable characteristics that can interbreed among themselves and produce fertile offspring.

Your wording is interesting. You speak of mosquito "populations" and "genres". How is a genre of mosquito different from a species of mosquito? Does a population of mosquito represent multiple species of mosquito and multiple genres? Are you trying to tell us that mosquito is the species?

Zarinus, there are 3,000 species of mosquitoes! For your theory to be true, God created each of those species in the garden, and then Noah selected two from each and every mosquito species and put them on the ark. That's 6,000 mosquitoes on the ark. And then each of those species has survived up to this day, never evolving into new species nor interbreeding.

Okay, if you hadn't guessed it yet, I know of one example where a given species has jumped to become a different species, it's the very example you gave.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/11 ... es-062916/

In one example of manmade evolution, the standard house mosquito has adapted to the ecosystem of the subway system in London and established a subterranean population. Now known as the ‘London Underground mosquito’, it can't interbreed with its surface counterpart and is essentially regarded as a new species.

Be honest. When you wrote that essay, you believed that title Mosquito equates to a single species, correct? The Mosquito species? That would be very consistent with what you wrote. Among the Mosquito species, there are mutations and some populations are stronger and others weaker, these are genres, and then various populations are made up genres but they are all mosquitoes and can have wild mosquito sex with each other.

Did you take biology in school? Do you remember "Kingdom, phylum, class, order..."

Your assignment for today is to determine just what the word "mosquito" means in reference to this chart:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomic_rank

[_zerinus]

If a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species.

- Source is a Harvard guy

That is the theory, but it is not a proven fact.

If you sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.

- Source are professors from state universities.

That has been observed; but there are other explanations for it; and no "evolution" has taken place. The fruit flies may be "reluctant to mate," but that does not mean that biologically they have become different species, meaning that they could not mate if they chose to; or that if they did, they would not produce a fertile offspring.

I recommend Zerinus read this article to address common arguments made against evolution for a quick takeaway as to why he's not on the right side of this one:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... eationist/

- Doc

That is actually a good article, but for the opposite reason to the one you are recommending it. It does a good job of summarizing the arguments against Evolution, while at the same time providing rather unsatisfactory answers to them.

[_zerinus]

The argument is about evolution, not my understanding of anything. I am not remotely interested in demonstrating to anybody my understanding of anything.

That's not true. You've linked, twice now, to your blog demonstrating your understanding of evolution. You're more than willing to talk about it. I don't see why you shouldn't continue the conversation since you're clearly interested in the subject. Take the opportunity to convince the lurker that your position is on the right side of the issue.

- Doc

I linked to my blog in order to present the arguments that I had previously made, to avoid having to repeat them again; not in order to "demonstrate my understanding" of anything.