Re: Answering Friar Broccoli

On Oct 31, 7:43 pm, NITRO <NITRO...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 31, 4:48 pm, John Harshman <jharshman.diespam...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

NITRO wrote:

<snip>


In that case, why couldn't god just have created an initial universe
with the Big Bang and left it to develop naturally from that beginning?
Why, if you think this way, are you forced to reject evolution?

He might have created the Universe with a Big Bang, but thats fits
with the Biblical creation model. But evolution does not fit with the
Bible as far as I can tell.

I am unable to determine in advance what you will think fits the bible
unless you tell me directly, because what you are and are not willing to
accept as fitting it has no pattern that I can see. Just keep that in
mind when you are explaining.

So you are disabled? If you cannot determine what I'm am going to
think fits with the Bible don't default to your projection of what you
think a creationist should think, that is bigotry, and it might be the
reason why you couldnt understand why I would want to post here. I am
not like your projection of what a creationist is. The reason why my
statements are not fitting with your 'pattern' is because I am not
limited to what your ideas of a creationist are.

Most of us would be happy to address your beliefs on this matter if
you simply stated them. Usually "creationist" in these parts means
"someone who follows a typically American fundamentalist literalist
interpretation of the bible, especially regarding the origins of life,
the universe, and everything".

This covers a wide range of beliefs - old Earth and young Earth, for
instance - and it would help if you just asserted what you think
happened. I or others can then respond with the scientific opinion and
its reasoning on that issue.




And no, trilobites have nothing to do with petroleum

Apparently it is just simply your habit to be rude and belch out
certainties without any qualification at all, but I for one do not
care for simple statements with no evidence to back it up. The science
I learned stated that we know very little about the formation of
petroleum and that it was probably formed by organisms that lived 500
million years ago. Since trilobites allegedly lived 500 million years
ago according to all the charts I have looked at, perhaps you can tell
me why they have nothing to do with the formation of petroleum, and
what DOES contribute to it?

This is something it would be easy for you to look up. But oil is not
500 million years old; it's of varying ages. The major theory is that
it's the product of lots and lots of microorganisms. Trilobites couldn't
have had enough biomass to account for it. I wouldn't consider my
response rude, though it certainly was an unsupported assertion; still,
it's one you could easily verify on the web or elsewhere.

Now apparently you are not so certain, now you are talking about the
'major' theory, and trilobites not being able to account for ALL the
biomass. A little bit different from your smug certainty from your
last answer. By the looks of it your arrogance seems to fix you closer
to ignorance than a barnacle is fixed to his rock.

Now who's being insulting? All I'm saying here is that nobody thinks
that trilobites are a source of oil. Now in fact it's conceivable that
everyone else is wrong about this and you are right, but I have seen no
evidence for that.

So you have gone from trilobites having nothing to do with petroleum
productions to they couldn't account to all of the biomass to now the
statement that nobody thinks they are a source of oil. I am going to
help you in this by simply disregarding anything else you might say
about the topic because clearly you don't know any more than I do.
In this way you won't feel obligated to attempt to fabricate anything
else.

These three statements are not the same, but they compatible, and as
far as I know, true. Do you dispute any of them?




But there is a fairly smooth series of transitions between these
small-brained hominids and modern humans. Where is the cutoff?

Even if I believed in evolution I would have difficulty with these
small-brained as ancestral to modern humans.

Why? If evolution happened as we believe it did, then we are
inevitably descended from smaller brained organisms.

I might believe that we
once hunted them, but I know so little about the subject. If these
small-brained ones used tools, is it brain size which gave them the
ability?

Yes. The earliest hominids used very simple tools - broken rocks, and
sticks. As the brain size of our ancestors or their cousins increased,
the tools became more sophisticated. There is a gradation of brain
size in the fossil record. The earlier smaller-brained hominids were
replaced by larger-brained hominds. Until very recently, there were
multiple species of humans (or almost-humans, if you will) at any one
time.

Or did the ability to use tools make brain sizes bigger? This
is perhaps off-topic, but it shows an example of how 'adjustable' the
theory of evolution can be.

All science is adaptable. If incompatible facts show up and are
confirmed, then the standard models must be adjusted to fit the facts,
or discarded altogether.

You might want to consider the alternative - refusing to face the
facts because they don't fit preconceived notions.




I don't know. Perhaps there were many races, perhaps they are just
different breeds of apes altogether. There should be many more human
fossils rather than the relatively few I have seen. Twenty or so
skulls don't seem like nearly enough to trace a lineage of human
history that spans a million years. I don't really know all the
details, thats why I'm studying it.

The answer is that there is no cutoff. One form grades into another
fairly smoothly. There are many more than 20 skulls, though I have no
idea how many you would consider sufficient. This too is something you
could easily look up for yourself.

But note that something else that you don't actually know, but your so
willing to state as a fact. As far as what I would consider
sufficient, many hundreds more. Since we have millions of fossils in
museums we should be able to produce a lot more human skulls.

You have no basis for such a statement. Why should the existence of
millions of fossils mean that there should be more human skulls than we
have? And what is it that I don't actually know? That's not clear to me
from your statement, unless you are talking about my inability to read
your mind. Now a quick web search finds that the total number of hominid
fossils currently known is estimated at around 6000. An actual count in
1976 came up with 3998, and there are many more discoveries since then.
Is that enough? I have to admit that not all of them contain skulls, but
surely the number of skulls exceeds "many hundreds".

The problem is that 'I' don't know how they all fit together, and that
why I have humbly approached this group and why I continue to humbly
approach this group for answers. I really don't consider some casual
castoffs to google as being answers. Any of these fossils can be
manipulated in several ways to whatever sequence is convenient.

Not without discarding much evidence. The dating of the geological
strata in which they are found, or associations with other dated and
sequential fossils.

Some
of these fossils may lead to ancient great ape species, some of them
may lead to extinction, some of them might extend across the entire
Cenozoic era, from its beginning Paleocene epoch 63 MYA to the
Pliocene, and maybe they don't lie in man's ancestry.

Most of them don't. We can say that species X or Y *might be our
ancestors, and species Z almost certainly is not, but we can't be
positive that this particular one is grandpa and not Uncle Amos.


These bones are themselves subjects of debate within the ranks of
scientists also,

Yes. But not the broad picture. As an analogy, The Baptists and
Pentecostals argue about a number of interpretations in the
scriptures, but those arguments are not evidence that Christianity is
false.

so given all the variables, I would say that there is
bound to be some very 'imaginative' placings along side of some
outright deceit, which has also been shown on several occasions.

Well, there was Piltdown, but that was discovered by scientists, and
we still don't know who perpetrated that fraud. There was a German
anthropologist recently who was found - again, by scientists - to have
faked some evidence on Neanderthals. Would you claim that fraud in
Christianity establishes its falsehood? And how could you tell if
someone, say, claimed to be a prophet but they were lying?

In science, evidence is counted *only if it is verifiable. This helps
avoid errors from insanity, incompetence, dishonesty, or causes which
are as yet unknown. This is why there are thousands of sects of
Christianity, but one one or two or three models in science for any
field. The more verifiable data we have, the more likely there is to
be a broad consensus on how things happen or happened.

Unfortunately my skeptism follows the old reasoning (which I believe
is sound) that the less that is known about a fossil in terms its age
and scarcity the more sweeping our generalizations can be about them.

Of course, we have millions of fossils. Thousands just of hominids and
other apes. But data from other fields, like genetics, geology,
ethology, and the like.

If you find the remains of someone who has died recently you have to
be careful about what you say about him because someone might know
something different. Surely you would know, as a scientist, that the
less data you have on a subject, the more room for "interpretation"
there is,

Actually, the less we know, the more *speculative is the nature of our
explanation. There's a difference. Scientists are painfully aware of
how uncertain their models are on some subjects. But then, so are the
other scientists. This is one reason we have peer-reviewed journals.

the more dat you get, the tighter the restrictions get.

Correct, altho I would have said, "The more reliable the model".

Therefore I don't think any reasonable person would disrespect my
desire for more data, especially since I have come to you as a sincere
learner and you wanted to decry my very existence here.

OK. But the best we can probably do is point you to where the evidence
is explained and organized the best. Introductory books on
evolutionary theory, for instance. But this is a good place to start.


But even if you lined up 10000 man-like fossils next to each other,
even if they are in temporal order, it does not prove descent.

Correct. Assertions about the universe can always be over ruled by
further evidence. Science never proves anything in the logical or
mathematical sense, but only in the pseudo-legal sense of "established
beyond any reasonable doubt". The data can be so overwhelming that it
is perverse to deny the mainstream theory.

It is
circular reasoning in that you would be assuming evolutionary descent,

This is not an assumption, but a conclusion after examining the
evidence. Creationist scientists 200 years ago came to this
conclusion, and Darwin provided a model which explained why it
happened. His theory has been modified since then, as new evidence
came to light.

and then using the line-up as proof of the assumption, when it is in
fact the assumption itself that needs to be called into question.

No, it's more like a jigsaw puzzle. As more and more pieces are
assembled, it becomes easier to place new pieces as they are found.
There are great rewards in science for anyone who can reassemble them
into a new picture (anyone who can come up with a new theory that fits
all the known data), but as more pieces are assembled, it becomes more
and more difficult to do this.




Nor does the record allow for any time at which the entire world was
covered with water, neither in the Flood of Noah or at the second
sentence of Genesis.

There you go with one of your statements again. Pardon me for calling
you out on it, but why would you assume that the record does not allow
for a flood?

Because a flood would presumably produce a worldwide sediment layer, for
one thing. There is no such layer, however thin. And it would kill off
all land life. Any flood in the past many thousands of years would show
up as a genetic bottleneck in every terrestrial species, which it
doesn't. And there is also no time in the fossil record in which every
land species becomes extinct.

A wordwide flood would leave clear
evidence behind, of many sorts, none of which we see. That's why
geologists (most of them creationists) abandoned the idea early in the
19th Century.

-"clear evidence behind of many sorts"-none of the sort which you can
actually talk about however, but that is supposedly because I can
easily look it up I presume.

I mentioned three sorts of clear evidence above. Please read. They were
1) a worldwide sediment layer, 2) genetic bottlenecks in all species of
terrestrial organisms, and 3) a time-horizon that no fossil species
passes through. We observe none of these.

There are certainly widespread soil depositions as well as areas of
massive erosions. The Sydney Basin, an area of land in Australia
around Katoomba and the three sisters is connected to an evern larger
basin extending 1200 miles north, which connects to the Great Artesian
Basin is a massive soil deposition which had to have been caused by a
catastropic amount of water.

Known flood deposits are local, and the occurred and widely different
times, and many were laid down before there were even apes, let alone
humans.

I don't know what you mean by 2) and 3)

Genetic bottle-neck: the genetic analysis of many thousands of humans
indicate that we are descended from as few as two thousand humans, as
recently as 70,000 years ago. Other animals did not go through this.
This information directly contradicts the Global Flood story. Noah's
tale could have been local history, "writ large". Or another culture's
myth, absorbed by their neighbors and changed slightly. Or it could be
an allegorical myth, not intended to be read literally, or it could
simple be untrue. The only other alternative that comes to mind is
that God faked the evidence later, but in that case, what else is
faked, what can be trusted?


For the rest of the debate I'll have to return to it later, as I'm
getting a little sleepy.

Later.

Kermit


.

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