Re: My review of Dawkins' "Greatest Show on Earth".
- From: Jack Dominey <jack.dominey+use@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:04:38 -0500
In
<d7c8ffe6-969d-4252-8770-0402205b82cc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Viktor D. Huliganov" <jerzy.jakubowski@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 28 Lis, 00:07, Jack Dominey <jack.dominey+...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In
<38d00387-0323-4072-ab98-05b8fd81b...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Viktor D. Huliganov" <jerzy.jakubow...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 23 Lis, 22:12, Jack Dominey <jack.dominey+...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In
<380cf56f-ee63-4537-859d-74c8ea834...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Viktor D. Huliganov" <jerzy.jakubow...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<snip>
But it makes much more sense out of
the idea that the sea was created unsalty, and became so after the
flood, which was associated with great tectonic upheavals. That is
which freshwater fishes did not die out in the flood.
So you think it makes *more* sense to say that the ability to live in
saltwater - for both vertebrates and invertebrates, indeed for *every
living thing in the sea* - appeared after Ye Fludde of Noe? You've
created a worse problem than you "solved".
Why?
Instead of trying to explain why vertebrates use a particular
regulation system, you now need to explain the origin of several
different systems in a very short time period.
This is never a problem when we can invoke the supernatural.
Absolutely. When you can balance the equations by inserting a step
that says "and then a miracle occurs", the math always works out!
I tend to forget that you're not actually interested in explaining or
understanding the things you post about.
<snip>
Not to mention that you now have to explain why the pre-Flood oceans
utterly failed to leave the chemical and isotopic evidence of fresh
water.
Where would they leave it?
In the sedimentary record.
Where did the pre-aerobic world leave the chemical and isotopic
evidence of a nitrogen based repiratory economy?
Again, it's in the sedimentary record. Before the earliest Banded
Iron Formations you don't see the kinds of minerals that form in the
presence of free oxygen
(And I'd take the
argument that such organisms exist today as not relevant, as the
question is not whether they are here today but how do we know the
whole world had them before the blue-greens?)
Damn hard for aerobic bacteria (much less eukaryotes) to survive in
the absence of oxygen.
On top of that, I still don't get how the first oxygen producing blue
green didn't get killed by its own oxygen, as it is usually fatal to
anaerobes, which science seems to think is all there was at the
outset.
As long as the environment can take up the free oxygen faster than the
anaerobes can poop it out, they don't have a problem.
But then we have levels of oxygen going to 35% in the carboniferous,
according to Dawkins. Where does he think this oxygen has gone now?
This article could give you some clues:
http://www.pnas.org/content/96/20/10955.long
It also caters for the mass trilobite extinctions. They needed to
be at 9 promilles of slainity, and had no innate genetic code for
quickly developing a kidney.
And you're digging the hole even deeper. Why could horseshoe crabs
adapt but trilobites couldn't? Why could octopus and squid and
nautulis adapt but ammonites and belemnites and nautilois couldn't?
It's predestination.
Back to "a miracle occurs here", huh?
The animals set to survive were given the ability
to switch into a kidney producing mode at an environmental trigger,
like these lizards on Pod Thingummy.
Why can you tame some animals and not others? Why can some animals
cope with sub-zero temperatures and not others? Similar questions.
No, they're not similar at all. You claimed to explain the extinction
of trilobites. My question just highlights that your "explanation"
amounts to nothing but special pleading.
As you probably know, 96% percent of marine species are credited to
have died in what is wrongly identified as the Permian-Triassic Event.
Wrongly identified? Really? You think the geologists are so
incompetent that they can't tell the difference between Permian and
Triassic rocks? That the paleontologists are so delusional that they
make up differences in the fossils on either side of the boundary?
Not to mention the very basic question of why trilobites aren't mixed
with modern fauna in the fossil record.
They were dying en masse, which the modern animals were not doing. The
concentration of trilobite fossils in certain places shows that they
were incapable of dealing with the increasing salinity. They tried to
swim away from it into less salt water. The places where they couldn't
swim away from it is where they died in huge numbers. Other animals
were not involved in that.
Wait. You're not saying the modern species had the latent genetic
ability to adapt to salt water, you're saying they were magically
transformed at the instant of the salinity event. A latent genetic
ability to grow gills and breath underwater wouldn't do me any good,
only my offspring, and then only if the ability were expressed, i.e.
if they had gills.
You really shouldn't attempt to explain things like this. You have to
keep multiplying the miracles.
The lizards on the two Croatian islands, Pod Kopiste and Pod Whatever,
which Dawkins references in his "before our very eyes" chapter pretty
much in the middle of TGSOE, in only fifteen generations had ev-loved
the mechanism to utilise their Harry Caecums for a vegetarian
lifestyle. DO you think they all developed that extra info in fifteen
generations?
Since you are mentioning this "extra info" you must have some
measurement, yes?
Just going by what Dawkins writes. I didn't measure it.
Then to answer your question, sure, why not? The mechanism wasn't
present in the parent population and it's there now.
Is the mutation rate so high? Or was it a switch that
brought on pre-existant dormant info in the gene to play?
How much mutation was needed? Do you have any idea?
Not much, but RD reports it as a big deal.
I don't know much about genetics, but I do know enough to recognize
that your alternatives ("mutation" vs. "switch") are so oversimplified
as to be nonsense. Yes, I do expect that mutation was involved - the
island lizards are genetically distinct from the mainland population.
As to the nature of the mutation(s), I have no information. A single
change in the timing of expression of some genes in the lizards'
embryonic development may be sufficient to account for the resulting
change in their intestines.
<snip>
It also explains why migratory fishes such as the salmon, need to go
to freshwater to breed. They are a living clue of this. Eels appear, at
face value, to do the reverse, and go all the way to the Sargasso sea
to breed, but in fact they do this in deep water next to subterranean
vents which pump out into the sea exceptionally clean water.
What is your source for this information? The info I found indicates
that the spawning locations are not known. And the subterranean vents
I've heard of pump out anything but "exceptionally clean water" (what
does that mean, anyway? Fresh water?)
I heard that the sea would be more salty if it were not replenished by
less saline water from subterranean aquifers.
Heard where?
On here somewhere, several years ago. What's the prevailing view these
days?
You're dodging. "but in fact they do this in deep water next to
subterranean vents which pump out into the sea exceptionally clean
water."
Do you have any actual facts, or are you just blustering?
<snip>
So you think the ability to manage saltwater existence - which you
said depends on "advanced mechanisms in their kidneys" for vertebrates
- evolved over the course of one lifetime? Gosh, that's really fast
evolution. Wouldn't most creationists say that such a change requires
a lot of information be added to the genome?
Unless it was there already. Predestination, remember.
giving us a living clue that has survived thousands of
years to today's date as to what happened after the flood, when systems
suddenly appeared that enabled fishes to cope with all the salts that
emerged when the continents suddenly moved in the time of Peleg.
Continents suddenly moving, yet! Let us know when you've worked out
the physics of that one. Problems like boiling the oceans tend to
crop up.
They will not boil because the amount of water is too large. The
amount of water in the oceans is sufficient to cope with the cooling
of that amount of friction. 2/3 of the planets surface is water. It
will not boil because some of the crust moves around a little bit.
Only if you're proposing that the continents move by magic. Otherwise
you've got to have the energy to start and maintain the movement and
in the final analysis that energy is going to show up as heat. You're
moving something like 10^24 grams of continent over thousands of
kilometers. Something like that would crack the crust in a zillion
places - you'd have dozens, maybe scores of places like the Deccan
Traps. Every supervolcano on the planet would blow. It would be
another mass extinction event - something notably missing from the
description of the descendants of Noah.
People were gathered in one place at Babel, so something like a quick
change of Pangea to something like what we have today would have been
less noticeable to them. The continents are floating about on a molten
bed anyway. The heat is already there down there.
You know what happens when a tiny piece of crust moves a few feet,
right? You are talking about an event several orders of magnitude
bigger. Breaking up a supercontinent on human time scales would wrack
the earth - the whole earth, not just little parts - with quakes
bigger than any recorded. The Genesis reference to Peleg somehow
seems to omit the parts about their brick buildings being shattered
all the time and their tents falling down and the constant landslides
and slumps and rivers changing course and the air turning sulfurous
and hot and volcanoes blowing their tops and forests burning and most
of the earth being rendered uninhabitable by plants and animals on
account of the cooling lava everywhere. Oh, and the fact that the
weather was utterly different from year to year, so the droughts and
floods and frosts and heat waves made growing crops impossible. Funny
how they didn't think that stuff was important, huh?
--
Usenet: http://xkcd.com/386/
Jack Dominey
jack_dominey (at) email (dot) com
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