Political Roundtable Pulsar of Annihilation part IV

[hands11]

'macro' evolution is indeed a fact

genetics prove this - for instance we know the exact break point where a
chromosome relocated in chimps and humans. Genetics provide irrefutable
evidence of the interrelated ancestry of 'higher' life forms.

Maybe you're right dobrojim. I'm not a scientist and I'm getting old. I will look into it further and tip my hat to you if macro evolution is a provable fact. BTW - assuming a scientist or group of scientist did prove it, wouldn't they be celebrated around the world as the person/people that exposed the Book of Genesis as a complete and utter fraud? It just seems to me that the publicity accompanying such a discovery would be such that I wouldn't have missed it- but maybe I did.

Genesis will never be viewed a fraud. It follows the same stages of creation as science. Just remove the days and years. I read a book a long time ago that outlined this very well. It pulled the bible scripture and then outlined the science that supports it. They are describing the same thing.

Funny thing is, the Church actually support the both are true view. They except evolution. Its been that way since 1996. People need to catch up with the news.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19956961/ns ... FkZk1ErHIU

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1996 ... ion-theory

[hands11]

Ok, here's the response of my friend the genome decoder:

Me: Guy on internet forum wants to know if there are any peer-reviewed journal articles proving macro evolution (one species can evolve into another). Anyone?

Buddy: Oh gosh, only *all of peer-reviewed modern biology* - that's a tough one to even narrow down. Which specific aspect of macroevolution do you want to show evidence for? That's kind of like asking "show me peer-reviewed evidence that outer space exists!!

I mean - we could start with *all of phylogenetics*... or all of *evolutionary molecular biology*... I'd recommend that anyone who questions our connection to higher primates (which I assume this is ultimately about) go look into phylogenetics and comparative genomics, and then do some BLAST searches on NCBI..."

Zonk - I appreciate your efforts. I don't know what any of that stuff means however - I'm an ignorant laymen. Maybe there are many proof sources out there but if so, why would there still be controversy? I do know there are a substantial number of highly educated scientist that don't believe it. Why would they risk their hard earned reputations if it was so obviously documented in the journals?

Maybe you are asking the wrong question. Answers are only as good as the question that is asked.

I would imagine a lot of scientist would believe in God. The further they dig and learn about the vast complexity of things, and they still find holes that can't be answered... lots would conclude God exists.

They obviously believe in science. But you say they believe in creationism. The question for them is, do you believe evolution is the basis of creationism. Is what you study in science merely the discovery of the pieces and processes by which God did it ?

[Ed Wood]

It isn't at all the case that the establishment of macroevolution or any other scientific postulate that conflicts with a literal interpretation of the bible would immediately be trumpeted as a repudiation of it or that the bible would immediately loose all traction in society. Nor does it need to. Nevertheless I think criticism of the handling of evolution in schools is a little misguided.

One of the fundaments of science as I understand it to be taught (in the area anyway) is an emphasis on the scientific method and the understanding that science is a process from which conclusions are extracted from the evidence and subject to the scrutiny of any future evidence. To demand that evolution be taught only as the sum of our current understanding and subject to that same scrutiny is to ask that it be taught as everything else is. In my experience the scientific method and critical thinking is just about literally the first unit in every single high school level science class, to the extent that students find the repetition monotonous. We already struggle to motivate students to engage with science, what alteration would be an improvement?

[Zonkerbl]

Here's one of many journal articles on the subject:
http://arts.anu.edu.au/grovco/Goodman%20et%20al.pdf

Not a big deal because phylogenetic scientists don't earn a living disproving the Bible, frankly. They get published if they push the envelope of established scientific knowledge. They could care less about what the Bible says.

Darwin's paper was the big one that made a big splash, Darwin didn't have the mechanism but Mendel did. Everything since then is just exploring the consequences of Darwin's theory and checking them against reality.

Popper, there are no peer-reviewed articles proving the Law of Demand (when prices rise, demand falls), because the debate over the Law of Demand occurred before there was such a thing as a "peer-reviewed journal article." It is one of the fundamental laws driving modern economics. All of the related economic articles nowadays explore the consequences of this law.

Well, and there's this too:

http://ncse.com/taking-action/project-s ... ss-release

[montestewart]

Popper, be careful about quoting Gibbon. He seems to lay much of the world's problems at religion's door.

Monte - why would I stop quoting Gibbon just because he concluded that religion played a major part in the world's problems. Had he lived in the twentieth century he would have concluded that the Soviet Union played a major part in the world's problems. According to my Webster's, the Soviet's atheism should be defined as a religion --- "An objective pursued with a fervor or conscientious devotion." Wouldn't OWS also be defined as a religion?

Hey, I didn't say stop, Popper. I'm not the police or anything. You know what you're doing. I think if that Gibbon mind was writing today, he'd have a few things to say about the United States, Russia, the Middle East, Israel, Wall Street, and modern organized religions of all stripes, and I'll bet he'd really hate reality shows.

Based mostly on the people I know that lived in the Soviet Union, I don't really have the impression that the average Soviet citizen pursued state sanctioned atheism with any sort of fervor. Maybe the rulers wanted such fervor, but if you encourage your people to reject long held customs en masse, you'd better offer a good replacement.

I'm not sure the origin of this quote, but "Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby," pretty well sums up my view on that.

[Wizards2Lottery]

Macroevolution, does indeed prove a literal interpretation of Genesis to be wrong. As do the laws of physics, geology and many fields of science.

It's how you choose to interpret Genesis.

Either way, 'macroevolution' and 'microevolution' are both redundant terms. Macroevolution is microevolution over a long period of time. If you believe that the Earth is aged in the billions, then overtime life as it underwent microevolution gained enough changes at the genetic level where species started diversifying more and more. They are both arbitrary terms without any real meaning. At its core, evolution proceeds with natural selection acting on genes.

By the way, there is no disagreement in the scientific community on the validity of evolutionary biology. Take it from someone who is enrolled in one of the best evolutionary biology programs in the country. The disagreements are on specifics within the field, i.e which mechanisms contribute more than others. For example, in my field (Genetics), people are trying to figure out how much transcriptional regulation plays a role in changing of expression patterns and development of new ones in comparison to random mutations. That doesn't mean, that scientists question the validity of macroevolution.

If you consider evolution to be false, you literally cannot conduct 99% of the work done in a lab. It would render the data completely meaningless.

Agreed, but unless somebody can prove macro evolution it should be emphasized in science class as an unproven theory, not a provable fact.

So, Popper, what would you accept as proof that macro evolution is a provable fact?

I would settle for a feature article in one of the peer reviewed scientific journals stating that macro evolution has been proven to their satisfaction. After all, it should be big, big, big news.

Such articles exist. Do a search on NCBI. What you are asking is a bit ridiculous because peer reviewed articles have a very specified (narrow) topic.

A simple search into say, phylogenetic analysis, would give you plenty of results. Now if you have the scientific background to understand the data is a whole another issue.

PS: macroevolution is the same thing as microevolution. If you believe one is true, you automatically consider the other to be.

I do know there are a substantial number of highly educated scientist that don't believe it.

No. No there aren't. The number is not substantial. It's a VERY SMALL minority. Like the size of the Earth in comparison to the Universe small.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA111.html

Of the scientists and engineers in the United States, only about 5% are creationists, according to a 1991 Gallup poll (Robinson 1995, Witham 1997). However, this number includes those working in fields not related to life origins (such as computer scientists, mechanical engineers, etc.). Taking into account only those working in the relevant fields of earth and life sciences, there are about 480,000 scientists, but only about 700 believe in "creation-science" or consider it a valid theory (Robinson 1995). This means that less than 0.15 percent of relevant scientists believe in creationism. And that is just in the United States, which has more creationists than any other industrialized country. In other countries, the number of relevant scientists who accept creationism drops to less than one tenth of 1 percent.

Additionally, many scientific organizations believe the evidence so strongly that they have issued public statements to that effect (NCSE n.d.). The National Academy of Sciences, one of the most prestigious science organizations, devotes a Web site to the topic (NAS 1999). A panel of seventy-two Nobel Laureates, seventeen state academies of science, and seven other scientific organizations created an amicus curiae brief which they submitted to the Supreme Court (Edwards v. Aguillard 1986). This report clarified what makes science different from religion and why creationism is not science.

[hands11]

So Mitt latest on taking both sides on a issue.

He saying 47% of people don't play income taxes and that they are basically lazy drains on society.

Meanwhile in the Rs debate when he was going against Newt who wanted dividend taxes at zero, his response was, if that was the case, I would have paid zero in income taxes.

So he admits he pays no income taxes himself and he is only paying on dividends - lol
Show us your tax returns Mitt.

To make maters worst for the Rs as a whole, it was lord Reagan and other who wrote in some of the exemptions allowing lower income people not to pay income taxes. They promoted it as a good idea. Things like the child tax credit. Mortgage interest tax credits. Others that don't pay, retired people. They already paid theirs during all the years they worked. And it isn't like this 47% don't pay taxes at all.

I really honestly don't understand. Not only is Mitt a terrible option, he has run a terrible campaign, he has the same foreign policy team as GWB. He is doubling down the economic plan that got us into this mess and most Rs I know admit that Bush was a disaster. Mitt was the last person most Rs wanted. And yet they still would vote for his fool. If you are a true R, best thing you can do for your party is stay home and send a single that you deserve the party to give you a better option then Mitt or McCain and Palin. I said it before, the machine should have handed you Huntsman. He could have won against Obama.

And on the other side you have Obama who has done a really good job. It just goes to show you the power of money in politics. If not for the money he spends on his commercials, his numbers would be at like 35% because that's about the number of people that vote R regardless of any facts.

As an aside, I listened to a panel of undecided N Virginia voters yesterday. What an uninformed group of people. I couldn't believe how uninformed and misinformed they were. People that called in after the panel was interviewed were amazed there were people interested in voting that know so little so late in the game.

[popper]

It's been an interesting discussion on macro-evolution. Semantics and definitions seem to play a big part in the confusion that exists in my mind. I was expecting some big headline like "Science Proves Man Evolved from Ape" or "Scientist Create Life from a Mixture of Chemicals." If only life and science were so simple.

Now I have a headache so I'll leave further discussion, if any, to those on the thread with a scientific background.



Conclusions

Is Microevolution distinct from Macroevolution and vice versa? We concluded that this depends very much on what is meant by "distinct" and so forth. All phenomena of microevolution – evolution below the species level – must necessarily have some effect above the species level. But whether this is an additive effect or not depends on the complexity of the relationships between the two levels in each case. At least some macroevolution is the result of microevolutionary processes. So we are only asking now if all is. This is open to debate: the E (environmental) factors that affect macroevolution are not within-species (Mi) forces, but do microevolutionary processes like gene frequency changes necessarily mediate them? And this question is still unresolved amongst specialists. One thing we can say now, though, is that we cannot draw a simple equals sign between the two domains. It is an open question, one much argued within evolutionary biology and related disciplines, whether Mi = Ma in any sense.

Ontologically, all the objects of Ma are accounted for by the objects of Mi plus the objects and processes of E. However, we can't just assume all the processes of Ma are just the aggregate sum of the processes of Mi – this needs to be shown. Methodologically, we can not predict the outcomes of Ma from a knowledge of the states of Mi plus E. This is not because the outcomes of Ma are not the result of Mi and so on, necessarily, but because we cannot compute in a reasonable time those outcomes – too many variables, conditions, and interconnections (Dupré 1993, Rosenberg 1994).

But this doesn't mean that we can say that it is impossible to evolve from one group to another because there is a barrier, as creationists claim. Genes and developmental sequences are extremely modifiable, and to date no barrier has been found, nor any reason to suspect one exists. All modern biology accepts that Ma is possible, through biological processes. The question is, in what ways? And that is a matter for empirical investigation, which is ongoing, and through which we are learning new things.

Macroevolution is at least evolution at or above the level of speciation, but it remains an open debate among scientists whether or not it is solely the end product of microevolutionary processes or there is some other set of processes that causes higher level trends and patterns. It is this writer's opinion that macroevolutionary processes are just the vector sum of microevolutionary processes in conjunction with large scale changes in geology and the environment, but this is only one of several opinions held by specialists.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/macroevolution.html

[pancakes3]

1 - there are subtle differences between micro and macro. micro agrees with mutations within a species. macro assumes that these mutations within a species will lead to a collective shift of that species.

2 - evolution is accepted as fact. how evolution occurs is theory. so maco is accepted as fact. how macro occurs (natural selection, mutations, genetic drift) is theory.

3 - [image]http://www.life.uiuc.edu/bio100/lectures/fall97lects/cladogram.GIF[/image]

shows what dobro was talking about with respect to genetic markers.

the first group of 6 letters is the same for all the species. the next 6 differs for A/B and C/D/E/F/G/H. That's why A/B splits off. and so on and so on.

4 - edwood raises an interesting point that we're underselling the scientific method. i think part of it is that in none of the general sciences do they teach statistical significance or how data can be so EASILY manipulated. this xkcd is hilarious and enlightening.

http://xkcd.com/882/

[popper]

Let's change the subject and find the most controversial topic imaginable to debate. Something that will inflame the passions and raise the hackles of even the most serene among us. Any suggestions?

For instance, is it true that Hands is a paid political operative in the Democratic Party Machine or, how many of the 14 individuals, including Lanny Bruer, referred by the Inspector General for punishment in the Fast and Furious controversy will go to jail?

[Severn Hoos]

Hughes or Stackhouse?



Well, it raised a hackle or two back in the day....

[Zonkerbl]

I think the most controversial topic possible is changing the zards name back to the bullets...

[DCZards]

We can talk about how Romney says that almost half of the American voters are no-taxpaying, irresponsible, government parasites. Oh, we can also debate how many of that 47% are actually Republican voters as opposed to supporters of Pres. Obama.

[Ed Wood]

How about this one: foreign policy fueled by nationalism and American exceptionalism is fundamentally unacceptable both functionally and morally.

[Chocolate City Jordanaire]

How about this one: foreign policy fueled by nationalism and American exceptionalism is fundamentally unacceptable both functionally and morally.

So does that mean you're for or against "keeping America American"?

http://www.snopes.com/politics/romney/slogan.asp

[hands11]

We can talk about how Romney says that almost half of the American voters are no-taxpaying, irresponsible, government parasites. Oh, we can also debate how many of that 47% are actually Republican voters as opposed to supporters of Pres. Obama.

You talking about this kind of stuff ?





That 28% include people that work but have more deductions then taxable income because of things like child tax credit, and mortgage interest deductions. Also armed forces people that get special tax credits.


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4daYJzyls[/youtube]

And they all cheer.

[popper]

Great pie chart hands. I don't think Romney took the particulars of the 47% into account when he made his comment. Someone on this thread, maybe you or DCZ, also made the point some time ago that it was the Repubs that proposed EITC (which at the time surprised me but sure enough was true). I don't know how many people are truly gaming the system (maybe 5% ? ) and many of them will not even vote in the election. And if they do, it is a crap shoot as to who would be the better candidate for them. Conventional wisdom says Obama but there are so many variables that they cannot be sure.

I will still vote for Romney but only because he is the lesser of two evils in my opinion.

[hands11]

Great pie chart hands. I don't think Romney took the particulars of the 47% into account when he made his comment. Someone on this thread, maybe you or DCZ, also made the point some time ago that it was the Repubs that proposed EITC (which at the time surprised me but sure enough was true). I don't know how many people are truly gaming the system (maybe 5% ? ) and many of them will not even vote in the election. And if they do, it is a crap shoot as to who would be the better candidate for them. Conventional wisdom says Obama but there are so many variables that they cannot be sure.

I will still vote for Romney but only because he is the lesser of two evils in my opinion.

Pop

You seems like a decent person who is keeping up with things and who is willing to consider new views and new information.

What I don't get is why you would still vote for Mitt. What does this guy have to do more then what already shown us to lose your vote ?

His policies on economics are just a third term of Bush which has been proven a total failure.
He has the same Bush Neocons as advices.
He is all over the place on the issues.
He continues to lie about things he knows are lies.
He is running a terrible campaign. Not bad but terrible.
And he is just totally unnatural in how he presents himself when he speaks. He doesn't project any presidential presence.

How is the lesser of the two?

Just asking honestly. I mean if the answer is... I have a ton of money and I want more regardless of how it hurts the country. At least that would be honest. I could respect that.

[popper]

I'm sure I'll catch hell for this post but it's important information in my opinion.

My son has been on the same travel soccer team going on 8 years. He is one of two whites on the team. The rest of the players are Hispanic and Black. I am good friends with all of the parents. We travel out of town together for tournaments, we eat together, we party together, and we support our boys together.

Over the last couple of years many of the parents tell me they feel beaten down. You can see it in their faces. Between escalating gas prices, food prices, stagnant wages, fear of losing their job, etc., they are one or two paychecks away from oblivion. Yet to a person they are all voting for Obama.

The foregoing reminds me of another sad story. I had the same housekeeper for 15 years. One day she told me she had saved up enough money to buy a new car. I said great and insisted that she allow me to negotiate the deal for her knowing the dealer would rip her off if given an opportunity. She was clear she did not want my help. Sure enough they put her together and two years later the car was repossessed.

My sister makes the same mistakes. People seem to prefer the misery resulting from their independent choices versus seeking help from more informed sources.

I spent 30 years in business and the one thing I learned is to always seek advice from those with more experience, more education, etc.

It's truly sad because those who can least afford to lose are the ones most likely to suffer financially from another Obama term.

I hope I haven't offended anyone with my post.

[hands11]

Great pie chart hands. I don't think Romney took the particulars of the 47% into account when he made his comment. Someone on this thread, maybe you or DCZ, also made the point some time ago that it was the Repubs that proposed EITC (which at the time surprised me but sure enough was true). I don't know how many people are truly gaming the system (maybe 5% ? ) and many of them will not even vote in the election. And if they do, it is a crap shoot as to who would be the better candidate for them. Conventional wisdom says Obama but there are so many variables that they cannot be sure.

I will still vote for Romney but only because he is the lesser of two evils in my opinion.

As for what percent are gaming the system, I don't think a percentage number is what I would focus on. I would focus on ... for what amount of money.

The most dangerous gaming of the system is done right in front of our eyes. Its Exxon. Its these mega rich donating 20 million because its going to save them 1.2 Billion. It the banks doing what they know was wrong knowing damn well they were to big to fail so the government/us would bail them out. Its people changing laws regarding who can vote.

The welfare queen is a red herring. Hey, look over there at that person getting a free sandwich... while I do the real gaming of sucking the government/us dry.

People like Mitt are the ones who are really gaming the system. He is poster boy of the big gamers and that alone is why he is exactly the opposite of who we should elect as our president.