What you’ve done is shown that there are paths that don’t work. That’s not the same as showing that there are no paths that work.
Most changes certainly would not happen as you suggest. There would be hundreds or thousands of changes, each of which providing some tiny advantages. In most cases, we’re looking at the result of many small changes and finding intermediate steps would be hard.
A couple of problems with your response. First of all one cannot merely say tiny changes. One has to say if these are tiny anatomical changes or tiny physiological changes or tiny psychological changes.
And one cannot merely say tiny advantages. These advantages have to be large enough to provide a sufficient advantage to get over the randomised death hurdle. So a minuscule advantage would be just as likely to die out as the person without the minuscule advantage.
And it is not merely a matter of saying we don’t know what pathways worked. For the vast overwhelming majority of these systems we cannot even imagine a pathway that could work.
Which is obviously a huge problem. If someone says we actually know this is the way it happened and yet they cannot even provide a possible pathway for it to have happened that is logical nonsense.
Actually, those tiny changes don’t need to provide any advantage at the time. They only need not to provide a disadvantage that would eliminate them from the population. Most populations have a fair bit of diversity in traits that don’t have a significant impact on reproduction or survival. But environmental changes can turn those differences into advantages… which can lead to those traits becoming more widespread.
Both your statements are true. If they do have an impact on our survival (as you said in your first post), and if they don’t, they can end up sticking around in the gene pool… like some annoying algea.
But as you well know, if they don’t provide a significant advantage then, mathematically, they can’t meaningfully participate in evolution. If Patton had gotten shot in his first battle, then he couldn’t have helped in the Battle of the Bulge.
The entire evolutionary fairy tale is built on ‘natural selection’, in which favorable mutations build toward a better and more glorious future… or a sturdier cockroach. Evolution cannot depend upon millions of useless modifications suddenly coming together to produce an enchanted evening or a beautiful web.
The vary behaviors which produce the beautiful web, if not accompanied by the web creating organs, and the hole in the posterior, would be actively destructive to the chances of spiders surviving. No matter how far back one goes in the ‘modification’ chain, a certain minimum number of features, which I lumped into A, P, and Psy… have to be present to be helpful, and most of the time if they are present in part, they will be destructive to the organization.
A breast that produces no milk and attracts no mate… is not just a lump of flesh. It is an annoyance, an encumbrance, a waste of material that could have been used for other purposes. A penis in a world with no vaginas is…well… it might make it easier for a warrior to pee. No squatting. But the testes just leave him more vulnerable.
They don’t have to provide a significant advantage when they first appear. They only have to be propagated among other variants. If the environment ever shifts so that they are advantageous, they will spread. If it shifts so that they are disadvantageous, they will be reduced.
You’ve posited a simple-minded process that doesn’t work in order to claim that evolution is impossible. Your model probably won’t - but that doesn’t mean that it is the only possible model.
They idea is not that “millions of useless modifications suddenly com[e] together,” but that each modification, or combination of modifications, winds up as advantage at some point, and thus spreads.
You mention, for example, the penis. Now that happens to be something that has actually been studied. Here is how one AI describes the process:
Penises evolved as an adaptation for internal fertilization when animals moved to land, driven primarily by natural selection, sperm competition, and female mate choice. The oldest known fossilized penis dates back 425 million years in a tiny marine crustacean, showing that intromittent organs arose long before land colonization to secure successful gamete transfer.
The Shift to Internal Fertilization
• Water to Land: Early aquatic life relied on releasing eggs and sperm into open water. Moving to land meant gametes would dry out, requiring direct transfer inside the female's body.
• Cloacal Beginnings: Ancestral vertebrates used a shared opening called a cloaca to pass sperm packets (spermatophores), which gradually developed into specialized protruding muscular and vascular structures.
Evolutionary Drivers of Shape and Size
• Sperm Competition: In species where females mate with multiple males, penises evolved specific shapes—such as ridges, curves, or spines—to scoop out rival sperm or place fluid closer to the cervix.
• Sexual Selection: Female choice and male-male intimidation heavily shaped the distinct size and visual traits of the organ, notably making human penises larger relative to body size compared to other primates.
A lot to explore there, but let’s stick to our first for a minute. You write:
»f the environment ever shifts so that they are advantageous, they will spread
But that misses the point, eh? We are talking about a small, useless change, that needs other changes in order to become useful… even a little bit. The tiny bump in the crotch is not waiting for the environment to become useful, it is waiting for a thousand other changes.
Science has shown us that, so far, every single mutation they have managed to create or is created naturally either removes functionality (which can be useful), or is neutral… but is usually detrimental. Like overwhelmingly often.
You seem to keep changing your mind. First you talk about useful, then you say useless but kept anyway, and now we are back to useful.
And as I point out, it needs to be useful enough to get past the randomized death barrier… not just ‘useful’. And then it needs to be paired with the other necessary bits to be truly useful. And then…
You say that you are “searching for truth.” How, exactly are you doing that, and what objective tests do you expect to apply to see if what you’re finding is “truth”? You may not be interested in science, but it at least has a clear set of ways to recognize and reject failed theories. What do you believe that science is?
As for “unfalsifable”, I literally gave you set of possible observations that could falsify a theory of evolution.
I really have the sense that you are not actually reading anything i say to understand. When I said that we have different eye colors, I was using them as an example of a mutation that has not been shown to be advantages - and yet has persisted. You keep invoking this “random death trap” that you have no described other than to reject the definition i had found.
I have no idea what you are talking about when you speak of something “proceding to evolution.” Are you just making up phrases, now?
Well, I did say I was working on an entire post on at least one of those subjects.
Now as far as being not interested in Science that’s actually false. However, first of all Science needs to be put in its place. And any Science that rejects the actual search for truth because of its various rules is Science that has deliberately subjected itself to this second rank. If Science is saying that it believes that it’s capable of making a distinction between evolution and special creation then Science would need to come up with a set of rules which said that special creation would produce X effect and that evolution would produce Y effect. And that must be about things that are not yet known.
But the general reaction is that special creation is not Science and so we don’t even have to choose between it. In which case I say well that’s very good but that means that you’re not actually looking for truth. You’re only merely playing your little game and nothing that fits outside of your rules can be actually regarded within your little Game.
As you know, that was not the way that the founders of modern Science looked at it. There are millions of things which cannot fit within the little box that is modern Science. And so if someone is going to search for truth, the first thing they have to do is to say Science is not actually a search for truth. It is a little game that’s played in one corner that may have some interesting things to say but it can never make a distinction between something like special creation and evolution.
And I will mention that for most of these conversation I’ve been out on my phone using voice recognition so something is truly incomprehensible. That may very well be why.
I suppose now we’ll have to define working :-) as far as I’m concerned you’ve given me a great excuse to post another post on the difference between evolution and creation and I have it maybe 75% written. So from my standpoint it’s working fine.
And as far as falsifiability is concerned, evolutionist accuse each other of having been falsified all the time. And if you go back in history and you look at predictions that evolutionist have made they have been falsified repeatedly. The problem is that since evolution is the only Game allowed in town what falsifies evolution is merely being treated as oh so we must not understand it correctly. It cannot be falsified because there is nothing that evolution would say I well if we were defined this then that would mean that evolution is false. They would merely say that means that our particular brand of evolution has been proven false in this area. Or perhaps we don’t really completely understand.
You can see this and comparing it to astrophysics. Somebody comes up with a grand old theory of astrophysics in five years later people look at some new star New galaxy or something and they go well so much for that theory. But seriously, what would it take for a modern evolutionist to say well so much for evolution?
OK, you're ignoring something I pointed out a few messages ago. There are two different things bearing the name "evolution."
The first is the observation, based on the fossil record, that different species have existed at different times, and there are patterns of relationships among those species. The second is the attempt to explain how that happened, by devising testable models ("theories") of various mechanisms. Some of those theories have made predictions of observations which have either not been confirmed, or found to conflict with observation. That one or more theories of evolution have failed does not say that evolution didn't happen. For example, an early theory predicted a continuous gradual change in species - that is not consistent with what has been seen, so many newer theories today take a "punctuated equilibrium" approach. Developing a good theory isn't trivial.
That "evolution is the only game allowed in town" is based on the simple fact of the fossil record combined with the various chemical and physical analyses of the fossils and their strata. An alternative approach would require a falsifiable theory which does a better job of matching observations.
Actually, the first thing you need to do is define “truth.” Science, logic, and philosophy (which includes religion) use different definitions. Applying the philosophical definition of truth when doing science is a category error - and the fact that science started with philosophy doesn’t change that.
There is an interesting bit of equivocation in there. The fact that someone comes along and says I have a new definition of truth does not make that definition true or useful. In the case of evolution it would seem pretty obvious what we’re talking about but perhaps you’ll tell me that this is just the philosophical definition of truth :-)
If the actual historical record is that sometime within the last tens of thousands of years there was a six day period in which the entire universe was created and came to contain all of the basic kinds of animals that we have now along with all of the stars and planets, et cetera, et cetera then that would mean that special creation was true.
If on the other hand the universe has been around for billions of years and came about very via various naturalistic processes which through random mutation and natural selection lead to the existence of baseball players and drunks than that would mean that evolution was true.
If all of that last happened but it happened because of the directing and guiding force of an omnipotent and omniscient being then that would mean that thetic evolution was true.
And then we can throw in aliens landing from another galaxy or something and seating the Earth and we can add in yet another possibility for what is true.
Well, the historical record doesn't appear to show any such six-day period, and it does appear to show that the universe has been around for billions of years. But all that shows is that the universe is billions of years old.
Science is not philosophy. It is specifically concerned with what is observable, and it works with models which predict new observations that we haven't yet made. Thus, for example, Newtonian gravity predicts that objects fall towards one another. Those are observations that we can and have made, and apply to all massive bodies. Einsteinian gravity (General Relativity) makes slightly different observations, but under most conditions here on earth, most observations fit both theories.
Evolution makes certain predictions about how organisms resemble one another, and that includes things we can observe about fossils.
Radioactive decay makes predictions about how the composition of elements in a mass of unstable isotopes will change over time. Many observations have been made and they all fit the known theories. There are tests that can and have been made.
What testable predictions does special creation make?
What you’ve done is shown that there are paths that don’t work. That’s not the same as showing that there are no paths that work.
Most changes certainly would not happen as you suggest. There would be hundreds or thousands of changes, each of which providing some tiny advantages. In most cases, we’re looking at the result of many small changes and finding intermediate steps would be hard.
Hey Russ, long time no hear from you!
A couple of problems with your response. First of all one cannot merely say tiny changes. One has to say if these are tiny anatomical changes or tiny physiological changes or tiny psychological changes.
And one cannot merely say tiny advantages. These advantages have to be large enough to provide a sufficient advantage to get over the randomised death hurdle. So a minuscule advantage would be just as likely to die out as the person without the minuscule advantage.
And it is not merely a matter of saying we don’t know what pathways worked. For the vast overwhelming majority of these systems we cannot even imagine a pathway that could work.
Which is obviously a huge problem. If someone says we actually know this is the way it happened and yet they cannot even provide a possible pathway for it to have happened that is logical nonsense.
I prefer the elephant nose.
Actually, those tiny changes don’t need to provide any advantage at the time. They only need not to provide a disadvantage that would eliminate them from the population. Most populations have a fair bit of diversity in traits that don’t have a significant impact on reproduction or survival. But environmental changes can turn those differences into advantages… which can lead to those traits becoming more widespread.
Oooh, lowering the bar, are we?
Both your statements are true. If they do have an impact on our survival (as you said in your first post), and if they don’t, they can end up sticking around in the gene pool… like some annoying algea.
But as you well know, if they don’t provide a significant advantage then, mathematically, they can’t meaningfully participate in evolution. If Patton had gotten shot in his first battle, then he couldn’t have helped in the Battle of the Bulge.
The entire evolutionary fairy tale is built on ‘natural selection’, in which favorable mutations build toward a better and more glorious future… or a sturdier cockroach. Evolution cannot depend upon millions of useless modifications suddenly coming together to produce an enchanted evening or a beautiful web.
The vary behaviors which produce the beautiful web, if not accompanied by the web creating organs, and the hole in the posterior, would be actively destructive to the chances of spiders surviving. No matter how far back one goes in the ‘modification’ chain, a certain minimum number of features, which I lumped into A, P, and Psy… have to be present to be helpful, and most of the time if they are present in part, they will be destructive to the organization.
A breast that produces no milk and attracts no mate… is not just a lump of flesh. It is an annoyance, an encumbrance, a waste of material that could have been used for other purposes. A penis in a world with no vaginas is…well… it might make it easier for a warrior to pee. No squatting. But the testes just leave him more vulnerable.
They don’t have to provide a significant advantage when they first appear. They only have to be propagated among other variants. If the environment ever shifts so that they are advantageous, they will spread. If it shifts so that they are disadvantageous, they will be reduced.
You’ve posited a simple-minded process that doesn’t work in order to claim that evolution is impossible. Your model probably won’t - but that doesn’t mean that it is the only possible model.
They idea is not that “millions of useless modifications suddenly com[e] together,” but that each modification, or combination of modifications, winds up as advantage at some point, and thus spreads.
You mention, for example, the penis. Now that happens to be something that has actually been studied. Here is how one AI describes the process:
Penises evolved as an adaptation for internal fertilization when animals moved to land, driven primarily by natural selection, sperm competition, and female mate choice. The oldest known fossilized penis dates back 425 million years in a tiny marine crustacean, showing that intromittent organs arose long before land colonization to secure successful gamete transfer.
The Shift to Internal Fertilization
• Water to Land: Early aquatic life relied on releasing eggs and sperm into open water. Moving to land meant gametes would dry out, requiring direct transfer inside the female's body.
• Cloacal Beginnings: Ancestral vertebrates used a shared opening called a cloaca to pass sperm packets (spermatophores), which gradually developed into specialized protruding muscular and vascular structures.
Evolutionary Drivers of Shape and Size
• Sperm Competition: In species where females mate with multiple males, penises evolved specific shapes—such as ridges, curves, or spines—to scoop out rival sperm or place fluid closer to the cervix.
• Sexual Selection: Female choice and male-male intimidation heavily shaped the distinct size and visual traits of the organ, notably making human penises larger relative to body size compared to other primates.
A lot to explore there, but let’s stick to our first for a minute. You write:
»f the environment ever shifts so that they are advantageous, they will spread
But that misses the point, eh? We are talking about a small, useless change, that needs other changes in order to become useful… even a little bit. The tiny bump in the crotch is not waiting for the environment to become useful, it is waiting for a thousand other changes.
Science has shown us that, so far, every single mutation they have managed to create or is created naturally either removes functionality (which can be useful), or is neutral… but is usually detrimental. Like overwhelmingly often.
So the system not only can’t work, but doesn’t.
No, in this case, the bump is useful in of itself, because it provides a reproductive advantage by removing sperm competition.
Yes, most mutations are harmful, but over millions of years, the small number of useful mutations get selected.
You seem to keep changing your mind. First you talk about useful, then you say useless but kept anyway, and now we are back to useful.
And as I point out, it needs to be useful enough to get past the randomized death barrier… not just ‘useful’. And then it needs to be paired with the other necessary bits to be truly useful. And then…
You just don’t have enough faith in the gods Chance and Time. Irreducible complexity.
You say that you are “searching for truth.” How, exactly are you doing that, and what objective tests do you expect to apply to see if what you’re finding is “truth”? You may not be interested in science, but it at least has a clear set of ways to recognize and reject failed theories. What do you believe that science is?
As for “unfalsifable”, I literally gave you set of possible observations that could falsify a theory of evolution.
I really have the sense that you are not actually reading anything i say to understand. When I said that we have different eye colors, I was using them as an example of a mutation that has not been shown to be advantages - and yet has persisted. You keep invoking this “random death trap” that you have no described other than to reject the definition i had found.
I have no idea what you are talking about when you speak of something “proceding to evolution.” Are you just making up phrases, now?
Well, I did say I was working on an entire post on at least one of those subjects.
Now as far as being not interested in Science that’s actually false. However, first of all Science needs to be put in its place. And any Science that rejects the actual search for truth because of its various rules is Science that has deliberately subjected itself to this second rank. If Science is saying that it believes that it’s capable of making a distinction between evolution and special creation then Science would need to come up with a set of rules which said that special creation would produce X effect and that evolution would produce Y effect. And that must be about things that are not yet known.
But the general reaction is that special creation is not Science and so we don’t even have to choose between it. In which case I say well that’s very good but that means that you’re not actually looking for truth. You’re only merely playing your little game and nothing that fits outside of your rules can be actually regarded within your little Game.
As you know, that was not the way that the founders of modern Science looked at it. There are millions of things which cannot fit within the little box that is modern Science. And so if someone is going to search for truth, the first thing they have to do is to say Science is not actually a search for truth. It is a little game that’s played in one corner that may have some interesting things to say but it can never make a distinction between something like special creation and evolution.
And I will mention that for most of these conversation I’ve been out on my phone using voice recognition so something is truly incomprehensible. That may very well be why.
So maybe don’t do that if it’s not really working?
I suppose now we’ll have to define working :-) as far as I’m concerned you’ve given me a great excuse to post another post on the difference between evolution and creation and I have it maybe 75% written. So from my standpoint it’s working fine.
And as far as falsifiability is concerned, evolutionist accuse each other of having been falsified all the time. And if you go back in history and you look at predictions that evolutionist have made they have been falsified repeatedly. The problem is that since evolution is the only Game allowed in town what falsifies evolution is merely being treated as oh so we must not understand it correctly. It cannot be falsified because there is nothing that evolution would say I well if we were defined this then that would mean that evolution is false. They would merely say that means that our particular brand of evolution has been proven false in this area. Or perhaps we don’t really completely understand.
You can see this and comparing it to astrophysics. Somebody comes up with a grand old theory of astrophysics in five years later people look at some new star New galaxy or something and they go well so much for that theory. But seriously, what would it take for a modern evolutionist to say well so much for evolution?
OK, you're ignoring something I pointed out a few messages ago. There are two different things bearing the name "evolution."
The first is the observation, based on the fossil record, that different species have existed at different times, and there are patterns of relationships among those species. The second is the attempt to explain how that happened, by devising testable models ("theories") of various mechanisms. Some of those theories have made predictions of observations which have either not been confirmed, or found to conflict with observation. That one or more theories of evolution have failed does not say that evolution didn't happen. For example, an early theory predicted a continuous gradual change in species - that is not consistent with what has been seen, so many newer theories today take a "punctuated equilibrium" approach. Developing a good theory isn't trivial.
That "evolution is the only game allowed in town" is based on the simple fact of the fossil record combined with the various chemical and physical analyses of the fossils and their strata. An alternative approach would require a falsifiable theory which does a better job of matching observations.
You will be pleased to know that I am on my computer and frantically working on the post I promised the world yesterday :)
Actually, the first thing you need to do is define “truth.” Science, logic, and philosophy (which includes religion) use different definitions. Applying the philosophical definition of truth when doing science is a category error - and the fact that science started with philosophy doesn’t change that.
There is an interesting bit of equivocation in there. The fact that someone comes along and says I have a new definition of truth does not make that definition true or useful. In the case of evolution it would seem pretty obvious what we’re talking about but perhaps you’ll tell me that this is just the philosophical definition of truth :-)
If the actual historical record is that sometime within the last tens of thousands of years there was a six day period in which the entire universe was created and came to contain all of the basic kinds of animals that we have now along with all of the stars and planets, et cetera, et cetera then that would mean that special creation was true.
If on the other hand the universe has been around for billions of years and came about very via various naturalistic processes which through random mutation and natural selection lead to the existence of baseball players and drunks than that would mean that evolution was true.
If all of that last happened but it happened because of the directing and guiding force of an omnipotent and omniscient being then that would mean that thetic evolution was true.
And then we can throw in aliens landing from another galaxy or something and seating the Earth and we can add in yet another possibility for what is true.
Well, the historical record doesn't appear to show any such six-day period, and it does appear to show that the universe has been around for billions of years. But all that shows is that the universe is billions of years old.
Science is not philosophy. It is specifically concerned with what is observable, and it works with models which predict new observations that we haven't yet made. Thus, for example, Newtonian gravity predicts that objects fall towards one another. Those are observations that we can and have made, and apply to all massive bodies. Einsteinian gravity (General Relativity) makes slightly different observations, but under most conditions here on earth, most observations fit both theories.
Evolution makes certain predictions about how organisms resemble one another, and that includes things we can observe about fossils.
Radioactive decay makes predictions about how the composition of elements in a mass of unstable isotopes will change over time. Many observations have been made and they all fit the known theories. There are tests that can and have been made.
What testable predictions does special creation make?