A stupidity of Darwinism: "There was never a time when there were only two humans!"

[7djengo7]

Yes. It's possible it dipped below 10,000 following a bottleneck event about 75,000 years ago, but in principle it would be doubtful that humans would have made it if the total number ever dropped much lower than 10,000.

Sure. (Here's some crude ASCII art):

<---(A)--no humans on earth ------(C)--accumulation of human traits in protohuman population of several thousands------(B)-- no fewer than 10,000 humans on earth--->

Stuart

How many humans are on earth in the period of time you represent on your line between C and B?​

:rotfl:​

 

[Stuu]

How many humans are on earth in the period of time you represent on your line between C and B?

Never fewer than several thousand. 10,000 is a reasonable estimate for a minimum viable population. The question is, when on the timeline between (C) and (B) do you start to call them humans? There are many answers, each with their own justifications.

Stuart

 

[7djengo7]

Never fewer than several thousand, 10,000 is a reasonable estimate for a minimum viable population.

Stuart

Then you fail, because that is what is depicted by the timeline diagram I have already given:



You fail miserably. You still have not escaped handing me that a number of humans "never fewer than several thousand" were on earth abruptly and simultaneously, ever since the moment when the yellow meets the red. You cannot escape that. Your attempted diversion by adding a point, C, onto the line, is a hilarious failure. I love it.

 

[Stuu]

You still have not escaped handing me that a number of humans "never fewer than several thousand" were on earth abruptly and simultaneously, ever since the yellow meets the red. You cannot escape that.

The period represented on my timeline between (C) and (B) lasts in the order of millions of years. There is no abrupt change in it.

Stuart

 

[7djengo7]

The period represented on my timeline between (C) and (B) lasts in the order of millions of years. There is no abrupt change in it.

Stuart

So what? You're telling me that, at the very first instant of "the period represented on my timeline between (C) and (B)", there were many thousands of humans on the earth. You've gained nothing. You're still handing me an abrupt appearance, at the very first instant of the period spanning from C to B, of thousands of humans on earth. You still fail!

 

[7djengo7]

Never fewer than several thousand. 10,000 is a reasonable estimate for a minimum viable population. The question is, when on the timeline between (C) and (B) do you start to call them humans? There are many answers, each with their own justifications.

Stuart

By your pronoun, 'them', to which are you referring? To humans or to non-humans?

Which are you asking?

• "When...do you start to call HUMANS humans?"
• "When...do you start to call NON-HUMANS humans?"

I always call HUMANS humans. What about you?
I never call NON-HUMANS humans. What about you?

 

[Stripe]

All living species use the same system to store and transmit their genetic code.

Is that DNA or RNA?

 

[7djengo7]

*oops...meant to edit post, not post new one.

 

[Stuu]

So what? You're telling me that, at the very first instant of "the period represented on my timeline between (C) and (B)", there were many thousands of humans on the earth. You've gained nothing. You're still handing me an abrupt appearance, at the very first instant of the period spanning from C to B, of thousands of humans on earth. You still fail!

I stand by what I wrote. There was no abrupt appearance of humans.

By your pronoun, 'them', to which are you referring? To humans or to non-humans?

'They' were the whole population of hominins that were in the process of acquiring traits that you might call human.

I never call NON-HUMANS humans. What about you?

I'm with you. I try to avoid the mistake of calling non-humans 'humans'.

Stuart

 

[Stuu]

Is that DNA or RNA?

Yes. DNA as the storage medium and RNA as the messenger medium, with RNA taking some other interesting roles too. Many viruses use RNA as their storage medium but it's a separate discussion to include or exclude viruses from the category of living species.

Stuart

 

[Lon]

Your interruption is most welcome.

You are welcome to your opinion obviously, but a philosophical argument is not going to cut it in biology.

Not my degree, but two have it in my family. Both aren't on your side. Bottom line? Apparently not your opinion either.

Here are the scientific classifications for chimpanzees (first) and humans (second). Carl Linneaus (who was, if it makes any difference to you, a creationist) classified us this way:

Kingdom:Animalia
Phylum:Chordata
Class:Mammalia
Orderrimates
Suborder:Haplorhini
Infraorder:Simiiformes
Family:Hominidae
Subfamily:Homininae
Tribe:Hominini
Genusan
Species. troglodytes

Kingdom:Animalia
Phylum:Chordata
Class:Mammalia
Orderrimates
Suborder:Haplorhini
Infraorder:Simiiformes
Family:Hominidae
Subfamily:Homininae
Tribe:Hominini
Genus:Homo
Species:H. sapiens

The African great apes, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and humans make up the subfamily Homininae.

Who decided? Am I not able to contest the apparently random pooling together of assumptions? Why or why not? If I dispute the idea, does it make me a poor scientist?

When you look at ALL apes, they have elongated hands, shortened feet, except humans. When you look at their noses, all are flat (few exceptions). There is, scientifically, a huge divide between us and apes. Honestly? It feels like a Sesame Street episode of what is the same and what is obviously different.

Yes, that makes a great analogy for natural selection. Descent with natural modification.

:nono: Entropy rather.

He is also welcome to hold his own opinion. I'm not sure what criterion are included under either 'assumptions' or 'adequate characteristics' that would make enough of a distinction. You might need to ask him to be more specific.

Good, glad to see definitions correctly stated. Anybody in the biology field (anybody with little qualification) has the where-with-all to discuss these matters and determine which are opinion and which are far-out opinions and what seems to be pretty solid and in agreement. In short: When there is any dispute and especially within the biology community, it means 'sides' are posturing despite objections contra-wise. There is no way one side just 'gets' to be right but there are a lot of politics going on with bought-into assumptions in the biology game.

I refer you to Stripe, who would require you not to share opinions but provide evidence against the specific biological claim you are making. The word 'clues' is used in popular science writing as a substitute for 'painstaking work by scientists to collect evidence'. In regards to mammalian evolution, it depends what standards you wish your opinion to uphold, but any reasonable interpretation says it's more than substantiated. There is substance in the evidence for it, unlike the content of laypeople's opinion.

Er, my science is in the psychological field and no less painstaking, however, recent politics show clearly that a bit of psychology is influence by social pressure. Biology? Yep, just as susceptible. You can always follow the money on assumptions.

What are you asking me to show you?

That 'time' is a great producer of anything, especially without hard work. I'll contest that any 'day' of the week. Time is incapable of producing any scientific thing. Rather, it shows what hard work of anything does, does not produce it.

The most famous example of transitional species comes from horse evolution, which is unusually well represented in the fossil record. The problem with the term 'transitional species' is that every species is transitional, either to modified descendants, or on the way to extinction, which is the overwhelmingly more likely outcome.

:nono: It hasn't changed much at all. While it is larger today, it still has roughly the same anatomy and still a herbivore, not a flying pegasus etc. I don't know of anybody that disputes minor changes, we are talking about something on a major scale with you somehow being 'able' to be related to a fish. It all begs the question that 'time' has no way of explaining. It IS problematic and a simple shrug is not science, not when really big science questions are asked and this is all the response one gets. "Time" and "Horse" will never cut muster.

Perhaps you could explain how your speculation above relates to adaptation to be suited for survival and reproduction in a given environment. For example, why would you ask about a modern species giving rise to another non-existent modern species? What selection pressure are you suggesting should have acted but hasn't that would produce aquatic versions of these animals?

Not too hard. The idea that dinosaurs changed into birds is a very common belief. We have iguanas that could use some gills, or wings to fly off the island. Science TRIES to explain things they believe happened by looking at things that 'are alike' (that Sesame Street theme). People who pay attention, also notice when things are very unalike (another Sesame Street song). It doesn't take a brain surgeon to know I'm VERY different from all apes in the world. Very different: more so than any ape that exists, is different from the rest, in fact.

Can you justify that as an analogy for a biological process?

Sure: Do you believe you came from an onion, or an onion from you, down the ancestry pike?

Once again, you may form opinions as you wish.

In which circle?

As an example of creationism being helpful, could you give us a recent example of a creationist source being cited by a paper in Nature or another professional journal of biology?

Yes. That you care about? Likely not. Why do you suppose? I've got a good guess.

You are absolutely right to challenge bold assertions. Have you, yourself, ever challenged the bold assertion made in Genesis 2:7? If so, what was the outcome?

Stuart

Why WOULD you challenge it as a bold assertion? Do you think ANYTHING came from other than the dust of the earth??? :think:

I know that God exists, why would I question Him about His creative work? Why would you 'pit' science against Him? Doesn't it show a awful amount of bias in your science? I believe it does, clearly.

 

[Lon]

Never fewer than several thousand. 10,000 is a reasonable estimate for a minimum viable population. The question is, when on the timeline between (C) and (B) do you start to call them humans? There are many answers, each with their own justifications.

Stuart

If this was in a vacuum, and it had never ever been explained on this forum- you'd be right. But it has been explained COUNTLESS times.

I will give it a quick try, but I won't waste a whole lot of time of it.

The basic misconception that this thread is based on is that evolution happens in sudden steps. One day there are apes, the next day there are also humans. On Tuesday there are wolves, and on Wednesday also dogs. Thus there must have been a point at which there was a single pair of humans (just like in the Bible), and a single pair of dogs. But evolution happens gradually, over populations. Not suddenly with individuals.

Let's take animal breeds as an example. Was there ever a time were there was just one pair of German Shepherds? One pair of Merino sheep? One pair of poodles?

It only took four (4) English cocker spaniels to create American cocker spaniels. The take-away seems to be 1) that there was intelligence and purpose in making the breed with such genetic traits and 2) that it didn't take a whole lot of time.

The problem with propogation, according to Evolution, is that it never had two of anything, to propagate (an amoeba simply splits). You'd have to see 'male' and 'female' as design, reason, purpose. There is no reason other than design, that species would multiply any other way, or that amoeba weren't good enough that they would ever need legs, or to turn into onions, etc.

I don't believe most creationists are against anything 'changing,' just not doing so with no reason behind such, willy nilly. Science hasn't been interested in 'reasons' for something to exist, and it probably should be. There is no rhyme or reason in even science if it isn't interested in rhyme and reason.

 

[Stripe]

Yes. DNA as the storage medium and RNA as the messenger medium, with RNA taking some other interesting roles too. Many viruses use RNA as their storage medium but it's a separate discussion to include or exclude viruses from the category of living species.

Stuart

What is the name of the system that you are calling evidence for common descent?

 

[Stuu]

Who decided? Am I not able to contest the apparently random pooling together of assumptions? Why or why not? If I dispute the idea, does it make me a poor scientist? When you look at ALL apes, they have elongated hands, shortened feet, except humans. When you look at their noses, all are flat (few exceptions). There is, scientifically, a huge divide between us and apes. Honestly? It feels like a Sesame Street episode of what is the same and what is obviously different.

It would probably seem more obvious to you if we had not lost to extinction all of the members of the subfamily homininae that looked much more like us than the other great apes do. We are the only ones on our line of descent to have made it. If the recently extinct 'hobbit' people of the island of Flores in Indonesia, the Denisovans of Asia, the Luzon people of the Philippines and the Eurasian Neanderthals were all still extant then it wouldn't look so isolated in our part of the tree of life.

Also, there are significant differences between chimpanzees and gorillas, and when you make the physiological comparison between us and chimpanzees, pretty much every bone and every muscle are placed identically, it is really just the sizes of them that are different.

Entropy rather.

The whispers game involves humans who make copying errors but will at least tend to preserve the message in a form that is somehow intelligible, even if it contains a nonsense concept. At least the sentence will continue with some kind of basic language structure intact. So, have one whisperer tell two people, and each of the hearers then pass it on to two more. After a while you will have some variation in the population of messages being reproduced. The message that says 'Don't eat the red berries' might save the lives of its transmitters, whereas the message that says 'Don't eat the red cherries' might lead to the demise of a cherry-dependent people. Ridiculous, I know, but actually not that ridiculous.

There is no way one side just 'gets' to be right but there are a lot of politics going on with bought-into assumptions in the biology game.

Evidence is king. Opinion is irrelevant. The reality is often that the proponents of old, wrong ideas have to retire or die before a field can move on. It is getting better though as interdisciplinary cooperation replaces the obsessed scientist working alone.

That 'time' is a great producer of anything, especially without hard work. I'll contest that any 'day' of the week. Time is incapable of producing any scientific thing. Rather, it shows what hard work of anything does, does not produce it.

Wasn't there something about a platypus as well?

It hasn't changed much at all. While it is larger today, it still has roughly the same anatomy and still a herbivore, not a flying pegasus etc. I don't know of anybody that disputes minor changes, we are talking about something on a major scale with you somehow being 'able' to be related to a fish. It all begs the question that 'time' has no way of explaining. It IS problematic and a simple shrug is not science, not when really big science questions are asked and this is all the response one gets. "Time" and "Horse" will never cut muster.

From the Holy Wikipedia:

Do you believe you came from an onion, or an onion from you, down the ancestry pike?

No, because humans and onions are both modern species. Neither can possibly be descended from the other. Each species has its own ancestry; onions and humans share a single-celled alga as a common ancestor that lived about 1.2 billion years ago.

Why WOULD you challenge it as a bold assertion? Do you think ANYTHING came from other than the dust of the earth??? I know that God exists, why would I question Him about His creative work? Why would you 'pit' science against Him? Doesn't it show a awful amount of bias in your science? I believe it does, clearly.

So you are selective about the bold assertions you question. Isn't that going to leave you with a biased view of the world?

Stuart

 

[Stuu]

What is the name of the system that you are calling evidence for common descent?

I wrote this in #71: 'The first important piece of evidence for common descent is the fact that all living species use the same system to store and transmit their genetic code, and the molecular machinery of any one species can read the DNA of any other species.'

As I understand it, the first part is called the universal genetic code and the general term for the second part is gene expression.

But the names of systems do not provide evidence. It is the universality of both that is the evidence.

Stuart

 

[Stripe]

The first part is called the universal genetic code

So the assumption of common descent is built into the thing you're using as evidence.

I'm fairly comfortable that your idea of what constitutes the evidence is a useful starting place, but not under those conditions. What if what you call a "universal" genetic code could be shown to have distinct an non-transferable classes?

The names of systems do not provide evidence. It is the universality of both that is the evidence.

It doesn't pay to assert that what you're presenting as physical evidence is a philosophical construct.

If it is your assertions that DNA is common to all living entities and thus evidence for common descent, then that would be an acceptable starting point.

However, if your assertion is that a "universal code" is universal and thus evidence then you're going to run into fallacies.

 

[Stuu]

So the assumption of common descent is built into the thing you're using as evidence.

No. There is no assumption built in. I am not constructing a circular argument.

I'm fairly comfortable that your idea of what constitutes the evidence is a useful starting place, but not under those conditions. What if what you call a "universal" genetic code could be shown to have distinct an non-transferable classes?

What are 'distinct an non-transferable classes'?

If it is your assertions that DNA is common to all living entities and thus evidence for common descent, then that would be an acceptable starting point.

Good, so the demonstrated fact (not my assertion) that all living species use the same system to store and transmit their genetic code, and the molecular machinery of any one species can read the DNA of any other species, is the first piece of evidence for common ancestry.

Here is a second important piece of evidence: The phylogenetic tree of life made from comparisons of the physiology of fossil species and modern species matches very closely the phylogenetic tree of life made from comparing the DNA sequence or amino acid sequences for the same proteins in different species.

Here is an example found in the Holy Wikipedia. The phylogenetic tree of life made by comparing physiology in humans, chimpanzees, mice, rats and cows shows that chimpanzees and humans are much more closely related to one another than either is to mice, rats or cows. The conclusion is that chimpanzees and humans shared a common ancestor much more recently than the last common ancestor of all these animals. To make an independent phylogenetic tree, scientists determine the sequences of amino acids in proteins doing the same job in the different animals. Here is an aligned sequence for the H1 histone protein. Histone proteins are the packaging mechanism for DNA in the cell nucleus (you can find the letter code here):

The sections of the amino acid sequences that are not conserved are shown as lighter grey. These changes are due to mutations in the relevant section of DNA (the gene for this protein). The differences marked 'conservative' are cases where one amino acid has been replaced by another that has a similar biochemical effect; non-conservative changes are where the choice of amino acid in that position is less important to the functioning of the protein. The sequences for chimpanzees and humans are identical because we have a much more recent common ancestor and so less time has passed for mutations to accumulate in the code for this protein.

To restate it, this evidence for common ancestry is in the correlation between the two independently determined trees made from fossil/physiological evidence and from comparing sequences in either DNA or in proteins.

Stuart

 

[Right Divider]

And what has this god 'said' about what was done, specifically regarding DNA?

God does not mention DNA in His Word. He does mention specially creating various kinds of plants and animals, including man.

I'll repeat the first example of evidence for common descent for you from my post #71:
"The first important piece of evidence for common descent is the fact that all living species use the same system to store and transmit their genetic code, and the molecular machinery of any one species can read the DNA of any other species."

I find it funny that you think that you've found some magic bullet with DNA.

DNA is a chemical system for CODING INFORMATION. INFORMATION only comes from intelligence and is not found "creating itself" in nature. In other words, INFORMATION always has a SENDER.

Again, DNA is evidence of a COMMON DESIGNER and not "common descent from a single original creature".

This evidence requires evidence of the creator whose anecdote you are retelling.

Stuart

The evidence is self-evident to anyone that is has not decided to reject it first.

 

[Stripe]

There is no assumption built in. I am not constructing a circular argument.

If you're going to call it a "universal" code, there certainly is an assumption built in.

What are 'distinct an non-transferable classes'?

That the "universal" genetic system might be implemented in very different ways among different groups of organisms.

The demonstrated fact (not my assertion) that all living species use the same system to store and transmit their genetic code, and the molecular machinery of any one species can read the DNA of any other species, is the first piece of evidence for common ancestry.

We're still not sure what you're talking about when you say "same system." What is that system? DNA?

This evidence for common ancestry is in the correlation between the two independently determined trees made from fossil/physiological evidence and from comparing sequences in either DNA or in proteins.

OK.

 

[7djengo7]

I stand by what I wrote.

And so you fall by what you wrote.

There was no abrupt appearance of humans.

Here, you are again contradicting your claim that, so long as there were any humans on the earth, there was never less than several thousands of humans on the earth.

By your pronoun, 'them', to which are you referring? To humans or to non-humans?

<NO ANSWER>

Why can't you answer this question, Stuu?

By claiming that, so long as there were any humans on the earth, there was never less than several thousands of humans on the earth, you are claiming that, within less than one second after there ceased being 0 humans on earth, there was already a number no less than several thousands of humans on the earth.

You, by your rabid, irrational dedication to being a Darwin cheerleader, have utterly destroyed your Darwinism. Nice.