There’s enough craziness in the world, I don’t think I want to subject the world to more.

Well going through my points in turn, the issue of genes ‘knowing’ their are ‘beneficial’ (i.e. fitness) is definitional and thus tautologous – it is just what ‘fitness’ and ‘evolution by natural selection’ mean. For further information you could read an introductory textbook.

The vulnerability of DNA/RNA to damage, and the infidelity of copying mechanisms is very well attested and, again, I’d suggest a textbook for a description and references to the primary literature.

As for the teleological argument presented, there is ample mathematical/computational modelling on the evolution of mutation rates, and an experimental literature on mutation rates in various organisms under various circumstances. If you want to read about the studies try looking in google scholar.

Seems I hit a nerve, sorry ;>

Sorry, no, you didn’t. I try to respond to comments if I can.

Your rant still says (to me at least) you have no true evidence.

Sorry, again, it wasn’t a rant, and I’m not even sure what you’re alluding to: the original post, or my response to you. Either way, neither were rants.

PJ’s response was well thought out and written. My question for him is simple, what evidence exists for this and what scientifically based experiments can be performed to test it? Otherwise, this is just as scientific as ether.

I’ll let PJ respond to you directly then, of course if PJ so chooses.

I will also note that nobody offered evidence of intermediate species either living or fossilized.

Wrong. In my previous response to you I offered up links to three separate avenues of evidence, which you’ve obviously failed to either notice or look at, or you chose to ignore them.

As for a living example, may I offer up the coelacanth. Not that I expect this to convince you of anything.

The nature of the tone of your reply points out the flaw with humans being good because it is the right thing to do. I can’t wait until the genes that control our treatment of one another realizes that a limited number of attitudes are appropriate.

Again wrong. Your assertion as to my “tone” is completely groundless. And, for my own curiosity, which gene or genes are these that are responsible for an appropriate response? To help you out, I’ll provide a link to the Human Genome browser so that you don’t even have to look for it yourself.

As for the simple simulation. I see it more as simple propoganda. That is why I treated it the way I did.

How you see it is immaterial: it was a simple simulation, whether you like the outcome or not. The manner in which you treated it (i.e. with bathetic sarcasm) is a red herring.

Even if we wrote a fortran (or I could participate in up to seven other programming language choices) program and ran it on the computers either of us have available it still is only propaganda, proof of nothing other than our ability to write code.

I don’t care how many languages you can program in: it’s irrelevent. I’m not interested in a pissing contest that you think you can win.

Of course, I wouldn’t submit this program to be run on an HPC, that would be a massive waste of compute cycles. However, there have been plenty of HPC simulations of biological processes, including evolution: 1, 2, 3.

If you wanted, I’m sure you could do something on your desktop.

To declare my ignorance is simply ignorant. You know nothing about me or my education. As for my trinity rating, let me help you out.

I never claimed to know anything about you or your education. However, since you seemed to be pimping a link to Kent Hovind as some kind of authority on evolution on WotM, I can only assume that you agree with him and his ideas. If you do not, you didn’t make this completely clear. Do you have a doctorate too, like Hovind? What discipline? What was your thesis on? Can I read it?

- I asked for some simple evidence and you responded with none.

Wrong. Again, I refer you back to the three links I provided in my first comment. Obviously the irony of linking to evidence while using the phrase I’m not naive enough to think that any actual evidence is going to convince you seems to have completely bypassed you. I hope you’re now able to see these links.

All you had to do was tell me about: – A book (please not Dawkins, his arguments fall apart too quickly to even be fun),

1) Why, is only one book required for you to totally and completely accept something? That seems like a rather poor way to inform yourself, but that’s just my opinion. I prefer to read as much literature on a topic as I’m able before coming to a conclusion, and I also like to give myself the option to change my mind if better evidence comes along.

2) I have no idea why you single out Dawkins. I can only presume that you have a preconcieved bias against him. Please, if you have evidence-based counter-arguments to those that you think “fall apart too quickly”, I’d be more than happy to read or hear about them.

As for books, allow me to point you towards:

• Your Body – The Fish That Evolved by Keith Harrison
• The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins (yeah, I heard what you said, but you don’t seem to have read this one…)
• The Origin of Humankind by Richard Leakey
• Dinosaur in a Haystack by Stephen Jay Gould

I’m sure you can find others if you cared to search.

Or how about some videos? Are they OK?

• Carl Sagan
• Ken Miller on genetic evidence
• Ken Miller on fossil evidence
• a video explaining the basics to ID advocates

Again, I’m sure you can find more if you do a search or two.

Actually, I’ll also point you to the Wikipedia article on evolution. Even if you don’t read it (although it might be useful) there are plenty of signposts to further reading at the references section.

- A concept to investigate that has some form of validation available for it (I know validation is an out-dated scientific concept but I still like it when I talk science),

Aside from the 3 links I posted above? Sure. Why not read the entire of TalkOrigins, and perhaps some of the books and papers that are used as references therein. You might also want to do your own research using the literature available on JEB, OJOSE, JStor, PubMed or any of the other sources of scientific literature (this is a good list). Of course, you may need to have legitimate access to some of these resources. They offer shitloads of experiments you can do. Of course, they will usually require a laboratory and research specimens, and probably some kind of biological education so that you can understand the results.

If you have no experience (as you said, I don’t know you) of scientific literature this introduction might be helpful.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t offer up the alternative sources of “evidence”, so here’s the Institute for Creation Research, Answers in Genesis, the Discovery Institute, the Flying Spaghetti Monster hypothesis, Rael and the reDiscovery Institute.

- A fossil or statistically relevant link between a multitude of various species.

Ah, I see you’ve moved the goal posts. First off you wanted an “ample supply” of evidence (even though you didn’t define what you meant by “ample” and I, as a starting point, gave you three). Now you want the same for a “multitude of various species” (again not defining what you mean by a “multitude”. As I noted before, I don’t think any amount of evidence is going to convince you, but at least I’ve tried.

I also note that you’re still lying about your email address. This does not bode well for me believing anything else you might have to say. But, I’ll let it go this time, although I would in future prefer a bona fide email address (which only I would see). Otherwise, I guess, I should just assume that it’s spam: spammers lie all the time.

The nature of the tone of your reply points out the flaw with humans being good because it is the right thing to do. I can’t wait until the genes that control our treatment of one another realizes that a limited number of attitudes are appropriate.

As for the simple simulation. I see it more as simple propoganda. That is why I treated it the way I did. Even if we wrote a fortran (or I could participate in up to seven other programming language choices) program and ran it on the computers either of us have available it still is only propaganda, proof of nothing other than our ability to write code.

To declare my ignorance is simply ignorant. You know nothing about me or my education. As for my trinity rating, let me help you out.

- I asked for some simple evidence and you responded with none. All you had to do was tell me about:

– A book (please not Dawkins, his arguments fall apart too quickly to even be fun),

– A concept to investigate that has some form of validation available for it (I know validation is an out-dated scientific concept but I still like it when I talk science),

– A fossil or statistically relevant link between a multitude of various species.

Now I ask you, which of us is baseless? Without evidence it is simply the one claiming to base their opinion on science.

Your rant still says (to me at least) you have no true evidence.

PJ’s response was well thought out and written. My question for him is simple, what evidence exists for this and what scientifically based experiments can be performed to test it? Otherwise, this is just as scientific as ether.

I will also note that nobody offered evidence of intermediate species either living or fossilized.

The creationist nonsense about probability infuriates me. How some people who claim degree education (or further) can be so clueless is amazing.

That is an impressive failure to understand anything about evolution by natural selection. Genomes obviously don’t need to ‘know’ that the mutation is beneficial – beneficial in this sense is defined entirely as resulting in increased numbers of offspring compared to other genes (fitness).

The question as to why the genome mutates can be answered mechanically – in that the copying mechanism of DNA/RNA is not 100% accurate and there can be damage to DNA/RNA. It can also be answered teleologically in that while a mechanism that is very innacurate will lead to a loss of fitness by the introduction of lots of errors, a mechanism that is not 100% accurate allows the slow accumulation of beneficial mutations.

I was going to respond properly to your comment, until I observed the appeal to Kent Hovind that you posted on WotM. From that, combined with your comments here, I can only conclude that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

One thing you failed to note was that this was a (repeat after me) simple simulation, not a representation of an actual biological process.

As it is, I’ll just let you in on a little secret: where I work, I have access to several of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. If I so chose, and could be bothered and needed to rewrite this program in Fortran, and booked the CPU time needed, I could easily do so.

However, since you lied and didn’t supply a genuine email address, I can only assume that you’re not really interested in the terrabytes of data that would result, and hence I won’t bother. However, if you contact me again and pay for the CPU time and data transfer costs (just to know that you’re serious about asking for the favour) I’d be happy to do so.

I don’t think that showing you the evidence of intermediate forms would be worth my time. Since you think Hovind has good arguments, I’m not naive enough to think that any actual evidence is going to convince you of anything.

However, I will be gentle with your TRINITY rating, seeing as you failed to quote any scripture whatsoever. Kudos to you.

Also, while the computer is choking on that, lets try to figure out how the genome “knew” it had a beneficial mutation and why it began mutating in the first place.