How is there reality without God?

[EarthScienceguy]

Neils Bohr
"No Phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." Or another way to say this is that a tree does not fall in a forest unless it is observed.

The only way for there to be an objective reality is if God is the constant observer everywhere.

Physicist John Archibald Wheeler: "It is wrong to think of the past as 'already existing' in all detail. The 'past' is theory. The past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present."

God is everywhere so He can observe everywhere and produce objective reality.

[Jose Fly]

I was just playing around with you to see if you understood the equation or not...

...Again just making sure you did.

It's always interesting to see how creationists react to losing a debate. I gotta say, this "I was just kidding to test you" schtick is a new one....but I don't think anyone is buying it. The fact is, you were wrong on both the purpose of population genetics models and their applications....may as well own it.

It is a make-believe story. Why can't I have my own story that I make up?

LOL...you've been all over the map on this for a long time now and you've never gotten it right.

In September 2022 I pointed out your mistake in thinking that humans descended from chimps.

In December 2022 I had to do it again.

Then in January 2023 I had to do it again.

And now here you are thinking humans and chimps evolved from gorillas.

All of this leads me to ask....are you okay? The last thing I want to do is find out later that you have some sort of medical/cognitive/memory issue, which would make me feel terrible about pointing out your inability to understand the subject matter and retain basic information.

How can there only be 240 gene differences when all primates have over 21,000 coding genes and humans only have 1900 coding genes? There is even a larger difference in the non-coding genes.

2nd Ian only used coding genes in his calculations. There is a larger difference in the non-coding genes. Even if you say that they are non-functioning, which they are not, the large difference still has to be accounted for.

3rd There is more than just a little evidence that there were millions of single nucleotide mutations.

Apparently you are unaware of copy number variation.

David Dewitt Liberty University

I told you earlier, no one in science cares about anything at creation.com.

Well, that statement is a textbook example of "argumentum ad ignorantiam."

Yes that is right another example of "argumentum ad ignorantiam."

Actually, this is an even better example of "argumentum ad ignorantiam."

That is right ladies and gentlemen it is another "argumentum ad ignorantiam"

Sigh....no, it's not. "Argument from ignorance" is the fallacy of "since X hasn't been proven false, it is therefore true" or "since X hasn't been proven true, it is false".

That's nothing at all like pointing out your repeated fundamental ignorance of the subject matter.

What do you mean I have just been egging you on?

Seriously, are you okay? I said "I've been begging you to stop".

And the article you cited actually says that no one knows how the numbers for evolution work.

• The last several years have seen two key advances in this field. First, a number of important, and fascinating, theoretical advances have been made, each bringing us one step closer to theoretical predictions that might pertain in a ‘real’ laboratory population. Second, in parallel with this effort, experimental techniques in microbial evolution have advanced to the point where the fate of a novel mutant strain within a controlled population can be followed over many generations. Thus, these experiments are on the verge of being able to test our theoretical predictions of the fixation probability—predictions that have in many cases stood untested for 80 or 90 years. This is extremely exciting.

So at the present time theoretical predictions do not match laboratory experimentation which is exactly what I said. You conceded the discussion a long time ago that is why you have had to resort to "argumentum ad ignorantiam" arguments.

Oh for the love of....

I've already explained this to you, several times. The context of the above is population geneticists acknowledging that their models aren't completely accurate in predicting how populations will evolve over time, as shown by comparing model outputs with evolutionary lab experiments. IOW, the models aren't exactly right....they are attempts to approximate reality, not dictate it.

So when a model says X can't happen, and we see X happen....that means the model is wrong, which is what Barbarian and I have been trying to get you to understand for weeks now, and is what Haldane himself said. Yet you keep trying to switch it around and say that because Haldane's model says X can't happen, that means X can't happen.

Earlier I was wondering if you kept doing that from a place of dishonesty and stubbornness (e.g., unwillingness to surrender a talking point), but now given the above, I'm thinking differently.

[The Barbarian]

[Replying to Difflugia in post #6]

2. God in the Copenhagen interpretation God has to observe the universe that is consistent with the laws of nature. The double-slit experiment would show a basic law of nature. We do not even know what part of observations breaks the wave function. So it is possible for God to observe the particle without disturbing the wave function.

In fact, to give man free will this would have to be the case.

This merely shows that a Creator would be essentially different than creatures. Doesn't really explain anything, but it pretty much rules out the "maybe a space alien" designer of the ID guys.

[The Barbarian]

I had some trouble at first, trying to see how creationists would see Haldane's Dilemma as a serious problem for evolution. And as it became clearer what the problem was, I had some trouble explaining why it wasn't what they thought. I recently found an article that sums it up pretty well, in a way that would be accessible to a non-biologist:

I started reading the article: nearly instantly, I hit a red flag:

At most, 500,000 generations have elapsed. Given Haldane’s limit, this makes for 3333.3 adaptive differences.

Can roughly 3000 changes explain all of the complex adaptive differences between humans and chimpanzees?

This is Haldane’s dilemma.

Wait, what? That isn't Haldane's Dilemma. At least, only incredibly indirectly: Haldane's Dilemma is about the cost of fixing adaptive differences. It says if we fixed this many mutations, either many of us died along the way, since they didn't have the right blend, or Haldane didn't have the complete picture of how genetics progressed.

Directly quoting from Haldane:

In this paper I shall try to make quantitative the fairly obvious statement that natural selection cannot occur with great intensity for a number of characters at once unless they happen to be controlled by the same genes.

or:

ten other independently inherited characters had been subject to selection of the same intensity as that for colour, only (1/2)10, or one in 1024, of the original genotype would have survived.

These two lines are important:

a) if characteristics come off a single gene, it's less of an issue; the Russian fox experiment shows how many characteristics come off the neural crest, which demonstrates that many traits can fix at once.

b) when you do apply selection strongly, you will fix other portions of the genome as well, and here you will usually face some problems.

So, basically, the author skipped over Haldane's Dilemma, jumped straight to Haldane's Limit, then jumped back to plug that in here so he could call this Haldane's Dilemma, because this line is sexy. It's wrong, but it's sexy. People love controversy.

Otherwise, there are numerous solutions to the dilemma he goes over:

Refactoring cost in reproductive terms instead of deaths: "fertility excess necessary for gene substitution". If you can reproduce more, you can fix for more genes.

Gene centric views: "it is only the absolute number of copies of the new allele that matters". Fixing genes isn't what makes populations healthy, it's just about getting good genes out to a decent level such that enough functional individuals are likely to be generated from the alleles available in the long term.

Costs may not matter: "cost is only severely limiting for species with a limited reproductive output". If you're producing thousands of children, then it really doesn't matter if 99% die due to fitness losses from inbreeding or from other forms of bad genetic blending, the healthy remaining 1% is more than enough to replace you and brother-husband and run this process all over again.

And honestly, these three things are right. But not right enough to explain the rate of genetic change, at least not for all organisms.

But of course, Kimura showed up with neutral theory, which can solve this issue:

It now becomes apparent how the neutral theory solves the quantitative problem of a high substitution rate. Imagine that all mutations are neutral. There are many neutral mutations in a population and these may be substituted together for the cost of one. Over the 500,000 generations since divergence, this amounts to 25 million substitutions, which is very close to the actual number of substituted nucleotides observed. In this way, the neutral theory allows a faster rate of evolution.

Basically:

There are multiple genes for a single phenotype, so fixing for a phenotype is cheaper than the naive cost of fixing for a genotype.

A gene may be effectively fixed, with only neutral variations in existence, giving the impression of genetic diversity.

Populations in divergence can fix different neutral variations, which pays for the diversity loss with no real fitness loss.

With respect to neutral substitutions, it follows that there is no real dilemma. They can easily account for the approximately 30 million nucleotide differences observed between humans and chimpanzees.

Yeah. Basically, Haldane was right, if you were breeding cows. It's only a problem for the cows because we're applying very strong purifying selection and inbreeding a lot, and so we're likely to fix a recent off-target mutation. Otherwise, since many mutations are neutral, they generate variation that can be fixed in the background of selection at no real cost, allowing for higher order organisms to exceed Haldane's Limit.

So, I started looking for other red flags, because this article is far too reasonable once you get over the kneejerk historical background of Haldane's genetic alarmism. This one showed up real quick:

As few as one in 1077 protein domain-sized polypeptides may be able to form functional folds.

Douglas Axe, creationist hack. His article is well debunked at this point, but now I know how /u/MRH2 got to this article.

Axe chose his protein for being a highly-specific variant of an enzyme: it works at narrow and specific range of conditions, and fails outside them, which gives it a very rough fitness terrain. However, it is a variant of a more common enzyme with a broader activity range. His odds are the chances of that specific variant being generated de novo: it is not the odds of that protein arising from one of the more common background variants through duplication, and it is not the odds of any one of those variants from arising de novo.

They basically drop this line and run off quite quickly. Lists off a few things that might explain it: "whole-genome duplication" and "phenotypic plasticity". But they don't really go into any serious detail there. This is mostly the author plugging the work of his mentor, and thus his own work. Ultimately, it's just a shallow self-promotional piece, which is disappointing.

So, any questions?

By analogy, it's like he has a huge bag of marbles and claims to have looked inside and seen that red marbles are super-duper rare, like don't even bother looking because you'll never find one. Meanwhile scientists are reaching in and blindly pulling out red marbles constantly...

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #403]

I am not going to through your entire post but I still do not see how what you are saying helps the numbers.

1st Neutral theory Kimura

You said that 30 million mutations can all be fixed at one time. The problem is the population size it would take to produce 30 million mutations. Along with the problem that many of these mutations have to be in a specific order one after the other. So that creates two problems

• 1st the number of generations that it takes for an allele to become fixed is 4N in which N is the population.

• • Take for example your 1 million individual examples. For an allele to become fixed in the genome it would take 4 million generations. Which equates to 80,000,000 years.

• • You may think that smaller groups might speed things up but that would not be the case. If you have a population of 500 it would take 2000 generations to become fixed. If every individual in the 500 had a mutation that became fixed then it would take 2000 generations for an allele to become fixed in the group of 500. The problem is you would have to have 60000 groups of 500 that would have to come together so that would take 120,000,000 generations or 2.4 E9 years.

• 2nd the probability of an allele becoming fixed is 1/2N

• If each individual would have 3 mutations that became fixed the probability of that happening would be 1/1000000 x 1/1000000 x 1/1000000 = 1/1E18 chance for each. Now, remember we are talking about neutral mutations that have no selective value so they have to follow probability.

• So a structure that takes multiple mutations to occur like 5 or 6 mutations. 1 to 1E30 and 1 to 1E36 chance of occuring.

So how are you saying that Neutral theory helps the time issue?

Natural selection Haldane's dilemma

• Haldane arrived at the 300 generations by calculating the average cost. He calculated the average cost for an allele to become fixed to be C30 more of a cost for a recessive allele and a lower cost for a dominant allele. He also calculated that the average excess that an organism like primates to be 0.1 or 10% per generation. He then divided to get the number of generations. 30 individuals/.1 individuals per generation = 300 generations

• So what are you saying you are changing in his calculation and why are you saying it should be different?

[Jose Fly]

That's a fairly decent writeup (written a bit oddly in places, but no big deal), but the same fundamental issues with creationists' misuse of Haldane's work remain. Namely...

1) At best, the model only applies to populations that meet his "simplifying assumptions" of large populations that maintain a constant size and are under weak selection.

2) The model is an attempt to depict reality; it was never intended to dictate reality. Creationists trying to say "Haldane's model says X can't happen, therefore X is impossible" is a massive misuse of his work.

While this has been an interesting trip down memory lane for me (it's been a while since I delved into population genetics), in the end it's still yet another old, stale creationist argument that hasn't accomplished anything or changed how evolutionary biologists go about their work in any way. It's just something creationists like ESG come across, don't really understand, think is compelling because it's very technical, and mindlessly parrot with no clue at all how to respond to informed rebuttals.

It does make for some amusing posts though, such as when ESG was like "Oh, you mean drift is neutral?" after having already tried to debate models of drift. That's like someone trying to debate the Bible for a few weeks and then finally realizing "Oh, you mean this Jesus guy is supposed to be the Messiah?"

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to Jose Fly in post #401]

LOL...you've been all over the map on this for a long time now and you've never gotten it right.

In September 2022 I pointed out your mistake in thinking that humans descended from chimps.

In December 2022 I had to do it again.

Then in January 2023 I had to do it again.

And now here you are thinking humans and chimps evolved from gorillas.

All of this leads me to ask....are you okay? The last thing I want to do is find out later that you have some sort of medical/cognitive/memory issue, which would make me feel terrible about pointing out your inability to understand the subject matter and retain basic information.

Human-ape evolution is your fairy tale. You still have not shown how it is even possible along with the starting point. By looking strictly at the size of the genome Humans are much closer to gorillas and orangutans. Morphologically humans are closer to orangutans. And if you look strictly at coding and non-coding genes humans are totally different than primates. So can you make these numbers work, it is less math and more conceptual.

Gorillas have

• Base pairs 3,063,362,794
  21794 coding genes
  7,768 non coding genes

Humans have

• Base pairs 3,096,649,726
  19,827 coding genes
  25,967 non coding genes

Chimps have

• Base pairs 3,231,170,666
  23,534 coding genes
  9,710 non coding genes

Apparently you are unaware of copy number variation.

I would have an abhorrence for numbers also if I was trying to defend evolution. How many copy variations are you saying and how do you know?

David Dewitt Liberty University
I told you earlier, no one in science cares about anything at creation.com.

So are you saying that Dr. Dewitt did not receive his Ph.D. in Neuroscience?
And he did not receive his undergraduate degree from Michigan State?

And he was not published in all of these publications?

• Shtridelman, Y., Holzwarth, G.M., Bauer, C.T., Gassman, N.R., DeWitt, D.A., and Mocosko, J.C. In vivo Multimotor Force-Velocity Curves by Tracking and Sizing Sub-Diffraction Limited Vesicles. Cellular Molecular Bioengineering 2:190-199. 2009.
  Shtridelman, Y., Cahyuti, T., Townsend, B., DeWitt, D., and Macosko, J.C. Force-Velocity Curves of Motor Proteins Cooperating In Vivo. Cell Biochem Biophys. 52:19-29 2008.
  DeWitt, D.A., Hurd, J.A., Fox, N., Townsend, B.E., Griffioen, K.J., Ghribi, O. and J. Savory. J.Alzheimer’s Dis 9(2):195-205, 2006 (abstract)
  Castellani, R.J. DeWitt, D.A., Perry G., and Smith, M.A. Involvement of complex carbohydrate chemistry in Alzheimer’s disease. Med. Hypotheses Res. 2:393-400 2005.
  Griffioen, K.J.S., Ghribi, O., Fox, N., Savory, J. and DeWitt, D.A. Neurotoxicol 25:859-867, 2004 (abstract)
  Ghribi, O., Herman, M.M., DeWitt, D.A., Forbes, M.S. and J. Savory Mol. Brain Res. 96:30-38, 2001 (abstract)
  Ghribi, O., Herman, M.M., Forbes, M.S., DeWitt, D.A. and J. Savory. Neurobiology of Disease 8:764-773, 2001 (abstract)
  Ghribi, O., DeWitt, D.A., Forbes, M.S., Arad, A., Herman, M.M., and J. Savory J.Alz.Disease 3(4):387-391, 2001
  Ghribi, O., DeWitt, D.A., Forbes, M.S., Herman, M.M., and J. Savory Brain Res. 903: 66-73, 2001
  DeWitt, D.A., Perry, G., Cohen, M., Doller, C., and J. Silver Exp. Neurol. 149:329-340, 1998
  DeWitt, D.A. and J. Silver Exp. Neurol. 142(1):103-110, 1996
  Smith, M.A., DeWitt, D.A., Proprotnik, D., and G. Perry Neurobiol. Aging 16:343-344, 1995
  DeWitt, D.A., Richey, P., Proprotnik, D., Silver, J. and G. Perry Brain Res. 656(1):205-209, 1994
  Perry, G., Richey, P., Siedlak, S.L., Smith, M.A., Mulvihill, P., DeWitt, D.A., Barnett, J., Greenberg, B.D. and R. Kalaria Am. J. Pathol. 143:1586-1593, 1993
  Canning, D.R., McKeon, R.J., DeWitt, D.A., Perry, G., Wujek, J., Fredrickson, R. and J. Silver Exp. Neurol. 124:289-298, 1993
  DeWitt, D.A., Silver, J., Canning, D.R. and G. Perry Exp. Neurol. 121(2):149-152, 1993

I've already explained this to you, several times. The context of the above is population geneticists acknowledging that their models aren't completely accurate in predicting how populations will evolve over time, as shown by comparing model outputs with evolutionary lab experiments. IOW, the models aren't exactly right....they are attempts to approximate reality, not dictate it.

But that is my point they cannot even approximate reality within the time frame needed.

So when a model says X can't happen, and we see X happen....that means the model is wrong, which is what Barbarian and I have been trying to get you to understand for weeks now, and is what Haldane himself said. Yet you keep trying to switch it around and say that because Haldane's model says X can't happen, that means X can't happen.

But you have not given one example that does not more than fit into Haldane's predictions.

[Jose Fly]

Human-ape evolution is your fairy tale.

I'm sure you see it that way, but at the very least you could get it right when you try and debate it. I mean, I don't believe the Bible but I don't go around saying that Jesus built the ark or Moses was one of Jesus' disciples.

You still have not shown how it is even possible along with the starting point.

Because we don't have to. We've known for a long time now that humans share a common ancestry with other primates. Just because creationists like you deny it, doesn't mean anyone else is obligated to meet your demands.

I would have an abhorrence for numbers also if I was trying to defend evolution.

That's hilarious coming from someone who's made some unbelievably ignorant mistakes in this thread.

How many copy variations are you saying and how do you know?

You missed the point. CNV's show that large numbers of nucleotide differences can arise via a single mutation, something I've been trying to get you to understand for quite a while now.

So are you saying that Dr. Dewitt did not receive his Ph.D. in Neuroscience?
And he did not receive his undergraduate degree from Michigan State?

And he was not published in all of these publications?

LOL...I'm saying if he wants his arguments to matter at all, he has to publish them somewhere other than a creationist website.

But that is my point they cannot even approximate reality within the time frame needed.

Dude, that doesn't even make sense.

But you have not given one example that does not more than fit into Haldane's predictions.

Ugh. You really don't get this at all. I've lost most of my interest in trying to get you to understand some of the basics of this subject. It's obvious that you're either unwilling or incapable of grasping them, and I'm not inclined to keep repeating myself over and over and over.

If you really think Haldane's models prove that evolution is impossible, I'm curious....why do you think no population geneticist or evolutionary biologist has noticed? Do you think you know more about their fields than they do? Do you think they're engaging in a massive, almost century long cover up? Do you think they're all completely incompetent? Is Satan casting a spell on them?

Or has it ever occurred to you that maybe, just maybe, you're the one who's wrong?

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #403]

Over the 500,000 generations since divergence, this amounts to 25 million substitutions, which is very close to the actual number of substituted nucleotides observed. In this way, the neutral theory allows a faster rate of evolution.

• 500,000 generations would equate to 125,000 individuals. If each one had 100 mutations that would be a little short of 25 million. And that is if all 100 mutations became fixed. Which can really not be the case. The probability of an allele becoming fixed would be 1/2N or 1 in 250000 chance. So the math says that the probability of getting one would be lucky.

Personally, I do not see how anyone can believe that this actually happens except for in very small groups. And I really do not see how scientists believe that neutral theory solves anything.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to Jose Fly in post #407]

I'm sure you see it that way, but at the very least you could get it right when you try and debate it. I mean, I don't believe the Bible but I don't go around saying that Jesus built the ark or Moses was one of Jesus' disciples

The Bible makes it very clear and it does not change. Noah has built that Ark for thousands of years. Moses received the law for thousands of years. The law has been the law for thousands of years.

That is not the cause of evolution. Again can you explain how that is the case by using the size of the genome and the number of coding and non-coding genes? I am still waiting on that. Here are the numbers agian.

Gorillas have

• Base pairs 3,063,362,794
  21794 coding genes
  7,768 non coding genes

Humans have

• Base pairs 3,096,649,726
  19,827 coding genes
  25,967 non coding genes

Chimps have

• Base pairs 3,231,170,666
  23,534 coding genes
  9,710 non coding genes

Because we don't have to. We've known for a long time now that humans share a common ancestry with other primates. Just because creationists like you deny it, doesn't mean anyone else is obligated to meet your demands.

Why do you believe this? Because the genome does not show they are the closest the genome shows the primate that is closest to humans is a gorilla. And the genes coding and non-coding genes show that humans are totally different than other primates. Just like creationists say they are. You want to debate a creationist and not have an answer for this. Not convincing at all.

I would have an abhorrence for numbers also if I was trying to defend evolution.
That's hilarious coming from someone who's made some unbelievably ignorant mistakes in this thread.

I am still waiting on that mathematical proof that disproves my calculation.

• You may think that smaller groups might speed things up but that would not be the case. If you have a population of 500 it would take 2000 generations to become fixed. If every individual in the 500 had a mutation that became fixed then it would take 2000 generations for an allele to become fixed in the group of 500. The problem is you would have to have 60000 groups of 500 that would have to come together so that would take 120,000,000 generations or 2.4 E9 years.

• Haldane arrived at the 300 generations by calculating the average cost. He calculated the average cost for an allele to become fixed to be C30 more of a cost for a recessive allele and a lower cost for a dominant allele. He also calculated that the average excess that an organism like primates to be 0.1 or 10% per generation. He then divided to get the number of generations. 30 individuals/.1 individuals per generation = 300 generations

So what are you saying you are changing in my calculations and why are you making those changes?

If you really think Haldane's models prove that evolution is impossible, I'm curious....why do you think no population geneticist or evolutionary biologist has noticed? Do you think you know more about their fields than they do? Do you think they're engaging in a massive, almost century long cover up? Do you think they're all completely incompetent? Is Satan casting a spell on them?

And that is the reason why you believe what you believe. Not because the evidence demands it, because the evidence surely does not. In fact, the evidence points to creation and a creator. Who created animals according to their own kind. Haldane's calculations and population genetics all point towards creation and a creator. At least that is what the math says. If you want to believe in the religion of evolution you would not be the first person in history to deny the evidence of science for faith in some made-up belief.

[The Barbarian]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #403]
Personally, I do not see how anyone can believe that this actually happens except for in very small groups. And I really do not see how scientists believe that neutral theory solves anything.

One million individuals would not be very small group. And the data shows that allopatric speciation is the norm, usually in a small, isolated population. So that fits the numbers, too.

As you see, neutral mutation avoids the "cost" issue, since almost all mutations do not have selective pressure.