Dogs and people and evolution math
I posted two pictures yesterday.
Jack the Dog - As an adolescent puppy, the kids named him "Tae-Kwon-Dog" because when he was very happy he would whip his tail so hard it would break things, knock small children to the ground and occasionally leave a mark on an unprotected adult leg. Jack is even bigger (around 110 pounds) as an adult dog but a couple of times actually spraining his tail by whacking it against the corner of a a doorway has caused him to curtail (ha) the amount and force of his wag. Usually. But if I come home after being gone for several hours that tail will be dangerous for awhile.
I do love dogs but I think that animals and people are very different in more ways than can be seen in the genetic code. Jack, like other animals, relies a great deal upon instinct whereas conscious thought is our primary guide. Instinct is one of the biggest problems for Darwinism. The Mound Bird, for instance. As an adult man with many years of schooling, I could not possibly bury an egg in a mound of dirt and branches and leaves and know when to add a bit here and to take a bit off there in order to keep the interior temperature at the same level continually. Given special instrumentation and years of training I might have an outside chance of succeeding where the Mound Bird, with no training or instrumentation at all, just knows.
Dog breeders have found you can not only breed dogs for size, color, etc. but also for instinctive behavior. Pointers point, Chows protect and remain suspicious, Sheepdogs herd, Springer Spaniels love to jump in the water and swim around.
It doesn't bother me that I could have evolved from an ape. First, I don't believe it happened. Second, there are major differences between an ape or any other animal and man that are more than simply body type or shape. Man is the animal that thinks, that can philosophize, that understands concepts foreign to any animal. Animals can be trained to do amazing things and some have problem-solving skills. But to understand life and death?
My dog Jack is afraid to be hurt, it is instinctive. But I am sure he doesn't know what death is and I believe than when Jack dies he will simply cease to exist. He has a body and the breath of life but not an eternal spirit. I do, however, and truly believe that I will continue on after this body takes a last breath. I don't fear death, because I expect to meet my Creator face-to-face when I pass. But I don't hasten death. Life is a pain in the butt sometimes, but it is a gift to cherish. I am grateful that I was born and I intend to enjoy life and love others as long as I possibly can.
People
Another picture was of three of the people I love most in this world, my wife and my two oldest sons. What is interesting about those two guys, just about a year apart and with the same parents, is their differences. Both inherited my chin and my nose, but look quite different in person.
Rob was an acrobat as a child. He was climbing walls and jumping off of things, a natural athlete who was the fastest kid in his class. His gradeschool gym teacher nicknamed him "Flash". He has blue eyes and sandy hair and while he is somewhat lanky is just naturally very strong. He was a remarkably athletic and skilled basketball player in his school days. He is also an artist and a cartoonist. He is the Sergeant in the Military Police who has come back from overseas and is now stateside. We are waiting impatiently for his Commander to okay his leave so he can come home and visit for awhile.
Dave's nickname as a child was "Tank". He was, and is, a bit bigger and wider than his brother. He preferred football as his favorite sport. He has brown eyes and black hair and a darker complexion than anyone else in his immediate family. He works out on weights more than his brother and is able to bulk up more than his brother, being more of a mesomorph. He is the family table tennis champ, better at volleyball than the rest. He is far more of an avid reader than his brother. He is at home right now, working, getting ready to resume his college career after he piles up some funds.
Two young men, same genes, very different in many ways. Both are intelligent and did exceedingly well in school. Both are gifted singers. But both have different preferences in music, in favorite games, in fact in a lot of other ways. They have some obvious physical variations. I suppose if Dave married a darker-complexioned girl and Rob married a lighter blonde type, their offspring would appear to have come from two entirely different families. I can see how various "races" could have come from a family of eight individuals, that had a total of twelve unrelated individuals as parents.
The great thing, perhaps the greatest thing that I know about being a father is that I have loved my children and taught them and guided them to the best of my ability. There are still two more to help through high school. I figure by the time they are out of high school, they are who they are and it is now between them, the school of life and their God who and what they will become in the future.
Every one of my kids has their own relationship with God. You can tell people about God and you can live a life that reflects what you believe but you sure can't make anyone a believer. So I never tried to force my kids to believe, just gave them the information and taught them what I knew. Taught them to think. Tried to help them be who they were, whether teacher or artist or singer or craftsman or salesman or lawyer or whatever. It is fascinating to see them grow up and become adults, and thank God I think maybe all of them will be adults. There are too many thirty-five year old children out there and you know what I mean...
But dogs and apes and sheep and birds....animals...they don't become, they are. They have instinctive behavior. You can train them and use them for various things (dogs, especially, are great for this; cadaver dogs, seeing-eye dogs, drug dogs, etc.) but there will be no philosopher dogs or lawyer dogs or artist dogs. Animals aren't people and no animal became a person.
One great mystery to a Darwinist is just what exactly life is and where it comes from. They have no answer to how life may have come from non-life. But another problem is that great gulf between instinctive animal and thinking man.
MATH ONE MORE TIME
A commenter suggested that he could throw five decks of cards into the air and the combination that would fall to the floor, the order of those cards, would illustrate to me the reason I am wrong about statistics. The odds would be wildly against that particular order of cards to have occurred and would be completely unlikely to occur again should he devote his life to throwing cards up in the air. Yet it happened!
Here is the answer: Throw the five decks of cards up in the air until they fall to earth in one neat stack, sorted by suit and consecutively by value. Then we can talk. For you see, the Huxley Horse argument is still misunderstood. The absolutely ridiculous odds against a horse ever evolving were one over (In Huxley's own words):"The figure 1 with three million naughts after it: and that would take three large volumes of about 500 pages each, just to print! ... no one would bet on anything so improbable happening; and yet it has happened."
Now Huxley was actually being conservative even with such numbers. Statistically any odds more than 1 over 10 to the 50th power are considered an impossibility. Darwinists try to say, no, that isn't right. A horse just happened to occur but it could have been any animal and with all the possible animals that could have been the odds that one of them would have happened are, well, it is almost inevitable.
BUT
The odds against a horse are not so specific, really. The computation is based on the odds against the number of mutations that must occur by chance, survive, and be beneficial enough to become part of the gene pool, over and over again through millions of incremental stages until an animal as complex as a horse is reached. But ANY ANIMAL that you can conceive, not just a horse. A Philaramic Pakylumar would still have to go through that many beneficial and surviving mutations to exist. So, again, using cards to try to change the equation does not work. No matter what organism, the odds of going through so many changes to exist today are so overwhelmingly against occurrence as to make it a statistical impossiblity. On top of that, we don't just have the horse, but we have innumerable different organisms of different kinds, and innumerable species within the kind with all sorts of varieties each of which requiring additional mutations to enter into the gene pool and be a viable organism. So multiply Huxley's impossibility times a few million and then you have life as we know it. Impossible. Yet it is here. Huxley, with great faith, just decided that it happened anyway. I, with greater logic, agree with the Bible account. God created. It fits the evidence without additional corollaries and suppositions. Darwinism still doesn't.
Jack the Dog - As an adolescent puppy, the kids named him "Tae-Kwon-Dog" because when he was very happy he would whip his tail so hard it would break things, knock small children to the ground and occasionally leave a mark on an unprotected adult leg. Jack is even bigger (around 110 pounds) as an adult dog but a couple of times actually spraining his tail by whacking it against the corner of a a doorway has caused him to curtail (ha) the amount and force of his wag. Usually. But if I come home after being gone for several hours that tail will be dangerous for awhile.
I do love dogs but I think that animals and people are very different in more ways than can be seen in the genetic code. Jack, like other animals, relies a great deal upon instinct whereas conscious thought is our primary guide. Instinct is one of the biggest problems for Darwinism. The Mound Bird, for instance. As an adult man with many years of schooling, I could not possibly bury an egg in a mound of dirt and branches and leaves and know when to add a bit here and to take a bit off there in order to keep the interior temperature at the same level continually. Given special instrumentation and years of training I might have an outside chance of succeeding where the Mound Bird, with no training or instrumentation at all, just knows.
Dog breeders have found you can not only breed dogs for size, color, etc. but also for instinctive behavior. Pointers point, Chows protect and remain suspicious, Sheepdogs herd, Springer Spaniels love to jump in the water and swim around.
It doesn't bother me that I could have evolved from an ape. First, I don't believe it happened. Second, there are major differences between an ape or any other animal and man that are more than simply body type or shape. Man is the animal that thinks, that can philosophize, that understands concepts foreign to any animal. Animals can be trained to do amazing things and some have problem-solving skills. But to understand life and death?
My dog Jack is afraid to be hurt, it is instinctive. But I am sure he doesn't know what death is and I believe than when Jack dies he will simply cease to exist. He has a body and the breath of life but not an eternal spirit. I do, however, and truly believe that I will continue on after this body takes a last breath. I don't fear death, because I expect to meet my Creator face-to-face when I pass. But I don't hasten death. Life is a pain in the butt sometimes, but it is a gift to cherish. I am grateful that I was born and I intend to enjoy life and love others as long as I possibly can.
People
Another picture was of three of the people I love most in this world, my wife and my two oldest sons. What is interesting about those two guys, just about a year apart and with the same parents, is their differences. Both inherited my chin and my nose, but look quite different in person.
Rob was an acrobat as a child. He was climbing walls and jumping off of things, a natural athlete who was the fastest kid in his class. His gradeschool gym teacher nicknamed him "Flash". He has blue eyes and sandy hair and while he is somewhat lanky is just naturally very strong. He was a remarkably athletic and skilled basketball player in his school days. He is also an artist and a cartoonist. He is the Sergeant in the Military Police who has come back from overseas and is now stateside. We are waiting impatiently for his Commander to okay his leave so he can come home and visit for awhile.
Dave's nickname as a child was "Tank". He was, and is, a bit bigger and wider than his brother. He preferred football as his favorite sport. He has brown eyes and black hair and a darker complexion than anyone else in his immediate family. He works out on weights more than his brother and is able to bulk up more than his brother, being more of a mesomorph. He is the family table tennis champ, better at volleyball than the rest. He is far more of an avid reader than his brother. He is at home right now, working, getting ready to resume his college career after he piles up some funds.
Two young men, same genes, very different in many ways. Both are intelligent and did exceedingly well in school. Both are gifted singers. But both have different preferences in music, in favorite games, in fact in a lot of other ways. They have some obvious physical variations. I suppose if Dave married a darker-complexioned girl and Rob married a lighter blonde type, their offspring would appear to have come from two entirely different families. I can see how various "races" could have come from a family of eight individuals, that had a total of twelve unrelated individuals as parents.
The great thing, perhaps the greatest thing that I know about being a father is that I have loved my children and taught them and guided them to the best of my ability. There are still two more to help through high school. I figure by the time they are out of high school, they are who they are and it is now between them, the school of life and their God who and what they will become in the future.
Every one of my kids has their own relationship with God. You can tell people about God and you can live a life that reflects what you believe but you sure can't make anyone a believer. So I never tried to force my kids to believe, just gave them the information and taught them what I knew. Taught them to think. Tried to help them be who they were, whether teacher or artist or singer or craftsman or salesman or lawyer or whatever. It is fascinating to see them grow up and become adults, and thank God I think maybe all of them will be adults. There are too many thirty-five year old children out there and you know what I mean...
But dogs and apes and sheep and birds....animals...they don't become, they are. They have instinctive behavior. You can train them and use them for various things (dogs, especially, are great for this; cadaver dogs, seeing-eye dogs, drug dogs, etc.) but there will be no philosopher dogs or lawyer dogs or artist dogs. Animals aren't people and no animal became a person.
One great mystery to a Darwinist is just what exactly life is and where it comes from. They have no answer to how life may have come from non-life. But another problem is that great gulf between instinctive animal and thinking man.
MATH ONE MORE TIME
A commenter suggested that he could throw five decks of cards into the air and the combination that would fall to the floor, the order of those cards, would illustrate to me the reason I am wrong about statistics. The odds would be wildly against that particular order of cards to have occurred and would be completely unlikely to occur again should he devote his life to throwing cards up in the air. Yet it happened!
Here is the answer: Throw the five decks of cards up in the air until they fall to earth in one neat stack, sorted by suit and consecutively by value. Then we can talk. For you see, the Huxley Horse argument is still misunderstood. The absolutely ridiculous odds against a horse ever evolving were one over (In Huxley's own words):"The figure 1 with three million naughts after it: and that would take three large volumes of about 500 pages each, just to print! ... no one would bet on anything so improbable happening; and yet it has happened."
Now Huxley was actually being conservative even with such numbers. Statistically any odds more than 1 over 10 to the 50th power are considered an impossibility. Darwinists try to say, no, that isn't right. A horse just happened to occur but it could have been any animal and with all the possible animals that could have been the odds that one of them would have happened are, well, it is almost inevitable.
BUT
The odds against a horse are not so specific, really. The computation is based on the odds against the number of mutations that must occur by chance, survive, and be beneficial enough to become part of the gene pool, over and over again through millions of incremental stages until an animal as complex as a horse is reached. But ANY ANIMAL that you can conceive, not just a horse. A Philaramic Pakylumar would still have to go through that many beneficial and surviving mutations to exist. So, again, using cards to try to change the equation does not work. No matter what organism, the odds of going through so many changes to exist today are so overwhelmingly against occurrence as to make it a statistical impossiblity. On top of that, we don't just have the horse, but we have innumerable different organisms of different kinds, and innumerable species within the kind with all sorts of varieties each of which requiring additional mutations to enter into the gene pool and be a viable organism. So multiply Huxley's impossibility times a few million and then you have life as we know it. Impossible. Yet it is here. Huxley, with great faith, just decided that it happened anyway. I, with greater logic, agree with the Bible account. God created. It fits the evidence without additional corollaries and suppositions. Darwinism still doesn't.