Emmanuel Velikovsky

Hmm... let's suppose that I take a culture of E. Coli (which thrive at about 99 degrees F) and put them in a culture vessel at 85 degrees, and add a bit of antibiotic that's harmful to them (but not enough to wipe them out under normal circumstances) and then adjust the pH downward enough to stress them, but not kill all of them off (under normal circumstances).

If you're right, the culture should usually die off. But in my experience (my undergraduate degree is in bacteriology) they don't.

So we have a disconnect between theory and reality here. Which one would you choose?

It sounds like a good science fair project to me.

 

Galatian, I have already linked to Dr. John Sanford who is the person who has said that three traits is the max. It is what he deals with daily. Your what-if's don't compare.

Paul, I'll go down point by point:

1. Yes. Some. Glad you enjoyed down under.

2. Gravity is not connected to the speed of light. Period. In the meantime, the evidence of the changes in the referred-to constants is referenced and charted here:
http://www.setterfield.org/Charts.htm#graphs
and here
http://www.setterfield.org/report/report.html

2. Nothing has departed from its basic type no matter what mutagents we throw at them. Is that better? We do not have 'evidence that species and genus have risen over vast ages of time.' We have interpretations that tell us that. There is a difference.

3. References regarding mutations is available a number of places. You don't trust what I say, and that's fine with me. Not required. But find yourself someone who is a professional in population genetics and check in with him or her. The genetic load in humans is building at an uncontrollable rate now.

3. Unicellular asexually reproducing organisms are capable of back and forth mutations. This provides what you are claiming is evidence of evolution. I think you will find that the bacteria remain bacteria, yeast remains yeast, etc.

4. The information on the limit of three traits is from practicing geneticist Dr. John Sansome, inventor of the gene gun and known for his work with berries. He works with this sort of thing for a living. He knows what he is talking about. I have already referenced him, but you can find him on Google pretty easily.

5. No, I'm not saying that extinction proves evolution isn't true. You are not thinking about what I am saying or else not really reading it. Over-speciation subtracts so much genetic variation potential from a population that it can no longer live anywhere but in its own special niche. It is, at that point, an endangered species. That's a definition thing.

6. The fact that it is 'normal' for there to be areas of disagreement in science is a cover-up and also deceptive. It is a cover-up because the disagreements in the area I mentioned about dating are fierce and sharp and continuing. It is not a little thing. If the geologists are right then the bones found there which are attributed to our 'ancestors' could no more be that than they are ancestors of our dogs!

It is deceptive because anyone who does not agree with the existing paradigm is not even allowed to disagree without being mocked and scorned. It doesn't matter what kind of data, logic, math, evidence are on his or her side!

7. My remarks about the above have nothing to do with the popular press, but rather with some papers (original research from a geochemist and another from an anthropologist) which I have has the privilege of editing. The data and the evidence really mess up the Olduvai Gorge ideas being put across in the popular press by the anthropologists who need the funding for continuing research there!

8. Material against evolution has been widely published, but is suppressed by evolutionists who don't like it and control education. Try putting 'Darwin on Trial' or 'Pandas and People' in a school for discussion! Neither is YEC or even remotely close to it! Neither is advocating teaching creation. Both are examining some false evolution claims. Or try getting ReMine's 'Biotic Message' in a university classroom. That just ain't gonna happen, but his research is outstanding and his presentation clear.

Nahhh -- the stuff is published. You just don't like it.

9. What you claim "God did" is not what He says He did, but your interpretation based on what man has said.

10. No, I don't want to trade accusations. But I will list things that have happened to Barry and me PERSONALLY.

-- a. Kluge emailing those who support Barry publicly and trying to bully them down.
-- b. The phone calls
-- c. The slander on other forums
-- d. Refusal by peer reviewers to turn in material of his they said to the editor they were willing to review.

I am quite sure none of you has experienced any of this. You are quite safe in your armchairs sniping away as you like. We are on the front lines. We speak in public. Don't tell me what happens and doesn't happen until you have been here, too.

 

EF I speak in public about scientific research. People snipe at me in meetings when I present my research. Sometimes they are kind comments and sometimes not so kind. I write grant proposals, some get funded others don't. That's the nature of science. I publish in scientific journals, some articles get rejected, most get accepted. I conduct research everyday. I train the next generation of scientists. As far as I can tell, that's a lot more than Setterfield has done in his scientific career, but I am happy to be corrected (I looked up peer-reviewed physics literature for publications with his name). Perhaps I am looking in the wrong place?

 

>>>>>>>>>>>>I disagree with a lot of what Velikovsky wrote, but the man was brilliant and, again, his thoroughness in data gathering was incredible. I find a great deal of value in much of the material he presents. His work has led me to find other references and other sources I might not have known existed as far as ancient civilizations go.

He put some things together in a new and original way. Whether or not he was right or wrong in any particular thing does not take away from the value of what he did. His work was not junk, but neither was it Bible.<<<<<<<<


Do you mean that even though his work was wrong, it has value? Not in my book. As nearly as I can tell, Velikovsky is just another of the many eccentrics who are often found on the fringes of science. They make grandiose claims but are short on evidence. Of course most of the public cannot tell the difference between a Velikovsky and a real scientist.

 

I thought I had made myself clear. I truly appreciate the amount of data he gathered. I disagree with what he did with it.

I feel the same way about a lot of evolutionists!

 

(Barbarian noting that three traits can be selected for in a bacterial culture, with no apparent hazard of extinction in the culture)

It's not "what-if". I've observed it happen. And the culture ended up primarily with bacteria that had adapted to three new conditions at the same time. Now, I have to pick between what I've seen happen, and your doc's unsupported assertion. Not much of a choice, is it? Why do such cultures adapt rather than go extinct? Ask him.

 

Maybe this is over my head, or I do not understand. A problem my wife says I have.
But this proves evolution? It’s still Bacteria is it not?

 

John, yes.
Galatian: get past your unicellular prokaryotes and try to deal with the rest of life. In plants, three traits appears to be the maximum possible. Their genomes are more plastic than animals. So there is the possibility that animals cannot even select for three without endangering the population.

See if you can deal with animal life, OK?

 

(Barbarian observes that bacteria refute the claim that three traits cannot be selected for at one time without danger of extinction)

So, you are conceding that your doc is wrong about prokaryotes, at least? Good. Let's go on.

Since we've demonstrated that your "authority" is wrong about at least some populations, it would be perhaps better to provide some evidence.

Well, no. So far, we've got an unsupported assertion that I know is wrong, because I've seen counter-examples.

What does your doc think about two isolated populations, each with three traits being selected for, becoming unisolated, and sharing genes? Does that mean that six would then be O.K.? If not, why not?

And if there were many such populations, with occasional interbreeding, what would that suggest? That is, after all, pretty much what we see in animals.

Is it possible that he's talking about fixation, rather than the evolution of new alleles in the population?

 

That would be like documenting the evolution of seals from bears, and then having someone say:

"So what? They're still animals, aren't they?"

 

Of course gravity is connected to the speed of light! In Einstein's general theory of relativity, he points out how acceleration necessarily makes light appear to curve and therefore (equating gravity field affects with acceleration) gravity necessarily makes light appear to curve.

Now, readers, pay attention, because this is a line of reasoning with more than one step in it.

The curvature of light by acceleration depends on the ratio between the acceleration speed and the light speed. If light speed is faster, and the acceleration stays the same, then the curvature will be less.

Light curvature by gravitation is directly observed in the galactic gravitational lens affect. If the light cruising by distant galaxies were moving faster, and the gravity affects of the galaxies causing the lens phenomenon were NOT linked to the speed of light but were considerably less - consistent with, say, a mapping of 6 to 8 thousand annual orbits of the earth around the sun into the putative 14 billion year history of the universe - then the lens affect would necessarily be affected. It would become less. The light speed factors necessary to rescue a young earth from the observed light speed distances are such that the lens effects would vanish.

There. I hope that wasn't over most of your heads.

But wait, there's more!

Galaxies are observed to rotate. The rotation rates are of course, the orbiting of the stars around the galaxies. The measurement of the rotation is determined first as a percentage of the speed of light, because doppler shifting methods are used. Then this percentage is turned into an actual speed, based on the assumption that the light speed has been constant.

Rotation rates are observed under these assumptions to be the same no matter how distant the galaxies are observed. There's some natural variation due to the size of the galaxies, that's all.

If light were faster in times past, then the unequivical evidence of the doppler shift observations is that the rotation rates were also faster in the past. Translating this to earth orbits would mean that if light traveled faster in the past then the earth orbited the sun faster in the past anyway and all those years are brought back for the history of the earth anyway.

But wait, there's more!

Binary stars are observed in the nearby galaxies. They are all so distant, even the nearest, there should be some signifigant light speed change factors going on. The same observations occur - the rotation rates due to gravitational orbiting are NOT what light speed change theory would predict, they are what would be predicted by the funny idea that light speed has been constant all this time.

There's more still, but this is enough to establish the point!

Hmm. You don't count watching bacteria change from gram negative to gram positive bacteria as a change in type?

Seems to me that the key ingredient missing is time. It would be an interesting research project for someone to take a single cell life form and cause it to develop a multicellular form by selective breeding. Would that count?


(skipping a few here)

Oh, at last a sympathetic soul! Helen, (sob) you don't know what its been like - I've been trying and trying to pound some sense into the hyper-creationist type on this board for a long time now and they just keep resisting my brilliant posts and perfect refutations of their mistaken ideas . .they just keep hanging on to their outdated existing paradigm. . . Oh wait, that was you. Ahem.

Get the point?

We've seen this "interpretation" gig for a while now, but the truth is, everything you or I post is, in a way, an interpretation, so now all I can say is - what else is new? What about an argument against my interpretations, instead of merely accusing me of having interpretations?

To a certain extent, a lot of this is merely because you are a public figure. Every movie star experiences the "slander" and "phone calls" in spades. You probably get fewer crank calls than, say, Madonna, if its any consolation. Of course, she hires staff to intercept them!

Otherwise, Kluge and other members of the scientific community have an opinion about Barry's work that it does not merit publication in a peer reviewed scientific journal. That is their opinion and I don't know what you can do about it since I share the same opinion.

 

(This is also pertinent to this thread.)

Bacteria are prokaryotes, while almost all other organisms are eukaryotes. There is more taxonomic distance between a bacterium and a slime mold than there is between a slime mold and a human. This is why, even after a couple of centuries of studying bacteria -- however fast they multiply -- we've never seen a population of bacteria evolve into anything else.

Changing a prokaryote into a eukaryote requires the addition of things like a nucleus and various organelles. It's possible that eukaryotic cells arose from a symbiosis of two or more prokaryotic cells. Specifically, our own mitochondria may be symbiotic organisms living within us. This is a hotly debated topic, and mitochondria may well have some other origin. If it is the case, our own mitochondria act as a kind of beneficial "infection," passed on to us in the female gamete (i.e. egg cell). This is why mitochondrial DNA is so useful -- it stretches back largely undiluted by meiosis. (There may be exceptions -- recently discovered -- but they don't impinge on the general concept.)

So a bacterium changing into a non-bacterium is not something you'd expect to see happen in vitro, unless you were trying awfully long and hard to do it. Compared to culturing bacteria in general, we haven't been trying it very long or very often. It's probably pretty rare in the wild as well, which is why prokaryotes were around for a long time before eukaryotes evolved.

-Neil

 

Helen wrote:

Hardly. It is not I who have misunderstood when I pointed out that in Setterfield's Equation (13) he has equated Delta(1/lambda) with 1/(Delta lambda). He takes the change in each side of Equation (8). Thatt's no misinterpretation on my part. That part of Setterfield's paper is very clear. Anyone can check for himself or herself. It's just a simple, silly, algebraic mistake by Setterfield which has been pointed out to him and which he has not corrected. No misinterpretatio on my part at all. Nothing controversial about it except in Setterfield's mind. Or does anyone who thinks he or she is mathematically competent at the high school level dispute that Delta (1/lambda) is not equal to 1/(Delta lambda)?

Similarly with Setterfield's Equations (108) - (110) it is obvious that when one substitutes his Equation (109) into (108) that one gets an equation of the form of his Equation (110) except that his "T" values must all be replaced with "X". Nothing at all controversial here. It's simple algebra. The only way he could replace X with T is if X = T. However, that obviously implies a constant speed of light (dX/dT = constant), which is contrary to Setterfield's basic thesis. Again, Setterfield is perfectly here. There is no misunderstanding. It's just that he has been inconsistent. Any reader not convinced is welcome to look for himself or herself. This is easy.

None of this has anything at all to do with whether or not I have contacted or will contact Setterfield. His equations are clear. They are just contradictory. One does not need to ask him what he means. That is perfectly clear. But if, perchance, Setterfield genuinely believed or believes that I have misconstrued his work, then there is no doubt that he could construe it as he saw fit without waiting for me to contact him. He hasn't done so.

Finally, there is the silly matter of Helen's falsely claiming that I have "bull[ied]" some 0f the Setterfield's friends into backing off their support. That is silly. I did e-mail some of the individuals mentioned in Setterfield's paper as having reviewed the manuscript, asking them whether the manuscripts they reviewed contained the two blunders I have outlined above, and if so, how those reviewers failed to detect such errors in thorough reviews. I suppose one might be "bullied" by that in the sense that one would be compelled to submit to reason, but that is no more bullying than is practiced joyfully every day by every scientist the world over.

Because of the elementary and silly nature of the blunders, and because such obvious errors were not promptly acknowledged, I also suggested to Setterfield's reviewers that they might use their good offices with Setterfield's sources of funding, or potential sources of funding, to encourage them to steer their funds elsewhere. I did this for a reason we all share: A desire to make creation science research as high in quality as possible. That means unfunding creation science researchers with histories of producing bad or inept science in favor of those who will produce quality creation science research.

I can well understand that Barry and Helen Setterfield might have felt disconcerted at facing potential loss of the funds enabling Barry Setterfield to pursue his avocation on a full-time basis. LIke scientists, however, they must understand that the funding gravey train is not a right, and is contingent upon producing quality science. Losing funding, or at least potentially losing funding, is a routine part of being a scientist. If Setterfield wants to be considered a scientist he must accept the pain with the glory.

I am fully confident that if Setterfield can answer the objections I have raised here (he cannot), then he wil do so frankly and forthrightly without more ado either from himself or his spouse.

 

Helen complains about...

Yeah, you're supposed to retain copies for yourself. Editors aren't in the business of cleaning up after Referees. I can assure you that material sent to referees for reviews has been by them safely filed away, although whether in the circular or rectangular file I cannot say.

 

Kluge, what you did was slimey and showed your character. To quote from a letter you received back from a person you contacted:

It is acceptable for you to point out what you perceive to be errors of fact or of reasoning in Setterfield's papers. It is not acceptable to pour upon him and others a torrent of ridicule. Your attempts to embarrass or intimidate those persons who have been connected with Setterfield, in various ways not known to you, are unworthy of civil scientific discourse.


ITM, I'm not at all worried about the funds we receive being cut off. They are private and very much appreciated.

Second, you have mistaken what is going on and Barry has pointed that out to you before.

Third, you didn't even understand what I was saying about the peer reviewers. When someone says they will review a paper, they should review it and then turn it back in with the corrections and suggestions to the editor. They should not say they will review it and then refuse to do so, while still promising they will 'get to it soon.'

 

Helen wrote:

Where's the hyperlink? Where's the URL? I think you mentioned this, but didn't link it.

MOre importantly, where's the argument? It makes absolutely no difference what even a great geneticist says if what he sahs is not backed up by some cogent argument. In science it's the justification of a conclusio that is of interest, not its mere assertion.

 

Kluge, if you think I am ignoring you from now on, you are right.

 

Helen wrote:

Helen, I do not appreciate being slandered. You accuse me of ridiculing someone sans evidence, merely upon the assertion of someone whom you quote. As I have explained previously I harshly criticized some of what Setterfield wrote. One might construe that criticism as ridicule of what he wrote. I did not ridicule Setterfield himself beyond whatever incidental ridicule would inevitably fall his way as author of the criticized writings.

I find it distastful to respond here or otherwise publicly to the e-mail that you quoted. I was under the impression that it was a private e-mail in no way connected with this list. I will note, however, that that correspondent did not in any way respond substantively to the two errors I pointed out in Setterfield's work. My letter was science-laden. His was not. While I might have been excessive in my criticisms of Setterfield's work, his entire letter (and your own diatribe here) attack upon my character.

Even granting that my character is as small and foul as you and our mutual Correspondent believe, it is perverse to use whatever excesses of which you or he might think me guilty as excuse not to answer forthrightly the scientific objections that I have raised to Setterfield's work.

 

Helen wrote:

You're perfectly free to do that. You are perfectly free to ignore whatever is inconvenient for you. I should think, though, that as a scientist (or at least one interested in science) you would seek out interesting ideas and read what interesting people write, whether or not you personally like those people. After all, resolving to ignore people is resolving to ignore whatever evidence they might provide. Not intellectually sound, is it? Foolish, isn't it? It's the ultimate ad homonim

Of course I shall continue to follow with interest the scientific carreer of Barry Setterfield, and shall continue to respond from time to time with constructive criticisms of his writings. He will be weel=advised to carefully consider my criticisms of his work. I suggest for his own good that he respond to me in a way different from that which his spouse has resolved.

Don't let the door hit you.

 

>>>>>Kluge, if you think I am ignoring you from now on, you are right. <<<<

Helen, as I have said previously, you are happy to respond to people most of the time. The only time when you don't respond is when they advance arguments that you cannot answer.