Watch Forrest Valkai on his Video from 17:00 to 18:00

Watch Forrest Valkai on his Video from 17:00 to 18:00 · Debate with Shane Wilson and ReiperX

Scientist Reacts to "Adaptation ≠ Evolution" | Reacteria
23rd Nov. 2021 | Forrest Valkai
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wOLIZAyeAk

My only claim to intellectual originality in my following comments is, I'm discovering how much schooling Forrest Valkai needs. The rest being creationist commonplaces (both YEC and ID use the arguments passim).

3:26 It so happens, among Creationists these days (I'm no exception), no "species" are not considered as "kinds".

There are 17 hedgehog species, in 5 genera, there is 1 hedgehog kind, which may include gymnures as well (bringing it to 10 genera and 26 species).

In this case and it's perhaps not untypical for mammals, the level closests to "kind" would be either subfamily or family.

I think I can predict your point : developing a difference of family level would take too long time. Exactly : it hasn't been observed. That it hasn't been observed doesn't per se disprove it, but it proves you have some lack in your argument for it. It's a refutation for the most basic proof there is, namely observation, as applied to Evolution.

3:34 Baraminology isn't about Ray Comfort. Try to look it up with Creation Scientists, Ray being a preacher. I looked him up, he's a school quitter at 17 (nothing bad with that), a bank clerk (he might want to look up Exodus 22:24) and then a pastor ...

If I made a commented version of Darwin's book, I would not cut out biogeography, there are Creationist answers on that one.

4:02 We haven't seen cats and dogs come from Miacis Cognitus (which is AronRa's identification of their common supposed ancestor).

And we haven't seen the evolution of a new cell type. You know, nerve cell, bone cell, liver cell, etc - they are different and differentiate according to a "preplanned" program during ontogenesis. Obviously the one-celled primal eucaryote would have had only one cell type (one-celled eucaryotes have one cell type today, like yeasts, and sorry for saying "one-celled" instead of "single-celled" by the way, both Swedish and German terms would translate literally as "one-celled"). And I don't think we have in real time observed any viable mammal born with tetraploidy as compared to its parents either.

You know, tetraploidy, it's not a gradual thing, building up little by little, it's a one-time thing, and it happens in plants and some amphibians. While some have claimed Red Viscacha Rat descends from a tetraploid, we haven't seen this happen. We do see tetraploid beings born before time, dead, or born, rarely, to survive a month or two, unless the tetraploidy is chimeral.

4:11 "while faith is extremely important for him and his beliefs" (is John on screen or are you talking of Ray?) "in all other circumstances it is bad"

For my part, I'd say blind faith is at least non-ideal in Christianity as well. It beats apostasy, while seeing no solution, but is not an excuse for not seeking one, when faced with a difficulty intellectually.

Excepting exceptions, like the mysteries of faith, which cannot be proven rationally from non-Biblical arguments (God's a Trinity, God became man, the Eucharist, basically). But even they can stand up against pretended disproofs.

4:33 Yes Jane! Do do this!

You just may have heard that the latest species of Galapagos finches is a hybrid. Meaning its first exemplar's parents were from different species. Meaning the different species were classified as such bc one hadn't seen them give fertile offspring yet. Two Galapagos species were one kind.

And while I am an amateur, I think even my level might slightly beat Mr. Comfort's and there are guys whose level beats mine (as in, they are scientists, and I don't mean from diploma mills, and as in relevant area - like Georgia Purdom and another lady on AiG).

6:40 Come on, changing terminology is not changing your claim.

You may claim that marine invertebrates evolving to eventually land vertebrates isn't upwards, but to normally minded people, it kind of is. At least you would have to admit the marine invertebrate at any given moment as live such is typically (let's except a few high mountain lakes) somewhat closer to the centre of the Earth than the land vertebrate.

9:38 Some mutations will change nothing in phenotypic expression, there are cases when first two are defined and it gives exactly one amino acid for proteins, in all four possible cases for the third letter.

But we also have cases which would lead to gibberish : like coding for a protein's amino-acid that definitely has no function in the overall protein.

Plus what happens if 1, 4, 7 or whatever letters are deleted? The remainder of the gene would have the triplets start at wrong places, I guess?

On the last item, I don't know. In the immediate offspring, it would obviously be compensated by the non-deleted version on the other chromosome, speaking of eucaryotes now.

Below comment thread:

Misposted under 3:26 / 3:34 and replaced here.

Shane Wilson

You really don't seem to be able to grasp cladistics Hans.

And the observation is there. You see, you, like many creationists, don't understand the actual scientific method. Or how testing goes.

Additionally, I find it funny that you continued to post the old "no new information" line when Forrest actually explained how new information can come up, when he listed some of the types of mutations. Duplication and insertions both add.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Shane Wilson Duplication and insertion don't add, they misplace.

Duplication plus mis-sense mutations could only add if one gene that's functional could come through errors in another gene that's functional in a very different way.

He complained about John and Jane confusing UCAT with English alphabet and three base units with words, but it seems you are doing so.

The word "wore" can replace a letter and get equally meaningful (though in a different context) "woke".

Its quite different to suppose you get a new protein with a new function just by replacing one seryl with one propyl, given the old function is retained in the other place where the seryl remains seryl.

This comment of yours is actually misplaced. The only thing that's in place is "cladistics" and I did make another comment on the topic of mutations.

+ @Shane Wilson My comment on mutations and new information is actually under time signature 9:38.

13:42 If you weren't claiming men evolved from some kind of lampreys (with appropriate number of inbetween stages over some half billion years or so), that would certainly have been a very appropriate end of the story.

Some mutations are advantageous.

In the case of pesticide resistance, it would seem that advantage is linked to some lack of previously extant function. A very advantageous one, but not a new function not previously extant.

14:14 The point is precisely : enzymes were mixed up.

14:22 The pesticide resistent mosquitos are in fact diseased. That's why John calls them diseased.

It's a bit how the swine flu strain got extinct or nearly, before being replaced by another swine flu strain : human immune system very effectively culls away non-mutated viruses, and that means the non-diseased viruses. Man has (especially Europeans) lived through a Middle Ages with lots of small pox epidemics making us overall strengthened in immune system, since those with too weak ones died off. Small-pox came in late antiquity and stayed all over the Middle Ages (while getting milder) and for part of the Modern ages too.

14:34 The point is, the "gain of function" for pesticide infested areas are a loss of function for all others. It's bad faith to compare that to whales on land, yes, they would die, but we didn't see them evolve from land animals. And land and water doesn't equate to "pesticide" and "non-pesticide" environments, since land and water are in and of themselves major areas of habitats.

14:59 No, what the mutation did made them BOTH more resistant to pesticide AND less fitted in many other ways. They didn't just become unfit for a specific non-pesticide area, but for all areas where mosquitos without pesticide resistance could survive and compete with them.

Remember, whales supposedly first having and then losing the capacity to live on land doesn't show the overall trend that evolution from single-celled (!) eucaryotes must show : new information, new functions.

16:08 The point is, the phenotypic benefit has an explanation which doesn't give explanations for yeast cells gaining retina cells (two types of them, by the way) and these needing for instance ten genes (the example taken from blind Chiclids, where two genes are damaged out of the ten, making the retina useless) that the first single-celled eucaryotes obviously didn't have.

16:22 Taking your analogy with money and hamburger - the examples observed would be very much like observing people buy hamburgers without explaining where they got the money from (the analogy is imperfect, since the one selling hamburgers would, unlike observed evolution, be shown as gaining money).

15:27 Plagiarism? No, it's a common meme. If you claim man evolved from apes you will not be plagiarising AronRa.

I suppose, if you had gone from Ray Comfort to William Morris, sorry, Henry Morris, you might have found it there.

Or perhaps not, I did not recall that since From Nothing to Nature clearly, so it could be a gain of information since their time (but by the intelligent design commonly pursued of finding arguments, not by mutations, mind you!)

17:15 Have you heard any Creationist dispute the existence of natural selection? (Except me, I think we deal with providential selection)

And unsuited traits disappearing don't mean suited traits appearing. They have to exist in the first place for natural selection not to kill a whole population off instead of improving it.

17:24 "is exactly what Darwin wrote about"

You mean in the chapters where he described his observations, instead of philosophising about common origin of all living species?

And philosophising badly at that ...

17:40 Yes, precisely. Poorly suited characters disappearing is a loss of information.

Can actually happen in living beings that have information in the first place and most importantly alternative and suited information in the first place.

A yeast cell can't develop an eye by just losing information, OK ... that's the whole point.

17:48 Thank you!
Loss of information doesn't tell us anything about where that information came from in the first place. (Attributed : Forrest Valkai said so 23.XI.2021)

And one other thing that doesn't tell us anything about it is : observing mutations. At work. Even at work in speciation events.

17:54 Yeah, Forrest, did you think about your answer before you spoke it?

[Here was a debate which now has its own post : Debate with Shane Wilson and ReiperX]

20:11 "2/10?" Good for that level to have exposed you, if you go back to your question given in between 17:15 and 18:00 of the video!