Here is another reference that heavily supports my hypothesis of inherent design. It deals with PHI, and it also deals with my theory of ‘built-in’ variation.
I suggest you take a look as it has images and stuff that help to explain things easily: http://www.evolutionoftruth.com/adm/overview.htm
I believe that the loss of eyes in the cavefish Astyanax mexicanusis more an issue of entropy. A mutation towards no eyes (which can happen very, very easily in most animals – a simple matter of turning off just one gene, Pax6 or a member of its pathway) is neutral if there is no light. The organism may get no advantage out of this, but it won’t lose fitness. Areas of the genome degrade relatively quickly if not selected for. This is what I believe happened with the cave fish.
What Hiryuu I suspect will be along shortly to mention is two points about the cavefish. The first is that optic primordia form to a quite complex level. The second is that if you transplant a working fish eye lens (ha ha) into the eyeless cavefish, you can often rescue degeneration.
These do not show that the program of eye formation is intact in the cavefish. They show that this may not be the best example, as parts of the program are still intact, and therefore we presume that the selective process began rather recently. It also shows that part of the process is broken in the lens (which is quite a complex part of eye development and responsible for many growth factors involved in forming the eye correctly) and that replacing the broken lens with a working one from a related species will correct the problem. The “built-in genetic diversity” (potential to form a functioning eye) no longer exists in the cavefish – it requires outside factors.
In fact I really recommend you give this site some serious consideration, because it is really everything I am talking about. As I said it has pictures and stuff, so it is really helpfull to all knowledge levels of this topic.
Here again is the site: http://www.evolutionoftruth.com/adm/overview.htm
Oh yea, you guys will love this section of his site, this is where he gets letters from critics who are evolutionists and he replies to them with his interpetations which are very similar to my own.
Enjoy: http://www.evolutionoftruth.com/let/LtTOC.htm
I am not avoidng trying to explain it all myself, I am simply saying that this guy presents the same theory in an easy to read way. Then when we are both clued in we can continue to discuss it.
Hiyruu wrote:
Um … if that were the case, then wouldn’t we expect PHI and Fibonacci sequences to be selected for by natural selection? I.e., if the world were populated by, say, pine trees that didn’t take advantage of Fibonacci sequences in their branch structures, and then one day a mutation occurred in a pine tree that caused it, just by chance, to utilize Fibonacci sequences in its branch structures, wouldn’t this new mutant pine tree have such a great advantage over its competitors that it would be enormously successful and leave lots of baby pine trees around which would eventually multiply so well that they would completely supplant the non-Fibonacci pine tree population?
If life takes advantage of something “optimal,” this is not evidence that this ability was designed into it.
Unfortunately Hiyruu the “divine proportion” was already used to describe phisical properties. what I am trying to say is: nature used those numbers before religious sites like that one came to call the “Golden rule” a “divine proportion”
http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Fibonacci.html
Many people, even the religious establishment of the day, thought that the numbers had no practical value, the reason being that very few thought his research was important until 300 years into the future.
However, the Fibonacci radio is not quite perfect:
http://library.thinkquest.org/27890/altver/applications1a.html
that is important if we are dealing with an inteligent designer.
But scientists do take those limitations into account and do use the numbers even in evolutionary research:
http://corporate.stanford.edu/research/programs/compgen.html
So we have this Hiyruu: Fibonacci is used to investigate evolution, religion is only playing catch-up and ignoring that science is using the golden rule already, an intelligent designer is not needed.
Let me emphasize this point: PHI and Fibonacci are evident throughout the entire fossil record timeline which means that it was never something that was learnt since it was always already known.
How can the utilization of PHI and Fibonacci be the result of millions of years of evolution if they were already used in the beginning anyway.
This all proves my point that design has always been around.
Hiyruu, do you feel that natural selection operates at all, or is it merely a complete fallacy?
Duh… I could kick myself for not figuring out that he was talking about suppressors of eyeless. The mutations which make the eye go away and come back must just be a push-pull, where (to oversimplify) you remove an activator and then remove a suppressor. All his idiotic talk of the “eye gene” (what, there’s just one of them?) threw me off track.
-Ben
Natural selection means that species become eliminated resulting in less species overall. Evolutionists even admit this, because they claim there used to be many more species than there are today when they “analyse” the fossil record.
The thing is if this is the principle of natural selection, then how did many species arise from the few that emerged from the “primordial soup”, surely the weak would of been eliminated resulting in fewer species.
Bear in mind, too, that having no eyes means that parasites can’t attack them, and injuries to the delicate eyes means no eye infections.
Anyway, Hiryuu, your idea that already present genes are just switched on or off is just plain wrong. If that were the case, then lampreys would have genes for hemoglobin alpha and beta, but just wouldn’t use both of them. Moreover, non-mammals and monotremes would have fetal hemoglobin genes, but those genes wouldn’t be expressed.
In reality, we see that not only do new hemoglobin genes appear at points in evolution where they are needed, not only do those genes clearly arise from unequal crossing over, not only do some of those unequal crossovers produce pseudogenes, but last but not least, the physical arrangement of the genes and pseudogenes reflects their arrangement in the phylogenetic tree, precisely as you would expect if they arose from unequal crossing over. Did I mention that lampreys don’t have fetal hemoglobin?
-Ben
You are getting close to lying here, I did not say that. What is clear from all the info I saw is that evolution used those numbers before Fibonacci found them. I also even saw cosmologists using those numbers. And also they do not need an intelligent designer to describe the process.
In any case you ignored that the Fibonacci radio is not perfect:
http://library.thinkquest.org/27890/altver/applications1a.html
It is indeed a natural phenomenon.
I have presented the sum total of my arguement. My case rests entirely on the PHI/Fibonacci which implies inherent design which implies ‘built-in’ variety.
I encourage you to study these issues at your own leisure, I have provided ample links to get you started.
Well, having given my full hypothesis and reasoning, I will now leave this thread and continue my studies into the the ‘golden ratio’ which is my favorite topic. Anyway thanks to those of you who gave some considerations to my rants, I hope we all learned something.
Good bye, and good night.
… you ARE Darran Aronofsky!
“Restate my assumptions. One, there are patterns everywhere in nature…”
For further research. Hiyruu, I suggest renting the movie “pi.” You should absolutely love it. And I’m not kidding; it really is a good movie, but the main character (if you haven’t seen it) goes into the golden spiral for quite a bit of it. Check it out.
Let me also add that we have maintained homozygous eyeless and sine oculis stocks in our lab since at least 1994. They have not gained spontaneous eyes yet. Although, sometimes I wish that they did… 
Some notes about the Fibonacci Sequence (and other numeric patterns in nature):
I quote Gould here:
(emphasis mine)
From his essay, “Double Trouble”, in the collection “The Panda’s Thumb”.
Clearly, there is nothing “mystical” about the appearance of regular numeric patterns or shapes in nature; they exist, not because of intelligent design, but as a consequence of natural laws (as in the case of Fibonacci sequences) or “best” designs which can easily be selected for through natural selection (as in the case of hexagonal honeycombs).
Yeah, I know (in fact, I thought I mentioned that the birds did not re-evolve the ability to fly, even though it would certainly have been advantageous…)
I probably should have phrased that more along the lines of “the genes responsible for the wings are still there, obviously altered in some manner since the wings themselves are still present, though much reduced in size.”
But, it’s late, and I’m too tired to think right now 
Back on page 3 of this thread, I said this:
Did you miss that, Hiryuu?
All species have a “life-span”, usually on the order of about 10 million years or so. So, obviously, species will be dying out fairly constantly through out the fossil record and new ones will be evolving as well. Depending on the prevailing conditions, rates of speciation may exceed rates of extinction; however, there are a number of instances where mass extinctions occurred, and a large number of species died out all at once (well, more or less - “instantaneous” is a relative term when dealing with the fossil record).
Speciation can be likened to population growth. A given species acts as the “parent” species, and gives rise to “daughter” species. These, in turn, can go on to produce daughter species of their own, and so on. Over time, even with a few “offspring” dying off periodically, the overall number of species will increase.
Don’t bother with any further arguments or cites, folks. The Great Teacher has bestowed his Golden Knowledge upon us unenlightened atheist heathens, and has left us to ponder his wondrous writings. Our job is to study the TRUTH he has left us, fall to his logic and realize that everything has indeed been designed. Then we wiil be prepared for the ULTIMATE TRUT*H that he, in his wisdom, withheld from us-that there is a Designer.
Thank you, Oh Wondrous Master, for bestowing upon us your TRUTH. And don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Well, that’s disappointing in a way since your argument is quite weak. I say this because you have presented no supporting evidence (key on the word EVIDENCE please).
Ah, so you’re just deluded. I say this because your entire case rested on belief and not on EVIDENCE. This, in turn, I say based on the EVIDENCE that when you finally make a statement in answer to the questions put to you, you preface with [YOU] BELIEVE.
Got any EVIDENCE to support that implication? Or is it just a WAG?
Got any EVIDENCE to support that implication? Or is it just a WAG?
Oh, and lest you think I missed it: You, sir, ma’am, it whatever have lied to your readers here. You are most certainly a creationist and that you think that any of us are so feeble as to buy your statement that you are not is even more pathetic than your argument.