The Science of Biological Evolution (no politics or religion)

May I remind you, that this is a forum on evolution not on what those pesky bronze age idiots said.

And I'd like to remind you that this is a science thread (it says so explicitly in the title), creationism doesn't have anything to do with science.

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Is it possible that all animals originally had the information for the proper production of vitamin C?  Yes.  Is it possible that a few independently lost this information over time most likely due to common environmental factors?  Yes.  Does this provide further evidence that our genetic pool loses information over time? One could argue, Yes.

By complexity I am not referring to diversity but rather the end result i.e. us.  Who can tell how many mutations are required to change a single-celled organism into an organism that can perform photosynthesis.  Not only that, all of these mutations would also need to be environmentally beneficial in order to ratified by natural selection.  So since I am right about the inefficiency, am I also right not about the diversity but also about the complexity?

The argument goes a little like this, you can't say DNA loses information over time because it isn't useful information in the first place.  However many proponents of Intelligent Design would argue that it is useful information in the first place and as such it can be lost.  The computer algorithms you speak usually make the assumption that it isn't useful information in the first place and as such is subject to improvement. 

I am indeed speaking about myself, and unfortunately about us all.

Science does not give you facts, it gives models that change sometimes quite significantly with time.

Science doesn't claim 100% truth. It only claims to be the most reasonable explanation based on observation and logic available.

Could a designer have created and guided evolution? Yes, absolutely. But e.g. Occam's razor shaves that stuff off. Again science doesn't offer the only explanations, but it does offer the most reasonable and evidence based explanations.

You can point out that it change its mind from time to time. Sure. This is the most reasonable thing to do when new and better observations are made. I'd like to point out this methodology has a pretty good track record: modern technology, medicine, and engineering.

By complexity I am not referring to diversity but rather the end result i.e. us. 

There's the problem maybe. We are not the end result of evolution.Our species has only been around for 2 million years,and will become extinct just as over 99% of all species have gone extinct. Humans,ants,bacteria:etc... are all travellers on the same highway. Nothing special at all.

Not this one again. Are we to take it from this that you don't have the benefit even of a basic science education?

Theoretical models are far more powerful than mere facts. A dataset alone cannot explain a process, a model can.

Scientists are hard tryers. But you must admit, they have a lousy track record w/ things they can't see, hear, touch, etc. from millions of years ago. Stuff like the evolution of people, planets, & Babybop.    

Why do you think that is ?

I think most people would say that humanity is the current pinnacle of the evolutionary process on this planet, no doubt as you say we are steering ourselves recklessly towards omnicide.  However, many would agree that the most advanced life form on this planet is us, unless you count those triffids.  So the question is, how did we arrive on this planet?  

"A theoretical model is far more powerful than mere facts."  This is where you've lost me I'm afraid, a theoretical model is only a shadow of the mere facts.  The point of a theoretical model is to simplify the mere facts in a way we can process because trying to understand the actual mere facts has a tendency to fry your noggin.

I personally blame it on the Boogie!

There's no disputing that there is still much we don't know, but that's what makes science so fascinating. There's also no disputing the fact that we know a great deal more about ourselves, our world and our universe than even 100 years ago, which is a mere eyeblink in human - never mind evolutionary - history.

When Darwin's "The Origin of Species" was published in 1859 it was widely recognised that parents pass characteristics to offspring, but nobody understood the mechanism by which this occurred. Amusingly, Darwin himself presented some of the ideas that were being hypothesised at the time in his book and some of them were pretty outlandish, for want of a better phrase.

We know the mechanism now: the double-helix was finally isolated in the 1950s, and it further helped to confirm Darwin's model (see what I did there?).

Then most people would be wrong. There is no pinnacle. Evolution doesn't have a plan,it's just something that happens,like the Earth orbiting the Sun.

I find it strange that your able to say, things like there is sill much we don't know and then go around saying things like "A theoretical model is far more powerful than mere facts."  

So you are talking about interpreting data sets.  Let's talk about one of the simplest methods used, the line of best fit.  Let me make this clear, this does not contain all the information collected during your data collection phase.  Often a figure called r squared is quoted, which is basically telling everyone that your conclusions are an approximation and overall I'm fudging my results by about this much.  Don't get me started about outliers, the fact that they have a name for them should tell you everything you need to know.  They are often taken as a sign of equipment failure or some other thing and are often discounted from the final analysis.  So no, theoretical models in the sense of interpreting data sets do not contain all the information about the data collected.

I'm not sure how to put pinnacle in a way that will get past the board of directors.

How about, most recently evolved in a significant way?  On the evolutionary tree of life currently the last stop is usually homo sapiens...  I don't know why I'm bothering, the're being deliberately cantankerous. 

Little problem with the whole evolution thing. Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. Let not my age deceive you. I am extensively studied in universal mechanics. This is your evolution theory in short. 18-20 billion years ago, nothing exploded, and it formed giant Clouds of gases Thad were evenly distributed to all the ends of the universe. The laws of physics were temporarily reversed, and some of these clouds were condensed into baby galaxies. These galaxies for some strange reason formed stars, ( even though it would take the energy of 20 stars to explode simultaneously next to each other to form one new stars) and these stars attracted glass clouds. One of these stars was our sun. This particular star's gas cloud broke the laws of chemistry, and from hydrogen and helium formed all the elements. Some gaseous balls formed solid planets and some remained gaseous. One planet was our earth, which formed 4.6 billion years ago. In the early days of our rocky planet, it rained on the rocks for millions of years, ( even though there was no oxygen and hence, no rain) and the rain formed great oceans. From the ocean, a primordial soup formed, and the soup came alive, and here we are. Does that sound dumb to envy one else?

Tree of Life:

I'm trying my best here, the notion that a theoretical model is better than mere facts is a little bit alien to me.  It does not compute!  You see one of the things they teach you in engineering is that models are inherently flawed and that you should come to know the flaws in your model in order to build reasonable countermeasures against them.