Feed Your Head

UPDATE DEC 8    Just watched the new film about Clarence Thomas:  Created Equal:  Clarence Thomas In His Own Words.   I've seen so much good stuff by and about blacks in the last few months I feel I've taken a course in Black History and learned a lot from it.  A University Black History course wouldn't focus on the conservatives as I've been doing, of course.   This film about Clarence Thomas is a good one to follow Larry Elder's Uncle Tom.   Of course I like Thomas's Constitutionalism but now I like him as a man as well.   Poverty, racism, a strong positive influence by his uneducated grandfather, a time in a Catholic seminary training for the priesthood, followed by a time of sixties style black radicalism, all finally coming together in his immersion in the founding documents of America that now informs his work on the Supreme Court.  He's particularly effective and moving in his response to the Anital Hill attack by the way, especially if you missed it at the time of the hearings, as I did.  Good film. 

UPDATE:  Most of what I link to in the body of this posis political, but at the end I've added the most recent radio show by the Christian ministry Understanding the times radio, and here I want to add Chris Pinto's most recent radio show as well, that deals with the voter fraud as treason and the COVID vaccine at the very end:  NOTR - TREASON, TRIBUNALS & THE LUCIFER VACCINE - 12.2.20 - Show Downloads - Noise of Thunder Radio with Chris Pinto  *

============================================

Here I want to link to some resources I think just about everybody should watch, especially some people I know won't watch them.  I kind of think they will, however, if the Rapture actually occurs soon, which is a reason I want it to come soon.  The main reason, of course, is that I'm ready to leave this fallen world in which I feel so useless.   I can pray of coruse, but that's really about all I can do, and although I can and do pray I have this sinking feeling that we're on the downward slide to the End.  It's all in God's will, we are under judgment and He isn't going to stop it.  

Yes it would no doubt be a lot worse if He weren't restraining the worst, He's no doubt having mercy on us in many ways and that's in response to our prayers.  As Curtis Bowers points out in his discussion with Jan Markell which is one of the videos I link below, a sign of His mercy is how the voter fraud is being explosed, and I agree.  That God would expose the fraud and all the hidden evils is something I pray for a lot.   Nevertheless I know that this exposure is only reaching some of us and there is a total media blackout of the information on the Left.   I hate to be so pessimistic but again I have this sinking feeling.  I don't think the exposure is going to reach the ones who most need to know about it.

In spite of God's merciest I think nevertheless that the time has come, the jig is up, it's over.  If He gives us another four years of Trump that would be a wonderful mercy but the Left will only escalate its horrors if He does, it's not going to stop.  There are too many people on the side of evil who don't want it to stop and God hasn't acted to interfere with them.  Somehow they think that they are doing a good thing.  It's horrifying to consider how it's going to hit them when they finally see what they've been involved in when it's too late.  I'm glad to think, however, that it WILL hit some of them nevertheless, even when there's no way to stop the massive destruction.

Well, here are a few suggestions in the hope that they might open some eyes.

First the interview of Curtus Bowers on Jan Markell's Understanding the Times Radio.  Bowers made two films about the Marxist plot to destroy America.  They can be bought from Markell's ministry or from Amazon, and the films can be watched at Amazon for a rental fee.   Both are titled Agenda, the first subtitled Taking Down America, or something like that, I'll have to go look it up, and the second Masters of Deceit.   Here's the interview:

Game Over? – Curtis Bowers - YouTube

I also recently watched an inspiring show by Candace Owens interviewing a woman originally from Zimbabwe about how blacks are best benefitted by conservative politics, even the Republican Party, while the Democratic Party is really their enemy.

 The Candace Owens Show: Melissa Tate - YouTube\\

Hooray for black America.  Smart, sane, successful black America.   Besides the Candace Owens show I also watched the movie by Larry Elder at Amazon, titled Uncle Tom.  Great anticidote to the leftist violent race-baiting mentality.  

Lots of smart sane successful black Americans everybody should get to know.  Thomas Sowell for instance, Walter Williams, who just died, Larry Elder and Candace Owens too, Allen West, Alan Keyes, Coleman Hughes, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, and I'm forgetting many others.  They're not all conservatives..

There's also Dinesh D'Souza's Trump Card movie at Amazon.

Added Dec 5:  Jan Markell's latest which gets at al the events that are destroying the US and heralding the Antichrist and the Rapture.   Lawlessness in the Land! – Terry James - YouTube

And I think I'll add in some others I've posted here before:

Yuri Bezmenov, former KGB officer in the USSR:  

Yuri Bezmenov - Deception Was My Job (full interview) - YouTube

=Yuri Bezmenov Full Interview & Lecture - HQ - YouTube

A note beneath the interview video says that it has been taken down as "hate speech" and was reloaded.  It may of coure be taken down again.  The powers that be don't want anyone to know about this Communnist coup that is going on in this country, they want to keep you in the dark.

And the one I've posted many times of the interview with Noraman Dodd who investigated the tax-exempt foundations such as Rockefeller and Carnegie and discovered that they have been working to promote Communism in the country:    Norman Dodd On Tax Exempt Foundations - YouTube

----------------------------------\

*  Thinking about something General MacInerney said that Pinto aired, that the voter fraud is actually treason, as is the rioting and the refusal by elected leaders to quall it.  He's right about that and I'm glad he has the courage to say it.  He goes on to give the remedy in a military tribunal to bring the traitors to justice, which also seems like the right idea, though I get this sinking feeling as usual that it's not going to happen because the forces of evil are so strong these days and have succeeded in brainwashing so many people into thinking their cause is the righteous one.   Yes, arrest the trators and bring them to justice.  Yes.  But then he goes on to mention martial law and Pinto objects to that, rightly I think.  We don't need martial law, we just need to arrest those who are guilty which is a numer of identifiable people in particular places and far from the majority in the country who certainly do not deserve to br put under martial law.  But again, the problem is the success of the propaganda.  The Left knows how to commit all the evils but accuse their opponenst of what they are doing and sway much of the public with such lies.  While the leaders of BLM must know the truth about their Marxist intentions, most of those who support them no doubt have no idea at all but really think they are supporting a righteous cause about justice for black people.  They are deprived, for instance, of all the information that would show George Floyd was not the victim of racism since whites get treated the same way, as well as the information that BLM is a Communist front organization.  So their anger gets stirred up against the wrong people and that is maybe the biggest danger at the moment.  It would be right to arrest the traitors and bring them to justice but if public opinion has been shaped by lies that would make such a right action appear to be wrong, fascist or whatever, we've already lost the battle.  

Another Walk Through the Tribulation Period for Those Who Will Have to Endure It

 Looking at Amazon for Chris Pinto's latest film The True Christian History of America, which isn't there yet, another film caught my eye, From Babylon to America, by some Prophecy group,  Not knowing anything about it I did a search on it.  Seventh Day Adventist.  A cult, but usually pretty well grounded biblically in spite of that.  Except for the seventh-day stuff of course.  But I prayed about it and decided to watch it.   

Needed a break about half an hour into it, hard to take the slow pace of the information, the incessant background music, some of the sound effects, and the narrator's accent.   His narrative is very good but his accent grates on me.  \ t's a very interesting film nevertheless and unless despite its veering into SDA heresy.  .

I could tell he was going to identify the papacy as the little horn of the fourth beast in Daniel's vision, and he did.  He does a great job of showing the connection, quotes Roman Catholic documents that make the case identifying the papacy with the prophetic descriptions.  Nevertheless I have a couple of objections.   Both in Daniel and in Revelation we are given a time period to be aware of in connection with the Antichrist:  "A time, times and half a time" is interpreted to mean three and a half years, and this is confirmed by the synonymous use of "42 months" to refer to the same period of time, as well as "1260 days" also referring to the same time period.   And he starts out agreeing with this.  These are all clearly equivalent, and scripture seems to be treating this time period as extremely important for us to be aware of and to be able to trust to be exactly what it says it is.    The Pretribulation Rapture eschatology puts the Tribulation period into Daniel's as-yet unfulfilled Seventieth Week of the prophecy of Seventy Weeks, 69 of which were fulfilled on the Sunday Jesus rode the donkey into Jerusalem to announce that He is the Messiah.  After that there is no time period that fits that could finish the 70 weels. in Jesus' time or throughout the last 2000 years.   The 70th week is a "week of years" or seven years, and three and a half years is of course half of seven.  People who are  going to experience this time of tribulation are being alerrted by scripture in a number of different places, in Daniel and in the book of Revelation, to hold onto this time period to help them get through the horrific events they are going to have to endure.  The meaning of those events will probably become much clearer to those going through them than they are to us now.  We have our interpretations to offer now for whatever help they may be, but they may be flawed.

But the narrator of this film takes an unwarranted turn and treats the 1260 days as that many years instead, using scripture reference to make the equation.  But that can't work in this case because the 1260 days is clearly meant to be synonymous with the time, times and half a time as well as the 42 months.  If it's equivalent to those times then it can't refer to years.  Nevertheless he makes it fit by claiming that the papacy was established in 538 AD with a decree of Justinian, and if you count that many years from that year you arrive at 1798 AD when Napolean arrested the Pope and stripped the Vatican of its power.  It's a dramatic point to make.  The Vatican's power was reinstated later by Mussolini, don't remember that year, bso that it again possessed oth its civil power and its religious power.  HOWEVER, I'm used to the Protestant Reformers' identification of the year 606 AD as the year the Bishop of Rome officially became Universal Bishop which made him Pope, by a decreee of the Byzantine emperor Phocas.     That of course changes the timing, and I'm not sure if it can be determined which date is truly the correct one.  But it certainly seems clear that the 1260 days is intended to be the equivalent of three and a half years as well as 42 months and doesn't refer to years s the SDA film maintains.  .  

Of course I also believe the papacy is the Antichrist so I'm on track with the film to that extent.  I've pointed out in an earlier post here that a great many Christians down the centuries have made that identification, not just the Protestant Reformers.   If the Pretribulation Rapture exchatology is correct then scripture is referring to a period of three and a half years during which the papacy will have power over the world at the very end of time, the last half of the seven-yar Tribulation period of the Book of Revelation.  

Yes it's true that the Pope had that power through the Middle Ages also.   The narrator also says it was a hundred million Christians the Church of Rome killed during the Dark Ages.  I've accepted the number of fifty million and so far, about halfway through the film, he hasn't given his source for that number.    

He also interprets the description of the Antichrist as "changng times and laws" to mean even changing the Law of the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday.  But it wasn't the papacy that did that, it was the early Church that met on the first day of the week which is Sunday in commemoration of the Lord's resurrection.  The Roman Church didn't yet exist  at that time in anything like its current form although there was a Bishop of Rome.  The Roman Church, however, DID change one of the Ten Commandments -- to eliminate the commandment against bowing down to graven images since they are big on graven images and worshiping them, although they try to get away with saying it's not worship, it's "veneration."  Not much difference but it's also true that Catholics do worship the images.  Some do, certainly, perhaps more in Europe or other parts of the world than in the US.  They get down on their knees and even lie prostrate on the floor to worship them, especially images of Mary.  At Medjugorje where there were apparitions of "Mary" women walked on their knees around a statue of her.  So I'd agree with the SDA narrator that the RCC did tamper with the Law of God, but not in the way he has it.

So, two problems I have with this presentation of prophecy, but otherwises I'd say it's a very good study overall, especially of the images in the book of Daniel .  I already agree with most of what he's said.  That's why it tends to move slowly for me.   But he's doing a good job of backing up his statements from scripture.  (I will point out, however, that the claim that it's ENTIRELY based on scripture is not true, since in the early part of the film where he traces the paganisms of the Roman Church back to Babylon he is giving he same information I found in the book The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop..  He doesn't mention the book or any other source but the information about Nimrod and Semiramis and the birth of Tammuz are not in scripture.  The mother-child imagery so prominent in Roman Catholicism is found in many pagan religions and comes down from the original in Babylon.   None of this is in scripture.   I don't object to this use of historical sources along with scripture, all I'm saying is that his interpretation isn't entirely based on scripture.

He does make the good point that the fourth beast of Daniel which is the Roman Empire is depicted in  Nebuchadnezzar's statue is "divided" which i think he gets from its depiction as the two legs of the statue.  And he identifies this division as the formation of the Eastern Empire of Byzantium, with the western part under the Bishop of Rome.  But he doesn't go on to point out that Byzantium fell to Islam under Mohammed and has remained Islam ever since.  This occurred soon after 606 AD when the Byzantine emperor declared the Bishop of Rome to be Universal Bishop, thus launching the Roman Church.  That makes Rome and islam the two legs of the statue.  So it's fair to expecdt that Islam is going to have a part to play in the Great Tribulation, and considering their jihadist bloodthirstiness to ehead everyon who won't bow to Allah their role is certain to add horror to horror  for those who come to Christ during that period.    Those are the "great multitude noone  can count" referred to in Revelation 7.  It will include a multitude of Jews as well as a multitude of former Muslims and former Catholics and former apostate Protestants and former Buddhists and former atheists who recognize the truth during this time of the greatest suffering ever endured on Earth.   And since beheading is the chosen style of murder by Islam that probably explains the desription of the martyrs in Revelation 6 as beheaded.   Chris Pinto has said that he thinks the current effort of Leftists to move many Muslims into the West, both into Europe and America, is prompted by the Catholic Church so make them the executors of their revived Inquisition.  We've already seen murders in France and other parts of Europe by jihadis.  It will no doubt eventually come to America too, if Biden is President, who would certainly continue that policy of Obama's, and after the true Church is Raptured.  

So if nothing else is going to convince people to give themselves to Christ now before these horrors descend on the world, even an inkling that any of this could be true should be incentive enough to seek it with intense prayer.

The SDA film mentioned none of that though.  It also doesn't mention the Seventieth Week of Daniel and its fulfilmment in the Great Tribulation.   Perhaps that's because they accept a "Historicist" eschatology and reject the futurist system of the Pretribution Rapture.   One thing he does mention is that in the effort to wash the Antichrist label off the papacy,  a Catholic invented the futurist eschatology which interprets it all as future, and another Catholic the Preterist eschatology which interprets it all as past.  It apparently worked because hardly any Christians teach that the papacy is the Antichrist although the Reformers made such a strong case for it, not to mention the hundreds of others before them who also made the equation, which I put in a blog post some time ago.  

Although I accept the Pretribution view in general I also see the Pope as having already been identified as Antichrist, 1400 years ago.

The SDA film also identifies the ten kings represented by the ten toes of the statue in Daniel 2 as ten European kingdoms, and the three that the prophecy says are to be displaced by the rise of the Antichrist as the Visigoths, Ostrogoths and I think the Vandals (?), which don't seem to me to qualify as European Kingdoms but then maybe I'm deficient in history on that point.  So I can't judge his interpretation on this point.  He sees Europe as represented by the feet of the statue, made of both iron and clay, which is pretty much shared by the Pretribution people.

There are two beasts described in Revelation 13.  The first beast rises up out of the sea and is clearly an amalgam of the beasts in Danie's vision, understood to represent the Roman empire and the Antichrist.  It is that same beast the Harlot Church sits on in Revelation 17.  The second beast that rises out of the Earth instead of the sea, has two little horns like a lamb but speaks like a dragon,  The SDA narrator makes the case that this is the United States of America.  

He makes a barely plausible logical case for this.  The US is certainly not the only Christian country.  After the Reformation the countries of Northern Europe declared themselves Christian.  So did the UK.  The claim that the country has to be in the western hemisphere is pretty weak.  He has to juggle words too often to be convincing it seems to me but I'm not sure there's much point in going into that.    

This beast with the horns of a lamb is understood in the Pretribulation framework to be the False Prophet who causes the world to worship the Antichrist.   

He's interpreted the wound of one of the heads of the first beast, described in Revelation 13,  to be Napoleon's  putting an end to papal power in 1798, but the interpretation I'm most familiar with has the Reformation dealing that wound, which makes a much better argument it seems to me.  Although Mussolini reinstated the civil power of the Vatican (I think the film identifies some other event as the healing of the wound but I forget what) and the Pope goes around acting like he's king of the world, he doesn't yet have anything like the power the Antichrist world leader is to have.   That would restore the Holy Roman Empire in essence on a worldwide scale with the Pope as head, and it's probably coming soon, after the Rapture of the Protestants and other true Christians. That wound is certainly going to be healed by the time the Tribulation is uunder way.  "All the world" is said to marvel at its recovery.  Prpbably the triggering event will be the Rapture after which the rise of the Pope to world leadership over the revived Church-State Roman Empire should be pretty speectabularly marvelous..

So now he goes on to clai that God's seal, which He put in the foreheads of the 144,000 of Revelation 7, is.... the Sabbath Day.  I didn't expect this study to be so aggressively Seventh-Day Adventist.  Ah well.   Oh yes and now he goes on to give quotes by various Roman Catholic leaders about how they changed Saturday to Sunday, and this is the mark of the beast.  But it wasn't the Catholic Church that called the early believers to assemble   on the Lord's Day, which is Sunday, the first day of the week, because the Catholic Church didn't yet exist.  It was a day of worship by the Church.  Acts 20:7 "when the Church came together to break bread."  Sunday is the Lord's Day, it is a mark of the true Church if anything because it is the day the Lord rose from the dead.  So, no, there is no Roman authority to change the Sabbath that is the Mark of the Beast.   The RCC claims they changed it but it was actually the practice of the Church from the time of the Apostles.  No, it was not started by  Constantine later.  

Whatever the Mark of the Beast is it will be soemthing that puts a person under the authority of the Roman Church, and it will cost those their lives who refuse to accept it.

Among other things he identifies Sunday as the day OF the Sun and sun worshippers.  But by the same logic Saturday is the day of Saturn, a planet often taken to represent Satan, which somehow he overlooked.   All the names of the days of the week refer to pagan gods or idols.

Well, that's enough of that.but I would add some thoughts about the role of the US in the last days.  I think he's stretching things a great deal to equate the US with the beast from the land with the horns of a lamb but he makes a good general point about that beast and he's right that the US has been changing for the worse in a direction that  unfortunately fits right in with the Antichrist world order.\

The beast with the horns of a lamb that speaks as a dragon suggests an apostate form of Christianity separate from that of the Roman Antichrist apostasy but of course since this fake lamb causes people to worship the Antichrist it's part of the system in that sense anyway.  

APOSTATE PROTESTANTISM

There's no doubt that plenty of Protestant churches have deteriorated into apostasy in the last century starting with the Liberal movement and now the Charismatic movement and the Emergent Church.  The acceptance of Social Justice and the BLM in some churches very recently is certainly part of it.  Many of them regard the Church of Rome as a Christian denomination.  I left a Charismatic parachurch organization because they prayed for the Pope as a Christian brother.  The Charismatic Movement in general embraces Romanism and there are Roman Catholic Charismatics who claim the gifts of the Spirit.  Some years ago I saw a video of some well known Charismatic Christian leaders visiting the Pope and even bowing down to him to kiss his ring.  Some of them may have been from denominations other than the charismatic churches but I don't remember.  In any case it's no small number of churches that have lost their way and accepted Rome.  

Then we have the depressing phenomenon of George Washington's rumored conversion to Catholicism on his deathbed and his deification in the painting in the rotunda of Congress, painted by a Catholic, a theme about as far as you can get from Protestant thinking.  And tanother depressing phenomenon in  George W Bush's saying he sees "God" in the Pope.  And then we have the Pope's visiting our Congress a few years ago at the invitation of Representatives Pelosi and Boehner who are Catholic.  Wish my memory were better because now I'm remembering that Ronald Reagan made some official move or other that increased the favor of the Pope with the US.  We have lots of Catholics on the conservative side of our politics and Protestants join with them on many political issues because of our shared commitment to such things as the pro-life movement among other conservative causes.  We have many conservative Catholics on the Supreme Court as well as in Congress.   According to Chris Pinto, President Trump is "surrounded by Jesuits."  We have many major universities that are run by Jesuits.  A few years ago one came out and suggested we do away with the Constitution.   I think I have a post on that somewhere either on this blog or the America blog.

In other words, although America started out as a Protestant nation and maintained that identity for over a hundred years since the founding, the fact is that there is an enormous influence of Catholicism in the nation now.  In America Catholics think more like Protestants, but as long as they acknowledge the Pope they represent an anti-Protestant mentality in the country.  The Jesuits of course are formally dedicated to the destruction of Protestantism and Protestant nations historically.  John Adams famously expressed dismay at the opening of nations to receive them again after they'd been banished, saying even that if any man deserved Hell it was Ignatius of Loyola who founded the order of the Jesuits.  And John  Adams was not an orthodox Christian, rather a Unitarian.  Nevertheless like the other nonChristian founders he shared in the general cultural Protestant Christian mindset.

I've also pointed out in a blog post here the revelations Chris Pinto put together in one of his documentaries showing the Catholic influence in the artchitecture of Washington DC.  Congress itself is housed in a replica of the basilica in Rome complete with obelisk in the form of the Washington monument.  The Antichrist himself embodied in plain sight.  Pinto also points out many Greco-Roman influences besides that.  All that apparently got built while nobody was paying attention or recognized the symbolism.  Satan already has his mark on America.  So what the SDA film narrator said about America's being the fake lamb of Revelation 13 may not be the correct reference but there is nevertheless reason to identify the US as eventually coming under the power of Rome in the end despite our strong Protestant origins.

BEAST WITH LAMB'S HORNS WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES?

I've found that beast with the lamb's horns to be quite a puzzle, maybe just haven't heard what MacArthur had to say about it, not sure, but as I was thinking about it a few days ago it hit me that since it must represent an apostate Christianity how about the World Council of Churches?  Aha!  I already posted what my greatnephew talked about in one of his videos, that the Pope and the WCC have been working together.   For the WCC to represent the False Prophet makes a lot of sense.  That's my candidate for the role now. 

All this leads me back to the Pretribulation Rapture scenario and the Great Tribulation.  I was listening to Jan Markell's recent radio shows where as usual they talk about how close it all is but speak of the Antichrist as yet an unkown figure to be revealed after the Rapture of the Church.  Prophecy Roundtable 8 – The Great Re-Set in Bible Prophecy - YouTube

I've veen taking the position of the Protestant Reformation and many of its precursors back to the declaration of the Bishop of Rome as Universal Bishop, that the Pope was revealed to be Antichrist upon that declaration, so his identity has been known for 1400 years already.  And the Restrainer that prevented his being revealed until that point had to have been Caesar, since the Pope in a sense replaced the Caesars and became the head of the revived Church-State Roman Empire embodied in the Roman Church.  The SDA film got a lot of that right in my opinion though they identified an earlier date and made other interpretations I can't agree with.  

A SECONDARY FULFILLMENT OF THE REVELATION OF THE ANTICHRIST AND THE RESTRAINER?

What I'd say now is that although he's been revealed, and I think today's churches are very much in error that they rejected the Reformers' identification of the Pope as the Antichrist, mevertje;ess there may be justification for their view in that he won't be revealed to the world until after the Rapture, and that means that the Church IS in some sense the Restrainer that must be taken out of the way for him to be revealed.  And it makes sense of course, that the true Christian Church would have to be "taken out of the way" because they'd object to the Pope's elevation over all Christiqanity.  

No doubt in my mind , however, that the Pope IS the Antichrist and will be the leader of the World Church-State of the Great Tribulation period.   

And now I'm thinking that the World Council of Churches or perhaps a particular leader of that body, will be the beast with the horns of a lamb, or the False Prophet who causes the world to worship the Pope.

It's going to look like a Christian world though it will be Satan running it all.  Perhaps the scenario envisioned by one of the pastors on Jan Markell's shosw that I link above will characterize its politics, as the most diabolical form of Communism will reign.

GREAT COURAGE OF THE SAINTS TO RESIST IT

And those who are to be saved during that period will have to recognize that the Church of the true Christ is not on the Earth and put their trust in the true Christ even though it will cost them their lives.  This is the "patience of the saints."  Jesus said that "He who would save his life will lose it, but he who will lose his life for My sake will find it" and in losing this earthly life will gain eternal life."   Those who refuse to worship the beast and to take his Mark will be put to death in numbers that will far overshadow those put to death by the Roman Church in the Middle Ages.

Ticking Off the Main Points Around Why Evolution Can't Happen

At some point way back when, it hit me that evolution -- meaning of course microevolution since there is no other kind --  proceeds by selection, and only by selection, not just what is formally known as Natural Selection, but all the ways that new phenotypes become characteristic of populations are really a form of selection.  By which I mean a portion of the gene pool is selected, most commonly by simple geographic separation, ideally isolated so that gene flow is prevented, and over some number of generations having to do with the number of its founders, it will develop a blended phenotype.  There's probably a name for it but i do't know the name, it's the look that develops from the set of gene/allele frequencies possessed by the founders of the population.  Yes in reality there is likely to be some continued or resumed gene flow and hybrid zones, because reality is messy, but the principle I'm getting at is most clearly illustrated where there is perfect reproductive isolation and only the members of the new population breed together.  \

\

That was certainly the case with the Pod Mrcaru lizards.  There were no other lizards on the island where they were released.  The ten founders were the sole source of the genes from which the population developed its own peculiar characteristics, the large head and jaws, and the digestive system to go with them.  

The point I keep making in relation to the validity of the Toe is that selection reduces genetic diversity.   It's the only way a new population with a new appearance can come about, even a new "species," but the only way you can get there is by losing genetically, which is hardly good news for the ToE.  You can't get it by adding anything.  All you get that way is individual changes, even a whole population of different individuals; but unless some of those individuals are selected and isolated you aren't getting evolution..  But the idea of evolution is the creation of new "species" and that means whole populations that are internally more or less homogeneous phenotypically, while differing distinctly from parent populations, and selection is how that comes about.  

Selection can be the mere emigration of a random portion of a population, a random selection of individuals, to a new location some distance from the parent population.  In fact I don't know why this isn't on that list of "mechanisms of evolution" at UC Berkeley's Evolution 101 website.  They've got migration, mutation, genetic drift and natural seletion.  Migration is the same as gene flow, and the migration is the rejoining of two populations.  It's rather an awkward concept that doesn't really say what it means.  And it's really migration OUT of a population to form a new daughter population that is the real "mechanism of evolution".  Well, genetic drift is another form of it, in which the isolaselection ahd isolation occur withihn a parent population without any movement outside of it but it's clearer to think of the movement out of the gene pool  Migration INTo a population isn't evolution.   If it all blends together you could call it evolution, but then what's happening is a form of selection, some alleles dominating others, even some possibly evently dying out of the population altogether.  It isn't evoljution until a gene pool is selected and inbred, and its own gene/allele frequencies are blended into a new group phenotypic appearance.  

Natural Selection as usually understood is probably very rare.  A familiar description is of the removal of a trait or set of traits by a predator, selecting a different set of traits to proliferate because it can survive the predation.  White moths survive against white bark because the birds can't see them, while mottled moths will be picked off leaving the white ones.  But against mottled bark the white ones are picked off and the mottled moths proliferate.   It isn't just the alleles for those characteristics that are affected of course, because it is individuals that are being picked off and individuals possess genes for all the creature's characteristics so that whatever mix they possess is also lost when the individual is lost.  After a number of generations of this change from white to mottled and maybe even back again, the whole gene pool should be genetically depleted, perhaps even approaching a condition similar to clones.  Natural Selection of this sort is genetically costly, and it leads to less ability to evolve, again just what the ToE does not need..  

Of course my arguiment is that any selection is genetically costly, and that eventually, through a number of popujlation splits that bring about the formation of new daughter populations. any creature could eventually reach a state of genetic depletion.  

THE FAST TRACK TO GENETIC DEPLETION IS BOTTLENECK

That state is of course best illustrated by the endangered species, cheetahs and elephant seals for instance.  Bottleneck is really just a drastic form of selection.  Some kinds of domestic breeding may have been as drastic.  The cheetah came through a natural bottleneck of some sort, in which their numbers were drastically reduced, and the elephant seal's bottleneck was brought about by human predation, hunters who nearly destroyed the whole species.  But when protected its few survivors were able to resttore their population to great numbers, despite their being geneticallyh depleted.  The cheetah has also survived and continued to reproduce but it's reprodictively compromised and remains endangered.  

In discusseions I've ahd about this it is usually denied that the genetic depletion brought about by bottlenecks has anything in common with the effects of less drastic selection as I talk about it.  The only difference I see is that bottleneck is a faster route to the same end.  A series of selections would ultimately lead to the same genetic condition.  It's always the trend though it may not become serious until a number of poulation splits have occurred.  The example I like to give is "ring species," in which new populations form from earlier  populations by moving into new geographic areas away from the parent population.  In the new location their collective set of gene/allele frequencies eventually bring about a new "species."  

(I put the word in quotes because "species" is such a vexed term.  It's simply the Greek word for "kind" and any distinctive population, parent, daughter etc., is a "kind."    

THE TERM "RACE"

By the way, I'm pretty sure I've seen the term "race" used to refer to creatures other than human beings but it's probably an older form that's no longer in favor and I'd have to look it up.  It had no controversial connotations originally, it was just a word for the subspecies that form new characteristics in isolation from a parent population.  A race of penguins perhaps?  A race of beetles?  I don't know.  Anyway now there is all this controversy and the claim that there is no such thing as race.  All that means is that the term has come into disrepute, because of racism, but its original use was perfectly objective.  Now we're just to say"population?"  That one is so generic it's meaningless.   I think the clearest terminology is "Species" and "subspecies."  Or if you insist on "Population," then also use "subpopulation."  Or "parent population" and "daughter population." 

The need is to be able to say clearly what group descended from what group.   However, none of this nomenclature is appropriate when talking about people.  People aren't animals though of course that's what the ToE says we are.  Referring to us as "species" really grates on me.   "Race" may be fraught with cultural problems but it's still the clearest term to designate the biological differences between people groups.  I guess you could use "tribe" in some contexts, but the point is to be able to point out the biological differences brought about by genetic isolation.   At least in discussions like this one.  Maybe happily it's not of much use otherwise. 

"SPECIES" TERMINOLOGICAL CONFUSION

 The nomenclature is always a problem,  If you talk about a "species" of penguin you muddy up the whole idea of what a species is in the Linnaean sense.  I dismantle some of the Linnaean system with my way of putting things together as it is.  Or maybe the idea is muddy to begin with.  I'm for designating Bird as a Species myself.  Because I think most likely all birds come from an original pair of birds, all of them from the ostrich to the penguin to the buzzard to the hawk to the starline.  They are morphologically the same creature, and probably genetically also.  If you can look at DNA and tell what creature it belongs to, Bird should be identifiable, as is dog as is Cat..   Some groups would take more thought.  Maybe  Rodent is a species as I'm talking about it because of shared morphology.   I'm looking for shared sharacteristics that belong only to a particular group.   I suppoe any group of characteristics I choose would be disputed, but I do have a very definite idea about it.  Getting it into words may be a problem though.   It's morphological distinctions I have in mid, that much I know.  A rodent always looks like a rodent, they all have a certain skeletal structure in common, they do not look like any other creature.  All cats share a skeletal structure, from the tiget to the lion to the mountain lion to the panther to the housecat.  And it is not shared by dogs, all of which have their own skeletal structure, from the chihuahua to the Great Dane, and also include wolves and foxes.  Seems to me these are the groupings that should be called Species.  If there is a way to identify the genome of each that would help.  Divisions of Species can then be called "subspecies."  

If every daughter population is called a "species" it  then gets used as evidence for evollution.  People still think microevolution is evolution or evidence of it.  That's why this argument that there is a natural limitation to evolution is important.  If the formationm of new populations with their own characteristic traits always occurs through the loss of genetic diversity,  as I'm arguing it does, then what is normally considered to be evolution, the production of such new phenotypes that get called "species" is contrary to the necessary condition for further evolution.  Once you've reached fixed loci for most genes in a subspecies you've reached a point beyond which further change is impossible.  The cheetah and the elephant seal serve as examples for that.  If mutation could restore their genetic diversity it would have by now.  But also if you restore genetic diversity you also lose the speices.  Breeders must know this as they've had to compromise on their desire to produce pure breeds in order to preserve an animal's health, so they breed back genetic diversity into their breeds trying not to destroy their essential characteristics.  But it's a compromise.  The pure breed is the desired end product, the breed with the most fixed genes, or homozygous genes, but that's the condition that produces the most health problems for the animal.  Which is the cheetah's problem.  In the cheetah's case it can't breed with any other cat so it's stuck unless a beneficial mutation comes along.  Dogs don't seem to have that problem, they can continute to breed with other dogs in any case, so at the cost of losing some of their purebred characteristics their health can be preserved or restored.  

SELECTION 

Domestic breeding of animals is an example of selection of course, Artifical Selection.  Darwin made use of his own experience of breeding pigeons as the selection of chosen traits to be bred, which can become the basis of a distinctive new creature, as the process or mechanism that must also happen in nature to explain the variety found there.  This he called Natural Selection.  His observation of the many varieties or "species" of finches is a famous one.  Also the Galapagos turtle.  his basic reasoning is still followed by biologists.  In the case of the finches he reasoned that their different beaks came about by their being limited to the kinds of food that a particular beak could best eat.  He observated that finches with different beaks ate different kinds of food and reasoned that the food selected the beak as it were, that is the food caused the finch to develop the kind of beak needed to eat it.

NATURAL SELECTION BY ENVIRONMENTAL PRESSURE...

This same kind of reasoning is used to explain the Pod Mrcaru lizards.  It is reasoned that their larger head and jaws and tougher digestive systems evolved to adapat to the tougher kinds of food in their new island home.  The lixards that could eat the tougher food would have the better chance of survival and reproduction and so would pass on their genes and that's how the new population developed.

...VERSUS RANDOM SELECTION

That's pretty much classical Darwinism but I don't think that's how it happens in reality.  I think that the new gene frequencies shared among the founding ten individuals simply brought out the larger head and jaw because they just happened to occur in higher frequenciy than the alleles for the original sized head and jaw,.  The new traits worked their way through the entire population over some number of generations until they characterized the entire population.  The people who had released them originally came back to check on then thirty years later and were very surprised to find the whole population so changed in such a short period of time by evolutionary standards.   Evolution supposedly takes millions of years.  That's what is supposedly shown in the fossil record.  But instead of the food's dictating the evolution of the head and haw, it seems more likely to me that the head and jaw came first, the simple repeated recombination of a limited set of allele frequencies shared among the ten founders.  The genetic changes then led the lizards to food that their new heavier jaws could now easily eat  It wasn't that the food they'd eaten when they were part of the parent poulation back on the mainland wasn't available on the island, it's that their new heavier head and jaws could now handle the tougher food, so they gravitated to it.

I think that's what happened with Darwin's finches also.   The finches split into spearate populations and became reproductively isolated from each other and  each split would produce a new daughter population from a few individuals which together possessed a new set ofgene/allele frequencies that would produce a new style of beak.  That beak would enable the bird to eat a particular kind of food.  There are beaks that are suited to digging insects out of tree bark, beaks that can crunch hard nuts or something like that, beaks that do best with soft berries.  I don't know what all the range of beaks and food is but I know there are a lot of different beaks in the finch species and that they define the sort of food each subspecies prefers.  Again, instead of this being the food's calling the shots and the bird having to adapt, I think it efar more likely that the beaks developed from the splitting of the population determine the food eaten.  Again, this is a random selection of a particular, usually smaller, set of individuals that share a new set of gene/allele frequencies that eventually blend together to give the new population a characteristic kind of beak, and proably other traits as well but it's the beak in focus at the moment.  It's the beak that adapts them to a particular kind of food.    It's selection but it's selection brought about by normal sexual recombination within a randomly selected pool of gene frequencies that bring out a type of beak/  As tje mew population continues to breed together in isolation from other finches, their shared genetic material produces the ultimate character of the whole population over time,   The new beak selects the food it is best adapted to.  The environment, the food, does not do the selecting.  The classical case that requires the animal to adapt to the environment occurs occasionally, such as in the example of the black and white moths, and the black and tan pocket mice, but it must be very rare.   

Ring Species illustrate the principle I'm getting at.  This is a series of populations of a particular species that develop as daughter populations each from the previous population, that happen to form around a geographic barrier of some kind until there are many subpopulations of this one species, and each differs from all the others.  If I'm right, the farther you go around the ring in the direction the animals went, the less genetic diversity you should find along with the phenotypic changes you also find from population to population.  It ought to be detectable by analyzing the DNA.  The genetic direction should be to more fixed genes which means less genetic diversity as alleles drop out of the population.  And in some cases perhaps, more dramatic phenotypic characteristics will also be the case.  Maybe.  Because new combinations of alleles can bring out all kinds of interesting variations.   Chipmunks around the Sierra Nevada mountains, salamanders around a California valley, seagulls around the north Atlantic, greenish warblers in northern Europe -- not sure what the barrier is there.   Such a series of populations formed from other populations is particularly evident when there is such a barrier around which they can form, but they also illustrate the principle of how creatures change simply from geographic separation.    The idea that the new population changes in response to the new environment really doesn't hold up when there's nothing particularly different about each new environment from the others.   The changes are driven by genetics as an emigrating set of individuals  takes part of a gene pool to a new location.  I really think this must be the most common way new subspecies develop.  It's a lot more benign than the scenario of the struggle for survival pictured by the ToE where the creature most fitted to a given environment survives and reproduces in greatest numbers while others less well fitted eventually disappear.   Even in this challenging fallen world competition isn't as bloody as the AToE pictures it.

I've used the Wildebeest as an example.  It has two or three populations that differ from ne another.  The main or largest population is more or less brown, one of the others is called "blue" to describe its hide, and it's smaller and I think has different shaped antlers.  This is the kind of thing that would happen if a few of the brown ones just wantered off and got lost and started their own daughter population.  Their new set of gene frequencies in this case brought out the blue hide and the size difrence and the antler difference from the original

There is also the example of the Jutland cattle which I don't remember very well, but the idea is that a large herd split into four isolated smaller herd that in isolation each developed  their own distinctive peculiarities over a matter of years just from the new pool of gene/ allele frequencies possess among the original founders of each separate population.  That's just another illustration of my point, that variation even to the creation of new "species" or really subspecies, is simply a matter of the reproductive isolation of a portion of a gene pool.  No dramatic reason for it, no predator, no scarcity of food, no hostile environment, just reproductive isolation of a new set of gene/allele frequencies.   Period.

If we just notice the variety of types of human beings that have formed tribes in isolation from each other all over the world we see the same genetic situation there too.  Each group over some number of generations develops its own distincive appearance unlike any of the other groups.  Biblically it's how we got all the races of human beings.   There is something called the Table of Nations based on the geneaologies of Noah's family given in scripture, that outlines how the Noah's descendants spread out around the world some years after the landing of the ark in the Middle East.   The children of Japheth went  North into Russia and west into Europe, the children of Shem spread around the Middle East and possibly to Asia, the children of Ham went into Africa.  I'm not sure which group went to India and Asia.   But the point is that each group developed its own characteristic population identity over time simply by blending its own gene/allele frequencies.  

AND EACH DAUGHTER POPULATION IS GOING TO HAVE SOME DEGREE OF REDUCTION OF GENETIC DIVERSITY.  THAT'S HOW NEW PHENOTYPES, SPECIES, DEVELOP.  THAT'S HOW YOU GET NEW BREEDS, YOU LOSE THE GENETIC MATERIAL FOR OTHER BREEDS.  

Same principle of geographic migration and isolation would have brought about all the various subspecies of every animal that had been on the ark too,.

BOTTLENECK DOES THE SAME THING, ONLY FASTER

And speaking of the ark it always comes up in discussions that such a drastic bottleneck sas the Flood, in which only eight human beings and a pair or seven animals were all that survived, hould have made all such further changes impossible.  It took me a while to think all this through.  At first I thought there must have been an enomrously bigger genome in the original species, indlucing humans, but then I reread a creationist book, drat I may not be able to remember the title or the author, I hope it comes back to me.  Anyway they presented a hypothetical Mendel's square from light AA to aa to dark BB to bb  show how ordinary genetics could explain how all the different skin colors found across all humanity could have been possessed by our original parents Adam and Eve.  Since it isn't all just light and dark but also shades of color they could also have had other genes for skin color.  Many genes for one trait is quite common.  Anyway I saw from that presentation how very possible skin tone could derive from a single genome.  So I didn't have to imagine any special kind of genome after all, just a genome that had a full complement of genetic possibilities, meaning no junk DNA for instance.  

HOMOZYGOSITY

This is the crux of the whole situation I'm talking about.  each of us may have homozygous genes for some trait or another.  I have homozygous bb for blue eyes, someone else may have homozygous BB for brown eyes, and many will have the heterozygous Bb which is also brown because the B is dominant.  Perfectly common way the alleles get distributed among people.  Or animals.  But what has happoened with the endangered cheetah is that it has so many homozygous genes for its salient traits it can'[t breed with any other kind of cat.   Same with purebred animals, at least those bred in the days before the dangers to health of the animal through the drastic method of breeding for a given trait or set of traits.  Purebreds were defined as having a great many fixed loci or fixed genes or homozygous genes for the desired traits.  This wouldn't be a problem in the original Created world but it is a problem in our fallen world.  In any case homozygosity is how traits get fixed in a population.  And homozygosity is the result of bottlenecks.   That is why the question comes up about the ark since the Flood certainly created genetic bottlenecks for all living things.

It may have been working through that Mendel's square for skin color based on the book -- Creation  Science I think now though I still can't remember its author --  I began to realize that although greater homozygosity would of course be the result of a bottleneck, back at the   -- oh I remember now.  That book said that we now have something like 7% heterozygoisty so that a bottlneck now would esily reduce genetic diversity to the drastic level of tghe cheetah.  But in the days of the ark, all the creatures saved would have had much greater genetic diversity than any creature has now.  Every gene in the original parents at the Creation would have been heterozygous, and hopmozygosity would develop through sexual recombination in individuals.  On the ark there would still have been a great percentagle of heterozygosity left in each creature so that further variation was possible.  that's how they could have been the progenitors of every variety of living things we see today.  They would not have had the enormous genetic diversity of the original parents but they would still have had enough for the variation that occurred when they all spread out after the FLood.  I don't know how much.  30%?  70%?  Wild guessing.  But a lot more than we have now.  

THEREFORE, although the Flood bottleneck would have led to much reduced genetic diversity, meaning much more homozygosity, it wouldn't even be particularly noticeable since great variation would have continued for each Species.  

Not sure how this works exactly, but my guess is that mutations destroying homomzygous genes that then spread through a population could be a big contributor to the death of genes or Junk DNA.

JUNK DNA

Yes I think Junk DNA IS junk, genes that have died, representing characterestics no longer possessed by the organism, including the loss of things like the appendix and other "vestigial" organs, but also no doubt hundreds or even thousands of capacities and traits we can't even imagine.  Capacities once possessed that have been lost over the millennia because of the Fall that introduced death and disease into the world, many no doubt lost in the Flood.  Mutations are probably the biggest cause now. I think  of mutations as a disease process due to the Fall.  Anything that is a ':mistake" which is how mutation is described, has to be the product of the Fall.  If mutations occasionally produce something new and viable, that's just because it hit on a particular chemical sequence, probably one that had been lost before anyway, nothing really new.  

SPECIATION

This idea is ridiculously bogus.  The idea is that a subspecies branches off a parent population and becomes unable to breed with that population and this makes it a new Species.   My guess is that if you analyzed the DNA of these new "Species" you'd find that they have many fixed genes and are low on genetic diversity compared to the parent population.  In other words they are just another isolated race or variety or breed of that population or Species that has formed in isolation from others of its kind.  It may not be as genetically depleted as the cheetah or the elephant seal but my guess is it has to be genetically reduced.  The term "speciation" implies something from which further evolution could be launched, it implies a point at which one Species can become another Species, according to the ToE, but genetically it can't happen.  If it hasn't reached an absolute end ot its ability to vary further it hasat least reached a poitn of less ability to produce variations, far from the expectation generated by the term "speciation " as defined in the context of the ToE/.  

SOME IMPLICATIONS OF WHAT I AM ARGUING HERE:

• Species were originally created separately.  What  creationists call Kinds in an attempt to distinguish them from the Species of the ToE   My provisional definition of a Species iw first of all morphological identity, which I would have to spell out eventually for each Species, and secondly genetic.  I assume each is definable by its shared genome, but what that looks like I don't know.  Since geneticists and biologists think in evolutionary terms they aren't looking for what I'd be looking for.
• Each Species was created with a genome unto itself, with perfect DNA that always replicated without making any mistakes in copying, no junk DNA, every gene functional for some important purpose of creative variation or protection, health, strength etc. 
• If there had been no Fall every living thing would have been immortal and disease-free, and reproduction would produce endless new varieties or subspecies, while the original parents continued alongside them, never dying.
• The original genome of each individual Species possessed by the original parents, contained the possibility of an enormous number of variations, every kind of every Species we see now and some uncountable number of others that either died or never got born. 
• Those others went extinct or never could exist because so many possible allele combinations died out, certainly many subspecies died in the Flood.  Maybe even whole Species.  Well, the Trilobites are one of those.  
• In this fallen world of disease and death  none of the original parents of any Species is still alive, nor any of those preserved on the ark, nor any of the generations up to present time.  So that when a particular line of variation/microevolution is pursued out to its limits it is vulnerable to disease and extinction, whereas in theoriginal Creeated world before the Fall it would reach that genetic limit without any threat.  Thousands and thousands of such lines of variation could be generated from any original set of parents, just because God loves variety I would have to suppose.   Perhaps we'd have automatically colonized all the other planets if we ran out of room.  They would not have been dead planets as they are now.
• .

SUMMATION OF THE ARGUMENT

• Evolution, meaning any kind of phenotypic variation at the population level, is powered by selection and no other "mechanism"
• Selection means the isolation of a portion of a population either randomly or by intention or necessity, either by separation from the parent population or within it (which is Genetic Drift)
• Selection always trends to the reduction of genetic diversity, and at the extremes to genetic depletion
• This reduction means the increase of homozygous genes in the population as alleles for competing traits are ultimately eliminated and those for the selected traits become fixed
• Selection can be immediate or drastic as in bottleneck and founder effect or a slow accumulation over many population splits
• The Theory of Evolution assumes an endless ability for a Species to continue to vary, even to the eventual formation of an entirely new Species, even by Natural Selection, but this is impossible.  Selection reduces genetic diversity even to the point of genetic depletion which makes further evolution impossible.  The very mechanism that brings aqbout the phenotypic changes taken for evidence of cpmtinuous evolution actually make it impossible.  Evolution defeats Evolution.
• Any addition of genetic material into a populatoin interferes with the formation of a daughter population or new species or subspecies, such as gene floow between the parent and evolving population or mutation  There is no evolution where there is addition.  Gene flow is just the reintroctuion of formerly reduced or eliminated alleles.  Mutation may or may not add something that's actually new.  But both interfere with the process of evolution because that cess requires eproductive isolation.   Even the formation of hybrid populations only happens with selection and isolation of the reintroduced alleles.   If the isolation isn't perfect you may still get soe population change but imperfect population homogeneity
• Mutation is often made to bear a burden it can't really bear.  It is assumed to be the source of all functioning genetic material, the engine that drove the formation of DNA in the first place.   It's assumed, it can't be proved because it can't happen in reality.  Mutation is a destructive event, a mistake.  It destroys a perfectly functional allele to replace it with another, and the new one is usually either deleterious or "neutral," meaning doesn't change the product although it changes the chemical sequence of the original functioning allele to no good purpose.   Very very rarely it has a "benetificial" result in that it produces a new function. First, all it an do is produce a new form of whatever the gene does.  If it governs fur color it will produce a fur color, apparently a new one.  It can't change what the gene does.   And it brings about this change in function by destroying what was porbably the perfectly viable functioning allele  it replaced.  And it probably isn't new, it is probably just the reemergence of a formerly lost function by the accidental fortuitous recreation of a chemical sequence that had been lost at some time in the history of the species.  And then it has to be selected in order to spread in the population and replace the function it displaced at the the population level.   Such a messy business cannot possibly be how DNA came about in the first place.  This ought to be obvious.
• So all the variety we see in Nature is brought about by the variability of genes built into the genome of each Species.  It can't vary anything but what is already programmed into each gene,   And as new traits get established the alleles for those traits become fixed and the competing alleles drop out, which is the reduction of genetic diversity that fuels the phenotypic change.  It is essential to phenotypic change.  You don't get that population level change that gets called a new species unless it occurs.    Resumed gene flow could in many cases bring them back but then you lose the character of the Species that was supposed to be the evidence of evolution.   

Yes I know I keep repeating myself, though I hope I do it with enough variety of expression to overcome some of the resistance.  I'm trying to unseat an entrenched paradigm and the resistance to such efforts is often insurmountable even if mostly a matter of completely irrational devotion rather than an attempt to grasp the reasoning against it.

Beyond this argument there is also the geological argument about the absurdity of identifying a discrete horizontal slab of sedimentary rock with a unit of geological time in which supposedly unique events occurred as the fossils of a unique set of living things appear in this rock, while a different unique set of living things appear in a different kind of sedimentary rock above and below it.   tje cpmtact betweem tje tpw rpcls os pftem razpr sjar[ amd straight which suggests something other than a time period but the equation nevertheless persists.  If only the fossils of reptiles whow up in one layer and only the fossils of mammals show up in the compoletely diferent rock above it this is taken for evolution from the reptile to the mammal.  I don't know how the absurdity of this is lost on the scientists who accept it.    And of course there's a lot more to say about this but this post is already too long.

==============================================================

Sometimes people talk about "cultural evolution" as if it exists and has something in common with Darwinian theory.  I don't get it.   Just noting it for now.

I know I shouldn't come back and add to posts later but an afterthought so often just needs to fit into what I've a;readu written.  So i apologize but later versions of this may be different in some ways, mostly new elaborations..  

  I'll try at least to come back and correct typos and my horrific run-on sentences. 

Lockdown Blues sort of

 When the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?    The righteous these days are silenced.  Oh you can hear them if you want to but you have to know who they are and that's already an obstacle, and you have to go out of your way to hear them.  What hits you in the face every minute is the lies.  And unfortunatley a lot of people believe them.  

 I feel helpless, I AM helpless or at least I don't know what to do if I had the means to do it..   I watch the conservative films at Amazon but the people who need to watch them don't.  D'Souza's Trump Card, Curtis Bowers' Agenda, both films, The Plot  Against the President that just came out.   They play in the echo chamber.   

And every day I hear the latest COVID statistics and the vaccine promises that don't tell you about the side effects, and the impression is created that the hundreds of thousands that are dying are inevitable, not a word to the contrary when I know, and I know others know, that HCQ could have saved every last one of them if they'd received it in time.  Zelenko Protocol, you can find it at Eleftherios Gkioulekas Zelenko but it may go poof on you as it did on me though I found it again.  And Simone Gold   I've posted some interviews with her.  Del Bigree also did one I haven't linked.  Harvey Risch.  Knoweldgeable honest people who are being silenced.  But there must be many others.  Why aren't we hearing from them?   This is murder.  I'm happy to know that the suppressors are going to face God for it some day, and so are those who are silenced by their own cowardice.

Totalitarian control by the Left has been brewing for quite a long time but I guess we didn't expect it to appear so suddenly, so effectively shutting us all up so completely.   All the right things are said by some, you can find them, but that's all, they are said and nothing happens, and of course they are said only into the echo chamber, outside of which the lies prevail.

I don't think I've ever looked forward to death as I do now.  I'm useless here, there's no reason to stick around, the alternative is a better life in a better world in the presence of Jesus.  I'm grateful I have that faith because so many others don't, and they won't let me give it to them either.  I'd prefer to go in the Rapture.  My own personal death, even if I die happy, probably won't persuade anyone, but the Rapture might.  Of course that will be twisted by lies too.  

Evolution Proven To Be Impossible.

We are now in essence a banana republic as they are called, complete with bogus "President Elect" who is not legally President Elect but is called that by our corrupt media and the whole corrupt leftist gang, who continue to force their views on the rest of us, yes, even to the point of election fraud which very probably replaced enough Trump votes with enough Biden votes to steal the election.  We might have a chance to save ourselves from this destruction of our great American system except for the fact that there are among other things all too many nonleftists who think Donald Trump is a fascist or something other than the effective defender of true American values his supporters know him to be.  Thus are we likely lost.  Doomed.  No more America.  Well I knew it was coming years ago, why make a fuss about it when it's finally come?  We tried.   They were smarter.  

So I'm trying to ignore it all, there being nothing I can do about it, and have been entertaining myself with such pastimes as rereading the UC Berkeley web pages they call Evolution 101.  

There is one subject that is particularly relevant for my purposes, the "mechanisms of evolution," also called there "mechanisms of change" and "mechanisms of microevolution."  The same four "mechanisms" are listed for each designation.

They are Mutation, Migration, Genetic Drift and Natural Selection.  As I recall, when I read this site some fifteen or so years ago now-- it's changed some since then but this concept is pretty much the same -- it was this part of it that contributed most to launching me toward the thoughts I've been elaborating ever since.  I think the first post I wrote on the subject at EvC was titled something like "Natural Limitations to the Processes of Evolution"  I've been blocked from EvC so I can't go find out for sure.  I'd read up on some population genetics and spent some time thinking through the genetics involved in breeding programs, mainly dogs.  

So, Mutation, Migration, Genetic Drift and Natural Selection are given as the "Mechanisms" of the biological changes that are mistaken for evidence of the ToE.

 These four "mechanisms" are not very similar to each other.  Mutation hapopens at the genetic level, producing a new sequence for better or worse, Migration is the movement of individual animals from one place to another, Genetic Drift is the consequence of random selection of traits/genetic material that creates a subpopulation within a larger population, and Natural Selection is one of the ways a trait and its genetic substrate is favored in reproduction which results in the creation of a new gene pool, or supposedly ultimately a new species.   

What I noticed back then was that that Mutation and Migration add to the genetic pool while Natural Selection subtracts from it and Genetic Drift is one of many possible effects of a subtractive process.  I already thought of natural selection as a subtractive process because I'd been thinking about domestic breeding and how it's all about preeserving chosen traits from contamination by alien genes.   In other words nothing is ever added, all alien or unwanted traits are eliminated -- that's the subtraction -- and the whole idea is to pare down the genetic stuff to as many fixed alleles as possible, which is what creates the breed you want.

After having thought about this for so many years it's hard for me to understand why it isn't obvious that getting new phenotypes in nature has to follow the same path as getting them in domestic breeding:  in selecting a trait or set of traits you are eliminating all competing traits, and this means you are reducing the genetic variability in the new population.  And reducing genetic variability means you are reducing its opportunities for further phenotypic change.  If the genetic variation is quite high to begin with, continued development of new phenotypes can go on occurring for some time, even the formation of daughter populations with their own different phenotypic presentation, but the trend is always toward the reduction of genetic variability.  This fact absolutely defeats the ToE but it's utterly ignored.  Even when reduced genetic variability is recognized its implications for the ToE never enter the discussion.

So I discovered that such things have been discussed in population genetics circles but always with the idea of which phenomenon being considered has most to do with furthering evolution.  

I've always struggled with why Genetic Drift is taken so seriously.  I don't get it.  It's just one version of the processes that bring about a new population phenotype or its gene pool.  In other words it's just a version of the subtraction of traits and their alleles or genetic material of whatever  kind, in order that others come to expression, the old having disappeared.  It's always emphasized that genetic drift is random, as if this distinguishes it from other ways populations change.  The only method that could be considered not to be random is Natural Selection but the effect is the same.  A trait is eliminated, others favored and the allele for the rejected trait disappears from the population.  Subtraction.  The alleles for the selected trait or traits increase in number but nothing new has been added.  All that has happened is that one or some have been lost.  Subtraction.  Loss of genetic diversity.

Migration is just the REconnection of one population with another that had split at some time in the past.  During their separation new genetic combinations would have emerged, bringing out new phenotypes so that it looks like they are something new and different.  What keeps getting overlooked is that you can get dramatic differences in appearance just from inbreeding a new set of gene/allele frequencies in reproductive isolation.  Quite dramatic.  But the point here is that you get them because of the elimination, subtraction, of other forms of the traits involved.  

The ToE seems to be talked about as if there were endless genetic possibilities for change.  But if the phenotypic changes that suggest evolution in the first place turn out to be the product of eliminating genetic material the opposite from the usual expectation is the reality.

Mutation is like migration or gene flow except that it actually does bring something new into the genetic picture.  Usual a bad something or a neutral something.  But for it to be part of the population phenotype it has to be selected and all its competitors eliminated.  There's always going to be subtraction meaning always a loss of genetic diversity when you get new phenotypes.  

This is true even at the individual level.  Sexual reproducion is the process by which traits for the offspring are selected, quite randomly, all other possible traits possessed by the parents eliminated from the chosen genetic collection.  That's the formula.  It's elimination or loss that brings out the new traits.  

In one of the Attenborough films I watched recently there was footage of him as a younger man meeting an isolated tribe somewhere like Borneo or Irian Jaya, I don't remember.  Every time you see such a tribe of people who have been isolated for a very long time you can't fail to notice how strikingly distinct they are as a population, very similar to each other, clearly all of the same family, but identifiable as a group.  That's what a race is, just a population that has developed its own identifying traits in isolation over time.

That's how the ten lizards loosed on Pod Mrcaru developed their characteristic huge head and jaws over the thirty years they were left alone there.  they started out with normal sized heads and jaws like their parent population and all it took was their reproductive isolation over somenumber of genertations to bring out the traits they now all shared.  Breeding only among themsleves their own peculiar set of gene frequencies got recombined and passed on over and over again down the generations without the input of genes from the original population they'd come from.

There is no exception to this.  Evolution is impossible because of how genetics works.  Certainly there are lots more examples to be explored and lots more angles on the question that are also fun to pursue, but I dare claim that this is the rock bottom definitive falsification of the ToE.   Tty all the chess moves you can think of, if you're smart enough and honest enough you have to come to this same conclusion.

Thanks to God in Anticipation of the Day Dedicated to that Purpose

There are lots of things for me to be grateul for.  I'm taken care of, I'm free of major worries about my family and my own wellbeing, as well as having writing projects I enjoy enormously, and much more.  

But I have to say that the way things have been going politically I'm seeing the destruction of America looming, and while I know that God's judgments are for the good in the end as is everything else He does, it's nevertheless sad that it's come to this.    How it affects me personally is not my concern, I'll probably do fine as far as that goes, but the loss of America is enormously sad.   And the corruption that has been growing adds to my melancholy.

All of which this year makes it my most fervent gratitude that this world is not my true home and that eventually I'll live in a perfect world where truth and honesty and true love of God and neighbor reign.  I'm SO grateful I have that to look forward to, and above all that I've had the highest privilege a human being can have, of believing in God and the truth of His Word and salvation through Christ Jesus. 

Back to Evolution: It's SO wrong and I've proved it but so far to deaf ears

  Been watching more films than usual these days.   Could write opinions on a few of them but for the moment I'm most interested in David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet.

His films do a nice job of nature photography, especially capturing animal behavior, always fun to watch.   But of course he's big on evolutionary theory, explains everything in those terms, and is concerned about the human impact on the planet.  He's convincing about the consequences of some thoughtless human actions such as the wanton destruction of rain forest and the poaching of animals in Africa, and the need to take measures to correct these things.  I'm all for whatever can be done rationally in that direction that takes care of both man and environment, and that is also Attenborough's aim.  

But what exercises me the most is the question of global warming and human contribution to it.   It is demonstrable that the planet is warming, just from the melting of the Arctic ice, the disappearance of glaciers for instance.  The controversy is over how much is contributed by human activity.  

If you are convinced of evolutionary theory you will be thinking in terms of vast aeons of time.  If the last ice age started about 2.6 million years ago, the timing accoding to current scientific theory,  you think of an enormously slow process of freezing and warming, you also think of there having been many ice ages so that when this one is over another one will begin, on that very slow schedule.   

The last ice age, according to science, ended 11,700 years ago, warming ever since apparently, although they also say the planet is considered to be still in that ice age.   Which I suppose must mean the warming trend isn't over yet?:  I don't know -- reading is hard on my eyes so I tried to get the gist and not spend more time on it --  but with the Arctic ice melting it must be close to ending.

 https://www.livescience.com/40311-pleistocene-epoch.html#:~:text=The%20Pleistocene%20Epoch%20is%20typically,parts%20of%20the%20planet%20Earth. 

However, it's interesting that the 11,700 years of warming is at least in the time frame ballpark of the biblical framework I think is the real timing.  It's not the usual millions of years   On biblical time the Flood was roughly 4500 years ago, a little less I think, and that would have to be the event that brought on the ice age.  I think in terms of the way an airconditioner works, by evacuating heat, and there are many events associated with the Flood that would generate heat s well as evacuate it, including of course the splitting apart of the continents which must have happened around that time, which I've argued quite a bit at EvC Forum.  

Only one ice age, somehow precipitated by the Flood, or by the climatic catastrophe of which the Flood was a part.  There is evidence of glaciation that came pretty far soueeth, covering much of North America for instance, though something I read put the southernmost extent of the ice as far south as northern South America a few degrees above the Equator.  Since it would have occurred after the Flood there would have been no human beings in the western hemisphere.  I'm not sure how long it took the descendants of Noah to spread out over the world, but even to spread from their landing place in the Middle East into Europe and Eastern Asia and Africa would likely have taken hundreds of years at least.  (No, humanity did not originate in Africa.  The African races or tribes are descended from Noah just like all the rest of humanity).

There is no reason to dispute the physical observations of global warming, only the timing.   What science thinks took billions or years, on biblical time only took thousands.  Sure it's laughable, but only because we're so used to thinking in terms of such vast stretches of time.  It certainly made me laugh when I first encountered the biblical timing.   Now I just automatically think in those terms.  

SO.  The ice age has been retreating for a few thousand years, the planet has been warming up for that length of time.  We know the glaciers have been retreating, there's evidence of how far they went and they aren't there now, so why is there such a big panic about its all finally retreating to the point that even the Arctic is melting?  AND of course, what is the necessity of imputing that event to human activity?  It was going to come to that point anyway, and while eleven thousand isn't four thousand it's not the huge time frame of millions in this case, it's computable on a human scale.  

If there is some contribution of human activity to the process, some argue that it's very minor, a matter of two or three percent of the total effect.   Stopping human activity is not the solution although we certainly need solutions, and if we had a biblical perspective we would have been thinking in those terms for a long time already how to mitigate the destructive effects of the warming trend.  If we were rational we would be thinking this way I mean.  Stopping SOME human activity of course, such as cutting down rainforests and doing whatever we can to replenish them and even grow a few more in other places, planning agricultural development around them, making use of new technologies that reduce the space required for agriculture, as Attenborough points out is now possible.  That sort of thing,  (Getting the Africans to stop poaching is another rhing.)

A biblical perspective would of course also tell us that this world is destined to end, and probably fairly soon too.   Doing what we can to improve its habitability for people as well as other living things is the right thing to do in any case for as long as we have left   -- that is certainly within the responsibility God gave us back in Eden before the Fall -- but it will come to an end anyway.  Because the whole thing is about human sin, meaing disobedience to God's commandments.  Think "Karma" if you can't wrap your head (or your prejudices anyway) around the idea of God's Law.  Karma is a very flawed intuition of God's Law by fallen human beings, but it's the same basic idea:  misbehavior brings negative consequences, only the Bible puts those consequences on a global as well as personal scale.  That's what brought death and disease and suffering of every kind into the originally perfect Creation, that's what brought on the Flood that destroyed most of life and the physical Creation as well, and it's human sin that brings on all forms of God's judgment, which must certainly have increased in the west since the sixties.  Very few of us think in such terms unfortunately, even Christians although it's the reason the Son of God became a man to live and die for us so we can be saved from our debt to God's Law    On the national scale, the blood of aborted babies cries out for God's vengeance, just as the blood of Abel did, but on we go committing murder anyway, and every other kind of sin.  Because as fallen creatures we are blind to God and the spiritual underpinnings of reality.

===============================================

While I'm at it I feel like sketching out my usual arguments against the Theory of Evolution.   The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection was Darwin's title for his theory and although it's changed in some ways the basic theory remains mostly intact.  They still don't seem to have discovered that Natural Selection CAN'T be the means of evolution from one Species to another, because selection subtracts genetic material in order to bring out the new traits/phenotypes that are considered to be the evolution that results. 

Darwin didn't have the benefit of the science of genetics in his day but he did have a lot of experience with breeding, pigeons mostly, or Artificial Selection, which is what led him to his formulation of Natural Selection:  by selecting traits he could create some dramatic new species of pigeons, so it made sense that Nature must do the same thing to bring about all the variety we see there.  

Even his experience of breeding pigeons could have shown him that to get his elaborate new breeds required the loss of other traits than those he selected.  There is a cognitive trick involved here that is easy to fall for.  You are getting something new, a pigeon with enormous tail feathers perhaps, or with an enormously puffed-out chest,  but you get it not by adding anything but by removing everything that doesn't contribute to that chosen trait.   Since you are selecting FOR the trait you may not be aware that it requires losing all competing forms of that feature to bring it about.  

Genetically this is what happens too.  A pure breed is sometimes defined as having reached the condition of fixed genes for all its main characteristics, or "fixed loci"  or homozygosity for those traits.    This is because competing alleles for each gene have been eliminated from the breeding pool by selection and the selected alleles then reproduced over many generations.  Or not as many generations in the case of a very small founding population.   

A small number of cattle originally taken from a wild herd would first produce scattered observable individual differences that had been present in the original population but barely noticeable there.  It would take the inbreeding of the particular genes in the daughter population to bring such traits to the point where they can be clearly seen.   (Another way of saying this is that the daughter population has a new set of gene frequencies from that of the parent population and over time they bring out new phenotypes that disitnguishes it from the original wild herd)  These new phenotypes now come to the fore in a few generations because there are fewer mating choices in this smaller population,  

As the herd continues in domestication it grows in population and continues to elaborate and develop an emerging phenotype.  It contains only the genes selected in the original isolation from the wild herd, and as long as the domesticated herd continues in reproductive isolation it will be those and only thoe genes that will contribute to the herd phenotype that will develop over time.  It will go through many changes in individual animals through many generations until eventually a characteristic herd phenotype should emerge.  This requires reproductive isolation so that only those original selected genes contribute to the herd phenotype.    The population could grow very large and continue to display its own characteristics that distinguish it from the original wild herd.  Of course animals will be sold and the population diminshed and the genetic component will lose some genetic material that way but if the growing herd is large enough such losses may not make much difference.  The owner of the herd may also decide to breed chosen individuals for reasons of his own.  In any case we know there are hundreds of different cattle breeds that have become purebreds over some number of generations, all most likely from the same original wild stock, all differeing from that original wild herd -- AND from other herds that were also taken from it  

This is because the domestic herd does NOT have the OTHER genes, it has only those of its own set of gene frequencies shared within its own population, that produce its own particular phenotype.    It has LESS ability to evolve than the original herd did, not more, and ultimately this means evolution  is limited and at the extremes will become impossible.  So, far from being the means of evolution from species to species, Natural Selection actually makes evolution impossible beyond the built-in genetic material of the species genome.   Evolution defeats evolution.  Meaning the phenotypic variations that selection and isolation bring about reduce genetic diversity within the selected population and such reduction is contrary to what would be required if the ToE were true.

Everybody always wants to add in mutations at this point as if that would defeat my argument.  But all mutations do is what any genetic addition does -- it interferes with the reproductive isolation that brings about new phenotypes.  Any kind of addition such as resumed gene flow between populationjs will have the same effect.  Supposedly a mutation would bring about something truly new but this is unlikely.  All it can do is change the trait coded by a particular allele, and it will only vary whatever that gene already does.  If it's eye color it will change the eye color, it can't do anything else.  If it's fur texture it will change the fur texture, it can't do anything else.  And if you do get a viable mutation that also gets selected, for it to become characteristic of the population requires that it continue to be selected and reproduced and the same genetic situation of loss of genetic diversity is the result in any case.  So you get a new eye color.  That's about it.  And my guess would be it's not new anyway, it's probably only the reemergence of an eye color that was lost to the species a long time ago.  Genes are just strings of chemicals.  

I always forget how long it takes to make any part of this argument.   I could go on to the Pod Mrcaru lizards and the Jutland cattler, which demonstrate that evolution, which is really microevolution or built-in variation, can occur in a very short period of time, thirty years in the case of the lizards, something less I think in the case of the cattle.  All it takes is reproducrtive isolation of a daughter poulation breeding among themselves for enough generations to bring out all the possibiities of the new set of gene frequencies and blend them together.   No millions of years are required.  Darwin's Galapagos turtles were the result of separation from the mainland turtle population, whose new gene frequencies produced a new general phenotype over generations of breeding in isolation.  Probably only took a couple of decades, depending on how many founding turtles there were.  The Pod Mrcaru lizards started from ten individuals.

Another argument I like is the fossil trilobite argument but I didn't intend this to become my definitive statement.  

And then there are the Geological arguments, since the ToE is considered to be shown in the fossil record which is contained in layers of sedimentary rock.  There is a seeming progression up through the Linnaean taxonomy that seems convincing, and I certainly can't explain that apparent sequence.  But the strata are explain in terms of tens of millions of years to define a specific time period -- Cambrian, Devonian, Mississippian, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic etc etc etc -- that all together from primordial to recent time add up to billions of years.  On this time scale a  particular creature, say reptiles, show up within one period of tens of millions of years, and the next period up, meaning the next layer of sedimentary rock above it, contains mammals which are then taken to have evolved from the reptiles.  this is impossible for many reasons but I'm too tired to try to argue it out again here.

And besides, the mere equation of a slab of sedimentary rock with a time period is just plain ludicrous.  And don't tell me that equation isn't made.  There is a model of the strata at the Grand Canyon that makes it very clear that is how it is understood.    No, such strata of different kinds of sediments could not possibly have occurred so regularly over tens of millions of years per layer, neatly changing from one sediment to another so abruptly and completely.  Obviously the best explanation for the strata is the Flood of Noah.  Worldwide.  Chock full of fossils of all the dead things the Flood was intended to bring about.   Water in many forms causes layering of sediments.  It even occurs with the rising of sea water.  Walther's Law I think.  I forget so much of this because I haven't argued it in so long.  It should all be at EvC Forum though unless Percy decided to censor it all.  Some of it is on my other blog here but not as much as is at EvC.  

Wish some evolutionary biologist might come along who has the honesty and integrity as well as the IQ to get my point.  Not that I have such a great IQ I hasten to add.  Mine is only middling, but perseverance and prayer can accomplish a lot.  Nevertheless it takes a lot of thought and a lot of time and it's counterintuitive in many ways, as well as fraught with all the baggage of the ToE that is being challenged.  If I die soon I'd like to think somebody appreciated it all though.