A Mathematician's View of Evolution

In 1996, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe published a book entitled "Darwin's Black Box" [Free Press], whose central theme is that every living cell is loaded with features and biochemical processes which are "irreducibly complex"--that is, they require the existence of numerous complex components, each essential for function. Thus, these features and processes cannot be explained by gradual Darwinian improvements, because until all the components are in place, these assemblages are completely useless, and thus provide no selective advantage. Behe spends over 100 pages describing some of these irreducibly complex biochemical systems in detail, then summarizes the results of an exhaustive search of the biochemical literature for Darwinian explanations. He concludes that while biochemistry texts often pay lip-service to the idea that natural selection of random mutations can explain everything in the cell, such claims are pure "bluster", because "there is no publication in the scientific literature that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred."

When Dr. Behe was at the University of Texas El Paso in May of 1997 to give an invited talk, I told him that I thought he would find more support for his ideas in mathematics, physics and computer science departments than in his own field. I know a good many mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists who, like me, are appalled that Darwin's explanation for the development of life is so widely accepted in the life sciences. Few of them ever speak out or write on this issue, however--perhaps because they feel the question is simply out of their domain. However, I believe there are two central arguments against Darwinism, and both seem to be most readily appreciated by those in the more mathematical sciences.

1. The cornerstone of Darwinism is the idea that major (complex) improvements can be built up through many minor improvements; that the new organs and new systems of organs which gave rise to new orders, classes and phyla developed gradually, through many very minor improvements. We should first note that the fossil record does not support this idea, for example, Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson ["The History of Life," in Volume I of "Evolution after Darwin," University of Chicago Press, 1960] writes:

"It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution...This phenomenon becomes more universal and more intense as the hierarchy of categories is ascended. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large. These peculiarities of the record pose one of the most important theoretical problems in the whole history of life: Is the sudden appearance of higher categories a phenomenon of evolution or of the record only, due to sampling bias and other inadequacies?"

An April, 1982, Life Magazine article (excerpted from Francis Hitching's book, "The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong") contains the following report:

"When you look for links between major groups of animals, they simply aren't there...'Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life', writes David M. Raup, a curator of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, 'what geologists of Darwin's time and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the fossil sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence, then abruptly disappear.' These are not negligible gaps. They are periods, in all the major evolutionary transitions, when immense physiological changes had to take place."

Even among biologists, the idea that new organs, and thus higher categories, could develop gradually through tiny improvements has often been challenged. How could the "survival of the fittest" guide the development of new organs through their initial useless stages, during which they obviously present no selective advantage? (This is often referred to as the "problem of novelties".) Or guide the development of entire new systems, such as nervous, circulatory, digestive, respiratory and reproductive systems, which would require the simultaneous development of several new interdependent organs, none of which is useful, or provides any selective advantage, by itself? French biologist Jean Rostand, for example, wrote ["A Biologist's View," Wm. Heinemann Ltd. 1956]:

"It does not seem strictly impossible that mutations should have introduced into the animal kingdom the differences which exist between one species and the next...hence it is very tempting to lay also at their door the differences between classes, families and orders, and, in short, the whole of evolution. But it is obvious that such an extrapolation involves the gratuitous attribution to the mutations of the past of a magnitude and power of innovation much greater than is shown by those of today."

Behe's book is primarily a challenge to this cornerstone of Darwinism at the microscopic level. Although we may not be familiar with the complex biochemical systems discussed in this book, I believe mathematicians are well qualified to appreciate the general ideas involved. And although an analogy is only an analogy, perhaps the best way to understand Behe's argument is by comparing the development of the genetic code of life with the development of a computer program. Suppose an engineer attempts to design a structural analysis computer program, writing it in a machine language that is totally unknown to him. He simply types out random characters at his keyboard, and periodically runs tests on the program to recognize and select out chance improvements when they occur. The improvements are permanently incorporated into the program while the other changes are discarded. If our engineer continues this process of random changes and testing for a long enough time, could he eventually develop a sophisticated structural analysis program? (Of course, when intelligent humans decide what constitutes an "improvement", this is really artificial selection, so the analogy is far too generous.)

If a billion engineers were to type at the rate of one random character per second, there is virtually no chance that any one of them would, given the 4.5 billion year age of the Earth to work on it, accidentally duplicate a given 20-character improvement. Thus our engineer cannot count on making any major improvements through chance alone. But could he not perhaps make progress through the accumulation of very small improvements? The Darwinist would presumably say, yes, but to anyone who has had minimal programming experience this idea is equally implausible.

Major improvements to a computer program often require the addition or modification of hundreds of interdependent lines, no one of which makes any sense, or results in any improvement, when added by itself. Even the smallest improvements usually require adding several new lines. It is conceivable that a programmer unable to look ahead more than 5 or 6 characters at a time might be able to make some very slight improvements to a computer program, but it is inconceivable that he could design anything sophisticated without the ability to plan far ahead and to guide his changes toward that plan.

If archeologists of some future society were to unearth the many versions of my PDE solver, PDE2D , which I have produced over the last 20 years, they would certainly note a steady increase in complexity over time, and they would see many obvious similarities between each new version and the previous one. In the beginning it was only able to solve a single linear, steady-state, 2D equation in a polygonal region. Since then, PDE2D has developed many new abilities: it now solves nonlinear problems, time-dependent and eigenvalue problems, systems of simultaneous equations, and it now handles general curved 2D regions.

Over the years, many new types of graphical output capabilities have evolved, and in 1991 it developed an interactive preprocessor, and more recently PDE2D has adapted to 3D and 1D problems. An archeologist attempting to explain the evolution of this computer program in terms of many tiny improvements might be puzzled to find that each of these major advances (new classes or phyla??) appeared suddenly in new versions; for example, the ability to solve 3D problems first appeared in version 4.0. Less major improvements (new families or orders??) appeared suddenly in new subversions, for example, the ability to solve 3D problems with periodic boundary conditions first appeared in version 5.6. In fact, the record of PDE2D's development would be similar to the fossil record, with large gaps where major new features appeared, and smaller gaps where minor ones appeared. That is because the multitude of intermediate programs between versions or subversions which the archeologist might expect to find never existed, because-- for example--none of the changes I made for edition 4.0 made any sense, or provided PDE2D any advantage whatever in solving 3D problems (or anything else) until hundreds of lines had been added.

Whether at the microscopic or macroscopic level, major, complex, evolutionary advances, involving new features (as opposed to minor, quantitative changes such as an increase in the length of the giraffe's neck*, or the darkening of the wings of a moth, which clearly could occur gradually) also involve the addition of many interrelated and interdependent pieces. These complex advances, like those made to computer programs, are not always "irreducibly complex"--sometimes there are intermediate useful stages. But just as major improvements to a computer program cannot be made 5 or 6 characters at a time, certainly no major evolutionary advance is reducible to a chain of tiny improvements, each small enough to be bridged by a single random mutation.

2. The other point is very simple, but also seems to be appreciated only by more mathematically-oriented people. It is that to attribute the development of life on Earth to natural selection is to assign to it--and to it alone, of all known natural "forces"--the ability to violate the second law of thermodynamics and to cause order to arise from disorder. It is often argued that since the Earth is not a closed system--it receives energy from the Sun, for example-- the second law is not applicable in this case. It is true that order can increase locally, if the local increase is compensated by a decrease elsewhere, ie, an open system can be taken to a less probable state by importing order from outside. For example, we could transport a truckload of encyclopedias and computers to the moon, thereby increasing the order on the moon, without violating the second law. But the second law of thermodynamics--at least the underlying principle behind this law--simply says that natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen**, and it is absurd to argue that because the Earth receives energy from the Sun, this principle was not violated here when the original rearrangement of atoms into encyclopedias and computers occurred.

The biologist studies the details of natural history, and when he looks at the similarities between two species of butterflies, he is understandably reluctant to attribute the small differences to the supernatural. But the mathematician or physicist is likely to take the broader view. I imagine visiting the Earth when it was young and returning now to find highways with automobiles on them, airports with jet airplanes, and tall buildings full of complicated equipment, such as televisions, telephones and computers. Then I imagine the construction of a gigantic computer model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics (the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces) would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on our planet (perhaps using random number generators to model quantum uncertainties!). If we ran such a simulation out to the present day, would it predict that the basic forces of Nature would reorganize the basic particles of Nature into libraries full of encyclopedias, science texts and novels, nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers with supersonic jets parked on deck, and computers connected to laser printers, CRTs and keyboards? If we graphically displayed the positions of the atoms at the end of the simulation, would we find that cars and trucks had formed, or that supercomputers had arisen? Certainly we would not, and I do not believe that adding sunlight to the model would help much. Clearly something extremely improbable has happened here on our planet, with the origin and development of life, and especially with the development of human consciousness and creativity.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Ironically, W.E.Loennig's article "The Evolution of the Long-necked Giraffe," has since convinced me that even this feature could not, and did not, arise gradually.

**An unfortunate choice of words, for which I was severely chastised. I should have said, the underlying principle behind the second law is that natural forces do not do macroscopically describable things which are extremely improbable from the microscopic point of view. See "A Second Look at the Second Law," for a more thorough treatment of this point.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Granville Sewell completed his PhD at Purdue University. He has subsequently been employed by (in chronological order) Universidad Simon Bolivar (Caracas), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Purdue University, IMSL (Houston), The University of Texas Center for High Performance Computing (Austin), and the University of Texas El Paso; he spent Fall 1999 at Universidad Nacional de Tucuman in Argentina on a Fulbright grant. He has written three books on numerical analysis.

... . In any event, the taxonomical categories are artificial and man-made. ...

No, I have to disagree. One of the "holy grails" of biology is to unambiguously determine the true tree of life. Cladistic analysis, especially that using DNA, is getting us there. In fact, large parts of the tree are already known. It's no more man-made than the periodic table.

For example, we know, way beyond any reasonable doubt, that chimps and people form a clade (all descendants of some species), that chimps-people-gorillas are another, and so on and so on: primates, artiodactyls, carnivora, a lot of the familiar Linnean orders, classes and genera of mammals, birds, reptiles, plants, fungi, etc etc.

It is known, with no reasonable doubt whatsoever, that mammals are a clade, and that birds are.

I have to restrict the discussion to eukaryotes, because bacteria and archaea trade genes in funny ways, and the definitions af ancestor and descendant aren't nearly as obvious, and also because I don't know much about them. But the scheme seems to work very well indeed for eukaryotes.

Assuming common descent, there is a clade defined by any two organisms. For example, I've seen mammals defined as the group of things descended from the last common ancestor of people and platypuses, or bilaterally-symmetric animals as the descendants of the last common ancestor of "Antlia the ant and Attila the Hun".

But there are a few surprises:

Reptiles, as commonly defined, aren't a naturally-defined grouping. The clade defined by crocodiles and snakes includes birds and dinosaurs, and, IIRC, reptiles as well. The clade defined by any green plant and any fungus includes all, again IIRC, multicellular life.

Insisting on using only taxonomical categorizations is "begging the question" (e.g. whales are mammals, and therefore evolved from land-mammals), since we are discussing the natural (not man-made) origin of species.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Whales are mammals, and "proto-mammal" was pretty obviously a land dweller.

Taxonomical categories describe species, but do not tell us whether one came from another. ( whales could have theoretically developed from fish without leaving the water leaving the water, while the other mammals happened to get their systems independent of what was going on with the whales.)

This hypothesis (about whales) is disproved by genetic analysis: cetaceans are clearly most closely related to artiodactyls (cattle, deer, hippo, giraffe, etc). In fact, there is a clade called the cetartiodactyls that covers these exactly.

The analysis doesn't say what came from what; it shows which thngs are more closely related to each other than to anything else; their common ancestor may or may not be found as a fossil, and it isn't always obvious which fossil correspnds to the common ancestor.

If this cladistic taxonomy were to prove impossible, it would be a serious blow to the biological theory of common descent, if not to evolution itself. Conceivably, there are some things that just refuse to be classified; so far these have not been found.

The greatest unknowns are the relationships at the phylum level: are flatworms more closely related to roundworms, or hair worms, or bearded worms, or what? are starfish more closely related to chordates than anything else? what are the relations between insects, spiders, trilobites and crustacean? are they a clade or not? This stuff is being researched, and answers are being found.

I'm sure you must be on the something here....executing a designed heuristic search algorithm that includes designed mathematical abstractions and a designed ("really really complicated") selection operator and a designed ("really really complicated") variation operator on a pre-exisiting designed computer must indeed prove that the world was not designed.

In fact even saved yourself a lot of work....on your next programming assignment, (I enjoyed graduate school as well) when you design coded instructions for specific actions... ....Obtain the use of as many computers as you can (make the search space as big as you want) to randomly type characters....... and then evaluate the random characters via a (designed) fitness algorithm on a pre-existing (designed) computer. If you get computers to generate enough random characters over and over and over again, and keep evaluating them with a "really really complicated" fitness algorithm, over and over again on a machine with pre-existing design and order.. I'm sure that you will eventually have a meaningful program. Given enough time and enough characters, I'm sure that random characters will eventually compile. In fact not only will they compile, they will of coarse create a meaningful program. In addition you should take the existing meaningful programs the computers you are running your heuristic search method on and apply random changes to them. I'm sure this will save you some work as well…..surely you won't introduce any bugs, and of coarse not ones that will crash the system. In fact, I am really confident that you could make multiple beneficial positive random changes in a row by typing random characters, and certainly won't produce any software that will crash from memory corruption or a stray pointer. It will also be beneficial to make random changes to the hardware the software is executing on via static electricity. This will provide external energy so the computer is not a closed system so the hardware can achieve less entropy or disorder. The new software with random changes will of coarse be more better then the existing. The software you design by generating random characters over a large search space will be so good and so fit that it will you are sure to earn an "A". Your professor will be so happy to get a gigantic pile of paper with random characters, or a gigantic stack of burned CDs full of random characters, you will surely get an A.

The usual gang of stubborn damn fools, liberals and "progressives" and other atheists or non-lineal thinkers endlessly repeating their mantras of praise of an idjit like Darwin and his crackpot theories, backed by the utterly corrupt (and taxpayer funded thanks to the usual gang, etc.), gummint edjumakashun establishment, and by "scientific" community convinced that that its members are gods and that God is not (they hope, they hope, they hope), those self-imagined simians who prefer to worship themselves and to ignore the word of God, thereby freeing themselves to do what they damn well please to do regardless of consequences to others and to practice a faux pragmatism released from the bounds imposed by their Creator (whether they acknowledge Him or not).

You can post continued inquiries for the refutation of the Darwinian frankly ridiculous until the cows come home but the most you will get from me is the somewhat disingenuous suggestion that I can accept (for you and others of similar delusion) that you imagine yourselves descended from monkeys, apes, gorillas, chimpanzees, primordial soup suddenly energized by lightning, alien space invaders of limited imagination (most likely as to Darwinists) or from granite rock piles or prehistoric salamanders and to concede that you and your ilk may be right (but only for you and your ilk). If you find this separation of you from us as to origins to be somehow irrational, remember that I do not actually believe that you and your soulmates are actually descended from baboons or whatever regardless of objective evidence, but if I did believe that, it would be at least competitive with Darwinian delusions in terms of believability.

These delusions of yours, when quarantined or properly ridiculed or even examined, are as harmless as the dopey nephew in the movie Arsenic and Old Lace who keeps on charging up the stairs and blowing his trumpet as though he were Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill. Its a little hard on the ears of the innocent Brooklyn neighbors and the elderly aunts but not as sinister or harmful as the elderly aunts' little hobby of poisoning the elderberry wine served to the strangers who are their elderly men victims who wind up buried in nephew Teddy's Panama Canal Zone dig in the basement.

Of course, Arsenic and Old Lace is an hysterically funny film whereas the "I am an ape man, I am an ape ape man" obsessives are simply tragic.

If science is still regarded as the "search for truth,", the best science books are the Bible and the Baltimore Catechism and Pascendi Domenici Gregis and Lamentabile Sane none of which suggest that man was created by or descended from Bonzo or the organ grinder's little pal or Mighty Joe Young or King Kong or Clint Eastwood's cinematic orangutan pal or from Darwin for that matter. Nor from the moonbat anti-God Kansas federal judge referenced in the statement of Darwinist "faith" represented by your link, which, unlike Darwin's does not remain missing. Another bully funded by our tax money making American gummint skewels safe for godlessness.

The late 19th century was a special time of left self-worship and enthusiastic delusion: Marxism, spiritualism, seances, phrenology, eugenics, and, of course, people actually so naive as to be impressed with Darwin's delusions in their eagerness to reject God. Nonetheless, there were others.

An old man, carelessly and frumpily dressed and praying his rosary (you can just imagine the type) was seated on a train in the vicinity of oh sooooo sophisticated Paris when he was joined in his cabin by a young stranger who immediately set about an impossibly modernistic rant against that rosary and against any belief in God whatsoever. After all, this late 19th century was THE AGE OF SCIENCE when bold, noble Promethean scientists would give mankind the faux intellectual fire which would free man from silly superstitions like a dependence upon or a need to obey that pie in the sky, bye and bye God, (worshiped only by those with unlaundered grey matter), to say nothing of the traditional personal humiliation of acknowledging that God knows better than the clever "science"/philosophers of one's late night college dorm BS session pals much less oneself. The young man was merciless and pitiless in his championing of science over the "discredited" old superstitions and humiliating "old ways" but the old man stayed the course and continued to pray his rosary. We don't know who that young champion of science unshackled was but eventually the elderly man, when he finished his rosary, introduced himself as Louis Pasteur. Rumor has it that this Pasteur fellow had something to do with actual science.

It is also truly remarkable that the metroandohsoooosophisticati (MAOSS) find it so horribly humiliating to genuflect before God and His Truth but not to imagine themselves "evolved" from mere beasts or whatever.

I have a very large jukebox (a regular anti-Darwin Wurlitzer) and if you keep on looking for refutations of the Darwinian ridiculous, I will interpret that as: "Please, mister, please, please play B-17" and all the others one by one.

Oh, and asserting that Darwinism is true does not make it so. Darwinism is NOT the standard and the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the Roman Catholic Church owe Darwinists absolutely nothing but ridicule. I'll take Pasteur and Pope St. Pius X and Ann Coulter (a determined Christian who I understand to be one who attends Catholic and reformed churches but certainly has Darwin's number. You get Darwin and his tax-funded religion of pseudo-science which needs defense at all costs lest anyone have the opportunity in taxpayer funded brain laundries to consider the obvious alternative that God created the universe, you, me and everything else in it and did so without the assistance of Darwin or or of apes (except in the creation of other apes).

I tend to specialize in the Catholic point of view. I have pinged some Catholics and invite them to abuse Darwinian deviancy as they wish. For balance and for what are another entire chapter of valid anti-Darwinianism, I have pinged a number of Sola Scriptura Christians to contribute here.

The fossil record, even from 3,000 years ago is far from complete,

I suggest you find a subject you know something about, and argue that. Your posts are inane in the extreme. For one, there really aren't fossils from 3kya -- there are intact and nearly intact human and animal remains. To pretend that we don't know anything about what large mammals were alive within the recent realm of recorded history suggests you're talking out of your ass. Equines weren't rare 3kya, and we know a heck of a lot about their development from a huge variety of sources. Those include skeletons, yokes, bits, chariots, written records, artistic depictions, saddles, and probably about a thousand other kinds of sources I'm forgetting to include. Horses were domesticated in just that part of the world where we do have excellent historical information. If you still think that anatomically modern horses evolved 2mya, you're just being deliberately obtuse.

The root of the peanut is edible, while the fruit of other legumes are edible.

Huh? Peanut roots aren't edible. The edible part of the peanut is the fruit (which does grow underground). If you want to try to eat peanut roots, you can try to prove me wrong, but I doubt they taste very good. In any event, edibility has nothing to do with the plant and everything to do with human digestion.

Peas are green and grow in soft pods. Peanuts are light brown and grow in harder shells.

I'm sorry, do you have a point? Is your time best served by explaining to me that peas are, in fact, green? Or are you still insisting that peanuts are meat?

The usual gang of stubborn damn fools, liberals and "progressives" and other atheists or non-lineal thinkers

You have yet to demonstrate that all who accept the theory of evolution are members of the above categories.

endlessly repeating their mantras of praise of an idjit like Darwin and his crackpot theories,

You have yet to demonstrate that Charles Darwin was an "idjit", not have you demonstrated that his theories are "crackpot". Insulting people will not demonstrate that your assertions are correct.

acked by the utterly corrupt (and taxpayer funded thanks to the usual gang, etc.), gummint edjumakashun establishment,

Please provide evidence to support this claim.

and by "scientific" community convinced that that its members are gods and that God is not (they hope, they hope, they hope),

Please provide evidence to support your claim that members of the scientific community believe themselves to be "gods". Your claim that they "believe that God is not" is demonstratably false, as there exist theist scientists who accept the theory of evolution.

those self-imagined simians who prefer to worship themselves and to ignore the word of God, thereby freeing themselves to do what they damn well please to do regardless of consequences to others and to practice a faux pragmatism released from the bounds imposed by their Creator (whether they acknowledge Him or not).

Your insults and false claims about scientists does not falsify the theory of evolution.

ou can post continued inquiries for the refutation of the Darwinian frankly ridiculous until the cows come home but the most you will get from me is the somewhat disingenuous suggestion that I can accept (for you and others of similar delusion) that you imagine yourselves descended from monkeys, apes, gorillas, chimpanzees, primordial soup suddenly energized by lightning, alien space invaders of limited imagination (most likely as to Darwinists) or from granite rock piles or prehistoric salamanders and to concede that you and your ilk may be right (but only for you and your ilk).

So you admit, then, that you are willfully falsely misrepresenting what I believe and also that you will utterly refuse to provide evidence for your unsubstantiated claimse. If you refuse to provide any reason to show that your assertions are credible and willfully misrepresent the positions of others, why then should anyone believe what you say?

If you find this separation of you from us as to origins to be somehow irrational, remember that I do not actually believe that you and your soulmates are actually descended from baboons or whatever regardless of objective evidence, but if I did believe that, it would be at least competitive with Darwinian delusions in terms of believability.

This does not justify your beligerant refusal to support your claims with evidence, nor does it excuse your insults and misrepresentations.

These delusions of yours, when quarantined or properly ridiculed or even examined, are as harmless as the dopey nephew in the movie Arsenic and Old Lace who keeps on charging up the stairs and blowing his trumpet as though he were Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill.

Please provide evidence that I am delusional. If you cannot, I can only conclude that you are making unwarranted personal attacks against my person.

Oh, and asserting that Darwinism is true does not make it so.

I have never claimed othewise. You are attacking a strawman.

You get Darwin and his tax-funded religion of pseudo-science which needs defense at all costs lest anyone have the opportunity in taxpayer funded brain laundries to consider the obvious alternative that God created the universe, you, me and everything else in it and did so without the assistance of Darwin or or of apes (except in the creation of other apes).

The theory of evolution is not a religion, and it is not honest to claim that it is.

Your long-worded post provides makes a number of personal attacks, but thus far you have provided absolutely no evidence to support your claims. It fact, you have even admitted that you will not provide evidence to support your claims. Based upon the energy that you have expended specifically to refuse to support your unsubstantiated assertions, it seems highly likely that your purpose is to willfully spread falsehoods, such as your continued efforts to falsely equate acceptance of the theory of evolution as valid science with atheism. Your behaviour is clearly irrational and it is not honest. If you are an example of your faith, then I must confess that I have far too much integrity and ethical concerns to allow myself to become as dishonest as your faith apparently requires of its adherents.

I don't put much store in what the "scientific" community has to say. Many have their own agenda.

Even if this is true, an 'agenda' does not falsify scientific data.

Are kids overweight? Our scientific community says it's due to soda pop.

I was not aware that the recent increase in child obesity has been attributed to one single cause. Do you have a reference?

Our scientific community says it's due to soda pop. Is global warming happening? Data dating back 50 years (out of a 6 billion year history) confirms this to be so and the scientific community attribute the cause to pollutants.

Some scientists believe that the trend is the result of pollutants. Others believe that the current trend is part of a normal cycle. Research continues into investigating the cause, thogh that average global temperatures are rising is not disputed.

Is the fetus alive? Well, yes and no. It all depends on what the mother says.

"What the mother says" is not used as scientific justification for the life of a fetus. The ambiguity is based upon defining when a human "life" begins, which is not a scientific question. It is indisputable that the cells of a developing fetus, and the zygote before that, are 'alive'. The dispute over the point at which the collection of living cells is a 'living human' -- whether it is at the moment of conception or the moment of birth -- is a philosophical question, not a scientific one.

The "scientific community" can't agree on some of the simple things and they want to tell me how the earth was created?

There is little dispute as to the means by which the earth came to exist, though that subject is not related to the theory of evolution.

It was the scientific community more than the Church that tried to prove Galileo's theory the earth revolved around the sun was wrong. I

Please provide references to support this claim.

I wouldn't put my faith in the scientific community.

This does not falsify the extensive research and uncovered data in support of the theory of evolution.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.