Posted on 12/25/2010 4:00:25 AM PST by wendy1946
No normal science theory is ever defended the way evolution is. What IS defended in that sort of manner are lifestyles, tenures, entrenched positions, and careers which have been built pyramid-style atop a base row which is sitting on quicksand. The people sitting ten or eleven rows of stones up don't like being told that the whole thing is unworkable.
What most people are unaware of is that the whole theory of evolution has been overwhelmingly refuted a number of times and via a number of totally unrelated arguments to such an extent that ANY normal science theory under the same circumstances would have been rejected and thrown out literally decades ago.
The first such disproof and the one which rightfully should have ended the debate involved fruit flies. Fruit flies breed new generations every other day so that running any sort of a decades-long experiment with fruit flies will involve more generations of them than there have ever been of anything even remotely resembling humans on our planet. Those flies were subjected to everything in the world known to cause mutations and the mutants were recombined every possible way; all they ever got were sterile freaks, and fruit flies. Several prominent scientists publicly denounced evolution at that point in time including the famous case of Richard Goldschmidt.
The failure was due to the fact that our entire living world is driven by information and the only information there ever was in the picture was that for a fruit fly. When the DNA/RNA information scheme was discovered, even if the fruit fly thing had never happened, evolution should have been discarded on the spot. But GIVEN the fact of the fruit fly experiments, somebody HAD to have thought to himself "Hey, THAT'S THE REASON THE FRUIT FLY EXPERIMENTS FAILED!!!!!!"
The DNA/RNA system is an information code just like C#, Java, or C++. Information codes do not just sort of happen or appear amongst inanimate matter for no particular reason. In other words, there is no way in the world anybody should be believing in evolution 40 years after the discovery of DNA and, again, that's just one overwhelming disproof amongst a number of such. Again no legitimate science theory would ever survive such a history.
There is the question of the probabilistic odds against any sort of life forming from inanimate matter via any random sequence of events; the junk science reports we now read about "string" theory and "multiple universes" is basically motivated by a recognition of what the odds are against evolution in the one universe we actually have any evidence for.
And then there is the Haldane dilemma, which amounts to an understanding of the time spans which would be needed to spread ANY genetic change through any group of creatures. A very simple version of the thing is all most intelligent people should need:
Imagine a population of 100,000 apes or "proto-humans" ten million years ago which are all genetically alike other than for two with a "beneficial mutation". Imagine also that this population has the human or proto-human generation cycle time of roughly 20 years.
Imagine that the beneficial mutation in question is so good, that all 99,998 other die out immediately (from jealousy), and that the pair with the beneficial mutation has 100,000 kids and thus replenishes the herd.
Imagine that this process goes on like that for ten million years, which is more than anybody claims is involved in "human evolution". The max number of such "beneficial mutations" which could thus be substituted into the herd would be ten million divided by twenty, or 500,000 point mutations which, Walter Remine notes, is about 1/100 of one percent of the human genome, and a miniscule fraction of the 2 to 3 percent that separates us from chimpanzees, or the half of that which separates us from neanderthals.
That basically says that even given a rate of evolutionary development which is fabulously beyond anything which is possible in the real world, starting from apes, in ten million years the best you could possibly hope for would be an ape with a slightly shorter tail.
People who have carried out the math for real-world rates of substitution come up with it taking quadrillions of years for our present living world to have evolved in any fashion even if that were possible, which it isn't.
So evolution needs quadrillions of years... how much time do they (evolutionites) actually have? A very big part of the answer has been coming in lately in the form of blood, blood vessels, and raw meat turning up in dinosaur remains:
In other words, Midrashic sources and Amerind oral traditions are basically correct in describing human interaction with dinosaurs just a few thousand years ago (there is no way raw meat and blood can survive for millions of years) and the thing we've heard all our lives about dinosaurs dying out all our lives is a bunch of BS.
A theory which needs quadrillions of years and only has a few thousand is basically FUBAR; no reasonably well educated person should ever buy into it.
What about humans, hominids such as the Neanderthal, and the stories we keep seeing in the news about some new human ancestor of the year which is supposedly going to save evolutionism, and what about the 30,000 and 200,000 year time frames involved in those stories?
In order to be descended from something via any process resembling evolution, at some point, you have to be able to interbreed with the something. Thus the curious total lack of any real evidence of modern man ever interbreeding with Neanderthals was always viewed as a big mystery particularly since there was evidence of the two groups living in close proximity for long periods. James Shreeve described the problem in an article published in Discover magazine in the mid 90s:
"Humans love to mate. They mate all the time, by night and by day, through all the phases of the female’s reproductive cycle. Given the opportunity, humans throughout the world will mate with any other human. The barriers between races and cultures, so cruelly evident in other respects, melt away when sex is at stake. Cortés began the systematic annihilation of the Aztec people--but that did not stop him from taking an Aztec princess for his wife. Blacks have been treated with contempt by whites in America since they were first forced into slavery, but some 20 percent of the genes in a typical African American are white. Consider James Cook’s voyages in the Pacific in the eighteenth century. Cook’s men would come to some distant land, and lining the shore were all these very bizarre-looking human beings with spears, long jaws, browridges, archeologist Clive Gamble of Southampton University in England told me. God, how odd it must have seemed to them. But that didn’t stop the Cook crew from making a lot of little Cooklets.Project this universal human behavior back into the Middle Paleolithic. When Neanderthals and modern humans came into contact in the Levant, they would have interbred, no matter how strange they might initially have seemed to each other. If their cohabitation stretched over tens of thousands of years, the fossils should show a convergence through time toward a single morphological pattern, or at least some swapping of traits back and forth.
But the evidence just isn’t there, not if the TL and ESR dates are correct. Instead the Neanderthals stay staunchly themselves. In fact, according to some recent ESR dates, the least Neanderthalish among them is also the oldest. The full Neanderthal pattern is carved deep at the Kebara cave, around 60,000 years ago. The moderns, meanwhile, arrive very early at Qafzeh and Skhul and never lose their modern aspect. Certainly, it is possible that at any moment new fossils will be revealed that conclusively demonstrate the emergence of a Neandermod lineage. From the evidence in hand, however, the most likely conclusion is that Neanderthals and modern humans were not interbreeding in the Levant..."
And then in the late 1990s results of DNA studies of Neanderthal remains began to come in and cleared up the mystery:
"He said his team ran four separate tests for authenticity - checking whether other amino acids had survived, making sure the DNA sequences they found did not exist in modern humans, making sure the DNA could be replicated in their own lab and then getting other labs to duplicate their results. Comparisons with the DNA of modern humans and of apes showed the Neanderthal was about halfway between a modern human and a chimpanzee."
That's right: the Neanderthal was basically an advanced ape whose DNA was almost exactly halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee, and we could no more interbreed with Neanderthals than we could with horses. Even the prestigeious PlosBiology system gave up on the idea (No Evidence of Neandertal mtDNA Contribution to Early Modern Humans).
Clearly that should have been the end of any talk about modern humans having evolved from hominids since all other hominids were significantly FURTHER removed from us THAN the neanderthal. Nonetheless evolutionites go on talking about a "common ancestor(TM) for both ourselves and Neanderthals, 5000,000 years back. That of course is idiotic; it's as if somebody had discovered some reason why dogs could not be descended from wolves, and the evolutionites were to claim that therefore they (dogs) must be descended directly from fish.
But what about the time frames? We've seen that the time frmes we read about for dinosaurs are totally FUBAR, what about the 50,000 and 200,000 and 500,000 year time spans you read about for supposed human ancestors? Do evolutionites have the sort of time they'd need to even be talking about hominid/human evolution?
Gunnar Heinsohn is best/brightest category in European academia and a frequent speaker at NATO gatherings since his population youth bulge theories predict political unrest with near 100% accuracy; he's also a major player in the ongoing efforts to reconstruct Med-basin chronologies. His "Wie Alt ist das Menschengeschlect" describes the problem with the dating schemes typically associated with Neanderthal studies:
Mueller-Karpe, the first name in continental paleoanthropology, wrote thirty years ago on the two strata of homo erectus at Swanscombe/England: "A difference between the tools in the upper and in the lower stratum is not recognizable. (From a geological point of view it is uncertain if between the two strata there passed decades, centuries or millennia.)" (Handbuch der Vorgeschichte, Vol I, Munich 1966, p. 293).
The outstanding scholar never returned to this hint that in reality there may have passed ten years where the textbooks enlist one thousand years. Yet, I tried to follow this thread. I went to the stratigraphies of the Old Stone Age which usually look as follows
modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
Neanderthal man (homo sapiens neanderthalensis)
Homo erectus (invents fire and is considered the first intelligent man).
In my book "Wie alt ist das Menschengeschlecht?" [How Ancient is Man?], 1996, 2nd edition, I focused for Neanderthal man on his best preserved stratigraphy: Combe Grenal in France. Within 4 m of debris it exhibited 55 strata dated conventionally between -90,000 and -30,000. Roughly one millennium was thus assigned to some 7 cm of debris per stratum. Close scrutiny had revealed that most strata were only used in the summer. Thus, ca. one thousand summers were assigned to each stratum. If, however, the site lay idle in winter and spring one would have expected substratification. Ideally, one would look for one thousand substrata for the one thousand summers. Yet, not even two substrata were discovered in any of the strata. They themselves were the substrata in the 4 m stratigraphy. They, thus, were not good for 60,000 but only for 55 years.
I tested this assumption with the tool count. According to the Binfords' research--done on North American Indians--each tribal adult has at least five tool kits with some eight tools in each of them. At every time 800 tools existed in a band of 20 adults. Assuming that each tool lasted an entire generation (15 female years), Combe Grenals 4,000 generations in 60,000 years should have produced some 3.2 million tools. By going closer to the actual life time of flint tools tens of millions of tools would have to be expected for Combe Grenal. Ony 19,000 (nineteen thousand) remains of tools, however, were found by the excavators.
There seems to be no way out but to cut down the age of Neanderthal man at Combe Grenal from some 60,000 to some 60 years.
I applied the stratigraphical approach to the best caves in Europe for the entire time from Erectus to the Iron Age and reached at the following tentative chronology for intelligent man:
-600 onwards Iron Age
-900 onwards Bronze Age
-1400 beginning of modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
-1500 beginning of Neanderthal man
between -2000 and -1600 beginning of Erectus.
Since Erectus only left the two poor strata like at Swanscombe or El-Castillo/Spain, he should actually not have lasted longer than Neanderthal-may be one average life expectancy. I will now not go into the mechanism of mutation. All I want to remind you of is the undisputed sequence of interstratification and monostratification in the master stratigraphies. This allows for one solution only: Parents of the former developmental stage of man lived together with their own offspring in the same cave stratum until they died out. They were not massacred as textbooks have it:
monostrat.: only modern man's tools
interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and modern man's tools side by side
monostrat.: only Neanderthal man's tools
interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and Erectus' tools side by side
monotstrat.: only Erectus tools (deepest stratum for intelligent man)
The year figures certainly sound bewildering. Yet, so far nobody came up with any stratigraphy justifiably demanding more time than I tentatively assigned to the age of intelligent man. I always remind my critiques that one millennium is an enormous time span--more than from William the Conqueror to today's Anglo-World. To add a millenium to human history should always go together with sufficient material remains to show for it. I will not even mention the easiness with which scholars add a million years to the history of man until they made Lucy 4 million years old. The time-span-madness is the last residue of Darwinism.
Heinsohn is not putting an exact age on the Neanderthal die-out; what he IS stating is that there is no legitimate interpretation of existing evidence which would indicate that they died out any more than four or five thousand years ago and that is basically consistent with the thing about raw dinosaur meat.
That of course is nowhere remotely close to the time frames which any sort of an evolutionary scheme of modern man from hominids would require. We are left with three basic choices:
Those are your three basic choices and none of them involve evolution. Moreover the second and third choices merely amount to kicking the can a block or two down the road as far as how anything like modern man ever came into existence anywhere in the universe at all since the the same mathematical and probabilistic laws which prevent macroevolution on this planet would hold true anywhere else. The 17B years which supposedly intervene since the "Big Bang(TM)" wouldn't be enough for modern man to evolve in the universe even if that were possible which it isn't, and even if the Big Bang idea itself weren't just another bunch of BS like evolution, which it is.
That’s a bad reason not to be a Christian. You really should find another reason if you’re going to base your eternity on it.
Wait a minute...theres no such thing as the world? OK, clearly I’m in the wrong place...
I”m not really going to jump into the middle of this because I’m not well enough versed and I’d get slaughtered, however, if you don’t believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, then you can start picking and choosing, and therein lies a real problem. Whether the earth was made in 7 days or not isn’t the problem, but there are other things that certainly would be (the literal resurrection for instance or if Jesus is the literal Son of God).
But, as I said, I’m just tossing things out, I’m not qualified to really debate the issue. However, this is why the issue is so important that people get so riled up.
You’d have to be more specific.
later
That is gibberish. If you are actually getting this line from some Christians, you need to interact with better-informed Christians. Neo-Luddite know-nothings aren't doing any of us any favors.
If Jesus had tried walking around in a Roman province in an actual dead human body for 40 days, Romans would have seen him and crucified him a second time and done whatever it would have taken to ensure that he STAYED crucified. I assume the resurrection was the sort of thing Julian Jaynes described but it was not any sort of a mass hallucination and to the people who experienced it, it was utterly indistinguishable from Jesus having come back in his own corporeal (and dead) body. That IS the way Jaynes described that sort of experience and that is also the way that the OT ghost story involving Saul, the prophet Samuel, and the "witch" of Endor reads.
I dont know how to be more specific. If you say there is no world, I’m not sure where the heck I am. So... I clearly am not where I think I am, so I must be in the wrong place. It would be difficult for me to be any clearer, since I don’t know where I am.
What?
Reminds me of good old-fashioned Gnosticism applied to the philosophy of naturalism.
***That’s what it reminded me of as well, but you said it more eloquently than I would have.
So, basically what we have here is someone suggesting that we set up what is already set up, but it turns out he doesn’t like what he asked for.
I believe in religion in the sense I believe it exists and has many interesting stories. I believe in science in that it exists and has many interesting theories. I believe the theories when the preponderance of the evidence indicates they are most likely true. Perhaps rather than say I believe in science, we who do should say “I believe scientific evidence” when there is enough of it and it is reproducible. Unfortunately religion has little reproducible evidence, which is why it is not science.
“Seen any new creations lately?”
Yes, last month when I went to get this seasons flu virus shot. The little bugs keep evolving so we have to spend millions in creating vaccines to fight the most recently evolved.
Perhaps you have not read any really good modern books regarding evolution. I strongly recommend “Endless Forms Most Beautiful” by Sean Carroll (sp?). It is only a few years old and is quite a fascinating book.
And perhaps I've read more than you have; perhaps a lot more.
ML/NJ
1) The myth of evolution between different species as an attempt to explain how living things got here. (Just a note: This is what I mean by evolution here - I'm not talking about evolution within a species like breeding dogs or cats to look different over time.)
2) The attempt by some on this thread to mutually exclude true science and the Bible or the Christian faith.
My Comment: The myth of evolution between species has no evidence and is contrary to the laws of (true) science some of which is pointed out here. The best refutation of evolution is intelligent design which is everywhere, evidence more numerous than the sand of the sea. True science supports and is the friend of God's Word, the Bible. You don't, however, have to be a scientist to know that everything is intricately made with purpose thus pointing to a purposeful and intelligent maker - little kids even know that. That's why Romans 1:20 says that living things so obviously point to a God of intelligence and purpose and authority that naysayers have no excuse.
3) Libertarians v. conservatives: I’m an economic libertarian but a political constitutional Christian conservative. In that sense you might say I’m both, at least generally, but not specifically. I am a conservative politically, not a libertarian. But economically, I’m pretty much an absolute libertarian and wish we had a hundred more Milton Freidmans running around (strictly economically speaking only).
Funny, but I don't recall me ever saying or writing that; you probabaly have me confused with somebody else.
LOL Wendy, I blame too much chocolate and Christmas candy! You said “if there was such a thing IN the world” I read “if there was such a thing AS the world” and I thought...well, I have finally managed to get myself into a parallel universe. How did that happen? Whew! It’s al good. :)
Part of the problem may be that I write in more complex and longer sentences than many people, sometimes they’re not hard to misread.
Well, that may be,but this was simply a matter of me misreading one word. So, that was just me.
Part of the problem may be that some people believe that if they write in more complex and longer sentences they can argue utter nonsense and lesser minds will actually believe that someone who can write such complex and long sentences actually knows what they are talking about. NOT!!
One of the most interesting aspects of evolution is the economy which is explained so well in Endless Forms Most Beautiful. Apparently genes are modified and reused over and over again over the ages. The segmented earthworm body becomes the segmented insect or crustacean body, becomes the fish, amphibian, reptile, mammal spinal cord, etc. There are many such reusings meaning mutations don’t have to start from scratch as it were.
Whether or not you believe God did it or unknowing nature, it is nevertheless awesome and worthy of reverence!!
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