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Evolution: probably no other scientific theory has generated so much public controversy since Copernicus and Galileo proposed that the sun, not the earth, is the center of our solar system. This is most apparent in the realm of public education where “scientific creationists” repeatedly attempt to either remove evolution from, or add “scientific creation” to, science curricula (Zetterberg, 1983, p. 386-401; Belluck, 1999; Brown, 2000). The controversy was brought to the forefront most recently in Kansas during August, 1999, when the Kansas Board of Education voted to remove much of evolution from the state’s new science curriculum (Belluck, 1999; Scott, 1999a; Brown, 2000).
It is clear, from reading “creation science” books, that a major motivating factor in such efforts is the conviction that evolution is atheistic, anti-God, anti-Christian, and will produce immorality (Morris, 1994, p. 118-136). Nothing could be further from the truth. Morality is relevant and necessary for humans as gregarious animals to live together in societies. Theology, spirituality, and morality inform us why we are here, and provide a purpose for our lives and a code of conduct for us to live by. In contrast, evolution as science independently informs us of when and how we got here.
Dobzhansky (1983) stated that, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” and the National Academy of Sciences’ curriculum recommendations (Kennedy et al., 1998) include evolution as a major component of science education. And yet “creation scientists” have convinced some school boards that evolution is invalid and that “creation science” is a better scientific explanation of the origin and diversification of life on earth. If scientists are so certain of evolution, how could this be? What is the evidence for evolution? What is “creation science?”
The purpose of this article is to inform the NOGS membership of the fossil evidence for evolution. In this article, I limit my discussion of evolution to whether or not it has occurred, not the mechanisms that explain how. Then, I will discuss the major tenets of “creation science,” and the primary arguments “creation scientists” present against evolution. Finally, in keeping with the scientific method, it will be possible to objectively evaluate the merits of both evolution and “creation science.”
For the reasons discussed above, “creation science” is definitely not science. However, proponents of “creation science” insist that it is and that it has equal merit to evolution (as a reason for either inserting “creation science” in, or removing evolution from, science curricula). Therefore, we must subject “creation science” to scientific scrutiny. Indeed, “creation science” cannot withstand such scrutiny; there are no verifiable, repeatable data to corroborate it. “Creation sci ence” is comparable to flat earth ideas, geocentric solar system ideas, alchemy, and others long since disproved. Please take special care to note that this falsifies the “creation science hypothesis” of the diversification of life on earth. It does not i n any way negate God, religion, or morality.
New thread bump.
New thread bump.
New CvE thread bump
New thread bump.
Yeah, don't bump me, you satanic evolutionist.
Physics
Chemistry
Astronomy
Geology
Biology
I could go on, but the point is I have a hard time thinking of anything that's really in its infancy.
Let's ignore the:
Yeah, right! If you hadn't hitched a ride with Luddite gore on this thread, you might have more credibility here.
Whoah there. You misunderstand me. Evolution (as you guys define it) is the magic I'm talking about. Obviously, you have history with mr. gore3000. No need to project that history on me; I spot the flaws independently of his direction. You might could say that what is noticed by one without reading the other is there to be noticed.
Society of Economic Paleontologists...
Do they have any theories about what dinosaurs considered the lowest sustainable rate of unemployment without inflation or atmospheric catastrophes? Oh, wait...that may be in my minutes of the last meeting of the Society of Microneuroplanetological Engineering. I'll be right back.
Did too!
The famous "list-o-links" (so the creationists don't get to start each new thread from ground zero). This is just the initial section, with the newest links I've assembled.
NEW:
aaaa. The Fossil Record: Evolution or "Scientific Creation". From VadeRetro
NEW:
aaa. Smooth Change in the Fossil Record
. From VadeRetro
aa. The Literal Meaning of Genesis. By Augustine, written in AD 401
a. Resources: Evolution vs. Creationism Debate
.
b. Why Bad Beliefs Don't Die. From garbanzo.
c. A List Of Fallacious Arguments. From VadeRetro.
Isn't calling this mental sewage "Creation Science" very much like calling janitors "Sanitation Engineers?"
-toddhisattva
I think they have something to do with looking for oil. They depend upon their knowledge to make money. (Your average professor is paid to teach, not perform.)
Wow! Two new List-O-Links entries in two days! :)
"Sanitation Engineers" is incongrous and a little dishonest, but it's not an oxymoron.
...since Copernicus and Galileo proposed that the sun, not the earth, is the center of our solar system.
And just when was this blasphemy spawned?
Next you science cultists will say the earth is spherical or something, or that there are more than the four elements of earth, air, fire and water.
Harumph. Unholy nonsense.
Don't forget "crevo_list" BUMP.
I think they have something to do with looking for oil.
They depend upon their knowledge to make money. (Your average
professor is paid to teach, not perform.)
Then I would call them Commercial Paleontogists
or some such. The name they chose is....fatuous.
The way I see it, there's been no creation yet. We're all just sitting around outside of space and time waiting for creation to happen. You claim creation has already happened? Prove it. Prove it now! Prove it here!!!! NO LINKS!!!!! Prove it!!!!!!!
</creationism mode>
...since Copernicus and Galileo proposed that the sun, not the earth, is the center of our solar system.
If ridicule for erroneous/incomplete knowledge is the order of the day, please get your facts straight. The solar system was not what was at issue, it was the whole universe.
While he was in Italy, Copernicus visited Rome, and it seems to have been for friends there that in about 1513 he wrote a short account of what has since become known as the Copernican theory, namely that the Sun (not the Earth) is at rest in the centre of the Universe.
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.
.
Different source
The theory of an Earth-centered Universe held unchallenged until sometime between 1507 and 1515 when Nicolaus Copernicus proposed that the planets revolve around the sun and that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of our Universe. It should be noted that the Copernican system was not a wholesale dismissal of Aristotlian and Ptolemic understanding: the planets are assumed to move in circles around the sun. Copernicus, whose theory of the order of the Universe would reign for centuries, did not publish his thesis until just before his death in 1543. During the remainder of that century and into the next Copernian theory had few followers; a few notable exceptions are covered below .
In 1599, a third alternative was offered by Tycho Brahe who suggested that the various planets, with the exception of the Earth, orbited the Sun and that the Sun in turn orbited a stationary Earth which was at the center of the then-known Universe.
Thanks for the reminder! We also could use a BACK POINTER TO PREVIOUS THREAD
ostensibly on another topic.
So I guess that's it. There are two possibilities: "Creation Science" and "Evolution Science." The referenced piece treats the former as nonsense, and the latter like dogma. Would it be any different if it were the Talmud and the Quran?
I'm not sure what NOGS is, but I followed the link and began to read. When I got to this I stopped:
The United States National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution has an excellent display of fossil horses, including feet, teeth, and skulls, that illustrate these changes. The evolutionary history of the horse was classically illustrated as a single straight line (Dott & Prothero, 1994, p. 62). It is now known that this was an oversimplification;Oversimplification, my arse? This is a fraud.
ML/NJ
Archive Post (from a discussion on talk.origins)
To a very close aproximation, all change these days is due to cultural evolution (memes). Any biological change will be through genetic engineering as you say. Genetic engineering is a result of cultural evolution. Overpopulation will be curbed by either mass culling of the population by starvation, which genetically would be almost a random cull (there's no correllation between genes and wealth/power) Or else by cultural evolution leading to population control by changing breeding patterns. Id prefer the latter. In a deep sense it would be humane to supply aid to fund payments for voluntary sterilization all over the world.
Consider the following as an alternative:
Friedrich Nietzsche had a lot to say about what he saw as the next step in human evolutionary development, the uebermensch; everything pretty much EXCEPT a believeable plan for developing or breeding him. I now know how that can be done. At the very least, I have a plan which would dramatically improve the genetic pool of the entire human race in one generation.
The plan requires what I would term an Infinitely Stupid Ideological Doctrine, or ISID for short which, while modeled on evolutionism, the only real-world example of an ISID, could not be evolutionism itself since that would weight the program in favor of the offspring of religious groups, rather in the desired direction of the uebermensch.
Nonetheless, a religiously neutral ISID would be devised using evolutionism as a model, i.e. the doctrine would require belief in an infinite number of impossible/zero-probability occurances as evolutionism does, require infinite expanses of time as an enabling mechanism for believing in things which cannot be made to happen in real life as evolutionism does, and generally be unfalsifiable as is evolutionism.
Moreover, to students at all K12 levels, the new ISID must appear to be supported in entirely the same manner as is evolutionism. It must appear to be backed by every organ of American government at nearly all levels, supported by hosts of "experts" with PHD degrees and no common-sense or judgement, defended by vicious attacks upon the intelligence and judgement of any would-be doubters, and in fact the new ISID must appear to be part of a winning program for the final victory of light over darkness, good over evil; people opposed to the new ISID must be cast as mindless "staroveriyeh", people who want to bring back the dark ages.
The truth and beauty of the new ISID must be drummed into the heads of every child in America from the day he is born until the day he graduates from high school by every facet of his existence, school, MTV, radio, the movies, mod clothes, beer cans... all should bear witness to the grandeur and beauty of the ISID.
And then, on graduation day, the kids should be brought into an interview room one at a time and asked "Do you believe in the ISID?" The ones who reply "No" should be allowed to live.
I've already posted this one on talk.origins once, and the following exchange was worth noting:
But Ted, it wouldn't be evolution. It might be politics and eugenics, but it wouldn't be evolution. Indeed, you are obvioulsy refering to Hitler's masterrace, such ideas lead inevitabally to ibredded populations with low genetic diversity that are vulnerable to extinction through the forces that cuase evolution. Remember, Ted, Social Darwinism is NOT Darwinism, or evolution. It is a political ideology that mistakes political and racial tests for evolution.
The reply:
One facet of communism was the new kind of person which it was supposed to produce, the "new communist man" so to speak. One of the reasons for the current disenchantment WITH communism which has not been publicized in the west overmuch, has to do with this same new communist man; apparently there were a number of well publicized situations in which a particular incarnation of the "new communist man" ended up in some sort of a critical situation and screwed up in some sort of a highly visible and highly costly way, and critical analysts were able to fairly easily show that, yes, this guy really was what the system intended to produce as the "new communist man" and, yes, the guy really did screw up in some indefensible sort of way in a situation in which a normal person would not be expected to screw up, and yes, the whole deal was predictable from the nature of communism.
The problem was that communism itself was acting like a breeding system for flawed human types, and then putting those flawed types into critical situations. Basically, a certain well defined type of individual was succeeding in life, getting ahead and all that, and nobody else was and, along with all of the other problems involved, the entire system collapsed.
Now the Holden/Nietzsche plan (TM) (Which is a pure fantasy by the way, i.e. don't try it at home) would invert the above process. You start off with a doctrine (the only doctrine) which is actually stupider THAN communism, i.e. evolutionism as a model, devise a religiously/culturally neutral clone (e.g. the doctrine of metallurgical advancement, the doctrine of the great pumpkin and pumpkinism...), and then cull all of the losers who buy off on it. That would have to have the opposite effect of communism and actually improve the human race.
An idea of the sort of thing I mention regarding the "new communist man" may be seen on the Anti-Stukachi WWW system:
THE STORY OF PAVLIK MOROZOV
In the 1930's, Stalin attempted to eliminate independent Russian peasants by confiscating all of their grain supply and forcing them to become kolkhoz serfs. Millions of peasants starved to death during this "collectivization".
Pavlik (Pavel Trofimovich) Morozov was born in 1918 in the village of Gerasimovka in Verkhne-Tavdinski rayon of Sverdlovsk(????new name???) oblast'. Pavlik was the chairman of the pioneer organization in his school. In 1932 the little stukach Pavlik Morozov denounced his own father to a representative of Communist Party raykom for hiding some grain that was supposed to be taken away ("khlebozagotovki"). Pavlik served as a witness at his father's trial and condemnded him as a traitor. His father was executed by the Soviets. At a general meeting in the village, Pavlik pointed out to the authorities other peasants who hid grain, and helped the OGPU search their homes. On Sept. 3, 1932, Pavlik's own grandfather killed him with an axe. The grandfather and other family members were also executed by the Soviets.
Stukach Pavlik Morozov, who denounced his own father, became a hero to Soviet children. The "kolkhoz" organized in the village of Gerasimovka was named after Pavlik. Many schools and "Palaces of pioneers" were named after him.
Ted Holden
www.bearfabrique.org
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Splifford the bat says: Always remember:
A mind is a terrible thing to waste; especially on an evolutionist. Just say no to narcotic drugs, alcohol abuse, and corrupt ideological doctrines.
Cleanup codes for Netscape 6.0.
I suppose it's a small miracle you made it that far.
Copernicus had followers dotted around Europe, but they were not outspoken about their views. It was Michael Mästlin, a mathematics professor at the University of Tübingen, who introduced Kepler to Copernicus' ideas. Kepler, who had entered the university in 1589, immediately perceived the essential correctness of these ideas and started on a course in life which would culminate in his development of the three laws of planetary motion.
An interesting tidbit in this history is that Galileo was not interested in Kepler's ideas, did not acknowledge him in his publications, and insisted to the end that the laws of planetary motions were unknown.
Galileo, who has become the triumphant symbol of scientific reasoning against dogma and faith, was not immune from a bias which blinded him to the truth of new ideas.
Pavlik (Pavel Trofimovich) Morozov was born in 1918 in the village of Gerasimovka in Verkhne-Tavdinski rayon of Sverdlovsk(????new name???) oblast'.
I suggest writing in English for the FR audience, Tovarisch. "Region" and "Province," respectively.
I suppose it's a small miracle you made it that far.
I'm sure you know what you mean. Maybe you will let the rest of us know too.
Let us know too if your SAT score for "Analytical Reasoning" required anything other than four elipses to be reported.
ML/NJ
I guess I was lamenting that, bailing when you did, you missed the "Mammal-like Reptiles." Then again, if you were looking for reasons to bail, there's no reason to think going any further would have helped.
Let us know too if your SAT score for "Analytical Reasoning" required anything other than four elipses to be reported.
I think it was asterisks. They did a lot with FORTRAN back in the 60s.
Did you forget to invite me to the party Vade? Well, I have been out of town a lot lately.
Actually, I can't get into the article past...
I limit my discussion of evolution to whether or not it has occurred, not the mechanisms that explain how.
Please. The mechanisms are what must be shown in order to prove it has occurred. The fossils document one time, non-repeatable historical events the causes of which are open to interpretation. Plus, the scientific method is lousy with history.
THe mechanisms are what, hypothetically, are still operating and what can be repeated in the lab or in the field- If macro-evolution were true.
Show me the mechanisms that produce the observed amount of change in the allowed amount of time. Right now at least, you can't do it. You know it, I know it, the American People know it, Bob Dole knows it. Yada Yada.
Please. The mechanisms are what must be shown in order to prove it has occurred.
Please. You can get that elsewhere. How many threads have you been on? That's the most ridiculous reason to refuse evidence since gore's "I don't do links! Post it here!"
“Scientific creationists” classify organisms not by standard Linnean taxonomic procedures, but rather group them into basic “kinds” (the terms “type” and “kind” are apparently synonymous; Gish, 1995, p. 29-31). As Morris & Parker (1987, p. 137, 138) stated, “For creationists, it’s the created type that is the real unit in nature.” Gish’s (1995, p. 29) definition is that, “A basic animal or plant type would include all animals or plants which were truly derived from a single stock.” As e xamples of “basic kinds,” Gish (1995, p. 30) offered the following: “Among the vertebrates, the fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals are obviously different basic types. Among the reptiles, the turtles, crocodiles, dinosaurs, pterosaurs..., an d ichthyosaurs...would be placed in different kinds. Each one of these major groups of reptiles could be further subdivided into the basic kinds within each. Within the mammalian class, duckbilled platypuses, opossums, bats, hedgehogs, rats, rabbits, dogs , cats, lemurs, monkeys, apes, and men are easily assignable to different basic types. Among the apes, the gibbons, orangutans, chimpanzees, and gorillas would each be included in a different basic kind.” That is curious: “kinds” are identified to exist as a hierarchy, “kinds” within other “kinds.” Yet Gish (1985, p. 34; 1995, p. 35) stated both that God separately created all of these basic animal and plant “kinds,” and that a “kind” includes those variants which have been derived by genetic variation from a single stock. If a “kind” consists of all those variants derived from a single stock, then how can some of the variants also have been created separately? At what level did God r eally create? This is both internally inconsistent and a major logical fallacy. Furthermore, it renders “creation science” neither falsifiable nor scientific. Scientists, and to some extent “creation scientists,” both agree that finding transitional forms between taxa (or “kinds”) would falsify “scientific creationism” (Cuffey, 1984; Gish, 1995, p. 40, 41). But, given the internally inconsistent definition of “basic kind,” what should be looked for? If intermediates between two species of the brachiopod < i>Eocoelia are found, it can be explained as “variation within the Eocoelia kind.” If intermediates connecting Hyracotherium with Equus are found, it can be explained as “variation within the horse kind.” If intermediates between mesonychid ungulates and whales are found, it can be explained as “variation within the mammal kind.” If intermediates between reptiles and mammals are found, it can be explained as “variation within the vertebrate kind.”
HAH! I love it! Kinds are separately created, and yet these "kinds" are also heirarchical. As Ross Perot would say, "Now that's rich!"
Hey, you know what? We simply add one more heirarchical "kind" to the mix: Carbon-based lifeforms. You see, all evolution, even macroevolution, is merely change within the "carbon-based lifeform kind". Works for me.
You see, all evolution, even macroevolution, is merely change within the "carbon-based lifeform kind".
Hey! That way the Ark could have been a rowboat!
Gish’s (1995, p. 29) definition is that, “A basic animal or plant type would include all animals or plants which were truly derived from a single stock.”In addition to Gish's logically self-contradictory definition of hierarchical kinds, he also, almost explicitly, defines a "kind" as a Clintonian concept:
It's the same trick Clinton's supporters used -- they divided the accusations against their Glorious Leader onto those which "do not rise to the level of impeachment" (micro-corruption) and those which "if proven, would justify impeachment" (macro-corruption), and placed every charge that did stick, regardless of objective severity, into the former category.
[steve-b, FreeRepublic message board, 1999]
OK, if it gets you unstuck: here's a page on mechanisms. But the lead article of this thread is about how the fossil record proves that evolution happens. Your demand for mechanisms looked to me like an attempted change of subject when you were faced with strong proof of something you don't want to see. That's an unfortunate impression which I'm sure you didn't intend to make.
It would look particularly bad if, reading the page on mechanisms, you came back and asked, "What's the proof any of this stuff really happens?"
I guess I was lamenting that, bailing when you did, you missed the "Mammal-like Reptiles." Then again, if you were looking for reasons to bail, there's no reason to think going any further would have helped.
Again, I do not know what you are talking about. Based upon your lauditory self-review, I'm sure whatever reply or message you sent was extremely intereseting, but I don't think you flagged me.
And re the SATs and asterisks ... I'm not sure about this comment either. I took the SATs last in 1963. There were no asterisks on my report.
ML/NJ
This is a fraud.
So you are claiming that the scientist(s) who created the classical single-lineage portrayal of horse evolution at the museum (Henry Fairfield Osborn?) was INTENTIONALLY doing something he KNEW to be fundamentally deceptive? I'm sure you wouldn't make a claim like this without having some reason or evidence in mind (as if). Please share.
I assumed you were joking, so I went along. A field full of asterisks is standard FORTRAN arithmetic-overflow handling. (The number is too big to fit in the digits allotted.) In fact, I lost track of my SAT scores a long time ago.
I suggest writing in English for the FR audience
Thoughtful of you, Vade (& Patrick), to consider the interests of the remaining few who do not simply scroll past Holden's posts.
. . . the remaining few who do not simply scroll past Holden's posts.
Bet there aren't many of those. Should have pinged you up top! Sorry!
bump for the always lucid VadeRetro.
Should have pinged you
No problem. I've never been able to keep up with you folks anyway, and my participation may be even more spotty than usual for awhile due to various distractions.
... the remaining few who do not simply scroll past Holden's posts.
You gotta be kidding. I love Splifford the Bat and all his links. I devour every golden drop of information they offer. I am never so happy as when medved is posting his wisdom -- no matter how often the same material appears. Centuries from now, medved will be hailed as an unsung genius, a man far ahead of his time. It's too bad you don't appreciate him. It takes courage to persevere in the face of universal scorn. Medved is an intellectual giant.
Forgot to bump you.
From the link:
Of prime importance is that science begins with a series of facts from which hypotheses are developed by application of inductive logic.
In contrast, “scientific creation” is a belief system based upon the untestable assumption that scripture is infallible.
I disagree with both of these statements. The first restricts science to ex post facto hypothesizing, which is fine for the fossil record, but too restrictive for science in general. Further, scientific creationism is scientific as an empirical body of data which has been falsified.
The author engages in some misleading hyper-dichotomy in order to make his argument. His blurring of the micro-macro distinction, with the support of a single reference (he knows the scientific community is not behind him on this one) is a case in point. He may be on the right side of the argument, but I abhor the deceitful means he uses to advance his side as much as the creationists do theirs.
I'm sorry, I'm not a native English speaker.
I disagree with both of these statements . . . I abhor the deceitful means he uses to advance his side as much as the creationists do theirs.
I see no deceit.
Cuffey: Of prime importance is that science begins with a series of facts from which hypotheses are developed by application of inductive logic.
He only says here that you start with a collection of real data. That's an induction. "So far, there's this pattern." Nowhere does he say you don't then begin thinking deductively, and I imagine that he's fully aware that deduction is the next step.
Cuffey: In contrast, “scientific creation” is a belief system based upon the untestable assumption that scripture is infallible.
It may not be airtight, (it overlooks some non-YEC flavors of creationism) but it conforms to my own experience and does not strike me as deceitful.
Here's the entire paragraph containing the sentence you decry. In context, it looks even more accurate.
Science proceeds by hypothetico-deductive reasoning (Kyburg, 1970; Dott & Prothero, 1994, p. 53-55). Scientific investigation is an ongoing, self-correcting cycle of observation, inductive logic, deductive logic, hypothesis testi ng and modification. This has become known popularly as the scientific method. Of prime importance is that science begins with a series of facts from which hypotheses are developed by application of inductive logic.
So far, two creationists made a point of announcing that they bailed out of reading before they hit this:
The top two are considered mammals. As you go down, you go back in time through a line of reptiles.
Note the "motion" of the hole(s) around the eye-socket. You could almost make a movie of it. The lower jaw and some bones that are jaw bones in reptiles but ear bones in mammals get a lot of discussion in the text, too.
The top two are considered mammals. As you go down, you go back in time through a line of reptiles.
That is obviously another Darwinist hoax. But even if you can prove that it's not (which you can't because you're pure Clintonesque slime), then it's nothing more than proof of divine creation. Heads or tails, it doesn't matter; creationism always wins!
</creationism mode>
No! It's like this:
1) What's the proof of that?
2) Excuse me, but WHERE are the intermediate fossils between those forms?
Thanks for the bump :)
"creationism always wins"
Just like truth, isn't it!
Galileo, who has become the triumphant symbol of scientific reasoning against dogma and faith, was not immune from a bias which blinded him to the truth of new ideas.
More evidence of what we all should know, we all walk with a limp.
What?
Huh?
What stela protruding from my eye?
Galileo, who has become the triumphant symbol of scientific reasoning against dogma and faith, was not immune from a bias which blinded him to the truth of new ideas.
Yes, and Kepler spent all his time trying to explain his findings as the 'Music of the Spheres'. Even though he had stumbled on the basic concepts Newton would later use, he didn't really see it either.
“creation science” is definitely not science.
Fine, it's not science. I'm not sure what "creation science" is. I have never promoted Genesis 1-3 as a science curriculum for public school, if that's what he means.
Lets have a science class called Origins Speculations and we can cover evolution and creation and everything in-between. Let everyone have all the information and decide for themselves. What always happens, to the dismay of evolutionists is that people are incurably aware that there must be more to it than Function Origins. What I protest is that evolution has become the sole unquestionable scientific approach; all dissent being labeled "creationist", the proponents of dissent being isolated, and opposing ideas totalitarianized for the public's safety.
What is this unwarranted fear? Because it has wonderful explanatory powers, evolution is allowed the only microphone. So does the Bible. Same category. An authoritative quote from Dobzhansky (1983) hardly makes evolutionary theory become "science". An intro to philosophy maybe, but not science.
“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,”
What does "makes sense" mean to his guy?
Making sense out of biological life is what the Bible does. It explains. Evolution "explains" nothing!!! Think about it. Evolution merely *describes* form and offers what? A confused description of apparent descendancy based on related forms.
Nevermind that the flow chart doesn't follow the prescribed-according-to-theory patterns.[thread II Gore3000's post 298] Anytime you hear the word "explosion" or "punctuated" you are hearing repair patches on the gradualistic micro-changes-over-time that are supposed to equal macroevolution.
Puff!! species appear!! Puff!! theory blown to smitherines. But wait, let us explain. No it isn't because this theory is not able to be disproven...ha-HA!!! We just insert one more variable to describe the way gradual change over time occurs...in rapid moments, evolutionary bursts, similar to, but certainly not, creation events.
My point has validity and so do the points of others. These are philosophical issues of interpretation, not scientific explanations. When you limit the conclusions to the natural you make one HUGE philosophical assumption...that the cause was natural all the way, from start to finish.
That's where science must moor its boat? It must only consider the natural? Then perhaps evolutionary "science" cannot answer the questions being posed to it for explanation. Did that ever occur to you? There are possibly better than scientific explanations required and the evidence does point in that direction if you are willing to look at the whole picture.
Evidence for miracles is much too poor and anecdotal to put them in just to celebrate diversity.
You could almost make a movie of it.
Yeah the nostrils are kinda strange though. As you go up they get bigger and smaller etc. The holes even change shape. Wait!! The top animal doesn't have a nose. Come on now. You expect me to believe there's a mammal running around without a nose??? :^D
"Dobzhansky stated that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution". Evolution would fly if it didn't keep getting it's wings snapped off when it smashes into the fossil record and the fruit fly.
When we ladies create a quilt, we sew little patches of different colored fabrics together to form a quilt. We may take a blue patch of fabric and sew together a horse on the quilt, and use that same blue fabric to sew together a bear. Isn't it possible that the D.N.A. chain is put together this same way?
Why would God have to make totally different harmones for example for each creation, when one harmone will work in several creations? For instance man and cockroach have the same harmone in their brains, that does not neccessarily mean they evolved from some common branch that forked. Couldn't it mean that this harmone was plugged into each DNA, mans and cockroach because that is what was needed to make each work the way it was suppose to? I think a deliberate blind eye is turned to this possibility.
Besides man was created from the dust of the earth, not some single cell in the ocean that got lucky. If man were not created from the dust of the earth, God would have said so.
From the article
As a second example, until 20 years ago, a significant gap separated whales from their inferred ancestors, the mesonychid ungulates. Mesonychids were wolf-like, carnivorous, hoofed mammals (Carroll, 1988, p. 520, 521). Subsequently, about a half-dozen genera have been described, mostly from the Tethys, that form a geochronologic and morphologic link between mesonychids and whales (Gingerich & Russell, 1981; Gingerich et al., 1983; Kumar & Sahni, 1986; Gingerich, Smith, & Simons, 1990; Thewissen & Hussain, 1993; Gingerich et al., 1994; Thewissen, Hussain, & Arif, 1994; Berta, 1994; Thewissen et al., 1996; Thewissen & Fish, 1997). These specimens document the morphologic changes in the skull , ear (Gingerich & Russell, 1981; Gingerich et al., 1983; Thewissen & Hussain, 1993), and loss of functional walking legs (Gingerich, Smith, Simons, 1990; Thewissen, Hussain, & Arif, 1994; Thewissen & Fish, 1997).
Forgot to deal with your last point:
The author engages in some misleading hyper-dichotomy in order to make his argument. His blurring of the micro-macro distinction, with the support of a single reference (he knows the scientific community is not behind him on this one) is a case in point.
Now, he does indeed claim majority status for the idea that macro- is simply micro- writ large. But he also mentions that this is not unanimous. His impression as--I believe--a geologist may vary from yours.
Yes, he mentions the mesonychid, whose place is now in question. But he's not citing meso- as a new transitional--he's correctly saying that Rodhocetus and Basilosarus--I hope I remembered those names right--have been added to the picture.
Here's the entire paragraph containing the sentence you decry. In context, it
looks even more accurate.
Science proceeds by hypothetico-deductive reasoning (Kyburg, 1970;
Dott & Prothero, 1994, p. 53-55). Scientific investigation is an ongoing,
self-correcting cycle of observation, inductive logic, deductive logic,
hypothesis testi ng and modification. This has become known popularly as the
scientific method. Of prime importance is that science begins with a series of
facts from which hypotheses are developed by application of inductive logic.
The only problem I have this one is the last sentence. The rest is fine, but that one sentence, as written, is just wrong. Not only that but it commits the genetic fallacy: to impugn an argument because of its source rather than its content.
I do not disagree if you argue that, in the majority of cases, hypotheses are generated by mental operations of some roughly inductive nature; and I'll certainly be with you if you note that, in practice, it's only persons with extensive, detailed and intimate acquaintance with the facts of a field who are able to create useful hypotheses...
But you can't -- and this is where the genetic fallacy comes in -- make the inductive generation of hypotheses a necessary component of the scientific process, nor even of "prime importance". In a purely logical sense (leaving aside, for instance, the practical considerations of training young scientists such that they are able to make useful hypotheses) it doesn't matter at all how a hypothesis being scientifically tested was generated. If a hypothesis withstands deductive scientific testing, or even if it fails, but proves useful in advancing the course of research in some way, then it was a good hypothesis even if the fairies whispered it into your ear.
. . . And of course, our friend Ambulocetus.
His blurring of the micro-macro distinction, with the support of a single reference (he knows the scientific community is not behind him on this one)
Which section of the article was that in?
You don't have to start with some kind of facts? What science is this? Mathematics? ("The Queen of the Sciences." Yeah, I know.)
His impression as--I believe--a geologist may vary from yours.
You put that rather delicately; remembering possibly the fractious "bones versus molecules" wars of the 70's? No fear, Nebby's side won. Right, Nebullis?
When we ladies create a quilt, we sew little patches of different colored fabrics together to form a quilt. We may take a blue patch of fabric and sew together a horse on the quilt, and use that same blue fabric to sew together a bear. Isn't it possible that the D.N.A. chain is put together this same way?
The preponderance of evidence doesn't look much at all like that, and it's getting a little late for the tide to turn. There was a time when your version was as likely as anything else. But then, your version is what everyone believed back then.
I agree that science must have facts, and that practically they must have something to do with generating hypotheses, but logically facts only play a necessary role in testing hypotheses, not in generating them. Inductive hypothesis generation is logically optional, regardless of whether or not it is practically necessary.
OK. I was just being practical.
The top two don't look like the third one at all. That's probably because they're mammals and the ones below are reptiles.
The top animal is simply a mouth-breather. Its truly amazing adaptation is that it's invisible from above, obviously an adaptation against predatory fliers.
Two and three have the same lower jaw, minus a little aspect ratio distortion. (There are similarities elsewhere also.)
It is clear, from reading “creation science” books, that a major motivating factor in such efforts is the conviction that evolution is atheistic, anti-God, anti-Christian, and will produce immorality
Ok, I'll play the game! Tell me where in the theory of evolution it is taught that individuals have rights?
Ok, I'll play the game! Tell me where in the theory of evolution it is taught that individuals have rights?
Nowhere. Does that make it bad science?
Well the evidence seems stuck at the very place I stated doesn't it? The two views are at an impasse, and are likely to stay stuck at that spot into infinity unless more evidence is forth coming.
Yes, and Kepler spent all his time trying to explain his findings as the 'Music of the Spheres'. Even though he had stumbled on the basic concepts Newton would later use, he didn't really see it either.
Stumbled upon? I see you need to brush up on your history. Here's a start and here's more.
Johannes Kepler is now chiefly remembered for discovering the three laws of planetary motion that bear his name published in 1609 and 1619). He also did important work in optics (1604, 1611), discovered two new regular polyhedra (1619), gave the first mathematical treatment of close packing of equal spheres (leading to an explanation of the shape of the cells of a honeycomb, 1611), gave the first proof of how logarithms worked (1624), and devised a method of finding the volumes of solids of revolution that (with hindsight!) can be seen as contributing to the development of calculus (1615, 1616). Moreover, he calculated the most exact astronomical tables hitherto known, whose continued accuracy did much to establish the truth of heliocentric astronomy (Rudolphine Tables, Ulm, 1627).
Jah! Asioryctes hat nie kind of naas.
You put that rather delicately; remembering possibly the fractious "bones versus molecules" wars of the 70's? No fear, Nebby's side won. Right, Nebullis?
We pulverized them We strive toward congruence.
That is obviously another Darwinist hoax. But even if you can prove that it's not (which you can't because you're pure Clintonesque slime), then it's nothing more than proof of divine creation. Heads or tails, it doesn't matter; creationism always wins!
</creationism mode>
Hey, now stop that. I almost sprayed a really good wine on my keyboard.
Which section of the article was that in?
On this page. The micro vs. macro distinction is one which I frequently address because it's one that is played out differently among scientists than among the cultural/religious debaters. I think it ties in with a larger issue of certain weaknesses in various parts of evolution theory (no, NOT the fossil record!) which the creationists probe to their advantage, although these do not butress their own theory, and the evolutionists tend to deny.
The premise of the article is completely erroneous. It attacks the evolutionist strawman, the young earth creationists. The disbelief in the evolutionists characterization of the fossil record as proving evolution is shared by many biologists, scientists and others totally in the mainstream of the scientific community.
The problems with the fossil record are as follows:
1. the problem of dating - the dating of rocks is quite imperfect. Even in radioactive dating there are wide discrepancies to be found and there is no way to test dating methods which are being used for overall accuracy. The only one that we have been able to test was C-14 because it could be tested against historical data. The testing resulted in calibration changes of some 20% in the age of results. C-14 can only be used to some 50,000 years back, not sufficient at all for purposes of evolution discussions.
2. The problem of who came first - because the fossil record is not complete and never will be complete. It is essential for proving evolution which species came first and which after. Since the record is incomplete, it will never be possible to say with certainty that a species did not exist before another (also see 1. above regarding dating).
3. The problem of the continuation of species - while we may have a fossil that shows when a species first appeared, we do not know with certainty when it dissappeared. The classic example of this is the coelacanth which was thought extinct by Darwinists but was suddenly found to be still alive and well in 1938 near Madagascar. Therefore we can not tell if a species was around to be an ancestor of another species at a particular time (see also 1. above).
4. fossils only preserve a small amount of the biological information of a species - basically only the bones and hard parts. The real evidence needed for determining whether a species descended from another is usually to be found in the 90% of the other parts which the fossil record does not preserve - the soft body parts of living things.
And now for the bonus answer: when evolutionists are caught with lack of evidence from the fossil record for their theories, they always complain that the fossil record is inadequate to prove or disprove the point being made.
Well the evidence seems stuck at the very place I stated doesn't it?
Not from my seat.
The two views are at an impasse, and are likely to stay stuck at that spot into infinity unless more evidence is forth coming.
The science is all evolution. Creationism had to be reborn as a political movement to get back into the classroom for a few months in Kansas.
...logically facts only play a necessary role in testing hypotheses, not in generating them
Exactly.
What I protest is that evolution has become the sole unquestionable scientific approach; all dissent being labeled "creationist", the proponents of dissent being isolated, and opposing ideas totalitarianized for the public's safety.
Nice dramatic speech and all, but in the end the only thing that matters are the ideas that are tested and communicated by workers engaged in the advancement or consolidation of a scientific field through research, and the ideas actually used and implicated in that research. As long as creationists fail or refuse to do significant research based on creationistic ideas, and publish it, the rest is just whining.
You talk as though debates in highschools, or in popular fora among adults, have something to do with determining the content of science. They don't.
The premise of the article is completely erroneous. It attacks the evolutionist strawman, the young earth creationists.
It also attacks the idea that you can make any sense of the fossil record without evolution, and that "there are no tranistional forms."
1. the problem of dating - the dating of rocks is quite imperfect.
Nuclear chemistry works. None of that helps you with Cuffey's article anyway.
2. The problem of who came first - because the fossil record is not complete and never will be complete. . .
Minor revisions happen as new fossils turn up, and yet faunal succession is still detectable and obvious.
3. The problem of the continuation of species - while we may have a fossil that shows when a species first appeared, we do not know with certainty when it dissappeared.
Faunal succession is still obvious.
And now for the bonus answer: when evolutionists are caught with lack of evidence from the fossil record for their theories, they always complain that the fossil record is inadequate to prove or disprove the point being made.
Your usual canned diatribe, as per the previous thread. This article points out that there is plenty of proof of evolution in the fossil record.
(chuckle)
A marine wonderworld. Thousands within thousands of fish, most species never before known, lest seen. ...Ridden through daily by thousands through subway tunnels cut trough Miocene marine basins beneath current day Wilshire and Normandy, Los Angeles.
All there long before, as long since gone but there traces.
There, seems some evolutionary aspect.
Other than that (so far - still need to look at Nebullis' micro-macro criticism) this article is quite good. Packs a lot of good information into the brief subsections.
It doesn't address ID or some OEC models but that's OK. It addresses the people who say the fossil evidence doesn't support the process of evolution.
All: I've had it for tonight. Just pile the flames up here and I'll de-queue them in the morning.
The Cambrian explosion decisively shows that the gradual change required for evolution theory to be true, is totally false. Since the evolutionists love quotes from authorities here are a few:
Most families, orders, classes, and phyla appear rather suddenly in the fossil
record, often without anatomically intermediate forms smoothly interlinking
evolutionarily derived descendant taxa with their presumed ancestors.
Eldredge, N., 1989
Macro-Evolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, and Adaptive Peaks
McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, New York, p. 22
The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps
we see reflect real events in life's history -- not the artifact of a poor
fossil record.
Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I. (1982)
The Myths of Human Evolution
Columbia University Press, p. 59
[The above two quotes are from the very same Eldredge who with Gould developed the punk-eek excuse]
The fossil record suggests that the major pulse of diversification of phyla
occurs before that of classes, classes before that of orders, and orders before
families. This is not to say that each higher taxon originated before species
(each phylum, class, or order contained at least one species, genus, family,
etc. upon appearance), but the higher taxa do not seem to have diverged through
an accumulation of lower taxa.
(Erwin, Valentine, and Sepkoski, 1988).
Erwin, D., Valentine, J., and Sepkoski, J. (1988)
"A Comparative Study of Diversification Events"
Evolution, vol. 41, p. 1183
Described recently as "the most important evolutionary event during the entire
history of the Metazoa," the Cambrian explosion established virtually all the
major animal body forms -- Bauplane or phyla -- that would exist thereafter,
including many that were 'weeded out' and became extinct. Compared with the 30
or so extant phyla, some people estimate that the Cambrian explosion may have
generated as many as 100. The evolutionary innovation of the
Precambrian/Cambrian boundary had clearly been extremely broad: "unprecedented
and unsurpassed,"
as James Valentine of the University of California, Santa
Barbara, recently put it (Lewin, 1988).
"Why, in subsequent periods of great evolutionary activity when countless
species, genera, and families arose, have there been no new animal body plans
produced, no new phyla?"
Lewin, R. (1988)
Science, vol. 241, 15 July, p. 291
[G]aps between higher taxonomic levels are general and large.
Raff, R. A. and Kaufman, T. C., 1991
Embryos, Genes, and Evolution: The Developmental-Genetic Basis of Evolutionary
Change
Indiana University Press, p. 35
Evidence of gradualism between phyla, classes and even orders is either
non-existent or is much disputed. Certainly, no pervasive pattern of gradualism
exists.
George Gaylord Simpson acknowledged this decades ago as he described the
situation in these terms:
"This is true of all thirty-two orders of mammals...The earliest and most
primitive known members of every order already have the basic ordinal
characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous sequence from one
order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large
that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed...
This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an
almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is
true of almost all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate...it is
true of the classes, and of the major animal phyla, and it is apparently also
true of analogous categories of plants.
Simpson, G. G. (1944)
Tempo and Mode in Evolution
Columbia University Press, New York, p. 105, 107
[T]he fossil record itself provided no documentation of continuity -- of gradual
transitions from one kind of animal or plant to another of quite different form.
Stanley, S. M., 1981
The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species
Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, N.Y., p. 40
The gaps in the fossil record are real, however. The absence of a record of any
important branching is quite phenomenal. Species are usually static, or nearly
so, for long periods, species seldom and genera never show evolution into new
species or genera but replacement of one by another, and change is more or less
abrupt.
Wesson, R., 1991
Beyond Natural Selection
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 45
[T]he origin of no innovation of large evolutionary significance is known.
Wesson, R., 1991
Beyond Natural Selection
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 45
[L]arge evolutionary innovations are not well understood. None has ever been
observed, and we have no idea whether any may be in progress. There is no good
fossil record of any.
Wesson, R., 1991
Beyond Natural Selection
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 206
Taxa recognized as orders during the (Precambrian-Cambrian) transition chiefly
appear without connection to an ancestral clade via a fossil intermediate. This
situation is in fact true of most invertebrate orders during the remaining
Phanerozoic as well. There are no chains of taxa leading gradually from an
ancestral condition to the new ordinal body type. Orders thus appear as rather
distinctive subdivisions of classes rather than as being segments in some sort
of morphological continuum.
Valentine, J.W., Awramik, S.M., Signor, P.W., and Sadler, P.M. (1991)
"The Biological Explosion at the Precambrian-Cambrian Boundary"
Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 25, Max K. Hecht, editor, Plenum Press, New York
and London, p.284
"The models we consider are of three sorts: those that extrapolate processes of
speciation to account for higher taxa via divergence, those that invoke
selection among species, and those that emphasize that many higher taxa
originated as novel lineages in their own right, not only as a consequence of
species-level processes. It is in this latter class of model that we believe the
record favors."
(Valentine and Erwin, 1985, p. 71)
"... many of the large populations should have been preserved, yet we simply do not find them. Small populations are called for, then, but there are difficulties here also. The populations must remain small (and undetected) and evolve steadily and consistently toward the body plan that comprises the basis of a new phylum (or class). This is asking a lot. Deleterious mutations would tend to accumulate in small populations to form genetic loads that selection might not be able to handle. Stable intermediate adaptive modes cannot be invoked as a regular feature, since we are then again faced with the problem of just where their remains are. We might imagine vast arrays of such small populations fanning continually and incessantly into adaptive space. Vast arrays should have produced at least some fossil remains also. Perhaps an even greater difficulty is the requirement that these arrays of lineages change along a rather straight and true course --- morphological side trips or detours of any frequency should lengthen the time of origin of higher taxa beyond what appears to be available. Why should an opportunistic, tinkering process set on such a course and hold it for so long successfully among so many lineages?
We conclude that the extrapolation of microevolutionary rates to explain the
origin of new body plans is possible, but does not accord with the primary
evidence."
(Valentine and Erwin, 1985, pp. 95, 96)
"The required rapidity of the change implies either a few large steps or many
and exceedingly rapid smaller ones. Large steps are tantamount to saltations and
raise the problems of fitness barriers; small steps must be numerous and entail
the problems discussed under microevolution. The periods of stasis raise the
possibility that the lineage would enter the fossil record, and we reiterate
that we can identify none of the postulated intermediate forms. Finally, the
large numbers of species that must be generated so as to form a pool from which
the successful lineage is selected are nowhere to be found. We conclude that the
probability that species selection is a general solution to the origin of higher
taxa is not great, and that neither of the contending theories of evolutionary
change at the species level, phyletic gradualism or punctuated equilibrium, seem
applicable to the origin of new body plans."
(Valentine and Erwin, 1985, p. 96)
Valentine, J., and Erwin, D. (1985)
The way I see it, there's been no creation yet.
You make an anti-relibious joke out of it, but most of the argument by evolutionists is pretty much the same - look at all the species around, they prove evolution. This is no different from the creationist argument you laugh at. Seems the pot is calling the kettle black.
So you are claiming that the scientist(s) who created the classical single-lineage portrayal of horse evolution at the museum (Henry Fairfield Osborn?) was INTENTIONALLY doing something he KNEW to be fundamentally deceptive? I'm sure you wouldn't make a claim like this without having some reason or evidence in mind (as if). Please share.
I can't say for sure about what Osborn knew, but it has been known for some time that the Evolution of a Horse display at the Museum of Natural History in New York City doesn't even square with mainstream evolution's theories. Leaving it there is akin to the Hayden Planetarium keeping an Earth-centered solar system model.
I haven't been to the Museum of Natural History in ten years or more. I loved the place as a child, but once my eyes were opened and I went looking for things in their collection which are difficult to explain with the commonly advanced theories, I found that almost none were on display.
I suggest you read Earth in Upheaval by Immanual Velikovsky (and before you neysayers shout, "Oh vey," it will be useful to recall that the manuscripts for many chapters of this book were read by Dr. Albert Einstein and he supposedly supplied comments to Velikovsky). Velikovsky discusses the horse exhibit, but I cannot find a quote quickly. Velikovsky makes reference to numerous items in the museum's collection and discusses the difficultly they present to the conventional wisdom. As I recall I could find only one of these on any of my visits. I inquired about several others and was told they didn't have the space to display everything. I didn't get a sense that I had received an intellectually honest answer.
ML/NJ
The top animal is simply a mouth-breather. Its truly amazing adaptation is that it's invisible from above, obviously an adaptation against predatory fliers.
Well it would seem more of a maladaptation, seeing as it is not possible to eject liquids from the oral cavity using the alternate method when something simply hilarious is encountered.
"Friedrich Nietzsche had a lot to say about what he saw as the next step in human evolutionary development, the uebermensch; everything pretty much EXCEPT a believeable plan for developing or breeding him. I now know how that can be done. At the very least, I have a plan which would dramatically improve the genetic pool of the entire human race in one generation. "
Notice how since Clinton no one talks of the perfection of the human race?
It also attacks the idea that you can make any sense of the fossil record without evolution, and that "there are no tranistional forms."
If there is such proof there - post it here, I will not do your work.
I almost sprayed a really good wine on my keyboard.
Enquiring minds want to know, red or white?
Nuclear chemistry works. None of that helps you with Cuffey's article anyway.
No it does not. The question is accuracy, let's see proof of the accuracy. Further, if Cuffey does not discuss it, then he clearly is ignoring a very important part of the question - as evolutionists always do. They ignore what does not fit their theory.
No, it's bad science for different reasons. But it does demonstrate that evolution promotes immorality.
2. The problem of who came first - because the fossil record is not complete and never will be complete. . .-me-
Minor revisions happen as new fossils turn up, and yet faunal succession is still detectable and obvious. -vade-
3. The problem of the continuation of species - while we may have a fossil that shows when a species first appeared, we do not know with certainty when it dissappeared. -me-
Faunal succession is still obvious.
Only if you use the theory of evolution to prove evolution. That is a tautology and it does not prove anything. To prove evolution you need to prove faunal succession not assume it.
Your excuse shows quite well why I do not call evolution science, the most basic concepts of proof they just pooh pooh when their phony theory can not be shown to support them.
I suggest you read Earth in Upheaval by Immanual Velikovsky
I really did try to once, and got a ways into it, but (just to be honest) it absolutely bored the hell of me. Phantasy isn't interesting without a moral.
You are darned right I do not do links. Your links are garbage. If they prove what you say you should be able to summarize the proof for everyone instead of expecting them to do your work for you. In fact I would call your calling links "proof" of anything an utter abuse of these threads.
Here is an example why links are garbage:
The proof that evolution is garbage
A red from South Africa (Rust en Vrede '93).
Yup, as usual, bashing religion and proving nothing, that is what the evos are good at.
What I protest is that evolution has become the sole unquestionable scientific approach; all dissent being labeled "creationist", the proponents of dissent being isolated, and opposing ideas totalitarianized for the public's safety.
Nice dramatic speech and all,
Thanks. I enjoyed coming up with it.
As long as creationists fail or refuse to do significant research based on creationistic ideas, and publish it, the rest is just whining.
I'm not sure that's fair criticism. How do you propose that they put the Creator on view? To say He was not involved is more than can be stated. To assume He wasn't in no way excludes the possibility. He is visible by inference of intangibles like beauty, by degree of complexity and by orderly laws which tell us intelligence has preceeded us. The unlikely scenario of chance and many years, causing our life satisfies the dolt alone, even if he is a scientist. These men are mortals.
You talk as though debates in highschools, or in popular fora among adults, have something to do with determining the content of science. They don't.
Science can go which ever way it wants.
The philosophy of science is fair game for the scrutiny of anyone. One need not be a scientist to determine that more is being stated, than can be proven.
I can see a cultish world in which Vade & Co. find comfort from each other.
I asked how many of you are atheists and nobody wanted to respond.
Curious.
Is that a relevant fact? You tell me.
So, that's fine. Fellowship with one another.
I'm not sure what you think is being proven by lining up bones to
some symmetrical order and then shouting "Eureka!"
I think the true and actual laws which govern the development of life are far more complex than the dinky Darwin assessment of natural selection and mutation.
A red ...
Thanks. Sigh, my wife won't let me partake and I obey. Take an extra swish for me. I'm having decaf.
For one thing the beginning of the "line", the eohippus, was originally called the Hyracotherium because it was very closely related to a different genus - the hyrax. However, since the evos needed to prove something after 100 years of digging, they "borrowed" it, renamed it and put it as the start of the horse series. For another the middle of that line, the dinohippus, is just the upper part of the head, from that they have reconstructed the entire "missing link" of the horse series.
In addition, since we are speaking of fraud, please note that all the evo "proofs" of lineages, are drawings, not pictures of what has been found of those animals. Oftentimes the actual bones found for a particular animal are just one or two, sometimes just a tooth. You may not call that fraud, but I sure do.
"Notice how since Clinton no one talks of the perfection of the human race? "
Why? Do you believe Clinton to be the apex? Or perhaps the nadir?
You really ought to concede macro-evolution in his case.
How can you tell which one of those fossils layed eggs and which ones had live births? I guess that is not important to the question of reptiles and mammals?
The teeth samples show some small teeth at first, then some big teeth, and then small teeth again. I guess teeth do not matter as far as evolution?
Three of the middle samples show a rounded head, while those before and after show an elongated head. Guess that does not matter when it comes to evolution either? (Note, the brain is in there).
What are those parts with spots on them? Ear cavities, eye cavities, nose cavities or parts not found? It does make a difference you know.
What else do we have to tell us if it is a reptile or a mammal? Some of the samples are only of the top of the head, doubt we have anything else for them. How do you reconstruct a whole animal from a few bones? - Imagination?
The examples also do not show the age of the fossil, they do not show a single well known species, or numerous other characteristics which are necessary to show descent.
Only if you use the theory of evolution to prove evolution. That is a
tautology and it does not prove anything. To prove evolution you need to
prove faunal succession not assume it.
Your excuse shows quite well why I do not call evolution science
Either that or it shows that you've simply wiped your mental slate clean in the last five minutes as usual since the last time it was explained to you that the recognition of faunal succession and the construction of the geological column were (historically) and are (logically) independent of evolutionary theory. The reasoning is therefore not circular. You are wrong.
The proof that you are wrong can be found here. This page gives the dates (note they PRECEDE 1859) that most of the major divisions of the geologic column were defined, and the names of some of the CREATIONISTS who defined them. Note also that I have given you the summary that you require of links that are directed to you. You therefore have no excuse (he said hopefully though knowing there are always excuses). The basic facts are simple. Faunal succession was recognized and the geologic column was constructed BY CREATIONISTS. How can they be then based on evolution by circular reasoning?
TO ALL: I need a better link than the one I provided gore. One that shows at the names and dates in a nice neat chart or table or something. I may just have to type that up sometime, but if anybody know of a link please post here.
If evolution can not give scientific proof to support itself then it is nothing more than miracles or nonsense - you take your choice. Your constant bashing of opponents and critics who ask for proof as calling for miracles is a completely invalid form of argument. You call it science, it is up to you to prove it by scientific means, not by insulting opponents.
"Notice how since Clinton no one talks of the perfection of the human race? "
Why? Do you believe Clinton to be the apex? Or perhaps the nadir?
You really ought to concede macro-evolution in his case.
**********
Naw...the guy is a miserable failure at spreading his genes around in the right places.
The question of micro and macro evolution is central to the theory of evolution, but since it is an embarassment to evolutionists, he does not deal with it and just refers the question to polls (like Clinton and the leftists) instead of answering it himself. Seems that your "authorities" also just refer everyone to somewhere else instead of answering questions directly. Guess all evolutionists must be memory deficient or unable to grasp concepts and explain them succinctly for others.
His impression as--I believe--a geologist may vary from yours.
Clifford Cuffey appears to be Roger Cuffey's son. He works for Chevron, made it to finalist in a science talent search by Intel, got his name on one of his dad's posters, and is chairman of the NOGS field trip committee this year.
Roger Cuffey has compiled a list of over a hundred transitional fossil species, complete with references to the scientific literature in a chapter of SCIENCE AND CREATIONISM edited by Ashley Montagu (1984) called "Paleontologic Evidence and Organic Evolution"
You must remember, you are only supposed to look at what the evo magicians tell you to look at, it is not fair to look at what they are doing with the other hand.
the eohippus, was originally called the Hyracotherium because it was very closely related to a different genus - the hyrax. However, since the evos needed to prove something after 100 years of digging, they "borrowed" it, renamed it and put it as the start of the horse series.
Usually I just ignore this kind of *expletive deleted* from you. I know for a fact that it has been explained to you precisely how and why the name changes of Hyracotherium occurred, and that this was dictated entirely by dry rules of nomenclature that have nothing to do with what "evos needed". At the moment I've become tired of pretending that your practice of pretending like prior refutations (often only days prior) never happened is somehow charming or humorous. I'm too close to telling you what I really think of the intellectual and moral quality of your arguments, and will not be responding to you until my mood improves.
What it shows is that when differences are shown, the evos always have an excuse ready. Everyone is an idiot, they are not supposed to look at what they are not told to look at. You have been told what to look for, now don't argue with the experts.
I meant to ask you if you read the thread on FR last night about the fruit fly, and how it flies in the face of evolution. I wondered what you thought of that.
For the average person, it would seem that evolution while proving that most life is made up of bits and pieces of the same DNA, it falls apart at the question, is it design or random chance?" Random chance, given the nature of the universe and life as a whole, would seem to stretch credibility to me.
The question of micro and macro evolution is central to the theory of evolution, but since it is an embarassment to evolutionists
Not at all. We don't arbitrarily say that change can occur at this level but not at that one.
In other words, by excluding anyone with opposing views you can assure that your theory will not be challenged.
You call that science? I call that an ideology and that is as far from science as anything can be.
devised a method of finding the volumes of solids of revolution that (with hindsight!) can be seen as contributing to the development of calculus (1615, 1616
Like I said. Without the calculus, the vision was not clean and complete.
Only if you use the theory of evolution to prove evolution. That is a tautology and it does not prove anything. To prove evolution you need to prove faunal succession not assume it. -me-
Either that or it shows that you've simply wiped your mental slate clean in the last five minutes as usual since the last time it was explained to you that the recognition of faunal succession and the construction of the geological column were (historically) and are (logically) independent of evolutionary theory. The reasoning is therefore not circular. You are wrong.
So it does not matter who came first the elephant or the amoeba?
You think everyone is a moron? You are insulting everyone who reads this thread, not just me.
If you do not know who came first then you can not prove descent. Remember the name of Darwin's book? "The Descent of Man"? Guess that has nothing to do with evolution?
Sell your garbage to idiots, those are the only ones who will buy it.
"Usually I just ignore this kind of *expletive deleted* from you. I know for a fact that it has been explained to you precisely how and why the name changes of Hyracotherium occurred
I know, you and your fellow evos always ignore facts. You and your fellow evos always have proof somewhere else, but not here. I could not care less what the excuse you gave for it (if you gave it I certainly did not see it). The truth of the matter is that the evolutionists hijacked this species for their own use after a scientist had decided that it did not belong to the horse family but to a different genus completely. The middle of the line is also phony, as are all drawings made from bones and all "recreations" of non-living animals.
Just the fact that evolutionists go around shifting bones from one species to another, from one genus to another shows quite well that all this fossil stuff does not prove anything.
Without the calculus, the vision was not clean and complete.
What does this say of Galileo or anyone who came before Newton and Leibniz? Or after? That dolt Newton didn't see the things Einstein did.
"The question of micro and macro evolution is central to the theory of evolution, but since it is an embarassment to evolutionists -me- Not at all. We don't arbitrarily say that change can occur at this level but not at that one. "
Absolutely wrong. In fact evolutionists do not even concede that there is a distinction between macro evolution and micro-evolution. They do not because they know they cannot prove macro-evolution. All the examples they can give - finches, moths, etc. are examples of micro-evolution. For example, Ken Miller, in Jenny's favorite book completely ignores the question and says that macro-evolution has the same character as micro-evolution.
Adaptation or even the mutation of a single amino acid in a gene is vastly different in character from the creation of additional genes and additional complexity. To deny that lots of things have to happen more than change of color, size, etc. to turn an amoeba into a human being is absolutely dishonest and that is what the evolutionists are saying.
Yup, as usual, bashing religion and proving nothing, that is what the evos are good at.Nope, it's what inevitably happens when a creationist finally dares to put forth a positive statement of what creationism is: an embarrassment for the creationist. Once again, here's Cuffey quoting Gish himself on just what a "kind" is:
Gish’s (1995, p. 29) definition is that, “A basic animal or plant type would include all animals or plants which were truly derived from a single stock.” As e xamples of “basic kinds,” Gish (1995, p. 30) offered the following: “Among the vertebrates, the fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals are obviously different basic types. Among the reptiles, the turtles, crocodiles, dinosaurs, pterosaurs..., an d ichthyosaurs...would be placed in different kinds. Each one of these major groups of reptiles could be further subdivided into the basic kinds within each. Within the mammalian class, duckbilled platypuses, opossums, bats, hedgehogs, rats, rabbits, dogs , cats, lemurs, monkeys, apes, and men are easily assignable to different basic types. Among the apes, the gibbons, orangutans, chimpanzees, and gorillas would each be included in a different basic kind.” That is curious: “kinds” are identified to exist as a hierarchy, “kinds” within other “kinds.” Yet Gish (1985, p. 34; 1995, p. 35) stated both that God separately created all of these basic animal and plant “kinds,” and that a “kind” includes those variants which have been derived by genetic variation from a single stock. If a “kind” consists of all those variants derived from a single stock, then how can some of the variants also have been created separately? At what level did God r eally create? This is both internally inconsistent and a major logical fallacy.
I'll bet you never thought that "mammal" was a "kind", and, at the same time, "rats, rabbits, dogs , cats" and other groups within the mammals were also their own "kinds"! That makes absolutely no sense at all.
You tell me: Do you believe that God made one pair of generic mammals which were the ancestors of all later mammals, but he also had to make one pair of generic rats, and one pair of generic cats, and one pair of generic dogs, etc? Since the dogs are already spoken for, and the cats are already spoken for, and the rats are already spoken for, etc. etc., which existing mammals didn't get their own specific created initial ancestor? Do you agree with Gish that these mammals had to rely on the default mammal ancestor "kind"? Does this really make any sense to you?
""Notice how since Clinton no one talks of the perfection of the human race? " -me-
Why? Do you believe Clinton to be the apex? Or perhaps the nadir?
You really ought to concede macro-evolution in his case. "
Congratulations! You have passed the leftist test with flying colors. You have shown yourself to have no sense of humor and that entitles you to full participation in all left activities.
In fact evolutionists do not even concede that there is a distinction between macro evolution and micro-evolution.
Evolutionists (Dobzhansky) coined the terms and, as any perusal of an evolutionary journal will show you, use them as distinctive ideas all the time.
You are quite wrong on both counts. Micro and Macro evolution is a distinction first made by Intelligent Design theorists. Darwin ignored it completely and his followers try to ignore it also. As I said, it is a very important distinction, macro evolution is not just more micro-evolution. If you have been reading these threads, you know very well that each time the subject of macro-evolution is brought up the evolutionists ignore it or say it does not exist.
To show that man descended from the amoeba, the evolutionists have to prove macro-evolution. They have not done that in any way at all, and I do not just mean here, but anywhere at all.
I think too much emphasis is placed on speciation and that the origins of this may lie in the notion of 'kinds'.
Sorry, post 126 should be addressed to you.
I think too much emphasis is placed on speciation and that the origins of this may lie in the notion of 'kinds'.
Interesting! That could well be.
Although... once a population speciates from the "sibling" population, it's not going to merge back, unlike microevolutionary changes which can. That does have vastly different implications for their futures.
Although... once a population speciates from the "sibling" population, it's not going to merge back, unlike microevolutionary changes which can.
They're related, aren't they? There is some backwards direction in the case of parasitism or symbiosis (Margulis), but in general, change is unidirectional, no matter what the unit of selection is.
I'm not sure what you're asking.
Not worth a new thread, but an interesting sideshow from the people who believe in Intelligent Design - by ancient aliens. (Hey, kinda like medved!):
Forbes.com
Human Cloning Attempt Continues, Despite Scrutiny
By Matthew Herper
A group attempting to clone a human being was warned by U.S. regulators not to perform certain experiments within this country. One of the group's leaders says the cloning efforts continue both inside and outside the U.S., but they are being careful not to break any laws.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration told the group, which is conducting cloning experiments on behalf of the Raelian religious sect, not to clone a human being in the United States. Some reports have stated that the cloning group, called Clonaid, was halted in its effort to create a genetic duplicate of a child that died of heart disease. But one of Clonaid's leaders says their work continues.
Brigitte Boisselier, Clonaid's director, says her operation is continuing. The Raelian group operates two laboratories, one inside the U.S. and one outside the U.S., Boisselier says. She adds she was visited by the FDA in April, and was warned about human cloning experiments at that time. Boisselier emphasizes that the group does not and will not break the law.
The cloning effort was an offshoot of the Raelian religious movement, which believes aliens created life on Earth.
Since you wanted my views on post#126 let me give them to you:
You seem to be making fun of Gish for using "kinds" instead of scientific language. Personally I do not follow her argument and am not sure what she is trying to show.
I do know this, at the species level, new non-interbreeding species can arise through adaptation or mutation. However at higher levels there are very distinct boundaries between the families of living forms. These boundaries never seem to cross. For example, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, etc. are all quite distinct and except for the platypus among the reptile/mammal distinction and the lungfish in the fish/amphibian category there are no intermediate species known. This is a great problem for evolutionists in my view because clearly there is no reason for all of the intermediate species which evolution predicts there should have been would become extinct. One would expect some to have survived. After all we have many species which have survived totally unchanged for hundreds of millions of years such as the shark and the manta-rays.
As to your final question, how much does God intefere in earthly matters? Quite a bit I think. I do not think that creating a few new species now and then is such a big deal when one considers His concern as shown in the New Testament.
Oh and one more thing, new discoveries in biology are showing that similar functions and similar traits in different families of animals (homologies) are not accomplished in the same way in these different animals. A direct contradiction of evolution theory and proof of an intelligent designer.
UFF DA! Here's the link to the Raelians.
"Although... once a population speciates from the "sibling" population, it's not going to merge back, unlike microevolutionary changes which can.
So it seems you agree with me that macro-evolution and micro-evolution are different in kind (since micro-evolution can be 'taken back')?
Micro and Macro evolution is a distinction first made by Intelligent Design theorists.
THUMP! (sound of jaw striking floor)
Velikovsky (as compared to Gould) at least tried to provide a mechanism for his version of extreme rapid evolution. Nonetheless, even Velikovsky's vision of catastrophic evolution does not really work as a logical basis for explaining how something like a flying bird could come into existence. You've still got something amounting to a probabilistic miracle.
Placemarker.
It is clear, from reading “creation science” books, that a major motivating factor in such efforts is the conviction that evolution is atheistic, anti-God, anti-Christian, and will produce immorality. Nothing could be further from the truth.
OK Time to ante up.
How many of you evolutionists believe in God?
Any of you going to church this morning?
Are we all atheists?
It is hardly fair to chastize the Christians for unwarranted characterization of evolution as atheistic, decry their bias and then hide your own.
We've been very honest about our faith, why not be honest about yours, if that is so.
Say it isn't so; ante up!!!
[Various dumb-dumbisms on the reptile-mammal skull series]
Too bad you don't do links. The guy did a whole page talking to that picture, explaining the difference between a reptile and a mammalian jawbone, and the way in which three reptilian jawbones became ear bones in mammals. There's a key, a nice table, and several paragraphs of main-line text.
Too bad you didn't read the whole article, because the guy dissected an attempted creationist argument against that skull series by Duane Gish. That would be this Gish article or another very like it. Gish's attempted rebuttal of these inert fossils is indefensible. Fossils 10, Gish 0.
Now, you say you're not a YEC, but I've spent a lot of time debunking Gish-ICR junk offered up by yuou. You freely borrow from the Witch Doctors on the premise apparently that anything, however dishonest, aimed at your enemy is your weapon too. But this makes it hard to tell you from them. In fact, I can't imagine what you believe if you're not a YEC.
Another thing you missed by not following links:
Second, as is typical of “creation science” books, Gish (1995) presented a series of quotes that have been taken out of context from various articles about synapsid evolution and fitted together to form a story that misrepresents the meaning of the original authors’ works. That is not corroborative evidence for “creation science,” and it does not disprove evolution. . . .Think about that before you post your next quote salad.One paleontologist’s critique of Gish (1978) is: “On 67 of the 97 text pages I found at least one error of fact, logical error, or quotation out of context, all chosen carefully to mislead the reader. On checking a standard college logic text with a list of logical fallacies, I found that Gish did not manage to miss a single one! Their works have the appearance of scholarship, but not the substance” (Sloan, 1983, p. 263).
Since I made that statement, why did you not address it to me?
Okay, since you know better, let's see you show who used the terms macro-evolution and micro-evolution first. Let's see some quotes.
Oh, and also let's see you show some examples of macro-evolution, I need a good laugh.
Velikovsky (as compared to Gould) at least tried to provide a mechanism for his version of extreme rapid evolution. Nonetheless, even Velikovsky's vision of catastrophic evolution does not really work as a logical basis for explaining how something like a flying bird could come into existence. You've still got something amounting to a probabilistic miracle.
Velikovsky documents difficulties with the conventional wisdom by presenting contradictory facts. That is what I find most useful in Earth in Upheaval. I would agree that his "vision of catastrophic evolution" has its own difficulties.
ML/NJ
All the examples they can give - finches, moths, etc. are examples of micro-evolution.
There's a sense in which this is true. It's true to the extent that creationists move the macro- bar whenever an example becomes firmly established as fact. Macro- is never proven because the proven is never macro-.
Oversimplification, my arse? This is a fraud.
That's not the only problem. Just for a moment, let's agree with the author's conclusion:
?Creation sci ence? is comparable to flat earth ideas, geocentric solar system ideas, alchemy, and others long since disproved
This would seem an excellent time, then, teach Creation alongside Darwinism so that the evos could prove it wrong and convert the 50% of those government school kids who don't believe in evo.
This would seem an excellent time, then, teach Creation alongside Darwinism so that the evos could prove it wrong and convert the 50% of those government school kids who don't believe in evo.
This endless dialogue in which creationists instantly forget every rebuttal-by-evidence as soon as it happens doesn't belong in a High School biology class. What are a bunch of 14-15 year olds going to get from it? It belongs in a graduate course, Psychiatric Medicine 603.
No, there is a difference in kind between macro-evolution and micro-evolution. In micro-evolution you do not have greater complexity, all you have is a change of features. Features such as color in the moths, beak size, coloring and overall size in the finches. These animals have not added new features, have not added any additional complexity. There are just slight changes in the genes which they already had.
Evolution though requires far more than such simple adaptive changes. It requires increased complexity. It requires additional genetic material. It requires new, improved and more complex systems. In fact, this is the hoax of evolution, mixing up macro-evolution with well known micro-evolutionary adaptation. Evolution has never proved that macro-evolution occurs. You can not have a "descent of man" from lower species unless you can prove macro-evolution.
I really did try to [read Earth in Upheaval] once, and got a ways into it, but (just to be honest) it absolutely bored the hell of me. Phantasy isn't interesting without a moral.
"Phantasy" is an interesting way to describe research and exposition that drew the attention and interest of Albert Einstein. If you ignore all the work of all the people who confront Darwin, of course it will be difficult for you to come to the conclusions I have. I didn't say so before, but one of the reasons for my adult visits to the Museum of Natural History has been an attempt to view the best evidence, and purchase texts, supporting a theory I was in the process of discarding. Like nearly all US children I learned about evolution and believed it as fact. But I grew up.
I notice that your reply quoted here omitted further discussion of my characterization of the "Evolution of the Horse" exhibit as fraud, which was really the point I was responding to. Can I assume you agree that it is dishonest to continue such an exhibit when it is known that what it presents is untrue?
ML/NJ
How many of you evolutionists believe in God?
Any of you going to church this morning?
We do this about every month these days at the request of some creationist or other. We've done it twice for Elsie alone. I'm an agnostic. Sunday tends to be laundry day for me. I'm not a militant agnostic. I just don't know about spiritual matters and don't see how people who claim to know can have any basis for their claims. I don't see any way at all to investigate such given that we very clearly live in a mechanistic universe. That said, I don't care what church you attend so long as you realize that the history of the universe does not depend upon what church you attend.
Dataman and myself have shown that some the "evidence" evolutionists show is complete fraud yet evolutionists keep calling it proof of evolution even after it has been shown to be a fraud. I showed that the horse series was a fraud in the thread prior to this and you continue to use it as evidence. I gave you tons of quotes from scientists that the fossil record is nonsense and neither you nor your fellow evos even acknowledge its existence. I have shown that fossils can not prove evolution and do not prove the gradual evolution which is required by Darwinian theory and you fail to refute my statements with any kind of proof.
Clearly your statement that "This endless dialogue in which creationists instantly forget every rebuttal-by-evidence" is a blatant lie.
I'm not sure what you're asking.
I was making a comment on the general forward trend of evolution at any level, gene, organism, or species.
No, there is a difference in kind between macro-evolution and micro-evolution. In micro-evolution you do not have greater complexity, all you have is a change of features. Features such as color in the moths, beak size, coloring and overall size in the finches. These animals have not added new features, have not added any additional complexity. There are just slight changes in the genes which they already had.
So micro- is only changes that don't increase the genome size? Maybe I'd better read on to make sure, here:
Evolution though requires far more than such simple adaptive changes. It requires increased complexity. It requires additional genetic material.
So, if the genome size increases, that would be macroevolution. You've said it clearly.
Mutations that increase the genome size are well documented. They're known as Gene Duplication Mutations. Note that one limited type of gene duplication mutation, polyploidy, can produce new species in a single generation in asexual species. (This is not the standard Darwinian or even the punk-eek model of speciation, but it has been observed many times in the wild and in the lab.)
Now, have we cleared that up?
I'm almost sorry I brought up micro and macro. Grist for the mill of delusion.
How many of you evolutionists believe in God? Any of you going to church this morning?
This is probably the most irrelevant post in recent memory. It is no more pertinent to evolution than if you had asked how many of the posters were sodomites, or vegetarians, or cigar-smokers. Suppose you got your answer on church-going, what would you do with the data? If a majority of the evolutionist posters here didn't go to church, would you exclaim: "Aha! This proves that they're all marxists, atheists, etc., and that evolution is garbage!!!" Is that what you would conclude? But what if the poll went the other way, and a substantial number of the evolution-minded posters on this thread actually did get to church this morning? I know what the creationists would do with that information -- they'd ignore it, as they ignore all evidence which contradicts their dogma. So what's the point of your survey? (Besides, I'm not going to participate in your survey regardless of your reasons for wanting such personal information.)
How many of you evolutionists believe in God? Any of you going to church this morning?
I believe in God largely during the evening hours.
I am not going to church this morning.
Be honest and make a disclaimer that junk polls such as this are not scientific and not representative of any trends in the population under question.
ThirstyMan: These are philosophical issues of interpretation, not scientific explanations. When you limit the conclusions to the natural you make one HUGE philosophical assumption...that the cause was natural all the way, from start to finish.
Retro: Evidence for miracles is much too poor and anecdotal to put them in just to celebrate diversity.
ThirstyMan remains correct. There are at least two stumbling blocks for FODs over which they cannot climb:
The origin of matter and the beginning of life.
Those two stumbling blocks must be substantially removed before evolution can be intelligently discussed. Here's why:
The doctrine of uniformitarianism loses all meaning because the two above events stand in absolute opposition to it.
The Big Bang theory negates evo's required closed materialistic system in the following ways:
It requires a First Cause.
It was indeed ex nihilo.
It is expanding into something which indicates something is outside the universe.
Does anyone really believe (and that word illustrates the faith it takes) that all the matter from the billions of stars in each of the billions of galaxies in a universe that cannot be measured fit at one time into a mass the size of an atom? There's one for science to verify in a lab.
OK, I'l bite, this once, Vade. From your posted link:
Lots of pretty drawings, then . . .
"Many other morphologic changes are documented in the fossil record. These demonstrate the morphologic and geochronologic succession from sprawling limb posture to upright limb posture of mammals (Jenkins, 1971; Romer & Lewis, 197 3; Kemp, 1982; Carroll, 1988; Hopson, 1994). As Jenkins (1971, p. 210) stated, “In details of morphology and function, the cynodont post-cranial skeleton should be regarded as neither ‘reptilian’ nor ‘mammalian’ but as transitional between the two classes .” Other changes have been adequately summarized elsewhere (Kemp, 1982; Sloan, 1983; Carroll, 1988; Hopson, 1994). Obviously, fundamental physiologic changes must have taken place as well, many of which are not directly preserved in the fossil record, though some can be inferred from the skeletal anatomy (Findlay, 1968; Kemp, 1982; Sloan, 1983, Carroll, 1988; Hopson, 1994)."
". . . should be regarded . . ."? Sez who? ". . . must have taken place . . . "? This ain't science, Vade. It's all based on "looks like" and wild guesses as to which came first. No explanatory mechanism is discussed.
And, more generally, I'm disappointed that you would stoop to attacking "creation science" as your apology for the Evols' inability to make their "science" fly on its own. You accuse others of lawyering, then commit it.
And this is why I won't follow or read any Evol link.
Does anyone really believe (and that word illustrates the faith it takes) that all the matter from the billions of stars in each of the billions of galaxies in a universe that cannot be measured fit at one time into a mass the size of an atom? There's one for science to verify in a lab.
This strikes me as irrelevant to whether the fossil record demonstrates that evolution has happened. It's probably also irrelevant to theology for that matter.
but most of the argument by evolutionists is pretty much the same - look at all the species around, they prove evolution.
That about sums it up.
"Mutations that increase the genome size are well documented. They're known as Gene Duplication Mutations. Note that one limited type of gene duplication mutation, polyploidy, can produce new species in a single generation in asexual species. (This is not the standard Darwinian or even the punk-eek model of speciation, but it has been observed many times in the wild and in the lab.) "
Nonsense.You do not get from amoeba to man by duplicating a gene. A duplicate gene does not increase complexity. For a duplicated gene to increase complexity it needs to provide the individual and the species with a new previously not present function. To get from a reptile to a mammal you need entirely new systems with entirely new genes and with far more complex systems from top to bottom. Evolution has never shown such a thing ever happening. Evolution has never shown the intervening species that would result from the gradual evolution of such new systems. Each time we see a new major change in some natural organism we see it full blown from the beginning. We never see evolution's gradual steps anywhere.
What a bunch of crap. Perhaps if they would show us this repeated evidence I would begin to not scoff so much at evolution in the first place.
". . . should be regarded . . ."? Sez who? ". . . must have taken place . . . "? This ain't science, Vade. It's all based on "looks like" and wild guesses as to which came first. No explanatory mechanism is discussed. "
Yup the evolutionists have been trying to make more out of the fossil record than is legitimate. Darwin for example adhered to the totally disreputed brachycephalic notion of measuring the proportions of the head and those that were closer to the monkeys proportions were deemed to be more stupid. As to brain size, seems to me that if it mattered that much, then elephants should be building spaceships.
OK Time to ante up.
How many of you evolutionists believe in
God?
I am an agnostic. For many years I was very close to the atheistic end of the spectrum. For the last ten years or so I've been much closer to the theistic end of the spectrum. I don't see myself adopting a particular religious devotion, however, for the simple reason that I don't think any of them are true, or likely to be true. I’m also not inclined to think that God wants or requires devotions directed toward him specifically, although he may credit the loving and trusting intent of such. I believe that, if God exists, he is manifest (immanent) in his creation (although I find pantheism unsatisfactory, and think that God would have transcendent aspects also) and that one can therefore express love for God by loving his creatures, and express thankfulness towards God by appreciatively reveling in the wonders of existence.
Any of you going to church this morning?
I may go today to a nearby Methodist, which is having a Fourth of July music special. I occasionally go to church (or non-Christian services) when invited (and sometimes when not invited) and usually enjoy watching people practice their various devotions. I also often enjoy the music, especially in African American churches.
It is hardly fair to chastize the Christians for unwarranted characterization of evolution as atheistic, decry their bias and then hide your own.
Again, this is where I disagree. If the characterization is indeed "unwarranted" (and it is) then it is irrelevant whether this is pointed out by an atheist or a theist.
I'm not sure what you think is being proven by lining up bones to some symmetrical order and then shouting "Eureka!"
Drawings of bones. I understand that original discoveries are usually filed away and under most conditions only the castings are allowed to be studied. Color, density, some texture and general quality are lost. Drawings (evolution of the embryo), animations and computer graphics are also a big help to imagination of FODs who are always looking for creative ways to prove their theory.
Do you believe Clinton to be the apex?
Minus the x.
Hillary would be an xape.
How can you tell which one of those fossils layed eggs and which ones had live births? I guess that is not important to the question of reptiles and mammals?
That is still a point of great debate, btw, among evos concernig many dinosaurs. They can't agree if they walked like gators or elephants, were warm or cold blooded, laid eggs or had live births. Yet they can tell you without a doubt that there are transitional forms.
Nonsense.
Maybe, but I used your definition precisely.
You do not get from amoeba to man by duplicating a gene.
When did getting from an amoeba to a man in one generation become the problem? Are you the little boy who runs around calling all the grown-ups dishonest?
A duplicate gene does not increase complexity.
I dragged you kicking and screaming all through this in excruciating detail on this thread. (A sample: replies 38, 48, 76, 83, and 100.) I don't feel like doing it over. Just read it again to yourself and try not to move your lips.
Perhaps if they would show us this repeated evidence I would begin to not scoff so much at evolution in the first place. "
Yup, the evolutionists always say that they gave the proof already, that they cannot repeat themselves, that the answer is to be found somewhere else. That you cannot read, that you are being dishonest for asking for proof that has already been given, yada, yada, yada.
That's why I tell them: post the darned thing already and stop making excuses.
Just for fun, I'd like to see your reaction to post 49 of this thread. There's an early (Cretaceous) mammal at the top, a reptile at the bottom.
The basic facts are simple. Faunal succession was recognized and the geologic column was constructed BY CREATIONISTS.
Your referenced article says neither of these things. Your assertions, although somewhat justified, were derived from reading meaning into the text. The only thing that article said, and it is far from proof as you claim, is that some of the layers were named and, in some cases, a clergyman/geologist, was involved.
There was also this interesting line: However, since the German strata were relatively unfossiliferous, the reference section was moved to a richly fossiliferous marine rocks in the Alps.
What are richly fossiliferous marine rocks doing in the Alps? A global flood, perhaps? After all that work the evos went through to "disprove" the fossilized clams on top of Everest, now you have to debunk your fellow evos and make the fossiliferous marine rocks disappear.
What did I tell you? I said:
1) What's the proof of that?and Dataman said:
Drawings of bones. I understand that original discoveries are usually filed away and under most conditions only the castings are allowed to be studied. Color, density, some texture and general quality are lost. Drawings (evolution of the embryo), animations and computer graphics are also a big help to imagination of FODs who are always looking for creative ways to prove their theory.I also said:
2) Excuse me, but WHERE are the intermediate fossils between those forms?And gore3000 said:
To get from a reptile to a mammal you need entirely new systems with entirely new genes and with far more complex systems from top to bottom. Evolution has never shown such a thing ever happening. Evolution has never shown the intervening species that would result from the gradual evolution of such new systems. Each time we see a new major change in some natural organism we see it full blown from the beginning. We never see evolution's gradual steps anywhere.
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The excruciating detail added up to: "it is a reasonable hypothesis that our genes for myoglobin and hemoglobin are "descended" from one single ancestral gene, which got duplicated. "
As I pointed out to you in my response, hemoglobin is not a duplicated gene of myoglobin. It would take four (4) copies of myoglobin to create hemoglobin. One would have to combine these four genes, accomplish several mutations to have them work together, develop new organs that could use this faculty, develop new species that would benefit from this new capability (after all the species that used myoglobin only were quite successful), connect the whole thing to the rest of the organism, etc.. All this accomplished by random chance since until the hemoglobing gene was perfected the individual would not have any better fitness than before (in fact it would have less). Nothing reasonable here, no proof here, just an unreasonable hypothesis.
What are richly fossiliferous marine rocks doing in the Alps? A global flood, perhaps?
You dropped out for a while, so you may not have seen this one:
What Would We Expect to Find if the World had Flooded?
Number 20 from there:
20. We should expect that all mountain ranges (being all formed during or immediately after the Flood) should show similar, near equal amounts of erosion. They don't.
Where is your answer to my question and dataman's question? Reposting the questions is a refutation????????????? Your standard of proof seems to be pretty low.
What does this say of Galileo or anyone who came before Newton and Leibniz?
It merely says that Gallileo had no clearer picture of the real gems in Kepler's work than Kepler did. Kepler gave them more credence, but his explanations in his lifetime never fully answered them, and Gallileo obviously recognized that fact. In hindsight, Newton could give credit to Kepler for being the giant upon whose shoulders he had stood, but not until he had first actually stood on them (philosophically speaking, of course.)
Where is your answer to my question and dataman's question? Reposting the questions is a refutation?????????????
Can you read at all? I predicted last night, post 51, that some creationist would 1) question veracity of the evidence, and some creationist would 2) obliviously repeat the demand for evidence of gradualism that the evidence in post 49 so fully answers. (You are so oblivious!)
Now, as it happens, in a merry sidebar with AndrewC on whether one of those fossil critters had a nose, I happened to link a photo of a skull fossil. It conforms in every way with the drawing of the same animal. It's ridiculous to think Cuffey could fake the drawings and go unchallenged for more than a few weeks, probably from people on the E side of the argument. One thing scientists don't like is bad science, and that's the problem you're having getting whichever anti-E story you secretly favor into the classroom.
Your own objection is answered by re-pointing you to post 49. You're asking, "Where are the gradual changes?" Du-uh!
Micro and Macro evolution is a distinction first made by Intelligent Design theorists.
THUMP! (sound of jaw striking floor)
You may replace that primitive jaw with one having a 5Y tooth pattern.
The distinction is necessary becuase you analog darwinists repeat the logical fallicies, variation therefore evolution and creationist therfore blind to variation. Creationists do not deny variation. Many evolutionists, however, exempt themselves from the laws of logic.
How many of you evolutionists believe in God?
'TrickHenry and JennyPo have previously admitted they are atheists.
This endless dialogue in which creationists instantly forget every rebuttal-by-evidence as soon as it happens doesn't belong in a High School biology class. What are a bunch of 14-15 year olds going to get from it?
Your statement can be categorized in the typical "We're smart, they're dumb" condescending attitude of the evo.
If creationists were to take your approach, they'd have to say the the existence of God is not open to debate. If you're too dumb or to blind to too bound up in your personal perversions to attend to the evidence before your eyes daily, then you should remain a burger-flipper for the rest of your life.
The real problem with allowing creation to be taught in public school is that those kids who aren't exposed to another point of view might actually think for themselves and question the evo propaganda. Then what? Funding might start to dry up! And funding, especially in the imaginary world of the FODs, is more important than truth.
And, more generally, I'm disappointed that you would stoop to attacking "creation science" as your apology for the Evols' inability to make their "science" fly on its own.
Well said and thanks for the laugh.
You never came close to addressing the detailed myo-to-hemo scenario on this page.
Your own side undercuts your claim for the level of change needed to make a hemoglobin from myoglobin.
Thus, to change a protein like myoglobin into either of the two hemoglobin chains, 36 amino acid substitutions are required. Bacteria can reasonably be expected to bring about 3amino acid changes (maybe 4 if I change some assumptions in the number of tries). Furthermore, hemoglobin and myoglobin evolved in fish. Fish cannot get nearly enough tries to make this transition plausible.Never mind that they're saying it's still impossible. When you read back through their on-line pages and see their model of how many tries you get you'd have to laugh. (Hint: It's an argument for forcible sex education of creationists.)
This strikes me as irrelevant to whether the fossil record demonstrates that evolution has happened.
Vade, why am I not surprised? In a logical progression, A must precede B and B must precede C. In your scenario, you start with T and ask us to assume that the previous elements in the progression are satisfied.
You cannot hide from the issues of the origin of matter and the self-creation of life simply because they logically contradict your withering world view.
Perhaps if they would show us this repeated evidence I would begin to not scoff so much at evolution in the first place.
Precisely. Their demand that all believe is proof enough.
20. We should expect that all mountain ranges (being all formed during or immediately after the Flood) should show similar, near equal amounts of erosion. They don't.
LOL! That statement overlays catastrophism with uniformitarian presuppositions!
What did I tell you?
Well done. I had predicted an allegation of fraud, followed by a claim of miracle. You predicted an allegation of "no evidence" followed by a claim of gapism. You are certainly more familiar with the thought-processes of the creationist side of the debate than I am. I just don't know where I went wrong. So much still to learn ...
One thing scientists don't like is bad science
Oh, please!
Science is a business with all the politics of normal business and then some. Do you believe the global warming nonsense? If there were no government grants to study (demostrate) the global warming "threat", it would have almost no advocates.
Bad scientists like bad science. Witness "studies" of the effects of second-hand smoke, AIDS in Africa, and just about everything produced by Carl Sagan!
ML/NJ
The drawings do not show what you and Cuffey said they show. I gave you a detailed refutation and you never responded. As I keep saying, you insult but do not refute.
[ ...genetic engineering by space aliens... ]
That isn't really what I believe, particularly when you see things like:
the progress of the Embassy which we are building for Extra-terrestrials.
on the site you linked to. The general perception of these kinds of groups is that UFO's and space aliens generally come from cosmic distances, and I don't see that as terribly likely. Moreover, the entire UFO phenomenon has its main beginnings around 1946 - 1948, i.e. the precise time during which people flying around in piston-engined aircraft started seeing jets over America for the first time.
What I believe is that our ancient solar system had more than one inhabited planet (we now know of at least two i.e. Earth and Mars). New species being introduced here from other planets within our own system would go a long way towards explaining the total lack of the intermediate forms which Darwinism demands. Moreover, the technological basis of the multiplanetary society involved could easily have included genetic engineering.
The two basic realities of our present biodiversity are that the changes which took place took place very rapidly, and that the process involved is presently shut down and no longer in operation.
Hey Vade, I see nothing refuting anything I said. That you go around looking for strawmen to refute, proves nothing. Address the points I make, not those of your strawmen.
LOL! That statement overlays catastrophism with uniformitarian presuppositions!
The link I gave you demolishes the predictions of catasrophism on the global flood, young earth level. (But I like it that you're at least not ashamed to say what you believe. So many others decline to defend a turf at all lest it become obvious that what they propose is far, far sillier than what they attack. Even gore is embarrassed to defend YECism. But he's no loss.)
Perhaps you need to clarify your overly abstract one-sentence rebuttal. I'll re-state the problem concretely.
The Himalayas contain proto-whale fossils. (They contain sediments from what was once known as the Tethys Sea.) The Himalayas are also spectacularly high, relatively un-eroded mountains and are still being tectonically raised at a measurable rate by a plate collision.
The Appalachians are worn-down, low and rounded. They contain no dinosaur fossils. Sane people believe that this is because they were raised as mountains by the time that there were dinosaurs. Mountains are raised from below; they erode from the top. Deposition was over and erosion had begun. They've been eroding ever since.
But what's the YEC story? In the Himalayas, not only dinosaurs but mammals. In the Appalachians, the Permian or lower is the top level, ignoring some alluvial flood plain. Did the Great Flood carry the mammal and dinosaur bones here but not there?
I gave you a detailed refutation and you never responded.
You asked a bunch of questions on the figure. The figure is labelled, tabeled, and talked to in detail in the Mammal-like Reptiles section of the main article.
Demonstration of ignorance is not a refutation.
Kepler's mystical side did not interfere with his scientific method but it provided him with some intuitive notions (starting out with the assumption that planetary orbits were circular, for example) which aided him in a starting hypothesis for his study of the data. Galileo practiced astrology. You might be aware that Newton had a mystical side to him as well. And his work has been subsequently improved upon. Do you also believe that, therefore, Newton didn't quite understand what he was doing scientifically and that his work was not scientifically acceptable by contemporaries?
Kepler was correct about the elliptical orbits of the planets. He knew it then and he proved the truth of his laws (Rudolphin tables). It was the best theory to fit the data, setting the tone for generations of scientists to come. Galileo just didn't see it, nor was he able to advance a better theory.
By the way, it wasn't calculus which Newton used for proof of Kepler's laws!
Demostration that you refuse to post your answer is proof of dishonesty. You got proof - post it. You never addressed my question, now you pull a link. Post it here, you know how to cut and paste.
Like I always say, the proof of evolution is always somewhere else, in the future, in another book, in another page, in another link. Excuses is all you give. When you post it here we will see if you are blowing smoke as usual or actually addressing my points.
It was the best theory to fit the data,
Yes, but it wasn't very good, was it, this 'music of the spheres.' Not at all the vison one gets of the orbits when one has the more potent tools of modern mathematics at hand. Kepler sensed it more than he literally understood it. It was indeed in his data, and he did see that it in the raw numbers, but he lacked the proper cohesive overview to pull it together. That is what Galileo also saw.
Yes, but it wasn't very good, was it, this 'music of the spheres.'
I think you are confusing Kepler's various projects. Kepler used a geometry approach. He didn't add the gravitational forces that Newton did, and, although Kepler anticipated gravitation correctly, he did not forsee its significance.
It was indeed in his data, and he did see that it in the raw numbers, but he lacked the proper cohesive overview to pull it together.
He formulated the theory based on Braha's data, then used them to correctly predict planetary positions as well as positions of Jupiter's satellites. Perhaps you don't realize what his Rudolphian tables were about. Cohesive overviews are left for legacies.
By the way, it wasn't calculus which Newton used for proof of Kepler's laws!
Newton's published Principia contains no calculus. His papers reveal that he first derived his results with calculus, then tediously crafted purely geometrical proofs for publication.
You never addressed my question, now you pull a link.
PULL a link? As in "to pull a fast one?" Is everything at all anything you want it to be?
If I link a discussion of the figure in post 49, that's a refutation of post 49. When you don't understand the figure in the first place, that's a refutation of post 49.
Why is confusion so great for creationism? If I get confused, you win. If you get confused, you win. Are you sure that's right?
Who are the people you can confuse?
Is everything at all anything you want it to be?
"As long as you love her, Harvey ..."
Newton's published Principia contains no calculus. His papers reveal that he first derived his results with calculus, then tediously crafted purely geometrical proofs for publication.
Interesting. He had already developed calculus but, perhaps, didn't use it so his results would be better understood? I think you've mentioned Feynman's Lost Lectures before.
Harvey also needs his wayward love, as she does him. (Big Al ignores her too much.)
You never addressed my question, now you pull a link. -me- PULL a link?
As in "to pull a fast one?"
You got it, pull a fast one. And that if I waste my time looking for it and say there is no proof you will say I am an idiot, am lying or both. We have played this game before. Your continued failure to answer questions shows your utter dishonesty.
BTW: the refutation of every thing you and all your friends have ever said about evolution is on my post#102.
Now if y'all really believed in evolution, you wouldn't have the slightest worry about it being taught side by side with creationism.
Interesting. He had already developed calculus but, perhaps, didn't use it so his results would be better understood?
Something like that. Newton was slow to get into the race to publish calculus papers, apparently regarding it as something of a personal secret weapon for a time. That ultimately led to a nasty priority fight with Leibnitz over some of the basics.
Now if y'all really believed in evolution, you wouldn't have the slightest worry about it being taught side by side with creationism.
I've actually done this. I mentioned that there is a creation theory in which God creates the earth and all living creatures in six days. It took less than 3 seconds and put off the squirming by a couple of students in the class for the rest of the quarter.
I take it this Harvey isn't a seven-foot tall more-or-less invisible pookah rabbit.
M: How many of you evolutionists believe in God? Any of you going to church this morning? VR: We do this about every month these days at the request of some creationist or other. We've done it twice for Elsie alone.
Thanks for indulging me. I am a new person in these dialogues. I am finding them very enjoyable. I am continually impressed with the great depth of knowledge most of you bring to this subject. This is no lie...I will never be in your league.
My contribution, if any, will be at the philosophical entry gate to the discussion, not at the deeper level of bone skull lengths as a determining factor for intelligence.
For Example:
Stultis made this comment:
As long as creationists fail or refuse to do significant research based on creationistic ideas, and publish it, the rest is just whining.
And I responded:
I'm not sure that's fair criticism. How do you propose that they put the Creator on view? To say He was not involved is more than can be stated. To assume He wasn't in no way excludes the possibility. He is visible by inference of intangibles like beauty, by degree of complexity and by orderly laws which tell us intelligence has preceeded us. The unlikely scenario of chance and many years, causing our life satisfies the dolt alone, even if he is a scientist. These men are mortals.
I received no answer[to my knowledge].
So....How do you propose that they put the Creator on view?
And this is my comment:
I'm not sure what you think is being proven by lining up bones to some symmetrical order and then shouting, "Eureka!"
I received no answer.
So, "What do you think is being proven?"
Anyone feel free.
I posed the "Are you atheists?" question to determine what motivates the tremendous effort that you and others put forth. I am impressed, again, that is no lie. Do you think a "creationist" [whatever that is] cannot respect an evolutionist [whatever that is]?
Anyways thanks for letting me know. I'm not sure what it means other than, this avenue of revelation remains to be opened for you. Dispute that if you will. Those who do know if this avenue, you seem to disrespect tremendously from what I can tell. That does seem like an unfortunate, "baby with the bathwater" discard, to me.
Quoting creationists Henry and John Morris won't make an impression on me. I recognize they are of a predetermined conclusion before they investigate the facts. They have an agenda. They therefore do not make good scientific investigators. Not every "creationist" is guilty of this.
I hope to find on this list evolutionists who are of a similar commitment to the truth as I am, above their prior commitment to the dogma.
Aside from the fact that the page you refer to did not answer my questions (how could it unless the writer knew of my existence, when I would be on this site, that Vade would post his article, that I would question it, and what specific questions I would ask years after he wrote it), the footnotes show how the reptile/mammal line of descent was constructed - by modifying the evidence. I am sure that Vade, in true Clintonian fashion will argue over the meaning of the word "modify" and tell us that it did not mean modify. However, when someone "modifies" the evidence to prove a point there is only one word that can be used, the word is:
. Hylonomus modified from Carroll (1964, Figs. 2,6; 1968, Figs. 10-2, 10-5; note that Hylonomus is a protorothyrod, not a synapsid). Archaeothyris modified from Reisz (1972, Fig. 2). Haptodus modified from Currie (1977, Figs, 1a, 1b; 1979, Figs. 5a, 5b). Sphenacodo n modified from Romer & Price (1940, Fig. 4f), Allin (1975, p. 3, Fig. 16);note: Dimetrodon substituted for top view; modified from Romer & Price, 1940, pl. 10. Biarmosuchus modified from Ivakhnenko et al. (1997, pl. 65, Figs. 1a, 1B, 2); Alin & Hopson (1992; Fig. 28.4c); Sigogneau & Tchudinov (1972, Figs. 1, 15). Eoarctops modified from Broom (1932, Fig. 35a); Boonstra (1969, Fig. 18). Pristerognathus modified from Broom (1932, Figs 17a, b,c); Boonstra (1963, Fig. 5d). Procynosuchus modified from Allin & Hopson (1992, Fig. 28.4e); Hopson (1987, Fig. 5c); Brink (1963, Fig. 10a); Kemp (1979, Fig. 1); Allin (1975, p. 3, Fig. 14). Thrinaxodon modified from Allin & Hopson (1992, Fig. 28.4f);Parrington (1946, Fig. 1); Allin (1975, p. 3, Fig. 13). Probainognathus modified from Allin & Hopson (1992, Fig. 28.4g); Romer (1970, Fig. 1); Allin (1975, p. 3, Fig. 12). Morga nucodon modified from Kermack, Mussett, & Rigney (1981, Figs. 95, 99a; 1973, Fig. 7a); Allin (1975, p. 3, Fig. 11). Asioryctes modified from Carroll (1988, Fig. 20-3b). Abbreviations: ag = angular; ar = articular; cp = coronoid process; d = dentary; f = lateral temporal fenestra; j = jugal; mm = attachment site for mammalian jaw muscles; o = eye socket; po = post orbital; q = quadrate; rl = reflected lamina; sq = squamosal; ty = tympanic.
Notice that he did not answer your question. Also, I have been on these threads for over a month, and I have not seen the evos tell us if they believe in God or not. The response was typical Vade - the answer is somewhere else, I cannot be bothered to give it right now.
I received no answer.
Maybe that's 'cause he has no answer to give.
In case you haven't noticed the ones here who are certain that we evolved from amoebae (and amoebae from the "primordal ooze" which doesn't seem to be around anymore, but probably came from someplace else that doesn't exist either) can thrust but they do not like to parry.
ML/NJ
I got started doing this after I'd been on FR for a while and noticed some YEC threads spraypainting graffiti on the walls of science. I didn't get too involved on the first one or two but jumped in and shouldered the load one day when someone had posted some really appalling gore-level stuff on the fossil record and not too many others seemed to be speaking up.
It turned out to be very educational and fun. Lately, I've become more fascinated with the abnormal psychology of it all. I came to realize that the creationists exactly parallel my JFK-assassination conspiracy nut childhood buddy who has made me tear my hair out for years.
Impenetrable delusional systems, both. All contrary data is a conspiracy of some sort. Planted, corrupted, manipulated by the great THEM. And all manner of illogic and deception is justified because it's WAR, baby! US and THEM.
I'm not sure I can learn much more this way, but it's still fascinating.
RC1: Now if y'all really believed in evolution, you wouldn't have the slightest worry about it being taught side by side with creationism.
Nebullis: I've actually done this. I mentioned that there is a creation theory in which God creates the earth and all living creatures in six days. It took less than 3 seconds and put off the squirming by a couple of students in the class for the rest of the quarter.
I have no doubt this can be done rather quickly and with great sport. It is why I take issue with the 6/24 creation followed by that one day of rest. It just isn't science, is it.
It is theology wrapped up in a love letter to the Hebrew [God's] people. It has always been this. Sadly, we've become fixated on the 24 hours to the detriment of the deeper message of Who did all the creating.
Share something like that with the students and I'd venture a guess that they might gain a little more depth of understanding to the real controversy.
I believe the modifications have to do with the skulls all being the same apparent size, facing the same way, and viewed from the exact same angle. If you can show otherwise in any case, please do and I will pay rapt attention. (But it would be clumsy of him to draw attention to the modification if he had used it to distort the fossils. Not to mention that it would be noticed whether he did so or not.)
Somehow, I feel as if I was just talking about you to somebody else.
And this is my comment: I'm not sure what you think is being proven by lining up bones to some symmetrical order and then shouting, "Eureka!"
If the bones show no progression, there will be nothing to shout about. But the bones above are ordered by chronology with the newest on top, the oldest on the bottom, the way they appear in the geologic column. If you can't see a progression there, a change of eyeglasses is in order.
Share something like that with the students and I'd venture a guess that they might gain a little more depth of understanding to the real controversy.
See, if we give you an inch...
I prefer that teaching of science is not done as a presentation of a body of facts but a development or evolution of ideas by real people. This historical perspective cannot avoid the conflict or influence that culture, politics or religion exert on scientific progress. I think that the case for evolution becomes more convincing this way.
Let's have a science class called Origins Speculations and we can cover evolution and creation ...
This idea is still unconstitutional. Which of the hundreds of creation myths will "we"
cover in this hypothetical class? Or will we use the Bible's legend? If so, "we" are
excluding hundreds of religions, which is one reason why many mainstream religions
are against the teaching of creation "science".
Where are the hypothesis of this so called "creation science" to be found?
Besides, the topic could be better covered in a history or philosophy class on comparative religion.
Nebullis: I prefer that teaching of science is not done as a presentation of a body of facts but a development or evolution of ideas by real people. This historical perspective cannot avoid the conflict or influence that culture, politics or religion exert on scientific progress. I think that the case for evolution becomes more convincing this way.
"not...a body of facts" :) probably you'd get no objection from the creationists then.
"cannot avoid"
I'd agree with that. The presuppositions of people put them in conflict with changing ideas. Threat is perceived and some conflict is inevitable.
Sporting with 6/24 creationists in the making of your case is you being antagonistic -- making conflict increase. True, conflict cannot be avoided. Conflict can be increased though.
I think we should lead the way out of the cave and not do further battle over the turf inside it. The first step in walking out of the cave, is to know when a claim of science or religion is overstepping its boundaries of inquiry.
TM: Let's have a science class called Origins Speculations and we can cover evolution and creation ...
DB: This idea is still unconstitutional. Which of the hundreds of creation myths will "we" cover in this hypothetical class? Or will we use the Bible's legend? If so, "we" are excluding hundreds of religions, which is one reason why many mainstream religions are against the teaching of creation "science".
I think the class would be well attended and if done right one of the most popular on campus. As for its constitutionality, I think the topic speaks for itself and is no violation of anyone's rights, but an investigation into a very serious wedge in our society. [the idea of excluding some less influential ideas is inherent in all education]
DB: Where are the hypothesis of this so called "creation science" to be found?
Drop the "Creation Science" label then...it is so misleading anyways. "Origins Speculations" places all theories on a level playing field.
Pit the best materialists against the best of the intelligent design theorists. There is so much material there that one would need two semesters to examine it all.
Education will result and that's what people pay for in school. It sure beats the dorky values orientation crap that we are involved with in most schools today.
DB:Besides, the topic could be better covered in a history or philosophy class on comparative religion.
Don't you understand the beauty of my proposal? Evolution as the materialist's origin theory could be presented without the unpleasant mantle of being called a religion. So could the other theories of origin be examined for their liklihood alone. Forget the religion word, it sets us up for another battle altogether and it is usually an exchange of fruitless tirades.
How many of you evolutionists believe in God?
I must be doing something right! I've thoroughly confused everyone! In fact I taught my adult Sunday School today. The lesson was about losing commitment to God. It was based on Peter's denial of being a disciple of Jesus.
This
Matthew 16
15 He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?
16 And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
17 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.
Became this
John 18
26 One of the servants of the high priest, being his kinsman whose ear Peter cut off, saith, Did not I see thee in the garden with him?
27 Peter then denied again: and immediately the cock crew.
Why?
John 15
8 Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples.
9 ¶As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love.
10 If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love.
11 These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.
12 This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.
13 Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
14 Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.
15 Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth:
but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made
known unto you.
16 Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and
bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the
Father in my name, he may give it you.
17 These things I command you, that ye love one another.
18 ¶If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.
19 If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the
world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.
John 16
12 I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.
13 Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he
shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he
will shew you things to come.
14 He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.
15 All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of mine,
and shall shew it unto you.
16 ¶A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me,
because I go to the Father.
17 Then said some of his disciples among themselves, What is this that he saith unto us,
A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me:
and, Because I go to the Father?
18 They said therefore, What is this that he saith, A little while? we cannot tell what he saith.
John 16
25 These things have I spoken unto you in proverbs: but the time cometh, when I shall no
more speak unto you in proverbs, but I shall shew you plainly of the Father.
26 At that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father
for you:
27 For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I
came out from God.
Oh and yes of course, Jesus is the Christ. The Son of the Living God. Who died, was buried, and arose on the third day for the remission of our sins.
John 18
37 Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.
I have been watching this thread and the previous threads with fascination. I am shocked at the stamina both sides have shown in this debate especially since both sides must be aware that no amount of discussion will change the minds on the other side.
The pattern that seems to be devoloping is, evidence of evolving species is shown, referenced or linked to. Creationists, like yourself, have provided links, references and arguments as to why and how the evidence is wrong, misrepresented or otherwise fraudulant. A few random insults and tangents later, the whole thing starts over again.
Might I be so bold as to suggest a small change in strategy to perhaps bring this debate to another level? Since it is obvious that creationists find evidence a legitimate line of inquiry, I would find it most helpful to read the evidence creationists use to back up their claims of intelligent design, or creationism. That is to say, not just refutations of evolution, but real evidence of intelligent design or creationism so that we can take a look at those arguments using the same intellectual scrutiny you have used on the evidence provided for evolution.
I got started doing this after I'd been on FR for a while and noticed some YEC threads spraypainting graffiti on the walls of science. I didn't get too involved on the first one or two but jumped in and shouldered the load one day when someone had posted some really appalling gore-level stuff on the fossil record and not too many others seemed to be speaking up.
What is fascinating to me is that people who look at ink blot pictures and fossils tend to see what they want to see. You honestly don't recognize the degree of inference you bring to these fossil records? To belittle Gore because he doesn't see what is obvious to you and the hard core evos, is one step away from what you need to do, prove it.
Being certain amongst yourselves and being convinced yourself is a start. The real challenge is to make your point so we all can figure it out. I don't think that is possible with so much conflicting information coming forth, the selection of information that does support the theory and the ignoring of conflicting data.
The recent China discoveries of all level fossils being found laying together in the same time strata is the most recent puzzling find. When the Chinese say, "In China you can't criticize the government; in America you can't criticize Darwin." something has to change for us Americans to trust and listen to the fossil data that you guys present as supposedly "proving" the theory as "fact". Theories are here today and gone tomorrow because they are so much based upon interpretation. [like the ink blots]
"Origins Speculations" places all theories on a level playing field.
What's this? Affirmative action for origin theories?
I have a different idea. Why don't we teach the ideas generally accepted by the experts of the field, the ones with a vast amount of substantiating evidence?
You honestly don't recognize the degree of inference you bring to these fossil records?
That's a good point. As Feynmann said, "you're the easiest one for yourself to fool." That's why it's important to adopt a skeptical attitude, to submit each finding and idea to intense scrutiny.
But guess what? That's the way the field has progressed. There's hardly a significant discovery or claim that isn't disputed vociferously, ridiculed even. The arguments are intense, even bitter, but gradually the opponents are won over or eventually a consensus or transforming view emerges.
The basic facts are simple. Faunal succession was recognized and the
geologic column was constructed BY CREATIONISTS.
Your referenced article says neither of these things.
In any case it IS true that all the systems -- excepting only the Ordovician defined in 1879 in a resolution of a long standing controversy about the boundary between the Cambrian and the Silurian -- were defined by creationists and that the geological column was constructed by creationists. (You are invited to falsify my claim, or try to.) How do you reconcile this historical fact with the claim that the column is based on the assumption of evolution (presuming you share that opinion with gore)?
Altering the size of the samples is fraud in itself. You are quite good at making excuses but this will not sell. Also you do not know the author, you do not know why he modified the samples, what he modified in them, or by how much it changed the evidence. In other words Vade, your excuse is as fraudulent as the proof you gave.
No wonder you refused to post the explanation for the drawings here!
I just proved that the fossils you put up are a fraud and you go merrily along as if they were valid - and you accuse me of not accepting evidence!
I have shown that the bones you put up were a fraud. I have shown that the horses series is totally made up, and in a previous thread I showed that the walking whale's feet were not from where the whale was found and that there was nothing in the bones that were found that would show where those legs would have been attachhed - the whole bottom part of the whale was missing.
That is three out of three frauds on the fossil evidence put up by the evolutionists on these threads.
This idea is still unconstitutional.
Yup, evolution is the only "science" that has gone to court to get itself into the curriculum. Real science does not need lawyers, but phony science does.
BTW - nowhere in the Constitution does it say any such thing, this teaching of atheistic evolution is just another of phony decisions by a power mad Supreme Court.
I am shocked at the stamina both sides have shown in this debate especially since both sides must be aware that no amount of discussion will change the minds on the other side.
We do it all for you, the lurker.
Might I be so bold as to suggest a small change in strategy to perhaps bring this debate to another level? Since it is obvious that creationists find evidence a legitimate line of inquiry, I would find it most helpful to read the evidence creationists use to back up their claims of intelligent design, or creationism. That is to say, not just refutations of evolution, but real evidence of intelligent design or creationism so that we can take a look at those arguments using the same intellectual scrutiny you have used on the evidence provided for evolution.
Small change? LOL!
don't hold your breath
No, seriously, Fuzz, that is a most excellent suggestion, but it ain't gonna happen. Just watch.
Yup, evolution is the only "science" that has gone to court to get itself into the curriculum.
Which case was that? You never said. What was the enabling language? You never said.
Evolution became common in American textbooks before 1890. Was the court case before that?
Which case was it? You never said.
In case that wasn't clear, I'm asking you which court case put evolution into the curriculum. Is that clear to you? I have to ask because you claim to have answered this question although you never did. I want to make sure you are not confused.
I just proved that the fossils you put up are a fraud
Actually you neglected to share your proof. Which of the references cited by Cuffey did you consult by consult in determining this? Please share this information and be specific. Fraud is extremely serious. We will all want to check up on this and join you in reporting this to the GCSSEPM.
I repeat THIS IS A VERY SERIOUS MATTER. Please specify without delay which drawing(s) are fraudulent and how they misrepresent the referenced drawings.
AS IF...
Might I be so bold as to suggest a small change in strategy to perhaps bring this debate to another level? Since it is obvious that creationists find evidence a legitimate line of inquiry, I would find it most helpful to read the evidence creationists use to back up their claims of intelligent design, or creationism.
There is a very good reason you haven't seen any of that in these threads. There is ZERO evidence for the alternative "theories" (conjectures is a more appropriate word). The only attempt at "evidence" for Intelligent Design is a bunch of useless math purporting to indicate how improbable life is. In other words, notwithstanding the abundance of evidence that life has indeed evolved from simpler forms, they claim that it can't happen, so it must be supernatural. That's the whole story. Not much to debate.
Below is a good article on intelligent design, do not expect the evolutionists to discuss it, I have attempted to do so before and they always ignore any facts presented from the non-evolutionists side. However, unlike them, I am not afraid to have the evidence from my side displayed for all to see. Here is the full and complete article:
The Weekly Standard, June 7, 1999, BOOKS & ARTS; Pg. 35 Experimental Support for Regarding Functional Classes of Proteins to be Highly Isolated from Each Other
Michael J. Behe Department of Biological Science Lehigh University
Preliminary Remarks
In writing on the topic of naturalism and evolution the problem arises of what to call the contending camps. The difficulty comes from the fact that, although the term "evolutionist" is often used to refer to persons who demand the unrelenting application of physical laws to all phenomena in the universe, many other persons who are opposed to this view are perfectly willing to concede that a limited number of phenomena can be explained by Darwinistic principles. Similarly, although a term like "creationist" brings to mind champions of a young-earth theory, it is often applied to persons who do not defend that thesis but do contend that natural laws have at some points been superseded by a supernatural agency. Since the focus of this symposium is the sufficiency of natural law, and in order to avoid the confusing terminology discussed above, in this essay I will use the term "believer" for those who believe in the universal application of natural law and the term "skeptic" for those who doubt it. This has the advantage of using terms for each side that the opposite side generally regards positively. Perhaps this will go a little way toward promoting the good will that this conference strives for.
Introduction
Several years ago the fossilized remains of an extinct species of whale were unearthed in the Zeuglodon valley of Egypt. The particular aspect of the fossil which excited archeologists and science writers was the fact that the whale apparently had functional legs and feet. From the condition of the fossilized leg bones it could be discerned by trained eyes that the legs were well-muscled and thus must have been actively used during the life of the whale. Now, the Washington Post ran a story on the discovery. Along with the article was a drawing of a modern whale and an ancient whale, showing the differences in their shapes but similarities in their lengths. Also included in the illustration, down in the lower right hand corner, was a drawing of an animal that looked for all the world like a scruffy dog. Underneath the dog was the caption "Mesonychid, the ancestor of the whales". In the story it was explained that
Most researchers agree the earliest whales descended from a line of large carnivorous beasts the size of wolves and bears. These furry land mammals, known as mesonychids, ran around on four legs. But for unknown reasons, some mesonychids evolved into forms that returned to the sea, from which all life originally arose. The legs found on primitive whales are remnants from their time on land.
Washington Post, July 13,1990.
Even allowing for the enthusiasms of the popular press the story reflects the way in which a theory, here evolution, is allowed to supply "facts" which the evidence in no way justifies. I discussed this article with my students in a course I teach for Freshmen, entitled "Popular Arguments on Evolution". The course is intended to develop critical reasoning skills, using popular books that have opposing viewpoints on evolution as the vehicle. This past semester we read, side by side, Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker and Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. This forced the students to argue over the meaning of observations, without the automatic social support that usually goes to proponents of evolution in academic settings. The students themselves, after reading the Post's article, pointed out that there is no reason to suppose that the ancient whale appeared on earth before the modern whale since modern whales have vestigial legs which could have developed into the functional legs of the Zeuglodon whale. For the same reason, the students noted, the discovery does not represent the development of a new trait or even the loss of an old one. Finally, and most glaringly obvious, if random evolution is true there must have been a large number of transitional forms between the mesonychid and the ancient whale: Where are they? It seems like quite a coincidence that of all the intermediate species that must have existed between the mesonychid and whale, only species that are very similar to the end species have been found. The students concluded that the fossil whale, although a fascinating discovery for natural history, was no evidence for the Post's evolutionary scenario.
I have started my contribution to this symposium with a discussion of the Zeuglodon whale because it is a paradigmatic example of evolutionary argumentation: a small change in a preexisting structure is used to argue to massive changes involving completely new structures or functions. It is like arguing that because a man can jump over a fissure five feet wide, then given enough time he could jump over the Grand Canyon. Now, a believer in the unabating rule of natural law would argue that the man could jump over the Grand Canyon if there were ledges and buttes for him to use as stepping stones. The skeptic would ask to be shown the stepping stones. This essay will examine how the search is going for stepping stones in one area of biochemistry: that of protein structure. We will see that, without a prior committment to naturalism, there is little reason to suppose that stepping stones exist in the canyon separating functional classes of proteins.
Protein Structure
I ask for the patience of those who already have a working knowledge of protein structure, but in order to make sure that everyone reading this essay has the necessary background I will spend a little time discussing some fundamentals.
Although most people think of proteins as something you eat, one of the major food groups, when they reside in the body of an uneaten animal or plant proteins serve a different purpose. Proteins are the machinery of living tissue that builds the structures and carries out the chemical reactions necessary for life. For example, the conversion of foodstuffs to biologically- usable forms of energy is carried out, step by step, by part of a group of proteins called enzymes. Skin is made in large measure of a protein called collagen. When light impinges on your retina it interacts first with a protein called rhodopsin. As can be seen even by this limited number of examples proteins carry out amazingly diverse functions. However, in general a given protein can perform only one or a few functions: rhodopsin can not form skin and collagen can not interact usefully with light. Therefore a typical cell contains thousands and thousands of different types of proteins to perform the many tasks necessary for life, much like a carpenter's workshop might contain many different kinds of tools for various carpentry tasks.
What do these versatile tools look like? The basic structure of proteins is quite simple: they are formed by hooking together in a chain discrete subunits called amino acids. Now, although the protein chain can consist of anywhere from about 50 to about 1,000 amino acid links, each position can only contain one of twenty different amino acids. In this they are much like words: words can come in various lengths but they are made up from a discrete set of 26 letters. As a matter of fact, biochemists often refer to each amino acid by a single letter abbreviation - G for glycine, S for serine, H for histidine, and so forth. Each different kind of amino acid has a different shape and different chemical properties; for example, W is large but A is small, R carries a positive charge but E carries a negative charge, S prefers to be dissolved in water but I prefers oil, etc. Now, a protein in a cell does not float around like a floppy chain; rather, it folds up into a very precise structure which can be quite different for different types of proteins. This is done automatically through interactions such as a positively charged amino acid trying to get near a negatively charged one, oil-preferring amino acids trying to huddle together to exclude water, large amino acids being excluded from small spaces, etc. When all is said and done two different amino acid sequences - two different proteins - can be folded to structures as specific and different from each other as a three-eighths inch wrench and a jigsaw. And like the household tools, if the shape of the proteins is significantly warped then they fail to do their jobs.
Proteins and Language
Because amino acid residues are often abbreviated by letters, because there are a similar number of letters and amino acids (26 vs. 20, respectively), and because a small protein consists of about 100 amino acids, many commentators have likened a functional protein (i.e. - one which has the correct shape to be able to do a particular job) to a functional sentence (i.e. - one which obeys the rules of English grammar) of about 100 letters. My students in "Popular Arguments on Evolution" found it particularly interesting that both believers and skeptics used this kind of analogy in their writings, but that their reasonings brought them to opposite conclusions. The skeptic typically argues that a monkey banging away at a typewriter (monkeys and typewriters are very popular) would be very unlikely to produce an intelligible, grammatically-correct sentence like "Drop the anchor in one hour." in a reasonable length of time. Near misses don't count for the skeptic since the change of even one letter would break a spelling or grammar rule, or change the sense of the sentence. Needless to say the hour would most likely pass, and the anchor remain undropped, before the monkey produced the correct sentence.
Believers in the universal application of physical law take a different approach with their monkey and typewriter. Their argument generally goes something like this. Suppose in his first try the monkey typed "bsqm dshcbbbk,RR .nsurlei aknex". Admittedly this is poor grammar, but it's the only sentence we've got. Since living systems reproduce, and since there is Darwinian competition, the bad sentence will be reproduced until a better one comes along. Now suppose in his second try the monkey typed a 'p' in the fourth position and a 'u' in the penultimate position. Well, since these are closer to the target sentence we will throw out the original sentence and keep "bsqp dshcbbbk,RR .nsurlei aknux". After a few more rounds perhaps the monkey has got a few more letters correct, say a 'd' in the first position and a 'ch' in the 13 and 14 positions. Now we have "dsqp dshcbbbchRR .nsurlei aknux". Since this has more matches with the target sentence we'll keep it and throw out the last sentence. After perhaps 50 rounds we get to "dsop dhe abchRR in uneei hnur." Breed from this. In another 50 rounds or so we arrive triumphantly at our target "Drop the anchor in one hour."
The above argument in its pure form can only be convincing to persons already convinced. It asserts a functional difference between two nonsensical strings of letters. No person, or machine for that matter, looking for a sentence would notice a difference between "bsqm dshcbbbk,RR .nsurlei aknex" and "bsqp dshcbbbk,RR .nsurlei aknux." It is only because the believer has a distant goal in mind that he chooses one nonsense character string over the other. In the believers' argument the analogy of proteins to language is implicitly abandoned in the first rounds of the monkey's typing, since the character string does not have to obey any rules of spelling or grammar. The analogy to language is used simply to try to impress the unwary with the apparent production of sense from nonsense. My students in "Popular Arguments on Evolution" were uneasy with this argument when they read it in Dawkins' book, but they could not refute it. It is not easy for the casual reader to see that the illusion of steady, gradual evolution to a functional sentence is produced by an intellect, either the believer's directly or in some cases a computer program written by him, guiding the result to a distant goal. This of course is the antithesis of Darwinian evolution.
But perhaps there is a middle ground between the skeptic's insistence on absolute grammatical correctness and the believer's abandonment of grammatical rules. Suppose we allowed the vowels in the sentence to vary to produce something like "Drep tha enchir on une hoir". Such a sentence could probably still be recognized by someone, perhaps a sailor, even though all the words are misspelled. Or, alternatively, suppose we vary some consonants: "Trof tte ankhow im ode hous". Clearly some misspelled words would be easier to recognize than others and some letter substitutions ('t' for 'd', 'k' for 'c') would be easier to follow than others ('r' for 't', 'l' for 'g'). The ability of a sentence like that to function would depend a lot on the reader and the context.
To put this back into a protein context, it might be possible for a protein to tolerate a lot of amino acid substitutions and remain functional. (Again, when talking about proteins `functional' means folded to a discrete, stable structure.) And in fact it has been known for a long time that this is true. Analogous proteins from different species, for example human hemoglobin and horse hemoglobin, have differences between their amino acid sequences, yet fold to discrete and closely similar structures. But what is the limit to tolerance for amino acid changes? Are proteins significantly more tolerant to changes in 'spelling' than words are? Is there a point at which, like our sentences above, further changes will render a protein nonfunctional? What then is the probability of finding some member of a particular class in a reasonable time in a nondirected search? These are empirical questions and, although they can be speculated upon in the absence of relevant data, such speculations must be radically curtailed when data are available. A direct approach to the question, How isolated are functional protein sequences? would have been experimentally impossible twenty years ago, before the molecular biological revolution. But since the development of powerful tools to probe the molecules of life an answer to that question appears to be within reach. Progress in this area is the topic of the following sections.
How Rare Are Functional Proteins?
The observation that analogous proteins from different species could differ from each other, often by quite a bit, and yet retain the same compact shape led workers in the field to speculate that perhaps the exact identity of an amino acid at a particular position in a protein was not as important as its overall chemical properties. So, for example, if one finds an I at position 10 of hedgehog hemoglobin and an L in position 10 of the analogous protein from skunk, then perhaps the important feature is that both I and L prefer an oily environment, and maybe any other amino acid, such as W, F, or V, that prefers a similar environment would also be suitable at that position. This is something like saying that in a language perhaps all of the vowels are interchangeable. Taking the idea further, perhaps amino acids, such as S, A, H, and T, that prefer a watery environment could form an interchangeable group, and perhaps charged amino acids (E, D, R, and K) another group.
Fifteen years ago a man named Hubert Yockey published an article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology (1) showing that these considerations could enormously reduce the odds against finding a functional protein by trial and error. If we do not insist on the perfect diction of the typical skeptic, but allow some slurred speech in proteins, then the probability of finding a small, functional protein of 100 amino acids in length is reduced from 1 in 10 to the 130 power to 1 in 10 to the 65 power - a reduction of 65 orders of magnitude! Yockey went on to show in the article that his calculation of 1 in 10&%, which he obtained from theoretical considerations, fit very closely with the number that could be calculated from considerations of the known sequence variability of the protein cytochrome c among many different species.
Now, the problem with Yockey's calculation for a believer in the sufficiency of natural law is that, although 10&% is enormously smaller than 10!# , it still is quite a big number. It has been calculated that there are about 10&% atoms in a galaxy. Thus, if Yockey was correct, the odds of finding a functional protein are about the same as finding one particular atom in the Milky Way. Not too likely. Well, if you were a believer how might you answer this challenge? One way is through obfuscation, like the production of sentences from nonsense character strings, as was discussed above. A second way is by claiming that Yockey's calculation is inaccurate and that the known sequences of cytochrome c that he used to buttress his work do not reflect all the possible sequences that could produce a folded protein. The best way, though, in the absence of relevant data, is to produce your own calculation, starting from a separate set of independent principles, and show that the odds are not quite so long as Yockey thought. This is what has been done in an elegant series of calculations from the laboratory of Ken Dill (2,3) at the University of California at San Francisco.
Dill's laboratory asked a question which can be paraphrased as follows: Given a ten-by-ten square matrix (like a big checkerboard) and a string of pearls containing both black beads and white beads, in how many ways can a string of 100 pearls be laid on the checkerboard so that each square contains one and only one pearl, and most of the black pearls are in the middle spaces of the board? This analogy is intended to represent a folding protein comprised of two types of amino acids - ones that prefer watery surroundings and ones that do not. After feeding this scenario into a computer the surprising result Dill's group obtained was that it wasn't that hard to fit the pearl necklace on the checkerboard in the right way. They then mathematically extrapolated from the two dimensional checkerboard to three dimensional space, and finally arrived at the conclusion that about 1 in 10! amino acid sequences would yield a folded protein. This is a much smaller number than Yockey's (the federal government spends 10! dollars -ten billion dollars- every three days) and brings the spontaneous generation of functional proteins into the realm of the credible.
Now the problem for a skeptic is how to refute Dill's calculation. It isn't easy since few people are as mathematically talented as he and since it's hard to disprove the simplifying assumptions his model contains. Skeptics are free to criticize the assumptions, but there is enough uncertainty in such things to allow believers to credibly tout Dill's calculation over Yockey's. To resolve this dilemma, to gain firm ground to stand on, hard experimental results are required. Fortunately in the past several years such results have been forthcoming from the laboratory of Robert Sauer (4-6) in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We now turn to those crucial experiments.
Very Rare
In the past twenty years the science of molecular biology has made enormous strides. It is now literally possible, in laboratories with such expertise, to cut up a gene, rearrange it to suit yourself, and place it back in a functioning biological system. Since genes code for proteins, one can also produce proteins made-to-order in this manner. Sauer's laboratory, in order to answer questions about protein structure that interested them, took the genes for several viral proteins, systematically took out small pieces of them (corresponding to instructions for three amino acids at a time) and inserted altered pieces back in the genes. They did this, three amino acids 'codons' at a time, for the whole length of the gene. By clever manipulation of the altered pieces they were able to screen codons for all twenty amino acids at each position of the protein. This is like trying all 26 letters of the alphabet in turn at each position of a word. The altered genes were then placed in bacteria, which read the DNA code and produced chains of amino acids from them. It turns out that bacteria quickly destroy proteins that are not folded, so Sauer's group looked for the altered proteins that were not destroyed. By determining their sequences they could tell which amino acids in a given position were compatible with producing a folded, functional protein. And what did they see?
In some positions of the protein Sauer's group saw that a great deal of amino acid diversity could be tolerated. Up to 15 of the twenty amino acids could occur at some positions and still yield a functional, folded protein. However, at other positions in the amino acid sequence very little diversity could be tolerated. Many positions could accomodate only 3 or 4 different amino acids. Other positions had an absolute requirement for a particular amino acid; this means that if, say, a P does not appear at position 78 of a given protein the protein will not fold regardless of the proximity of the rest of the sequence to the natural protein. In terms of our sentence analogy, this is like saying that, yes, all vowels are interchangeable, but that if the last `r' is changed to any other letter, such as 's' ("Drop the anchor in one hous"), the protein sentence is no longer understandable.
Sauer's results can be used to calculate the probability of finding a given protein structure (6). We proceed in the following manner. If any of ten amino acids can appear in the first position of a given functional protein sequence then the odds are 1 in 2 that a nondirected search will place one of the allowed group there. If any of four amino acids can appear in the second position then the odds are 1 in 5 of finding one of that group, and the odds of finding the correct amino acids next to each other in the first two positions are one-half times one-fifth, which is one-tenth. Suppose in the third position there is an absolute requirement for G. Then the odds of getting a G at that position are one in twenty and the odds of getting the first three amino acids right are now up to one in two hundred. In this aspect it is like winning a trifecta in horse racing. Over the course of 100 amino acids in our small protein the odds quickly reach astronomical numbers.
From the actual experimental results of Sauer's group it can easily be calculated that the odds of finding a folded protein are about 1 in 10 to the 65 power (6). To put this fantastic number in perspective imagine that someone hid a grain of sand, marked with a tiny 'X', somewhere in the Sahara Desert. After wandering blindfolded for several years in the desert you reach down, pick up a grain of sand, take off your blindfold, and find it has a tiny 'X'. Suspicious, you give the grain of sand to someone to hide again, again you wander blindfolded into the desert, bend down, and the grain you pick up again has an 'X'. A third time you repeat this action and a third time you find the marked grain. The odds of finding that marked grain of sand in the Sahara Desert three times in a row are about the same as finding one new functional protein structure. Rather than accept the result as a lucky coincidence, most people would be certain that the game had been fixed.
The number of 1 in 10&%, arrived at by Sauer's experimental route, is virtually identical to the results obtained by Yockey's theoretical calculation and his deduction from natural cytochrome c sequences! It therefore strongly reinforces our confidence that a correct result has been obtained. Sauer's group obtained closely similar results for two different proteins: arc repressor (4) and lamda repressor (5,6). This means that all proteins that have been examined to date, either experimentally or by comparison of analogous sequences from different species, have been seen to be surrounded by an almost infinitely wide chasm of unfolded, nonfunctional, useless protein sequences. There are no ledges, no buttes, no stepping stones to cross the chasm. The conclusion that a reasonable person draws from this is that the laws of nature are insufficient to produce functional proteins and, therefore, functional proteins have not been produced through a nondirected search.
Implications of Protein Sequence Isolation
The numerical concreteness of Sauer's and Yockey's results is breathtaking. When a skeptic sees a drawing of Mesonychid next to the Zeuglodon whale he intuitively realizes that the transformation is highly improbable. But how improbable? There is no way to put a quantitative measure on the difference between a dog-like animal and a whale, and believers in the relentless application of physical law take advantage of this by verbally minimizing the differences. The situation is otherwise with proteins. Because there is a discrete set of amino acids and a finite number of positions in a given protein, the odds of attaining a folded, functional protein can be calculated quite closely, but only if the tolerance of proteins to amino acid substitution is known. Thanks to Sauer and Yockey we now have such quantitative data.
It is important to realize that Sauer's and Yockey's results hold whether or not the system can replicate and is subject to Darwinian selection. The odds against finding a new functional protein structure remain astronomical in either case. This is because Darwinian selection can only discriminate based on function and, with the exception of those found in living organisms, virtually all protein sequences are functionless. An amino acid sequence can be replicated and mutated in living organisms till the cows come home and the odds are still 1 in 10&% that a new functional protein class will be produced.
The problem of the isolation of functional protein sequences is a vivid illustration of the truth of the symposium thesis,
Darwinism and neo-Darwinism as generally held and taught in our society carry with them an a priori commitment to metaphysical naturalism, which is essential to make a convincing case in their behalf.
The skeptic can accept Sauer's and Yockey's results with equanimity because his world is not necessarily limited to those phenomena that can be explained by naturalism. Furthermore, the skeptic can happily concede that many biological phenomena are explained by natural laws. He can agree that beak shape and wing color can change under selective pressure, or that different proteins in the same structural class, such as the alpha and beta chains of hemoglobin, may have arisen through Darwinistic mechanisms. But the believer in the universal application of physical law is stuck. He must maintain, against the evidence, that different protein classes, like cytochromes and immunoglobulins, found their way by raw luck through the vast, dark sea of nonfunctional sequences to the tiny islands of function we observe experimentally. He must maintain, without any evidence, that Mesonychid gave birth over time to the whale. And why, we ask, must he maintain these positions against impossible odds and without supporting evidence? Because, he replies, I can only measure material phenomena, and therefore nothing else exists.
In closing I would like to paraphrase Hubert Yockey (7), who in his career repeatedly pointed out facts that are not supposed to be mentioned in polite scientific company: "Since science has not the vaguest idea how (proteins) originated, it would only be honest to admit this to students, the agencies funding research, and the public."
References
1. Yockey, H. P. (1978) "A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory", Journal of Theoretical Biology 67, 377-398.
2. Lau, K. F., & Dill, K. A. (1989) "A Lattice Statistical Mechanics Model of the Conformational and Sequence Spaces of Proteins", Macromolecules 22, 3986-3994.
3. Chan, H. S., & Dill, K. A. (1990) "Origins of Structure in Globular Proteins", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 87, 6388-6392.
4. Bowie, J. U., & Sauer, R. T. (1989) "Identifying Determinants of Folding and Activity for a Protein of Unknown Structure", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 86, 2152-2156.
5. Bowie, J. U., Reidhaar-Olson, J. F., Lim, W. A., & Sauer, R. T. (1990) "Deciphering the Message in Protein Sequences: Tolerance to Amino Acid Substitution", Science 247, 1306-1310.
6. Reidhaar-Olson, J. F., & Sauer, R. T. (1990) "Functionally Acceptable Substitutions in Two -Helical Regions of Repressor", Proteins: Structure, Function, and Genetics 7, 306-316.
7. Yockey, H. P. (1981) "Self Organization Origin of Life Scenarios and Information Theory", Journal of Theoretical Biology 91, 13-31.
Copyright© 1992 Michael Behe. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. File Date: 10.20.99
This data file may be reproduced in its entirety for non-commercial use. A return link to the Access Research Network web site would be appreciated. Access Research Network
this was all (save the "Devonian controversy".
Sorry, got that all messed up. I meant to say that all the systems save the Ordovician were defined well before 1859, i.e. under a creationist paradigm and by creationists.
The recent China discoveries of all level fossils being found laying together in the same time strata is the most recent puzzling find.
The fossil record of the Cambrian has driven many scientists to call the evidence for evolution from fossils complete nonsense - as I posted on post#91 and the evolutionists have completely ignored.
"Why don't we teach the ideas generally accepted by the experts of the field, the ones with a vast amount of substantiating evidence?" "
Hey, we agree on something! Evolution should be taken out of the classroom. As we have seen here the "evidence" is fraudulent and totally made up. The evolutionists do not even dare acknowledge evidence against their theory and the only thing they do is try to bully others and attack straw men. There is no evidence of evolution. I have been asking on these threads for evidence of macro-evolution for over a month and the evos have not been able to come up with ONE.
How do you reconcile this historical fact with the claim that the column is based on the assumption of evolution (presuming you share that opinion with gore)?
Hierarchies prove nothing. In fact the first hierarchy was not proposed by a creationist at all, it was done by Aristotle. You are using a made up hierarchy which had nothing to do with evolution to prove evolution. It proves no such thing. What the hierarchy does prove is the immutability of species, the great distinctions between the major genera, families and taxa which have enabled these species to remain in the same classifications in spite of tremendous amount of new research since the middle of the 19th century. These hierarchies also do not disprove my statement that the fossil record does not prove evolution. The correct date of when a species first appeared is essential to prove evolution. What species was an ancestor and which was a descendant is completely required to prove evolution. Further 90% of the biological makeup of a species is not to be found in the fossil record. Accordingly the fossil record does not prove evolution and will never be able to.
Your friend edsheppa said so, you calling him a liar?
There's hardly a significant discovery or claim that isn't disputed vociferously, ridiculed even. The arguments are intense, even bitter
Indeed. I'm not a scientists myself and I've only attended a couple of scientific conferences, but this was very apparent at both.
As I recall more time was allotted for Q&A than for reading of papers. The scientists in the audience would sometimes display visible impatience during the reading, eager for their chance to "get at 'em." I've attended one creationism conference (admittedly a small one - Bryan '89) and the contrast (I'd attended an AAAS convention that same year) could not have been more striking.
At Bryan there was 45 min for the papers and 15 min for Q&A (almost the exact opposite of AAAS) and even so those 15 min were virtually unnecessary as none of the creation "scientists," with only one exception, asked any challenging questions. The exception was Kurt Wise, a geologist (I think) who had studied under Gould at Harvard. He stuck out like a sore thumb.
Funny thing was a lot of people in the audience seemed to think, because he was asking presenters to support their claims, that Wise was an evolutionist. If fact he was a professor at Bryan and the official host of the conference! Even when they figured out he was a creationist one could still feel a palpable wave of discomfort wash over the audience every time he asked a question, even though they really weren't all that aggressive compared to what would be expected at a normal scientific presentation. It was SO WEIRD!
You are lying again Patrick. I have posted proof of Intelligent Design on many of the threads you have "placemarked". I have posted long articles on it which you have failed to discuss. Further, if you look up a few posts up from this one, you will see that I have posted another one.
message #?
Which refereed journal was this published in?
Actually you neglected to share your proof.
You should read the thread before you make accusations.
In post#211 in Cuffey's own words - he modified the drawings. That's fraud.