Altenberg! The Woodstock of Evolution?

Scoop ^ | Tuesday, 4 March 2008, 1:49 pm | Suzan Mazur

[Sopater]

Scientists who dogmaticly cling to the faith-based ToE despite the mountains of evidence that are piling up against it are doing their trade a great diservice.

[BuglerTex]

whop-ping post

[Sopater]

whop-ping post

In quantity or quality?

[joeystoy]

ping

[Oztrich Boy]

[ClearCase_guy]

Between this and the Democrats, I don’t think the world has enough popcorn.

[Sopater]

Looking at simple forms like the snowflake, he noted that its "delicate sixfold symmetry tells us that order can arise without the benefit of natural selection".

A snowflake is order without information. This is as far from DNA as the East is from the West.

[ScubieNuc]

In a discussion with a person awhile ago, I agreed to read a ‘Denying Evolution’ by Massimo Pigliucci. It was interesting but failed to prove what the pro-evolutionist thought it proved.

My original argument with this person was along the lines that to believe in the theory of Origins as laid out by evolutionist, it takes far greater faith then that required to believe that God created us. He said science didn’t involve faith. The following is an excerpt from my correspondence with him:

“In my first e-mail to you, I made a statement about faith being required to believe in evolution. Massimo reaffirms this on page 28 where he says, “Although we all necessarily have to make assumptions about the world in order to live our lives, some assumptions represent small and others large leaps of faith and science is distinguished by an attempt to make those leaps as small as possible—in fact, no larger than any person of common sense would make ”

• He demonstrates a few of those leaps of faith when he states that science is not immune from ideology or social pressure (p.66), or on p. 145 that science can not draw conclusions about things it can not measure (like a primitive organisms (p. 203) or transitional forms or how non life created life or how mutations could add genetic information vs. subtract information, etc.), or how science is subjective because it is done by human beings (p.248), or how it is influenced by politics in academia (p.262), or that scientists will “stretch a point if it fits with the scenario he is trying to convene” and that he MAY not get away with it under peer review (p. 228-229).”

I’m thinking that if any of these scientists are honest they will see the error of Darwins folly. However, I’m not holding my breath. What I expect is for them to come back saying that they have discussed it, and conclude that any dissension from Darwins theory will no longer be tolerated. Case closed.

[muawiyah]

I watched Michael Lynch stare 15 or 20 minutes at 3 movies rendered from a series of drawings made using a popular artists' software (similar to ArtRage).

The artist stuck the various paintings together following a design principle that Lynch proposes is behind development of forms.

He was absolutely immersed in the movies.

So, yeah, I think I understand what these guys are looking for ~ and it ain't another demigod like "Natural Selection".

[muawiyah]

DNA can arise similarly ~

[BuglerTex]

whop-ping post

In quantity or quality?

Well, it is a lot of what that I have yet to determine.

The source is strange - I had not realized that the Wichita Falls city council had come out against the Patriot Act, for example.

[Sopater]

DNA can arise similarly ~

The key word in that sentence is "can", and equates your assertion to any philosophical assumption as to how DNA actually did arise.

[muawiyah]

You'd best believe folks are working very hard to be able to manufacture DNA to order.

Within 5,000 years we are going to lose track of what we've done and what was already there.

So, yes, "can", ~ self-assembly ~

[Sopater]

Your original post equated the order snowflakes with the order and information contained in DNA. You said that DNA “can arise” similarly.

In your second post, you went way off the rails.

[muawiyah]

Many things are possible (raises hands, touches outstretched fingers together in lotus fashion, bows head)

It's possible to crush pure water sufficiently to force its atoms into double-helix molecules.

Stuff happens.

[Sopater]

What I expect is for them to come back saying that they have discussed it, and conclude that any dissension from Darwin's theory will no longer be tolerated. Case closed.

Actually, I get the impression that these scientists are faced with the conundrum that the more we learn about the complexity of life, the more we realize we don't know, and the better we can see the huge leaps of faith that are being made in evolutionism in order to try and make the evidence fit the theory.

What's obviously needed is a new theory that better aligns with what science has discovered over the past century. It must fit all of the evidence, and it must make sense.

Unfortunately, this "new" theory will also require purely natural explanations for our existence. What we'll get is a "new and improved" theory of evolution that will be less likely to be debunked by true science, but will still require immense faith that the presuppositions of "nature as creator" are true.

[Sopater]

Many things are possible

Yes, and the vast majority of the possible explanations for the appearance of DNA on this planet are not what actually happened. Only one possibility is actually true.

[BuglerTex]

The polarization of faith and faithful scientists disturbs me deeply. This is how I think things line up:

4,500+ million years ago there is light

3,500 million years ago - Precambrian (began), ooze, photosynthetic life appearing late

600 million years ago - Cambrian, explosion of marine life forms, huge variety

425 million years ago - Silurian, explosion of land life forms, first plants

405 million years ago - Devonian, first seed plants (in only 20 mil yr! We gardeners appreciate the difference), first amphibians

220 million years ago - Triassic, dinosaurs

181 million years ago - Jurassic, first flowering plants, birds

135 million years ago - Cretaceous, monocotyledons, oak and maple forests, Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rocky Mountains the extinction of the dinosaurs as a finale. The K/T discontinuity world-wide.

65 million years ago - Tertiary, 35 mil yrs Oligocene Epoch appearance of most modern genera of mammals and monocotyledons

0.004 million years ago civilizations learn to write, all over the world at about the same time.

0.002 million years ago philosophy is advanced enough to describe the New Covenant in The best Greek of the New Testament, the Book of Hebrews, to Jews in Rome. Would that our society were as well read.

0.002 million years later Free Republic provides a forum, as the Nation Under God is bringing Liberty to the Cradle of Civilization and the birthplace of Abraham, the site of Daniel’s vision of the Ancient of Days the repository of the treasures of the first Temple, the captivity of Israel.

Life on this earth, on this planet with a molten core, a magnetic field, plate tectonics ( understood in only our lifetimes), distributed continents and a single moon so large as to cause our oceans to breathe, has developed in the last seconds of the last minutes of the last hour of the clock of the firmament.

And yes, I am still stubborn and stiff-necked. And I have no right to be here, but for prevenient grace.

[lasereye]

What demonstrates that “DNA can arise similarly”?

Manufacturing DNA wouldn’t be “similarly” to how snowflakes arise.

[lasereye]

A central issue in making a new theory of evolution is how large a role natural selection , which has come to mean the weeding out of traits that don't favor survival, gets to play.

Natural selection was only part of Darwin's Origin of Species thinking. Yet through the years most biologists outside of evolutionary biology have mistakenly believed that evolution is natural selection.

A wave of scientists now questions natural selection's relevance, though few will publicly admit it. And with such a fundamental struggle underway, the hurling of slurs such as "looney Marxist hangover", "philosopher" (a scientist who can't get grants anymore), "crackpot", is hardly surprising.

So these top scientists say they see a problem with the text book explanation for how evolution occurs. Yet text books will continue to tell you natural selection drives evolution, with no hint that there's any problems with that. At least at the grade school level textbook and probably beyond. This is not unusual with evolution theory, where everything is made to sound very pat, but when you go outside what's in the standard textbook seems a lot less coherent.

Many traits we see in life forms don't seem to have any apparent explanation using natural selection. To take just one example, the ability to enjoy music. Does that confer a survival advantage? You'd have to be pretty imaginative to come up with a scenario where that occurs, expecially when it was first "evolving". Of course evos are pretty imaginative.