Evolution of creationism: Pseudoscience doesn't stand up to natural selection

Daytona Beach News-Journal ^ | 29 November 2004 | Editorial (unsigned)

[sayfer bullets]

Interesting.

It's been a while since I got into one of these threads. Generates quite the list, don't it?

And I haven't even seen an irreducible complexity argument yet. Darn.

[Ichneumon]

Please do not feed the troll. Over the past year or so, his only "contribution" to these threads has been rambling non-sequitur games of "gotcha", which usually don't even actually make the point he thinks they are. Or maybe he's letting certain banned posters use his login, the incoherent style and font color often seem to point in that direction.

[Dimensio]

I don't quite get at the point that you're trying to make by quoting Darwin.

[Ichneumon]

And I haven't even seen an irreducible complexity argument yet. Darn.

I just brought a few such arguments to a screeching halt on a couple of other threads, so maybe they're trying different material for a while.

[Ichneumon]

I don't quite get at the point that you're trying to make by quoting Darwin.

...as I was saying in post 1022...

[AndrewC]

Interesting.

I did not post the link or full reason for the second paragraph so as not to create an avenue for a red herring, but the article I got the quotations from, state the fact that Damadian did not receive a Nobel prize for his work. Another person received the prize, who evidently also did important work but should not have received the prize to the exclusion of Damadian. The observation to note is that it is Damadian's machine that is in the Smithsonian, not the other person's "thing(s)".

[AndrewC]

I don't quite get at the point that you're trying to make by quoting Darwin

He uses the creationist versions of improve, good, etc. etc.

[Ichneumon]

[Ahem. I beg to differ. The fossil sequence is a cornerstone of evolutionary theory.]
In other words, it is true and verifiable because it is a cornerstone. Do you see the circular reasoning here?

Um, you might want to work on your reading comprehension. You have it exactly backwards. The fossil sequence is a cornerstone of evolutionary theory *because* it is true and verifiable, not vice versa. And no, it's not circular.

[If things happen purely by nature, one would expect a specific sequence.]
There IS a specific sequence, just like there is with any intelligent process.

The point you're missing is that designed things so seldom exactly match results one would expect to find from *natural* processes. And the sequences found in the geological record, and the fossil record (not to mention the DNA record, which is the most detailed of all) are consistent with what one would expect natural processes to produce. This is not at *all* what one would expect to see from an "intelligent process". Human-written computer programs, for example, look drastically different from those produced by genetic algorithms.

Are you trying to tell me that nature, intelligence, and design are mutally exclusive? Get out of town.

No, he's not. Try thinking more about what he *is* saying -- he's been rather clear about it.

[An exterior intelligence can do anything in any order he or she wished.]
An exterior intelligence also has the volition to leave well enough alone when it wishes. No?

Sure, but when the results look like what one would expect to find if things were "left well enough alone" entirely, by what evidence do we infer "an exterior intelligence" in the first place? When you find a pile of rocks that has all the characteristics of a natural rockslide, how often do you conclude that someone must have just happened to have stacked them all that way due to some whim, or that a rockslide must have been overseen by some intelligent bystander who could have intervened by instead chose "to leave well enough alone"? Why not go with the most straightforward hypothesis, that a rockslide occurred without anyone around at all, unless evidence comes to light that someone was?

[Dimensio]

He uses the creationist versions of improve, good, etc. etc.

That's not quite how I see it. I see nothing with his definition of 'good' and 'improve' that contradicts contemporary usage amongst those who accept evolution.

[AndrewC]

That's not quite how I see it. I see nothing with his definition of 'good' and 'improve' that contradicts contemporary usage amongst those who accept evolution.

Well then you missed Stultis defense of evolution on another thread. He denied what Darwin states here "Natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being;" when he stated this "Well, of course, evolution isn't about improving creatures."

[Ichneumon]

No one denies that Damadian conducted pioneering work in the field of MRI. He was the first, in 1977, to use the technology to visualize the organs of a live human subject—after practicing on rat livers and a kosher turkey. (The human volunteer was Damadian’s colleague, Larry Minkoff; Damadian himself had a bit more body fat than little Indomitable could penetrate.) Furthermore, Damadian’s central patent on the technology, awarded in 1974, was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1997. In that dispute, Damadian and the company he founded, Melville, New York-based FONAR Corporation, won more than $128 million in patent infringement penalties from MRI goliath General Electric.

DittoJed2, is that you?

[AndrewC]

Nobel e-Museum Nobel Prize Internet Archive	Prize Fight Raymond Damadian refuses to take his failure to win a Nobel Prize, for a prototype MRI machine, lying down Raymond Damadian says he’ll never forget that day in June 1970 when he drove from his New York laboratory—his car trunk jammed with cages of cancerous rats—to a little town near Pittsburgh. He was heading for an obscure company, NMR Specialties, to test an idea: that a nascent technology involving intense magnetic fields and radio waves could be used to differentiate between rodents with cancer and those without. The experiment worked. And Damadian, a physician-scientist then

[Ichneumon]

You're just inviting more red (font) herrings, like the one he's already done about Stultis, which of course has nothing to do with how Darwin or any later evolutionary science has defined their terms (or not). If he has a disagreement with Stultis, let him take it up with Stultis.

If you keep conversing with this poster, he'll just drag you off in 19 different directions to keep you running without ever actually getting anywhere.

[Doctor Stochastic]

However, he has failed to give any definitions so far and thus he isn't taking part in the discussion at all.

[AndrewC]

Well, I guess I mind melded to you so you would answer my reply to Doctor S so that I could pull you in 19 different directions. I'm pretty potent, huh?? LOL ;^)

[AndrewC]

What definition would you like?

[Ichneumon]

Repost #195:In a nutshell, Creation is more in line with the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics than evolution. Something does not come from nothing and the organized tends toward disorganization.

Okay, I'll bite -- since "Creation" is the most extreme example possible of "something coming from nothing", and "organization" coming from "disorganization", how the HECK do you conclude that "Creation is more in line with the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics than evolution"?

Evolution only posits that reproducing things will tend to accumulate beneficial variations -- which is not "something from nothing", and while it can be loosely described as "organization from disorganization", that actually violates no laws, not even the laws of thermodynamics (as another poster correctly implied, if increasing organization did violate physical laws, even snowflake formation would be impossible).

The expanding universe shows it had a beginning and requires an outside source.

An unwarranted simplification, but I'll let it slide. Even so, this in no way indicates that the "outside source" is some sentient creature -- it could just as well be some source working by other sets of natural laws of some sort.

"Chance" is unlikely, our planets and the life on it requires very specific conditions.

Or perhaps these are the only laws of physics possible. You have no grounds for comparison.

There was a plan.

Or not.

There is adaptaion but not evolution.

Adaptation *IS* evolution... So you're contradicting yourself.

Genetic code does not allow reproduction outside of a species.

Sure it does. How else do you explain the pattern of shared endogenous retroviruses?

Homology can show similarities but not relation.

No, it can show relation as well. Even if you're not aware of the many ways that analogs can be verified as truly homologous, and even if you refuse to accept the conclusions of the experts in this area, there's still the fact that DNA analsysis can and has been used to verify the true relation of phenotypic homologs.

Finally, even ignoring homologs entirely, DNA analysis very clearly shows "relation" (i.e., common descent).

[Ichneumon]

The fossil record also seems to indicate the Law of Gravity was present and active when it was laid down, just as it is today. Smaller creatures sifted downward with more alacrity than the big critters.

ROFL! You obviously know as little about "sifting" as you do about the fossil record.

First of all, small things in water sink MORE SLOWLY than large things. Very small things -- such as the size of the microfossils in the lowest part of the fossil record -- sink the slowest of all, and micron-scale particles take WEEKS to settle only a hundred meters in the best case scenario, which is PERFECTLY STILL water. Any turbulence in the water will tend to lift the smaller particles and keep them suspended, like silt in a moving river.

So perhaps you could explain why the *lowest* strata contain nothing but the *smallest* microfossils, why the average fossil size roughly goes UP higher in the fossil strata, why tiny fossils are so often found in coarse sediments and large fossils are so often found in *fine* sediments, why coarse sediments are often found INTERLAYERED with fine sediments, why bouyant ammonites are found only in *intermediate* layers in the strata, why most fossil-bearing strata contain fossils of various sizes and shapes, why some species are found across a wide range of strata, while others are found only in thin layers within those ranges...

I'm sorry, but the creationists' fantasy of "hydrological sorting" is falsified by even a cursory glance at the ACTUAL fossil record.

See for example The Geologic Column and its Implications for the Flood , by a former creationist. He graduated from a creationist school, but after working out int he field, he learned that most of what he had been taught by his creationist teachers was a lie.

I would suspect, if the whole world were immersed in water today the same thing would happen. You would be a fossil on top, and your so called ancestor would be below.

You would suspect wrongly.

Would you predict any differently? If so, why?

Absolutely. See above, especially the article in the link. A worldwide flood would jumble all life forms and sediments, and what minimal "sorting" would occur (most would be overriden by the enormous turbulence, acting like a giant blender) would cause the largest and coarsest debris to settle *first*, followed by the smaller debris, etc., etc., with the very finest particles being deposited over a LONG period of time as a thick layer atop all the rest.

It would result in *nothing* like what is actually found in the fossil record. Have you ever seen a global flood produce ice beds with 40,000 annual layers? Have you ever seen a global flood that wouldn't leave large amounts of terrestrial debris on the sea floors? Have you ever seen a flood that would "sort" all dinosaur remains under all elephant remains? Have you ever seen a flood deposit layered fossil forests? Have you ever seen a flood deposite layers of salt? Have you ever seen a flood deposit thousands of meters of limestone in a short period of time, gathering such unbelievably vast amounts of microscope sea life from *where*, exactly? Have you ever seen a flood that could produce 5 x 10²² grams of limestone without boiling all the oceans of the Earth (and poaching Noah and his family) from the exothermic reaction which forms calcite?

And that's just the tip of the geologic iceberg. For just one example (out of COUNTLESS) why a global flood doesn't make any sense as an explanation for the geological record (and check the link I gave for many more from the countless examples), here's a post I wrote in response to "Answers in Genesis" ludicrous claims about how the Grand Canyon formations could have been laid down by a single global flood:

Your link discusses two points of argument: 1. "Those aren't surface animal tracks, those are amphibian tracks, dangit", and 2. "Those aren't sand dunes, those are underwater sand piles." The reason they want to argue for underwater processes instead of in-air processes is, as they freely admit, because this would cause a major problem for any Flood scenario. But their own attempted explanations leave a lot to be desired.

Let's examine each of them and see how well they hold up:

1. The Coconino sandstone layer of the Grand Canyon strata unmistakably shows animal tracks across its (many) surfaces. And yet, the creationist version of the the Grand Canyon story maintains that the thousands of feet of layers were laid down almost instantaneously (no more than a single year total, actually much less according to their beliefs about what the Flood did when).

So to "explain" (or "explain away") the animal tracks, they suggest that the sands were a) laid down underwater by the churning Flood waters, b) the animal tracks were made by aquatic amphibians running for their lives across the sea floor.

This fails on almost every level. First, there are many lines of evidence clearly pointing to a wind-blown sand dune origin for these sands, including fossilized raindrop impressions. You just don't see many raindrops under the ocean...

Second, the mighty straining to write off one kind of animal track as amphibious instead of reptilian, besides being contrary to the evidence, very conspicuously fails to even attempt to address the insect and mammal tracks which are also present in the sands. Last time I checked, there weren't a lot of spiders, scorpions, or mammals trotting around on the sea floor.

Spider track (along bottom), raindrop impressions, and piece of bark:

Bark floats -- what's it doing lying flat on the "bottom of the ocean" on top of several cubic miles of sand that has just washed into place (according to AiG) next to some raindrop impressions and the tracks of, um, an aquatic spider?

Scorpion tracks (note the characteristic tail-dragging):

There are also animal burrows preserved in the sands. Pretty amazing for animals to manage to burrow into sand as 10,000 cubic miles of it are being violently water-transported 2-300 miles through the ocean in just a few days, eh? (These are AiG's OWN FIGURES).

They also say that this happened at least 300 feet under the surface of the water, a considerable period of time after the Flood allegedly started. Just how many amphibians do they think would be left alive at that point to make countless tracks along the sea floor 300 feet underwater after all that titanic churning of rock and wave?

2. AiG claims that rather than being sand dunes accumulated over millions of years, the Coconino sandstone layer of the Grand Canyon was, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, violently shifted several hundred miles by "flood action" in incredible volumes and dumped over 200,000 square miles in "a matter of days".

There are, shall we say, several little problems with this.

The first is that such a massive "move and dump" would leave the "internal" structure of the sandstone just an amorphous pile of well-mixed sand. But that's not what we see. Instead, it's made up of many, many layers of overlapping dunes and wavy horizons:

Second, the sandstone is layered:

Note that this slab consists of two thin layers of sandstone, and must have been lifted off yet another layer since the spider tracks are a "cast" of the underlying tracks (they bump "out" instead of "in"). How exactly is the "10,000 cubic miles dumped in just days" scenario going to explain how multiple distinct thin layers of sand were nicely stacked?

Worse, animal tracks occur BETWEEN layers at various depths. AiG wrote their web page in a way to give the impression that animal tracks only occur on the *top* of the thick layer of sand, as if it was dumped there, and then animals went skittering across the top of it. That is not the case, but they sure seem to believe it themselves when they write of "catastrophic deposition of the sand by deep fast-moving water in a matter of days" followed by "in its waning stages, build huge sand waves in deep water". This begs the question, how exactly did those spiders and such manage to stroll across the various underlying surfaces of the sand as more was being "catastrophically deposited" on top? And how did *any* animal tracks (at any level) survive what AiG calls the building of "huge sand waves in deep water"? It seems that AiG would also expect to find clean animal tracks inside the remains of a massive mudslide which had been subsequently bulldozed -- from animals which made them during the mudslide itself and/or bulldozing. Color me skeptical.

Finally, the whole exercise is a graphic example of one of "scientific creationism's" favorite tactics: "resolving" one issue by proposing ad hoc scenarios that make NO SENSE in even their own larger picture. But we weren't supposed to notice that...

For example, they've tried to explain *ONE* layer in the Grand Canyon by proposing massive currents bringing in 10,000 cubic miles of sand, then "waning" to the point where it could appropriately make wavy shapes on the deposited sand. Okay, fine, so they propose that the flood waters had "waned" once the sand was deposited and then it was time to make pretty swirls on top. That's nice. THEN WHERE IN THE HELL DID THE SIX HUNDRED FEET OF ADDITIONAL ROCK OVER IT COME FROM?

See the layer marked "CS"? That's the Coconino Sandstone. See the enormous layers marked TF (Toroweap Formation), KFf (Kaibab Formation - Fossil Mountain Member), and KFh (Kaibab Formation - Harrisburg Member)? That's 600 additional feet of rock on top of the Coconino. AiG sort of "forgot" to explain how *those* ended up on top of the sand after the Flood waters had "waned".

Nor do they even acknowledge, much less explain, the 2500+ feet of rock layers *under* the Coconino sandstone, along with all their (varying) fossils, tracks, compositions, and histories.

[Ichneumon]

Homology can show similarities but not relation.

Oops, one more example: There are also DNA homologs.