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

In a poll released last week, two-thirds of Americans said they wanted to see creationism taught to public-school science pupils alongside evolution. Thirty-seven percent said they wanted to see creationism taught instead of evolution.

Wrong. Science isn't a matter of votes -- or beliefs. It's a system of verifiable facts, an approach that must be preserved and fought for if American pupils are going to get the kind of education they need to complete in an increasingly global techno-economy.

Unfortunately, the debate over evolution and creationism is back, with a spiffy new look and a mass of plausible-sounding talking points, traveling under the seemingly secular name of "intelligent design."

This "theory" doesn't spend much time pondering which intelligence did the designing. Instead, it backwards-engineers its way into a complicated rationale, capitalizing on a few biological oddities to "prove" life could not have evolved by natural selection.

On the strength of this redesigned premise -- what Wired Magazine dubbed "creationism in a lab coat" -- school districts across the country are being bombarded by activists seeking to have their version given equal footing with established evolutionary theory in biology textbooks. School boards in Ohio, Georgia and most recently Dover, Pa., have all succumbed.

There's no problem with letting pupils know that debate exists over the origin of man, along with other animal and plant life. But peddling junk science in the name of "furthering the discussion" won't help their search for knowledge. Instead, pupils should be given a framework for understanding the gaps in evidence and credibility between the two camps.

A lot of the confusion springs from use of the word "theory" itself. Used in science, it signifies a maxim that is believed to be true, but has not been directly observed. Since evolution takes place over millions of years, it would be inaccurate to say that man has directly observed it -- but it is reasonable to say that evolution is thoroughly supported by a vast weight of scientific evidence and research.

That's not to say it's irrefutable. Some day, scientists may find enough evidence to mount a credible challenge to evolutionary theory -- in fact, some of Charles Darwin's original suppositions have been successfully challenged.

But that day has not come. As a theory, intelligent design is not ready to steal, or even share, the spotlight, and it's unfair to burden children with pseudoscience to further an agenda that is more political than academic.

So...in other words, the stirring and redistribution lasted longer?

Yep. The step-by-step flooding of ecosystems (resulting in groups of similar fossils), varying degrees of mobility (fast moving animals escape the rising flood waters), and water sorting (segregation of fossils via gravity) all have a part in the geologic record. Too bad neither you nor I were there to witness it, but at least a human was around to take notes (more than I can say for the "millions of years" folks).

Wait. No. We're lucky we get to see any evidence at all. Thanks to righteous Noah we get to take a look around this fantastic creation of God for a little while and enjoy His gifts.

Did you get even a hint about how much water we are talking about here from your chat with Junior?

How much water is currently on the planet, give or take a few billion gallons? Why should I have any reason to believe there is less water on the planet today than there always has been? I reckon God could have fabricated more water for the occasion, but I don't think proper study would reveal it. Do you know how much water there is and where it all resides? Does science?

Have Damadian/Fonar benefitted humankind? Debatable. By the time they got in on the act, several major instrument companies were building imagers. Damadian got a lot richer off it; but he contributed nothing of substance.

Bull, you are blinded by your worldview and your loyalty to a colleague. I have said nothing bad about Lauterbur, but you do not hesitate to belittle an acknowledged pioneer in the field. First, Damadian has patents filed. Second, these patents were useful enough to GE and others that diagnostic equipment was built using them. The proof is in the suit he won and the concessions he got from others.

Against All Odds: History of the MRI

Once the potential to detect tumors was accepted, however, Dr. Damadian had to fight off giant companies such as Hitachi and General Electric to protect his patented technology. Hitachi settled out of court, but the case against GE went to trial in 1995. In a "David v. Goliath" lawsuit, FONAR won one of the largest patent settlements on record: $128.7 million.

That is proof enough to most people that Damadian is no fraud.

Here is one comment, and note the charge at the end. It is worse than your charge against another creationist for allowing his name to be added to a study which had a portion he would disagree with.

Damadian invented Medical MRI

As a physician with a biophysics degree, I have followed the Damadian story from its beginnings. Claiming he didn't invent MRI is like saying the Wright brothers did not invent powered flight because slighly later aircraft were rather different from their original "Flyer".

T1/T2 had been around for decades. He was the first to realize and show they could be used for imaging. This is what made medical MRI possble and will be used long after the contributons of this years winners are obsolete.

Further, in the patent suit, Lauderbur's notebook revealed that he had been directly inspired by Damadian, though he never acknowledged this in his published work. This is called "citation plagarism" and is a definite no-no.
Posted by: Peter H Proctor, PhD, M at October 14, 2003 08:35 AM

Shubi, I think where those who have faith in evolution and those who don't part ways is in the area of limits. Evolutionists see no limits while its critics do. Evoutionists assume that the wide variation we see within kind means there exists an unlimited capacity for variation. Perhaps there is, but there's no evidence for such a claim.

Evolution is not a matter of faith. It is a matter of mountains of evidence. Study this site, especially the evidence section:

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/lines/index.shtml

What is the scientific definition of kind?

What is the age of the oldest person who ever lived in modern recordable history? I'm too lazy to look it up, but let's say it's 121 years, 5 months, sixteen days. Okay, there appears to be approximately a 120 year upper limit on a human life. Does that mean no one ever crosses it? No, they might cross it a little. And someday the record might be broken. But does it follow from that that we can expect people to one day live to be 13,672 years old? Perhaps we might freeze them and that can be obtained. I don't know. But does anything in the realm of nature lead us to believe such ages could be obtained, or could have ever occurred by natural processes?

I don't see how this is at all pertinent to evolution.

An evolutionist looks at a Great Dane and says, "Wow! If breeding can lead to a dog that large, who's to say millions of years of random accumlated mutations couldn't make it 20 times as large?" They assume that because there's variation within kind, there's no limit to variation, even without man's help.

If it were twenty times as large it would probably be a different species and fit what Darwin was speaking of when talking about the Origin of Species

I think that's a rather wishful assumption. Yes, speciation occurs. The genetic capacity for limited variation that exists in each species allows for wide divergence due to either deliberate breeding or random isolation of some species members from others. On the extreme edges of this variation, it may be possible that mating no longer can occur with certain other species members either because of the obvious physical impossibility (Great Danes & Chihuahuas for example) or because of loss of the genetic capacity.

If you admit that there is speciation, you have lost your whole argument. Speciation is macroevolution. If you admit macroevolution occurs that all creationists won't admit, you have become an "evolutionist".

One thing you should understand is that Darwin used domestic breeding as a sort of analogy to what happens in nature. It was convenient to do so because selective breeding causes allele frequency changes in populations far faster than it normally occurs in nature (Darwin was not too familiar with unicellular organisms). No scientist thinks that dogs of different breeds are different species. No scientist knows what a kind is either.

When you mix the domestic selective breeding that is used to understand the principle in nature, with what happens with speciation in the wild you are using an apples and oranges comparison that is not valid.

But there is nothing to lead anyone to believe that this is anything other than an outer limit being reached. To simply assume that from the extremes within each species, there will then occur random mutations which can carry the creature in question not only beyond the observable limit but into radically different genetic territory is just wishful thinking. Unless that happens, there can be no evolution, and since we can't tolarate that possibility, we must assume that over time those micro-organisms that somehow managed to appear all those eons ago "evolved" into all the millions of life forms we see today.

Why do you fail to understand that if you have a chain of speciations over millions of years there will be a wide divergence from the beginning of the chain to the end? And furthermore, evolution works as a Tree of Life (sound familiar) that has multiple branches. So it is not a straight line thing and amounts to a geometric progression in numbers of different forms of life, which is what we see on Earth now and in the fossil record.

Can it be proven that that didn't happen? Nope. Can it be proven that it did? Nope. So there we are. Choose your faith.

OK, you know this really gets frustrating. We repeat over and over that science does not "prove" things, yet you insist on proof. As if your cockeyed literalism proves anything? No, science goes by evidence and when enough evidence mounts up to convince any honest, rational person that evolution happened, it becomes a Theory.

Your implication that science is faith is contradicted by your hostility to it. Why would you be against someone with faith. My original point is that if someone does not believe in the works of God, then they cannot claim to believe in God. God created evolution. It is one of his works. If you do not find it convincing that He allowed us to collect all this evidence substantiating this fact, you are turning your back on God's revelation.

The reference to age limits in humans was simply an analogy about limits per se.

The issue with speciation is whether it reaches a limit or does not. Is speciation an example of how maximizing certain pre-existing traits can lead to loss of others? Or is it a stage in the evolution of one thing into another?

That's the debate. The evolutionist would propose that random mutations over time account for the diversity of life on earth. That's an awful lot of diversity. Millions of species. Some fly. Some swim. Some are huge. Others are so small they can only be seen through a microscope. Some split to reproduce. Others have complicated courtship rituals, followed by mating, gestation, birth, nurturance, etc..

I don't object to faith at all. I have it myself. Perhaps I've inadvertently left the impression that I devalue faith by stating that belief in evolution requires faith (and a lot of it) but that was not my intent.

On another issue you raised, I understand that deliberate breeding produces results different from the more random variations we see in nature. It's doubtful nature would produce a chihuahua. But the lesson there is that deliberate efforts to stretch natural boundaries eventually reach a limit. We can't breed a dog the size of a flea or the size of an elephant. We can't produce anything from breeding fruit flies other than fruit flies. What would lead anyone to assume that random mutations would ever lead to anything radically different from what was there to begin with?

How long would we have to observe micro-organisms dividing until somehow we ended up, through random mutations (and it would surely take a ton of them), with a larger creature that reproduces sexually?

Might it simply be that such a thing never happened? That giraffes have always been giraffes? That the variation we see is in fact limited. Natural selection takes it to one level, and we can push it to another through selective breeding, and then CRASH! We hit a wall that neither we nor nature can breach. You simply CAN'T produce dogs the size of an elephant, and neither can natural selection and mutation.

Nor can natural selection and mutation lead to micro-organisms evolving over eons into the millions of life forms we see today.

If you believe in evolution, you must believe that the limits we have seen in everything from amoeba to fruit flies to dogs can be breached and have been breached countless millions of times by random chance. Maybe that's true, but it's speculation. I would suggest that those limits are unbreachable by any natural process. The number of mutations necessary to account for all the life we see would be unfathomable.
Anyone is free to suggest that such an incredible, and unobserved, series of mutations happened. Perhaps it did. So offer it as a theory. But don't shout down other ideas, or use the circular reasoning we so often see (e.g., those countless millions of mutations had to occur because without it there would be no evolution). That's like the atheist who once said, "spontaneous generation of life seems impossible, but it must have happened because here I am!"

shubi, I see that I failed to answer your query about the scientific definition of "kind". I'm not a scientist and don't have a science dictionary handy but I'd say it probably refers to species, or perhaps genus. Feel free to correct me! :-) I didn't comment on your religious opinions, as that would seem to be out of the scope of the discussion here. However, if you want to engage me in a theological discussion feel free to Freepmail me!

The reason you cannot answer what a kind is-NOBODY KNOWS. It is in the Bible and is a common sense type of word, but it is hardly scientific. Creationists like to use it because they can alter their argument as they go along to completely confuse the scientists they are debating or to dupe those ignorant of science into joining their cult.

Creationism is all about religion. There is little science in it. They have created a "new denomination" of believers who think science is wrong. It has created a level of ignorance and anti-modern thinking that is dangerous to the security of our country. Creationism is one of the most insidious forces in the world right now, next to terrorism and tyranny.

Creation science was laughed out of court, so they made up "Intelligent Design" to attempt to indoctrinate children in science classes in public schools with their nonsense. The main ploy they use is to substitute the Life for Species in Darwin's title, The Origin of Species.

So, if you want to discuss creationist "theology", this is the place to do it. Or come to

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/1291515/posts

which is my thread on the same subject. Since creationist theology is worse than creationist science, there isn't much to seriously discuss.

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