Posted on 08/28/2002 9:36:04 AM PDT by gdani
Making Monkeys Out of Evolutionists
Wednesday, August 28, 2002
By Cal Thomas
Tribune Media Services
It's back-to-school time. That means school supplies, clothes, packing lunches and the annual battle over what can be taught.
The Cobb County, Ga., School Board voted unanimously Aug. 22 to consider a pluralistic approach to the origin of the human race, rather than the mandated theory of evolution. The board will review a proposal which says the district "believes that discussion of disputed views of academic subjects is a necessary element of providing a balanced education, including the study of the origin of the species."
Immediately, pro-evolution forces jumped from their trees and started behaving as if someone had stolen their bananas. Apparently, academic freedom is for other subjects. Godzilla forbid! (This is the closest one may get to mentioning "God" in such a discussion, lest the ACLU intervene, which it has threatened to do in Cobb County, should the school board commit academic freedom. God may be mentioned if His Name modifies "damn." The First Amendment's free speech clause protects such an utterance, we are told by the ACLU. The same First Amendment, according to their twisted logic, allegedly prohibits speaking well of God.)
What do evolutionists fear? If scientific evidence for creation is academically unsound and outrageously untrue, why not present the evidence and allow students to decide which view makes more sense? At the very least, presenting both sides would allow them to better understand the two views. Pro-evolution forces say (and they are saying it again in Cobb County) that no "reputable scientist" believes in the creation model. That is demonstrably untrue. No less a pro-evolution source than Science Digest noted in 1979 that, "scientists who utterly reject Evolution may be one of our fastest-growing controversial minorities . . . Many of the scientists supporting this position hold impressive credentials in science." (Larry Hatfield, "Educators Against Darwin.")
In the last 30 years, there's been a wave of books by scientists who do not hold to a Christian-apologetic view on the origins of humanity but who have examined the underpinnings of evolutionary theory and found them to be increasingly suspect. Those who claim no "reputable scientist" holds to a creation model of the universe must want to strip credentials from such giants as Johann Kepler (1571-1630), the founder of physical astronomy. Kepler wrote, "Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it befits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God."
Werner Von Braun (1912-1977), the father of space science, wrote: " . . . the vast mysteries of the universe should only confirm our belief in the certainty of its Creator. I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science."
Who would argue that these and many other scientists were ignorant about science because they believed in God? Contemporary evolutionists who do so are practicing intellectual slander. Anything involving God, or His works, they believe, is to be censored because humankind must only study ideas it comes up with apart from any other influence. Such thinking led to the Holocaust, communism and a host of other evils conjured up by the deceitful and wicked mind of uncontrolled Man.
There are only two models for the origin of humans: evolution and creation. If creation occurred, it did so just once and there will be no "second acts." If evolution occurs, it does so too slowly to be observed. Both theories are accepted on faith by those who believe in them. Neither theory can be tested scientifically because neither model can be observed or repeated.
Why are believers in one model -- evolution -- seeking to impose their faith on those who hold that there is scientific evidence which supports the other model? It's because they fear they will lose their influence and academic power base after a free and open debate. They are like political dictators who oppose democracy, fearing it will rob them of power.
The parallel views should be taught in Cobb County, Ga., and everywhere else, and let the most persuasive evidence win.
Several independent dating mechanisms show the Earth to be around 4,5000,000,000 years old.
They're not independant. They're all based on certain kinds of uniformitarian assumptions.
In most species, this mutation would cause them grave damage, so a critter that had this mutation would likely die or at least have far less survival fitness. As it happens, primates get a lot of vitamin C in their diet through the food they eat, so this mutation did not have any real disadvantages to the primate species it occurred in. In other words, this mutation stayed in the genome because it wasn't detrimental to the primates it occurred in; most other species could not support this mutation in their genome.
Geez, looks like we're due for one pretty soon, huh? ; * ) Night, guys...
OOOOOH! So you think the majority does determine truth!
Jenny, you do not believe in any God. Who determines your truth and why?
Your statement is ‘your’ question…
Truth exists apart from my beliefs. As a practical matter, I rely on the evidence of my senses, logical induction from that evidence validated by later experience (the scientific method), and sometimes I even rely on the word of people I trust. And sometimes I even make educated guesses. But regardless, the objective Truth is out there; it's up to me to keep improving my ability to discern what it is.
So what? This threadlet started with you telling me to move to China because my beliefs only comprise 6% of the population here. I'm sure that in 1938, 6% of Germans believed that the Jews weren't getting a fair shake.
Thanks!
So if someone makes the positive claim that 'A' is true but the evidence that is supposed to support that claim doesn't convince you at all, what do you believe? Especially if there is no way to show that 'A' is necessarily false?
Should we believe every unfalsifiable proposition?
Maybe because it's not his favoured Young Earth model?
Still waiting for a satisfactory answer myself.
Yes, but having a scientific background of my own I do not genuflect to the Great God Science. People who teach science of do scientific research still put their pants on one leg at a time and subscribe to any number of crackpot ideas. I don’t let people pull rank. And I don’t accept “trust me, I’m an expert.” I work in the Jack Grubman era.
”The real issue, when it comes to defending evolution, is not that the creationists object to the theory, but that they ignore the evidence. You would see exactly the same reaction by scientists if a significant number of Americans believed that the Earth was flat.”
The real issue when it comes to evolution is that its proponents are not willing to admit its flaws and shortcomings. It is an elegant theory and many pieces of evidence have been assembled to support it, but it is not totally persuasive. The reference to a flat earth is off the mark. I am sure that many learned people of long ago believed in a flat earth. They have been conclusively proved wrong for millennia and now with pictures from space and direct observation. The same cannot be claimed for evolution.
”Of course it's testable. The Genesis account says that the universe and the Earth are a few thousand years old; several independent methods date them as being of order 15 billion years old and 4.5 billion years old, respectively. The Genesis account says that the Earth was covered by a flood a few thousand years ago. This would have led to gross geological effects that have been shown not to exist. The Genesis account says that trees and grasses existed prior to the sun; the fossil record reveals a long history of life on Earth before the existence of grasses and trees, which could not have occurred without the sun.”
First the Genesis account says nothing about the age of the earth. Second, using a literal interpretation of Genesis (a “day” is a modern 24 hours) is a straw man. Intelligent Design does not require belief in a God of the Christian Bible. Don’t let prejudices force you to jump to conclusions. Intelligent Design allows for both religious and non-religious assumptions.
”The universe is the way it is, and not how we would wish it to be.”
That’s true. And the puzzle we’re creating may not correspond to the picture on the box, no matter how much we may be wedded to making it so.
” It will take billions of years to confirm our prediction that the sun will become a red giant; does that mean the standard solar model is not science? Scientific theories are required to be falsifiable, not necessarily conveniently falsifiable.”
Sometimes a scientific theory is conveniently unfalsifiable … until the theorizer is long dead.
”As a matter of curiosity, what does the evolution of man theorize we will be in another million years?[me]"
[you]Different, or more likely, extinct.
We can't predict what the weather will be for more than a few days. Does that mean that we have no scientific understanding of our atmosphere?"
Here you have a problem. You have an elaborate theory with claims of millions of years of data to draw on. You claim to be able to use fossil records to demonstrate the transformation of species (mental image of the “ascent of man”) and your predictive power is … zero, nada, nothing. There is a huge gap between different and extinct. Why didn’t you cover all the bases and say “the same to different to extinct.”
Weather prediction now is another interesting issue isn’t it. We have the issue of local weather and the bigger issue of climate change. I am old enough to remember the Holy Scientific Community predicting Global Cooling … now. having moved 180 degrees to predicting Global Warming … all within a few decades. Does this mean we have no scientific understanding of our atmosphere?
Ah, the vagaries of certainties in science. It should teach one humility.
Try this for a mental image:
Documentaries typically show australopithines or some similar "human ancestor" coming down from trees to live in the savannas. All such productions ignore the fact that there are real reasons why apes and monkeys live in trees: they are too slow on the ground and they make too much noise to survive very long other than in trees.
The most major difference between human infants and baby deer, for instance, is that baby deer have the sense not to attract attention to themselves. Picture some group of "proto humans" out on the savanna for the first time with thousand pound carnivores walking around all over the place, and picture some human infant screaming his head off the first time something displeased him. Kind of like somebody ringing a dinner bell...
It certainly proves that atheism is totally false. It certainly proves that the materialist viewpoint of life is totally incorrect. More importantly to our discussion however, it proves that there is another much more likely explanation for the creation of life and for the creation of species. It certainly makes the viewpoint of intelligent design totally legitimate. When something is so unlikely as the transformation of one species into another, the argument that they were designed is the more likely one. Such an argument cannot be denied out of hand when one has admitted that God exists.
Of course He did, His work is His evidence. Why do you think abiogenesis has been shown to be practically impossible? Why do you think that the more we learn about how organisms function, the more ridiculous the theory of evolution looks?
And of course, Darwin was no atheist, although he moved closer to atheism as he got older. But first & foremost, Darwin was a scientist.
Oh please, you know better than that. Not only was he an atheist, he was a hypocritical atheist:
"P.S. Would you advise me to tell Murray [his publisher] that my book is not more un-orthodox than the subject makes inevitable. That I do not discuss the origin of man. That I do not bring in any discussion about Genesis, &c, &c., and only give facts, and such conclusions from them as seem to me fair.
Or had I better say nothing to Murray, and assume that he cannot object to this much unorthodoxy, which in fact is not more than any Geological Treatise which runs sharp counter to Genesis."
From: Daniel J. Boorstein, The Discoverers, page 475.
If I did believe in God, I'd still believe in evolution because I'm not going to disbelieve my lyin' eyes.
You have seen evolution with your own eyes? This is one story I need to hear!
Designed, engineered, and re-engineered. The evidence is that more than one or two sets of hands has been involved in engineering life forms on this planet in past ages. A loving god would not create biting flies, mosquitos, or disease organisms.
Other than that, there is major evidence indicating engineering in the human genome itself;
Henry Gee
Monday February 12, 2001
The Guardian
The potentially-poisonous Japanese fugu fish has achieved notoriety, at least among scientists who haven't eaten any, because it has a genome that can be best described as "concise". There is no "junk" DNA, no waste, no nonsense. You get exactly what it says on the tin. This makes its genome very easy to deal with in the laboratory: it is close to being the perfect genetic instruction set. Take all the genes you need to make an animal and no more, stir, and you'd get fugu. Now, most people would hardly rate the fugu fish as the acme of creation. If it were, it would be eating us, and not the other way round. But here is a paradox. The human genome probably does not contain significantly more genes than the fugu fish. What sets it apart is - and there is no more succinct way to put this - rubbish.
The human genome is more than 95% rubbish. Fewer than 5% of the 3.2bn As, Cs, Gs and Ts that make up the human genome are actually found in genes. It is more litter-strewn than any genome completely sequenced so far. It is believed to contain just under 31,780 genes, only about half as many again as found in the simple roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans (19,099 genes): yet in terms of bulk DNA content, the human genome is almost 30 times the size.A lot is just rubbish, plain and simple. But at least half the genome is rubbish of a special kind - transposable elements. These are small segments of DNA that show signs of having once been the genomes of independent entities. Although rather small, they often contain sequences that signal cellular machinery to transcribe them (that is, to switch them on). They may also contain genetic instructions for enzymes whose function is to make copies and insert the copies elsewhere in the genome. These transposable elements litter the human genome in their hundreds of thousands. Many contain genes for an enzyme called reverse transcriptase - essential for a transposable element to integrate itself into the host DNA.
The chilling part is that reverse transcriptase is a key feature of retroviruses such as HIV-1, the human immunodeficiency virus. Much of the genome itself - at least half its bulk - may have consisted of DNA that started out, perhaps millions of years ago, as independent viruses or virus-like entities. To make matters worse, hundreds of genes, containing instructions for at least 223 proteins, seem to have been imported directly from bacteria. Some are responsible for features of human metabolism otherwise hard to explain away as quirks of evolution - such as our ability to metabolise psychotropic drugs. Thus, monoamine oxidase is involved in metabolising alcohol.
If the import of bacterial genes for novel purposes (such as drug resistance) sounds disturbing and familiar, it should - this is precisely the thrust of much research into the genetic modification of organisms in agriculture or biotechnology.
So natural-born human beings are, indeed, genetically modified. Self-respecting eco-warriors should never let their children marry a human being, in case the population at large gets contaminated with exotic genes!One of the most common transposable elements in the human genome is called Alu - the genome is riddled with it. What the draft genome now shows quite clearly is that copies of Alu tend to cluster where there are genes. The density of genes in the genome varies, and where there are more genes, there are more copies of Alu. Nobody knows why, yet it is consistent with the idea that Alu has a positive benefit for genomes. To be extremely speculative, it could be that a host of very similar looking Alu sequences in gene-rich regions could facilitate the kind of gene-shuffling that peps up natural genetic variation, and with that, evolution. This ties in with the fact that human genes are, more than most, fragmented into a series of many exons, separated by small sections of rubbish called introns - rather like segments of a TV programme being punctuated by commercials.
The gene for the protein titin, for example, is divided into a record-breaking 178 exons, all of which must be patched together by the gene-reading machinery before the finished protein can be assembled. This fragmentation allows for alternative versions of proteins to be built from the same information, by shuffling exons around. Genomes with less fragmented genes may have a similar number of overall genes - but a smaller palette of ways to use this information. Transposable elements might have helped unlock the potential in the human genome, and could even have contributed to the fragmentation of genes in the first place (some introns are transposable elements by another name). This, at root, may explain why human beings are far more complex than roundworms or fruit flies. If it were not for trashy transposable elements such as Alu, it might have been more difficult to shuffle genes and parts of genes, creating alternative ways of reading the "same" genes. It is true that the human genome is mostly rubbish, but it explains what we are, and why we are who we are, and not lying on the slab in a sushi bar.
• Deep Time by Henry Gee will be published shortly in paperback by Fourth Estate. He is a senior editor of Nature. Related articles
That's fair, but we're not talking about some obscure technical point. We're talking about one of the basics of how I do my job. It's like asking a carpenter which way a screw turns, and then not accepting his answer without a published reference. But if I did give you a reference, why should you accept it any better than what I told you? The qualifications of the author are probably comparable to my own. I might have written the reference myself, for that matter.
They have been conclusively proved wrong for millennia and now with pictures from space and direct observation. The same cannot be claimed for evolution.
You illustrate my point.
You claim to be able to use fossil records to demonstrate the transformation of species (mental image of the “ascent of man”) and your predictive power is … zero, nada, nothing.
So let me get this straight. The fact that we can't predict supernovae means that the study of supernovae isn't scientific? The fact that we can't predict when an atomic nucleus can decay means there's no such thing as nuclear science? The fact that we can't predict an animal's behavior means that it can't be studied by science? The fact that we can't predict how a protein will fold means that biochemistry is not science? What does archeology predict for our civilization? What are the predictions of computer science?
Dogs have been bred for thousands of years. What dog breeding shows is that you cannot change a species by selection, whether natural or selected. In fact, the more selection, the less viable a species becomes:
However, inbreeding holds potential problems. The limited genepool caused by continued inbreeding means that deleterious genes become widespread and the breed loses vigor. ...
The ultimate result of continued inbreeding is terminal lack of vigor and probable extinction as the gene pool contracts, fertility decreases, abnormalities increase and mortality rates rise. ...
Inbreeding holds problems for anyone involved in animal husbandry - from canary fanciers to farmers. Attempts to change the appearance of the Pug in attempts to have a flatter face and a rounder head resulted in more c-sections being required and other congenital problems. Some of these breeds are loosing there natural ability to give birth without human assistance. From: Problems of Inbreeding
So selection really leads to the destruction of species.
Aside from the fact that all anybody ever got from breeding dogs was dogs (no goats, birds, or horses...), you can take any collection of danes, shepherds, and poodles and turn them loose in the wild and, after five generations, all that will be left alive is your ordinary, universal, fifty pound wild dog.
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