Posted on 12/25/2010 4:00:25 AM PST by wendy1946
No normal science theory is ever defended the way evolution is. What IS defended in that sort of manner are lifestyles, tenures, entrenched positions, and careers which have been built pyramid-style atop a base row which is sitting on quicksand. The people sitting ten or eleven rows of stones up don't like being told that the whole thing is unworkable.
What most people are unaware of is that the whole theory of evolution has been overwhelmingly refuted a number of times and via a number of totally unrelated arguments to such an extent that ANY normal science theory under the same circumstances would have been rejected and thrown out literally decades ago.
The first such disproof and the one which rightfully should have ended the debate involved fruit flies. Fruit flies breed new generations every other day so that running any sort of a decades-long experiment with fruit flies will involve more generations of them than there have ever been of anything even remotely resembling humans on our planet. Those flies were subjected to everything in the world known to cause mutations and the mutants were recombined every possible way; all they ever got were sterile freaks, and fruit flies. Several prominent scientists publicly denounced evolution at that point in time including the famous case of Richard Goldschmidt.
The failure was due to the fact that our entire living world is driven by information and the only information there ever was in the picture was that for a fruit fly. When the DNA/RNA information scheme was discovered, even if the fruit fly thing had never happened, evolution should have been discarded on the spot. But GIVEN the fact of the fruit fly experiments, somebody HAD to have thought to himself "Hey, THAT'S THE REASON THE FRUIT FLY EXPERIMENTS FAILED!!!!!!"
The DNA/RNA system is an information code just like C#, Java, or C++. Information codes do not just sort of happen or appear amongst inanimate matter for no particular reason. In other words, there is no way in the world anybody should be believing in evolution 40 years after the discovery of DNA and, again, that's just one overwhelming disproof amongst a number of such. Again no legitimate science theory would ever survive such a history.
There is the question of the probabilistic odds against any sort of life forming from inanimate matter via any random sequence of events; the junk science reports we now read about "string" theory and "multiple universes" is basically motivated by a recognition of what the odds are against evolution in the one universe we actually have any evidence for.
And then there is the Haldane dilemma, which amounts to an understanding of the time spans which would be needed to spread ANY genetic change through any group of creatures. A very simple version of the thing is all most intelligent people should need:
Imagine a population of 100,000 apes or "proto-humans" ten million years ago which are all genetically alike other than for two with a "beneficial mutation". Imagine also that this population has the human or proto-human generation cycle time of roughly 20 years.
Imagine that the beneficial mutation in question is so good, that all 99,998 other die out immediately (from jealousy), and that the pair with the beneficial mutation has 100,000 kids and thus replenishes the herd.
Imagine that this process goes on like that for ten million years, which is more than anybody claims is involved in "human evolution". The max number of such "beneficial mutations" which could thus be substituted into the herd would be ten million divided by twenty, or 500,000 point mutations which, Walter Remine notes, is about 1/100 of one percent of the human genome, and a miniscule fraction of the 2 to 3 percent that separates us from chimpanzees, or the half of that which separates us from neanderthals.
That basically says that even given a rate of evolutionary development which is fabulously beyond anything which is possible in the real world, starting from apes, in ten million years the best you could possibly hope for would be an ape with a slightly shorter tail.
People who have carried out the math for real-world rates of substitution come up with it taking quadrillions of years for our present living world to have evolved in any fashion even if that were possible, which it isn't.
So evolution needs quadrillions of years... how much time do they (evolutionites) actually have? A very big part of the answer has been coming in lately in the form of blood, blood vessels, and raw meat turning up in dinosaur remains:
In other words, Midrashic sources and Amerind oral traditions are basically correct in describing human interaction with dinosaurs just a few thousand years ago (there is no way raw meat and blood can survive for millions of years) and the thing we've heard all our lives about dinosaurs dying out all our lives is a bunch of BS.
A theory which needs quadrillions of years and only has a few thousand is basically FUBAR; no reasonably well educated person should ever buy into it.
What about humans, hominids such as the Neanderthal, and the stories we keep seeing in the news about some new human ancestor of the year which is supposedly going to save evolutionism, and what about the 30,000 and 200,000 year time frames involved in those stories?
In order to be descended from something via any process resembling evolution, at some point, you have to be able to interbreed with the something. Thus the curious total lack of any real evidence of modern man ever interbreeding with Neanderthals was always viewed as a big mystery particularly since there was evidence of the two groups living in close proximity for long periods. James Shreeve described the problem in an article published in Discover magazine in the mid 90s:
"Humans love to mate. They mate all the time, by night and by day, through all the phases of the female’s reproductive cycle. Given the opportunity, humans throughout the world will mate with any other human. The barriers between races and cultures, so cruelly evident in other respects, melt away when sex is at stake. Cortés began the systematic annihilation of the Aztec people--but that did not stop him from taking an Aztec princess for his wife. Blacks have been treated with contempt by whites in America since they were first forced into slavery, but some 20 percent of the genes in a typical African American are white. Consider James Cook’s voyages in the Pacific in the eighteenth century. Cook’s men would come to some distant land, and lining the shore were all these very bizarre-looking human beings with spears, long jaws, browridges, archeologist Clive Gamble of Southampton University in England told me. God, how odd it must have seemed to them. But that didn’t stop the Cook crew from making a lot of little Cooklets.Project this universal human behavior back into the Middle Paleolithic. When Neanderthals and modern humans came into contact in the Levant, they would have interbred, no matter how strange they might initially have seemed to each other. If their cohabitation stretched over tens of thousands of years, the fossils should show a convergence through time toward a single morphological pattern, or at least some swapping of traits back and forth.
But the evidence just isn’t there, not if the TL and ESR dates are correct. Instead the Neanderthals stay staunchly themselves. In fact, according to some recent ESR dates, the least Neanderthalish among them is also the oldest. The full Neanderthal pattern is carved deep at the Kebara cave, around 60,000 years ago. The moderns, meanwhile, arrive very early at Qafzeh and Skhul and never lose their modern aspect. Certainly, it is possible that at any moment new fossils will be revealed that conclusively demonstrate the emergence of a Neandermod lineage. From the evidence in hand, however, the most likely conclusion is that Neanderthals and modern humans were not interbreeding in the Levant..."
And then in the late 1990s results of DNA studies of Neanderthal remains began to come in and cleared up the mystery:
"He said his team ran four separate tests for authenticity - checking whether other amino acids had survived, making sure the DNA sequences they found did not exist in modern humans, making sure the DNA could be replicated in their own lab and then getting other labs to duplicate their results. Comparisons with the DNA of modern humans and of apes showed the Neanderthal was about halfway between a modern human and a chimpanzee."
That's right: the Neanderthal was basically an advanced ape whose DNA was almost exactly halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee, and we could no more interbreed with Neanderthals than we could with horses. Even the prestigeious PlosBiology system gave up on the idea (No Evidence of Neandertal mtDNA Contribution to Early Modern Humans).
Clearly that should have been the end of any talk about modern humans having evolved from hominids since all other hominids were significantly FURTHER removed from us THAN the neanderthal. Nonetheless evolutionites go on talking about a "common ancestor(TM) for both ourselves and Neanderthals, 5000,000 years back. That of course is idiotic; it's as if somebody had discovered some reason why dogs could not be descended from wolves, and the evolutionites were to claim that therefore they (dogs) must be descended directly from fish.
But what about the time frames? We've seen that the time frmes we read about for dinosaurs are totally FUBAR, what about the 50,000 and 200,000 and 500,000 year time spans you read about for supposed human ancestors? Do evolutionites have the sort of time they'd need to even be talking about hominid/human evolution?
Gunnar Heinsohn is best/brightest category in European academia and a frequent speaker at NATO gatherings since his population youth bulge theories predict political unrest with near 100% accuracy; he's also a major player in the ongoing efforts to reconstruct Med-basin chronologies. His "Wie Alt ist das Menschengeschlect" describes the problem with the dating schemes typically associated with Neanderthal studies:
Mueller-Karpe, the first name in continental paleoanthropology, wrote thirty years ago on the two strata of homo erectus at Swanscombe/England: "A difference between the tools in the upper and in the lower stratum is not recognizable. (From a geological point of view it is uncertain if between the two strata there passed decades, centuries or millennia.)" (Handbuch der Vorgeschichte, Vol I, Munich 1966, p. 293).
The outstanding scholar never returned to this hint that in reality there may have passed ten years where the textbooks enlist one thousand years. Yet, I tried to follow this thread. I went to the stratigraphies of the Old Stone Age which usually look as follows
modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
Neanderthal man (homo sapiens neanderthalensis)
Homo erectus (invents fire and is considered the first intelligent man).
In my book "Wie alt ist das Menschengeschlecht?" [How Ancient is Man?], 1996, 2nd edition, I focused for Neanderthal man on his best preserved stratigraphy: Combe Grenal in France. Within 4 m of debris it exhibited 55 strata dated conventionally between -90,000 and -30,000. Roughly one millennium was thus assigned to some 7 cm of debris per stratum. Close scrutiny had revealed that most strata were only used in the summer. Thus, ca. one thousand summers were assigned to each stratum. If, however, the site lay idle in winter and spring one would have expected substratification. Ideally, one would look for one thousand substrata for the one thousand summers. Yet, not even two substrata were discovered in any of the strata. They themselves were the substrata in the 4 m stratigraphy. They, thus, were not good for 60,000 but only for 55 years.
I tested this assumption with the tool count. According to the Binfords' research--done on North American Indians--each tribal adult has at least five tool kits with some eight tools in each of them. At every time 800 tools existed in a band of 20 adults. Assuming that each tool lasted an entire generation (15 female years), Combe Grenals 4,000 generations in 60,000 years should have produced some 3.2 million tools. By going closer to the actual life time of flint tools tens of millions of tools would have to be expected for Combe Grenal. Ony 19,000 (nineteen thousand) remains of tools, however, were found by the excavators.
There seems to be no way out but to cut down the age of Neanderthal man at Combe Grenal from some 60,000 to some 60 years.
I applied the stratigraphical approach to the best caves in Europe for the entire time from Erectus to the Iron Age and reached at the following tentative chronology for intelligent man:
-600 onwards Iron Age
-900 onwards Bronze Age
-1400 beginning of modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
-1500 beginning of Neanderthal man
between -2000 and -1600 beginning of Erectus.
Since Erectus only left the two poor strata like at Swanscombe or El-Castillo/Spain, he should actually not have lasted longer than Neanderthal-may be one average life expectancy. I will now not go into the mechanism of mutation. All I want to remind you of is the undisputed sequence of interstratification and monostratification in the master stratigraphies. This allows for one solution only: Parents of the former developmental stage of man lived together with their own offspring in the same cave stratum until they died out. They were not massacred as textbooks have it:
monostrat.: only modern man's tools
interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and modern man's tools side by side
monostrat.: only Neanderthal man's tools
interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and Erectus' tools side by side
monotstrat.: only Erectus tools (deepest stratum for intelligent man)
The year figures certainly sound bewildering. Yet, so far nobody came up with any stratigraphy justifiably demanding more time than I tentatively assigned to the age of intelligent man. I always remind my critiques that one millennium is an enormous time span--more than from William the Conqueror to today's Anglo-World. To add a millenium to human history should always go together with sufficient material remains to show for it. I will not even mention the easiness with which scholars add a million years to the history of man until they made Lucy 4 million years old. The time-span-madness is the last residue of Darwinism.
Heinsohn is not putting an exact age on the Neanderthal die-out; what he IS stating is that there is no legitimate interpretation of existing evidence which would indicate that they died out any more than four or five thousand years ago and that is basically consistent with the thing about raw dinosaur meat.
That of course is nowhere remotely close to the time frames which any sort of an evolutionary scheme of modern man from hominids would require. We are left with three basic choices:
Those are your three basic choices and none of them involve evolution. Moreover the second and third choices merely amount to kicking the can a block or two down the road as far as how anything like modern man ever came into existence anywhere in the universe at all since the the same mathematical and probabilistic laws which prevent macroevolution on this planet would hold true anywhere else. The 17B years which supposedly intervene since the "Big Bang(TM)" wouldn't be enough for modern man to evolve in the universe even if that were possible which it isn't, and even if the Big Bang idea itself weren't just another bunch of BS like evolution, which it is.
Perhaps rather than say I believe in science, we who do
***right there, you acknowledge that you DO...
should say “I believe scientific evidence” when there is enough of it and it is reproducible.
***Then why do I encounter so much vehemence against the historicity of Jesus’s claim that caused men to kill Him? Each time I have logged onto creat threads I have seen this irrational mode coming from the evo crowd. It seems to bother them quite a bit when there is rational evidence presented for the historicity of Christ and the claims He made for Himself. Even his ENEMIES acknowledge such claims, but many evolutionist types here on FR put less credence in that historical evidence than they do about something that happened billions of years ago.
Unfortunately religion has little reproducible evidence, which is why it is not science.
***Then if something isn’t reproducible, it isn’t science. The past is not reproducible.
As I noted above, that is basically a fairytale; that's the part of it which went down with the fruit fly experiments.
If you spend much time on FR’s evolution threads, it’s easy to get the impression that the “better informed”, non “Luddite” Christian is about as rare a specimen as the moderate Muslim.
I'll say it again, I am not into pushing religion. I'll RECOMMEND Christianity if somebody WANTS a recommendation, but in most cases all you're really talking about is people wondering what to do with themselves after they realize that evolution is unworkable on purely scientific grounds and, for that, i.e. for the large numbers of people who simply need something to replace evoloserism, any religion other than I-slam would do and that includes Voodoo and Rastafari.
Neither Voodoo nor Rastafari requires anybody to believe in infinite sequences of probabilistic miracles and zero-probability events as does evolution.
One of the main reasons that I am not a Christian is all the Christians who insist that if I reject the concept that the universe is only a few thousand years old, I am rejecting the entire faith.
***You should read the book written by two of our best Freepers, Betty Boop and Alamo Girl.
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Yikes.
Hopefully the less strangulation-dogma-inclined believers are just quiet on the subject.
For what it's worth, I think the basic idea behind morphogenic fields is close to the truth. David Bohm's enfolded holomovement model fits too. The tiniest tip of the reality iceberg peaks out of the probability sea as physical life. I think the patterns are far deeper than mere "random" molecular recombination, but they certainly drive it.
Jeepers, I'm a Christian, and I don't believe the universe is "only a few thousand years old." See here for a comment I made on this subject recently.
Thank you so much Kevmo!!!
What Sheldrake is saying as I understand it is that once you have a dog or a horse on this planet, getting one on some planet 200 light years away becomes several orders of magnitude easier, same thing with any complex idea or concept more or less. I don’t see how that explains getting life as we know it from inanimate matter. Sheldrake doesn’t seem to be saying anything about abiogenesis.
Agreed. It's not an exact match, but I believe it is a step in the right direction. Remove time as separate dimension, and include the enfolded universe variables, and you get closer. And it's not abiogenic. That distinction starts from the viewpoint that there is such a thing as inanimate matter. What I'm suggesting is that all matter is more or less a projection of a deeper animation, in which case nothing is abiogenic, just from our perspective, it may appear to be pre-biogenic. And that may be wrong too.
“One of the main reasons that I am not a Christian is all the Christians who insist that if I reject the concept that the universe is only a few thousand years old, I am rejecting the entire faith.”
Those who are insisting YEC as a standard for being a Christian are wrong - period. That IS NOT a primary salvation issue at all....
Scott
50 percent of the population are below average IQ.
So even 20% of those people who are dumber than a box of rocks know that creationism is a joke.
The problem: No version of creationism requires belief in infinite sequences of probabilistic miracles and outright zero-probability events as does evolution. In other words, a reasonable person could at least listen to a theory which demanded one or two probabilistic miracles but evolution stands everything we know about modern mathematics and probability theory on their heads. In other words, ANY religion is better than evolution, including Voodoo and Rastafari.
>>No one in flesh walking this earth can with for a certainty date this earth. But all the evidence demonstrates this earth is very very old.<<
Out of curiosity, if you could have met Adam the day after he was created, how old would you have guessed he was?
Interesting question I have never considered. We are given no indication how much time elapsed from Genesis 2:7 until Genesis 2:21 when the woman was created.
Given what we are told from Genesis 2:7 on, I would 'guess' based upon what little I know, Adam would have been mentally younger than 25, physically at least 21-25. He was to have a 'tough' time making ends meet after he directly disobeyed the Heavenly Father, and yet lived 930 years. So physically speaking Adam would by necessity had to have been in excellent physical shape. Mentally speaking he surely lived a long time regretting his disobedience.
I ask that question of myself and others for this reason: If God could create a man that, even though he was only a day old, he appeared in every way to be a full grown man (and all of the previous development time that would cause one to infer), why could he not create a planet that, the day after it was created it appeared to be “fully developed” (and all the previous development time that would cause one to infer).
OTOH, I think our current world really IS best explained by the movie “the matrix”. Think about it. Matter does not really exist. It is just “coagulated energy”. It is merely perceived to exist in the form we “see and touch” it.
IOW, I feel like we are basically the equivalent of a bunch of first graders, after our first exposure to a teacher telling us those points of light in the night sky are just suns a long way away, trying to explain everything.
We don’t know what we don’t know by so many orders of magnitude that these discussions sometimes actually make me laugh out loud. I’m not so much impressed with what we know as I am with so much that we DON’T know.
Ah. Interesting that I so noted the point of what I could not know with the information given, specifically in regard to the age a full grown Adam.
The claims are not over what God 'could' do, they are statements of FACT called theories or religious doctrines explaining what God did or did not do which are against what He elected/predestined some to put into writing.
Genesis 1:2 is probably the most overlooked, and least understood verse in the whole of the WORD. It says there was an event wherein this earth was made inhabitable after a 'time' declared in Genesis 1:1.
Genesis 1:2 says there was a flood and Peter affirms this as another witness in IIPeter 3. Now some claim they hold Peter's keys, but they willingly ignore what Peter's keys unlock. What Peter got were keys that Peter put into writing it was not a locksmith business that evolves as politically correct pressures require a new set of keys.
Yes, absolutely God could do anything He decides. But to ignore what He said He did is called 'sottish' by Him.
I hate to sound dense, but I read the scriptures you referenced, read and reread your post, and I’m not sure what you are trying to communicate. Could you “dumb it down” a bit?
I would like to respond to you saying that Genesis 1:2 said there was a flood. I think that is not really accurate. At least as I see it. When taken in context with 1:9 I see it as the earth being like a cue ball with a relatively uniform earthen surface covered by a relatively consistent layer of water.. And then the ground lifted up in places to be above the water and in 1:10 He calls the dry ground “land”.
To interpret the scripture to say “there was a flood” is kinda like saying there is “a flood” in the middle of the Pacific. A flood implies normally dry ground that is flooded with water. I think Genesis 1:9 describes the first time ever that land was above the water.
In fact, one could argue that in Genesis 1:2, where it says the earth was “formless and empty” that it was sort of describing an “earth” that was nothing BUT water. Of course, within the context of our current physical laws, that would not be possible. there would be interesting pressures on the water at the center of this giant water drop in space.
But I am starting to argue how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. We all run the risk of arguing information that is our inference only.
When did the first rebel rebel? He is symbolically called the 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil'. When did the evil happen and what was the evil knowledge that this tree symbolically speaking contained? When did this division occur? The first rebel is not fully described in his 'origin' until Ezekiel 28:12--- and slightly different 'fallen' description in Isaiah 14:12---.
Moses was not yet born of woman when the events of Genesis up to Exodus 2, and up until Exodus 3, Moses was treated and educated as Egyptian.
None can call Moses uneducated, or solely indoctrinated in the 'Hebrew' tradition, he had a 'secular/pagan' upbringing at the very least and at most training of the knowledge of Pharaohs.
So what Moses penned up to his first hand experience and personal observation would be of necessity Divine inspired WORD.
Moses is given and pens a 'chronology' of events without the date and time of Genesis 1:1, and Genesis 1:2. What can be dated with a 'comfortable' measure of time is how long ago Adam was formed.
Genesis 1:2 'WAS' not the state of creation, but 'became' without form, and void; Without form means 'waste', and apparently the Divine wanted it to be known that He did not created a 'waste' as so noted in Isaiah 45:18.
There is no mention of the creation in Moses account of the creation/formation of the dinosaurs, yet, they are described in Job. I have read that Moses is the most likely author of the book of Job, and if that is the case then Moses would have had the Egyptian education working in his mind as he was given the WORD to pen.
Jeremiah 4:19-31 speaks of a destruction where everything was destroyed, and Jeremiah uses the very same words (Hebrew) as used in Genesis 1:2 'without form and void; and the heavens, and they had no light'.
Christ and Paul use the word 'foundation', and when that word is defined to the prime it means casting down/overthrow. And Peter says there are three different heaven/earth worlds/ages and the world that WAS was destroyed by water and all that lived perished. Noah's flood was brought forth to protect the bloodline to Christ.
Interesting hypotheses. I’ll have to ask God about them after I die.
The problem with a lot of this “educated speculation” on what is meant by the words used in the Genisis account of creation is that the information is incomplete. Or, a better explanation would be that it is incomplete within the context of what we humans actually know. I think that much of the bible, when dealing with things spiritual or without eyewitness account, is akin to explaining the color “red” to a person that only sees grayscale. It is amazing it is able to communicate anything at all.
I am also reminded of the line in a song by the group Genesis: “They’re trying to find themselves an audience. Their deductions need applause.”
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