Posted on 12/15/2005 9:10:41 AM PST by flevit
Simon Schama appears to have little understanding of biology (Opinion, September 4). With an ostrich mindset that tries to ignore reality, pseudo-scientists continue in the vain hope that if they shout loud and long enough they can perpetuate the fairy story and bad science that is evolution.
You don't have to be a religious fundamentalist to question evolution theory - you just have to have an open and enquiring mind and not be afraid of challenging dogma. But you must be able to discern and dodge the effusion of evolutionary landmines that are bluster and non sequiturs.
No one denies the reality of variation and natural selection. For example, chihuahuas and Great Danes can be derived from a wolf by selective breeding. Therefore, a chihuahua is a wolf, in the same way that people of short stature and small brain capacity are fully human beings.
However, there is no evidence (fossil, anatomical, biochemical or genetic) that any creature did give rise, or could have given rise, to a different creature. In addition, by their absence in the fossil record for (supposed) millions of years along with the fact of their existence during the same time period, many animals such as the coelacanth demonstrate the principle that all creatures could have lived contemporaneously in the past.
No evidence supports the notion that birds evolved from dinosaurs, nor that whales evolved from terrestrial quadrupeds, nor that the human knee joint evolved from a fish pelvic fin. And the critically-positioned amino acids at the active sites within enzymes and structural proteins show that the origination of complex proteins by step-wise modifications of supposed ancestral peptides is impossible. In other words, birds have always been birds, whales have always been whales, apes did not evolve into humans, and humans have always been humans.
But you might protest that it has been proved that we evolved from apes. In fact, the answer is a categorical No. Australopithecines, for example, were simply extinct apes that in a few anatomical areas differed from living apes. If some of them walked bipedally to a greater degree than living apes, this does not constitute evidence that apes evolved into humans - it just means that some ancient apes were different from living apes.
Ah, EXACTLY as I predicted in my first post. A ping and a wave of argument. I knew it was inevitable.
If you're interested in learning about evolution, visit The List-O-Links.
If you're serious about debating this issue, see How to argue against a scientific theory.
If you're permanently stuck on stupid, but determined to post anyway, use the Evolution Troll's Toolkit.
So if I show you a bunch of pictures of different color and sized legos, that would mean they all evolved one from another - right...
I assume you think this is brilliant.
But when you're done laughing, just think a bit on "evolving" the mechanisms required for live birth. The baby (now nine months old BTW) has been living on one system which handles food, oxygen, and waste; and then suddenly switches to a completely different system without opportunity to revert. I wonder how many small changes there were and how many babies died while "evolution" was trying to get this right. If it took a whole generation, we would have been dead.
ML/NJ
No, what everyone needs to get there heads around is that this is the way you've interpreted it.. that they all appear to be of different ages. No one has proved this to be the case. Technologies that work based on assumptives which are unproveable are no more reliable than a guess in the first place. No matter how you build the intricate highly technical babble you put into saying "our research shows x" it all boils down to a guess that is no more founded than just guessing blindly at the ages in the first place. This is true and apparent, yet it is not acceptable to people who think themselves smarter than average because they have a "degree" (whispering lest someone else catches the disease). It takes degreed people to place two similar looking things on a table and posit that they "evolved" from one another because they appear similar. Educated morons find this persuasive - right up till its absurdity is exposed, then they find the exposing party hateful to look upon and must handwring thereafter. Stupidity is taken for brilliance among degreed idealogues. Why? You tell me.
"I believe God created the rules that set the universe in operation, and that from time to time he intervenes to achive His goal. I believe He created us through these rules He set up, and that we were His intended end-product."
Or maybe we're still just an intermediate stage? Maybe it's the silicon-based artificial intelligence that will spring from ours that He's after.
Is God a computer looking to make beings in His image?
The length of your post isn't impressive.
It just makes you look wrong longer.
But you, of course, are above saying why it is wrong.
I don't get into arguments over something that to me is a matter of faith.
Whenever you ask an evolutionist monkey ancestor, where the evidence is of his ancestorship with apes, he/she goes into this long diatribe that is basically full of nothing but more theory.
So until you people can show me, point blank, without all of the bullshit, where the link is.
You're wrong.
But you are above pointing out where.
I'll just make a few points, because I hate these discussions....
Creationists who claim that cetaceans did not arise from four-legged land mammals must ignore or somehow dismiss the fossil evidence of apparent whale ancestors looking exactly like one would predict for transitional species between land mammals and whales--with diminutive legs and with ear structures intermediate between those of modern artiodactyls and cetaceans (Nature 368:844,1994; Science 263: 210, 1994).
Not going to get into this realm of the match, except to point out that a good, smart programmer can write software that will successfully "predict" every known move in the stock market. Then, when the program fails to predict the next one, they can tweak it to predict that also. This does not, in an of itself, mean that eventually the program will successfully predict the stock market. It would be remarkably surprising if the current layout of speciation did NOT match the current evidence, as the evidence is used to create the layout.
Then after an excellent and easily understood explanation of genetic mutation and redundancy: All this is as predicted by evolutionary theory, you'll note.
There may be creationists who don't believe in evolutionary theory as regards genetic mutation and variation, but I'm not one of them. This is the "science" of evolution, that genetic mutations occur, that they cause variations in species, that they can and have created what we now refer to as "new species".
A little further down: This is the sort of prediction implied by the evolutionary theory which could be cross-checked by further research of various types, and if verified, would be yet further confirmation that evolutionary theory is likely correct. So far, evolutionary theory has been subjected to literally countless tests like this, large and small, and the vast majority of results have confirmed the evolutionary prediction
This is somewhat a circular argument. When this type of work first started, the "vast majority" of results were not confirmed, but as things were re-arranged to match this science, it provided a more consistant history than we had before we had this ability, and instead were dependent on less "scientific", more "artistic" matching of partial fossil records.
Even now, findings don't always match the existing "evolutionary tree", but we don't throw out the tree when this happens, or call evolution false because it failed to correctly predict something, instead we simply re-arrange the trees and happily move on.
And finally on this same discussion of GLO: Finally, note that there are ZERO mutational differences between the human DNA and the chimpanzee DNA, our nearest living relative.
Which could be counterintuitive, since with the billions of each species that have lived, and with a useless gene, you might expect MORE genetic variation than in species for which the sequence is critical. But, like how commentators can always tell you why the stock market goes up, or goes down, this does not disprove evolution. If we find no variation, it's because we are "close" on the tree, if there are a lot of mutations it's because evolution predicts there can be more mutations in a sequence that is unnecessary.
one thing is clear. Virtually anybody who truly believes that God created life (in a meaningful way) will NOT make it into the field of biology today. The creationist would argue that is because of the faith of biology, the biologists assert it is because of the anti-scientific views of the creationists. But whichever the reason, the fact that 99+% of biologists believe in evolution is only somewhat more interesting than that 99+% of the priests in a church believe in the church teachings, or that most people who join an Adult Lego Fan Club actually like to play with Legos.
Hey, I just used Legos in MY post (which of course appears after yours......
I keep shaking my lego boxes, hoping they will construct themselves into SOMETHING interesting....
Evolution and the stock market are unpredictable for the same reason. They are driven by the consequences of change, not by planning or design.
When someone says evolution predicts something, this is a statement about forensics. For example, in a murder investigation, you might say, "I predict what if we find the murder weapon it will have john Doe's fingerprints on it." Or, "I predict that testing John Doe's hands will reveal powder residue."
The fossil record is forensic evidence. It is evidence of a history. Theories about that history predict the kind of evidence expected. To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing about creationism or ID that could lead to predictions of this kind.
I don't suppose you have a chart that shows how we supposedly got from hydrogen to "N"?
Provide a specific example of something incompatible with the tree.
After all your posturing and cut-and-paste book-sized post that's your bottom line.
Again, the weaker the position, the more personal the attack and vociferous the argument.
Thanks for the book, but I've read books on evolutionary biology. And it was crammed down my throat in private school and college.
I'll give you a C+ for effort.
No, they are not the best explanations, they're just the explanations you like. There is a difference. Any moron can look at a 3 length leggo next to a 4 length lego and understand that a pair of 2 length leggos didn't copulate and spawn the other two. Yet on the same grounds, you'd offer that they did. What grounds? "well just look at them." Yeah.. we're stunned.
If you think that the ages of sediment are "guessed blindly," you just don't have a grasp of the science involved.
I didn't say that, did I. But as is the usual case, rather than direct your attention where it belongs, you'd rather debunk arguments not made under the pretense that you're saying something on point or worthwhile. What I did say is that your techological nincompoopisms that you use for dating all diverge from reality on the same fault - they all make assumptions that cannot be upheld or show to be so. All. That renders them no more useful than guessing blindly. And date testing knowns has upheld that summation. Rather than deal with the raw plainness of the circumstance, you'd rather hide behind pretense that the vast complication involved in explaining the method means that people 'just don't understand..' No, we do. And we're tired of the pretense and abuse - you're fooling no one. We've been behind the curtain now. And that is why we're all largely done with listening to pretense and fictions being sold as though they were science - they are not.
I might point out that rearranging theories to fit evidence it the strength of science. It happens with Newton and gravitation. It happens at every level and in every branch of science. Take it or leave it, but biology is not unique or even unusual in this respect.
It even happens with religion, as in the reintrepertation of the sun stopping in the sky.
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