Posted on 07/25/2018 2:07:56 PM PDT by Heartlander
That’s a pathetic reply
General relativity has had many experiments run that test its validity. So far all have said yes
Name any for evolution
I learned evolution in High School and accepted it as true. Let’s consider that a presentation of one side of the debate. Many have insisted that this one side only be taught in our schools. That has been the practice for decades. It is dogma. So perhaps no one should be surprised that some people are dogmatic in its defense.
Icons of Evolution replied to the text books, case by case. I found some parts of Icons more persuasive than others. I’ve read various books challenging evolution, or advancing intelligent design.
I am aware of several biologists who take biological evolution as a given, then move on to explain everything through “evolution.” As for those who challenge biological evolution, they think a sneer will suffice.
I don’t think sneers, mockery, or snotty comments count for anything. Plus they are a real turn off. Can anyone point me in the direction of a proponent of biological evolution who respectfully considers the arguments of skeptics and provides a quality response?
“One thing scientists cannot figure out is how the right side of our body and the left side of our body comes out that way as in a mirror. It is a mystery involving our DNA.”
Interesting thought, the words equilibrium or symmetry come to mind. As does the thought of how sometimes the mirror must be distorted which is how asymmetry in some folks rather then symmetry. Just a thought....
There are various quotes about history repeating itself. I like the one from Mark Twain that “history may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.”
Whether it’s history repeating, or “Deja vu all over again,” the evolution debates seem just like the global warming debates. Call me a skeptic.
Good post.
In the case of evolution, what you have is a theory which has been repeatedly and overwhelmingly disproved over a period of many decades now via a number of independent lines reasoning and yet the adherents go on with it as if nothing had happened and, in fact, demand that the doctrine be taught in public schools at public expense and that no other theory of origins even ever be mentioned in public schools, and attempt to enforce all of that via political power plays and lawsuits.
At that point, it is clear enough that no disproof or combination of disproofs would ever suffice, that the doctrine is in fact unfalsifiable and that Carl popper's criteria for a pseudoscience is in fact met.
The educated lay person is not aware of how overwhelmingly evolution has been debunked over the last century.
The following is a minimal list of entire categories of evidence disproving evolution:
The decades-long experiments with fruit flies beginning in the early 1900s. Those tests were intended to demonstrate macroevolution; the failure of those tests was so unambiguous that a number of prominent scientists disavowed evolution at the time.
The discovery of the DNA/RNA info codes (information codes do not just sort of happen...)
The fact that the info code explained the failure of the fruit-fly experiments (the whole thing is driven by information and the only info there ever was in that picture was the info for a fruit fly...)
The discovery of bio-electrical machinery within 1-celled animals.
The question of irreducible complexity.
The Haldane Dilemma. That is, the gigantic spaces of time it would take to spread any genetic change through an entire herd of animals.
The increasingly massive evidence of a recent age for dinosaurs. This includes soft tissue being found in dinosaur remains, good radiocarbon dates for dinosaur remains (blind tests at the University of Georgia's dating lab), and native American petroglyphs clearly showing known dinosaur types.
The fact that the Haldane dilemma and the recent findings related to dinosaurs amount to a sort of a time sandwich (evolutionites need quadrillions of years and only have a few tens of thousands).
The dna analysis eliminating neanderthals and thus all other hominids as plausible human ancestors.
The total lack of intermediate fossils where the theory demands that the bulk of all fossils be clear intermediate types. "Punctuated Equilibria" in fact amounts to an attempt to get around both the Haldane dilemma and the lack of intermediate fossils, but has an entirely new set of overwhelming problems of its own...
The question of genetic entropy.
The obvious evidence of design in nature.
The arguments arising from pure probability and combinatoric considerations.
Here's what I mean when I use the term "combinatoric considerations"...
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, the specialized system which allows flight feathers to pivot so as to open on upstrokes and close to trap air on downstrokes (like a venetian blind), a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
I ask you: What could be stupider than that?
Fruit flies breed new generations every few days. Running a continuous decades-long experiment on fruit flies will involve more generations of fruit flies than there have ever been of anything resembling humans on Earth. Evolution is supposed to be driven by random mutation and natural selection; they subjected those flies to everything in the world known to cause mutations and recombined the mutants every possible way, and all they ever got was fruit flies.
Richard Goldschmidt wrote the results of all of that up in 1940, noting that it was then obvious enough that no combination of mutation and selection could ever produce a new kind of animal.
There is no excuse for evolution to ever have been taught in schools after 1940.
Magnificent post, and easily one of the best things I have ever read on this website.
Intelligent Design is, without doubt, the most intriguing, most awe inspiring subject in science today.
Copernicus didn't know about black holes or the big bang or exoplanets.
Neither did Kepler or Galileo or Newton.
Yet they accomplished a lot and we shouldn't begrudge them some respect.
Is "relevance" really the right question to ask?
That we aren't arguing whether the sun circles the earth or whether other planets have moons or why objects fall down and fall at the same rate makes Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton "irrelevant," but also incredibly significant in human history.
No, it's not. That is granting way too much respect for Darwin.
Evolution is a hypothesis, at best.
I should have mentioned that I read Darwin’s most famous book. I’ll give the short title, as the complete title is inflammatory.
I found Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to be a mixed bag for many reasons. He was clearly an intelligent man who worked a long time on that book. He polished it and he polished it. It was better for it’s day than for today.
That they are trying present themselves as a biological sciences research institution when what they really are is a political and religious advocacy group.
I prefer to quote from the introduction to Coyne and Orr's Speciation:
So begins The Origin of Species, whose title and first paragraph imply that Darwin will have much to say about speciation. Yet his magnum opus remains largely silent on the "mystery of mysteries," and the little it does say about this mystery is seen by most modern evolutionists as muddled or wrong.ML/NJ
That kind of thinking - what I take to be that kind of thinking - cuts two ways. I was trying to remember a quote from Julian Huxley.
I found a selection of 25 quotes here:
https://www.azquotes.com/author/23433-Julian_Huxley
The first two entries:
“The sense of spiritual relief which comes from rejecting the idea of God as a supernatural being is enormous.”
Sir Julian Huxley, one of the world’s leading evolutionists, head of UNESCO, descendant of Thomas Huxley - Darwin’s bulldog - said on a talk show, ‘I suppose the reason we leaped at The Origin of Species was because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores.’.
Whatever "a biological sciences research institution" is, it is either a place that has biological labs and does research that might lead to a discovery or not. If you meant the former, they certainly did not present themselves that way on their public web page at least. If you meant the latter than your rhetorical challenge to show what discoveries they have made seems rather hollow.
They do seem to present themselves as knowledgeable about the sciences. And perhaps some of the people who are members also do science and may have made some scientific discoveries. But I don't see anything from them that makes me think they are claiming to be doing biological research as an Institution. Did you mean to conflate this or was it an accident?
I get the feeling what you were really trying to say is that we should regard them as quacks because they were not being straightforward about being nothing but a bunch of quacks. But people that don't already think they are quacks may find the reasoning circular so you needed a less straightforward way of making your point.
Wait, they meant the 19th-century scientist (the second-most-famous man born on February 12, 1809).
The answer in their case is; not. They call themselves "The Discovery Institute", but they don't make any discoveries and they aren't set up to make any as far as I can tell.
Oh ok...how is your lawsuit against the so-called “Never Ending Story” going?
No, it is not. Great literature has a place in our western culture.
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