Creationism vs. evolution debate to be topic of two-day Clarksb

CLARKSBURG -- Was the earth really created in six days? What happened to the dinosaurs? Where do fossils come from?

According to Ken Ham, president and founder of Answers in Genesis, the answers are all found in the first book of the Bible, Genesis.

Ham will be speaking at the Answers in Genesis conference May 21-22 at Robert C. Byrd High School.

"It is a blessing for the Christian community to have such a world-renowned speaker come to our area," said Jay Wolfe, chairman for the event. "The best part is that it's free. Typically, it costs $35 per family."

Ham, a native Australian who now resides near Cincinnati, is one of the most in-demand Christian speakers in North America. He is the author of numerous books on Genesis, the accuracy and authority of the Bible, and creationism vs. evolution.

His radio show, "Answers with Ken Ham," is heard on 680 stations worldwide. He is also a contributing author for Creation magazine. A former teacher, Ham is concerned with how education teaches the theory of evolution as fact and how the whole scientific aspect of the Bible is being ignored.

Others from Answers in Genesis participating in the conference are Buddy Davis, Michael Oard and Stacia McKeever.

Davis is a dinosaur sculptor, author/speaker and popular musician. He is also an accomplished paleo-artist, specializing in building life-sized dinosaur sculptures for Answers in Genesis's Creation Museum near Cincinnati.

An expert on Noah's Flood, the Ice Age and Mammoths, Oard recently retired from the National Weather Service as a meteorologist. He'll give illustrated talks on the compelling evidence for Noah's Flood and the Ice Age that resulted, and how the woolly mammoth connects to biblical history.

He is also author of a children's book, "Life in the Great Ice Age," and a book for teens and adults, "The Weather Book."

McKeever is an author and children's speaker. She'll lead workshops for ages 4-6 using a variety of hands-on activities, taking children on a journey through the "7Cs of History."

She graduated summa cum laude in biology and psychology, and has been working full-time for Answers in Genesis (USA) since 1997. She is also a co-author of the Answers for Kids section in Creation magazine, and has written or co-authored a number of articles for that magazine and also for the AiG Web site.

In March, Ham spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at a breakfast/planning meeting held at the Holiday Inn in Bridgeport. At that time, the planning committee and local church leaders set out to raise enough money to bring the conference to Clarksburg at no cost to the community.

"We have raised over $14,000 so we can offer it to the community for free," Wolfe said.

Wolfe added that he felt it was important for everyone to attend the conference.

"There are two world views -- God is or God isn't -- creation or evolution," Wolfe said. "Which one is the predominant world view, espoused by most information media?"

He added that the church must take responsibility for allowing the creation world view to be defeated in our culture. It is time, he said, to "equip ourselves with the sword of the spirit, which is the truth of God's word, and enter the science arena to battle for the hearts and minds of the young people of this generation."

"Some will be skeptical," he said. "But the people who are still open-minded even though they now believe in evolution can come out and hear a specialist. They can then analyze for themselves the creation point of view."

Rev. David Hulme of Clarksburg Baptist Church said that hearing Ham speak and reading his books has radically changed the way he looks at some issues facing the church and society.

"I have his book and DVD series, and we've watched it at church," he said. "There seems to be a lot of interest. I think it's because he uses the whole of scripture, not just the creation."

"Everyone should come and see that God's word is truth from beginning to end," she said.

Ham will also speak May 23 at Calvary Baptist and Trinity Assembly of God churches. To pre-register for workshops or for more information, call 622-2241.

Your statement that clotting too much or too little is "not necessarily fatal before the organism reaches breeding age" is considerably weaker than "has a survival advantage over" and does not imply it.

I don't see where that's a problem, since he was making two separate points, in response to two separate issues.

That's not what he said, and in any case you're oversimplyfing the issue.

First, it's hardly a "choice" between "too much or two little". Instead, the path could have been from "way too little" to "too little" to "a little too little" to "just right", for example. In that case every step would be an improvement over the last, without ever having to contrast "too little" against "too much".

Second, even if the pathway did oscillate around "just right" before homing in on it, "too little" and "too much" are hardly binary conditions. They exist on a continuum, and something along the lines of: 50% too little -> 30% too much -> 20% too little -> 10% too much -> just right would again be an example of continuous improvements.

Finally, the biggest thing that you're missing is that the clotting system can, and almost certainly did, evolve over periods where the requirements it had to meet were changing. What is "not good enough" today may have been close to "just right" back when the modern vertebrate clotting system was in an earlier stage. Thus it's a mistake to try to ponder whether the system(s) which were precursor(s) the modern vertebrate clotting sytem might be workable *in modern vertebrates*, since its precursors would have actually arisen in amphibians, and before that fish, and before that notochords, and before that invertebrates.

In short it's a fallacy to consider only whether a more primitive form of the clotting system would have been workable in modern vertebrates, since that's *not* where the earlier forms of the clotting systems evolved.

Come to think of it, this is yet *another* mistake that Behe makes, both in his examination of the vertebrate clotting system, *and* in all of his other "IC" analysis -- he never takes into account the fact that evolutionary precursors might have been "built" in *very* different conditions (i.e., in very different ancestral species). Behe only examines whether removing a component of the system would "break" it *in the modern species in which it now resides*. That quite simply is not a valid test.

I thought this might be a good time to remind everyone that Behe has responded to critics.

Behe Responds (to Doolittle and others):

http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_brrespbr.htm

Professor Doolittle is a prominent scientist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences who has worked hard on many aspects of protein structure over the course of a distinguished career. He knows more about the process of blood clotting, and more about the relationships among the protein members of the clotting cascade, then perhaps anyone else on earth. He does not, however, know how natural selection could have produced the clotting cascade. In fact, he has never tried to explain how it could have. Nonetheless, as reflected in his comments in Boston Review, he clearly thinks he has addressed the question. This results from a basic confusion, which I will try to clarify.

As Professor Doolittle points out, the sequence of amino acids in one protein might be strikingly like that in a second protein. A good example is the one he gives us--the different subunits of hemoglobin. This gave rise to the idea that the similar proteins might have descended from a common gene, when in the past the gene was duplicated. Virtually all biochemists accept this, and so do I. Many proteins of the clotting cascade are similar to each other, and similar to other non-cascade proteins, so they also appear to have arisen by some process of gene duplication. I think this is a very good hypothesis too. The critical point, however, is that the duplicated gene is simply a copy of the old one, with the same properties as the old one--it does not acquire sophisticated new properties simply by being duplicated. In order to understand how the present day system got here, a scientist has to explain how the duplicated genes acquired their new, sophisticated properties.

With hemoglobin the task of getting from a simple protein with one chain to a complex of four chains does not appear to present problems, as I discussed on pp. 206-207 of Darwin’s Black Box. In both cases the proteins simply bind oxygen, with more or less affinity, and they don’t have to interact critically with other proteins in a complex protein system. There is a fairly obvious pathway leading from a simple hemoglobin to a more complex one.

With the proteins of blood clotting, however, the task of adding proteins to the cascade appears to be horrendously problematic. With one protein acting on the next, which acts on the next, and so forth, duplicating a given protein doesn’t give you a new step in the cascade. Both copies of the duplicated protein will have the same target protein which they activate, and will themselves be activated by the same protein as before. In order to explain how the cascade arose, therefore, a scientist has to propose a detailed route whereby a duplicated protein turns into a new step in the cascade, with a new target, and a new activator. Furthermore, because clotting can easily go awry and cause severe problems when it is uncontrolled, a serious model for the evolution of blood clotting has to include quantitative factors, such as how much of a clot forms, what pressure it can resist, how frequent inappropriate clots would be, and many, many more such questions.

Professor Doolittle has addressed none of these questions. He has confined his work to the question of what proteins appear to be descended from what other proteins, and is content to wave his hands and assert that, well, those systems must have been put together by natural selection somehow. The title of the reference to his work that he cites here says it all, "Reconstructing the history of vertebrate blood coagulation from a consideration of the amino acid sequences of clotting proteins." His work concerns sequence comparisons. Doolittle has no idea of whether the clotting cascade could have been built up by natural selection.

An illustration of this fact is shown in his citing Bugge et al. ("Loss of Fibrinogen Rescues Mice from the Pleiotropic Effects of Plasminogen Deficiency," Cell 87, 1996: 709-19). Professor Doolittle writes:

"Recently the gene for plaminogen was knocked out of mice, and, predictably, those mice had thrombotic complications because fibrin clots could not be cleared away. Not long after that, the same workers knocked out the gene for fibrinogen in another line of mice. Again, predictably, these mice were ailing, although in this case hemorrhage was the problem. And what do you think happened when these two lines of mice were crossed? For all practical purposes, the mice lacking both genes were normal!6 Contrary to claims about irreducible complexity, the entire ensemble of proteins is not needed. Music and harmony can arise from a smaller orchestra."

However, if one goes back and looks at Bugge et al, one sees that Professor Doolittle misread the paper. The mice that have had both genes knocked out do not have a functioning clotting system: they can’t form clots; they hemorrhage; females die during pregnancy. They are certainly not candidates for evolutionary intermediates.

The lesson here is not that Doolittle misread a paper, which can happen to anyone. Rather, there are two points. First, a Darwinian mindset can tend to make one glide over problems that would occur in the real world. And second, sequence information is not sufficient to conclude that a system evolved by natural selection. The sequence information that Professor Doolittle had did not stop him from mistakenly pointing to a nonviable situation as a potential evolutionary intermediate. One can go further to say that, if a scientist as prominent as Russell Doolittle does not know of a detailed route by which natural selection could produce the clotting cascade, nobody knows.

I argue that each of the steps of the clotting cascade is irreducibly complex (see Chapter 4 of my book)--requiring the rearrangement of several components simultaneously before a viable, controlled clotting system could be in place, and that is why I conclude that the cascade is a product of design. Clotting factors may be related by common descent, but the clotting cascade was not produced by natural selection.

On a different note, I’m glad Professor Doolittle likes Rube Goldberg too, but unfortunately it supplies what I think is his rock-bottom reason for deciding that natural selection produced the clotting cascade: "... no Creator would have designed such a circuitous and contrived system." Well, Doolittle is a good scientist, but he’s no theologian, and he doesn’t serve science well when he lets his theological presuppositions influence his scientific judgment.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.