Posted on 08/28/2005 2:14:36 PM PDT by AZLiberty
...
Is "intelligent design" a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn't such a hoax be impossible? No. Here's how it has been done.
...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Someone else pointed out that Einstein's comments place him as a pantheist or deist. A mystical agnostic.
He would have been horrified by the suggestion of God meddling in creation, once it is up and running.
Even more horrified by the claim that we could find God's fingerprints on the cookie jar after it has been tampered with.
He made the cookies, so He can.
Yes, but that wasn't the question.
Quite so, if you don't believe in a baker then why fuss about the cookies.
The question was about what Einstein believed. Learn to read before butting in.
No, we believe that there is no watchmaker needed. Living organisms are not watches. Organisms grow, repair, reproduce, their offspring are modified versions of themselves.
The analogy of a watch to a living organism is nothing more than a false analogy.
I'll be a monkey's nephew.
Non sequitur! This has what to do with evolution? Or any science for that matter?
Strawman.
The beginnings of life would have involved the chemical bonding of very simple self replicating molecules, not some complex cell community like 'road kill'. The first protolife would not need DNA or RNA, simply some combination of chemicals that had a path to RNA.
That will not work. You are using assumptions that start with a current living thing rather than a prebiotic organism, that is came together all at once, it is the result of 'random chance' rather than predictable chemical interaction, and that it and only it is a test for abiogenesis. Even the tiniest probability that it could not come about by random chance does not make ID the only other possibility. At best this is a test to disprove random chance. You need a test that will show it is ID not tests that show it isn't something else.
This is simply an argument from personal incredulity. However your point is taken. Your test says nothing about showing that it could only come from ID but that it could not have been random chance. Abiogenesis does not come from random chance but from the laws that determine how atoms become molecules. Atoms will only combine with other atoms in specific ways, removing their interaction from the large probability space IDists want to place them in and placing them in a much smaller space.
It would be virtually impossible to falsify every non-ID possibility.
Woah, big surprise there. That's called protecting your turf. Shouldn't be surprising though when Dr. David L. Abel, Program Director of theThe Gene Emergence Project/Origin of life prize says this;
The Gene Emergence Project is interested in the chemical evolution of initial genetic instructions in primordial life. For most ISCB members, life-origin interests are just a hobby or avocation. But the topic is nonetheless fascinating and fun for many. Our interest is in promoting quality research that would silence religious intrusions into science.
For more information, please contact:
Dr. David L. Abel, Program Director
The Gene Emergence Project(R)
E-mail: life@us.net
;-)
The analogy of a watch to a living organism is nothing more than a false analogy.
I didn't make up that analogy some militant evolutionist did, what was his name, oh yeah, Richard Dawkins. Now go ahead and accuse me of making an argument form authority.
;-)
The beginnings of life would have involved the chemical bonding of very simple self replicating molecules, not some complex cell community like 'road kill'. The first protolife would not need DNA or RNA, simply some combination of chemicals that had a path to RNA.
Ok.
Go for it.
Did you observe the Taj Mahal being built? No. But you assume a designer because every experience with something so obviously designed always is the product of a designer. Can you not admit that the universe dwarfs the complexity and wonder of a man-made building? The effect cannot be greater than the cause. Thanks for illustrating my point.
Also, Marx wasn't simply a social engineer that happened to be an evolutionist. It was integral to his system. In the same way that Creationism was integral to the American government. The French Revolution based on humanism produced nothing as great as our system of government. Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, but Darwin asked him not to, afraid of the backlash it might cause. A coward as well as a moron.
I notice that even you don't want to deal with Darwin's imbecilic and evil racial and biological views.
Darwin's close friend Professor Adam Sedgwick was one of the people who saw what dangers the theory of evolution would give rise to in the future. He remarked, after reading and digesting The Origin of Species, that
"if this book were to find general public acceptance, it would bring with it a brutalization of the human race such as it had never seen before." [1]
And truly, time showed that Sedgwick was right to have doubts. The 20th century has gone down in history as a dark age when people underwent massacres simply because of their race or ethnic origins.
"The Preservation of Favored Races..."
Most Darwinists in our day claim that Darwin used the expression "By the Preservation of Favored Races" in the subtitle to The Origin of Species only for animals. However, what those who make this claim ignore is what Darwin says about human races in his book.
Darwin claimed that the "fight for survival" also applied between human races. "Favored races" emerged victorious from this struggle. According to Darwin the favored race were the European whites. As for Asian and African races, they had fallen behind in the fight for survival.
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. [2]
As we have seen, in his book, The Origin of Species, Darwin saw the natives of Australia and Negroes as being at the same level as gorillas and claimed that these races would disappear. As for the other races which he saw as "inferior," he maintained that it was essential to prevent them multiplying and so for these races to be brought to extinction. So the traces of racism and discrimination which we still come across in our time were approved and lent justification by Darwin in this way.
Darwin's racist side showed its effect in much of his writing and observations. For example, he openly set out his racist prejudices while describing the natives of Tierra del Fuego whom he saw on a long voyage he set out on in 1871. He described the natives as living creatures "wholly nude, submerged in dyes, eating what they find just like wild animals, uncontrolled, cruel to everybody out of their tribe, taking pleasure in torturing their enemies, offering bloody sacrifices, killing their children, ill-treating their wives, full of awkward superstitions". Whereas according to the researcher W. P. Snow, the Tierra del Fuegians were "fine powerful looking fellows; they were very fond of their children; some of their artifacts were ingenious; they recognised some sort of rights over property; and they accepted the authority of several of the oldest women." [3]
Darwin's disciple, T. H. Huxley, wrote, "It may be quite true that some negroes [sic] are better than some white men, but no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro [sic] is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man....The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins...."
The evolutionist German biologist Ernst Haeckel is one of the most important of Nazism's spiritual fathers. Haeckel brought Darwin's theory to Germany, and prepared it as a program ready for the Nazis. From racists such as Arthur Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain Hitler took over a politically-centred racism, and a biological one from Haeckel. Careful inspection will reveal that the inspiration behind all these racists came from Darwinism.
When Hitler said, 'Take away the Nordic Germans and nothing remains but the dance of apes' he based that thought on the Darwinist ideas that man had evolved from apes, for which reason some of them still possessed 'ape status.'
The major haters of the last 100 years have been evolutionists. Men like Nietzsche (who often said God was dead, called for the breeding of a master race, and for the annihilation of millions of misfits), Hitler, Mussolini, Marx, Engels, and Stalin were all outspoken evolutionists, and these people and their theories have been responsible for the slaughter of multi-millions of people, and the destruction of freedom all over the earth. It is amazing that so many liberals, radicals, fascists, communists and the easily impressed worship at Darwin's shrine.
As has been seen from these examples Darwin was a complete racist.
Furthermore, Darwin's theory's denying the existence of God had been the cause of peoples' not seeing that man was something created by God and that all men were created equal. This was one of the factors behind the rise of racism, the acceleration of its acceptance in the world and the 20th century saw massacres carried out for reasons of racism…!.
Modern evolutionists have become increasingly desperate in their attempts to prop up their absurd theory. So major renovations of Darwin have been required to save secular scientists from their worst nightmare -- a personal Creator God before whom they will someday be judged. So enter, the latest evolutionary nonsense. The "Hopeful Monster" rides to the rescue.
In the 1930s, paleontologist Otto Schindewolf concluded that the missing links in the fossil record were not really missing at all, but rather were never there in the first place! Schindewolf proposed that all the major evolutionary transformations must have occurred in single large steps. He proposed, for example, that at some point in evolutionary history, a reptile laid an egg from which a bird was hatched! This bizarre notion was championed in 1940 by the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt of the University of California at Berkeley. Like Schindewolf, Goldschmidt resigned himself to the fact that true transitional forms were not found despite over a hundred years of searching for them, and that evolutionary theory would simply have to accommodate this fact.
Goldschmidt sought to advance Schindewolf's notion of evolution through single large steps by trying to imagine a plausible mechanism for it. He suggested that the answer might lie in what are known as embryological monsters, such as the occasional birth of a two-legged sheep or a two-headed turtle. Goldschmidt conceded that such monsters rarely survived very long in nature, but he hoped that over a long period of time some monsters might actually be better suited to survive and reproduce than their normal siblings. Goldschmidt named this monstrously hopeless speculation the "hopeful monster theory." Since there was not even the slightest shred of evidence to support the hopeful monster theory, it was dismissed with derision by almost all evolutionists of his time. But Goldschmidt was quick to point out to his critics that there wasn't the slightest evidence for their gradual evolution either!
The hopeful monster theory would have joined the "recapitulation theory" in the scrap heap of abandoned evolutionary speculations, were it not for Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldredge. In 1972, these influential evolutionists resurrected the long-discredited hopeful monster theory and gave it a more respectable name -- "punctuated equilibrium." This theory speculates that the intermediate stages in the evolution of organisms do not appear in the fossil record because these transitional organisms were short-lived, extremely unstable species which, as luck would have it, quickly evolved into stable species. Thus, the evolution of any organism is characterized by long periods of equilibrium (no evolutionary change) during which time many offspring, and thus many fossils, are produced -- punctuated by relatively rapid bursts of evolution that left no fossil record. In the May 1981 issue of Discover magazine, Gould explained that "two outstanding facts of the fossil record -- geologically sudden origin of new species and failure to change thereafter" actually "predicted" this new evolutionary theory!
While most evolutionists have now reluctantly accepted punctuated equilibrium as the only way out of a difficult situation (i.e., no evidence), a few stubbornly cling to classical Darwinism, and indeed it is this discredited version of evolution that is generally taught as "fact" in our schools. Eldredge challenged classical Darwinists by reminding them that they could disprove punctuated equilibrium theory if they were to find so much as a single series of intermediate forms in the fossil record; no one has. Of course the sudden appearance of relatively unchanging organisms in the fossil record is perfectly consistent with special creation, but most evolutionists find the idea of an omnipotent Creator to be simply unthinkable.
This theory of random occurrences of almost instant "hatchings" of totally new types of plants or animals is supposed to have produced all the life forms on our planet. But it all happened in the past and never happens now nor in recorded history. Achieving such a stunt would be impossible in a laboratory setting, much less by random chance out in nature. Yet it has provided a dream for some evolutionists to cling to as they continue their search for some possible way for evolution to occur.
The Devil's Dictionary of Evolution
For All True Scholars
I cannot reveal how I came to possess this diabolical dictionary but I can assure you that this is the unexpurgated version from the "old cuss" himself. Naturally I cannot vouch for the scientific accuracy of these definitions but each one seems to reflect at least some of the meaning conferred on these terms and phrases in their common usage by evolutionists. It will perhaps surprise no one to discover that the devil himself is clearly biased in favor of evolution. The only thing unusual about his definitions is their brutal bluntness; you might say that the "old boy" is not afraid to call a spade a spade.
Your faithful scribe,
David N. Menton, Ph.D
ABIOGENESIS
That slow process by which living organisms were spontaneously generated from non-living matter. This scientific fact should not be confused with the old discredited myth of spontaneous generation by which it was once foolishly believed that living organisms arose from non-living matter. (see Law of Biogenesis).
A.C.L.U.
An organization that zealously protects our American civil liberties by preventing students in public schools from considering scientific evidence that is either consistent with creation or critical of evolution.
BIG BANG
The mechanism, or at least the noise, by which all matter and energy came into existence billions of years ago.
BIOLOGY
The branch of the exact sciences which is exclusively concerned with the evolution of living organisms by means of random mutations and natural selection.
DROSOPHILA
The "guinea pig" of the evolutionist to which we all owe a debt of gratitude for our understanding of the role of mutations in evolution. Trillions of generations of these rapidly breeding little flies have had their wings crumpled and their eyes damaged by strong mutagenic agents to provide us with a genetic insight into how man evolved from the prehominid brutes in a few thousand generations.
EVOLUTION
A truly perfect scientific theory which explaims in detail how everything in the universe came into being -- slowly. The theory of evolutions is so perfect and flexible in its ability to explain virtually all observable phemomena or opinions that it would be impossible to even conceive of an experiment capable of disproving it. (see Law).
GEOLOGIC COLUMN
A precise hierarchy of fossilized animals and plants of known age found in successive layers of stratified rock with the simplest and oldest at the bottom and the most highly evolved, i.e., most recent, at the top. Uninterrupted columns of this type may be found in any book of geology, paleontology or evolution. Bits and pieces of the column may even be found in the stratified rocks of the earth, but since these layers are often out of correct order and very incomplete, one should study the geologic column in books, not nature.
HOPEFUL MONSTER THEORY
A concept first introduced out of necessity by the geneticist, Richard Goldschmidt, which states that evolution occurs by sudden and large changes in the offspring of a species resulting in radically different but well adapted organisms, i.e. "hopeful monsters." After being widely discredited for many years this idea is being reintroduced, out of necessity, as a serious theory. The great leaps forward implicit in this theory entirely account for the absence of the "missing links." (See Punctuated Equilibrium)
INDEX FOSSILS
Fossils of animals whose ages are precisely known from the age of the rocks in which they are found, thus, serving as a means for accurately dating the rocks in which they are found as well as the age of any other fossils that may be contained therein.
LAW
In science, a statement of fact about a sequence or phenomenon that has been invariably observed to occur under known conditions such as, for example, the theory of evolution. (see Evolution).
LAW OF BIOGENESIS
Simply states the obvious...that all life comes from pre-existing life. This law, which was confirmed by Redi and Pasteur, permanently laid to rest the ludicrous idea of the ignorant ancients that living organisms could spring from inanimate matter. It should be emphasized that this law in no way precludes the slow origin of living organisms from inanimate matter through the process of evolution - after all, we are here, aren't we? (see Abiogenesis).
LIFE
The only term in this dictionary that defies definition since it has been said that "the division of matter into living and nonliving is perhaps an arbitrary one. It is a convenient method for distinguishing, for instance, a man from a rock." (quoted verbatim from The Origins of Life, by Cyril Ponnamperuma, 1962, H. P. Dutton, New York, p. 36).
MICROSPHERES
Primitive cells which have been artificially synthesized from simple laboratory reagents. As the name implies, the principal similarity between microspheres and living cells is that both are small and sort of round.
MISSING LINKS
An inconceivably vast assemblage of plants and animals which are intermediate in their evolutionary development between all of the discrete kinds of plants and animals one sees either alive or in the fossil record. Unfortunately as the name implies they are missing.
MUTATIONS
A change in the genetic material (DNA) of the cell induced by hazardous chemicals or radiation which in addition to killing or maiming organisms will, given enough time and enough mutations, inexorably lead some organisms on to an ever more successful and adaptive life.
NATURAL SELECTION
That miraculous process by which incredibly complex and useful structures, such as the eye or brain, are culled out from a vast array of random and purposeless mutations. In the distant past this marvelous natural artificer has produced the whole scope of existence from molecules to man but today it appears to be limiting its activities to such mundane matters as controlling the relative numbers of white and black moths in England.
NEO-DARWINIAN EVOLUTION
An embellishment of the old Darwinian theory of evolution, it states that random changes (mutations) in the genome of an organism will be selected for, and thus contribute to the evolution of the new species, only if they ultimately lead to a greater number of offspring. Thus, an ever-increasing rate of reproduction entirely accounts for the evolution from bacteria to man.
ONTOGENY RECAPITULATES PHYLOGENY
A law first discovered by Ernst Haeckel which if pronounced correctly and with conviction, impresses laymen and students of science in the elementary grades. Simply stated, and thus less convincingly, it means that the embryos of all animals bother to provide a historical review of many stages of their evolution during their embryological development. Although this type of reminiscing is touching and is taught in almost every general science and biology text book, it is no longer accepted by scientists or even evolutionists.
PHYLOGENETIC TREE
A tree that grows mainly in textbooks of biology and which has a variety of both contemporary and fossil animals perched on the tips of its branches. This tree clearly shows how all of these animals branched off from common ancestors a long time ago. For some reason the common ancestors are never shown sitting in the crotches of the tree. Plants presumably grow on different trees which are rather rare.
PILTDOWN MAN
Once known by all true scholars of human evolution to be an ancient ancestor of man. This true "ape man" had the jaw of a modern ape and the skull of a modern man. Today this ape-man is not so well known among true scholars of evolution.
PRIMITIVE
Old, inferior, poorly adapted, less evolved, shoddy, bungling.
PROOF
The assimilation of data in such a way that the desired conclusion seems to be the most plausible hypothesis.
PROTOZOA
As the name implies, these are known to be the first true animals on earth. If these primitive organisms had continued to adapt to their changing environment they might still be with us today.
PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM
An ad hoc hypothesis or alibi that claims the reason there are no known transitional forms in the fossil record is because evolutionary changes occur so quickly and the reason we can't see evolutionary changes in the laboratory is because they occur so slowly. (see Hopeful Monster Theory).
RADIOCARBON DATING
A remarkably precise method of actually measuring the age of any carbon-containing sample. Except for certain spurious (young) dates, radiocarbon, like other methods involving the decay of radionuclides will, given several absolutely safe assumptions, invariably indicate a ripe old age for any specimen consistent with a slow process of evolution.
SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS
One of the most fundamental laws of science which essentially states that nothing can increase in order, complexity, or information but rather everything from the universe to the one-horse shay will in time fall apart (not assemble). We may be sure, however, that the mind-boggling increase in order, complexity and information accomplished by the evolution of chemicals to man in no way violates this law or it wouldn't have happened.
SELECTIVE PRESSURE
That natural and highly selective pressure that actually forces particularly useful structures such as brains, eyes, legs, wings and long necks on giraffes to evolve by random mutations. Unnecessary structures such as eyelids on your navel fail to evolve by chance because there is no selective pressure for this.
SPECULATION
The single most powerful tool in the hands of the evolutionists.
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
The most important contribution of Darwin to biological thought which states that only those organisms which are fit survive, or in other words, survival is the result of being fit. By this kind of logic it can also be proven that loss of vision is a principal cause of blindness.
THEISTIC EVOLUTION
The belief that the evolutionary account of origins (where everything ascends from a very imperfect state to a more nearly perfect state) and the Biblical account of origins (where everything descends from a perfect state to a very imperfect state) are both true.
TIME
That miracle ingredient which in sufficient quantity can give scientific credibility to any hypothesis no matter how improbable. It is a well- known axiom of science for example, that given enough time virtually anything is possible - indeed you might even say it has to happen.
TREE
That which only evolution can make. (see Phylogenetic Tree).
VESTIGIAL ORGANS
Organs or other body parts, left over from evolutionary ancestors, which are no longer used or needed by an organism that has become more highly evolved by abandoning organs and getting simpler. Seventy years ago man had nearly one hundred vestigial organs such as the parathyroid, tonsils, coccyx, etc., but today he has very few vestigial organs because a good use has been discovered for most of these organs.
XERDEMA PIGMENTOSA
A disease of man in which certain enzymes which normally repair mutations of DNA fail to do so resulting in malignant tumors of the skin which are often fatal. Since it is well known that mutations were essential for the evolution of man from primitive cells, we must assume that too much of even a good thing like mutations is bad for us.
Originally published in New and Views, March 1979, Vol. 7, No. 1
by the Missouri Association for Creation, Inc. (M.A.C.)
I am amazed you would imply a group of obviously good evolutionists like the The Gene Emergence Project with the blatently stated purpose of "promoting quality research that would silence religious intrusions into science." would be that deceptive.
Is that really what you are trying to say?
That will not work. You are using assumptions that start with a current living thing rather than a prebiotic organism, that is came together all at once, it is the result of 'random chance' rather than predictable chemical interaction, and that it and only it is a test for abiogenesis. Even the tiniest probability that it could not come about by random chance does not make ID the only other possibility. At best this is a test to disprove random chance. You need a test that will show it is ID not tests that show it isn't something else.
Whaat do yo have to say about this from the The Origin-of-Life Prize ® web site;
Mathematically, it is impossible to go backwards from 20 AA to 64 codons. There is no way to know which of four or six codons, for example, coded a given AA when one tries to go backwards against the "Central Dogma." Prescriptive Information has been lost. Various models of code origin often pursue primordial codon systems of only two nitrogen bases rather than three. At some point, such a two-base codon system must evolve into a three-base codon system. But catastrophic problems such as global frame shifts would have resulted from such a change midstream in the evolution of genetic code.
Those guys are not creationists either.
I noticed your other reply to RussP the statement, "This is simply an argument from personal incredulity." . I don't know about Russ but for me the "argument from personal incredulity" works just fine especially when I read evolutionists themselves noting the mathamatical impossibility of some casually accepted ideas floating around out there.
How about that?
An argument from authority and an argument from personal incredulity, both in one post!!
Woohoo!!
Plus I'm happy, not a sour puss like Junior!
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.