Posted on 02/10/2006 10:13:29 AM PST by SirLinksalot
Professor challenges evolution
By NAN AMA SARFO
Staff Writer
February 09, 2006
A Pitt professor challenged a part of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in an article published in the scientific magazine The New Anatomist last week. Jeffrey Schwartz — a Pitt professor in the department of anthropology and the department of history and philosophy of science — collaborated with Bruno Maresca, a professor of biochemistry at Italy’s University of Salerno, for the article, which refutes Darwin’s Theory of Evolution using modern knowledge about cell biology.
The two decided to collaborate after Maresca contacted Schwartz after reading his book, “Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species,” in which Schwartz first explained his theory of evolution.
Schwartz refuted Darwin’s theory of gradual evolution in organisms with one that states that evolution occurs quickly and suddenly as the result of cell mutations.
“Darwinism’s presence in science is so overwhelming,” Schwartz said. “For the longest time, there was no room for alternative thinking among the scientific community.”
This has led Schwartz — who believes that this indoctrination has resulted in scientists who don’t know enough about the history of the theories they learned — to teach all different aspects of evolution to his students.
It was through exposure to influential scientists and their questioning views of Darwinism as a Columbia grad student that Schwartz became interested in exploring the issue.
Darwin’s theory, a staple in science curriculums, states that evolution in organisms occurs gradually over time. His theory also states that gaps in the fossil record, in which there are missing links between the different phases of evolution in organisms are temporary because the linking fossils haven’t been found yet.
Schwartz, through research of the fossil record and use of Maresca’s findings about cell structure, believes otherwise.
“If you look at the fossil record, organisms didn’t gain new items like teeth and jaws gradually,” Schwartz said. “It’s not like fish developed bony teeth one piece at a time. It happened suddenly.”
Schwartz believes that stressors such as extreme heat and cold precipitate changes in evolution.
“Cells don’t like change. They have many different proteins that protect them from extreme changes,” Schwartz said. “With all these different mechanisms that they have, it’s unlikely that they change willingly over time, as Darwin’s theory says. Modern cell biology doesn’t support Darwinism.”
These extreme changes, says Schwartz, quickly overwhelm the stress proteins in a cell and cause mutations. Most of the time, cell changes kill the organism. Other changes are beneficial.
However, it takes years for these changes to appear in organisms, since, according to Schwartz, mutations occur recessively and are passed unknowingly until the mutation saturates the population. Then, when members of the population receive two copies of the mutation, the trait appears suddenly.
According to Schwartz, time will tell if and when the scientific community will begin to move away from Darwin’s theories and adopt others, such as his own. But he sees the most urgent application of his theory toward the protection of animals and endangered species in general.
“We don’t know what the stressors are that cause extinction in animals,” Schwartz said. “So we need to be much more sensitive about the environment and be aware of local and global events. It’s all a domino effect. One small change affects everyone else.”
Because of the current constraints on science, does science now state that nothing was ‘designed’?
>Evolution has been a 'theory' for what... more than 150 years?
And will remain a nebulous theory for years to come. It will never make it to law.
>My guess is that it will be a theory for another 300 years or until people give up on it or new and improved theories are developed.
I predict that your prediction will soon prove wrong as more and more evidence comes out that evolution is mere pseudo science. I can't believe seemingly intelligent people still believe in this nonsense of evolution.
You clearly haven't got a clue about the difference between a scientific theory and a law. Please refrain from commenting on science until you know some.
Note that this states a law, not a theory. The law is false.
Too bad it's not the same genealogy as in Genesis. How can two inerrant genealogies be different? Inquiring minds want to know.
More supporting evidence why evolution is a fake, phony and fraudulent theory.
Wow, are *you* confused... First, the fringe opinion of a paleontologist speculating far outside his own field (in cell biology) is not "evidence" of any sort. Real evidence is hard facts, not anyone's opinion on anything.
Second, Schwartz is quite simply wrong on this point. Modern cell biology spectacularly confirms evolutionary biology. Don't just take my word for it, pick up any science journal that deals with cell biology or DNA.
Third, Schwartz appears to be trying to drum up sales for his book, and portray himself as a "maverick" in the interests of self-aggrandizement, so any of his press releases should be taken with the same grain of salt you'd use for anyone who clearly has a personal agenda and a motive for self-promotion.
Fourth, I never cease to be amused by anti-evolutionists' transparent and dishonest habit of latching instantly onto anyone's opinion as if it were the Word of God if it happens to reinforce your preconceptions, while at the same time utterly rejecting out of hand the considered conclusions of the great majority of the foremost experts in the field just because you *don't* want to hear what they have to say. You do the same with hard evidence (when you bother to look at it at all) -- you grab onto any isolated fact that you think you can spin into matching your beliefs, but think nothing of dismissing with nothing more than a hand-wave vast mountains of evidence which paint an unmistakable "big picture" view contradicting your cherished notions.
You guys aren't really interested in what the evidence actually indicates or what the experts actually have to say, you're just interested in grasping onto anything that helps you reinforce your current beliefs.
So it's laughable when you then try to dismiss real science as:
fake, phony and fraudulent Pseudo science.
No, sorry, that's *your* method, not ours. Ours is to gather as much evidence as possible, perform as many tests as we can conceive of, do as much research as humanly possible, and see where it leads us, while carefully validating all of our tentative conclusions against the real world by checking to see if the evidence and findings -- ALL of them, not just any one isolated fact -- match the predictions of our potential explanations.
Evolution has met the strict challenges of the scientific method for 150 years, and has survived countless validation checks and falsification tests when compared to vast mountains of evidence across multiple cross-confirming lines. It's an extremely solid and well-established field of science, and it never ceases to astound me that there can be endless waves of grossly ignorant people who can manage to maintain completely false fantasies about how evolutionary biology is just some sort of empty shell run by a cabal of nefarious conspirators or such nonsense.
Why don't you get an education and then come back and try again? You guys are as tiresome as the Michael Moore parrots, and for exactly the same reasons.
No, it just states that there's no evidence supporting a "design" hypothesis (i.e., no evidence *of* design in the sense the IDers mean it). But this has nothing to do with any "current constraints", it has to do with the lack of evidence for the IDers' design hypothesis.
Thus (some of ) the YEC's should be called Young-Moon followers.
So again, can there be any connection into the ‘real world’ with any intelligent design in physical science -including/extending into biology?
No. It started out as a collection of observations.
>people who can manage to maintain completely false fantasies about how evolutionary biology is just some sort of empty shell run by a cabal of nefarious conspirators or such nonsense.
And it is.
Then you seem to know little about the Soviet era.
And will remain a nebulous theory for years to come. It will never make it to law.
ROFL!!! You know, you should *really* read the thread before you step into the same pitfall that others have already fallen face-first into and been shown to be foolish for doing. Heck, even if you had just read the replies to THAT SAME POST you were responding to you'd have seen how it was already explained that theories do not "graduate" to laws as you naively and incorrectly presume.
They are different classes of description, and do not change back and forth into each other
I predict that your prediction will soon prove wrong as more and more evidence comes out that evolution is mere pseudo science.
Dream on. The ignorant have been predicting that was about to happen "any day now" for oh, 150 years now.
For some perspective, check out this web page on The Imminent Demise of Evolution. Anti-evolutionists have been continuously predicting that evolution was about to come crashing down any day now since 1840... That page contains quotes predicting the "any day now" crash of evolution from 1840, 1850, 1878, 1895, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1912, 1922, 1929, 1935, 1940, 1961, 1963, 1970, 1975, 1976, 1980, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002.
Sample:
"It must be stated that the supremacy of this philosophy has not been such as was predicted by its defenders at the outset. A mere glance at the history of the theory during the four decades that it has been before the public shows that the beginning of the end is at hand."But surely, you're finally right *this* time, eh? Dream on.
-- Prof. Zockler, The Other Side of Evolution, 1903, p. 31-32 cited in Ronald L. Numbers, Creationism In Twentieth-Century America: A Ten-Volume Anthology of Documents, 1903-1961 (New York & London, Garland Publishing, 1995)
You guys crack me up.
Meanwhile, evolutionary biology has only become more and more solid as more evidence has been examined and more research has been done. In fact, in the past 10-15 years, with the explosion of data flooding in with the advent of rapid DNA sequencing techniques, the amount of evidence supporting evolution, in so many different cross-confirming ways, has become so massive that for all practical purposes, the "debate" is *over*. The reality of evolutionary common descent is so vastly overwhelming in the DNA, and evolutionary histories can be "read" from the DNA so easily, that no one who is actually familiar with the evidence doubts the reality of common ancestry. Even the so-called "leaders" of the "design movement", like Behe and Dembski, admit the reality of common descent.
I can't believe seemingly intelligent people still believe in this nonsense of evolution.
I can't believe that there are people so ignorant of basic science that they can make the kind of goofy and dead wrong statements that you make here, but there sure are an endless number of you showing up all the time.
Law: Grown, mature, experienced man with accumulated knowledge and common sense.
Theory: a newly born baby.
Wow!
You typed all that in 2 minutes, or do you just cut-and-paste? LOL!
If the hypothesis is drawn specifically enough and in a way which allows testable predictions to be made and those predictions are subsequently matched by the totality of the evidence, yes.
As it stands today, though, the "ID movement" has neither a specific hypothesis, testable predictions, nor positive evidence. It hasn't even conducted any original research. Nor does it seem likely to -- the "ID movement" is characterized by its affection for press releases and mass-market books, and by its aversion for making any testable hypotheses, much less actually testing them or doing research.
It's an anti-evolution creationist PR campaign dishonestly masquerading as a science.
I type at 120wpm, you do the math.
Actually I did cut-and-paste the paragraph listing the years in which the "imminent demise of evolution" had been predicted (from an earlier post I wrote myself), but when you include the time it took me to hunt up that old post, it probably didn't save much time. The rest I composed and typed on the fly.
An extremely invalid and incorrect analogy. Care to try again?
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