Some Professionally-Safe Darwin Doubters Are Now Speaking Out

When the coast is clear, and their careers are safe, some academics can afford to doubt Darwin publicly.

My experience after teaching at three universities, when discussing Darwinism with colleagues, I have learned there exist many more Darwin skeptics than commonly believed. Most are in the closet for very good reasons (career survival), or at least they decline to publicly speak out about their views opposing Darwinism. The evidence against Darwinism is so great that it seems inevitable a few would speak out about their well-founded doubts about evolution. And some have.

>That particular study [the 2012 articles] is discredited by, if nothing else, its definition of “junk”. Originally “junk” meant simply non-coding DNA.
>>This article says 75% is “junk” DNA (Le Page and Graur)
>>This article says 95% is “junk” DNA (Wisegeek?)
>>This article says 98% is “junk” DNA (Zimmer)

Did you actually read those articles? The Wisegeek article doesn’t really say anything.

Dan Graur is, above all else, a far left whack job — seriously! He makes the nutty Lawrence Krauss look like a choir boy. The 2017 article by Graur that Le Page referenced is only one of his many attacks on the Encode project, which he claims: 1) provides support for intelligent design, and 2) doesn’t take into account the primary tenent of his religion, which is “everything is shaped by evolution”. “If Encode is right,” according to Graur, “then evolution is wrong.” I don’t disagree on that point, but even he claims the functionality of Junk DNA is as high as 25%. That pretty much rules out human-chimp similarity.

Graur is partially correct about the Encode project. The participating biomedical scientists were more interested in curing disease than in propping up evolution, which, by default, ended up supporting intelligent design.

In Zimmer’s NY Times article, we find Francis Collins in opposition to Graur:

“In January, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, made a comment that revealed just how far the consensus has moved. At a health care conference in San Francisco, an audience member asked him about junk DNA. “We don’t use that term anymore,” Collins replied. “It was pretty much a case of hubris to imagine that we could dispense with any part of the genome — as if we knew enough to say it wasn’t functional.” Most of the DNA that scientists once thought was just taking up space in the genome, Collins said, ‘turns out to be doing stuff.’” [Zimmer, Carl, “Is Most of Our DNA Garbage?”. New York Times, March 5, 2015]

That is the same Francis Collins who back in 2007 discounted any notion that Junk DNA was something other than junk:

“Some of these [”Junk DNA”] may have been lost in one species or the other, but many of them remain in a position that is most consistent with their having arrived in the genome of a common mammalian ancestor, and having been carried along ever since. Of course, some might argue that these are actually functional elements placed there by the Creator for a good reason, and our discounting of them as”junk DNA” just betrays our current level of ignorance. And indeed, some small fraction of them may play important regulatory roles. But certain examples severely strain the credulity of that explanation.” [Francis S. Collins, “The Language of God.” Free Press, 2007, Chap.5, p.136]

Worse for the evolutionist, this 2018 article states that 95% of the human genome is restrained, that is, it cannot evolve:

https://elifesciences.org/articles/36317

So much for human evolution:

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>>This article from 2007 discusses the idea of non-coding DNA becoming active though evolution.

It is meaningless. Genetics has moved on.

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>>All new science begins as “wild imaginations and extrapolations” based on anomalies in data, then reduced to falsifiable hypotheses. Eventually one or more hypotheses are confirmed as theories and so science advances.
That’s how it’s supposed to work.

That is over-generalized. Real science is observable and repeatable. Even forces, such as gravity, are observable, or at least their results are. Charlie did it backwards. He took observable science (adaptation and speciation,) and extrapolated it into unobservable, untestable, unrepeatable conjecture (common descent). That is not science.

Mr. Kalamata

Kalamata: "Did you actually read those articles?
The Wisegeek article doesn’t really say anything."

Did you read it?
It says 95% of DNA is non-coding, aka "junk".
It also says:

"By looking at the differences in junk DNA between organisms, researchers have been able to learn more about when these organisms diverged from common ancestors.
The fact that noncoding DNA has been preserved for millions of years would seem to indicate that it has some sort of function, perhaps in the role of gene regulation, gene repair, or gene evolution.
Noncoding DNA also appears to act as a buffer in the genetic code which may play a role in DNA replication.

"There is some evidence that some of the sections in junk DNA were once active genes, leading researchers to refer to these sections as 'pseudogenes.'
At some point in evolutionary history, these genes were deemed unimportant or superseded by other genes, but they quietly remained in the background."

Kalamata: "Dan Graur is, above all else, a far left whack job — seriously!
He makes the nutty Lawrence Krauss look like a choir boy."

So you know him personally?
This article makes the entirely reasonable point that "junk" depends wholly on your definitions.
The original definition of "junk" meant simply all non-coding DNA, which remains today 98% of the total.
Then researchers began to find some activity in the "junk", but what was that activity, exactly?
In most cases they don't know, but to some people it didn't matter, they just wanted to get rid of the term "junk" and so claimed any activity at all was reason enough to call "junk" something else.

But non-coding DNA is still 98%, whether you call it "junk" or something else.

Page's article on Graur begins with the headline: "At Least 75% of our DNA really is useless junk after all".
In the article's body it uses other numbers, from 92% to 86%, again depending entirely on how, exactly, you define "junk".

"The heart of the issue is how you define functional.
ENCODE defined DNA as such if it showed any “biochemical activity”, for instance, if it was copied into RNA.
But Graur doesn’t think a bit of activity like this is enough to prove DNA has a meaningful use.
Instead, he argues that a sequence can only be described as functional if it has evolved to do something useful, and if a mutation disrupting it would have a harmful effect."

Key point: a DNA sequence is not "junk" if a mutation to it will cause a harmful effect.
But if the mutation has no bad effect, then the sequence can legitimately be called "junk".

Kalamata: "The 2017 article by Graur that Le Page referenced is only one of his many attacks on the ENCODE project, which he claims: 1) provides support for intelligent design, and 2) doesn’t take into account the primary tenent of his religion, which is “everything is shaped by evolution”.
“If ENCODE is right,” according to Graur, “then evolution is wrong.”
I don’t disagree on that point..."

None of that is in the article I posted, so I have to assume that, as usual, you misrepresent someone because you dislike him.
That's sort of your thing, FRiend.

Kalamata: "...even he claims the functionality of Junk DNA is as high as 25%."

Or at least that's what Page's headline said.
The article itself argues that "functionality" is ill defined and so anything outside the 8% of coding-or-functioning DNA is suspect of being non-coding "junk".

Kalamata quoting Zimmer, NYTimes: " 'Most of the DNA that scientists once thought was just taking up space in the genome,' Collins said, ‘turns out to be doing stuff.’ "

But how much "doing stuff"?
Turns out, not much because:

"On average, each baby is born with roughly 100 new mutations.
If every piece of the genome were essential, then many of those mutations would lead to significant birth defects, with the defects only multiplying over the course of generations; in less than a century, the species would become extinct."

Right, 100 new mutation per generation and yet the vast majority of us are born as healthy as our parents.
Clearly that suggests the label "junk" is not so inappropriate for non-coding DNA.

"He expects that as we examine the genome more closely, we’ll find many

bottle caps and nails.
It’s a prediction based, he and others argue, on the deep evolutionary history of our genome.
Over millions of years, essential genes haven’t changed very much, while junk DNA has picked up many harmless mutations.
Scientists at the University of Oxford have measured evolutionary change over the past 100 million years at every spot in the human genome.
“I can today say, hand on my heart, that 8 percent, plus or minus 1 percent, is what I would consider functional,” Chris Ponting, an author of the study, says.
And the other 92 percent? “It doesn’t seem to matter that much,” he says"

So, despite ENCODE's claims, many scientists in the field are not convinced that "junk DNA" is anything but.

"It’s no coincidence, researchers like Gregory argue, that bona fide creationists have used recent changes in the thinking about junk DNA to try to turn back the clock to the days before Darwin.
(The recent studies on noncoding DNA “clearly demonstrate we are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ by our Creator God,” declared the Institute for Creation Research.)
In a sense, this debate stretches back to Darwin himself, whose 1859 book, “On the Origin of Species,” set the course for our understanding natural selection as a natural “designer.”
Later in his life, Darwin took pains to stress that there was more to evolution than natural selection.
He was frustrated to see how many of his readers thought he was arguing that natural selection was the only force behind life’s diversity."

Kalamata: "Worse for the evolutionist, this 2018 article states that 95% of the human genome is restrained, that is, it cannot evolve:"

No, your link is highly technical however, no surprise, it doesn't say what you claim.
What it does say is this:

"The exact proportion of the genome that is influenced by selection is still the source of an intense debate (Bernstein et al., 2012; Rands et al., 2014; Graur, 2017; Kern and Hahn, 2018).
Here, we show that up to 80–85% of the human genome is probably affected by background selection (BGS), an effect that is not subtle (Reed et al., 2005) and that is visible from single individuals genomes (Figure 1—figure supplement 5A).
Even though our estimate of the fraction of the human genome influenced by BGS matches relatively well with that reported to be biochemically functional by the ENCODE consortium (Bernstein et al., 2012), our results do not imply that 80–85% of the human genome is functional.
They rather show that functional sites that are the direct target of purifying selection in both coding and non-coding regions (potentially representing 8–15% of the genome, Rands et al. (2014); Graur, 2017) have an important but indirect influence on most of the genome."

So, 8-15% of our genome "matters", the rest is fairly called "junk".

Kalamata: "It is meaningless. Genetics has moved on."

Not nearly as much as you'd wish, FRiend.

Kalamata: "That is over-generalized.
Real science is observable and repeatable.
Even forces, such as gravity, are observable, or at least their results are.
Charlie did it backwards.
He took observable science (adaptation and speciation,) and extrapolated it into unobservable, untestable, unrepeatable conjecture (common descent).
That is not science."

Nonsense, that is certainly science -- observed, tested & repeated, Darwin's hypothesis is now strongly confirmed theory.
It will never be "fact" because the past cannot be observed directly, but every indirect vision we have into the past (i.e., fossils, DNA, geology, radiometric dating, morphological comparisons, etc.), all confirm what evolution theory predicts.

Darwin's basic idea has never been falsified.

>>>Sorry, but that’s just a lie [that evolition is a religion], regardless of how often you repeat it, it never becomes objectively true.

Don’t be silly. Even evolutionists claim it is a religion, or is at least faith-based. The loony Michael Shermer even has a name for your high priests [”shamans”]:

“[C]osmology and evolutionary theory ask the ultimate origin questions that have traditionally been the province of religion and theology. Scientism is courageously proffering naturalistic answers that supplant supernaturalistic ones and in the process is providing spiritual sustenance for those whose needs are not being met by these ancient cultural traditions. Second, we are, at base, a socially hierarchical primate species. We show deference to our leaders, pay respect to our elders and follow the dictates of our shamans; this being the Age of Science, it is scientism’s shamans who command our veneration. Third, because of language we are also storytelling, mythmaking primates, with scientism as the foundational stratum of our story and scientists as the premier mythmakers of our time... Scientism’s voice can best be heard through a literary genre for both lay readers and professionals that includes the works of such scientists as Carl Sagan, E. O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and Jared Diamond.” [Shermer, Michael, “The Shamans of Scientism.” Scientific American, 185:6, June, 2002, p.35]

Evolutionist Michael Ruse calls it a secular religion:

“Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion — a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint — and Mr. Gish is but one of many to make it — the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.” [Ruse, Michael, “How Evolution Became A Religion.” National Post, May 13, 2000]

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>>>Paine was hardly the first to disparage Christians as “atheists” — that’s also what ancient pagan Greeks & Romans called Jews and Christians. After all, they only believed in one God and He is invisible! What a laugh, in the minds of ancient pagans.

I’ll bet he and Bertrand Russell would have gotten along very well.

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>>>Sure, and as you say, it’s your faith, not science.
>>Isaac Newton — early 18th century mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist & theologian.
>>Clark Maxwell — 19th century, worked in electrical & chemical fields.
>>Michael Faraday — 19th century, worked in electrical & chemical fields.
>>St. Nicholas Steno (Niels Steensen) — 17th century, abandoned his advanced work in biology and geology after conversion to Catholicism.
>>None of the above can be described as having made an informed opinion regarding the overall age and natural history of the Earth.

You forgot to mention they were all were genius scientists and creationists, even Steno, who based his work on the evidence of a global flood and a 6,000 year earth:

“There are those to whom the great length of time seems to destroy the force of the remaining arguments, since the recollection of no age affirms that floods rose to the place where many marine objects are found to-day, if you exclude the universal deluge, four thousand years, more or less, before our time. Nor does it seem in accord with reason that a part of an animal’s body could withstand the ravages of so many years, since we see that the same bodies are often destroyed completely in the space of a few years. But this doubt is easily answered, since the result depends wholly upon the diversity of soil; for I have seen strata of a certain kind of clay which by the thinness of their fluid decomposed all the bodies enclosed within them. I have noticed many other sandy strata which preserved whole all that was entrusted to them. And by this test it might be possible to come to a knowledge of that fluid which disintegrates solid bodies. But that which is certain, that the formation of many mollusks which we find to-day must be referred to times coincident with the universal deluge, is sufficiently shown by the following argument.” [Nicolaus Steno, “The Prodromus of Nicolaus Steno’s Dissertation Concerning a Solid Body Enclosed by Process of Nature Within a Solid - 1916.” The MacMillan Company, 1937, p.258]

Newton was into fine-tuning before fine-tuning was cool:

“the parity of reason must take place in the celestial spaces above the earth s atmosphere; in which spaces, where there is no air to resist their motions, all bodies will move with the greatest freedom; and the planets and comets will constantly pursue their revolutions in or bits given in kind and position, according to the laws above explained; but though these bodies may, indeed, persevere in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws... This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” [Newton, Isaac, “Newton’s Principia: the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.” Daniel Adee, 1846, Book III, p.501]

Of course, like any sensible person, Newton gave glory to God.

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>>And that is post number what?

You commented on Paley. Did you forget?

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>>Nowhere does the Bible itself claim to be scientific.

Again, the Bible is loaded with scientific gems, for anyone who bothers to look.

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>>In fact, there is no scientific definition of “kind”, never was — not even by Linnaeaus back in 1735!

Linnaeus was a creationist who wrote of the created kind:

“Like other animals who enjoy life, sensation, and perception; who seek for food, amusements, and rest, and who prepare habitations convenient for their kind, [man] is curious and inquisitive; but, above all other animals, he is noble in his nature, in as much as, by the powers of his mind, he is able to reason justly upon whatever discovers itself to his senses; and to look, with reverence and wonder, upon the works of Him who created all things.” [Carolus Linnaeus, “A General System of Nature Vol I: Animal Kingdom: Mammalia, Birds, Amphibia, Fishes.” Lackington, Allen and Co., 1806, Introduction, p.1]

He also believed in the immutability of the species, but with an inherent potential for variation:

“The 5 classes of plants. The number of species is the number of different forms produced by the Infinite Being from the beginning; and these forms have produced more forms, according to the laws laid down, but always ones that are similar to themselves. Therefore the number of species is the number of different forms or structures that occur today.” [Stephen Freer, “Linnaeus’ Philosophia Botanica.” Oxford University Press, 2005, p.113]

The Latin Vulgate erroneously translated the created kind as either species or genus. When Linnaeus adopted his classification scheme, he included both words, with the genus rank just above the species:

“SYSTEM is conveniently divided into five branches, each subordinate to the other: class, order, genus, species, and variety, with their names and characters.” [Carolus Linnaeus, “A General System of Nature Vol I - Animal Kingdom - Mammalia, Birds, Amphibia, Fishes.” Lackington, Allen and Co., 1806, Introduction, p.3]

***********************
>>Nor was Paley a scientist — he was, naturally, a Unitarian theologian.

And Darwin was, naturally, a failed theologian.

***********************
>>Now just suppose I’d claimed to be a famous “rocket scientist” and you informed the world that, no, I’m not.
Is that ad hominem?

If you were a scientist, like William Paley, and some ideologue claimed you were not, that would be ad hominem. Alternately, if you were not a scientist, like Darwin, and someone claimed you were not a scientist, that would not be ad hominem

***********************
>>Which scientists care what Kalamata thinks?

Are you conceding my point that evolutionary biologists are not scientists?

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>>Natural science, by definition excludes anything outside natural explanations for natural processes.
It’s not a matter of “erasing the Bible from science,” because the Bible was never part of science.

Who invented that stupid rule? There is nothing more natural that the creator of all nature.

***********************
>>The Bible itself never claims to be “a book of science”.

It doesn’t have to. It has a perfect record.

***********************
>>>Science has never recognized “kinds” but instead has always divided plants and animals into many different categories beginning with breeds & varieties up through sub-species, species, genera, families, orders, etc.”

Scientists have always recognized “kinds”, or the modern equivalent, family. You must be thinking about evolutionists, not scientists.

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>>At each higher level of generalization it becomes more difficult, then impossible for different sub-groups to interbreed.

The barrier is the “family”, or “kind”, which is exactly what biblical science predicts, and exactly what real scientists have been claiming all along. Biochemist Michael Behe explains it this way:

“Darwin rightly touted natural selection as relentless, as ‘daily and hourly scrutinising... every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good.’ Yet, since the mechanism has no foresight, and since in many circumstances the random damaging of genes can be helpful to an organism, then selection ‘adds up’ those degradative changes only in the sense that broken pieces of machinery might be added to a growing pile of junk. Its inexorable predilection to hastily squander genetic information for short-term gain—encapsulated by the First Rule of Adaptive Evolution—guarantees that Darwin’s mechanism is powerfully devolutionary and explains why unguided evolution is self-limiting. Ironically, random mutation and natural selection do help form new species and new genera, but chiefly by promoting the loss of genetic abilities. Over time, dwindling degradatory options fence in an evolutionary lineage, halting organismal change before it crosses the family line.” [Michael J. Behe, “Darwin Devolves.” HarperOne, 2019, Chap.10]

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>>Sometimes the dividing line is species — where different species don’t or can’t naturally interbreed.”

Speciation is the result of devolution, not evolution. The “kind” doesn’t change.

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>>There are literal tons of evidence for anybody to see in any public natural history museum.
You should go look someday.

LOL! You really should get up to speed. That highly imaginative “whale evolution” chart you presented was debunked years ago. The wild-eyed claims of U. Michigan’s Phil Gingerich and associates for the Pakicetus, Ambulocetus and Rhodocetus have all been proven false, from out of their own mouths.

This is Dr. Hans Thewissen on the Ambulocetus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkwhd_gIR7c&index=6&list=PLrCQerz2L0Ifpe9QdbWBZ1ACbEa3kMO2g

This is Dr. Phil Gingerich on the Rodhocetus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N—Xtcr8h7k&list=PLrCQerz2L0Ifpe9QdbWBZ1ACbEa3kMO2g&index=8

This is Thewissen on the ear of the Ambulocetus and Pakicetus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxcZCJ_WgXo

Like all other evolution frauds (Piltdown Man, Haeckels Embryos, Junk DNA, Vestigial Organs, etc.), it will be years before they are removed from museums and our children’s textbooks.

The dirty little secret of the “whale evolution” fraud is that even if all the animals turned out to be exactly as claimed, there would still be no proof of whale evolution. Each species in that chart is not only distinct and specialized, but there is no evidence that any of them had offspring, nor is there evidence of the minute transitions that would be required to support species transitions.

When are you going to show us scientific evidence for evolution? Betcha can’t.

Mr. Kalamata

>>Kalamata is all about “smug”, I don’t do “smug”. In fact I enjoyed the lecture, it’s why I listened to all 58 minutes (!) of it.

You were smug. I believe you characterized his lecture as a “rabbit hole”.

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>>And I did hear some things I’d not heard before, but the key takeaway remains the fact that there’s still vastly more we don’t know than do. That means to me there’s unlikely to be an end to employment opportunities in this field. We don’t know how much Federal tax money supports origin of life research. I am not aware of any O.O.L research that is not funded by federal grant money. I suspect not very much money because to hear your man Tour tell it, there’s not really very much of it going on. Tour even claims there’ve been no real advances since Miller-Urey in 1952!

You are guessing.

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>>By definition a “fact” is simply a confirmed observation, such as the globe-shaped Earth — it was a theory, now a fact. Evolution is a confirmed theory based on literal mountains of facts — deny them all you wish, they still exist.

When are you going to throw out a single pebble of evidence from that mountain you claim to exist?

Admit it. You don’t know of any scientific evidence for evolutionism, and you are merely parrotting propaganda from the party line.

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>>Right — I did watch the video, all 58 minutes of it, and right, your man Tour wants to stop origin of life research to punish those who he claims have over-hyped it. Tour’s word is “moratorium” on research, until those people confess their alleged sins of claiming too much for science!

I believe Tour was being much too lenient. We should shut down ALL research that has been over-hyped. That would release the taxpayer from any obligation to fund the religion of evolutionism and the big-bang.

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>>No! That’s what he said, go back and review your own piece yourself. I’ll save you some time, start at minute ~54:50.

I was referring to this gibberish by you:

>>Then, I’d suppose, as soon as everybody who made such claims recants their heresies, then the research can continue.<<

Start at 54:48 for Tour’s statements on the moratorium. No real scientist would object. He finished at 56:00.

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>>Tours goes straight from his moratorium to condemning over-hypers to quoting Deuteronomy 13: 3-4. That text refers to: “If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder...” Such texts have nothing — zero, zip, nada — to do with our understandings of natural science. As for the media, academia & politicians (Democrats all), of course, that’s a very different story.

You mischaracterized his statement. Immediately after the 56:00 mark, he paused while awaing the commpletion of the applause, and then said, “I’m just going to finish up.” He finished up with the quote from Deuteronomy.

I would have preferred John 8:44, but Deut 13:3-4 was more than appropriate.

Me. Kalamata

>>Never, but your claim to be blind to literal mountains of evidence has to be the ultimate “dumb act”.

A pebble of evidence from that mountain of evidence will do. Can you not spare us a single pebble?

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>>I eagerly await your first ever visit to any natural history museum where you will steadfastly blind yourself to literal tons of evidence.

I have been to museums of natural history, and there is no evidence for evolution in any of them. You foolishly tried to pass off “Whale Evolution” as evidence, which proves you are clueless.

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>>Of course evolution theory could be falsified, in any of thousands of ways, should they ever be confirmed observations.

Gibberish. Evolution has never been observed, in any way. Devolution has, but not evolution.

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>>To pick just one example: dinosaur & elephant fossils, undisturbed in the same geological strata. Consider, in the past 150+ years literally billions of fossils representing hundreds of thousands of extinct species have been found & classified, but not one confirmed as that type of anomaly.

That proves nothing except there is plenty of evidence of hydrologic sorting and possible liquefaction. The fossil record shows evidence of a catastrophic, world-wide flood, with increasing terrestriality in the fossil record, from sea to land. The evidence of marine fossils in the highest layers, world-wide, is enough to cause any real scientist to pause, if not to reject uniformitarianism and Darwinism.

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>>But here is a partial listing of evolution predictions later confirmed.

Okay, you pick any item from that list and explain how it provides evidence for common descent. Any item.

BTW, is it true that Charlie was a big fan of William Paley?

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[Kalamata] “However, the fossil record reveals abrupt appearance followed by stasis, and disparity before diversity, both of which falsify any use of the fossil record to support evolutionism.”

>>Now there is complete gibberish.

Those are facts. I realize that Gould said some pretty foolish things, but those two paleontological evidences are well documented by him, and by others:

“Several of my colleagues (Jaanusson, 1981; Runnegar, 1987) have suggested that we eliminate the confusion about diversity by restricting this vernacular term to the first sense-number of species. The second sense-difference in body plans-should then be called disparity. Using this terminology, we may acknowledge a central and surprising fact of life’s history-marked decrease in disparity followed by an outstanding increase in diversity within the few surviving designs. . . Measured as number of species, Burgess [Shale] diversity is not high. This fact embodies a central paradox of early life: How could so much disparity in body plans evolve in the apparent absence of substantial diversity in number of species? of vertebrates? or of life on land? or simply of multicellular persistence for 600 million difficult years? “ [The Meanings of Diversity and Disparity, in Gould, Stephen Jay, “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.” 1989, Chap. I, pp.48-49]

“The sweep of anatomical variety reached a maximum right after the initial diversification of multicellular animals. The later history of life proceeded by elimination, not expansion. The current earth may hold more species than ever before, but most are iterations upon a few basic anatomical designs.” [Gould, Stephen Jay, “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.” 1989, Chap I, p.46]

“Before Niles Eldredge and I proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium in 1972, the stasis, or nonchange, of most fossil species during their lengthy geological lifespans was tacitly acknowledged by all paleontologists, but almost never studied explicitly because prevailing theory treated stasis as uninteresting nonevidence for nonevolution. Evolution was defined as gradual transformation in extended fossil sequences, and the overwhelming prevalence of stasis became an embarrassing feature of the fossil record, best left ignored as a manifestation of nothing (that is, nonevolution).” [Gould, Stephen Jay, “Cordelia’s Dilemma.” Stephen Jay Gould Archive]

“It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution... This phenomenon becomes more universal and more intense as the hierarchy of categories is ascended. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes, and phyla are systematic and almost always large. These peculiarities of the record pose one of the most important theoretical problems in the whole history of life: Is the sudden appearance of higher categories a phenomenon of evolution or of the record only, due to sampling bias and other inadequacies?” [”The History of Life”, by George Gaylor Simpson, in, in, Sol Tax, “Evolution after Darwin Vol I - The Evolution of Life.” 1960, p.149]

*****************
>>The fossil record, in fact, shows hundreds of thousands of species spread over hundreds of millions of years, and yet something like 99%+ of species aren’t found because they left no recoverable fossils. So all the “stasis” you allege is, first & foremost, the absence of fossils.

Are you claiming the absence of evidence IS evidence? Now I have heard everything! LOL! This is Gould, again:

“[Gould] The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record:

“[Darwin] The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps. He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory.”

“[Gould] Darwin’s argument still persists as the favored escape of most paleontologists from the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution directly. In exposing its cultural and methodological roots, I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism (for all general views have similar roots). I wish only to point out that it was never “seen” in the rocks.”

[The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change (Reprinted from Natural History 86:5, ‘Evolution’s Erratic Pace’, May 1977, p.14), in, Stephen Jay Gould, “The Panda’s Thumb.” W. W. Norton & Company, 1980, Chap.17, p.181]

Did you catch that last statement by Gould: “it was never ‘seen’ in the rocks”? LOL!

How about the last statement by Darwin: “He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory.”

Thank you, Charlie. I rightely reject your entire theory.

*****************
>>Second, geology shows that environmental conditions can sometimes remain unchanged for millions of years, during which life-forms also change little. But when the environment changes — hotter, colder, wetter, dryer, etc. — then life too much change, or die.

The notion that the earth has been around millions of years is an imaginary construct with no supporting evidence.

*****************
>>The classic examples are dinosaurs whose fossils are found in strata dated over tens of millions of years, from beginning to end, then suddenly they disappeared.

There is no evidence for your conclusion, or that the strata is millions of years old. Besides, many animal groups have been found with dinosaur bones, including crustaceans, insects, invertebrates, and vertebrates, including mammals and birds:

“In order to test evolution, Dr. [Carl] Werner visited 60 natural history museums and ten dinosaur dig sites in seven different countries. When he asked paleontologists if they had any personal knowledge of modern birds found with dinosaurs, he was in for quite a surprise.

“I interviewed a scientist at the Museum of Paleontology at Berkeley who discussed a parrot fossil they had found in Cretaceous layers (‘dinosaur rock’). But the parrot fossil was not on display in the museum.

“With each interview, more modern birds that had been found with dinosaurs were added to his list, including: parrots, penguins, owls, sandpipers, albatross, flamingos, loons, ducks, cormorants and avocets. Carl assembled this list from interviews he did with various paleontologists, as well as from articles by evolutionist scientists and a textbook (the details of the sources can be found in Living Fossils).”

[Don Batten, “Modern birds found with dinosaurs.” Creation Ministries International, 2012]

The strata shows evidence of rapid deposition of all layers, as would be expected by hydrodynamic sorting and liquifaction. That explains the virtually flat sedimentary layers, including coal, with little or no erosion and bioturbation in and between layers.

*****************
>>Dinosaurs could not change enough to survive, but mammals & others did.

You made that up. That is called a “just-so” story. Absent story-telling like that, evolutionism would collapse like cheap construction in an earthquake.

Dan

>>Sure, but the Bible nowhere says that science itself is evil.

Don’t be silly.

******************
>>Sorry, but as you can see, I found no speculation presented as “facts”.

I am not surprised YOU found none. The phrases you posted are typical of those found in evolutionary “research” papers and text books; so where does the “evolution is a fact” hype come from? I read those same phrases, over and over again, in high school, undergraduate and graduate schools; and I came out believing evolution to be a fact. It is definitely hyped, and intentionally so.

******************
>>Certainly Miller-Urey was a big deal if, as your man Tour claims, nothing more significant has been done since.”

You don’t read or listen well. This is Dr. Tour at about the 12:40 mark:

“All life we know composes those four building blocks. So they try to make those four building blocks. Then they publish a paper making bold assertions about origin of life from these function-less crude mixtures of stereochemically scrambled intermediates, much like Miller did in 1952.”

In my world, the last sentence is characterized as mockery.

******************
>>The Bible itself nowhere claims to be “scientifically accurate”, and it’s impossible that it should, since the Bible’s whole purpose in being to demonstrate God’s rule over nature. The Bible is not trying to accurately portray nature as it is, but rather to show God’s mastery of nature.”

No, God’s Word accurately portrays history, science, nature, and the future.

******************
>>To God it’s irrelevant whether we agree “scientifically” with the Bible, what matters is we agree that God rules over whatever we think science tells us today.

Are you claiming these are idle words?

“But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.” — Mar 10:6 KJV

Or, are are you saying we should throw the Bible in the trash and rely on our “reason”, like the Pharisees in the time of Christ? Just curious . . .

******************
>>In fact they have several different methodologies (to predict the age of the earth,) all of which roughly agree. The current estimate of 13.8 billion years is simply considered the best of the group.

None agree. For that reason, the results from radiometric dating must be cherry-picked to keep the myth alive.

Generally, radiometric-dating labs require an estimated age of the rocks before they will proceeed (they need to know the answers before they will take the test.) Some scientists decided to test the accuracy of radiometric dating, but without telling the labs how old the rocks were. These are the results in million-years, using the K-Ar method (real dates are in parentheses):

Hualalai basalt, Hawaii (AD 1800-1801) 1.6±0.16 Ma; 1.41±0.08 Ma
Mt. Etna basalt, Sicily (122 BC) 0.25±0.08 Ma
Mt. Etna basalt, Sicily (AD 1972) 0.35±0.14 Ma
Mt. Lassen plagioclase, California (AD 1915) 0.11±0.03 Ma
Kilauea Iki basalt, Hawaii (AD 1959) 8.5±6.8 Ma
Mt. Stromboli, Italy, volcanic bomb (September 23, 1963) 2.4±2 Ma
Mt. Etna basalt, Sicily (May 1964) 0.7±0.01 Ma
Hualalai basalt, Hawaii (AD 1800-1801) 22.8±16.5 Ma
Rangitoto basalt, Auckland, NZ (<800 years old) 0.15±0.47 Ma
Kilauea basalt, Hawaii (<200 years old) 21±8 Ma
Kilauea basalt, Hawaii (<1,000 years old) 42.9±4.2 Ma; 30.3±3.3 Ma

Pretty wild stuff, huh? How about the 200 year-old basalt dating to be at least 13 million years old. LOL!

The “millions of years” nonsense came along decades before radiometric dating arrived on the scene. Now that radiometric dating has been invented, it is manipulated and hyped to make rock dating appear to be scientific.

Mr. Kalamata

>>You lie when you claim my statement is a lie.

Try telling the truth. It only hurts for a minute.

****************************
>>More lies, and for those no “redemption”.

You claim there are mountains of evidence for evolution, and yet you cannot present a single pebble of evidence. Are you lying, or brainwashed?

****************************
>>The truth is, you don’t need me to present anything, because you can find evidence in any natural history museum, but you’d refuse to see it even there.

I have visited plenty of museums.

Wanna hear a related story? An acquaintance took a trip to Chicago, and while there he visited the Chicago Natural History Museum. He went in the doors as a long-time evolutionist, and came out believing in intelligent design. His medical training provided him the knowledge to spot the massive fraud within the exhibits that most people will never see.

****************************
>>So my presenting yet more will have no effect on you. You have blinded yourself.

You have presented no scientific evidence: only just-so stories and highly imaginative artwork.

****************************
>>”Sanctimonious belligerence” is your specialty, pal, not mine.

No. That label defines you perfectly.

****************************
>>Such evidence is splattered all over this thread, you simply refuse to see it, here or anywhere else.

Obviously, you don’t understand the definition of evidence, nor of science. A good scientist will spend time trying to prove his theories wrong, rather than to prove them right:

“[O]nce the theory is in hand, Popper tells us, it is the duty of the scientist to extract from it logical but unexpected predictions that, if they are shown by experiment not to be correct, will serve to render the theory invalid. Popper was deeply influenced by the fact that a theory can never be proved right by agreement with observation, but it can be proved wrong by disagreement with observation. Because of this asymmetry, science uniquely makes progress by proving that good ideas are wrong so that they can be replaced by even better ideas. Thus, Bacon’s impartial observer of nature is replaced by Popper’s skeptical theorist. The good Popperian scientist somehow comes up with a hypothesis that fits all or most of the known facts, then proceeds to attack that hypothesis at its weakest point by extracting from it predictions that can be shown to be false. This process is known as falsification.” [Karl Popper’s Falsification Theory, in, Kassirer & Kessler, “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence.” National Academies Press, 3rd Ed, 2011, p.40]

Evolutionists tend to spend their time trying to prove evolution and uniformitarianism to be true, except maybe when they are in the “cover up” mode. That is not science.

Mr. Kalamata

>>[The Wisegeek article] says 95% of DNA is non-coding, aka “junk”.

This is the quote:

“In humans, for example, 95% of the genome is composed of noncoding DNA. Junk DNA appears to explain a large part of the differences in genome size between different organisms, as some plants and animals have a great deal of junk DNA, while others have less.”

That is ancient history, based on an old evolutionism myth. Try to stay current.

***********************
>>It also says: “By looking at the differences in junk DNA between organisms, researchers have been able to learn more about when these organisms diverged from common ancestors.

That is what it says, but it is story-telling, not science.

***********************
>>The fact that noncoding DNA has been preserved for millions of years would seem to indicate that it has some sort of function, perhaps in the role of gene regulation, gene repair, or gene evolution.

It is NOT a fact that “noncoding DNA has been preserved for millions of years”. That is more story-telling.

There is no need for you to quote profusely from an article I have already read. Just give me your interpretation, and I will tell you why it is wrong.

***********************
>>So you know him personally?

No sane person wants to know him personally. It is burden enough to read his ideologically-driven rampages.

Seriously, you need better sources.

***********************
>>This article makes the entirely reasonable point that “junk” depends wholly on your definitions.

What else can they say now that the ENCODE project has exposed their made-up “evidence” for evolution.

***********************
>>The original definition of “junk” meant simply all non-coding DNA, which remains today 98% of the total.

The definition was abused by those desperately seeking evidence for evolution, and against intelligent design.

***********************
>>Then researchers began to find some activity in the “junk”, but what was that activity, exactly? In most cases they don’t know, but to some people it didn’t matter, they just wanted to get rid of the term “junk” and so claimed any activity at all was reason enough to call “junk” something else.”

That is slanderous. You are accusing the ENCODE researchers, most or all of which are evolutionists, of faking their results.

***********************
>>But non-coding DNA is still 98%, whether you call it “junk” or something else.

The rule-of-thumb for real scientists is, “Don’t call it junk, unless you know it is junk.”

***********************
>>Page’s article on Graur begins with the headline: “At Least 75% of our DNA really is useless junk after all”.
In the article’s body it uses other numbers, from 92% to 86%, again depending entirely on how, exactly, you define “junk”.<<

There are some who agree with him, and there are plenty who do not.

***********************
>>ENCODE defined DNA as such if it showed any “biochemical activity”, for instance, if it was copied into RNA.
But Graur doesn’t think a bit of activity like this is enough to prove DNA has a meaningful use.

And the ENCODE biomedical researchers obviously thought it did.

***********************
>>Instead, he argues that a sequence can only be described as functional if it has evolved to do something useful, and if a mutation disrupting it would have a harmful effect.”

That would require evidence that evolution can occur.

***********************
>>Key point: a DNA sequence is not “junk” if a mutation to it will cause a harmful effect. But if the mutation has no bad effect, then the sequence can legitimately be called “junk”.

Maybe, or maybe not.

***********************
>>None of that is in the article I posted, so I have to assume that, as usual, you misrepresent someone because you dislike him. That’s sort of your thing, FRiend.”

Of course I don’t like him. He is a belligerent jackass. But everything I quoted can be found in the literature, some of which can be found in this article:

“Graur’s atheism inflamed his anger at ENCODE. He perceives an echo of intelligent design in the consortium’s ‘80% claim,’ which he takes to imply that most of the genome exists because it serves a purpose. ‘What ENCODE researchers did not take into account,’ he contends, ‘is that everything is shaped by evolution.’ And evolution is slow to weed out useless features.” [Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, “The Vigilante.” Science, Vol.343, Iss.6177; March 21, 2014, p.1307]

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/343/6177/1306.summary

More came from here. In my post, I left out the part about Graur resorting to circular science:

“We read the paper, and looked over Graur’s accompanying PowerPoint. We’re not impressed by theoretical population genetics because it is based on neo-Darwinian assumptions rather than biological realities. Basically, he is using that circular science to add a quantitative gloss to his fundamental position, namely that if ENCODE is right then evolution is wrong, and evolution can’t be wrong, so ENCODE can’t be right.” [”Dan Graur, Anti-ENCODE Crusader, Is Back.” Evolution News & Science Today, July 28, 2017]”

https://evolutionnews.org/2017/07/dan-graur-anti-encode-crusader-is-back/

***********************
>>The article itself argues that “functionality” is ill defined and so anything outside the 8% of coding-or-functioning DNA is suspect of being non-coding “junk”.

Yes, that is what he claims.

***********************
>> But how much “doing stuff”? Turns out, not much because: “On average, each baby is born with roughly 100 new mutations. If every piece of the genome were essential, then many of those mutations would lead to significant birth defects, with the defects only multiplying over the course of generations; in less than a century, the species would become extinct.”

Have you read that mutations within Junk DNA can cause cancer?

BTW, I read Zimmer’s 2015 article a long while back, so there is no need for you to copy paste from it.

***********************
>>No, your link is highly technical however, no surprise, it doesn’t say what you claim.
What it does say is this: “The exact proportion of the genome that is influenced by selection is still the source of an intense debate (Bernstein et al., 2012; Rands et al., 2014; Graur, 2017; Kern and Hahn, 2018).” . . . So, 8-15% of our genome “matters”, the rest is fairly called “junk”.. .

Perhaps you misinterpreted. This report from the AAAS of a release by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics states:

“Models used to reconstruct the history of a species or to discover how populations are related to one another rely on a key assumption: that the genome regions under scrutiny are made of”neutral” snippets of DNA, i.e. parts that have evolved randomly rather than being selected for or against. But these regions might actually not be as neutral as previously thought, according to a recent finding by scientists at SIB and the University of Bern: “What we find is that less than 5% of the human genome can actually be considered as “neutral””, says Fanny Pouyet, lead author of the study. “This is a striking finding: it means that 95% of the genome is indirectly influenced by functional sites, which themselves represent only 10% to 15% of the genome”, she concludes. These functional sites encompass both genes and regions involved in gene regulation.” [”A Genome Under Influence: The faulty yardstick in genomics studies and how to cope with it.” Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Oct 9, 2018]

That clearly states, “What we find is that less than 5% of the human genome can actually be considered as ‘neutral’”.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-10/siob-agu100918.php
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181010105536.htm

********************
>>Nonsense, that is certainly science — observed, tested & repeated, Darwin’s hypothesis is now strongly confirmed theory. It will never be “fact” because the past cannot be observed directly, but every indirect vision we have into the past (i.e., fossils, DNA, geology, radiometric dating, morphological comparisons, etc.), all confirm what evolution theory predicts. Darwin’s basic idea has never been falsified.

It has never been confirmed, or even observed. It is a theory on life support, perpetuated by suppression of opposing theories. It is dead, for all practical purposes. We are just biding our time until the “Planck Doctrine” kicks in:

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” [Max Planck, “Scientific Autobiography And Other Papers.” Williams and Norgate, 1968, pp.33-34]

Mr. Kalamata

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