Posted on 09/01/2003 5:46:19 PM PDT by Tribune7
Generations of American schoolchildren have been taught that Darwin's theory of evolution is the explanation for the origin of life -- regardless of what they might have learned in Sunday school. Yet according to law professor and author Phillip E. Johnson, this modern-day mantra of science classes is little more than a dogma of materialism. In his books "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds," "Darwin on Trial," "Reason in the Balance" and others, Johnson defends the truth with the intellectual clout that earned him a prestigious seat at the University of California, Berkeley, yet with a humility that can only come from knowing the Creator one-on-one. Here, he talks candidly with "Decision" on the topic he is most passionate about -- dismantling Darwinism.
Q: The Ohio Board of Education recently ruled that public schools in that state can now discuss controversies surrounding the theory of evolution. Why do you think so many leading educators fought to keep such debate out of the classroom?
A: It's a good question. You would think the Darwinists would be glad to teach the controversy as a matter of educational policy. According to public opinion polls, most of the nation has serious doubts about the truth of the evolutionary theory. Why don't the educators want to address those doubts seriously? They are afraid to acknowledge that there are any doubts that matter. Real scientists, they say, believe without any doubt in the theory of evolution. But in Ohio we had petitions signed by dozens of well-credentialed scientists saying that this area of study should be opened up to freedom of thought. Science should not be committed to a dogma -- much less a dogma that is in serious trouble with the evidence -- but should freely acknowledge areas of doubt and should address them honestly.
Q: Through your books and lectures, you've become known as someone who has worked hard to bring together different factions of the creationist movement.
A: My policy is to concentrate on the first issue: What scientific evidence points toward or away from the need for a Creator? Does the evidence of science really show that Darwin's force of natural selection is so powerful that nature can do its own creating and that there is no need for God? That's the philosophical doctrine the Darwinists propose, but my colleagues and I have shown that it is not true. The evidence, as opposed to the scientific imperialism, points to the fact that natural selection has no creative power and that the Creator is very much needed. So if we concentrate on that issue first, then we can get to other issues that are somewhat divisive within the Christian world. I have done that by saying, "Let's be careful that we start with the correct Scripture."
(Excerpt) Read more at billygraham.org ...
Slavery is a special case. We were talking about mill workers, presumably in England. Free men. It's simple economics. Employers don't pay more than they need to. If labor was abundant, and willing to do the work for the wages offered, then it's a done deal. The worker always has a choice of rejecting the job. If he takes it, that's because he thinks it's his best option. In a primitive economy, there arent too many options. As wealth increases, and other people start up businesses, skilled labor becomes more valuable, and wages rise. You know ... supply and demand. There's not much more to it.
They can disagree all they want, if they have no evidence, it is just a matter of faith, not science and therefore there is no need to listen to them.
Science is about facts and evidence, not about opinions.
You don't really think that one will ever find satisfactory means to explain, by analyzing parts, how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, do you? It would be easier to interpret a picture, whether photography, paint, or mosaic, by analyzing the shapes and sizes of its patterns, and the hues, tones and shades of its colors.
Consistency with theme, is all we can hope for, here.
Not even that, merely by our studying any combination of objects and their behavior, however complex --not as long as they are seen as objects and not as long as we see only by analysis.
I doubt the question which will capture of the attention of the scientists is so much whether the whole is greater than the parts; IMHO, they may avoid that one in favor of the philosophers.
Rather, I suspect the questions which will give rise to a new approach (such as integrative science) will include these: what is life, symbolizations, functional complexity, qualia, bridge between the micro and macro worlds, autonomous self-organizing biological complexity and emergent behavior.
How far they can get with any of these is an open question, in my view.
No those who believe in evolution are not relying on evidence. They cannot be for the simple reason that there is none. No one has ever seen a species transform itself into a more complex species.
Further, the evidence against it is overwhelming by now. The specificity and complexity of numerous systems in living organisms completely show the impossibility of the ability of stochastic change to achieve their construction.
One can look all one wants and not find anywhere an explanation according to all the scientifically known facts of how any organ or any complex system in an organism could have developed according to Darwinian evolution, the eye is a famous example of the failure of such attempts.
Very well and concisely put, gore3000. This is the problem in a nutshell, isn't it?
Very interesting, Alamo-Girl! Looks like there's a way to answer this key problem. Whether the answer is correct is another matter. I certainly don't know. What would the "dynamic (catalytic) substrate" be?
But what really caught my eye in the passages I cited was the idea that biological organisms can affect and transform the environment, and that microorganisms filled (and putatively still fill) a niche in nature that tends to "support of the whole biota." This is not a result envisioned by Darwin. I gather Darwinist theory holds that organisms are basically "done to": the external hostile environment impinges on organisms and that's why they have to select for greater fitness in order to survive. Also competition is key, not cooperation; and yet here we have a picture of closely cooperating biological entities -- a picture of bacteria performing some kind of regulatory function with respect to, for example, atmospheric gasses, thus transforming the environment, and making it "livable" for biological life. I thought these ideas were rather striking.
I cited observable facts. Gore3000 deleted them, but they won't go away. The rest is just his usual attempt at proof by loud font color.
Showing an important reason why RNA life is impossible - the instability of RNA would make it a very bad medium for transmitting hard to acquire genetic information.
He previously asserted that RNA based genomes are impossible, an assertion that would seem particularly risible for the millions worldwide dying from infection with a virus with an RNA genome. HIV has retained its infectivity over at least 30 years. Other RNA viruses are known to have existed and remained virulent for far longer. But hey, facts are unimportant when you know you're right.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/nolan/tutorials/ret_5_struct.html
Read and learn.
I disagree.
The transfer of genes betwen organisms, that Margulis refers, to is called 'lateral gene transfer'. It does indeed complicate genetic studies of early evolution; it's hard to construct trees if bits of one branch get lopped off occasionally and attached to other branches. For example a recent (pretty speculative) paper on the early evolution of the globin gene claims there is evidence of two indepedent gene transfers between unrelated bacteria in the early history of the globin gene, between one billion and two billion years ago. However, so far it appears these gene transfers, while they complicate molecular evolution studies, are not so common that they completely mixed the gene pool or prevent tracing of lineages.
Lynn Margulis, BTW, is the originator of the 'Gaia' hypothesis. The 'all life is interconnected' theme is as ideological with her as it is scientific.
RNA world, if it existed, certainly predated all this, and may not have lasted very long. In an odd analogy, and one I wouldn't want to stretch very far, I see it as similar to the inflation period of the inflationary universe - where there was rapid mutation, presumably massive generation of molecular diversity, all sorts of strange splicings and hybridizations of genes, a sort of roiling ferment of life which resulted in the evolution of the basic framework of the cell. Once the cell had started producing reduced ribonucleotides, perhaps initially for entirely different reasons, those deoxynucleotides started to be incorporated into the genome (and remember, RNA-DNA hybrids are well known), natural selection took over, and the chemistry got a lot less interesting. In fact, I see no reason why this had to be a sudden change. You could have had replacement of U by T, then C by dC, then A and G by dA and dG, in several stages. Some genes - maybe the ones where stability was most important - could have been replaced first.
So, to answer your question, 'RNA world' was probably the very earliest part of the 2 billion years of microbial ascendancy. The chemical relics of RNA world - the very ancient enzyme that produces DNA precursors from RNA precursors, and not vice versa, plus the fact that the most fundamental organelle - the ribosome - is RNA + protein, are tough to explain away with a DNA based origin of life.
Although these unnatural concentrations of HIV can be kept alive for days or even weeks under precisely controlled and limited laboratory conditions, CDC studies have shown that drying of even these high concentrations of HIV reduces the amount of infectious virus by 90 to 99 percent within several hours. Since the HIV concentrations used in laboratory studies are much higher than those actually found in blood or other specimens, drying of HIV-infected human blood or other body fluids reduces the theoretical risk of environmental transmission to that which has been observed--essentially zero. Incorrect interpretation of conclusions drawn from laboratory studies have unnecessarily alarmed some people.
Results from laboratory studies should not be used to assess specific personal risk of infection because (1) the amount of virus studied is not found in human specimens or elsewhere in nature, and (2) no one has been identified as infected with HIV due to contact with an environmental surface. Additionally, HIV is unable to reproduce outside its living host (unlike many bacteria or fungi, which may do so under suitable conditions), except under laboratory conditions, therefore, it does not spread or maintain infectiousness outside its host.
This is just silly. Of course you have to understand a process to emulate it, but there would be no purpose to emulations if they did not produce predictions. The whole point of emulation is to learn previously unknown things in an environment that is safer, cheaper, faster, or more ethical than the "natural" environment.
The error here is assuming that understanding a process automatically confers understanding of all possible outcomes of the process. That is a key misunderstanding. Even designed things do not spring fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. Even designed things evolve.
There's nothing to dispute WRT the above. It is my thinking exactly.
But the point seems to be that you can't produce reasonable predictions from an emulated process if you can't emulate the process because you don't understand it in the first place. You do have to understand something about it, or you wouldn't be able to simulate it. You might say, "Well, whut the hey, let's just go ahead and model it anyway." But how good would the resulting information be? What would it really tell you? What value would the findings have as a "prediction" of anything?
But IMHO there's an even deeper issue involved here. Biological complexity may not be reducible to digital emulation at all. You can perhaps isolate pieces of that complexity and study it; but isolating a particular piece -- abstracting it from its place in the whole -- may give you a false picture because the piece needs the whole to express its function in the total system -- which I think is probably the thing one is trying to get to by means of digital simulation: The piece's function in the total system.
This is simply an attempt to render into language an intuition about complexity. It probably isn't sufficiently "scientific" from your point of view. I will, however, be studying up to see whether I may be able to put the idea in a more rigorous form, in due course.
Well, here's the problem.
We can do a lot of backwards modelling. We can use genome analysis to get some sort of a consensus view of what a very primitive microbe looked like. I expect in 20 years or so, we'll be able to simulate a small organism of this sort computationally, simulating macromolecules as discrete units and using spatially variant concentrations for the small molecules. The trouble is, I think it's fairly clear that if we look far enough back to life's origins, at some point there will be no further information we can glean. All the processes and the most primitive enzymes will have been replaced, with little residual trace of what they were. And so, it is likely to understand life, we'll also have to do forward modelling. The first attempt at this was the much-reviled Miller-Urey experiment, but people are starting to use more realistic ideas of what protobiotic conditions were, and trying different scenarios for crerating primitive life. And it is entirely possible we might be able to simulate abiogenesis experimentally, using combinatorial methods (testing many many diferent combinations of initial conditions). But it is also possible we may make much faster progress using a simulated chemical environment to screen for productive pathways of abiogenesis, and then test the most likely scenarios experimentally. The computational tools for this aren't here yet, but I confidently expect they'll be here in 20 years. At the end, one shoots for discovering as many possible abiogenetic pathways as one can find, which one can then match by our knowledge of what life ended up as.
http://www.ipmofalaska.com/files/TMV.html
Humility is a rare thing among Darwinists.
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