Posted on 06/24/2002 8:09:41 AM PDT by medved
The primary science focus on Bearfabrique is renegade science and catastrophism; evolution is a sort of a second topic. Nonetheless, there's a reason for the evolution page. Evolutionism poisons religion, ethics, and science in equal measure. There is a fabulous new world of science waiting in the wings to be born once the dead hand of evolution and the evolutionists can be removed from the picture.
There are several overwhelming arguments against evolution in any form which arise from catastrophism in fact; it would be good for Christians, in particular, to become aware of those arguments.
One such argument arises from studies of what many term "paranormal"
It's fairly obvious to most people that complex capabilities like flight or the sonar which whales use could not evolve; what if an outsider were to come up with something hundreds of times more fabulous than flight or sonar. For instance, what if a creature were to be found which, without recourse to any technology, was naturally able to withstand the cold and vacuum of space and somehow navigate and travel across cosmic distances?
Is there any point at which even the most hardcore evolutionist would have to stop, examine the evidence, and say to himself "JEEEsshh, now I KNOW that %%$% can't evolve... time to go back to the drawing board."
If there is no such point, than evolution is basically unfalsifiable and clearly a pseudoscience.
I believe that a number of things which are normally termed "paranormal" represent just such a case. Evolutionists generally pooh-pooh such evidence and attempt to discredit the people involved with such studies, since they instinctively dislike the idea of having to deal with anything like that within an evolutinoary context.
Nonetheless, there are other people and groups of people who do not have the luxury of trying to ignore things which do not fit within their ideological paradigms. The king of France in the 1400's, for instance, did not have such a luxury. The Catholic church, apparently making up in thoroughness for anything they might lack in celibacy, took several hundred years to analyze the case of Joan of Arc, and ultimately determined that at least some of her activities required information that she had no way of having other than for paranormal means; they cannonized Joan in the 20'th century.
Likewise the US military does not have the luxury of ignoring such things. You can check out:
http://www.kingdomlife.com/kingdom/remote_viewing.htm
or do your own google search on 'Stubblebine' and 'remote viewing' at your leisure. Books have been published on soviet activities in this area and I presume American general officers are not paid to investigate pseudoscience.
My own take on this sort of thing resides on the Bearfabrique Babel Page which covers the story of the tower of Babel and the question of human languages. It turns out evolution doesn't work any better for human languages than it does for animals.
Rupert Sheldrake's www site is at Sheldrake dot org
Sheldrake is a former director of studies in cellular biology at Cambridge University who has made a second career of using statistical methodology and intelligent experiment design to investigate things normally termed "paranormal" and is generally viewed as public enemy #1 by the CSICOP crowd and other such "science vigilantes". If nothing else, his methods are unassailable and his credentials are significantly better than theirs are.
Sheldrake's "Seven Experiments Which Could Change the World" is available in paperback and is a must read. His experiments with dogs which apparently know when their owners are coming home have been documented on German cable channel shows and the most fabulous of all such animal stories resides on the Nkisi page at Sheldrake dog org
Another overwhelming argument against evolutionism arises from a realistic assessment of the amount of time which has actually been available for it. The tens of millions of years you've read about all your life turn out to be a bunch of BS fabricated for the benefit of Charles Darwin and not based upon any realistic analysis of evidence.
Robert Bass is one of America's best mathematicians and is responsible for a dynamical derivation of the standard Titus/Bode law in celestial dynamics, in other words, a demonstration that the positioning of the planets is actually a solution to a sort of a dynamical relaxation problem. He notes:
"Lord Kelvin stopped Darwinism dead in its tracks when he made an irrefutable thermodynamic calculation that at the rate which the Earth is cooling off (and heat is being conducted from the interior to the surface and then radiated into space) the Earth could not possibly be more than 2 to 20 million years old. This really put "the fear of God" into the staunchest Darwinists for a while."But when radioactivity was discovered, the uniformitarians rejoiced because they had found a "new" source of heat to prolong the Earth's life-span. But they _failed_ to repeat Kelvin's calculation, because the results would have been too embarrassing. I once found in a geology text-book an account of Kelvin's calculation, which (using Fourier transform solution) I modernized by incuding on the right-hand side of the equation as a "source" of energy inside the Earth the _maximal_ modern estimates of abundance of radioactive materials inside the Earth (which I got from publications by famed Princeton physicist Dicke). Part of the reason that I was fired from BYU is that I circulated a copy of my paper showing that with inclusion of the heat sources which Lord Kelvin had not known about, the _MAXIMAL_ age of the Earth gets revised upwards from his 20 Million years to only about 200 Million years..."
And then there's the question about dinosaurs. Readers may do their own google search on "Ica Stones" or check out this link. As I see it, despite the fact of locals producing the things once they discovered that gringos would pay for them, there's basically no possibility that the originals were all fakes.
There is no possibility that the state park systems of Utah and Ontario are both perpetrating the same fraud on the public without even realizing they are doing so. The basic reality is that Indian ancestors dealt with dinosaurs on a regular basis a few thousand or a few tens of thousands of years ago, and not 70 million years ago. Vine DeLoria in particular has no use for Christianity or any other form of western religion, making this line of evidence pretty much immune from being written off as Christian propaganda. Indian legends and oral traditions describe the stegosaur as having red fur and the characteristic saw-blade back and "great spiked tail" which it used as a weapon. The petroglyphs we find around lakes and rivers are warnings, meaning "One of these lives here, be careful"
In fact, aside from the one or two accurate depictions of Mishipishu such as at Agawa Rock, there are other more symbolic pictographs, and yet they all show the dorsal spines of the stegosaur:
My own findings regarding gravity, dinosaurs, and weightlifting are another line of evidence.
Moreover, The gravitational attenuation required for the super animals of past ages extended into the age of man:
That's right; the column stone the man is sitting on is something like 20'x20'x100'.
Those column stones were not created by dinosaurs and the Army Corps of Engineers has flatly asserted that no modern technology, much less any ancient technology, could move them (in present gravity that is).
The idea of the theory of relativity being blown to hell by a simple finding from the realm of the weightlifting sports is comical in the extreme and kind of makes a joke out of Time Magazine's naming Albert Einstein as the man of the last century. It kind of says old Al should have spent less time doing "thought experiments" and more time in the gym. I mean, somebody should have figured that one out 90 years ago.
Nothing Einstein ever said about gravity would allow anybody to believe that gravity had ever changed in our world. Einstein was trying to use relativistic time to account for the fact that light does not obey the ordinary additive laws for velocities. This was based on what he called "thought experiments", such as the mirror-clock experiment, rather than upon anything resembling real evidence or real experiments. Thought experiments, it turns out, are not a terribly good basis for physics. Moreover, the basic approach is unsound. Louis Carrol Epstein ("Relativity Envisioned"), uses the following analogy: a carpenter with a house in which everything worked flawlessly other than one door which bound, would usually plane the door until it worked. He COULD, however, purchase a couple of hundred jacks and jack the foundation of the house until the one door worked, and then try to somehow or other make every other door and window in the house work again... Light is the one door in the analogy; distance, time, mass etc., i.e. everything else in the house of physics are the other doors and windows. Epstein assumes that relativity is the one case you will ever find in which that sort of approach is the correct one, nonetheless, common sense tells us it isn't terribly likely.
It turns out there is another way in which one could account for light not obeying additive laws, and that this other way is the correct one. That is to assume that light simply does not have a velocity; that it is an instantaneous force between two points, and that the thing we call the "velocity of light" is the rate of accumulation of some secondary effect.
The story on this one lives on Ralph Sansbury's www site
The basic Ralph Sansbury experiment amounts to a 1990s version of the Michelson/Moreley experiment using lasers and nanosecond gates, which Michelson and Moreley did not have. Wal Thornhill's description of the basic Sansbury experiment and my own totally simpleminded description of it reside on the Bearfabrique Catastrophism page
The idea of relativistic time, of course, is unnecessary within the context of Sansbury's theory.
Another overwhelming argument against evolution arises from realistic assessments of the manner in which the last one or two changes in human physiology arose, and the time scales involved. Gunnar Heinsohn of the University of Bremen is one of the best and brightest in European academia and a major player in the ongoing efforts at med-basin chronological revision. I once sent him an email asking his version of how long caucasians had been around on the planet, i.e. how long had caucasian languages had, as an outside figure, to have "evolved".
Heinsohn comments are, as usual, on Bearfabrique
Heinsohn is saying that there is no reason, based on evidence or any application of reasonable archeaological methods, to believe that the changeover from neanderthal to modern man took more than two or three generations, and that says genetic engineering and re-engineering, and not evolution or anything resembling evolution.
In the case of humans, the chain is clearly broken near the top and not near the bottom. Analyses of neanderthal DNA have indicated that their dna was "about halfway between ours, and that of a chimpanzee", clearly eliminating them as a plausible ancestor (at least via evolution).
That says that anybody wishing to believe that modern man evolved has to come up with some closer hominid, i.e. a plausible ancestor for modern man, and that the closer hominid would stand closer to us in both time and morphology than the neanderthal, and that his works and remains should be very easy to find, since neanderthal remains and works are all over the map. Of course, no such closer hominid exists; all other hominids are much further from us than the neanderthal.
An evolutionist could try to claim that we and the neanderthal both are descended from some more remote ancestor (such as the so-called "archaic" homo sapiens) 200,000 years ago, but that would be like claiming that dogs couldn't be descended from wolves, and must therefore be descended from fish, i.e. the claim would be idiotic.
That leaves three possibilities: modern man was created from scratch very recently, was genetically re-engineered from the neanderthal, or was imported from elsewhere in the cosmos. The evidence seems to point to item 2 as most probable.
Other kinds of evidence point to genetic engineering and re-engineering having been some sort of a regular pastime or industry in recent prehistory, particularly finding necessary human genes which have been inserted via bacteria much the way our own genetic researchers conduct experiments.
All of this, of course, is aside from the probabilistic arguments which should have killed evolution off 70 years ago, the fruit fly experiments which should have ended the debate 80 years ago etc. etc. Basically, evolutionism survives because it is a quasi-religious ideological doctrine and because people with a lot of power and money hold to it not so much because of evidence but because they do not like any of the available alternatives.
Aside from all of that, it's not as if there were any shortage of traditional arguments against evolutionism, any one of which should have ended the debate 60 years ago.
The basic problems of evolutionism include a short list of things sufficient to demolish any normal theory, i.e. any theory which was not being held for irrational reasons.
Because of the nature of the laws of probability, the likelihood of any new kind of animal arising, with new kinds of organs, a new basic plan for existence etc. is a high-order infinitessimal, i.e. you are talking about a zero-probability event.
Now, it might be one thing to believe that one or two such events had ever occurred in the history of the world, but evolution posits an endless series of such events, i.e. it stands everything we know about probability on its head and requires a believer to pretend that such laws do not exist.
Moreover, natural selection could not plausibly select on the basis of hoped-for or future functionality; all you'd get would be a random walk around some norm for the old function. I.e. you'd have to come up with rationales for why an arm 10% of the way to becoming a wing offered an advantage, and then why an arm 20% offered an advantage over the 10% creatures, and then why an arm 30% of the way to being a wing....
Moreover, in real life, in trying to get to a new kind of a creature such as a flying bird, assuming you somehow miraculously evolved the first necessary new feature, then by the time the second evolved, the first would have de-evolved and either become vestigial or disappeared outright since it would have been useless - disfunctinal the entire while the second was evolving.
Darwininian gradualism has basically been abandoned at this point due to the lack of intermediates in the fossil record and also due to the Haldane dilemma and other problems of population genetics, basically the impossible time spans needed to spread genetic changes through sizeable populations of animals. The new semi-official replacement theory is the Gould/Eldredge notion of Punctuated Equilibria or "punc/eek". Unfortunately it turns out that punc/eek has even worse conceptual problems than the theory it is meant to replace:
It amounts to a pure pseudoscience since it involves a claim that the lack of intermediate fossils supports the theory. In other words, it amounts to a claim that a theory can be valided by a lack of evidence rather than evidence.
It amounts to a claim that inbreeding is a good thing and the source of all genetic advancement.
It ignores the familiar "gambler's problem" and in fact requires yet another kind of a reversal of overwhelming probabilistic laws in requiring tiny groups of animals to repeatedly spread out and overwhelm vastly larger groups, countless billions of times.
It ignores the fact that in real life, globally adapted animals invariably prevail over parochially adapted ones.
Gould and Eldredge do not even talk about a mechanism for the rapid change which must occur amongst the tiny groups of peripheral isolates which they try to claim are the salvation of evolutionism.
Realistically, that makes punk-eek a sort of a conjecture rather than a theory. A theory is supposed to have explainatory power, and they don't even try.
Punc-eek does not really succeed in avoiding the notion of large-scale violation of probabilistic laws; it merely substitutes one set of such violations for another. Alexander Mebane of the Tampa Bay Skeptics notes:
But it may be questioned, on obvious probability grounds, whether this way of accounting for the observed absence of intermediates will really wash. Admitting that every intermediate stage "must have" a small population, we may nevertheless observe that there must have been a far greater number of them than of the stable, " finished" species known to us, since (according to the Darwinist picture) every species-transition must necessarily pass through several intermediate stages. That greater number would increase the likelihood that some intermediate forms, here and there, would chance to be preserved as fossils. And the dogma further requires that the larger transitions - between different genera, families, orders, classes, and even different phyla, must all have come about in just the same gradual and continuous manner, simply by a long- continued succession of normal species-transitions! We have all seen "genealogical trees" drawn by evolutionists, to show the order in which these taxonomic groups have all come into existence over a long period, by successive "branchings from a common root".But it must be asked: Where are all the fossils that should have been left by the many millions of species that this tree requires to have once existed on its trunk, boughs, and branches, before its final branchings took place? Why are none of these seen in the fossil record of the period during which the evolutionists' tree requires them to have lived?
Why have none of these myriad intermediates survived to the present?
What about the recent cenezoic mammal explosion? Why have none of the myriad intermediate forms from that ever been found? Inquiring minds want to know.
For the lowdown on Chuck Darwin and his BS theory, and on the continuing efforts of feebs like Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge to keep the charade going for another generation:
How does that leave time for evolution? Inquiring minds want to know.
Right...
Hi Andrew. Here is a web site which shows some theories on how flight evolved in birds. It may have nothing to do with predators:
The selective pressure on the pre-birds to evolve the ability of flight in the sense of elevation, most likely was the reduction of the damaging impact of a jump or a fall from a level, supposely from the side of a tree-trunk.
(I surmise they use the term "Pre-bird", since "ProtoBird" TM has already been patented.)
Obviously, but we are playing Darwinians. That means that any just so story qualifies, as long as it "cudda happened".
I think you are wrong. From your link this is what the Talk Origins writer has to say about the purpose of Talk Origins
The Talk.Origins Archive exists to provide mainstream scientific responses to the frequently asked questions and frequently rebutted assertions that appear in talk.origins.
and
To summarize, if Mr. Fernandez is accusing the Talk.Origins Archive of pretending to represent both sides in the debate, he is clearly mistaken. The Archive does not now claim, nor has it ever claimed, to present anything other than the mainstream scientific perspective.
This is what propaganda means.
prop·a·gan·da Pronunciation Key (pr p  -g n d)n.
|
They can reasonably be called a propaganda mill.
Now, you've shown that you have reason to believe that t.o disseminates propoganda. What makes you believe that it is a propoganda mill. There is no dictionary definition of propoganda mill, but the term is reminiscent of releasing information favorable to said unit willy-nilly--without pausing to check if that infomation is true or not. Do you have information that this is indeed the case?
Certainly Medved thinks so, but he has emotional reasons to think so, along with his joy with fringe theories. What's your take?
What's the matter, "thinkplease"? Too many big words??
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