Posted on 07/25/2009 10:11:21 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Life is not a naturalistic phenomenon with unlimited evolutionary potential as Darwin proposed. It is intelligently designed, ruled by immutable laws, and survives only because it has a built-in facilitated variation mechanism for continually adapting to internal and external challenges and changes. The essential components are: functional molecular architecture and machinery, modular switching cascades that control the machinery and a signal network that coordinates everything. All three are required for survival, so they must have been present from the beginning—a conclusion that demands intelligent design. Life’s built-in ability to adapt and diversify looks like Darwinian evolution, but it is not. Darwin’s theory of speciation via natural selection of natural variation is correct in principle, but it cannot be extrapolated to universal ancestry. What we see instead is different kinds of organisms having been designed for different kinds of lifestyles, with enormous potential for diversification built-in at the beginning, but with time this potential for diversification has become depleted by selection and degraded by mutations so that we are now rapidly heading towards extinction. Intelligent design and rapid decay point to recent Creation and Fall, as the Bible tells us....
(Excerpt) Read more at creation.com ...
That's one of those canards that gets passed around in creationist sources but isn't really true. You might be interested in Lucy's Knee Joint: A Case Study in Creationists' Willingness to Admit their Errors.
Evos just refuse to get it, don’t they?
The articles are pretty clear.
When scientists admit they were wrong, they’re heroes for uncovering the error (or fraud) and admitting to it.
When creationists admit they’re wrong,.........
I see a double standard.
The articles are pretty clear.
Okay, let's review. You said, "The thing that creationists disagree with is that enough variation can occur within a species to result in speciation." I read that to mean that the variation that does occur is not enough to produce new species. Is that correct?
Stultis disagreed with you and pointed out, correctly, that many if not all creationists claim that all existing species of horses are descended from two somethings that were on the Ark. That means that variation since then did produce new species.
You said, "Um, yes, really," which I read as a reassertion of your original point that variation does not result in speciation. In support, you provided links to a bunch of ICR articles.
I said that I'd read a couple of the articles and that they didn't seem to address the point. I then asked whether your disagreement with Stultis was because (a) you don't consider the current horse species to really be different species, or (b) you claim there were more than two horse representatives on the Ark. The only other scenario I can see is that you think variation was enough to produce speciation for a while, but now it's stopped. If I'm missing a scenario, please let me know.
If you have anything to add besides passive-aggressive snipes--like maybe a pointer to a relevant portion of one of those articles--please add it. Otherwise, your objection seems to be just another way of nursing your grievance against "evos" and doesn't actually have any substance.
Which was when, again?
My point exactly.....
Thank you very much.
My contention was that creationists, like ICR, don’t deny that wide variation within species (*kinds* may have been a better term) occurs but not to the point of what is called *macroevolution*.
Groups like ICR don’t seem to hold to the *Everything was created exactly as it is now* POV, and those links support that.
Ah, okay. So the representatives of the "kind" that was on the Ark were able to produce enough variations to give us the species we see today, but today's species are not able to produce enough variation to give us new species? Something like that?
I guess my other post didn’t get past my fingers.
I know about the knee joint and where it was found, I had in mind the fact that the bone fragments assembled into “Lucy” were found all over the side of a hill.
Yes. I've read many dozens of ICR articles, at minimum, possibly hundreds. I've also read cover to cover many of the classic books by ICR authors like Henry Morris and Duane Gish. (It was in Morris and Whitcomb's The Genesis Flood that I first came across this claim that only pairs of "kinds," and not the total number of extant species, needed to have been embarked on Noah's ark, thus making the size of the cargo and it's care-taking more manageable; although this argument has been repeated by Morris and others many times since.)
My complete antievolution library numbers around 200 volumes, at least if you include the small paperbacks. I've also followed the movement in other ways, for instance attending two national creationism conventions/conferences back in the 1990's, or spending a couple summers assisting researchers like Glen Kuban and Ronnie Hastings in investigating the Paluxy River "mantrack" claims of Carl Baugh and others.
You may be the creationist here, and I the evolutionist, but despite that, I, almost certainly, know creationism better than you do.
But I haven't followed the movement as closely in the last decade or so, and my antievolution library is mostly packed away. However, since you specify ICR articles anyway, how about this one:
How Could all the Animals Get On Board Noah's Ark?
by John D. Morris, Ph.D.
The total number of land-dwelling mammals birds, reptiles, and amphibian species is less than 20,000 or so. [Stultis: Wrong, incidentally. It's more, not less, than 20,000, by several thousand; and this is not "the total number," but only the number of scientifically named species. But nevermind.] The number of "kinds," the Biblical designation, is probably much smaller. For instance, of the 9,000 bird species, approximately 400 are hummingbirds, with only minor differences in color, size, and habitat. Very likely, they all come from only one or a few kinds, thereby dropping the total number.
There you have it. The president of the ICR says that, most likely, 400 separate species of hummingbirds arose, in the space of only a few thousand years mind (vastly faster than any evolutionist would consider plausible) from maybe two or three "created kinds" aboard the ark, or even from only one such "kind".
Is this sufficient? If not, please specify in advance how many more clear example will suffice.
Problem is that speciation is macroevolution by definition.
"Macroevolution" is defined as, "evolution above the species level." If a new species arises, then this is macroevolution. If MANY THOUSANDS of new species arise, within a few thousands, even mere hundreds, of years, from a single center of disembARKation, populating the entire globe with it's present level of biodiversity, then that's supermegahypermacroevolution, whatever YECs want to pretend.
Part of the problem is that the biblical “kind” is a much broader taxonomic category than species. Creationists hold that all species capable of hybridizing are members of the same biblical kind. This goes way beyond the narrow definition of species.
Creationists have no problem with speciation, as many species can fit under a single created kind.
==Problem is that speciation is macroevolution by definition.
Actually, when the Temple of Darwin refers to macroevolution, they mean unlimited protocell to man evolution. Creationists on the other hand hold that each kind was created fully formed and fully functional, and that all variation since (which is quite extensive) is limited to the boundary that defines a biblical kind. Moreover, creation scientists are quick to point out that this builit-in/designed mechanism, which gives the created kinds the capacity to vary, is the antithesis of the random mutations the Temple of Darwin depends on for goo-to-you evolution.
Then they weren't created "fully formed" and "fully functional".
Let's say, for instance, we believe creationist Wayne Frair, who eventually came to the conclusion (at least in a talk I heard) that all turtles were probably one created kind. How did God initially create a single "turtle kind" which was, simultaneously, "fully functional" both as a desert tortoise and as an obligate aquatic sea turtle?
That's just an extreme example, but of course it applies to less extreme variation, as in mere color and markings, or less dramatic habitat adaptations, as well. A single animal (or pair) can't simultaneously be "fully formed" both as an American mustang and as an African zebra. Those are identifiably different forms.
IOW you can't have it both ways. You can't say that the "created kinds" were front loaded with all this variation (i.e. that the variation was packed in and hidden somehow [in the genome?] as opposed to being acquired over time, as by some evolutionary process) and that this variation was only much later expressed in a wide variety of variously adapted (variously functional) forms, and say they were fully formed from the beginning. Obviously your doctrine entails that the "kinds" (somehow) possessed many capabilities, variations and adaptations NOT initially expressed in their "form" and/or "function".
It can work.
There's a difference between *fully formed* and all genetic material being expressed. Recessive traits are carried by a great many individuals who are fully formed and yet they aren't expressed.
Stating that an individual is fully formed, would be like stating that man was created as a physically complete, mature adult. He could have easily carried within him the genetic material for all the characteristics that have ever shown up in races across the globe.
As groups became isolated (a concept evolution relies on much) some traits would have become lost, allowing the recessive ones to show up. In that case, there's never any chance of *going back*.
Evolution presupposes, from everything I've read on this forum, that evolution is the INCREASE of information, but if an individual has front loaded DNA that contains all patters for all options within that species, the only way that some characteristics could show up is as a loss of information.
And lest you say that information is not lost in evolution, there's this........
Male Sex Chromosome Losing Genes By Rapid Evolution, Study Reveals
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2295556/posts
“Evolution presupposes, from everything I’ve read on this forum, that evolution is the INCREASE of information, but if an individual has front loaded DNA that contains all patters for all options within that species, the only way that some characteristics could show up is as a loss of information.”
—Information *can* increase, but I’ve never seen anyone suggest that information *has* to increase for evolution to take place. Much of evolution certainly is a result of a loss of information. In fact, it’s certainly the case that loss of information is the more common direction for mutations.
It can work.
Not much of an argument, that. "It can work" is pretty much an admission of the obvious: This idea is utterly gratuitous. It's prima facie wildly implausible (but maybe somehow, in manner unspecified, "it can work") and there's no reason whatever even for a creationist to believe it except that, 1., it allows some of the more obvious cases of evolutionary relatedness to be admitted, while pretending it's not really evolution, and, 2., it helps with the problem of Noah's ark by reducing the amount of live cargo.
Stating that an individual is fully formed, would be like stating that man was created as a physically complete, mature adult. He could have easily carried within him the genetic material for all the characteristics that have ever shown up in races across the globe.
That's not actually true. A single human can't even carry the genetic material for all possible AB blood types (since there are three alleles, A B and O, and an individual can only have two alleles).
Many genes have dozens of alleles (gene variants). Some have hundreds.
There's a difference between *fully formed* and all genetic material being expressed. Recessive traits are carried by a great many individuals who are fully formed and yet they aren't expressed.
If they aren't expressed they aren't part of the "form". You know what "form" means, right? It's the shape or structure of something, its morphology. It's basically the same thing biologists refer to as the "phenotype," which is as opposed to the genotype, and comes from the Greek word phaínein, which means to shine (forth) and appear, i.e. it's how something looks.
As groups became isolated (a concept evolution relies on much) some traits would have become lost, allowing the recessive ones to show up. In that case, there's never any chance of *going back*.
Pardon me, what was that you typed? "As groups became isolated"?
How, in the process of repopulating the entire globe, do you possibly get any more isolated than seven pairs of each clean animal and one pair of each unclean animal (Genesis 7:2)?!
There could hardly be a better example of how unworkably backward (literally backward) this idea is. You are (literally) asserting that maximum genetic diversity was to be found in population sizes of 2 to 7 individuals, and that diversity decreased from there as population sizes grew.
WHAT a howler! Talk about hypocrisy! Your argument is hollow because what is evolution but "it can work"?????? Some people see some similarities and auto-assume because of their ideology that creatures are somehow related by a common ancestor just because of similar bones, shared genes and so on...but that's nothing but sheer conjecture.
Soooo Christianity is perfectly compatable with evolution, so long as you ignore the scripture.
Got it.
BTW, I don't know why you keep bringing up Catholicism (particularly when demanding science should somehow be separate from religion and religion kept out of the science classroom) but I know alot of Catholics that believe scripture, Genesis and creationism, etc.
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