Posted on 03/02/2002 5:10:54 PM PST by Karl_Lembke
Some members of the Ohio State Board of Education are maneuvering to have "intelligent design" (ID) taught to Ohio students as an alternative to teaching them about biological evolution.1 These board members were pursuing the inclusion of ID in the biology curriculum despite unambiguous opposition from the relevant science advisory committee. One board member apparently regards this development as a chance for Ohio "to be on the cutting edge." Unfortunately, this cutting edge will only serve to whittle away a bit more of the collective intellect of the citizenry of Ohio, and the implications reach much farther than the state's boundaries.
According to the enthusiasts for ID, metabolic systems, such as the clotting cascade, are too complex ("irreducibly complex" in their preferred wording) to have arisen through evolution.2 Problems with this view are readily apparent. First, complexity is problematic to define, and irreducible complexity more so.
At present, it is doubtful whether it is possible to measure, prospectively and precisely, the complexity of biological systems so as to distinguish systems that are irreducibly complex from those that are reducibly complex. The concept of irreducible complexity is simply asserted; it is not based on either evidence or compelling logic. Consequently, proponents of ID must decide, essentially arbitrarily, what is too complex to have evolved. They can claim that all of life is too complex to have evolved. Or, are we to believe that bacteria evolved but that humans (or mammals, or whatever groups of organisms) were designed? Would it make any more sense the other way around?
A truly fundamental problem with the notion of ID, as a scientific idea, is that, ultimately, it has effectively no explanatory or predictive power. Suggesting that an unknown Intelligent Designer of unspecified attributes designed the eye, the clotting cascade, or the immune system offers no scientific insights into these biologic marvels and suggests no incisive experiments. There is also the nagging issue of how the Intelligent Designer implements designs without being noticed. How do ID proponents explain the existence of defective genes, no longer capable of expression, in one species that are strikingly similar to still functional genes in a related species? What insights does ID provide in accounting for the origin and spread of bacterial resistance to antibiotics? These phenomena are consistent with the principles of evolution, which find application from the molecular level to the level of ecosystems.
Were the genes associated with conditions such as sickle cell disease or cystic fibrosis designed by The Intelligent Designer, or by her sister, The Not-So-Intelligent Designer? If the response is that we do not understand the motives or goals of the Designer, then of what use is it to posit this inscrutable being in explaining such realities as the relatively high frequencies of these genes in the human population.
On the other hand, evolutionary principles provide a compelling rationale for the high prevalence of the b-globin allele associated with sickle cell disease: in a single copy it provides protection from the deadliest effects of one type of malaria parasite. Consistent with this hypothesis, sickle cell disease is prevalent almost exclusively in populations that live in, or are descended from those who lived in, malaria-endemic regions of the globe. Whereas some ID advocates suggest that mutations are uniformly harmful, there are thoroughly documented human mutations, such as the mutation associated with sickle cell disease, that are alternately harmful or beneficial depending on the exact genotype and the environmental circumstances.
Enthusiasts for ID ignore the growing laboratory evidence for the selection of biological function from random collections of proteins and nucleic acids.3,4 Molecular biologists and biotechnologists have shown that selection acting on randomly generated libraries of billions or trillions of biological polymers, such as peptides or RNA molecules, can produce molecules with useful biological functions, such as specificities for small ligands or catalytic activities. Computer scientists, complexity theorists, and even physical chemists have also documented striking examples of order that develops spontaneously.5,6 It is simply no longer tenable to equate order, complex structure, or sophisticated function uniquely with conscious design.
The Design advocates also ignore the accumulating examples of the reducibility of biological systems. As Russell Doolittle has noted in commenting on the writings of one ID advocate, mice genetically altered so that they lack either thrombin or fibrinogen have the expected abnormal hemostatic phenotypes.7 However, when the separate knockout mice are bred, the double knockouts apparently have normal hemostasis (reducible complexity after all), at least in the laboratory.8 These results cast doubt on the claim by proponents of ID that they know which systems exhibit irreducible complexity and which do not.
Evolution is best regarded as a fact. What is more, it is a fact that is inescapable. The resistance of bacteria to overused antibiotics, viruses to inhibitors of viral replication, and insects to pesticides, are all examples of the evolutionary process in operation. If you do research with cells or microorganisms, genetic variation and selection are continuously in evidence, even when you would prefer them not to be. Thus, that evolution occurs, and has occurred, is not in doubt. It has been directly observed in operation not only in the laboratory but also in the field.9 Where there is still room for argument and discussion is in the precise contributions of different mechanisms to evolutionary change. In this vibrant debate, intelligent design offers no meaningful contribution.
The effort to insert nonscientific ideas into Ohio's science curriculum is being carried out under the banner of promoting critical thinking.10 Perhaps other scientists will be as surprised as I was to learn that the education bill, "No Child Left Behind," signed into law by President George W. Bush on Jan. 8, originally contained an amendment from US Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.). This amendment, ultimately removed from the bill, comprises the following two statements: "It is the sense of the Senate that: (1) good science education should prepare students to distinguish the data or testable theories of science from philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science; and (2) where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why the subject generates so much continuing controversy, and should prepare the students to be informed participants in public discussions regarding the subject."
It would appear that a new and clever strategy has been found to get religious ideas into biology class. Those in other states concerned that the science curriculum remains focused on science should be vigilant against similar campaigns in their own states. Otherwise, they could find that the officials crafting the science curriculum for their schools are engaged in a process that comes closer to deserving the label "subversive design" rather than "intelligent design."
Neil S. Greenspan, MD-PhD, is professor of pathology at the Institute of Pathology, Case Western Reserve University, Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106-4943.
References
1. J. Mangels, S. Stephens, "Evolution targeted in curriculum study," The Plain Dealer, Jan. 15, 2002, pp. A1, A9.
2. M.J. Behe, Darwin's black box: The biochemical challenge to evolution, New York: Free Press, 1997.
3. J.R. Lorsch, J.W. Szostak, "Chance and necessity in the selection of nucleic acid catalysts," Accounts of Chemical Research, 29[2]:103-10, 1996.
4. J.K. Scott, G.P. Smith, "Searching for peptide ligands with an epitope library," Science, 249:386-90, 1990.
5. S.A. Kauffman, The origins of order: Self-organization and selection in evolution," New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
6. D. Kestenbaum, "Gentle force of entropy bridges disciplines," Science, 279,1849, 1998.
7. R. F. Doolittle, R.F. "A delicate balance," Boston Review, February/March 1997, or online at bostonreview.mit.edu/br22.1/doolittle.html.
8. T.H. Bugge, "Loss of fibrinogen rescues mice from the pleiotropic effects of plasminogen deficiency," Cell, 87:709-19, 1996.
9. J. Weiner, The beak of the finch: A story of evolution in our time, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
10. R. Lattimer, J. Calvert, "Intelligent design is a matter of academic freedom," The Plain Dealer, Jan. 18, 2002, p. B9.
The Scientist 16[5]:12, Mar. 4, 2002
Go ahead, say it. It's true. In real life, mutations all have names, such as Down's syndrome, Tay-Sachs Disease, Cri-du-chat syndrome, phoco-loci...
Ever notice the women walking around collecting money for the Mothers' March of Dimes? Ever notice that they're always asking for money for research to avoid mutations, and never for research to cause them? Think there might be a reason for that??
The big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion.
That's BS. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be Rastifari and Voodoo. The debate would be between the evolutionists, and the voodoo doctors: Dick Dawkins vs Jr. Doc Duvalier.
The real dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.
Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...
To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
God hates IDIOTS, too!
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) That sort of logic is less limiting than the ordinary logic which used to be taught in American schools. For instance, I could claim that the fact that the fact that nobody has ever seen me with Tina Turner was all the evidence anybody could want that I was sleeping with her.....2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:
They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
Many Experts Quoted on FUBAR State of Evolution
"If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all came from slime. When we died, you know , that was it, there is nothing..."
Jeffrey Dahmer, noted Evolutionist
Noting:
"For more than a century, Darwin has dominated the biological sciences, but his hypothesis for the evolution of life does not cohere with natural history and leads to a philosophical morass."
What would you figure the final fall-back position of the evolutionists will eventually be after it finally reaches the point at which they cannot even talk about evolution without inviting laughter and ridicule?
I fully expect, within the next five years, to hear from the talk.origins crowd and others like them, something like:
"Well, Darwin may not have been much of a scientist, and evolution was obviously a crock of BS, but Darwin was basically a good boy who simply went wrong, and he treated his dog good and his mother loved him..."
Don't believe it. The Bible itself tells us that is unlikely:
17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
Hugunin delves into the social and political melieu which spawned Darwinism, and the story which emerges is somewhat different from the picture evolutionists would have us see of Darwin, to say the least:
In an entry to his diary dated October 1838, the affable Darwin tells exactly how he came up with this hypothesis:
"I happened to read for amusement Malthus On Popula- tion, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-con- tinued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favor- able variat{ons would tend to be preserved, and un- favourable ones to be. destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at least got a theory by which to work."Parson Thomas Malthus, an economist working at the British East India Company college in Haileybury, England, had insisted that population (of men and of other living crea- tures) tends to expand geometrically, while food supply ex- pands arithmetically. Hence, the Malthusian world is so arranged that in the natural course of things, horrible crises must occur as population presses against fixed resources. This cycle can be alleviated only by the depopulating effects of "vice and misery"-that is, nonreproductive sexual activity and death-dealing poverty. To cull the human flock, neo- Maithusians advocated active social measures beyond accep- tance of starvation and disease.
The original full title of Darwin's 1859 opus, it should be noted, is
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, went a step further than Malthus in explicitly proposing that the human race should be culled on the basis of the inferiority of certain sub- groups, thus winning his title as the father of British eugenics. With the support of T.H. Huxley, Darwin's publicist, Darwin's son Leonard wrote The Need for Eugenic Reform, "dedicated to the memory of my father. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could towards making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book."
As for Malthus, publication of his dogmas led to the enact- ment of the 1830s Poor Laws in England, which abolished "outdoor relief"-the equivalent of today's welfare pay- ments-and forced the unemployed into workhouses,. where they slaved for scant rations of food until they took sick and died. This was the practical corollary of Malthus's precept that charity (or, even worse in his view, policies of elevating a na- tion's per capita living standards and productive capabilities) would simply lead to disastrous overpopulation.
Like Alexander von Humboldt, Malthus and the East India Company knew that statecraft can transmit the benefits of sci- entific progress throughout society. The United States was al- ready a living example of geometric expansion of new re- sources when Malthus assembled his Essay Humboldt and his associates devoted themselves to promoting that statecraft, while the Malthusians devoted themselves to opposing it.
Malthus's collaborator Sir James Mackintosh at Hailey- bury was the father-in-law of Darwin's cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood; Charles himself married his Wedgwood cousin and lived on his wife's Wedgwood wealth. The Darwin- Wedgwood~cIan were among the leading merchant-banking clans with immense control over colonial raw materials.
Can we simply ignore those dark, Malthusian thoughts, or are they perhaps relevant to the scientific issues? It is generally said that Darwin synthesized and subsumed the work of the scientists such as Humboldt who preceded him, but can this be the case, when we consider how at variance their funda- mental assumptions really are?
Man, in Darwins view, is just another beast and thus the human herd might be culled (via eugenics) just as one might cull a herd of cattle. And once one tries to justify eugenics, in- evitably the claim is made that some groups of men, for rea- sons of skin color, reIigion or whatever - are more fit than another.
Compare Darwinian eugenics to Alexander Humboldt's view: Humboldt insists that man and human civilization are of a higher order that is not dominated by the same kind of law- fulness that characterized the evolution of life up to that point.
Humboldt, Dana, and others of the continental science tradi- tion assert not only that man is the crowning glory of the process we call evolution, but also that man goes beyond this, taking evolution into a different, a higher realm.
This is very much a hot issue today. The much publicized book The Bell Curve, for example, by scientists Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, claims that human beings of darker pigmentation are just not as "fit" as those of lighter pigmenta- tion. The research for the book was supported by The Pioneer Fund, which had its start in the eugenics movement of the first half of this century. Before World War II, Harry Laughlin, leader of the Pioneer Fund, wanted the "lowest" 10 percent of the human population sterilized, in order to better build a race of human thoroughbreds. Laughlin and his Fund distributed Hitler's propaganda films in American schools, while Hitler put the Darwinian implications of eugenics into practice in slave labor camps.
Other contemporary researchers with a eugenics theme in- clude neuroscientist Xandra Breakerfield at Harvard University, who is trying to prove that violent behavior is genetic, while others are trying to prove that homosexual behavior is genetic.
At this point, it ought to be clear that no scientist studying something as broad as the origin and evolution of life can to- tally avoid issues that have political, philosophical, and reli- gious connotations. As much as such scientists might want to stay out of politics, the political questions are raised because of the very nature of the underlying assumptions adopted.
Logically, you only have to think about it a little bit to realize how stupid it really is.
You are starting out with apes ten million years ago, in a world of fang and claw with 1000+ lb. carnivores running amok all over the place, and trying to evolve your way towards a more refined creature in modern man. Like:
HEY! Ya know, I'll betcha if I put on these lace sleeves and this powdered wig, them dire-wolves an sabertooth cats'll start to show me a little bitta RESPECT!!!"
What's wrong with that?
The problem gets worse when you try to imagine known human behavorial constants interacting with the requirements of having the extremely rare to imaginary beneficial mutation always prevail:
Let's start from about ten million years back and assume we have our ape ancestor, and two platonic ideals towards which this ape ancestor (call him "Oop") can evolve: One is a sort of a composite of Mozart, Beethoven, Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare, i.e. your archetypal dead white man, and the other platonic ideal, or evolutionary target, is going to be a sort of an "apier" ape, fuzzier, smellier, meaner, bigger Johnson, smaller brain, chews tobacco, drinks, gambles, gets into knife fights...
Further, let's be generous and assume that for every one chance mutation which is beneficial and leads towards the gentleman, you only have 1000 adverse mutations which lead towards the other guy. None of these mutations are going to be instantly fatal or anything like that at all; Darwinism posits change by insensible degree, hence all of these 1000 guys are fully functional.
The assumption which is being made is that these 1000 guys (with the bad mutation) are going to get together and decide something like:
"Hey, you know, the more I look at this thing, we're really messed-up, so what we need to do is to all get on our motorcycles and pack all our ole-ladies over to Dr. Jeckyll over there (the guy with the beneficial mutation), and try to arrange for the next generation of our kids to be in better genetic shape than we are..."Now, it would be amazing enough if that were ever to happen once; Darwinism, however, requires that this happen EVERY GENERATION from Oop to us. What could possibly be stupider than that?
This is an old talk.origins archive post. Basically, I had challenged the talk.origins crew (bandarlog) to see if they could tell the difference between ideological writing samples from the famous racist and evolutionist, Chuck Darwin, and the famous racist and evolutionist, Adolf Hitler. A champion (Pflanze) from amongst the bandarlog arose to take up the challenge:
Subject: Re: Darwin/Hitler Test
From: medved@access.digex.net (Ted Holden)
Date: 1997/05/11
Message-ID: <3375fdd4.143923491@newsreader.digex.net>
Newsgroups: alt.fan.publius,alt.fan.splifford,alt.christnet,talk.origins
On 11 May 1997 12:06:52 GMT, cwpf@news.utk.edu (Charles W Pflanze) wrote:
Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development.
>This is more likely Darwin's work. Anyone doing experimental or
>developmental work in biology knows and uses all the the above
>observations. What's the big deal?
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world...
>This is more likely Hitler's work. Now we read about civilized races
>exterminating "savage races."
My reply:
Congratulations, you have earned an incredible distinction for yourself; you can tell your grandchildren that you were the first to flunk the official alt.fan.splifford Hitler/Darwin test. In years to come, after evolutionism has been laughed to scorn and is no longer taught in civilized nations, your name will be famous. Textbooks will note that, once it became obvious that even a genius such as Charles Pflanze could not tell the difference between Darwin's writings and those of Adolf Hitler, it was pretty much all over but the shouting.
The story goes that two old boys named Luke and Ray-Bob had themselves a truck and were buying watermelons in Fla. and Ga. for $2 and trucking them to Chicago and Detroit and selling them for $2. After awhile, they noticed that they were not making any money; naturally enough, they had a big business meeting and came to the conclusion that they needed a bigger truck.
Evolutionists, of course, are using time in precisely the same manner in which the two rednecks are using truck size, and there is no real reason for anybody to take them any more seriously than they would take the two rednecks.
Now, You couldn't easily prove that Luke and Ray-Bob couldn't possibly make money buying and selling for $2 since they could always say they merely needed the next size bigger truck. There is one thing which would really demolish their case however: that, God forbid, would be for somebody like Algor to get elected president and immediately outlaw the internal combustion engine; after THAT, guaranteed, nobody would ever make money trucking watermelons from Florida to Chicago and selling them for what they paid for them.
Likewise, If comebody could provide a coercive case for the fact that American Indians dealt with dinosaurs on a regular basis, then the time-frames which evolutionists so love to use as a magic wand to enable their doctrines would be demolished, the entire doctrine of evolutionism, broken. Not that there is any lack of logical proofs that no amount of time would suffice for macro-evolution but, without those time scales, no version of evolution is even thinkable, much less possible.
In this regard, evolutionists and geologists would appear to have developed a sort of a dinosaur-in-the-livingroom problem over the last few years. Take the case of Mishipishu, the "Water panther" for instance.
Petroglyphs show him with the dorsal blades of the stegosaur and Indian legends speak of him using his "great spiked tail" as a weapon. Remarkably, the Canadian national parks which maintain these pictographs are unaware of the notion of interpreting Mishipishu as a stegosaur, and refer to him only as a "manatou", or water spirit.
Vine Deloria is probably the best known native American author of the last half century or so. He is a past president of the National Council of American Indians, and several of his books, including the familiar "Custer Died for Your Sins", are standard university texts on Indian affairs.
One of Vine's books, "Red Earth, White Lies", is a book about catastrophism and about the great North American megaufauna extinctions which occurred around 12000 years ago (using conventional dating). In this book, Vine utterly destroys the standard "overkill" and "blitzkrieg" hypotheses which are used to explain these die-outs.
Vine informs me that "Red Earth, White Lies" is one of several books which arise from decades of research including conversations with nearly every story-teller and keeper of oral traditions from Alaska down to Central and South America. He tells me that, if there was one thing which used to completely floor him early on in this research, it was the extent to which most of these tribes retain oral traditions of Indians having to deal not only with pleistocene megafauna, but with dinosaurs as well. In "Red Earth, White Lies", he notes (pages 242-243) that:
Indians generfly speak with a precise and literal imagery. As a rule, when trying to identify creatures of the old stories, they say they are "like" familiar neighborhood animals, but then carefully differentiate the perceived differences. I have found that if the animal being described was in any way comparable to modern animals, that similarity would be pointed out; the word "monster" would not be used.Only in instances where the creature bears no resemblance to anything we know today will it be described as a monster. Since no dinosaur shape resembles any modern animal, and since the reports are to be given literal credibility I must suggest that we are identifying a dinosaur. Thus, in the story of large animals at Pomme de Terre prairie in southwestern Missouri, a variant of the story suggests that the western animals were megafauna and the creatures who crossed the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and invaded the lands of the megafauna were dinosaurs. The dinosaurs thus easily displace the familiar, perhaps Pleistocene, megafauna and move west, where we find their remains in the Rocky Mountains today
In numerous places in the Great Lakes are found pictographs of a creature who has been described in the English translation as the "water panther" This animal has a saw-toothed back and a benign, catlike face in many of the carvings. Various deeds are attributed to this panther, and it seems likely that the pictographs of this creature which are frequently carved near streams and lakes are a warning to others that a water panther inhabits that body of water. The Sioux have a tale about such a monster in the Missouri River. According to reports, the monster had ". . . red hair all over its body . . . and its body was shaped like that of a buffalo. It had one eye and in the middle of its forehead was one horn. Its backbone was just like a cross- cut saw; it was flat and notched like a saw or cogwheel" I suspect that the dinosaur in question here must be a stegosaurus.
Then there is the case of the Brontosaur Pictograph on rough stone.
This petroglyph, in fact, first came to light with the Doheney Expedition to Java Supai, the report of which comes not from the National Enquirer, but from the Peabody Muscum of American Ethnology at Harvard University.
Then there is the case of the man and brontosaur petroglyph at the Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah:
A book on Indian rock art sold atthe park visitors center notes:
"There is a petroglyph in Natural Bridges National Monument that bears a startling resemblance to dinosaur, specifically a Brontosaurus, with a long tail and neck, small head and all." (Prehistoric Indians, Barnes and Pendleton, 1995, p.201) The desert varnish, which indicates age, is especially heavy over this section.
Then again, there is the picture which the people at Bible.ca snapped of Don Patten with the petroglyph of the triceroptops:
And the pterodactyle at San Rafael Swell in Black Dragon Wash, Utah:
Like I say, it's never been easy to be an evolutionist, and it's not getting any easier.
In other words, a reasonable person might at least listen to a theory which requires one or two probabalistic miracles in the entire history of the Earth, but an endless series of them? That basically just stands everything we know about mathematics and probability on its head.
Defensive? No. Cynical. Jaded. But looking forward to your evidence.
The rubbish goes deep--wide!
Free Republic should be honored to have a registered net.kook joining us. So few are still active nowadays...
Welcome!
Free Republic is an online gathering place for independent, grass-roots conservatism on the web. We're working to roll back decades of governmental largesse, to root out political fraud and corruption, and to champion causes which further conservatism in America. And we always have fun doing it. Hoo-yah!
Now that you mention it, Medved's been spamming usenet since at least 1993. It is impressive, in a wigged-out sort of way.
Getting rid of evolutionism would do that...
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