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Note this on Ayala debunking intelligent design, in a recent San Francisco Chronicle story:

"The most sustained criticism of intelligent-design theory comes from Francisco J. Ayala, a widely respected evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Irvine. Ayala refused to come to Berkeley in 1991 to debate Johnson when "Darwin on Trial" was published, a refusal that still rankles Johnson.

"Ayala says that Johnson's argument that a superior being designed human organs and other parts of the anatomy amounts to blasphemy. "If our organs have been designed by somebody, that person was very clumsy, outright stupid, and much worse than any human engineer," says Ayala.

"Take the human jaw. The jaw is simply too small for all our teeth, Ayala notes. The reason is that 2 million years ago, through natural selection, our brains started to become larger. The head grew -- and something had to give because the birth canal is not big enough to allow a larger head to pass through. So, again through natural selection, the human jaw became smaller. The larger brain has also made childbirth extremely painful.

"Millions of babies continue to die as a result of the mother's birth canal not being big enough for the head. What engineer would do such a lousy job? I would not want to do anything with a God who would design things so badly," Ayala says. ""

The story's at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/04/21/IN214026.DTL

1 posted on 05/09/2002 3:18:42 PM PDT by laureldrive
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To: laureldrive
Well, ID'ers appeal to the notion of the infinitely perfect designer -- so they're open to every criticism of the design -- the jaw, the weak back, the knee problems, useless organs like the appendix, etc.
2 posted on 05/09/2002 3:25:32 PM PDT by jlogajan
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To: laureldrive
"Millions of babies continue to die as a result of the mother's birth canal not being big enough for the head. What engineer would do such a lousy job? I would not want to do anything with a God who would design things so badly," Ayala says. ""

Point of order... Mr. Ayala.....why hasn't evolution allowed mother's birth canals to develop large enough for the increased brain size?

3 posted on 05/09/2002 3:26:55 PM PDT by Seeking the truth
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To: laureldrive
"Millions of babies continue to die as a result of the mother's birth canal not being big enough for the head. What engineer would do such a lousy job? I would not want to do anything with a God who would design things so badly," Ayala says.

I guess Ayala hasn't heard the final word on the subject.

God inflicts the pain of birth on women to punish them for Eve's sin. Of course in those days everyone lived a thousand years.
4 posted on 05/09/2002 3:27:03 PM PDT by Belial
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To: laureldrive
With comments like these, the guy probably does deserve some kind of an award. I recommend our own Darwin Award.
5 posted on 05/09/2002 3:27:08 PM PDT by DoughtyOne
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To: laureldrive
"If our organs have been designed by somebody, that person was very clumsy, outright stupid, and much worse than any human engineer,"

With as "billiant" as evolutionists are it would be nice to see them design a self correcting and self replicating cell.

11 posted on 05/09/2002 3:37:20 PM PDT by week 71
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To: laureldrive
much ado about nothing.
The guy's a chemistry geek, so what? This is his big moment to shine. Let 'im.
15 posted on 05/09/2002 3:44:27 PM PDT by Recovering_Democrat
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To: laureldrive
Francisco Ayala, 68

Not to worry. At his age it won't be long before he finds out where he came from and where he's going.

19 posted on 05/09/2002 3:52:25 PM PDT by mississippi red-neck
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To: laureldrive
A quick look at Democrat presidential hopefuls pretty much refutes ID and confirms Darwin, IMO.
26 posted on 05/09/2002 4:21:10 PM PDT by Ken H
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To: laureldrive
The BIG error here is in linking evolution to religon in ANY way. "Religon" was around long before the Christen era. Only man of all life has a "psychological need" for "something" to handle the unknown or what he cannot understand or fathom. Religeon (sp) answers this need. Man will ALWAYS look to it to comfort his "psyche". No matter what science "discovers" it will be around eons from now.
27 posted on 05/09/2002 4:33:28 PM PDT by Waco
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To: laureldrive
The difference in amino-acid sequence of the same proteins in different species [crystallin or hemoglobin for ex.] changes at the same rate over time, regardless of population size.

This is the theoretical basis for the molecular clock and according to neo-darwinian theory, it shouldn't exist, as it trivializes the role of natural selection in evolution. What this suggests is that chance plays a greater role in evolution than does natural selection. And, as micro-evolution is essentially a process that only optimizes existing genes according to enviromental or selection pressure, it would follow that macro-evolution would require the production of new genes using random chance acting on randomized DNA.

Bloody hopeless...

I wonder if this will come up at the award ceremony at the White House?

Brian.

28 posted on 05/09/2002 4:35:38 PM PDT by bzrd
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To: laureldrive
Ayala is a former Dominican priest who left the clergy to study evolution and genetics

Nuff said.

38 posted on 05/09/2002 5:21:20 PM PDT by Neenah
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To: laureldrive
Be kind to creationists. Every day there is one more nail in their coffin.

The sad thing is what they are doing to their children. The children's warped scientific knowledge will keep them from participating in science after their parents have taken the creation dogma to the grave.

"Children, two plus two is not four because it doesn't say so in the bible. Those mathematicians are wicked!"

Pathetic.

39 posted on 05/09/2002 5:30:24 PM PDT by Born to Conserve
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To: VadeRetro; jennyp; junior; longshadow; crevo_list; RadioAstronomer; Scully; Piltdown_Woman...
"Former priest becomes evolutionist" ping.
40 posted on 05/09/2002 5:31:04 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: laureldrive
I am quite confident our President is not in any way involved in the selection of these people. He just presents the awards.

This is just another way for the liberals to spit on his Christianity, so to speak!

43 posted on 05/09/2002 5:51:32 PM PDT by CyberAnt
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To: All

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50 posted on 05/09/2002 6:21:52 PM PDT by Bob J
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To: laureldrive
The term "intelligent design" is a bit of a redundancy, anyway. As usual, the Devil has everyone arguing on a level that misses th whole picture, and the whole point.
62 posted on 05/09/2002 8:08:26 PM PDT by agrandis
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To: laureldrive
Ayala is a former Dominican priest who left the clergy to study evolution and genetics. He achieved fame partly because of his work on the "molecular clock," a field in which scientists can date when some species diverged from a common ancestor. The timing of the clock involves analysis of DNA....

IF you keep on making the kinds of assumptions which evolutionists and their fellow travelers make, i.e. uniformity, the curious notion that only processes which we observe today could ever have been at work in past ages.

When I was a kid, nobody got nobel prizes or presidential recognition for that kind of thinking; you got to wear a dunce cap and sit in the corner for other kids to laugh at. Something's gone seriously wrong since then.

The big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion whicih operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.

The 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 them, they wouldn't BE witches...)

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:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

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?

64 posted on 05/09/2002 8:16:45 PM PDT by medved
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To: All

Some useful references:

Major Scientific Problems with Evolution

Evol-U-Sham dot Com

Many Experts Quoted on FUBAR State of Evolution

The All-Time, Ultimate Evolution Quote

"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

Social Darwinism, Naziism, Communism, Darwinism Roots etc.

Creation and Intelligent Design Links

Catastrophism

Finding Cities in all the Wrong Places

Given standard theories wrt the history of our solar system and our own planet, nobody should be finding cities and villages on Mars, 2100 feet beneath the waves off Cuba, or buried under two miles of Antarctic ice.

Intelligent Versions of Biogenesis etc.

Talk.origins/Sci.Bio.Evolution Realities


65 posted on 05/09/2002 8:18:47 PM PDT by medved
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To: laureldrive
The tacit assumption (and central fallacy) of Ayala's criticism of ID is that God would only design us in conformity with our purposes and our convenience. In other words, God forgot to consult us before he proceeded to create us. Ayala is surely aware that no human invention is ever perfect, ie. it is always a trade-off. So why would he presume to give God instruction in what constitutes "perfect" design -- Ayala has no idea what perfection actually would look like or how it would play out in the real world that we actually live in. This "perfection" is in truth nothing but fantasy. It can't even be found in the designs of nature which consistently dwarf our own. In the real world, it is enough that a thing simply works.
83 posted on 05/10/2002 2:10:33 AM PDT by Bonaparte
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To: laureldrive
Ouch!
115 posted on 05/10/2002 8:27:13 AM PDT by <1/1,000,000th%
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