Posted on 06/17/2002 3:10:50 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up
When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural selection 143 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it fiercely, but the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution's truth beyond reasonable doubt. Today that battle has been won everywhere--except in the public imagination.
Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy. They lobby for creationist ideas such as "intelligent design" to be taught as alternatives to evolution in science classrooms. As this article goes to press, the Ohio Board of Education is debating whether to mandate such a change. Some antievolutionists, such as Philip E. Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Darwin on Trial, admit that they intend for intelligent-design theory to serve as a "wedge" for reopening science classrooms to discussions of God.
Besieged teachers and others may increasingly find themselves on the spot to defend evolution and refute creationism. The arguments that creationists use are typically specious and based on misunderstandings of (or outright lies about) evolution, but the number and diversity of the objections can put even well-informed people at a disadvantage.
To help with answering them, the following list rebuts some of the most common "scientific" arguments raised against evolution. It also directs readers to further sources for information and explains why creation science has no place in the classroom.
1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
3. Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils--creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
14. Living things have fantastically intricate features--at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels--that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution. [Rebuttal omitted to save space. See the original article.]
CONCLUSION
"Creation science" is a contradiction in terms. A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism--it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms. Thus, physics describes the atomic nucleus with specific concepts governing matter and energy, and it tests those descriptions experimentally. Physicists introduce new particles, such as quarks, to flesh out their theories only when data show that the previous descriptions cannot adequately explain observed phenomena. The new particles do not have arbitrary properties, moreover--their definitions are tightly constrained, because the new particles must fit within the existing framework of physics.
In contrast, intelligent-design theorists invoke shadowy entities that conveniently have whatever unconstrained abilities are needed to solve the mystery at hand. Rather than expanding scientific inquiry, such answers shut it down. (How does one disprove the existence of omnipotent intelligences?)
Intelligent design offers few answers. For instance, when and how did a designing intelligence intervene in life's history? By creating the first DNA? The first cell? The first human? Was every species designed, or just a few early ones? Proponents of intelligent-design theory frequently decline to be pinned down on these points. They do not even make real attempts to reconcile their disparate ideas about intelligent design. Instead they pursue argument by exclusion--that is, they belittle evolutionary explanations as far-fetched or incomplete and then imply that only design-based alternatives remain.
Logically, this is misleading: even if one naturalistic explanation is flawed, it does not mean that all are. Moreover, it does not make one intelligent-design theory more reasonable than another. Listeners are essentially left to fill in the blanks for themselves, and some will undoubtedly do so by substituting their religious beliefs for scientific ideas.
Time and again, science has shown that methodological naturalism can push back ignorance, finding increasingly detailed and informative answers to mysteries that once seemed impenetrable: the nature of light, the causes of disease, how the brain works. Evolution is doing the same with the riddle of how the living world took shape. Creationism, by any name, adds nothing of intellectual value to the effort.
The Author(s):
John Rennie is editor in chief of Scientific American.
What you are saying is essentially that frumious is correct. What you are also saying, and this totally false is that it is legitimate to call an event 'random' when one cannot explain it. This is a clear misuse of language. Ignorance does not imply randomness. In other words you are making the argument of ignorance, a false argument. If an experiment can repeatedly show something to have happened, then that event which the experiment has shown to occur repeatedly is not a random event.
Good analysis, but I don't know about your last sentence. Personally, I have no idea how God thinks or operates, or even if God thinks (as we do) or if He actually conducts any operations of which we could be aware. The evidence is clear that we're here, and evolution appears to be the way we got here, so you may be right. But God's function and intentions in all of this -- even God's awareness of such matters -- is unknown to me. I'm not sure that we could ever know these things, and I have no idea how to begin exploring such questions. (I've read the speculations of holy people, but I can't personally verify what they claim.) One thing I'll try to guess at -- God didn't give us brains, curiosity, and free will if He wanted us to remain ignorant; and He won't be upset if we use these faculties and try to learn all we can about the world, the universe, and ourselves. If God is the creator of the universe, then the more we learn, the closer we come to understanding Him.
And Patrick, I think maybe you have set a record in the amount of replies to one thread in such a short period of time…
And Patrick, I think maybe you have set a record in the amount of replies to one thread in such a short period of time?
It's quite an amazement to me. But I can't really claim credit; all I did was post an article and then sit back ...
Nice first statement but it is hanging there essentially naked. You are defining things through eyes conditioned to see things in a certain way. Remove those blinders. The "society" of lions exists. It is small, but stable and it thrives. Male lions "murder" other males offspring. You can examine other animal "societies" and observe similar behaviors that do not hold to our "moral" concepts. Apparently infanticide, rape, and aggression are part and parcel of the great apes. So a "society" could exist that is stable and does not have the moral values that you have acquired. Moreover, the societies you envision are those with which you are accustomed. They hold values that you identify and treasure. However, you can see throughout human history the values that you now hold were not always present in thriving societies. It is not a given that men will not tear out other mens hearts. It is not given that all men are equal. If you do not believe in an absolute moral code apart from mankind, then human behavior is entirely due to mankind's "defined" morality. We are just a few years away from the Hutus and the Tutsis. Do you see China? Do you see Pakistan and India? Do you see Myanmar? Do you see Indonesia? etc. Now if the moral code is defined elsewhere why do these same things happen? That is because of free will. The choice to do good or evil. What is good? The absolutes, which I will not reference due to "D". What is then is the moral code of man? We know here. The foundation of our form of government is derived from those self-evident facts.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Notice Creator is in caps
"Survival of the fittest" does not convey equality, but it does create the stable "society" with self-serving "values". So yes, I do see "societies" that exist and thrive that have the self-serving properties you defined, but I wouldn't want to be a part of them.
Does it? Where? Do they know that?
I don't see even of 1/10 of 1/10 of 1% of Christians doing that.
Mother Theresa followed her moral code; it certainly didn't ease her life (you know, emptying the bed pans of lepers, day in and day out amid extreme squalor).
Hummm... that's not the way Hitchens described it. Perhaps he had a better view of it than you.
In a word: bullsh!t.
Nor did I say anything about selfishness - that is your description and both incorrect and stupid in this context.
I said "adherents" and meant a society sharing a sufficiently similar moral code.
I believe you misdirected your response. I said nothing about relativism.
People always put Mother Theresa high on their lists of most-admired people. Yet, if you ask someone if he wants his sister or his daughter to live like that, they almost always say they don't. This is a bit of a contradiction, at least on the surface. I think the contraction is resolvable when we realize that people imagine Theresa reacted to such activities (emptying the bed pans of lepers) in the same way we would -- with revulsion. Yet I think Theresa loved her work and it made her happier than any other occupation she could imagine. So the way I look at it, she selfishly (gasp!) persued her own desires. Therefore she's not all that different from someone like Madonna, who likewise follows her own desires. People get their pleasure in different ways.
Peter Singer discusses this in his book "Rethinking Life and Death" page 169-172. Singer quotes Darwin's journal in 1838 where he says he would prefer non theistic origins of man, and then Singer traces how Darwin slowly introduced this idea in his books over the next 40 years.
So? Ditto if I had lived in a Hindu society, a Muslim society, a Jewish society, a Shintoist society, a Buddhist society, etc. What's your point?
You may not have had a choice in another society.
What choice? How can one not have choices however limited? Again, what's your point?
No they are not within the gene. Genes only produce proteins and RNA which are used as structural elements of the organisms or as chemical catalysts for the functioning of the organism. The promoter regions are outside the genes in the non-coding part of the DNA. Genes are identified largely by working back from a stop codon. They are also identified by chemical analysis of a protein and then matching the protein with the gene that made it. As to the functions of junk DNA the functions we already have scientific proof of are quite varied:
Some studies have found that noncoding DNA plays a vital role in the regulation of gene expression during development
Over 700 studies have demonstrated the role of non-coding DNA as enhancers for transcription of proximal genes.
Over 60 studies have demonstrated the role of non-coding DNA as silencers for suppression of transcription of proximal genes.
Some studies indicate that non-coding DNA regulate translation of proteins.
From: Junk DNA (See article for references and more specific examples).
Non coding DNA (also called introns because they occupy the space between the coding DNA or exons) have another very useful role - to enhance the variety of proteins produced by an organism in a very efficient way:
The problem of identifying introns was compounded by the discovery that alternative readings of the genetic code exist in which "introns" function as exons.30 Some DNA behave as exons when expressed by one pathway, but as introns when expressed by another pathway.31 Both pathways can operate simultaneously, resulting in greater protein product variety.32
Termination codons are also sometimes deliberately bypassed, allowing the coding of a part of an intron in order to produce a specialized protein.
From: The Function of Introns
This discovery answered the nagging question produced by the genome project: how could the human body produce 100,000 proteins (which had already been identified before the project began) with only 35,000 genes.
Here we part company PatrickHenry. If there's no difference between (8 abortion, four venereal disease) Madonna and Mother Theresa, there's no difference between anyone (or between right and wrong). I am glad I don't live in that foggy world of yours.
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