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.
Not according to you Darwinians. After all the Pakicetus is a whale.(so you say)
We can consider other ways of life, for starters
Free will? Where did that come from?
If it wasn't based on mankind's needs, then morality would be a meaningless, arbitrary floating abstraction.
A meaningless statement without knowing what mankind's needs are or it is a restatement of your rejection of any explanation other than what you presently believe and that is no argument to me.
Everybody's different to some extent, but ultimately there is one human nature. And I think that history has shown that there is one general class of society that best serves mankind, given that one human nature.
The first part of your first statement is a tautology. The second part is unbelievable.-- Why do people act so differently(PH with Madonna and Mother Teresa). And finally, an unsupported conjecture, What is best?
You: "That is silly. Our omnipotent God used evolution to create the universe as it is exists today."
Me:I don't know what god you believe in but the Judeo Christian God is not an ape. We are created in His image which of course is not that of a primitive ape. Secondly you ought to read the Bible and double check the Hebrew. Days ARE 24 hours long in Creation and also pay CLOSE attention to the ORDER in which God created. The Judeo Christian God also doesn't lie. When He says SEVEN 24 hour days He means just that!
It is not possible to believe in the Judeo Christian God and evolution at the same time. To believe in evolution attempts to mock God (an ape) and call Him a liar. The Judeo Christian God is beyond our intellect. Also it is the premise of the evolutionist that there is NO god. It is not a coincidence that notable evolutionists are atheists. You've been duped by ignorance from many angles. Needless to say you also know nothing about science or being objective. Evolution is a joke riddled with hoaxes. It's like saying Bill Clinton is an honest man with honest intentions. Fat chance!
You: "Men of limited imagination and faith like you try to limit God's abilities to something they contain in their small minds."
Me: This is too funny. My faith is complete in His Word. Your's is not and you allow your imagination to run wild with fantasties of evolution. I don't limit God's abilities as you do through believing He couldn't get it right, was an ape and took millions of years to create all we see and don't see. It is YOU who is small minded, ignorant and lack faith, reason and logic.
Me: Assuming you have a "day job" if that fails you for some reason, consider being a stand up comic. You'd be a natrual. You really gave me quite a chuckle in more ways than one.
Our big brains.We can consider other ways of life, for starters
Free will? Where did that come from?
Me:I don't know what god you believe in but the Judeo Christian God is not an ape. We are created in His image which of course is not that of a primitive ape.
<cough> ROTFL <cough> <cough> ... Yep, we all know God is, in fact, an old white man on a throne!
No you are not, you are just speaking of the protein coding region before the stop codon. In fact genes were discovered through the proteins. By analyzing the proteins, scientists matched them up with the portion of DNA which matched the composition of the protein. Before the genome project was completed scientists believed that there were some 100,000 genes in the human genome because there were 100,000 proteins produced in the human body. When it was found that there were only 35,000 or so genes, and that 95% of the genome did not code for proteins an answer to the mystery was looked for. They found that one gene was making more than one protein through reuse of the DNA sequence by starting and ending the sequence at different points. A quite ingeneous system and certainly implying design, not evolution. In fact it implies design to such a great extenct that it is exactly the way in which old assembly language programs were constructed - subroutines would be written with different entry and exit points in order to reuse the code.
Also introns break-up the protein coding region and may themselves regulate transcription. The stop codon is not where it ends though either, you have regions further transcribed downstream which will contain information which regulates how stable the mRNA is and how efficiently it will be translated.
Quite correct and does not contradict anything I previously said. In fact, the stop codons are themselves used as coding DNA. It had been thought that DNA only coded for 20 amino acids. Recently it has been found that 3 new amino acids occur and are coded by the stop codons. Clearly there is a mechanism in the genome telling the coding DNA where to start and where to stop transcribing in adition to the other mechanisms that had been previously determined. This is more evidence of the interrelatedness of the entire genome to each other and also more evidence that the genome is not just a set of individual pieces randomly put together, but a very well organized system.
None of this is new to anyone and it is generally not what we are talking about when we are talking about Junk DNA. There are vast stretches of DNA in the genome which are nowhere near a gene or ceratinly not close enough to have any effect on gene expression via the mechanisms we know of. Perhaps there are indirect effects....?
Yes there are vast stretches of non-coding DNA in the genome (which prior to the discovery of their purpose were called 'junk DNA' by evolutionists), but these are everywhere - that is why it was so hard for the genome project to decipher where the genes were. In fact, it was done by two different organizations and the locations of genes match exactly far less than half the time. The problem of gene expression brings us to another great problem for evolutionists: a gene does not work unless it is told to work. All cells have the exact same set of genes, the exact same DNA - all 3 billion base pairs are in every cell (with the exception of the sex cells, blood cells and another I forgot). The different cells in the body perform different functions, behave differently and have a different physical structure because they are ordered by the controlling program in the organism to express different genes.
Vade again trying to intimidate an opponent with insults. Guess you call that honest discussion?
The saying goes that it is usually the first person that takes notice of the smell is indeed the one who farted.
Wow, where to begin? It is taken as an absolute given in biology that genes are related to each other.
Here are a few reports from the genomebiology website...
A nice analysis of a family of the bHLH transcription factors: http://genomebiology.com/2002/3/6/research/0030/
Mammalian Olfactory (smell) receptors: http://genomebiology.com/2001/2/6/research/0018/
These belong to a huge superfamily of proteins which act as molecular switches in the cell. All of these guys are very similar in size/structure yet they have distinct functions:
http://genomebiology.com/2001/2/5/reviews/3007/?isguard=1
This was just a quick search.
If you are really interested you can BLAST away here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/
...with your gene of interest.
Well, I think not.
Right, but things like mutations & other contingent events are random events.
We do not know exactly how that happens in all cases, but we do know the causes of some mutations - chemicals, the sun's rays, radiation, etc. Such mutations are not random at all. We therefore cannot say that all mutations are random with any degree of certainty. The most scientific statement in such a case is 'we don't know'.
Look, Frumious' claim that there are no real random numbers is basically the same as someone saying it's a determined universe because every particle's position & velocity can be predicted from its position & velocity the moment before.
I think that Frumious was speaking specifically of computers and in computers that is certainly the case. The random numbers for games in computers are usually generated by using the least significant portion of the computer's clock.
It's a useless, moot point. It's another variation of the cobbler's elves theory of ID: It only looks random, but there's really a supernatural being meticulously flipping the bits in selected spots of selected genes of selected organisms at selected times. It's utterly impossible to falsify.
No it is not. For example, I doubt very much that any scientist will tell you that weather is a random event. It may look random, we may not know all the components that go into what weather we get, but we do know some and we do know that certain conditions create a certain weather pattern which can be predicted. We all know that such predictions are not always correct, but they are correct enough times that we can say that the weather is not a totally random event. So you see, in a way it is you that is making the argument from ignorance in this case. You are saying that because we do not know something, it is a random event.
Quite correct - as far as it goes. However, what is important about gene expression is the mechanism for it. This is not a random mechanism, far from it. It is a very specific mechanism which tells each and every cell what genes to express and when. It is a mechanism which controls the actions of each and every cell throughout the organism's life. It is a mechanism which controls everything from the embryo's development to the time a person dies. Nothing random about it. In fact, it means that every part of an organism is tightly controlled by a set of instructions embeded in the genome. What this means is that a new gene is useless until it is coded into the organism's program to do something. This makes the arising of favorable new functions in a stochastic way totally impossible. It shows that evolution is totally impossible.
I realize I didnt do a good enough job clarifying my earlier point in regards to this. It has been known for some time that much of the human genome was "junk" (although the genome project gave us a much better estimate of how much of this there was in relation to the coding "non-junk"). There are quite a few studies if I remember correctly showing how enhancer elements can be found "intronnically" as well as in the conventional upstream portion of the start of transcription. For the most part these vast stretches of DNA which are non coding STILL dont advertise any obvious function. Currently researchers are investigating of those repeats are important for anything.
It had been thought that DNA only coded for 20 amino acids. Recently it has been found that 3 new amino acids occur and are coded by the stop codons.......This is more evidence of the interrelatedness of the entire genome to each other and also more evidence that the genome is not just a set of individual pieces randomly put together, but a very well organized system.
I am aware of the study you are referring to and I believe this is a very special case in very specific microorganisms. Recombinant DNA technology wouldn't work if this was ubiquitous. Your point about the complexity of the genome is appreciated though.
Yes there are vast stretches of non-coding DNA in the genome (which prior to the discovery of their purpose were called 'junk DNA' by evolutionists)
I am not sure how elucidating the function for junk DNA is the holy grail for intelligent design. It would merely imply nature is a bit more efficient than we had previously thought.
In fact the opposite seems to be true. Organisms with the fewer genes (up to a point) are the more advanced. What seems to show greater advance and greater complexity is not the number of genes or the size of the genome, but the amount of non-coding DNA in the genome. In fact, mammals have the most non-coding DNA of any species. The higher species achieve complexity through intricate programming designed to reuse genes for the manufacture of different proteins.
We are in agreement on the above. Except that you must realize that we have just discovered how much of this non-coding DNA there is and even in such a short time we have found how some of it is used. Also, the search for the function will be harder than the search for genes. For genes we had proteins to help us find them. For the non-coding DNA we do not have such a clue - yet.
I am aware of the study you are referring to and I believe this is a very special case in very specific microorganisms. Recombinant DNA technology wouldn't work if this was ubiquitous. Your point about the complexity of the genome is appreciated though.
True, it is quite rare for these extra amino acids to be produced. Just pointing out one of the complexities of the genome.
I am not sure how elucidating the function for junk DNA is the holy grail for intelligent design. It would merely imply nature is a bit more efficient than we had previously thought.
Now that we know that the genes are controlled by DNA outside of the gene itself we have a strong hint that many of the questions we have been asking for a long time probably reside in the non-coding DNA. The questions are - why do cells develop differently even though they all (with 3 exceptions) have the same genes in them - the answer gene expression controlled by the non coding DNA. How does an organism develop from birth, where are the instructions for such development - most likely in the non coding DNA. Why do people age - we know that there is something that tells cells to stop replicating after a certain point - not found yet, but we know it is somewhere. What tells a cell to do a certain thing such as shed tears, make certain chemicals, replace itself, etc., etc., etc. - we don't know yet, but the only likely place is in the non-coding DNA. Quite a program if you ask me, not likely to have arisen or been modified at random.
Wow. Something happened to the forum while I was working.
Anyhow, a fossil is simply the remains or traces of remains from an organism that lived during some time in the past. The word is derived from the Latin: fossils, which means "dug up".
Fossils usually are grouped into four categories, if I remember correctly. They are: calcitic, aragonitic, siliceous and chitinous categories of remains.
That's the classical definition of a fossil that I was taught in school. I have no argument with it.
Is that the sort of answer you were looking for, or were you more interested in my philosophy of the fossil?
Oh my god. Are you really claiming that multiple entry points, and overlapping code that must be executed backwards to function is an example of good design???
If you ever came to work at our shop, I would never, EVER let you write so much as a macro! :-)
How is that? Free will is of the mind not of the brain. Tell us how this brain developed free will and when it did that.
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