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.
OOBFOO placemarker!?
Your posr did not cause me dismay because I do not take literally the creation story in Genesis.
If I did, I would be dismayed because your point about death being necessary to evolution does appear to conflict with what you say is the biblical implication that death is the result of man's sin. So I can see how that would be a conundrum.
However, I note that Genesis 3 22 (King James Version) has the following passage: "And the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become as one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live for ever"
This verse pretty well indicates that Man was never intended to be immortal, and therefore, that death is not the result of original sin.
So upon further reflection I'm not sure that your point is all that valid from a strictly Biblical perspective. (But what do I know? I'm not a Christian or practicing Jew. I'm just a Cemetarian, and certainly no Biblical scholar.)
cells (9). The elimination of the telomere caused cell cycle arrest (stopping of cell division), indicating that telomeres help cells to distinguish intact chromosomes from damaged DNA. In the cells that recovered from the arrest the chromosome was eventually lost, demonstrating that telomeres are essential for maintaining chromosome stability. Therefore, non-coding DNA is absolutely necessary for chromosomal structure and function. Studies published in February, 1997, show that organisms produce special proteins that bind to the telomeres during DNA replication (10). These proteins are counted in order to determine how long the telomeric DNA should be, otherwise the telomere would be shortened with each replication, eventually resulting in loss of critical genes.
From: When Junk DNA is not Junk
Interesting, if true. The lack of telomeres at the end of a run of DNA would be a simple way to detect if there's a break in the chromosome. (But score one for mundane materialistic explanation vs. some kind of mysterious intelligent life force that "knows" and interprets what's going on!)
However the paragraph seems to contradict known facts: Telomeres do in fact shorten over the course of multiple cell divisions. That's a big part of why old people stop growing & repairing themselves. Artificially lengthening the telomeres has kept test worms alive & sprightly far longer than their normal lifespans. (I believe it's C. elegans, and some female researcher - I don't have time to look it up unfortunately, but it's a very intriguing development regarding life extension & aging research.)
That junk-DNA is not junk is beyond doubt now. What is left to learn is to discover what functions are being coded for and where they lie. This will be a tremendous task and it is just beginning.
Telomeres only begin to make a dent in that 95%. The vast majority of "Junk DNA" are introns, short repeats, genes with invalidated promoter regions, etc., IOW things which are not telomeres.
although I suspect its role has been in regulating evolution itself by helping to separate the gene parts that got duplicated over time into functional groups, so that the protein parts that got duplicated tended to be discrete structural lengths of proteins. This had at least 2 advantages that I can think of. Maybe I'll go into it further someday. (But not tonite. The role of the junk is purely my speculation, anyway.)
Hmmm, interesting, directed evolution! Sounds like you are admitting design while trying to hold on to a materialist view!
In your dreams! But there is a deep pattern that developed, and I think it had its advantages, which would've been selected for. But I'm too swamped with work to go into that now.
That’s quite a charge “Palaeontology is absolute fakery”. So there is no useful information to be gained from the study of fossils? That life was much different in the past is an indisputable part of biological knowledge, not some atheist plot.
I’ve seen you trumpet the Cambrian explosion as being devastating to the theory of evolution. Creationists aren’t slow to use the so-called Paluxy human-dinosaur tracks when claiming that dinosaurs and humans lived together, therefore the earth is young a la literal Genesis. I even saw an Ozzie guy called John Mackay on TV last week, explaining how some dinosaur coprolites (fossil crap) were evidence for Noah’s flood. Apparently, these coprolites (in their former life) were in the middle of being burrowed through and broken down by dung beetles, when the beetles stopped working. Loads of them were found in a similar state of mid-deconstruction. According to Mackay, something had happened to stop these beetles. The only sensible conclusion? Noah’s flood!
BTW, young platypus have teeth.
You're ... in Washington??? <grimace>
May I remind you my input started with these statements---You are consistent. You allow as you are the sole possessor of certainty.
This was prompted by your statements, previously referenced. This in turn led to your question on pseudogenes. Which I declined to answer the way you wished. I may disagree with your interpretation of the data, but that was not my entry into the discussion. Even though Gore3000 may have used hyperbole to say there is no controversy, you essentially do the same thing in your answer. Thus my original comment.
Now you seem to have a misconception that to doubt and thus not accept an interpretation requires some sort of intellectual payment to hold that view. Nonsense, my mind belongs to me not you. If I propose that others hold my viewpoint, then that payment must be made. I did not make that proposition. The proposition I did make was in post 1400
Finally, I hope that you as a scientist are not asserting that the happenings here are science.
No, it's precisely gore3000's point. He thinks God is a machine language coder (not even assembler really - that'd be too inefficient!) who was not able to create cells with enough space for a big enough ROM to concentrate on implementing the functional specs; He had to do it while reusing vast amounts of code in very ugly ways - such as mutliple entry and exit points & combined backwards/forwards reading:
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.
... indeed it is excellent design! It is just this kind of excellent design that allowed Visicalc, the first spreadsheet to work in just 64k of memory and which allowed Lotus to do just about everything a spreadsheet needs to do in a mere 256k. Reuse of code is an efficient and proper programming practice when resources are limited or one wants or needs concise code.
Why would God - who created the cells in the first place - have to limit Himself in such a way?
p.s. Remember: "God has His own reasons" destroys any hope of your belief being falsifiable.
The "junk DNA" consists of the 95% of the genome after allowing for the exons, introns, promoters, and other regulatory parts-- jennyp post 1381
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." ---Ralph Waldo Emerson
Despite more evidence of your misunderstanding, this statement is not true. Beliefs are not falsifiable, they are held or not held. Theories are different.
I've known for some time that you would not be pleased. I live 2 doors down . . .
Celera's president and chief scientific officer Craig Venter said the jury is still out, but his camp also believes the repeated DNA has some use.
"We just don't know. We don't call it junk," Venter said.
One critic thinks both camps got it wrong.
"They say 99 percent of the genome is not genes. I believe it's 3 percent that is genes," said Bill Haseltine, president of Human Genome Sciences, a competitor of Celera.
At any rate, Haseltine believes studying the whole genome is a waste.
"It's clear we should focus on genes and not the genome," he said.
...
Still, the jury on the value of "junk DNA" is still out.
"The repetitive DNA may act as a buffer," said John McPherson, co-director of Washington University's Genome Sequencing Center. "I guess any theory is a good as the next."
McPherson's statement touches on part of my theory of why it's there. (Hint: it strongly implies random mutations!)
Thanks for the reference to Zipf's Law. I had vaguely heard of the phenomenon, and I was hoping to someday come across it again. Also, this seems to be where Stephen Meyer's claim (from the CRSC) came from that the DNA is like a language. When I get some downtime at work & need to decompress I think I'm going to do some experiments to test that Law. It should be fun. (In between laying on the beach of course... :-)
Why did Ford have to limit themselves by painting all Model T's Black?
Statements tend to imply things. Whether those implications are true or not depend on facts.
Repeats are used at histone binding sites which are indirectly involved in regulation of transcription.
Look, I don't support the nonsense that that Gore3000 spouts on these threads, but he culls information from other sites which occasionally get it right. So-called "junk" DNA is an issue about which I have had my hackles raised number of times. The creationists don't want to call anything God made "junk" and the evolutionists on these threads are, somehow, tied to the view that this "junk" represents an important Darwinian history carried around in every organism. In my view, both are incorrect. The term 'junk' used to be applied to regions outside of obvious ORFs and covers an enormous amount of DNA in many species, including humans. There are tons of papers describing uses for specific sequences within these regions. Telomeres, and their effects in aging are an obvious example. Don't forget that many pseudogenes and many repeats are transcribed. nuclear RNA concentrations have an affect on transcription of other genes. It's simply naive or ludicrous to write these regions off as useless historical baggage. Genomes as a whole, but particular the protein coding regions, (because we know more about them) give an evolutionary history of the organism. Junk isn't necessary for the narrative. And some of the protein coding regions isn't even critical for survival. Organisms (like mice) with huge chromosomal deletions that include protein coding genes survive. Yet, we wouldn't call those regions junk. Rather, such redundancy in the code is feature which allows an organism to be as robust as it is.
Anyway, welcome to the forum.
[They start with the example of English words]
The second example Zipf showed in his book was the population of cities (or population of communities). The population of the city as plotted as a function of the rank (the most popular city is ranked number one, etc) is a power-law function with exponent close to 1.
The income or revenue of a company as a function of the rank is also an example of the Zipf's law (also in Zipf's book). This should also be called the Pareto's law because Pareto observed this at the end of the last century.
Neither city populations nor company revenues are designed. Zipf's Law describes an interesting deep pattern, probably having something to do with chaos (I don't know), but it's just not evidence of design. (Who decreed that English words would be used by people in a Zipf's Law distribution? Is there someone at the Census Bureau who keeps track of the distribution of city populations & forces people to move out of cities that fall out of the distribution?)
It turns out that jennyp is right. The majority of intervening sequences are intronic.
They are a consequence of design.
It is hard to be wrong when you stake out both sides of a two-sided question.
The "junk DNA" consists of the 95% of the genome after allowing for the exons, introns
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