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.
LOL, I finally got a chance to examine the code. I think you're right!
howz your search ..."for the creator via evolution"---going?
One day is excusable but the eighteen or so years Shermer has had to examine the code speaks tellingly of his "skepticism". By the way, why would anyone need a magazine in order to be skeptical? Is it a crib sheet for new excuses for Darwinians?
As I understand it, it goes more into debunking mentalists, UFOs, Holocaust deniers... things like that.
I know just kidding. Those things aren't on my radar screen.
This doesn't agree with quantum mechanics experimentally (at least not so far.) The described concept of random seems only to apply to sentience whereas most physics would ascribe randomness only to inanimate things.
Of course I should've pinged you too to check my math, Dr. Stochastic!
Yes, that is nice, but if you notice the paper you are referring is dated 1991 and the one to which I refer is dated Mar 2002 as it is out of ADVANCES IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS Mar 2002 issue. The statements "Here, random texts and real texts are compared through (a) the so-called lexical spectrum and (b) the distribution of words having the same length. It is shown that real texts fill the lexical spectrum much more efficiently and regardless of the word length, suggesting that the meaningfulness of Zipf's law is high." appear to answer the contention in the 1991 paper, namely "The facts that the frequency of occurrence of a word is almost an inverse power-law function of its rank and the exponent of this inverse power law is very close to 1 are largely due to the transformation from the word's length to its rank, which stretches an exponential function to a power-law function".
No, you are absolutely wrong and if you look it up instead of looking for excuses for you phony evolution, you would stop repeating that nonsense. The chances are 50% because there are two alleles and by all scientific research either one is as likely to be chosen as the other. Since a new gene would have no allele it would only have a 50% of going on to the next generation. If it survived, it would only have a 50% chance of continuing to the next one and so on until such time as it had spread enough that sometimes both parents would have such a gene, so stop talking garbage and start facing the truth. You must remember this is a new gene - no one else has it. The chances of its spreading are very slim indeed. Because there is no selective advantage in a useless gene the chances of its spreading are always the same 50% at each reproduction. Such genes dissappear from the population for the same reason that any gene which which is detrimental (and that is the basis of your stupid evolution) dissappears if it goes around killing those who have it - because the rate of reproduction of that particular gene is less than that of the population at large. Even if you start with a population of one million with half having one gene (call it A) who reproduces at 100% and the other half which reproduces at 90% of the rate of the first gene (call it B), gene B will almost dissappear and be in less 1/1000th of the population in a mere 100 generations.
And no, 4, 5 and 6 do not magically dissappear as a problem to evolution no matter how much you would like them to. The one chance of finding a correct series of mutation at random (because again the gene is non functional) is astronomical. In addition to which, regardless of your nonsense about 'inefficiency is good' carrying extra baggage which does nothing is never beneficial, if you don't believe me, put ten pound weights on your clothes and start carrying them around for a while and let me know how much benefit you derived from it.
How much nonsense can you put in one post? Nothing depends on knowing the mind of the designer, nothing at all. We have a model in the DNA code which almost exactly replicates the way computer code has been written (only that the way the DNA code was done much better). It is also not an intuition, we have gone over this a long time and you have already agreed that this is indeed the way programming has been done, so cut the nonsense on that. And RWNilla has not given a single piece of evidence for his statements least of all the one you mention. In fact he said no such thing to me. Lastly, it does not matter what has been found up to now. Fact is that we keep finding new things going on in the non-coding DNA on a daily basis. Your statement that this much or that much is garbage is total nonsense. You are arguing from scientific ignorance and everyday that scientific ignorance is being pushed away. In addition to which it really does not matter for my argument if the code is in 1% or 150% of the DNA. What matters is that such a program is certainly in effect, that such actions have been shown by scientists to be going on in the genome, and that such actions explain quite well how things which we know do happen - such as how a cell comes to be such and such a kind of cell, how the body changes from conception to death, how the body reacts to the environment and internal conditions take place occurs. So no, you are just blowing smoke and you cannot refute a single statement I have made with any scientific evidence.
You can make all the correct calculations you want, if your premises are wrong, the result is wrong. Evolutionists claim that a slight difference in reproduction of a trait can make a man out of a bacteria. Yet they at the same time claim that a 50% less reproduction of a trait is inconsequential? Are you guys mad? Or are you guys such utterly desperate that now you are going to tell us the theory of evolution changed again in the last 15 seconds????
And the important part of your statement in the above is 'so far'. Everything that is little known looks random. Until recently we thought that weather was pretty random. But nowadays we can follow how weather changes pretty well and know why things happen. We know very little about quantum mechanics yet, evidence is very hard to get. In fact the randomness may be due to our ignorance - we may be following a wrong path or a wrong hypothesis and thus the observed effects look random. It is way too soon to tell that this is an example of randomness in nature.
You're missing some of the fun, Patrick. When somebody blows one of gore's assertions totally and hopelessly out of the water, you know he isn't going to just acknowledge the correction. Remember whales and hippos? "Wildly elliptical?" 1720? The Line of Death? (Ooops! That was somebody else!)
Jennyp's 1616, supposedly rebutted by gore's 1631.
We have here the full-blown Holy-Warrior Syndrome brazen. "I'm caught out but by God nobody's going to make me see it."
[Dunno why, but everytime I read his posts, this is what pops into mind]
Yes, continue to blind yourself to the truth, it is the only way to continue to hold on to your faith in your materialistic/atheistic evolution theory.
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