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15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense [THE FINAL DEBUNKING]
Scientific American ^ | 17 June 2002 | John Rennie

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.


TOPICS: General Discusssion
KEYWORDS: crevolist
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To: gore3000; jennyp
How come none of your evolutionist friends back you up?

Maybe it's 'cause she's doing fine on her own?

1,701 posted on 06/24/2002 8:02:35 AM PDT by Dementon
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To: VadeRetro
Some research indicates amplification effects are common and often render duplication mutations favorable.

Gene duplication appears to have occurred so many times that there must have been some initial advantage in some instances, even if the effects were indirect. Thanks for the links.

1,702 posted on 06/24/2002 8:33:42 AM PDT by RightWingNilla
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To: medved
So you get some creature which is perfectly adapted for its own "niche(TM)" and, according to the theory one surmises, the only way the creature would ever evolve after that would be for the environment to change, and new or different features to become advantageous.

No one is "perfectly" adapted. Life is a constant struggle for survival. The fish are also getting faster and better at evading the seals, a drop in temperature ushers in an ice age.

The females would go right on selecting against any male which tried to adapt outside the species boundaries. Or is some females velociraptor supposed to have said to herself:

"Say, you know, that Alvin over there sure looks weird with those wings and that beak, but that's sure gonna be useful for flying some day...

That was funny, thanks for the laugh medved. Seriously, evolution doesnt argue that beaks and wings just spontaneously appear out of nowhere in one generation. We are talking about "simple" adaptations and improvements thereupon - longer claws, faster arms, thicker skin etc.

As for flight... this page offers a simple hypothesis for how flight may have evolved in birds.

1,703 posted on 06/24/2002 8:46:46 AM PDT by RightWingNilla
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To: All




1,704 posted on 06/24/2002 10:01:34 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: VadeRetro
Congratulations on the even numbered post.

From here.

One of the more spectacular examples is this one, which gore has seen and forgotten dozens of times. Other people have other implausible excuses for ignoring it.

Please read your first link and explain this.

The inconsistency of empirical evidence with Ohno's model prompts questions on the validity of some of the assumptions underlying this model. One major assumption, which was inherited by the subfunctionalization model, is that one gene copy is sufficient to perform the respective function, so that a gene duplication is redundant and has no effect on fitness [1,10]. This notion has been widely accepted, and often becomes one of the central postulates of models of duplicated gene evolution [3,7,26,27]. Should this be the case, however, a duplication event would only very rarely achieve fixation [28,29]; moreover, in the event that a duplication is slightly deleterious, it would be effectively prevented from achieving fixation [30].

Although the notion of duplication producing redundant genes is central to current theories of duplicated gene evolution, the short-term benefits of gene duplications are well known. This is illustrated by the numerous observations of adaptive gene amplifications in response to antibiotics [31,32,33], anticancer drug treatments and exposure to various toxins [34,35,36,37,38,39] or heavy metals [40,41,42,43,44], nutrient limitations [32,33,45,46,47,48,49,50], pesticide treatments [51,52,53], extreme temperatures [54,55] and symbiotic and parasitic interactions [56,57]. Combining this information with the observations that recently duplicated genes evolve under purifying selection ([21] and our present work), it seems reasonable to hypothesize that a majority of duplicated genes that achieve fixation in a population increase fitness when present in two or more copies in a genome and thus are subject to purifying selection from the moment of duplication.

Recently duplicated paralogs appear to be a nonrandom group enriched in genes coding for proteins involved in different aspects of the organisms' interaction with the environment (see Additional data files). In particular, a substantial fraction of these paralogs encode (predicted) membrane or secreted proteins.


1,705 posted on 06/24/2002 10:16:58 AM PDT by AndrewC
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To: PatrickHenry
More entertaining than Spiderman. Is that a Marvel or DC production?
1,706 posted on 06/24/2002 10:23:11 AM PDT by RightWingNilla
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To: RightWingNilla
Suppose you aren't a flying bird, but you desire 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.

An idea of how hard it would truly be for "proto-bird" (TM) to make it to flying-bird status can be gotten from the case of the escaped chicken.

Consider that man raises chickens in gigantic abundance, and that on many farms, these are not even caged. Consider the numbers of such chickens which must have escaped in all of recorded history; look in the sky overhead: where are all of their wild-living descendants??

Why are there no wild chickens in the skies above us???

A flying bird requires a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including flight feathers, wings, a special light bone structure, specialized flow-through design hearts and lungs vastly more efficient than ours, specialized tails and balance parameters, and a number of other things. Now, you can imagine the difficulty involved for something like a dinosaur which did not have any of these things to evolve them all, but the feral chicken

already has all of these things!!!!!

In other words, if there's any chance whatsoever of a non-flying creature evolving into a flying bird, then surely, surely the feral chicken, close as it is, could RE-EVOLVE back into being a flying bird. They're only missing the tiniest fraction of whatever is involved.

They've got wings, tails, and flight feathers, and the whold nine yards. In their domestic state, they can fly albeit badly; they are entirely similar to what you might expect of an evolutionist's proto-bird, in the final stage of evolving into a flight-worthy condition.

According to evolutionist dogma, at least a few of these should very quickly finish evolving back into something like a normal flying bird, once having escaped, and then the progeny of those few should very quickly fill the skies.

But the sky holds no wild chickens. In real life, against real settings, real predators, real conditions, the imperfect flight features do not suffice to save them.

In real life, if you ever lose the tiniest part of some complex trait or capability, you will never get it back. In the real world, if you lack the tiniest part of some complex trait or capability, then, other than possibly via some genetic engineering process, you will never get it.

Thus we see that "proto-bird" (TM) not only couldn't make it the entire journey which he is supposed to have, he couldn't even make it the last yard if we spotted him the thousand miles minus the yard.

The basic question is: How in hell is some velociraptor supposed to make it the thousand miles, if history proves that a creature which amounts to the final stage of such a development cannot make it the final yard of such a process?

1,707 posted on 06/24/2002 10:24:03 AM PDT by medved
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To: RightWingNilla
More entertaining than Spiderman. Is that a Marvel or DC production?

Don't laugh. Such material is the main source of information for creationists.

1,708 posted on 06/24/2002 10:31:28 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: PatrickHenry
Don't laugh. Such material is the main source of information for creationists.

You are the only one posting those comics here.

1,709 posted on 06/24/2002 10:37:04 AM PDT by AndrewC
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To: AndrewC
What don't you understand? Why don't you just ask me to explain the entire article while we're at it?

In the case of your first giant blue font selection, it describes a model of duplication mutation contraindicated by their study. Note that other models are indicated. Your other grouping looks like a big Tah-dah on "nonrandom." Many processes in nature, e.g natural selection, are nonrandom. Please show where it says either "Evolution does not occur" or "God operates here."

1,710 posted on 06/24/2002 10:45:54 AM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: All
More Jack Chick comics on line:

In the Beginning.
Big Daddy (Evolution).
Earthman (Adam & Eve).

1,711 posted on 06/24/2002 10:55:01 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: VadeRetro
What don't you understand? Why don't you just ask me to explain the entire article while we're at it?

I understand it, you obviously don't. You apparently support jennyp's argument that a neutral duplication will inevitably be fixed. That is the one contraindicated. As to the random are you now disavowing the Darwinian random mutation foundation?

1,712 posted on 06/24/2002 10:58:00 AM PDT by AndrewC
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To: All

More Jack Chick comics on line:

In the Beginning.
Big Daddy (Evolution).
Earthman (Adam & Eve).

AKA PatrickHenry personal library.

1,713 posted on 06/24/2002 10:59:46 AM PDT by AndrewC
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To: biblewonk
You don't know much about data compression do you?

Why, please, enlighten me, sir.

1,714 posted on 06/24/2002 11:06:10 AM PDT by balrog666
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To: medved
Suppose you aren't a flying bird, but you desire to become one.

At this point, you have left the realm of evolutionary theory. Evolution jettisons teleology.

1,715 posted on 06/24/2002 11:06:35 AM PDT by Doctor Stochastic
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To: AndrewC
Jack's draftsmanship seems to have improved recently. I notice in "Earthman (Adam & Eve)," that the two title roles are played by caucasians.
1,716 posted on 06/24/2002 11:09:09 AM PDT by Gumlegs
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To: AndrewC
Please note that jennyp did not claim that neutral duplication would inevitably be fixed. She pointed out that neutral duplication would not inevitably be erased.
1,717 posted on 06/24/2002 11:09:46 AM PDT by Doctor Stochastic
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To: PatrickHenry
50% Placemarker
1,718 posted on 06/24/2002 11:10:33 AM PDT by Dementon
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To: AndrewC
Oops. I should have checked the copyright dates first. His draftsmanship appears to vary randomly.
1,719 posted on 06/24/2002 11:11:38 AM PDT by Gumlegs
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To: PatrickHenry
Not only that, the moon shines by the reflected light of the sun: it's a sun young moon.
1,720 posted on 06/24/2002 11:12:00 AM PDT by Doctor Stochastic
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