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.
Now I take issue with your characterization of the manner of my arguing, as you knew I would. My words speak for themselves quite capably, thank you very much.
But then again and bottom line, I am a "minister without portfolio" here, like yourself, and without authority. I don't like playing cop but some of the crap just makes me angry, partially, at least, because it's absolutely irrelevant to any article that is purportedly being discussed.
The above is absolutely wrong. It is the reason why so many gamblers lose their shirts. If the odds against winning the lottery are say 1 in 100,000,000 and you played it 99,999,999 times wihtout winning, the chances of winning on your next bet are still 1 in 100,000,000. Random events do not have a memory.
No, you are absolutely wrong. If you bet on the lottery on the next 100,000,000 plays, your odds of winning at least once are 0.9999999999.
You are talking a posteri about 1 chance while looking back at 99,999,999 failures; he is talking a priori looking forward at 100,000,000 chances. They are not the same situation as even the garden-variety, mathematically-challenged Freeper can tell.
I ask you, will you admit you talking about a different situation than the one he proposed?
No, I am not being obtuse. I am telling you that you are wrong. First of all a duplicate will not work until it is 'connected' to the rest of the organism - just like a tv will not work if you do not have electricity. I have already shown that such is the case, I have given scientific evidence that a gene that is not expressed does not work. You have rebutted by saying that duplicate genes always have the expression factors duplicated at the same time. Such a statement is totally ridiculous to speak of about random mutations. There is nothing that tells where the expression code is to be found within all the non-coding DNA between genes. In fact, there is nothing to tell, where a gene starts. There are no 'start' codons. There are only 'stop' codons. As I mentioned before, the only way scientists have been able to find the starts and ends of genes is by comparing the DNA to that of a protein produced by the body and matching the sequence of amino acids to the DNA that coded it. So you are way out in left field on that.
Mendel was very lucky in that the genes which encoded for the phenotypic traits he was tracking showed independent assortment. However when genes are so close together on the same chromosome, they get passed on as if they were "one" gene. Imagine now the duplicate sitting right next to your "dominant" gene in your little pundit square.
Is this ignorance or obfuscation? It does not matter if it sits next to another gene or not, the picking of genes to be passed on is totally random and whether it gets picked every time the one next to it gets picked or not, the chances of its being picked are still 50% - like those of every other gene in the genome.
Your gambler analogy doesnt hold up here Gore. Life continually propagates itself, in theory there is no limit to the number of chances you have - there is no running out of money. Consider bacteria. The bacteria are a self-renewing population. These guys divide once every 20 minutes - they're playing with house money. When an unfavorable mutation occurs, that bacterium simply die and the gap is filled in with the progeny of the wild types - no big deal. I used your lottery metaphor to point out that even if something has a low probability, given enough chances you will eventually hit it. So after many years and generations of bacteria, eventually you are going to get a mutation which confers an advantage, even if the odds are 1,000,000 to 1 for that hit.
Yup, you had been warned over a month ago about such antics, yet you did it again in your posts# 1784 and 1791. Guess you think that splitting your insults in two will make a difference. Clearly you continue to try to evade the rules of this forum.
BTW - you and your friends seem to have some kind of idea that if you hit somebody under the belt that it is improper to hit back. Don't know who you folk think you are, but I for one find it perfectly legitimate to hit back when attacked and everything in your posts #1784 and 1791 was a response to your deliberate provocation. It was also an attempt to destroy this thread in which your side is losing abysmally.
And you know that how? You read minds? You have read the minds of all the scientists out there? You must be getting pretty desperate to make such an absurd comment.
Did you read my discussion with Andrew where I pointed out that perhaps ...
I read it. 'Perhaps' is not a scientific term. Perhaps martians started life on earth because they found the climate friendlier here. Perhaps there is life in other planets. Perhaps all the stuff in the Art Bell show is true - but I seriously doubt it.
What the scientist believes the evidence he discovered means is irrelevant. The evidence speaks for itself. - me -
Listen to yourself Gore! I am gonna go out on a limb here and say the Chairman of the Department of Genetics at U. Penn is perhaps just a little bit more qualified to interpret the data on junk DNA than you are.
My point stands. First of all my statement is backed up by evidence from just the kind of scientists you speak of. Your 'evidence' for junk DNA was from that nobody Lindsay (who may perhaps be Vade Retro himself) using TalkOrigins as a source. So in the matter even of authorities, you lose.
When Galileo was arguing that the earth went around the sun… -me-
I find it more than a little ironic that you should use this example. The religious fundamentalists...
I find it utterly desperate of you to try to refute my statement with such an irrelevant argument. My argument in 1785 was: " When Galileo was arguing that the earth went around the sun, the geocentrists had the same evidence as he and argued strongly against it due to their ingrained prejudices. The evidence belongs to the world, not to he who discovers it." You cannot refute it, but if you'd like to argue against it and look ridiculous, I can't stop you.
With repair components available, how does the DNA "know" when to start or stop evolving?
In post#1774 I said:"It is more than complex, it is completely interrelated. You cannot shotgun your way with random mutations to create such a way of doing things. The authors call this whole developmental process a "program"." This was in reference to your attempt at rebuttal to my post#1754 in which I showed a summary of the human developmental process. The scientist who wrote the article called it a program. And indeed I agree with that and I also posit with certainty that a program cannot be changed at random. The proof is quite easy as I said, take any program go around changing bits and bytes on it at random and see if it works better. Now the relevance of this to your statements is that as I said, a new gene has to be connected to the rest of the organism. A new gene would not be included in the developmental program. It would require reprogramming of the developmental program. To reprogram it by random means is totally absurd. So your new gene would never be useful, would never be connected until it became part of the developmental program. That's why evolution is absolutely impossible.
Does not matter if one looks at it going forward or backward. Each time you buy a ticket, that ticket has a one in 100,000,000 chances of winning. Whether it is the first ticket you ever bought or the 100,000,000th ticket. Luck does not 'have' to change. Numbers do not 'have to' come up. As I said random events have no memory and it is those who ignore that simple fact and continue playing that have built all those huge hotels in Las Vegas. RWN said it was almost certain that a win would result. I say there is no such certainty in random events. There is a probability, but any time one plays a random game one must realize that it does not matter how many times one played and lost - the dice, the cards, the roulette wheel, the little balls in the lottery - have no memory so one starts with the same chances each time.
No serious biological scientist doubts the basic tenets of evolution. There is no alternative scientific model which fits the data. I already told you not to take my word for it. Start with e-mailing the authors of the drosophila passage you pasted above. They could probably use a good laugh after writing NIH grant proposals all day.
I read it. 'Perhaps' is not a scientific term. Perhaps martians started life on earth because they found the climate friendlier here. Perhaps there is life in other planets.
I said perhaps since the paper I cited looked only at chromosomes #21 and 22. It was an extrapolation. And the number they arrived at was in the ballpark of 10,000 processed pseudogenes.
Perhaps all the stuff in the Art Bell show is true - but I seriously doubt it.
Art Bell has as much credibility as your so called creation "scientists". I am not kidding.
Your 'evidence' for junk DNA was from that nobody Lindsay
I have no clue what you are talking about. My evidence is from a number of sources. The paper is "Molecular Fossils in the Human Genome: Identification and Analysis of the Pseudogenes in Chromosomes 21 and 22" at this address:
http://bioinfo.mbb.yale.edu/~nick/reprints/human_pseudogenes.pdf
Its a good read. Start with this and Ill give you more if you wish.
ingrained prejudices
Sounds like a certain blue friend of mine. hmmm.
There you go again, ducking the question or deliberately misunderstanding. The difference is between one ticket and 100,000,000 tickets for the next drawing. Which would you choose, hypocrite?
Do you even think about your posts or do you just wing it with the first bullshit you think up?
I vote for Art Bell on his worst day over these hypocrites.
Let's take it one step at a time. Correct me if I am wrong, but your statement is a bit of a departure from your previous assertions that NO change is possible. Am I reading you correctly now? Just answer the question - can the genome handle change - "yes" or "no"?, don't respond with a blue essay.
There is no "knowing" involved. The repair enzymes are good, but not infalliable. Mutations are inevitable.
Hey some people think aliens seeded the planet with primitive bacteria. Pseudoscientists of the world unite!
(I agree, this is getting brutal).
Excluding data? Please back that up. I think you are misidentifying those who are excluding data.
Why is there differential repair?
AH, the AH argument. Wins all of the time in the Darwininian universe.
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