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.
In the meantime, I'll assume everything is A-ok up on the 'holodeck'?
Yes let us apply the Scientific Maethod to Evolution:
SCIENTIFIC PROBLEMS WITH MACROEVOLUTION:
1. OBSERVATION -steps of evolution have never been observed (Stebbins )
In the fossil record we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.(Gould )
2. EXPERIMENTATION -The processes would exceed the lifetime of any human experimenter (Dobzhansky )
3. REPRODUCTION impossible to reproduce in the laboratory. (Dobshansky )
4. FALSIFICATION -cannot be refuted thus outside empirical science. (Ehrlich )
RESEARCH PROBLEMS WITH MACROEVOLUTION:
1. ORIGINS -the chance of life originating from inorganic chemical elements by natural means is beyond the realm of possibility (Hoyle )
2. DEVELOPMENT -to produce a new organism from an existing life-form requires alterations in the genetic material which are lethal to the organism (Maddox )
3. STASIS -enzymes in the cell nucleus repair errors in the DNA (Barton )
4. GEOLOGIC COLUMN -out-of-place artifacts have been found in earth's sedimentary layers which disrupt the supposed evolutionary order (Corliss )
5. DESIGN -irreducible complexity within the structure of the cell requires design (Denton, Behe ).
(DNA REPAIR: The genome is reproduced very faithfully and there are enzymes which repair the DNA, where errors have been made or when the DNA is damaged. - D.H.R. Barton, Professor of Chemistry, Texas A&M University, Nobel Prize for Chemistry )
(CHANGE WITHIN GENETIC BOUNDARIES: Microevolution does not lead beyond the confines of the species, and the typical products of microevolution, the geographic races, are not incipient species. There is no such category as incipient species. Richard B. Goldschmidt )
(MUTATION ACCUMULATIONS RELENTLESSLY FATAL: Any random change in a complex, specific, functioning system wrecks that system. And living things are the most complex functioning systems in the universe.Science has now quantitated that a genetic mutation of as little as 1 billionth (0.0000001%) of an animal's genome is relentlessly fatal.The genetic difference between human and his nearest relative, the chimpanzee, is at least 1.6% Calculated out that is a gap of at least 48 million nucleotide differences that must be bridged by random changes. And a random change of only 3 nucleotides is fatal to an animal. Geneticist Barney Maddox, 1992 )
[They therefore decided that one of them should confront God and inform Him that His "services are no longer needed."]
Is there some doubt this is a made up story????
But the fossil record shows organisms in a distinct order of appearance; obviously God was zapping things into existence up until fairly recently. Why would he stop now? The Bible says He did it all in a couple of days, but the fossil record doesn't support that contention. Rather it says that life has been appearing and disappearing for quite a long time. God must pop in occassionally to zap new organism into existence (which is non-Biblical) to explain the fossil record -- either that or the scientists are onto something with evolution. And, there is evidence He must've been doing this up until fairly recently. Why would He have stopped?
This is a classic. An absolute classic. Thank you.
Come to think of it, there in fact is MUCH more "proof" the human race is de-volving :-D as you've theorized...
You need to read it first. Mentioning the fact of Ad Hominem is not pleading anything. You lost it after this point.
Yep, true to form Ad Hominem appears.
It is common knowledge among honest evolutionists today that Darwin's concept of gradualism via natural selection is no longer accepted in the realm of academia to explain the fossil record. Allow me to briefly exemplify by letting the following evolutionists speak for themselves:
[Stanley, Steven M., 'Macroevolution: Pattern and Process' (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1979), 332p.]
The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid. (p.39)
[Raup, David M., "Evolution and the Fossil Record," 'Science,' vol. 213 (July 17, 1981)]
So, the geological time scale and the basic facts of biological change over time are totally independent of evolution theory. (p.289)
[Ridley, Mark, "Who Doubts Evolution?" 'New Scientist,' vol.90 (June 25, 1981), pp.830-832. Ridley was in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University.]
In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualistic or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation....(p.831)
Ever notice the women walking around collecting money for the Mothers March of Dimes? Ever notice they're always collecting money for research to PREVENT mutations, and not to CAUSE them? Basically, in the real world, mutations all have names, like Downs syndrome, Tay-Sachs disease, Phoco-Loci, cri-du-chat syndrome etc. etc.
420 posted on 6/17/02 11:09 AM Pacific by PatrickHenry
Evolution, being the opposite of science, requires no faith---intelligence at all, just fabrication--observation of non-exzistant data and the application of made up/rationalization-reason.
Science has now quantitated that a genetic mutation of as little as 1 billionth (0.0000001%) of an animal's genome is relentlessly fatal.The genetic difference between human and his nearest relative, the chimpanzee, is at least 1.6% Calculated out that is a gap of at least 48 million nucleotide differences that must be bridged by random changes. And a random change of only 3 nucleotides is fatal to an animal. Geneticist Barney Maddox, 1992 )
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