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.
How about negative Darwinian selection? It's a form of natural selection.
That's fair. The important point is that it is external and thus not controllable by the system. Beta-testing might be appropriate.
I have experienced the color green. I have, at one period, absolutely begged any supernatural being out there to come and enter my life to help me with my problems. Nobody bit. Not God, not Satan, not Baal, not Athena, not some supernatural being who I haven't even heard of ... nobody!
My sister - we'll call her Ann - talks to God daily & he talks right back to her. She "knows personally" the Holy Spirit. (Actually I think she talks to God Himself, but according to my Catholic upbringing the one God is also 3, 3, 3 Gods in One. But who's counting?)
Anyway, Ann sez "God is a gentleman", and that's why He won't even show Himself to you unless you get to an absolutely hopeless point in your life, and then, if you desperately want to believe in God, then he'll show himself you. IOW, you have to first believe in God in order to see him.
As it happens, no supernatural being ever answered my call, so I ended up solving my problems on my own, and couldn't be happier. Ann ended up being best friends with God, who constantly talks back to her as a literal voice in her head, and she couldn't be happier. (Satan, BTW, tries to horn in on their conversations. He's the voice in her head who can't help referring to "me", "I", "my". I thought the voice in my head that refers to "me" is in fact myself. But apparently not. But I digress...)
Anyway, Kevin, from this I conclude that Ann is delusional, and I am sincerely surprised that she's still able to function with some semblance of normalcy in her life. You, I take it, will conclude that I just wasn't trying hard enough to believe, or ... what?
I make mistakes and throw away my work all the time. Then, I'm not God. Neither can this Designer of Andrew's bear much resemblance to the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent guy I've heard so much about.
I haven't. I'm color blind to green. I really don't believe "green" exists at all. Describe it to me. Tell me what "greenness" is like.
No, He doesn't. Take the evolutionary findings of researchers. Change the label. Call it ID.
Vade, you answered it with your “infinite God-did-it loop” which could easily be substituted for an “infinite nature-did-it loop” with the exception, ironically, of predicting future events.
This is irrelevant. yendu bwam seemed to think that there were so many more Christians in the world than Athenians because of some kind of inherent truth to Christianity: Well, an awful lot of people seem strongly attracted (of their own free will) to Christ. I would infer that there is more truth (and more of value) residing there than with the Athenians.
I simply pointed out that the early growth of Christianity - just as impressive as the early growth of Islam 4 centuries later - was due to the coercive power of the State forcing it on the populace, just as with Islam, another pervasive religion. Do you disagree? Do you want to claim the rape of Hypathia never happened?
You have to look back at the post where he reasoned the existance of a branch-point ancestor of whales and hippos presumably younger than Pakicetus. Without worrying about whether the details of his logic are right--OK, he may have forgotten about the anthracotheres, which take the hippo line back almost to Pakicetus--he took some data and predicted a new fossil. Your theory don't do that.
Now, Andrew has a creation theory that he claims does do what evolution does. That's because it retains common descent, variation, and the death of the unfit. It looks like evolution because it is, except some designer is running in at some intervals doing, pardon the expression, God-knows-what.
If that's your ID theory, you can relax and let science roll on. Just figure out something for the designer to do that nature wouldn't do anyway.
No. I critiqued Dembski's entire article earlier. If you're too dumb to remember, then stop bothering me.
Thanks for those links, and the image. I would have liked to read McGinnis' paper on Nature's web site, but they want $15 for the privilege. Sigh.
The slide show was interesting, but I don't see that as conclusive evidence of evolution. The "Segmented Ancestor" (the worm) and the "Wingless Insect" aren't specifically identified. It's quite a leap from there to the fly. The other two, which are identified, look quite a lot like modern millipedes and centipedes. I suspect that those were, however, maybe two or three feet long. There's definitely something to those genetic experiments, but I would have to say that the jury's still out as to what it really ends up being. Without question, gene splicing can make for some pretty bizarre critters. Pity the fly with no mouth.
The UCSD article was also interesting, but here is the problem I see. The "multi-limbed crustacean-like ancestor" of 400-million years ago; If this creature could be "reconstructed" through gene splicing and induced mutations, which is what it sounds like they could do, why must there be 400-million years between them originally?
This places the hypothesis in the realm of speculation. We assume the original bug-crab-thing is 400-million years old because of the rocks their fossils are located in, and the rocks are dated by the fossils, particularly index fossils, that are found in them. The evidence of distant ages past is evolutionary supposition. Then there's that nagging problem of no world-wide unconforminity. The only exception is the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, but since that lies beneath the pre-Cambrian layers, it really doesn't count.
For me, catastrophism explains the geologic column better than uniformitarianism. Just looking at the Rocky Mountains of Southern British Columbia, for example; the smoothly folded, fossil-rich, sedimentary layers almost demand their formation while soft and wet. These rocks are now quite brittle making it very difficult to imagine how any uplifting force, over any length of time, could fold them without some sort of widespread chemical change in the rocks, which would have left traces.
What the genetic experiments do prove is that it takes brains to turn a worm into a fly. Unfortunately, genetic material doesn't do well at all when fossilized, otherwise we could test the thesis experimentally, but we'd also have to worry that the Jurassic Park nightmare could possibly happen (some people will do anything for money).
As to the question concerning the two and four-winged flies, is it not possible that neither one are really mutants? No explaination was provided as to how it was known an actual mutation was responsible for the two extra wings. Nevertheless, both are still flies.I don't deny horizontal variation. I mean, look at the poodle? Not even I believe that G-d created the poodle. Yes, it's a dog, but it's definitely not the original dog :-) So, lacking any evidence to the contrary, I'd have to say the 4-winged fly was likely either a seperate, unknown species that migrated into an area where it was eventually discovered, or an adaptation If it's an adaptation, I have no clue, and I won't guess, as to what might have been the force to start flipping it's genetic switches. It could have been anything.
Homeotic genes do appear to be quite interesting. The action of Ubx on the genes seems to be quite important. I would tend to think that these genes and the level of Ubx functionality to be a programmed function, resulting in a wide variety of lifeforms which all seem to be complete in the drawings and fossils at least.
The complexity of the organism would require more controls, as the DNA chain became longer, as the slide indicates by comparing the number of HOX genes in organisims of increasing complexity.
Now, while they say "gene duplication" is responsible for the added HOX genes, evolutionary presupposition only, stands in the way of the genetic material being assembled that way from the start.
If things evolved as the result of random, naturalistic processes, I would not expect to find the same genes controlling the development of similar structures in diverse organisms, but rather, similar genes doing different things in different species because of the randomness factor if for no other reason.
Unfortunately, this sort of research requires lots of money and expensive facilities for experimentation. A guy who used too write computer programs and now builds recumbent bicycle and tricycles isn't about to be given the opportunity to test his ideas out in such a place :-)
About Jonathan Wells. It's unfortunate that guys like that are out there, making the rest of us look foolish. As Alan Gislick observed in the NCSC paper: "We keep waiting for real scientific research to emanate from proponents of Intelligent Design but if Wells's latest effort is any indication, then -- to paraphrase a Russian proverb -- we may be waiting until shrimp begin to whistle."
When I became a Christain and a creationist, I didn't check my brain at the door. I don't judge books by their covers. Mr. Wells and the Discovery Institute don't even appear on my radar. If he really said and did what the NCSC says, then it's no wonder. I look at a lot of different creationists ideas and end up rejecting many of them because their proponents end up stepping in it all too often. They get cocky and proud then end up taking a fall. I also look at evolutionists ideas, those which can be tested anyhow, like this one.
I guess that's why I usually find myself standing alone on a lot of issues. I just don't fit into anybody's mold. Heck, maybe my Ubx clusters are acting up again :-)
It looks like the color of money.
However, notice how weak Scientific American is on the origin of life. The theory of evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life.
I'm sorry, but a rock does not become a plant through natural selection, and if it was so damn easy it would be a high school science project, with kids creating new life forms in the lab.
As easy as it is for weeds to pop up in my lawn, no scientist has been able to make one from inanimate matter.
So here is the reality. Evolution is a feature of the life forms put on this earth by intelligent design. If not for evolution, God would be busy all the time redesigning things.
The Big Bang, the cosmos, abiogenesis, morality, art, love, intelligence, and free will…
Nothing could more relevant. You made a bald assertion of fact: that Christians have committed these atrocities. You didn't say gnus had done these crimes. You didn't accuse Harvard professors. You said "Christians." Given the pride you demonstrate in thinking logically, presumably you were attempting to make a logical, sensible--even falsifiable--statement.
Are you using your own private definition?
Please define the term "Christian" and tell me where you got the definition.
If you cannot do this, I must conclude you don't know what you're talking about--that you are engaging in sloppy, nonsensical thinking.
Have you tried making yourself more attractive to them, lipstick, losing weight....
"I believe people who claim to have experienced "green" are delusional. And, as general re sagely points out, the fact the 5 billion people claim to have experienced the color green isn't persuasive. . . . . something about 5 billion flies having a taste for manure."
That is because you are locked onto anti-God. If you note, I used cellular design. If you note, Nebullis did not refute that, she said "Take the evolutionary findings of researchers. Change the label. Call it ID." Whatever it is, it is certainly not Darwinian evolution. Nebullis new thread even has Woese producing three times the starting of life. Why? The title says it all. New Cellular Evolution Theory Rejects Darwinian Assumptions. Whatever you think of the factor behind ID, it spells the death of Darwinian evolution.
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