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Boris Godunov
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Portland, OR
Aug 2001
time: 00:29
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Neither of these (nor any of those) offer any proof against evolution. Even if their claims (which, it must be noted, are erroneous based on their own willful ignorance and selective interpretation) were true, it wouldn't prove evolution false, especially considering we've observed evolution in action.
Negative argumentation does not prove anything.
At any rate, I'll turn you to someone who has refuted all of these 9 "problems"
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanave...6/lapointe.html
At TalkOrigins, they've shown why these "evidences" are full of problems and lies themselves:
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/feedback/jun98.html
"In all likelihood, you have seen quotes from Nelson that have been taken out of context in order to "prove" that "scientists have doubts about the theory of evolution." One site on the web that has done so is the Top Ten Evidences Against Evolution site, which quotes Nelson and others out of context, and also repeats other legends such as the thoroughly debunked Lucy's knee joint story."
The site your source has been proven to quote Nelson out of context to support their claims. How's that for being dishonest? Check the TalkOrigins link and scroll down to the above quote, there are links showing how that thing is a crock of ****.
These are real stretches. Note they are not all inconsistencies, as the title claims. They are also only logical problems to creationists who are claiming they are problems, based on their perspective of how things should be. A perfect example is this one:
"That living things are suited for their environment better explains the fact that they were created for it not that they evolved into it."
If you can't see the logical absurdity of this statement when you compare it to what evolutionary theory states, then no wonder you believe this tripe.
The notion that living things are suited to their environment because they are designed to be is unsupported. It is also a twisiting of what evolution says. Evolution says that a species adapts via random variation+natural selection. It is the environment that determines the species suitability, not anything else. Species not suitable for an environment die, those that are live.
How does Creationism, if it believes all living things are suited to their environment by design, explain why 99%+ plus of all species that have ever lived are now extinct? There's your own logical inconsistency.
It goes on again and again with each item. Like:
"Similarity among living things points to a common design by a designer who used similar patterns."
This doesn't show an inconsistency in evolution at all! Evolution states systems are similar due to common ancestry. How does the above become more logical, unless one presupposes a designer in the first place? Absurd circular reasoning.
And I love this one:
"We find that the world was obviously made for humankind and this demands more than change for survival but order, interdependence, and design."
Obviously?! Why obviously? Evolution explains why humankind has thrived in our world. The notion we were "made" for it is unsupported, circular logic, yet again.
And what part of Ecolution does this falsify? Polystrate fossils are far better explained by mainstream geology. If the flood happened, please tell me how successive layers of forest, with rooted trees (amongst transported examples) with identifiable, mature soil horizons form 5/6ths of the way up the geologic column during a catastrophic flood.
The flood, utterly fails to explain the fossil record. Why are single celled bacteria buried before single celled eukaryotes? Why are single celled organisms buried before multicellular? Why are fossil forests not found at the bottom of the gc, given entire layers of paleosols have rooted trees in them, in fact, why are angiosperms & gymnosperms found so consistently at the layers they are found at, given they both produce small plants to large trees?
More on the geologic nonsense of the Flood:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icr-visit/bartelt4.html
Note the second above talks about your ICR, which you cite. Any clue as to who the ICR is and what they say? Here's a great link to their stupid claims:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icr-whoppers.html
quote:
Evidence supporting creationism (Note that they are all peer reviewed scientific papers)
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Whoa...peer reviewed? Where? What scientific journal were these published in? Just because it's trussed up as a research paper doesn't make it peer-reviewed. It was published in the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal Vol. 10! Oh, "scientific" journal devoted to proving Creationism! Yeah, I'm sure that's peer reviewed.
Here's some refutation of their geologic nonsense:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icr-science.html
Note they show how Austin is prone to making false claims and misinterpreting his evidence to support his conclusions.
Here's more on radiodating and why it is a reliable measure of age:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dating.html
"There are many situations where radiometric dating is not possible, or where a dating attempt will be fraught with difficulty. This is the inevitable nature of rocks that have experienced millions of years of history: not all of them will preserve their age of origin intact, not every rock will have appropriate chemistry and mineralogy, no sample is perfect, and there is no dating method that can effectively date rocks of any age or rock type. For example, methods with very slow decay rates will be poor for extremely young rocks, and rocks that are low in potassium (K) will be inappropriate for K/Ar dating. The real question is what happens when conditions are ideal, versus when they are marginal, because ideal samples should give the most reliable dates. If there are good reasons to expect problems with a sample, it is hardly surprising if there are!"
You'll note that just because there are situations wherein radiodating can be problematic does not invalidate its accuracy in all situations. Basic logic.
Regardless, geologist Austin is no biologist, and nothing he posits proves evolution wrong. Bringing dating methods into question doesn't change the fact that we have observed evolution in action. We have observed random variation + natural selection at work. How does questioning geologic aging methods contradict that?
quote:
There is no conspiracy. Most scientists just don't really have a choice since evolution is the only secular theory possible. |
Only secular theory possible? Why is that? If there is such evidence against evolution, why isn't another secular theory possible? Maybe all the species were planted here by aliens! That's secular, and is possible.
But you seem to be indicating that if evolution is wrong, then Creationism must be correct. False dichotomy. In order to show Creationism to be correct, you must come up with positive evidence for it. You must also explain why everything science has observed supports evolution (as you seem to admit here) yet such things are not correct.
I'm still waiting for you to support your previous claims. Scientific sources would help as opposed to the likes of that page that claims to have the 9 evidences against evolution. Hey, how about 29 evidences for?
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
Did you even read it? I did the courtesy of reading yours, you could at least do the same.
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Boris Godunov
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Portland, OR
Aug 2001
time: 00:29
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quote:
Originally posted by The diplomat
I never said it was. I just said that speciation is a theory not a fact.
Frankly, I don't care how old the Earth is. It probably is billions of years old. I firmly believe that life was created by God. Obviously, variations developped within species. But, I don't think the evidence supports the conclusion that all species evolved from a primitive soup of proteins without any God at all. |
Then why bring up the geologic nonsense of the ICR if you don't even believe it? 
Guess what? Just because you choose not to believe it out of ignorance (you seem unwilling to actually educate yourself on what evolution actually says but rather rely on creationist strawman garbage) isn't a problem for science.
Explain rationally why you accept variations within a species but reject that a species could vary enough to become a new one, especially since (as I showed) such things have been observed? Where is this magical barrier between species? Science certainly doesn't support your belief here.
As for the "soup," guess what? We know it can happen. Scientists have recreated the conditions of the primordial earth in a laboratory, and guess what? Proteins formed:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/home...suk/abiogen.htm
"In 1953, a University of Chicago graduate student named Stanley Miller working in Harold Urey's lab flipped a switch sending electric discharges through a chamber containing a combination of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water. The experiment yielded organic compounds including some amino acids, the building blocks of life, and catapulted a field of study known as exobiology into the headlines. Since that time a new understanding of the workings of RNA and DNA, have increased the scope of the subject. Moreover, the discovery of prebiotic conditions on other planets and the announcement of a bacterial fossil originating on Mars has brought new attention to the study of life's origins. Exobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe."
Does this disprove God? No. You can believe in God all you want. But please stop making fallacious attacks on what is and isn't scientific fact because it happens not to jive with your belief system.
Last edited by Boris Godunov on 27-07-2003 at 04:51
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The diplomat
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Terre Haute, IN USA
Sep 1999
time: 23:29
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I apreciate that you checked my links. I have read yours.
It seems to me phylogenetics does not necessarily prove common descent. It just proves that all life shares similar "building blocks". If life were designed, it would also have those same "building blocks", because it would make much more sense to design life piece by piece rather than build every life in a completely separate and unrelated way. After all, when engineers design an airplane, they don't start from scratch every time, they build on previous designs.
All airplanes share common characteristics because they were designed that way.
All life is automatically going to share common characteristics since all life shares the same planet, and therefore shares fairly similar environments.
This quote caught my attention:
"Finally, many molecules besides ATP could serve equally well as the common currency for energy in various species (CTP, TTP, UTP, ITP, or any ATP-like molecule with one of the 293 known amino acids or one of the dozens of other bases replacing the adenosine moiety immediately come to mind). Discovering any new animals or plants that contained any of the anomalous examples proffered above would be strong falsifications of common ancestry, but they have not been found."
If other molecules besides ATP are equally acceptable as currency for energy, then why did the others not develop simultaneously with ATP? In other words, if life evolved, and the other molecules are equally acceptable, then why is there not some life that uses ATP, and some life that uses UTP, that evolved simultaneously? I don't quite see why anomalous examples would necessarily falsify common ancestry.
And if only ATP works, then it would make sense that life would only use ATP if it were designed, since you are not going to design something to fail.
That brings me to my other point. The fact that life is most generally well suited for its environment can also fit intelligent design, since logically, if you design life, you are going to design it to fit into its environment. You are not going to purposely design life to fail.
It just seems to me that evolution has to involve circular reasoning to some degree. Since science cannot prove or disprove God, it can only rely on naturalistic explanation. If naturalistic explanation is the only acceptable explanation, then the only logical explanation to why life shares common characteristics, is common ancestry. Therefore, you are automatically going to classify life through a tree of life. Once you have your tree, you have proved common ancestry. But you had to assume common ancestry to begin with, since you are assuming a naturalistic explanation. If life were organized completely differently, scientists would not reconsider common ancestry, they would just draw a different tree.
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The diplomat
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Terre Haute, IN USA
Sep 1999
time: 23:29
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quote:
Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Guess what? Just because you choose not to believe it out of ignorance. |
I don't reject evolution because of ignorance. I reject evolution because I am not convinced by the research and conclusions of evolutionists. When I read that scientists believe they have uncovered a new piece of human evolution, and the evidence is only a partial skull, I have difficulty believing the conclusion on such fragmented evidence.
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Explain rationally why you accept variations within a species but reject that a species could vary enough to become a new one, especially since (as I showed) such things have been observed? Where is this magical barrier between species? Science certainly doesn't support your belief here. |
I believe variations within a species because it has clearly been observed. The cases of speciation that TalkOrigins mentions, are all minute changes. As MtG said, the time scale is too short to ever observe "significant evolutionary changes".
To put is simply: small variations do not neccesarily prove that a fish can evolve into a reptile.
We know from biology and genetics, that organisms have self-repair mechanisms for their DNA. These self-repair mechanisms will tend to prevent deviation in the genetic structure beyond a certain point. This will tend to work against variation to the point of becoming another species.
Maybe I am a bit confused about what a species is. If the barrier between species is whether or not the two can procreate together, then if I have a child that can't reproduce with other humans, is the child really a new human species? There are humans that are sterile, are they a new human species?
quote:
As for the "soup," guess what? We know it can happen. Scientists have recreated the conditions of the primordial earth in a laboratory, and guess what? Proteins formed: |
Not the Miller-Urey experiment! That was proved to be false. They deliberately set up the experiment with the perfect conditions they knew would likely form proteins. We don't know that the conditions in the experiment really were the same as on the primordial Earth. They probably weren't. You can't deliberately manipulate an experiment to get a certain result, and then claim the experiment proves what you were hoping it would prove!
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Boris Godunov
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Portland, OR
Aug 2001
time: 00:29
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quote:
Originally posted by The diplomat
I apreciate that you checked my links. I have read yours.
It seems to me phylogenetics does not necessarily prove common descent. It just proves that all life shares similar "building blocks". If life were designed, it would also have those same "building blocks", because it would make much more sense to design life piece by piece rather than build every life in a completely separate and unrelated way. After all, when engineers design an airplane, they don't start from scratch every time, they build on previous designs. |
How about phylogenetics plus the fossil record, which clearly shows step-by-step transformation of species? The two combined are rather unassailable as proof evolution occurred...in addition to our having observed evolution occuring!
But you're making the unfounded assumption that all systems for similar purposes share a common design, and biologically this isn't true. Take the eye. The eye has been shown to have evolved, independently, at least 11 times. Now, take the human eye. We don't see images exactly how they are. Our eye inverts the image, and then reverts it back. It's a convoluted and biologically unneccessarily complicated process for vision. Yet the squid sees things exactly as they are--its eyes do not invert images. Why didn't this vaunted designer copy the same design for squids for us, to avoid this unneccessary stuff? What about the designers other design flaws? Take the bottom-dwelling fish who is born with one eye on top and another on the bottom. The bottom eye is useless, as it has to rest in the mud. So, throughout the course of the fish's life, the bottom eye migrates up top to join the other. Does this sound like good design?
There are a plethora of other engineering problems in all species that make intelligent design very questionable as a theory. What kind of intelligence gave us appendexis, vulnerable scrotums, tailbones and such?
quote:
All airplanes share common characteristics because they were designed that way. |
And funny, because airplane wing design is precisely one of the fields where Darwinian mechanics is being used quite helpfully today to create better wings than can be engineered!
quote:
All life is automatically going to share common characteristics since all life shares the same planet, and therefore shares fairly similar environments. |
But guess what? This notion supports evolution, too. Since we have no proof of intelligent design, but tons of proof for evolution, which should we believe? Common descent is not refuted by positing a supernatural theory that explains the same thing, since supernatural theories defy any scientific verification. Occam's Razor applies. If faced with a plausible scientific theory and a supernatural theory for the same thing, the scientific one should be accepted.
quote:
If other molecules besides ATP are equally acceptable as currency for energy, then why did the others not develop simultaneously with ATP? In other words, if life evolved, and the other molecules are equally acceptable, then why is there not some life that uses ATP, and some life that uses UTP, that evolved simultaneously? I don't quite see why anomalous examples would necessarily falsify common ancestry. |
The answer lies in natural selection. Yes, other molecules could have formed the basis, but ATP ended up winning out through random chance. Who knows what happened to make that the case? Perhaps the others did arise, but simple chance made it so ATP happened to survive and the others did not. If ATP happened to be the first to form, then it may have had just the leg up to outcompete the others. Perhaps by the time the others got around to it, ATP was dominate enough that they couldn't hope to survive.
quote:
And if only ATP works, then it would make sense that life would only use ATP if it were designed, since you are not going to design something to fail.
That brings me to my other point. The fact that life is most generally well suited for its environment can also fit intelligent design, since logically, if you design life, you are going to design it to fit into its environment. You are not going to purposely design life to fail. |
Then why did your intelligent design 99.9% of the species that have existed on this planet to fail? You assert a designer wouldn't make his designs to fail, yet a huge majority of them have! Why? How does intelligent design explain that better than natural selection?
You are again using circular logic to back your point, namely that life is suited to its environment. That doesn't in any way promote intelligent design, unless you could prove that life was perfectly suited to its environment. That is clearly not the case. If we were perfectly suited to our environment, I'd have to wonder how disease and allergies are problems.
The scientific reality is that certain life is better suited to the environment than other life, and that life will win out. As the environment changes, life that is better suited to the changed environment will win out, whereas the life not suited to it (or worse suited to it) will die out, being evolutionary dead ends.
A perfect example of this is how giraffes evolved their long necks. We know from fossil evidence that the giraffes had a mammalian ancestor whose neck was comparatively normal to other mammals. So how did giraffe's neck get long? Well, the ancient giraffe diet consisted of leaves from trees (they had successfully evolved to be leaf-eaters, as the trees became, through natural selection, the predominat foliage. Ergo mammals who could eat tree leaves flourished, those that could not died out). The ancient giraffe had no problem reaching the lower branches of trees...but some giraffes, due to a random variation, had slightly longer necks and could get at higher leaves. Well, there were so many short-necked giraffes that the leaves on the lower branches of the trees soon became sparse. So, competition among small-necks became fierce. They soon began dying out, not having enough food to eat. Or maybe they became grass-eaters. However, the longer-necked ones could reach the leaves still, so they survived. And bred. And their longer necks were passed to the next generation. In the next generation, there were those with still longer necks! And guess what? The cycle repeated, with the longer-necked ones winning out over the shorter-necked ones, who eventually exhausted their food supply and died out. The result is what we have today, a long-necked giraffe.
If you accept microevolution, there is no logical reason to reject macroevolution. Given 100,000 generations, a species that has one random variation per generation will end up dramatically different after 100,000 variations, since inherited variations are cumulative.
quote:
It just seems to me that evolution has to involve circular reasoning to some degree. Since science cannot prove or disprove God, it can only rely on naturalistic explanation. If naturalistic explanation is the only acceptable explanation, then the only logical explanation to why life shares common characteristics, is common ancestry. Therefore, you are automatically going to classify life through a tree of life. Once you have your tree, you have proved common ancestry. But you had to assume common ancestry to begin with, since you are assuming a naturalistic explanation. If life were organized completely differently, scientists would not reconsider common ancestry, they would just draw a different tree. |
So you object to evolution and accuse it of being circular because it relies on a naturalistic explanation? Tell me, do you reject all naturalistic explanations, or just the ones you find morally objectionable? I just want to know how consistent you are, since science itself is founded on naturalistic explanation of observable phenomena. Do you reject that the Earth goes around the Sun? That relies on a naturalistic explanation. What about magnetism? Gravity? Hell, wouldn't it be easier to assume God does everything and go live in a cave in animal skins?
I don't think you know the history of evolutionary theory, as it certainly was NOT founded by someone looking to back up a presupposition of naturalism. Darwin was a creationist before he set out on his voyage. What he observed convinced him common descent and natural selection. It wasn't a preconceived notion.
This is precisely what scares me about creationists. Just because one theory, Evolution, doesn't jive with their dogma, they decide that the entire foundation of science is therefore incorrect. If you reject evolution based on this, you have to reject modern biology, medicine, physics, geology, astronomy, chemistry, etc., etc. If you're willing to do that, I will await your postcard from the fringe.
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The diplomat
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Terre Haute, IN USA
Sep 1999
time: 23:29
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quote:
Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Occam's Razor applies. If faced with a plausible scientific theory and a supernatural theory for the same thing, the scientific one should be accepted. |
That is not what Occam's razor says. It does not say anything about scientific or supernatural explanations. It simply says,
"one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything". There is nothing there about supernatural or scientific explanations. It simply says not to add unnecessary variables.
If you ask me, I think Occam's razor could support creationism. After all, creationism only has 1 variable, ie God, which is completely sufficient to explain life. Evolution on the other hand, has to involve many many variables that have to fit just right for life to work.
quote:
Then why did your intelligent design 99.9% of the species that have existed on this planet to fail? You assert a designer wouldn't make his designs to fail, yet a huge majority of them have! Why? How does intelligent design explain that better than natural selection? |
I meant designed for normal circumstances. It is not the organism's fault, if an asteroid slams into it.
quote:
So you object to evolution and accuse it of being circular because it relies on a naturalistic explanation? Tell me, do you reject all naturalistic explanations, or just the ones you find morally objectionable? I just want to know how consistent you are, since science itself is founded on naturalistic explanation of observable phenomena. Do you reject that the Earth goes around the Sun? That relies on a naturalistic explanation. What about magnetism? Gravity? Hell, wouldn't it be easier to assume God does everything and go live in a cave in animal skins? |
Of course, I don't reject all natural explanations. A person can have a problem with one particular explanation, while still accepting others. I accept natural explanations that are proven true.
quote:
This is precisely what scares me about creationists. Just because one theory, Evolution, doesn't jive with their dogma, they decide that the entire foundation of science is therefore incorrect. If you reject evolution based on this, you have to reject modern biology, medicine, physics, geology, astronomy, chemistry, etc., etc. If you're willing to do that, I will await your postcard from the fringe. |
Do you reject all food because you don't like one particular food item? No of course. Just because I have a problem with evolution, does not mean that I have to reject all science. I happen to love science.
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Agathon
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Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:29
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Someone mentioned evolution within species as opposed to creating new species. Presumably this concerns whether natural selection can occur separately from common ancestry.
Here's an interesting paper. This guy argues that evolutionary natural selection hypotheses aren't testable without hypothesising common ancestry. The claims of natural selection and common ancestry are logically independent, but the upshot is the hypothesis isn't testable unless you assume both.
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/CANS1.pdf
I went to the talk this paper is based on. Way out of my area of interest, but food for thought nonetheless - I was quite convinced at the time. (I hope he hasn't changed the paper too much since the talk).
Last edited by Agathon on 27-07-2003 at 08:54
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Jon Miller
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creationism (done properly) is outside the realm of science
evolution is a science (not done nearly as well as physics)
they don't really interrelate, except when creationism tries to say something about evolution (in which case creationism is getting out of bounds), or when people try to use evoltuion to say something about religion
there are many different creationist ideas that do not interfere with science (neither physics or evolution)
and evolution (as understood now) is nowhere near infallible, in fact I guarantee it is wrong (it is a lot closer to right than anything else we have in that area right now though)
Jon Miller
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Jon Miller
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quote:
Originally posted by Fez
There are things I accept and things I don't. And creationism is one of the things I don't accept. Comparing evolution to pink fluffy dinosaurs is the most retarded inference I have seen here yet. Evolution is infallible. |
it would be silly for you to accept creationism since you are in athiest
(I have heard about creationist nondeists, I am not sure if I understand their position though)
Jon Miller
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Berzerker
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topeka, kansas,USA
May 1999
time: 23:29
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Boris - quote:
But if Christian doctrine is so built upon the notion of Original Sin, then I can see the threat of evolution. Evolution being fact proves that Adam and Eve is a myth, and thus eliminates Original Sin as a factor in the world. This, in turn, would render Jesus's mission moot! |
How does evolution prove Adam & Eve is a myth? According to Genesis, God used existing "materials" to bring them forth. The Sumerians have a much older "myth" about the first peoples and they claim the Gods mixed their "blood" with that of an existing creature to make humans. The Zulu also have a "myth" about ancient wars between the "apemen" and the "artifical ones". Now, Christians obviously don't care about these stories, and while I reject original sin as an immoral premise (the sins of the father), I don't see how Christianity is compromised by evolution. We know humans are primarily responsible for the wide variety of dogs in the world, but that doesn't mean wolves didn't evolve before our interference nor does the evolution of wolves mean humans didn't jump in as a catalyst for dog breeding.
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27-07-2003 04:11
I wish I had your skill.
Evolution is a fact. The fossil record is proof of that. Why does Archeopterix look like a small Dromaeosaurian ("Raptor")? Because Raptors are the ancestors of birds. the Mitochondria in our cells are the decendents of symbiotic aerobic bacteria 2 Billion years ago; the proof is in that Mitochondrial DNA and ribosomes are bacterial in nature. They even found feathered dinosaurs; many paleontologists now believe ALL dinosaurs had feathers, although the large ones lost the downy covering to prevent overheating.
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