Slims

I have read the other threads on evolution vs. creationism, and I was amazed by the blanket statements and bickering.

The intent of this thread is to create a place where people can post the evidence for/against evolution.

Rather than say: "There is no evidence for evolution" or "There is lots of evidence for evolution" say stuff like: "Here is why the theory of evolution can't possibly be correct..."

Or just post articles written by people who are far more eloquent then we are:

Link

From Scientific American:
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.

Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty--above a mere hypothesis but below a law. Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses." No amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generalization about nature. So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution--or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that matter--they are not expressing reservations about its truth.

GALÁPAGOS FINCHES show adaptive beak shapes.
In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent with modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution. The NAS defines a fact as "an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as 'true.'" The fossil record and abundant other evidence testify that organisms have evolved through time. Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling.

All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make physicists' conclusions less certain.

2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.

"Survival of the fittest" is a conversational way to describe natural selection, but a more technical description speaks of differential rates of survival and reproduction. That is, rather than labeling species as more or less fit, one can describe how many offspring they are likely to leave under given circumstances. Drop a fast-breeding pair of small-beaked finches and a slower-breeding pair of large-beaked finches onto an island full of food seeds. Within a few generations the fast breeders may control more of the food resources. Yet if large beaks more easily crush seeds, the advantage may tip to the slow breeders. In a pioneering study of finches on the Galápagos Islands, Peter R. Grant of Princeton University observed these kinds of population shifts in the wild [see his article "Natural Selection and Darwin's Finches"; Scientific American, October 1991]. The key is that adaptive fitness can be defined without reference to survival: large beaks are better adapted for crushing seeds, irrespective of whether that trait has survival value under the circumstances.

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.


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This blanket dismissal of evolution ignores important distinctions that divide the field into at least two broad areas: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution looks at changes within species over time--changes that may be preludes to speciation, the origin of new species. Macroevolution studies how taxonomic groups above the level of species change. Its evidence draws frequently from the fossil record and DNA comparisons to reconstruct how various organisms may be related.

These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has been upheld by tests in the laboratory (as in studies of cells, plants and fruit flies) and in the field (as in Grant's studies of evolving beak shapes among Galápagos finches). Natural selection and other mechanisms--such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis and hybridization--can drive profound changes in populations over time.

The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution implies that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about 100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should not--and does not--find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (144 million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.

Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might have originated this way. If superintelligent aliens appeared and claimed credit for creating life on earth (or even particular species), the purely evolutionary explanation would be cast in doubt. But no one has yet produced such evidence.

It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the 1930s. More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor.

4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution.

No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. Pick up any issue of a peer-reviewed biological journal, and you will find articles that support and extend evolutionary studies or that embrace evolution as a fundamental concept.

Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are all but nonexistent. In the mid-1990s George W. Gilchrist of the University of Washington surveyed thousands of journals in the primary literature, seeking articles on intelligent design or creation science. Among those hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, he found none. In the past two years, surveys done independently by Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University and Lawrence M. Krauss of Case Western Reserve University have been similarly fruitless.

Creationists retort that a closed-minded scientific community rejects their evidence. Yet according to the editors of Nature, Science and other leading journals, few antievolution manuscripts are even submitted. Some antievolution authors have published papers in serious journals. Those papers, however, rarely attack evolution directly or advance creationist arguments; at best, they identify certain evolutionary problems as unsolved and difficult (which no one disputes). In short, creationists are not giving the scientific world good reason to take them seriously.

5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution.

Evolutionary biologists passionately debate diverse topics: how speciation happens, the rates of evolutionary change, the ancestral relationships of birds and dinosaurs, whether Neandertals were a species apart from modern humans, and much more. These disputes are like those found in all other branches of science. Acceptance of evolution as a factual occurrence and a guiding principle is nonetheless universal in biology.


Unfortunately, dishonest creationists have shown a willingness to take scientists' comments out of context to exaggerate and distort the disagreements. Anyone acquainted with the works of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University knows that in addition to co-authoring the punctuated-equilibrium model, Gould was one of the most eloquent defenders and articulators of evolution. (Punctuated equilibrium explains patterns in the fossil record by suggesting that most evolutionary changes occur within geologically brief intervals--which may nonetheless amount to hundreds of generations.) Yet creationists delight in dissecting out phrases from Gould's voluminous prose to make him sound as though he had doubted evolution, and they present punctuated equilibrium as though it allows new species to materialize overnight or birds to be born from reptile eggs.

When confronted with a quotation from a scientific authority that seems to question evolution, insist on seeing the statement in context. Almost invariably, the attack on evolution will prove illusory.

6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

This surprisingly common argument reflects several levels of ignorance about evolution. The first mistake is that evolution does not teach that humans descended from monkeys; it states that both have a common ancestor.

The deeper error is that this objection is tantamount to asking, "If children descended from adults, why are there still adults?" New species evolve by splintering off from established ones, when populations of organisms become isolated from the main branch of their family and acquire sufficient differences to remain forever distinct. The parent species may survive indefinitely thereafter, or it may become extinct.

7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth.

The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry. Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to earth in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young.

Creationists sometimes try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing to science's current inability to explain the origin of life. But even if life on earth turned out to have a nonevolutionary origin (for instance, if aliens introduced the first cells billions of years ago), evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by countless microevolutionary and macroevolutionary studies.

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.

Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving "desirable" (adaptive) features and eliminating "undesirable" (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times. As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.

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.

This argument derives from a misunderstanding of the Second Law. If it were valid, mineral crystals and snowflakes would also be impossible, because they, too, are complex structures that form spontaneously from disordered parts.

The Second Law actually states that the total entropy of a closed system (one that no energy or matter leaves or enters) cannot decrease. Entropy is a physical concept often casually described as disorder, but it differs significantly from the conversational use of the word.

More important, however, the Second Law permits parts of a system to decrease in entropy as long as other parts experience an offsetting increase. Thus, our planet as a whole can grow more complex because the sun pours heat and light onto it, and the greater entropy associated with the sun's nuclear fusion more than rebalances the scales. Simple organisms can fuel their rise toward complexity by consuming other forms of life and nonliving materials.

10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.

Image: CLEO VILETT

CLOSE-UP of a bacterial flagellum.
On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations (changes at precise positions in an organism's DNA)--bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example.

Mutations that arise in the homeobox (Hox) family of development-regulating genes in animals can also have complex effects. Hox genes direct where legs, wings, antennae and body segments should grow. In fruit flies, for instance, the mutation called Antennapedia causes legs to sprout where antennae should grow. These abnormal limbs are not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic mistakes can produce complex structures, which natural selection can then test for possible uses.

Moreover, molecular biology has discovered mechanisms for genetic change that go beyond point mutations, and these expand the ways in which new traits can appear. Functional modules within genes can be spliced together in novel ways. Whole genes can be accidentally duplicated in an organism's DNA, and the duplicates are free to mutate into genes for new, complex features. Comparisons of the DNA from a wide variety of organisms indicate that this is how the globin family of blood proteins evolved over millions of years.

11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.

Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species. Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms. Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.

12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.

Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult, because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species. The most widely used definition, Mayr's Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations--sets of organisms that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community. In practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain or to plants (and, of course, fossils do not breed). Biologists therefore usually use organisms' physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership.

Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection--for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits--and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the University of California at Davis demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.

13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils--creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance.

Actually, paleontologists know of many detailed examples of fossils intermediate in form between various taxonomic groups. One of the most famous fossils of all time is Archaeopteryx, which combines feathers and skeletal structures peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs. A flock's worth of other feathered fossil species, some more avian and some less, has also been found. A sequence of fossils spans the evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus. Whales had four-legged ancestors that walked on land, and creatures known as Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus helped to make that transition [see "The Mammals That Conquered the Seas," by Kate Wong; Scientific American, May]. Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various mollusks through millions of years. Perhaps 20 or more hominids (not all of them our ancestors) fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern humans.

Creationists, though, dismiss these fossil studies. They argue that Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between reptiles and birds--it is just an extinct bird with reptilian features. They want evolutionists to produce a weird, chimeric monster that cannot be classified as belonging to any known group. Even if a creationist does accept a fossil as transitional between two species, he or she may then insist on seeing other fossils intermediate between it and the first two. These frustrating requests can proceed ad infinitum and place an unreasonable burden on the always incomplete fossil record. Nevertheless, evolutionists can cite further supportive evidence from molecular biology. All organisms share most of the same genes, but as evolution predicts, the structures of these genes and their products diverge among species, in keeping with their evolutionary relationships. Geneticists speak of the "molecular clock" that records the passage of time. These molecular data also show how various organisms are transitional within evolution.

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.

This "argument from design" is the backbone of most recent attacks on evolution, but it is also one of the oldest. In 1802 theologian William Paley wrote that if one finds a pocket watch in a field, the most reasonable conclusion is that someone dropped it, not that natural forces created it there. By analogy, Paley argued, the complex structures of living things must be the handiwork of direct, divine invention. Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species as an answer to Paley: he explained how natural forces of selection, acting on inherited features, could gradually shape the evolution of ornate organic structures.

Generations of creationists have tried to counter Darwin by citing the example of the eye as a structure that could not have evolved. The eye's ability to provide vision depends on the perfect arrangement of its parts, these critics say. Natural selection could thus never favor the transitional forms needed during the eye's evolution--what good is half an eye? Anticipating this criticism, Darwin suggested that even "incomplete" eyes might confer benefits (such as helping creatures orient toward light) and thereby survive for further evolutionary refinement. Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified primitive eyes and light-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom and have even tracked the evolutionary history of eyes through comparative genetics. (It now appears that in various families of organisms, eyes have evolved independently.)

Today's intelligent-design advocates are more sophisticated than their predecessors, but their arguments and goals are not fundamentally different. They criticize evolution by trying to demonstrate that it could not account for life as we know it and then insist that the only tenable alternative is that life was designed by an unidentified intelligence.

15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution.

"Irreducible complexity" is the battle cry of Michael J. Behe of Lehigh University, author of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. As a household example of irreducible complexity, Behe chooses the mousetrap--a machine that could not function if any of its pieces were missing and whose pieces have no value except as parts of the whole. What is true of the mousetrap, he says, is even truer of the bacterial flagellum, a whiplike cellular organelle used for propulsion that operates like an outboard motor. The proteins that make up a flagellum are uncannily arranged into motor components, a universal joint and other structures like those that a human engineer might specify. The possibility that this intricate array could have arisen through evolutionary modification is virtually nil, Behe argues, and that bespeaks intelligent design. He makes similar points about the blood's clotting mechanism and other molecular systems.

Yet evolutionary biologists have answers to these objections. First, there exist flagellae with forms simpler than the one that Behe cites, so it is not necessary for all those components to be present for a flagellum to work. The sophisticated components of this flagellum all have precedents elsewhere in nature, as described by Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University and others. In fact, the entire flagellum assembly is extremely similar to an organelle that Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium, uses to inject toxins into cells. The key is that the flagellum's component structures, which Behe suggests have no value apart from their role in propulsion, can serve multiple functions that would have helped favor their evolution. The final evolution of the flagellum might then have involved only the novel recombination of sophisticated parts that initially evolved for other purposes. Similarly, the blood-clotting system seems to involve the modification and elaboration of proteins that were originally used in digestion, according to studies by Russell F. Doolittle of the University of California at San Diego. So some of the complexity that Behe calls proof of intelligent design is not irreducible at all.

Complexity of a different kind--"specified complexity"--is the cornerstone of the intelligent-design arguments of William A. Dembski of Baylor University in his books The Design Inference and No Free Lunch. Essentially his argument is that living things are complex in a way that undirected, random processes could never produce. The only logical conclusion, Dembski asserts, in an echo of Paley 200 years ago, is that some superhuman intelligence created and shaped life.


Dembski's argument contains several holes. It is wrong to insinuate that the field of explanations consists only of random processes or designing intelligences. Researchers into nonlinear systems and cellular automata at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere have demonstrated that simple, undirected processes can yield extraordinarily complex patterns. Some of the complexity seen in organisms may therefore emerge through natural phenomena that we as yet barely understand. But that is far different from saying that the complexity could not have arisen naturally.

"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.

A broadcast version of this article will air June 26 on National Geographic Today, a program on the National Geographic Channel. Please check your local listings
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.

Cynthetiq

damn.. that is a lot to digest....i'm going to have to read it in chunks

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rogue49

That's cool, I once has a history prof,
who was the local rep for the "Flat Earth Society".
That's right...people who still think the Earth is flat,
and argue the point.

So this is nothing, ignorance is bliss for some.

For me, it's much more awesome,
MUCH more complex & intricate
to think something such as ourselves
& our environment developed over time & chaos.
Very profound, very inspiring.

It's much too simple to just "snap" your fingers to make things happen,
that sounds too much like a "human" idea.

MacGnG

it cant be dis/proven because no matter how much evidence u have on either side, you cant convince some one who just doesnt want to accept it.

RatherThanWords

Occham's Razor... Given the same circumstances, The simplest explanation is usually the right one. This has been proven time and time again. Now, which seems more simple, that we were developed over millions and millions of years through a slow and tedious process with many errors until finally the world came to what it is today or... Everything was created instantaneously by a being nobody has ever seen or heard from since this creation, and this being left no evidence to point to himself (hey, all good artists sign their work)

I go for Evolution...and on that note...God Bless Atheism!

seventhtao

LMFAO
That was great man! Much more organized and eloquently put than i could have put it. My wife is a wavering Creationist and I think this thread will make a wonderfull starting point for a worthwhile debate with her.

BTW You gotta see George Carlins HBO special. He goes into creationism. Quite funny. He envisions (in the event creationism is true) a Pan like 'God' running around with Jesus planting fake bones of Dinasaurs saying something to the effect of "This will REALLY screw with their heads!"

If this is really the "Truth" then life really is a joke with a really BAD punchline.

As for me I'll take evolution, the big bang, etc and just nudge this creator figure into the less bombastic role of First Cause.

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Antagony

Good article. Very thorough. It may not be completely valid, but I'm too lazy to check.

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Lebell

Everything I know and have read validates that article.

Scientific American is one journal I trust for integrity.

(I've seen it before, but thanks for posting it again.)

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BBtB

Of course it will all be proven wrong tomorow.

But thats the great thing about having a doctrine that dosn't care about how you got here. Dosn't REALLY matter.

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"I would like about three fiddy"

Easytiger

BBtB, please expand on what you're saying. I'm not sure which side of the debate you're coming in to bat for.

Tech

that's cool. i personally am a devout christian but i also believe in evolution. i mean seriously. i think God can do anything, but i believe that when the Bible speaks of the "7 days" of creation, that they are not literally days, not to mention the note that elsewhere in the Bible states that a day to God is like a thousand years to us (again, not an exact number)... maybe it was 7 God days. and if you look at the 7 days of creation they follow the progression of evolution exactly.

however, i think truely... it doesn't matter. my salvation does not lie in whether the earth was created in 7 days or millions of years, my salvation lies grace and love and forgiveness.

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Loki

Interesting article, but im a bit pressed for time, so a more in-depth analysis to come soon. just thought id add this:

to the best of my knowledge --

Axiom - something that we know is true, but cannot really prove.
(i.e. the field laws of mathematics)

Law - Something that we know is true for all instances and can prove. (e.g, Kirchoffs Voltage Loop)

Theory - Something that we know is true for many instances, but we have not, or cannot prove it for all instances (e.g. Theory of Relativity)

Hypothesis - Something that we belive may be true (e.g. my hypothesis that if an alien race really wanted to invade the earth withi minimum casualties, all they had to do is dress up as cute widdle bunny rabbits. By the time we, as a Race, would have finished laughing, they could have taken over it all )

So, i say sure, present the theory of evolution, but present the other views too,and let the children make up thier minds regarding which theory makes more sense.

Slims

That was my intention. I posted support for evolution because I personally believe that the theory of evolution is correct. However, I would like to read about anybody elses beliefs, as long as they provide their reasons for holding them.

So if you are a creationist, and you think you can explain why, or shoot down evolution, please feel free to do so.

Loki

aight, i read through the article. Good read, but the author does omit a rather important point which is the *fudging* of nformation and then the relative fierceness of some scientists when thier pet theory is questioned. By this i mean:

http://www.arn.org/docs2/news/pepperedmyth111702.htm

The Peppered Myth


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Jonathan Wells

Open almost any textbook dealing with biological evolution and you'll probably find photographs of peppered moths resting on tree trunks—illustrating the classic story of natural selection in action. A friend of mine says those photographs are all he remembers about evolution from his undergraduate days.
Before the mid-1800s, almost all peppered moths were light-colored, but during the industrial revolution dark-colored ("melanic") moths became more common—a phenomenon called "industrial melanism." In theory, industrial melanism was due to survival of the fittest: Dark moths were better camouflaged on pollution-darkened tree trunks, and thus more likely to avoid being eaten by predatory birds. For a long time, however, the theory lacked evidence.

In the early 1950s, British physician and amateur moth-collector Bernard Kettlewell released light and dark peppered moths onto nearby tree trunks and watched as birds ate the less camouflaged ones. He then released moths that had been marked on the underside with a tiny spot of paint. When he later recaptured some, the proportion of moths matching the color of nearby tree trunks was significantly higher than in the batch he had released, consistent with the camouflage-predation theory. Kettlewell called this "Darwin's missing evidence," and it quickly became standard fare in biology textbooks.

Most textbooks fail to mention, however, that the peppered moth story began to unravel in the 1960s, when biologists noticed that dark moths were unexpectedly plentiful in some unpolluted locations. When anti-pollution legislation led to cleaner air in the 1970s, light-colored moths made a comeback; but, contrary to theory, the comeback occurred without corresponding changes in tree trunks. Then, in the 1980s, biologists realized that peppered moths almost never rest on tree trunks (as Kettlewell wrongly supposed when he initially released the moths onto tree trunks, creating atypical conditions). Instead, these night-flying insects probably spend their days hiding underneath horizontal branches high up in the trees, where they can't be seen.

In 1998, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne wrote: "From time to time, evolutionists re-examine a classic experimental study and find, to their horror, that it is flawed or downright wrong." According to Coyne, the fact that peppered moths rarely rest on tree trunks "alone invalidates Kettlewell's release-and-recapture experiments, as moths were released by placing them directly onto tree trunks." Coyne concluded that this "prize horse in our stable of examples" of natural selection "is in bad shape, and, while not yet ready for the glue factory, needs serious attention" (Nature, Nov. 5, 1998).

Tipped off by a 1999 article in Whole Earth, author Judith Hooper decided to investigate the peppered moth story. The result is a fascinating book, Of Moths and Men: An Evolutionary Tale. Hooper deftly portrays the two men largely responsible for producing the classic story, E. B. Ford and Bernard Kettlewell—and one man who took the lead in debunking it, Ted Sargent.

Oxford geneticist Edmund Brisco Ford wanted to study evolution under natural conditions, and peppered moths seemed a good test case. Ford obtained grant support for Kettlewell, who was then able to do what he loved most—traipsing around the woods surrounded by moths. Strangely, Kettlewell's field notes were never found; since he usually worked alone, there was no independent verification of his data. Ford helped Kettlewell compile and interpret his results, but according to Ford's biographer the fit between theory and data was too good to be true.

In addition to the fundamental false assumption that prompted Kettlewell to release moths onto nearby tree trunks, where they don't normally rest, Hooper lists various other problems with his experiments; for example, (1) Kettlewell's moth densities were too high, "in effect, creating a feeding tray," with the intensity of predation recorded in his experiments simply being "a learned response by the local birds"; (2) Kettlewell measured camouflage by his own eye, even though bird vision is quite different from human vision; (3) he and Ford disregarded evidence that selection might operate on caterpillars (through differential mortality when exposed to pollution) instead of on adult moths; and (4) the two men ignored the fact that the main predators of peppered moths are night-flying bats.

Despite problems with the classic story, critics have been notably scarce. One of the few has been University of Massachusetts biology professor Ted Sargent, now retired—the third major protagonist in Hooper's book, and the real hero of the story. A lepidopterist, Sargent has been critical for decades of the camouflage-predation explanation for industrial melanism in peppered moths. In 1998 he and two colleagues wrote in Evolutionary Biology that "there is little persuasive evidence, in the form of rigorous and replicated observations and experiments, to support this explanation at the present time."

For his efforts, Sargent has been "marginalized" and even "demonized" by what Hooper calls "the industrial melanism establishment." (His principal protection, it seems, was that he resisted the modern trend among scientists to get research grants, so he remained free of the political entanglements that muzzled so many of his contemporaries.)

Why was Sargent treated so badly? One reason may simply be the tendency of scientists to cling to theories that are mainstays of their careers. I suspect, though, that something more is involved: a desire to protect the classic story as an icon of Darwinian evolution in action. Although Jerry Coyne is an outspoken evolutionist, and Ted Sargent is no creationist, the evolution-creation controversy fosters a climate in which many Darwinists regard criticism of supposed evidence for evolution as giving aid and comfort to the Enemy.

Ironically, though, the truth or falsity of the peppered moth story is largely irrelevant to the evolution-creation controversy. If the story were true, it would show only a reversible shift in the proportions of two varieties in a preexisting species—a result that even the most uncompromising creationist could accept. And its falsity poses no threat to the most uncompromising evolutionist, because there are now other, better examples of natural selection within existing species.

Nevertheless, many defenders of Darwinian evolution rush to protect the peppered moth icon as though their religion depended on it. In 2000, I wrote a book pointing out that the peppered moth story—though of limited significance in itself—is part of a larger pattern of systematic misrepresentation serving to prop up Darwin's theory. Kevin Padian, a Berkeley professor and president of the National Center for Science Education, a militantly pro-Darwin advocacy group, responded by likening me to the sociopathic antihero of the film The Talented Mr. Ripley. According to Padian, "a particularly egregious example of Mr. Wells's talents is his treatment of the peppered moth." Padian then went on to defend the classic story by claiming that peppered moths "rest on tree trunks 26% of the time" (The Quarterly Review of Biology, March 2002).

Padian bases his astonishing claim (which contradicts the published scientific literature) on the fact that 47 moths were found resting in the wild between 1964 and 1996, and that one quarter of these were on tree trunks. During the same period, however, many thousands of moths were caught in nighttime traps, so the 47 found in natural resting positions were less than 1 percent of the moths studied, and much less than 1 percent of all peppered moths living in the wild. Padian might as well claim that a quarter of all ocean fish are visible to predatory birds because he did statistics on the few that can be spotted from a boat.

Character assassination supported by transparently bogus statistics—how does a highly placed scientist end up indulging in such tactics? Obviously, the peppered moth story involves more than objective science.

So, what about those textbook photographs that impressed my college professor friend? If peppered moths don't normally rest on tree trunks, how were the photographs obtained? It turns out that they were staged—often by pinning or gluing dead moths in place.

Jonathan Wells is a Senior Fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and the author of "Second Thoughts About Peppered Moths" (The Scientist, 1999) and Icons of Evolution (Regnery, 2000).



File Date: 11.17.02


Its an interesting read, and its funny how one of the first real proofs of evolution was in fact, not

Lebell

Loki,

I'm sorry, but that was a classic example of the length that creationists try to go to to put doubt about evolution in the mind of the public.

They take one study (or one fossil or one quote or one particular hypothesis) that may or may not have particular problems and blow it up into a huge debate to cast doubt on evolution all the while ignoring the great corpus of scientific evidence that supports the theory.

I can happily live without the peppered moth in my arsenal of evidence for evolution.

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Dilbert1234567

eek one peice of evidence is wrong, 9999 to go

pray to santa, maybe he'll get you into heaven

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Slims

It is true that scientists can sometimes hold on to their pet beliefs even though the evidence is against them, but that is true for everybody.

I don't particularly think the moth example was ever supposed to demonstrate evolution, but rather natural selection. It was supposed to be one of the first blatantly obvious, demonstrable examples of natural selection at work.

Oh, and just FYI, the article I posted never once mentioned moths. I guess the scientific community has recognized the error of the moth example.

Nice article though, I personally had not heard of that before and I might have used it as an example for somebody else. Thanks for filling me in.

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duckznutz

would I be right in thinking that sexual selection is different from natural selection . . . . . . . . ?

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duckznutz

we have here right under our noses . . . (in the form of the Titty Board) . .a live experiment in sexual selection . . . .the rating system emulates sexual selection . . Tammi is God to many!

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Loki

The point of that article was that based on inconclusive evidence, a bloke went "well, chalk that one up for darwinism" and all the scientists and learned blokes in the world went "yay". Now, since its obvious that the colour change occured due to evolution, other people start doing things like pinning dead moths to trees and taking pictures. these pictures get stuck into science textbooks as proof of evolution. Other scientists examine the peppered moth, and realise that its a load of hogwash, and release findings to say otherwise, that this particular example is not due to evolution. this, in turn is refuted by other scientists doing such activities as quoting inaccurate statistics... And the peppered moth remains in textbooks as an example of evolution.

Anyway, the point im trying to make is that its still a theory. yet, many people just assume its a law, and do all sorts of inexplicable things to make it fit. hardly the behaviour one expects from professional scientists.

It also makes me wonder what else has been, uh, embellished, when presented as proof of evolution.

(Don't get me wrong, im not a big fan of the evolution theory, but its a cursed sight more probable than the theory of creation)

Some scientists are just as guilty as the creationalists.

Lebell

I'm not trying to pick on you Loki, but this bears repeating:


So when a scientist says "theory" they mean something their pretty sure about.

Could the "theory of evolution" still be proven incorrect? Well, sure. But then so could the "theory of relativity" and "subatomic theory".

It COULD happen, but I wouldn't bet the milk money on it, if I were you.

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Dilbert1234567

how bout the theory of gravity, we still have no clue haow it acualy works, but we know it hasn't failed us yet (on the macro scale not sub atomic)

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XenuHubbard

A more recent example of evolution; the Australian cross-breed horses used by the army during the first world war is extinct. The DNA of the breeds used to make this cross-over has changed over the past 80 years.

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Loki

no offense taken, Lebell. You are in perfect right to question my understanding of "theory" as it is somewhat fundamental to this discussion, eh?

This is what im getting at. Take Kirchoffs Voltage Loop/Law for an example. Give me any closed electrical circuit, and ill show you how KVL works in it. There has not been a single case in which KVL has been disproved, and hence it is a Law.

now, lets have a look at subatomic theory, for example...

As our ability to analyse and detect improves, so do our theories. A classic example is the atom. In Classical Greece, the atom was arbitrarily defined as the smallest amount of matter. We uh "forgot" about that for a thousand years or two, then Dalton rediscovered the atom school of thought, i believe. Then Thompson came along with his "Plum Pudding" Model, followed by Rutherford who proved that every atom had a nucleus... Followed by Bohr's solar system model of the atom, followed by Schrodingers Uncertainty Principle pertaining to electron movement.

Sorry if i've got the names and models mixed up... i only vageuly remember high school chemistry =)

Now we realise that they are all somewhat wrong, that there are many different types of sub-(sub?)-particles that make up protons, neutrons and electrons. Maybe ten years from now, or twenty, or even two thousand, it is probable that we will see a different picture of sub-atomic theory then we do now.



Well, since no-one else appears to be vaguely anti-evolution (and one sided discussions get boring... i guess ill take the stand. Please note that i do not support creationalism in any way shape or form, but all i am saying is that the Theory of Evolution isn't all that its cracked up to be.

Anyway, i was pretty sure that the spotted moth wasnt the only example of fudging, so i did some digging. This source appears to be a bit kooky (judging from the last section of his essay), and tends to lean towards creationalism. An intersting read nonetheless, if a bit on the long side.

http://www.lauralee.com/news/pyeessay.htm


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Starting with the Sumerians, the first great culture 6,000 years ago, through the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, everyone accepted that some form of heavenly beings had created all of life and, as a crowning achievement, topped it off with humans. Now, consider that for a moment. Today the CEO of a medium-sized corporation can verbally issue an instruction to be carried out company-wide and have no hope it will reach the lower echelons intact. So the fact that most historical cultures, from first to most recent (our own), believed essentially the same creation story is astonishing in its consistency.

Naturally, such long-term consistency made it extremely difficult to challenge when the accumulation of scientific evidence could no longer be ignored. Charles Darwin is usually credited with issuing the first call for a rational examination of divine creation as the belief system regarding the origins of life and humanity. However, in his 1859 classic, The Origin Of Species, he skirted both issues in an attempt to placate his era’s dominant power structure—organized religion. Though he used the word "origin" in the title, he was careful to discuss only how species developed from each other, not how life originated. And he simply avoided discussing humanity’s origins.

Ultimately, pressure from both supporters and critics forced him to tackle that thorny issue in 1871’s The Descent Of Man; but Charles Darwin was never comfortable at the cutting edge of the social debate he helped engineer.

The true roots of the challenge to divine creation extend 65 years prior to Darwin, back to 1795, when two men—a naturalist and a geologist—published stunning works. The naturalist was Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, a brilliant intellectual in his own right. In The Laws Of Organic Life he suggested that population numbers drove competition for resources, that such competition was a possible agent of physical change, that humans were closely related to monkeys and apes, and that sexual selection could have an effect on species modification. In short, he dealt with nearly all of the important topics his grandson would later expand upon, except natural selection.

The geologist was a Scotsman, James Hutton, whose Theory Of The Earth suggested for the first time that Earth might be much older than 6,000 years, then the universally accepted time frame established a century earlier by Anglican Bishop James Ussher. (Many if not most of today’s mainstream Christians are convinced that the creation date of 6,000 years ago is Holy Writ, even though mortal Bishop Ussher arrived at it by the mundane method of calculating the who begat whoms listed in the Bible.)

Hutton studied the layering of soils in geological strata and concluded that rain washed soil off the continents and into the seas; at the bottom of the seas heat from inside the planet turned soil into rock; over great stretches of time the new rocks were elevated to continent level and slowly pushed up to form mountains; then in turn those mountains were weathered away to form new layers of soil. This unending cycle meant two things: Earth was not a static body changed only superficially at the surface by volcanoes and earthquakes; and each layering cycle required vast amounts of time to complete.

The significance of Hutton’s insight, to which he gave the jawbreaker name of uniformitarianism, cannot be overstated. However, he couldn’t challenge Ussher’s 6,000 year dogma because he provided no alternative to it. He was certain that 6,000 years was much too short a time span for any weathering cycle to be completed, but in the late 18th century there was no way to accurately measure geological eras. That would have to wait another thirty-five years until Sir Charles Lyell, a far more methodical British analyst and researcher, could firmly establish uniformitarianism as the basis of modern geology.

Lyell took Hutton’s work and ran with it, creating a three-volume series called Principles Of Geology (1830-1833) that convincingly provided the time lines and time frames Hutton lacked. Bishop Ussher’s 6,000 year dogma still held complete sway with ecclesiastics everywhere, but the world’s burgeoning ranks of scientists could see that Hutton and now Lyell were correct; the earth had to be millions of years old rather than 6,000. But how to convince the still largely uneducated masses of Ussher’s fallacy? Like Hutton before him, Lyell and his supporters could not break through the dense wall of ignorance being perpetuated by religious dogma. However, they had knocked several gaping cracks in it, so when Charles Darwin came along in another thirty years (1859), the wall was ready to begin crumbling with an echo that reverberates to this day.

Darwin was strongly influenced by Lyell, who published the first of his geology tomes while Darwin was at Cambridge completing his last year of theological training (he only studied nature as an avocation). He took the first volume of the trilogy on his fateful voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle and devoured it along the way. Masterfully written and persuasively argued, it made such an impression on the 22-year-old that in later life he said, "I really think my books come half out of Lyell’s brain. I see through his eyes." So between Lyell’s genius and his grandfather Erasmus’ unconventional views about nature instilled during his childhood, young Charles set sail toward his destiny with a blueprint of his revolutionary theory in mind and a tool to build it in his hands.

Without saying it outright, Darwin’s bottom line was that life’s myriad forms managed their own existence from start to finish without divine help. This did not take God entirely out of the equation, but it did remove His influence on a day-to-day basis. The irony is that Charles Darwin did his work reluctantly, being a devout man who had trained to become a minister. Nonetheless, the schism he created between evolution (a term he never used; his choice was natural selection) and God was the battering ram that breached the forbidding wall of dogmatic ignorance that had stood for thousands of years.

Though breached, that wall did not come down entirely. Instead, an ideological war erupted on both sides of what remained of it, pitting Darwinists against Creationists in intellectual bloodletting that eventually forced some of the wounded to seek relief in compromise. Both sides might be content, they suggested, if God could be acknowledged as the initiator of all life, followed by a "hands-off" policy thereafter to let nature take its evolutionary course. All well and good. But instead, both sides adopted a winner-take-all strategy, unwilling to make even marginal concessions to the other side’s point of view.

Allowing no room for compromise left both sides open to continuous attack, and the salvos they exchanged were fierce and relentless. James Hutton and Charles Lyell had proven beyond reasonable doubt that the earth was immensely older than 6,000 years, yet they and their supporters had been overwhelmed by the oppressive power of ecclesiastic influence. Now, however, Darwin’s arguments supporting gradual changes over equally vast amounts of time tipped the scales in favor of science. Public opinion began to shift. The uniform rejection of old became tentative acceptance at an ever-increasing rate.

This alarming turn of events forced all but the most ardent Creationists to seek ways to appease their critics, to put themselves back in the driver’s seat of public opinion. Bishop Ussher’s unyielding time line of 6,000 years was gradually coming to symbolize their willful disdain of reality, like a chain draped around their necks, drowning them as the tide of understanding shifted the sand beneath their feet. They began to modify their insistence that God had created everything in the universe exactly as recounted in the Bible. They could suddenly see the wisdom of granting Him the latitude to accomplish His miracles in six eras of unspecified length rather than in six literal days.

Of course, Creationists did more than hit the reverse pedal on their sputtering juggernaut. The brightest of them dug deep into Darwin’s emerging theory to discover holes nearly equal to the ones scientists were exposing in religious dogma. In 1873, only fourteen years after The Origin Of Species, geologist J.W. Dawson, chancellor of McGill University in Montreal, published The Story Of The Earth And Man, which was every bit as well written and as carefully argued as Darwin’s masterpiece. In it Dawson pointed out that Darwin and his followers were promoting a theory based on three fallacious "gaps" in reasoning that could not be reconciled with the knowledge of their era. What is so telling about Dawson’s three fallacies is that they remain unchanged to this day.

The first fallacy is that life can spontaneously animate from organic material. In 1873 Dawson complained that "the men who evolve all things from physical forces do not yet know how these forces can produce the phenomenon of life even in its humblest forms." He added that "in every case heretofore, the effort (to create animate life) has proved vain." After 127 years of heavily subsidized effort by scientists all over the world to create even the most basic rudiments of life, they are still batting an embarrassing zero. In any other scientific endeavor, reason would dictate it is time to call in the dogs and water down the fire. But when it comes to Darwinian logic, as Dawson noted in 1873, "here also we are required to admit as a general principle what is contrary to experience."

Dawson’s second fallacy was the gap that separates vegetable and animal life. "These are necessarily the converse of each other, the one deoxidizes and accumulates, the other oxidizes and expends. Only in reproduction or decay does the plant simulate the action of the animal, and the animal never in its simplest forms assumes the functions of the plant. This gap can, I believe, be filled up only by an appeal to our ignorance." And thus it remains today. If life did evolve as Darwinists claim, it would have had to bridge the gap between plant and animal life at least once, and more likely innumerable times. Lacking one undeniable example of this bridging, science is again batting zero.

The third gap in the knowledge of 1873 was "that between any species of animal or plant and any other species. It is this gap, and this only, which Darwin undertook to fill up by his great work on the origin of species; but, notwithstanding the immense amount of material thus expended, it yawns as wide as ever, since it must be admitted that no case has been ascertained in which individuals of one species have transgressed the limits between it and other species." Here, too, despite a ceaseless din of scientific protests to the contrary, there remains not a single unquestioned example of one species evolving entirely—not just partially—into another distinct and separate species.

To be fair, some of today’s best-known geneticists and naturalists have broken ranks and acknowledged that what Dawson complained about in 1873 remains true today. Thomas H. Morgan, who won a Nobel Prize for work on heredity, wrote that "Within the period of human history, we do not know of a single instance of the transformation of one species into another if we apply the most rigid and extreme tests used to distinguish wild species." Colin Patterson, director of the British Museum of Natural History, has stated that "No one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural selection. No one has gotten near it." And these are by no means extraordinary disclosures. Every scientist in related fields is well aware of it, but shamefully few have the nerve to address it openly.

By the time Darwin died, in 1882, one of his most zealous supporters, German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, had produced a series of drawings that showed the developing embryos of various mammals (rabbit, pig, chimp, man) were virtually identical until well into their gestation. This had been a great comfort to Darwin in his old age, but by 1915 it was clear that Haeckel had forged the drawings. Nonetheless, they served Darwinists so well that Haeckel’s forgery conviction at the University of Jena, where he taught, was conveniently overlooked, and his drawings can still be found in modern texts supporting evolution. In fact, any reader of this article who was taught evolution in school will very likely have seen Haeckel’s drawings in textbooks and been assured they were legitimate.

A more widely known fraudulent attempt to support Darwin’s flagging theory was England’s famous Piltdown Man hoax of 1912, which was an ancient human skull found in conjunction with a modern orangutan’s lower jaw that had been doctored (its teeth filed down to look more human) and aged to match the look of the skull. This was much more important than Haeckel’s fraud because it provided the desperately sought "missing link" between humans and their proposed ape-like ancestors.

Nearly all of England’s evolutionary top guns swung in behind the fraud, and their colleagues worldwide joined them with such zeal that it took 40 years to expose it for what it was. However, the damage it caused to the search for truth had already been done. The world became so convinced that Darwinian evolution was true and correct, it was just a matter of time before Creationists would draw a line in the dirt and call for a last great battle to decide the issue once and for all. That battle did come, to an obscure American hamlet called Dayton, Tennessee, 75 years ago (July, 1925).

The "Monkey Trial," as H.L. Mencken dubbed it, revolved around John Scopes, a 24-year-old gym teacher and football coach who once substituted for the regular biology teacher in Dayton’s high school. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) chose him as its point man because he vocally disagreed with a new Tennessee law that banned the teaching of evolution instead of, or alongside, the Biblical account of creation. He also was unmarried, incurring no risk to a family by allowing himself to be prosecuted.

Though now one of many so-called "trials of the century," this one drew 200 reporters from 2,000 newspapers across the country and the world. It has since generated hundreds of books, plays, television movies, and feature films. In October, 1999, George magazine chose it the fourth most important event of the 20th century. Yet historian Garry Wills has astutely called it "a nontrial over a nonlaw with a nondefendant backed by nonsupporters. Its most profound moment involved nontestimony by a nonexpert, followed by a nondefeat." Without question it can stand alongside the O.J. Simpson debacle as a world-class black eye for the American legal system.

All during the trial Clarence Darrow, a staunch Darwinist and Scopes’ lawyer, tangled with William Jennings Bryan, an equally staunch Creationist who represented the State of Tennessee. Both were outstanding advocates and renowned orators, and each was certain he could outtalk the other and convince the world of the rightness of his vision of creation. However, Darrow’s rapier wit shredded Bryan’s assertions that the Bible was a literal record of God’s sacrosanct word. Bryan won from a legal standpoint because the issue in question was whether Scopes had defied his state’s law, which he admitted all along in order to get the trial arranged in the first place. Scopes was convicted and fined $100, which was later overturned on a technicality, so in the end he was vindicated.

More than anything else, the Monkey Trial was staged to settle the Darwinism-Creationism debate once and for all by pitting the most eloquent defender of each in a mouth-to-mouth duel on a world stage that no one could ignore. And when the dust had settled it was clear the rolling tide of history would not be turned. The mounting support for Darwinism crested in a tsunami of doubt—and even ridicule—that crashed down on Creationists everywhere, sweeping them from the dominant positions they had enjoyed for centuries, into the social and political backwaters they endured for decades.

Though clearly knocked down by the Darrow/Scopes haymaker, the Creationists were far from out. They lowered their profile and became relatively inactive through the Depression and the years of World War II, waiting until society stabilized in the 1950’s. Then they rallied their troops and resumed attacking educational systems, where young minds were being indoctrinated with Darwinist dogma. And this time they did it right. Instead of wasting effort and money lobbying state legislatures, they moved out into the heartland and focused on local school boards, insisting belief in evolution was costing America its faith in God and religion, and destroying morality and traditional family life.

When the social eruptions of the 1960’s appeared, Creationists were quick to say "We told you so!" They blamed the teaching of "Godless evolution" as a primary cause, demanding that religion be put back in schools as a quick way to return to "the good old days." At the same time, they hit upon their most brilliant tactic yet: formally changing their basic tenet from "Biblical Creationism" to "Creation Science." Then, in an equally brilliant stroke, they shifted from lobbying school boards to getting themselves elected to them. Predictably, they enjoyed great success in the Bible Belt girdling the Deep South.

Apart from making most real scientists gag every time they hear it, "Creation Science" provided Creationists with the cachet of authority they had been seeking—and needing—since Darwin so thoroughly sandbagged them. And, it has been remarkably effective in shifting public opinion away from the scientific position. Gallup Polls taken in 1982, 1993, 1997, and 1999 show the percentage of Americans who believed "God created human beings in their present form at one time within the past 10,000 years" was 44%, 47%, 44%, and 47% respectively. In a recent Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll asking people what they thought about human origins, 15% said they accepted Darwinian evolution, 50% believed the Biblical account, and 26% felt there was truth on both sides. The most perceptive group might well have been the 9% who said they were not sure.

One could argue that those numbers are more of a comment on America’s failing educational system than on the effectiveness of Creationist strategies. But in any case, the Creationist cacophony reached a fever pitch in August of last year, when the Kansas State Board of Education voted by a 6 to 4 margin to eliminate from the state’s high school curricula the teaching of not only biological evolution, which received virtually all media focus, but also of geology’s "Old Earth" theories, and of cosmology’s "Big Bang" of universal creation. The Kansas School Board went after science across the board.

That vote has been by far the high point of the modern Creationist offensive, but courts are still loath to accept any comparison between so-called "Creation" science and what is considered "real" science. In 1981 Arkansas and Louisiana passed laws requiring that Creationism be taught in public schools. In 1982 a U.S. District Court declared the Arkansas law unconstitutional. In 1987 the Louisiana case made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled Creationism was essentially a religious explanation of life’s origins and therefore favored one religion (Christianity) over others (Islam, Hindu, etc.).

As usual, after the 1987 defeat the Creationists went back to the drawing board and devised yet another shrewd strategy, which has carried them through the 1990’s and into this new millennium. They have transformed "Creation Science" into theories they call "Sudden Appearance" outside the Bible Belt, or "Intelligent Design" within it. Both versions carefully avoid referring to God by name or to specific aspects of religion, but they strongly focus on the Achilles heel of Darwinism, which is that all species thus far discovered in the fossil record appear suddenly, whole and complete, males and females, leaving no plausible way they could have evolved by Darwinian gradualism.

Fortunately for Darwinists, the legal protection provided by the Supreme Court currently trumps the Achilles heel their rivals keep pointing out. But that tide is running and running strong. Eventually it will turn on them the way the tide of ignorance turned on Creationists when Darwin appeared, and then again at the Monkey Trial. But as long as its legal protection remains intact, Darwinist dogma is in no imminent danger of being confronted with Creationist dogma in the nation’s classrooms. In fact, all this could soon be moot because many school districts have responded to the pressures being applied to them by refusing to teach either viewpoint, which will leave a large and serious hole in the educational background of our next generation of students.

Despite the extreme volatility of these issues, and the immediate rancor received after aligning with the "wrong" side in someone else’s view, any objective analysis will conclude that both Darwinists and Creationists are wrong to a significant degree. Indeed, how could it be otherwise when each can shoot such gaping holes in the other? If either side was as correct as, say, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which—apart from occasional dissonance with quantum mechanics—has faced no serious challenge since Einstein revealed it to an awestruck world in 1915, there would be no issues to debate: one side would be declared right, the other would be wrong, and that would be that.

We all know "right" when we see it, just as we all should know "wrong." Anyone without a vested interest should be willing to accept that the earth is vastly older than 6,000 years. Likewise, despite widespread proof of the noticeable changes in body parts called for by microevolution, there is no clearly definitive evidence for the innumerable species-into-higher-species transformations required by macroevolution. If Charles Darwin were alive today and could be presented with the facts that have accumulated since his death, even he would have to admit his theory has turned out wrong.

Let us make the assertion, then, that both Darwinists and Creationists are wrong to such a degree that their respective theories are ripe for overthrow. It is simply a matter of time and circumstance before one or another piece of evidence appears that is so clear in its particulars and so overwhelming in its validity, both sides will have no choice but to lay down their bullhorns and laptops and slink off into history’s dustbin, where so many other similarly bankrupt theories have gone before them. But until that happens, what about those who would choose to explore more objective and possibly more accurate scenarios for the creation of life itself and human life in particular?

Because of their all-out, do-or-die strategies, Darwinists and Creationists stand at opposite ends of a very wide intellectual spectrum, which leaves a huge swath of middle ground available to anyone with the courage to explore it. Moreover, the signposts along that middle ground are numerous and surprisingly easy to negotiate. All that’s required is a willingness to see with open eyes and to perceive with an open mind.

The basic Darwinist position regarding how life began is called "spontaneous animation," which J.W. Dawson complained about back in 1873. It is the idea that life somehow springs into existence suddenly, all by itself, when proper mixtures of organic and inorganic compounds are placed into proximity and allowed to percolate their way across the immensely deep chasm between non-life and life. Based on everything known about the technical aspects of that process—from 1873 until now—it is quite safe to say spontaneous animation doesn’t have the proverbial snowball’s chance of enduring.

Ignore the howls of protest echoing from far off to our right. Here on the middle ground reality rules, and reality says there is simply no way even the simplest life form—say, a sub-virus-sized microbe utilizing only a handful of RNA/DNA components—could have pulled itself together from any conceivable brew of chemical compounds and started functioning as a living entity. To cite just one reason, no laboratory has ever found a way to coax lipids into forming themselves into a functional cell membrane, which is essential for encasing any living microbe. Then there is permeability, which would also have to be a part of the mix so nutrients could be taken into the cell and wastes could be expelled.

Fred Hoyle, a brilliant English astronomer and mathematician, once offered what has become the most cogent analogy for this process. He said it would be comparable to "a tornado striking a junkyard and assembling a jetliner from the materials therein." This is because the complexity evident at even the tiniest level of life is mind boggling beyond belief. In short, it could not and did not happen, and anyone insisting otherwise is simply wrong, misguided, or terrified of dealing with what its loss means to their world view.

So, if spontaneous animation is simply not possible, how does life come into existence? How can it be? Here we must call on an old friend, Sherlock Holmes, who was fond of saying that in any quest for truth one should first eliminate whatever is flatly impossible. Whatever remains, however unlikely, will be the truth. With spontaneous animation eliminated, that leaves only one other viable alternative: intervention at some level by some entity or entities. (Ignore the rousing cheers erupting far to our left.)

Before anyone in our group of middle-ground explorers goes jogging off toward those would-be winners, understand that "entity or entities" does not mean "God" in the anthropomorphic sense espoused by Creationists. It means some aspect or aspects of our present reality that we do not officially acknowledge—yet—but which nonetheless exist and act on us, and interact with us, in ways we are only just beginning to understand.

As of today, all human beings are bound by three dimensions. We are born into them, we live in them, and we die in them. During our lives we struggle to fit all of our personal experiences into them. Some of us, however, undergo experiences or receive insights which indicate other levels of reality might exist. These don’t manifest in our usual corporeal (body) sense, but in purely ethereal forms that nonetheless have enough substance to make them perceivable by those locked into the three known dimensions.

For as woo-woo metaphysical as that might seem at first glimpse, please take a closer look. There is a slowly emerging branch of "new" science which deals with these other dimensions. Called hyperdimensional physics, it concerns itself with devising and executing experiments that—however briefly—provide glimpses into these other realms of reality. It is not greatly different from the earliest days of Einstein’s time-and-motion studies, when he was trying to break the 200-year-old academic straitjacket imposed by Newtonian physics. Now Einstein’s revolutionary physics has become the straitjacket, and hyperdimensional physics will eventually become the means to break out of it and move humanity to a much higher level of awareness and understanding of true reality.

Detailing these experiments is grist for another mill, but suffice to say that string theorists are leading the charge. (Their subatomic "theory of everything" requires ten or more new dimensions in order to be considered valid.) In due course they and others will progress from the barest glimpses being obtained at present to fully opening the doors to those other dimensions. When they do, they are likely to find them populated by the kind of entity or entities discussed earlier, beings who are not necessarily "God" with a capital "G," but rather "gods" with small "g’s." Perhaps, even, the same plural "gods" mentioned in Genesis ("Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.") But that, too, is grist for another mill. However, it does lead into an analysis of how humanity came to be as it is.

The problem is simple: nobody in any conceivable position of power wants to confront the truth about human origins. No scientist, no politician, no clergyman could hope to preserve his or her authority—at whatever level—after actively coming forward with the truth about this incendiary subject. They have all seen colleagues "disappeared" from their ranks for stepping out of line, so they know retribution is swift and sure.

As noted above, Creationists insist that God (a singular male now, reduced from the genderless plurals of original Biblical text) created man in His own image, after His own likeness. Well, if that’s true, He must have been having a heck of a bad day, because we humans are a poorly designed species. True, we do have highly capable brains, but for some reason we are only allowed to use a relatively small portion of them. (Now we will hear frantic howls of protest from the scientists off to our right, but ignore them. If 100 idiot savants can access 100 different portions of their brains to perform their astounding intellectual feats, then those same portions must be in our brains, too, but our normalcy keeps us from being able to access them. Period.)

Morally we are a terrible mishmash of capacities, capable of evil incarnate at one moment and love incarnate the next, while covering every range of emotion in between. Physically we carry more than 4,000 genetic disorders, with each of us averaging about 50 (some carry many more, some many less). New ones are found on a regular basis. No other species has more than a handful of serious ones, and none which kill 100% of carriers before they can reach maturity and reproduce. We have dozens of those. So how did they get into us? Better yet, how do they stay in us? If they are 100% fatal before reproduction is possible, how could they possibly spread through our entire gene pool?

If we assume God was at His best the day He decided to create us, functioning in His usual infallible mode, that gives Him no legitimate excuse for designing us so poorly. Surely He could have given us no more physical disorders than, say, our nearest genetic relatives, gorillas and chimps. A little albinism never hurt any species, not those two or ours or dozens of others that carry it, so why couldn’t He just leave it at that? What could have been the point of making us much less genetically robust than all the other species we are supposed to be masters of?

There is no point to it, which is my point. It simply didn’t happen that way.

Now, let’s examine the Darwinist dogma that humans descended from primates (chimps and gorillas) by gradually transitioning through a four-million-year-long series of prehumans known as Australopithecines (Lucy, etc.) and early Homos (Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, etc.). Even though Australopithecines undoubtedly walked upright (their kind would have left the famous pair of bipedal tracks at Laetoli, Tanzania, 3.5 million years ago), their skulls are so ape-like as to be ineligible as a possible human ancestor. But let’s assume that somehow they bridged the evolutionary gap between themselves and early Homos, which indeed are in the ballpark of physical comparison with humans.

Notice that in any series of photos showing the skulls of the Homo prehumans, little changes over time except the size of their brains, which increase by leaps of roughly 200 cubic centimeters between species. Every bone in those skulls is much denser and heavier than in humans; they all had missing foreheads; huge brow ridges; large, round eye sockets holding nocturnal (night) vision eyes; wide cheekbones; broad nasal passages beneath noses that had to splay flat across their faces (no uplift of bone to support an off-the-face nose); mouths that extend outward in the prognathous fashion; and no chins.

Each of those features is classic higher primate, and they predominate in the fossil record until only 120,000 years ago, when genuinely human-looking creatures—the Cro-Magnons—appear literally "overnight" (in geological terms), with absolutely everything about them starkly different from their predecessors. In fact, the list of those differences is so lengthy, it is safe to say humans are not even primates! (More howls of outrage from off to our right, but please keep to the middle ground and consider the evidence.)

According to our mitochondrial DNA, humans have existed as a distinct species for only about 200,000 years, give or take several thousand. This creates quite a problem for Darwinists because they contend we are part of the sequence extending back through the Australopithecines at four million years ago. Furthermore, we should follow directly after the Neanderthals, which followed Homo Erectus. But now the Neanderthals, which existed for about 300,000 years and overlapped Cro-Magnons by about 100,000 of those, have provided mitochondrial samples which indicate they are not related closely enough to humans to be direct ancestors. This compounds yet another serious transition problem because human brains are on average 100 cubic centimeters smaller than Neanderthal brains! How might that have happened if we are on a direct ancestral line with them?

Anthropologists are now left with only Homo Erectus as a possible direct ancestor for humans, and Erectus supposedly went extinct 300,000 years ago—100,000 before we appeared. Obviously, something had to give here, and—as in war—truth has been the first casualty. Recently anthropologists started reevaluating Homo Erectus fossils from Indonesia and guess what? They are now finding possible dates as early as 30,000 years ago, well beneath the 120,000 years ago Cro-Magnons first appeared in the fossil record. Such a surprise! However, scientists still have to account for our "sudden" appearance and our wide array of new traits never before seen among primates.

Understand this: humans are not primates! Yes, we do fit the technical definition of having flexible hands and feet with five digits, but beyond that there is no reasonable comparison to make. We don’t have primate bone density (theirs is far more robust than ours) or muscular strength (pound for pound they are 5 to 10 times stronger than we are); but we do have foreheads; minimal brow ridges; small, rectangular-shaped eye sockets holding poor night-vision eyes; narrow nasal passages with noses that protrude off our faces; mouths that are flat rather than prognathous; we have chins; and we are bipedal.

Apart from those skeletal differences, we don’t have primate brains (that is an understatement!), throats (we can’t eat or drink and breathe at the same time; they can); voices (they can make loud calls, but we can modulate them into the tiny pieces of sound that make up words); body covering (they all have pelts of hair from head to toe, thick on the back and lighter on the front; we have no pelt and our thickness pattern is reversed); we cool ourselves by sweating profusely (they tend to pant, though some sweat lightly); we shed tears of emotion (no other primate does); we do not regulate our salt intake (all other primates do); we have a layer of fat of varying thickness attached to the underside of our skin, which primates do not have; that fat layer prevents wounds to our skin from healing as easily as wounds to primate skin; human females have no estrus cycle, as do all primates; but the number one difference between humans and primates is that humans have only 46 chromosomes while all higher primates have 48!

This last fact is the clincher. You can’t lose two entire chromosomes (think how much DNA that is!) from your supposedly "parent" species and somehow end up better. And not just better, a light year better! It defies logic to the point where any reasonable person should be willing to concede that something "special" happened in the case of humans, something well beyond the ordinary processes of life on Earth. And it did. The "missing" chromosomes, it turns out, are not actually missing. The second and third chromosomes in higher primates have somehow been spliced together (there is no other term for it) by an utterly inexplicable—some might call it "miraculous"— technique.

Once again, the only plausible explanation seems to be intervention. But by whom? The same hyperdimensional entity or entities that might have created life in the first place? Not necessarily. Certainly that would have to be considered as a possibility, but humans were probably a breeze to create relative to initiating life and engineering all subsequent forms. That leaves room for three-dimensional assistance. In other words, we could have been created as we are by other three-dimensional beings who for reasons of their own decided to make us "in their own image, after their own likeness."

Accepting such a heretical explanation would certainly go a long way toward resolving these anomalies about humanity: (1) our many inexplicable differences from primates; (2) our all-too-sudden appearance in the fossil record; (3) our much-too-recent speciation; (4) our lack of a clear ancestor species; (5) our astounding number of genetic flaws; and (6) the unmistakable splicing done to our second and third chromosomes. The last two are, not surprisingly, hallmarks of hybridization and genetic manipulation, which is exactly how human origins were accounted for by—get this—the ancient Sumerians! We began this essay with them, and now we will end it with them.

As was noted at the beginning, the Sumerians were Earth’s first great culture, emerging fully-formed from the Stone Age around 6,000 years ago (shades of Bishop Ussher!). They utilized over 100 of the "firsts" we now attribute to a high civilization, among them the first writing (cuneiform), which they inscribed on clay tablets that were fired in kilns (another first) into stone. Thousands of those tablets have survived, and in many of them the Sumerians describe a period wherein hundreds of three-dimensional "gods" (with a small "g") came to Earth from another planet orbiting in a long clockwise ellipse around the Sun rather than in a counterclockwise circle like the other planets.

While on Earth, those vastly superior beings decided to create for themselves a group of slaves and servants they would call Adamu. It was written in stone over 4,000 years ago (1,500 years before the Old Testament) that those "gods" agreed to "make the Adamu in our own image, after our own likeness." They did it by processes that sound remarkably like genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization, and hybridization. Perhaps most remarkable of all, they said they did it around 200,000 years ago, precisely when our mitochondrial DNA—against all expectations—says we originate as a species!

When the task of creating the Adamu was complete, the first of them were put to work in the Lower World of deep, hot mineshafts in southern Africa, where—not to put too fine a point on it—nearly every modern authority agrees that humankind originated. Eventually a surplus of slaves and servants became available, so that group was sent to work in the lush Upper World home of our alleged creators, which they called the E.Din ("home of the righteous ones") located in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley of modern Iraq.

All went well until the end of the last Ice Age, around 15,000 years ago, when the gods realized the immense icecap covering Antarctica was rapidly melting, and at some point in the future its massive edges would drop into the surrounding oceans and cause gigantic tidal waves to sweep across Earth’s lowlands, where their cities were. Because all Adamu could not be saved, several of the best were chosen to survive in a specially constructed boat able to withstand the immense tsunamis that were certain to strike.

When the time came, the gods boarded their spacecraft and lifted off into the heavens, from where they watched the devastation below and were shocked by the level of destruction. But when the waters receded enough for them to come down and land in the Zagros Mountain highlands, above the now mud- and sludge-covered E.Din valley, they joined the surviving Adamu to begin rebuilding their decimated civilization.

Again, not to put too fine a point on it, but most scholars now agree that modern civilization (settlements, farming, etc.) inexplicably began around 12,000 years ago in the Zagros Mountain highlands, where settlements would be extraordinarily difficult to build and maintain, and where terrace farming in poorly watered, sparse mountain soil (not to mention arid weather) would be vastly more demanding than in any fertile, well-watered lowlands. Yet the same scholars do not accept that there was any kind of worldwide flood event which may have caused a prior civilization to have to reboot itself in dry highlands.

In general, modern scholars scoff at all similar correlations to the Sumerian texts, considering them nothing more than an extended series of coincidences. They insist the Sumerians were merely being "overly creative" while forming incredibly sophisticated, richly detailed "myths." After all, the myriad wondrous things they described over four thousand years ago simply could not be an accurate record of their "primitive" reality.

Or could it?


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just a little bit of verification of his examples --

http://zygote.swarthmore.edu/evo5.html - Haeckels Drawings

http://www.unmuseum.org/piltdown.htm - piltdown man hoax

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Of the three gaps, the author from the Scientific American does give some uh, evidence, of the first gap, or the gap between life and non-life, or its lack of relevance. i would like to know what countless studies he is referring to =)

The plant to animal gap is the biggie, imo. There should be modern, or ancient examples of hybrids.

Slims

It is late, so my tackling that last post will have to last until tommorrow.

But I will throw these out now:
There are examples of hybrids between plants and animals. I believe certain kinds of plankton are photosynthetic animals.

We did not evolve from primates, but rather, we, apes, and primates evolved from some distant common ancestor.

As far as 'gaps' between species in the fossil record are concerned, for all intents and purposes, there are no hybrids between species. Either something is ones species or it is another. You can't have something in between. Besides, adaptive radiation can occur almost instantaneously, geologically speaking.

Was the person who wrote this article a Raelian (sp?) I think this might have been written by one of those guys who thinks aliens made everything. Who knows.

I will try to back up what I have just said tommorrow, as well as do my best to pick apart that last post by Loki if someone doesn't beat me to it (no offense Loki).

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"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible." Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence

Lebell

Umm

Interesting article, Loki.

Like Greg700, I found myself wondering if they writer was a raelian (also sp?).

Maybe we can get XenuHubbard in here and ask him if he knows.

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CSflim

A book that I would definatly reccomend on the subject of Evolution is The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. While you may not like the guy (he can be quite the arrogant arsehole at times!), it is definitly worth a read.

Personally, I am a big "believer" in the theory of evolution.

One thing I will throw out: Why are there no (or at least very very few) atheists who disagree with the theory of evolution?

Surely if evolution is based on such bad science as we could be lead to believe there would be other pure scientists who would be able to see through such things? The fact is evolution is damn near watertight. And it can be proven in the laboratory. All of the evidence points towards it being flat.

I mean at the time of Darwin, when he proposed his theory he was unable to explain any mechanism. Well now we HAVE a mechanism, its called DNA. We have an entire science devoted to it, genetics. I'm not seeing anyone jump up and down, saying that is bad science. Yet the mere idea of seriously studying genetics, without "believing" in the theory of evolution, is just...well...silly!

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XenuHubbard

The read was really interesting.
As for the end; I haven't heard this about the Sumerians before.

Lloyd Pye - check out his webpage at www.lloydpye.com - is apparently an Interventionist, meaning that the main cause of the World looking the way it does today is because of alien intervention. This groups him in with the Raelians, the Scientologists, the Four Winds and those people who castrated themselves in Switzerland. (Don't know their name in English.)

As for atheists disagreeing with evolution; I've met a few Chinese atheists who doesn't believe in it, but many Chinese who consider themselves atheist still take certain spiritual elements as natural, such as ancestral worship and spirits.

New thoughts and viewpoints are always good.

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smooth

Michael Behe wrote an excellent book (Darwin's Black Box regarding irreducibly complex systems (so you can gain a rounder perspective).

There are quite a few sites rebutting his claims along with those supporting his counter-claims.

Behe, a Senior Fellow and Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvani, claims that various systems would not operate any more if one were to remove any one piece of the system. Any agreement with Behe's assessment places me squarely against the claim that evolution has been tested and explained in relation to various organic systems that could not have evolved one step at a time.

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Slims

Smooth, take a look at the 'evolved' verses the human invented chips for several circuits. Using genetic programming, scientists have been able to duplicate previously patented inventions by 'evolving' circuits. Interestingly, these evolved circuits are usually better than their human invented counterparts, and in the case of the example given in the article (a circuit for generating cubic waves, I think) we don't understand how it works. It, like many complex systems would not operate if any one piece was removed (except for a few left over extraneous ones), and yet it's existence is due to an evolutionary process.


I couldn't find the original article anywhere, but I think the one I am referring to came from the february 2003 issue of scientific american.

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"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." - Winston Churchill

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CSflim

Yes you are correct. An EXCELLENT book on this subject is Digital Biology. I can't recall the authors name at this time. Evolution of both hardware and software is an increibly exciting field at the moment, operating on the very fringes of computer science. It is now obvious that the only way we are really going to develop artificial intelligence is by "evolving" it, rather than attempting to actaully write it, in the traditional sense of software engineering.

Were evolution not a natural phenomena, then I would say that I was amazed at how humans have invented quite an amazing tool!

Whatever the media may tell you, to be hosest with you, all real scientists simply take evolution as fact, and get on with it. It is only when dealing with public relations, that they have to be P.C. and tip toe around the subject.

Why is it that evolution comes under such a strong attack? Especially be complete outsiders and non-scientists? (or "scientists" with a degee in a completely unrelated area). I mean there are far more shakey areas of science that don't come under nearly as much outsider attention. Take for instance the world of particle physics. The theories and hypothesises behind this science aren't nearly as watertight as evolution. Why aren't people complaining about the propsed existence of messons? There is far less evidence than there is for evolution.

CheapBastid

Behe? I'm sorry, I've gone through the process of tracking down his statements and counterstatements and what I came to (as have other rational folks) is that he changes the markers of what is irreducible and is not honest in his motives. He makes statements that he is not interested in proving the validity of any specific 'higher power' yet that does not jibe with how he addresses the Creationists and IDers.

BentNotTwisted

IMHO, it's because particle physics doesn't directly challenge people's belief systems. Evolutionists come along and say, 'Hey you creationists over there. You got it all wrong. Quit believing some omnipotent being created us.' Challenge a person's core beliefs and you are in for a serioius fight.

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docbungle

How it all began will always be based on a hypothesis of some sort, as no one was actually there at the beginning, writing it all down for us, taking notes and drawing pictures. In order to prove something, you need actual proof. We have no proof, only religious ideas and scientific calculations. If there was proof then there would be no argument. I don't understand why people argue so vehemently over something they can never prove to one another. That is, to someone who believes differently about the subject than they do. All of the facts that CAN be proven do not prove either theory as a whole, they merely contribute to the hypothesis of the theory. Those who believe in God and those who do not are rarely able to discuss this intelligently because their emotions get in the way and the discussion is not objective. I believe in God and creationism but hey, I could be wrong. That's simply what I believe and I'm going with it. When it's all over I'll either be wrong or I'll be right. And then I'll know or I won't know.

Sun Tzu

I’m a person of science. It makes more sense to me that humans evolved. The dots connect better (for me). I don’t know if the Bible were true if we would be any better off. Evolution still holds emptiness for me as far as looking at the Universe as a whole. I can’t conceive that in the size of our galaxy alone how much intelligent life there has to be. That’s where the soul issue come in and my frustration; lack of faith, and overall feeling of being lost comes in. My beliefs currently are that some form of a higher power exists and that each of us carries an energy that goes somewhere (like everything else). I wish I had more faith in something I probably would feel so lost (in this area).

I have a couple questions.

There are no sulfur deposits in Israel. If you were taken to an area that may have been Gomorrah and found round balls of pure sulfur would it mean anything?

If chariot remains were found at the bottom of the Red Sea would it mean anything?


My skeptic conclusions: someone could have dumped all that sulfur there long ago.

The chariots could have been aboard a ship.

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papermachesatan

www.talkorigins.org is always a great evolution website.

CheapBastid

Things Creationists Hate is interesting as well.

Cynthetiq

Icelandic people and horses are being closely studied because of the isolation of their homeland for many generations. Even their language has not evolved very far from it's origins.

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koeppel

Please see:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/re2/index.asp

for Jonathan Sarfati's (Ph.D.) response to the Scientific American article mentioned above. (15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense). He methodically responds to each and every one of SA's 15 issues. He also addresses the PBS Evolution series.

Todd Koeppel

Sargeman

Along the lines of the Moth story, I read a story many many years ago the lunar landing was also a form of evidence against evolution.

Apparantly the belief was that there would be many feet of moon dust on the surface of the moon over the millions of years of stuff crashing into the moon. So they put those circular things (kind of like snow shoes) on the legs of the lander so when the it landed it wouldn't sink to deep into the moondust. Then much to their (NASA) disbelief the moondust was only a few inches thick.

I don't know if it's true or not but that story has been stuck in my head for a while now.

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