Ok, here we are again. We have a couple new creationists (Pashley and CalifBoomer) making all sorts of claims in several different threads. So as I’ve done before, I’m opening a new thread just for the creationists to put forth their evidence for creationism and/or against evolution. But, be warned – this site is all about fighting ignorance. So if you really don’t know what you’re talking about and aren’t prepared to discuss it with people who do know what they’re talking about, you might as well just slink away now.
Looks like so somebody hasn’t got their debunking fix recently 
David- We would like you to posit your view on this issue, please. While you’re formulating your response, take a look at This (Activist Creationists?)
Oh, golly. We have Johnson (where have we heard about him previously?) who, trained as a lawyer, frequently tears up the verbal presentations of scientists in debate, but who has never submitted an actual defendable assault on evolution to a science journal. Then we have Behe, a nice guy and a decent scientist, but one who has chosen to declare that certain events “require” design because his personal feeling is that they could not occur through random events–even though he has not yet demonstrated why they could not occur through random events.
And I loved this quote:
Since several theistic religions can and do accept both of those statements as valid as a functional description of the continuity of life and as an accurate depiction of the operation of evolution, I have to wonder who these people are that think they get to define what all theistic religions can believe.
Oh, well. Let the fun begin.
Tom~
(snicker) Let me guess: Kansas?
[quote]
I was practically an evangelist for evolution," Mr. Anderson says wryly. His turnabout was sparked when a colleague told him baldly, “Don’t get me wrong, I believe human evolution happened, but there’s absolutely no evidence for it.” [/qoute]
(snicker) You know, evidently he wasn’t all that fired up (or knowledgeable) about evolution if he couldn’t come up with any evidence of human evolution when some idiot chirped. Evangelist for evolution, my ass. Moron.
Huh? What? Is this even a coherent thought? Free will? What? Lock up whom?
I can’t believe I just wasted five minutes of my life reading that crap.
Please, CalifBoomer, don’t waste our time. The people you linked to don’t even know that “species” and “family” aren’t synonyms.
-Ben
The Creationists are making an extraordinary claim (to wit: the earth is only millenia old, despite all the evidence consistent with an age in the billions of years).
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Positive evidence in favor, not just attempting to refute contrary evidence.
I challenge Creationists to present this positive evidence.
And don’t just throw the link at us. Present a piece of evidence in summary form, and then present the link.
He’s the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armor, shouting ‘All Gods are Bastards!’
Did anyone else notice that no where in that a entire article did it actually define what “Intelligent design” was? The closest it came was giving a vauge description of it.
Why?
Fyi, Cells did not just spontaneously appear. There were many different types of cell-like not-quite-organisms before the first real cell.
Dna is not encoded intelligence, but rather the coding for proteins.
Btw, according to the ribozyme theory, Dna originated from a self-replicating enzyme/RNA (ribozyme) that was acted upon by another protein called reverse transcriptase. (elaboration will be made if inquired about)
Cause then it wouldn’t be natural science. It would be supernatural science.
[QUOTE But the Cambrian fossils show precisely the opposite pattern: The major patterns of life appear in a shotgun blast of radically different forms, and only then begin to diversify.[/quote]
Good point. I can’t explain it.
Although cataclyzmic evolution could–but the probability of cataclyzmic evolution is a sliver of slim at best.
Islamic view
Yes it can a fish can and did, and man didn’t evolve from monkey.
Fish to amphibian to reptile to bird.
[quote]
bla bla bla…probably dimishes to 209x10^-50 or 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000209 chance of getting a singular combination bla bla bla
[quote]
Uh, ok thats for one combination. there are many millions or billions of ways DNA could have come into existance–or rather RNA did(see above).
It’s not haphazard. The ribozyme would be able to self-replicate and thus having the ability to mutate. In short it is not haphazard, but gradual.
Dna can have 100% different nucleotide combination and still code for the same exact protein. Each aminoacids have several code-ons to which they attach.
Monkey didn’t evolve into man. Go back about 20 or so million years and you will find the DNA sequences much more similar.
oh, and btw, Chimp and Human ARE 99% similar.
alternate christain
So what about the poor ole jacka**?
I always seem to forget. Was it a Horse + donkey = Mule? or Horse + Mule = donkey?
It matters not. They interbreed.
They have fossils of animals that do seem to show the divergence of man and primate.
Uhh, yes they have. I can’t recall the exact scientfic name, so i’ll use the common knowledge one. The perodactyl–and it’s many ancestors(some of which DID have feathers)
This changing of species occurs rapidly only when there is some huge change in environment. Otherwise you’d just keep the greater whole of the species at the median of the bell curve of traits for a species.
Oy… that took to long…
good day.
aaaaaccccchhhh!! Earthlink keeps dropping my connection…I swear I’m gonna get DSL, but i won’t be with earthlink…
ahem.
Ok, where were we? I agree with Single Dad. The earth and entire universe as we know it are billions of years old. So let’s have a reasonable discussion. First, let’s find points of agreement. I submit that a creationist philosophy is not automatically an “anti-evolution” philosophy. I agree that ‘speciation’, if understand the term correctly, has indeed occurred over the course of history. My objection goes to the notion that there absolutely, definitely was no creator. I maintain that there was a creator, and that He is God. I can’t prove to you that God exists, and you can’t prove He does not exist. I’ll post this before the connection goes again…
I love it when people object to evolution by saying: Well how come we don’t see apes turning into humans now? or Where are all the intermediates now? Just makes me want to smack em upside the head. The concept of geologic time is just harder for others to grasp, I guess.
It’s not how you pick your nose, it’s where you put the boogers
I have no objection to someone claiming that ‘God’ created the Universe 10-15 billion years ago. That is an unfalsifiable proposition, although, IMHO, not a very interesting one.
It is the Fools assert as fact that the Earth and Universe are only about 5600 years old with no evidence whatsoever (outside of the Bible) to support that assertion.
An amusing sideline, if you will.
There was somebody, a writer of some middling prominence in Mid-19th Cent. England, who adroitly sidestepped the whole fossil/age of the Earth by advancing the notion that God not only created the Earth, while he was at it he built in all the fossils and other geological evidence to make it look like the planet evolved in geological time, rather than something God cooked up in 6 days in the macrowave. (His name escapes me, but I might have read about him in one of my Gould books.) Anybody know his name?
elucidator
That’s a common argument of the creationists. It begs the question, however, of why God would perform such a deception, giving rise to term “Divine Weasel”.
Regardless, it’s not a rational argument: It’s a dismissal of emprical evidence on non-rational grounds.
He’s the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armor, shouting ‘All Gods are Bastards!’
elucidator
I had heard this argument, and brought it up to my paleontology professor at Calvin College- a fairly conservative Christian college. He had a good laugh about it. To apply reductio ad absurdum, God could have created the universe just now, with me in mid keystroke. Well, he could have, right?
It’s not how you pick your nose, it’s where you put the boogers
Bored2001 wrote:
I can.
The Cambrian “explosion” took place over approximately 5 million years. During this time every single animal phylum, both currently existing and extinct, came into being.
Now, you’re probably saying, “But wait, tracer! It takes tens of thousands of years for a population to evolve into another species. It must take a bazillion jillion years for a population to evolve into a whole different phylum!” Well, actually … no, it doesn’t. And it certainly wouldn’t have taken all that long at the start of the Cambrian period.
You see, we big apes in the modern world have inherited a vastly hugely complex genome with all sorts of intricately interwoven biological machinery (and a hell of a lot of useless vestigial baggage) encoded in it. It would take an awful lot of successive and carefully guarded mutations for us to sprout an extra pair of legs – and even more to sprout and extra abdomen. And even if we did, we live in a world populated by all sorts of other animal species just as complex as we are, who have filled just about every ecological niche that can be filled; a radically new phylum-spawning body plan, and every intermediary stage on the way to that new body plan, would have to have some advantage in this heavily-populated world of ours to evolve.
But at the start of the Cambrian explosion, the new animal phyla came into existence from animal ancestors that had no body plan to speak of. Sprouting an extra lobe here or a limb there just didn’t require as many evolutionary steps as it would for a big hulking land-dweller like us. And more importantly, they were coming into a world that had almost no animal species exploiting any niches at all. If your newly-evolved fin allowed you to dig one millimeter under the sand for food, it was a huge boon, because nobody else was already there digging under the sand and no sand-dwelling critters had as yet evolved a defense against your new sand-digging power – so you and your progeny would almost be guaranteed to prosper.
The fact that it took 5 million years for the newly erupting animal phyla to fill all these virgin niches is a testament to the slowness of evolution, not to a mysterious, divine Burst of Creation.
The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.
Re: Cambrian Explosion
One must also consider that there might have been a soft bodied creatures in the preC that did not fossilize well. These types of creatures are not easy to find; indeed most of the discoveries are relatively recent. This effect further extends the time period of the explosion, dampening it. The seperation of the supercontinent Pangea also occured at about the same time. This undoubtedly created many unfilled niches by changing climate and creating a warm shallow sea.
When dealing with paleontology, people (Creationists like Duane Gish) tend to forget that what fossils we do have are but a mere glimpse of what actually existed. It’s like getting 57 peices of a 1000 piece puzzle and trying to figure out what the picture is.
It’s not how you pick your nose, it’s where you put the boogers
http://www.isidaho.com/bluetree/anmonkey.gif
So far, I’ve yet to hear anyone-except me- propose just how everything started.
Statements like this
cause me to ask–** from where?? ** did ‘we big apes’ inherit 'vastly hugely complex genome bla, bla, bla. Well, you people are great thinkers, where?
ok, CalifBoomer, start paying attention. I’ll give you a quick overview of how the procees works.
It all started a long, long time ago. (Unfortunately, we haven’t quite figured out exactly how it all started, but we’ve got some of our best minds on it, so eventually we’ll work it out.) Some very simple single celled ‘bugs’ are floating around, trying to eke out an existence and pass along their genes. Some can withstand more UV than others, so they pass on their genes more often. Soon enough, all of the bugs can withstand more UV. Flash forward a few billion years- some apes are trying to eke out an existence and pass on their genes. Some can fashion tools and survive better than others, and pass on their genes more often.
If you want more details, feel free to educate yourself by reading some of Stephen Jay Gould’s books, notably Ever Since Darwin. Also try Beak of the Finch- the author escapes me.
It’s not how you pick your nose, it’s where you put the boogers