I wonder if he has the evidence to back up this assertion; he will doubtless rattle on about bombarding Canola with Gamma radiation, knocking out the genes responsible for toxicity; this is a good example of what he describes, but has he scrupulously examined every example of mutation to be sure that it isn’t a ‘new’ trait? - I still think that pesticide and antibiotic resistance are examples of ‘new’ traits.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves about Creationism: treating Darwin as if he’s some sort of God of evolution, and that proving something he said was wrong, or that he recanted on his deathbed, or whatever, somehow makes evolution less valid. He could have been (and likely was, being so early in the field) wrong about many things concerning evolution (mechanism, for instance), but that doesn’t affect the validity of current evolutionary theory more than 100 years after Darwin.
And this quote has another common misconception of Creationists: that things evolve into each other. I.e., that fish evolve into reptiles evolve into mammals evolve into primates evolve into humans. That is not how evolution works! A carp will never in a hundred billion years evolve into a human. It will certainly become something fascinating and unique, but not a mammal or a reptile, or even a bass or a catfish. It will become something we’ve never seen before.
And the time scale is immense. The reason this “hasn’t been observed in…genetics” is that the time scale of our observation is too short. Of course the offspring of a carp is carp-like. It may be slightly bigger, or smaller, or fatter, or whatever, but one generation will not produce that fundamental of a change. However, it should seem pretty obvious that millions of generations, with no cosmic “force” holding the animals to one specific “type,” will lead to something different on a more fundamental scale. It is interesting that they attribute this statement to a geologist, as the fossil record is exactly where we see this sort of long-term, fundamental change.
Order (a decrease in entropy) can come out of any part of a system, as long as the entropy of the system as a whole increases. Hell, they say that themselves in quote number five. Contrary to what they state about explosions, the early universe had low entropy. All the particles were more closely packed, and there for the level of order was much higher. In an expanding universe, the expansion (which, since the particles are getting thinner, causes an increase in entropy) can fuel the decrease in entropy in small sub-sections. Considering the density of the universe – the number of “organized” bits, like stars and planets, compared to the vast emptiness between them – I’d say not to much loss of entropy has to be accounted for.
And what do they call the sun and photosynthesis? The sun is a huge energy source creating disorder on a much greater scale than the order produced on earth by the harnessing of that energy. No sun (no increase in disorder), no life. Also, the amount of waste heat generated by living things (i.e., the increase in disorder) is greater than the amount of increase in order produced. Furthermore, I don’t see what this has to do with evolution. Evolution is a population-level phenomenon, and doesn’t require energy. It is a property of a group – a characteristic. Not an active process that does work. There is no force of evolution. What does have to obey the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is life itself, not evolution. They seem to be arguing that life itself cannot exist according to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. I’d have to say the evidence is against that. 
-b
I don’t think there is any way for a single individual to defend science against the wholesale assault by creationists, or any need to either. The assault involves attacks on our current understanding of biology, geology, paleontology, nuclear physics, cosmology, chemisty and on and on. No one person can possibly be familiar enough with the ins-and-outs of all these subjects to give an adequate response.
Furthermore, those who are actively engaged in the specialties of science that are assailed by the creationists are too busy with their own work to take time to answer claims that have been answered many times before.
As has been said many times, a fool can ask more questions in 5 minutes than a multitude of knowledgeable people can answer in a lifetime.
The creationists position is that the universe, with the earth as the center and mankind as the crowning achievement, was created in six 24-hour days, about 6000 years ago.
The Forward to the book Scientific Creationism published by the Institute for Creation Research contains the following: *"Man and his world are not products of an evolutionary process but, rather, are special creations of God. According to the Biblical record, God Himself wrote with His own hand these words: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is. . . .(See Exodus 20:11; 31:17-19).
That being true*[my underline added], it follows that real understanding of man and his world can only be acquired in a thoroughgoing creationist frame of reference."
Also see the chapter Creation According to Scripture in the same volume. There can be no objection to maintaining this as a philosophical position. However, to attempt to have it placed by law into science classes in schools is outrageous.
Ask you creationist relative to defend the cited creationist position using science. All of the scientific advances made over the past 300 years don’t need any defense against the same old claims by the creationists, endlessly repeated.
Point out the new fossil discovery that unearthed an intermediate form between birds and dinosaurs. It had characteristics of both.
As a matter of fact, the fossil records is one of the things that Creationsts won’t touch, unless when they are muttering some “missing link” this or that.
Anyway, ask this question: “Why are certain groups of lifeforms appear only after a certain age, while others disappear after a certain age?”
This shouldn’t be difficult. Just give him a correct definition of evolution. As your family member whether geology includes astronomy, or physics psychology.
Check out this article about observed speciations.
The only thing that’s necessary is a decreased order. Considering that the orignal “fireball” had a lot of energy in a small area, it can have a high degree of internal order.
The earth is not a closed system, we get energy from the sun all the time. As for mechanisms, there are lots of mechanisms for capturing energy. Consier the example of leaving a pot of water under the summer sun. The energy from the sun heats up the water, thus is captured by the water, so to speak.
There’s a grain of truth in the planet-formation one… But only a grain. Due to the outliers in a thermal distribution, there will always be a few gas molecules able to escape a planet’s gravity at any given time, so any planetary atmosphere (even if the atmosphere is most of the planet) will eventually be lost to space. However, if you calculate the timescales for this, it’ll work out to be many billions of years. Jupiter hasn’t been around for long enough to have evaporated just yet.
Theoretically, a lone defender cannot fend off all these attacks. However, just because there are mobs of creationists around doesn’t mean their attacks are anything new. There are only a handful of things they have been pushing; all of them have been debunked long ago.
Some of the more outlandish attacks were even refuted by other creationists.
This is too pessimistic for me. Many of these creationist arguments are so clearly wrong that they can be answered in a few sentences. In addition to the comments here, check out
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo.html
for more info on the (easily refutable) thermodynamic arguments.
Ain’t that the truth! :rolleyes: