Baraminology is indeed a shocking pile of bollocks.
If you don’t fight all ignorance, you’re fighting no ignorance.
- Aristotle - unpublished email correspondence.
The cool thing is that the actual mechanism for transmitting traits across generations supports evolution much better than Darwin’s mechanism. Which Darwin hardly offered as a done deal.
A good way to decide whether someone’s position is based on science or not is to ask, “What kind of evidence would cause you to change your mind?”
That very question was asked of a famous biologist, and his immediate reply was “Finding rabbits in the Silurean!” (or something like that – and hopefully someone here can find the real cite). The point is, there is lots and lots and lots of evidence for the order in which most classes or organisms developed, but finding repeated unexplainable cases where that order was violated would compromise the theory. And, surprise, surprise, we don’t find it.
I’d like to know what kind of evidence a creationist would accept to falsify their theory. I think the only answer would be “If God tells me!”
That’s a clue to who’s doing the science here.
Quibble: it is believed by some. The two big camps were “RNA first” and “protein first”. Both camps have nearly irrefutable arguments against the other. I think it’s pretty clear that something else must be going on. Currently, there is no good scientific story for how life began in the first place, but there are a lot of interesting discussions and avenues of study.
Right. There is some other thing we’d like to put a name to and discuss here. A guy name Dembsky coined the term “specified complexity” to help sort the issue out, but unfortunately he knew what answer he wanted to come up with, and as a result bollixed it all up, resulting in bad math and worse science.
As far as I know, nobody’s come up with a good definition for what we’re trying to get at here, which is “meaningfulness”, in contrast to the “information” of classic information theory. Keep in mind that classic information theory was devised to study the transmission of signals, irrespective of the meanings of the signals.
Just an observation, but if Darwin had known of Mendel’s results, he would actually have found them discouraging rather than encouraging.
And I might as well point out that what Darwin thought or wrote is utterly irrelevant to modern evolutionary science. If we discovered tomorrow that Darwin was tripping on acid and pulled his entire body of work out of his ass, based on nothing at all, that would shatter the foundation of modern biology not a whit. We’ve had well over a century of follow-up work now that has independently confirmed and expanded on what Darwin thought and wrote. If we yanked Darwin away right now, absolutely nothing would change.
I think that creationists, being so religious themselves, like to assume that we scientists do as they do, and revere and worship our “leader”, refusing to believe that they were anything but perfect. This is why you still get personal attacks on Darwin, like all these people who claim that he recanted on his deathbed and decided that good ol’ Christianity was right about this all along. To a religious creationist, that’s a devastating blow. To actual scientists, it’s utterly irrelevant, even if it were true (which it ain’t). But, no, we are all “Darwinists”, and so an attack on Holy Chuck is an attack on our “religion”.
It’s all so very tiresome.
The answer is so blindingly obvious that, in my opinion, this thread should have been posted in General Questions.
Yes, or you could use as an example of finding any mammal in Silurian rock which would seriously disrupt evolution theory and bring it to a screeching halt if it was authentic, but to date none have been found. The first clear signs of land life don’t even start to appear until this time period. There is a possibility that it might have arrived just a little bit earlier than that in the Ordovician period, but those fossils I understand are more difficult to interpret due to their fragmentary nature.
Paleontologists now have microfossils dating back to about 3.5 billion years or so and such simple life forms is all you’d expect to see during that time, just like the evolution theory predicts. I think the oldest may be 3.85 billions year old.
It’s been over twenty years since I’ve read from Ecker, but he is an excellent source for all of this in his Dictionary of Science & Creation by Prometheus books, and made things so easy to understanding the basics, anyway. He cites Futuyma in which he says there are literally millions of potential fossil discoveries that could be found that could DISPROVE evolution, if they were found in layers of rock they weren’t supposed to be found in. As you mention, the theory of evolution is both testable and falsifiable, which are two hallmarks of any great scientific theory.
An excellent site on-line that I used to spend many hours on years ago is this one at Berkeley. Their geological time scale is also helpful.
The problem is going to be getting creationists to read from such books. This is clearly out of their comfort zone, and to accept evolution would be to deny a literal account of Genesis of which many are awfully damn fond of, and have their soul at stake not to believe it.
What sort of change in the puppy would do? [swings hammer]
I don’t get the impression that this was drive by winessing or that he wasn’t looking for answers. In fact he came back to post that he found the TalkOrigins site useful.
Sounds to me he was looking for information to rebut someone elses claim.
IvoryTowerDenizen’s first impression isn’t necessarily unjustified, though. The form of the OP’s question, the fact that he’s brand new, and the fact that his OP includes a link to a creationist website; together, these fit the profile of a drive-by witnesser. It’s not like we haven’t seen enough of them over the years.
True, so it’s a good thing we didn’t assume the obvious conclusion was necessarily correct, and provided useful answers.
Yes, and people posting such questions tend to be quite young, I think. This poster says he is 50+ in his profile, seems like he would have addressed these questions long ago. But it’s never too late. And it could be he was only exposed to like-minded creationists for pretty much all of his life, never knowing sure where to look. It does happen.
He has seven posts to date, and seems civil enough, so hope he sticks around.