And everyone’s favourite St. Augustine quote fits in here nicely…
http://www.ediacara.org/august.html
This is just something to think about.
One thing to remember is that not all arguments against evolution come from creationists. Some come from evolutionists themselves.
I’ll leave it to others to debunk your quotes (particularly amusing are the 150 years out of date “arguments against evolution” from Darwin himself,) but for now I’ll just point out that this is just another example of how creationists love quotefests. You know what Leonardo said: people who try to win arguments by quoting famous people aren’t demonstrating their capacity for reason, they’re just demonstrating the capacity of their memory. And now that they have the web, they aren’t even demonstrating that!
Please, Joel, enough! I asked you a question: how do you explain protein homology from a creationist standpoint? No answering questions with questions, no irrelevant quotes, just find me a valid creationist answer or admit that creationism can’t provide one! And good luck on finding an answer- even the authors of creationist textbooks couldn’t come up with one. We had a creationist molecular biologist on SDMB some time back, and even she couldn’t do it! And do you know why? Because creationism is bunk!
-Ben
Ben,
I appreciate your taking the time to type all that. Some response:
- Your analogy to George Bush is again inapt. I am not saying that it is impossible for evolution to be true because of the gap in the fossil record; only that much of the evidence is missing. In the case of Bush there’s no need for evidence, because no one doubts that he grew up continously. If there was some serious doubt possible about that issue, the intervening years would indeed amount to missing evidence.
I’ve seen the horse evolution progression, and was actually thinking of that when I made my original point. The theory of evolution would seem to require that there is no specific types of horse, one following the other. It would be one continous progression.
- I fail to understand your point about the DNA. In the case of two humans, it is a known fact that different people who are related will share DNA characteristics. Therefore one can establish identity and paternity on that basis. Comparing across species does not have that same advantage. Whether the similarities in DNA are the result of heredity or the result of merely a general similarity is part of the question. You can’t make the assumption that it must be the result of heredity, and then turn around and prove evolution through this.
Imagine if there was no DNA. You could theoretically make the same argument. People who are related tend to look similar. Monkeys look more like people than elephants. Therefore monkeys must be more closely related to people than elephants. The addition of DNA to the mix doesn’t add to this argument.
It’s as if you determine that bicycles built by the same manufacturer tend to look alike. Two bicycles that look very similar can be presumed to be made by the same manufacturer. There all bicycles must be ultimately made by the same holding company.
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pseudogenes. if I understand you correctly, you are saying that there are comletely useless genes that are thought to be left in place because they were useful at one point in the evolutionary past. This sounds similar, though on a molecular level, to other proofs of the same sort made about “vestigial organs”. It is my impression that some organs originally thought to be vestigial (pituitary?) have subsequently been found to be nothing of the sort. Is it possible that the same will ultimately be found about pseudogenes? The field of molecular biochemistry is relatively young.
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Segregational load. I don’t understand this at all. It seems to me that what you are saying boils down to “evolution works through suvival of the fittest. Therefore any example of a species having a survival feature is proof of evolution”. This is bizarre. Please correct me if I’ve misunderstood you.
Thanks again for your response.
Heh…I guess I’m not alone in thinking this! (And just because it’s the only competing explanation doesn’t make it correct.)
Many of the quotes in the link provided by Joel are taken out of context. In particular, take a look at this one:
Darwin wrote The Origin of Species to argue for his theory of natural selection, not for evolution. Darwin did not ‘invent’ evolution, he provided a mechanism for it. As indicated by the quote above, the eye presents difficulties for the theory of natural selection. Also realize that Darwin wrote Origin without the knowledge we know have of genetics, molecular biology, etc.
Also consider this quote:
This says nothing against evolution! This is a comment about textbook writers presenting what are known speculations as fact! And this applies to any field. He’s also arguing against the ‘science as truth’ concept. Science does not seek truth; it seeks understanding.
Mauve Dog:
Does this mean that in considering creatures that lived constntly in the same environment there are no gaps?
Note my earlier remark, which I shall reprint here
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But in order to have a “continuous progression” you would need an infinite number of fossils. As is, we have a finite number (roughly 17) of fossil species, each differing only very slightly from the next in the sequence.
**
What do you mean, “general similarity”?
If you are a teacher, and two students give you papers in which large chunks of the text are word-for-word identical, do you assume that one copied from the other, or do you say that it’s the result of some “general similarity”, perhaps because they were writing about the same subject?
**
There are two arguments that could be made:
Firstly, as far as processed pseudogenes go, you’re basically saying that if you find a smashed bottle, it must have been deliberately manufactured that way. Processed pseudogenes look like a duck, smell like a duck, and sound like a duck, but you’re positing that one day we will discover that they really aren’t what they obviously seem to be.
Secondly, transposons are pieces of parasitic DNA which can insert themselves into the genome. We’ve seen transposons insert into a person’s genome and tracked them through that person’s descendants. We’ve also found identical transposons between humans and apes. So here we have the same argument as for pseudogenes, but we know even more surely that they are not inherent, useful parts of the genome. If you accept that two people with a transposon at a particular place in the genome are related, then you have to accept that humans and apes are related when they share the exact same transposon.
Again, it’s hard to see how you can accept paternity testing for humans but not for primates in general. A man can’t claim in court that the child just shares a “general similarity” reflected in his DNA; if the test says they’re related, they’re related. The same goes for humans and apes.
Remember, too, that you can see where chromosomes have fused in the course of human evolution, and remained unfused in apes.
You’ve completely misunderstood me. Before I explain further, do you know what homozygous and heterozygous mean? Do you know what an allele is? Do you remember all that stuff from high school about how the child of a father with green eyes and a mother with brown eyes has a 50% chance of having brown eyes and a 50% chance of having green eyes?
Let me know where I need to start, and I’ll try to explain it again.
Maybe sickle-cell anemia is a better example. Basically, humans only have room for two genes for the hemoglobin involved in sickle-cell disease. Most people have two normal genes. People with sickle-cell disease have two defective genes. If you have one normal and one defective, then you don’t get the disease, and you’re resistant to malaria. But if you marry someone else with one defective and one normal gene, 50% of your children will have the good mix, 25% will have sickle-cell disease, and 25% won’t be resistant to malaria.
If you have room for four genes, you can have two normal in one place, and two defective in another place. If you marry someone else with room for four genes like that, then all of your children have two normal and two defective genes too, because the normal and defective genes don’t get mixed and matched together when sperm and eggs are made.
In evolutionary terms, there’s a lot of selectional pressure for chromosomal rearrangements that will make room for four genes.
Why didn’t God make everyone have room for four genes in the first place? Why didn’t God make everyone immune to malaria, and make it so nobody would get sickle-cell disease?
-Ben
Mauve Dog:
Not only that, but, IIRC, later in the very same chapter or in any case elsewhere in his writings, Darwin relates how the “problem” of the evolution of the eye was solved to his satisfaction by someone else’s explanation.
Nope. Fossilization is not simply a matter of the right environment (I apologize if that’s how I made it sound with my previous post). It’s a matter of the right circumstances as well.
Here are a few fossilization references which may (or may not) clear things up:
http://www.tiac.net/users/cri/taphonomy.html
http://www.dinosauria.com/jdp/fossil/fossil.htm
This one describes a ‘lab-activity’ for teaching the process to young children:
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/fosrec/Breithaupt2.html
http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/Entomology/courses/en570/papers_1998/spriggs.htm
Ben, sorry, I really can’t see where you’re going with this. Why should God have made these things (assuming spontaneous creation) any differently than they exist?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Ben *
**
Please Ben, enough. Do a better job of reading my replies. I said I would have to study up on that question. My last post wasn’t related to protein homology. And yes, there are some questions that are hard or almost impossible to answer by creationists, but that doesn’t mean that creationsim is bunk. There are facts that blow big holes in the theory of evolution, yet evolutionists continue to believe in evolution anyway.
You say that evolution is a fact? What are the facts? What has been observed or is observable?
Natural selection? - Yes.
Micro-Evolution, changes within species? - Yes.
Macro-Evolution, one species changing into another? - No.
And tell me this, how did the very first life begain? By chemical reactions in a primordial (hope I spelled that right) soup? Uhm, chemical reactions tear down life, not build it up. Cells need food to help repair the damage done by chemical reactions.
Sorry, but just as there are (and I freely admit this) many arguments that go against creationism, so there are many arguments that go against evolutionism.
You may also enjoy reading what Cecil Adams has to say about getting fossilized.
IzzyR:
You are correct here. The very idea of a ‘species’ is a man-made one. Ask a hundred zoologists what the deifinition of a species is, and you might get a hundred different answers (well, ok, maybe only 95). In truth, evolution is a continuum, because each succesive generation is only slightly modified from its predecessor. Granted, the changes may occur rapidly on a geological time-scale, but the timing for these changes typically exceeds the lifespan of any given individual. The theory of evolution in no way requires there to be discrete ‘species.’
Ben:
A continous progression does not require an infinite number of fossils. It merely requires that the fossils that you do have be evenly distributed, not clustered at any number of points. If you recall, my original question was if you took all the fossils that were ever found and lined them up…Mauve Dog and Triskadecamus seem to be supporting the notion that the fossils are clustered at specific points, but explain that by saying that the fossil record is lackink for certain eras or environments. Do you disagree with them?
What I mean by general similarity is that apes and humans are generally similar. Finding that this similarity extends to a molecular level does not add anything - one would have expected that similar creatures would also be similar on a molecular level. Thus this molecular knowledge does not give new reason to believe that there must have been a common ancestor.
The argument about the student’s turning in similar papers sounds strikingly similar to the old creationist argument about finding a watch in the forest. These are equally invalid.
Your example is of something which is recognizably the result of cheating. Experience has told us that the chance of there being this degree of similarity by chance is small. Experience tells us that watches are made by people. Experience does not tell us whether a creator creating a world would have made similar creatures have similar molecular structures.
The broken bottle analogy is strange. I was questioning whether the bottle is indeed smashed at all. It is not valid to compare it to a situation in which we can clearly recognize the object as a broken bottle.
I’ve apparently misunderstood you again. Why did God make anyone suffer? Why are some people born with hereditary diseases and some not? This is a problem that great minds have wrestled with forever. But for whatever reason, God decided to do this. I don’t see how this is relevent to the debate over evolution.
Mauve Dog:
I thought that’s what I originally wrote. You seemed to be correcting me on this.
IzzyR: Actually, I was correcting this statement:
(Italics mine)
We do not only have fossils from certain eras, but we do only have fossils from certain areas, specifically, those locations where the environmental factors are conducive to fossilization. I realize that’s a bit circular; the point is, it’s not the geological time that affects fossilization, but the circumstances and events immediately following the death of an organism. We have gaps in the fossil record because fossilization itself is a crap-shoot.
IzzyR, you seem to be complaining that every organism that has ever lived has not conveniently fossilized for our scientific perusal. I fail to see your point. There are a vast number of fossils currently unearthed, and more are being excavated almost daily. The theory of evolution does a remarkable job of explaining these findings and predicting what new types of fossils will likely be found. Of course there are gaps in the fossil record – how could you reasonably expect it to be otherwise?
I respectfully disagree. Were the theory of Special Creation correct(as if it were deserving of the moniker “theory”), we might have found an entirely different story on the molecular level. Nothing about creationism requires that the alleles of entirely different species to have any similarity whatsoever. For that matter, creationism makes no predictions of any sort, but that’s a different debate (I think). If the molecular structures of species that are assumed to be closely related under evolutionary theory had been found to be completely different, this would have been a strong piece of evidence in favor of creationism. As it is, this is one more in a long line of evidence supporting evolution.
You have almost grasped the concept, so maybe I can help. I suggest you read this article first, Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics. It is a little long and technical for a layperson such as myself, but it is well worth the effort.
Imagine that each of the student’s papers were examined and found to contain a “scratch pad” area where useless ramblings were written prior to answering the questions on the test. Now you find that not only are the ramblings the same, but errors and misspellings are also identical between the two tests. You realize that the chance of each test being separately created is remotely small, so one must have been copied from the other. This is exactly the type of situation Ben is describing. You may try to argue “similar design for similar function” for other sections of the DNA sequence, but there is no design reason to include identical errors in the junk DNA. This is but one more small piece of evidence in support of evolution.
The implication is that imperfect beings are the expected result of an evolutionary process. Only those who choose to ignore science and favor creationism must do the necessary mental gymnastics to accommodate these questions.
Hardcore:
despite the contempt that you must feel for anyone silly enough to question evolutionary theory, you should, if you chose to comment, at least pay attention to what you are commenting on. Refer to my earlier remarks on this matter for what I actually said.
Not sure why this should be. I would think if you saw a car and a truck you might expect some similarity between thair components. you would not expect that much similarity between the components of a car and a pizza pie.
i was questioning whether any piece of DNA could conclusively be classified as junk.
To reiterate, this is just an athiest/religious argument masquerading as an evolution proof. You are saying there is no conceivable reason why God would have made the world in this manner. Therefore there must be no God. Please do not confuse evolution issues with theological ones.
It seems to me that the development of “morals”, is a hinderance to evolution (assuming there is no God, or a god that we can never know. one that created it all and then walked away to allow the “natural” process of evolution takeover. agnostically speaking). In order for us to continue our evolutionary process all laws should be banned and the weak should always be killed. In other words, the laws of nature should take over and it would be “survival of the fittest”. Allowing the weak to survive does nothing to strengthen the gene pool. In fact it weakens it.
So my question is this… How/Why did man develop morals? Why is it bad to kill someone? We don’t imprison lions when they attack a gazelle (aside from zoos, which aren’t designated as punishment for the animals but as entertainment for the people).
And why do we wear clothes?
Because, although it is contained in an article about the Earth’s age, it’s important and relevant. Consider the probability numbers you posted in your first message. Those are “earthly, empirically testable things” and “demonstrably untrue” (as has been pointed out). Consider the passage I posted, and what effect you produce by disseminating the information you found in a Creationist tract without evaluating it.
I agree that people on both sides of the debate should study both sides. It is unfortunate that most of the “creation science” publications are so repetitive and lacking in original thought.
Joel:
Feel free to post any facts, arguments or evidence that refute evolutionism. After all, that’s why this thread is here. Simply proclaiming that contrary evidence exists without producing any just seems so… Phaedrus-like. <shudder>
You really should avail yourself of the previously noted links, especially the ones regarding observed speciation. Also study the essay Evolution is a Fact and a Theory.
You seem willing to accept the fact of evolution as long as it doesn’t involve speciation. What is your reasoning? Why do you suppose there to be a magical boundary preventing speciation at the molecular level? There is no technical difference between your terms “micro-evolution” and “macro-evolution”, just as there is no qualitative difference between walking across the street and walking across the country. One merely requires more time than the other.
Here you are really demonstrating your ignorance. How do you think cells obtain “food”? They do so utilizing chemical reactions. Chemistry is at the foundation of life, not some purely destructive force that must be neutralized. IMO, you should do quite a bit of research before attempting to continue this type of debate.
One friendly piece of advice – if you use the “Preview Reply” button, you can avoid unintentionally bolding your entire reply. Definitely a nice feature that was recently added.