Here are two recent examples of this dogma. In Alabama last week evolutionist Lee Meadows stated that evolution is important to understand because it explains so much. Meadows wrote in his new book, The Missing Link: An Inquiry Approach for Teaching All Students About Evolution, that students "will never achieve the level of scientific literacy they need to make sense of even everyday practicalities such as how human viruses work."
There's only one problem: understanding how viruses work has precisely nothing to do with evolution. Even a six-day creationist could be an expert in viruses without losing a step.
Meanwhile in nearby Oklahoma last week, evolutionist Michael Mares, Director of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History stated in a press release that the museum's exhibits illustrate:
the fact of evolution by natural selection as first described by Charles Darwin and continually supported by all branches of science ever since that time.
The truth, on the other hand, is that evolution has not been "continually supported by all branches of science." In fact, evolution has been consistently shown to be problematic by various branches of science.
This sampling of anti intellectualism from Meadows and Mares comes from prepared statements. They were not stray comments and they are typical of the evolution genre. Religion drives science and it matters.
Nothing to do with evolution? Presumably you've never heard of quasispecies. The only reason a 6-day creationist could do fine with viruses is if they compartmentalize and just ignore all of the relevant evolution going on, which you can do for everything in biology. You'll be missing out, of course... it's like ignoring MO theory or entropy in chemistry.
ReplyDeletegreat post, and a great example of your "science by commenting on press release" approach. tell me, are the ctrl-F and ctrl-B keys on your board worn down to little nubs by now?
ReplyDeleteIts hilarious. The Darwin Cult is here to defend their dogmatic ideas as soon as Hunter makes a post. Just more proof in the pudding. They are so blind to the fact that their responses are exactly what this blog is all about.
ReplyDelete"All of the evolution that is going on", or at least a good part of it, could be explained by a devolutionary process. Things are breaking down since the intitial creation. Or it could all be epigenetic.
ReplyDeleteI'm an undergrad who just discovered the blog, Phil 1:21. Apparently he's a DI fellow and these arguments and claims he makes are just embarrassing and it's entertainig to point out the failures and receive no substantive responses (just like yours!).
ReplyDeleteSo, responses to his poor arguments = 'just more proof in the pudding'. What would no responses indicate?
To Anonymus @7:56, can you tell me how a devolutionary process explains an increase in fitness for a virus, including endogenously? The topic here is viruses and how apparently understanding evolution doesn't matter for being an expert in virology, despite their, you know, evolution being a major part of their ability to continue infecting hosts. There's a reason there's a new flu shot every year...
ReplyDeleteShirakawasuna - denialism at its best.
ReplyDeleteThis is ludicrous. For a scientist, you do not seem to understand the process very well nor the science behind evolution. Every theory is completely falsifiable otherwise, it wouldn't be a theory to begin with.
ReplyDeleteEvolution can be disproved at practically every level, from the geological age of the earth through the mechanisms in DNA, all the way to the tree of life that relates all living creatures being laid bare. That the many disciplines all agree is a testament to the strength of the theory in being able explain what was, what is and what will be.
Your own group's Irreducible Complexity is being torn down in front of our very eyes. This shows that the science is working; that a falsifiable theory can indeed, and has been falsified.
"For a scientist you don't seem to understand the process very well."
ReplyDeletethat why he's a failed scientist: 3 papers to his name (none in the last 6 years), no grants, part-time teaching job at a Bible college. funny that he says discarding evolution would help science advance; you'd never know it from his own example.
Hey Khan, lets see your credentials pal. I am willing to bet its nothing but a lonely website. What do ya say Moiz?
ReplyDeleteA loss of some structure or function can, under some circumstances. Sickle cell disease results from damage to a hemoglobin molecules, but it confers resistance to malaria. Some cave fish lost their eyes. This wasn't a gain, but under the circumstances, it confers an advantage. And in some case of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, when they put the resistnat strain together with olde strain in a petri dish without the antibiotic, the resistant bacteria doea not do well in competition. So it looks like it liost some structure or function.
ReplyDeleteAnd if an organism has a built in mechanism for changing in reesponse to the environment, that isn't evolutionary, at least not in the Darwinian sense.
ReplyDeleteAnd evolution doesn't appear to be falsifiable because every problem is somehow explained away. Lack evidence of species to species change in the fossil record. Either the fossil record is incomplete, or punctuated equilibrium. No one has ever actually seen a clearly new species emerge. That's due to the fact that it takes too long. And genetics doesn't match morphology. No problem, horizontal gene transfer.
ReplyDeletethe theory of gravity doesn't appear to be falsifiable because ever problem is explained away. perturbations in Mercury's orbit? no problem, General Relativity. stars moving too fast? no worries, we'll alter Newtonian dynamics. accelrating expansion of space? let's make up something and call it Dark Energy. it['s unbelieveable that anyone takes the theory of gravity seriously, let alone say it is as a fact, as much as gravity.
ReplyDeleteKhan;
ReplyDeleteIf by the theory of gravity, you mean that when you throw a rock in the air it falls back down, then you are right. But if by the theory of gravity you mean the reason why a rock falls down, well, Aristotle had an explanation that had something to do with the substance of the object. That was falsified. Newtons equations have been corrected by Relativity. Now it looks like dark matter will falisify our current understanding via general relativity. And my undertanding is that dark energy doesn't replace relativity. It is a fifth fundamental force.
"No one has ever actually seen a clearly new species emerge."
ReplyDeleteThis is just a lie.
www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html
"Lack evidence of species to species change in the fossil record."
What are you looking for? A half-cat half-dog? Even creationism predicts "species to species change in the fossil record." You know when all the 'kinds' diversified after leaving the Ark?
exactly my point. the theory of gravity is constantly being modified, yet there is no crowing from the sidelines and calls to trash the whole theory when it is.
ReplyDeleteno credentials huh Khan?
ReplyDeleteSome of the cases listed involve polyploidy in angiosperms. This doesn't apply to other organisms. One case mentions a plant population of plants that a scientist found that is reproductively isolated. But he found them this way. He didn't actually observe the change. And the case of reproductively isolated fruit flies may be just part of the normal variation within species. The literature in case describes them as possible incipient species. Again, I said clear cases. That would be something like a fruit fly turning into a house fly.
ReplyDeleteI would expect to see, oh lets say, a bacteria in one strata level. Then a bacteria that is incrementally bigger in the next level. Then a bacteria that is a smigden bigger. The process repeats through a number of strata untill we find a bacteria that is big enough to swallow another bacteria. Then we see a bacteria that actually swallowed anothe smaller bacteria, but didn't digest it. Then the chromosomes in the big bacteria gradually got smaller until they disappeared. And the little bacteria became the nucleus. I'd expect to see this because this is what the evolutionists say happened. Now bacteria fossils are not all that rare. So I would expect them to have left some trace. It doesn't have to be bacteria. There are from 2 to 10 million species that exist now. There were from 20,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 species that are now extinct. If each is the product of evolution, then that means a lot of evolution, which is species to species change happened. If only 1% left a record,then there should be from 200,000 to 10,000,000 cases of species to species change in the fossil record. Thats a lot more than the 3 dozen or so transitions listed at talkorigins. And I don't like the "fossils are rare answer" because fossils aren't rare. There are tens to hundreds of millions of fossils in museums. There are entire rock strata made entirely of fossils. There are huge dinosaur bone beds.I have three fossil collections I didn't spend much money on.
ReplyDeleteThe last two Anonymous posts:
ReplyDelete1) What's wrong with polyploidy and angiosperms? Do you hate trees so much that they don't count as species? They provide some of the clearest cases of speciation as well as the mechanisms, you don't get to throw them out because you don't know how to frame your question using the words of science.
2) Your requested examples are... silly. They're so simplistic that I wouldn't be surprised if they were already catalogued, but they wouldn't actually show anything - inferring the clades (when even applicable) of fossil bacteria/archaea is extremely difficult as internal structures are not preserved (I know of no exceptions). In other words, all you'd see in your example are small bacteria-shaped fossils, then larger ones, then other ones that appear to be absorbing another one (why is that even necessary?). Furthermore, if you're the same anonymous as before, when did you imply that you'd accept evidence of it happening in the past? There's all kinds of evidence for basic things like common descent like oh say the fossil record and molecular biology.
3) 'Evolutionists' do not say that the nucleus is the remnant of an endogenous bacterium. Some scientists have postulated that this may be the case and there has been debate.
4) Eukaryotes are not thought to have arisen from bacteria with nuclei. We are more closely related to archaea and are more likely to have arisen from something different from archaea and bacteria (but related).
5) Garbage in, garbage out. What's the empirical basis for saying 1% of all species fossilized? If they did fossilize, what's the chance of them being on land and still on surface layers? What's the likelihood that with our small amounts of digging, they'd be found be now? No, the sampling we have is much smaller than 1%. Furthermore, you asked for speciation (if you're the same Anonymous). Having 1% of species (again, more than we have) doesn't imply at all that they would be one after another in a group (you said there'd be 200,000 to 10,000,000 transitions!). Bad math.
However, we do have quite nice examples of evolution in the fossil record. The history of whale evolution - not just the fossil record, but how the subject itself changed with respect to shoddy religious ideas and science, is very interesting and iconic. I'm certain you can learn about the topic on your own but if you have any questions, arguments, or requests for my own input after looking into it, I'd be happy to oblige.
Polyploidy in angiosperms only works for angiosperms. How di angiosperms evolve in the frist place?
ReplyDeleteSome scientists do say that the evolution of organelles in eukaryotes came about when big bacteria, or archaeocetes, ate small bacteria and incorporated them. But this is just an example. However it happened I'n like to see a record. OR else maybe the development of the trilobite eye gradually, incrementally from an eyeless trilobite. Or any other example, If that is what really happened.
And the new, polpyploidy angiospersm don't seem to be better than the old ones. So natural selection doesn't seem to be working there.
ReplyDeleteAnd Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge said that the fossil reocrd is a pretty good record of what really happened, so saying evolution isn't in the record because fossil are rare doesn't really cut it anymore. So they came up with punctuated equilibrium which says that evolution happens too fast to catch.
According to this article:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.physorg.com/news137679868.html
Evolution can be thought of as an increase in entropy of the entire ecosystem. But that is only after the mechanisms are in place. My quesyion is about origins. For a bunch of small molecules to get together and form a cell results in a loss of entropy.
Anonymous, if you wanted a detailed example of a transition, you should've asked for one. Instead, you asked for speciation and were given polyploidy, which is an observed mechanism of speciation. Tough cookies if you don't know what the words mean, like I said before. The game of many questions is just plain silly, if you don't actually want answers to your questions you should say so rather than asking them.
ReplyDeleteIf you do want a transition that's easy for the layman to interpret, I already recommended whale fossils to you.
Here's a very good place for you to start, your own quote: "How di angiosperms evolve in the frist place?"
I would say it's pretty clear that they evolved via common descent and transmutation due to that being well-demonstrated means of eukaryotic speciation and diversification. If you want to know the specifics, I haven't a clue and I'm not familiar with that fine of a transition. Perhaps there's great evidence, perhaps there's not. Why don't you go research it? Libraries, particularly university libraries, keep journals so you can check the primary literature to see. I certainly don't need to be an expert in the origin of angiosperms for evolution and its mechanisms to be demonstrated, nor does it need to be demonstrated specifically for each and every finer transition you can think of. It's an interesting question, not a gotcha response.
"And the new, polpyploidy angiospersm don't seem to be better than the old ones. So natural selection doesn't seem to be working there."
First, a quibble: 'better' is relative, with natural selection it's in reference to reproductive success i.e. the propensity for alleles to increase in frequency. 'Better' isn't even required for evolution to be happening, the neutral theory of evolution has quite a bit of support. Finally, you asked for speciation and you got it. Reproductive isolation. You're shifting the goalposts.
I've never said that "evolution isn't in the record". I've said that your math is poorly done and your expectations as a result are erroneous. In fact, I've pointed you at a resource for the question you apparently wanted to ask, but didn't: the evolution of whales.
Punctuated Equilibrium is an explanation for the appearance of different rates of change in the fossil record. Sometimes it explains the data better, sometimes it doesn't: sometimes changes accrue faster in some periods than others, sometimes they're more gradual. Note that 'faster' here still refers to thousands or millions of years. As such, saying that Gould says that "evolution happens too fast to catch" is only accurate depending on the specific fossil record in question. Some of his own favorite examples ended up having finer gradations and being demonstrably more gradualistic than he had interpreted, for just one example. And when I say it's accurate, I mean that there are gaps in transitions which imply a greater rate of change than 'normal'. If you're about to go crazy about gaps, I recommend realizing that every new transitional fossil creates an extra gap despite explaining more about life's history.
The PhysOrg article is a fun way to think about life and evolution as being perfectly in line with the second law of thermodynamics, Anonymous. I really don't know what your point of citing it really is unless you didn't understand what it was saying.
So, if abiogenesis or the beginning of evolution violate the second law of thermodynamics, demonstare it Anonymous. I expect math. A high school level misunderstanding of entropy isn't going to cut it, you haven't even defined the systems in question nor their attributes with respect to thermodynamics. I also will avoid teaching you the physics: you shouldn't be making claims like that when you don't understand them at all. Teach yourself first.