Why Bother? A scientific Critique of Evolution

npetreley · #1 15th June 2002, 05:15 AM

I strongly recommend this article, which presents a scientific critique of evolution. It's "Dr. Lee Spetner
in an exchange with Dr. Edward E. Max."

http://www.trueorigin.org/spetner1.asp

I believe any reasonable person who reads this would either abandon belief in evolution or at least begin to doubt it. But that's not why I've posted it here. The main reason this that the so-called rebuttals by evolutionist Ed Max are practically word-for-word the kind of empty rebuttals for evolution that you read on this forum, and Spetner's responses are exquisite. I truly relished them all, because he says more eloquently (and with more scientific detail than I could provide) what I've been saying here since I began participating.

But perhaps my favorite section of the whole article goes as follows, which I would have summed up as "Why does anyone even bother with the theory of evolution?"

[Neo-Darwinian Theory] NDT is a theory that is supposed to account for the natural development of all life from a simple beginning. [color=red]I don’t know why we need such a theory, because the development of life from a simple beginning is not an observable.[/color= The theory is gratuitous; it comes to account for something that was never observed.

Actually, evolutionary thinking goes like this.

One observes present life.
One then assumes that it arose in a natural way.
One then concocts a theory (e.g., the NDT) to account for the observation, given the assumption.

I suppose that if the theory were really a good one, and could really explain well how life could have developed in a natural way, it would lend some credence to the assumption that life did indeed develop in a natural way. But it is not a good theory, and it does not account for what it is supposed to. Evolutionists, realizing this, have lately been reduced to arguing that if no one has a better theory that can account for the natural origin of life, then one must accept NDT.

chickenman · #2 15th June 2002, 05:56 AM

thats all just a bunch of rhetoric. You severley underestimate the intelligence of the people on these boards if you think that they're going to be swayed by something like that

chickenman · #3 15th June 2002, 06:13 AM

The genetic changes that could illustrate the theory must not only add information to the bacterium’s genome, they must add new information to the biocosm. The horizontal transfer of genes only spreads around genes that are already in some species.

- this statement is so illogical it makes my head hurt. Antibiotic resistance to man-made chemicals which are not found in the natural environment of a bacteria is new genetic information. Horizontal transfer of this newly evolved gene spreads the gene throughout the "biocosm". The newly added genetic information spreads throughout the "biocosm" through horizontal gene transfer. He has just lost his argument. Not that its all that compelling. His basic argument is that we haven't observed "Evolution A" (despite numerous speciation events which suggest the contrary) therefore it can't happen because it seems really improbable. Despite the fact that the evidence in the genomes showed that it HAS HAPPENED.

chickenman · #4 15th June 2002, 06:16 AM

"Evolution cannot be built by accumulating mutations that only degrade specificity" - loss of information is allowed by evolution and is explained quite well by the theory. Vestigial psuedogenes for photoreceptors represent a loss of information in blind animals and its also what the theory of evolution would predict

KraKto$is8 · #5 15th June 2002, 06:16 AM

Okay, I am about to ask what may be an obvious question:
If life did not occur naturally, then how did it occur?

chickenman · #6 15th June 2002, 06:25 AM

the whole bit about enzyme specificity is mystifying, I don't know where he got the idea that specificity = informational content. its a ridiculous assertion. I suggest this guy study some basic metabolic biochemistry, particularly the difference in specificity between hexokinase and glucokinase

chickenman · #7 15th June 2002, 06:26 AM

"The evolutionist community, from Darwin to today, has based its major claims on unwarranted conclusion jumping."

what? like jumping from "enzyme activity" to "informational content of a gene"?

LewisWildermuth · #8 15th June 2002, 06:29 AM

Read Gen 1 and 2 then take them literaly. That is where the creationists in here are. God did it in that exact order in six days exactly.

chickenman · #9 15th June 2002, 06:34 AM

Max: “I want to make it clear that I don’t buy your interpretation of certain specific mutations as reflecting a ‘loss of information.’ You state that the ‘information content of an enzyme is the sum of many parts, among which are: level of catalytic activity, specificity with respect to the substrate, strength [and specificity] of binding to cell structure, [and] specificity of the amino-acid sequence devoted to specifying the enzyme for degradation.’ This formulation is vague, non-quantitative, not supported by clear logic, not accepted in the scientific literature (to the best of my knowledge; please educate me if I am wrong), and in my view not useful.”

Spetner: Ed, the level of your argument here is quite low. You have seen this entire section (above), and you took from the introduction my list of what characteristics can contribute to the information content of an enzyme and criticized it for being non-quantitative (followed by other pejorative epithets). Is that supposed to be some sort of debating tactic? In any case, the tactic is out of place in this discussion. From the context of what I wrote, it should have been clear to you that this partial list of characteristics that can contribute to the information in an enzyme was an introduction to my quantitative estimate of one of the characteristics of specificity of an enzyme. After I showed how one might calculate the information related to a type of specificity, I showed how a mutation that appeared to enhance activity on a new substrate actually reduced the information by about 50%.I showed how a mutation that appeared to enhance activity on a new substrate actually reduced the information by about 50%.

gotta love that last sentence. He actually did nothing of the sort, for some strange reason he equated specificity for with "information" - there doesn't seem to be any rational explanation for why he did this. I personally can't see how he came to that conclusion - its like stating a car with 4 doors has more "information" than a 3-door car. Completely illogical, and Max's objection is perfectly reasonable

chickenman · #10 15th June 2002, 06:39 AM

Max: “Alternatively, it could just as well be argued that in all cases of single amino acid replacements there has been no change in information content at all, in that any given amino acid sequence is equally ‘improbable’ compared with any other amino acid sequence of the same length.”

Spetner: This is not a useful concept. It is like the pleading of the poker player who had a bust hand. When it came to the call, his opponent showed four aces. He pleaded that his bust hand was just as improbable, and therefore worth as much, as the four-aces, and suggested they split the pot. He’s right about the probabilities of the two hands, but in the context of poker, four aces win and the bust hand loses. Although in the context of the organism’s survival in streptomycin, the degraded specificity of the S12 protein is beneficial, in the context of evolution, it is a dead end and it loses.

spetner again, shows that logic is not his forte. Using his poker argument the guy with the bust hand has four different cards, and just as much informational content as the guy with 4 aces, and thats what max is arguing - that two amino acid sequences of the same length contain the same amount of information, just as two sets of four cards contain the same information. Spetner just goes off on some tangent about the rules of poker.