Evolution is an elaborate fairy tale

lucaspa · #**491** 29th November 2003, 08:36 PM

Originally Posted by LovingMother

Actually, in my original post to which this was referrenced I stated that we haven't been able to demonstrate that life can begin from non-life without the assistance of an intelligent being.

Actually, your original claim was for human intelligence. Go back and check. I did before I replied.

It was not my intention to limit this to humans. I was implying that since we can't demonstrate that life can begin from non-life without the assistance of an intelligent being to start the process, then we can not demonstrate that God didn't make it happen.

With respect, you were trying to discredit the abiogenesis experiments because you thought there was input from human intelligence.

I don't dispute at all that humans are not needed. If that is what we are arguing here, then there is no argument.

Good. Then life arises from non-life by the material process of chemistry. That material process is complete as a material process. There is no need to have God directly manufacture life from non-life. Chemistry will do it quite nicely. Now, in any material process is there an additional necessary supernatural component? Science won't tell you. Theistic evolutionists believe so. Atheists believe that there is no supernatural component. We simply agree to disagree on our beliefs at this point.

lucaspa · #**492** 29th November 2003, 08:43 PM

Originally Posted by Calvin

I believe evolution is a fairy tale....didn't Christ himself speak of 6 day creation?

He is never wong!

Calvin, why do so many Christians forget that Jesus was totally human. As a human, he was limited to the knowledge other humans had of his day. And all other humans mistakenly believed in the creation stories.

However, if you look closely, you will find that Jesus uses only the theology of the creation account, not the literal part of it. IOW, in discussing marriage he refers to Genesis 1:26-27 in Mark 10 and Matthew 19. But that is only to say that divorce is wrong. In doing this, Jesus also states in both places that Moses wrote the laws (that part of the Bible) and that Moses got it wrong! Which, of course, undermines completely the infallibility of a literal Pentateuch.

lucaspa · #**493** 29th November 2003, 08:52 PM

Originally Posted by Calvin

I think Darwin was the one that was crazy and also a racist!

As we use the term, Darwin was not a racist. In fact, he spent most of his life fighting slavery because he was against the underlying racism. Evolution dealt a huge blow to racism in that day. People had justified racism by saying that the different races were different separate creations. See Godineau on a web search. Evolution, by making all races come from a common ancestor, blew away the basis of racism.

That, of course, was only temporary. Racism is a very stubborn idea, and people will warp any idea they can to justify it. By 1900 Haeckel, Virchow, Spencer, and others had misused and misstated Darwinism to support racism.

From page 521 of Desmond and Moore's biography: ""That month Darwin pored over Wallace's first paper [on human evolution], delivered to the unpleasantly ultra-racist, pro-slavery Anthropological Society. ... There was no scientific justification for slavery, and the entire rival Ethnological Society agreed. ... The white supremacist Anthropologicals were at the throats of the abolitionist Ethnologicals (led by Huxley, Busk, Lubbock, Galton, and Wallace, with Darwin an honorary fellow and Eras on the Council), ... Wallace was trying to engineer a truce based on a daring evolutionary compromise. He proposed that the races had long been separate (pleasing the Anthropologicals), yet has emerged from a single stock just after the ape stage (pleasing the Ethnological Darwinians). "

Bushido216 · #**494** 29th November 2003, 08:56 PM

Bao bao bao bao, another one bites the dust!

And another one's down!

And another one's down!

lucaspa · #**495** 29th November 2003, 08:57 PM

[quote=Calvin]In this passage, Jesus makes it clear that one must believe what Moses wrote.{/quote]

Go back and re-read all of Mark 10. You will find that we don't have to believe all that Moses wrote.

And one of the passages in the writings of Moses in Exodus 20:11 states: For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. This, of course, is the basis of our seven-day week –six days work and one day rest. Obviously, this passage was meant to be taken as speaking of a total of seven literal days based on the Creation week of six literal days of work and one literal day of rest.
Source: Answers in Genesis

AiG gets their exegeses as wrong as their science.
1. All the Pentateuch is a redacted or edited document. Exodus 20:11 is an editorial insertion.
2. Exodus happened before Genesis 1 was written. At that time God simply commanded that the 7th day be the Sabbath.
3. The authors of Genesis 1 decided that there had to be a justification for the Sabbath. For some reason, having God command it just wasn't enough. Therefore they constructed their creation story around 6 days with the 7th being a day of rest. Thus giving an unnecessary justification for the Sabbath.
4. Then the editor injected Exodus 20:11 to make the circle complete. Read Exodus 20 without verse 11. It works just fine.

Finally, look at Genesis 2:4. While Genesis 1 says 6 days, Genesis 2:4 says the heavens and the earth were created in one day (beyom). Where is your 6 days now?

lucaspa · #**496** 29th November 2003, 09:12 PM

Originally Posted by Lonnie

Lol, here is some thing intresting for all of you evolutionists. Have you ever seen evolution? Is there any reason to believe, besides all these claims of these tests?
Any thing you actualy did to see if evolution is true, besides just taking peoples word for it?

Yes. Lonnie, none of my scientific publications would work if evolution were not true.

Hypotheses are tested in huge bundles. Yes, that's a hard concept to grasp, when you are taught that you test each individual hypothesis. But consider. When you look thru a telescope at the moon, all the hypotheses that make up optics for the gathering of light, the reflection in the mirrors of the telescope, and the magnification of the image, are being tested. If any of them were false, you wouldn't be able to see the craters clearly.

All my work with stem cells has been based on the underlying hypothesis that evolution is true. We started out with embryonic chicks because they are easy to work with. When we found pluripotent stem cells there, we reasoned that they would be preserved by evolution and that mammals would have them. And yes, late fetal and newborn rats had the stem cells. We then reasoned that since humans and rats are related by evolution, this meant that humans would have the stem cells also. Lo and behold! adult humans have the stem cells. We are also testing the stem cells to see if they can regenerate tissues -- articular cartilage, peritoneum, spinal cord, bone, kidney. We do these in animal models but the models are chosen based on evolution. After all, we are not really interested in curing arthritis in rabbits. We want to cure it in humans. But humans and rabbits share a common ancestor, so the ability of stem cells to regenerate cartilage should be similar in rabbits and humans because they are related.

Lonnie, none of the drugs or surgical treatments discovered in the last 60 years could have been found if evolution were not true.

Do you just take peoples words that evolution is true?

As they could just be lying to you, or greatly mistaken.

No. They all can't be lying to me. Remember, Lonnie, that science is based on public knowledge. The data is put out there for the public to examine. We can all go to the American Museum of Natural History and see "Lucy" on display and compare her to both modern human and gorilla skeletons. We can see that she is an intermediate. We can read the papers and critique them for ourselves. We can look at the data and see if it says what the authors say it says.

For example, every one KNEW the world is was flat 1000 years ago. But now every knows that is not true.

Not a good example for your case. Because the same methods that showed the earth is not flat has also showed that creationism is false.

Lonnie, you are arguing that evolution might someday be shown to be false. Even if that were to happen, it won't bring back creationism. It is false and is going to remain false no matter what happens to evolution.

I will say that in terms of common ancestry and natural selection, there really aren't any other tests that can be run to show they are false. We've tried all of them we can think of. The only data that could falsify common ancestry would be to find mammalian fossils in Cambrian or earlier strata. If and when that happens, then we will have to reevaluate common ancestry. Until that time, however, it is simply perverse not to regard evolution as (provisionally) true.

lucaspa · #**497** 29th November 2003, 09:22 PM

Originally Posted by Lonnie

Number one, Not everyone believes in evolution (why would we be discussing this then?).

We discuss it because there are a few people too stubborn to admit that creationism is falsified. Remember, Lonnie, no one believes in evolution. We accept the theory as valid. Belief is not part of it at all.

Another reason we discuss is that some people have tragically made the logical error of tying the existence of God to a particular how of creation. They can't give up their how of creation without giving up God. Their mistake.

And Number 2 Every one was proved that the world was not flat, and still is not flat. As far as I know. lol

And it has been proved that creationism is false! Same thing done by the same methods.

LovingMother · #**498** 29th November 2003, 09:35 PM

Originally Posted by lucaspa

Actually, your original claim was for human intelligence. Go back and check. I did before I replied.

First, I made no claim. In my original post I asked questions in order to better understand. I made no claims. Second, I only used the example of a human scientist as the form of intelligence that created life from non-life in a laboratory setting. There was no reference to human intelligence in my ultimate question of has life created from non-life without the assistance of an intelligent being been demonstrated. Perhaps the term observed would have been more appropriate here. I appologize for the confusion, but there is no need to quibble. I made it clear in a later post that I had not intended to limit this to humans.

Originally Posted by lucaspa

With respect, you were trying to discredit the abiogenesis experiments because you thought there was input from human intelligence.

I was not trying to discredit anything. I was asking questions to better understand. I wanted to know whether we have been able to demonstrate that life can be created from non-life without an intelligent being starting the process. In the laboratory setting, a scientist starts the process. I want to know if the process has been demonstrated or observed without such intervention. I am not trying to argue with you, lucaspa. I am asking questions and trying to learn.

lucaspa · #**499** 29th November 2003, 09:50 PM

Originally Posted by Calvin

But I have a book which discusses that leading secular scientists believe evolution is a fairy tale and that it does not have a firm foundation whatsoever.

Calvin, look over your quote-mined sources and see if they are really arguing against evolution. Is there anything here against descent with modification, common ancestry, or natural selection. NO! All of them are conserved with the origin of life. Abiogenesis. Not evolution as Darwin wrote of it in Origin of the Species. You are not discussing evolution, you are discussing atheism vs theism by trying to argue god-of-the-gaps. You are saying that life had to be directly manufactured by a deity. I dealt with that above. The data falsifies these opinions.

Crick, Francis, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981) 192 pp.
"If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare an event would this be?

"This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is, if anything rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written 20200 and is approximately equal to 10260, that is, a one followed by 260 zeros.

" Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense. The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time." pp. 51-52

Crick gave you the wrong premise: "particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance"
1. We are not dealing with that. We are looking for the chemical synthesis of a protein that has a biological activity. Not a particular amino acid sequence. But any amino acid sequence with any biological activity. It turns out the odds for that are ONE. Virtual certainty.
2. Crick is also assuming that each amino acid can fit in each position in the sequence. That has also been shown to be wrong. The amino acids in proteins made by chemical synthesis are self-ordered.
Tyagi S, Ponnamperuma C Nonrandomness in prebiotic peptide synthesis. J Mol Evol 1990 May;30(5):391-9
Melius P. Structure of thermal polymers of amino acids. Biosystems 1982;15(4):275-80 Jul;8(2):45-50
SW Fox, Stereomolecular interactions and microsystems in experimental protobiogenesis. BioSystems 7: 22-36, 1975
SW Fox, Self-sequencing of amino acids and origins of polyfunctional protocells. Origins of Life, 14: 485-488, 1984.

Denton, Michael, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (London: Burnett Books, Ltd., 1985), 368 pp.

"Even today we have no way of rigorously estimating the probability or degree of isolation of even one functional protein. It is surely a little premature to claim that random processes could have assembled mosquitoes and elephants when we still have to determine the actual probability of the discovery by chance of one single functional protein molecule." p. 324

Denton has since changed his mind. His latest book accepts evolution.

Also note the strawman -- "chance". Natural selection is not chance. This negates Dentons argument below:

"Altogether the total number of connections in the human brain approaches 1015 or a thousand million million. Numbers in the order of 1015 are of course completely beyond comprehension. Imagine an area about half the size of the USA (one million square miles) covered in a forest of trees containing ten thousand trees per square mile. If each tree contained one hundred thousand leaves the total number of leaves in the forest would be 1015, equivalent to the number of connections in the human brain." p. 330

"It is the sheer universality of perfection, the fact that everywhere we look, to whatever depth we look, we find an elegance and ingenuity of an absolutely transcending quality, which so mitigates against the idea of chance.

But evolution isn't about chance. Natural selection is not chance. Now, Denton is wrong about that "universality of perfection". This is what got special creation into trouble in the first place. There are simply too many cruel, stupid, and imperfect designs in nature. If God directly manufactured them, as Denton and special creation maintain, then the only possible conclusion is that God is sadistic, stupid, and suffering from Alzheimer's. Since God is none of these, it is obvious that creatures are designed by natural selection. Evolution by natural selection was so readily accepted by Christians because special creation makes too many problems for God.

Hoyle, Sir Fred, and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 176 pp.

"No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning.

And it didn't. Chemistry isn't random. Hoyle sets up another strawman.

"The likelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it. It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution.

Hoyle never read Darwin. Here is what Darwin stated about the origin of life and its relation to evolution in Origin:

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." C. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, pg 450.

The strawman is very evident here, isn't it? Hoyle had no idea what he was talking about.

"If there were a basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward life, its existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory. One could, for instance, take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill it with any chemicals of a non-biological nature you please. Pump any gases over it, or through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy. Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes [proteins produced by living cells] have appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save the time and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You would find nothing at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other simple organic chemicals.

Well, he did the wrong experiment. Not only can you get the proteins, but they can form cells.
http://www.siu.edu/~protocell/
http://www.theharbinger.org/articles/rel_sci/fox.html

How can I be so confident of this statement? Well, if it were otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and would be well-known and famous throughout the world.

It was. But Hoyle simply was unaware!

Mora, Peter T., "The Folly of Probability," in The Origins of Prebiological Systems, ed. Sydney Fox (New York: Academic Press, 1965), 482 pp.

"I believe we developed this practice (i.e., postulating prebiological natural selection) to avoid facing the conclusion that the probability of a self-replicating state is zero. When for practical purposes the concept of infinite time and matter has to be invoked, that concept of probability is annulled. By such logic we can prove anything, such as that, no matter how complex, everything will repeat itself, exactly and immeasurably." p. 45

Right. There was no prebiological natural selection. Natural selection only comes under certain conditions, and unless the molecules are self-replicators, there will be no natural selection. I note that this appears in a book edited by Fox, who demonstrated the protocells.

Natural selection comes later, after you have the protocells. The co-author of Of Pandas and People (an oft-quoted intelligent design book) wrote:
"The ease with which such protocell units arise under possible primitive Earth conditions has been abundantly documented, especially in the elegant experiments of Sidney Fox and his collaborators on the proteinoid microspheres. .. For our purposes it is sufficient to note that preformed primitive polypeptides (proteinoids) have properties enabling them to aggregate spontaneously to form remarkably uniform spherical units of bacterial dimensions which contain complex internal morphology including a double wall, exchange materials with the ambient medium, grow, cleave in two, fuse, exhibit weak catalytic activiity, and move when ATP is added to the medium. Protocells containing both proteinoid and polynucleotide have been shown to carry on a primitive kind of protocoding activity (27,29) The proteinoid microsphere is a compelling model for the high-probability prebiotic origin of discrete individual units of evolving organic mattter which could conceivably compete with one another and thus provide the basis for a primitive selection process." Dean H. Kenyon, Prefigured ordering and protoselection in the origin of life. In The Origins of Life and Evolutionary Biochemistry, ed. Dose, Fox, Deborin, and Pavlovskaya, 1974, pg 211.

Wickramasinghe, C., Interview in London Daily Express (August 14, 1981), Wickramasinghe is Professor of Applied Math & Astronomy, University College, Cardiff.

LOL! You do realize that, on the basis of this, Wickramasinghe was called as a witness for creationism in the 1982 Arkansas trial? Well, at the trial he cut young earth creationism off at the knees by saying no one could possibly think the earth was created in 6 days or was less than 20,000 years old! Instead, he testified not to God but a seeding of the planet by DNA from space!

The probability calculations suffer from the same problems as those of Crick.

Yockey, Hubert P., "Self-Organization Origin of Life Scenarios and Information Theory," Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 91 (1981), pp. 13-31.

"The calculations presented in this paper show that the origin of a rather accurate genetic code, not necessarily the modern one, is a pons asinorum which must be crossed to pass over the abyss which separates crystallography, high polymer chemistry and physics from biology. The information content of amino acids sequences cannot increase until a genetic code with an adaptor function has appeared. Nothing which even vaguely resembles a code exists in the physico-chemical world. One must conclude that no valid scientific explanation of the origin of life exists at present." p. 26

That's not true. Nice try, Yockey, but he too skipped over some important information.
"In more recent work, Fox and his colleagues have shown that basic proteinoids, rich in lysine residues, selectively associate with the homopolynucleotides poly C and poly U but not with poly A or poly G. On the other hand, arginine-rich proteinoids associate selectively with poly A and poly G. In this manner, the information in proteinoids can be used to select polynucleotides. Morever, it is striking that aminoacyl adenylates yield oligopeptides when incubated with proteinoid-polynucleotide complexes, which thus have some of the characteristics of ribosomes. Fox has suggested that proteinoids bearing this sort of primitive chemical information could have transferred it to a primitive nucleic acid; the specificity of interaction between certain proteinoids and polynucleotides suggests the beginning of the genetic code." A. Lehninger, Biochemistry, 1975, pp 1047-1048

"A practical man will not believe a scenario which appears to him to have a very small probability if a tossed coin is observed to fall heads ten times consecutively, a practical man will believe it to be two-headed without examining it even though the sequence of all heads is exactly as probable as any other sequence" [Total No. permutations - 1024]. p. 27

"Faith in the infallible and comprehensive doctrines of dialectic materialism plays a crucial role in origin of life scenarios, and especially in exobiology and its ultimate consequence the doctrine of advanced extra-terrestrial civilization. That life must exist somewhere in the solar system on 'suitable planets elsewhere' is widely and tenaciously believed in spite of lack of evidence or even abundant evidence to the contrary." pp. 27-28[/quote]
Hmm. Lehninger knew of this 6 years before Yockey wrote the paper. It appears that Yockey missed the relevant literature, doesn't it?

lucaspa · #**500** 29th November 2003, 10:07 PM

Originally Posted by Calvin

Karl,

That is not true. Many leading scientists have abandoned evolution because it just doesn't work. ... As a result numerous leading scientists and biologists are embracing a new movement in science called Intelligent Design. As a result these scientists have performed numerous experiments falsifying evolution.

1. This is a claim made by IDers, but simply isn't true. The number of IDers is less than 100 according to the adds that IDers take out in newspapers. They represent less than 0.01% of scientists in the US alone. Shoot, there are over 700 scientists named Steve that have signed a support of evolution! And they certainly are not the "leading scientists". They are all second-rate hackers. Check their publication record.
2. What "numerous experiments"? I haven't seen any. Any of their publications in the scientific literature always support evolution! Look at Michael Behe's publications on PubMed. And look at how many publications he has had since 1995 when he became an IDer.

There is absolutely no evidence of "adding information" in genetics. All scientists can rely on is "entropy," i.e., degeneration.

Of course there is. Several papers on the subject. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...arch&DB=PubMed

And while falsifying the Theory of Evolution doesn't make creation by the God of the Bible the only possibility, it does make a literal Genesis more likely.

A literal Genesis has already been falsified. Falsifying evolution doesn't change that.

Darwin based his theory on assumptions about where variation comes from and how it is inherited that were prevalent during his lifetime, assumptions that have long since been discredited. And Mendelian genetics reveals barriers to upward change that Darwin was unaware of.

It does? Where?

Intelligent Design scientists have concluded that Intelligent Design is the best explanation for the presence of life on this planet for the following reasons:

* There is tendency to degenerate in higher plants and animals, with enough genes and a high enough mutation rate.

Hmmm. Notice the qualifiers. Where are the papers? However, this is what natural selection does: removes the unfit genes.

* Even for bacteria with few genes and no degeneration, natural selection can't favor the harmful or nonfunctional steps between two unrelated proteins needed to bridge the gap.

These experiments say differently:
1. BG Hall,Evolution on a petri dish. The evolved beta-galactosidase system as a model for studying evolution in the laboratory. Evolutionary Biology 15: 85-150,1982.
2. BG Hall, Evolution of new metabolic functions in laboratory organisms. in Evolution of Genes and Proteins ed. by M Nei and RK Koehn, Sinhouer Associates,Sunderland, MA, 1983. Also described at http://biocrs.biomed.brown.edu/Darwin/DI/AcidTest.html

* 4.5 billion years is not long enough to make the evolution of even the simplest one-celled organism likely, even under unrealistically favorable conditions.

Chemistry will do it in less than an hour. More information in protocells than in bacteria!
http://www.siu.edu/~protocell/
http://www.theharbinger.org/articles/rel_sci/fox.html

* The lack of examples of evolution during recorded history that require new genes for unrelated proteins to explain them.

Nylon bug. Here's another one:
5: J Bacteriol 1999 Jun;181(11):3341-50. Isolation and characterization of mutations in Bacillus subtilis that allow spore germination in the novel germinant D-alanine. Paidhungat M, Setlow P

* The virtual absence in the fossil record of the countless close intermediate varieties that must have existed if the Theory of Evolution is true.

http://www.christianforums.com/t43227

* Examples of complexity that can't be explained by natural selection acting on a series of point mutations etc.

Strawman. Here's the real story:
http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/staff/dave/articles/jtb.pdf

This is a very important scientific movement today. By eliminating bias and hatred out of the lab and embracing all idea's and presuppositions, scientists can now work freely to let the facts speak for themselves instead of constantly trying to prove a theory that has proven to be completely unreliable.

LOL! It's a falsified scientific theory. However hard ID tries to avoid making statements that are falsifiable, it can't help but do so. All those falsifiable statements have been tested and shown to be false.

As theology, it's god-of-the-gaps and Paley dressed up in new clothes. Worse, it accepts the basic statement of faith of atheism.