Evolution/Creation on Trial

[Not_By_Chance]

I understand what the definition is, but what I'm more concerned with is



What's a kind?

What's a species for that matter? I understand a "kind" to be a classification of animal or creature that is able to mate and have fertile offspring. At least, that's the explanation I have heard.

 

[crjmurray]

I understand what the definition is, but what I'm more concerned with is



What's a kind?

I dunno. I've never seen a definition.

 

[Loudmouth]

What's a species for that matter?

There is no set definition for species because the concepts will be different for sexual, asexual, and fossil species. What the overall concept is trying to describe is a gene pool. However, no one expects speciation to be a quantum event, so speciation will possibly start out with some interbreeding.

I understand a "kind" to be a classification of animal or creature that is able to mate and have fertile offspring. At least, that's the explanation I have heard.

That's not how I see it used. I have seen people use "kind" in reference to the bird kind which comprises 10,000 groups of non-interbreeding populations. They use kind to describe hummingbirds and ostriches as the same bird kind even though they don't mate and don't have offspring. In response to the Lenski experiments they will say that they are still in the E. coli kind even though E. coli don't mate.

 

[crjmurray]

OK, so we hear a lot on this forum that masses of evidence overwhelmingly confirms evolution to the extent that for all intents and purposes it can be regarded as fact. In that case, can someone please present a non-scientist like myself with perhaps half a dozen pieces of evidence that if presented in a court of law, would be sufficient to convince a jury that evolution were true beyond all reasonable doubt. At least one of these should directly relate to the claim that one type of creature (e.g., a reptile) can turn into a bird, with some examples of actual creatures where this has happened or is happening.

Let’s flip the coin now. Can someone also present a similar amount of ideas presented by creation scientists that can be shown to be false, again using the above court room scenario.

Finally, could someone answer the question about how the first life could have got started all on its own without any divine intervention. In particular, where all the information came from to start life and build the first self-reproducing cell and how the problem of chirality could have been overcome in such a process.

Since you would be presenting these ideas to non-scientists, could you for each piece of evidence you present, indicate what the specialism of any scientist working in that field would need to have.

It should be noted that the TOE has already been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, according to the standard accepted definition. Special creation by a deity, YEC, gap theology, embedded age, etc are not reasonable or logical alternatives. Based on the current evidence there is not an alternative explanation for the biodiversity of life we see today that is more reasonable or logical than the TOE.

Entertaining the idea that a deity created the earth in the recent past and specially created all the life we see today while at the same time making everything look like it occurred naturally is not reasonable. It is the criminal law equivalent of a defense counsel asserting that aliens came down, killed a man's wife and then made the evidence appear that the husband did it. That is not reasonable nor logical.

 

[Not_By_Chance]

Meaning the evidence points to a conclusion for which there is no other logical alternative.

Reasonable alternative may be a term that sits better with some.

This is based on the standard requirement in the western justice system. For the purposes of this discussion, I have adapted it to try to visualise an imaginary trial in which it were trying to be shown that evolution were true, rather than trying to determine whether a crime had been committed.

Generally the scientists or expert witnesses trying to show that evolution were true would bear the burden of proof and would be required to prove their version of events to this standard. This means that the proposition being presented to the judge/jury must be proven to the extent that there could be no "reasonable doubt" in the mind of a "reasonable person" that the theory were an established fact. There could still be a doubt, but only to the extent that it would not affect a reasonable person's belief regarding whether or not were theory is true.

 

[Not_By_Chance]

It should be noted that the TOE has already been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, according to the standard accepted definition. Special creation by a deity, YEC, gap theology, embedded age, etc are not reasonable or logical alternatives. Based on the current evidence there is not an alternative explanation for the biodiversity of life we see today that is more reasonable or logical than the TOE.

Entertaining the idea that a deity created the earth in the recent past and specially created all the life we see today while at the same time making everything look like it occurred naturally is not reasonable. It is the criminal law equivalent of a defense counsel asserting that aliens came down, killed a man's wife and then made the evidence appear that the husband did it. That is not reasonable nor logical.

How has the theory of evolution been proven beyond a reasonable doubt? I'm a lay person on the jury - convince me.

 

[Loudmouth]

This is based on the standard requirement in the western justice system. For the purposes of this discussion, I have adapted it to try to visualise an imaginary trial in which it were trying to be shown that evolution were true, rather than trying to determine whether a crime had been committed.

The ERV evidence would be the type of evidence you are looking for. It is directly comparable to DNA fingerprinting that is used in real court cases.

http://www.christianforums.com/threads/lines-of-evidence-part-1-ervs.7867271/

Generally the scientists or expert witnesses trying to show that evolution were true would bear the burden of proof and would be required to prove their version of events to this standard. This means that the proposition being presented to the judge/jury must be proven to the extent that there could be no "reasonable doubt" in the mind of a "reasonable person" that the theory were an established fact. There could still be a doubt, but only to the extent that it would not affect a reasonable person's belief regarding whether or not were theory is true.

"Given the size of vertebrate genomes (>1 × 10^9 bp) and the random nature of retroviral integration (22, 23), multiple integrations (and subsequent fixation) of ERV loci at precisely the same location are highly unlikely (24). Therefore, an ERV locus shared by two or more species is descended from a single integration event and is proof that the species share a common ancestor into whose germ line the original integration took place (14)."
http://www.pnas.org/content/96/18/10254.full

Of the 200,000 ERV's in the human genome, more than 99% are found at the same location in the chimp genome. This is like finding 200,000 of the suspect's fingerprints at the crime scene.

 

[sfs]

How has the theory of evolution been proven beyond a reasonable doubt? I'm a lay person on the jury - convince me.

But are you an impartial jury member?

 

[Not_By_Chance]

The dotted lines are shared features and shared DNA. They are still here. The "orchard of life" that you describe would not produce the nested hierarchy that we see when we objectively organize life by shared and derived traits.

"The nested hierarchical organization of species contrasts sharply with other possible biological patterns, such as the continuum of "the great chain of being" and the continuums predicted by Lamarck's theory of organic progression (Darwin 1872, pp. 552-553; Futuyma 1998, pp. 88-92). Mere similarity between organisms is not enough to support macroevolution; the nested classification pattern produced by a branching evolutionary process, such as common descent, is much more specific than simple similarity. Real world examples that cannot be objectively classified in nested hierarchies are the elementary particles (which are described by quantum chromodynamics), the elements (whose organization is described by quantum mechanics and illustrated by the periodic table), the planets in our Solar System, books in a library, or specially designed objects like buildings, furniture, cars, etc."
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.html#nested_hierarchy

There is much talk of this on creationist websites, e.g., http://creation.com/search?q=is+nested+heirarchy+evidence+for+evolution and their accounts sound just as plausible to the lay person.

 

[Not_By_Chance]

But are you an impartial jury member?

I'm trying to be. As this is a forum, anyone who has not made their mind up about the evolution/creation controversy is of course welcome to add their comments.

 

[sfs]

I'm trying to be. As this is a forum, anyone who has not made their mind up about the evolution/creation controversy is of course welcome to add their comments.

Your chosen user name is likely to raise questions about your impartiality. Kind of like adopting the name "Not Guilty" during jury selection.

 

[crjmurray]

There is much talk of this on creationist websites, e.g., http://creation.com/search?q=is+nested+heirarchy+evidence+for+evolution and their accounts sound just as plausible to the lay person.

Alien abduction may sound plausible to certain people. It does not make it a reasonable or logical alternative.

 

[Not_By_Chance]

There's the Scopes trial and the Dover trial, both of which were about evolution versus creationism.

Evolution won every time because it has the vast majority of scientific evidence behind it, whereas creationism has a bunch of charlatan's lies and slander against real science, reality, and Biblical interpretation.

To quote this article:
"In the nation's first case to test the legal merits of intelligent design, the judge, John E. Jones III, issued a broad, stinging rebuke to its advocates and provided strong support for scientists who have fought to bar intelligent design from the science curriculum. Judge Jones also excoriated members of the Dover, Pa., school board, who he said lied to cover up their religious motives, made a decision of "breathtaking inanity" and "dragged" their community into "this legal maelstrom with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."

He's a conservative judge appointed by Bush, by the way -- no liberal agenda here.

But there are other views, e.g: http://www.wnd.com/2005/08/31895/ quoted below:-

A federal court of appeals ruled yesterday Wisconsin prison officials violated an inmate’s rights because they did not treat atheism as a religion.

“Atheism is [the inmate's] religion, and the group that he wanted to start was religious in nature even though it expressly rejects a belief in a supreme being,” the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals said.

The court decided the inmate’s First Amendment rights were violated because the prison refused to allow him to create a study group for atheists.

Brian Fahling, senior trial attorney for the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy, called the court’s ruling “a sort of Alice in Wonderland jurisprudence.”

“Up is down, and atheism, the antithesis of religion, is religion,” said Fahling.

The Supreme Court has said a religion need not be based on a belief in the existence of a supreme being. In the 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins, the court described “secular humanism” as a religion.

Fahling said today’s ruling was “further evidence of the incoherence of Establishment Clause jurisprudence.”

“It is difficult not to be somewhat jaundiced about our courts when they take clauses especially designed to protect religion from the state and turn them on their head by giving protective cover to a belief system, that, by every known definition other than the courts’ is not a religion, while simultaneously declaring public expressions of true religious faith to be prohibited,” Fahling said.

 

[crjmurray]

The ERV evidence that loudmouth has mentioned once or twice is a good example to start with. These are genetic markers pointing to a common ancestor for chimps and humans. The ERVs would not be there were it not for common descent. We understand when and how they are inserted and how they are passed on. There is not an alternative possibility for the shared ERVs between humans and chimps.

 

[Not_By_Chance]

Your chosen user name is likely to raise questions about your impartiality. Kind of like adopting the name "Not Guilty" during jury selection.

Maybe, but I'm trying to be like one member wrote, the scientist who may believe in God outside his work, but in the lab, he totally rejects having any part in what he is studying (perhaps even as one might say, "playing the Devil's advocate"). In any case, I don't believe that macro evolution is possible, so I'm sort of regarding creation science as the innocent party until proven guilty by the [apparent] overwhelming evidence of evolution. Where is it - I haven't seen anything yet that doesn't have an equally-plausible explanation or serious refutation in the creationist camp?

 

[lasthero]

What's a species for that matter? I understand a "kind" to be a classification of animal or creature that is able to mate and have fertile offspring. At least, that's the explanation I have heard.

That's the same as the common definition of species, and we've definitely seen new species emerge.

 

[lasthero]

Maybe, but I'm trying to be like one member wrote, the scientist who may believe in God outside his work, but in the lab, he totally rejects having any part in what he is studying (perhaps even as one might say, "playing the Devil's advocate"). In any case, I don't believe that macro evolution is possible, so I'm sort of regarding creation science as the innocent party until proven guilty by the [apparent] overwhelming evidence of evolution. Where is it - I haven't seen anything yet that doesn't have an equally-plausible explanation or serious refutation in the creationist camp?

What did you think of the ERV evidence Loudmouth linked to?

 

[lasthero]

I'm trying to be. As this is a forum, anyone who has not made their mind up about the evolution/creation controversy is of course welcome to add their comments.

If this were an actual trial, you wouldn't be allowed on the jury. Neither would I, for that matter. Lawyers typically go for jurors that come as close to being nuetral as possible.

 

[Audacious]

But there are other views, e.g: http://www.wnd.com/2005/08/31895/ quoted below:-

A federal court of appeals ruled yesterday Wisconsin prison officials violated an inmate’s rights because they did not treat atheism as a religion.

“Atheism is [the inmate's] religion, and the group that he wanted to start was religious in nature even though it expressly rejects a belief in a supreme being,” the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals said.

The court decided the inmate’s First Amendment rights were violated because the prison refused to allow him to create a study group for atheists.

Brian Fahling, senior trial attorney for the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy, called the court’s ruling “a sort of Alice in Wonderland jurisprudence.”

“Up is down, and atheism, the antithesis of religion, is religion,” said Fahling.

The Supreme Court has said a religion need not be based on a belief in the existence of a supreme being. In the 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins, the court described “secular humanism” as a religion.

Fahling said today’s ruling was “further evidence of the incoherence of Establishment Clause jurisprudence.”

“It is difficult not to be somewhat jaundiced about our courts when they take clauses especially designed to protect religion from the state and turn them on their head by giving protective cover to a belief system, that, by every known definition other than the courts’ is not a religion, while simultaneously declaring public expressions of true religious faith to be prohibited,” Fahling said.

Some other wonderful things from World Net Daily:
"Are Obama and the Hard Left the Hand of the Devil?"
This should be self-explanatory.

"Experts: Passover Blood Moon Arrives At 'Dark Moment'"
A direct quote: "If it’s a coincidence, it’s an astounding one. An ominous “Blood Moon” appearing at the same time the Obama administration is boasting of a nuclear agreement with Iran that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says endangers the very survival of the Jewish state."

The moon is red. This means that disaster is about to occur. There are no coincidences.

"Baltimore: Is It A Set-Up?"
"I don’t think the chaos in Baltimore “just happened”; I think it was planned and is the next step in the breakdown of our society. ... If the verdict is not what they want, perhaps Obama will have to institute martial law to preserve order, form a national police force and postpone the 2016 elections."

"Obama About To Sell Us Out To His Mullah Buddies"

Is this enough to conclude that your source is utterly ridiculous?

I don't see how what you said is relevant at all to what I said, or the thread, but if you're going to link WND I may as well show why it's freaking crazy and not a reliable source.

 

[Loudmouth]

There is much talk of this on creationist websites, e.g., http://creation.com/search?q=is+nested+heirarchy+evidence+for+evolution and their accounts sound just as plausible to the lay person.

Why do you think they are just as plausible?