Hello,
Since we have a Harun Yahya fan here who has posted a couple links to his work, I thought I would look at some of it. One link was to "The Collapse of the Theory of Evolution in 20 Questions" so lets see if Evolution Collapses or not.
Since the entire article is pretty long, we shall start with the first 5 and then maybe go on from there.
"The Collapse of the Theory of Evolution in 20 Questions"
http://www.harunyahya.com/20questions02.php#q1
(Quotes from the article are in blue.)
1 WHY IS THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION NOT SCIENTIFICALLY VALID?
"THE theory of evolution maintains that life on Earth came about as the result of chance and emerged by itself from natural conditions. This theory is not a scientific law or a proven fact."
The very first sentence and already something is wrong. They have given an incorrect definition of the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution maintains that the diversity of life on earth came about as the result of Mutations and Natural selection, and says nothing about the origin of life, that is abiogenesis. It is a common fallacy to combine Evolution and Abiogenesis and then pretend to attack evolution when they are really attacking abiogenesis, this is called a strawman.
I get the feeling many of their arguments are based on this false definition, but we will see.
"The theory of evolution was put forward as an imaginary hypothesis in the context of the primitive scientific understanding of the nineteenth century, and to this day it has not been backed up by any scientific discovery or experiment."
So the thousands of articles that appear at www.pubmed.org (not to mention many other places) don't really exist. Denial is not the way to the truth.
[Quote by Francis Crick]
"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle."
Misrepresenting people is not a good thing to do.
First of all, the quote if from Crick's book in 1981, much has been learned since then, and you will notice that the quote says,
"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle."
Second, Crick's book and beliefs do not look to creationism as an answer. He is unsure how life could have formed on earth but believes that it formed else where, that evolution happened and that aliens seeded the earth.
Third, We should let Crick finish his thoughts,
" . . . so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against."
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-4.html
Fourth, As expected, it appears that they are trying to attack abiogenesis (not part of evolution) and pretend that they are hurting the Theory of Evolution.
Finally, it seems hypocritical that earlier it was suggested that evolutionistic ideas are devoid of morals and that creationism offers morals (not quoted in this thread) yet it is Harun Yahya and not evolutionists that is dishonestly quoting Crick.
"The fossil record represents another crushing defeat for the theory of evolution. Among all the fossils discovered over the years, there is not one trace of the intermediate forms that would be necessary if living things were to have evolved stage by stage from simple species to more complex ones, as the theory of evolution claims. If such creatures had really existed, there would have been millions, even billions, of them. More importantly, the remains of these creatures should be present in the fossil record."
Fossilization is a rare process and so no one expects to see billions of fossils. And again we have another denial of evidence, there are plenty of transitional fossils, and many still to be found. Here is a rather large list of some,
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html
There are plenty more errors in this first "question" but since these are pretty long I think for now it would just be beating a dead horse. So far Harun Yahya has shown that he doesn't understand evolution, that he is willing to ignore evidence, and misquote people. Things aren't looking good for him.
2 HOW DOES THE COLLAPSE OF THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION DEMONSTRATE THE TRUTH OF CREATION?
This is a pretty short one.
First section,
1) It starts out with the same fallacy #1 started with, abiogenesis is Not part of the theory of evolution.
2) It is partially true that if creationism was a valid theory, the only other theory, and evolution was falsified, creationism would become the new theory. However, creationism still needs to stand on its own and show itself to be a valid theory, so far it hasn't done that.
3) Its false that there are only two theories, Evolution and Creationism. There are multiple theories of creationism. Young Earth Creationism, Gap Creationism, Old Earth Creationism, Muslim Creationism, Intelligent Design, Etc. Each one of these theories says something different and thus they are all competing theories.
Second Section, Cambrian explosion.
This can be pretty complicated but to keep it simple. The Cambrian explosion was an explosion of animal Fossils. An understanding of fossilization explains why this happened. Fossilization is a rare event, and its even rarer for soft tissue to fossilize. The Cambrian explosion is a time period of 5-10 million years where many animals developed hard structures and ended up fossilized. It is expected that when animals develop hard tissue that there will be a jump in fossils. Harun Yahya doesn't seem to understand this, expecting that we should have a smooth picture.
3 HOW FAR BACK DO TRACES OF MAN GO? WHY DO THESE NOT SUPPORT EVOLUTION?
"One of the oldest traces of man are the "footprints" found by the famous palaentologist Mary Leakey in 1977 in Tanzania's Laetoli region."
There are a many opinions about these foot prints and none that has been shown to be correct so to use them as evidence that evolution is not true is to use opinion as fact, which seems hypocritical.
"Tuttle (1990) thinks the footprints are too human-like to belong to A. afarensis, and suggests they may belong to another species of australopithecine, or an early species of Homo. Johanson, who has often said that Lucy was fully adapted to a modern style of bipedality, claims (Johanson and Edgar 1996) that the A. afarensis foot bones found at Hadar, when scaled down to an individual of Lucy's size, fit the prints perfectly. Stern and Susman (1983), who have argued that Lucy's foot and locomotion were bipedal but not yet fully human-like, believe that the footprints show subtle differences from human prints and could have been made by afarensis. Clarke (1999) believes that the Laetoli tracks could have been made by feet very similar to those of the new australopithecine fossil"
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_anomaly.html
"Another of the oldest remains to do with man was the ruins of a stone hut found in the Olduvai Gorge region by Louis Leakey in the 1970s. The remains of the hut were found in a layer 1.7 million years old. It is known that structures of this kind, of which similar examples are still used in Africa in the present day, could only be built by Homo sapiens, in other words modern man."
This argument was used by Gish in 1985. Gish ignored Leakey's own thoughts on the find, just as Harun Yahya has done now.
"there is no evidence that the stone circle was a hut, or that it was so advanced that it could only be attributed only to H. sapiens, as claimed by Gish. Louis Leakey claimed that it may have been no more than a windbreak, and so rudimentary that he saw no difficulty in believing that H. habilis could have made it:
"The recent discovery of a rough circle of loosely piled stones on the living floor at site D.K. I, in the lower part of Bed I, is noteworthy. ... It seems that the early hominids of this period were capable of making rough shelters or windbreaks, and it is likely that Homo habilis may have been responsible." (Leakey et al. 1964)
Thirdly, most scientists now agree that the circle is not an artifact. It is only a rough arrangement, and could have just as easily have been formed by water or other natural forces. (Johanson and Shreeve 1989; Tattersall 1993) "
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_anomaly.html
"A 2.3 million-year-old modern human jaw found in the Hadar region of Ethiopia was very important from the point of view of showing that modern man had existed on the Earth much longer that evolutionists expected."
If this is the same jaw I found this is false. The jaw is not from a modern human but from a species of the Homo genus, the same genus we belong too. But it was Never declared a modern human jaw.
"An upper jaw of early Homo, the genus to which modern humans belong, was recovered with primitive stone tools at Hadar, Ethiopia. Dated to 2.33 million years, they represent the oldest firmly dated association of stone tools with a fossil human ancestor. Never before at this site has a hominid fossil been found in stone tool-bearing layers."
http://www.asu.edu/clas/iho/1996jaw.html
The rest appears to be more out of context finds and quotes. I think Harun Yahya needs to realize that when someone says "this fossil will change how we understand human evolution." It doesn't mean that evolution is false and creationism is true.
4 WHY IS THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION NOT THE "BASIS OF BIOLOGY"?
Not much to say about this as it doesn't seem to be evidence against evolution.
"In our day, there is no reason why science should remain tied to the theory of evolution. Science is based on observation and experimentation. Evolution, on the other hand, is a hypothesis regarding an unobservable past."
If science is based on observation and experimentation then the Theory of evolution should remain part of science. Since it has been observed to happen. Evolution is also based on the none directly observable past, because the past can leave evidence behind that the present can piece together it can be observed indirectly. If this is not real science, then forensic science is not real science and every murderer who has been convicted by the religion of forensics should be set free.
5 WHY IS THE EXISTENCE OF DIFFERENT RACES NOT EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION?
Not much to say here either. Variation within the species has been demonstrated in many better examples than humans. Variation within the species is acceptable to creationism, but is part of evolution as well.
Conclusion 1-5
So far Harun Yahya hasn't gotten off to a good start, he has shown a lack of understanding of evolution, he doesn't even understand the very thing he claims is false and appears to be willing to misrepresent people to support his position. I would take anything else I read from him with a grain of salt.
Hopefully the persons that support Harun Yahya will read this, and not ignore it (and maybe be willing to discuss it, but unfortunately I'm not getting my hopes up.
-Ari
Since we have a Harun Yahya fan here who has posted a couple links to his work, I thought I would look at some of it. One link was to "The Collapse of the Theory of Evolution in 20 Questions" so lets see if Evolution Collapses or not.
Since the entire article is pretty long, we shall start with the first 5 and then maybe go on from there.
"The Collapse of the Theory of Evolution in 20 Questions"
http://www.harunyahya.com/20questions02.php#q1
(Quotes from the article are in blue.)
1 WHY IS THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION NOT SCIENTIFICALLY VALID?
"THE theory of evolution maintains that life on Earth came about as the result of chance and emerged by itself from natural conditions. This theory is not a scientific law or a proven fact."
The very first sentence and already something is wrong. They have given an incorrect definition of the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution maintains that the diversity of life on earth came about as the result of Mutations and Natural selection, and says nothing about the origin of life, that is abiogenesis. It is a common fallacy to combine Evolution and Abiogenesis and then pretend to attack evolution when they are really attacking abiogenesis, this is called a strawman.
I get the feeling many of their arguments are based on this false definition, but we will see.
"The theory of evolution was put forward as an imaginary hypothesis in the context of the primitive scientific understanding of the nineteenth century, and to this day it has not been backed up by any scientific discovery or experiment."
So the thousands of articles that appear at www.pubmed.org (not to mention many other places) don't really exist. Denial is not the way to the truth.
[Quote by Francis Crick]
"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle."
Misrepresenting people is not a good thing to do.
First of all, the quote if from Crick's book in 1981, much has been learned since then, and you will notice that the quote says,
"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle."
Second, Crick's book and beliefs do not look to creationism as an answer. He is unsure how life could have formed on earth but believes that it formed else where, that evolution happened and that aliens seeded the earth.
Third, We should let Crick finish his thoughts,
" . . . so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against."
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-4.html
Fourth, As expected, it appears that they are trying to attack abiogenesis (not part of evolution) and pretend that they are hurting the Theory of Evolution.
Finally, it seems hypocritical that earlier it was suggested that evolutionistic ideas are devoid of morals and that creationism offers morals (not quoted in this thread) yet it is Harun Yahya and not evolutionists that is dishonestly quoting Crick.
"The fossil record represents another crushing defeat for the theory of evolution. Among all the fossils discovered over the years, there is not one trace of the intermediate forms that would be necessary if living things were to have evolved stage by stage from simple species to more complex ones, as the theory of evolution claims. If such creatures had really existed, there would have been millions, even billions, of them. More importantly, the remains of these creatures should be present in the fossil record."
Fossilization is a rare process and so no one expects to see billions of fossils. And again we have another denial of evidence, there are plenty of transitional fossils, and many still to be found. Here is a rather large list of some,
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html
There are plenty more errors in this first "question" but since these are pretty long I think for now it would just be beating a dead horse. So far Harun Yahya has shown that he doesn't understand evolution, that he is willing to ignore evidence, and misquote people. Things aren't looking good for him.
2 HOW DOES THE COLLAPSE OF THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION DEMONSTRATE THE TRUTH OF CREATION?
This is a pretty short one.
First section,
1) It starts out with the same fallacy #1 started with, abiogenesis is Not part of the theory of evolution.
2) It is partially true that if creationism was a valid theory, the only other theory, and evolution was falsified, creationism would become the new theory. However, creationism still needs to stand on its own and show itself to be a valid theory, so far it hasn't done that.
3) Its false that there are only two theories, Evolution and Creationism. There are multiple theories of creationism. Young Earth Creationism, Gap Creationism, Old Earth Creationism, Muslim Creationism, Intelligent Design, Etc. Each one of these theories says something different and thus they are all competing theories.
Second Section, Cambrian explosion.
This can be pretty complicated but to keep it simple. The Cambrian explosion was an explosion of animal Fossils. An understanding of fossilization explains why this happened. Fossilization is a rare event, and its even rarer for soft tissue to fossilize. The Cambrian explosion is a time period of 5-10 million years where many animals developed hard structures and ended up fossilized. It is expected that when animals develop hard tissue that there will be a jump in fossils. Harun Yahya doesn't seem to understand this, expecting that we should have a smooth picture.
3 HOW FAR BACK DO TRACES OF MAN GO? WHY DO THESE NOT SUPPORT EVOLUTION?
"One of the oldest traces of man are the "footprints" found by the famous palaentologist Mary Leakey in 1977 in Tanzania's Laetoli region."
There are a many opinions about these foot prints and none that has been shown to be correct so to use them as evidence that evolution is not true is to use opinion as fact, which seems hypocritical.
"Tuttle (1990) thinks the footprints are too human-like to belong to A. afarensis, and suggests they may belong to another species of australopithecine, or an early species of Homo. Johanson, who has often said that Lucy was fully adapted to a modern style of bipedality, claims (Johanson and Edgar 1996) that the A. afarensis foot bones found at Hadar, when scaled down to an individual of Lucy's size, fit the prints perfectly. Stern and Susman (1983), who have argued that Lucy's foot and locomotion were bipedal but not yet fully human-like, believe that the footprints show subtle differences from human prints and could have been made by afarensis. Clarke (1999) believes that the Laetoli tracks could have been made by feet very similar to those of the new australopithecine fossil"
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_anomaly.html
"Another of the oldest remains to do with man was the ruins of a stone hut found in the Olduvai Gorge region by Louis Leakey in the 1970s. The remains of the hut were found in a layer 1.7 million years old. It is known that structures of this kind, of which similar examples are still used in Africa in the present day, could only be built by Homo sapiens, in other words modern man."
This argument was used by Gish in 1985. Gish ignored Leakey's own thoughts on the find, just as Harun Yahya has done now.
"there is no evidence that the stone circle was a hut, or that it was so advanced that it could only be attributed only to H. sapiens, as claimed by Gish. Louis Leakey claimed that it may have been no more than a windbreak, and so rudimentary that he saw no difficulty in believing that H. habilis could have made it:
"The recent discovery of a rough circle of loosely piled stones on the living floor at site D.K. I, in the lower part of Bed I, is noteworthy. ... It seems that the early hominids of this period were capable of making rough shelters or windbreaks, and it is likely that Homo habilis may have been responsible." (Leakey et al. 1964)
Thirdly, most scientists now agree that the circle is not an artifact. It is only a rough arrangement, and could have just as easily have been formed by water or other natural forces. (Johanson and Shreeve 1989; Tattersall 1993) "
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_anomaly.html
"A 2.3 million-year-old modern human jaw found in the Hadar region of Ethiopia was very important from the point of view of showing that modern man had existed on the Earth much longer that evolutionists expected."
If this is the same jaw I found this is false. The jaw is not from a modern human but from a species of the Homo genus, the same genus we belong too. But it was Never declared a modern human jaw.
"An upper jaw of early Homo, the genus to which modern humans belong, was recovered with primitive stone tools at Hadar, Ethiopia. Dated to 2.33 million years, they represent the oldest firmly dated association of stone tools with a fossil human ancestor. Never before at this site has a hominid fossil been found in stone tool-bearing layers."
http://www.asu.edu/clas/iho/1996jaw.html
The rest appears to be more out of context finds and quotes. I think Harun Yahya needs to realize that when someone says "this fossil will change how we understand human evolution." It doesn't mean that evolution is false and creationism is true.
4 WHY IS THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION NOT THE "BASIS OF BIOLOGY"?
Not much to say about this as it doesn't seem to be evidence against evolution.
"In our day, there is no reason why science should remain tied to the theory of evolution. Science is based on observation and experimentation. Evolution, on the other hand, is a hypothesis regarding an unobservable past."
If science is based on observation and experimentation then the Theory of evolution should remain part of science. Since it has been observed to happen. Evolution is also based on the none directly observable past, because the past can leave evidence behind that the present can piece together it can be observed indirectly. If this is not real science, then forensic science is not real science and every murderer who has been convicted by the religion of forensics should be set free.
5 WHY IS THE EXISTENCE OF DIFFERENT RACES NOT EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION?
Not much to say here either. Variation within the species has been demonstrated in many better examples than humans. Variation within the species is acceptable to creationism, but is part of evolution as well.
Conclusion 1-5
So far Harun Yahya hasn't gotten off to a good start, he has shown a lack of understanding of evolution, he doesn't even understand the very thing he claims is false and appears to be willing to misrepresent people to support his position. I would take anything else I read from him with a grain of salt.
Hopefully the persons that support Harun Yahya will read this, and not ignore it (and maybe be willing to discuss it, but unfortunately I'm not getting my hopes up.
-Ari
