How do you think his work is impacted by the theory of evolution?
Then his expertise is probably in engineering and business, not geology.
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Here is a page with some information about Lumsden.
What I know about Sewell is just based on his biography in that book: he worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and in the 1960s he was the chief engineer at Isotopes Incorporated. (This was before he became a YEC.)
How do you think his work is impacted by the theory of evolution?
We acknowledge that many biologists would condemn not only the lifestyle of tapeworms but also their structure as being hopelessly degenerate. Certainly, tapeworm histology differs, in some cases remarkably so, from what one is accustomed to seeing in most other kinds of animals. But to regard tapeworm structure as degenerate is, to the present authors, highly inappropriate. Rather, in our specialized judgement, tapeworms are uniquely well specialized for meeting the demands of what Allee et al. (1949) recognized as the world's third habitat (after the aquatic and terrestrial) - other living organisms. In the course of evolution, tapeworms have merely exaggerated certain features and diminished others in adapting most successfully to a lifestyle which exemplifies the ultimate welfare state.
Here is a listing of papers he's authored on Google scholar. As the page I quoted mentions, the majority of them seem to be about parasitology and cell biology. In general, natural selection is the main factor that shapes the relationship between parasites and their hosts, so evolution certainly impacts his area of research in that respect.
For example, here's a quote from a book chapter that he wrote in 1980:
This was presumably written before he became a young-Earth creationist.
Looking at specific immunlogical pathways and toxin interactions, that doesn't require any application of evolutionary histories. Evolution is important for understanding the natural history of those systems, but for direct interactions it isn't that involved.
I should probably look at the GULO paper. Comparative genomics is not exactly my thing, but I do like GULO as an example, so I'd better see what new counterarguments have arisen.
Okay, maybe there aren't any examples of people converting to YEC whose work is specifically about evolution. It's clearly happened in other areas of the biological sciences, though. My argument is still the same: people like Lumsden aren't ignorant, and the fact that it was possible for creationists to win him over is an example why sophisticated creation science arguments shouldn't be ignored.
Any word yet on what the problem is with this paper? If there's a flaw in it that's easy to point out, that would be useful for the book I'm working on.
I don't think that's Aggie's point. He's arguing that having unrefuted creationist arguments out there is bad, since they can persuade fairly knowledgable people.If creationists are trying to appeal to authority, then they will fall severely short.
I don't think that's Aggie's point. He's arguing that having unrefuted creationist arguments out there is bad, since they can persuade fairly knowledgable people.
My argument is that the great majority of those who are familiar wth the evidence accept evolution. That remains true.
"Of the scientists and engineers in the United States, only about 5% are creationists, according to a 1991 Gallup poll (Robinson 1995, Witham 1997). However, this number includes those working in fields not related to life origins (such as computer scientists, mechanical engineers, etc.). Taking into account only those working in the relevant fields of earth and life sciences, there are about 480,000 scientists, but only about 700 believe in "creation-science" or consider it a valid theory (Robinson 1995). This means that less than 0.15 percent of relevant scientists believe in creationism. And that is just in the United States, which has more creationists than any other industrialized country. In other countries, the number of relevant scientists who accept creationism drops to less than one tenth of 1 percent."
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA111.html
If creationists are trying to appeal to authority, then they will fall severely short.
My expertise isn't in geology, so hopefully we can get word from an expert before I muddle through it.
I don't think that's Aggie's point. He's arguing that having unrefuted creationist arguments out there is bad, since they can persuade fairly knowledgable people.
I don't disagree with this. You seem to be arguing against a point I'm not making. What I'm saying is that creationists' more sophisticated scientific arguments are the reason the number isn't zero percent, and that it's worth making some effort to bring it closer to zero. This is one of the reasons I think it's unwise to assume that these arguments, and the journals in which they're published, don't matter.
The paper is about genetics, not geology.
Quite frankly, the arguments don't need to be sophisticated in order for a number that isn't zero percent. Scientists are no different than any other group of people. There will always be a handful that will accept really bad arguments.
I thought you were referring to the paper on the dinosaur fossil. Which paper were you referring to?
That may be true, but I suspect that it isn't true the majority of the time. All of the reasonably well-educated creationists I've interacted with have placed a lot of stock in the creation science technical literature. RichardT, a former YEC who's a member of this forum, was an example of that: he was a creationist largely because he was convinced by the conclusions of the RATE group.
I was referring to this one, about the GULO pseudogene: https://cdn-assets.answersingenesis.org/doc/articles/pdf-versions/human_GULO_pseudogene.pdf
After skimming a few sections of the article, this one section stood out as something to comment on immediately:
". . . the entire 28,800 base GULO region in human (hg19; chr8:27417791-27446590), which contains the putative remnants of six exons and five introns, is only 84% identical compared to chimpanzee using the previously established technique of optimized sequence slices and the BLASTN algorithm (Tomkins 2013b). Even more interesting is the comparison with gorilla using the same technique, which yielded 87% identity. These similarities are clearly outside the evolutionary paradigm and gorilla is more similar to human in the GULO region than chimpanzee— negating the inferred order of phylogeny."
As discussed in other threads, Tomkins' method is not a valid way of comparing these sequences.
If I could make a suggestion, that paper would make for a great topic in a thread of its own.
Not all of his genetic comparison papers use the "ungapped" method, but I see in this case he's citing the one that does. That doesn't seem to be the crux of his argument about the GULO pseudogene, though.
I might post one eventually, but the trouble is that there are a lot of creationist papers like this out there. The main reason I brought up this one is just because it was an example I'd been looking at it recently, so it easily came to mind. I was intending to make a broader point that in general, papers like this one are the sort of argument it would be better to not ignore.
This is the reason I was asking whether anyone knows of a way to get access to papers in the Journal of Creation that are less than a year old, although it sounds like nobody has any suggestions aside from e-mailing the authors.
If you do a google search for the title of one of the papers you might get lucky and find a copy elsewhere on the interwebs.
I already tried that, but the only Google result is for the listing of recent papers in the Journal of Creation archive. The paper I'm looking for is this one:
Bergman, Jerry and Philip Snow. "Dino-bird theory—a flight of fancy." Journal of Creation 29.1 (April 2015): 17–24
The origin of birds is the aspect of evolution I'm most knowledgeable about, and I'm also familiar with all of the most popular arguments creationists have used about it over the past few years. But every now and then creationists come up with new arguments in this area. As far as I know this is the first time Jerry Bergman has written about the topic, so this paper is more likely than most to contain some examples of that.
I cover the origin of birds extensively in the book I'm working on, so if this paper introduces any new arguments about it, I'd like to know about them. I'm hoping my book will be published in less than a year, so I also can't wait for the paper to become publicly available.
Do you have access to a reference librarian? They're good at finding things.I already tried that, but the only Google result is for the listing of recent papers in the Journal of Creation archive. The paper I'm looking for is this one:
Bergman, Jerry and Philip Snow. "Dino-bird theory—a flight of fancy." Journal of Creation 29.1 (April 2015): 17–24.
Do you have access to a reference librarian? They're good at finding things.
Here is a more recent example of a creationist paper that I've been struggling to find a response to: https://cdn-assets.answersingenesis.org/doc/articles/pdf-versions/human_GULO_pseudogene.pdf
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