The plank in the materialist's eye

Npetrely: supernatural explanations are thrown out because they are superfluous.

As for abiogenesis being necessary for evolution: Ever heard of Deists like Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine and Albert Einstein? They'd say God could create the universe or life and let it go. God for example might have made dogs in your theory but that doesn't necessarily mean he guided the process by which dogs split into different breeds.

Such explanations become superfluous thoough when natural ones are found.

And yes, creationists take quotes out of context in such a dishonest manner as to make even the most immoral, atheist scientist wash over with shame.

For example this quote from Charles Darwin in his book Origin of Speicies :

Organs of extreme perfection and complication. To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.

In looking for the gradations by which an organ in any species has been perfected, we ought to look exclusively to its lineal ancestors; but this is scarcely ever possible, and we are forced in each case to look to species of the same group, that is to the collateral descendants from the same original parent-form, in order to see what gradations are possible, and for the chance of some gradations having been transmitted from the earlier stages of descent, in an unaltered or little altered condition. Amongst existing Vertebrata, we find but a small amount of gradation in the structure of the eye, and from fossil species we can learn nothing on this head. In this great class we should probably have to descend far beneath the lowest known fossiliferous stratum to discover the earlier stages, by which the eye has been perfected.

In the Articulata we can commence a series with an optic nerve merely coated with pigment, and without any other mechanism; and from this low stage, numerous gradations of structure, branching off in two fundamentally different lines, can be shown to exist, until we reach a moderately high stage of perfection. In certain crustaceans, for instance, there is a double cornea, the inner one divided into facets, within each of which there is a lens shaped swelling. In other crustaceans the transparent cones which are coated by pigment, and which properly act only by excluding lateral pencils of light, are convex at their upper ends and must act by convergence; and at their lower ends there seems to be an imperfect vitreous substance. With these facts, here far too briefly and imperfectly given, which show that there is much graduated diversity in the eyes of living crustaceans, and bearing in mind how small the number of living animals is in proportion to those which have become extinct, I can see no very great difficulty (not more than in the case of many other structures) in believing that natural selection has converted the simple apparatus of an optic nerve merely coated with pigment and invested by transparent membrane, into an optical instrument as perfect as is possessed by any member of the great Articulate class.

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With the rest following with an argument for how a complex eye could evolve. This was taken out of context in one creationist book
Life how did it get here: BY evolution or creation? to say:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

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With none of the following explanation. As if Charles Darwin decided the question could not be answered. That to me speaks of obvious dishonesty.

"Such explanations become superfluous thoough when natural ones are found."

I'd say you need to add the word assumed to be in front of the word found.

If Camp was so off, then why did the Talkorgins guy write?

"First, I have incorporated new material into the original essay that specifically addresses many of Camp's points, and thus much of his response is now superfluous."

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/camp.html

Also, what a load of sophistry and bS from Talkorigins designed to avoid the issue.

"Ashby Camp writes:

The alleged prediction and fulfillment are:

If universal common ancestry is true, then all organisms will have one or more traits in common.


All organisms have one or more traits in common.


Although Camp is most likely simply trying to paraphrase the point succinctly, he distorts the intent in doing so. The prediction is more specific than the above. To quote from the original prediction 1:

"Some of the macroscopic properties that characterize all of life are (1) replication, (2) information flow in continuity of kind, (3) catalysis, and (4) energy utilization (metabolism) .... all living species today should necessarily have ... inherited the structures that perform these functions. The genealogical relatedness of all life predicts that organisms should be very similar in the particular mechanisms and structures that execute these basic life processes." (emphasis added)

Which traits should be in common was and is expressly stated - the structures and mechanisms that perform the four basic life functions.

Camp does not consider his paraphrase to be a straw man:

... I do not see how my summary phrasing qualifies as a straw man, given that it encompasses the claim being made. If one argues that two bullets must have come from the same gun because they have certain striations in common, would it be a straw man to say the claim was that the two bullets must have come from the same gun because they have one or more traits in common? Specifying the traits (striations) does not affect the nature of the argument ...


"Encompassing" a claim is not stating the claim, just as the United States is not Colorado. Camp's gun-and-bullet example certainly is a straw man. We cannot infer that two bullets came from the same gun if they have just any two traits in common. For instance, two bullets might be both made of lead or they might both weigh the same. Can we thus infer that they both came from the same gun? No - that inference is only valid when it is based upon traits that are caused by a particular gun, such as specific striations. Rephrasing the argument as Camp does is a straw man, since the rephrased argument is a weaker form of the real argument, and since the weaker form is much easier to criticize. Specifying the traits certainly does change the nature of the argument, because the valid inference is solely based upon certain types of traits (for bullets, those traits caused by a specific gun; for common descent, those traits strongly constrained by gradualism).

Camp's clear use of the straw man fallacy so early in his "Critique," and his subsequent confusion regarding its definition and usage, does not bode well for the efficacy of the remainder of his article."

Camp is right here. Theobald's assertions on nested heirarcies just hot air, and proves nothing.

"The notion that the nested hierarchy of organisms is incompatible with creation is based, not on science, but on the unprovable theological assumption that if God created life he would do it in some other way. As biologist Leonard Brand explains:

The hierarchical arrangement of life illustrated in Fig. 9.6 has been used by Futuyma (1983) and others as evidence that life must have evolved. They believe that if life were created, the characteristics of different organisms would be arranged chaotically or in a continuum, not in the hierarchy of nested groups evident in nature. If we think of that concept as a hypothesis, how could it be tested? Actually, to state how a Creator would do things and then show that nature is or is not designed that way is an empty argument. Such conjecture depends on the unlikely assumption that we can decide what the Creator would be like and how he would function. (Brand, 155.)

It may be that the nested hierarchy of living things simply is a reflection of divine orderliness. It also may be, as Walter ReMine suggests, that nested hierarchy is an integral part of a message woven by the Creator into the patterns of biology. (See, e.g., ReMine, 367-368, 465-467.) The point is that the hierarchical nature of life can be accommodated by creation theory as readily as by evolution. Accordingly, “t is not evidence for or against either theory.” (Brand, 155.)"

"Humans and horses, both being placental mammals, are presumed to have shared a common ancestor with each other more recently than they shared a common ancestor with a kangaroo (a marsupial). So the evolutionist would expect the cytochrome c of a human to be more similar to that of a horse than to that of a kangaroo. Yet, the cytochrome c of the human varies in 12 places from that of a horse but only in 10 places from that of a kangaroo. (See matrix in Brand, 134.)

Such discrepancies between traditional phylogenies and those based on cytochrome c are well known. Even Ayala could only bring himself to say that “[t]he overall relations agree fairly well with those inferred from the fossil record and other sources” (emphasis supplied). (Ayala, 68.) He then acknowledged:

The cytochrome c phylogeny disagrees with the traditional one in several instances, including the following: the chicken appears to be related more closely to the penguin than to ducks and pigeons; the turtle, a reptile, appears to be related more closely to birds than to the rattlesnake, and man and monkeys diverge from the mammals before the marsupial kangaroo separates from the placental mammals. (Ayala, 68.)"

Basically Jerry, I admit to knowing little of genetics and some of this stuff, but Theobald seems full of it in terms of his argument, and Camp is clearer, more direct, and appears more accurate.

I certainly think the 29 evidences is pretty much BS, but I'll grant you that I prefer to stick to simpler stuff like fossils which to me are the hard data.

I agree with Camp here.

"Moreover, while ancestral taxa must have existed before any taxa that descended from them, that does not mean the appearance of their fossilized forms must correspond to that order of existence. However unlikely the claim may be, it remains possible for a proponent of common descent to assert that select taxa appear in the fossil record contrary to the order in which they came into existence.

Witness the fact dromaeosaurids, which are offered by Dr. Theobald as “reptile-bird intermediates,”[13] first appear in the fossil record some 25 million years after the first fossil bird. (If one accepts Protoavis, rather than Archaeopteryx, as the first fossil bird, the gap in appearance increases to about 100 million years.) Rather than disqualifying dromaeosaurids in Dr. Theobald’s eyes as “reptile-bird intermediates,” which he argues must appear in the order suggested by the standard phylogeny, it is simply assumed that dromaeosaurids lived tens of millions of years before there is any evidence of their existence. (The ambiguity of “general chronological order” prevents such nonconformities from falsifying the claim.)

This same strategy could be employed if dromaeosaurids turned up in strata older/lower than that in which synapsids first appear. That is, it could be assumed that pelycosaurs and therapsids actually predated dromaeosaurids but for some reason did not appear in the fossil record until later. So the suggestion that the hypothesis of universal common ancestry would be falsified if dromaeosaurids first appeared in the fossil record before synapsids reptiles is incorrect.

The fact synapsids appear before dromaeosaurids hardly constitutes proof (confirms the “prediction”) that “fossilized intermediates” appear in the general chronological order indicated in the standard phylogeny. They are only two data points. But more importantly, one must bear in mind that Figure 1 is of necessity a simplified and fragmentary phylogeny. The picture changes significantly when the scope of inquiry is broadened.[14] According to one Harvard-trained paleontologist:

[T]he correspondence between phylogeny and the fossil record is not as strong as it might first seem. When the order of all kingdoms, phyla and classes is compared with the most reasonable phylogenies, over 95 percent of all the lines are not consistent with the order in the fossil record. The only statistically significant exceptions are the orders of first appearances of the phyla of plants and the classes of vertebrates and arthropods. Yet these three lineages also order organismal groups from sea-dwellers to land dwellers. The land-plant phyla, for example, are in a simple sequence from plants that need standing water to survive (e.g., algae and bryophytes) to those that can survive extreme desiccation (e.g., the cacti). The vertebrate classes go from sea-dwellers (fish) to land/sea creatures (amphibians) to land creatures (reptiles/mammals), to flying creatures (birds). The arthropod classes go from sea-dwellers (e.g., trilobites, crustaceans) to land dwellers (e.g., insects). So it’s not clear that macroevolution is a truly good explanation for the order of fossil first appearances of major groups of life. Such a radical idea as a global flood, for example, which gradually overcame first the sea and then the land, actually explains the primary order of major groups in the fossil record (sea to land) better than macroevolutionary theory. (Wise, 225-226.)
Part 2 "

How can you argue with this?

Dr. Theobald accuses me of constructing a straw man because I said his argument was that the hypothesis of universal common ancestry predicts that all organisms will have one or more traits in common. He claims that this summary phrasing weakens his argument by omitting the fact he specifies that the traits all organisms must have in common relate to the basic functions of life. He then quotes “from the original prediction 1” to verify that his claim was more specific. (In saying that he was quoting “from the original prediction 1,” Dr. Theobald may leave the casual reader with the false impression that those comments were not included in my paper. The fact is that I quoted his alleged prediction in its entirety.)"

http://www.trueorigin.org/ca_ac_01.asp

I read Theobald, and Camp is right here, and more to the point, Theobald appears disingenious in claiming Camp misses the point and does not properly address the issue. Basically, Theobald tries to use sophistry and fails miserably. The fact Camp quoted its entirety pretty much demolishes Theobald's windy mess.

Camp basically devastates Theobald's weak arguments elsewhere as well.

"In response, Dr. Theobald defends the proposed 25-million-year disjunction between the first appearances of Archaeopteryx and dromaeosaurids by arguing that it is statistically insignificant. The issue, however, is not whether the claim of disjunction between Archaeopteryx and dromaeosaurids can be defended but whether a claim of disjunction could be made in the event dromaeosaurids were found below synapsids. By suggesting that disjunctions of 100 million years or more are to be expected, Dr. Theobald shows how easy it would be to explain away dromaeosaurids being found below synapsids, which was my point.

As for the disjunction between the first appearances of Archaeopteryx and dromaeosaurids, Dr. Theobald underestimates the problem. It is not simply the absence of dromaeosaurids from the Early or Mid-Jurassic that must be explained but also the absence of other theropod clades whose existence is suggested by the existence of dromaeosaurids. As Witmer noted in reference to Protoavis, a Triassic bird would mean “we should reasonably expect to find Triassic representatives of the ornithomimid, tyrannosaurid, troodontid, and dromaeosaurid clades, among others.” (Chatterjee, x.)

So the situation is quite unlike the coelacanth going undetected for 80 million years. Even experts who believe that the positions of Archaeopteryx and dromaeosaurids are an artifact of the fossil record describe it as “puzzling” and “vexing.” (Padian and Chiappe, 78; Chatterjee, x.) If Protoavis is the first fossil bird, as is believed by such esteemed paleornithologists as Evgeny Kurochkin and D. Stephen Peters, it adds over 75 million years to the problem.

The flexibility that exists regarding the order of fossils is illustrated by the fact that some who accept Protoavis as the first fossil bird also accept the theory that birds descended from theropods (e.g., paleontologist Chatterjee). In other words, they do not consider the absence of a suite of theropod clades for 100 million years sufficient to falsify the claim that dromaeosaurids were reptile-bird intermediates."

http://www.trueorigin.org/ca_ac_01.asp

"Hey, these genes [blueprints] for a chimp look a lot like the genes [blueprints] for a man. Could it be because they're so similar? Nah, it must be because they have a common ancestor. Well, there you have it. Evolution is proven."
this is a strawman argument, arguing at your level of understanding of sequence homology

Originally posted by randman
If Camp was so off, then why did the Talkorgins guy write?

"First, I have incorporated new material into the original essay that specifically addresses many of Camp's points, and thus much of his response is now superfluous."

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/camp.html

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Huh? If Bob's criticisms were bad, why did John update his paper so that Bob's criticisms were answered? My first guess that Bob's criticisms were outside the scope of John's original paper, so John expanded the scope of his paper to handle them.

Originally posted by randman
Camp is right here. Theobald's assertions on nested heirarcies just hot air, and proves nothing.

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Then why doesn't show that in his argument? If he is going to spend a couple of paragraphs talking about it, why doesn't he show why Theobald's statements on nested hierarchies is just hot air?

"The notion that the nested hierarchy of organisms is incompatible with creation is based, not on science, but on the unprovable theological assumption that if God created life he would do it in some other way.

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Of course! ANY data is "compatible" with creation - who cares? The obvious difference is that the nested hierarchy is predicted by evolution, and required by evolution. The prediction is that ANY newly found species (and they are being found every day) will fall (within limits) IN THE NESTED HIERARCHY. The falsification would be easy and obvious. Under any model other than common descent there is no reason to expect a nested hierarchy. The absense of one would make common descent a non-starter.

Originally posted by randman
"Humans and horses, both being placental mammals, are presumed to have shared a common ancestor with each other more recently than they shared a common ancestor with a kangaroo (a marsupial). So the evolutionist would expect the cytochrome c of a human to be more similar to that of a horse than to that of a kangaroo. Yet, the cytochrome c of the human varies in 12 places from that of a horse but only in 10 places from that of a kangaroo. (See matrix in Brand, 134.)

Such discrepancies between traditional phylogenies and those based on cytochrome c are well known. Even Ayala could only bring himself to say that “[t]he overall relations agree fairly well with those inferred from the fossil record and other sources” (emphasis supplied). (Ayala, 68.) He then acknowledged:

The cytochrome c phylogeny disagrees with the traditional one in several instances, including the following: the chicken appears to be related more closely to the penguin than to ducks and pigeons; the turtle, a reptile, appears to be related more closely to birds than to the rattlesnake, and man and monkeys diverge from the mammals before the marsupial kangaroo separates from the placental mammals. (Ayala, 68.)"

Basically Jerry, I admit to knowing little of genetics and some of this stuff, but Theobald seems full of it in terms of his argument, and Camp is clearer, more direct, and appears more accurate.

I certainly think the 29 evidences is pretty much BS, but I'll grant you that I prefer to stick to simpler stuff like fossils which to me are the hard data.

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You think 29 evidences is pretty much BS without knowing exactly WHY in this case.. Camp is clearer and more direct, I agree. I think that may be because he is doing a snow-job.

Originally posted by randman
How can you argue with this?

Dr. Theobald accuses me of constructing a straw man because I said his argument was that the hypothesis of universal common ancestry predicts that all organisms will have one or more traits in common. He claims that this summary phrasing weakens his argument by omitting the fact he specifies that the traits all organisms must have in common relate to the basic functions of life. He then quotes “from the original prediction 1” to verify that his claim was more specific. (In saying that he was quoting “from the original prediction 1,” Dr. Theobald may leave the casual reader with the false impression that those comments were not included in my paper. The fact is that I quoted his alleged prediction in its entirety.)"

http://www.trueorigin.org/ca_ac_01.asp

I read Theobald, and Camp is right here, and more to the point, Theobald appears disingenious in claiming Camp misses the point and does not properly address the issue. Basically, Theobald tries to use sophistry and fails miserably. The fact Camp quoted its entirety pretty much demolishes Theobald's windy mess.

Camp basically devastates Theobald's weak arguments elsewhere as well.

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So the "one or more traits in common" argument: that was what? Not a straw man, or not Camp's argument? If it wasn't a straw man, then what of the bullet analogy? If it wasn't Camp's argument, then just what the heck was Camp's argument?

Camp seems to be spooked by the fact that Theobald quotes his original paper to prove that his position was not accurately reflected by the straw man. Why?

Originally posted by npetreley


Oh yeah, and I love how it's been proven.

Hey, these genes [blueprints] for a chimp look a lot like the genes [blueprints] for a man. Could it be because they're so similar? Nah, it must be because they have a common ancestor. Well, there you have it. Evolution is proven.

And why is the fossil record lacking? "For some reason." (actual quote) Yeah, that's the ticket. "For some reason." God enough for me.

Gosh, well, that's all the proof I need.

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Nick, don't waste our time with any more of this garbage, please. You've been called out on it and failed to show up to the challenge. When the hard questions get asked you are nowhere to be found. When you see an opportunity to pop your head around the corner and call insults, you invariably do... If this is all you care about doing, please do it somewhere else. Others here are at least attempting a substantive discussion.

I don't have time to dissect the rest of the quotes you pasted from Camp's articles. What I read of them doesn't seem to carry a lot of weight: at best it is nitpicking, at worst, it is an attempt to call the evidence into question by glossing over its real impact.

I do ask that you be a little bit more clear when you paste these segments over into this thread. Please use some indicator other than nested quotation marks about who is saying what. It takes me a long time just to figure out which part is Camp, which part is Theobald, and which part is you... It would be better, even, if you could summarize the arguments in your own words instead of pasting them. That way, I don't argue against one of Camp's points only to find that it isn't one that you specifically agree with & you don't have to defend Camp - you only have to defend randman....

Thanks.

Sorry, I wanted to add one thing, with reference to this:

I certainly think the 29 evidences is pretty much BS, but I'll grant you that I prefer to stick to simpler stuff like fossils which to me are the hard data.

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Fossils are only a single tiny part of the hard data. Look around you: There are more organisms living on the earth today than there are fossil specimens from the past by a few orders of magnitude. The living organisms are by far the best source of "hard data", and the most abundant. The fossil record can only give us a few glimpes into the distant past. It is definitely good evidence for the theory of evolution that each of those glimpses does show us the same picture that the theory of evolution says we should see, but to say that this is the only data worth considering would be to wilfully close our eyes to worlds of data.

If you are so convinced that TalkOrigins is "BS" as you put it, and doesn't deserve your attention, then learn about the subject another way. Take some college courses in the field. Go to the library and read from the journals. Don't just sit pat and and tell everyone that the data doesn't confirm evolution because you don't trust the people who have presented the data to you. Find out what the data is!

Originally posted by npetreley


Really? My opinion of witchcraft aside, can you show me the studies that disprove witchcraft?

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Well, I believe it was you who first mentioned the fact that most people don't believe in witchcraft ... Checking ... Ah yes, post #51 or were you just quoting C.S. Lewis? As with most claims of the supernatural you can't do a scientific study refuting them since they can never be reproduced. Witch: "I cast a spell to make them fall in love and it worked, see they got married". Scientist: "Ok, could you cast another spell to make these two people fall in love". Witch: "Not today, don't feel like it, maybe later ....."

Not much of a paper to right here. This is my point. When you include supernatural events in science then all things are valid ... witchcraft included.

By the way. I am well aware of modern day witches (Wicca, etc.) however the ones I know don't believe they can acutally invoke supernatural forces -- maybe others believe this. If they can do it reproducibly under controlled conditions then I suggest they seek out James Randi and collect his million dollar offer.