True.Origins

Originally posted by A Sheep
If you want to counter talkorigins with a bit of truth, try http://www.trueorigin.org/

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This site is really simple to debunk -- light weight stuff.

Lets start will a too easy criticism. They chose someone who thinks the Sun goes around the Earth to write one of their article on astronomy.

Another true.origins person wrote:

2) Knowledgeable men of science recognize that, while the geocentric view is no longer in use, it has not been ruled out by empirical science. The simpler interpretation (heliocentricity) is now the prevailing view because of its simplicity—not because any empirical data has “proven” it to be correct and/or “proven” the geocentric view to be false.

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This alone is a big hint that one is dealing with quacks.

How about this jewel:

We have a choice of many criteria that could be used to define similarity between species.

‘By comparing lysozyme and lactalbumin, Dickerson was hoping to "pin down with great precision" where human beings branched off the mammal line. The results were surprising. In this test, it turned out that humans are more closely related to the chicken than to any living mammal tested!’ [17]

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The reference is to Answers in Genesis. This one has been debunked for decades. It is FALSE claim and everyone who has paid attention to the creation/evolution debate knows it. (I don't think you have paid attention unless you have, well, actually read your opponents.) The reality is that chicken lysozyme is closer than NO living mammal tested.

The claim in question originated from falsely stating what Dickerson found when he wrote in the late 1969. A misuse of a three-decade old source! Sequences had barely started back then it is unreasonable to ask for far more recent sources. But even if it was current it would not justify the misuse.

That Dickerson's paper was misused was documented in "The Bullfrog Affair" which was written in 1990. So not only are the creationists misusing a three-decade old source but it was debunked a decade ago. (Actually there are MANY older debunkings as well.) The article was put online in 1997. This issue is brought up multiple times in the Talk.Origins Archive and has been discussed in many forums like this one. There is simply no excuse for this one.

If anyone want to defend the undefendable and say that there are mammals that have a more different lysozyme that chickens that you are welcome to try and find one. I want to know what mammal it is. You can followed the last link and check to see if he really did have an example of such. Or you can go to PubMed which contains virtually ever single publically available sequencing data and an index to decades worth of the relevent scientific literature.


True.Origins is no stranger to the favorite creationist tactic of quoting out of context.

Here is talk.origins (the newsgroup not the website) post on a highly dishonest quote. As of about a week ago, the dishonest quote mentioned in the October 2000 post is still up at true.origins and the other web site mentioned in the post. (I personally checked about a week ago give or take.)


My post continues with the next message since what I intended to post exceded length limit.

[The edit a replacement of one word to make my meaning clear.]

In this article True.Origins tells us:

George Gaylord Simpson, another leading evolutionist, sees this characteristic in practically the whole range of taxonomic categories:

"...Every paleontologist knows that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of family appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences." [George Gaylord Simpson (evolutionist), The Major Features of Evolution, New York, Columbia University Press, 1953 p. 360.]

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What is wrong with the quote? Well ignoring that it was written a half-century ago and much work has been done since that time, Dr. Simpson was taken out-of-context in that True.Origin is not being honest with either what he said or with what he meant.
Here is a bit more of what Dr. Simpson wrote five long decades ago. Bold is what was quoted by True.Origin and underlined is where True.Origins quoting was wrong in some way. Red is mine.

...Among the examples are many in which, beyond the slightest doubt, a species or genus has been gradually transformed into another. Such gradual transformation is also fairly well exemplified for subfamilies and occasionally for families, as the groups are commonly ranked. Splitting and subsequent gradual divergence of species is also exemplified, although not as richly as phyletic transformation of species (no doubt because spitting of species usually involves spatial separation and paleontological samples are rarely really adequate in spatial distribution). Splitting and gradual divergence of genera is exemplified very well and in a large variety of organisms. Complete examples for subfamilies and families also are known, but are less common.

In spite of these examples, it remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families and that nearly all new categories above the level of families appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences. When paleontological collection was still in its infancy and no clear examples of transitional origin had been found!!, most paleontologists were anti-evolutionists. Darwin (1859) recognized the fact that paleontology then seemed to provide evidence against rather for evolution in general or the gradual origin of taxonomic categories in particular. Now we do have many examples of transitional sequences. Almost all paleontologists recognize that the discovery of a complete transition is in any case unlikely. Most of them find it logical, if not scientifically required, to assume that the sudden appearance of a new systematic group is not evidence for special creation or for saltation, but simply means that a full transitional sequence more or less like those that are known did occur and simply has not been found in this instance

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More documentation on the nonsense and misquotations of that article can be found at this rebuttal.

Here is article about True.Origins:

More Errors On True.Origin: J. Sarfati's Support of Flood Geology

True.Origins lies about what it is "refuting." From this FAQ:

Q: When was the TrueOrigin Archive website started and why?
A: The site began in November 1997 with a single rebuttal ("Five Major Evolutionist Misconceptions About Evolution"), after a well-meaning relative suggested that a few TalkOrigins articles (including Mark Isaak’s "Five Misconceptions") would clear up Tim’s "erroneous" thinking on the subject. The rebuttal was originally written to demonstrate (for that relative) the application of critical thinking skills and a measure of objectivity in the analysis of evolutionary dogma. It was then "published" as a web page in hopes of reaching a few other readers. (The relative only responded with silence.)

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Q: Why not just contribute to TalkOrigins instead of creating a whole new site?
A: In spite of the TalkOrigins publishers’ pretense to be "exploring the creation/evolution controversy" (as if their "exploration" were characteristically balanced and objective), even a cursory examination of the TalkOrigins content reveals that the site is heavily biased in favor of the evolutionary belief system. There was—and is—no evidence that material from a creationary perspective would meet with anything but the same out-of-hand rejection and/or the customary dismissive derision already poured out on the creationary viewpoint among TalkOrigins regulars. (This probably explains why there are no positive articles regarding creation science there, even though TalkOrigins was establish long before TrueOrigin.)

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Now here from the Archive's Welcome page:

"What is the Talk.Origins Archive?"

The Talk.Origins Archive is a collection of articles and essays that explore the creationism/evolution controversy from a mainstream scientific perspective. In other words, the authors of most of the articles in this archive accept the prevailing scientific view that the earth is ancient, that there was no global flood, and that evolution is responsible for the earth's present biodiversity.

The archive was established in 1994 to provide easy access to the many FAQ (frequently asked question) files and essays that were being posted regularly to the Usenet newsgroup talk.origins. Since that time, the archive has grown immensely. It now houses a "post of the month" feature, a local search engine, a user feedback page, and an extensive list of links to other web sites dealing with the creation/evolution controversy.


"Why doesn't the archive contain any articles that support creationism?"

The Talk.Origins Archive exists to provide mainstream scientific responses to the frequently asked questions and frequently rebutted assertions that appear in talk.origins. The archive's policy is that readers should be given easy access to alternative views, but those who espouse alternative views should speak for themselves. Hence, the archive supplies links to relevant creationist web sites within many of its articles. It also maintains a frequently updated and extensive list of creationist and catastrophist web sites so that readers may familiarize themselves with anti-evolutionary perspectives on scientific issues.

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(I did not bother putting in the Archive's hyperlinks in what I quoted. I assume everyone can follow my link.

In case someone thinks The Talk.Origins Archive rewrote their Welcome file because of True.Origins click here for www.archive.org's archive of what that page looked like in 1997. As you can see it is very similiar to as it is now. (Note that the second question quoted above was the bottom paragraph in the old version.)

My final shot for now is an example of cowardess at True.Origins. They review a web site and don't have the courage to provide a link to it in spite of the fact that they link to many things in that article. Typical behavior for Sarfati.

Well there has been plenty of time for people to challenge my previous examples of errors and deception from True.Origins. Lets give another example of a major error from that highly inaccurate web site. Actually it is an error that is very common in creationist and ID literature that demonstrates a complete lack of basic understanding of evolutionary theory. And it allows a powerful confirmation of common descent.

From this article:

The cytochrome c data on which Dr. Theobald relies present some puzzles from a neo-Darwinian perspective. First, the cytochromes of all the higher organisms (yeasts, plants, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) exhibit an almost equal degree of sequence divergence from the cytochrome of the bacteria Rhodospirillum. In other words, the degree of divergence does not increase as one moves up the scale of evolution but remains essentially uniform. The cytochrome c of other organisms, such as yeast and the silkworm moth, likewise exhibits an essentially uniform degree of divergence from organisms as dissimilar as wheat, lamprey, tuna, bullfrog, snapping turtle, penguin, kangaroo, horse, and human. (See matrices in Brand, 157 and Davis and Kenyon, 37.)

Why would the sequence divergence of cytochrome c between bacteria and horses be the same as the divergence between bacteria and insects? The presumed evolutionary lineage from the ancestral cell to a modern bacterium differs radically from the presumed evolutionary lineage from the ancestral cell to a modern horse, both of which differ radically from the presumed evolutionary lineage from the ancestral cell to a modern insect. How could a uniform rate of divergence have been maintained through such radically different pathways? According to Michael Denton, a molecular biology researcher, "At present, there is no consensus as to how this curious phenomenon can be explained." (Denton 1998, 291.)

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Another creationist makes the same argument here.

The "scale of evolution" refered to is not an evolutionary concept, at least not as evolution has understood since the development of the Modern Synthesis in the late 1930s to the early 1950s. It is actually a pre-Darwinian concept: the Great Chain of Being.

Now the common creationist argument expects the molecular biology of a fish to be intermediate between that of a bacterium and that of a man. The problem is that this argument a hidden assumption that most evolution deniers do not notice. That assumption is that we are doing the molecular biology on the very fish that we are descended from. That fish has in reality been dead for a few hundred million years. Since the common ancestor of people and what is informally known as "fish" the fish have been evolving too. Indeed the fish we see in today's world have been evolving for exactly as long as we have. All of this and its implications for molecular biology has been discussed in the literature since at least the mid-1960s.

The pattern mentioned is a prediction of evolution and is a pattern that one would not expect from creationism. This also shows the falsehood of a common argument of evolution deniers: that homology is mere similiarity. Evolution does far more than predict that similiarity will occure, it also predicts what the pattern of similiarity will be.

For those who need more explantion of this should check out Sequences and Common Descent: How We Can Trace Ancestry Through Genetics.

Originally posted by unworthyone
Yay this thread is to debunk "creationism" but never are these debunking facts "observable".

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Actually the facts I used are very much observable. I showed that True.Origins was saying false things about the here and now. They quoted people out-of-context. They quoted gave false facts about the world. They either failed to understand or intentionally misrepresented the predictions of evolutionary theory. And for heaven's sake you don't think they are right about claiming that the Sun going around the Earth is consistent with the evidence--right?

The complex pattern of Evolution is not observable and never will be.

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The pattern is very much observable.

You could debunk every freaking thing a "creationist" would write about evolution being wrong but never once will you yourself prove a darn thing to anyone.

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Proof in the sense you probably want is only availiable in mathematics and not the real world. But keep in mind I have hardly spent my time in this forum just debunking. I have tried to show a tiny part of why scientists think the way that they do. Indeed the pattern shown by cytochrome c is positive evidence for evolution since it shows a pattern that would not have been expected if evolution is not true.

If you want to read a detailed account of the positive evidence for evolution I doubt anyone could do better than 29 Evidences for Macroevolution: Scientific Evidences for the
Theory of Common Descent with Gradual Modification. Indeed for anyone is even the slightest bit interested in why biologists accept evolution, this one is a must read.

Evolution vs Creationism is a stupid argument. Nobody wins nor ever will, until the afterlife when evolution won't mean squat.

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Actually there has been a winner. Among those who study the living world whether in the field or in the lab and among those who study the fossil remains of past life the consensus is utterly overwhelming: evolution is a fact of life. The evolution/creationism debate exists in the public and not those who are the most familiar with the natural world.

Originally posted by chickenman
I was so happy the other day when I used BLASTp to debunk a creationists claims about cytochrome c, I knew bioinformatics would be useful someday. This is great stuff, people need to know that most creation science is either erroneus or outdated

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Just for the spectators, BLAST can be found here. It from the National Center for Biotechnology Information that is part National Institutes of Health.

What creationists claims about cytochrome c did you debunk? I debunked Hovind's sunflower cytochrome c using Entrez-protein which is another NCBI resource which is integrated with every useful PubMed.