Feedback for November 2000

But science is science. Research and honest investigation has brought us to the inescapable conclusion that life on earth has a common ancestor, and has descended through time not unchanged, but with modification, and that species are not fixed. It is up to people of faith to reconcile the findings of science with their beliefs. But do not attack science, just because it reaches conclusions that differ from your sacred writings.

We have researched creationism as well as the creationists have. Interesting, maybe, but far from factual.

Bowler, P. J. (1983). The eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian evolution theories in the decades around 1900. Baltimore and London, John Hopkins University Press.

What would be better is if you could send your appeal to a few creationist websites instead.

And I would just point out that there is a difference between the "unexplained" and the "unexplainable".

You make it sound like the human body is a complicated piece of machinery, but plants and animals aren't. That's truly ridiculous.

The old comparison of a house blowing up and falling back together, or an airplane, or a tornado in a junkyard, or whatever, is made by those who do not understand the process, have not looked at the evidence, and have not bothered to investigate further-- those who are simply not interested in changing their opinions.

We need more people like you out there-- sending in their opinions to programming directors. TV Programs like this influence public opinion, and therefore are potentially very dangerous to science and truth. Public school boards, and legislatures, are not made up of scientists, but regular people-- people whose opinions may have been shaped by fallacious programs like this.

As far as Christians accepting evolution, we have absolutely no say in the matter. It is a personal choice. Religion, as you may well know, is a very personal subject. For example, just think of how many Christian sects there are. (Would one type of Christian ever seriously consider becoming another? A Catholic becoming a Baptist? Or a Methodist to a Presbyterian? Or a Lutheran to a Pentacostal?) It is up to the individual, and his or her own conscience and integrity. Many Christians do not interpret the bible literally, as a history or science book, but as a book containing a spiritual message.

You should read God and Evolution.

Your last comment on judgement needs more thought-- taking into account the Christian concepts of "freewill" and especially "predestination".

Scientists don't need to disprove creationism-- creationism suffers from so many fatal flaws and a failure to provide one single testable theory that it has shot itself in the foot right from the start. Creationism is non-science.

Your comment about everything "winding down" simply shows you have no clue about the mechanisms of evolution. Evolution has nothing to do with winding up or winding down. And growing trees just don't enter into it.

Evolution relies only on biological processes that are currently active. Please list a currently active biological process which violates the second law of thermodynamics, and explain why it does so.

Next!

If you want kiddy-level knowledge, go to a kiddy-level site. If you want to understand, then be prepared to do some hard work. This is rocket science - in fact, it is a good deal more complex than rocket science. One thing is generally true, simple answers are usually wrong.

I look forward to your contributions.

There is a tremendous need for a website that provides current and accurate scientific information, produced by working scientists. TalkOrigins is that website.

As for "scratchy stuff", your comment is too vague to respond to. You should have been more specific.

Despite its (perhaps) polished appearance, the Talk.Origins Archive is nothing more than a collection of articles written by volunteers in their spare time. Knowledgeable volunteers, but volunteers nonetheless. This puts some constraints upon our ability to respond quickly or on a large scale to critiques such as those presented in the True.Origin Archive. In any event, there has been some discussion of responding to those critiques, though nothing much concrete has been assembled yet. Do check back with this site in the future; I expect that in time, you will see responses to those critiques here.

We present the data regarding creationism in as fair and honest a way as possible. This is the way it is. We are not distorting the facts. Maybe the scorn you feel is with creationism itself.

The only way we could represent creationism as valid is if it were valid. But the facts speak for themselves.

Second, we are hostile only to bad science, or religious theology masquerading as science, which describes creationism perfectly.

Thirdly, we have looked at the facts. Over and over again. But even more importantly, what we have here in evolution is not a "belief system", but a scientific explanation of observed phenomena. The fact that you phrased it that way is interesting, and says a lot about your misconceptions.

Forthly all those "facts" you state are old nonsense and falsehoods from the creationist camp. Moon dust? Give me a break. The oldest tree? What does that prove? Noah's ark, that bit of Babylonian mythology, has never been found. Silliness. This sort of stuff is not science. The answers to those long-discredited arguments are found The General Anti-Creationism FAQ, and Frequently Encountered Criticisms in Evolution vs. Creationism. You should check these first before firing off a list of such rubbish.

Hovind's bogus challenge has been exploded on the "No Answers in Genesis" website.

As far as seeing the facts as you wish them to be and not as they are, creationists are clear and away the guilty party.

It is a common error to think that evolution is predetermined to follow some set of steps or stages. It is not. While it may be the case that the "next" Homo species is more intelligent, it is more likely that it will not be, since big brains cost a lot to maintain and develop, and it is likely to be the cause of the eventual extinction of Homo sapiens.

Anything that happens has to be achievable through feasible developmental steps. Human evolution can't suddenly have us grow wings or horns, but some rather major things can happen with very little genetic change. For example, there is a tribe in southern Africa where the middle three digits of their foot do not develop, leaving them with "ostrich feet". This is apparently a better arrangement for long distance walking, but is caused by a single genetic instruction that causes those digits to die off during development in the womb by extending the time taken to kill unwanted cells between digits.

There are so many possible outcomes that we cannot say which ones will occur. We also cannot say before the fact which ones will be fitter than others, because fitness depends on the environment, and we don't know what environments mutations will encounter. So while we know how to explain some of what did happen, we don't know what will. It may even be, that there is no "next human species". 99% of all species that ever lived are extinct, and while there are no reliable figures on how many speciated before going extinct, we can assume that most species don't leave progeny. We are the last Homo species of about seven or so - we may very well be the last ever.

Henig, R. M. (2000). The monk in the garden: the lost and found genius of Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.

Here are some articles on the topic:

Daniel Hartl on Galton and Mendel

There. I didn't bother you with quantum mechanics or references (except for a couple of webpage links). There is no need for you to worry that someone might dare to ask you to think a thought, or exercise an idea. And heavan forbid that anyone suggest that you actually read something.

2. There are no fossils of trilobite ancestors that I know of, but there is a fossil of a primitive trilobite with only two "lobes" instead of three, and the Precambrian fossil Spriggina has a head shield similar to trilobites, suggesting that it is related, although not ancestral. For more details, see Conway Morris' The Crucible of Creation (Oxford U. Press, 1999).

3. Whether plants originated before animals depends on exactly what you mean by plants. Photosynthetic algae evolved billions of years before animals. The "green plants", with chlorophylls a and b, double-membrane chloroplats, and cellulose cell walls, also originated before animals according to chemical evidence. (The first animals still hadn't differentiated from algae when the green plants branched off.) However, I think the first plant fossils are more recent than animals, and the first land plants probably originated after animals. For more information, see The Tree of Life.

What you should do instead is to write to creationists and urge them to develop a theory of creationism... one that is testable, falsifiable and makes specific predictions. They haven't done this so far.

The origins of biomolecules is a hot topic in some parts of biology, but it has very little to do with evolutionary biology, because the origins of living systems (which occurred perhaps only once) are not explained by evolutionary biology but by other disciplines (geology, chemistry, physics). If life began because, as Darwin said, the "creator breathed life into one form or a few", the subsequent history of life is a matter of evolution just as much as if it arose through mere physical laws.

I fail to understand your comment about there being only three choices. Why, for example, can we not adopt the notion of a dynamic historical universe? How would this lead to "anomalous science" whatever that is? You may think a creator is needed to explain the existence of the universe, or not, but the direct action of a creator in the evolution of life is not needed by science and indeed would not be science.

How often a "beneficial" mutation appears is, theoretically, a matter of the parameters that one sets. Some set of parameters is sure to yield a century's interval of time, on average, between such mutations. The question is not that such a set of parameters exists, but whether the values of those parameters are reasonable.

To get a century interval, one need only postulate a very small population with a very long generation time, a very low mutation rate, and a very small proportion of beneficial mutations. Change any or all of these to larger values, and the average interval will drop. Thus, the "beneficial muation per century" dictum could only reasonably apply to a very special case of circumstances. Most organisms have relatively short generation times and relatively large population sizes. To keep that century interval, the remaining parameters would have to shift in the other direction correspondingly. But they do not. Mutation rates do vary somewhat, but not by the several-orders-of-magnitude that would be required.

I developed some formulas for modelling retention and loss of mutations back in the October 1999 feedback.

But theory is not supreme here. The biological evidence is. If one's model does not match the biological reality, then there is something wrong. When researchers look at changes in populations in the wild, they find that such changes can and commonly do occur at very high rates. This is even for vertebrate populations, such as fish or bird species.

I suspect that the anti-evolutionist presenting this objection does not clarify his choice of parameters, or justify that they represent reasonable values, or show that this applies for most organisms, or show that they match what is seen in actual biological research.

Wesley

I haven't heard of this Starkey person, but it sounds like he should stick to mechanical engineering. From his example, he doesn't know what natural selection is all about-- the preferential propagation of species which have genetic traits that give them survival advantages amid environmental pressures.

I suspect, though, that that will not satisfy your creationist friends. (It seems nothing ever does, nor can.) Another approach would be to ask them what kind of evidence they would accept as evidence for speciation. If they respond with something like, "a fish giving birth to a frog," point out that evolution doesn't work that way; in fact something like that would be evidence against evolution. Instead, such a phenomenon would be much more akin to creation, and the fact we haven't witnessed it should be considered evidence against creationism.

The fossil record is a far larger and more extensive body of knowledge than most people realize, with literally millions of fossils known world wide. That fossil record is subject to study, and the results are uncomfortable indeed for the creationist. One recent study, using the Fossil Record 2 Database, plotted extinction and origination events for all existing families in the database. They were able to establish that the frequency of extinctions and originations, over the last 600 million years, includes a "noise" factor (typical of any real process) that was distinguished by a 1/frequency form, which is in turn typical of self-organized criticality, which is in turn consistent with mathematical models of evolution. Imagine that! [Evolutionary patterns from mass originations and mass extinctions; D. Hezwulla et al.; Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B - Biological Sciences 354(1382), pp. 463-469, February 28, 1999]. And another recent study to determine the quality of the fossil record concluded this: "However, if scaled to the stratigraphic level of the stage and the taxonomic level of the family, the past 540 million years of the fossil record provide uniformly good documentation of the life of the past." [Quality of the fossil record through time; M.J. Benton, M.A. Wills & R. Hitchin; Nature 403(6769), pp. 534-537, February 3, 2000].

The existence of these transitional forms by no means invalidates such ideas as adaptive radiation. Neither do they require "essentialism", only that organisms can change with time.

you refer to "recent articles" contradicting the traditional rule that organisms live in specific "geologic tables", but you cite no specific articles. For that matter, it is not at all clear that such a "traditional rule" exists at all. It is well known that speciation can create a new species without eliminating the parent species, and also that some species can exist for very long times, while others do not. Without more details, and without a better explanation, it is not at all clear that your objection makes sense.

Personally, I HAVE read the bible, and came from a very religious background. But the worldly facts were not altered by my wishing otherwise.

Your final statement, ending with "but is it not still a frog", is a perfect example of why a textbook would be of immense value to you, as well as anyone unfamiliar with the science of evolutionary biology. Can you accurately state the mechanisms of evolutionary theory? Can you describe HOW a froglike species can evolve into a reptillian one? If not, further education is required before any meaningful discussion can take place.

This website does not serve as a source of primary education regarding evolutionary biology. It serves to offer scientific rebuttals to creationist misinformation. For true understanding of the current science, a small library is required.

I recommend getting a few good books on the subject that will fill in the missing details. You should try "From So Simple a Beginning, The Book of Evolution" by Phillip Whitfield as a good start. As far as the big bang, you can start with NASA's Introduction to Cosmology. Good luck!

If evolution were a religious worldview, it would not permit itself to be absorbed and subjugated by the other religious worldviews, would it?

As a "for instance", you should know that there is no such thing as a "Law of Biogenesis" in science, that's just a snappy collection of buzzwords designed to deter the faint of heart. Now, it is true indeed that nobody has actually observed in situ the genesis of life from non-living material (i.e., abiogenesis). However, just because something is unobserved certainly does not automatically imply a "law" that it can never be observed, and your own assertion that such a thing "never will be observed" is quite an unscientific pronouncement in its own right.

Actually, the more we learn about abiogenesis, the more we realize that it may very well have happened, and that there are many ways in which it may have happened. It only requires a cursory examination of the literature to find support for this. There is, for instance, a three part study on biochemical evolution in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) which argues strongly in favor of abiogenesis as a process of surface chemistry, as opposed to the more popular primordial soup class of models [ Biochemical evolution I: Polymerization on internal, organophilic silica surfaces of dealuminated zeolites and feldspars, J.V. Smith, PNAS 95(7): 3370-3375, March 31 1998; Biochemical evolution II: Origin of life in tubular microstructures on weathered feldspar surfaces, I. Parsons et al., PNAS 95(26): 15173-15176, December 22 1998; Biochemical evolution III: Polymerization on organophilic silica-rich surfaces, crystal-chemical modeling, formation of first cells, and geological clues, J.V. Smith et al., PNAS 96(7): 3479-3485, March 30 1999]. However, don't count the ever popular primordial soup out of the running quite yet. Despite creationist insistence to the contrary, it is not an unfeasible idea [for example, Life out of magma: a new theory for the origin of life, G. Lucido, Nuovo Cimento Della Societa Italiana Di Fisica (D), 20(12bis): 2575-2591, December 1998]. And finally, there is a recent, extensive survey of the science of abiogenesis: The Origin of Life, J.H. McClendon, Earth Science Reviews 47(1-2): 71-93, July 1999. The facts are rather in contrast to your version of reality, and abiogenesis remains a thoroughly scientific pursuit.

The same kind of list could be mounted against your argument about mutations & information, which is just another of those buzz-word populated creationist phantasms, every bit the fantasy which you claim that evolution is. Mutations increase the information content of the genome all the time, probably nearly every day, considering the number of humans born every day. In fact (whatta word), the rate at which information is added to genomes in general (not just the human genome) is sufficiently rapid that the entire process of abiogenesis, plus evolution from primordial thingy to bacterium-like structure, probably takes no more that about 10,000,000 years [How long did it take for life to begin and evolve to Cyanobacteria?, A. Lazcano & S.L. Miller, Journal of Molecular Evolution 39(6): 546-554, December 1994]. So much for the "information problem", which in reality deals more with the creationist's inability to stay informed, than it does for a genome to do likewise.

Now, you're pretty close to the mark with natural selection (congratulations!). It does not "create" anything, but then it doesn't have too. It just acts as a filter on genetic diversity maintained by mutations, genetic drift and the like. The result is a gene pool, the detailed contents of which change with time, in response to natural selection provided by the environment.

But you really blew the age of the Earth big time. Although you visited the "Age of the Earth FAQs" before posting feedback, you don't seem to have read very far. Alas, for the magnetic field of the Earth decays not, which you might have noticed had you gone far enough down the page to find "On Creation Science and the Alleged Decay of the Earth's Magnetic Field, before telling us that the Earth's magnetic field was decaying. Sorry, but you will have to find some other excuse for believing that science supports a "young" Earth, that one won't do. However, perhaps before trying to introduce any additional young-Earth arguments, you should first actually read some of those FAQ files, lest you run afoul of yet another error in the creationist pantheon of ideas.

And, at long last, as for Satanic deception, I have but one response: I shall await the opportunity to be judged by Truth itself, rather than worry over your version of it.

The answer to your question, as well as a detailed look at the quote, can be found here: talkorigins.org/faqs/ce/3/part8.html.

Both are hypothetically testable, but only one of them makes testable predictions... evolution. Evolution is also tested through the science of population genetics.

Evolution does not require faith. There are mounds of physical and experimental evidence which support the theory. Efforts have been made for over a century to overturn the theory, and none have succeeded. The theory still stands, stronger than ever. Creationism, on the other hand, doesn't even fit the definition of a scientific theory. It proposes no explanations, is backed by no physical evidence, makes no theoretical predictions, and is theoretically unfalsifiable. It is based soley on a religious document. Hardly the stuff of science.