This is from an older, but still relevant, article from July 2002: 1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law. Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty--above a mere hypothesis but below ...
03-04-2007, 11:41 PM
| #1 | ||||
| Last Starfighter  Independent Northern California 
| 15 Answers To Creatonist Claims This is from an older, but still relevant, article from July 2002: 1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law. Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty--above a mere hypothesis but below a law. Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses." No amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generalization about nature. So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution--or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that matter--they are not expressing reservations about its truth.</B> In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent with modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution. The NAS defines a fact as "an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as 'true.'" The fossil record and abundant other evidence testify that organisms have evolved through time. Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling. All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make physicists' conclusions less certain. 2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest. "Survival of the fittest" is a conversational way to describe natural selection, but a more technical description speaks of differential rates of survival and reproduction. That is, rather than labeling species as more or less fit, one can describe how many offspring they are likely to leave under given circumstances. Drop a fast-breeding pair of small-beaked finches and a slower-breeding pair of large-beaked finches onto an island full of food seeds. Within a few generations the fast breeders may control more of the food resources. Yet if large beaks more easily crush seeds, the advantage may tip to the slow breeders. In a pioneering study of finches on the Galápagos Islands, Peter R. Grant of Princeton University observed these kinds of population shifts in the wild [see his article "Natural Selection and Darwin's Finches"; Scientific American, October 1991]. The key is that adaptive fitness can be defined without reference to survival: large beaks are better adapted for crushing seeds, irrespective of whether that trait has survival value under the circumstances. 3. Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created. This blanket dismissal of evolution ignores important distinctions that divide the field into at least two broad areas: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution looks at changes within species over time--changes that may be preludes to speciation, the origin of new species. Macroevolution studies how taxonomic groups above the level of species change. Its evidence draws frequently from the fossil record and DNA comparisons to reconstruct how various organisms may be related. ADVERTISEMENT (article continues below)  These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has been upheld by tests in the laboratory (as in studies of cells, plants and fruit flies) and in the field (as in Grant's studies of evolving beak shapes among Galápagos finches). Natural selection and other mechanisms--such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis and hybridization--can drive profound changes in populations over time. The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution implies that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about 100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should not--and does not--find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (144 million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly. Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might have originated this way. If superintelligent aliens appeared and claimed credit for creating life on earth (or even particular species), the purely evolutionary explanation would be cast in doubt. But no one has yet produced such evidence. It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the 1930s. More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor. 4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution. No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. Pick up any issue of a peer-reviewed biological journal, and you will find articles that support and extend evolutionary studies or that embrace evolution as a fundamental concept. Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are all but nonexistent. In the mid-1990s George W. Gilchrist of the University of Washington surveyed thousands of journals in the primary literature, seeking articles on intelligent design or creation science. Among those hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, he found none. In the past two years, surveys done independently by Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University and Lawrence M. Krauss of Case Western Reserve University have been similarly fruitless. Creationists retort that a closed-minded scientific community rejects their evidence. Yet according to the editors of Nature, Science and other leading journals, few antievolution manuscripts are even submitted. Some antievolution authors have published papers in serious journals. Those papers, however, rarely attack evolution directly or advance creationist arguments; at best, they identify certain evolutionary problems as unsolved and difficult (which no one disputes). In short, creationists are not giving the scientific world good reason to take them seriously.  5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution. Evolutionary biologists passionately debate diverse topics: how speciation happens, the rates of evolutionary change, the ancestral relationships of birds and dinosaurs, whether Neandertals were a species apart from modern humans, and much more. These disputes are like those found in all other branches of science. Acceptance of evolution as a factual occurrence and a guiding principle is nonetheless universal in biology. Unfortunately, dishonest creationists have shown a willingness to take scientists' comments out of context to exaggerate and distort the disagreements. Anyone acquainted with the works of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University knows that in addition to co-authoring the punctuated-equilibrium model, Gould was one of the most eloquent defenders and articulators of evolution. (Punctuated equilibrium explains patterns in the fossil record by suggesting that most evolutionary changes occur within geologically brief intervals--which may nonetheless amount to hundreds of generations.) Yet creationists delight in dissecting out phrases from Gould's voluminous prose to make him sound as though he had doubted evolution, and they present punctuated equilibrium as though it allows new species to materialize overnight or birds to be born from reptile eggs. When confronted with a quotation from a scientific authority that seems to question evolution, insist on seeing the statement in context. Almost invariably, the attack on evolution will prove illusory. 6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? This surprisingly common argument reflects several levels of ignorance about evolution. The first mistake is that evolution does not teach that humans descended from monkeys; it states that both have a common ancestor. The deeper error is that this objection is tantamount to asking, "If children descended from adults, why are there still adults?" New species evolve by splintering off from established ones, when populations of organisms become isolated from the main branch of their family and acquire sufficient differences to remain forever distinct. The parent species may survive indefinitely thereafter, or it may become extinct. 7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth. The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry. Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to earth in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young. Creationists sometimes try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing to science's current inability to explain the origin of life. But even if life on earth turned out to have a nonevolutionary origin (for instance, if aliens introduced the first cells billions of years ago), evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by countless microevolutionary and macroevolutionary studies. 8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance. Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving "desirable" (adaptive) features and eliminating "undesirable" (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times. The rest of the article can be found here: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense: Scientific American | ||||
     |
|
03-05-2007, 12:53 AM
| #2 | ||||
| helluo librorum The Lab Moderator  Humanist Chicago Suburbs
| One of my favorite articles.  | ||||
| |
|
04-04-2007, 11:29 AM
| #3 | ||||
| Deuteronomy 32:41  Paleolibertarian USA
| it doesn't answer shit. All it does is create blanket statements and straw-man arugments to knock down. #1 Evolution isn't even a theory. It's a collection of theories. It's all blanketed together by those who religiously support their version of the concept. Kinda like those all-or-nothing Christians that say you have to believe in THEIR God, get saved in THEIR church. So these evolutionists try to wrap all of evolution into one blanket theory that says you have to believe in all of it, or you can't believe in any of it. #2 is a weak straw-man I've heard often. #3 is like #1. You have to believe all or none. SOME evolution has been through the scrutiny of science. MUCH has not, and is based on supposition. #4 is a repeat of #3. I doubt there's any scientist worth his salt that would stand up and say living things do not change over time or that living things are exactly the way God created them in the Garden of Eden. So, given that, isn't it true that no scientist "doubts the truth of evolution"? But what is "THE TRUTH OF EVOLUTION" Now you get to the top of the same paragraph, where they admit there's debate. Of course there's debate. But they all accept "the truth of evolution" for your argument's sake. 5=4 . next #6. I'm surprised at how many evolutionists also believe we came from monkeys. This ignorance goes both ways because of the teachings in school. In both cases, we were recklessly taught that we came from monkeys (and our "cave men" ancestors looked like black people). Pick up a science text from the 1950s or 60s and you'll see what I mean. Even well into the 80s this was taught, although the blatant racism was being slowly squeezed out of the books. So you have two responses. The religious fellow sees it as sheer stupidity to think he's an evolved monkey or to think that a black man is less human than himselves (God says we are all born sinners, not one perfect), and the athiest swallows it hook line and sinker. Then neither can effectively argue their position, becuase they were taught a lie. I admit, it's been a few years since I was in school, but my kids are getting closer to high school age, and I'll be examining their science texts very closely. Most of the REAL disbelief is where some scientists suppose that goo became you over "billions of years". Most any educated person knows that change over time (evolution) has been observed, directly and indirectly. Also, they like to throw in abiogenesis (#7), because they KNOW that evolution can't explain that. That's not evolution at all, it's abiogenesis, which is a seperate "theory" to debate. Both creationists and evolutionists are guilty of that one. #8 is particularly amusing, because it assumes selection can do what it can't- that is, invent new things (mutate). Natural selection can only SELECT AN EXISTING TRAIT that is "desirable" according to that aricle. It's a fallacy to believe that natural selection can select something that doesn't exist. That's like picking an orange from a barrel of apples when there is no orange to pick. It doesn't matter how "good" the orange would be, if it isn't there, it isn't there. Bigger apples, little apples, fresher and rotton. Those would all be traits of apples, and people would pick which ever they liked the best. At no point, though, could an orange magically appear. Last edited by AVengeance; 04-04-2007 at 11:48 AM. | ||||
| |
|
04-04-2007, 12:04 PM
| #4 | ||||
| Banned  Conservative Government is another way to say Better Than You
| The Theory of Evolution isn't even a consistent theory; it changes from decade to decade. | ||||
| |
|
04-04-2007, 02:25 PM
| #5 | ||||
| ipsa Scientia Potestas est  Pragmatist Greensboro, NC
| New facts necessitate changes | ||||
| |
|
04-04-2007, 02:39 PM
| #6 | ||||
| Banned Conservative Government is another way to say Better Than You
| Originally Posted by motivez Absolutely. Changes made upon the realization of new facts support that the previous theory was incorrect, and also supports the doubt by others.
There are two issues you're speaking of. Yes, new facts necessitate changes in previous thinking. Let's take two examples. One is the issue of DNA. DNA was theorized to be in a double-helix structure by Watson and Crick. After much more research was conducted, new facts were obtained, but in the end, the theory never changed...DNA is still known and shown to be in the double-helix structure. We've learned more and more about its properties, but the base knowledge of DNA has never changed. Is there a fact regarding this knowledge about DNA? Yes indeed...that it remains in a double-helix structure. Another example, from the opposite spectrum would be the circulatory system. It was originally thought that blood left the heart and was 'used up', or disappeared, while new blood was quickly made and delivered to the heart to be pumped. We now know, after research, that blood is for hte most part consistent, and used over and over again until the red blood cells die. Two parts to this knowledge, 1) that the heart was a pump, which is still true, and known to be fact since the beginning, and 2) that blood was used up, which is not true, nad has since changed, but only once. It has not changed since, and is now fact. What's the difference between this and the evolutionary theories? They change over, and over, and over...so what is right, and what's still subject to change? Now let's look at the base knowledge about the theory of evolution...there isn't any. There are consistently new 'facts' that arise about evolution, and the theories continuously change. There isn't one 'fact' that remains the same. What does that say about the theory? It's porous...it's changing constantly, it's never right, and it's easily manipulated to fit the current thought trends. It's not a solid theory, and that's why it's under constant scrutiny and controversy. The same approach can be taken with global warming. So yes, new facts necessitate change, but you can't use that as a blanket excuse to constantly change an underlying theory taken as fact. | ||||
| |
|
04-04-2007, 04:15 PM
| #7 | ||||
| I wonder Independent San Antonio, Texas
| Originally Posted by ballz2wallz Your saying once something is a theory it cannot be proven wrong it only changes. We really know so little about the world to say something is absolute is folly.
| ||||
| |
|
04-04-2007, 04:19 PM
| #8 | ||||
| Banned Conservative Government is another way to say Better Than You
| Originally Posted by Rouger2 That's not what I'm saying at all. The second example I gave is a theory that changed as we learned more about it
 Read what I wrote again. | ||||
| |
|
04-05-2007, 11:44 AM
| #9 | ||||
| Deuteronomy 32:41 Paleolibertarian USA
| Bingo! The only "factual" statement that has remained the same has become the base definition of evolution. "Living things change over time". How they change, how much they can change, what precipitates these changes, how fast or slowly the change is capable of taking place... all those answers have changed drastically since the concept was introduced, and the change isn't slowing. We still have much to learn. Either side coming up with straw-man arguments and not understanding the position the other side takes or the evidence to suppor their claims does not help us learn more. I would one by one beat down each of those silly arguments, but it wouldn't make any difference.
Perhaps the most dangerous assertion lies in their closing statements
Originally Posted by ballz2wallz
Last edited by AVengeance; 04-05-2007 at 11:51 AM. | ||||
| |
|
04-06-2007, 05:51 AM
| #10 | ||||
| Member Green Party
| Originally Posted by AVengeance rather loose thinking to my mind...
what is your definition of new kind? is a goldfish the same kind as a shark? is a wolf a dog? is a polyploydal hybrid of grass wheat? is a "new kind" represented by a gross change in the amount of genetic information or just how the information expresses itself? Boris London | ||||
| |
|
04-06-2007, 08:24 AM
| #11 | ||||
| Banned Conservative Government is another way to say Better Than You
| Originally Posted by mididoctors A new species. Is a wolf and dog of the same species? I think so. What he's saying is the drastic changes it takes to change from a frog to an elephant. I'm sure there are plenty of examples you could use in between, but you get the idea.
| ||||
| |
|
04-06-2007, 09:16 AM
| #12 | ||||
| Deuteronomy 32:41 Paleolibertarian USA
| Originally Posted by ballz2wallz Species is a word that science developed in modern times for the purpose of classifying living things. The word "kind" is used in the Bible, and is more of a common-sense definition than a strict scientific one.
Kingom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species (and yes, I did that from memory). My wife Dawn wants to get a big cat. She wants a Savannah. This cats are much larger than a standard tabby, they love water, they're not aggresive, they're very clever, and can eat regular cat food. Pretty cool, huh? They're made by mating a domestic cat with a Serval (one of the smaller varieties of wild cats). You can even keep breeding them farther from their Serval DNA. They're called F1, F2, F3, and so-on. A standard house cat is Felis Domesticus. A Serval is Leptailurus serval. That's right, they can be bred, even though they're a different GENUS AND SPECIES. Because they can be bred, they're more commonly known now as Felis Serval. Science had to change it's definition. A Christian would still call them the same kind of animal. The cat kind. I think you can breed cats 'till the cows come home, and you'll breed nothing but cats. You'll never get a dog-kind or a horse-kind or a fish-kind (not even a catfish). I realize that "kind" doesn't have a scientific definition you can pin down like Species, but you need to realize that speciation is not macroevolution, either. You can play coy about what constitutes a different kind, but any first grader could answer the question. Put a picture of three different dogs and a horse on a piece of paper, and ask the kid to point out the one that's a different kind than the rest. Pretty simple. So do you know of something that has evolved into a different kind? A domestic dog is Canis familiaris (I think) and a wolf is Canis lupus (again, I could be misspelling it). Even though they are different species, they can breed (and have been known to do so). BUT I think you would see they are the same kind of animal, even without the help of a first grader. There are a number of definitions for Species. Do you know what a species is? How about this:
On the other hand, if you have two very different varieties of domestic dogs, they not only will not choose to breed, but sometimes simply cannot. Yet scientists refuse to give them different species names, calling them all the same species. Science isn't quite as "written in stone" as some people would like to think. EDIT: ballz, I was just clarifying what you said, not really disagreeing. Except the part about wolves and domestic dogs being the same species. Technically, they're not. Last edited by AVengeance; 04-06-2007 at 02:46 PM. | ||||
| |
|
04-06-2007, 01:54 PM
| #13 | ||||
| Member Green Party
| Originally Posted by AVengeance Sorry to push you on this matter but you did use the term as specific ccritisim of evolutionary theory so some specific definition should be forth coming.
What is a kind.. a new species? a fish kind does not equate to possible hybridisation... a goldfish can not breed with a shark? If your terms are too loose to have any meaning i contend you have little in the way of an argument
I world subscribe to the notion that one facet of scientific understanding is it is a understanding that is not an absolute fixed truth written in stone.. I think laying down some characterization of what is the perceived reality of science does little to help any discussion on creationism especially when the characterization is somewhat false or misleading in a sense this sets up an ability to attack science for a crime it does not commit Boris London | ||||
| |
|
04-06-2007, 03:04 PM
| #14 | ||||
| Deuteronomy 32:41 Paleolibertarian USA
| Originally Posted by mididoctors No, a kind is not a species. I've said this already, but both kind and species are open to interpretation.
The difference is that some scientists attempt to say that when there is speciation, that it somehow "proves" macroevolution. Species is really nothing more than a man-made word with whatever meaning you want it to have based on the results you're trying to achieve. Dispite this, I see often the argument where a population of something is split up. Then the two populations, with varying natural pressures, develop some different traits (like beak shape). You might point to that, and surmise that because they look a little different from each other, and each "group" generally looks the same, we'll call them by a different species name. THEN go on to say that if the beak shape changed, perhaps over miiiiiiilions of years, they could change into non-birds. That is a huge leap of faith, and there is no evidence to support it. I don't have an exact "definition" for Kind. I realize that the education system today is designed to produce drones rather than those that can think for themselves (these drones require uniform static definitions for everything or they can't "understand" it), but surely you can tell the difference between a black man, a white man, a chinese woman, and a parrot. Yes, the PARROT is a different kind of living thing. Man will never evolve into parrots, and parrots will never evolve into man. By the way, it might help you understand my position (or it could confuse you further, which would be more amusing anyway) for me to say that Darwins observations were, in some cases, correct. Evolution does happen. Change over time DOES HAPPEN. It has been observed. In that regard, it is as much a fact as it is a theory. Where we probably differ is how far evolution can go. I believe that DNA is a computer program. That computer program has various flexible design parameters in it, which allow living things to adapt to an environment that is in a state of constant change. Those adaptations can only go so far, however. There are also other forces that can act upon the computer program, causing errors. Those errors are almost exclusively negative, and almost exclusively not passed down genetically. Because of this, it is mathematically impossible for these errors in program code to bring about new kinds of life. All other forces of "evolution" are limited to existing information. Natural selection, for example, cannot make up new stuff- it requires existing traits to select from. That's all I feel like typing right now, gotta get back to work. | ||||
| |
|
04-06-2007, 03:30 PM
| #15 | ||||
| Member Green Party
| Originally Posted by AVengeance this is a poor answer... is something that looks human like a Neanderthal a human kind.. were they capable of cross breeding..
surely the ability to interbreed is a genetic issue in the main and as such this blurring is infact divergent evolution.. if i breed dogs until i get something that can not breed with other dogs is that a new kind?. how long do we go on like this? seagulls show divergent characteristics as you move around the world... seagulls from the west coast of the US are IIRC incapable of breeding with european seagulls
traits such as the nature of wheat heads to separate from the chaff via wind sorting is the opposite trait to the grasses it hybridized from.. not only that the hybridization doubled the number of chromosomes... this accident happen twice in a row to produce wheat it was also simulations with the neolithic explosion and the invention of agriculture the trait was always selected against as its existence results in a plant unable to spread because its seeds are too heavy to be spread by the wind effectively.. it was the intervention of man and a subsequent symbiotic relationship with man that has lead to wheats success as a organisim.. its traits did not exist previously.  what do you mean about traits? where is the line in the sand you allude to? is the ability of the bombardier beetle to fire boiling liquid a new trait..ie it must have been created separately from other beetles and not "micro-evolved" from a common beetle? other beetles do not have this ability? where is the origin of this trait?.. are bombardier beetles a totally independent kind? this limited "micro-evolution" idea is interesting but rather unclear... there must be some way to define what the limits are when it comes to traits? did all fish micro-evolve or did they come from different creations? ie there are several different "fish kinds" Boris London | ||||
