What are the 7 REDICULOUS claims of evolution

[Confused]

These come from the following website:
http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/what ... ution.html


A person I work with suggested I take a look at this site and see the truth of evolution. A brief synopsis of the 7 claims:
1) 1. Acquired characteristics can become inherited characteristics. This one basically says that if a species is surviving, there is no need for genetic change. The claim is that since evolution happens so slowly, any species surviving would not need to alter its genetics to continue to survive. My friend gave the example of the climate change. If evolution was so slow, then those species who were to die because of the new environment would die, those who lived would have no need change since they were already surviving. Any change through evolution would be so slow it couldn't assist the species before death so it would be pointless.

2) . Matter came into existence from nothing. This is an oldie, but still hot. If the BB theory is correct, then something existed prior to the BB so it didn't come from nothing. But the real oldie is what caused the BB? It requires a causation. Genesis provides a causation as well as an orderly result. The BB lacks a causation and results in random chance results. Which is more likely?

3) Evolution is statistically possible. The author quotes many noble prize winners as well as respectable scientists to essentially say that statistically, it is improbable. His two most noted:

"The occurrence of any event where the chances are beyond one in ten followed by 50 zeros is an event which we can state with certainty will never happen, no matter how much time is allotted and no matter how many conceivable opportunities could exist for the event to take place" (Dr. Emile Borel, who discovered the laws of probability).

"The probability for the chance of formation of the smallest, simplest form of living organism known is 1 in 10 340,000,000. This number is 10 to the 340 millionth power! The size of this figure is truly staggering since there is only supposed to be approximately 1080 (10 to the 80th power) electrons in the whole universe!" (Professor Harold Morowitz, Biophysicist of George Mason University)

4) Evolution produces improvements in species and a more highly organized universe. Here the author uses the infamous 2nd law of thermodynamics to show how with the tendency for entropy to increase:

This universally known and recognized law directly contradicts the brazen postulation of the theory of evolution that matter has become more organized over time and that the evolution of living organisms has somehow produced greater order and provided us with more usable energy.

5) The geological strata prove organic evolution. He quotes:

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. If the strata prove anything, it is that evolution has never taken place. What we observe in the strata are fully-formed animal and plant species. We do not see half-lizard-half-bird species, but we do see lizards and birds embedded in the rock layers as fully-formed lizards and birds.

6) We can date the age of fossils by looking at the surrounding strata: He states:

In actual fact, the strata are "dated" by the fossils contained in them. You read that correctly; the strata are dated by the fossils, and the fossils are dated by the strata. This kind of circular reasoning is very tricky, but biologists and geologists have been using it for years to "prove" their case for evolution

7) Evolution is "scientific." : This basically says it is untestable, hence, not scientific.


So open for debate: Has the author actually pointed to the flaws in evolution to disprove it? My main focus of interest:
1) If evolution occurs over such a long period of time, adaptation would take longer than would likely be beneficial to any species. Why would a species that was already surviving in the environment need to evolve? I understand climatic changes etc... But for those that had already survived the initial insult, why would they need to adapt? Wouldn't it take to long to benefit the species anyways?

3) Is evolution statistically improbable?

5) Is geological strata truly unreliable and does the strata indicate the lack of evolution as is charged?

Feel free to comment on the others, but I think most are redundant attacks that don't really merit dwelling much into. They have been taken out of context to show something not true such as with #7.

[Jose]

1) If evolution occurs over such a long period of time, adaptation would take longer than would likely be beneficial to any species. Why would a species that was already surviving in the environment need to evolve? I understand climatic changes etc... But for those that had already survived the initial insult, why would they need to adapt? Wouldn't it take to long to benefit the species anyways?

Two points are relevant here. The first is Luria and Delbruck's demonstration that the mutations are already in the population before the selection is applied. If bacteria are already resistant to kanamycin, then they'll survive kanamycin. If they aren't, they die.

The second point is that "needing to evolve" isn't part of it. Gee, y'know, I'd sure like to be taller so I could be a basketball superstar. I'd really like to evolve into a taller person to make this possible. *uuunh!* *grunt* *ooooooof* nnnnnnnrggggh!* Dang. I can't do it.

Evolution happens because it can, not because it needs to. Mutations happen. Chemicals like oxygen mutate DNA. Mutation is inescapable. If so, then genetic diversity must always exist in every population, and some genetic variants are simply going to be better at survival and reproduction than others. Their genes are the ones that get passed on.

Would evolution take too long? Apparently not.

3) Is evolution statistically improbable?

Yes. But then, so am I. The probability of my mom producing the particular allele combination of the egg that produced me would be...oh....1 out of 2 e30,000 (2 possible alleles of 30,000 genes). The probability of the particular sperm of my dad's was 1 out of 2 e30,000. The probability of those two happening to come together is the product of those two individual probabilities. I'm virtually impossible.

5) Is geological strata truly unreliable and does the strata indicate the lack of evolution as is charged?

People don't understand rocks. That's ironic, since we typically refer to dimbulbs as being "dumb as a rock." Imagine being unable to understand something that's the Gold Standard of dumbness!

If Chicago is east of St. Louis, which is east of Joplin, which is east of Okalahoma City, and OKC is east of Amarillo, which is east of Gallup, which is east of Flagstaff, east of Kingman, east of San Bernardino, relative to, say, Los Angeles....well, we have a relative positioning system. It's kinda like the relative positions of strata. Now, if we also measure the miles along Route 66, and figure out where each of these cities is, is it really so stupid to say that Holbrook's Bucket of Blood Street is about X hundred miles from Chicago because it's about 3/5 of the way from Gallup to Flagstaff?

Once you've marked a string with knots every 3 feet, it seems fair to use it to measure things even though you're not using a yardstick. The strata and the fossils they contain are markers along the yardstick, the tickmarks of which are calculated ages. What's the big deal? [Oh yeah...I remember now. We're dealing with math here. There's a strange correlation between people who understand evolution and people whose eyes don't glaze over when we talk math.]

Thank you, Confused. This has been fun. I liked the part about acquired characteristics becoming inherited characteristics. When is my son going to be able to predict the weather the way I can by feeling it in his torn plantaris muscle? It hasn't happened yet...it seems more likely to be that he'll have to rely on his ankle that he sprained many times in soccer. Hmmmmm...do they tell us precisely how acquired characteristics become heritable? Imagine--I accidentally grind off part of my nose sharpening my shovel on a grinding wheel [what? of course you have to keep your shovels sharp! That's one of the first lessons in forest service firefighting], just how does this nose amendment find its way to the DNA of my testes? How does it find the right genes to modify? Wow. Pretty clever lack-of-nose to be able to figure that out!

I'm also impressed to discover that I don't exist. I'd never done the calculations before, but it's clear that they prove I'm so improbable as to be a figment of my imagination. Tell me, does my imagined self also imagine a self, which imagines a self, on and on and on into infinity? Do all of these selves have souls, or must we share one amongst us? Or is the soul also imagined?

What's more ridiculous, evolution, or the attempts to make it seem ridiculous?

[Confused]

My pleasure Jose. I have a few things to add you your post but lack time right now. I think on the basis of probability, while the odds were stacked against your presence, perhaps the survival of the fittest applies as early as conception. The sperm that makes up your genetic profile happen to have been the strongest of all released. Or perhaps you were smart enough to buy a road map before you were released (LOL)

[QED]

Two points are relevant here. The first is Luria and Delbruck's demonstration that the mutations are already in the population before the selection is applied. If bacteria are already resistant to kanamycin, then they'll survive kanamycin. If they aren't, they die.

How about a more familiar example? A relative of mine has very pronounced "webbed fingers" - something that has a fancy name:

Syndactyly occurs in the womb as a detour on the road to developing one thumb and four separate fingers on the hand. In the womb, the new hand starts out in the shape of a paddle, then splits into separate fingers. Sometimes the fingers don't split apart enough, and webbed fingers result: syndactyly. Sometimes a extra split forms and extra fingers result: polydactyly. Syndactyly and polydactyly are about equally common disorders. Combinations of both can occur as well - webbed extra fingers. Why does a child have this? It is not due to anything the mother did during pregnancy - it just happens. Sometimes these problems are in the genes and can be passed down generation to generation, but many times there is simply no known explanation.

If all the Ice melted in the Antarctic, only a few things would stop people like him becoming the norm in the human population. First the sea level will only rise 60m or so, so there will still be plenty of dry places to walk about on and our ingenuity would let us devise boats, flippers or whatever else we needed to survive in Water World.

But that's a rather "in your face" global environmental catastrophe. Evolution can help you through such things if you are sufficiently pre-adapted -- as mammals found and dino's didn't at the KT-Boundary. More typically the environment changes slowly so the pre-adaptions need not be so radical. Why are pre-adaptions already present in populations? Because that's just looking at things with hindsight. To my relative, his hands are just a random mutation that got him labelled as a freak at school.

-----------

Sigh. I've just finished re-reading George Smoot's book called "Wrinkles in Time". George was the head of the COBE team - which back in the early 90's mapped the Cosmic Microwave background radiation. I picked up his book again after recently finding out that he had been awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics for this landmark piece of cosmology. I mention this because his story is typical of the many scientific endeavours that have delivered our current scientific world-view and is a truly heroic story of determination to present an accurate interpretation of the subtle inferences of his microwave data.

I really don't think the general public (and these are the almost exclusively the people behind these creationist websites) have the faintest appreciation of the sheer amount of effort that goes into the exhaustive verification of material for publication. As if the 2nd law of thermodynamics would be overlooked in evolutionary theory .

The only reason these weak arguments persist is because they are part of a campaign to "teach the controversy". For this objective it does not seem to matter how often these arguments are shown to be wrong. The power of electronic media ensures that the penetration of this false idea is accomplished all the same.

[QED]

advertisement Colonel Kane: You're convinced that God is dead because there's evil in the world.
Captain Cutshaw: Correct.
Colonel Kane: Then why don't you think He's alive because of the goodness in the world?

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The Inmates: Hail, Caesar!

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[Captain Cutshaw stomps in wearing scuba flippers]
Captain Cutshaw: Take me to the beach.
Colonel Kane: It's night, and it's raining.
Captain Cutshaw: I see you're determined to start an argument.

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Colonel Kane: [Reading the back of a St. Christopher medal aloud] "I'm a Buddhist. In case of an emergency call a Lama.

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Col. Vincent Kane: In order for life to have appeared spontaneously on earth, there first had to be hundreds of millions of protein molecules of the ninth configuration. But given the size of the planet Earth, do you know how long it would have taken for just one of these protein molecules to appear entirely by chance? Roughly ten to the two hundred and forty-third power billions of years. And I find that far, far more fantastic than simply believing in God.

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Colonel Kane: Maybe we're just fish out of water.
Col. Richard Fell: What was that?
Colonel Kane: I just think about sickness, cancer in children, earthquakes, war, painful death. Death, just death. If these things are just part of our natural environment why do we think of them as evil? Why do they horrify us so?... unless we were meant for someplace else.

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[Captain Cutshaw stands up, interrupting church services]
Captain Cutshaw: Infinite goodness is creating a being you know, in advance, is going to complain.

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Captain Cutshaw: I think the end of the world just came for that bag of Fritos I had in my pants pocket.

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Captain Cutshaw: The man in the moon tried to **** my sister!

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Captain Cutshaw: I know my rights, I demand to see my urologist.

Was this the product of some serious research or did it originate in this movie script do we know?

[seventil]

I agree with your statement, but TOE at least tackles Cosmology, does it not?

However, I've always found when a un-evolutionist says "SOMETHING FROM NOTHING!" they've not really understood that the TOE is just a "best guess" in what happened at the creation of the universe. While we can play the God card and say "AHAH!" easily, it doesn't mean science should stop and not try and figure out exactly how that happened.

TOE, as in the Theory of Evolution does not.

The 'Theory of Everything' does not deal with evolution, but is trying to combine the theories on how the 4 known 'forces' of the universe combine into one basic force. That is a far off dream at the current time.

Sorry for the late reply on this.

Just a quick clarification: what is the official standpoint on where the Big Bang Theory and Cosmological Evolution fit in?

Basically, when a scientist/atheist/person thinks of the universe, from beginning to present, can they subscribe to just one theory/idea or do they have to combine BBT, TOE and Origin of Life and everything to reach our current point?

I was under the impression that these were separate theories, so to speak, but it was all of these combined that gave us the picture on where we stand, scientifically, on the origin and evolution of our universe.

[MikeH]

It only takes one time to start and get the ball rolling

Just to play devil's advocate, I think it would have to happen much more than one time, unless it immediately started replicating like crazy. Does anybody on here know the life cycle of this original living organism, or it's reproductive qualities?

[Cathar1950]

It only takes one time to start and get the ball rolling

Just to play devil's advocate, I think it would have to happen much more than one time, unless it immediately started replicating like crazy. Does anybody on here know the life cycle of this original living organism, or it's reproductive qualities?

Well quit playing.
Maybe it did for all we know. It is hard to trace an oranism that might be billions of years old. I can imagine once it happens anything after that would have changed.
I don't remember how long it took to have enough O2 that oranisms could have developed to use it. First it had to get rid of enough iron.
There may have been reproduction before it was anything like what we think of as a living oranism.

[Jose]

Just to play devil's advocate, I think it would have to happen much more than one time, unless it immediately started replicating like crazy. Does anybody on here know the life cycle of this original living organism, or it's reproductive qualities?

As I understand the geologists who work on this stuff, there are a number of places in old rock where Strange Things have been found. By Strange Things, I mean chemical compositions that are not produced by "normal" geological processes. They are also not produced by "normal" living things as we currently recognize them. The implication is that early life, or early "organized chemical reactions that are somehow self-perpetuating," was very diverse.

Think of dozens, or maybe hundreds of odd chemical reaction systems working with those bizarre chemicals that got produced in that weird atmosphere. Think of lots and lots of pools, rock fissures, and the like, with these chemicals getting into them and then getting concentrated as they stick to the clay particles. There could have been hundreds of semi-alive things going on in these kinds of fissures--and all of them different, leaving different chemical signatures in the sediments.

How long did this go on? A billion years? Could be.

That's time for bazillions of different kinds of chemical interactions. None of 'em would leave a trace of visible "life shapes." They'd just leave odd chemical mixtures in the sediments. Even the creation of an actual cell would leave nothing more, because mere cells are just globs of chemicals. The membrane surrounding 'em is pretty much equivalent to an oil film on top of water. These wouldn't leave fossils. We'd have to get pretty far along, and have cells develop cell walls and be able to survive after they are washed out of their special crevices, before there'd be anything we could recognize. We can find fossilized bacteria (or things that look like fossilized bacteria), but this is hundreds of millions of years after the weird chemical signatures show up.

So, we can answer the question:

We don't know what it was like. We're pretty sure it was in a protected place where things would be concentrated, and proto-life thingies wouldn't wash away from each other. We're pretty sure there were lots of proto-life thingies, but that the one that happened to develop the use of nucleic acids worked the best and eventually took over. We're also pretty sure that the first living things were weird, compared to what we usually see now--using sulfur, or hydrogen as a source of energy, rather than light. Think of the bacteria that live in the ocean vents as an example. Perhaps the ocean vents are the location where all of this took place, and they lived there for millions of years spilling out cells into the ocean. Most of 'em died, out there in the cold water, but it would only take a few survivors to colonize other places and start life as we know it.

[QED]

Talking of playing the Devil's Advocate, I once asked why life today was exclusively based on DNA -- as it ocurred to me that we might expect at least more than one "prototype" system to get off the ground. I don't recall the exact answer, but the voracious appetite that DNA based organisms have for each other was I think, the key to the answer. Looking at the world of commerce it's easy to spot the same kind of trends.