Well, technically she calls herself an "intelligent designist". Ah, but "to-mah-to"/"to-mae-to", what's the difference?
I don't really have to go through what's wrong with the creationist's picture even if they don't leave out god(s), do I? Oh come on, surely you have heard of the arguments? What you haven't? Which year have you been living in, don't you know the evidence that you came from a monkey? Oh, all right already, let me spell out what's wrong with creationism.
1. Evolution is the process of genetic mutation producing difference between species, and natural selection action as the judge to see who survives, those with good mutations have a higher tendency to survive, while the others die (duh!). So what happens is that populations pretty soon get filled up with the animals better adapted to survive in the environment.
- (Here comes the creationist big mouth) Creationism argues that random mutations can't give rise to new species just like that, some supernatural entity must help do so.
Answer: Wrong! Didn't you read what I wrote? I said natural selection chooses who live and who doesn't, of course mutations at random can't produce anything, but with selection, the better mutations become cumulative, and adds to the progress of the organism.
- Creationism argues that there is not enough time for living things to evolve.
Answer: Wrong again! Of course if those idiots think that the Earth was only 6000 years old, living things can't evolve, the point is that it isn't (geology points the other way with radioactive dating, and no radioactive decay doesn't change speed), the Earth is 4.6 billion years old. It took only about 50,000 years for Homo sapient (us) to evolve. And after you finished counting in thousands, don't forget you still have to deal with millions.
- Creationism argues that evolution can't be right because at some point, life will have to be created.
Answer: Evolution doesn't tell us anything about life being created, its just explains how humans and other complex living things can be formed from simpler things like bacteria (technically, we're still clumps of bacteria, but you do see the difference between us and them, right?) For a description of how life started, look up for abiogenesis, and don't disturb evolution.
- Creationism argues that there is no evidence of evolution in action
Answer: Well just because you didn't see them doesn't mean that those events didn't occur. Usually they require much patience to be observe, and a little luck. The most famous example is the butterflies during the industrial revolution turned black in colour due to the sootier environment (no, no one painted them, neither did the soot made them black), but after some environmental efforts, the air was cleared and they became mostly white again. However a more recent example is that of a butterfly being parasited by a bacteria, killing most of its male population, leaving the sex ratio 99 female: 1 male (lucky guys!), but suddenly a mutation occur, and the butterfly became immune to it. In just one year, the sex ratio returned to 50-50.
2. A conclusion of evolution is that we evolved from apes, that evolved from monkeys
- Creationism argues that if we evolve from them, why are they still there?
Answer: Wow, this is a no-brainer question. Simple, because we did not compete with the apes and monkey for survival, for example a group of monkeys might be isolated from one another, one group then evolving into apes.
3. Evolution is based on fossils dug up from up till 500 million years ago, dated by radioactive dating of many different radioactive isotopes, confirmed by plate tectonics, embryonic development (babies in mother's stomach start of just like fish with gills in first few weeks after fertilisation), DNA mapping, and possibly common sense.
- Creationism argues that it is more true as it has evidence from a book written about 2000 years ago
Answer: I don't think I need to say anything.
So what did I do? I asked the teacher to stop saying the word 'assume' when talking about the proofs of evolution, after all she doesn't give a better suggestion of a proof (scientists can all agree on what will it take to change their minds, and nothing tested so far have done so), surprisingly she agreed. Although she still doesn't think that humans came from monkeys.
However, what she doesn't realise is that evolution, though having gaps here and there in fossils (you can't really expect every animal to fossilise right? If just ever single person ever lived was fossilised, we would need a space larger than the thickness of the Earth's crust), gives the only workable solution for life, all other explanations have so far been empty of evidence and hence are not Science.
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Just a thought, friend.. One wonders what is the percentage chance say, just the solar system organizing itself into a manner which would give rise to living organisms such as those which exist in reality, within the time frame proposed by anti-Creationist scientists.
I'd venture a guess and say that it'd be disproportionately small..
Also, it's disconcerting to know that you've associated so many different fields together and proclaimed yourself anti all of them.. Proponents of your various anti-fields have disagreements amongst themselves, and to associate them might be misleading..
Well, I don't have the exact statistics, and I don't know the different factors involving all of them. However, if I would make guess, it is quite likely than more than ten planetary system in just our Milky Way galaxy can give rise to life, why shouldn't Earth be one of them?
What you're suggesting is like winning a lottery in 1 out of a million numbers, and saying that it's a miracle that any number will win, surely it's the work of a supernatural agent. Well, obviously it's not, someone has to win the winning ticket, no matter what you do.
And I don't get your last paragraph, can you give some examples?
It's true that in such an immense set of planetary systems, surely one of them has to give rise to life, even though your claim that more than ten planetary systems in the Milky Way could potentially give rise to life is spurious. However, my issue was that even in the time frame proposed by Big-Bang theorists, it seems intuitively unlikely, to me anyway, that the solar system could have formed in such a short span of time.. Basically, even an infinite number of monkeys in a room would require a finite amount of time to type out Shakespeare's Hamlet, and i dare say no scientist would postulate an infinite number of galaxies and planetary systems out there.. It just goes against my intuition that such a short span of time is enough, that's all, really. It's pretty hard to talk about it unless you have numbers to back it up, i guess.
Hmm.. Interesting. While it's true that there seem to be a number of holes in the Creationist's argument, there are as many questionable portions of the anti-Creationist's scientific argument.. The claim that early-stage embryos appear similiar, with gill-like structure and the like in organisms ranging from mammalian to reptilian to birds has been disproven a number of years back, i believe, as a result of the uncovering of the doctoring of photographs by the person who proposed it..
fossil records seem to disagree with evolution in a number of accounts, for example the charts of horses and the species' supposed ancestors have had fluctuating number of backbone segments and sizes through the layers of strata with no apparent order of growth. They seem to just poof large and smaller and more or less developed..
Another common grouse against the evolutionist theory is the idea that inter-class evolution.. For example, evolutionists hold that reptiles evolved from amphibians, which evolved from aquatic creatures, which breath using gills. The question is, how did lungs evolve? Given, there could have been environmental stimulation, such as a place with water with horribly little oxygen in the water, but as the lungs begin to evolve, the little stubs of pre-lung that are as yet useless are a detriment to the organism, being useless and taking up resources, and thus according to evolutions own laws, creatures with such growths would be eliminated, and lungs would never evolve.
There are a number of other unanswered questions within science itself, even if you ignore the presence of an alternative theory like creationism.. For example, the question of original causation.. Every effect has a cause..? So if you make the claim that the universe has been expanding and collapsing since forever, still something had to put it there, and in effect break certain apparent laws of physics..? Not too sure about that.. Sort of confusing myself a little there.
Yeah, anyway. Food for thought.
Rictor, I wouldn't call 15 billion years a short span of time. I'm quite sure that a whole lot of interesting things can happen within that time, including the development of life. After all, our Science is only about 3 centuries old and we are already able to literally move the world.
Friedemann, let me proceed to dismantle your claims one by one.
First of all, there's absolutely no need to doctor photographs. Have you been to a hospital before? They have this machine called an ultrasound scanner, you can see the gills of any human embryo from there. And up till 8 months from time of conception, no one can distinguish just by looking at the foetuses, the difference between a chimpanzee and a human.
As for horses, I know that there's already like a few dozen species of horse, from zebras to donkeys, I'm not sure if anyone who isn't an expert is able to differentiate them, but I the bones can be easily mistaken. Anyway, natural selection still acts on the species level, what's wrong with different conditions leading to different adaptations in horses?
For an example of only a half-lungs that works, please look at a mud skipper fish. And anyway, if you can't think of a way of a working intermediate doesn't mean nature can't too. Nature is not limited by petty human imagination.
Finally I don't see what's wrong with an expanding and contracting universe existing forever. The problem with you is that you try to think of nature as an invention, well it isn't, it's the inventor that invented us.
You do know that the guy who published the sketches of the similarities between mammalian/reptilian embryos falsified them, don't you?
Au contraire, friend.. Subsequent to the uncovering of the scam of the comparison of the embryos of various species of animals, including reptiles, birds, smaller mammals and of course the one that would spark the most interest, the ape, the ACTUAL photographs were examined and it was made most clear that the embryos of ALL the animals, including that of the ape, were quite distinct. Even one without the education of a biologist could tell that the embryos were of different species.. Furthermore, so what if humans have gills in the embryonic stage? It seems to simply be the basic necessity of an organism under embryonic conditions, and the presence of gills in embryos gives support to neither the creationist not the evolutionist's stand., taken at face value.
About the horses, also.. Please don't be mistaken that i'm so imperious as to make judgement myself, but frankly information such as i have read and as i can only report are by peoples of certain qualifications and expertise in their fields, at least.. variations and inconsistencies with evolutionary theory in the fossil record of horses in a single general location are noted without further comment by a one who was, interestingly enough, neither a creationist nor an evolutionist, if i'm not mistake. so what's wrong with having such a fossil record..? you tell me, i guess..
the quotation of the mud skipper as an example of creatures with both working lungs and gills is flawed in a number of ways. it's convoluted, so let me attempt to organist points.
Firstly, the development of lungs must have had some motivation. Let's take for example, perhaps, low oxygen content in the water. ok, so that mud skipper's half lungs begin to evolve, which would, in the final stage, allow it to breath out of water for a short period of time. but what then? there still have to be intermediates, intermediates would have useless half-lungs and thus would be eliminated from the system. you don't have regular fish in one generation the mudskippers with working half-lungs in the next, no matter how outrageous the mutation.
Secondly, and on an issue more widely debated on this topic, this argument works for the claim that reptiles evolved into birds too. feathers would just slow them down or something and generally be a waste of resources. and there would have to be intermediates between the feathers and scales, which even at a microscopic level are VASTLY different structures.
I don't memorize names of funky supposed fallacies to attempt to intimidate folks, but it seems that to some extent at least your implication that just because we can't think of a way that stuff could evolve doesn't mean that nature couldn't is just avoiding the question. It just means that evolution, period. no need to even bring creationism into the picture.
and ok, i'm willing to concede the possibility of a universe that had no origin. it's a theoretical possibility though, and such a theoretical possibility exists also for the flying spaghetti monster, and where does that leave us.. basically, no proof, it's just an empty theory. heck, without proof is it even a theory? i don't know, i'm not a nuclear physicist.
No doubt like many evolutionists you'd invoke the argument that the fossil record is imperfect. However evolution takes a LOOONG time, as we have noted... Does it really seem plausible that in such an extended period of gradual change would COMPLETELY escape any form of record at all.. however many billion years you're talking about.. it IS sort of a lot of time, wouldn't you say..and it's not little insignificant gaps we're talking here, these are monumental holes in the supposed web of evolution. we're missing loads and loads of intermediate lifeforms in the fossil record.. there's simply no evidence of gradual change over time that amounted to significant mutation that could be described as the meaningful transformation of one species into another..
As far as I know all that guy did in the diagrams were to remove the arms and legs in the fetus, not really such a big deal since with arms and legs, all mammals still look alike during the first few weeks. In fact, the only difference between chimpanzees and us remains to be the size of the brain. And that start developing in humans only on the 7th month, and only near the end of the 8th does it become prominent. Information is obtained from Carl Sagan's book Dragons of Eden, Sagan being one of the most prolific writers of Science.
And I still don't get what's wrong with the horses, unless you're telling me those horses appeared with the dinosaur. There are so many species of horses present, why can't they move around? After all they are indeed one of the most mobile animals.
Mutations are gradual and cumulative, nobody ever says that one single mutation made the mudskipper's lungs. Indeed you're forgetting that when the first mudskipper just develop the smallest sign of the lungs, there were no other mudskipper there to compete with it for food on land (even if it was only for a short period, to raise its head to get food), making it king of the system, why would it be eliminated from the system???
There are fossils of feathered dinosaurs and they showed that the dinosaurs used them for cooling purposes. Archaeopteryx was the first one to develop these feathers for flight. How did it do it, for one it was small and the feathers was of more use to it. As I said, stop finding faults with evolution when your own imagination is the real problem.
As for fossils, you're lucky to have any fossils at all. Most bones get decayed and turn to dust, to get fossils, the animal has to die in a certain specific way. As a results the fossils we can get are of those species that exist for a significant time to be preserved. Intermediates are seldom found, and considering the amount of intermediates, we're already even luckier. (We've got the bird-dinosaur, the fish legs, the herbivore-dolphin, a full set of chimpanzee-human, reptile-mammal, and perhaps many others I'm not aware of)
P.S. Intermediates usually last for a few thousand years, while well adapted species can last for millions.
Sigh.. i grow weary of this.. you're mistake about the diagrams, i'm afraid, unfortunately the issue with the photographs was far more than just that and well then, if you really feel that the only difference between the chimp and you is your brain sizes, fair enough then.. furthermore i've never head of carl sagan, but i'm not very well informed in that area cause i haven't been keeping up with detail scientific material in the past couple years, but a quick check on wikipedia says that he's known for his work in astrophysics and advocates aliens. so what makes him an authority in this field above people who actually specialize in biology..
and the horse thing is getting tiring too. tell me, since all the horses are mobile, how did they evolve into separate species? if they became mobile at separate times, doesn't that still indicate that there must have been some basic ancestor whom they evolved from..? nonexistant..
and the mudskipper. friend, a single mudskipper cannot breed, and the most we can allow within reason is a single mudskipper having such a mutation. who would compete? other mudskippers in the system who didn't mutate that way..? and furthermore we haven't even mentioned how it's been observed that such mutations aren't inheritable.
so they're for cooling purposes, fair enough. but why feathers? skin and fans with blood vessels actually passing through them are far more efficient.. and then explain why feathers are so aerodynamically shaped for flight. and i noticed you skimmed over the evolution process of feathers from scales.. the archaeopteryx was an isolated, single fossil ever recovered, didn't small dinosaurs as such normally dwell in packs..?
i'm just skimming through points, there's really no need to elaborate once you see the facts; try to keep up. the bird-dinosaur deals with incredible improbability and guesswork and speculation, and with all the scams uncovered with regard to inter-phylum evolution there's just more scepticism. fine, so there's no proof that it is a scam, or that it couldn't fly, so you can believe whatever you like, really.
personally never heard of the reptile-mammal thingy, and any proof of inter-phylum evolution is usually quite a big deal. i don't see where herbivore-dolphin brings you, it's like saying i've discovered a carnivorus horse. so what? and the chart of human evolution from ape's supposed ancestor to modern man that was popular in the twentieth century has been so dismantled by scientific proof that no self-respecting well-informed evolutionist would even mention such an unforgivable jumping to conclusions, one such as which you often accuse people of committing, i notice.
perhaps it's time to combine the scientific method with the method that predates it, as a double check.. you really have to look at the ground evidence and then compare it to hypotheses formed and theories concocted to see if they really hold any water..
Hey, wasn't that what I said? I said the sketches of the similarities were falsified.
That's the funniest/weirdest thing I've heard for a long time. Carl Sagan advocates aliens? One of his most famous quote was when a reporter asked him what his gut feelings were about the existence of aliens after he told the reported science stands inconclusive about it and he said "But I don't usually think with my gut." I'm not sure how you ever came across the alien avocation thing. Besides, Sagan is one of the most well-versed scientist among all fields of Science ranging from astronomy to DNA, he stands among some of the best Science writers such as Issac Asimov.
Horse ancestors are existent, if you haven't read, the first five toe horse evolved in Asia in the eocene about 50 million years ago(mya), then they migrated to America after becoming four-toed (via Siberia). Five toes died off in Asia, while four toes kept evolving in America, sometime later, they went back to Asia (20 mya) but again dies off in Asia. Finally 2 mya, your modern one toe horse arrived in Asia from America. All fossils have been found, and one article that talks about it is: http://laelaps.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/the-branching-bush-of-horse-evolution/ It's quite a long article but if you have the time... just go ahead.
Regarding mudskippers, you're idea of a gene is sketchy at best, non-existent at worse. Genes are passed on through generations, all it takes is just one mutation to bring about it. Once that happens, it enters into the gene pool and circulate and spreads like mad if that gene brings advantages to the organism. One example is the butterfly bacteria resistance gene, which spread so fast, it just took one single year! http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070712143300.htm
And if you used wikipedia to check on Sagan, couldn't you have done the same to the reptile-mammal? Anyway, reptiles are cold blooded, they don't use blood the same way we use it, so they don't perspire. Feathers have large surface areas and that's all that matters. Like I said, one mutation is all it takes.
And one more thing all these arguments have been dubbed the argument from personal incredulity. Before you try to make an argument go an read the current research status on it, it doesn't mean that just because you can't imagine something happening, therefore it couldn't have happened. It is really damned frustrating trying to spoon-feed you with every single example/explanation, that is supposed to be your job before making any arguments.
Ok, due to comments not able to have large width, the horse link is here
The butterfly one is here
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