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The Talk.Origins Archive: Exploring the Creation/Evolution Controversy

Feedback for August 2006

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Author of: Dino Blood Redux
Response: This covered a lot of topics.

This covered so many topics that I have resorted to quoting sections and then responding. This is known as "fisking."

The very fact that the purpose of your site is to discredit "anti-evolutionists" makes me suspect that you're unreasonably biased against Christians who believe that the origin of life is God.

The TalkOrigins site is the product of many people, with many motivations. Our purpose is stated in the TalkOrigins Home Page This is not a bias against Christians. Sadly, there are Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, and even "New Age" Pagan creationists. They are all equally opposed to rational evaluation of scientific evidence.

Your calling creationists "anti-evolutionists" says that you are seeking to bring about a desired mindset, which is akin to the pro-abortionists calling the pro-lifers "anti-choice." Creationists, as far as I can tell, are pro-God and are anti-evolution as a matter of course just as pro-lifers (those who believe human life begins at conception and, as such, should not be destroyed) are anti-abortion as a matter of course.

"Anti-evolutionists" are self selected by a political choice- not scriptural, just as are "anti-choicists." The opponents of stem cell research contribute to the deaths of thousands daily because they subscribe to a doctrine not supported biblically or scientifically. This is not "pro-life."

In short, your zeal for evolution and demeaning of creationists give me the impression that you are in a panic to make sure people believe what you want them to believe. I find that both creationists and evolutionists blur, bend, and distort facts to suit their own purposes.

I feel actually quite calm. Maybe it is late in the day? The destortion of facts by creationists is well documented. For example, there is the well documented phoney degrees they award themselves. Then there are their phoney claims about science; Dr. Dino comes to mind. The late Ron Wyatt found enough "Noah's Arks" to build two or three. More have been reported since then. I can't begain to list the creationist frauds. The Pardoner's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer was a 14th century satire on pious frauds. We at TalkOrigins are in good company, exposing over seven centuries of known religious frauds.

Why should you care what people believe about the origin of life? I hear over and over that it is because the U.S. is behind other countries in science education. Is that deficit because of a lack of belief in evolution concerning origins? I think not.

I'm a teacher in the public school system, and I can assure you the problem is not that kids don't believe evolution. The problem is that public school is just another entitlement in our country -- parents see it as free daycare.

Obviously you do not teach science. In fact, if you can't teach- quit. It will help other teachers when the public knows that it is not "daycare," and they don't have to carry your slack. If you only fill space and draw pay, you have no justification to continue driving to your school.

Excellence in education isn't the reason for your zeal -- I know of no teacher or education professional who thinks excellence in education is in any way linked to belief in evolution.

I first taught science at an "inner city" ie. not all white/anglo, 7-8th grade school in 1972. I have since taught at primary, high school, college, graduate, and post-graduate institutions, public and private. I can definitely assert that religious fundamentalism/creationionism is an impediment to education, and a threat to our (USA) national security. When I was Director of Education for a natural history museum, I encountered problems with religious fanatics nearly daily (that was some years ago and it has only gotten worse).
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Response: There are two ways. The first requires that you have an Internet Service Provider (ISP) which supports newsgroups. If you do not, go to option two. If you do, you will then need a news reader, such as Agent, FreeAgent, or Thunderbird (you can download some of these for free). The news reader will need some configuration information, the most crucial of which is the name of your ISP's news server, which typically looks something like "news.isp-name.com", and identification and password information such as you use to set up email. The first time you connect to the news server, the news reader will download the names of thousands and thousands of newsgroups. Select talk.origins and perhaps a few others. Then download the messages.

The second option is to go to http://groups.google.com and enter talk.origins (which takes you here) and start reading.

Note that talk.origins gets hundreds of messages per day. It words best to look for individual threads that interest you and ignore the rest. The first option above may sound like more of a hassle, but it allows one to better manage which threads (and authors) to read and which to ignore, which makes reading easier.

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Response: Luskin tries to rebut CI001.4, but the weakness of his response only reinforces it. A rebuttal would consist of citations of several papers published in quality peer-reviewed journals which describe research which collects and analyzes data in the investigation of specific hypotheses concerning intelligent design. Plainly, there are none.

The quote about Meyer's paper and the peer-review process loses credibility when one realizes that the quote comes from the person who subverted the peer-review process, according to the Statement from the Council of the Biological Society of Washington. I have no doubt that Sternberg, who served on the editorial board of a creationist study group, could find other creationists to submit Meyer's paper to, and that he might even consider those creationists "qualified." However, the quality of the paper, or lack of it, speaks for itself. See here and here for just some of the problems with it.

Dembski, in his works, specifically rules out the effects of natural law from being evidence for intelligent design. So yes, Denton referring to natural law does exclude his work from being support for ID.

Furthermore, Luskin misses two more important points. First, the point was not merely about peer-reviewed articles, but about peer-reviewed articles supporting ID. The best he can claim is articles arguing against evolution; there is nothing supporting ID. Second, this lack of evidence for ID was brought up in the context of a legal trial. The ID supporters had every opportunity to enter evidence for ID into evidence in the trial, and they did not. The only reason that makes sense why they did not enter evidence for ID is that they have no evidence for ID.

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Author of: Dino Blood Redux
Response: When I first read this my immediate thought was that this had been written by someone who pretended to be a creationist just to make them seem illiterate.

Naw, its a creationist.

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Response: Try the "building without a builder" argument with some other words. Can you have a river without a riverer, or lightning without a lightninger? Perhaps one may anthropomorphize the forces that cause rivers and lightning enough to give meaning to those labels, but clearly it is anthropomorphization. Putting the label "creator" on the forces which cause rivers, lightning, life, and so on does not magically turn those forces into an intelligent supernatural being.
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Response: Heheh,

Thanks BOB! It has been a long day.

Gary

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Response: No, we don't think humans evolved from chimpanzees. Humans and chimps split off from each other before either lineage evolved their present forms.

Humans evolved from a group of apes, yes, and we are still apes, taxonomically speaking (Linnaeus, a creationist as everyone was in the 18th century, classified humans and apes together even then). The apes we evolved from, though, had evolved bipedal walking long before they were recognisably human.

Finally, we don't "believe in" evolution theory. We accept that it is the best theory that science has offered to explain biological diversity, and this is because it is both based on evidence and and makes the best predictions about what we will find. Evolution is not a belief system, any more than the principles of hydrodynamics or gravity are.

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Response: You can find a list of examples, documented and explained, in the 29+Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ.

What Kitts was referring to is the process of changing from one species to another, not from one large class of organisms to another - there's plenty of examples of that provided by paleontology. But since speciation typically happens relatively rapidly in small populations and mostly in conditions that do not fossilise well, the likelihood of capturing that event in the fossil record is pretty slim. We have some examples, though.

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Response: The Quote Mine Project will offer you many examples of this. However, we don't have a school book directed article as such, largely because (as you said) that isn't where the science is actually published.
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Response: You are right that this is no substitute for a biological education. But it is better than allowing the lies and misrepresentations of antievolutionists. Not everybody has the time or opportunity to get a biological education.

This site was set up to deal with creationism. There are numerous evolution sites, listed in the links page.

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Response: Science does make a distinction between microevolution, which occurs at the level of populations, and macroevolution, which occurs at and above the level of species. But you are right that creationists have changed over the years from denying that species can evolve at all to saying that arbitrarily large groups can evolve but no further. However, I doubt this is ever going to lead them to accepting common descent, as they are unlikely to ever accept evidence for its own sake. Their motivation is based on doctrinal solidarity, and so until they cease to be creationists, they have to assert that kinds, whatever they might be, cannot change.
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Response: We know, but the author of that FAQ, Chris Colby, has gone AWOL. We believe he has been spirited off by the black helicopters for a Special Assignment, but we aren't cleared for that, and so we can't modify the FAQ until someone who Really Knows Their Stuff decides to revise it. But technical papers do often use N as the symbol for effective population.
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Response: Evolution does not require that the same mutation happen twice because speciation need not happen all in one step. If two populations of the same species for some reason rarely breed with each other for whatever reason (geographic isolation, having different ecological niches, differences in mating behavior, etc.) then over time differences can eventually add up so that cross-mating will not happen at all. (Some taxa can very quickly form new species by an observed mechanism called polyploidy that is fairly common in plants.)
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Response: The discussion was during his "exile" in Egypt. Geoffroy tried very hard to maintain his standing in French science while he was there, for 9 years, but when he returned he found that Cuvier had basically sidelined him, and he never regained the standing he had beforehand.

Geoffroy paid particular attention to what came to be known as homologies, and tried to draw relationships between different organisms' organs and traits because he believed that form was what gave organisms their abilities.

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Author of: Dino Blood Redux
Response: 1) Nothing made it stop anymore than airplanes made gravity stop. 2) We are running around, at least for the moment. 3) Smart is not good, smart is bad; consider the Bush family. 4) No, the global flood myth would not make the Earth appear older, unless there were lots more added to the story. The mere billions of tons of appearing and disappearing water would not make the Earth appear "older" It would have cooked everything living, and caused geological features that do not exist, but it could not have altered the basic geophysics we use to determine the age of the Earth. For a number of well researched articles on the imposibility of a global flood as insisted on by some biblical lieralists, I recommend the TalkOrigins.org Search Function, and Glenn Morton's "Noah's Flood".
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Author of: Dino Blood Redux
Response: Thanks. A cold shower might help (never did it for me, but you never know).
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Response: Matzke hasn't responded in public, no. Yet.
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Author of: Bombardier Beetles and the Argument of Design
Response: When we see a dog walking along the street, are we justified in claiming that the dog has a heart? We cannot see the heart of that particular dog, so obviously we don't know.

Most people, I trust, would find that conclusion absurd. We know plenty about other dogs, and about vertebrates in general, to know that hearts occur in all we know of, and we have absolutely no reason to think that that particular dog is exceptional. So, knowing nothing more about the dog than that it is a living dog, we can say it is a fact that the dog has a heart.

For the same reason, we can say that it is a fact -- not an assumption -- that bombardier beetles evolved. There are multiple lines of evidence that all life, and animals in particular, evolved from a common ancestor. So knowing only that bombardier beetles are animals, we can say they evolved. As it happens, there has been much comparative anatomy (one of the lines of evidence) done on carabid beetles (which includes bombardier beetles), so we have direct evidence of the fact as well.

Do we know for sure? No more than we know for sure that all dogs have hearts.

You are correct that people, as individuals, are rarely neutral in their theological assumptions. But groups of people can be. Evolutionary biology is done by people of all religious views, including Hindu, Buddhist, Moslem, Jewish, atheist, and innumerable denominations of Christian. The fact that people from all these backgrounds agree that evolution is fact shows that their theological assumptions are not an important factor.

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Author of: Evolution is a Fact and a Theory
Response: Dear "no it all,"

If you help keep the secret we'll share some of the grant money with you and give you a university degree.

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Response: There is no evidence of which I am aware that evolution has been slowing down. There is, however, the "pull of the Recent", which is to say we have a lot finer grained detailed information about events in our own geological period (the Recent) than we do of older periods. This foreshortening led some to suppose that evolution was slower today, but it is an artifact of our access to information of organisms in the modern period.
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Author of: Evolution is a Fact and a Theory
Response: Dear Dr. Blume,

We don't need to make it look like everyone who attacks evolution is a fool. They do a good job all by themselves.

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