Creation vs. Evolution

[Warthaug]

Everything in a scientific model should be predictable, otherwise it wouldn't be a very effective model.

Tell that to the people who study quantum dynamics for a living. The whole science is based on randomness, uncertainty, and probabilities.

Scientific models/theories should represent reality. And a huge part of reality is uncertainty.

Bryan

 

[Soggy]

Tell that to the people who study quantum dynamics for a living. The whole science is based on randomness, uncertainty, and probabilities.

Scientific models/theories should represent reality. And a huge part of reality is uncertainty.

Bryan

Heh, SeanQ should have a conversation with Mr. Heisenberg.

 

[AevnsGrandpa]

Hi all and good morning,

After some research and a fresh night of sleep I have some quotes to post from various scientist who at least question some of the "facts" of the evidence for evolution. I have tried to keep the quote and it source together and also the link to the web site where I found the quote. You will have to pardon that the site I got the quotes from are pro-creation sites as I could not find anything when I searched Nature, and Scientific America and other science publications.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v14/i4/fossils.asp

Dr Colin Patterson, a senior palaeontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, agreed about the lack of fossil evidence connecting man with a lower primate. In answer to the question, ‘What do you think of the australopithecines (Lucy) as man’s ancestors?’, Dr Patterson replied, ‘There is no way of knowing whether they are the ancestors to anything or not.’ The above was largely quoted from Luther Sunderland’s book, Darwin’s Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems. Before interviewing Dr Patterson, the author read his book, Evolution, which he had written for the British Museum of Natural History. In it he had solicited comments from readers about the book’s contents. One reader wrote a letter to Dr Patterson asking why he did not put a single photograph of a transitional fossil in his book. On April 10, 1979, he replied to the author in a most candid letter as follows:
‘… I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic licence, would that not mislead the reader?
’I wrote the text of my book four years ago. If I were to write it now, I think the book would be rather different. Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwin’s authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it. Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.” I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test.
‘So, much as I should like to oblige you by jumping to the defence of gradualism, and fleshing out the transitions between the major types of animals and plants, I find myself a bit short of the intellectual justification necessary for the job …’ Patterson, personal communication; documented in: Luther Sunderland, Darwin’s Enigma, Master Books, El Cajon, CA, pp. 88–90, 1988.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/re2/chapter8.asp

Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils—creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance.
Actually, Charles Darwin was worried that the fossil record did not show what his theory predicted:
“Why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.” C. Darwin, Origin of Species, 6th ed. 1872 (London: John Murray, 1902), p. 413.

One of the most famous fossils of all time is Archaeopteryx, which combines feathers and skeletal structures peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs. [SA 83]
“This hardly qualifies for a fossil ‘intermediate in form’; it is more like a mosaic or chimera like the platypus. Alan Feduccia, a world authority on birds at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an evolutionist himself, says: Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that.” Cited in V. Morell, Archaeopteryx: Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms, Science 259(5096):764–65, 5 February 1993.

Mollusks
Scientific American makes another false claim: Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various mollusks through millions of years. [SA 83]

So the anti-creationist neo-catastrophist geologist Derek Ager wrote:
“It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student, from Trueman’s Ostrea/Gryphaea to Carruthers’ Zaphrentis delanouei, have now been ‘debunked.’ Similarly, my own experience of more than twenty years looking for evolutionary lineages among the Mesozoic Brachiopoda has proved them equally elusive.” D. Ager, The Nature of the Fossil Record, Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 87(2):131–160, 1976; see also D. Catchpoole, Evolution’s oyster twist, Creation 24(2):55, March–May 2002.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/522.asp

‘The philosophy of experimental science … began its discoveries and made use of its methods in the faith, not the knowledge, that it was dealing with a rational universe controlled by a creator who did not act upon whim nor interfere with the forces He had set in operation … It is surely one of the curious paradoxes of history that science, which professionally has little to do with faith, owes its origins to an act of faith that the universe can be rationally interpreted, and that science today is sustained by that assumption.’ Loren Eiseley: Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men who Discovered It, Doubleday, Anchor, NY (1961).

‘If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our thought processes are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts—i.e. of Materialism and—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give a correct account of all the other accidents.’ C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970) pp. 52–53.

There are, for example, excellent skeletons of extinct animals showing the transitions from primitive fish to bony fish.

‘All three divisions of the bony fishes appear in the fossil record at approximately the same time. They are already widely divergent morphologically, and they are heavily armoured. How did they originate? What allowed them to diverge so widely? How did they all come to have heavy armor? And why is there no trace of earlier intermediate forms?’ G. T. Todd, American Scientist 20(4):757, 1980.

The ‘mammal-like reptiles’ are commonly asserted to be transitional. But according to a specialist on these creatures:

‘each species of mammal-like reptile that has been found appears suddenly in the fossil record and is not preceded by the species that is directly ancestral to it. It disappears some time later, without leaving a directly descended species …’ Tom Kemp, ‘The Reptiles that Became Mammals’, New Scientist 92:583, 4 March 1982

‘The earliest and most primitive members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous series from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed.’ G.G. Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944), pp. 105–6.

I will put up a second post with the rest as what I had was too long for one post.

Jeff

 

[AevnsGrandpa]

http://www.icr.org/home/resources/resources_tracts_scientificcaseagainstevolution/

A current leading evolutionist, Jeffrey Schwartz, professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, has recently acknowledged that:
. . . it was and still is the case that, with the exception of Dobzhansky's claim about a new species of fruit fly, the formation of a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed. Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins (New York, John Wiley, 1999), p. 300.

With respect to the origin of life, a leading researcher in this field, Leslie Orgel, after noting that neither proteins nor nucleic acids could have arisen without the other, concludes:
And so, at first glance, one might have to conclude that life could never, in fact, have originated by chemical means. Leslie E. Orgel, "The Origin of Life on the Earth," Scientific American (vol. 271, October 1994), p. 78.

Even dogmatic evolutionist Gould admits that:
The Cambrian explosion was the most remarkable and puzzling event in the history of life.8 Stephen Jay Gould, "The Evolution of Life," chapter 1 in Evolution: Facts and Fallacies, ed. by J. William Schopf (San Diego, CA., Academic Press, 1999), p. 9.

A professor in the Department of Biology at Kansas State University says:
"Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic." Todd, Scott C., "A View from Kansas on the Evolution Debates," Nature (vol. 401, September 30, 1999), p. 423.

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, . . . in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated commitment to materialism. . . . we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” Lewontin, Richard, Review of the Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan. In New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997.

I am hoping that because of the above quotes everyone will see that the supposed concrete evidence for evolution is far from that. There is lots of supposing in taking the evidence we have today and making it fit both models of the origin of the universe.

It seems to me that no matter what is shown to suppose both world views, no one will actually budge; we believe what we believe about how things came about.

Jeff

 

[Warthaug]

Heh, SeanQ should have a conversation with Mr. Heisenberg.

But Mr. Heisenberg is soooo uncertain in his opinions.

Sorry, bad science joke. I'll go crawl back under my rock now :geek:

Bryan

 

[Soggy]

You will have to pardon that the site I got the quotes from are pro-creation sites as I could not find anything when I searched Nature, and Scientific America and other science publications.

Perhaps that should tell you something...

 

[Soggy]

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v14/i4/fossils.asp

This one guy actually has some credentials to speak of. I'd be interested in reading his work outside of a creationist website, since they did not publish his work, but only interviewed him.


http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/re2/chapter8.asp

Dr. Jonathan Sarfati,
B.Sc. (Hons.), Ph.D., F.M.

Creationist Physical Chemist and Spectroscopist

He's a chemist...not really qualified to make claims about fossils.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/522.asp
Same guy


http://www.icr.org/home/resources/resources_tracts_scientificcaseagainstevolution/
Written by Henry M. Morris, a civil and hydraulics engineer

I am hoping that because of the above quotes everyone will see that the supposed concrete evidence for evolution is far from that. There is lots of supposing in taking the evidence we have today and making it fit both models of the origin of the universe.

It seems to me that no matter what is shown to suppose both world views, no one will actually budge; we believe what we believe about how things came about.

Sorry, you failed. Except for *maybe* the museum curator, the others are unqualified. You need to actually check the credentials of those authoring the works before you accept their conclusions....

 

[Warthaug]

Hi all and good morning,

"Dr Colin Patterson, a senior palaeontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, agreed about the lack of fossil evidence connecting man with a lower primate. In answer to the question, ‘What do you think of the australopithecines (Lucy) as man’s ancestors?’, Dr Patterson replied, ‘There is no way of knowing whether they are the ancestors to anything or not."

The above quote is an oft-used, but misleading quotation of what this scientist actually said. I.e. it is a distortion of his statement, used by creationists, to create the illusion that Dr. Patterson doesn't think we can prove ancestry with fossils. The story is long and complex, but if you're board:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html

The shorter version is the full quote:
"Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else with a watertight argument."

The second quote of his you refer to, the one about transitional fossils, is also a commonly used distortion by creationists. The full quote, in context, appears at the top of the page my first link directs you to. His point was simple - that transitionally fossils exist, but it is not possible to determine which species evolved from it with 100% certainty.

As for the rest of it, your quotes date from Darwin through to 1980. Hate to break it to you, but evolutionary science has progressed a little over the last 150-odd years. Just as an example, some of the transitional fossils identified showing the evolution of the three major groups of fish (from talk.origins):

1) Acanthodians(?) (Silurian) -- A puzzling group of spiny fish with similarities to early bony fish.

2)Palaeoniscoids (e.g. Cheirolepis, Mimia; early Devonian) -- Primitive bony ray-finned fishes that gave rise to the vast majority of living fish. Heavy acanthodian-type scales, acanthodian-like skull, and big notochord.

3) Canobius, Aeduella (Carboniferous) -- Later paleoniscoids with smaller, more advanced jaws.

4) Ctenacanthus & similar ctenacanthids (late Devonian) -- Primitive, slow sharks with broad-based shark-like fins & fin spines. Probably ancestral to all modern sharks, skates, and rays. Fragmentary fin spines (Triassic) -- from more advanced sharks.

Bryan

 

[Thalassamania]

One of the creationist complaints concerning Darwinism is that, to them at least, that it doesn't convincingly explain where new species come from. They just can’t see how members of one species become so different from other individuals through natural variation that they would become two separate species (or “kinds”).

I will try and deal with this question by explaining a rather rare thing (I know of but three examples, there are likely more) called a "ring species." When a species is distributed in a large circular pattern (Larus sp. sea gulls around the North Pole, the Ensatina eschscholtzii salamander around the central valley of California, and Phylloscopus trochiloides, the Greenish warblers around Tibet) neighboring populations vary slightly, and can interbreed, but at the ends of the pattern that overlap to make circle, enough genetic difference has accumulated that the populations function as two separate, non-interbreeding species.

Perhaps the best studied example a salamander found on the Pacific Coast of the U.S. Down at the southern end of the central valley there are what appear to be two distinct species. One has strong, dark blotches in camouflage pattern and the other is uniform in color with bright yellow eyes (thought to mimic a poisonous newt). Both populations are found in the same area, and do not interbreed. But if you go north, these two populations divide (they’re not found in the central valley) the Newt mimic going up the coast and the camouflaged form being found in the hills and mountains east of the Central Valley. At the northern end of the Central Valley, where the populations merge, just one form is found. Up north we can see that what we thought were two species in the south are in fact one species with a bunch of interbreeding subspecies, in one continuous ring.

An ancestral population of salamanders, in northern California, move south down the Sierra Nevada mountains and down the coastal mountains. In the east the camo coloration was selected for and on the coast Newt mimic provided better protection. When they met again at the south end of the Central Valley they were so different that they rarely interbreed and when they do, though the hybrids are healthy and vigorous, they were neither well-camouflaged nor good mimics and are more vulnerable to predators. Moreover, the hybrids do not attract mates so they don’t reproduce. They are reproductively isolated and therefore different species.

Recently the genetic relationships between the salamander groups were studied with DNA sequencing and other molecular tests. The genetic evidence leads to the same conclusion. Geographical variation, when combined with the inferred history revealed by the DAN and molecular test, shows the small steps taken by an ancestral species in the north resulted, through evolutionary divergence in two species in the south.

Much the same thing is seen with the Larus sea gulls that interbreed in a ring around the arctic,


A classic example of ring species is the Larus gulls circumpolar species "ring". The range of these gulls forms a ring around the North Pole. The Herring Gull, which lives primarily in Great Britain, can hybridize with the American Herring Gull (living in North America), which can also interbreed with the Vega or East Siberian Herring Gull, the western subspecies of which, Birula's Gull, can hybridize with Heuglin's gull, which in turn can interbreed with the Siberian Lesser Black-backed Gull (all four of these live across the north of Siberia). The last is the eastern representative of the Lesser Black-backed Gulls back in northewestern Europe, including Great Britain. However, the Lesser Black-backed Gulls and Herring Gull are sufficiently different that they cannot interbreed; thus the group of gulls forms a continuum except in Europe where the two lineages meet.

and the Greenish warblers (Phylloscopus trochiloides) that circle Tibet.

Asia showing the six subspecies of the greenish warbler. The crosshatched blue and red area in central Siberia shows the contact zone between viridanus and plumbeitarsus, which do not interbreed. Colors grade together where there is gradual morphological change.

 

[MikeFerrara]

Perhaps that should tell you something...

So should we ignore all information about evolution that comes from a pro-evolution source?

Why not examine the merit of the individual quotes based on the content and the individual it comes from?