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

Feedback for November 2002

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Response: I don’t claim to be an expert in the philosophy of science, but in my view your definition of science as requiring it to make predictions of the future is too narrow to be useful. This definition would, for instance, exclude much of astronomy outside the solar system. Astronomy’s realm is too distant for experiments that manipulate the objects of study, and evolution’s realm is too ancient. However, I believe that hypotheses from both of these fields can be validated by collecting independent data that support one or another hypothesis, even if these data do not come from experiments of the sort that physicists can do.

Evolutionists can do experiments of model systems in the laboratory, but because evolutionary adaptations rely on random mutations in individual organisms for their source, even these may play out differently in replications of the same experiment (Bennett and Lenski EXS 83:135, 1997). The important role of random mutation in evolution makes it unlikely that the features of your next garden predator could be predicted. In this respect, the theory of evolution itself predicts the difficulty of making predictions about specific adaptations; so predictions of the sort that validate theories in physics cannot be expected for evolution. Does this make evolution less than science? I think not.

Evolutionists have made a number of hypotheses that may have violated common sense (and certainly violated creationism) and which have nonetheless been supported by the collection of additional independent data. My favorite is the hypothesis – based on anatomic comparisons between whales and other mammals - that whales evolved from artiodactyls (even-toed ungulates). Although no one could predict exactly what the intermediate species should have looked like, reasonable candidates for intermediate species (“whales with legs”) have recently been found in the fossil record (e.g. Gingerich et al, Science 293:2239, 2001) in rocks of just the right geologic age; and these fossils seem to validate the hypothesis. Furthermore, molecular genetic evidence also independently supports this hypothesis (Shimamura et al. Nature 388:666, 1997).

Also keep in mind that you are unlikely to see scientists investing time in trying to disprove evolution because it has already been so solidly supported by the evidence. How often do physicists design experiments to “disprove” accepted principles of quantum mechanics or statistical thermodynamics, and how often would such grant proposals be funded?

In short, with thousands of papers supporting evolution by evidence from paleontology, molecular genetics, laboratory models of evolution, field studies, population genetics, biogeography, computer simulations and mathematical modelling, there’s a lot more than “proof by assertion” going on here.

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I'd like to update the Jargon entries with new terms and acronyms. Unfortunately, I have been and continue to be very busy. I hope to be able to update the Jargon entries on a more regular basis after I finish my Ph.D. program next year.

Wesley

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Response: In the article in question, Ed Babinski details his references. He inquired about the quotation and received a reply from Marie-Antoinette de Lumley at France's National Center for Scientific Research, who attributed this quotation to the February 1959 edition of Age Nouveau, p. 12.

Beyond that, you'll have to take the matter up with Mr. Babinski.

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Response: I stand corrected. GRI's web site does seem to have a fairly balanced set of links, though they are not as extensive as this site's. Thanks for the reference.

For those who may not be aware, Geoscience Research Institute is associated with the Seventh-Day Adventists.

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Response: The writer's initial criticism that our "theories" arguments are "weak" and "circular" is too vague to respond to, however I believe I can shed some light on his/her other statements.

I assume the writer's comments regarding "footsteps" is meant to refer to the famous Laetoli footprints found by the late Mary Leakey. Is to it is true that these prints are generally thought, due to their age, to have been made by an early hominid such as Australopithecus, but this assumption has been questioned by some paleoanthropologists who believe that the prints may belong to an early species of our genus Homo. See this page by Jim Foley for more information on this.

Either way these prints do not present an insurmountable problem for current theories of human evolution.

The writer asks where, if there was no (global?) Flood, the sediment come from to bury and petrify trees in an upright position? The answer is rather simple, local flooding. Local large scale flooding is rather common and quite capable of burying trees in sediment. Another source of sediment capable of burying trees are volcanoes, which can bury whole forests in layers of volcanic ash. See Andrew MacRae's article on polystrate trees.

I'm not sure about the writer's reference here to the Gulf of Mexico, but it is possible he/she is referring to the petrified forest found in the State of Mississippi (See Mississippi Petrified Forest: National Natural Landmark and Mississippi Petrified Forest for more information).

The writer next asks about the Grand Canyon and how it was formed. No the water of the Colorado River did not have to run uphill in defiance of gravity. The "hill" (the Colorado Plateau) arose after the river was already there and as it grew higher the river simply cut into it.

See Young-Earth Creationism and the Geology of the Grand Canyon, The Geologic Story at Grand Canyon, and Grand Canyon Geology for more information on the Grand Canyon.

Finally the writer unknowingly argues against his/her own position by asking how it is, if many dinosaurs were carnivorous, that we find complete skeletons rather that fragmentary scavenged remains. There fact of the matter is that while complete articulated dinosaur skeletons are sometimes found they are relatively rare. Most vertebrate fossils, including dinosaurs, are disarticulated fragments and partial skeletons, occasionally bearing telltale tooth marks of predation and/or scavenging. So turning the question around on the writer: why if most of the fossil record is the result of a global flood do we find so few complete articulated skeletons?

See A king-sized theropod coprolite found in Saskatchewan and Nibbling Triceratops for some rather obvious evidence of carnivorous behavior by dinosaurs.

See The Complete Dinosaur: Selected Excerpts, for a good overview of dinosaur diets and the evidence involved.

And see Basic Concepts in Dinosaur Taphonomy, for a book chapter on dinosaur taphonomy.

As for "drdino.com", AKA Kent Hovind, he is a bottom feeder even amongst anti-evolutionists. Look at the Kent Hovind FAQs for more on him.

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Response: It is possible, from the description, that the device could have an external energy source, in which case he could be describing a typical garden fountain. Without the external energy source, he is describing a perpetual motion machine. Such machines are generally considered impossible because they violate the first law of thermodynamics. The professionals at the US Patent Office don't accept applications for perpetual motion machines without a working version because all claims for such machines have been bogus.
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Response: There are several laboratories that do mitochondrial DNA testing. For instance, I typed "mitochondrial DNA testing" into a search engine and came up with Mitotyping Technologies, LLC. This may be an expensive procedure, however.
From: Jim Foley
Author of: Fossil Hominids: mitochondrial DNA
Response: Bryan Sykes, the author of The Seven Daughters of Eve, has set up a business that does exactly what you want: Oxford Ancestors: Putting Genes in Genealogy It costs US$220 - not exactly cheap, but affordable for most people if you're interested enough!
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Response: Although it may sometimes seem to the contrary, this site is really not concerned with "trashing" other sites. The web site in question here is by Harun Yahya, a Turkish creationist. His views appear to be little more than a rehashing of arguments espoused by young-earth creationists found in America. To that extent, the arguments he raised should be (in most part, at least) already covered by this archive. As always, we leave it to our readers to examine our site, examine other sites, and most importantly, read the peer-reviewed literature to decide for themselves.
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Author of: Creation Science and the Earth's Magnetic Field
Response: "The problem? It doesn't happen. Its impossible. You know this. So you say "Oh, but mutations."

Actually, it is very possible, very probable, and in fact unavoidable. That is what I actually know, as opposed to what I have been told I know.

See, for instance, Mark Chu Carroll's comments in "How to Measure Information", our February 2001 Post of the Month.

The claim that it is impossible to create new information is a fiction based on an erroneous choice for the measure of information.

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Response: I'm not sure what you expect from this feedback. It is intended to contain short answers to questions that readers of this archive have. We cannot possibly--nor do we intend to try to--provide all of the scientific evidence for evolution in a couple of paragraphs.

Rather than criticizing these feedback responses for something they were never intended to provide, why not instead read some of the articles on this site? They go into far more detail discussing the scientific evidence for evolution, and also contain references to the peer-reviewed literature that goes into much greater detail about the evidence. You might learn that a few of your preconceptions are wrong. For instance, evolution can be and has been tested, both in the lab and in the field. Try looking at our Must-Read Files section for starters.

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The art of criticism is much improved by specificity. The anonymous reader doesn't like something he found here about transitional fossils. That's rather vague. It doesn't even tell us which of several pages might have irritated the self-proclaimed unbiased reader.

Somehow, I can't picture our intrepid reader here as Diogenes reincarnate.

Wesley

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Author of: The Recession of the Moon and the Age of the Earth-Moon System
Response: If so, then what are we, as humans evolving into?

In the short run, a different type of human. A smarter type, if we are lucky. In the long run, nobody can tell. It depends on the details of the future, which are unpredictable. So, in the long run, the question is impossible to answer.

Also where are the half ape-half human people that are still evolving into humans?

Of course there aren't any, and there is no aspect of evolutionary theory which would imply that there should be any, so the question does not make sense.

As for the evolution of blood clotting, see Is the Complement System Irreducibly Complex?, part of the T.O archive FAQ Irreducible Complexity and Michael Behe. There are sound scientific descriptions of blood clotting evolution.

If the world blew into existance .. what did it blow from?

Nobody knows. In fact, nobody knows that the universe "blew into existence" (it almost certainly did not, even within the confines of the Big Bang models of cosmology). The Belgian Jesuit priest & astronomer Georges Lemaître called it a "primordial atom". But most cosmologists recognize the Big Bang models as being descriptions of how the universe evolved, not how it began. The assumption that the universe blinked into existence "from nothing" is far too simplistic. We simply don't know what the state of the universe was before the event we call the Big Bang. In the setting of string theory, it may even be that the "bang" was a collision between space-time structures of larger geometric dimensionality. See Paul Steinhardt's webpage at Princeton, for stuff about the cyclic model & "ekpyrotic" cosmological models. Also see Ned Wright's Cosmology Tutorial for more material on Big Bang cosmology.

What about the sun growing smaller over time?

The sun is not growing smaller over time (see the Shrinkage section of The Solar FAQ: Solar Neutrinos and Other Solar Oddities in the T.O archive, and my own Response to the Shrinking Sun Argument.

my case rests

And one might enquire "on what"?

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I agree that leaving out an earned degree would be a bad thing, but so far as I can tell our page does no such thing.

There is a difference between holding an academic position and earning a degree. An assistant professorship is not the same thing as an earned doctorate.

If you do know of a legitimate earned doctoral degree for Slusher, please do give us the details. I tried searching for "slusher" in the URL provided, but his name did not appear to be mentioned. Since the URL seems to have nothing to do with the issue of Slusher's educational history, I'm not sure why it was cited.

Wesley

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Response: As for "Educated Creationist's" first question regarding the origin of the DNA to RNA to "protiens" [sic] process, I personally cannot answer this question (though someone else might be able to say something about it). As far as I am aware this question is part of the problem of the origin of life from non-life for which there is currently no strong theory. And since the process leading to the origin of life is currently unknown it is impossible to calculate any probabilities regarding it and therefore Educated's claim that this is "too complex for evolution" is merely a bald assertion.

Educated then asks how the first (pot?) bacteria could "power itself" without "mitacondria" [sic]. Given that "Educated Creationist" is "educated" there should be no need for me to point out that in fact no bacteria (prokaryote) has mitochondria. Only eukaryotic organisms have mitochondria. So by Educated's logic all the bacteria that have lived for the last three billion years or so have not in fact lived at all. An interesting aside here is that eukaryotic mitochondria and chloroplasts are thought to have originally been free-living bacteria that formed symbiotic relationships with the early eukaryotes, a process known as endosymbiosis.

For more information on endosymbiosis see Endosymbiosis and The Origin of Eukaryotes, Endosymbiosis in Evolution, and Endosymbiotic Theory.

Next Educated wants to know where the bacterial Adam found his Eve. Fortunately for our prokaryotic Adam most bacteria reproduce asexually by simply dividing into two new cells, no mate needed. Note: Some bacteria do exchange genetic information through a process called conjugation, a simple form of sex.

For more information on the reproduction of bacteria see Microbial Reproduction, and Bacteria Divide and Multiply .

Finally Educated asks what the first bacteria would eat. Well, Educated gives one possible answer in his/her question. Sunlight. And in fact some of the earliest fossils are of colonies of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) known as stromatolites that lived on sunlight just as cyanobacteria do today. However many researchers believe that still earlier forms of bacteria lived off of various chemicals found in nature much like species of bacteria that live today in the deep sea feeding on hydrogen sulfide which flows from hydrothermal vents.

For more information on hydrothermal vents and the bacteria that live near them see Ancient Bacteria, Hot Vents, and Hydrothermal Vents: "Hot springs" on the sea floor near mid-ocean ridge crests.

"Educated Creationist" may want his/her tuition money back.

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Response: You're in luck. We have an article on this very topic. See the 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ.
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Author of: Creation Science and the Earth's Magnetic Field
Response: The Greenland Ice Core Project, and the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 are only two of many ice core projects (see the National Ice Core Laboratory Science Management Office webpage).

The assumption is that the layers are annual, so 110,000 layers is 110,000 years. But this is not an arbitrary assumption. Pollen lands on the ice seasonally, as do other environmental tracers like dust. These are used to calibrate that ice cores in time. The isotopic ratios in atmospheric gas are also known to vary seasonally. These too are used to pin down the annual nature of the layers. The process is not perfect, and sometimes annual layers melt together or become otherwise indistinguishable. But this is taken into account when the time length for the core is determined.

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Author of: Meteorite Dust and the Age of the Earth
Response: There is no truth to the claim that the 2nd law (or any other law) of thermodynamics prohibits macroevolution. In fact, I would say quite the contrary, that thermodynamics makes macroevolution an inevitability. See, in this archive, Thermodynamics, Evolution and Creationism. Also see Entropy, God and Evolution and Note on Entropy, Disorder and Organization (the last one might be too technical, but it does get to the reality of the matter in detail).

As for Answers in Genesis, it is full of mistakes. See, for instance, the No Answers in Genesis webpage.

It may well be that nobody can ever convince you that macroevolution may be real, especially if you have already decided that you will not be convinced. However, from the practicing scientist viewpoint, I ponder a question which no creationist has ever satisfactorily answered, so far as I know. And that is this: What physical process, or law of nature, prevents microevolution from inevitably leading to macroevolution? The usual attempt at an answer is to claim that "information" in the genome can never increase, but that is an easily destroyed argument (see How to Measure Information).

So maybe you can take my question to your homeschoolers and provide me with the long sought answer. I'm sure we all would like to know, over here in the land of Talk.Origins.

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Response: Two things that Tim did not cover in his response:
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Author of: Creation Science and the Earth's Magnetic Field
Response: This site is "supposed to be" neither more nor less than what it says it is, like anything else. And here is what it says it is, on the very first page of the archive: The Talk.Origins Archive is a collection of articles and essays, most of which have appeared in talk.origins at one time or another. The primary reason for this archive's existence is to provide mainstream scientific responses to the many frequently asked questions (FAQs) and frequently rebutted assertions that appear in the talk.origins newsgroup.

Our attitude is what we have always said it was. And we are what we are supposed to be.

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Author of: The Recession of the Moon and the Age of the Earth-Moon System
Response: The accuracy & precision of any measurement are always functions of how carefully it's done. Sloppy work begets unreliable results. Careful work begets more reliable results. It is certainly not true that any radiometric dating tool is "calibrated before hand" in the obvious sense of this message (i.e., "rigged"), in the vast majority of cases (i.e., the honest ones).

Also keep in mind that 14C dating is usually only reliable out to about 40,000 years, though I think one could push it to 60,000 years with newer, high precision techniques. So, in the context of methods used to determine the few billion years age for the Earth, 14C dating is not really relevant.

For details, see the following entries in the Talk.Origins archive.

Outside the archive, also see my own Radiometric Dating Resource List, which includes several items specifically on radiocarbon dating.

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Response: The fossil evidence (and other evidence) on modern humans dates from around 120,000 years ago (see the Hominid Species FAQ). The Hominid Fossils page on this site lists and displays only some of the most historically important fossil discoveries.
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Response: This letter is very typical of the feedback we receive quite regularly here. It's full of inflated rhetoric, unjustified conclusions, false claims and misspellings as less-than-thorough understanding of the subject those claims are being made about. I'm going to ignore the inflated rhetoric and just look at the specific factual claims.

The supposed fossil link between dinosaurs and birds, a bird-like reptile found in China. Turned out to be yet another fraud on the evolutionist landscape

The reference here is to Archaeoraptor, a fossil reported on in National Geographic in 1999. It turned out to be a combination of at least 2 different fossils, glued together. But your claim that this was "the supposed fossil link between dinosaurs and birds" is false. It was actually only the latest in a long line of feathered theropods that are intermediate between dinosaurs and birds. And it is important to note that it was found to be a forgery by paleontologists doing their jobs, examining the evidence. It is an example of how science self-corrects, as this particular specimen never made it through peer review. That's how science operates, and it works quite well.

just like Nananderthal (sic) Man

I presume you mean Neanderthal Man. I have no idea why you listed this as "yet another fraud". What is fraudulent about Neanderthalensis? There are literally hundreds of specimens extent.

just like the famed "Lucy" which Leaky (sic) himself admits he found the leg bone in strata 200 feet deeper a half a mile away

This is an ideal example of how a completely false claim gets made among creationists, gets repeated over and over as it gets retold, and changes as it is passed on. Yet every time it is repeated, it is said as though it were credible. Alas, it is not. The demonstration of why this claim is false is to be found at Lucy's Knee Joint: A Case Study in Creationists' Willingness to Admit their Errors.

Information on the "mathematical impossibility" of abiogenesis can be found at Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations

Thermodynamics is dealt with at Thermodynamics, Evolution and Creationism

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God charges Christians with upholding truth and exposing falsehoods. Telling it like it is about liars is Godly, IMHO, whether they happen to share one's views on creation or not. If creationism is about telling lies, then telling the truth would indeed be "unprofessional" for a creationist.

About the mission... Perhaps the reader should check out the Welcome page again.

Wesley

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Response: This discussion may have been referring to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons). Mormon doctrine holds that family relationships continue after death. It also holds that a person's deceased ancestors can also receive the blessings of being eternally united with their families. For this purpose, Church members make covenants in temples in behalf of their ancestors, who may accept these covenants, if they so choose, in the spirit world. In order to do so, however, the person must be able to identify those ancestors; thus, the Mormons place a strong emphasis on genealogy and have one of the most complete genealogical databases in the world.

Here are a couple of links that might interest you on this topic:

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Response: The short answer is that "Dr." Hovind's offer has been carefully (and dishonestly) crafted so that nobody will ever be able to win it. For more information, take a look at John Pieret's FAQ on Kent Hovind's $250,000 Offer.
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