Here is a previous exchange over supposed counterarguments or criticisms of evolution:

Criticism: The truth is that, just as there is evidence for evolution there is also evidence against it. Evolution teaches that things evolve from simple to complex. And this is supposed to be true for all living things. But there is stacks of evidence against that hypothesis. A few examples from an interesting book called "The Crumbling Theory of Evolution," by J. W. G. Johnson.: "Among the dead bones of the past, we find no fossil links, no evolution.

Response: There are many intermediate species found within the fossil record. The fossil record is particularly telling because a VERY tiny percentage of organisms have been fossilized. Additionally the geological strata provide a nice smooth progression from single celled organisms roughly 3.5 billion years ago through the complex organisms today. There are no instances of any organisms grossly more complex than their predecessors merely appearing ex nihilo.

The fossil record is corroborated in terms of dating via numerous forms of radiometric dating. A wide range of dates can be tested with various forms of radioactive decay including Uranium 238-Lead 206 (4.5 billion year half life), Uranium 235-Lead 207 (704 million), Thorium 232-Lead 208 (14 billion), Rubidium 87-Strontium 87 (48.8 billion), and Potassium 40-Argon 40 (1.3 billion). All of these tests are very robust and have very tight error bars.



Criticism: Then, if we look at the living world of the present, again we find no inter-mediates between living kinds.

Response: Every species in existence is an intermediate. All species will follow what came before and will be replaced by what precedes them. That is a very elementary concept. Good examples are the many breeds of dogs that have been produced through selective pressures provided by humans. Can these breeds still reproduce? Sure, for the time being anyway. If you keep breeds separated for a long enough time genetic drift will generally make them unable to interbreed.



Criticism: Living creatures prove that kinds do not change no matter how long the time span. For example, using the evolutionist's supposed ages (later I will talk a bit on this particular issue as well), there is a dragon-fly species still with us after sixty-million years. The Australian lung-fish should have evolution in its blood, but it has not changed in 220 million years. Spiders remain unchanged after 300 million years. Cockroaches and silverfish unchanged in 350 million years. "Turtles have been turtles for 250 million years of evolutionary time.

Response: All that means is these few species the author cherry picked have not mutated significantly in the amount of time chosen. There is nothing in the workings of evolution that would indicate change MUST occur. It does tend to occur as seen from the fact that the dragonfly, lung-fish, spiders, and turtles evolved from prokaryotic cyanobacteria over the course of three billion years. Additional many other species were mutating into forms that were more appropriate for the changing ecological niches that ebb and flow with climatic changes and with the ever changing balance with other species. However with any system it should not be surprising if a few components/species remain viable and near optimal for their particular niche or their niche has not been subjected to pressures for a relatively lengthy period of time.



Criticism: Turtles have an incredible skeleton. They live inside boxes; and their girdles are inside the rib cage. That should mean a lot of evolving. We should find millions of quarter-turtles, then half-turtles, and so on. But we don't. The very first turtles were perfect turtles. There is no fossil of something pre-turtle, nearly-turtle. "The hard fact is that every kind of creature living today which appears in the fossil record, appears there in form similar to its present form.

Response: He is cherry picking the data again. The entire fossil record is a collection of simpler forms followed by small mutations over vast time spans. The first fish sans fins were followed by fish with first very subtle fins followed by more complex fins, then by fins that doubled as legs, then true legs, etc. This is evidenced by the mutations evidenced by Eusthenopteron, Panderichthys, Ticktaalik, Ichthyostega, and Acanthostega over the roughly 25 million year time span from 380-365mya.



Criticism: This was dramatically confirmed by the Coelacanth fish. This fish, through one of its relatives, was credited as being the ancestor of amphibians, a vigorous evolutor. It was regarded as extinct for seventy million years. But in 1939, a fisherman hauled up a Coelacanth very much alive. To an evolutionist, this was just as upsetting as if a dinosaur had walked up the street. Since then, several more living Coelacanths have been caught, all of them exactly as they were when the last Coelacanth fossil was laid down seventy million mythical years ago."

Response: This was not upsetting at all to evolutionists. In fact quite the opposite was the case. This was a very exciting finding for evolutionists. Again there is nothing within the workings of evolution and natural selection that precludes well adapted species from continuing for millions of years. Furthermore because this living fossil in the form of Coelacanth is so readily available morphological, bio-behavioral, and genetic studies can and have greatly enhanced our understanding of evolution.



Criticism: Then there is another interesting law of science called The Second Law of Thermodynamics. ... "It would hardly be possible to conceive of two more opposite principles than this principle of entropy (mass-energy loss) and the principle of evolution. Each is precisely the converse of the other. (Henry M. Morris, The Twilight of Evolution., p.35).

Response: This is a VERY old and worn out argument against evolution. The earth is not a closed system. Entropy works when you have a finite amount of energy in a system that is sealed off from all outside inputs. The earth has had a constant supply of external energy for the last 4.6 billion years in the form of the sun. It is very analogous to the continued creation of complexity in a car factory. If you close and lock the doors on the factory then yes things will begin to decay and nothing will ever come out the doors in the way of products. However, if you continually provide electricity, raw materials, and food for the workers then complex systems will be generated. It is quite possible that entropy will eventually lead to the darkening and dissipating of the matter in the universe over many trillions of years. However the big bang infused all of the matter in the universe including what is included in the stars with massive amounts of energy. Complexity can increase in the local subsystems around stars because there is a massive energy imbalance between the star and the surrounding matter.



Criticism: Evolutionists will say that different layers of rock formations will show different periods of the evolutionary process, in other words, the simple becoming more complex as you get closer to the surface of the rock formations. This sounds very good and fine except that fossil remains don't always appear in that order. In fact, fossils are found in all kinds of order contrary to the evolutionary ladder. Many caves and canyons that appear to be millions of years old can indeed have been formed over a very short period of time. A simple example. Some years ago a volcanic mountain blew up and left a huge deep gorge that looked like a prehistoric canyon. Of course it wasn't as it had just been formed. So things are not always as they appear.

Response: Small differences in a local area are taken into account by paleogeologists and paleontologists. Taking a very small difference in a localized area does not negate the findings that are rigorously compared across the planet. Also see my comments on radiometric dating above. The various forms of radiometric, stratigraphic, and paleomagnetic data fit very tightly together and provide an incredibly robust picture of the ages of the many and varied fossil finds.



Criticism: There's no question that genes determine what a foetus is and what it will grow into. Here also manipulation plays a big part. We know that we can develop better breeds of cows, flowers, etc. But still a cow is always a cow; a flower is always a flower, etc. We may be able to change the colour and the size of something but the specie itself always remains true to its own kind. So here once again evolution falls flat.

Response: That is over a VERY short period of time. Selective breeding has only been around for thousands of years whereas evolution works over hundreds of millions of years. The difference is so many orders of magnitude apart that the author's comparison falls flat. As I mentioned above, if you keep the breeds completely separated for a long enough period of time the differences will generally continue to build until interbreeding cannot occur.

So the improvements of the spontaneous type (just going back to the Second Law of Thermodynamics for one minute) hypothesised by the devotees of the current theory of evolution who suggests that cosmic radiation caused genetic changes which resulted in a higher order of off-spring survivability than the parent possessed, and also a change in the genetic makeup have not been found to support that theory.

This is only one very small cause of genetic change. There is massive amount of evidence that shows genetic changes are incredibly common and most of these changes happen because of transcription errors that randomly/accidently occur when genes are replicated within each organism. The fact that this has been happening for hundreds of millions of years is evidenced by the "junk" DNA found in every organism. Most changes that occur randomly are neither beneficial nor nefarious. Thus there are no selection pressures that would eliminate organisms that carry these random mutations.



Criticism: In simple words, scientists may be able to work with genetic engineering and indeed have made wondrous advances, but that's not creating life, it's simply meddling with life that already exists. Even cloning is not creating life but is simply taking from already existing life.

Response: This argument is what is called ignoratio elenchi or a red herring. While it is true that current genetic engineering is only altering current life forms this has nothing to do with the mechanisms that drive evolutionary change necessarily.


Criticism: Because of all the millions of creatures that exist on the earth, only humans think in terms of logic, good and evil, can invent incredible devices and machinery, understands and is in a constant learning process and development, etc.

Response: Another red herring and he is also begging the question. He is assuming that there must be an intelligent designer without providing a rationale for why that is so. Self organization and increases in complexity driven solely by the laws of physics are observed in the lab and throughout the universe on a regular basis. One example is the creation of new stellar and associated planetary systems from the remnants of previous systems.



Criticism: The evolutionists say that we are related to the apes. Yet we are separated by a gulf so wide that it seems to defy all logic.

Response: The genetic differences between Homo sapiens and the various other hominids are actually very small with our genetic code being comfortably over 95% identical. We actually share a tremendous amount of DNA with all other living organisms including things like pine trees and fruit flies.

The evidence for evolution is immense and volumes of data are added each year that provide additional support. There is no theory that fits the massive amounts of evidence better than evolution while the theory of evolution becomes more robust with every passing discovery.

Thank you for jumping in on the last post to give your knowledge. You've clearly got a deep background in this area, and it's nice to see the details laid out in a very thorough way.

In the empirical world of science, the matter of organic evolution is defined as a theory, not as a hypotheses.

Check out what, in scientific terms, a "theory" means, as opposed to a "hypotheses."

Here's a basic primer on the subject for the anti-scientific/religious;y illiterate crowd:


("Origins of Species, Etc.: Is Evolution Merely a "'Theory'?", at: http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_stat.htm)



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 12/12/2010 04:23PM by steve benson.

It's hard to educate those who refused to pay attention to grade school science when they went over the differences between facts, hypothesese, and theories.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/science/23angier.html

The tuatara is a reptile so unique it has its own order in the hierarchy of classification, and even though it resembles a lizard there are differences that give powerful evidence in favor of evoution from this "living fossil."

>For example, the tuatara has a third eye at the top of its skull, the legendary if poorly understood pineal eye, which is found in only a sprinkling of reptile species and which vision researchers suspect harks back to nature’s original eye — pretty much a few light-sensitive cells on a stalk. A tuatara’s teeth likewise follow the no-nonsense design seen in dinosaur dentition, erupting directly from the jawbone and without the niceties of tooth sockets and periodontal ligaments that characterize the teeth of all mammals and many reptiles. Some researchers are looking at tuataras for clues to how dental implants, which are inserted directly into the jaw, might be improved.

>“Their biology is quite distinctive,” said Charles Daugherty of the Allan Wilson Center for Molecular Ecology and Evolution at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. “They have a unique type of hemoglobin, and their enzymes are set to function at lower temperatures than in most reptiles.” As a result, tuataras remain active at night, and in weather just a few degrees above freezing, said Dr. Daugherty, “at temperatures at which most reptiles couldn’t survive.”

One concept not previously discussed in how an organism can augment its genome is through a viral vector. Viruses insert large sections of functional DNA into cells, essentially hijacking the cell's metabolic machinery turning it into a virus baby-making factory. There are other mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer as well, ie: recombination, conjugation, but most people are familiar with viruses.

Evidence of molecular biology

Amino acid sequencing of homologous proteins and immunological and electrophoretic methods of protein comparisons have shown that human polypeptides are more than 99% identical to those of the chimpanzee (king and Wilson 1975) The genetic distance between Human and chimp is so small that it corresponds to sibling species, and is closer than 2 non-sibling species of the same genus.
As Human and Chimp do not even belong to the same family, these finding indicate that structural gene evolution was very close between the great apes and Man.

The evidence of the Digestive System

The alimentary tract of all primates is similar. While the Liver of the monkey species is located in a different place from that of apes and man, the latter two have the liver attached in the same place, underneath the diaphragm.
The four modern anthropoid apes and man possess in common a number of clear visceral characteristics that clearly pronounce their affinity. (Strauss 1936)

The evidence of parasites


Man shares most of these with the Chimp and the Gorilla, fewer with the Orang Utan, and less with the Gibbon
FROM DNA investigation, it is apparent that the Malarial Parasites of man and every one of the apes evolved from a common ancestor... This is important as it point to the fact that the hosts – man and ape – did likewise

The evidence of dentition

despite differences in the dental arch. the dental formula for old world monkeys, apes and humans is:
2.1.2.3
2.1.2.3
for new world monkeys and lemurs it is
2.1.3.3
2.1.3.3

Evidence of Vision

most primates, including man, have rod and cone photoreceptors. Colour vision is especially good in primates and man. Tests have shown that new world monkeys mostly protonomolous trichromats – the deficiency being less severe in more advanced species. Old world Monkeys, apes and man are normal trichromats.
The visibility curve, stereoscopy and detail accuity common to old world monkeys, apes and man all point to a similarly latter evolution between species.

Evidence of Audition

upper range of hearing
dolphins......................... 100,000 hz
cats................................. 70,000 hz
lemurs............................ 75,000 hz
new world monkeys...... 46,000 hz
old world monkeys........ 45,000 hz
chimps …....................... 26,500hz
man................................. 20,000 hz

Best sensitivity – for apes and man – is around 2,000 – 3,000 hz
the apes and man jointly share a reduced audial frequency detection capability almost unique amongst the primates and mammals


Evidence of Olfaction

% of brain dedicated to olfaction
non primate insectivores
tree shrew – prosimians...... 0.1062
lemur – prosimians............. 0.0393
tarsiers – prosimians........... 0.190
new world monkeys............ 0.0053
old world monkeys.............. 0.0011
great apes............................. 0.0007
man...................................... 0.0001

Evidence of the grasp response

All primate infants share a grasp response (Palmar grasp response) – this can reasonably be deduced to have evolved from an arboreal habitat.
Old world Monkeys can grasp for up to 30 minutes
great apes can grasp for 5 minutes
human infants can grasp for up to 2 minutes


I could also give some evidence from Neotony, Brain physiology, reproductive system, intelligence and blood proteins, but a very deep part of my psyche tells me that the god-botherers do not really want any evidence..... all of this is easily available to anyone who cares to look for it...... but do they really want hard-to-digest facts? or is a simple "Look mummy it's magic" a lot more paletable to some people?

It was nearly ten years ago that I first posted the term "neoteny" on this board, and yeah, verily, there was much howling (evidence of evolution itself) and considerable stench from the trolls crapping their pants when their talking points and wedge approaches were not adequate to even discuss that one.

Neoteny often occurs when charateristics of an immature ancestral species emerge from the genone, but the expression of the genes is stifled (often because of a single change in the genetic sequence; that's how blue eyes arose because a pigment necessary for brown eyes wasn't produced, and it's suggested blue eyes had "survival value" because of their sex appeal--cue up an old Frank Sinatra song as evidence--or for the visually oriented, how about an old Paul Newman movie?).

In the evolution of our non-opposable big toe--necessary for extended upright, bipedal walking and running--what happened was an essential developmental stage never took place, and our toes don't rotate in the manner of our chimpanzee and gorilla cousins (who find grasping toes useful for an arboreal existence).

There's also a nice bit of "evolutionary detective work" that's being presented on the Nat Geo channel on the evolution of our jaw muscles.

Our jaw muscles are pretty wimpy; gorillas and chimps can bite through some pretty stout plant stuff, and we can't...

Again, this was a single change in the genome involving expression of a genetic sequence, and the result was this permitted our skulls to continue growing (because smaller jaw muscles did not have to anchor themselves the way they do in the great apes).

Smaller jaw muscles=bigger cranial capacity=room for bigger brains...

Evolution:Intelligent Design

Gravity:Intelligent Falling Down

'cause you folks seem like you might know the answers.

I'm debating with a semi-religious (not Mormon) nut who thinks Hovind has a clue what he's talking about. Aside from pointing out that Hovind's "PhD" is largely imaginary and the man isn't even intelligent enough to get a spellcheck device on his computer, I'd like to know more about the story of the fossilized cowboy boot and carbon dating thing that was supposedly done. Anyone have any information on it? :)

I went a-Googling, and I came up with this one, and shoot, I can't tell if someone is spoofing or not...

http://www.bible.ca/tracks/rapid-fossils-rapid-petrifaction.htm

Some stuff I fished out of the you-know-whats...

Limestone Cowboy... Please, Lard, I don't have to explain that to anyone, do I?

The Corvette Oil Company... No way would GM let a company with that name get by with the copyright infringement...

>A complete set of these scans remains with the boot at the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas.

It looks to me like we ought to be yelling at the people who taught these folks how to use a computer... It's kind of akin to letting them have a firearm without any safety training...

Here's another...

http://paleo.cc/paluxy/boot.htm

Seems to me bones found in such a situation would've called for a coroner's investigation at the very least...

>In June 2006 Baugh removed the original "Limestone Cowboy" article from his website, although a single paragraph in the "archives" still promotes it. He also did not display the boot among other allegedly anomalous artifacts discussed during his June, 2006 seminar at his Creation Evidence museum in Glen Rose, Texas.

Clicking on that link on "Moab Man" (Malachite Man) was a bit illuminating; those are the kind of stories that emerge from Southern Utah (damned peyote grows wild in the desert in a lot of places).

Finally, here's that guy Hovind...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Hovind

>Since January 2007, Hovind has been serving a ten-year prison sentence after being convicted of 58 federal counts, including twelve tax offenses, one count of obstructing federal agents and forty-five counts of structuring cash transactions. He is currently incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution, Jesup.

Doubtless he and Warren Jeffs could share some stories about how they're being persecuted....



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/13/2010 02:57PM by SL Cabbie.

It's stupid and assinine but it wouldn't mean he's a moron. However, the stuff he says, the words he doesn't know how to use OR spell correctly, and the dishonest claims -- those destroy his claims to knowledge. Heck, even if you can't spell or write a decent sentence a smart person will at least hire someone to proof and edit his stuff. :)

Thanks for the links, I'm going to look them up. I hope one of them debunks the claims that the stuff was "carbon dated" at millions of years old. :)

His claim is that carbon dating was done indicating a false "age" of the contents of the boot. I'm thinking that if any carbon dating was done all it found was the age of the limestone that obviously made a cast of the boot and protected the contents of the boot. And it's hardly fossilized. lol

Well, there's one born every minute. At least I've got him CONSIDERING immunizing his children. I'm all for an extended immunization schedule but the core vaccines for children have saved countless young lives.

The limit on C-14 is right around 60,000 years these days, or just after our ancestors left Africa...

And you can't carbon date limestone since it's inorganic... They could've dated the leather, but that's all, and we know there were no cattle in the New World before Columbus...

That's one of the "weasel tactics" to watch out from the bullshippers...

In addition to the intermediate species found in the fossil record, Charles Darwin's words show much in the living.

"The similar framework of bones in the hand of man, wing of a bat, fin of the porpoise, and leg of the horse, - the same number of vertebrae forming the neck of the giraffe and of the elephant...at once explain themselves on the theory of descent with slow and slight successive modifications."


1925 words of Clarence Darrow in The State of Tennessee vs. Scopes - "You insult every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion."

I believe that one of the main problems with anti-evolutionists is they simply cannot comprehend millions upon millions of years of time. They don't realize that hundreds of generations of dinosaurs were walking around on top the fossils of hundreds of generations of...other dinosaurs!

Just a question. Can an aethiest believe in anything other than evolution? If that's the case, isn't there an automatic bias introduced into this "argument"? I'm not sure a Believer has to make that decision?

Seems to me a belief that the Earth was "seeded" by UFO beings who guided the progress toward civilization would certainly qualify...

Among other possible hypotheses...

Religious sorts have no monopoly on the tinfoil hat market...

What's with the attempt to pigeonhole stuff, anyway? Language and word definitions are simply guides that provide the framework and "roadmap" for understanding and common ground for communicaton...

And of course, language undergoes evolution itself, following principles that are interesting in their own right...

Just seems that this debate is based more on dogma than honesty.

I really don't get what you are driving at.

Absolutely! Anything which is supported by evidence; is falsifiable: and, is replicable can be supported by an Atheist. Evolutionary theory has all of these. Should another theory account for all the evidence, then any Atheist worth his salt would have to seriously consider it.

Anything without evidence; is NOT falsifiable; must be accepted on "faith; and, is non replicable is supported by theists/deists.

See.. there is no overlapping majesteria.

Any more questions? Just ask! =)

HH

I guess there are still people out there that think the moon landing never occurred or that the Holocaust is fiction.

It is plain old depressing to have to show people evidence for evolution when it is more pervasive than air.

And even more who believe it's hollow. I read one such website and I STILL have a headache. ;)

Creation? Evolution? They both suffer from the same root problem.

Neither explains how it all started.

All this is nice and fine if you are talking about gross anatomy. But many biomolecular processes are not transitional. Take for instance eyesight. There are at least a dozen cascading events that turn a photon of light into a bioelectrical signal to the brain and another processes to reset it. If any one of the chemicals in the process are removed or dysfunctional, the result is called blindness. There are other processes as well in the body such as blood clotting and the glomerulus in the kidney. It's interesting though that evolution came up with all this during a period of about 50 million years called the "pre-cambrian explosion. Mathematically impossible.

Read that post I put up above about the tuatara's "third eye" for starters...

The check out National Geographic's "What Darwin Never Knew" for insights on those "biomolecular processes" you're attempting to allude to.

Seriously guy, I'm trying to be a good Christian sort during the holiday season and see that you're treated mercifully...

However, if you persist in hauling yourself up on that ol' cross and directing where the nails go, well...

And that "pre-Cambrian explosion" is another strawman... The processes that gave rise to the the abundance of life took place over a considerable period of time...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/4/l_034_02.html

>Then, between about 570 and 530 million years ago, another burst of diversification occurred, with the eventual appearance of the lineages of almost all animals living today. This stunning and unique evolutionary flowering is termed the "Cambrian explosion," taking the name of the geological age in whose early part it occurred. But it was not as rapid as an explosion: the changes seems to have happened in a range of about 30 million years, and some stages took 5 to 10 million years.

Why? Because you say so?

After it 'tis almost the season to celebrate your hatching and we're going for warm fuzzies right now. ;)