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Member (Idle past 4878 days) Posts: 310 From: Broomfield Joined: |
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Author | Topic: 15 Evolutionary Gems Refuted | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Fred Williams Member (Idle past 4878 days) Posts: 310 From: Broomfield Joined: |
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Adminnemooseus Administrator Posts: 3974 Joined: |
We don't debate material not actually presented at evcforum.net.
For this topic to be promoted, you need to bring your text here. Go ahead and do such via a new message in this topic. I'll merge this new registration with your original (2001!) registration. I'll use your current e-mail address for the profile. Adminnemooseus
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Fred Williams Member (Idle past 4878 days) Posts: 310 From: Broomfield Joined: |
No problem. Article is copied below.
15 Evolutionary Gems Refuted
Fred Williams December 2010 In January 2009, Nature Magazine produced an evolutionist evangelism tract called "15 Evolutionary Gems" to help their faithful "spread the word" of evolution as an "established fact"1. Since this was compiled by their own papers published over 10 years, it no doubt should serve as their best evidence for the theory. Hence it warrants a closer look from those of us who believe evolution does not qualify as a theory and is at best a low-grade hypothesis. I have a few general observations about the tract before addressing each one individually. First, the mere mention of fifteen lines of evidence gives the illusion of support by overwhelming numbers, a sort of pseudo "elephant hurling". Yet 12 of the 15 "gems" refer to small scale change, or variability within a kind of animal that everyone agrees occurs. Evolutionists coined the phrase "micro-evolution" to give the illusion that such small-scale change somehow supports the theory of evolution. This is a well-known and oft-used equivocation by evolutionists. The problem lies in the fact that evolutionists have no evidence small-scale change can produce large-scale change such as new organs, scales turning into feathers, etc. See my article "The Evolution Definition Shell Game".2 Now on to the list of evolutionary "gems":1. Land-living Ancestors of Whales God has a sense of humor. Since marine life is naturally found at the base of the fossil record, it was surely one of the main factors that pushed naturalists to assume terrestrial life evolved from aquatic life. However, if mammals evolved from marine life, what in the world is a mammal as complex as the whale doing in the water? This forced naturalists into the precarious position of having to explain why some mammals decided to venture back into the water! Here the authors promote Pakicetus, Ambulocetus, and more recently Indohyus, as whale ancestors, mostly due to minor similarities in their ear and teeth with whales.
2. From Water to Land This "gem" largely promotes the evolutionist darling Tiktaalik as "an aquaticpredator with distinct similarities to tetrapods".
3. Feathered Dinosaurs In an attempt to promote their idea that dinosaurs evolved into birds, evolutionists have been pushing a few fossil birds as intermediates on their way to full bird-hood. Here the authors push the evo-darling Archaeopteryx and newcomer Epidexipteryx.
4. The Evolutionary History of Teeth This portion of the tract simply lauds the "mechanisms behind the relative size and number of molar teeth in mice".
5. The Origin of the vertebrate skeleton
6. Natural Selection in Speciation Here we are provided an example of stickleback fish with different body sizes!
7. Natural Selection in Lizards
8. Co-evolution The tract provides an example of an "arms race" between water fleas and the parasites that infest them. As the water fleas become better at evading parasitism, the parasites become better at infecting them.
9. Differential dispersal in wild birds
10. Selective Survival of Wild Guppies They mention that less common guppies of a certain color had higher survival rates.
11. Evolutionary History Matters The argument goes that the moray eel “evolved” the ability to suck down prey: “Rather than prey coming to the pharyngeal jaws, the pharyngeal jaws move forwards into the mouth cavity, trapping the prey and dragging it backwards…. This study demonstrates the contingent nature of evolution; as a process it does not have the luxury of ‘designing from scratch’..."
12. Darwin’s Galapagos finches Here they champion the genes that are switched on during development that provide variation.
13. Micro-evolution meets Macroevolution The author provides an example of a gene producing two different functions, development in general, and pigmentation.
14. Toxin Resistance in Snakes & Clams The main argument is that garter snakes evolved resistance to Newt toxin, and a single mutation in the clam provided its new-found resistance.
15. Variation versus Stability The primary argument is that certain proteins under stress during development can rapidly produce a variety of change in fruit flies. They also mention that "genes hold variation in reserve that is released only when they are functionally compromised."
Conclusion If one were to compare this to a baseball game, the evolutionists came to bat with the best they had to offer, and were pitched a complete shutout. Not even a dribbler past the batter's box made its way into the field of play. Eighty percent of their arguments were examples of adaptation that creationists have long embraced, even before Darwin12, that showed no evidence whatsoever of neo-Darwinian evolution. Of the remaining 20%, the fossil fragment stories do more than just show how speculative and subjective the claims are, more revealing is how mighty and bold they are claimed in the media, implicitly (and sometimes even explicitly) affirming they never had the missing link before! Remember when Ida was hailed as the "8th wonder of the world" and "unprecedented" in its stature as missing link, prompting David Attenborough to gleefully proclaim "The link... is no longer missing", only to see their latest holy grail refuted by scores of scientists shortly thereafter?13 The fossil record is now very rich and well-catalogued, so surely by now we should expect to have good evidence of evolution instead of a handful of questionable claims desperately given headline news status. Finally, conspicuous in its absence were the evolutionary icon "gems" such as Lucy, Chimp/Human DNA similarity, vestigial organs, Junk DNA, etc. I guess they lost their luster over time, eroded by evidence and real science. To slightly modify the quote by the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, "Sometimes I've believed as many as fifteen impossible things before breakfast". 1 - "15 Evolutionary Gems", Nature Magazine, 2009. Nature - Not Found 2 - 404 Not Found
3 - NewScientist, Nov 2006. Whales boast the brain cells that 'make us human' | New Scientist 4 - Douglas Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 1998, p 196 5 - http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/natural_history_2_15.html 6 - Science magazine, Jan 6 2010; Science | AAAS 7 - Epidexipteryx: Dinosaur, Bird, or Dino-Bird? About.com. Thursday November 13, 2008. Why Did Dinosaurs Have Feathers? 8 - Fine-feathered dino sported bizarre bird tail, msnbc.com 10/22/2008. MSN | Outlook, Office, Skype, Bing, Breaking News, and Latest Videos 9 - Alan Feduccia; cited in Archaeopteryx: Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms, Science 259(5096):764–65, 5 February, 1993. 10 - From creation.com, cited CNN website June 1998 11 - As evolutionist Douglas Futyama states in his college textbook Evolutionary Biology, "The argument that adaptively directed mutations does not occur is one of the fundamental tenets of modern evolutionary theory" [emphasis added]. Evolutionary Biology, 1998, p 282. 12 - Before Darwin, British chemist Edward Blyth advocated adaptation of created kinds to their environment, and natural selection as a conservation mechanism.http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/biogeog/BLYT1835.htm 13 - 'Eighth wonder' Ida is not related to humans, claim scientists - Oct 21, 2009, guardian.com.uk Science News. 'Eighth wonder' Ida is not related to humans, claim scientists | Fossil Ida | The Guardian; Also: 'Missing Link' Fossil Was Not Human Ancestor as Claimed, Anthropologists Say - ScienceDaily, Mar. 3, 2010.http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100302131719.htm
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Adminnemooseus Administrator Posts: 3974 Joined: |
Sorry, this is something I should have brought up in message 2.
What you have in message 3 are the minimal outlines of 15 different topics. You include very little of the evolution side that you are refuting. What I think we need to do is for you to pick 1 or 2 of the 15 "gems", and propose a new topic or 2, each specific to each "gem". Remember to include the Nature - Not Found link. Let's do a maximum of 2 new topics now - We can move on to more of the others later. The in red text can function as the new topic title, although in some cases more info should be included in the title, such as the species (singular or plural) under consideration. Bottom line: Too many topics for 1 topic, therefore I'm going to reject it. Of course, members are welcome to debate the whole thing, but at your site. Adminnemooseus
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Admin Director Posts: 13020 From: EvC Forum Joined: Member Rating: 1.9 |
It would be helpful to have access to the Nature article. A number of your responses take the form, "The lizards are still lizards," and "Finches are still finches," which are rebuttals against macroevolution, but the points you're rebutting don't appear to have been about macroevolution, but rather about adaptation. But it's impossible to tell for sure since you only provide just a short phrase or sentence about the original point, so if you could make the original Nature article available I think it would be helpful.
There have been long discussion threads about many of the topics you list, so I agree that it should be broken down into individual topics. Since Nature articles are behind a paydoor and the original article might not be available, in the opening post of each topic you could provide excerpts from and expanded descriptions of the original point. It's great to hear from you, and I'm reminded that I once proposed to Ikester that our sites should work out some cooperative arrangements, but I never heard back.
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Fred Williams Member (Idle past 4878 days) Posts: 310 From: Broomfield Joined: |
No problem, I completely understand, in fact I like your idea to first approve a topic before opening it to the forum. I was under a time constraint for comments as we had decided to talk about the "15 Gems" for a radio show yesterday. So, I was looking for some quick criticisms, items I may have been "factually" incorrect on. Evolutionists are often more likely to find problems buried in the crevice of a creationist article, not because they are better versed on the science , but because of the very nature of this debate and the clash of worldviews - the opponent will go over it with a find tooth & comb looking for any problems.
I should have mentioned the time crunch before posting. At this point, the radio show has already occurred so I won't mess with posting sections here to debate, but would still be open to comments via email or my forum, and any criticisms we believe to be legit will be corrected in the article or on the website where the radio show is archived (RSR Takes On Nature's 15 Gems | KGOV.com) FYI, I did link to the Nature article in the footnotes, but I'll add a hyperlink at the beginning of the article. The radio host also thought I over-emphasized "the lizard is still a lizard" verbiage so I'll look to remove most of those. FredPS. I'll post in the private section your request to some cooperative arrangement. We have a little bit more onerous sign-up process, as each person has to first be approved (mostly to weed out sock puppets). We've also been hacked twice over the years, which led the Admins to initiate some of these safeguards.
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Fred Williams Member (Idle past 4878 days) Posts: 310 From: Broomfield Joined: |
I just had an idea. What if, on perhaps our next 'Real Science Friday' show on Friday Dec 10, we were to open the phone lines to evolutionists who either want to defend one of the 15 "gems", or present one of their own? We could call the segment "Stump the Creationist" (there is a "Stump the Professor" show on a popular radio in Denver, so this would be in the same spirit of how we parody NPR's Science Friday). Hopefully we would be able to get a few folks to commit to calling in. Any takers? I would have to approve this with the radio host (Bob Enyart) but I bet he'll go for it. FYI, Enyart has some national exposure, having interviewed plenty of high profile names including Eugenie Scott, Ann Coulter, Dick Morris, etc, plus he has appeared on Bill Mahr's program, The Orielly Factor, Hannity & Combs...
I think this would be fun for everyone. We broadcast at 3pm MST on Friday on AM 670 (55KWatt). We have recently received encouraging news on the growing popularity of the show, and it now re-broadcasts Friday night at 11pm, and Saturdays at 8pm. It reaches most of Colorado and some adjacent states, plus all shows are archived at kgov.com. Because of my work constraints, I can't always do a live show, so chances are we would likely record next Friday's show around 1pm MST. Just thinking out loud, if we could get 4 or 5 evolutionists to commit to calling in, we could probably fill up the half hour. Let me know what you think, perhaps you could share the idea with your forum at-large? Thanks,Fred
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Admin Director Posts: 13020 From: EvC Forum Joined: Member Rating: 1.9 |
Just post a copy of your message in the Coffee House forum, I'm sure you'll get takers.
Please let the webmaster for Home | KGOV.com know that some of the links on this page are broken:
For example, the link to the Michael Shermer interview refers to HTTP 429, which doesn't exist. Do you know anything about podcasting? I think a weekly conference call of an hour or two with both creationist and evolutionist participants would be interesting, particularly if we had a host or moderator who was any good at maintaining some structure, keeping things constructive, and moving things along.
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Fred Williams Member (Idle past 4878 days) Posts: 310 From: Broomfield Joined: |
Thanks, just posted this in the Coffee Shop. I'll also let the kgov.com webmaster know about the broken link. Thanks!
Fred
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