I'll take up where IrishRockhound had left off.
1. Where has macroevolution ever been observed?
Whatever Walt Brown means by macroevolution. Has he observed Jesus Christ rising from the dead in his tomb?
What’s the mechanism for getting new complexity, such as new vital organs?
New organs are modifications of existing features; clues are often available from embryonic development. Vertebrate jaws are modified gill bars, vertebrate lungs and livers are modified outpouchings of the gut, etc.
If any of the thousands of vital organs evolved, how could the organism live before getting the vital organ? (Without a vital organ, the organism is deadby definition.)
New organs initially provide assistance, rather than be absolutely necessary. Thus, a fish in a swamp can get more oxygen if it can gulp air, and throat pouches make it easier to absorb oxygen from the air. These pouches are also known as lungs.
If a reptile’s leg evolved into a bird’s wing, wouldn’t it become a bad leg long before it became a good wing?
It could have been an arm for grasping.
How could metamorphosis evolve?
As a byproduct of growth -- different growth stages can get specialized in different directions.
2. Do you realize how complex living things are?
???
How could organs as complicated as the eye or the ear or the brain of even a tiny bird ever come about by chance or natural processes?
Step by step.
How could a bacterial motor evolve? How could such motors work until all components evolved completely and were precisely in place?
They were originally strands used for other purposes.
6. Please point to a strictly natural process that creates information.
Gene duplication.
What evidence is there that information, such as that in DNA, could ever assemble itself?
What's "assembling itself"?
If astronomers received an intelligent signal from some distant galaxy, most people would conclude that it came from an intelligent source.
Except that earlier "detections" of extraterrestrial intelligence have proved to be bogus:
Johannes Kepler thought that the craters of the Moon are intelligently designed, but the large majority of them were made by impacts.
Percival Lowell and some other astronomers had thought that Mars's canals had been built by Martians, but they were a false perception.
When pulsars were first detection, some proposed that they were extraterrestrial beacons, but they are rotating neutron stars.
Why then doesn’t the vast information sequence in the DNA molecule of just a bacterium also imply an intelligent source?
Because there are more plausible hypotheses than generations of little elves working on the genomes of that bacterium's ancestors.
7. Which came first, DNA or the proteins needed by DNA, which can only be produced by DNA?
Proteins are not "produced", but copied. And that conundrum has led to consideration of an "RNA world", where RNA molecules served as both enzyme and macromolecule. How that RNA originated is another problem, however.
8. How could sexual reproduction evolve?
From asexual one-celled organisms exchanging genes. This gene exchange could lead to organism fusion followed by meiosis. The fused phase could become a persistent diploid phase. And organisms would work out a system for avoiding inbreeding -- some protists and fungi have large numbers of "mating types" or sexes.
Large organisms typically produce gametes which fuse to form new ones. One mating type could get specialized for getting the new organism off to a well-fed start, while another could be specialized for traveling to the aforementioned kind of gamete. Thus the origin of eggs and sperm.
Most aquatic organisms do external fertilization, but internal fertilization evolved several times. A male animal injects some sperm cells into a female one, where they seek out and fertilize eggs. A pollen grain sprouts a long pollen tube which searches for an egg.
How could immune systems evolve?
As a self-recognition system pressed into service to recognize hostile organisms.
5. How could the first living cell begin?
Perhaps from some pre-cellular organism.
How could that first cell reproduce?
By getting bigger and bigger until it splits in two. Walt Brown does not seem to have heard of asexual reproduction.
Just before life appeared, did the atmosphere have oxygen or did it not have oxygen? Whichever choice you make creates a terrible problem for evolution. Both must come into existence at about the same time.
Actually, being without oxygen is more reasonable, for two reasons.
It agrees with geochemical evidence.
It is necessary for abiogenesis to happen, because living things are out of chemical equilibrium with oxygen, and because the original ancestor would not likely have had oxygen-resistance mechanisms.
9. If it takes intelligence to make an arrowhead, why doesn’t it take vastly more intelligence to create a human?
There are lots of complex objects that do not require intelligence to create, like snowflakes. Or are there some little fairies that design each individual snowflake?
Do you really believe that hydrogen will turn into people if you wait long enough?
Galaxy-sized masses of it can.
10. If the solar system evolved, why do three planets spin backwards? Why do at least 30 moons revolve backwards?
Off-center collisions and chaotic precession can cause the planets to have such retrograde spins. Satellites can be captured -- and are more easily captured into retrograde orbits.
13. How could stars evolve?
Stellar evolution is not biological evolution, but it's reasonably well-understood.
14. Are you aware of all the unreasonable assumptions and contradictory evidence used by those who say the earth is billions of years old?
Whatever those are supposed to be.
15. Why are living bacteria found inside rocks that you say are hundreds of millions of years old and in meteorites that you say are billions of years old? Clean-room techniques and great care were used to rule out contamination.
And how does Walt Brown know that? There has been a lot of controversy over such finds.
17. Why do so many ancient cultures have flood legends?
From living near river valleys.
18. Have you heard about the mitochondrial Eve and the genetic Adam? Scientists know that the mitochondrial Eve was the common female ancestor of every living person, and she appears to have lived only about 6,000—7,000 years ago.
Demonstrably false -- more like 100,000 years ago. The mitochondrial Eve and the Y-chromosome Adam were simply the most recent ancestors whose mitochondria and Y chromosomes have present-day descendants. That Eve coexisted with many other women, and that Adam with many other men.
(I could be wrong but I think there actually were seven mitochondrial "Eve's". Anyone?)
There was only one, but she had several descendants who were the ancestors of various groups of mitochondrial-DNA sequences. Seven of them had lived in or near Europe; these are the "Seven Daughters of Eve", the title of a book on research into this subject.
19. Careful researchers have found the following inside meteorites: living bacteria, salt crystals, limestone, water, sugars, terrestrial-like brines, and earthlike isotopic patterns. Doesn’t this implicate Earth as their sourceand a powerful launcher, the fountains of the great deep"?
Where are the original reports of these finds? Only Walt Brown seems to know about them.
[This message has been edited by lpetrich, 01-14-2004]
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